Vital Signs by John Metcalf

Author:John Metcalf
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2016-11-01T22:41:59+00:00

POLLY ONGLE

Paul denton’s morning erection was thrusting the sheet into a comic tent. He regarded this sheeted protuberance with resigned pleasure. In one of those manuals which he somehow always found himself ashamedly scanning in bookstores, it had stated that REM sleep was accompanied by erections in males and by engorgement of the labia in females. He thought about that; he thought about engorged labia. He felt generally engorged most of the time but summers were more engorged than winters. He had thought when younger that sexual desire would diminish with age but now, his forty-sixth birthday approaching, he found it was getting worse.

The day’s heat was already building.

He felt swept as if on tides of sap, febrile, almost deranged.

Visible in the corner of the window, a great, still spread of maple leaves. In front of the window, the hanging plant’s soft tendrils were already brushing the Victorian balloon-back chair. At the back of the house, the small garden plot was teeming with a matto grosso of zucchini and cucumber, stiff, hairy stems and open-mouthed flowers. The tomato plants were heavy with green clusters. The tight skin of the green tomatoes, their chaste shine, the hints of white and yellow beneath the green as though they were somehow lighted from within, promising a warmth and swelling, made him think of firm, girlish breasts . . .

Beneath the sheet, he worked his ankle. The pain was quite severe. His laboured jogging along the canal would be impossible for a few days until the shin splints abated, which was probably just as well because it would spare him the torture of having to observe the bob of breasts, cotton shorts wedged in buttock clefts, nipples standing against sweaty T-shirts.

Though the word “bob” hardly summed the matter up. Some, simultaneously with the “bob,” seemed to shimmy, a tremor of flesh which suggested, regardless of size, such confined amplitude, such richness, that it made him want to whimper.

He cranked his ankle harder to see if the pain would dispel, or at least control, the summer riot in his mind of breast, thigh, cleavage, pubic mounds etched by cotton shorts or wind-tautened skirts.

From three floors below rose the voices of Martha and Jennifer.

But what’s so bad about goldfish?

Because white cords come out of them and it makes me sick and who has to flush them down the toilet?

What white cords? What are white cords? What . . .

The front door closed on the voices.

He regretted, daily, having been swayed by the mad enthusiasms of the renovator; he regretted, daily, the very idea of open-plan architecture. The restless night-turnings of his children, the blurts of sleep talking, the coughs, the soft padding of bare feet on cushioned carpet, the rubber seal on the refrigerator door meeting rubber seal with a plup—from his bedroom eyrie in what had been the attic, he could have heard a mouse break wind.

It was open-plan design which he blamed, in part, for the impoverishment of his sex life. Martha felt uncomfortable, unable to relax if the children were still awake or restless.

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