Read Online Contrary Pleasure by John D. MacDonald - Free Book Online

and then she would be muted by the distance, reduced to
life-size. In the booth there was no escaping her. When he was quite small, his
mother had read him the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. It had made a horrid
impression on him and caused many nightmares. The giant would grab him and hold
him in a big damp fist and, grinning, lift him slowly toward the big wet red
cave of his mouth and he would wake up screaming. Now it often seemed to him
that he had indeed married a giant. She talked at him. She directed
herself at him, talking of trivialities with such a dreadful energy that the
very burst and flow and torrent of her in that constricted space, under the
bright light, seemed to shrink him, dwindle him, dry him to a dusty husk. She
was a movie where you had to sit too far forward. The whites of her eyes were
blued with the health of her, and her white teeth chewed, and the red membranes
of her mouth were busy, and he would get a dazed dizziness by looking at her,
so that her head would seem to be the size of a bushel basket, all glistening
and bobbing and chomping and making loud sounds at him that he could not quite
understand. The torrents of her washed and buffeted him.
    Sometimes he would realize, almost with a feeling of shock, that she was,
after all, a woman of just slightly more than average size. She was five feet
eight inches tail to his six feet. She weighed one hundred and forty as against
his one seventy. Those moments of realization would occur when he happened to
stand beside her, as when they stood at church, or when he saw her clothing on
a bed or a chair. A shoe, a bra. In such moments he guessed that it was her
sheer health and energy that made her seem so vast at other times. Early in
their marriage he had played the part of the aggressor, and Bess had accepted a
frequency based, after the first month of marriage, on his lesser energies. But
by the third year of their marriage the roles had become reversed, and even
though he felt that a certain amount of masculine pride and honor was thus
sacrificed, he was glad to be rid of the burden of decision. As her needs were
stronger than his, and due to her persistence, once she was the aggressor, his
energies were reduced after a time to the point of impotence. This, added to
the reversal of roles, troubled him to the extent of seeing a doctor, though he
waited a long time before taking that step. If his relations were shameful,
they were at least private. Only he and Bess knew the true state of things. He
waited until he went on a business trip and then he picked the name of a doctor
out of the phone book and made an appointment, giving a false name.
    He realized later that he had been fortunate in the choice of doctors.
The man was sallow and quiet and wise. When Quinn Delevan faltered, the doctor
drew him out with carefully casual questions so that Quinn betrayed far more of
himself than he intended.
    At last he was finished and he sat back, sweating. The doctor turned so
that he looked out a large window across the city. “Would you say, sir, that
you have been torturing yourself with suspicions of a… repressed sexual
deviation?”
    “I guess I have, Doctor.”
    “That is nonsense of course. You feel lacking in masculinity because of
your wife’s strong sexual energies. You hear your friends talk in locker rooms,
in smoking cars. Tales of great prowess. You begin to think you are unique. You
suspect that your marriage relationship is… unhealthy. Uncommon. Nonsense! You
would be surprised. In many marriages the male is the aggressor. In many others
both partners assume that role almost alternately. And in a great many the
female is consistently the aggressor, the more active partner. That is the way
it should be. But out of pride and out of lack of knowledge, you have forced
your own response to her until she has literally exhausted you.” The doctor
smiled. “It is the privilege of the passive partner to say no, as many wives
have learned. You