Mr. Tompkins had been a patron—the chief patron, indeed—of an avant-garde publication with the austere name of Displeasure, to which Bech had been a faithful contributor. Clarissa had seen in him, perhaps, a noble savage—a woolly-haired, thick-bodied bohemian beyond all bourgeois scruples. The Fifties had been a boom time for noble savages, more or less modeled on Henry Miller, before the Sixties brought in such a slew of them that they became a politically demanding mob. But Bech had a tender regard, if not for wealth as a Marxian steamroller, a brute mass of blind numbers, then for the delectable artifacts wealth could purchase—for Tompkins’s lush carpets, for his gilt-brushed Oriental prints, for his kitchen gleaming with brass Swiss fixtures and green marble countertops, for his king-size bed and its sheets of sea-island cotton. The couple was childless; these possessions were their helpless children. Each tryst in the luxurious duplex—the maid and the cook tactfully dismissed by the mistress but retaining who knew what low suspicions—had made Bech morally queasy. Tompkins patronizes art; the literary artist pays him back by screwing his wife. Is this justice?

Clarissa, to do her credit, felt that the situation was somehow sensitive for her lover. She pressed her physical claims as if upon an invalid, with the soft yet unretreating voice of a hospital visitor, coaxing him into vigor; she led him as if he had been a teen-ager into certain byways of gratification that left her lipstick stains passed back and forth between their bodies like the ricochet marks in a squash court. The route to her orgasms could be tortuous. A yoga adept, she liked being bent backward over a silk-cushioned stool so that her head rested on the floor a foot below her hips, her green eyes groping for his face and the rug’s swirling pattern showing through her teased, expanded hair. She did not mind, she led him to slowly understand, certain Hindu variations on the standard positions, and with wordless hints drew his masculine force out of its shell of shyness. His very reserve and hesitation enabled her, it seemed, to break some seal on her own inhibitions.

Still, she could not hold him. His sense of himself as a violator of Arnold Tompkins’s posh apartment, its blameless silks and unstained satins, led him to write Clarissa a letter of withdrawal, pleading, not falsely, a desire to leave her ensconced among treasures whose beauty and worth, though negligently dismissable by her, were not so by him. In short, he did not want by any consequence of scandal to become responsible for a rich woman’s upkeep, ardent for debasement though she had shown herself to be.