Willard and His Bowling Trophies by Richard Brautigan

The Greek Anthology
    Constance turned herself awkwardly on the bed to watch him leave the room.
    “I’ve been thinking about this all day long,” Bob said. “I want you—” Then he was gone with his voice trailing away, “to hear it,” down the hall to another room.
    She lay there awkwardly waiting for him to return. She thought that he was only going to be gone for a moment but he was gone for almost ten minutes.
    The air in the bedroom was warm and still. It was an unusually warm September evening in San Fran cisco but the window was closed and the shades were down.
    They had to be.
    He can’t find the book , she thought
    He was always losing things. For many long months now he’d had a lot of trouble doing anything right. It made her sad because she loved him.
    She sighed, which became a slight muffled sound because of the handkerchief that was loosely stuffed in her mouth. She could have easily pushed the handkerchief out of her mouth with her tongue if she had wanted to.
    Bob couldn’t do anything right now.
    He couldn’t even gag her well.
    But of course he had tied her hands too tight and her feet too loose and she sighed again, making a muffled sound as she waited for him to find the book that he’d lost which was usual for everything he did now.
    He hadn’t always been this way and she felt guilty about it because she thought that it was partly her fault for giving him the warts and after he got the warts, all of this stuff started happening.
    The light hanging down from the ceiling should have been a hundred-watt bulb, but instead it was a two hundred-watt bulb. It was his doing. She didn’t like that much light. He did.
    Finally he came back into the room with the book and she pushed the gag out of her mouth and said, “My hands are too tight.”
    “Oh,” he said, looking down at her from the book in his hand which was turned to a particular page that he was just about to read aloud.
    He put the book down on the bed, still opened to the page that he wanted to read from. He sat down beside her and she rolled awkwardly over onto her stomach, so that he could get at the knot in the rope. She didn’t have any clothes on and she had a nice body.
    He retied her hands so that they weren’t as tight, but they were still tight enough so that she couldn’t get them loose.
    “Retie my feet,” she said. “They’re too loose.”
    If he’s going to be an amateur sadist , she thought, I might as well see if I can get him to do it right.
    She was very disappointed in him. She was a perfectionist in everything that she did and was very annoyed with his newly found incompetence.
    For months now, ever since he had gone on his amateur sadist trip, she had been thinking: Anybody can tie up somebody and gag them, why can’t he?
    Why can’t he do anything right and he overwaters the plants and things drop out of his hands and he’s always falling over things and breaking things and he forgets what he’s talking about half the time in the middle of what he’s saying but I guess it really doesn’t make that much difference because he doesn’t talk about anything interesting, anyway, and it’s been going on for months, ever since she gave him the warts, but hadn’t she suffered with them, too, going to the doctor all those times and having the warts burned off in her vagina with an electric needle and then coming home on the bus, holding back the tears in a lonely moving place filled with silent strangers? . . . oh, God . . . oh, well . . . we could be dead. Maybe this is better than being dead, I guess. I don’t know.
    After he finished tying her feet again, he started to pick up the book that he had been about to read from. Then he noticed that the gag was out of her mouth. He put the book back down and leaned over toward her. She knew what he wanted and what he was going to do.
    She opened her mouth as wide as she could.
    He suddenly got nervous. Sometimes when he gagged her he pushed part of the gag