Sermon for today: Pivotal opportunities arise when you least expect them. Be Prepared.

TWENTY-FOUR
APPOINTMENT IN COPROLIABAD

Happiness, it has been observed, is best achieved by those who have been most unhappy heretofore. So it was with me. The murkiness of my life gave way to felicity; I couldn’t get enough of her. Like a passionate pilgrim eager to explore every mysterious inch of Mecca, I journeyed to that holy of holies morning, noon, and night, and with a constancy that defied the clock. We’d go to bed early, to wake at dawn, and still I’d be late for work. I’d dash home at eventide, and to bed again. Most days of the week I’d bop in for a long lunch, so to speak. We gave that bed blisters, and through some startling convolutions of our bodies, nothing we ever did didn’t work. As the good times escalated, I learned among other sexual arcana that coitus could be a nonadversarial sport.

We did get on together. I gave her my total and flawless attention, showing possibly an excess of chivalry. She treated me with a kind of grave solicitude that far exceeded the niggardly esteem she had granted long, long ago to the grammarian-mathematician-linguist-poet who did her homework. Thus, and quite unconsciously, a pattern of intimacy was set, something mysterious, intricate, and wonderful beyond the Dionysian frenzy of the bed. Fucking can lead to fondling.

Valerie had quit her job. She never even went back to collect the few days’ pay owed her. She kept herself busy, puttering around the flat when I wasn’t there, watching TV, painting her toenails, reading Screw magazine. We put in a supply of her favorite porno comics from which, through delicate stages, I weaned her. First to a thick little gem of a book called Great Erotic Moments in World Literature, then Lady Chatterley and Ada, until one watershed day, bursting through the door for my noontide pick-me-up, I found her chortling over Pride and Prejudice. A late bloomer, her father had called her, and now in budding she showed the same propensity for literature that had earlier propelled her to the secret recesses of effortless sensuality.

And there was, as she curled up bonelessly around a book, an extra, added attraction, possibly because it came as such a surprise: she read faster than the blink of an eye.