all quite normal

Man: Yes, it seems so. Even when you're getting old and fat and smelly and ugly yourself. The fact is, it wasn't long at all before I was mostly thinking of someone else while having sex with Zelda. 

Mentor: Someone younger.

Man: Younger women, more attractive. The stock characters of my masturbatory fantasies. Often I got stuck on a particular one. There was a young woman I was haplessly chasing in the few years before I moved in with Zelda. Ridiculously young in fact, and ridiculously beautiful, but I'd managed to put myself forward and befriend her for a time, which was very daring for me. I knew I had no hope of bedding her, so I just tried to maintain the friendship, to keep close to someone so beautiful and sexy, but she chose to reject me completely, which created an obsession for a time. In fact I've never gotten over that. So, yes, I fantasised about her, but there were plenty of others to toss in the mix. A waitress I glimpsed regularly, a woman at the bus stop, the lovely Eveline, Geena Davis, etc etc.

Mentor: So when you were fucking Zelda you were imagining fucking her daughter.

Man: Sometimes. Yes, I have sinned in my heart. All quite normal, surely. And sometimes, depending on her response and how my emotionally labile mind was working, I imagined I was fucking Zelda. Anyway, I expected it to be temporary. I moved in on the understanding that it would be temporary. I was on my way to Sydney, to start a new life. That's what I told her, and myself. I was feeling wildly confident at the time about my writing. I'd almost finished writing a novel, and I fully expected it to be published, though I knew all about the odds. I'd had the first chapter published in a magazine. Extraordinarily easy success after years of writing and avoiding publishers and publications. One of the first things I did after moving in with Zelda was to apply to every creative writing program in every state other than my own [which didn't have any such programs anyway]. Creative writing courses had become all the rage, and they seemed the obvious course for me, and moving interstate would shake me up, rejuvenate me, set me back on my resources. This sense that I was moving on somehow made it easier to take advantage of the situation with Zelda. And it was a good situation. It made me feel normal and healthy for the first time in a long long time. And I was giving her something too, quite a deal in fact, and she was lapping it up. 

Mentor: But you didn't get to Sydney.

Man: No, well... I say Sydney but that was my first choice. I applied for all these courses, two or three in Sydney, but also in Melbourne, in Queensland, in Western Australia. Some of these universities, I had no idea where they were located. I sent them bits of my manuscript, and the piece I had published in the magazine. I knew the writing was pretty good, I was sure I'd have a choice of places. I didn't know how I was going to pay for the course, getting in was the first concern. And then there was the book. I'd picked out a local publisher, and then wondered if moving interstate was such a good idea after all. What if the local mob agreed to publish it? The book was set in South Australia, after all...