Jake's Thing

by Kingsley Amis

  "What? No I beg your pardon, I heard what you said. How much .... I don't know. But you're right. I mean she weighs a lot. She's quite tall but she weighs a lot. Fourteen stone? I don't know. How did you know?"

  "Oh, it's just one of the most statistically common reasons why men lose sexual interest in their wives. I couldn't say I knew."

  "All right. I mean I see. But it isn't that, or rather it may well be that too, or 'there' may well be that too but it's general, I simply don't—"

  "Your wife's age?"

  "Forty-seven."

  "Does she know you've come to see me today?"

  "Good God yes, of course. We're still, well, on close terms."

  "It's important she starts losing weight as fast as it's safe to do so. May I telephone her?"

  "No, don't do that. Write her a letter, but leave it a couple of days. Not that I can see it having much effect."

  "Ah, one never knows, one can but try." The doctor hurried on; the conversation about weight, however necessary, had been an obvious check to his interest. "You were saying you'd suffered a general loss of drive."

  "That's right. I don't fancy anyone, not even girls I can see are very attractive. And it wasn't always like that, I promise you."

  "I think Mr Richardson, before we go any further you might tell me when you first—"

  "Let's see, I first noticed something was wrong," began Jake, and went on to talk about the year or more he had spent in continual, at times severe gastric pain being treated by Curnow for an ulcer, drinking almost nothing, watching his diet, taking the antacid mixture prescribed him and telling himself that pain, discomfort, general below-parness had temporarily reduced his desires to some unestablished low level. In the end he had developed jaundice, had had diagnosed a stone in the common duct (that into which the canals from the liver and the gall-bladder unite) and had had this removed by surgery, another set of experiences decidedly not associated with satyriasis. Out of hospital his recovery had been steady but slow, marked by periods of fatigue and weakness, a third period in which it seemed to him natural to postpone sexual dealings with his wife, let alone going in pursuit of other ladies. He had still somehow not got round to either branch of activity, though admittedly beginning to feel rested and fit, when there came that fatal Saturday in late February—the night of 'Thunderball.'

  There was no point in telling Rosenberg the full story, but Jake remembered it with great vividness. Brenda had gone to stay with her grand cousins in Northumberland, one of the places where by tradition he didn't go with her. She had left on the Thursday; she was due back on the Monday evening; she had actually telephoned that lunchtime to ask him to find and read over a recipe for quenelles she had meant to take with her. Given ten years of his precept and example in the matter of each being kept informed of where the other was at all times, her dislike of changes of plan, the non-existence of anything likely to bring her back prematurely which he wasn't bound to hear of first, she couldn't have been away in a more armour-plated, hull-down, missile-intercepting fashion. Arriving back from Oxford on the Thursday night he had found her already well gone, had spent most of Friday self-indulgently and yet dutifully writing to some of the old friends and ex-pupils who had fled from the England of the 1970s and had made Saturday a remorseless build-up to the time at which, an avocado pear with prawns, a trout with almonds supported by brussel sprouts and chestnuts and a bottle of his beloved Pouilly Fume (£1.99 while stocks last) before him, he would settle down to watch the film of 'Thunderball' on television.

  When, twenty minutes before the off, the telephone brought him hurrying from the bog he had felt no premonitory stirrings: Brenda most likely, checking that it was indeed six pinches of powdered baboon's balls in the sauce, and if not, even Alcestis could hardly talk him out in Brenda's deluxe absence. A female voice he at once recognised but couldn't at once name had asked him if he was there.

  "Speaking."

  "Jake! You stinker. This is good old Marge. Remember me?" Christ yes, as what seven years earlier had been a bosomy thirty-five-year-old from Baltimore, the source of a strenuous and reprehensible couple of months before some now-forgotten necessity had plucked her away across the ocean. He had gone on to say enough to show he did remember her. "You sound as if you're alone."

  "I am."

  "Completely?"

  "Yes."

  "Oh, that being so, why don't I just grab a cab and come toddling up to your place and we could get along with kind of renewing our acquaintance if you've nothing better to do?"

  "Fuck me wept!" he had cried, regressing to an oath of his Army days; he had dapped his hand over the mouthpiece in the nick of time. "Shit!" he had added. And then he had been filled with alarm and horror.

  "You're telling me it was a failure, is that right?" asked Dr Rosenberg.

  "Not in the sense you probably mean, no. I .... performed. Not with any distinction, but adequately. No worse than many a time in the past. No, the striking thing was afterwards, immediately afterwards. I kept thinking about the trout and whether we could—"

  "Hunger is a normal reaction on completion of sexual intercourse."

  "I'm not talking about hunger, I was thinking about missing my dinner or it being spoilt or there not being enough for the two of us, no, it was more there being enough for me if she had some too and what else could she have. In fact the evening as I'd planned it for myself, very much including what was left of 'Thunderball.' I reckoned that if—"

  "I wonder if you'd kindly explain about this thunderball thing you've been constantly referring to. I don't believe I—"

  "Well, you know, 'Thunderball.' Film, didn't I say? Sean Connery. James Bond. Ian Fleming. Barbara something, was it?"

  "Ah to be sure, James Bond," said Dr Rosenberg without producing much conviction in Jake. "Do you want to tell me what happened later?"

  "I will. We lay around for a bit, not very long, and then she said brightly she was hungry and what about dinner, and I said we could eat at home, and she said if I didn't mind what she felt like was a long lazy rather greedy evening somewhere with a lot of pasta and a lot of vino, and so that's what we did, and it was quite good fun really, and we said good night in the restaurant. She was marvellous, she did it very well. The only thing she couldn't do was make me think she didn't know. Of course she couldn't. They always know things like that, not that much acumen was called for in this case. Yes. She knew I knew she knew I knew she knew."

  Rosenberg seemed to think this last part was important; at any rate he went in for a good deal of writing while Jake's memory fastened against his will on the hours he had lain awake that night and on how he had spent most of the next day: unable to read, unable to attend to radio or television, eating almost nothing, staring into space, hardly thinking, trying not so much to accept what had happened to him as just to take it in. To distract his mind from this he glanced round the small and by now slightly overheated room with artificial interest. He saw a couch of a height inconvenient for anyone much under eight foot (to use it himself the doctor would pretty well need a rope ladder), a green filing-cabinet, no books beyond diaries and directories and, on a fluted wooden pedestal, a life-sized human head in some shiny yellowish material with the surface of the skull divided into numbered sections. That distracted his mind like mad.

  "Right," said Rosenberg at last, "I think I have that clear. And you've had no intercourse at all since then. Have you masturbated?"

  It took Jake a little while to get the final participle because the Irishman had stressed it on its third syllable, but he did get it. "Er .... yes. Well, a couple of times."

  "Do you have early-morning erections?"

  This time Jake responded at once, with a desire to tell the bugger to mind his own business. Then he saw that that sort of wouldn't do and said, "Yes. Usually anyway."

  "Do you have fantasies?"

  "Sexual fantasies. A bit. Not much."

  "Have you over these last weeks used written or pictorial
pornography or visited a sex movie?"

  "No to the lot. I haven't read any pornography for years and I've never been to a, a sex movie."

  "I see. Going back now to before your illness, how was your libido in those days?"

  "Well, not what it was when I was a youngster, obviously, but my wife and I were having a—performing sexual intercourse at least once a week and more at special times like holidays, and I worked out that in "74 I had two affairs, one of them only a couple of, er, occasions but the other lasting several months on and off."

  "And longer ago, how active were you sexually in your forties and thirties?"

  "Just put it this way, in my time I've been to bed with well over a hundred women."

  Rosenberg had made some notes of the answers to all his questions until this last one, at which to Jake's distinct annoyance he merely nodded. More questions followed and more notes were taken. Parents, characters of, probable sex-life of, attitude to; knowledge of sex, how acquired; masturbation, frequency of (high); homosexual activities (none); first sexual experience, to what degree a success (bloody marvellous, thanks very much); then, at a less leisurely pace, subsequent sexual experience, marriages, divorces, causes of, present wife, relationship with, sexual and non-sexual. As far as he knew Jake kept nothing back here, but he had the feeling that a series of negatives was all that was established; still, necessary work, no doubt. At last the scientist of mental phenomena looked at his watch and said,

  "Ah now, just one or two final points. What is your height, Mr Richardson?"

  "Five foot eleven."

  "And your weight?"

  "Twelve stone six"—noted by Jake only the previous week to be exactly right for his height and age, according to whatever chart it had been.

  Rosenberg gave a small frown. "Is that all?"

  "Yes, that's all."

  "Mm. Well I think all the same you'd do well to lose a few pounds. Try to get down to twelve stone. Cut down on starchy foods and take more exercise. And of course, how much do you drink?"

  "Sometimes a glass of beer with lunch, sometimes a glass of sherry before dinner, three or four glasses of wine with dinner rising to a whole bottle on special occasions, say once every three or four weeks." This was the exact truth.

  Rosenberg frowned more deeply. "No more than that? No spirits?"

  "I haven't drunk any spirits for over thirty years. I found they didn't agree with me."

  "Try not to go beyond three glasses of wine in future."

  "All right."

  "Would you care to make a note of those points? There'll be more to come."

  "Okay." Jake scribbled on the back of his chequebook in his shameful handwriting. "Starch. Exercise. Wine."

  "Good. Now Mr Richardson, there is a certain programme of tasks you have to work through with me. We call it inceptive regrouping. Is this time next week convenient? Very well. Between now and then I want you to do the following. Buy some pictorial pornographic material and study it on at least three occasions for a minimum of fifteen minutes at a time. See that this leads to masturbation at least once, preferably twice. Write out a sexual fantasy in not less than six hundred and not more than a thousand words. Oh, and fill this in—there we are—making sure you give only one answer to each question. I'm not going too fast for you, I hope? Good. I also want you to have a non-genital sensate focussing session with your wife. You understand what I mean by non-genital?"

  "Yes, I understand that."

  "In a non-genital sensate focusing session the couple lie down together in the nude and touch and stroke and massage the non genital areas of each other's bodies in turns of two or three minutes at a time for a period of up to half an hour. They don't perform sexual intercourse. That's exceedingly important: sexual intercourse is strictly forbidden at this stage. You'll find it all set out here." He handed over a second sheet of sleek paper. "Now we come to the use of the nocturnal mensurator. If you'd just step over here, Mr Richardson."

  Dr Rosenberg turned and took from a narrow table behind him an object Jake had not noticed before, a heavy wooden box outwardly of much the sort women keep sewing or embroidery in. When the lid was raised it could be seen that a black composition panel covered most of the inside. On the panel were a brass turntable with a short thick spindle, an arm on the gramophone principle with a stub of pencil in place of the needle, a two-point socket, two electric switches and two lengths of double flex with various attachments at each end.

  "If you'll pay attention," said the doctor, "you'll find this is quite straightforward. Mains here." He put the plug at one end of the fatter length of flex into a socket in the side of the box and the plug at the other end into a socket in the wall behind him. "Mains on." He snapped one of the switches. "This in here." He put the much smaller plug at one end of the thinner length of flex into the socket on the panel and showed that attached to the other end was a broken hoop of light plastic an inch and a half or so across and apparently stiffened with wire. Then, neatly enough but with rather more force than might have been expected, he tore off a corner of paper, pushed a ballpoint pen through it and fastened it by way of the hole just made to the spindle. "You'll be wanting to run up nice neat little discs like gramophone records for your own use but this'll show the general idea. Now we lower the pencil on to the paper so, press the other switch so, and the turntable is now revolving, too slowly for you to see, but you can take it from me it is. Now: this fellow here"—he held up the plastic loop—"is what they call a circuit breaker. At the moment the wires in it are touching and so the circuit is closed. Now watch the pencil when I pull the wires apart and break the circuit." The pencil together with its arm moved an undramatic but definite tenth of an inch inwards, towards the centre of rotation. "Close." The pencil moved back. "Break. Close. And so on. So: when you go to bed you fasten the ring round the root of your penis, you go to sleep, the turntable revolves maybe half an inch, you get an erection, which pushes the wires apart and breaks the circuit and bingo! the pencil moves and stays in the same position until the erection passes. And so on. And in the morning, there we have a complete record of your nocturnal erections. Ingenious, don't you think?"

  "Very. What use is it?"

  "It's of use, or I wouldn't be asking you to go through all this riddle-me-ree, now would I? Every night, please, until further notice. Bring the discs with you when you come next week. Oh, and be sure to keep a note of the times you go to bed and wake up. Erections when you're awake don't count. And don't forget to turn off 'both' switches when you get out of bed."

  While he talked the doctor had been swiftly dismantling the nocturnal mensurator. He shut the lid and put the box into a Harrods plastic carrier, explaining with a smile that Jake wouldn't be wanting to have people in the Tube or wherever ask to see his tape recorder. On request, Jake supplied his address and telephone number, taking a visiting card in exchange.

  "Proinsias. Is that a German name?"

  "Irish. It's pronounced Francis. The correct Gaelic spelling. I take it you've no objection to exposing your genitals in public?"

  "I hadn't really—"

  "It's only semi-public. All qualified personnel. We have a first-rate sex laboratory at the McDougall Hospital in Colliers Wood. I venture to say it's the finest in the world at this time. Professor Trefusis runs a splendid team. We'll be running the rule over you.,

  "Will you?"

  "I will, I'll be there too. It'll take a few days to fix it up—I'll let you know. And I'll write to your wife."

  "Just one question, doctor, if I may. Can I take it that there is a connection between my illness, convalescence and so on and my loss of, er, lib-eedo?"

  "We don't generally find it helpful to talk in those terms."

  "Perhaps you'd talk in them this once just to please me. Connection?"

  "Physical pain and fatigue do not in general inhibit libido."

  "Thank you."

  5—Business-Head and Carter-Face

  It was almost with eagerne
ss that Jake embarked on his programme of inceptive regrouping. A kind of savour attached to the official, by-order-in-council doing of things often thought inappropriate, even unseemly, in those past their first youth. To the idea of doing them, at least. But first there was the Brenda side of the question to be settled. How much, if anything, was she to be told of the bits that didn't directly involve her? With the nocturnal mensurator his mind was made up for him by the impossibility of concealing it about his person on arrival back home, nor could he think of a plausible false description of it. And what after all did it matter? No accountability could be apportioned anywhere for how his tool behaved, or failed to behave, while he slept.

  Its conduct in waking hours was a horse of another colour. Any woman, even the most severely rational in intention, a category that excluded Brenda, must feel slighted to some degree when the one she regarded as her own property was turned to a different sexual use, not by any means least in cases where her successful rival existed only on paper, so to speak, or in the mind. And he felt sure that all the talk he could devise about the entire point of it being the restoration of their sex-life, however well argued, however carefully listened to, would only end up with her asking him to promise to try not to enjoy it. Besides. sneaking off on the quiet with some pictorial pornographic material would be like old times.

  The next morning looked like giving him as good a chance as he was likely to get; Brenda had gone off early with Alcestis to probe a new kickshaw-mart in New King's Road, an operation any male could have polished off in three hours at the most, bus there and back, but was going to last those two, travelling in the Mabbotts" Peugeot though they were, most of the day with lunch thrown in, no doubt at one of those places where they really worked on you to get you to have a glass of wine with your food. (Alcestis: he had whimpered and gone all shaky for a while at the thought—unentertained the previous day—of what would have happened without fail if she'd been at no. 47 when he got back from Rosenberg: him—Jake—flat on his back on the bamboo settee ballock-naked with the plastic whatsit round his john thomas and the other end of the flex plugged into the plugged-in nocturnal bloody mensurator in one minute flat.)