by Roald Dahl
Gently, he pinched the lobe of his left ear with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. Then he said, "Well, the truth of the matter is, Anna, oil of juniper has a direct inflammatory effect upon the uterus."
"Now come on!"
"I'm not joking."
"Mother's ruin," Anna said. "It's an old wives' tale."
"I'm afraid not."
"But you're talking about women who are pregnant."
"I'm talking about all women, Anna." He had stopped smiling now, and he was speaking quite seriously. He seemed to be concerned about her welfare.
"What do you specialize in?" she asked him. "What kind of medicine? You haven't told me that."
"Gynaecology and obstetrics."
"Ah-ha!"
"Have you been drinking gin for many years?" he asked.
"Oh, about twenty," Anna said.
"Heavily?"
"For heaven's sake, Conrad, stop worrying about my insides. I'd like another martini, please."
"Of course."
He called the waiter and said, "One vodka martini."
"No," Anna said, "gin."
He sighed and shook his head and said, "Nobody listens to her doctor these days."
"You're not my doctor."
"No," he said. "I'm your friend."
"Let's talk about your wife," Anna said. "Is she still as beautiful as ever?"
He waited a few moments, then he said, "Actually, we're divorced."
"Oh, no!"
"Our marriage lasted for the grand total of two years. It was hard work to keep it going even that long."
For some reason, Anna was profoundly shocked. "But she was such a beautiful girl," she said. "What happened?"
"Everything happened, everything you could possibly think of that was bad."
"And the child?"
"She got him. They always do." He sounded very bitter. "She took him back to New York. He comes to see me once a year, in the summer. He's twenty years old now. He's at Princeton."
"Is he a fine boy?"
"He's a wonderful boy," Conrad said. "But I hardly know him. It isn't much fun."
"And you never married again?"
"No, never. But that's enough about me. Let's talk about you."
Slowly, gently, he began to draw her out on the subject of her health and the bad times she had gone through after Ed's death. She found she didn't mind talking to him about it, and she told him more or less the whole story.
"But what makes your doctor think you're not completely cured?" he said. "You don't look very suicidal to me."
"I don't think I am. Except that sometimes, not often, mind you, but just occasionally, when I get depressed, I have the feeling that it wouldn't take such a hell of a big push to send me over the edge."
"In what way?"
"I kind of start edging toward the bathroom cupboard."
"What do you have in the bathroom cupboard?"
"Nothing very much. Just the ordinary equipment a girl has for shaving her legs."
"I see." Conrad studied her face for a few moments, then he said, "Is that how you were feeling just now when you called me?"
"Not quite. But I'd been thinking about Ed. And that's always a bit dangerous."
"I'm glad you called."
"So am I," she said.
Anna was getting to the end of her second martini. Conrad changed the subject and began talking about his practice. She was watching him rather than listening to him. He was so damned handsome it was impossible not to watch him. She put a cigarette between her lips, then offered the pack to Conrad.
"No thanks," he said. "I don't." He picked up a book of matches from the table and gave her a light, then he blew out the match and said, "Are those cigarettes mentholated?"
"Yes, they are."
She took a deep drag, and blew the smoke slowly up into the air. "Now go ahead and tell me that they're going to shrivel up my entire reproductive system," she said.
He laughed and shook his head.
"Then why did you ask?"
"Just curious, that's all."
"You're lying. I can tell it from your face. You were about to give me the figures for the incidence of lung cancer in heavy smokers."
"Lung cancer has nothing to do with menthol, Anna," he said, and he smiled and took a tiny sip of his original martini, which he had so far hardly touched. He set the glass back carefully on the table. "You still haven't told me what work you are doing," he went on, "or why you came to Dallas."
"Tell me about menthol first. If it's even half as bad as the juice of the juniper berry, I think I ought to know about it quick."
He laughed and shook his head.
"Please!"
"No, ma'am."
"Conrad, you simply cannot start things up like this and then drop them. It's the second time in five minutes."
"I don't want to be a medical bore," he said.
"You're not being a bore. These things are fascinating. Come on! Tell! Don't be mean."
It was pleasant to be sitting there feeling moderately high on two big martinis, and making easy talk with this graceful man, this quiet, comfortable, graceful person. He was not being coy. Far from it. He was simply being his normal scrupulous self.
"Is it something shocking?" she asked.
"No. You couldn't call it that."
"Then go ahead."
He picked up the packet of cigarettes lying in front of her, and studied the label. "The point is this," he said. "If you inhale menthol, you absorb it into the bloodstream. And that isn't good, Anna. It does things to you. It has certain very definite effects upon the central nervous system. Doctors still prescribe it occasionally."
"I know that," she said. "Nose-drops and inhalations."
"That's one of its minor uses. Do you know the other?"
"You rub it on the chest when you have a cold."
"You can if you like, but it wouldn't help."
"You put it in ointment and it heals cracked lips."
"That's camphor."
"So it is."
He waited for her to have another guess.
"Go ahead and tell me," she said.
"It may surprise you a bit."
"I'm ready to be surprised."
"Menthol," Conrad said, "is a well-known anti-aphrodisiac."
"A what?"
"It suppresses sexual desire."
"Conrad, you're making these things up."
"I swear to you I'm not." uses it?"
"Very few people nowadays. It has too strong a flavour. Saltpetre is much better."
"Ah yes. I know about saltpetre."
"What do you know about saltpetre?"
"They give it to prisoners," Anna said. "They sprinkle it on their cornflakes every morning to keep them quiet."
"They also use it in cigarettes," Conrad said.
"You mean prisoners' cigarettes?"
"I mean all cigarettes."
"That's nonsense."
"Is it?"
"Of course it is."
"Why do you say that?"
"Nobody would stand for it," she said.
"They stand for cancer."
"That's quite different, Conrad. How do you know they put saltpetre in cigarettes?"
"Have you never wondered," he said, "what makes a cigarette go on burning when you lay it in the ashtray? Tobacco doesn't burn of its own accord. Any pipe smoker will tell you that."
"They use special chemicals," she said.
"Exactly; they use saltpetre."
"Does saltpetre burn?"
"Sure it burns. It used to be one of the prime ingredients of old-fashioned gunpowder. Fuses, too. It makes very good fuses. That cigarette of yours is a first-rate slow-burning fuse, is it not?"
Ann looked at her cigarette. Though she hadn't drawn on it for a couple of minutes, it was still smouldering away and the smoke was curling upward from the tip in a slim blue-grey spiral.
"So this has menthol in it and saltpetre?" she said.
/>
"Absolutely."
"And they're both anti-aphrodisiacs?"
"Yes. You're getting a double dose."
"It's ridiculous, Conrad. It's too little to make any difference."
He smiled but didn't answer this.
"There's not enough there to inhibit a cockroach," she said.
"That's what you think, Anna. How many do you smoke a day?"
"About thirty."
"Well," he said, "I guess it's none of my business." He paused, and then he added, "But you and I would be a lot better off today if it was."
"Was what?"
"My business."
"Conrad, what do you mean?"
"I'm simply saying that if you, once upon a time, hadn't suddenly decided to drop me, none of this misery would have happened to either of us. We'd still be happily married to each other."
His face had suddenly taken on a queer sharp look.
"Drop you?"
"It was quite a shock, Anna."
"Oh dear," she said, "but everybody drops everybody else at that age, don't they?"
"I wouldn't know," Conrad said.
"You're not cross with me still, are you, for doing that?"
"Cross!" he said. "Good God, Anna! Cross is what children get when they lose a toy! I lost a wife!"
She stared at him, speechless.
"Tell me," he went on, "didn't you have any idea how I felt at the time?"
"But Conrad, we were so young."
"It destroyed me, Anna. It just about destroyed me."
"But how… "How what?"
"How, if it meant so much, could you turn right around and get engaged to somebody else a few weeks later?"
"Have you never heard of the rebound?" he asked.
She nodded, gazing at him in dismay.
"I was wildly in love with you, Anna."
She didn't answer.
"I'm sorry," he said. "That was a silly outburst. Please forgive me."
There was a long silence.
Conrad was leaning back in his chair, studying her from a distance. She took another cigarette from the pack, and lit it, Then she blew out the match and placed it carefully in the ashtray. When she glanced up again, he was still watching her. There was an intent, far look in his eyes.
"What are you thinking about?" she asked.
He didn't answer.
"Conrad," she said, "do you still hate me for doing what I did?"
"Hate you?"
"Yes, hate me. I have a queer feeling that you do. I'm sure you do, even after all these years."
"Anna," he said.
"Yes, Conrad?"
He hitched his chair closer to the table, and leaned forward. "Did it ever cross your mind.
He stopped.
She waited.
He was looking so intensely earnest all of a sudden that she leaned forward herself.
"Did what cross my mind?" she asked.
"The fact that you and I…that both of us have a bit of unfinished business."
She stared at him.
He looked back at her, his eyes as bright as two stars. "Don't be shocked," he said, "please."
"Shocked?"
"You look as though I'd just asked you to jump out of the window with me."
The room was full of people now, and it was very noisy. It was like being at a cocktail party. You had to shout to be heard.
Conrad's eyes waited on her, impatient, eager.
"I'd like another martini," she said.
"Must you?"
"Yes," she said, "I must."
In her whole life, she had been made love to by only one man-her husband, Ed.
And it had always been wonderful.
Three thousand times?
She thought more. Probably a good deal more. Who counts?
Assuming, though, for the sake of argument, that the exact figure (for there has to be an exact figure) was three thousand six hundred and eighty and knowing that every single time it happened it was an act of pure, passionate, authentic lovemaking between the same man and the same woman then how in heaven's name could an entirely new man, an unloved stranger, hope to come in suddenly on the three thousand, six hundred and eighty-first time and be even halfway acceptable?
He'd be a trespasser.
All the memories would come rushing back. She would be lying there suffocated by memories.
She had raised this very point with Dr Jacobs during one of her sessions a few months back, and old Jacobs had said, "There will be no nonsense about memories, my dear Mrs Cooper. I wish you would forget that. Only the present will exist."
"But how do I get there?" she had said. "How can I summon up enough nerve suddenly to go upstairs to a bedroom and take off my clothes in front of a new man, a stranger, in cold blood…?"
"Cold blood!" he had cried. "Good God, woman, it'll be boiling hot!" And later he had said, "Do at any rate try to believe me, Mrs Cooper, when I tell you that any woman who has been deprived of sexual congress after more than twenty years of practice of uncommonly frequent practice in your case, if I understand you correctly-any woman in those circumstances is going to suffer continually from severe psychological disturbances until the routine is reestablished. You are feeling a lot better, I know that, but it is my duty to inform you that you are by no means back to normal… To Conrad, Anna said, "This isn't by any chance a therapeutic suggestion, is it?"
"A what?"
"A therapeutic suggestion."
"What in the world do you mean?"
"It sounds exactly like a plot hatched up by my Dr Jacobs."
"Look," he said, and now he leaned right across the table and touched her left hand with the tip of one finger. "When I knew you before, I was too damn young and nervous to make that sort of proposition, much as I wanted to. I didn't think there was any particular hurry then, anyway. I figured we had a whole lifetime before us. I wasn't to know you were going to drop me."
Her martini arrived. Anna picked it up and began to drink it fast. She knew exactly what it was going to do to her. It was going to make her float. A third martini always did that. Give her a third martini and within seconds her body would become completely weightless and she would go floating around the room like a wisp of hydrogen gas.
She sat there holding the glass with both hands as though it were a sacrament. She took another gulp. There was not much of it left now. Over the rim of her glass she could see Conrad watching her with disapproval as she drank. She smiled at him radiantly.
"You're not against the use of anaesthetics when you operate, are you?" she asked.
"Please, Anna, don't talk like that."
"I am beginning to float," she said.
"So I see," he answered. "Why don't you stop there?"
"What did you say?"
"I said, why don't you stop?"
"Do you want me to tell you why?"
"No," he said. He made a little forward movement with his hands as though he were going to take her glass away from her, so she quickly put it to her lips and tipped it high, holding it there for a few seconds to allow the last drop to run out. When she looked at Conrad again, he was placing a ten-dollar bill on the waiter's tray, and the waiter was saying, "Thank you, sir. Thank you indeed," and the next thing she knew she was floating out of the room and across the lobby of the hotel with Conrad's hand cupped lightly under one of her elbows, steering her toward the elevators. They floated up to the twenty-second floor, and then along the corridor to the door of her bedroom. She fished the key out of her purse and unlocked the door and floated inside. Conrad followed, closing the door behind him. Then very suddenly, he grabbed hold of her and folded her up in his enormous arms and started kissing her with great gusto.
She let him do it.
He kissed her all over her mouth and cheeks and neck, taking deep breaths in between the kisses. She kept her eyes open, watching him in a queer detached sort of way, and the view she got reminded her vaguely of the blurry close-up view of a dentist's face
when he is working on an upper back tooth.
Then all of a sudden, Conrad put his tongue into one of her ears. The effect of this upon her was electric. It was as though a live two-hundred-volt plug had been pushed into an empty socket, and all the lights came on and the bones began to melt and the hot molten sap went running down into her limbs and she exploded into a frenzy. It was the kind of marvellous, wanton, reckless, flaming frenzy that Ed used to provoke in her so very often in the olden days by just a touch of the hand here and there. She flung her arms around Conrad's neck and started kissing him back with far more gusto than he had ever kissed her, and although he looked at first as though he thought she was going to swallow him alive, he soon recovered his balance.
Anna hadn't the faintest idea how long they stood there embracing and kissing with such violence, but it must have been for quite a while. She felt such happiness, such…such confidence again at last, such sudden overwhelming confidence in herself that she wanted to tear off her clothes and do a wild dance for Conrad in the middle of the room. But she did no such foolish thing. Instead, she simply floated away to the edge of the bed and sat down to catch her breath. Conrad quickly sat down beside her. She leaned her head against his chest and sat there glowing all over while he gently stroked her hair. Then she undid one button of his shin and slid her hand inside and laid it against his chest. Through his ribs, she could feel the beating of his heart.
"What do I see here?" Conrad said.
"What do you see where, my darling?"
"On your scalp. You want to watch this, Anna."
"You watch it for me, dearest."
"Seriously," he said, "you know what this looks like? It looks like a tiny touch of androgenic alopecia."
"Good."
"No, it is not good. It's actually an inflammation of the hair follicles, and it causes baldness. It's quite common on women in their later years."
"Oh shut up, Conrad," she said, kissing him on the side of the neck. "I have the most gorgeous hair."
She sat up and pulled off his jacket. Then she undid his tie and threw it across the room.
"There's a little hook on the back of my dress," she said. "Undo it, please."
Conrad unhooked the hook, then unzipped the zipper and helped her to get out of the dress. She had on a rather nice pale-blue slip. Conrad was wearing an ordinary white shin, as doctors do, but it was now open at the neck, and this suited him. His neck had a little ridge of sinewy muscle running up vertically on either side, and when he turned his head the muscle moved under the skin. It was the most beautiful neck Anna had ever seen.