Fifteen minutes later Jake was walking down Harley Street, buffeted by damp squalls as he went. He noticed a man and a woman in Western dress before he got to Curnow's place and was admitted. Thanks perhaps to the default of a bashaw or begum the receptionist showed him in straight away.
"Sit down, would you please?" The doctor made it sound as if this procedure would quite likely be painful and was certainly unusual but would turn out to serve his patient's interests better than any alternative soon come by. "And how have things been?"
"Oh, not too bad. A slight improvement on the whole."
"You've kept to your diet?"
"Pretty well. I've laid off the fruit and the spices but I have backslid a couple of times with the wine."
"You must cut it out altogether. You've passed no blood or
mucus or anything of that character or nature?"
"No, nothing of that category or description."
"Any pain? Good. Now if you'll just take down your trousers and pants and lie on the couch."
Curnow pushed a light up Jake's bum and had a look round there while Jake made hooting noises to relieve his fairly marked discomfort. When Curnow came down again it felt as if he had brought far, far more than his light with him but this proved not to be the case. Soon Jake was back in his chair and very glad of it too.
"Well, there are some unformed stools up there but nothing abnormal. Keep on with the Lomotil and the diet and it should clear up. But remember: no wine," said Curnow doggedly, adding with extreme reluctance, "for the time being. If you must drink stick to spirits." He paused, following up a memory perhaps set off by a glimpse of Jake's genitals a few minutes before. "Ah-your libido. I sent you to Dr Rosenberg, didn't I? What was the result?"
"Nothing whatever. No, that's not quite true. My .... libido declined further during the "therapy" and has gone on doing so since."
"I gather from that that you have ceased the therapy. Why?"
"Things like it being offensive and nonsensical."
"I could recommend you elsewhere. There are others in the field."
"If any of them could help me I shouldn't need to go to them."
The doctor said impressively, "Let me suggest an altogether different approach. When I measured the level of your testosterone in the spring, it was average."
"You mean that hormone test you did?"
"Yes. It's been established more recently that what is significant is not the crude testosterone level but the level of that part of it that isn't bound to plasma protein. It would be perfectly simple to establish what yours is. If it's below average it can be supplemented artificially."
"You mean it may be physical after all? And cured just by taking something?"
"Yes. As I said, we'll have to run tests."
Jake did a quick run-through of women in his mind, not of the ones he had known or dealt with in the past few months or years so much as all of them: their concern with the surface of things, with objects and appearances, with their surroundings and how they looked and sounded in them, with seeming to be better and to be right while getting everything wrong, their automatic assumption of the role of injured party in any clash of wills, their certainty that a view is the more credible and useful for the fact that they hold it, their use of misunderstanding and misrepresentation as weapons of debate, their selective sensitivity to tones of voice, their unawareness of the difference in themselves between sincerity and insincerity, their interest in importance (together with noticeable inability to discriminate in that sphere), their fondness for general conversation and directionless discussion, their pre-emption of the major share of feeling, their exaggerated estimate of their own plausibility, their never listening and lots of other things like that, all according to him.
So it was quite easy. "No thanks," he said.
THE END
FB2 document info
Document ID: 67a746a3-2923-4efd-a84d-015dac9f545a
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 1.9.2011
Created using: calibre 0.8.10 software
Document authors :
Kingsley Amis
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Jake's Thing Page 29
