The Heart of Justice by William J. Coughlin

Author:William J. Coughlin [Coughlin, William J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466875920
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2014-07-15T04:00:00+00:00

NINE

“I’M SORRY,” GEORGE Osburgh said. “I don’t understand why this is happening.”

His voice trailed off as he closed his eyes and fell back against the pillow.

“It’s okay, George,” Nancy said, pulling herself up to lie next to him. “You don’t have to keep apologizing. These things happen.”

But not to him. He felt mortified. Was his sudden inability to perform a function of his age? Just last month, his doctor had assured him he was in excellent health, with the cardiovascular system of a much younger man. Yet now, for the second time in two weeks, he had failed to get hard, no matter which of her very excellent techniques Nancy had used to try and arouse him.

It really was unprecedented. And humiliating.

“Do you want some gum?” she asked him, unwrapping a piece for herself.

“No, thank you,” he said. He forced himself to open his eyes and face her.

He wished she could have held off on the goddamn gum. She was trying to quit smoking, mostly because she knew he disapproved of the habit. Her therapist had told her that chewing gum was a good substitute for cigarettes, a way to fulfill her oral needs without lighting up a cancer stick.

He appreciated her effort. But as much as he hated the smell of smoke, there was something so cheap and undignified about gum chewing, especially when she did it right after they’d had sex. Or worse, right after they couldn’t have sex.

She reached for the bottle of wine in the ice bucket on her bed table and poured herself a glass. “What’s wrong, George?” she asked.

“Nothing’s wrong.”

He sighed. Everything was wrong. First, his huge financial losses. Then, his involvement in Crandell’s scheme. Now, his impotence. If only he could relive that moment when his life had begun to unravel. If only he could take a ride in H. G. Wells’s time machine and set matters right again.

“My therapist says that very often there’s a psychological component to impotence,” Nancy said. “Are you having some sort of psychological problem?”

“You discussed this with your therapist?” He stared at her in horror.

She shook her head impatiently. “What’s the big deal? It’s not as if he knows you. Anyway, he’s professionally bound to keep everything I say in confidence. Kind of like a priest in the confessional.”

“Like a priest.” He swung his legs over the side of the bed and reached for his boxer shorts, which he’d flung on the floor in his earlier flush of optimistic anticipation. He felt so close to Nancy in so many ways that he often forgot she was a lapsed Catholic.

He gazed bleakly at the framed black-and-white photograph on her wall, an original Atget. To think that he was being spoken about during her therapy sessions. It was all he could do not to bury his head in his hands, but he would never want her to see how weak and exposed he felt.

On several occasions during his childhood, he’d misbehaved badly enough that his mother had taken a hairbrush to his bare behind.

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