"Would you hook onto another man? Another rich man? You'd have to settle for second best, you know. I'm the richest man there is. But don't think I haven't seen how some of my business associates have been eying you. Don't think—"
"Jason, my arm."
"Then tell me what I want to know."
"All right. All right, I'll tell you. You've shown me what the good life is, Jason. I wouldn't want to be without it for long. I—I'd hook onto someone else, as you say."
Jason Wall smiled. "Thank you," he said sincerely. "Thank you so much for being honest."
He made love like a college sophomore that night. Eve was quite pleasantly startled.
Later that week and for the next month or so, he thought of suicide. The trouble was, he had never been able to stand pain. A weakness. The one weakness he had. When he thought of the pain which would surely come, when he thought of the last few months of his life, which would be spent, pain-wracked, on his death bed, his thoughts leaned most strongly toward suicide. Yes, suicide was the obvious way out, and Jason Wall had neither religious nor moral scruples about it.
Jason Wall had religious scruples, or moral scruples, about nothing under the sun. He was an utterly egocentric man.
But when his thoughts of suicide were strongest he would remember what he'd seen from the doctor's window. Children at play, delighting in their simple pleasures. A postman at work, contented with his lot, humming gayly. Or, he would send for Eve, and take from her body what he craved. And, when it was over, he felt a strange, hollow sense of loss. No, he would tell himself with complete objectivity (he had always been thoroughly objective) not exactly loss. A sense, rather, of lost possession, of something which belonged to Jason Wall, as his life belonged uniquely to him, and would be taken away at his death. He tried to imagine Eve in someone else's arms, Eve dancing with a younger man, drinking with him, making love. A rage of jealousy flooded him, not for the particular man lucky enough to win Eve, but for the world. For everything in it.