Short Story Poem by gershon hepner

She wore a dress and it was obvious that
there were no panties underneath.
She put on, after they made love, a hat;
he showered and he brushed his teeth.

Paul Theroux writes about Simenon’s famous love life “Georges Simeon, the existential hack, ” TLS, March 14,2008)

His sexuality too involved the stopwatch. Simenon was anything but a sensualist. A sex act in his books usually takes a few lines at most. In The Bells of Bicêtre: “They stayed a long time almost motionless, like certain insects you see mating”. The Man on the Bench in the Barn: “I literally dived into her, suddenly, violently, there was fear in her eyes” – and then it’s over. The Nightclub: “She looked at him in astonishment. It was over already. He couldn’t even have said how he set about it”. These hair-trigger instances echo the love life Simenon recorded in his Intimate Memoirs. One day, he approaches his wife in her office, as she is speaking with her English secretary Joyce Aitken. His wife asks him what he wants.
“You! ”
That afternoon she simply lies down on the rug.
“Hurry up. You don’t have to leave, Aitken.”
The Widow is exceptional in depicting several seductions that go on for a few pages. A sentence repeated so often in Simenon as to be a signature line is, “She wore a dress and it was obvious that she had nothing on underneath”. The Widow also contains a variation on this sentence.

3/19/08