A Beautiful Young Wife by Tommy Wieringa Page B

start I have on you,’ he once told his students, ‘is that I know what it’s like to be you, while you haven’t the faintest idea what it’s like to be me. That’s our only advantage, otherwise the world is furnished to accommodate you people. We may hold the buying power, but you possess the far more valuable capital of the future, whatever that may turn out to be.’
    When Ruth slid in beside him a little later and whispered ‘Sorry, love, you’re on duty again’, he cursed the fact, and not for the first time, that one could grow accustomed to a beauty even as exceptional as hers. Everything became humdrum, and what was habituation if not death’s gate? Her beauty didn’t lead inevitably to randiness; on the contrary, someone like Marjolein van Unen excited him with undeniably more urgency than his own wife, who was a thousand times prettier. And with that girl in mind — the finger he slid up her butthole — he was able to live up to his obligations.
    â€¢ • •
    Socio-psychological research at the University of Nijmegen showed that the chance of a male being unfaithful during his wife’s pregnancy was twenty-seven times greater than at any other point in a marriage. A man contained himself as well as he could during his wife’s periods of illness and recovery — and, more generally, during the slow but certain process of the loss of beauty and vitality — but during her pregnancy he went all-out. The periodic sexual obsession of his bloated wife frightened him, her protruding labia and excessively slimy cunt made him a bit nauseous. In addition, he experienced the clear and generally quite correct premonition that after the child was born his life would be more or less over — all the reason one needed to commit adultery.
    After a departmental sightseeing tour by boat of Amsterdam’s canals and the River IJ, followed by drinks at Hoppe’s on the Spui, Edward decided not to take the night train back to Utrecht, but to go by taxi. Beside him in the back seat was Marjolein van Unen. As they kissed, she opened his zipper and jerked him off until he almost came. He had enough self-control to push her hand away in time. They had the cabby drop them at the central station and found a public toilet. Fishing a one-euro coin from his pocket, he thought: a euro to take a piss is fairly steep, but a euro for a fuck is a real bargain. He locked the door behind them and pulled off her trousers and panties. She sat down on the toilet bowl and leaned back, her hands resting on the lid; he unbuckled his trousers and knelt between her legs. That was how he fucked Marjolein van Unen for the first time, beneath the glow of purplish fluorescent tubes and amid the odour of stale piss. He came as though it was the very first time, and in a sense it was. She leaned against the back wall with a saintly smile. So this was it, he thought, this is what it was all about, this border-crossing from which there was no return — the cunt of Marjolein van Unen, the centre of the universe.
    Ruth’s pregnancy went serenely, dreamily; she was bothered almost not at all by the discomforts her girlfriends talked about, the chronic nausea and inexplicable pains. She felt a bit distracted, but in a way that pleased her, as though she was barely in contact with the physical world. She converted her study into a nursery, and went in there every day for a while to rearrange the little rompers, socks, and caps, her movements charged with a glow of expectation for which she had no words. She told no one that it was going to be a boy, and that his name would be Morris. Even before the child was born, Edward already knew what it was to be part of the little conspiracy against the outside world that a family is. Not only Ruth was pregnant, but the whole house was — it radiated out into the park and far beyond. Their principal conversations were reduced to friendly