of celibacy was cast casually aside. Women were desperate now to get him into bed, and he obliged them with pleasure. He even managed to overcome some of the limitations of his awkwardness, and was soon no longer troubled by premature ejaculation.
But the sense of satisfaction did not last. It took only three months more for him to become thoroughly disgusted with himself all over again. It wasn’t so much guilt generated by the knowledge that he had cheated his partners into their passionate desire, although that did weigh somewhat upon his conscience; the real problem was that he became convinced that he was not giving them full value in return. He knew that, however disappointing any particular session of love-making might be, each and every victim would continue to love him vehemently, but he thought that he could see how disappointed his paramours were, in him and in themselves. They loved him, but their love only made them unhappy. That was partly because they realized that they were all competing with one another for his attentions, but he was convinced that it was mainly because those attentions were so inherently unsatisfying.
Giovanni could now present to the world the image of a genuine Casanova. He was talked about, in wondering tones. He was envied by others—but in his own eyes, he remained, in every sense, a despicable fraud. It was not him that was beloved, but some organic goo that he had concocted in a test-tube; and the women who were its victims were condemned to the desperations of jealousy, the disappointments of third-rate sex, and the miseries of helplessness. Giovanni did not have the stomach to be a wholesale heartbreaker; he was too familiar with misery and desperation to take pleasure from inflicting it on others—not, at any rate, on women that he liked and admired.
By the time the royalties began to roll in, when Melmoth’s discreet marketing of the discovery to the world’s richest men began to pay dividends, Giovanni was again deep in depression and cynicism. Others, he felt sure, would be able to exploit his invention to the full, as the means to illimitable pleasure, but not him. Casanova the fool had simply confirmed his own wretchedness. His cup of bitterness overflowed.
It was, as ever, Marmaduke Melmoth who brought it home to him that he was still suffering from an attitude problem.
“Look, Joe,” said Melmoth, “we have a few little problems—nothing you can’t sort out, I’m sure, but it’s necessary to keep the customers happy and the cash coming in. The way we’re playing this, we have a restricted market, and a lot of the guys are getting on a bit. It’s all very well to offer them a way of getting the slots in the sack, but what they really need is something to get the peg into the slot. Did you ever hear of this stuff called spanish fly?”
Giovanni explained that Cantharides was a beetle rather than a fly; that it was a powerful poison; and that it probably wasn’t terribly satisfying to have a painfully rigid and itchy erection for hours on end.
“So make something better,” said Melmoth, with the casual mastery of the art of delegation that had made him rich.
Giovanni gave the matter some consideration, and decided that it was probably feasible to devise a biochemical mechanism that would make it possible for a man to win conscious control over his erections: to produce them at will, sustain them as long as might be required, and generate orgasms in any desired quantity. It would require a couple of new hormones that Mother Nature had not thought to provide, a secondary system of trigger hormones for feedback control, and a cytogene for transforming the cells of the pituitary gland. Even when the biochemistry was in place, people would have to learn to use the new system, and that would require a training program, perhaps with computer-assisted biofeedback back-up, but it could be done.
He set to work, patiently bringing his new dream-child to perfection.
Naturally, he had to test the system to make sure that it was worth going ahead with clinical trials. Once the genetic transplants had taken, he spent a couple of hours a night in solitary practice. It only took him a week to gain complete conscious control of his new abilities, but he had started with the advantage of understanding, so he mapped out a training program for the punters that would take a fortnight.
Once again, he was filled with optimism with respect to his own personal problems. No longer would he have to worry about flaws in his technique; he could now be confident that any girl who was caused to fall in love with him would receive full measure of sexual satisfaction in return. Now, he was in a much better position to emulate his famous namesake.
Giovanni was no longer a callow youth, however, and his optimism about the future was not based entirely on his biotechnological augmentation. He had undergone a more dramatic change of attitude, and had decided that the Casanova he needed to copy was not the ancient Giovanni but his father Marcantonio. He had decided that the answer to the problem of happiness lay in monogamy, and he wanted to get married. He was now in his mid-thirties, and it seemed to him that what he needed was a partner of his own age: a mature and level-headed woman who could bring order and stability into his life.
These arguments led him to fall in love with his accountant, a thirty-three-year-old divorcee named Denise. He had ample opportunity to make the fingertip contacts necessary to make her besotted with him, because his fortune was steadily increasing, and there were always new opportunities in tax avoidance for them to discuss over dinner. Giovanni orchestrated the whole affair very carefully and—he thought—smoothly, graciously allowing Denise the pleasure of seducing him on their third real date. He still felt clumsy and a little anxious, but she seemed quite delighted with his powers of endurance.
His parents were glad when he told them the news. His father cried with delight at the thought that the name of Casanova would now be transmitted to a further generation, and his mother—who believed that getting married was a kind of certificate of belonging to the human race—was euphorically sentimental for months.
Denise gave up work when she became pregnant, mere weeks after the honeymoon, abandoning to other financial wizards the job of distributing and protecting the spring tide of cash that began to pour into Giovanni’s bank accounts as his new discovery was discreetly marketed by the ingenious Melmoth.
Giovanni loved Denise very much, and became more and more devoted to her as the months of her pregnancy elapsed. When she gave birth to a baby girl—named Jennifer, after his mother—he felt that he had discovered heaven on earth.
Unfortunately, this peak in his experience was soon passed. Denise got post-natal depression, and began to find her energetic sex life something of a bore. She was still hooked, unknowingly, on the produce of Giovanni’s fingertips, but her emotional responses became perversely confused, and her feelings of love and affection generated floods of miserable tears.
Giovanni was overwrought, and knew not what to do. He was slowly consumed by a new wave of guilt. Whatever was the matter, he was responsible for it. He had made Denise love him, and had avoided feeling like a cheat only because he was convinced that she was reaping all the rewards that she could possibly have attained from a love that grew spontaneously in her heart. Now things were going wrong, he saw himself as her betrayer and her destroyer.
When Giovanni became anguished and miserable, Denise blamed herself. She became even more confused and even more desperate in her confusion. The unhappy couple fed one another’s despair, and became wretched together. This intolerable situation led inexorably toward the one awful mistake that Giovanni was bound eventually to make.
He told her everything.
From every possible point of view, this was a disastrous move. When she heard how he had tied her finest and most intimate feelings to chemical puppet-strings, her love for him underwent a purely psychosomatic transformation into bitter and resentful hatred. She left him forthwith, taking the infant Jenny with her, and sued for divorce. She also filed a suit demanding thirty million dollars compensation for his biochemical interference with her affections.
