Chapter Sixty-Two
Monsieur Lapin-Défunt lay in his bath. His lover Deirdre had demanded some time for herself; he suspected she was beginning to be happy, a condition which repulsed her—she did not know how to handle it—and so needed to roll about in the swamp of gloominess to feel more at home. As for himself, he had never felt so certain that he had found his soul-mate. And yet, a gloominess had, like an inflating, malevolent tapeworm, invaded his body, coiled round his heart, and transformed him, to his bewilderment, into a blind mole thrashing about in the light, simultaneously reeking with life and desirous of death.
The knocking on the door ricocheted round the bathroom like gunshots in a barrel: “When will you be out?” Needless to say, there was no love to be detected in the timbre of his wife’s query.
“Just a minute, my dear.” It did not matter, he told himself, what Petunia thought of him, or he of her. He could feel doom seeping through the room, through the hotel, like tar, above the ceiling, behind the walls, under the floorboards. Since he’d met Deirdre, he came to know this doom, which, he assumed, had always been there, but which he’d always been too preoccupied, with his unapologetic pursuit of shallow pleasures, to sense. Only now, when this doom was calling to him, like a whirlpool to a foundering ship, did he see its beauty, did he love it, and did he realise that the sensual pleasures of his past were so short-lived as to be measurable in seconds—seconds which counted for nought when counted against eternity. The profounder pleasure, it had been revealed to him, to whose exclusion he had chased those shallow ones, was this very doom-love. It was a love the likes of Petunia, with her materialist provincialism, could never comprehend. Each time he had reached orgasm with Petunia—back when she had actually submitted to her conjugal duties—the tone was of a sense of mechanical functionality on his part, and compliant debasement on hers. Each time he reached orgasm with Deirdre, however, the cosmos cracked open and he could foresee, in a glimpse, if not the content, or particulars, then the tenor of his own demise.
“Hurry up! I need to piss.”
He closed his eyes. His doom, he told himself, could not come too soon.