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room.
    â€œThere’s a man with a glorious voice I sing with named Marcel Smith. We do duets and we are making a lot of money around town and we might get an album contract with some people up at Muscle Shoals.”
    â€œThat’s wonderful,” I said.
    â€œJust like your marriage,” Sister said.
    â€œI’ve got this woman. You’d like her,” I said.
    â€œI probably would. What do you want to do?”
    â€œFind it and live it,” I said.
    â€œDon’t you want me too?”
    â€œIf it wouldn’t be too much trouble,” said I.

III
    A FTER a Ray kind of honeymoon in Florida, where I composed myself as a father and husband,children from seven to twenty running around my mind and knees, I get a jet, the DC-8, a lovely bird that flies a lot of people, and sit back and dream until La Guardia in New York, queen of the Eastern shore.
    At Columbia University there are fifteen doctors, three from the South I know, alcoholics themselves. I read them my paper. I get the applause and the check.
    (I have another paper on women, unfinished. Like Freud, I threw up my hands.)
    Columbia University got me a companion for dinner at the Russian Tea Room. She was Laurie Chalmers, a Jewess with large bosoms, very visible in a velvet dress. She was a tall, frank girl. After the meal we went back to the room they gave me at the Cornell Club, where Laurie Chalmers disrobed and lay on her back on the bed and described herself as constantly starved—for food and liquor and Southerners. Her family was in Charleston, South Carolina, and she said she missed the South despite her job, that was high-paying. She was an anesthetist.
    She was a gorgeous and restless lady, with an amazing amount of beard around her sex. While she talked to me, she chewed a corner of her pillow. Her feet were perfect and unlined and un-knobbed in any way. She ate me, just like another delicious thing on her menu. I felt rotten, cool, and unfaithful, yet I came with an enormouslashing of sperm, which made her writhe and lick. Then Laurie Chalmers fell sound asleep.
    Ray, listen, I said on the plane back. You don’t have the spiritual resources to cheat on your wife. You feel wretched and sinful and hung over, without having had any liquor. Adventures in sex are just not in your person anymore. You know too many people already. Your conscience is banging your head off and you can’t even eat your eggs.
    So I ordered a double vodka to hose down my conscience.
    The idea to keep at it came on, but I beat it back with thoughts of Westy.
    Westy fixing up our house in Tuscaloosa.
    Westy with her big blue eyes.
    But this lousy barnacle of unfaithfulness would not leave my mind. It is enough to be married to a good woman. It is plenty.
    Ray, the filthy call of random sex is a killer. It kills all you know of the benevolent order of your new life.
    Then the plane is in trouble. The bad things in my head have passed through the air and gone into the engines of the DC-8. Starboard engine is gone, finished, and the plane begins rolling. The stewardess loses everything. Her poise is all gone.
    So I go up in the cockpit. One of the pilots has fainted. They’re young boys, about twenty-eight.
    â€œWant me to take it?” says I. “There’s no bigdisaster,” I say. “Keep the nose up, asshole. Keep the nose up. Yes. Pull back all the way. What’s wrong with him?”
    â€œWe’ve never had any trouble before.”
    I get the fainted pilot out of his seat, and while the other boy is leveling it, I try to get some action on the bad engine, meanwhile putting in my order for a second double vodka.
    We’re headed the wrong way, but that’s okay. We set it down in Birmingham. Suits me. I didn’t have to get another plane to Tuscaloosa. I called Westy and she came over to pick me up.
    â€œRay, are you all right?” asks she.
    I asked her to pull over so I could get out and