Which is what I have to admit I found unsettling. Wasn’t she altogether too easy, too lacking in natural caution and reserve to be put into the hands of some crank hypnotist who might prove to be disreputable? An image of Sharon with her eyes closed, taking off her clothes in public, flashed into my brain and was thence transmitted in shock waves and impulses, not all of them unpleasant but none of them soothing, to those other parts of my body whose workings so astounded me. Everyone who knew Sharon knew what a terrific sport she was. I suppose that was one of the reasons why I’d married her. And she was the kind of sport, quite frankly, that only a girl with a very good figure – heavy Spanish and Portugese breasts from her Sephardic mother, vertiginous limbs from her quarter-Scandinavian father, and high primitive buttocks from some African tribesperson lost in her family’s past – could afford to be. She always conveyed the impression that she was grateful for all that she’d been given and wanted to give some of it back. She was a wild and one might even say careless dancer; she told jokes that were sometimes so outrageous I could only suppose she didn’t really understand them; she needed no encouragement whatsoever to stand up in a pub and do her imitations of Sophie Tucker or Eartha Kitt; and when it came to charades her mimes of Fanny by Gaslight and Tit Willow Tit Willow Tit Willow left no one that I ever observed disappointed. I have no sympathy for men who deliberately marry mousy, retiring women and then spend the rest of their lives falling in love from a safe distance with glamorous, forward ones. But I am able to understand why they do it. A reserved wife in your bed might mean that you sleep more often at night but it also means that you sleep more soundly. For the whole time I had been with Sharon I had never once been able to enjoy the certainty, not for a single hour at a time, that she would not do something in public that would utterly disgrace and humiliate me. The fact that she never yet had was no guarantee that she never yet would. And what made my anxiety even keener now, notwithstanding that we had been five years married and added up, between us, to fifty-five and a half, was the way she had lately taken to dressing. Very short dresses made of filmy materials were the fashion this summer, and there was so much of Sharon compressed into so little that the threat of some sudden, palpable, and absolutely irrecoverable exposure made every social occasion a sort of hell for me. I watched with my heart in my mouth whenever she bent or stretched, and when she leaned forward I could actually hear the blood bubbling up in my temples.