Passion and Affect Read Online Free PDF Page A

shell. Suddenly he realized what it meant, Charlotte’s going away. Once he had been a raw clam in its natural state, a clam with a roommate. Now he was cooked and he decided vaguely, without knowing quite what to do, that it was time to smother himself in butter, or at least to dip his feet in the cocktail sauce.
    The first thing Benno thought of was to find some willing, random girl and go to bed with her. But, he reflected, any man can do that, and most men in his present position do. Benno was an industrial inventor. He had recently invented a plastic cartridge that could be inserted into chemical freight cars. Surely he could do better with his wife away than to find some fast girl.
    At first it rattled him that he was thinking of things to do—exotic things to do—because Charlotte was away. After all, he loved Charlotte and he thought that what he was feeling was childish rebellion. It didn’t quite make sense. But still, it was the first time in nine years that he had been alone.
    He had found the television set by accident, simply turned it on and watched. Several weeks later he realized that watching television was the exotic thing he was doing in Charlotte’s absence.
    He considered this. When Charlotte was home, they never watched television, not even the news. They had been given a set for a wedding present and it had been turned on four or five times: for inaugurals and assassinations. Charlotte, who taught British history, did not approve of the television set, of newscasters and especially of late-night talk programs. Benno had begun to think of the late-night talk program as some truly corrupting pageant so fanatic was Charlotte’s moral outrage at the idea of it. “It’s ruining the art of conversation,” she said. “Talk about communication gaps. Really, I think my students would listen better if I sang a commercial every half hour or so.”
    Talk shows were only one of the things Charlotte hated. She hated frozen vegetables and spoke about it. She hated prepackaged cheese that had paper between the slices, and American gin, plastic dishes; she hated orange flavoring, instant iced tea, spaghetti sauce in cans, Corfam, spray bottles, and paperback editions. Furthermore, she refused to wear makeup of any sort or to have her hair styled, and at one time she had threatened to become a vegetarian, but Benno had lured her to her senses with Irish bacon. It was a, good thing, Benno often thought, that Charlotte was good-looking, because left to her own devices, she might have been deeply unattractive and never noticed. She was a large, tall woman, with the coloring of a milkmaid, the laugh of a longshoreman, and the legs of a diver. Her hair was straight and as coarse as a horse’s mane and it was dark around her white face. She looked at various moments like a Kabuki dancer, a pale Apache warrior, a colt, or Michelangelo’s David , had it been female. It was all right for her to be natural about herself, Benno thought, because she was so striking, but she wasn’t a very good cook, or rather she was a plain cook. In her naturalism she made everything she cooked taste as if it had been boiled with apples and vitamin pills.
    He mulled Charlotte over. He was not actively glad she was gone, but he could not have been in his current state of mind if she were here. He was glad she had all her quirks; those were the things he had loved her for first, but they had lived with him for nine years like lice or germs; they had slept with him; they had been intimate with him; they were part of him. He yawned.
    Four weeks had passed since Charlotte’s departure. The house was as neat as she had left it, but Benno’s habits had begun to change. The first week she was gone he had bought a frozen cake, a frozen three-layer cake. He took it out of its icy little box as if it were an icon. It had the consistency of a sponge and tasted like slightly rubbery chocolate. Its