Please please me
“What do you want to do?” she said.
“Whatever you want to do.”
“I want to do whatever’s best for you.”
“What’s best for me is to please you,” I said.
“I want to make you happy, Jack.”
“I’m happy when I’m pleasing you.”
“I just want to do what you want to do.”
“I want to do whatever’s best for you.”
“But you please me by letting me please you,” she said.
“As the male partner I think it’s my responsibility to please.”
“I’m not sure whether that’s a sensitive caring statement or a sexist remark.”
“Is it wrong for the man to be considerate toward his partner?”
“I’m your partner when we play tennis, which we ought to start doing again, by the way. Otherwise I’m your wife. Do you want me to read to you?”
“First-rate.”
“I know you like me to read sexy stuff.”
“I thought you liked it too.”
“Isn’t it basically the person being read to who derives the benefit and the satisfaction? When I read to Old Man Treadwell, it’s not because I find those tabloids stimulating.”
“Treadwell’s blind, I’m not. I thought you liked to read erotic passages.”
“If it pleases you, then I like to do it.”
“But it has to please you too, Baba. Otherwise how would I feel?”
“It pleases me that you enjoy my reading.”
“I get the feeling a burden is being shifted back and forth. The burden of being the one who is pleased.”
“I want to read, Jack. Honestly.”
“Are you totally and completely sure? Because if you’re not, we absolutely won’t.”
-From White Noise by Don Delillo
Neha says:
how such a simple pleasure can be complicated…
January 25th, 2007 at 12:49 pm
Kunal Goel says:
this has happened with me in real life.
January 26th, 2007 at 01:45 am
Ishan Dubey says:
This White noise is really deafening.
January 26th, 2007 at 03:33 pm
Kunal Goel says:
it’s a damn good book by the way.
May 13th, 2007 at 05:40 pm