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Trumper hung up and turned to Tulpen. 'I don't understand,' he shouted, 'how you ever could have slept with him.'
That set a lot of things off.
'He was interesting,' Tulpen said. 'I was interested in what he did.'
'In bed?'
'Shove it, Trumper.'
'No, really!' he yelled at her. 'I want to know! Did you like sleeping with him?'
'I like sleeping with you much better,' she said. 'I did not sustain an interest in Ralph in that way.'
Her voice had some ice in it, but Trumper didn't seem to care. 'You realized it had been a mistake,' he prodded.
'No,' she said. 'I just wasn't interested in doing it any more. It wasn't any mistake. I didn't know anybody else, then ...'
'And then you met me?'
'I stopped sleeping with Ralph before I met you.'
'Why did you stop?' he asked.
She rolled over in bed, so that her back was to him. 'My twat fell out,' she said to the wall of aquariums.
Trumper didn't say anything; he began his trance then.
'Look,' Tulpen said a few minutes later. 'What is it? I just didn't feel much for Ralph that way. But I liked him, and I still like him, Trumper. Just not in that way ...'
'Do you ever think about sleeping with him again?'
'No.'
'Well, he thinks about sleeping with you again.'
'How do you know?'
'Interested?' he asked. She swore to herself and turned away from him. He felt himself turning to stone.
'Trumper?' she asked him later; he'd been still a long while. 'Why don't you like Ralph, Trumper? Is it the film?'
But it wasn't that, really. After all, he could have simply refused; he could have said that it touched him too deeply. But it didn't and he had to admit that he had an interest in it. It was not a therapeutic interest, either; he knew he was basically a ham, and he liked seeing himself in a movie.
'It's not that I don't like Ralph, exactly,' he answered. She rolled over, touched his wooden thigh, and said something he didn't hear. Then ... he thought of killing first the fish, and when the phone rang again, he would have killed the person who touched it.
He had a cramp in his back from sitting up straight for so long and Tulpen left him alone for a while before she tried again. 'Trumper? You know, you don't make love to me enough. Not nearly enough.'
He thought about that. Then he thought about his pending operation, about Dr Vigneron and the water method. 'It's my prick,' he said at last. 'I'm going to get it fixed up, so I'll be as good as new.'
But he liked making love to Tulpen very much, and he was worried by what she said. He thought about making love to her right now, but he had to get up to pee.
In the bathroom he studied himself in the mirror and watched the fear come into his expression when he had to pinch himself open before he could go. It was getting worse. Vigneron had been right again; you sometimes did have to wait a few weeks for minor surgery.
It seemed essential to him that he make love to Tulpen right away, but then - perhaps because he recognized something in his expression in the mirror - he thought of Merrill Overturf and pissed so hard that tears came to his eyes.
He was in the bathroom a long time, until Tulpen, groggy, called to him from the bed. 'What are you doing in there?' she called.
'Oh, nothing, Big,' he said, then tried to swallow it back.
