A Beautiful Young Wife by Tommy Wieringa Page A

assisted-reproductive technology. There was intrauterine insemination, in-vitro fertilisation, and if even that didn’t work there was always ICSI — intracytoplasmic sperm injection — in which the liveliest sperm cells were fished out from among all the dead material and injected into the plasma of the egg cell. Two fertilised egg cells were then put back into the uterus, which accounted for the preponderance of twins born after this treatment. In the parking garage, she ran her index finger over his crotch and said: ‘A Trabant , honey-pie?’
    Dutifulness crept into their sex life. They made love with awkward bodies, Ruth keeping track of when they had to. Abstaining from alcohol on weekdays made him so grumpy that she would shout: ‘Well then, open a bottle of wine, for Christ’s sake!’
    In the evening, as they stood together before the bathroom mirror, he saw a young woman and an old man. At fifty, every man has the face he deserves, Orwell had said, but Edward was convinced that that moment had already arrived on the cusp of his forty-eighth birthday. There were days when it looked as though he had never wiped the sleep from his eyes.
    He and Ruth, he noted, had slid gradually into a tragic vortex of age. She had adapted to fit his years, rather than his personality. Yes, that’s how it had gone: she became older because of him, and he got even older than he was because of her. When naked in front of her, he was careful not to bend down from the waist, for then his belly and breasts seemed to separate from his frame and dangle in shapeless pleats; he would squat instead to pick up the cap of the toothpaste tube. He tried not to groan aloud when he did so.
    Perhaps this, he thought, was his pain, the pain the Buddha had called the principal source of suffering: the acute awareness of disintegration. With a wife his own age it would have been different, he suspected; they would have grown old together in dignity, and closed their eyes discreetly to each other’s decline.
    Ruth and he would not grow old together. He already had grown old and, if the general demographic precepts held true, he would not become old enough to see her do so. What he would have given to be able to return to the very beginning, before things like this began to torment him so. The triumph he’d felt at that evening’s conquest! But now, six years later, he knew it was a victory that could never be secured. What had started as a triumph was now an unequal battle.
    Each morning he took a handful of pills, the benefits of which had been proven only barely or not at all. He was vaguely ashamed of his unreasoned belief that seaweed, ginseng, and royal jelly could provide him with youth and strength, but placed this in perspective by recalling how Herman Wigboldus had asked him to wipe his feet on the patch of lawn before his house.
    Otherwise he was as unlike his old mentor as he was unlike Jaap Gerson; forceful personages both, who felt that happiness was their just desert. They dropped on life like paratroopers and took it by force. God, such nonchalant power, Edward thought — power he knew he could imitate, but did not actually possess. He could seduce a woman with its intimation, but not convince her in the long run.
    Ruth had been in the shower for a long time, a sign that she was getting ready to have sex with him. He wondered whether he was capable of summoning up the requisite lust. Maybe if he licked her first.
    She rubbed a peephole in the steamy shower door and pressed her nose against it. He planted a kiss on it. ‘I’ll be there in a minute,’ she said from beneath the hissing spray. He lay in bed, toying with his organ in the hope of instilling a little life into it beforehand.
    He remembered well what it was like to get a hard-on just by pointing at it, as opposed to the result of focused efforts that Ruth had once described as ‘hardish’.
    â€˜The only head