‘It’s all right, Johnny,’ she said. ‘You’re awake now – you’re all right.’ He dropped his head on her shoulder and let out his breath. ‘Can you tell me about it?’ He shook his head. ‘You have this same dream often, don’t you? I want to hear. Please tell me.’
What happened then? Well, talk about an egg’s way of producing another egg! This wholly ruthless, madly comic act: this is how our genes go about producing genes: we’re no more than DNA’s way of producing another string of DNA: an instinct in us as blind as the migrations of a locust or the metamorphosis of a tobacco worm – the joke heightened by an illusion of control as idiotic as the humping itself. What difference does it make whether such stuff is carried out in the marital bed or in the whorehouse? But then how would I know? It’s not seemly for a cripple to dabble in sex. I do know he didn’t tell her about the dream, though. The diaries are clear: he and I are the only ones who know about that. But I know that a man with looks like his can get a woman to do what he wants without her being aware of her own resistance. Even in the depths of his illness, the anger had flickered at the edges of his face like a will-o’-the-wisp in the marshes; she’d watched it, fascinated, and legend has it that people who follow the will-o’-the-wisp lose their souls. Jonathan himself says in his diaries, in one of those flashes of humor, half mordant, half charming, that punctuate what you keep assuming is an unrelieved darkness of temperament: in one of these flashes he reports that he quoted to her from their marriage ceremony, saying, voice grave, demeanor profound, that ‘a man shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be as one flesh’.
At this, he says, she frowned, trying to understand. ‘This cleaving: you learned about it’ – her earnestness was absolute – ‘when you were studying how to preach?’
He dared not risk an answer. ‘All right?’ he said.
She nodded quickly, eyes on his eyes while he unbuttoned her gown. ‘I don’t think I agreed to anything like this,’ she said. ‘Nobody told me—’
She broke off to study the movement of his hands, and toward morning, an hour or so before dawn, he awoke again to find her staring down at him. He could see the outline of her face in the moonlight that came through the window, but he could not make out her expression.
‘Johnny’ – she drew herself up into a kneeling position beside him – ‘this cleaving: I’m not sure I’ve got it right. While it’s still dark, can you show me again?’
So it was that she exposed in him a second flank. And it doesn’t take a student of military tactics to know that an army with two flanks exposed is going to have a rough time on the field.