How can she complain so? After all, she can’t say that I don’t cherish her, care for her, cook for her, put her on a pinnacle and treat her like a princess. No, her complaint against me is a more basic one.
       I’ve been through the reasons for my position on this issue with her many times already, and I’m sure she knows them by heart. In the first place, the kind of concupiscent activity she envisages is messy and smelly and wet. Secondly, it’s aggressive. How can a switched-on post-feminist like April accept the concept of men going round sticking their things into women? Thirdly, it’s unseemly, with all these grotesque effusions – throbbing, heaving, flailing, writhing – all leading up to the monotonously inevitable climax like a piece of mediocre Tchaikovsky. Fourthly, it isn’t good for the health. There’s a considerable risk of contracting an incurable illness. Finally, it takes too much time. I think it’s this final reason that’s decisive. I don’t have the time. 
      April knows my position but she has settled her attentions on someone who hasn’t the slightest interest in doing the one thing that she desires. She knows that there are scores of good-looking red-blooded HIV-negative males who salivate at the chance of getting into bed with her. In fact, a brace of my acquaintances at college spent a great deal of time and inventiveness on trying to create such occasions. It makes no difference to her. It seems that what she wants is me.
      I don’t deny that at another time and place, and with different requirements on my time, I might be interested, since there are moments, I confess, when my thoughts do drift to the pleasures of the bedroom and April’s antic attractiveness. But the way of the artist is strait, and the time requirements binding. If once I end up in her bed, then I know what follows: shopping expeditions, visits to restaurants, changing the oil in her Datsun, spending weekends antiquing, entertaining her friends, and then, God help me, her relatives. At present, I can tell her she’s free to do all of these things and see all of these people on her own. I have a different destiny, which requires every minute of my time. That’s the basis on which she came here, and that’s the basis on which she stays. I’ve made the arrangement, and I have to maintain it, if I’m to look myself straight in the face.
                               From The Painter: A Novel of Pursuit, page 15

     See Stephen Denning, The Painter: A Novel of Pursuit, (iUniverse, October 2000) 
 

     Stephen Denning, Sonnets 2000, (iUniverse, October 2000)