Saline Solution by Marco Vassi Read Free Book Online

thrived on it. And you wondered how you would ever again be able to come inside a woman who was less than utterly enthusiastic.
    Or you might take home a yellow version of the girl next door, and when you took her to bed find out that she was a crazy who wanted to lick the shit off your arsehole, and bit you so hard on the chest that the skin broke and blood flowed, and you hit her four or five times to make her puff off into some private ecstasy and let you do whatever you wanted with her body. And. you played out every picture of degradation you had ever fantasised.
    Or you might fall in love.
    'Yoshie?'
    The thin girl turned lazily in her half-sleep, her eyes still closed, the dim light making her skin seem like stone, her face relaxed like that of a great bronze Buddha.
    'Hai. Nani?' she said.
    'I want you.' 'Oh.'
    It came out as a moaned whisper. You touched her. There was a long still moment, and she was suddenly upon you, as quickly as the movement of a striking snake. Always like that with her. She was always ready, always attentive. She cared for you the way a tree produces fruit, without thought, without consideration.
    And so you married her, and when you got back to the United States, suddenly everything was ugly again. You were ugly, she was ugly, life was a constant intimidation, and in confused frustration you walked out one afternoon, and she spent nine years recovering before she could let another man into her heart, and you still wonder whether you will ever know another woman like that. Was she the fabled only-one that is supposedly allotted to each of us?
    Captivated by the convolutions of the contest, I forgot to notice the nature of the arena. With deadening regularity I mistook the drama for the dharma. As Francis put it, 'Everyone's begun to confuse the collective subjective with the objective.'
    The next afternoon was timeless. The sun spoke geometrically from the sky and the earth felt cosy. There was no hint of the endless blackness of space or the vastnesses through which our planet plummets in its chaotic whirlings. I sat alone in the living room, watching the light contour the space into segments. The forty-year-old Seaview houses stood like hunchbacked rocks. And from one long wall of windows, I could see the dunes which led to the water.
    Lucinda had gone to visit her two daughters again who were just returning from camp. Her marriage had been prototypic. She was the debutante daughter of a wealthy lawyer and his dog-show addict of a wife. Her husband was the very successful, very bored, Long Island Jewish doctor. She played the scene for fourteen years, with the proper costumes, the proper lines, and the proper number of lovers. And one morning woke up to find that she was suffocating and had been dying of dryness for a long time.
    After a reflex consideration of what she supposed was her duty, she realised that she had absolutely no feeling at all for her husband, and only a detached interest in the future development of her children. 'I knew that if they stayed with him they would at least get the best in food, clothing, and shelter, go to good schools and all that shit. And I had nothing to offer them but inarticulate disillusionment.' Such was her reasoning.
    She left that day. And when all the shock had subsided and the legalities were arranged, she opted for a cash settlement and left him with a house, the cars, the daughters, the social matrix of his days, and a new girlfriend whom he soon married. She spent a year doing nothing, becoming promiscuous with men who would call her at three in the morning because they felt like fucking and knew she was available. Then she met me. And got pregnant again. ('The diaphragm must have slipped' -laughter.)
    During the first few weeks when we were telling one another enough of our life stories to provide at least an outline, I met her parents. They had long ago reached that state, so common, where marriage is a wearying, but necessary, truce. Her