Prince of Tides by Conroy Pat

Author:Conroy, Pat
Language: eng
Format: epub

Prince of Tides

Sex, the old leveler and destroyer, spreading its wicked, glorious seeds even into the houses of culture and privilege –and who knew what monstrous hybrids or what deadly orchids would blossom in these hushed salons. The flowers of my own garden, a southern variety all stunted and unoriginal, were hideous enough. I thought I would never think about sex again once I had gotten married or, more precisely, would think about it in connection only with my wife. But marriage had merely been an initiation into a frightening world of fantasy, frightening because of its furious ignition, its secret betrayals, its uncontrollable desire for all the lovely women of the world. I walked through this world burning with the love of strange women and I could not help it. In my mind, I slept with a thousand women. In my wife’s arms, I made love to shapely women who had never spoken my name. I lived and loved and suffered in a world that had no reality but did exist in some wild kingdom near the eyes. Goat, satyr, and beast roared and howled within the porches of the ear. I hated this part of me; I trembled when I heard the lewd snickering of other men admitting to the same fevers. I equated fucking with power and hated the part of me. where that flawed and dangerous truth dwelt. I longed for constancy, for purity, for absolution. I brought one murderous gift to sex. All the women who loved me, who took me to their breast, who felt me inside them, moving in them, whispering their name, crying out to them in darkness, all of them I betrayed by turning them slowly and by degrees from lovers into friends. Beginning as lovers, I turned them all into sisters and bequeathed to them the gift of Savannah’s eyes. Once inside a woman, to my horror, I heard my mother’s voice, and though my lover would be crying out “yes yes yes,” it was not as powerful a cry as my mother’s cold “no.” I took my mother to bed with me every night of my life and I could not help it.

These thoughts came unannounced, unbidden. Sex, I thought, as I watched Susan Lowenstein walk toward the terrace holding the two brandy snifters, the central issue of my conflicted, unsuccessful manhood.

She handed me my glass, stepped out of her shoes, and sat down in a wicker chair.

She sat quietly for a while before she spoke. “Tom, do you remember how we talked about what a closed man you are?”

I shifted in my chair and looked at my watch. “Please, Lowenstein, remember my age-​old contempt for psychotherapists. You’re off duty now.”

“I’m sorry. But I was just thinking as I was pouring the drinks, that as you tell me story after story about your family, Savannah is emerging slowly. And Luke. And your father. But I still don’t know or understand your mother at all. And you, Tom, remain the vaguest of all.

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