My dear Irene,
Thank you again for the cushions. I do like them. They brighten up the room as well as making it more “cozy” . . . quite ruined. With scrambled eggs it is better to leave the pot standing with cold water, not hot . . . You must not get too concerned about this matter of your veins, which are superficial. There is no pigmentation and no edema. Remember I like you just the way you are . . . I look forward to seeing you on Tuesday with the usual impatience but Friday might be more convenient. . . .
Blankly Tod turned to that chest of his. The photograph he wanted was all crushed and curled but he soon healed it with a squeeze of his fist. . . . Wow, I thought. So she’s the one. No spring chicken. And a really big old broad. Smiling, in a tan pants suit. When he went to work that evening, Tod left the letters by the front step, encased in a white shoebox on which someone—presumably Irene—had scrawled the words The Hell with You. It didn’t seem like a very good sign. But then Tod’s letter, in my view, wasn’t very promising either.
Two nights later he woke up in the small hours and lay there coldly. “Shtib,” he grunted. Tod’s been doing this quite a bit lately—grunting: Shtib. Shtib. I thought it might be a cough, or a half-stoppered eructation, or just some unalluring new vagary. Then I caught on to what it was the guy was saying. He climbed out of bed and opened the window. And it began. In waves, in subtle gusts, the room began to fill with the warmth and spoor of another being. Most noticeably, and surprisingly, cigarette smoke!—which Tod has a big thing about, for all his periodic perfectos. Something pastelike and candyish, too, something sweet and old.
These were the smells she was sending across the city. . . . Unhurriedly Tod slipped out of his pajamas and donned his fibrous dressing gown. He then discomposed the bedding with an inconvenienced air. Still, he prepared her cigarettes for her at least, filling a saucer with a few butts and plenty of ash. We closed the window and went downstairs and waited.
It showed good form—and was, I ventured to imagine, rather romantic of Tod—to go outside like that and stand in his slippers on the wet sidewalk. Though his mood at this stage, I admit, seemed, if anything, to be one of exhaustive disenchantment. Very soon we heard her car, its slithery approach, and saw the twin red lights at the end of the street. She parked, and opened the car door loudly, and squeezed out. I was slightly taken aback when she walked forward across the road, shaking her head in sorrow or denial. A really big old broad. Irene. That’s right.
“Tod?” she said. “This is it. Happy now?”
Happy or not, Tod preceded her through the front door. She wrenched off her coat while Tod trudged on up, and she came pounding after him. I was discouraged, I confess. I was hurt. Because this was my first time. Call me a fool, call me a dreamer—I was hoping it would all be beautiful. But no. I have to go and catch her on a really bad day. She wasn’t what she wanted to be either. Oh, can’t we work this out? Tod and I reclined on the wrung bedding as Irene advanced into the room, holding a tightly gripped paper tissue to her eyes and calling us a piece of shit.
Then she started taking her clothes off. Women!
“Irene,” Tod reasoned. “Irene. Irene.”
She undressed quickly, as if against time; but the speed of her movements had nothing to do with desire. She talked quickly too, and wept, and shook her head. A big old broad, in big white sweater, big white pants. Her breasts formed a bluff beneath her chin, sharply triangular and aerodynamic, and kept aloft, ultimately, by some kind of G.I. Joe backpack of hawsers and winches. Off came the carapace of her corset. Then that big white tush was ambling toward me. And I thought her clothes were white. What was she saying, Irene, what was she going on about, in words half-saved, half-drowned—in gasps and whispers? In summary, this: that men were either too dull or too pointed with nothing in between. Too dumb or too smart. Too innocent, too guilty.