A Solvent Moment of Self-Disgust

Chapter 15 – A Solvent Moment of Self-Disgust

The Beginning of the End: The Discovery of Polaroid Photos of Teenage Prostitutes Above the Drop Ceiling in the Basement of Carson’s Suburban Home.

It wasn’t really kiddie porn, although no court of law would have ruled in his favor. Fortunately, he was able to gather up all the photos, just after Beth flung the entire stack at his face. She discovered them stashed in a manila envelope above the ceiling tiles in the basement. She had been searching for places where their son Scully might have hidden his drugs. When Beth came across the pictures, she thought they belonged to Scully. Then she recognized the handwriting. Carson had stupidly written crude remarks on the white strips at the bottom of each photo, physical descriptions of the girls, like, “superb ass,” or, “large cunt lips.” Some denoted their special preferences and areas of expertise, such as, “nasty talker,” “loves cum on her face,” and, “begs to be pissed on.” He knew he was courting problems when he brought those photos into the house. But he had a weakness for them. He’d come to rely on the images while masturbating. He pulled them down from the above the ceiling when Beth and the kids were away and he was alone to indulge his fantasies, many of which were variations on his encounters at the Joy Fuck Club.

The JFC, as it was known among its members, was a clandestine group of men in the Valley. They met irregularly but they had a clear mission statement: to gang bang and sexually defile teenage runaways in need of money or attention. The club was organized by Wally Syrus, an L.A. County sheriff who worked out of Van Nuys. Carson knew Wally through Wally’s brother Kenny. Kenny Syrus was a deacon at the Lutheran church where Carson and Beth attended. Kenny and his wife befriended the Carsons when they joined other church members on a weekend Lutheran junket to Las Vegas. The two men hit it off, especially after they teamed up in a Texas Hold’Em game at Benny Binyon’s. Kenny was a novice and Carson offered to swap him some action. Kenny went on tilt almost from the get go, but Carson had a good run and made five thousand, 20% of which went to Kenny, according to their arrangement. Out of gratitude, Kenny took Carson to a titty bar later in the day, while the wives went shopping at the Bellagio. After a few drinks, Kenny filled Carson in on his brother Wally’s scam. Carson could buy in to the JFC for $500 every time the club met, usually at a club member’s house but never in the same place twice. What he got in exchange was free food, an open bar, and five to ten girls from the ages of 12 to 18 whom they fucked at will over a six-hour period. Because Wally Syrus was a detective on the vice squad of the Sheriff’s Department, he had his finger on a steady supply of under-age party girls. He knew every teenage girl in the Valley, from Pacoima to Chatsworth, who was on the lam from mommy, daddy or a group foster home. He knew which ones were clean and which to avoid, and which ones were eager to sell their flesh at a bargain basement price. The girls got a percentage of the take, a good meal, all they could drink, and lots of adulation. Wally was there to make sure there was no rough stuff and everybody went home drunk and well-depleted. For an additional $250, members could engage in a private photography session with up to three different girls. This was how Carson had come into possession of the photos Beth had found stashed above the ceiling tiles.

The discovery of the photos would have been shocking, even brutal, for any number of wives, but Beth had to endure the added indignity of not having been fucked by Carson in several years. Carson thought this was nothing unusual. He knew more than a few men who, after a couple of drinks, freely admitted to fucking their wives only under duress, as a way to keep the peace at home. He had loved Beth, he just didn’t desire her after the fourth or fifth year of marriage. He justified his hands-off approach by believing that marriage didn’t have to be built on sex at all. There were plenty of other reasons to stay married: the companionship, the tax benefits, status in the community, the kids. Aside from the periodic bouts of loathing that he assumed all married couples experienced, he liked the way he and Beth complemented each other. She was intelligent, if not widely read, and had a wry sense of humor. She took being a mother seriously. And she put up with Carson and his spendthrift ways, when he would have divorced himself long before. And she lent him money, or used to, until he stopped paying her back. She was a realtor and had an independent source of income. This was another reason – no small one, he admitted – for staying married, especially after his card sharking demanded higher and higher stakes. He knew he could count on Beth, at least in the beginning, when he was able to repay her loans. Before things got out of hand, he made a point of keeping the pot sweetened with trips to Hawaii, the Caribbean, or the occasional surprise gifts of jewelry, designer clothing, or a new car every couple of years. This had worked. Beth loved things, shiny things. Carson used to kid her that if she saw a diamond bracelet dangling from an erect cock, the cock would perish for want of attention. But the photos had changed everything. Before their discovery the two of them could pretend there were no big problems. But finding images of naked women in the rafters of their basement rec room – under-age girls with their legs spread wide apart – forcefully impressed upon Beth that she was way outside the loop about Carson. The knowledge of his secret made her ashamed, too, at the barrenness of their own sex life, and furious for coming upon very strong evidence of being lied to and duped.

Even with the photos in hand she still didn’t want to accept their reality. At first she was desperate to believe his explanations: that they were years old, from a bachelor party he’d attended, pictures that he’d long forgotten. But her fear of being deceived was more urgent than her preference to forego difficult questions. Her husband’s willful deception was more discomfiting than the emerging knowledge – knowledge that had always been within her grasp but which she’d chosen to ignore – that Carson was some kind of sex pervert with a big-time gambling habit. The gambling had never reached the reckless state, she told herself. He managed to break even every year, never netting less than the equivalent of his earnings at the phone company. And his sex tastes had never appeared to go beyond the legal, if unconventional, porn that constantly passed through their bedroom. But these pictures were like nothing she’d seen before, and the fact that he’d hidden them from her emphasized their volatile nature and his precarious secret life.

“Is this why you’re not fucking me,” she screamed at him. “You’re too busy beating off in the basement to this trash?”

“Look it, don’t start that tired old argument,” he answered, as though she were blowing everything out of proportion. “Don’t give me that victim routine, the ‘poor, neglected wife, if the world only knew the depth of my woe’ schtick. Give it a fuckin’ break, Beth. It’s an innocent outlet; that’s all those pictures are. Nothing else.”

He tried to direct her line of inquiry away from the photos, but this time she resisted.

“Why should I work my jaw into a lather over someone who can’t get it up,” she said. She could be cruel, too.

“Is that something a woman’s gonna get excited about? Or am I just too old for you? Is that it? My body just ain’t good enough any more? I have to lose 25 years before you can get an erection in my presence? Well, fuck you! How old are these girls,” she waved the photos in the air, as if by holding them up and exposing them to daylight might be enough to shame him.

“You could get into deep trouble with these photos, Carson. This is criminal. You would jeopardize our family by bringing this filth into our home?”

“Give me those damn things already, Beth. They’re nothing. I’ll get rid of ‘em.”

“Why are you doing this to me? What am I supposed to think anymore? You need help, you need therapy. You’re sick, Carson. Do you hear me? Do you know that? You’re sick. How could you bring this into our home, with our children? What the hell’s the matter with you? What would have happened if Liza found these? Oh, my God, the thought of it sickens me. You shit! What would you have done? How would you explain to your daughter these pictures? Or your son? Scully and Liza have a right to be protected from this crap, and what do you do? Their own father. You bring these pornographic pictures of young girls into their home. They would never forgive you. I will never forgive you. They don’t know you. I don’t know you, what you’ve become. You’re sick, Carson, do you know that? Sick! This has got to come to an end. I can’t take it anymore. Either you get help with your addictions, your gambling, your perverted sex, you do it soon, or it has to end. I don’t need you, and our children sure as hell don’t need you, not the kind of father, the kind of man, you’ve become.”

They had been through this routine plenty of times, minus the new wrinkle added by the photos. Carson thought it wasn’t Beth’s body so much as her uninspired lovemaking, the almost frigid, timid approach she had to sex. She shrank from sex because she hated her body. And he blamed her for it. He wasn’t responsible for her self-image. Even if she were more aggressive in bed, more confident about sex, he believed it wouldn’t change the situation. All his fantasies were about shapes different than his wife’s, as if their two dimensional properties were an antidote to her flesh and blood. Perhaps it was her body after all that chilled him. Maybe his physical aversion to her type only fed her insecurity. And the more she recoiled from sex, the less she allowed herself to share her erotic feelings with him. She closed down because she felt sexually rejected by Carson. It had gotten to the point where she had become an asexual creature, someone who didn’t or couldn’t enjoy it. That attitude affected Carson. It had become an effort to be aroused by her, to manufacture an erection to please either of them. It required the not wholly unpleasant task of fantasizing about someone he’d seen in a magazine, a movie, or a new client he’d met that day. Still, it was a chore. He wanted to fuck a slut. And Beth, picking up on his aversion to her drooping breasts, her sagging ass pock-marked by cellulite, drew further and further away from any physical intimacy with him. This only reinforced the discomfort she felt with her body. The sex was way too bland, and Carson lacked the ability to help his wife by encouraging her, supporting her by saying kind things about her body. He couldn’t do it. He knew that he was caught, arrested in some state of adolescent lust. But all he could do was lament the pitiful condition of his sex life with her. He, too, began to retreat, first to his imagination and then, later, to prostitutes, phone sex and Internet chat rooms, trying to placate the increasing urgency to fuck more and more, as though it were a metaphor for an insatiable, implacable condition of the mysterious part of his consciousness, expressing desire for a completion, a wholeness that mundane living could never offer, at least not without having to sacrifice a basic human need, the base impulse to spray his semen as often and as far reaching as he could. It was narcissistic and immature, but he was unable to commit to the civic-minded outlook in his life, to be the family man who, as part of his maturation and involvement in a responsible world, had to govern his impulses. Why was it necessary to live his life sexually-impaired? It was not the world he had created. That world had forced him to make decisions before he was ready; before he was fully conscious. Why couldn’t he fuck with impunity? To trade that freedom for a life of limitations, for the questionable and conditional contentment of religion or philosophy or marriage, seemed to be a bargain that had been fabricated by the grand engineers of control, founded upon tenets of obsolete notions of what constituted a sound society. It was a notion that had been around so long that it was incredibly hard to resist its arguments. Yet there had always been people who rebelled against those premises, or contravened them in some manner. They were the hypocrites and outlaws, the deviants and reprobates who chafed under the collar of whatever norms were prevalent in a society. Carson didn’t see himself as being anyone special. He wasn’t seeking some kind of elevated status in his own estimation of self or anyone else’s. He had no inclination to glorify his condition, his inheritance, but he was damned tired of pretending that he had to be anything other than the piece of shit he was, if that’s how people chose to view him. 

He knew that Beth wasn’t really an asexual person, even if she acted like it with him. He had always kept a few tit and ass magazines at home, in the bedroom, not hidden in the basement. And he knew full well that Beth often masturbated alone while looking at those same magazines. She always had one or two stashed beneath the bed next to her large electric vibrator. And like him, she was attracted to the magazines featuring young models, those who were photographed to appear under the age of 18. Perhaps it was their sleek hips and tiny breasts that fascinated her, reminiscent of her own before work, childbirth and time had robbed the suppleness from her skin. It was a fact. Beth and Carson both had very active masturbation lives when they were alone, as compensation for the frustrations of their sex life together. Or, as Carson sometimes thought, because they just happened to be very horny people. In the early years of their marriage, when they were more honest with one another, she would tell him, “I gave it to myself real good four or five times today.” Carson suspected that was still true, but she didn’t tell him any more. And the thought of Beth masturbating had no power to arouse him.

His entire marriage, his entire life as a father, Carson had tried to juggle two selves, the first one founded upon appetite, the second on sacrifice. Any dolt could see the two approaches to living were not compatible. He realized today that a betting man, if he saw a snapshot, a schematic diagram of Carson’s conflicted psyche, would have no problem in determining which approach would prevail. It was humiliating for him to admit that in a contest between the love of one’s children and the love of money and sex, money and sex had won. In fact, there was no contest; only a protracted struggle to postpone the inevitable.

When he was with his kids, in the days when they could only worship him, Carson used to think it was easy to go to the beach on Sunday and toss the Frisbee or boogie board with Scully. Or roller blade with Liza along the boardwalk to the Santa Monica pier and back. They were his duties as a father, but duties that had also been pleasurable. And they were easily accomplished. He could easily do those things with his kids before setting off later the same day, casually and habitually, to the casino in Bell for a few hours of Hold’em, then topping off the evening at Selena’s, his favorite bargain whore who lived in Culver City, draining his balls on her plucky breasts and, finally, getting home at 2 a.m., climbing into bed next to Beth and falling asleep without even so much as washing the prostitute’s dried juices from his fatigued dick.

None of this had troubled Carson. Being a family man, a devoted father, didn’t preclude hanging out with card sharks and paying to get laid. His idea of a family man was just that, an idea, a construct, a device and a persona. His conviction was that as long as he did right by his family, provided for them materially, was home for birthdays and went to his daughter’s soccer games, he was doing what was necessary to raise a family. What was hidden from them, what they didn’t know, had no effect on his ability to be a good father. It was simply time spent away from them, just as if he had a job that required him to travel. But the result was something he hadn’t anticipated. The gambling and the need to fuck more and more women rapidly encroached on all his waking thoughts. Even while with his children, watching TV together, going to a ball game, opening Christmas gifts or going to church; he wasn’t really there. His mind was at the poker table, or lodged between the legs of a young and tiny whore, preferably one who talked like she’d been coached by a casting agent for a low-budget porn video shot in a dingy bungalow in Canoga Park.

Another thing he hadn’t counted on was how much of his identity was at stake when Beth finally kicked him out. His response had been, “well, fuck it. I’ll make a clean break from everything. Why keep a straight job when I’m no longer part of a family I have to support?” And he got himself fired from his sales job so he could play the card circuit full-time, convinced that he was good enough to make some interesting money. But without his job and his family he was without a self; without the basic and fundamental structures he had formed over the years that told him who he was everyday. He always thought that his hidden identity, the one he kept from Beth and his employer, was his essential self, the true self that had been compromised by his more respectable front as father and businessman. But without Beth, the kids, his desk at the office with his name on the door, the calls to clients, his business cards, all the routine and dull details of his normal life, without these he found he didn’t know what he was. There was nothing and no one left to consistently tell him, “This is who you are, Carson.” The old Carson was defrocked. He was left with the gambling/whoring Carson, dependent on card sharks, on indifferent and meretricious women to coldly remind him who and what he was – a shill, nothing but a means for other people’s livelihoods. If on occasion he had failed in some area of his life in the past, he at least had a structure built around him through his family that had cut him some slack, forgave him, continued to love him despite his faults. But now when he failed, nobody was there to say it was okay. They just thanked him for his money and went on their way. With the card sharks, they either hated him when he was winning or mocked him when he lost. And with a whore, there was only one way to keep her happy and it had nothing to do with dick size or the intrinsic value of his soul. With a whore he was everything he wanted her to believe until his time was up. Then he was nothing but an empty wallet – his stories, which an hour earlier had her laughing, now made her yawn and tell him she had an appointment to keep, and to please close the door on the way out. In a solvent moment of self-disgust, Carson thought to himself, “You paid to be told you have a huge dick; if you need a reiteration, buy yourself a fuckin’ parrot and a full-length mirror.”

Fathers

Chapter 14 – Fathers

When Delilah told him she was pregnant, Giambone greeted the news as if a Frangelican angel had delivered it. The joy he felt – what for him was an unsophisticated and maudlin emotion – was sprung in his breast with giddy, brilliant colors, as though the torrent of love coursing through him were really meant for himself instead of Delilah. Her announcement seemed to be the necessary vindication of his very existence, the balm and denouement of a lifelong odyssey and quest in which he trudged on and on from one defeat to another.

“Of course,” he said, as if his quiver were always full, “I’ve always seen myself as a father. Being the oldest of eight siblings makes me a natural. You can see it in my demeanor. People have often commented on it. I never took them seriously. What did I know? We’re often the last ones to realize our true métier.”

 After so many disappointments in life and in love, it now seemed simplistically obvious. The best way to surround himself with the perfect attentive audience, one that would remain on call forever, was to make his own. With him at the center, idolized by an adoring wife and children, he was ready to give and receive love, and poised to let them appreciate the wisdom he believed it was his gift to impart. He believed there was no greater sense of feeling needed in the world than that which is elicited by one’s own children. Now he would be essential to something, to the lives of others.

He didn’t even trouble to ask how or when it happened.

“It was an accident,” Delilah falsely insisted.

Giambone interpreted it differently. Giambone, with his inclination to see the world as vast labyrinth of psychological and metaphysical symbols, was certain it was no accident.

“There’s no such thing as random occurrences,” he told her.

There was a reason that no woman had ever become pregnant by him. Relying on his faith in signs, the first woman to accept and grow his seed was clear enough indication of the universe’s profound intention that it be so.

With his proclivity for mystic explanations, he was prepared to ascribe the workings of deep unconscious forces at the base of all human action, even on the level of his sperm swimming assiduously upstream toward Delilah’s eggs. His tiny spermatozoa were imbued with a higher purpose, not just the mere procreation of human cells. They were sent out to perpetuate a mythic idea, the idea of himself, of Giambone. Delilah and the molecular life she was harboring were conjoined as one living vessel, the incarnation and sapient new manifestation of Giambone, his latest and most solemn transformation as an enlightened being. The microscopic messengers of protein and DNA were extensions of himself, the living embodiment of new knowledge come from the mystical unknown, making itself understood through Delilah and the fetus. They were the means by which he inferred what he now had become, not merely a father but a progenitor of himself. He embraced the idea with all the passion of an acolyte who has had a brief glimpse of the divine and takes from his revelation the grand design for his life’s new purpose. It was no accident of biology. It was the Force of Creation speaking directly to and through him. Meeting Delilah, getting her pregnant, were the instruments of his soul’s progression. He saw each event as having come into existence to further his own. He felt his connection to the great divine to be unique, as though everything he encountered had as its purpose the reinforcement of his own. His life was the central fact of all life. People may be more successful in terms of political influence or material wealth, but Giambone was convinced that the deprivations he endured on the material plane were the price he had to pay for his occult knowledge and his gift for penetrating to the metaphysical heart of Being.

“The signs are unmistakable,” he told Delilah.

The role and responsibility of father was being laid upon him from a higher power. He was absolved from all other concerns. His entire life had been leading up to this reckoning. His destiny had been fatherhood all along, only now had the unconscious been revealed. He felt humbled by the majesty of the workings of the great universal powers that directed all life. When Delilah told him, he wept. Now he knew what his struggle had been about. He wept as the prodigal son weeps upon being welcomed home again by the father, weeping with the joy of being forgiven for not having understood what the father has known all along. The son is greatly relieved when he arrives at that place where he knows what he must do. His life is prescribed and he is relieved from the burden of searching any longer. The heart aches to know, and when it comes to knowledge it sighs and lays down its burden, for it is welcomed back into the fold of the known, the circle of duty, the land of the law. Searching is over and it is now the time to act with the authority of tradition. There is a great joy that wells up in people upon returning to the known, a great comfort, for the shadows are cast out by the lights that come from the hearts of the familiar, the warm hearts of the familiar. Soon enough death will return them all to the dark and unknown, but for now the familiar will carry them through.

Giambone assumed his new role as father immediately. He had often thought about what kind of father he would make, as though the instances in which his imagination had deliberated on the topic were but numerous rehearsals for the real event, the one he would stage when the right woman came along, one who had the nerve to complete his dream. The place he always started when he surveyed the fathers he knew among friends or relatives was his own father, a man Giambone loved and whose judgment he feared. His father had raised a family of eight children and he had done it well, or well enough. This was in itself an accomplishment that intimidated Giambone.

His father Angelo was capable and stoical in the face of adversity. He never lost his composure. He struggled quietly and was self-effacing. Angelo spoke little but when he did his words had the force of gravity and conviction that had always eluded Giambone. Whenever he was in the company of his father he felt himself the object of the man’s silent censure for the little that Giambone had accomplished and the many opportunities he squandered. Angelo looked askance at his son because he was possessed of a mind that was given to dreamy vagaries and flighty equivocations, attributes that would have imperiled the family’s existence if Angelo had possessed them himself. Giambone’s father had been put to many tests and he had survived and prospered. Most of all he had endured. He had not succumbed to the seduction of art and literature and philosophy. Angelo was one of those men of a generation of men who seemed to have been born without doubts concerning their aims and obligations. They knew exactly what had to be done: work hard at a practical occupation and work at it every day without failure. Raise a family. Sustain the family. Imbue them with the faith of the Roman Catholic Church by sending them to parochial schools and mass every Sunday, where the nuns and the priests were left the task of explaining the mysteries of existence and inculcating lessons in moral rectitude. Send them to college from where their lives would naturally take the same course as his, working at a solid occupation and raising families of their own. These men had no doubts, or, if they had, they never spoke about them. They quashed them and dug in and persevered through hardships toward the goal, which was stability and comfort. This was life. To deviate from this path was foolish. Giambone had done nothing but to stray from it. And though his father was reluctant to criticize his eldest son, Giambone was ashamed in his presence. He knew that Angelo could not understand him and was dismayed that he had not turned out differently. He was sure that he was a fool in his father’s eyes, and it was in his company that Giambone most felt a fool, a failure in life. His father was a man. He, Giambone, was something unaccountable. Giambone knew that for men like Angelo it was important to be able to take the measure of a man and to be able to do it within ten seconds of meeting him. Within ten seconds of meeting him, you knew whether he was a man or a flake. Giambone knew that under the scrutiny of his father, he was a flake, a person who was a prevaricator, who lacked the stuff of masculinity to make it through and earn the admiration of society and the majority of other men. That is why much of Giambone’s joy at the news of Delilah’s pregnancy was attached to the hope he had of finally earning Angelo’s approval. He was becoming a father himself now, and he dreamed of his father’s embrace, the sign of his acceptance, instead of the man’s silent gaze, the look he leveled at his son when he heard of some development of which he disapproved. The look told him, “it’s your own life now. I’ve done my job, what was reasonably expected of me, my duty. Now you are free to fail. And you have failed.”

No judge in a court of law could have uttered more damning words than the gaze of silent condemnation flashed from the eyes of Giambone’s father. By becoming a father himself, Giambone hoped to salvage his father’s estimation of himself. He was still living for his Angelo’s approval, like every son who has had to live on a steady diet of censure, whether the quiet kind or the physically brutal.

But for now Giambone contented himself with his achievement and avoided the heartache of his father’s reproof. He had to be his own man. He struggled against the attraction of trumpeting his satisfaction to someone who would only sigh in response and ask him, “Tony, how can you raise a family? You’re not married. You got no profession. You don’t even have a steady job. What kinda work are you gonna do? How are you gonna support a family? You got no money. You still owe me five thousand bucks. What? Huh? You gonna make the mother work? Whatsa matter with that head of yours? Whatsa matter with you? Why don’t you talk to your brother? Why don’t you talk to Jack?”

 Those were the glum and pragmatic questions his father would ask, no-nonsense questions meant to detract from the occasion of Giambone’s happiness. And it was happiness that Giambone most felt and that he most wanted to sustain. He was sure that he had never been happier. He wanted his father to share in it, and so he would wait until he could satisfy the older man’s concerns before telling him. He would marry Delilah and he would find a job that he liked and work at it responsibly every day, situate himself first, make all the arrangements that would ensure his new family’s welfare so he might blunt his father’s oblique criticism.

He strongly doubted whether he could do it. Marry Delilah, yes; working steadily at some gainful employment – the thought of it was more terrifying to him than the prospect of fatherhood might be to any other man. For Giambone, the idea of becoming a father was not an exercise in hunkering down for a long life of hard work and sacrifice for the benefit of his progeny. It was more like imagining the child as a miniature version of himself, a self that he, Giambone, would befriend and guide and amuse and protect and educate just as he himself had wished to be guided, befriended, amused and educated. It was an idealization without any necessary grounding in the reality of changing diapers, getting the child shots, taking him to the dentist, registering him for school, paying for his food and clothes, listening to him cry, scream, throw tantrums, or watching the little inchoate version hatched from his head develop in such a way that Giambone was incapable of understanding. He worked from the premise that the kid was a gene splice, an exact reproduction, a chip off the old block, or, the most empathetic companion he could hope for, someone who would endorse all that Giambone was and signified. He didn’t imagine that his child might grow a personality, a character that Giambone couldn’t help but dislike. That perhaps his child might be fiendish or retarded or homosexual or effeminate or bandy legged, or that he might enjoy torturing little animals, or have no desire to listen to his father’s exegesis of the texts of Swedenborg and the arcana of William Blake. He might develop a passion for baseball, a game that Giambone had failed execrably at as a boy and had run from in extreme aversion ever since. He would never throw the boy a baseball, and he feared that some day he would be asked to do just that.

Giambone was unwilling to imagine such outcomes. His son and he would be inseparable. His son would worship him. There would be nothing to ever come between them. It would be a love of deep and profound significance. Giambone would not admit failure in this, nor give himself over to serious reflection on the drudgery that must be a part of any consideration of parenthood. For now Giambone wished only to celebrate the spark of new life that he had engendered. There would be time enough for the serious business of figuring out how it was all going to work. In his increasingly besotted consciousness, fabricating the child was the major thrust of his program; everything else would be taken care of and provided for by the generous and provident universe. And Delilah would be there to help him.

But Delilah was busy at first trying to mask her ambivalence about being pregnant, and her uncertainty about the identity of the father. She wanted Giambone’s child because it would be a Giambone, but his paternity was in question.

Around the time she stopped taking her birth control, she had unprotected intercourse with a long-term client, within the same week that she’d had sex several times with Giambone. The client’s name was Harmon Vizard. He was a former Catholic priest in his mid-fifties. Through the writings of Thomas Merton, Vizard had become interested in Asian religions. After leaving the priesthood he became a practicing Buddhist, eventually opening his own meditation center in the heart of Santa Monica where he had a following of mostly white professionals. He had married and started a family. Vizard and Delilah had been seeing each other for over ten years. He had sought her out first. She was a dirty diversion from his bland wife, and from the prison of his chaste role as spiritual mentor to the irrepressibly discontented affluent class. She exchanged sex for his spiritual guidance and meditation instruction.

Normally, Delilah would have discounted any probability that Vizard could have impregnated her. Vizard practiced an ancient Chinese method of sperm retention, which staved off impotency and prolonged virility. He was a huge advocate of conserving his “chi,” the life force coiled in his testicles. The first few years Delilah visited him regularly at his meditation center, where they fucked in a small room off the main hall, next to the supply closet where the incense and prayer mats were stored. In the beginning she made him wear a condom. Eventually, she realized he was telling the truth. He never had sex with anyone other than Delilah and his wife. Gradually she stopped insisting he wear protection. He always ejaculated on her, never inside, wagging his penis above her like a prelate’s crosier, sprinkling his libations over her belly and breasts. Except this one time, when he lost control, which coincided with the moment Delilah was trying to get pregnant by Giambone.

It was an unusually intimate exchange between them that day. They meditated together before having sex. They had intercourse by assuming a number of Kama Sutra positions and intoning a variety of mantras that he prescribed for unblocking the chakras, which were clogged, he said, by too much modern living. She must have felt emotionally vulnerable that day. It was as though she wanted this holy man to ejaculate inside her, she wanted his preciously guarded semen. He was the only client with whom she ever felt anything resembling intimate tenderness, nurtured over the many years of their business association and spiritual transactions. She didn’t tell him to come inside her, but he seemed to know that’s what she wanted. She always found him to be extremely perceptive because of the years of religious training he had undergone. After an unusually voluble repetition of the sacred word Om, he gave a little spasm that tickled her uterus. She felt his semen drip out of her after he withdrew. She felt the wet discharge in her panties while she drove down Wilshire Blvd. on the way to her next appointment. Neither of them had said anything about this alteration of their usual practice. And then, two weeks later, Delilah discovered she was pregnant.