I abused my body for a fairly long time and it must have some sense of grievance against me (or, as they say here, “a grudge”), and now, after the fact, there’s not a whole lot I can do for it—except torment it every morning with pointless knee-bends after which the tight, deceived thighs ache with forgotten, sweet moans; or else vapidly drag it to the swimming pool every night (off to work!) where they know me already: the black lady custodian in a motley turban who hands out locker keys blitzes me with her blinding smile each time: “You’re pretty faithful to that swimming, huh?”—God, how gentle, soft, and kind she is, like the water in the pool; at each unexpected kind word I’m ready to start bawling my eyes out, like a hounded adolescent wolf cub, ready to eat from each outstretched hand, like, for example, this trustingly open palm—pink nakedness upward—handing me a little golden key on a red nylon string, to which I eagerly explain that I must, that I literally must frequent this place, that this is the sole way I can save myself from depression—the Great American Depression from which it seems that about 70 percent of the population suffers, running to psychiatrists, gulping down Prozac, each nation goes crazy in its own way—and in order to describe my depression, which actually falls under a different name—I’ve already managed, willy-nilly, to pick up a little terminology familiar to them: “broken relationship,” and moreover “straight after a divorce,” and moreover “sexually traumatic,” and from there summoning psychiatric textbooks to my aid: “fear of intimacy, fear of frigidity, suicidal moods”—in a word, a classic case, not even worth going to a psychiatrist with, and my blessed African woman, so lusciously fleshy behind the narrow counter, Earth Mother, gentle, steamy moos and rough tongue, nods with a wise, knowing smile: “I’ve been there,” she says, “with the father of my kids”—how about that, so she’s divorced, a single parent with two little ones, the younger will be two soon, it’s easier when you have children—both easier and harder (“And now,” said that man, glowing triumphantly over her, a sweaty boy in the dark—“and now you’re going to be pregnant: I came right inside you!”—“No,” she laughed, gently so as not to spill all that tenderness over the brim—“no, my love, it won’t be today”—although this in fact was, from the first night, her main concealed thought, the submerged underwater current of that love: a baby boy, Danny, she secretly established—forehead covered in tickly baby-chick down, frog-like tiny legs tucked in, fingertips like the tiniest buds, oh, my Lordy!—in her dreams she eagerly cradled him to her breast: this is the anchor that keeps us alive and without which we, ladies, do not have full rights on this earth, “unregistered”: neither a word nor even a letter in that text but merely an accidental dot in the margins—and in the meantime her verses mumbled mutely to themselves, dispersing into multiglossia:
—no, no, I mustn’t think if it, I mustn’t!)—“Everybody seems to have been there,” I remark, feeling momentarily relieved of the heavy weight by joining at least some kind of community, a social group: join the club!—oh, yes, my black woman gives a stately nod, “every woman has been there”—and then a mischievous woman’s squint: “maybe you’ll meet someone here, at the pool?” That would have been the moment to start laughing hysterically, at the very least because this fall, as you forcibly dragged your miserable, oppressed body down the streets of an alien city, you first became familiar with the notion of invisibility—at first you didn’t even quite realize what the deal was, but once you did, you began to study it fastidiously: yup, it’s true—men walking toward you would glide over you with indifferent, unseeing eyes, like you were an inanimate object, and even on the bus, when pressed by the crowd into dangerously close proximity to somebody’s massive back with a hockey emblem on it, you did not pick up that lightning-quick flash of animal instinct—a twitch, a face turning to look at you—that which switches on in them automatically, simply from the smell of a woman but not only: in reality they—perhaps only with the exception of camp prisoners and soldiers, those who have lost their minds after years of abstinence—respond not so much to the woman as to the electric frequencies, undetectable by any scientific instrument, of all the other males’ desires which at the moment happen to be aimed at her and which envelop her (and which at the present moment do not envelop me) as a densely charged erotic cloud—no wonder they say a betrothed woman is attractive to alclass="underline" that’s the part that really seduces them, forces them to flare with nostrils dilated by fury and pound the ground with their hooves—the spirit of competition, the desire to win, the challenge to a duel, the silent call of the bugle to battle that vibrates the air, the insatiable need to prove superiority over all others, doesn’t matter if they’ve ever seen them or not: “