Chapter 9 Section 7

There was a Congregational church on the other side of town, and Babette went there two nights a week to teach grown-ups the proper posture for bodily movement in the basement of the church.She mainly teaches them how to stand, sit and walk.Most of the students are very old and I don't know why they should improve their movement posture.People seem to believe that it is possible to prevent death by simply following the rules of good behavior.Sometimes I go down to the church basement with my wife and watch her stand, turn around, strike all sorts of pompous poses, and gesticulate gracefully.She talks about yoga, Japanese kendo, and trance walking.She talks about fakirs and climbers.The old people nodded as they listened.None of these things are strange stories overseas, and nothing is out of reach.I'm always amazed at their acceptance and trust, at their unquestionable confidence in their geniality.Since they seek to save their bodies from a lifetime of bad posture, everything works for them and nothing needs to be doubted.This is the end of skepticism.

We walked home in the moonlight.My family's house at the end of the street looked old and pale, with a molded plastic tricycle under the porch light, a pile of sawdust and wax sticks that burned three hours of colored flames.Denise watched over Wilder while doing her homework in the kitchen.Wilder had slipped downstairs, sat on the floor, and was staring into the observation window of the oven.There was silence in the corridor, and there were shadows of various shapes on the sloping grass.We close the door and take off our coats.The bed was a mess, piled with magazines, curtain rods, a dark child's sock.Babette put the curtain rod in the corner and hummed the words of some Broadway play.We embraced, carefully sideways on the bed, and then changed positions, bathing in each other's flesh while we managed to kick the sheet under our feet.There are several long hollows in her body, places where the hands can stop and linger in the dark, and move slowly.

Something, we believe, lives in the basement. "What do you want to do?" she said. "Anything you want." "I want to do what's best for you." "The best thing for me is to please you," I said. "I want to make you happy, Jack." "I'm happy when I make you happy." "I just want to do what you want to do." "I want to do what's best for you." "But you please me as long as you let me please you," she said. "As a boyfriend, I think it's my responsibility to make him happy."

"I'm not sure if it's a subtle caring statement or a sexist one." "Is it wrong for a man to be considerate of his fellows?" "I was your partner when we played tennis, otherwise I would be your wife. By the way, it's time we started playing tennis again. Do you want me to read to you?" "great." "I know you like me reading some porn." "I thought you liked it too." "Essentially, isn't the listener benefited and gratified? I read to old man Treadwell not because I find the tabloids irritating." "Tredwell's blind. I'm not blind. I thought it was you reading pornographic passages."

"If it pleases you, then I like to read." "But it has to please you too, Babe. How would I feel otherwise?" "As long as you like my reading, I'm happy." "I feel like there's a moral burden that's being pushed around. That's the burden of who's happy about it." "I'd love to, Jack. Really." "Are you fully, utterly sure? Because if you're not sure, we never do it." Someone turned on the TV down the hall, and a woman's voice said, "If it crumbles into pieces easily, it's called shale. When it gets wet, it smells like clay."

We listen to the soft, steady stream of cars that seem to fall from the sky at night. I said, "Choose a century you like. Would you like to read something about slave girls, libertines? I think we have some stuff about that. How about medieval stuff? We have books about. Nuns There are also many lewd stories." "Anything that feels best to you will do." "I want you to choose, it's more sexually exciting." "One picks, the other reads. Don't we need balance, a 'give and take'? Wouldn't that make it sexually stimulating?" "Intense excitement and suspense. Excellent, I will choose."

"I'll read it," she said, "but I don't want you to pick anything that says a man is in a woman, blah, blah, or what a man is in a woman. 'I'm in her.'" He's in Me. 'We're not a lobby or an elevator.' I want him inside of me.' That kind of sounds like he could just sneak in, check in, sleep, eat, etc. Can we agree not to have that kind of thing ? As long as these people don't get in or get in, I don't care what they do." "agree." "'I got into her and started pushing.'" "I totally agree with you," I said.

"'Get into me, get into me, yes, yes.'" "Stupid statement, absolutely." "'Insert yourself, Ricks. I want you inside of me, hard, deep, yes, well, oh.'" I started to feel like I was going to get an erection.How silly and far-fetched.Babette laughed at what she read.The TV was saying, "Until the Florida surgeon put a prosthetic hand on it." Babette and I confide everything to each other.I've said it all, as I've said to every wife I've ever had.Because of getting married again and again, of course there are more and more things to say.But when I say I believe in radical bareness, I don't mean casual talk, like anecdotes or shallow revelations.It is a form of self-birth, a gesture of fiduciary guardianship.Love helps us develop a personality that is safe and secure enough to place ourselves in the care and protection of another human being.Babette and I have given our lives to each other's tenderness, put them into each other's pale hands by moonlight, and told of parents, childhood, friendship, awakening, old loves, old Fear (except fear of death).Not a single bit should be missed, not even the smallest detail of a lousey dog ​​or a neighbor's boy trying to eat an insect.And the smell of the pantry, the emptiness of an afternoon of idleness, the feeling of falling objects across our skin, things like fact and passion, pain, bewilderment, disappointment, breathless joy.In these babbles of the night, we create a space between what we were feeling then and what we are talking about now.This space is reserved for irony, compassion, and pleasant pastimes, the means by which we rescue ourselves from the past.

I decided to focus on the 20th century.I put on my bathrobe and walked down the corridor to Heinrich's room, looking for some junk magazine that Babette might have read—the kind that had letters from readers describing their sexual experiences.It occurs to me that this is one of the few contributions that the modern imagination has made to the history of sexuality.In such letters there is a double whimsy: one writes out the imagined plots and then sees them published in a national magazine.Which one thing is more stimulating? Wilder was there to watch Heinrich perform physics experiments with steel balls and salad bowls.Heinrich wore a terry cloth robe with a towel around his neck and tied around his head.He told me to look downstairs.

I found several family albums in the pile, one or two of which were at least fifty years old.I take them to the bedroom.We sat on the bed and spent hours flipping through them.The children languished in the sun; the women wore sunhats; the men shielded their eyes from the glare, as if the former light had some quality we no longer feel.Sunday's strong sun made the faces of people in Sunday clothes tense, and standing at an angle towards the future - seems to be slightly off - with stylized good-looking smiles, wondering what in the performance of box cameras . Who will die first?

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