For a few seconds she withdrew to the cat, petting it but with eyes that seemed to pass through that which she needed to neediness itself. Then she looked back at him--I don't find it lonely just to sit here.
- Should I? I don't know. Being with you, not knowing what you think of me...you in these women's company constantly, and me in their shadows...Often I just want to be contained here in my space. Here I don't feel so inadequate to your women, or the need to deprecate myself so much for feeling that way...so inadequate to your disadvantaged, dirty women.
- Inadequacies are fired onto me daily, you know, even if I do tell myself its inside me and that you do not pull the trigger.... No, it isn't the affairs. What you press against your body is none of my business. It isn't as if I need to inspect the underwear you plan to put on...if its cotton or silk, bikinis or boxers, clean or dirty...what you press against your body, who massages it, and how, I don't care.
-Yes, strangely enough you are so decent. Husbands should at least be friends with those they have. I knew what you were when I married you. It's those inadequacies like going out in rags....If you like yourself before, you end up losing any sense of anything good about yourself in being with such a man....No, I can sit here for hours and not see anything so lonely in it. Its like Ban Chiang pottery locked in a glass display but at least in that container I have me. Out of it, with you, I lose me... at best, I have just an image of you from long ago in a special mirror nobody else sees.
-You don't look like my image. He chuckled awkwardly to lighten the mood, fully aware of conversation being an inept bridge to link any pair let alone the purveyor of pain with its victim. Not knowing what to say he changed the subject--Let's move the furniture where it belongs out of the corners. This was his response to silence.
- Why, people ask me are we, I, an archaeological anthropologist and you, a playboy artist, together. They feel sorry for me for they think it a graphic humiliation worse than rape. In ways I suppose it can seem that way when rape is such a private act...and this is not private. I brag about your latest paintings as if to say that what he does with his own body is his business; I don't tell him how and where to move his legs so why should I worry about his other bodily movements and functions; and I couldn't be prouder of a husband who explores the human soul through a vagina. I suggest it, although not in those words...not any words really. She began to cry. - There is no paint for me, Nawin. No canvas...just the clutter of a woman's home...countless things if she marries well...countless knick-knacks she has to move around and in which she has to reflect her thoughts, all in different parts of the house. She moves the furniture to see a world where the same pain exists elsewhere to prove to herself that it is the natural state so as to make all else bearable...I mean it is the natural state in a sense but for other husbands maybe not to these extremes or at least not so openly depicted. If natural, a woman can console herself that it is not just the insanity of aching in her own head.