Therapy

told her that the future of the show was threatened by Debbie’s intention of leaving at the end of the present series, Sally said, “Well, that will suit you, won’t it? You can do something new with another producer prepared to take more risks than Ollie.” Which was quite logical, but not particularly helpful, since I don’t have an idea for a new show, and am unlikely to get one in my present state.
    Sally ran her finger round the inside of her cup and licked it. “When are you going to bed?” she said, which is her usual way of suggesting that we have sex, so we did, and I couldn’t come. I had an erection, but no climax. Perhaps it was the scotch, on top of the beer, I don’t know, but it was worrying, like working a pump handle and getting nothing out of the spout. Sally came — at least I think she did. I saw a programme on television the other night in which a lot of women were sitting round talking about sex and every one of them had faked orgasm on occasion, either to reassure their partners or to bring an unsatisfactory experience to a conclusion. Perhaps Sally does too. I don’t know. She went off to sleep happily enough. I heard her breathing settle into a deep, slow rhythm before I dropped off myself. I woke again at 2.35 with the collar of my pyjama jacket damp with sweat. I felt a great sense of foreboding, as if there was something unpleasant I had forgotten and had to remember. Then I remembered: now I had Internal Derangement of the Gonads on top of all my other problems. I contemplated a life without sex, without tennis, without a TV show. I felt myself spiralling down into the dark. I always think of despair as a downward spiral movement — like an aeroplane that loses a wing and falls through the air like a leaf, twisting and turning as the pilot struggles helplessly with the controls, the engine note rising to a high-pitched scream, the altimeter needle spinning round and round the dial towards zero.
     
    Reading through that last entry reminded me of Amy’s odd question, “How’s your Angst ?” and I looked the word up. I was slightly surprised to find it in my English dictionary: “1. An acute but unspecific sense of anxiety or remorse. 2. (In Existentialist philosophy) the dread caused by man’s awareness that his future is not determined, but must be freely chosen.” I didn’t fully understand the second definition — philosophy is one of the bigger blank spots in my education. But I felt a little shiver of recognition at the word “dread”. It sounds more like what I suffer than “anxiety”. Anxiety sounds trivial, somehow. You can feel anxious about catching a train, or missing the post. I suppose that’s why we’ve borrowed the German word. Angst has a sombre resonance to it, and you make a kind of grimace of pain as you pronounce it. But “Dread” is good. Dread is what I feel when I wake in the small hours in a cold sweat. Acute but unspecific Dread. Of course I soon think of specific things to attach it to. Impotence, for instance.
    It has to happen sometime, of course, to every man. Fifty-eight seems a bit premature, but I suppose it’s not impossible. Sooner or later, anyway, there has to be a last time. The trouble is, you’ll only know when you discover that you can’t do it any more. It’s not like your last cigarette before you quit smoking, or your last game of football before you hang up your boots. You can’t make a special occasion of your last fuck because you won’t know it is your last one while you’re having it; and by the time you find out you probably won’t be able to remember what it was like.
    I just looked up Existentialism in a paperback dictionary of modern thought. “A body of philosophical doctrine that dramatically emphasizes the contrast between human existence and the kind of existence possessed by natural objects. Men, endowed with will and consciousness, find themselves in an alien world of objects which have neither.” That didn’t seem much of a discovery to me. I thought I knew that already. “Existentialism was inaugurated by Kierkegaard in a violent reaction against the all-encompassing absolute Idealism of Hegel.” Oh, it was, was it? I looked up Kierkegaard. “Kierkegaard, Søren. Danish philosopher, 1813-55. See under EXISTENTIALISM.”
    I looked up Kierkegaard in another book, a biographical dictionary. He was the son of a self-made merchant and inherited a considerable fortune from his father. He spent