Ah, my dear, the abysses are all so shallow.
--Henry James to Edith Wharton

 ME

 First things first.  I mean who else?
 I am handsome beyond endurance.  Body by Michelangelo, it scares me.  No doubt all my emotions are versions of panic.  So in a sense I'm just like you.  A touch self-involved perhaps but with such a self who could resist?  Looking around at the others I wonder, how can they exist?  Smudges on the page of life, most of them.  But I boast.
 I like to sleep, which may account for my freshness of appearance.  Sleep is joy; The Others are pain.  This formula is perhaps adequate but I do not entirely despise The Others. The world is after all there, it sates the appetites and The Others are not unamusing.  On occasion they almost endear themselves to one, though one is careful not to involve oneself too deeply in their little projects.  Busy, busy, busy.  I'd rather just lie here and scratch my scrotum.
 Of course it's not very socially useful.  Moments follow moments in no apparent sequence. You are eating, you have food in your mouth.  You are in rut.  One is dragged through the element of time with nothing to preoccupy one but the care of one's teeth.
 What are my habits?  I like to gorge myself on exquisite food, go out dancing and get falling-down drunk.  I get so boiled I start to disintegrate but in the morning everything's still there.  The silhouette unaffected, I don't know how I do it.
 The morning.  Let us speak rather of the coming to.  The point of opening the eyes and inwardly acknowledging the world.  Sometimes vocally.  A cry of horror, after which I try to lie still.
 I interpret this as punishment for having it so good.
 I, I, I.
 But what the hell.
 And sex, of course.  One likes to ejaculate.  As long as one is lying down.
 Which brings us to Marcie.

 MARCIE

 Let us start with her feet.  I'm in the mood and they may anyway be of as much intellectual profit as the rest of her.  Her feet are blonde.  Hairless but blonde.  She is of a translucence, almost a spirituality that glows even in her feet.  I am dark.  Darkish.  Hazel-eyed.  A devil in heaven.  She is heaven.
 Her arches, high.  Her toes, long and succulent.  I do not, as I try to swallow them, grovel before her so much as before my own sensuality.  I place myself at the service of something larger, as it were, than myself.
 Her calves have none of the dancer's or the athlete's angularity.  They are all softness of line and white vulnerability, ready at any moment to give into an overripeness that will embarrass by its luxury.
 Need we violate her privacy by speaking of age?  Over thirty-five, I guess, we never discuss it.  Ideal, really.  Any younger and a woman is apt to implicate you in scenarios too dreary to contemplate, and raddle your sleep with mindless chatter.
 Her secret smell, floral, juicy.  Orange marmalade.  I chew on it for hours.  What is this passion of the mouth for the folded flower?  She goes off at intervals.
 Her breasts.  Her breasts.
 Afterwards she sleeps in my arms, her head on my chest.  I forget who she is and am happy with her.  It's not every woman who can make you feel like that.
 Why does she not recoil from me as from a monster?  Why does she not see me for the narcissistic opportunist that I am?  I think--now, we are in the area of theory here, but I think it's that the mere fact of her joyful unsuspicion renders me tame.  Marcie weeps when she hears Louis Armstrong sing Wonderful World.  If she steps on a bug she says Oh!  Don't worry!  It'll be over in a minute!  Then she looks for a magazine to hit it with.
 She paralyzes me with sentiment.  Seduces me with her sense of fun.  I am immobile.
 Which is how I like it.
 Here, in bed with Marcie, I am enclosed in satisfaction.  Reality, a groan in the sleep.  One turns on one's other side.
 And of course she is rich.  Not that that matters to either of us.  Certainly not to her.  She is as innocent of money as a goldfish of water.  She is perfect.
 "You are perfect," I tell her.
 "Yah?" she says.
 She doesn't believe me.  Being human she cannot firmly delude herself into an awareness of her perfectness.
 "You don't know how beautiful you are," I tell her.
 She ruminates, and is saddened.  "No," she admits.
 "It's part of your perfection."
 She is not comforted.  Her nose wrinkles.  "Gee!" she says.  "Suppose I find out!"
 Darlingissima!  These felicities of illogic keep her from being a mere rubber woman.
 I love her more than I know.  When she hurts her hand she asks me to kiss it, at which my soul weeps.  But I am unable to represent this to myself.

 I AM INTRUDED UPON

 But I must abandon the present tense to relate a thing that Actually Happened--which is always disturbing--one morning as I was having her in an unnatural manner.  Call it morning.  She submitted as usual with a provoking passivity, a knowingness that appeased the woman in me, perhaps stirred my envy a little, and I allowed myself to be boosted toward the top by a fantasy that I too was being penetrated.
 And now, oddly, as I glanced aside from my face-down sheet-clutching inamorata I saw a man gazing at my own tail as I but a moment ago at hers.  He was handsome--though I must say the physiques of men are of small interest to me compared to my own--mustachioed and in some kind of period drag--frilly shirt, tight pants, boots--which, glaring with lust, he removed.
 He mounted--my legs straddled Marcie's, his mine--carressed my not uninterested flesh, took his shah out of its sleeve and--well, what shall I say?  Effected an entry!  There was no pain--the whole thing was somehow insubstantial--and no weight oppressed me, but there was the anal-erotic sensation, the impression of accommodating something from without.  Ideal, really.
 We finished simultaneously (he and I that is; Marcie's earthquake can pass with no outward tremor) and when I rolled down beside her he was gone.  The stroboscopic trance of orgasm usually blanks me to what went before and strands me thoughtless but there was something about this--
 I mean it's all right.  Anything goes.  Certainly I do.  No use eliminating any universes.  And given my aversion to pain and what an actual partner might see as a too-consistent passivity, fantasy may be the best realm for these encounters.  And the least threatening to my income.
 No, what was disquieting about this episode was its full-bodied insistence.  I hadn't made this happen.
 I turned to look at the carpet with some vague thought of seeing footprints in the nap and there was his boot!  One of the boots he took off before he--
 I squinted incredulously.  Then I leaned from the bed and picked it up!  Limp calfskin!  Black.  So real was it that the idea of smelling it repelled me.
 I sniffed it anyway.  Nothing.  It was cold.  No living funk of leather and sweat.  And as the phrase no living echoed in my inner abyss I dropped it to the carpet and was attacked by anxieties I could not disentangle.  Someone--something--had been there.  I had had an actual homosexual experience.  With a dead person.  My fantasies were out of control.  I was insane.
 I could not even turn to Marcie for succor--for I am scarcely less fragile than she.  What would I have said?  She would not have been flattered by my cavorting with a caprice while in her whatever, let alone with a real presence!
 Trembling, perspiring I peered over the edge of the bed at the boot.  It was gone!  I groped madly for it, felt the rug for impressions.
 "Toby?" she said.  Me.
 I returned to her and took what comfort I could, my secret locked within me.
 But oh, so what!  A little fantasy once in a while!  Keeps the flower fresh!
 And we were in England.

 ENGLAND

 I glanced toward the window and the gray light of English day.
 That could explain it.  Everybody's a sod in England.  Sod off they tell each other.  Sod this, sod that.  It's in the air!  One breathes buggery with the fog.  Such reveries are bound to be vivid here.
 And in England the whole past bleeds.  Apparitions, racial memories, disembodied voices echoing down corridors--it's part of the atmosphere.  Impressionable old me.
 Downstairs I could hear Lady McGeorge playing rock CD's.  She sat in her parlor--if I closed my eyes I could see her--middle-aged, bottom-heavy, smoking Dunhill Extra-Longs an inch down, one after another.  She had read that the harmful part of the cigarette was after the first inch and her ashtrays were full of stubbed-out Dunhill Extra-Longs.
 She was in love with the idea of her aristocracy and did determinedly frivolous non-bourgeois things like listen to loud rock music.  Personally, I find the better sort of people are oppressed by these things, especially during the day when one is trying to sleep, but just now it was comforting to have her within earshot.
 The house was across the street from the Thames, and was old.
 I confess to a weakness for England.  There's a cuddly quality about it.  Everything's so miniature.  And everyone speaks the language, after a fashion.  In other countries one so often has the impression of idiots babbling at one another.  And of course the climate is good for my complexion.
 But that is not why we were in England.
 We were in England because of Haze.

 HAZE

 Hazelton Turnbull "Hard Turd" Harding IV.  Of Boston.  A beefy bully with white hair combed straight back.
 I see him pacing in rapid strides, hands behind back, cigar between clenched teeth while behind him through a giant window his empire of oil wells, mines, plantations, TV stations and tankers spreads away toward a horizon so vast it involves the curvature of the earth.  His son, Marcie's husband, is dead.  A man of science.  A bespectacled oddball.  Spent his life searching for something that didn't cause cancer.  Trying to establish a standard curve for the nailclipper, I don't know.
 Marcie married him.
 He made some money with a theory that beer cans on the ocean floor had made possible a new kind of mollusc, diverting the course of evolution toward some impending disaster and the beer people gave him a grant so huge he was persuaded not to publish till he had more facts.
 He later died in some wacko experiment and having had no head for business had turned the money over to Haze to invest for him.  Which means that Haze gives the widow her allowance.  It was his cherished view that he was supporting me.
 We were in London because he wanted to buy Lady McGeorge's house, and had ordered Marcie here because he said he wanted her approval.  He had had the child flown in from its Swiss school so they could be a family together, and I contemplated the immediate future with a certain weariness.
 Indeed, as we advance to the heart of this study of relationships I find I was not yet risen but lay cuddled in the post-coital snooze.  Always room for another grape, always time for another snooze.
 And there, wrapped in the outer layer that is Marcie, I would happily have stayed for the rest of the narration.  But the child was standing by the bed.

 THE CHILD

 Come we then to the child.  The blood link between Marcie and Haze, and the only reason he tolerates either of us.  She could withdraw the child from his tendernesses, and he loves the child.
 So do they both.  They are persuaded that it is good, in itself, because it is a child.
 What it is is pure mind in the arbitrary form of a nine-year-old girl.  This is no doubt its father's legacy.  Marcie has no more brains than anybody else.  The child on the other hand has more brains than anybody else.  It wears steelrim glasses, has a forehead you could show slides on and speaks with scientific neutrality, its lids drooping even as its little eyebrows go up.
 It was standing by the bed.  I opened my eyes part-way and looked at it.  "Fuck off, kid."
 "Tobee!" Marcie said.  I had not thought she was awake.
 The child regarded me with grim amusement.  It comes around when I'm hitting REM sleep and afflicts me with its demands.  I do not work because its mommy loves me.  The child knows this.
 "You got crunchers in your eyes," it observed.  Baby talk is the black fin cutting the surface of the child.  "Big green ones with yellow skish."
 "Andrea!" Marcie said.
 "Don't be pert," I told it.
 "Is this our house now?"
 "No."
 "Are we gonna stay here long?"
 "No."
 "Are you and Mommy married?"
 "No."
 "Do trees get tickled when ants crawl on them?"
 "No."
 "Can we go to the park?"
 "No."
 "Toby, why don't you take Andrea for a walk in the park?"
 I did not turn to Marcie with a look of protest but curled comfortably under the bed clothes.  "I'm staying here where it's nice and toasty-warmies," I said, not smiling.
 "It's nice out!" the child said.
 "No, it's not."
 "Yes it is."
 "No, it's not."
 "You'll get bedsores."
 "I'll turn on my side."
 "If you spend all your time sleeping your life will go by without any milestones," it said.
 See what I mean?  The child knows my thoughts.  It thinks my thoughts.  It thinks me.  I am a game for the child.
 "Do not," I told it, "weep."
 It threw the cat on me.  In my groggery I had not noticed that it was holding the cat.  I am allergic to cats, and raised the sheet like a shield, retreating into my burrow, but the cat was already fowling the pillow with its dander.  I emerged to the waist at the foot of the bed, tousled, oppressed.
 The child kept a straight face.  "Doesn't Toby like Wyatt?" it said.
 "Andrea," said Marcie, "that's not very nice."
 This, I was too aware, would be the extend of the reprimand.  "And let her know you mean what you say," I said.

 I GO FOR A WALK WITH THE CHILD

 Well, I was up anyway.
 I robed myself and padded out to squat on the jakes.  British bathrooms are located a maximum distance from everything else.  Inconvenience is a style there.
 The toilets can barely be flushed because there are no hills.  No water pressure.  You stand there watching your product pirouette.
 And no showers.  It takes half a day to fill the tub.  Bring something to read while this is happening.  Wait till it's deep enough to duck your head, and shampoo.  There will however be no clean water to rinse in.  You will try to force your head under one of the two-inch spigots, a choice between scalding and freezing, and try to combine them in your cupped hands, I know you will.
 That is why, in a country where almost everything is done for a social reason, the total body wash is still largely unknown, and if you find yourself in bed with an English person you will do well to restrain some of your curiosity.
 I could not at that moment contemplate the ordeal and made do with voiding my bladder, splashing water on my unshaven face and arranging my hair with my fingers.  Presently I was traipsing downstairs with the child, wrapped in my clothing as in a blanket.
 It was not, in fact, nice out.  It was gray and dismal with a damp that went to the bones.  I turned up the collar of my suit and, hands in pockets, hunched against the cold as we walked.  Why did I have no scarf?
 We crossed the street to the bridge and began the trek over to the park.  Below us, the river--gray, powerful, monotonous.  The most depressing thing about physical reality is the expanse of it, I find.
 The child sang.  Not The Itsy Bitsy Spider or anything.  A mass in F minor by Telemann, I don't know.
 "Bet you can't go out on that girder," it said.
 I did not oblige it by moving my eyes.  The child thinks I am its yoyo.
 "I dare you," it said.
 I am pains not to let it know I fear it.  If it knows I fear it it will gain control.
 "I double-dare you."
 "I'm afraid I just don't want to," I said.
 "I'll tell Mommy you made me do dirty things."
 And yes, what defense would I have?  I am just on the wrong side of every moral act.  In my unshaven state I look adequately depraved.  I shamble along doggedly, a photograph in a police file.
 "Is Grandfather going to buy that house?"
 "I don't know."
 "Where are we going after this?"
 "I don't know."
 "I have to go back to school."
 "Yah."
 "But I can come and meet you."
 "Mm."
 "Why aren't you and Mommy married?"
 "We are.  In a way."
 "What way?"
 "We live together."
 "But you're not my Daddy."
 "No."
 "Do you want to be?"
 I looked at it.  I looked away.  "Sure."
 "Let's skip across!" it said.
 "Skip across."
 "Yah!  Come on!"
 I did not come on, and it lingered for me.
 "Come on, Toby!  Skip!"
 I confess to being a little moved by the child's pleading with me to be its daddy.  Anyway, I skipped.  The motion is expansive and not graceful, bouncing one to an unpicturesque height as one travels, and we moved along together no doubt drawing stares from passing cars, I didn't look.
 "This is stupid," I said.
 It does however cover ground and we were soon across the river and entering the park.  I began to enjoy myself, possibly the rush of blood to the head.  The sun shone now as it does there, casting no shadow.  I felt warmer and poked along unambitiously.
 The child was doing a Christopher Robin thing.  "I can go anywhere 'cause I have my boots on!" it called, wading into a broad puddle.  I sat on the backrest of a bench, feet on the seat, and watched it amble.
 The energy of children surrounds us, threatens to overwhelm us and subsides leaving us uncomfortable with our relief, don't you find?  I beg to be excused.
 The child's steps began to probe and then the puddle poured in over its boot tops.  "Ha ha!" I called.  "Asshole."
 It's not that they disrupt your narcissism, assuming that to be possible, it's that they become your narcissism.  Little you's.  More images to take care of.  I'd so much rather have dinner.
 The child pried something from the mud bottom and swished it to rinse away the ooze.  A baby--no, a doll in the form of an infant.  Pausing to empty its boots it approached with the thing in a maternal embrace, huggling it, squeezing out a little party-horn yelp.
 "Gosh!" I said.  "You're a little mommy yourself!"
 It held the subchild in both hands and pressed from it a long series of squeals so irritating as to be life-like, relishing the noise.  There is something sadistic in the child.  The question is, which of us did it enjoy torturing more, me or the rubber baby?
 "Can I see it?" I smiled.
 Suspecting nothing the child handed it over.  Sometimes one can defeat the child.
 I squeezed out a cry, examined it, turned it upsidedown and balanced it that way on my finger.
 "Toby, give it back now."
 "I'm not finished," I said, achieving actual spin on my fingertip of the inverted baby.
 "Toby!"
 "OK," I said.  I held it out to the child by the head but jerked it out of reach when it grabbed for it.
 The child put its hands on its hips.  "I'm going to kill you!"
 "That won't get you the dolly," I said.  I flipped it in the air, caught it.
 "What will get me the dolly?"
 "Nothing will get you the dolly," I told it.  "The dolly was not meant for you, and you were not meant for the dolly.  You will never have the dolly."
 "Toby!  Give it!"
 I shook my head neutrally.
 While we were thus proceeding, the child whining and lunging, I lifting the dingus out of reach and shaking my finger, we were approached by a woman holding by the hand a boy child perhaps half Andrea's age though of disproportionate size.  Kid looked like a juke box.  He wept aloud, sustaining a noise not unlike that of the doll, at which he pointed.
 We looked at him.
 "Hi!" I said.
 He continued to bawl.
 "You've got his doll," said the woman.  She was a woman between twenty-five and fifty.  There is absolutely nothing to say about her.  English.  The kid's nanny or whatever they have.
 "His doll?" I said.
 "He dropped it in the puddle."
 The child's mouth twisted resentfully.  "I found it!" it said, citing a primeval law.
 This was ideal, better even than dismemberment.  I handed it to the child.  "Give the little boy back his dolly, Andrea," I said.
 The child hesitated but its Swiss obedience training carried the day and it handed the doll over.  The other child accepted it, hugging it even as it looked up at the woman for some indication of what came next.
 Amusement tugged at my features.  "Say thank you, Andrea," I said.
 "Thank you!" it snarled at the kid, who began to weep again.
 The woman gave me an adults-only look and led away her little charge.
 "I'm glad he's such a goober," the child said, perhaps hoping to be overheard.
 "We have to accept life," I reminded it.
 "Are you afraid of ghosts?"

 WHETHER THERE WAS REALLY A GHOST

 In this manner the child proposed to reopen the contest.  We had the house in view as we strolled back across the bridge and it tried to persuade me it had seen a ghost there.  My earlier experience, though vivid, had already been filed in the archives of my fantasy life, and I scoffed at the child.
 "How old is that house?" it said, attempting to portray wonder with its little voice.
 "More than a year," I said.
 "I bet it's real old!  The ghost comes from way back!"  It kept a straight face.  The child always keeps a straight face.
 "Sometime previous to now," I allowed, yawning.  It had been a serious walk.  I was ready to expire myself.  As I reached the steps I considered summoning the domestics to carry me up, but one must keep in shape for the lambada.
 Under my own steam I trudged up to the bathroom, let my clothes fall away and scraped off my beard while the tub was filling.  Then I stepped in and lay contemplating the ceiling.  No ghosts.
 In the hall I lassoed Marcie and locked us in the bedroom, let her have my body.  Swung Bodang into action, got him fed.
 "Toby," she said, rising, "don't forget we have dinner with Haze and everybody."
 "I'm just going to rest my eyes for a minute," I said.  When she came in I would obediently come to life, sit up, take off the electrodes.
 But when I woke up it was dark.  I was alone.  You know how you feel.  Late.  Out of place.  Perhaps I had missed dinner!
 The thought propelled me into my suit and downstairs to the large rooms where I prowled anxiously, hearing nothing.  They had gone away and left me!  My oral longing intensified.
 But no, there they were, standing around murmuring in the restrained English style.  Constipation is their national malaise.  They flow only reluctantly into the cesspool of conversation.
 Marcie flashed me her brights as I entered.  Beside me the child gave me a neutral look as Haze turned from them and stared at me down his cigar.  He was wearing a kilt.  Haze is the kind of guy, comes to England and wears a kilt.  His eyes dared me to be amused and I looked quickly around for someone else to join.
 Lady McGeorge was there with some guy, which was a relief.  I had sensed about her some vaguely romantic effort in my direction.  Trying to sell me something I didn't want to buy.  Being with Lady McGeorge was like visiting one's mother, you had that desperate feeling that no one ever gets above just living.
 But wait!  Whoa!  Hold it!  Oola-loola!  Off to one side stood an Asian woman in a minidress--tall, slender, short hair, perfect legs.  I went right over, I don't know how, I was just suddenly, you know, standing there.  Policy yields to the occasion sort of thing.
 She gave me an unimpressed look through which I smiled.  When you're brutally good-looking you don't need encouragement.
 "You must be Mr. Tucker," she said.
 "Nothing I can do about it."
 "Don't try so hard to keep your eyes on mine."
 I raised my gaze, which had lingered on her mounds of happiness, and took in her eyes.  "It doesn't take any effort," I said.
 The manservant paused with a tray of champagne.  We took a pair of glasses and stood facing each other with them, two people at a party.  No law against that.
 She was un-unlookable at!  Wow!  I meditated the painful gap between vision and fulfilment.
 "You think you're God's gift, don't you," she said.
 "No," I said.  "I think you're God's gift."
 This embarrassed her into silence, a significant victory.  She lowered her eyes and lay her lashes on her cheek.
 The guy talking to Lady McGeorge detached himself and came over.  Balding with huge sideburns, you know how the Brits have no idea about hair.  "Hi," he said, "I'm Lord Michael."
 This, I confess, nonplussed me.  "What?" I said.
 But my earnest stupefaction drew him up and he did not repeat the remark.
 "Lord what?" I said.
 "Lord Michael," he said, his smile regretful.
 "Can I just call you Lordy?"
 "Whatever you like."
 "I like Lordy," I said.  I widened my eyes, held my palms up, fluttered my fingers.  "Lordy, Lordy!"  I said.  Dumb fuck.
 "Well, here's a toast," announced Haze, recalling me to my poise, "to Lady McGeorge and her hospitality.  It's a wonderful house and I'll be proud to call it my own!"  When Haze makes a speech he rocks from side to side and works his way left, simultaneously standing his ground and inching out of the line of fire.
 "Oh, you don't want this house, Hazelton," said the Lord.  "It's haunted!"
 "Michael," said Lady McGeorge, "do shut up."
 "There is a ghost, Gwampa!" said the child.  "I saw it!"  The child talks like this.
 "Hey!" said Haze to it, wide-eyed, "a house with a ghost in it!"
 "Careful, old boy," said the Lord.  "Puts the price up."
 "Michael, can you manage not to interfere?"
 I looked at him.  "You mean an actual ghost?"
 "Oh, Lord, yes!  When I saw him I almost soiled my knickers!  Some old ancestor sort of fellow.  Part of the family!"
 "Michael, dain't!  I'd be sear happy if you'd stop this!"
 "Gives me the heeby-jeebies!" said Marcie.
 I stared at him.  "What did he look like?"
 "Sort of a Count of Monte Christo fellow with a flowing shirt.  Sort of like oneself, you know."  He posed, holding his chin out.  "That is if he's real.  That's why I've invited Dr. Lu to stay.  She'll know whether I'm suffering from delusions or not!"
 He turned to the Chinese chick.  So did I.  She gave me that forget-it look.  "I'm a psychiatrist," she said.
 I smiled at her.  "I feel better already."

 THEY CALL ME MR. LOVE

 We tethered the child and went out to Crockford's, a casino with a restaurant.  Lady McGeorge drove us in her Rolls, for which I was thankful.  Driving with Haze is an experience in leaning backward.
 She stopped the car in the middle of the street and lackeys came out to open doors and bow.  They had our coats off before we got inside.  We ate at a round table slightly too large for the six of us but the food was more or less what you want and I began to relax.  It gives me a warm feeling when they uncork the champagne and the smoke comes out.
 It emerged that Lord Michael and Lady McGeorge were brother and sister, which seemed to affect the seating arrangement.  He sat with Marcie, Lady McGeorge was separated from me by Haze and I, inwardly rubbing my hands, was with Dr. Lu.  It had not yet occurred to me to question my luck.
 Marcie of course is the very melted ice cream of women but it struck me at the moment that blondes are sort of obvious.  Dark women have more, I don't know, subjectivity.  I did what I could to convey to Dr. Lu that I was not unsingle.
 "Are you a Freudian or an Adlerian?" I said.  "Please God, not a Jungian."
 "You're acquainted with the discipline?"
 "Well," I said, "I don't really buy into all that guff."
 "He doesn't buy into anything," said Haze at my elbow.  "He doesn't have seventy-five cents."
 "I'm like the Queen," I explained.  "I never carry money."
 "You are the fucking Queen."  He turned away.
 I paused a moment before qualifying this.  "I live on an unearned income."
 "And you despise psychiatry."
 "Tenderness is where you find it," I shrugged, "but I can't say it's my first eagerness."
 "I've had enough of these English girls," said Lord Michael to Marcie.  "You ask them to sit down and they roll over."
 "The Oxford tell us what is correct," Lady McGeorge told Haze.  "Webster's only tells us what is permissible."
 Dr. Lu's legs were crossed in my direction.  I intuited this rather than saw it but was no less buoyed.  "But I think a single session might do me some good," I said.
 Marcie sat back and showed Michael her stocking.  "In England they say ladder," she said.  "In English it's a run."
 "How honest are you willing to be with me?" said Dr. Lu.
 "Honesty can be brutal," I said.  "What do you want me to be honest about?"
 "What are you trying to avoid?"
 "Pain."
 "Whose?"
 "Anybody's."
 "You live for pleasure."
 "What do you live for?"
 "You act as if I'm crazy."
 "How shall I act?"
 "As if I have something to say."
 "What's the difference?"
 She gave me a look.  "Are you a feminist?"
 "I think it's only gentlemanly to give women every chance."
 "So you're a gentleman."
 "Hm," I said.  "Whether or not to be a gentleman.  Always a tough call.  It depends."
 "Oh, yes, Hazelton, it's frightfully ancient," said the Lord.  "Henry VIII used to keep his mistress next door.  That's why they call it the King's Road.  Used to come down that way to see her."
 "Gee," said Haze, grinning.
 The Lord waited for more but that's all Haze had.  "I so much prefer London to New York," the Lord went on, "don't you, Mr. Tucker?"
 "It's not a real city unless you're being shot at," I said.
 More food arrived.  The champagne was replaced by Chateau-Neuf-du-Pape and fillet mignon.  For me, anyway.  Lady McGeorge had a plate of greens.
 "You are eating dead flesh," she observed.
 My mouth was already full.  "I like mine with a cream sauce," I managed to say.
 "Would you describe yourself as an intellectual?"  Dr. Lu said.
 I was tempted to lecture her on the vulgarity of ideas.  Pinching up your philosophical skirts as you wade through reality sort of thing.  But I said, "I don't know."
 "You don't know?"
 "I think descriptions of oneself are always a bit wishful."
 "Do you object to being wishful?"
 She had me there.
 "What is it that you think you might want?" she said.
 What I want is to work my tongue around in your rectum I almost said but I wasn't yet drunk enough.  "Well of course one doesn't always know."
 "Tell me."
 "Why?  What right have you got to my truth?"
 "Why don't you just say what you think?"
 "Too dangerous.  Fortunately I'm never quite sure what I think.
 "You eat quickly, Mr. Tucker," said Lady McGeorge.  Flirting?  Posing with her authority?  I don't know how to read these people.
 "Thank you," I said.
 Haze looked at me.  "You're not really that stupid," he said, "you're just pretending."  After which expense of patience he watched me holding a glass under a bottle.
 "Deep down I'm fairly shallow," I said, and he turned away.
 "Mr. Sarcasmo," said Dr. Lu.
 "You wound me.  I may permit myself the occasional irony."
 "You don't really want me."
 "I'm so relieved."
 "You're fixated on your mother."
 "You sound like a psychiatrist."
 "How does a psychiatrist sound?"
 "Like a cheap movie."
 "How do you think you sound?"
 "Like an expensive movie."
 "You're making fun of me."
 "Shouldn't someone?"
 "Not if it makes me feel silly."
 "If it's not silly it's not happening.
 "Necessity," she said, "is the invention of mother," and we laughed together almost into a kiss.

Will You Please Fuck Off Part 1

Will You Please Fuck Off Part 2

Will You Please Fuck Off Part 3