Gut Symmetries Read Online Free PDF Page A

my love for him.
    It was then that I began to cry. I knelt down, my head against the basin, filling it up like an offering with no one to whom I could offer it. A salty sea and no boat on it.
    Blood and tears and crumbled words and words not fit for human use. Without love what does humanness mean?
     
    YOU: Of course I love you.
    ME: And someone else.
    YOU: Sex ...
    ME: You talk as if it were an incurable disease.
    YOU: Perhaps it is an incurable disease.
    ME: I am the one who is suffering.
    YOU: My feelings for you have never changed.
    ME: How can you keep alive what is caught in its own death?
    YOU: Words, words.
    ME: Would you prefer I spoke in numbers? How many times have you slept with her? How many months have you been seeing her? How old is she? What are her measurements? Does she reach orgasm quickly?
    YOU: Stop it.
    ME: Or not at all?
    YOU: Calm down.
    ME: Wife as walking Valium.
    YOU: Look at this place . . .
    ME: All my own work.
    YOU: So I see.
    ME: But you don't understand.
    YOU: Men and women are different.
    ME: You think I don't desire other men?
    YOU: Who?
    ME: Who, who, for a theoretical physicist you have a solid concrete brain. I desire other men. I don't sleep with them because I love you.
    YOU: You should have been born a Catholic.
    ME: For comfort?
    YOU: For ambition. You might have been the first woman Pope.
    ME: Cruel man.
    YOU: Sorry. Just a joke.
    ME: My husband the bedroom humorist.
    YOU: Let me go into my study for a •while. I have to think.
    ME: Take a chair.
     
    He frowned at me as though I were an inelegant equation; necessary but cumbersome, a bore to manipulate. I was no longer his living beauty of physical laws. No doubt he was telling her about the poetry of numbers. I looked in the mirror. Was that my face? I was gargoyled with grief. A stretched taunted thing. A waterspout of misery. He had poured his indifference down on me and I had let it out as dirty water. He thought I was the dirty water not himself.
    Is it crazy to act crazy in a crazy situation? It has logic. It may even have dignity if dignity is what hallmarks the human spirit and preserves it.
    I was not going to sink for him.
    There was a noise from his study like a car that wouldn't start. A mix of roar and whine.
     
    YOU: What have you done?
    ME: I have thrown all of your things out of the window.
    YOU: Why?
    ME: To make me feel better.
    YOU: You could have killed someone.
    ME: I could have killed you.
    YOU: This isn't making sense.
    ME: There is no sense to what you have done. You didn't think about me when you were touching her. You threw me out of the window.
    YOU: You jumped.
    ME: What?
    YOU: You have lived in your own world for years.
    ME: You mean I haven't lived entirely in yours.
    YOU: I don't expect that. I just expect . . .
    ME: A little love and understanding.
    YOU: Yes. Love and understanding.
    ME: Then go and find it.
    YOU: I'd better pack a bag.
     
    He went into the exploded bedroom and returned with half a suitcase.
    'What do you expect me to do with this?'
    'Put it on your head.'
    He flung it down and walked back through the doorway. Then he hesitated.
    'What happened to the door?'
    'It had an affair and left home.'
    About half an hour later he came past me wearing three pairs of trousers, six sweaters, at least two shirts, his sports gear tied round his waist. In his arms he carried a bundle of assorted shoes and clothes.
    'This is ridiculous.'
    'Yes you are.'
    I let him out of the one remaining door. He was going down the stairs when he seemed to remember something, or maybe something remembered him. He looked back at me as puddles of dirty water spilled round my feet.
    'How did you find out?'
    'She wrote to me.'
     
    The morning mail. The sunny eight o'clock excrement of unasked for chances of a lifetime and unpaid bills. Buy a vibrating massage towel and win a trip to Iceland. Pay the electric company or spend the rest of your life in the dark. That morning I got a free gift of shampoo and an