The Reinvention of Love

these, four are living, one having died shortly after he wasborn.) My figure is not helped by my predilection for sweets and my aversion to exercise. Adèle said once that we look better clothed, and I would have to agree with her. But, that said, there is something wonderfully liberating about removing my clothes in the middle of the afternoon to lie naked with my lover in a rented hotel room.
    It puts me in a better humour, for one thing.
    We lie on our backs, naked, holding hands tightly, as though we are survivors from a shipwreck, floating on a makeshift raft over the stormy seas while waiting to be rescued. We are too shy to look at each other, too shy to give full expression to our desire. We have waited so long to be together like this that the fact we are actually here takes some getting used to.
    “If you could change one thing in this room,” says Adèle, “what would it be?”
    “The room itself,” I say. “I would have it be our room in our house, not a room in a hotel.”
    “How would you decorate it?”
    “New wallpaper.” The flowered wallpaper in this room is so old that it is flayed into strips in places. “Better furniture. A four-poster bed with a curtain around it so we could block out the world.”
    “But if it was our room, we would have no need to block out the world.”
    This seems so impossible to me that I cannot properly imagine it.
    “Flowers,” I say, continuing with our game. “I would fill it with bouquets of fresh flowers.”
    “I would make it much larger,” says Adèle. And then, remembering the climb up the staircase, she adds, “And I would move it down a floor or two.”
    The streaky light from the window catches the dust drifting through the air. The bed linen feels scratchy from over-zealous washing. I roll over on my side and Adèle rolls over as well, sothat we are facing each other.
    “I am writing some poems about us,” I say. “About our love. About you.” I say this tentatively because I know that she has often been the subject of Victor’s love poetry and that she tires of being his inspirational material. “Do you mind?”
    Adèle strokes my cheek. “No,” she says. “Make use of me, sweet Charles. Make use of me.” She slides her hand down to my chest, down my stomach, down through the patch of hair surrounding my sex.
    And here, right here, I must stop the story for a moment.
    It is now that I must tell you my secret.

I WAS NOT ALWAYS A WRITER, as I said. When I was a young man I trained as a doctor, went for four long years to medical school, studied anatomy and dissection with the same avid attention I now turn to reading and writing.
    I think I first became interested in medicine because I wanted an explanation for my body. I wanted to unlock the mystery of myself. My mother, when I was young and she was bathing me, had simply said that all men were
different
in that area. When I found the answer, in the medical library, in the study of a corpse who had the same condition as myself, I lost some of my interest in becoming a doctor and left the academy before I was fully qualified.
    I believe that every man and every woman has a secret, and life is first about naming that secret, and then about making peace with it. Adèle’s secret is me – or rather it is the fact that she is unhappy in her marriage to Victor. Victor’s secret is his desire for a noble birth, which is at odds with his other desire, to express the sentiments of the lowest common man through his writings.
    My secret is more visible than both of these – more visible, and more complicated.
    I have the sex organ of a man, although it is very small and incapable of becoming erect. I have the sex organ of a man, but on the underside I have what resembles the sex organ of a woman. The medical texts refer to the condition as hypospadias, an affliction that is linked to hermaphrodism.
    Mine is a more extreme case than some, and there is no cure for it. I was born with this condition and I will die with it, and in between I must find a way to make peace with it.
    I cannot impregnate a woman. I cannot have what the doctors would call “normal” relations with a woman. But I have finally found a woman who does not want this
normality
anyway. Adèle is sick of being impregnated by Victor. She wants love without complications and, strangely enough, the complication of my body is the simplest of joys for her. She wants both Charles and Charlotte. More important, she desires both