Vac Read Online Free Page B

ELIGMAN WAS fat again. A few months earlier his clothes had drooped. He had lurked healthily in a collapsed, pin-striped tent. During his previous bulging phase, he had shown me huge, blue love-bites in the swell of his belly. A few years before he had been struck by a coronary. Excess flesh unfairly burdens an ailing heart. He had been relatively thin for only a few months and now his navy pin-stripe clung tautly round him again.
    — Is it likely to harm a schizophrenic girl? To be made love to?
    — Eh?
    He glanced up vaguely but attentively, stubby cigar between extended fingers, medical text in his hand.
    — Nooo. Be very good for her. Watch she doesn’t bite off your penis.
    Sue’s teeth had in fact nipped, to the accompaniment of a little savage whimper, my left testicle. My gasped protest, as the sickening pain spread, had fortunately disciplined her.
    I watched Dr. Seligman frowning gently, sucking the cigar, occasionally inserting a correction or emendation as he edited medicine into a text I had translated. I had asked him about Sue as much to brag about being in a position to seduce a girl, schizophrenic or otherwise, as to elicit information. He had probably sensed this. I felt humiliated. His erotic anecdotes had been one of the factors which had made marriage seem intolerably constraining. How ignoble! Had I been jealous of the fat, middle-aged doctor? He lived with mum, who always answered the phone:
    — Dr. Seligman’s surgery.
    In a voice rigid with the gutteral accent of the harried. Jimvisualized her as ‘his greedy old mother’. How else account for his superb economic disasters? From Hungary and then a Russian prison camp where his captors, in deference to his technical enemy nationality, had flung a solitary Jew amongst Nazi officers, he had trekked through shattered Europe and liberated Paris to London and the ultimate catastrophe of hire purchase. This had nearly broken him as the earlier ordeals had failed to. He had snatched up, in an orgy of consumer lust, houses, cars and domestic equipment and so far had he waded into debt that it seemed he would flounder in it for the rest of his days. His evasive actions were picturesque and humiliating. He would sell and repurchase his car within an hour in order to modify the interest rate, alternately plead with the post office and threaten them that a disconnected telephone might, in addition to spoiling his chances of ever paying the bill, menace a patient’s life, borrow small sums and juggle large ones. Why was he so poor? He worked like a donkey. He had a research appointment, a private practice, devoted nights, not like other doctors and lesser men, to sleep but to an emergency service which, when he was not actually out on a call, provided what time he had for translating. Then why was he so poor?
    — His greedy old mum.
    Jim maintained.
    — The hire purchase. I will explain.
    But I tried to parry this. Each explanation was more complex and fabulous than the last. Naturally I didn’t want the fat, funny, clever pathologist to get another coronary but he showed a tendency to borrow money from us and then neglect our work.
    — Watch she doesn’t bite off your penis.
    I felt wary rather than alarmed. Was it a standard hazard of consorting with girls disturbed in this particular way? Actually Sue hadn’t seemed at all disturbed that glamorous evening —at least until the poignant farewell.
    — Watch she doesn’t bite off your penis.
    I couldn’t recall from random but fairly extensive reading in psychopathology that schizophrenic women were disposed towards oral castration. Perhaps it would be as well, if another intimate opportunity arose, to try and direct matters into more orthodox modes. That time she had had a period and we couldn’t do it properly.
    Steak and wine. Her slight form, dark face, quick little smiles, as she daintily sipped and chewed, impressed me with her youth. I was still ageless.
    In the car, as we hummed along the