How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
My brother winked at me over her head and gave an exaggerated tug to the top of his pants. He walked with a swagger I had never seen before and knew at once I did not like. It made me uneasy to see him so different. But I was so grateful for his wink that I began wiggling with happiness and excitement and began giggling at him almost uncontrollably. I was giddy with relief and started jabbering. I said:
"Hi Eddie. What was happening in there, Eddie? Did something happen?"
And he laughed and answered: "Oh yeah, something happened, all right" (1.5-6).
Slocum is amazed and almost marvels at the idea that his big brother had sex with Billy Foster's skinny kid sister. There's much more he wanted to find out about what happened on the floor of the shed, but he was never bold enough to ask. Regardless of what actually happened in that shed, it was a formative experience for Slocum.
Quote #2
Probably, I should be ashamed of myself, because she's only a decent young girl of twenty-four. Possibly I should be proud of myself, because she is, after all, a decent and very attractive young girl of only twenty-four whom I can probably lay whenever I want to. (2.29)
Slocum even has Jane "scheduled" weeks before the conference, when he knows he will be working closely with her department. He is intrigued not only by her figure, but also by her innocence and susceptibility to his kind of lame flirtatious jokes.
Quote #3
It was reassuring to learn that so many people were getting laid, that the activity was indeed so widespread. (3.66)
Slocum was glad to learn at such a young age that everyone has sex all the time, but he is hard pressed to understand why women who want to sleep with him all the time do not just come along automatically.
Quote #4
And by the time I finally did get around to screwing a woman of twenty-eight, it was my wife, and I was thirty-two and already married to her, and that was not what I had been daydreaming about at all. (3.67)
Slocum's dreams are shattered by the reality that sex is much different as a married adult than he imagined it being when he was a youngster. Why do you think sex is so unfulfilling for Slocum in his married life? Is it repetitious? Is it because Slocum and his wife don't actually have a real connection, so it's just a physical act they do sometimes?
Quote #5
That's the kind of faithful husband I am. Sometimes when I'm in bed with another girl in the city or out of town and find I'm already sorry I started, I close my eyes and pretend I'm f***ing my wife. Such fidelity. My wife should be honored to learn she rises in my thoughts on such occasions when we are apart, but I don't think I'll tell her. She might not like it as much as I do. (5.83)
Sex is meaningless for Slocum, just another routine act, whether he's with his wife or with strange women. It seems like he wants it to be meaningful; it just isn't. Perhaps one of the reasons is that he doesn't have a real connection with any of these women. That's not entirely his fault—it doesn't seem like anyone in this novel has a real connection with anyone else.
Quote #6
I think I can remember having sneaky, scary, tinglings in my tiny cock much earlier as I sat or hovered near my mother in her bedroom and watched her dressing or removing her street clothes to drape herself into one of her housecoats that always hung shapeless and looked faded. (5.89)
Oedipus complex much? Slocum has Freudian sentiments that stem from watching his own mother undress. His own mother's image does creep up an awful lot in his discussions of sex… Hmm, perhaps he has some unrequited guilt he needs to address? After all, his mother died crying for her mother, and Slocum supposes he'll die crying for his own.
Quote #7
I don't enjoy adultery, really. I'm not even sure I enjoy getting laid. Sometimes it's okay. Other times it's only coming. Is there supposed to be more? There used to be. There used to be much more heat. (5.91)
Slocum is a bit lost in his own sexual feelings. Is he just as much in control of his own pleasure as the women he lusts after? As in, not at all in control? Sounds like Slocum needs to work on himself a bit. Like everyone else in this novel.
Quote #8
Everybody wants to keep control. (I want to keep control. Penny makes me lose control, and often my wife does too. Penny diminishes me into a gargling, blabbering imbecile every time, and I love it.) (6.21)
Like most things in his life, sex has become somewhat routine for Slocum, and he knows what to expect and with whom each time that he has it. As in most areas in his life, spontaneity is a rarity.
Quote #9
Virginia is closed now, like those people in the storeroom whose cases had been settled in one way or another. So am I. And lying among them like flaked stains now in that dreary storeroom for dead records are my own used-up chances for attaining sexual maturity early, for getting laid young (or what we considered young). I could have had here there. (6.50)
Virginia still occupies Slocum's youthful sexual fantasies, and he'll always regret that he didn't make it past first base with her. But the thing is that because Virginia died young, Slocum never got the chance to experience an actual relationship—and the trials and tribulations an actual relationship brings—with her. She seems perfect partly because Slocum never actually got to really know her, sexually or otherwise.
Quote #10
I don't get that hot anymore. Apathy, boredom, restlessness, freefloating, amorphous frustration, leisure, discontent at home or at my job—these are my aphrodisiacs now. (6.54)
Any passion that Slocum once had, either for women or for work, or even for life as a whole, has been sucked dry by the monotony of adult life. Is that Slocum's fault? Is it only his fault? Why does this seem to happen to everyone in the novel?