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AND SO TO BED
Hoping to piss his pint and so to bed, Taylor hangs his dick in the sink, cold china pressing his thighs, his bloat belly haggis grey. Thirty-five years too tardy, he sees beyond the mirrored lamp-shade's jaunty fez, the narrow bed at 50 Glisson Road and a progress of "models." Janet, the waif, rat-haired, snaggle-toothed, chinless, white and slippery as a raw sweetbread, who was "inconceivable on canvas." Alyson, whose kohl-rimmed carnelian eyes, recalled now as horsy horse chestnuts, were "too rapturous to render in oils." Jehane, who, after he put the exquisite bone-handled Japanese knife to work chopping his own finger-bones, removed her cardigan, kneeling, just this once offering at least the sight of a brassiere, remembered as the wares of a sailmaker, an armorer, a maker of dummy limbs. Now, these girls—and a dozen others to whom he offered ad hoc marriage— serve as prostheses to a body that has seen no action, was neither entrenched nor blitzed nor starved nor threatened by sharp bamboo. His life knew only peace in a century of war. Good food, hot showers, soft beds. And if strife threatened on a minor scale he sought capitulation, settlement, opting for ambiguity and irony, not someone's truth. He kept neither faith nor wife. And art has eluded him, in spite of dreams and memories changed to dreams, dreams of fair women he never sees aright but through the keyhole of the bolted door. He's never had the key. Nor wants one now.
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