Free Proud Flesh by William Humphrey

beside the point.
    In fact, he had ceased to lead a double life. He led a single life: his secret one, the one he was not allowed to live openly. And he had seen the fear that it might be discovered change into the fear that he himself was going to give it away. The fear that he was never going to get any relief from oppression until he had given himself away. And then after he had, there would be nothing left but to slit his throat.
    What had happened to the simple joy of banging his chocolate-coated girl and saying—not in words, of course, but saying to anybody he might suspect of suspecting him of it—go screw yourself? Where had that untroubled pleasure gone? Why? When? And how could he recover it? Why all this torment? What did he care if she had other men, and if so, what shade they were? He got his. He got all he wanted. You can’t wear one of those things out with use. And he didn’t know she had another man. He had only old Rowena’s untrustworthy word for that, based on what she had seen, or thought she had seen, with her old untrustworthy eyes. Some witness! The one who professed to know that Shug was carrying on with some other man was the only one of her family not to know that Shug had been carrying on for years with him. Some witness to let upset you. And even if she was right, so long as he had no confirmation that she was, what did it matter? What you don’t know won’t hurt you. Why suffer? Why get emotionally involved? He got what he wanted out of Shug. What he felt for Shug was—hah!—no more than met the eye.
    He had become like one of those sexual derelicts who spend all their time in round-the-clock movie houses watching blue movies. His nonstop blue movie house, that ran even when his mother lay in danger of death, was his own mind.
    The trouble with him—all this obsession with sex, this mad urge to unmask himself—was, he was not well. Not well at all. He had not been for some time. Today was just more of the same, aggravated by worry over Ma and shame for the unseemliness of feeling what he felt while Ma was sick. He was not well. A constricted feeling in the chest, centering around the heart, making breathing difficult. Ma’s trouble was heart, and those things could be hereditary. Loss of appetite. Absentmindedness and inability to concentrate. Nerves. Unaccountable moments of nerves when for no reason at all his eyes would suddenly fill with tears. Irritability. And always that tight feeling in the chest, around the heart. Symptoms that, if you didn’t know better, or in a young man, or if the woman had been white, you might almost have taken for lovesickness. He must see the doctor as soon as he got a chance, have a physical, a thorough check-up. Should do so regularly at his age. As for his obsession with sex, that too was something for a doctor. It was a physical thing. It was not personal. Even his feeling it today. The time was inappropriate, grossly inappropriate, but that was only an unfortunate coincidence. He always got hard-up at this season of the year when, with the workers occupying the cabins, there was nowhere that they could get together. It could happen to any man. A man was a man even when his mother was sick. It was something beyond his power to control. He was not to blame. And men had their change-of-life, too, the same as women. It made women less sexy but it made men more so. Certain chemical changes occurring in the body at this time. Hormones. Nothing to be ashamed of. He was not the first dog to be wagged by its tail. Not the first to experience the contrariness of that thing between his legs, how it wouldn’t when you wanted it to and would when you didn’t.
    Watching himself constantly as he had to do for fear of giving himself away, he was all the more alarmed whenever others noticed something about him that he himself had not noticed. Thus when somebody remarked recently that he had lost weight, was looking