Cocksure by Mordecai Richler Page A

say he satisfied her. Naturally there were times when he ejaculated too quickly and other occasions when he botched it through drunkenness, but, on balance, he’d hazard Joyce was not a frustrated wife. And yet – and yet – she might have no enormous need for sex or, conversely, her desires might be profligate but unfulfilled. Is our marital life full, Mortimer thought, or is it niggardly? Here again he had to confess to inexperience; he simply didn’t know what other couples said or did in bed. Once more he was indebted to Ziggy and literary experience, both of which made him fear inadequacy, a lack of imagination.
    Ziggy and the chicks: Migod, he certainly never failed for them, did he? Fondly, warmly, Mortimer recalled his first meeting with Ziggy, shortly after the war, in the Red Lion pub in Soho, where Ziggy, his first adolescent poems out in New Writing , was a legend. No sooner had Mortimer been introduced than Ziggy invited him to join his group. My round, Ziggy insisted, doubles for everyone, discovering too late that he had forgotten his bloody wallet at home. Mortimer happily paid for the drinks and several rounds later he was flattered to be asked to continue with Ziggy and his bunch to a party in a squalid basement in Camden Town. Those were the days, Mortimer reflected, remembering how he literally bumped into Ziggy feeling up the prettiest girl at the party in a dark damp corner. The girl was especially exciting to him, Ziggy explained later, because she was pregnant by his best friend.
    Embarrassed, groping for any excuse to retreat, Mortimer noticed the girl’s pint-sized beer mug was only half full. “What are you drinking?” he asked, reaching for the glass.
    “His,” the girl replied, her eyes seething.
    Mortimer hadn’t grasped the full import of what she meant (after all, British beer was notoriously flat) until Ziggy began to chortle at his discomfort.
    “But – but – couldn’t that be, well unhealthy?”
    “If you really want to know,” the girl said, “I’ve never felt so close to him before. Now bugger off, please.”
    Mortimer had melted away gratefully, suppressing nausea. But come noon the following day he was seeking out Ziggy at the Red Lion.
    “You want her,” Ziggy said, willing to arrange it for a fiver.
    “No!”
    “Quite right. She’s thoroughly middle-class, actually. What I mean is she goes with dogs, but stops at great Danes.”
    Possibly, Mortimer thought, if our sex life is conformist, it’s not completely my fault. Joyce could be partially to blame. Not once, flooded with passion, had she ever bit his ear to make it bleed. Or called out to him, “Fuck me good, Daddy-o!” Why? Did he inhibit her? Would she make such licentious requests of other partners? He didn’t know. Once, only once, inspired by a novel he had just finished before they got into bed, had he walloped her on the buttocks, as they were enjoined in the most banal of love positions. There they were, he recalled, he thinking of Gordie Howe bearing down on the nets, she thinking of God knows what, when he had suddenly reared back and landed her an open-handed belt on the buttocks, but instead of releasing the animal needs in Joyce, it made her cry. She cried and cried, throwing him over and calling him names, not bracingly obscene, but clinical.
    Bitch. She may be nonconformist-minded, he thought vengefully, but she undoubtedly had an establishment cunt.
    Mortimer’s shrinking confidence, his wilting prick, assailed by minority-group litterateurs and conjugal doubts, had been furtherabused in contacts with the hoi polloi. Two topics of conversation were all-pervasive at The Eight Bells: geegees and sex. Mortimer did not play the horses and to judge by the early and prejudiced reception he got from Donnelly, Rapani, Gregory, Taylor and Wzcedak, you’d think he had no sex life either; if only because he was undeniably middle-class, his manner reticent, his dress neat. Once, in the early days,