The Elephanta Suite Read Online Free PDF Page A

body, fearing to be attracted by his pity, and watched her get dressed, the awkwardness of it, sometimes sad and slow, sometimes spitefully hurried, the expression in the eyes, the moment that Audie called "the last look."
    Even as he stood there in the room, usually a bedroom, they seemed to recede, grow smaller, losing significance. They were affronted, abandoned, as though they were standing on a railway platform and he was at the window of a train, pulling away, waving goodbye.
    Each parting that had caused him pain had caused them greater pain, anguish. But he was always able to say, "What did you expect? I'm a married man. I have obligations. What about my wife?"
    The mention of his wife, just the word, had maddened some of them. But anger had usually given way to tears. The opposite of sexual desire was not indifference; it was tears. Tears made him impotent, clumsy, a big pointless jug-eared man with enormous and futile hands, incoherent in his consolation.
    The endings of love affairs were tableaux in his mind, nearly always enacted in hotel bedrooms, the room going colder and dimmer, and then just cheerless with white wrathful voices.
    "I hate you" and "How could you?" and "You led me on" and "I wish you ill, I really do. I hope something bad happens to you."
    Each parting was a moment of crisis that he relived as he was being massaged. He could not say why this was so, why the occasion of his nakedness in the presence of strangers who were pressing upon his body revived these memories, yet it was so. And there was something new today, the memory of a woman he'd ended an affair with, who had turned to him in fury to insist that he make love to her one last time. He went through the motions, hating himself, feeling that she was made of clay. She seemed to be testing him, perhaps trying to humiliate him. He believed he had brought it off, but at the end she'd said, "That was horrible."
    "Sorry."
    "You're right-handed?"
    "Yes."
    She adjusted herself in the bed and parted her legs and said, "Use that, then."
    On the days of these breakups he'd buy something for Beth—an expensive charm for her bracelet, some flowers, a scarf, a pair of earrings—and offer her the present, saying, "I love you, Tugar. I could never love anyone else."
    She had told him that, as a child, she was unable to pronounce "sugar." She had said "tugar," and the name had stuck. He used it only in these moments of grateful tenderness, as in similar moments of gratitude she called him "Butch."
    His love for Beth was sincere. He had said he'd loved these women, but the word never got out of the bedroom. He had desired them and could spend an entire afternoon in a hotel room with them, but it was an evaporating passion—he shrank at the thought of sitting across a table from them for an hour to have a meal. In his life, though he had searched, he had never met a woman who felt the same, who could separate desire from love. The women he'd known combined these feelings. For them, desire was love, and it was also the promise of a future. Desire was hope, a house, children, a car, a vacation, new shoes, even grandchildren. But for him desire had a beginning and an end—no middle, no future, only its ungraspable evaporation. The end that seemed so natural to him was seen by the women as a betrayal. But worse than "I hate you" was that rejected face, that abandoned posture, the disappointment, the tears.
    Then it was over and he heard, "Be careful, sir."
    Anna was wiping the oil from one of his feet, Sarita wiping the other.
    They helped him off the massage table and guided him to the shower, where he scrubbed himself clean, and he left the room swaying slightly, fatigued and stunned by the experience.
    At lunch, Beth said, "How was it?"
    "The treatment? Very nice."
    He had no way of describing the turmoil of it, the women's hands, the drenching of hot oil, the reverie of sifted memories, the exhaustion, his sense of peace, and he regretted