I have left the apartment and now live in a furnished room in a large, odorous rooming house near the offices. Subletting the apartment was easy enough, I threw in the funiture, kitchen equipment and a large sheaf of pornography spread over three closets in the bedroom which will be a pleasant and unexpected bonus to the young couple who rented it should they ever stumble across the goodies. Giving each other yearning looks across the coffee tables, accepting every figure I quoted with quick, mumbling nods of the head, I doubt that they will stumble across the pornography for a long time even though the spirit is known eventually to flag, one’s true love to turn pale and the embers of desire to ash.
I live in this furnished room; it is far more convenient, contiguous with the offices, and having as it does only a bed, desk and chair, it imposes no housekeeping problems. Once a week the landlord, for a fee, sends up a chambermaid to clean out the refuse and put on fresh sheets; every third night or so a hasty bump and thump from the adjoining room, a cry of sheer passion, remind me that the tenants here, no less than anywhere else, are possessed by common desires. My wife’s lawyer contacted me shortly before I left our apartment and worked out a rather equitable, generous settlement which provides that she get no settlement fee and nothing weekly in alimony for the rest of her life. I understand that a quick, uncontested divorce has been worked out somewhere or the other and this is for the best. My wife was always a highly moral type; it would be expected that she would seek a divorce to sever a marriage as quickly as a marriage to cement a relationship; there is something surgical and merciless about her, for all her talk of living flexibly toward the inconsonant future.
My single companion is Lindy the Inflatable Companion whom I took home from the offices last week and who now keeps me company in the room when I am home and not engaged in professional tasks. I can perch her atop the desk to witness me while I lie on the bed; I can place her on the bed to see me while I struggle with an article at the desk; I can put her between the bed and the desk to see me pace as I work out the details in my head. She is not lovable, but she makes few demands; she is hardly attractive either but there is something to be said about the solidity and sheer sanity of her presence: she engages in no dialogues, makes no arguments, has no sting to relationships, has no questions about the future. I still feel her faintly horrid to the touch and pity those men to whom she has been sold as a masturbatory object (and at the same time am perversely jealous of those men, thousands of them possessing copies of my Lindy in small rooms dotted throughout this and the other nations), but my interests go far beyond the blatantly sexual: I have not attempted sex since the night my wife left me. Desire seems to have been excised surgically too; something else burns within me in exchange but it is nothing which has to do with human beings or the huffings and heavings of ejaculation. Lindy knows of this and the other things quite well; she regards me with a smile as I work and sleep, she may, for all I know, be making up a set of observations for her memoirs. She has all the time in the world. Built to last at a rugged fifty-two inches out of solid latex with a tough inflatable base, Lindy will undoubtedly survive me and all of those who made her. In that sense alone, she is not to be dismissed out of hand.
I have, I understand now, been in a furnished room all my life. Sometimes the furnished room was occupied by another person, sometimes by fifty-two, sometimes by three or four in the special services division. But it was always the same furnished room and huddled under the covers nearby, observing everything, saying nothing, waiting until this moment to reveal the aspect of her presence was Lindy the Inflatable Companion.