Thirty

Lawrence Block
Writing as Jill Emerson

Contents

January 7

January 8

January 12

January 14

January 19

January 20

January 23

January 24

January 27

February 2

February 17

February 20

February 21

February 25

February 27

February 28

March 1

March 2

March 3

March 5

March 6

March 15

March 16

March 17

March 23

March 24

March 27

March 28

March 29

April 2

April 3

April 6

April 10

April 11

April 12

April 13

April 19

April 20

April 24

April 27

May 1

May 5

May 7

May 9

May 12

May 14

May 15

May 16

May 19

May 20

May 27

June 14

June 15

June 21

June 24

June 27

June 30

July 3

July 7

July 8

July 9

July 11

July 15

July 17

July 18

July 24

July 29

August 9

August 11

August 17

August 22

August 25

August 29

September 1

September 4

September 6

September 9

September 12

September 23

October 2

October 12

January 5

A New Afterword by the Author

A Biography of Lawrence Block

January 7

How confusing!

The trouble with a diary is that you have to decide who you are writing it to. (I mean to whom you are writing it. No, I don’t. I mean what I said. If this is going to work at all, I’d be well advised to write as I talk. Which is not a matter of dese and dem and dose, because I am after all a literate and wordsworthy person, acknowledged to be fairly bright for a lady. But there is no point, in these pages, being a nut about grammatical perfection. Or sitting around hung up over the spelling of a word.)

Interesting, though, that the Personal Diary of Jan Giddings Kurland should begin How confusing. Interesting. Curiouser and Curiouser . . .

My lawyers. Curiouser and Curiouser, Attorneys-at-Law.

Confusing because I’ve been spending the morning and much of the afternoon pacing around trying to figure out how to start this. What tone to take. Whether to begin each entry “Dear Diary” as girls do in books—and thus probably in real life as well, life imitating bad art as it does. Or whether to write each day’s entry as if to Howie, if for no better reason than that the sneak will probably read this sooner or later anyway, and that if each entry began “Dear Howie” he could do so with a somewhat clearer conscience, assuming, that is, that conscience is still a valid concept while discussing Howie, that his has not atrophied from lack of use, like a nun’s cunt.

Howie is Howard Kurland, my husband. I am Janet Kurland, the former Janet Giddings. Howie is thirty-two. He is tall, he has brown hair, his eyes are also brown, he—

No, impossible. I cannot get hung up on things like that or this book will never get anywhere.

It’s probably too late anyway. The year is already a week old. The night before last was Twelfth Night. We put the Christmas tree out for the garbage. As it was, we had waited a little too long, but I’m a traditionalist. Every year when Twelfth Night comes we take out the mangy old Christmas tree, and I open my birthday presents! Christmas is officially over and I’m officially a year older.

When I was a girl (I don’t like that sentence, I mean phrase, I don’t like that phrase, not at all, the ring of it, the echo of an old woman’s voice speaking those words, I am still a girl, I want still to be a girl, twenty-nine is not that old, twenty-nine too old, twenty-nine years, my thirtieth year, God!). When I was younger (cheat!) it balanced off, Twelfth Night and birthday, because the end of Christmas was sorrowful, in a way, but the happiness of a birthday made up for it. Well, it still balances, but the other way around. I was glad to get that broken-down tree out of the house, glad to see Christmas over for a year, no more decorations all over the neighborhood, no more of the forced hilarity of the holiday season.

Being twenty-nine, having embarked on one’s thirtieth year, on the other hand, was the greatest drag imaginable.

So. I don’t keep diaries. I’m not good at it, I start off all ambitious (like everything else) and by the end of January I don’t want to be bothered with the job of recording each day’s trivia, and sometime in mid-February I remember that the diary, poor thing, poor orphan, is stuck up on some closet shelf, and I find it and destroy it unread, as if the future would be poisoned by the simple existence of the past, let alone its tangible presence.

(I don’t know what that last means. But I will not cross anything out. That’s part of what this diary is all about.)

And so to put down, now, once and forever what this diary is all about. Not a place to record everything that happens, not a source of guilt when a few days go by without an entry. But merely a place to write messages to the girl in the mirror.

I found myself, all afternoon, coming face to face with my reflections. Not my verbal reflections but with mirror images. Literally. The mirror over the bathroom sink, on the bedroom closet door, the car’s rear-view mirror, all sorts of mirrors. And I kept studying myself either critically or generously, and also I found myself just staring blankly into my own baby browns, staring unseeing is I guess the phrase, while I tried to puzzle out how this diary business ought to be aimed. And then I decided to write it to the girl in the mirror.

Which is to say not to my own self, because the girl in the mirror lives in her own world, really. That world must be rather like this one, because the girl’s life puts the same lines in her poor face that Reality (I saw a hippie button that says “Reality is a Crutch.”) has been putting with increasing frequency in mine. So I write to you, Mirror Jan. To a nonexistent person who exists as another self or I. Thus I need only tell you the things I find interesting. I don’t have to describe myself all that much, do I? You and I must look at each other half a hundred times a day. And I don’t have to apologize for the occasional run-on sentence, or for other errors of style which would be inexcusable if this were pretending to be some sort of Capotene nonfiction novel.

For that matter, I trust you won’t mind if I cease herewith to address you in the second person—it does seem rather precious. And that you won’t be dismayed if days or even weeks pass without word from me. Because it seems to me that the reason I generally abandon diaries is that they turn into chores, and my track record with chores of any description is Not Good.

And, actually, I rather would like this to turn out well. I don’t know exactly what I hope to accomplish, but—

But bullshit. I know what this is supposed to accomplish. It is supposed to be therapy. It is supposed to keep the everyday housewife from going quietly or unquietly over the edge. From dropping out of her tree. From wigging out.

Why do we have so many euphemisms for unpleasant truths? So many cute ways to describe ourselves if, for example, we are drunk. Or if we go insane.

I am not going insane.

I am going insane.

I am sick of this, for now. I think.

January 8

Last night was horrible.

Howard came home with what I think the lower orders would describe as a hair up his ass. Just a wee bit too much aggravation at the office and just a wee bit more booze than he positively needed in the club car. When I picked him up at the train he started bitching at me for not having had air put in the front left tire. It is not flat, but then neither is it round, and we had decided that I would have them put air in the tire, a service they perform willingly when they sell you gas. Had I failed to get gas? No. Then I meant to say that I had gone into the gas station without getting the tire filled? Right, guilty. Well, what the hell was the matter with me, anyway? A good question, and one which, although I said nothing, was not entirely original on his part; I had been asking myself much the same thing all day.

He had a couple more drinks with dinner. I don’t exactly blame him. Dinner, let’s be honest, stank. A noble experiment. One of those packaged things with equal parts of dried herbs and poisonous chemicals. Betty Crocker’s Rice Galitzianer, perhaps. Sometimes I have fantasies of buying stone ground flour and organic vegetables and making everything from scratch, and then I cruise down the aisles at the Pathmark and fill the cart with all of this processed shit. I think there’s something insidious about the pictures on the boxes. God knows nothing I make turns out looking like that. Even when they taste good they don’t look like that.

The point being that dinner was a loser. After dinner he took a drink in to watch television by, like mood music. I followed at a distance. After the eleven o’clock news he turned to me. He was, I guess, about half in the bag. Half in the bag for Howie means he can still wiggle his toes if you give him a few minutes to work it all out in his mind.

Why am I being so bitchy?

Because I’m hostile.

Next question?

No, let’s remember how this went. He said, “Jan, baby, this isn’t working out, is it?”

A moment of panic. What wasn’t working out? Our Vietnam policy? Our marriage? The new color television set? Rice Galitzianer?

“What I mean is that this is no way to start a family.”

“Oh.”

“You can’t get pregnant watching television.”

“Unless we do it doggie style.” (I didn’t say this. Like most good repartee, it occurred to me twelve hours after the moment when it would have been effective. What we all need is the opportunity to go over our lives with a blue pencil the next day.)

(And cross everything out? Maybe.)

“You know something, darling? I love you.”

“And I love you, Howie.”

“Baby, let’s go upstairs.”

“Sure, honey.”

We live in a ranch house. Everything’s on the same floor. One’s speech patterns seem to derive from the culture in which one lives to the point where one summons one’s bride unwittingly to the roof. I used to think, when Howie first invited me to an upstairs which wasn’t there, that he had spent his childhood in a two-story house. Not so. He had never lived in a two-story house, had in fact never lived in a house before we moved to Eastchester. It was always an apartment somewhere or other in Brooklyn or the Bronx. When he and I had the apartment on Seventy-seventh Street, there was none of this Let’s go upstairs cuteness. It came with the house, like the thirty-year mortgage and the leak in the basement and the army ants or whatever they are. Sometimes he catches himself, and sometimes I remind him, but it doesn’t matter, he does it again the next time. Movies and books and television taught the poor man that when you live in a house you have to climb stairs to go to bed.

So we went upstairs—why fight it?—and went to bed, and he kissed me boozily and felt my breast—felt one of them, anyway—and thus inspired he gave a great sigh and passed out. Went to sleep? No. Passed out sums it up fine.

Leaving me to feel guilty about feeling glad.

I don’t want a baby.

I guess I’ve never said that out loud. I guess most of the time I don’t really believe it myself, but I do now. God, yes. I mean God, no.

I don’t want a baby.

I wonder if he does, really. I don’t think so. Men are supposed to have these undeniable impulses. I have a feeling they’re as deniable as anything else. Mine certainly are.

You know what I think? I think it’s all part of the image. Being a few years married, and past the honeymoon (God in heaven, are we ever past the honeymoon!) and having moved out of the crowded evil city and into the fresh (?) air of sweet suburbia. The car we bought, for example, is a station wagon. We never owned a car in New York—that was one of the things I hated about New York, you had to go through a big production whenever you wanted to go somewhere—and here we finally have a car, one car for the two of us, and what kind of car is it? A cute little sportscar? A cunning and sensible compact? A big showy ostentatious ballsy sedan?

None of those things. A station wagon, a big klutzy station wagon with room for eighteen kids, none of which I want to have.

None of which I probably will have, having gone two years now without coming any closer to pregnancy than I don’t know what. (You have a way with words, Giddings.)

And if I were using this book as a way of keeping compulsive records, rather than a place to jot down the observations of the moments (I think I mean the observation of the moment, both singular, although how few moments are truly singular, Doctor?) I might in that case feel compelled to state here in blue-black and white that in this year, now eight days old, we have, if memory serves, fucked once, and then not very well.

January 12

It snowed today. The snow that we already had was just about gone. For the past week or so it’s been turning brown in the gutters, becoming slush, and bit by bit finding its way down the sewers. (You would almost think it was human.) So now it’s snowing, coming down in big wet sticky flakes. I sat at the window and watched it and thought how beautiful it was, and how depressing.

Why is my first reaction to everything to think how much damned trouble it will be? Why don’t I enjoy things?

January 14

Marcie Hillman thinks I should have an affair!

She came over this afternoon for the pause in the day’s occupation she calls the housewife’s hour, before her kids were due home from school. I made real coffee in honor of the occasion. The nice thing about instant coffee is that there is no way to screw it up. Not so with this afternoon’s pot. You would think that after seven years of marriage I would know how to make a simple thing like a pot of coffee. You would think that, wouldn’t you?

We sat in the kitchen and pretended the coffee was all right. And, like fighters warily circling one another in the opening round, we played Who’s Depressed? (That’s the first time I’ve named our game, but not the first time I’ve seen it as such. If there were a way to package it as a board game for two or more players, a way to introduce dice and spinners, I think it would outsell Scrabble.) We fence around, Marcie and I, alternately bubbly and sulking, until through some hard-to-follow process we mutually determine who will be patient and who will be therapist. The roles float back and forth from day to day and week to week. Her hangups are at least well defined, and I guess pretty standard. She keeps going on and off diets and forever weighs I guess twenty-five pounds more than she should. And she is periodically incapable of keeping her house as clean as she wants it, and never capable of keeping it as clean as Edgar wants it, Edgar being her husband. She is, for all of that, a tall and pretty blond with a pretty if ample body. She is also a year and a half older than I am, which is to say that she is thirty, has in fact been thirty for a half a year, and it hasn’t seemed to destroy her.

“You,” she said, “are in a bad way.”

“I suppose.”

“What’s the matter? The periodic distress of the female ilk?”

“Ilk? My periodic ilk isn’t due for a week.”

“And maybe you won’t have it.”

“Oh, I’ll have it.”

“You could be pregnant right now, kiddo. And then you’ll glow with motherhood, and all the doubts and fears—”

“Oh, sure. Anyway, I’m not pregnant.”

“I don’t like to keep harping at it, but this one particular doctor is supposed to be fantastic. Every woman who goes to his office comes home pregnant.”

“From his office?”

“I didn’t say that exactly right.”

“It sounded as if he screwed them himself.”

“Well, whatever works, doll. American pragmatism in action. Better things for better living.”

“Uh-huh. Who wants to be knocked up, anyway?”

“I thought you did.”

“Maybe I don’t.”

“Oh?”

“Maybe I’m getting a little old for that sort of thing.”

So we tossed the age pillow around for a little while, and other things, and then Marcie cocked her head—I think that’s the word for it, set her head at an angle and swung her eyes at me—and told me I ought to have an affair.

“You know what?” she said. “You ought to have an affair.”

“Just what I need.”

“You think I’m kidding, don’t you?”

“Well, aren’t you?”

“No.”

“Oh, for Christ’s—”

“For your own sake, kiddo. Not J.C.’s. You’re letting yourself go stale. Your whole marriage—do you mind home truths?”

“Go ahead.”

“Right where the angels fear to tread. All right. I get the impression that you and what’s-his-name are running out of each other. That it’s all turning sour.”

“That could be an exaggeration.”

“Is it?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. But the thing is that it’s more than your marriage. It’s you. Do you know that it shows in your face?”

“What does?”

“The fact that you’re bored all the time. That you’re all drawn out, strained.”

“I know. I can’t stand to look in mirrors.”

“Well, they ought to pass a law against mirrors. That’s something else again.”

“But I find myself looking into them all the time.”

“Because you’ve forgotten who you are.”

“Oh, come on—”

“A little trite, I grant you—”

“More than a little. Pure soap opera.”

“—but no less true for a’ that. Jan? Have you ever?”

“Ever what?”

“Had an affair?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You . . . ?”

She smiled at a happy memory.

“You’re not having one now?”

“Be serious. The way I look?”

We sidestepped into the Oh, you don’t look so bad/Oh, I’m so damn fat and what I wouldn’t give for your figure routine. But I was so taken with all of this that I almost forgot my lines. And she wouldn’t say anything much about her affair, just that it had happened a couple of years ago, lasted a couple of months, and left her very happy about the whole thing.

“Was it with someone I know?”

“Now don’t ask, Jan.”

“That means it was. Did Edgar know the man?”

“Cut it out.”

“Well, did Edgar ever find out about it?”

“No.”

“What if he had?”

“Do you really think he would have minded all that much?” I must have stared incredulously, because she reacted to my expression. “Let’s face it, honey. Edgar plays around.”

“I didn’t know that.” This is not exactly true.

“Oh, of course. He’s like a little boy, for God’s sake. I think all men are. I’m positive he started fooling around before we were married two years.”

“Well, who does he—”

“Girls at the office, tramps he picks up. There was a time, in my younger days, when I made scenes and threatened to leave. I laugh to think of it. I mean, where would I go?”

“But—”

“But what it amounts to is that something inside him makes him want that variety, and I can understand it most of the time, except when I start thinking that he wouldn’t do it if I took off thirty pounds or got the ironing done or compensated for one or another of my many faults. But actually I don’t think that would make any difference at all. I think he’s simply the way he is. You know, he even makes passes at my friends. Has he ever made a play for you?”

“No.” This wasn’t exactly true, either. I can remember a couple of boozy kisses at a backyard barbecue, a tentative Grope for the Boobies while collecting the coats at another party. The bit at the barbecue had been merely annoying, but the other pass had come at a time when I felt myself slightly less attractive than Miss Hippopotamus, and while I might not welcome the grab, I welcomed the reassurance in the knowledge that Edgar Hillman thought I was still worth grabbing, an opinion that Howard Kurland had not at the moment appeared to share.

“You know,” she said, a little later, “if you think Howard takes his marital vows so seriously, you’re only kidding yourself.”

“Are you trying to tell me something?”

“Nothing specific, no.”

“Do you know something that I don’t know?”

“Just that he’s a man.”

“And all men run around? I’m not positive I believe that. I’ve heard it often enough, but I’m not sure I believe it.”

“Maybe not. But things haven’t been going too well lately, have they?”

“Things have been going badly on and off for probably six out of the last seven years. Our marriage is like the country’s foreign policy. We somehow muddle through.”

“The country’s foreign policy before Vietnam, you mean. Now we muddle, but not through.”

“Fair enough. I don’t see—”

“Okay.” She pointed a finger at me. “Not all men run around. Some men have perfect marriages. Other men are profoundly unattractive, and other men lack the opportunity for an affair. Farmers who never get off the farm, for instance. But if a man’s marriage is not the ranking love affair since Heloise and what’s-his-name, and if he’s got a certain amount of poise and looks and intelligence, and if he’s got room to operate—”

“Uh-huh.”

“And if, like most men, he tends to think with his penis—”

“You are describing Howard.”

There was more, but that will do. My hand hurts. He called around dinner to say he was catching a late train. I had trouble not laughing until I put the phone down, and then for no particular reason I started crying instead. Real tears. My goodness, I hadn’t cried in, oh, perhaps a day and a half.

The funny thing is that I have to admit I don’t care if he’s fucking Elizabeth Taylor, as far as that goes. I really don’t care, and I suppose that was part of Marcie’s point.

I don’t know.

What do I want with an affair?

January 19

More snow.

The kid who carried the groceries out to the car at Pathmark yesterday said something fresh. I can’t remember exactly how it went, just some inane sort of double entendre which gave me the impression he wouldn’t mind taking me to bed.

I’m sure I am at least ten years older than him. Than he.

January 20

Last night was an odd, disjointed evening. Howie came home on his usual train. If he’s having an affair it can’t be a very intense one because he’s usually home on time. Maybe he’s screwing away his lunch hours.

If nothing else, I suppose that’s probably healthy. Good for the muscle tone and all.

During and after dinner, we talked more than usual. He talked mostly about the office. There’s some sort of minor crisis coming up and different people are positioning themselves on different sides and some of them may find themselves fired if things don’t go right. Not Howie, however. Or if his situation is risky, he’s not saying so.

Frankly, I had trouble following the whole thing. I didn’t even try very hard. But at least we were talking to each other. I talked about something I had read and some household things, and he nodded at the right times.

Now that I think about it, it was our first togetherness evening in a while, and neither of us was listening to a word the other was saying.

Are all marriages like that?

At eleven-thirty we went to bed and started necking. At first I was just going through the motions (Pardon, m’sieu, I thought she was English!) but all at once I was turned on as suddenly and completely as if someone had thrown a switch. It was like a rebirth. I was alive in all my more interesting organs. More than alive.

He spent some time nuzzling my breasts while he worked a finger into me and diddled me. (It is frighteningly embarrassing just putting the words down. I’ve enjoyed putting down occasional conversations here. I wanted to be a writer in college, and there is a certain pleasure in structuring scenes, and all without the need to invent. But sex writing!)

Does it matter who did what and with which and to whom? I don’t know. I got sopping wet immediately, hot and wet, and he went from breast to breast like a bee from flower to flower, which I do not suppose is an original image, but I couldn’t get it out of my head at the time, so it must have meant something to me. He buzzed from nipple to nipple while he fingered me very diligently, and I thrashed and panted and did other ladylike things until he took his finger back and climbed aboard and stuck it right on in. Look, Ma, no hands! He got the target on the first try and sank it all the way home, and he was hard as a bar of steel. I couldn’t remember the last time he had been so firm.

(I have been sitting here staring at the page. I have to stop now. I don’t know why. A woman ought to be able to write about her husband’s cock. It is, after all, something with which she is hopefully more familiar than anyone else on earth, himself excepted. But something is stopping me. More tomorrow, perhaps.)

January 23

I was going to mention some things that have happened over the last couple days but they aren’t important. And the whole point of this is not to write a record, a day book.

I just went over the last entry. It’s odd how I had to stop writing. I suppose you could say that I blocked. I remember the feeling that if I put it all down on paper just as it happened I would be stepping off the edge of a cliff and falling into darkness. I don’t know why.

He was, as I guess I said (as I know I said) rock hard, utterly virile. While I have never much understood the appeal of phallic statuary, there is something magnificent about the penis in full erection, when absolutely every cell of the man’s body is devoted to single-minded sex, when the penis leads and the rest of the body follows. Which is to say that Howie had what you might call an ultimate hard-on.

(Three days ago I was embarrassed. Now—admit it—I’m getting a kick out of this. Maybe I’ll masturbate later. God, it’s working, though, this diary; it opens me up, to myself if to nobody else. I wonder if this is good or bad. I read or heard that all meaningful analysis is self-analysis, and I don’t think I could bring myself to go to a psychoanalyst anyway, even if we could afford it, but I wonder if it is perhaps risky to do this oneself. Maybe so. But I don’t think it is any riskier than not to, if you follow me. Hah! I follow me. That’s what matters.)

So where was I? Ah, yes. In the privacy of my own bedroom, getting fucked by my husband. And, in keeping with the perfection of his erection (an unconscious rhyme, I swear) he had that total control which he has now and then and which was wholly in keeping with the perfect maleness of his erection. In and out, long whistling rippling strokes, in and out, so hard, so big, and with such sweet confidence. I know where the word cocky comes from. I never knew before. I just realized this moment. Cocky. Oh, he was cocky, and he fucked me with these long rippling slow strokes, in and out, in and out, and I suppose I’m being intentionally literary now, arranging words purposefully to create a mood, to create a rhythm, but thus it was, thus indeed it was, in and out, in and out, and the sweet pressure of his body on mine, and his chest just pillowy pressing on my breasts, and his tobacco and booze taste in my mouth, his mouth on my mouth, and fucking me so marvelously well!

And I was so hot, probably as hot as I’ve ever been, if one can keep track, if one can analyze in the heat of the moment the comparative degrees of hotness. And, a-tisket a-tasket, somewhere along the way I lost it.

This is hard to write not out of embarrassment but because I still don’t understand exactly what happened. I had it and I dropped it. It wasn’t anything he did or didn’t do. I’m positive of that. And it wasn’t a matter of getting turned off, actually. It was just that the way things started there was no question in my mind that I would make it, which is to say that I would come, have an orgasm, call it what you will. And then, after I had been fucked long enough and well enough for the average girl to have had several orgasms, and with no letup in passion, I came to realize that I wasn’t going anywhere, or that I wasn’t coming anywhere, or something.

I wasn’t going to make it.

Poor Howard. Whether out of gentlemanliness or male pride, he wasn’t going to let himself go until I was ready to go with him. And somewhere along the way I sensed that he was finding the whole thing frustrating. Here he was, hammering away at me, building up a full head of steam, so to speak, and we just weren’t making it.

So what I ultimately did was fake it.

Not for the first time, although on previous occasions it was passion that was feigned in the bargain. Show me a wife who has never pretended and I’ll show you a wife who is a lot less of a whore than I am.

Oh. . . .

He came like gangbusters, predictably enough, and I hummed along with him, and afterwards I heard a lot of Oh honey oh baby I love you, which is the way the male animal announces that he has enjoyed getting his rocks off. Then he fell asleep and I fell awake. I lay there with his come oozing out of me I wonder if we made a baby. How could one create a good child with a phony fuck? It would seem impossible.

All right, let’s put it all down. Therapy. Afterward I walked to the bathroom, dripping on the carpet as I walked, and cleaned up, and went back to bed, and lay there. And—say it!—finger-fucked myself easily and expertly to a frustrating, demeaning, easily reached little climax.

January 24

It’s the middle of the night but I can’t sleep. Howie is asleep now. He bubbled through breakfast, called me once from the office, and was positively bubbling when he got off the train. What ever happened to post coitum tristesse?

I thought we would have another hop in the hay with all that well-being on his part, and I didn’t think I would be up to it. He had felt so good he had a couple of drinks on the train, and two more after he walked in the door, and to fit the festive mood we had a bottle of Montrachet with dinner and brandy afterward. So he told me I was the bestest little girl in all the world, or something along those lines, and then he went upstairs, let his clothes fall where they may, and passed out on top of the bedspread.

Why am I such a bitch?

January 27

Marcie came by but didn’t stay long. One of her boys requires orthodontia. If she told me which one—and one would think she would have—then I don’t remember.

Or much care.

Is that all there is? Children with braces on their teeth, meals to prepare, dishes to wash, things, acres of meaningless things to do.

February 2

I went shopping this afternoon. To Pathmark for groceries. They were out of leg of lamb. How can a supermarket be out of something like that? Everyone knows it all comes in cellophane packages and they store it in a warehouse in the back.

Enough cuteness.

The same boy carried the bags to the wagon. Absolutely nothing happened, nothing at all, except in my own mind.

(Why am I bothering to write all of this? I just stopped and looked back through what I’ve written. The Chronicle of a Totally Uneventful Life. That’s what I could call it. Why am I bothering to write it all down? Why, for that matter, am I bothering to live it? Oh-oh, girl. Easy, now. There are certain questions one is better off not asking oneself. In college I went with a boy named Ray who told me never to ask a question unless I really wanted to hear the answer, whatever it might be. I had just finished doing unto him what I had done unto no man before, and only to Howie since, and, with the taste of his seed still lingering rather pleasantly, if the truth be known, upon my tongue, I asked him if he loved me. He said that he did not. I, predictably if illogically, cried. Ever since then I have tried to avoid asking such questions, which means that, in the space of a few minutes, Raymond had taught me two things. I wonder which was the more valuable?)

In the supermarket parking lot, then, following this boy ten years my junior, and watching his buttocks move as he walked, and chatting lightly with him, I found myself wanting him to resume the flirting, to say something mildly unpardonable to me. Not, of course, that I intended to do anything about it. Or to let anything happen.

Am I becoming sex obsessed?

The question seems laughable. Sometimes I play with myself. Sometimes I may let my mind wander a little when I do this. Having fantasies of things that—

February 17

It has been, let me see, more than two weeks since the last entry. Fifteen days, to be precise.

I never thought I would come back to the book. I didn’t even finish the last entry, I see now. I don’t remember what happened, whether I was interrupted by a jangling telephone or what. Probably what, she said archly.

Come to the point.

Yes, Doctor. Yes, you there in the mirror. The point. The point is that there is no point. I wonder how I expected to end that last entry. Having fantasies of things. Oh, yes. All manner of things.

I want to get this all down and make it right. I want to get it down right now as fast as I can. I don’t know what is going to happen next. I’m in this plastic motel that I don’t remember the name of, a Holiday Inn or Howard Johnson’s and I can’t remember which, and writing in this book, and trying to get it all down before it gets away.

Friday I was supposed to meet him in the city. Howie, that is, in New York. We do this occasionally. When we first made the move to Eastchester we swore we would do this once a week. After all, it’s simple enough to come in from the suburbs for a night on the town. Especially when you don’t have children. You just drive in and meet him after work and have a drink and dinner and a show and more drinks at a nightclub and then drive back to your happy little home in the country. The best of both worlds.

We did this every week at first, and then it gradually tapered off to once or twice a month. But Friday it was all set, he had tickets to I Love You Under the Olive Trees, and we were meeting at Gatsby’s at five-thirty.

It got called on account of snow. The worst storm of the season, and the Central canceled trains, and I couldn’t get the car out anyway to meet him at the station. Scratch Friday.

I don’t remember very much of Saturday, during the day. We stayed around the house mostly.

It doesn’t matter.

Saturday night there was a party at the Cargill’s. Edgar and Marcie were there, and Bill and Missie, and Walter and Lenore, the usual crowd.

There was nothing wrong with the party.

Just as there had been nothing wrong with the daytime, some sort of postseason exhibition football game—the fucking football games never stop, all weekend long whenever I look at the set he is in front of it and a football game is on it, it used to be just in the fall but now it never stops, preseason and postseason and season and training, nothing but football.

But there was nothing wrong with this, you see, that’s the whole point, that there was nothing wrong with it. That it was all perfectly normal, perfectly usual. The usual people at the usual party, the usual conversations, the usual drinks. Good New York suburban conversations. Wasn’t the President a horse’s ass, and would the war ever stop, and how the price of absolutely everything was going up, and some learned commentary on the wage-price spiral by Herb Gardenia, and Missie leasing Walter because Walter had once announced that he had smoked marijuana a couple of times, and general agreement that we would all like to try it, and unspoken certainty shared by all of us that of course we never would, or if we did it would be in the privacy of our own homes, away from each other, like masturbating. Does pot give you pimples? Or make you go blind?

(I smoked in college. Didn’t everybody? Didn’t we all of us smoke a couple of sticks of pot in college? And now we all pretend it never happened, each of us shielding ourselves from each other and I don’t care about the grammar in that sentence, I couldn’t care less about it if you want to know the truth. I smoked one time, a boy named Eddie turned me on. It was no sex thing, my roommate and I turned on with him. It was supposed to be this great experience. It was nice. Maybe we didn’t have enough of it. I remember being involved in words, caught up in what people said, finding new levels of meaning in everything.)

Nowadays I guess all the kids smoke. They all do everything these days. We were all born too soon. Five or ten years too soon. Everything is changing, completely turning inside out. Kids do all the things we sort of reached out for, and they do them easily and beautifully and without any guilt. And we live in Eastchester and drink too much and play with ourselves.

I just went to the bathroom. I thought I was going to throw up but it seems not to have been in the cards. I think it’s probably better to throw up than to want to throw up and not be able to. I think I shouldn’t have brought the liquor here with me. I think I shouldn’t drink at all.

I drank too much at the party.

I necked with Edgar Hillman.

The thing is that I had never thought of Edgar as attractive. He must be almost forty, and he’s lost about as much hair as he’s kept. The one attractive thing about him is that he has gone bald in front, his hairline receding more and more, and this doesn’t look so bad. It’s when a man has a bald spot in the middle of his head, an island of skin in a sea of hair, that I find it slightly ridiculous. But Edgar also has a spreading waist, and little eyes which are closer together than they might ideally be, and a nose with big pores in it. They told me that if I squeezed my pimples I would get enlarged pores. I squeezed any number of them and never got one.

What must have rendered Edgar attractive, I guess, is that Marcie had already told me that Edgar fluttered like a bee from flower to flower. (More precisely, she said that he would screw a snake if someone would hold its head.) The knowledge that he’s out there screwing all those snakes evidently got to me. Perhaps it’s a case of being unable to trust my own taste. If all those other women find Edgar attractive enough to have affairs with, they must be right, and he must be attractive, and thus I must be attracted to him.

There’s also the fact that I drank too much at the party.

The drinking helped cast a fine haze over everything, both at the time and in memory. I don’t know how we got into the room where they kept the coats. The bedroom, that is to say. The coals were piled on the bed. But somehow it’s a good deal less compromising lo think of oneself being in the coatroom with one’s best friend’s husband than in the bedroom.

“Jan, Jan, Jan,” he said. When people have nothing to say they repeat one’s name pointlessly. “Having a wonderful time, you wonderful girl?”

“Well, it’s a party.”

“It is indeed.”

“And people always have wonderful times at parties.”

“They do if they know what’s good for them.” He grinned owlishly, except that owls have their eyes spaced much farther apart. “You know,” he said, “I’ve had my eye on you for a long time now.”

“Which one?”

“Eh?”

“Which eye have you had on me?”

“Clever,” he said, moving toward me, eyes atwinkle. Both eyes atwinkle. Both beady eyes atwinkle. “I like women with something in their heads, you know. I like clever women.”

“Do you really?”

“I’ve always admired you, Jan.”

Then he kissed me. I didn’t discourage this. Quite the reverse, I guess. I opened my mouth and wrapped my arms around him, and he, the cute little rascal, stuck his tongue in my mouth.

We clung like that for what I think was a rather long time, neither separating nor quite managing to spill ourselves onto the bed, where we could have had a choice of fucking on Marcie’s silver-blue mink or Lenore’s beaver. Instead we just clung, and he groped me a little, and then we broke apart, both of us a trifle breathless.

“Jan,” he said.

“Oh, I don’t know, Edgar. Maybe we ought to go join the party.”

“We’re the party, doll.”

“I just don’t know about all this, Edgar.”

“I’m crazy about you, Jan.”

“Oh, and Marcie’s my friend and all—”

“Marcie doesn’t understand me. I’m really crazy about you, Jan.”

It was the talk that decided it. I just wasn’t stoned enough to handle that dialogue. He was crazy about me and his wife didn’t understand him. Bullshit, she explained. No, at that very moment Edgar made my decision for me. We were not going to have an affair.

But we did have a little genteel struggle. We did roll around on top of Marcie’s mink, and he did sort of lie on top of me and agitate his hips in a not unfamiliar motion, and I could feel his penis rubbing against me through his pants, and did, if the truth be known, handle it a little. It was large enough to impress me favorably, but not so monstrous as to be desirable in and of itself, separate and distinct from its owner.

And he did put a hand under my dress and a finger where one puts fingers, and we did rock and roll a bit in harmony, and ultimately he quivered and stiffened and said something actionable about loving me, and then relaxed, which I took to mean that he had come in his pants. So I guess we had what we in my lamented youth used to call a dry fuck. It wasn’t much fun now, but then it hadn’t been much fun then, either.

Edgar rolled off me, found his breath again, and put his hand back under my skirt and said something gallant about making me come. I said something about letting me go instead, which I guess was fine with him. I went to the bathroom and washed up, feeling a little like Lady Macbeth. All the perfumes of Arabia—

There were no kicks with Edgar. The kicks came back with the others, feeling a little soberer now but remedying that with a fresh drink, and fitting myself back again into the inane conversation, and looking around the room and thinking to myself that I had a secret from all these wonderful people. I know something you don’t know—do kids still chant that? Their parents do.

It felt good, having the secret. For about the same reasons it does when you’re a kid.

But then a thought came to me and almost knocked me over. Because, just as a little earlier I had wondered how many of my good friends and true had smoked pot at one time or another and now pretended it had never happened, well, I found myself wondering how many of the women had necked with Edgar. Or with Howard. And just who had slept with whom, and if anyone was currently sleeping with whom, and—

See? No major revelation. Just a new way of looking at things.

It seems as though I keep coming up with new ways of looking at things and I still have only the same old things to look at.

I don’t particularly remember the last half hour or so of the party. Neither did Howie. One of us drove us both home—probably him, because I think I was higher than he was for a change. And we went to sleep. The next day was Sunday, and instead of a football game there was a basketball game, and I called out for a pizza for dinner, and we watched some shows on television and went to sleep early.

Monday was today. Today, that is, is Monday. And it started with yet another snowstorm, which piled new snow on the old snow and new snow on the few places Howie had shoveled. We made the trip to the train station before too much of the white garbage came down but by late morning the driveway was socked in fairly solid again. Not that I had anyplace to go.

Quit stalling. Get to the point.

But this is the point, or part of it. I was sitting around thinking that I couldn’t go anywhere, and thinking that I had no place to go, and thinking, finally, that this was what it all added up to, that I was free and white, and twenty-nine and had no place to go. And that it was going to go on like this forever.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

I mean, I hadn’t originally planned a life of nothingness. It was never my idea. I don’t suppose it ever is, is it? Life has a strange way of happening to people. I don’t know many people who, at about this time of life, thirty or so, are doing what they originally set out to be doing. Doctors and lawyers, yes—but people who had vague ideas and who went to college and drifted through it and then got a job and quit it and got another. Or girls, in particular. We wanted so much not to be mere housewives that even now we join discussion groups and take evening courses and do all sorts of things to convince ourselves we are not mere housewives, and when all is said and done that’s precisely what we are, and the dumb little games we play only prove it.

I just went down the hall for some coffee. They have a row of machines, coffee and cigarettes and candy and soft drinks and ice. A person could stay here forever if she didn’t run out of quarters. I think I need the coffee.

He came to the door at a quarter after one. When I opened the door I looked at him and thought it was the bag-carrier from the Pathmark. Looked nothing like him on second glance, but even I can see the implications. You don’t need a psych degree. He was tall and rangy with a shock of once-combed black hair and the healthily stupid (or stupidly healthy) face that athletes have at Midwestern colleges. I couldn’t imagine what he wanted. He was holding an aluminum snow shovel over his shoulder, so I should have been able to figure it out, but the old mind wasn’t working all that well.

He said, “Shovel your walk, ma’am?”

I absolutely hate being called ma’am. As must everyone.

“Oh,” I said, cleverly. “Oh, yes, that would be good.”

“Walk and driveway?”

“Yes.”

“And I guess the path to the front door?”

“Yes, fine.”

“Right,” he said. He was wearing a sheepskin jacket with the hood thrown back. No gloves. His hands were quite large. Designed for gripping a football or basketball. Or a breast.

“Well,” I said, and he turned to begin the job, and I started to close the door. Then something occurred to me. I had forgotten to settle a price.

“It’s ten dollars,” he said.

“It’s that much?”

“That’s the going rate, ma’am.”

“Oh. Well, I guess that’s all right, then.” It seemed exorbitant, and none the less so because it was the going rate, but one learns to rely on order in an ever-changing world. I seemed to remember boys shoveling paths and walks and much longer driveways than ours for just a dollar. But everything else had gone up, and my memories were of longer ago than I cared to realize. I wonder, now that I think about it, how much he could have demanded without my objecting? Twenty dollars? A hundred? The keys to the car? What?

I went inside, I closed the door. And, between cups of instant coffee and half-smoked cigarettes, I kept finding myself sneaking to the window to watch him. At first I honestly didn’t realize what I was doing. Then I did, but that didn’t make it easier to stop it. Au contraire, mon cher.

I spilled a cup of coffee on the table. I mopped it up with a dish towel, which was slightly brainless. I stopped myself on the way to the window.

I felt—I don’t know how to describe it. Drunk? Maybe. It was a little like being drunk, like occasional states of drunkenness in which you can almost feel another mind taking control of your head. I was still me, but somehow it was a different kind of me, and the everyday me was still in there, watching, taking it all in, but not able to do much about anything.

Is that schizophrenic? I don’t know, I’ve never been out with one.

(This coffee is terrible.)

I went to the bathroom and stood under the shower for a while, letting the hot spray hit me on the back of the neck. This is usually better than a tranquilizer, and it sort of worked; I could feel the tension literally draining from my flesh. I got out, I dried off. I shaved my legs and armpits (I love that word, it’s so wonderfully crude), and fantasied shaving my pubic area. I have never done this but have often wanted to. To recapture youth? I don’t think so. I think it conjures up visions of Oriental cathouses or something. If I did it, I wonder how long it would be before Howie noticed.

I didn’t shave it. But I did put a little cologne on it, and some more between the breasts and under the arms and behind the ears. And did all this still thinking in at least one part of my mind that I wasn’t actually going to do anything, that this was just playacting, a costume for a role I would not perform.

I put on a terrycloth robe. Nothing under it. Except, she said vampishly, me. Then I went to the bedroom and put on my diaphragm. I had stopped taking the pill when Howie and I decided that we had to have children to go with the house and the station wagon. I didn’t want to have children, but if I was going to have them it seemed only fair to let Howie father them.

I watched him finish shoveling the path. The walk and driveway were already done. I checked myself in the mirror, looking to see if there was a gleam in my eye, a telltale gleam in my eye. I checked both eyes and saw no gleam, but I did seem to look younger and fresher than I had lately. Imagination? Wish father to the thought?

He came to the door. So did I, from its other side, and opened it. If he noticed that I had changed from sweater and slacks to bathrobe he chose to ignore it.

“All done,” he said.

“You did a good job.”

“Be no trouble getting the car out now.”

“You must be tired.”

“Well, it’s pretty hard work, but I don’t mind.”

“Why don’t you come in and have a cup of coffee?”

“Well, uh, thanks, but I don’t really care for coffee.”

I think groaned inwardly is what I did then. It seemed vital to get him inside. What could I offer him? Milk and cookies? Did we even have any in the house?

“How about a beer?”

“Well—” A tough decision for him. He didn’t want to come in but he really wanted the beer. The beer won.

We sat at the kitchen table. There was just one goddamned bottle of beer left in the refrigerator. Howie drinks it when he watches ball games, never otherwise. I guess it fits his self-image then. He also is apt to take his shoes off and pick his feet. One trouble with marriage is that when people are truly relaxed in one another’s company they let down their defenses and become genuinely disgusting.

I gave him the beer and made another cup of coffee for myself. We talked. The conversation went something like this:

ME: Do you go to school?

HIM: Over at East Central.

ME: I suppose they closed the schools today.

HIM: No, I cut when there’s a lot of snow. See, I can make thirty or forty bucks in a day. My old man gives me a note that I was sick.

ME: And you just go door to door looking for work?

HIM: That’s right.

ME: You must meet a lot of interesting people that way.

HIM: Well, just people, you know.

ME: A lot of lonely women.

HIM: Well, see, all I do is I shovel their snow, see, so I don’t really get to know too much about them.

ME: Oh, I’m sure a lot of them make a play for you.

HIM: I wouldn’t say that. And you know, most of them are pretty old, see, and there’s usually kids around the house or something.

ME: As old as me, for instance?

HIM: You’re not old.

ME: How old do you think I am?

HIM: Oh, I don’t know. I’m terrible at guessing ages. But to me a person is old or they’re not, see, and I would say that you’re not.

ME: Do you think I’m attractive?

HIM: You know, I’m getting funny feelings from this conversation. Like a little lost, if you know what I mean.

ME: Aren’t you going to answer my question?

HIM: I think you’re very attractive.

ME: (opening her robe): Do you really think so?

HIM: Jesus Christ.

If there seem to be parallels between this and The Graduate rest assured that I was painfully aware of them at the time. But if I was less adept at this than Mrs. Robinson, he was neither as sensitive nor as reluctant as Benjamin, which made things somewhat easier. We went to the bedroom (I almost wrote upstairs) after a couple of urgent kisses in the kitchen and another in the hallway. He was in a fantastic hurry and seemed hard put to decide whether to undress or to have me as soon as possible. He sat down on the edge of the bed and took off his shoes and socks, then his pants, then his shirt. He had his underpants on still. I got out of the robe and kicked off my slippers. He was staring at my breasts almost as intently as I was staring at the bulge in his underpants.

I said, “You’re wearing too many clothes.”

He looked down at his underpants and blushed.

And took them off.

His penis was good sized and oddly shaped. At least it looked unusual to me. I haven’t seen that many cocks. Howie’s, three boys in college, and a few pictures and statues, but the pictures and statues were never of erect ones. I suppose they must show erect ones in the little pornography shops around Times Square. I suppose there are some women who are ballsy enough to go into one of those shops and buy a magazine with pictures of men’s cocks. I am not one of those women.

This particular cock was sort of cone-shaped, much thicker at the base than at the tip, sort of like an inverted ice-cream cone.

I got on my knees in front of him and kissed the tip of it and then took its head in my mouth.

“Oh, Jesus! Oh my God!”

He was enormously excited, and worried I guess that he wouldn’t be able to make it last. He reached for me. I climbed on top of him. His hands went immediately to my breasts. I hardly noticed them. I didn’t want to be handled, I didn’t want him to touch me at all. In fact I didn’t want him to do anything. I wanted to do, I wanted to fuck him and not the other way around, I wanted to do it.

I got on my knees and I straddled him and I took his cone-shaped cock in my hand and rubbed it across myself (say the word! rubbed it across my cunt) and lowered myself on it and it sank in, sank all the way in and this feeling went through me, all through my body, and it was like losing my virginity it was exactly like that and I came instantly the instant he was inside me I came and came through my entire body, a total orgasm that hit me without any real prior excitement, there was no getting hot first, there was just this quick rush of orgasm. I came in a flash, that is what it was, that is exactly what it was, I came in a flash.

He was starting to move his hips.

I said, “No, lie still, please, lie still, let me do.”

He did and I did. He lay still, and I lifted and lowered, up and down, up and down, and at first it was mechanical, which is not to say that my heart was not in it because it most definitely was, but that I was getting nothing out of this but the aesthetic pleasure of fucking him well. But I had every desire to do just that. And somewhere along the way there was more than a spirit of amateur professionalism on my part, more than the delight in craftsmanship, and I knew that I was going to come again. I felt excitement mounting up again and knew I was going to make it, and I ground faster and faster against him, leaning way forward so that the top of his shaft rubbed against my clitoris (what a sweet word, except I don’t honestly know how to pronounce it, whether you accent the clit or say it so that it rhymes with Horace and Boris and Morris, it being a word you read more often than you speak it aloud) and I kept doing that so that I was using his cock to masturbate with, that is what I truly was doing, and I knew it at the time, and that somehow added to the excitement of the act. He was a tool, his tool was a tool. I was using him. Which was probably why I wanted to be on top and why I wanted to do everything and not be touched by him. The dominant female.

Sometimes I have fantasied while abusing myself that I was one of those women in the pervert magazines all done up in leather corsets and high heels and having sex with a man tied in a chair. I don’t think I would really like that but I like the fantasy. Maybe I would like the act also.

I liked this act, though. I was just about to make it, and I was looking down at his face, and his eyes were closed and his teeth clenched, and he started to twitch and he made it and I felt his come spurt into me, jets of it, he must have been saving it up for weeks, and I watched his face as he came, and that did it, that sent me over the edge, and I came with him and fell forward and almost passed out on top of him, his cock still inside me, still reasonably hard, and I almost blacked out.

It was hard to get rid of him, because he wanted to talk and he wanted to be tender (God forbid!) and he also wanted to do it a second time. I wanted nothing more than for him to get out of my bed and my bedroom and my house and my life. I figured it was easier to lay him than to talk to him, so I put my finger to his lips and got back in bed with him. I was smoking a cigarette, and I lay back on the pillow smoking the cigarette while he stroked my breasts and kissed them. He wasn’t very good at this, but it excited him, which was probably why he was doing it. He couldn’t have had much experience with girls. I don’t suppose he was more than seventeen, and maybe I was the first woman he had ever screwed, although I doubt this.

The second time wasn’t terrific. He took a long time getting hard, didn’t really get very hard after all, got on top, and came after four or five strokes.

It wasn’t the world’s greatest orgasm for him. It was nothing at all for me, but I made a little pretense of coming along with him. One gets in the habit, I suppose.

He got a little cocky afterward. “I suppose I can come around from time to time. Even when there’s no snow on the ground, huh? Say, do you do this a lot? You know, delivery boys and all that? I mean, I’m just curious. Not to pry into your affairs or anything. Your affairs, that’s a good one, huh?”

I almost forgot to pay him the ten dollars. For the snow, the ten dollars for shoveling the snow. As a matter of fact I did forget, but you can bet your sweet bippy he didn’t forget, but he didn’t mention it, either, and when he was dressed and ready to be on his way he shifted his feet and looked at the floor, not knowing how to ask for the money after he had just romped in my bed, but at the same time not wanting to go off without it, and I at first couldn’t figure out what in hell he was having trouble saying, and then I remembered and almost laughed aloud. I gave him the ten dollars. He blushed. He went away. I went to the bathroom. I took off my diaphragm—which you are not supposed to do for I forget how many hours, but what you are supposed to do is leave it on until morning, however many hours that is. I just didn’t really care. I stood there douching like Lady Macbeth washing her hands, but no, I don’t guess it was like that, because I didn’t feel that kind of guilt. I don’t know what it was exactly. What it was was strange.

I took another shower and I changed the sheets and put the dirty ones in the washing machine and made a cup of coffee and poured it out untasted and made a drink, vodka, the housewife’s friend. I drank it while I was washing and powdering and putting away my diaphragm. Then I made another.

I don’t remember exactly what was going through my mind then. A lot of things, I guess.

When the phone rang I knew exactly what it was. I have never had so strong a premonition. I knew just what had happened. I knew, without the slightest room for doubt, that my husband Howie was dead. That he had been killed in some sort of traffic accident in New York and that they were calling to tell me.

It was Howie. “Just called to tell you I’ll be a little late. I’ll probably catch the six-oh-four or the next one after that if they cancel it.”

“You’re alive.”

“What?”

“Howie, I won’t be here when you get back. I can’t be, I have to go away.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m leaving.”

“Jan, what are you—?”

“I can’t talk now. A boy came to the door to shovel the snow. I let him do it, I gave him ten dollars.”

“Seems a little high, but I guess—”

“He said it was the going rate.”

“Well, fine, then. I’m glad you got it done. Honey, I don’t quite understand—”

“I let him fuck me.”

“What?”

“I let him fuck me. Twice. In our bed.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Maybe you ought to stay in the city. In a hotel. I won’t be here when you get back. I suppose I’ll have to take the car, so maybe you should stay in town.”

“Well, if I stay in town you can stay at the house. But I still don’t see—”

“No. No, I cannot. I absolutely cannot stay in this house. I cannot stay in this house for another moment. I can’t. Howie, I don’t know what’s happening to me but I have to let it happen by myself.”

He was saying something else. I didn’t let him finish. I hung up and broke the connection, and then I took the phone off the hook so it wouldn’t ring again.

After that it was amazing how cool I was. I mean that it amazes me now that I think about it. I packed a suitcase. I threw clothes into it. I found the birth control pills that I had stopped taking when we decided I would stop taking them, and I took one right away and put the rest in my purse. I had dressed after making love (I don’t mean making love, we didn’t make love, we screwed) and I was wearing—oh, really who cares? Who cares what I was wearing?

I almost forgot this book, my diary. I haven’t written anything in it in two weeks. (Until now, when I seem intent on filling the whole thing at one sitting.) I had been keeping it on a shelf in my closet, a shelf Howie was unlikely to browse over. I came across it while gathering up clothes, and something made me realize I would want it. So I put it in the suitcase.

I lugged the suitcase out to the car—I wouldn’t have any trouble getting out, he had done a superb job of snow shoveling—and went back for my purse and the bankbook. I stopped in the bathroom and had a long look at the mirror. I had virtually had an affair with that mirror since my jump in the hay with what’s-his-name (my God, I really don’t know his name, we really never did get around to names, isn’t that hysterical!) and I kept running to look at myself in the mirror to see if I looked different. It really was like losing my virginity. I had kept looking in mirrors then too, just as I had done years earlier when I got my period for the first time. You always look to see if you look different, I guess everyone does that. I don’t think I look any different now but I keep checking.

Anyway, I took out my lipstick and wrote on the mirror. I wrote Howard and put a dash after it, and then I couldn’t think of anything to write, not a single thing. I was going to wipe it out but I didn’t get around to it, so it’s there to greet him if he comes home tonight after all, or it’ll greet him some other time, whenever he does come home, and I can’t imagine what will go through his mind when he sees it. Just that I’m out of my mind, I guess, which we both know now anyway.

Question: If you know you’re nuts, then are you really?

Answer: I don’t know, I’ve never been out with one.

I closed our savings account, or rather I took all but twenty dollars out of it, so it’s not officially closed but it might as well be. I have almost four thousand dollars in cash plus a purse full of credit cards, so I can go anywhere and do anything and sooner or later Howard will pay for it. Which is not nice of me, and if I figure out whether I love him or hate him or what, maybe I’ll do something more concrete about it. I don’t even know what that last sentence means. I’m slipping into automatic writing and besides my arm hurts.

I’m going to have a few more drinks and go to sleep.

February 20

I have an apartment. In New York, but I don’t think there’s any chance that I’ll run into Howard. His office is on Forty-eighth between Madison and Fifth, his train leaves from Grand Central, and he rarely if ever goes out of that vicinity. (How do I know that, really? For all I know he could have a mistress in the same building I’m living in, and have her for lunch five days a week. But I doubt it.)

I am living in Greenwich Village. Grove Street, the West Village, very ultradesirable location. I sublet it from some sculptor who’s going to Chile on a grant. I don’t know how he can afford it. The apartment, not going to Chile. It’s one largish room with a tiny kitchenette and a tinier bathroom. And it’s $375 a month, which is scandalous, but I just don’t care. I’d be afraid to live in a bad neighborhood. And I have the money and all the credit cards and money is just not going to be one of the things I worry about now. I have other things.

I think I was very clever about the car. I parked it in a lot and mailed the parking check to Howard at his office.

I haven’t had sex with anyone since the shoveler. I haven’t even had the desire to masturbate. Perhaps I’ll manage to get picked up tonight.

February 21

I didn’t.

February 25

This is the neighborhood I was living in before I met Howard. (Which undoubtedly has something to do with my returning to it. I realized that at the time. Nevertheless, it is the most sensible place for me to be living now.)

But the point is that I feel as though all of those years have somehow dropped away. I don’t know how to explain this, how to find words to go with the tune. Let me see. It’s as if I’m fitting back into the pattern of living I had then, except of course that I don’t have a job to go to five days a week, and that I don’t know anybody. There was a time when I seemed to know half the people in the Village. I wonder where they all went to. They couldn’t all be living in ranch homes and driving station wagons. Could they?

I wake up in the late morning, I go to the coffee shop around the corner for a roll and a cup of coffee. I buy the Times, I wander over to Washington Square, I sit on a bench and read the paper. Sometimes at night I go to a movie. Sometimes in the afternoon I buy something at a bookstore and take it to the coffee house on Bleecker Street. I read and drink espresso and watch the people. And I find myself belonging to this and no longer possessed by a house and a car and a husband.

There is a man who comes to the coffee house frequently. He reads or plays chess by himself. He seems to know everyone there.

A very exciting man.

I don’t know why this should be so. He’s not handsome in any of the generally accepted ways. (Whatever precisely they may be.) But there is, oh, something about him.

What?

Let us describe him. A long face. Dark brown, almost black hair, and quite a lot of it, lying shaggy on his neck like the mane of a mighty lion. A hawkish nose. Keen, rather intense eyes. A mouth one might describe as sensual. A mouth I might describe as sensual, anyway.

I don’t quite feel I have created a vivid word-portrait of this man. He must be thirty-seven or so, but it’s possible that he’s a good deal older than that but seems younger because he is in such good shape, very long and lean and capable looking.

That’s it! The last words, capable looking. That’s what it is about him, his presence, his air of competence, of authority.

I wonder if I should make an effort?

Maybe one doesn’t make an effort with such as he. Maybe he summons one when he wants one.

And maybe, for all I know, he’s a screaming faggot (of which there are certainly enough in this neighborhood) and I’m building him up in my mind for no good reason at all.

I think I’ll get in bed and think about him.

Is it progress to reach the point where you can not only plan to masturbate but admit it to yourself in writing? Or is it only a symptom of further deterioration?

Would I perhaps be better off paying this $375 a month to a shrink?

Excuse me, I have to think of Tall Dark and Capable while I play with myself. I’m damp already. Quel disgusting!

February 27

I finally got laid last night.

It’s really about time. One begins to feel foolish, all this sexual freedom, an apartment in the Village, no strings on me, and ten days in a row without getting close to anything more exciting than my own finger.

Nothing has happened yet with Eric. That’s his name. I have learned that much about him, and we are at the point now where we nod and smile politely at one another. Yesterday he brought someone with him, a little blond teenybopper who couldn’t have been more than eighteen, if she was that. She could have been his daughter, and may in fact have been just that, a college girl visiting her father who is divorced from her mother or something. I think, though, that she is his mistress. Or his occasional piece or something of the sort. It doesn’t really matter. I don’t think he’s interested in me, and I don’t think I care very much.

I was picked up in a bookstore. A couple of times I’ve gone to bars and other places looking to get picked up, and haven’t been, probably because I don’t stay long enough and am so uptight about the whole thing that I don’t come on as very approachable. But the bookstore, I only went to get something to read. The Eighth Street Bookshop. And this young man—I thought at first he was a clerk, but he was just browsing, like me—held this book up to me and said, “Have you read this? It’s really quite marvelous.”

I hadn’t, and I still haven’t, and I don’t remember what it was but it certainly didn’t look very interesting. I said something and smiled, and he smiled back and I said something about not really feeling like reading but being bored and having nothing to do, which was something of an invitation, the point of which was not lost on him.

“This is a bad city to be lonely in,” he said. “Sometimes I think companionship is the enemy of education. If I weren’t so much alone I doubt I’d have read half of what I have, over the years.”

He had longish light brown hair (and no doubt still does) and a rather fierce red-brown moustache and soft, liquid eyes. He was about my age, maybe a couple of years younger. He had a teaching fellowship at NYU. Philosophy. He was getting his doctorate, but philosophy was beginning to bore him and teaching bored him even more and he didn’t think he would want to spend the rest of his life doing it, but neither did he see anything else that appealed more. He had some money from his mother’s estate and had thought about going into some sort of business, maybe opening a store of some sort, perhaps a bookstore, except he didn’t know if he wanted the headache of running a business and if he wanted to tie himself down to anything. He didn’t think he would like it.

He told me all of this over coffee and at his apartment, which was on Tenth Street between Avenues A and B, not a wonderful neighborhood and several flights up, but comfortable enough inside. We drank wine out of jelly glasses, California Burgundy from a gallon jug, and we listened to a mixture of jazz and folk rock, and we screwed on his sagging bed.

It was sort of nice. He was a nice person, actually. His name is Arnold, which is less sexy than Eric, which figures, because so is he. His penis is long and narrow. He sort of hinted at one point that he might not recoil with horror if I happened to feel like blowing him, but I didn’t particularly want to so I failed to pick up on the hint. I don’t think he was tremendously disappointed. We did it twice. I didn’t come, but it wasn’t frustrating or anything and was in fact quite pleasurable, just that I didn’t come.

February 28

I was thinking about Arnold. He called this afternoon and asked if I’d like to have dinner. I said I was busy, which isn’t true, but that tomorrow would be all right. So I’ll have dinner with him tomorrow. And then I gather we’ll go to a movie and then back to his place.

He is not what I’m looking for. I don’t know why, any more than I know what it is that I am looking for.

Eric?

Oh, shit, Eric’s a fantasy, let’s face it. I don’t know him. But what Eric is to me is what I think maybe I am looking for.

I would love to blow Eric, and I don’t think I want to blow Arnold.

I wonder what that has to do with it. I think it must have a lot to do with it. I know that was what I wanted to do with the kid who shoveled the driveway. He made me stop, he wanted to screw instead, but I hadn’t wanted to stop. I wanted the whole thing. I wanted to suck his cock, I wanted to suck him off. I am getting myself excited right now writing the words and hearing them inside my head. I wanted to suck him off.

Howie always wanted me to do it and I did it some of the time but I didn’t enjoy it. Just as I know instinctively I wouldn’t enjoy it with Arnold.

Why is this?

March 1

This is a sex diary. Believe it or not, I didn’t quite realize it until today, when I skimmed through it and read some of the earlier entries. I think I should make a point of not doing this in the future. It’s important to write all of this down, and sometime it will be important to read it (prefatory to incinerating it, I should think) but in the meantime I don’t want to read it because it’s not finished yet and reading it might keep me from writing any more, or might even lead me to stick the thing in the fire. Which was an impulse I had this afternoon, as a matter of fact.

It’s funny. I have no trouble writing this stuff, but it’s like pulling teeth to read it. Agony. I’m naked on every page, and in more ways than one.

But it’s a sex diary. No question about it. And it’s not as though that’s all I think about, or all I do. Far from it. There are other aspects to my life which seem to take up far more of my time and interest, but when I sit down with this book and get ready to put pen to paper these other matters aren’t there and sex is all that concerns me.

I think—think? I damn well know—that I have sexual hangups which are presently coming out into the open. Which is what this whole separation business is I guess all about. So be it. The Sex Diary of Jan Giddings Kurland. Available wherever bad books are sold.

I’m going out with Arnold tonight, so I suppose I’ll have something to write tomorrow.

March 2

Arnold is really weird!

Who would have guessed it? Not I. He seemed (and truly is) so nice, so simpatico. Not that there is any reason why weird people should be other than nice and simpatico, but one has these stereotypes in mind.

We had dinner, as planned. An Italian restaurant on I think it was Carmine Street. Checkered table cloths and Chianti bottles with dripped candles in them. The usual sort of thing. He talked me into having calamari, which is squid, which is octopus, which turned out to be ever so much more palatable than I had dared to anticipate. From now on when I go to restaurants I am going to try to pick out something I have never had before.

After dinner we went not to a movie but to bed, and not to his bed but to mine. There was a long line in front of the movie, so we gave each other meaningful looks and I said something about my apartment not being very far away. He bought some wine and we went back and talked a little and necked a little and went to bed.

The necking part was really great. It brought it all back. Being young and dating and just feeling each other and groping toward sex instead of getting undressed and putting on a diaphragm and getting in bed together and mechanically gliding into the old husband-and-wife number.

When we wound up in bed it was like two happy kids playing with sex, very loose and sweet and nice. We sort of moved from position to position, and it was loose and lazy, no urgency. I think the wine probably had something to do with it. He was able to go what seemed an incredible length of time without coming and without losing his erection. We took turns being on top, he took me from the rear, we sat facing each other, and the whole thing was purely physical, pure bedroom gymnastics, with no complication of how did we feel about each other or where is our relationship going or any of that oppressive crap.

I hadn’t thought, on the basis of the other night, that he was that good a lover. I think maybe there’s a certain amount of getting used to each other that people have to do before they can really groove on each other’s bodies.

I could have come a couple of times before I finally did, but I waited, and we got there together. Strangely enough after all of that it was not overpowering, not designed to knock me unconscious or anything like that, but very enjoyable and clean feeling and happy making all the same.

Revelation: Sometimes one (i.e., me) does not want to have a big orgasm because it is too much of a surrender of self. Of ego. The little part of you inside your head does not want to let go all the way. Question: Is that why women are frigid? That same kind of holding back?

I am learning things about myself and the world. Maybe they are things everyone else already knows—I sometimes get that feeling, that I am in fact some sort of retarded child. But I am changing. I feel myself changing. Every day I find myself somehow no longer the child I was yesterday.

Scary.

But Arnold and his weirdness. Afterward we were lying on the bed together. I have naturally told him things about myself, not hiding anything in particular, merely being a little reticent about details. Now he begins to ask sex questions.

“Can I ask you something, Jan? Ever make it with a girl?”

“No.”

“Honestly? Not even once?”

“Of course not. I’m probably a lot of things, but not a lesbian. Why?”

“I wondered.”

“I impress you as a lesbian? I’m not sure that’s a compliment, love.”

“Oh, as a matter of fact, you’re wrong.”

“Really?”

“Mmm-hmmm. Most really sensual women have had a homosexual experience somewhere along the line. High school or college. A drunken thing with a roommate or a crush on a teacher or some sort of thing.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Your observation or Kinsey’s?”

“I suppose mine, but I don’t think it’s original with me, or that it strikes a blow at established theories. Everybody’s supposed to be basically bisexual, you know.”

“I’m sure I never felt anything that way.”

“Maybe not. Ever have any experience with group sex?”

“You mean wife swapping? Suburban sin clubs? I suppose some of that does go on—”

“You better believe it does.”

“But I never had firsthand evidence of it. In our crowd there was some occasional groping at parties and there may have been some affairs on the sly, but no Westport Roulette.”

“Is that what they’re calling it now?”

“Isn’t it? You know, with the keys in the hat?”

“I guess so.”

“Is that what you meant?”

“Not exactly. I meant, you know, more than two people in the bed.”

“Like an orgy?”

“Well, like three.”

“No, never.”

Looking off into the distance, “I knew this girl with an absolute passion for going to bed with two men at once. She told me she had done it a couple of times and it was fantastically exciting to her.”

“Two men at once?”

“Yes.”

“You mean one right after the other?”

“I mean two at once.”

“I don’t see exactly what sort of thing they would do.”

“Well, use your imagination.”

“I’m sorry, I’m stupid tonight. But they couldn’t both get into her at the very same time, could they? I don’t see—”

“There is, how to say this, there is more than one aperture in a girl, love.”

“Oh, one in the mouth.”

“Or one here.”

“I never thought of that.”

“Haven’t you there?”

“Never. It’s painful, isn’t it?”

“Not if you know what you’re doing.”

“I’m not sure I see the appeal.”

“You weren’t sure about the calamari, either.”

“Touché. I must admit I’m interested. I don’t know if I’m personally interested or if it’s just that I like to hear what different people do in bed. They would both make love to her?”

“And to each other.”

“Oh, then they were queer?”

“Everybody’s bisexual, they say.”

“Do you really believe that? I’m not sure I do.”

“Well, that’s the new sexual freedom. The new morality. The kids coming along these days are very open about it. They do whatever feels good.”

“I don’t think I could ever have anything to do with a girl.”

“Maybe that’s your hangup.”

“Maybe.”

I put out a cigarette, and looked down at him, and he was quite urgently erect. “Oh,” I said, and he chuckled, and we made love quickly, just a rapid urgent bang, and I made it seconds before he did.

Then, lying together facing each other, I looked at his now-little penis (his is absolutely tiny when it’s soft but respectable enough when it’s not, a complete transformation) and I thought how innocent it was now, how soft and innocent, and I looked up at his face, and all at once I knew.

I didn’t stop to think it over or I might not have said anything, but instead voiced the thought as soon as it came along. I said, “You were one of the men. With that girl. You were one of the two men.”

“Why do you say that?”

“It just came to me. I don’t know why. It’s true, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And you would want me to do that. With you and another fellow.”

“Maybe you would like to think about it.”

“Oh, God. I really don’t know.”

“It excites you, doesn’t it?”

“Oh, damn it, yes, of course it does. Anything sexual excites me if it’s just a matter of thinking about it. I don’t think I could do it. I really don’t. I don’t even think I could let anybody screw me In the bottom, as far as that goes. I don’t think, oh, I don’t even know what I think. I can’t imagine being in bed with you and having you do things with another man. What do you do with him, anyway?”

“The usual things.”

“I just can’t take all this in, Arnold.”

“Why don’t we have some wine and talk about something else?”

“Yes, maybe we should do that.”

And we did, and he hinted that he wouldn’t at all mind sleeping over, it being cold outside and all, and I said no, that I had to be independent now and that I had made up my mind that one part of my independence was that I would not spend the whole night with anyone. That this was one of the things I had been running from when I left my husband. I had not previously decided any such thing, but I didn’t want him to stay overnight I guess because I wanted to be alone when I woke up and also because I frankly didn’t want to hear any more about group sex until I had a little more chance to digest what he had told me.

The independence aspect went down well, though. Made perfect sense to him and he seemed to respect me for it. He had a last slug of wine, lit himself a cigarette, and away he went into the night, leaving me with more new thoughts to echo around in my head than I had room for.

He is really weird.

Two men at once? I don’t think I could relate to that sort of scene.

Or is it that I don’t want myself to enjoy something like that?

March 3

I am still recovering from the other night with Arnold. What a strange effect it’s been having.

I find myself looking at people differently, and almost blushing for the thoughts I’ve been having. All sorts of thoughts. Sexual, of course.

I will see two men deep in conversation, and in my mind they become a pair of faggots who do all sorts of unspeakable things to each other. And then I find myself enlarging on this and imagining things. Myself with them. Doing what?

Everything.

Or with a girl. I saw a girl on the street this morning. Dark haired and slender, much the same physical type as I, although I rarely see that sort of similarity in others. And I honestly didn’t have any sexual desires for her, not as far as I can tell, but I found myself, oh, thinking.

What do girls do with each other? Primarily eat each other, I think, although I suppose they could have dozens of other things that they do and that I have never thought of.

Being eaten is nice. If you can just give yourself up to it. If you can make yourself completely passive and just take a bath in feelings.

Howard never liked to do it. He did it, but he didn’t like to. He did it, I think, out of a sense of duty, and not well. He did it until I got sufficiently passionate to be an interesting fuck, and then he would stop eating me and climb aboard, which usually was the last thing I wanted him to do. And I suppose he made it obvious that he didn’t like to do it, just as I suppose I made it obvious I didn’t care much about returning the favor, and neither of us did it very well, and so we didn’t do it very often, or want it one from the other very often.

What a stinking shitty marriage. What an absolute complete farce of a marriage.

Incredibly, I don’t miss him at all. Sometimes I wonder where he is, what he is doing, if he has found someone, if he has moved permanently to the city. As you might wonder about some old friend you hadn’t seen in years. But as far as caring about him or what he is doing, I don’t.

At least I don’t think I do.

Would it be different to be eaten by a girl? How?

Could one just have that or would one be expected to return the favor? It would seem that there ought to be girls who would prefer to eat, while others like oneself would instead prefer to be eaten. Is there a whole body of rules of etiquette for this sort of thing?

And why do I care?

Do I?

I don’t think I do. This is silly. I’m not a lesbian, I don’t want any girl or woman touching me, I don’t want any of that.

Or do I?

Sometimes it seems as though I just don’t know anything anymore. As though all I really get in my travels through whatever it precisely is through which I’m traveling is more confused than ever.

If I have reached the point where I can write sentences like that last one I think it is time to stop.

March 5

Eric spoke to me this afternoon. I looked up from a Nero Wolfe mystery to smile at him, as I often do when he comes in, and he gave me the smile back and came over to my table.

He said, “The Mother Hunt? I think I missed that one.”

“You could borrow it when I’m done.”

“I’d appreciate it. I enjoy Nero Wolfe. I prefer to believe that he exists, you know, and that some day I could be invited to that West Thirty-fifth Street brownstone for dinner. And then I would know that I had made a success of my life.”

I laughed pleasantly. The one time I would have liked to say something bright, and all I could manage was a laugh. Eric smiled somewhat warmly and then went on to his usual table.

Big deal.

I wonder if he’s fucking that teenybopper.

March 6

I dragged The Mother Hunt to the coffee house. He never even showed up today. I’m seeing Arnold tomorrow.

March 15

Nine days since the last entry?

Doesn’t seem that long.

I’m a little depressed. Also maybe a little drunk. A little fuzzy in the head.

Last night was terribly frustrating. Things were going along on a nice even keel, I was seeing Arnold a couple of times a week, and nothing was too exciting but everything was loose, easy. I don’t know.

I’m having trouble making this come out on paper. I keep blocking and just staring at the page. I took a pill earlier today, one of my antidepressants. I have been trying not to take them but I thought it would be better for me in the long run to take the pill than to cut my wrists.

Not really.

But I took it, and you shouldn’t drink when you’re on those things. They don’t go together very well.

Last night we went to a party. A horrible place a couple of blocks from Arnold’s apartment, a really foul, filthy cockroach trap. Cracked plaster and broken pipes and genuine filth all over the place. Everybody seemed to be stoned, mostly I guess on pot but there were also some speed freaks.

Frightening. I felt at least a hundred years old and hopelessly square.

We didn’t stay long. Arnold smoked some grass. I didn’t. Why? Because I didn’t want to be high, I guess.

We went back to his apartment and had a scene. I guess I provoked it. It was a marriage game—Let’s Have a Fight So We Won’t Have to Fuck.

Stupid. Stupid and self-destructive. Why do something like that? We had a good relationship developing. It didn’t have a future but the last thing I need right now is a relationship with a future. Instead it looked as though it might have a long and pretty good present.

I can’t write any more of this, I have to go to bed or something.

March 16

I have a hangover. Well, I came by it honestly. I got what I deserved.

Eric returned the book and we talked about it. There is something about the way he looks at a person that suggests that he is having thoughts about one which are totally unrelated to what he is saying. As though while we chat blithely of Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe and the orchids on the roof, he is really looking right through my clothes and counting the hairs on my cunt and guessing what I am like in bed.

He terrifies me. I can’t avoid the feeling that he could make me do absolutely anything he wanted. All he has to do is ask. Absolutely anything.

I know why I had the fight with Arnold. Not to avoid going to bed with him. It was deeper than that. I was trying to break off the relationship permanently.

Because of the way it scares me.

The two of us have been getting much more deeply into sex the past week or so. Doing things we hadn’t done previously. We go down on each other, for example, lunching in marathon bouts of sixty-nine. Which is not scary in and of itself. It’s the conversations we have before and after and the effect they have upon the sex.

How to explain?

Oh, he talks about threesomes and group sex, not only in an effort to convince me to try it but also because the talking stimulates him. (Be honest. Stimulates us.) He talks about things he’s done and things he’s seen others do. Sometimes he’s almost blindingly graphic and other times he is annoyingly oblique, so that my own mind finds itself sketching in the details he has omitted, enlarging the fantasy.

And then, when we make love, the fantasy of what we have discussed slips in on the heels of the actual sex we are having. It is very strange. I clutch his buttocks in my hands and take his penis in my mouth while he gobbles away between my thighs, and somewhere in my mind behind my closed eyelids he is a girl eating at me and—

I can’t explain it. It’s something that was happening more in the mind than in the flesh and I don’t know how to make words out of it.

But it was scary, and I knew we were going to do scarier things as time went by. And that I wanted to do them, and would let them happen.

So I started a fight in an effort to break up with him, and I haven’t heard from him.

So I guess it worked.

I don’t know whether I’m glad or not. I really don’t know. I wish he would call and I hope he won’t call and, oh, maybe I should just go out and find somebody to ball to get my mind off all this.

I know one thing. If he called now and said he had a male friend over and why didn’t I just come over and join them, I would go. No question. I would go and I would do everything. I hope it doesn’t happen but if it did I would.

Sick sick sick.

March 17

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day.

March 23

Sitting in the coffee house absolutely all strung out. This black pit of depression has been deepening all week, a really fragmented sense of self. Sitting and turning the pages of a book and not retaining anything of what I was reading. My mind wandering all over the place.

“Jan.”

I look up. It is Eric.

“You are ready, aren’t you?”

“Pardon?”

“I have been watching you. You’re ready now.”

“For what?”

“To be yourself.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I think you do.”

The power of his eyes, his voice. He draws me and mesmerizes me.

“Come with me.”

I stand, put coins on the table, grab up my purse and book. He takes my arm. We walk through slushy gray afternoon streets. He strides. I have to walk very quickly to keep up with him.

“Where are we going?”

“My apartment.”

He lives south and west on a block I don’t know. His building is drab brick. It looks dismal. He unlocks doors and I follow him inside, up one flight of stairs. He unlocks a door. We walk into another world, a complete departure from the neighborhood, the buildings, the stairway, the hall.

Extreme modern furnishings, but with everything exquisitely selected. No straight lines. Everything curved, flowing. Everything perfectly rounded. Bold colors, black and white and a deep red. A black, high-pile fur rug on the parquet floor. A massive white couch, white velvet. Scarlet draperies.

“How beautiful!”

“I’m comfortable here.”

“I’ve never been anyplace like this.”

“You are going to go to many places you have never been.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I’m—”

“Yes?”

“Afraid.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-nine.”

“Yes. Twenty-nine years in the bud. And now you are going to open yourself up. You are going to become a flower.”

“Who are you?”

“Eric.”

“I mean, oh, what do you do?”

A rich smile. “You’ll see.”

He leaves me momentarily, brings two glasses of a dark red liquid that matches the drapes. I take a glass. The scent is of rose petals.

“What is it?”

“Drink it.”

The taste is sweet-and-sour, not unpleasant but quite unusual. There does not seem to be any alcohol in it. I am aware that the drink probably contains a drug. But it does not occur to me to refuse.

There is music, something faintly Oriental. There is the aroma of rose petals lingering after the drinks are gone. He touches my shoulder. I look into his eyes. They have infinite depth. One could drown in them.

We kiss. His hands are firm, gripping my shoulders, drawing me close. His mouth is hard against mine. I open to him entirely and his tongue is deep in my mouth, searing me, shooting flames. I am alive in every part of my body. I can feel his legs against mine, his chest against my breasts, his hands on me, his mouth on mine. I feel everything at once and am aware of everything at once, the taste of him, the feel of him, the music, the rose scent, everything.

In his bedroom he tells me to take off my clothing. I undress artlessly as in a dream, taking things off, dropping them. His bed is huge. It fills the room.

His eyes are on me as I undress. I can feel his gaze. There is warmth in it, as if a beam from his eye touches me. I feel his gaze on my breasts and their tips quiver and grow warm. I feel his eyes stroke my belly and thighs like fiery hands, like tongues of flame.

I have no will, I have no will at all.

He strips swiftly. I watch him. His body is beautiful, he is as all men should be, big in the chest, flat in the stomach, sloping shoulders, no fat anywhere, just enough hard muscle. His penis is huge, fully erect, a column of ivory topped with a fiery red sphere.

He crosses the room to me. He takes me in his arms. He puts me on the bed.

His hands are everywhere, touching me, preparing me. He strokes my shoulders and my breasts, runs his hands down to my thighs, opens me. He handles all the parts of my sex and his fingers start little fires wherever they touch me. My head is floating, my whole body is floating, my flesh is melting, I am alive for the first time, I am dying, I am everything at once.

He positions himself over me. The tip of his penis is poised at my entrance. I throb, wet, hot. He touches me, comes just a little ways into me, just half of the head of his penis enters me.

I begin to shudder.

He is huge. I am hot, I am wet, I am open, but still he must enter me little by little, must enter me by degrees. He begins to withdraw, and then he thrusts gently forward again and the entire head is inside me and I am on fire.

Only his penis touches me. None of the rest of him is in contact with my flesh. He supports his weight on his hands on either side of me, and his penis labors upon me as if it is his entire self.

He works himself in and out, in and out, and I pant and moan and writhe in involuntary motions, and all of his penis is all the way inside me, and I can feel him pressing against the back of my womb, I can feel him all the way up to my neck, not merely my vagina but my entire body is filled with him, and he presses all the way in and holds it there, and I seem to swoon, I go off somewhere deep in the private places of my mind.

And then he begins. He withdraws all the way, all the way, so that even the very tip is about to leave me, and I want to cry out, I want to scream for him, and then he rams himself home again, home again, and out and in and out and in, slowly at first and then faster, and it is as if I have never been fucked before because no one has ever fucked me like this before, no one has ever owned me before, no one has ever possessed me before, no one has ever utterly controlled me before.

Faster and faster, harder, so that there is pain in the banging together of our pubic ridges, but the pain is part of it, a good part of it, and faster and harder and he is fucking me like a great stallion, he is fucking me to death, and I am swept up by new sensations, dreamed but unknown sensations, faster harder higher and I come in colors, I come in bursts of red and yellow and blue and purple and green and orange, fiery electric bursts of color and I open and I explode and I come come come.

He stops, stops with the full force of my orgasm, stops deep within me, hard within me, a steel-ivory-fire rod inside me. And waits, hard within me, while the colors blink out and fade gently away and only the sweet warm all-enveloping glow remains.

He has not come yet.

He is not finished.

He withdraws, slowly, and my cunt grabs at him, wants to retain him, but he pulls away and exits with a little sweet popping sound.

I feel tears welling up and think I am about to cry for his absence.

But his hands are on me, turning me over, arranging me in the position he wants me in. On my knees, head flung forward, knees up toward my chest, bottom high, breasts hanging downward. He touches my shoulders and the sides of my chest. He is behind me, crouching over me.

He cups my buttocks in his huge strong hands. Tugs them apart, puts a finger in their cleft.

Then releases them, puts both hands around my chest and on my breasts.

And squeezes with all his strength.

I scream. The pain is extraordinary, his fingers are digging into my breasts, his nails bite the skin, and the scream is torn from my throat.

He releases my breasts, seizes my buttocks. Pulls them apart, places his penis in their cleft, and forces his way inside.

I scream. Louder than before, and go on screaming as he rams his huge cock into my asshole. I feel as though I am literally being torn in two. There has never been pain like this before, and I scream, I shriek, and it is as if I am making no sound at all. He utterly ignores my cries, ignores my pain. He uses me as he wishes to use me.

His hands on my buttocks, holding me firmly in place. His hips surging, in and out, in and out, not gentle at all, not preparing me as before, but fucking me brutally and furiously, with the pain getting constantly worse, and I scream, I scream, I think I am going to die of it.

And then, oh, oh, so strange—

The pain does not end, there is no end to the pain, there is no dropping off of the pain, but something happens in spite of the pain or on top of the pain or around the pain, something happens, something strange happens. I begin, oh, I begin to like it. It is still pain, it still hurts me, it still tears screams from my throat, but now I like it.

And I come from it. I roil, I boil, and with his last furious thrust into my bowels I come. Not as I have ever come before. Because I come there, in my anus, with the muscle contracting spasmodically around the great length of his cock, milking at him, and the vibrations spreading from that place through my whole body, colors again, I come in colors, but all yellows and golds and reds, no other colors, yellows and golds and reds.

He still has not come. He withdraws from me, a cork from a bottle, pop. I remain as he has arranged me. Face down, knees drawn to breasts, eyes closed, chest heaving. Pain in my bowels, pain in my breasts. But with it the most extraordinary sense of freedom, of liberation.

His hands on me.

Rolling me over, sitting me up, propping me against pillows. There is no tenderness in his touch, but sureness. His hand is on the back of my head, bunching up the hair, gripping it. He guides my face down toward his penis.

There are flecks of blood and traces of my parts. I smell myself upon him.

I do not want to suck him.

I want to suck him.

He guides my face to him. I open my mouth, take the tip of him inside. I taste and smell myself, my juices. My head spins. He forces my head down further. I am afraid that I will gag. He fills my mouth, he touches the back of my throat, but I do not gag.

I love him with my lips and tongue, I use my mouth as a plunger, up and down the length of the ivory shaft. I am intoxicated with that penis, I am involved with it with all my being, involved from head to toe with that penis. It is a part of me and I an extension of it, and I suck him, I suck him, and my lips and my tongue are completely given over to this and all my sense of self concentrated in that penis and my mouth upon that penis, and I want to swallow him cock and balls, I want to eat him alive, I want him down my throat and into my stomach and guts, I want him inside me, all of him, and I suck him and he comes in a spurting jet and I suck up every bit of it and swallow it down. And I come doing this, I actually come, I never thought it was possible, but it happens.

And the world slips sideways, and the colors fade to black, and I sleep.

March 24

I wrote all that yesterday as soon as I got home from Eric’s apartment. I had to put it down just that way, just as it occurred. I read it again now and it is right. I thought I might not get it right, but it worked. I had to do it in the present tense, as if I was putting myself back into it and describing it as if it were a film.

I must keep this diary. He does not know about it. He must not know about it.

I cannot believe that anything like yesterday has ever happened to anyone in the world before. Of course this is a conceit on my part, but what I experienced was inconceivable.

I wonder what was in the drink. What drug. And how much of what took place was caused by the drug. I asked, but he did not answer me.

After I awoke I showered, then looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. My perception was still affected by the drug, but I could still see that I did in fact look somehow different. There were new hollows under my eyes and in my cheeks. I had a slight haunted look about me.

And it seemed to me that I looked quite beautiful. One might do an article on it. The Cosmetic Properties of Bestial Fucking. For the great mass of women with no access to Eric, one might prescribe a bucolic interlude with a stallion.

The lady jokes—

Before I left I asked him what he wanted of me.

“To show you everything. To show you yourself, to watch you grow.”

“When will you want to see me?”

“From time to time. You might be at home in the afternoons. From two-thirty to three, for example. If I want to see you I will call you then.”

“I’ll give you my number.”

“I have it.”

I didn’t ask how he’d gotten it. The telephone is still in the sculptor’s name. There are any number of ways he could have gotten the number, I suppose.

“What will we—”

“Yes?”

“What will we do?”

“Everything.”

“Will it always hurt?”

He laughed, then broke it off. “No, of course not. Nothing is without purpose. I had to reach you today, in new ways.”

“You reached me.”

“You will learn new things about your body, Jan. About yourself. It won’t usually hurt.”

I nodded.

“But what if it would?”

I considered. “I would still do what you want me to do.”

“Why?”

“Because I . . . have to.”

“That’s right, Jan. You may go now.”

He has not called today. It is after three now and he has not called, which presumably means that he does not want me today. And I do not even know if I am glad or sorry.

I do not understand any of this. I cannot understand it. Things are happening to me that I do not understand. Who is he? What is he? What does he do for a living? What does he want from me? Obviously he has done this sort of thing with other girls in the past. My God, the man is Superfuck himself, he could get any girl he wanted any time he wanted and have her crawling through hoops in an instant. It’s not just me, it can’t be. But who the hell is he?

And what does he do with his women when he’s done with them?

What do I do, for example, if someone like Arnold calls? What do I tell him? Does Eric want me to see other people? To have sex with other people? I don’t know. But I do know that I will probably do whatever he wants me to do.

What is it about him?

I could leave. Right now, turn my back on this, go. I would not even need to pack. There is nothing here that I have that is so important.

I could go back. To the house, to the car, to the husband. I could do this. He might take me back, he might not, it doesn’t matter, the house and friends always belong to the wife. I could go back, and he could live with me or not, his choice, or even my choice if I wanted it to be that way. But either way I could be out of this apartment, neighborhood, life, away from Eric.

If I want.

Or could I?

I’ve known for some time that it is a sex thing that drives me. That I am compulsive, that this is some kind of compulsive behavior pattern I am going through. I have ideas as to why this is happening and where it is going, a batch of ideas, some in conflict, and I have put some of them down here and there in this book, and I have had others that I have not put down.

But I did not expect this. This person. I am afraid of him. He is too strong. If I belong so utterly to him, how can I belong to myself? How can I have any of me left?

March 27

He called me and I went there. We had sex, did different things. I am not going to write about it, describing it. I don’t feel the need tonight.

Afterward we sat on the large white couch facing the fireplace. There was a coal fire banked in a grate. We ate cheese and drank plum wine.

A day before I had seen him on the street with the blond girl. They did not see me.

I asked about her.

“Susan? Yes, you’ve seen me with her. What about her?”

“I used to wonder if she were your daughter.”

“And do you wonder still?”

“You’re teasing me.”

“Yes.”

“Of course I suppose she is your mistress.”

He smiled at something. “You might say she is my psychic daughter. Not my biological daughter, more’s the pity.”

“Why?”

“One ought to be able to make love to one’s daughters, one’s sisters, one’s mother. But I have no family.”

“No one at all?”

“I’m totally unrelated. Did you ever have sex with a relative, Jan?”

“Only if you count my husband.”

“I don’t think we should count your husband.”

“Then the answer’s no. I’ve told you about everything I’ve ever done.”

“But you’ve done so little.”

“I know.”

“You never sucked off a loving older brother? Or fingered a sister?”

“I was an only child, really, Eric—”

“Or warmed your father’s bed? Never fucked your father, dear?”

“He’s dead. I would really like it a whole lot if we talked of other things.”

“Sometimes those things which make you uncomfortable do you the most good.”

“Even so.”

“Yes.” He lit a cigarette, smoked in deep thoughtful drags. “You’ll have to meet Susan sooner or later,” he said at length. “You’ll enjoy her.”

“Who is she?”

“A girl.”

“She’s only a child, isn’t she? She can’t be more than, I don’t know, seventeen?”

“She’s fifteen.”

“That’s so desperately young.”

“Half your age.”

“I was thinking that, of course.”

“They grow up faster now, you know. This new generation is an interesting one. Their entire biological clock is different, you know. Speeded up. Their minds work differently, their eyes see differently.”

“Television children.”

“Atomic children, acid children, rock children. I met Susan two and a half years ago. She was twelve. For two weeks she never left that room. I brought her meals there. Then for some time she lived here.”

“My God!”

“She is half your age, but the things she knows now, the things she has done—”

“I can imagine.”

“No, I don’t think you can.”

He poured more wine into my glass. I sipped it. I had never had plum wine before. It has a rather haunting taste.

I asked him how old he was.

“I’m ancient,” he said.

“We’re all ancient.”

“No, I truly am.” He grinned richly. “I was middle aged when they built the pyramids. I was old when they tacked Christ to the Cross.”

“And you were there.”

“Who’d miss a good show?”

“Sometimes I think—”

“Yes?”

“Nothing.”

What had I been about to say? That he is the devil incarnate? Something like that? Probably. The obvious line.

Why didn’t I say it?

Arnold just called, while I was writing. Was I free tomorrow night? Eric has made it plain that I am to see other men whenever I wish, that I am only obliged to be available for him when he wants me. (White of him.) Even so, I almost told Arnold I was going to be busy. Something makes me want to limit myself to Eric, to exist only while I am with him.

I decided to fight this impulse. Especially since this was the first I had heard from him since the fight I started, and if I brushed him off now I would probably never hear from him again. I told him I would like to see him. He was pleased, said he would pick me up. We arranged a time.

I said, “Arnold—”

“Yes?”

“I was awfully bitchy. Tons of unwarranted hostility.”

“Oh, everybody’s entitled now and then.”

“No. I was a bitch. I was afraid of certain things and I was being defensive. I don’t want to go into it now. Listen, I was thinking that maybe I would like to smoke tomorrow night, if you’ll have anything.”

“I always do. I thought that wasn’t your scene.”

“Well, I’d like to try again.”

“Sure.”

“And you were talking about, oh, how to put this, about three not being a crowd.”

“Are you serious?”

“I think so. Yes, yes, I am.”

A trenchant pause. “Look, uh, Jan, don’t force yourself. I mean, we all of us have our little hangups, and maybe I was trying to sell mine a little too forcefully. Don’t rush into something you don’t want.”

“I think I want it.”

“If you’re sure.”

“I’m sure.”

“Then I know a fellow whom I think you would like. You and I could have dinner first and then meet him, or it might be more comfortable if the three of us went out for dinner together.”

“You decide.”

“All right.”

“There’s only one thing.”

“Oh?”

“Tomorrow’s the twenty-eighth? I might have to meet with my lawyer and my husband’s lawyers to work out the separation agreement. It’s a nuisance the way it keeps being postponed. If they do see it for tomorrow I’ll try to get out of it. I’ll know by three o’clock tomorrow afternoon.”

“Then I’ll call you around three-thirty just to make sure?”

“Fine, fine.”

You’re such a calculating bitch, Giddings.

March 28

Eric didn’t call. The phone rang promptly at three-thirty. Arnold, checking to see if the coast was clear. I told him the meeting with the lawyers had been indefinitely postponed. Did this mean I was running out of bread? I told him I was all right. Because if I needed any money he might be able to help. I told him thanks but not for the time being.

It’s all arranged, he said. He and David will come by for me at six-thirty.

What a strange feeling this is. A date with two men. Tonight I will meet them and we will presumably relax and talk together, all of us silently thinking ahead.

I just called Howard’s office. Just now, after writing that last paragraph. Why? I guess I had been thinking about him, after using him as a potential cop-out in case Eric had wanted me this evening.

Of course there is no separation agreement nor will there be one. I charged some clothing the other day. And a handbag on his Mastercharge card. I wonder if he will stop those charge accounts. It might not occur to him. Sometimes it takes months for a purchase to show up on a statement. Except that it would be typical for Howard to go to a lawyer the day I left him, just to touch all the bases as he would say it, and the lawyer would probably tell him to close the accounts.

Why should I worry? I haven’t had any trouble using the cards yet. And they’re never going to arrest me. The worst that could happen is that they tell me they can’t accept the cards or something along those lines.

I have plenty of money anyway.

I didn’t talk to him. I dialed the office and asked for his extension and his secretary answered. I wonder if he’s fucking her. She’s a real honey-voiced thing. I asked for Howard. She asked who was calling. I said Gloria Steinem. God knows why. It was the first name that came to mind. The stupid girl got it wrong anyway. “One moment, Miss Stein.” Dumb bitch.

When Howard came on I let him say hello a few times. I didn’t say anything. He said, “Nobody on the line,” and hung up.

Why did I want to hear his voice? A genuine puzzle. To convince myself that he still exists?

I did love him once. I know I did. And he me. I wish I knew what happened. Somewhere along the way we must have started being different people. I stopped being me and I became very boring, and so did Howard, and we were two boring people leading a boring life. That’s what happened to us.

Why?

I don’t know. Happens to everybody.

Any way for people to avoid it?

Probably not. Or maybe yes. Don’t get married, don’t get in ruts, fuck constantly. That might do it.

I feel wonderful. Really wonderful. Groovy and all that stuff. Happy and loose and free.

March 29

I almost feel too good to write.

In fact I do. More later. Like tomorrow.

April 2

The last entry was supposed to be about what happened with Arnold and David.

I think I’ll sort that out now.

They picked me up at six-thirty, the two of them. Arnold was wearing a corduroy jacket with leather elbow patches and dungarees. David wore a leather maxi coat, one of those German-officer jobs with acres of lapels. He had a slightly Prussian look about him, longish blondish hair, finely chiseled features. The well-spoken SS man who loves chamber music and likes to burn girls with cigarettes.

He didn’t exactly look like a faggot, but then neither does Arnold. But when you saw them both together it was not hard to believe it of them. Maybe this is simply because one is conditioned to believe it of any two men seen together, especially if they look any more sensitive than total clods.

I was all prepared to be very uptight at the first meeting. Surprise—everything is very cool and easy. They come to the door, I invite them in for a drink. We each have glass of wine, then across town to a Korean restaurant that David likes. Ginseng cocktails before dinner. Fried seaweed, other weird things. Everything tasted so great it didn’t bother me to think about what I was eating. We had a second round of ginseng cocktails. They were like daiquiris but with an aftertaste. Of ginseng, one would assume. They’re supposed to be very yang, which means something if you understand the macrobiotic diet, which I don’t. They’re also supposed to be aphrodisiacal, which they may be, and then again they may not be. Who could tell?

We went from the restaurant to David’s apartment, which was mildly slummy but a much better proposition than Arnold’s, much less depressing and better furnished and not all those fucking flights of stairs to climb. We were really beautifully relaxed with one another. You could actually feel a three-way love thing developing, a bond uniting me with David, me with Arnold, and Arnold with David.

Not love.

What, then? Call it a moral equivalent for love.

(Not my phrase. David used it.)

We talked. I don’t remember what about. Not about things, really, but just loose bubbling talk. We were already high, a little from what we had had to drink, and more from being high on each other. Arnold and I sat on the floor on pillows while David got the grass ready. There was music playing. Mozart. David likes only classical music, has no interest whatsoever in the new sounds. Mozart played. Arnold kissed me. I sucked his tongue, put my hand on his leg. David came back, holding a little brass water pipe, Indian or Ceylonese, I forget. There was a discussion about that at some point, whether the water pipe was Indian or Ceylonese, and we established tentatively that it was one or the other.

David sat on the floor with us. He touched Arnold’s cheek, twirled Arnold’s moustache. David is clean shaven with a schoolgirl complexion. He leaned across Arnold and kissed me. I reached around so that I could hug them both at once. “I love you both,” I said. “Oh, I love you both.”

The grass was a mixture of Panama Red and hashish. Panama Red is a particular kind of marijuana which is supposed to be particularly good, I guess. No one explained, just announced the composition as if stating a premium brand name. Panama Red. Gee, Dad, a Wurlitzer.

I hid my ignorance under a bushel.

The little water pipe passes from hand to hand. I suck gently on the mouthpiece, take the smoke directly into my lungs. (At least I remember that much.) The smell is of course familiar, not only from college days but because you smell grass all over New. York, constantly. People smoke in the streets, not hiding in closets as we just about did in college. But the taste is also familiar. I remember it from that far back.

It is very mild in my throat and lungs. I remembered it as being harsh and hot but this is milder than a cigarette. Very much so. And the pipe passes, with no urgency, no need to get high too quickly, and we talk.

I remember none of the conversation. Or maybe it’s that what I remember isn’t worth recording. It was all in and of that particular moment but doesn’t wear well.

The truth is that I was high before I realized it. At one point I was sitting there, not at all conscious that I was high yet, and I got up and started to move to the music, and it came to me that I wanted to be naked, that my clothes were confining me, choking me. I stood there swaying to Mozart—and why had I never before realized that Mozart could be danced to, that Mozart did everything but demand to be danced to? And in time to Mozart I removed every stitch of clothing, brandishing each piece gaily before me, then tossing it away like a stripper flipping garments into the wings.

Somewhere in the course of this performance I realized, with a cheerful little giggle, that I was absolutely stoned out of my head.

David pulled his turtleneck over his head. Arnold unbuttoned his shirt. Time and space were all grass-distorted. They undressed all the way and glided smiling toward me. I kissed one and then the other. I closed my eyes and went back and forth, from one to the other, kissing them, and I didn’t even know who I was kissing. David was clean shaven and had no hair on his chest but I was stoned and seemed to be simultaneously kissing a man with a moustache and pressing my breasts against a hairless chest.

I singsonged, “Georgie, Porgie, we’re gonna have an orgy!”

And we fell down laughing.

I sat on the floor and they sat on either side of me and we necked. I took David’s cock in one hand and Arnold’s in the other. They were both nice and hard. I leaned one way to kiss the tip of one, leaned the other way to kiss the other.

Everything felt so clean.

They carried me to the bed. Lifted me and carried me, one at my head and one at my feet, swinging me gaily as they walked. They put me on the bed and got on the bed with me. I lay with my eyes closed and I floated. Off in space, spaced out, weird, I don’t know all the words for where I was, so stoned, so utterly stoned on grass and hash, and I don’t have the experience or the vocabulary to convey the state I was in.

And they began to make love to me.

The foreplay must have gone on for an hour. Both of them busy at once, and me the apex of the triangle, all their attentions focused entirely upon me. Kisses here and there, hands ever busy, two mouths and four hands and the special perception of grass and hash making me feel everything separately and yet everything together.

Interesting, this. I had thought that group sex would be, well, confusing. Hard to follow.

Strange.

How to put it?

Well, I had thought that it would be complicated by the difficulty of relating to more than one person at a time. And on a more physical level, by the difficulty of paying physical attention to more than one set of caresses. If you were really enjoying having your breast sucked, how to contend with the simultaneous assault of another tongue upon your clitoris?

Hah!

Take my word for it, Mirror Girl. If you tried it, you would find a way to enjoy it.

Oh, wow!

I think the grass makes a tremendous difference. Although since that first time I’ve seen them again and we haven’t always smoked although we usually do, and you can get almost the same effect without the grass. Not as strong but you can do it. David says that the grass is abeacon, it shows you the way, and then you can make the same trip later or in the darkness once you know the route. I think it’s a particularly good metaphor, it says it all.

I wonder if there isn’t a major connection, though, between grass and group sex. The big use of the one and the big new thing for the other. They all come out of the same new openness, I know that, but maybe there’s more. Group sex is psychedelic, I guess.

The first time, on David’s bed, everything was for me, everything. They did not touch each other at all. It was not really three-way sex but a woman being loved by two men. And it was, oh—

After those subjective hours of foreplay, after an endless coming, hours of coming, after taking them in turn into my mouth and hands, after feeling all of them everywhere, they put me on my side. Arnold’s long slender penis skewered me from behind, shishkebabed my bottom (The pain that had been there when Eric did this was not present now. I had learned—from Eric’s teaching—to relax the sphincter and enjoy it. And Arnold was somewhat slimmer, and I think used a lubricant in the bargain.) And then, while my bottom held Arnold nicely in place, David came at me from the front and touched my breasts and kissed my mouth and slid his own nicely curved penis into my cunt.

Sheer heaven. They remained relatively still at first and I rocked back on Arnold, then forward at David, and on each stroke there was the double sensation, the sensation of the one ever-so-gently withdrawing and the other ever-so-gently attacking, and then as we were more comfortable and secure in the position they began to take up the movements, double-fucking me and at the same time using my body to fuck each other. I could never describe this effectively, I could write about it forever and not get it all down. There was so much going on! Perception so acute, all that grass and hash going for us, all that sweet control, that ability to slide one’s concentration into any part of one’s body, and God, God, it was wonderful.

Afterward I lay with utter rivers of sperm dripping out of me fore and aft and feeling like a goddess, a goddess.

Since then we’ve done everything, everyone doing everything to everyone, and it’s been great, but the first time was somehow special. First times are supposed to be special, aren’t they?

Everything is so nice and free and easy these days.

April 3

Eric still hasn’t called.

I am of two minds about this, she said deliberately. No, I really am. On the one hand I would just as soon he never called. He had his fun with me, she said grimly. And I with him, as far as that goes, and it did open me up, no question about it.

But.

But he scares the shit out of me, to be both crude and accurate about it. So on the one hand I would as soon stay with what I’ve got, that being David and Arnold and the sun in the morning and the moon at night.

On the other hand, if he called I would be glad of it, and I would go to him. Unquestionably.

April 6

How could I have thought that there was something so unmasculine (if there’s such a word, and if not, there is now) about a man having sex with another man? Maybe I would feel differently if Dave and Arnold acted like homosexuals.

Huh? What does it mean to act like a homosexual? Faggot is as faggot does, n’est-ce pas? Well, if they act effeminate, then. Campy. Like caricatures of women.

Dave and Arnold don’t.

Last night I sucked David while Arnold screwed him in the ass. And later I was tired, and off on a thought trip and very stoned, and I watched the two of them eat each other. Two good healthy studs with their cocks in each other’s mouths, gobbling greedily. And I got all involved in this great voyeurism trip, I really found myself getting all involved with watching, and they knew I was watching, and occasionally watched me watching them, and I played with myself, and I came that way.

You know what? Playing with oneself is very enjoyable. It really is. And it’s nicer still to do it right out in the open, not in one’s own room behind locked doors.

You can even turn masturbation into a togetherness thing. We talked about it and I said I would like to watch them do it sometime. Sometime in the future, because by then we were all sexed out for the night.

Arnold said that Philip Roth has opened the whole thing up. That jerking off is In this year. That everybody has always done it, but that they thought for years they were the only ones who did. Now everybody knows everybody does it. So they can start doing it with a clear conscience.

When you realize that we were still pretty high when he said this, you can imagine the depth it had. Logical wheels within wheels.

Out of sight, as we freaked-out hippy weirdos say. Hippie weirdos, that is. Hippy I’m not. I never entirely was, and I’ve lost twelve pounds in the past month.

Must be clean living.

April 10

It has been so long since I saw him that I answered the phone without even thinking that it might be him. He. Him. Who cares?

I’m rattled. It’s not a familiar sensation. I’ve been in such good shape lately and now I’m uptight again.

It was between two-thirty and three, and the phone rang, and I didn’t even think it might be Eric. I picked it up and said hello with bells in my voice.

“Jan? I want you this evening. Come at eight.”

“I—”

“Eight o’clock.”

“I wasn’t expecting you.”

“I have been out of town.”

“I see. Uh, I have a date, sort of.”

“I know.”

“How do you—”

“With the two queers.”

“They’re not exactly—”

“They are not expecting you tonight, Jan.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“I broke your date for you. To simplify things.”

“How could you do that.”

“I’ll expect you at eight.”

“Who are you?”

“Eight o’clock.”

End of conversation.

And I suppose if I don’t go two huge men dressed in black will come here and lead me to him in chains. And I suppose if I go right now and grab a plane for Timbuktu I’ll get off the plane and step into his arms.

I tried to reach David to break the date. No answer. Arnold would be working now, but I tried his phone to be sure. No answer.

He says he broke my date for me. How?

April 11

Of course I was there at eight.

Just now, sitting here in my own apartment a few hours after dawn, sitting here and trying to get the words flowing from the pen, it occurred to me how utterly changed I am once more after seeing him. I went back and read the entries describing the times with David and Arnold. I was, when I wrote those few pages, a girl I had never been before.

I am not that girl any longer.

I just now got up and went to look in the mirror. And a girl with my face looked back at me through frightened eyes. I had trouble forcing myself to look back.

Have I written yet that I understand the mirror superstition? Or have I had that thought while gazing into a mirror, not while scribbling in this book. Let us put it down in either case. It is simply that, if The People Who Run This Zoo hadn’t decided that breaking a mirror is seven years’ bad luck, everyone would break mirrors until there were none left. Hence they invented the superstition to keep the world from running out of mirrors.

I must have just had the thought and not written it out before. When you write it out you see what a dumb thought it is, and here I had felt myself rather clever.

I went there last night, appearing at his door on the dot of eight. He opened the door just as I was about to knock on it. He does that sort of thing all the time.

“Come in, Jan.”

I went in. He closed the door.

(No, damn it. I want to write about him in the present tense. Why?)

I walk in. He closes the door. When it shuts my mind fills with a vision, a thick nail-studded castle door being swung shut and bolted.

He turns to me. “Coffee?”

“All right.”

The coffee things are on the table in front of the large white couch. He pours, fills two small handleless cups. It is black, very strong and very sweet.

“You enjoyed yourself with the boys?”

“Yes.”

“I see.”

“You told me I should see anyone I wanted.”

“You do not have to tell me what I told you.”

“I thought you disapproved.”

“No. It was a step, an important one. I am glad you enjoyed yourself.”

“I was always at the phone from two-thirty to three. If you wanted me, I was available.”

“Why do you justify yourself? I have not criticized you.”

“You seem hostile.”

“Oh?”

“Perhaps I am mistaken.”

“Indeed, I think you must be, Jan.”

He sits beside me on the couch, drinks his coffee, pours himself another cup. I sense and share his tension. I look at the hairs on the backs of his hands. Of course he wears no rings on his fingers, no jewelry of any sort.

“Jan.”

“Yes?”

“You won’t see the boys anymore.”

“If they call—”

“They won’t call.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

“But—”

“I know.”

Fear, in the actual physical form of a chill, is upon me. I see David and Arnold broken and dead, their heads at impossible angles, their arms and legs broken, as if dropped from a great height.

“What have you done to them?”

“Nothing.”

“Then how can you say—I don’t understand. I just don’t understand.”

“You had a pleasant week with them. Be satisfied with that. There was no future in it, Jan.”

“Future?”

He gets to his feet, walks to the fire, warms his hands over the coals. He turns, looks intently at me.

“I like your dress.”

“Thank you.”

“I haven’t seen it before.”

“It’s new. I had to buy a lot of new things. I’ve lost weight.”

“You look very nice.”

“Thank you.”

“Take the dress off.”

I am not even surprised by the casual abruptness of the order. He might have been asking me to pour him another cup of coffee. I stand, strip. He looks at me appraisingly.

“Yes, you have lost weight. You looked good before, but I think you look better now. Leaner, trimmer. No extra flesh.”

“My breasts are smaller.”

“Yes.”

“Do you like them as well?”

He looks at me as if the question is inane. He tells me to sit down again. I sit and reach for my cup of coffee, drink it down, pour another.

“You bought new clothes.”

“Yes.”

“Charged them to your husband.”

“Yes.”

“I see.” He fixes his eyes on mine, holds my gaze to his. It is uncanny how he does this.

“I believe it is time for you to make a change, Jan. Time for a change in your life. I don’t think you should be able to depend on your husband anymore. You have some money of your own. Live on it.”

“And when it’s gone?”

He does not seem to have heard the question. “You have your purse with you? Let me have your credit cards, please. All of them, please. Anything that ties you to him.”

“Nothing ties me to Howard.”

“Then why retain the ropes?”

I go through the purse searching for credit cards. Here’s an oil company card, here’s Diner’s Club, here’s Master Charge, here’s Bloomingdale’s, here’s Saks, here’s Lord & Taylor—

He places them one by one on the coal fire. The cardboard ones burn, the plastic ones melt. They all go.

“You will see no one unless I tell you to. You will stay in your apartment as much as possible or walk to the park if you are not here. Do not speak to people.”

“Why?”

“You may go now.”

“Don’t you want to—”

“Go now.”

He is obviously out of his tree. What other explanation is there? I read somewhere once that certain types of maniacs have extremely strong and compelling personalities, and you find yourself following them through hell before you finally realize that they are certifiable. Does Eric require more explanation than that?

What does he want with me? Sometimes I have the feeling that when he’s all done with me, when he has made me jump through the last of the hoops, when my possibilities are quite exhausted, he’ll run a spit through me and roast me over the coals and literally consume me, hair and teeth and bones and all, so that there is nothing left of me.

Quel ridiculous. He’d do no such thing. When he’s bored with me he’ll just sell me to North African white slavers, that’s all. And let me end my days in some filthy Arab whorehouse.

He must never find out about this diary.

April 12

I’ve been calling David and Arnold more or less constantly. No answer. I’m a little worried, which I suppose is not rational, but what is rational and what isn’t and how does anybody tell the difference? I had to take an antidepressant yesterday. I had been promising myself not to take them, not to need them, and for a while this was an easy promise to keep. No one feels compelled to take antidepressants when she’s walking on air. I wasn’t depressed and I didn’t need them, but yesterday I had to take one, and it didn’t do all that I hoped it would, I was still down.

Rational. Is it rational that he should know everything I do? Does he have spies? Detectives? Or is he some comic-book hero who can see through walls?

I hope they’re all right. I don’t know how I know this, but I’m positive he has killed people. And that he’s capable of anything.

He owns me.

Lock, stock and barrel. He really does.

Oh, crap. The hell he does. If he owned me this book would not exist. I wouldn’t be writing these entries. They preserve my independence. You could even say that they constitute my independence. What independence I’ve got.

The thing this diary does besides is to keep me together. Not keep me sane, although maybe it helps do that, or helps toward that end, I don’t know. But I keep being different people and my life keeps finding new forms and this book, “Dear Diary,” is the only constant.

April 13

They have disappeared into thin air.

This isn’t funny! I keep starting to laugh, but God, there’s nothing funny about it. Nothing at all. They have absolutely fucking disappeared from the face of the fucking earth, and the obscenity is there for dramatic effect, not that the circumstances would not be sufficiently dramatic without such emphasis.

I went to their apartments. First Arnold, then David. I sensed that this was not what my keeper would have me do, but I decided to hell with him, because I kept calling them and getting no answer and I kept imagining the worst—what else?—and finally I said the hell with it and went over there.

And they have moved. Both of them, to parts unknown. No forwarding address. Nada.

Now of course it is perfectly possible that this had nothing to do with me. Or with Eric. That they simply folded their tents like Arabs and disappeared into the night. It is possible, and I do not believe it for a moment.

God, what did he do to them? Snap his fingers? Utter a magic incantation?

I wonder why I let him destroy my charge cards. I have been thinking about that scene, how theatrical it was and at the same time how ridiculous it was. The stench of the plastic cards melting on the coal fire! Why did he want to do this, and why did I let him?

I have to go there now. He just called, and when the strings are jiggled the puppet must dance. Au revoir.

April 19

It is like going to college. A tutorial course in sexual technique. He has been teaching me the most extraordinary things. Oriental accomplishments, bits of business I never believed people actually did.

Like things from those murky books by Burton. The long ago Richard Burton, not Elizabeth’s mad Welshman. I read those books over the years, and there were certain things therein to inspire one in fantasies and other things to add a soupçon of curry powder to one’s married life (I’d like two soupçons of curry powder, s’il vous plait, and a partridge in a pear tree.)

But I always thought Burton was a big put-on. Sir Richard is sending us up, I thought. The dear boy’s having us all on. People can’t really dangle from the chandeliers and bugger one another while drinking glasses of spiced tea and masturbating pet dogs with their toes.

Well, we haven’t done precisely that, but I couldn’t swear that it’s not on tomorrow’s agenda. Already there are things I never dreamed I was capable of. There are ways of controlling one’s responses, of developing muscular control and physical agility. According to Eric, it is all a matter of discovering oneself, of making the acquaintance of one’s body.

All of this sounds desperately clinical, does it not? Like a class in karate or something. And at times it does seem quite cold and austere, and would be literally ridiculous but for the particular personality of this man and its effect upon me. I suspect that, were I not so completely his property whenever I am in his presence, there are moments when I would laugh. But the impulse never even occurs to me at the time.

And there are enough times when the passion is real enough and the classroom turns back into a bedroom like Cinderella’s coach at midnight. (Why did I put it that way, Doctor? Not at all like Cinderella’s coach at midnight, I don’t properly think. Verrrry interesting.)

He can set me on fire with a touch, a kiss, a glance. And when we fuck it is a shaking, shattering experience. Always. There does not seem to be such a thing as a casual take-it-or-leave-it fuck with Eric. Always starbursts, always mountain peaks, always the usual purple metaphors apply.

There’s often some pain, but I don’t seem to mind it at all these days. In fact—

Oh, well. Yesterday there was no pain, and I missed it.

It bothers me to write this.

April 20

I thought I saw Arnold on the street. A comic moment, I suppose. I ran up for a closer look, and the man turned and gave me a what-seems-to-be-wrong-with-you-little-girl look, and of course on second glance it did not look like Arnold at all, not at all. I muttered something and turned away, feeling out of sorts.

The two of them have entirely disappeared. No trace. I only hope, well, that nothing happened. Would he do anything awful?

I am positive he has killed people. I think he would kill people as people kill flies.

No, wrong. He’d take some pleasure in it.

April 24

“You’re a sadist,” I said.

“DeSade was a bore,” he said. “A madman with a single preoccupation and an extremely limited grasp of logic. I can’t imagine anyone reading him except for titillation, and there are so many more effective pornographers of that sort.”

I looked at him.

“A sadist? A disciple of his? Could you honestly believe that of me?”

“I meant you take pleasure from inflicting pain. Sadomasochism. That bag.”

“Everyone does,” he said briskly. “It has nothing to do with that French idiot.”

April 27

He tied me up and spanked me on the bottom with his bare hand. Spanked me.

As hard as he could. It wasn’t a game, and it still hurts hours later.

I came, just from that. A completely different type of orgasm from the usual. It burst upon me rather without warning. Very strange.

May 1

Another month.

Four of them gone in this my thirtieth year. Eight of them yet to go.

I haven’t felt much like writing in this book. (Or in anything else.) In the past couple of weeks my world has closed up. Or closed in on me. There are great stretches of time in which nothing seems to happen. When I am not with him I hardly seem to exist.

I force myself to eat, but still continue to lose weight. I have never been really thin before. Thin in the sense that another would look at me and say, “That girl is too thin, she ought to gain a few pounds.” Thin enough so that, if the present trend continues, I will begin to look like something out of Dachau, and not long out of Dachau at that. I think I like being thin, actually. I think I like my body very much. There is nothing superfluous about it.

How do I spend the hours? The odd thing is that I hardly seem to know myself. When I am not with him—and I only see him every few days, and only for several hours at a time—life loses its color and becomes a black-and-white movie, colorless and lacking in dimension.

A book I read, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. About a teen-age schizophrenic, and she didn’t see depth or colors in real life, only in her self-constructed world of imagination.

Is it possible that I am schizophrenic? That Eric and his entire world are a hallucination, a trick of my own warped mind? That he does not exist?

Prove to yourself, Giddings, that you are not deluding yourself.

A syllogism or tautology or conundrum, one of those things of which I can never remember which is which, meaning that you can’t prove any such thing. No, I am not schizophrenic. Yes, Eric exists.

I just started writing this because it’s May. What do I care about writing this?

I get up, I lie in bed several hours dreaming. I eat or don’t eat I have coffee. I walk and walk and walk, endless walks all over Manhattan. I never talk to anyone while I walk. Sometimes I buy something. Not often. When I do—a book, a magazine, a souvenir, an article of clothing—I most often leave it somewhere. Either because I consciously decide I don’t want it or because I just lose it, forget it, and then it is gone and I am somewhere else.

I can’t write any more of this.

May 5

Today is the fifth straight day this month in which I did not kill myself.

See how I am sustained by tiny triumphs!

May 7

Sex is a drug. A habit-forming drug on which one can get hooked.

I was a candidate for this sort of habit. A sexual compulsive. Looking for something.

Question: Which is worse, to spend your life looking for something or to find it?

Answer: I don’t know, I’ve never been out with one.

Long as you hang on to your sense of humor, love, you’ve still got a chance in this too-cruel world.

Oh?

May 9

He called at five minutes of three. I was still in bed. Why? I don’t know. This happens so often lately. I go to sleep around midnight and wake up every four hours or so, have a cigarette, then slip back down under the covers and pull the blankets over my head like darkness itself, snuggling back under a blanket of sleep and drifting off in dreams for another four hours. And there are days when I do this for sixteen hours at a stretch. God knows why, or how.

After a point it isn’t really sleep. A long waking dream. It just seems that there is nothing worth getting up for.

A memory—I had days like that in Eastchester. Days of long sleep. I guess it was a way of avoiding things. Housework, things I did not want to do.

I have none of those responsibilities here.

Then what? Sleeping the long sleep to avoid being awake and facing—what? The fact that I have nothing to do, arduous or otherwise? The fact that life is empty?

But is it empty? It does not always seem that way. It seems—oh, I don’t know.

But I have to write about Susan.

I bathed and depped and perfumed. Depped—the word I have been using inside my head. Used a depilatory on my legs and armpits. Went to him, clean and hairless and sweet to smell. He opened the door, looking quite dramatic—tight black pants, a black silk shirt, a scarlet ascot.

“Come inside, Jan.”

In the living room, Susan is sitting on the couch. The teenybopper, fluffy blond hair, a quietly beautiful little girl face. She looks toward me and tries on a smile.

This rattles me. We have always been alone together in this apartment, Eric and I. I know there are other people in his life, as there were others in mine, but all our meetings have been one-to-one. I look at Susan and am unable to speak to her, nor can I speak to Eric. I wait.

He takes my hand, leads me to her. “Jan, this is Susan. Susan, this is Jan.”

We manage smiles.

She is very lovely, at once innocent and knowing. I wonder what she might have been like at twelve, when he first had her. Or what she might be now if he had never entered her life. Or her vagina.

“Each of you,” he says, “is a gift for the other. I trust you will enjoy your presents.”

I look at him. He turns, walks to the door.

“I have an appointment,” he says. “Good-bye.”

He goes out. The door closes. Again the fancy that it is a dungeon cell door swinging irrevocably shut. I look at the closed door, gaze at it and beyond it for a time, then sense the girl’s presence. I turn, and she is standing a few feet away from me.

She says, “Don’t be afraid.”

“Afraid? I’m not afraid of you.”

“I thought you were, you know, uptight in general.”

“I suppose I am.”

“What he wants—”

Harshly, “I know what he wants.”

“For us to make love.”

“I know.”

“You’ve never been with a girl?”

“No.”

“That’s pretty weird.”

“And you have?”

“Well, like I’ve been with Eric for almost three years now. That’s a long time to be with someone like him. Catch me—someone like him. I guess there isn’t anyone like him, is there?”

“Perhaps not.”

“Anyway, three years. Almost three years. I guess there’s not much I haven’t done, you know, in that length of time.”

She extends a hand. I draw away. She frowns, hurt, puzzled.

“I just wanted to touch you.”

“I don’t like to be touched.”

“Oh?”

“I’m—this wasn’t my idea. The two of us.”

“I know.”

“It was Eric’s idea.”

“I’m hip. So?”

“Well—we don’t really have to do anything.”

“He would want us to.”

“We could tell him.”

She shakes her head slowly. “You’re what, thirty?”

“Twenty-nine.”

“To be that old and still be uptight about things. And you’re so pretty.”

“I’m not.”

“I’d love to look like you.”

“I’m too thin. Skin and bones.”

“Beautiful skin.”

“You can almost see the bones through it.”

“Oh, come on.”

I light a cigarette. As I take it from my purse Susan says, casually, that there is grass if I want it. Not today, I tell her. She nods agreeably. I offer her a cigarette, as an afterthought almost. She says that she doesn’t smoke. “Except grass, see. No tobacco. No cancer trips for Susan.”

“That sounds sensible enough.”

“Sensible. Look, Jan. Let’s sit down, have something to drink, talk a little. You’re afraid to know me. We look at each other and your eyes run away. You won’t look at me.”

“I can’t help it.”

“Why?”

“I’m afraid.”

“That we’ll ball?”

“Yes.”

“So?”

“And that I won’t like it.”

“Bullshit. You ever do anything with Eric you didn’t like?”

“Sometimes.”

“And you lived through it, right? No agony, no sweat. What you’re uptight about is you’re afraid you will like it. You have a head full of labels.”

“Of what?”

“Labels. You ball me and you’re wearing a label that says dyke. Total bullshit. Everybody is supposed to swing every way there is. Otherwise it wouldn’t feel good. And you even know all that, I can tell you do, but you’re trying to block it. The hell with it. We’ll sit on the couch and look at the fire.”

I am blocking. On the couch, the girl at my side, the fire glowing on the hearth, I make myself think long enough to see what I am doing. I am all tied up inside myself.

I think of David and Arnold. Of the openness of the three of us tangling together in love. Of watching one of them suck the other. Of the naturalness of this, of how my own mind took this in without blocking.

I can accept it for men. But for women—

I am afraid of it.

Susan takes my hand. Her own little hand feels so plump and soft. I experience the momentary impulse to yank my hand away but this is largely reflex, there is nothing unpleasant in the contact of her hand with mine.

“Jan.”

“Yes.”

“This is crazy. I almost feel like I’m the lady and you’re the girl.”

“I know.”

“You feel the same?”

“A little.”

“I’ll get us a drink.”

“That red stuff?”

“Eric left a bottle of it in the kitchen. He said we might want it.”

“I don’t know if I do.”

“Makes it easier.”

“I don’t know. What is it, do you have any idea?”

“He never tells me things like that.”

“Well, he’s a secretive man. I don’t know him at all.”

“Maybe no one does, Jan.”

“You probably do.”

“Hardly. Like in a way he’s the God that made me, do you know what I mean? I mean, what was I when I met him? Nothing. A little kid. I didn’t know a thing. Eric created me. But—”

“Yes?”

Tentatively, “Well, see, Jan, with all of this there’s still a part of me he doesn’t touch at all. You know, like, inside my head there’s still me, and it’s me and it stays me. I am not great at taking words and making sense out of them—”

“I understand.”

“Do you?”

“And I’m glad. I thought, oh, that some day there wouldn’t be any of myself left.”

“No, you always have yourself left.”

“Good.”

“He never takes that away.”

“Good.”

“Listen, that red stuff, maybe I ought to get it.”

“Susan? Do you want to make love to me?”

“That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”

“I mean, do you want to? Not that Eric wants us to, forget Eric, but what you want. Is that what you want?”

“Well, yeah. Sure. Right.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Oh, yeah. I would do it anyway if he said to do it. I jump when he says frog.”

“So do I.”

“So does everyone.”

“I know.”

“But I want to, yes, right, sure I want to. It is so great with a girl. It is so much better.”

“Better?”

“In some ways. Yes, better in some ways. Clean, it’s the cleanest thing in the world. Oh, wow.”

“You keep surprising me, Susan.”

“Only it helps if you love the girl. I think I love you a little, Jan.”

“Do you mean that?”

“I only say what I mean. That’s one thing, I never put anything on. I want to kiss you, Jan.”

“Oh.”

“May I?”

I have no will. I have odd presences in my throat and chest. I have a dry mouth and wet eyes.

And this pretty little blond girl reaches out for me like a phototropic plant for the sun, reaches out butterfly arms and a petal mouth, and I close my eyes, I close my eyes, I close my eyes, and our mouths meet.

A voice in the brain: There, see, it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t turn you into a handsome prince, it doesn’t do anything but feel a little good. Except that it does in fact do more. It gives peace. It takes all the tension and sends it away somewhere out of sight and out of mind.

Her hands clinging to my shoulders, her head tossed a little back, her eyes half-lidded, her lips parted, curved in the merest shadow of a smile.

I think she is beautiful.

I want to kiss her.

We kiss, and our lips part, and our tongues touch. We slide deeply into a kiss, her tongue in my mouth, our arms around each other. Our breasts touching.

I am filled with a sudden longing to see her body. I want to look at her breasts and between her legs. I want to see all the parts of her body.

And to do what with them? To kiss, to touch, to—what?

She reaches out, opens a button on my blouse. I sit, legs curled under me, while her hands work idly, undoing each button in turn. She puts both hands inside my open blouse and takes my breasts in her hands. I have long since stopped wearing underclothing. Her hands settle on my bare breasts like birds on their nests, and I start to close my eyes but force them to remain open, and my eyes meet hers, and we drink each other like glasses of spiced wine.

“I am in love with you, Jan.”

“Oh, Susan.”

“Mommy. Sister. I love you.”

“God!”

We undress each other, slowly, lingeringly, with many stops to cling together in urgent kisses. I am kissing a girl, my mind notes. I am kissing a girl who is saying that she is in love with me.

Her body, revealed to me in stages, is incredibly beautiful. Skin like cream and honey, like warm living velvet. So rosy pink and clean. Breasts, beautiful luscious pears, and oh, I touch them, and oh, her nipples stiffen against the palms of my thin hands, and oh, she gazes into my eyes, moved by my touch, soft and liquid in her eyes and in her flesh.

Her pubic hair is a tangle of the finest golden fluff, neatly confined to her private parts, not sprawling all over as mine tends to do. I love her body, it is so clean and neat and precise, it has fresh little girl smells to it, I love it.

I want her.

And this revelation, echoing in my head in verbal form, is somehow far more shocking than the fact itself. The idea of wanting a girl is jarring; the reality that one is confronted by this delicious body, that one is healthy enough to respond to its appeal—is acceptable enough.

Life is infinitely easier without words and those thoughts which form in words. Animals fuck in the forest and walk away in stolid contentment without putting words to their actions. Only people need words, and only people have invented the sickness of civilization.

We should all fuck in the forest, like animals.

Nude now, both of us, in the bed, his bed. We have established, through words and gestures, that I am to lie still, that I am to be done to. I am to be the fuckee, the ballee, the suckee, as you will. I am to be soft and moist and passive, and Susan, sweet Susan, is to make love to me.

And so she does.

(Odd, this. I want to put down what happened and how it happened and what it was like. I feel certain that it is very important that I do this. That it is altogether fitting and proper that I should do this. But something stops me. As if this were private—and somehow more private than all the other private things which I have dutifully described and recorded on these pages.

(Do I fancy myself in love with this girl? I don’t think that’s it, and yet, and yet, there is something there, something between us unlike anything between me and, oh, anyone else. Does this mean in some strange way that my fears were well founded, that I have opened myself up to a possibility I dimly foresaw—what stilted prose comes today from this pen!—and that I am indeed a lesbian? No, no, nothing of the sort. Labels are nonsense anyway, and I’m not.

(I am, though, a little different than I was a day ago. Which is understandable, but which also seems in some way to inhibit the flow of ink from this pen.)

To press onward—

I lie on my back, eyes closed. She is partly alongside me, partly on top of me, and we are kissing, or more accurately she is kissing me, her mouth on mine, lips so soft, so infinitely softer than ever a male mouth could be, and our bodies are together, and her breasts touch mine, and our flesh merges all the way down. She is shorter than I am; when she extends her feet, lying on top of me like this, her toes reach to my ankles. I feel the contact there, and the joining of our thighs, and the sweet warmth where our loins do not touch, and the sensation of her pubic hair so beautifully golden, against mine, brushing me, and our bellies touching, fitting one into the other, her convexity into my concavity (or is it the other way around, I confuse the words, concave is like caved in, no?) and her breasts against mine, and our mouths, giving and receiving.

She gives a small pelvic thrust. I arch to meet it, and we touch.

It is like—I was going to write that it is like a plug going into a socket, but the phallic connotation of that metaphor is utterly wrong here, is it not? It is, rather, like the contact of two sockets, but with a great interchange of energy. I think that is what I mean. I am not too sure what I mean.

(Perhaps, Giddings, you ought to let the facts speak for themselves. Metaphor is not your forte, Metafor is not your phorte. Just give us the facts, ma’am.

(Ma’am. Who called me that? Oh, the schmuck with the snow shovel, half a hundred years ago. The connections, unbidden and unwanted, that the mind makes.)

Again and then again she works herself against me, works her pretty blond pussy against me, and then her body glides down mine, but moving so slowly that I would not be aware of the movement were I not so overwhelmingly aware of everything being done by her to me.

She moves downward, and rains kisses on my neck, and kisses the deep hollow of my throat. Her tongue touches the pulse there. She licks me like flame. My hands want to touch her but remain at my sides as if weighted down, as if nailed in place. She moves lower. Her hands are on my breasts and her mouth kisses their tops. She uses her tongue on my breasts, drawing wet lines from the outside to the center, starring each breast with lines radiating outward from the nipples. Each caress is not merely preparation but an act, satisfying and delicious, in and of itself. She spends a long time with my breasts. She becomes wildly involved with my breasts, and while her mouth and hands delight me and excite her as well, her legs straddle my thigh and I feel her pussy against my thigh, wet and warm, and she fucks herself gently against my thigh, so gently, that little moist open clam sucking at me as she rocks herself against me while she sucks my breasts, my breasts.

Oh, God.

I cannot recreate this scene. It hurts me to write it. I can summon up everything, every moment, every touch, every gesture, and I could fill this book all the way to the last page simply with the recollection of her progress down my body with mouth and hands until she magically reaches my secret place and eats me for months until I come like a star going into nova. I could write all of this and use thousands upon thousands of words and still not exhaust what I can recall. It is all still going on in my mind, it is all still happening as it happened then, but I cannot write it.

I must, then, summarize.

So.

She kissed and licked and sucked her way down my body and then she ate my cunt until I nearly died from pleasure.

See how much time and space we save that way?

But oh, oh, how fantastic it was. On a purely physical plane there should not be very much difference between being eaten by a man and being eaten by a woman. It is, after all, the same general thing. One’s eyes are closed, and it could be any disembodied head gobbling away between one’s thighs. There are few things nicer than being soundly eaten by a man who enjoys that sort of thing. It is best, of course, if he is either immaculately clean-shaven, or, praise God, equipped with beard and moustache. (Whenever I see a man with beard and moustache I find myself assuming that he likes to eat cunt, and is considerate of his partner. But I’m sure there must be some men who wear beards and moustaches because they like the way they look. Odd.)

A girl’s face is softer, and her mouth is a little softer, and that should be all the difference there is.

Not so.

How to explain it? How can I tell you about it, Mirror Girl, when I don’t understand it myself?

Never mind. It happened, it was divine, and I know as much as I need to know about it. Afterward, while I bubbled blissfully in afterglow, Susan’s sweet face lay briefly on the pillow of my loins. Then she came up and rested her head on my breast, and I put a hand on her back and a hand on her head and rocked her, cradled her, and she purred and told me she loved me, and I told her I loved her, and she purred some more. I patted her head, stroked that silken hair. Those earlier inhibitions seemed so utterly foreign to me now, just as her presence in my arms seemed completely natural.

(Once you jump in, and find the water fine, you wonder why you shivered so long on the bank.)

“Oh, Jan,” she says.

“And to think I didn’t want this to happen.”

“I was afraid you wouldn’t let it.”

“I almost didn’t.”

“We didn’t even need drinks.”

“No.”

“We could have them now. You don’t need it, you showed that much, so now it would be all right to have them just to give us that extra drive, don’t you think?”

“I think so.”

“I’ll get them.”

“No, let me.” She rolls off of me and lies on her back, eyes wide, smiling sleepily. I get up, then bend over to kiss her mouth. She tastes deliciously of me, of my cunt. I do not turn from the taste but kiss her deeply, my tongue working past her lips and into her mouth, tasting myself as I taste her. How good the taste of sex, of men and women!

(When I first learned to suck men’s cocks I lived in horror that some of their seed would be swallowed before I could spit it out. How awful, to spit out the essence of a man! Now, a new woman, I greedily suck up and swallow every precious drop.)

I leave her reluctantly, leave the bedroom, go to the kitchen. There is a decanter of the red liquid on the counter top. And two glasses. I fill the glasses. In the living room I stop to gather up my cigarettes and a pack of matches.

I return to the bedroom. I hand her a glass, keep one for myself. We drink them straight down. It is the same liquid he has given me before. The scent is of rose petals, the taste sweet and sour.

I set my glass aside and light a cigarette.

“Susan?”

“What is it?”

“I want to make love to you.”

“In a few minutes.”

“Would you like that?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I wish I knew what was in this drink.”

“Something kicky.”

“Some kind of drug.”

“Uh-huh. You really never made it with a girl before?”

“Never.”

“It’s good, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“It’s not as powerful as with a man, you dig what I mean? No thrusting and heaving and everything. Nobody getting under your skin. Can you dig it? A man gets inside of you, he gets under your skin. Girls, it’s different, girls just get themselves together, like.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know which is better. You were so many things when I ate you.”

“What do you mean?”

“In my head, like. The different hats you wore. You were my mother and my sister and my daughter, you know, all those female roles.”

“Oh, I see.”

“I tend to trip out that way. Role playing and sex. I’m a little crazy, I guess.”

“Who isn’t?”

“There’s a question. Nobody I know.”

“Eric?”

“I don’t suppose you could really understand Eric. Not you, personally. I mean like anybody.”

“Do you understand him?”

“Not for a minute.”

“You’ve known him a long time.”

“All my life, it feels like. Three years, not quite. More like three hundred years. I don’t know him at all.”

I draw on the cigarette, inhale. The smoke unaccountably makes me slightly dizzy. I breathe out, butt the cigarette in an ashtray on the bedside table.

I say, “What does he do?”

“Eric?”

“I mean for a living. Does he work?”

“No.”

“Did he inherit money or something?”

“I don’t think so. I think—”

“What?”

“He never said this, it’s just a guess, and maybe I shouldn’t say anything, so if you’ll keep it quiet that I said it—”

“Of course.”

“I have the feeling, it’s just a feeling, that he’s like some kind of a criminal.”

“That’s what I think.”

“Really?”

“But I don’t know what makes me think so.”

“Neither do I. He goes away on these trips. He doesn’t say anything, he just goes away. And then he comes back. I get the feeling that he steals money on these trips, or gets money illegally one way or the other. Maybe it’s just that I couldn’t picture him doing anything else. You know, he’s a man who when he wants something like he takes it.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“And I don’t think he would do anything respectable. He would never work for somebody.”

“God, no.”

“And he wouldn’t have a business. He’s not the type. I’ll tell you one thing, though.”

“What’s that?”

“I would never cross him.”

“No.”

“I would not want him to be upset with me.”

“I have the feeling, Susan, he would just kill anybody who displeased him.”

“He could do that, yes.”

“Without a second thought.”

“Don’t even say it, it gives me chills. I can’t stand that.”

“What?”

“Talking about that kind of thing. About killing or dying. The whole idea of death. I wouldn’t smoke a cigarette because of the idea that I might die of cancer fifty years from now. Fifty years is like forever but even that far off I can’t stand to think about death. And when you say like that about Eric, and I think about him killing a person, and then inside my head it becomes me that he’s killing, and it does things to me, it makes things happen in my head. Look at me—” holding out a hand, straight out, the fingers spread, and the tips it is true are trembling “—look at me, I’m actually shaking, that’s what this kind of talk does to me. Now that’s not normal, is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“To be that frightened. I mean you would have to be sick not to be frightened of dying, but to be this frightened of it for no good reason, that has to be a kind of a sickness too, right?”

“It’s something you’ll grow out of.”

“Do you think so? I hope so. Jan—”

I kiss her.

“Oh, groovy. Yes, let’s love each other. When that happens all of the fear goes away.”

“My turn, though.”

“Huh?”

“To do you.”

“Oh, we can do each other.”

“First just me. I’ve never done it, I want to, I want to get lost in you.”

“That’s pretty, to say that.”

“I love you.”

We kiss. We hug each other as if clinging together for mutual warmth and protection. (And perhaps we are doing just that.) She lies down and I kiss her mouth and her throat.

And her breasts.

And through it all one corner of my mind stands back aloof and notes all of this with interest and a measure of surprise. How extraordinary that I am capable of all this! How unexpected my enthusiasm for this girl’s breasts! See me now, curled at the breast as at another breast twenty-nine years earlier, eyes lidded, earnestly sucking.

When I crouch between her taut plump thighs and inhale her musk and taste her bittersweetness, it becomes something else again. For a time it is Susan I am loving, and then, somewhere lost in time and space, it is as if this disembodied cunt to which I pay homage is in fact my own, as if I am doing this to myself. I am at once giving and receiving—

(Hard to recapture this, hard to define. You say you were eating yourself, ma’am? With a spoon, no doubt. Unless you’re some kind of bloody contortionist, ma’am. Would you care to let us have that one again, ma’am?

(Never mind.)

I come while eating her, feeling in myself what I arouse in her. And we do more things, we find many things to do. There is nothing exhausting about this sort of lovemaking. We could go on forever. There is a wholly different rhythm to this sort of sex.

It is late at night when we finally agree to call it a day. Eric has still not returned. I sit on the couch finishing a cigarette, then drop the butt on the coal fire. Susan says we should not be seen leaving the building together. Why? But I do not ask this question. I go alone, and hurry back home.

Enough.

May 12

It is hard to believe that she is so young.

I gather she has had any number of men since Eric. I’ve picked this up between the lines, so to speak. She doesn’t like to talk much about what she has done. I’ve tried to get her to say how Eric seduced her in the first place. She was no more than a child at the time. She could not have been like me, sex-struck and just waiting to be asked. Did he rape her, I wonder? Or drug her? Or merely mesmerize her into seductibility, which, if it isn’t a word, jolly well ought to be.

May 14

All those cruddy novels about sensitive young girls looking for meaning in life and finding it between their roommate’s legs, I begin to appreciate them now. Not that it’s really like that, exactly, but—

Just what are you trying to say, Giddings?

Okay. Just that there is something basically innocent, I guess, about what girls do in bed. Maybe it’s because of the basic gentleness of it, the fact that no one really enters anyone else, that there is none of this high-pitched passion, none of this violent spurting of seed. One can be a lesbian and still remain a virgin.

So?

So I don’t know.

May 15

We went to a movie last night and held hands. Incredible. Susan and I holding hands in the balcony. And we didn’t make love at all before or after. I am having my period, but we could have found any of a number of ways around that, had it mattered much. But no, we just wanted to go to the movies together, and then she had to go shopping or something and I had a book at home I wanted to finish, sort of, so that was that.

Very pleasant, really.

Eric seems to be out of town. The other night I managed to convince myself that he’s some sort of superspy. But I don’t really think so. It’s easier to see him as some kind of very cool, very successful professional criminal. A top jewel thief, perhaps, or an armed robber specializing in banks and armored cars.

There was a holdup in Queens the other day, a branch bank, robbed of almost a quarter of a million dollars. But that was a few days ago and I think Eric was around at the time.

I don’t really know a thing about him.

May 16

For that matter, what do I know about Susan? Not very much. I can’t imagine where she goes when she leaves me, what she does when we’re not together. Which is ridiculous to waste time worrying about, I suppose.

But she is very secretive, whether by design or automatically I cannot say. She won’t tell me her address and says that she does not have a phone, so there is no way to find her or get in touch with her. She is vague about where she has come from or where she is going at any given time.

Oh, what do I care, anyway?

May 19

Saw Howard this afternoon.

He didn’t see me. I went uptown to look at some slacks but didn’t find anything I liked. Walking up Fifth Avenue I saw him about half a block ahead just getting ready to cross the street. He was holding a girl’s arm, a secretary type with one of those elaborate plastic hairdos and tits like missile nose cones. Those huge plastic tits that either don’t entirely belong to the girl or when you take her bra off they hang to her knees, or they will by the time she’s thirty.

Christ, listen to me, putting down a girl I never did more than look at. And why? Because she’s helping to clean up the food I left on my plate? If they enjoy each other, more power to them.

Why should I be jealous?

I seem to be. But I think it’s just a reflex, a knee jerking when the hammer hits it. I watched them a little. They must have been going to or from lunch. (Or to and from bed.)

He looks fat and stupid. I wonder what I ever saw in him. Really. That’s a cliché, I know, but what on earth did I see in him?

Or he in me, for that matter?

Does he miss me? There’s a question for the ages. Again, why should I care?

Funny. I remember one time when we saw on the street the car we had traded in on our station wagon. A fine car, but we had wanted the wagon. Because it went with the house, of course.

Anyway, we were driving along in the wagon, and there was our car. Unmistakably ours. There was a little dent the size of a teacup that I had put in the bumper once, and that of course no one had been able to do anything about, and that made the identification absolute.

And Howie and I began to hate the man who was driving the car. Typical dog-in-the-manger crap, but people are like that. Once something has belonged to you and you are done with it you automatically want it to cease to exist, or at the very least to have no life separate from you.

Oh, Eric’s back. From robbing banks or subverting the government of Australia or whatever he does. He called a few minutes ago.

I’m seeing him tonight.

Will Susan be there? And what scene will we play now?

Funny. Having seen Howard fires me up for this evening. I want wild things to happen. I don’t care if he strips us both bare-ass naked and takes after us with a leather whip.

One doesn’t entirely get over people in a hurry. Even shallow people that you would think wouldn’t take a lot of getting over. Howard, let us face it, didn’t have all that much to say. And it was I who left him, and good riddance. And all that happened today was that I saw the dumb son of a bitch crossing Fifth Avenue, which is probably something he does at least a couple of times a day, and the fact that he was walking with a girl with big tits suggested to me that maybe he hasn’t been faithful to our marriage vows since I ran out on him months ago. (Months! My sense of time is completely fucked up. It seems like years, and other times it seems like a matter of days.)

If Howie wasn’t getting laid, that might be something to worry about.

But the hell with being rational. I’m really anxious to do some wild screwing tonight. Which is the attitude every properly brought up young lady should have, I guess, when she’s on her way to do precisely that.

May 20

Three in bed is nice.

I am too tired to write. Hours and hours of fucking and sucking, to be crude about it. And why not be crude about it? Lewd and crude and rude and nude and never never never a prude. Lewd and crude and rude and nude and never a prude. Lewd and crude and rude and nude and thoroughly thoroughly thoroughly screwed!

Everybody doing everything to everybody else. The entire production choreographed by Eric.

I would say that I would hate myself in the morning except it’s the morning now and I don’t, not really. All I want to do is get into my own bed and sleep for a hundred and fifty hours, give or take a minute. I imagine there are other things I ought to do first.

Like bathe some of this sweat and sex off my skin. Like douche, like brush my teeth, like use a mouthwash. Like drink about three quarts of mouthwash. My mouth has done some odd things in the past few hours. Days. Weeks. Months.

Good night.

May 27

We tied up Susan. I ate her while he beat her with his belt. She was really screaming and it scared the life out of me. She swooned when she had her climax. Passed out and didn’t come to for about twenty minutes. I panicked, thought she was dead, for God’s sake. Eric told me not to be stupid.

When she came out of it she kept saying how good she felt. She touched her bottom gingerly now and then and joked about the pain.

The beating didn’t leave any marks to speak of.

June 14

Enough is too much.

No one can live this way. I have looked deep into the mirror and am falling into it. I will drown in the mirror. One day and another day, over and over.

I am dirty inside and out. I cannot go on this way and I do not deserve to go on.

June 15

I woke up this morning.

I generally do, but I guess I wasn’t supposed to this time. Last night I drank wine and slipped deeper and deeper into depression and ultimately wrote that last entry. At least I assume I did. It’s in my handwriting, and it’s consistent with the mood I was in. I do remember having some of those thoughts, whatever they might have meant at the time. I just don’t remember writing them down.

Nor do I remember taking the pills, but it’s evident that I did. I suppose I must have thought I was taking sleeping pills. I don’t own any sleeping pills, and after last night I think it might be a good idea never to own any sleeping pills. I had never considered myself as potentially suicidal before. I thought about suicide the way anyone with a sense of reality is apt to think about it, but it was like Mark Twain and the weather, I thought about it but never did anything about it. (Like Mark Twain and the weather, Gracie?) But last night I was not only stupid enough to try to kill myself but stupid enough to go about it wrong. Judging from the empty bottles on the bathroom floor, I must have swallowed about fifty aspirins and a dozen antidepressants. I have no idea what the cumulative effect of antidepressants might be—I suppose they could just sort of lift you off into euphoria or something. Except they aren’t exhilarants (if there is such a word, I bet that’s not how you spell it) but just antidepressants that neutralize a bad mood.

Well, none of this matters. Judging from the little pill-studded pool of vomit by the side of the bed, which I will have to feel much better than I do now before I can bring myself to clean up, I might as well have taken sleeping pills or even cyanide for the amount of time it stayed with me.

So you have to call it a bona fide suicide attempt, but whether or not you call it a close shave I do not know.

I haven’t been writing in this book much lately. I haven’t even been thinking much lately. I see Eric, I see Susan, I see the two of them together.

I think I’m coming unglued. I can be flip here today, I have to be flip here today, if I am less than flip here today I might try walking out the fucking window (or fucking out the walking window? Heh-heh, heh-heh), but I do not feel flip. What I feel is sick, awfully sick, sicker than I remember ever having felt before. Sick in mind and body. A sick mind in a sick body.

I have to go out and have something to eat. I absolutely have to eat. And the thought of food turns my stomach. Absolutely turns my stomach. There’s a word for this but I don’t remember what it is. A medically recognized condition in which the poor schmuck gets nauseous at the thought of food and simply doesn’t eat, getting thinner and thinner until he or she either recovers or dies, I think.

Those would seem to be the two logical alternatives.

I wonder if I have it, whatever the hell it’s called. I don’t suppose I can get very much thinner without dying. Except that’s not exactly true. Maybe it’s all in my mind, the way I perceive myself. I don’t think I’m really as scrawny as I think I am.

I will go out now and have a big plate of spaghetti (ugh!) and somehow eat it all. Well, maybe not spaghetti, now that I think about it. But something, somewhere.

Everything will be all right, she said bravely.

June 21

“Jan, you ought to go out more.”

“Go out more?”

“Yes. You should meet people. You should talk to men, get acquainted with them.”

“But you told me otherwise, Eric.”

“Times change.”

“So it seems.”

“One reaches a new stage in one’s development.”

“And have I reached a new stage?”

“You are about to.”

“You know, I never understand what this is all about. What the point of all this is. You know that I’ll do whatever you tell me to do.”

“Yes.”

“Though sometimes I wonder why that is.”

“Because you want it that way, Jan.”

“Do I?”

“You’re here, aren’t you?”

“Am I?”

“Don’t be oblique.”

“I—”

“You have to be owned and directed. That’s very obvious. And you’ve come a long way, you know.”

“I’ve certainly come a lot, anyway.”

He turns, walks to the window, addresses his remarks in its direction.

“I think you should move about more. Go to some bars and cocktail lounges. Dress attractively. Affect an open personality. Smile warmly.”

“You mean let myself get picked up.”

“If the opportunity arises, why not?”

“You told me you didn’t want me to go with any other men.”

“That was at another stage in your growth.”

“Eric, what happened to those boys?”

“Boys?”

“David and Arnold.”

“Oh, your two fairies. Why, I don’t know what happened to them. Why do you ask?”

“They disappeared.”

“Fairies have a propensity for disappearing. They do it all the time.”

“What happened to them?”

“How should I know?”

“Did you . . . do something to them?”

He looks at me, stares into my eyes until I turn from him. Then, briskly, “I’ll be unavailable for a while. I’m leaving town, I may be away for some time.”

“And Susan—”

“Susan is also unavailable.”

“I see.”

“So you might find it profitable to develop some other contacts. With men or women, as you prefer.”

“Profitable?”

“Yes.”

“Does that mean I’m supposed to fuck men for money?”

A raised eyebrow, more of the smile. “Is that what you think you want to do, Jan?”

I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what he wants of me, what he really wants of me. I don’t know . . . anything.

Oh.

June 24

I thought, oh, that it would be completely mechanical. It wasn’t that I didn’t think I could do it. Not at all. I knew I could do it.

I can do anything, can’t I? All the things I thought I couldn’t do. There was a time when I didn’t think I could sleep with anyone but Howie. (Sleep with—what a strange euphemism! And yet I really have not slept with anyone but Howie. I had this thought a few days ago. It’s absolutely true. I have never slept with any of these people since Howie. I screw, I suck. I receive them in all the orifices of my body, but when the sex part is over for the time being I then go home to my own apartment and sleep, at last, alone. Ah, Howard Kurland, I have slept with no one since leaving your home and hearth. Fidelity of a sort, my sweet. Make of it what you will.)

No, there’s nothing much I can’t do. Perhaps that is the message of this education that Eric has so often spoken of. That I am to be educated. Of course there has been a certain purely physical education; there are things I can do now that would qualify me to be a two-dollar whore in Port Said. I don’t have to sit around reading Sir Richard Burton any more. I could write a book of my own.

But the true education, perhaps, is the realization of my own potential for, well, for this sort of thing. I thought I could never permit my asshole to be penetrated, that I could never willingly swallow sperm, or embrace two men at once, or enjoy sex with a girl, or be spanked into orgasm, or any of those things. And each time I found I was wrong, that I was capable of more than I knew, until now I find myself at the point where I know in advance that anything is possible, that there is nothing I am too good for.

I didn’t do it simply because he told me to.

Not that I wouldn’t have done it for that reason, had he given me specific directions. If he had told me to go to a certain place at a certain time and do a certain thing I would of course have done it. But he was vague, purposely vague I don’t doubt, and after a day or two had passed with no further word from him I more or less decided that he could go to hell—i.e., I was not going to go around picking up strangers on his say-so, especially in view of the fact that he had not said so in any strong unequivocal terms.

I decided to take things a little easier, to let this whole sex thing ride itself out a little. My life has been getting as thin otherwise as I have. I don’t do anything.

So I decided that, if both he and Susan were going to be out of town for a while, it would at least give me a chance to get myself together. To repackage my life and make it work on an overall basis. So that I live twenty-four hours a day, not just during those moments when I am in someone’s arms.

Or legs, or what you will.

I began planning. It’s surprising in a way that I didn’t write it all down in here. It was that sort of mood, overflowing with the desire to make lists, to draw up plans, to systematize this new approach to life. Sex—oh, sex would play a part, but the whole point was that sex would be kept in its proper perspective. One has to be in a very ebullient mood in order to talk about keeping sex in its proper perspective. What in bloody hell is the proper perspective of sex? And who knows? And who cares? And what difference does it make?

Oh, the hell with it. I just want to get this down and on paper before I finish. Then I’ll go out and get something to eat, maybe that Chinese place on Waverly whose name I never remember. I feel hungry enough to eat two from group A and three from group B, which I suppose is a good sign—I haven’t felt this hungry in ages.

So. Yesterday I went to the Museum of Modern Art and walked around looking at paintings. Then I went and had lunch, and then I went to a movie, and then I stopped for a drink at a place off Third Avenue in the high fifties, and then I promptly got drinks bought for me by a marketing exec who just happened to know an understanding neighborhood hotel, and he bought a bottle of Scotch and we just happened to go to that hotel where I just happened to give him the time of his life.

Not because I was told to, but because from the minute I walked into that fucking museum early in the afternoon I began to feel this twitching in my groin every time a man looked at me, which happened rather often. And in the movie I couldn’t keep my mind on the picture. And when the clown made his play for me I wanted him. I didn’t like him, I didn’t think he was attractive, all jowly and wolfish and popeyed, but I wanted him.

Okay. Acceptable, no? And so easy to do. Nothing to it. Nothing at all. Part of the whole female independence bit, right? A girl should feel free to ball somebody if she decides she wants to. Steady sex, after all, is healthy.

Right?

He gave me twenty dollars.

Can you believe it?

Can I believe it, for that matter? That’s the real question. And I would have been really infuriated by the gesture if he hadn’t been so cool about it, and actually rather nice. We screwed ourselves into a lather, we really did, and I guess he’s used to doing it once and then rushing off to catch the 6:04 to Westport, but I fixed him so he missed his train and a few more besides. I gave him a balling he will not quickly forget, and it was sort of delicious as we left the hotel to see the expression on his face, as if he was trying to convince me that he made out in the hay like this all the time.

He was really turned on by my scrawniness, which he of course did not call that. Slender, sylphlike. His very words. He probably has a wife who takes a size 56.

He tucked me into a cab and pressed cab fare into my hand. We were halfway home before I opened my hand to see what he had given me, and it was a twenty. I hadn’t asked for money. I don’t think I gave the impression that money was what I was after. I’m sure I didn’t behave like a whore. Like a whore morally, but not like a whore in attitude, I don’t think. I behaved like someone who just enjoyed balling.

Did he think I was a whore? I would say no. Maybe he just wanted to give me a present, or maybe he felt he had to give me money so that he wouldn’t feel he had received more than he’d given, or something. I don’t know. For all I know he wanted to give me two bucks for the cab but he didn’t have anything smaller than a twenty.

Meanwhile I was wondering how I was going to get the cabdriver to change a twenty.

And then I remembered that I had other bills in my purse.

And then—how did this happen? I don’t know. But I opened my purse and put the twenty inside and closed the purse, and when we got to my place I leaned forward and told the cabbie that I didn’t have any money.

The meter read a dollar thirty-five, a dollar eighty-five, something like that. Under two dollars.

He said, “Oh, Jesus, lady, you’re breaking my back. Now, what kind of shit is it to take a cab and when you get there you tell the cabby you got no money?”

I said, “Can’t we work something out?”

He looked at me, getting the message.

He said, “Look, I don’t know about this.”

“Do you like to be Frenched?”

“Jesus, honey—”

“I’ll French you. How about it?”

“Where? In the fuckin’ cab? Sure, and we all wind up in jail. I don’t need it.”

“Oh.”

“How about your place?”

“My husband’s home.”

“You got a husband?”

“But I’d rather suck your cock than ask him for two dollars. In fact I want to suck your cock.”

“Jesus Christ.”

He drove to the West Side warehouse district below the Village. All the way there I kept getting him hot with words. He parked the car between a couple of huge empty trucks. I got in the front seat and went down on him.

His penis was long and thick, the vein very prominent. He wasn’t circumcised. He had an odd generally unclean smell. I felt odd myself, and generally unclean.

He didn’t take long. Nor did he show tremendous enthusiasm. He sat there, behind the wheel, and he shuddered lightly as he popped, and then he sank back in his seat for a moment or two, getting his breath, and then he tucked himself in and zipped himself up. I would have done that for him if he’d asked.

He said, “You want to open the door so you can spit it out on the street.”

“Never mind.”

“Huh?”

“I swallowed it.”

“You’re some crazy broad.”

“Why, is it fattening?”

“You really got a husband?”

“Yes, and I’m late. Why don’t you drive me back to my place?”

“Oh, sure.” He started the motor. “Maybe you ought to get in back. Oh, the hell with it, I’m leaving the flag up anyway. The hell with it, they won’t stop me around here. The hell with them and you stay right where you are.”

“Thanks.”

And, as we neared the apartment, “You do that to your husband?”

“Do what?”

“You know. Like what you did to me?”

“You mean suck his cock?”

“Yeah, that’s what I mean all right.”

“Oh.”

“Well, do you?”

“No. He had it shot off in the war.”

“No shit.”

“It was a tragedy.”

“You’re just giving me a lot of crap.”

“Why would I do that?”

I think there was even more to this inane conversation, but I see no reason either to remember it or to record it. I got out of the cab and went into my apartment and kept bathing and gargling. Why? Because I was disgusting? Neither soap nor mouthwash would change this.

My first two experiences in prostitution, one for twenty dollars, one for two.

To tell you the truth, with the flipness held in abeyance, and with all the cool cooled down, I am, frankly, a little bit worried about me.

June 27

Three days in a row without balling anybody. I’ve even started to look for a job!

Not that I expect to find one. Or that I’m positive I want one. But it is good play therapy, looking at the employment listing in the Times and trying to decide what would be fun and what I might be qualified for.

June 30

I went to pick up my shoes from the Italian who was endeavoring to make them as good as new when a girl gave me a real up-and-down look followed by one of those soulful gazes, as if to say that she adored and respected me and wanted to put me on a pedestal and eat my box.

I resisted the temptation. Now I’m almost sorry.

I wish I could see David and Arnold again and have that kind of scene. That crazy lazy sex. Why does everything have to be all one way or all the other. I just don’t understand it.

July 3

Edgar Hillman, for the love of God!

I was standing on Forty-second Street between Sixth and Seventh, trying to get up the courage to climb a flight of stairs to one of the employment agencies, and Guess Who came out of one of the Dirty Books and Peep Shows places? None other than Edgar Hillman, the Lothario of Eastchester. Husband of Marcie, father of her children, and Dry Humper and occasional Finger Fucker of one Jan Giddings Kurland.

I didn’t notice him at first, being at the time lost in a reasonable facsimile of thought. A voice said, “Jan? Jan Kurland? Is that really you?”

I turned, and it was really me, just as it was really Edgar.

“Edgar,” I said, as if I were pleased to see him. Oh, stop the bitchiness—I was pleased to see him, the first familiar face since I had taken myself away from all those familiar faces.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “I was just thinking about you.”

“Now there’s a compliment. In there?” With a nod of my head for the peep show parlor.

He blushed interestingly, then saved it with a wink. “Oh, just like to keep an eye on what they’re publishing these days. But you look great, Jan! Though you do look about half-starved. Have lunch with me?”

“I just ate.” A stand-up hamburger and malt just after I got off the subway.

“A drink, then.”

“Well, sure.”

“Because it’s really good to see you. Marcie was saying—”

So he told me what Marcie was saying, and what was new with who, and this and that, none of it memorable. I’m afraid I didn’t pay quite as much attention as I might have. Not that I wasn’t interested. I wanted to hear about these people, this life I had for so long belonged to, but at the same time the specifics were not particularly interesting because these were not very interesting people, nor did they do very interesting things. So I kept finding myself tuning out great hunks of the conversation, listening to Edgar the way you will sometimes listen to a song on the radio, hearing the tune but not paying any attention to the lyrics.

“But tell me what you’re doing, Jan.”

“Oh, nothing very much.”

“Do you think—I mean, is there any chance you and Howie might get back together again?”

“No, I really don’t think so.”

“You know, that’s a shame. But I guess everybody at one time or another feels the need to kick over the traces. To get away, to have a shot at some new kind of life. I’ll tell you something, you were lucky that you didn’t have any kids at the time. If you had had children it might have been a great deal different.”

“Yes, it would have made a difference.”

“Of course it would. If it weren’t for my own kids—”

“Yes, Edgar?”

“Oh, what am I talking about? Marcie and I have a good thing going. We’re really very happy together.”

“I know you are.”

He ordered us another round of drinks, our third, I think it was. I was drinking Scotch sours, he was drinking vodka martinis. I think they were beginning to get to him. I think that was what he had in mind when he ordered them. Nobody drinks vodka martinis because he likes the taste. They don’t have any taste. They just do the job.

Vodka, the housewife’s friend.

How long ago was that?

“Jan.”

“Yes?”

“You know, I can see just looking at you that you’ve got your life pretty much under control. I can see that, and you know something? I’m damned glad.”

“Why, that’s nice of you, Edgar.”

“I never did believe the things I heard about you.”

“Oh?”

“Not for a minute.”

“Just what sort of things did you hear?”

“Oh, nothing important.”

“No, I’d like to know.”

“You wouldn’t be interested.”

“I’d be very interested.”

“Oh, the usual thing. Sex stories, to be quite blunt about it, that you were raising all kinds of hell here in New York, you know, sleeping around.”

“But you don’t believe that.”

“I believe that what everybody does is their own goddam business and nobody else’s goddam business.”

“Amen to that.”

“Damn right.”

“You know, the closest I came in Eastchester—”

“Yes?”

“Was with you.”

“That so?”

“Yes.”

“There’s this story, something about a kid who came to mow the grass or something—”

“Shovel the snow.”

“I guess that’s what it was.”

“There’s not that much grass that needs mowing in the middle of the winter.”

“Stands to reason.”

“But that was something else. On the way out the door, so to speak. Before I left Howard.”

“Damn right.” His eyes focused owlishly upon me, and he smiled suddenly. Well, I thought, why not? When you start something, sooner or later you ought to finish it. A dry hump at a party is nice, but one ought to do things properly.

“Edgar?”

“Huh?”

“All those stories about the life I lead.”

“I never paid any attention to them.”

“You should have. See, they happen to be true.”

“Huh?”

“If you’ve got an hour to spare—”

“You have a place?”

“Well, not exactly. See, I’m living with these two colored fellows, and if I brought you there they’d have a fit. They’re junked up all the time and anything could happen. You know, they have knives, and when they get some cocaine in their systems anything can happen. And the one thing they don’t want is for me to bring any white men home.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“But they never come up north of Fourteenth Street, so if you know a place uptown, there’s no problem.”

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

“Is something the matter?”

“You live with a couple of niggers?”

The Eastchester liberal. Sad, sad. I looked skyward and waxed rhapsodic, saying things like Skin like black velvet and like that. I thought Edgar was going to have cardiac arrest. His face got slightly purple.

I thought, too, that this would turn him off. Not that that was my intention, but once I got into the spirit of the game I stayed with it, and judging by his reactions he wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me. Not quite the truth of the matter, however.

“Listen, I know a hotel.”

Are there any men who don’t know a hotel? I’m sure Howard knows a hotel. It occurred to me at the time that perhaps, as we stroll through the lobby, we will meet Howard and the girl with the plastic nose-cone tits.

By the time we got to the hotel I was sort of hoping this would happen. There has always been about Edgar Hillman and the idea of balling Edgar Hillman something that appeals to my sense of the ridiculous. And it was odd, all of this, because here I was going to get fucked for the first time in quite a while, not counting that Italian kid the night before last, because that didn’t really count, it was just a quick thing for both of us because we were both lonely, and I’ll never see him again and probably wouldn’t recognize him if I did, just a quick tumble in the last row of the theater that meant no more to me than it did to him, and I didn’t even come or get especially hot, so in a sense—

There is just no way out of that sentence. It’s one of those sentences that keeps coming to new commas and never has its period. A pregnant sentence, that’s what it is.

Anyway, the point was that I had not done much lately sexually, and here I was with Edgar, and I was driven not by the desire for sexual pleasure or by any deep compulsion but merely because I thought it would all be ridiculous and funny and all, which, come to think of it, is a better reason for balling someone than a good many.

We took a cab to this hotel that he knew, which was silly because we could have walked there in less time. The cab ride did give us a chance to sit in silence. Otherwise we would have had to talk to each other, which right then would have been more than difficult.

It occurred to me that it would really be a scream if the cabdriver was the same one I had gone down on. I snuck a look at him, and Guess What?

It wasn’t him.

At the hotel, Edgar was a little less smooth about things than he might have been. I was supposed to wait in the lobby while he handled things at the desk. I’m sure the desk didn’t care, but maybe he didn’t want me to see what name he used, or something like that. And then there was a lot of business with hand movements and head nods designed to clue me in that I should get on the elevator ahead of him. For a guy who had done this before, he was acting like a guy who hadn’t done this before.

In the room, he gave me this long look. I prepared myself for the news that Marcie didn’t understand him. I had news for him. Marcie understood him.

Instead he said, “You know, I always liked you, Jan.”

“We always liked each other.”

“Yes. Whenever the gang got together—”

“We responded to each other.”

“Exactly.”

Poor little Beady Eyes, I thought, and closed my own eyes and waited for him to kiss me. Which he proceeded to do. Ah, Marcie, I thought, savoring the kiss, rubbing my body against him, ah, Marcie, I wish you were here to watch.

Who would have guessed that he would turn out to be so oral? Kissing everywhere, hungry, desperate to kiss and lick. Not very good at it, and a rank idiot at missing the clitoris, but ravenously eager to please. And who would have guessed that, after he heaved himself out of the crouch and onto me, after he plunged squishily into me, after he gave the requisite number of thrusts and splashed my insides with his seed, he would pass out on me and give every evidence of having succumbed to a massive coronary?

I went through this whole trip about what to do next. Call the desk? Call a doctor? Call the police? Hello, I was fucking this fellow, the husband of a girl who used to be a very close friend of mine, when all of a sudden he happened to have a heart attack and die, and if you could just send up a couple of male nurses to sort of roll him off me, I’d be very grateful.

I could just sneak out, I decided. And leave him like that? And then what would happen?

God only knows what I might have done, but of course he opened his eyes and told me I was fantastic, the best there ever was. How would he know? All I’d had a chance to do was open my legs and lie there for a while.

We sat up in bed smoking cigarettes. “I’ll bet you’ve made some crazy scenes, Jan.”

“Oh, you could call it that.”

“I don’t blame you a bit. Same thing everybody would do if they had the guts. Who wants to spend the rest of your life with a millstone around your neck, right?”

“Right, Edgar.”

“Crazy scenes. Down in the Village, I know about the Village, you don’t have to tell me about the Village. Before I married Marcie I used to go down there all the time. I moved around, you know. I kept in motion.”

“I’m sure you did.”

“That was a lot of shit about living with a couple of shfoogs, wasn’t it?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You had me going for a few minutes. You live alone?”

“No, as a matter of fact, I have a roommate.”

“Oh, a roommate.”

“You’d like her.”

“Her.”

“A Chinese girl a couple years younger than I am. Really beautiful.”

“Is that right.”

“And if you think I’m wild, you should see her. I could tell you stories.”

“Really?”

So I made up some stories. I knew it would get him excited. What he really wanted was to screw my Oriental roommate, but she wasn’t available, so he settled for taking it all in and then screwing me while he pictured her. It was sort of fun.

There was one more pretty good moment, after we were dressed again, after he had taken down my address and phone number (the wrong address, and the wrong phone number). He asked if there was anything I needed, anything he could do for me, anything at all, just ask, anything.

“Well, now that you mention it—”

“You’re a little short?”

“Well, if you could spare a few dollars.”

“Jan, you should have said something. Whatever you want, whatever you need. Just pick a number.”

“Well—” trying it on “—well, see, I generally get twenty-five dollars.”

I wish I had a picture of his face to paste here. Out of sight. He was really a study.

“A joke,” I said, cutting it off, taking his arm, laughing so that he could gratefully join in my laughter. “But I had you for a minute, didn’t I?”

I wonder if I’ll ever see him again. The only pleasure I got out of balling him was the humor of it. The sex wasn’t good or bad. It was—how to put it? I was not taking part in it. It was going on, and there was certainly nothing about it that I didn’t like, but neither was there anything the least bit involving about it.

July 7

Twice today I thought I saw Eric on the street.

I went to a lesbian bar last night. I don’t think I’m ready for that scene just yet. Girls dancing with girls, some of them in very butchy drag. Maybe I could have enjoyed it if I had been high at the time. I wasn’t, and I got lower hanging around there.

One girl gave me the eye rather obviously, but I didn’t respond. Maybe if she had pushed it, if she had come over and started a conversation. But she didn’t, so I finished my two-and-a-half-dollar drink and went home.

July 8

Jesus, what do I do now?

At least the book is still here. But what do I do? Nobody’s around and the rent is due in a couple of weeks and for God’s sake what do I do?

July 9

The entry for yesterday looks inane. I wish it didn’t mean anything. I keep looking at the words like an inside-out cryptographer, hoping that if I study them long enough they will cease to mean anything to me.

Doesn’t work.

Yesterday evening when I got home after a sort of combination of lunch and dinner I found out I had been robbed. Burglarized, I guess I mean. You have to be home to be robbed. I think. Not that it matters.

They got all my money. I had my purse with me. Twenty dollars in it—I never carry a lot for fear of having my purse snatched, which is laughable, now. I left the rest at home, all carefully stashed in my dresser at the bottom of a pile of sweaters, because after all who would think of looking under a pile of sweaters, right?

Wrong.

They got over a thousand dollars from me. I don’t know how much it was because I don’t know how much I had exactly. Between a thousand and fifteen hundred. I think.

Leaving me with between twenty and twenty-five.

When I came home I almost had a stroke. I’m still someone who belongs in intensive care, no question. Funny things dept.— Before I ran to the sweater drawer, I first made sure that they hadn’t found this book. Over a thousand dollars up for grabs and some fucking junkie bastard is going to waste his time reading my diary, right?

Why do I keep thinking that this is funny? The one thing it’s not is funny. But this nervous giggle keeps wanting to develop somewhere in the back of my head, somewhere in those sinus cavities they show you in the Dristan commercials.

They didn’t wreck the place. That was one thing, I suppose, to be thankful for. My clothes got sort of thrown around a lot, because I guess you can’t expect burglars to put everything back neatly. But there was no tremendous damage done, like pillows and mattresses cut open and all that.

I suppose they stopped knocking their brains out when they hit the cash.

You know, I can’t get away from it, but I keep thinking he had something to do with it. Eric. I can’t think of any logical reason why he should waste his time burglarizing my apartment. It doesn’t make any particular sense. If he wanted money from me, which he wouldn’t, he could simply ask for it the way he can ask anything else from me.

I keep thinking about the time he burned up my credit cards. Cutting a link to Howard, he said. But maybe it was a way to make me dependent upon him instead, and maybe this was another part of that process. No credit, no money, no friends, nothing—not even Eric, because I still haven’t heard a word from him.

People keep floating in and out of my life. I got bored once because of the sameness, and now nothing’s the same from one day to the next. Not that things are that interesting, but the whole shape of my world keeps changing.

Fancy talk. What it comes down to is I’m broke, and what do I do now, Mother?

I am honestly damned if I know.

The jobs I checked out, the jobs I looked at but did not touch, were all pretty much the same thing. Nine-to-five crap for a hundred and ten dollars a week. It didn’t seem worth the trouble when I had money and now it just isn’t enough. What am I going to do on a hundred and ten a week? That comes to about eighty-five a week after taxes, and I pay more than that right now for rent alone. I pay three hundred and seventy-five dollars a month rent, and there is no kind of job I can get that will give me that kind of bread.

I suppose I could get out of here. Except that I really like it here, and where am I going to go? I could find some shithole in the East Village for fifty dollars a month, but how long could I live there before I started to go crazy? It wasn’t too bad visiting Arnold and David at their apartments, although it was occasionally depressing, especially Arnold’s, but then I had them with me. I can’t imagine being alone in a place like that, returning to it after a day’s work pounding a typewriter or whatever you have to do to bring home a lousy eighty-five dollars a week.

There are these jobs they advertise in the East Village Other. Modeling, which means nude work of one sort or another. Once in a while I suppose it’s a legitimate job for a photographer who takes dirty pictures, but I gather that mostly it’s working in those modeling clubs where creeps bring cameras and take nude pictures of you, half the time without film in the camera.

(What sort of men actually go to those places? I mean, I can see a man paying a whore, but to pay money to click a camera at some bored, naked girl. I mean, why?)

They pay five or ten dollars an hour. Ten dollars an hour to have some goon snap pictures of you isn’t too bad. But I don’t suppose the work is very steady. Not the sort of thing you can count on. Those places must get shut down from time to time, or else the customers must get tired of the same old faces.

Faces?

Besides, it’s not much different from being a whore, except for being less interesting.

That’s what it all keeps coming to, doesn’t it?

Oh, I don’t want to think about it. I really don’t. I can’t think about anything else and I don’t want to think about this, certainly not for the time being. It was all something I knew I was going to have to face pretty soon. Another three months at the outside and my money would have run out, even if that son of a bitch hadn’t walked off with it. (Maybe I shouldn’t call him names. Maybe he was poor and he really needed the money. Well, he isn’t poor now. Now he has my fifteen hundred dollars, the son of a bitch.)

God, I wish I could get high! I mean really nice and high and just sit around feeling great for a couple of hours. I think I could face anything right now if first I could just get high and have a little time to myself, just high and happy. That mixture of grass and hash that I smoked with the boys. I would love to have a taste of that now and go off on one of those happy bubbly cerebral highs. Or that red crud that Eric keeps around the place, the sweet-and-sour rose petals, whatever the hell it is. Some kind of a sex drug, but you could take it and get high and skip the sex and it would be better than sitting around like this.

I suppose I’ll get drunk, which isn’t the same thing at all. And if I do, it’ll have to be on wine. I can’t afford anything classier. Not now.

July 11

I don’t feel any different, and if I looked in the mirror, which I have been gradually breaking myself of the habit of doing, I don’t suppose I would look any different either. But then neither did Dorian Gray.

I made forty-five dollars. One this afternoon for twenty-five, one this evening for twenty. (If you can’t get five, take two.)

There’s nothing to it.

Literally nothing to it. I never would have believed this. I would have believed almost anything else about prostitution—what a windy clinical word for the actual process—but I wouldn’t have believed it could be so, oh, what’s the word? Noninvolving?

That’s not exactly it. That was part of it, the feeling of this-person-he’s-fucking-is-not-the-real-me, and I suppose every girl has to feel that in order to keep from despising herself. And there is a certain amount of tripping out involved. I have always been good, perhaps too good, at being able to carry on a conversation, nodding in the right places, grunting uh-huh and mmmm and uh-uh, even contributing a phrase or a sentence now and then, without paying a dime’s worth of attention to what’s going on.

And you know, you can do this physically as well as verbally. It’s much the same thing, except it’s the body instead of the mind that is just going through the motions of participating.

I made forty-five dollars today. That’s at least twice as much as I could have made in any job I could have gotten, and in half the hours.

The sex part—

A flash. It was almost exactly the same as when I hit the hay with what’s-his-name, Edgar. The same thing! The same I’m-not-really-here, the same faint sense of contempt for the man I was with, the same general disinterest in what we were doing in bed, the same experience of getting a certain amount of pleasure from it but being too detached to really enjoy it, or even to really hate it, for that matter.

I don’t see why I can’t go on this way. It shouldn’t be too terribly hard to put away a hundred dollars a week. A hundred dollars is four or five tricks. (The New Math.) Four or five men a week and the rent is paid.

Went to the gay bar last night and got drunk. A little foggy on what happened, but I think I went home with a girl and I think we made it. I drank some wine before I went there, then had a bottle of cough syrup—terpin hydrate and codeine—you have to sign the book when you buy it and the druggist gives you an I-know-what-you-want-this-for-you-junkie-bitch look, but how else can you get high for seventy-nine cents?

Then all the drinks at the gay bar, which she bought for me, and whatever we had at her place. For all I know we had cocaine at her place. I really don’t remember. I have vague sex memories but they parallel a couple of freaky dreams I’ve been having lately, so who knows which was which?

The other thing, which I haven’t written about in here, and which I’m still not writing about because it scares me that much, hasn’t happened yet.

If it doesn’t happen soon I don’t know what I’ll do. Oh, well, I guess I can always kill myself.

The girl is not entirely kidding.

July 15

Still nothing.

What will I do? If Eric were around he would know what to do. I suppose he would help, but who knows? Who knows anything any more?

Maybe it will work out.

Except I know it won’t. I’ve never even worried about it before and this time I just knew.

It’s impossible. Everybody says it’s impossible. What do you do? Sue the manufacturer?

Except I probably forgot. I know I forget a lot of the time, I always have extras left over.

(Write it, you idiot! Go on!)

No, I can’t. I don’t want to. I guess I’ll go out and fuck somebody and make some money.

Yesterday I turned five tricks and all five of them wanted to be blown. All five. That was the only contact they wanted to have with me.

Why don’t they turn queer?

If I did nothing but that all the time I wouldn’t have this problem.

July 17

I was reading through this.

I’m really sick. Most of the time I don’t realize it. Or maybe I do deep down inside. All of that shit early on about making progress. Some kind of progress. The girl is going noisily out of her skull.

I have a feeling, too, that it’s not a good idea to drink cough syrup every day.

Fuck it. Maybe it’ll hurt the baby.

July 18

It really looked as though I would never write that last line. It’s funny because I’ve been able to put down almost everything else I’ve done, but now what I seem to be is pregnant—I’m never late, and God am I late now. And even now I can’t sit back and let myself gush about it. I’m really uptight about this. I’ve never been quite like this before.

Then again, I’ve never been pregnant before.

This isn’t supposed to happen to girls on the pill. Everybody said the pill would put abortionists out of business. What is it, some sort of mad suicidal or self-destructive streak in me? How can you run around the city fucking absolutely everybody and forget to take your pill first thing in the morning? And it isn’t as if I have such a full schedule that I can’t find time to take a birth control pill. It isn’t as though I have so many other vital things to remember that little trivial things like not getting pregnant are too much to remember.

As a matter of fact, there have been days when taking my pill was just about the only thing I did do. There were also days when it was one of many things I didn’t do. Which is why I am presently knocked up.

When Howie and I were trying to have a baby, nothing happened. The river flowed red like a clock. Red like a clock? What is the matter with me today? And what’s with cutesy little euphemisms for menstruating?

What do I do now?

Who do I know who would know where to go for an abortion? The funny thing is probably just about anybody. Of the old gang in Eastchester I’m sure there were a lot who went under the knife. If this had happened before I left Howard, I would just have asked Marcie. Nothing simpler. If she hadn’t had an abortion herself she would certainly know somebody who had, and it would all be very intelligently arranged, and it would cost whatever it is that they cost, which I guess is a thousand dollars (which means I could have afforded it if I hadn’t had the robbery, and of course people become paranoid, why shouldn’t people become paranoid, because it’s pretty obvious that the world is conspiring against me. I mean, how else would everything happen this way, as if on schedule? It can’t all be luck. Somebody up there hates me.)

The same question, over and over and over. What do I do now? I wish I knew the answer.

There’s not even any point in looking for an abortionist now because I don’t have any money to pay him with. The way things stand now I’ll have the rent when it’s due and probably a couple of hundred dollars beyond that, but I don’t know how long I can go before it’s too late to have the abortion.

Maybe I should have the baby.

Oh, that’s just what I need. And if worst comes to worst I can take it back to Howie. Here’s somebody’s baby to bring us back together again.

Solid.

July 24

Liz says she knows someone who will do it for three hundred dollars. She insists he’s reliable and that he operates under sanitary conditions. I hope so. I really don’t want to die. I’d rather have the baby than die.

I wasn’t so sure about this the other night. I sat in the bathroom making lists of the different ways to kill yourself. Myself, to be specific. One was worse than the next. There was a Dorothy Parker poem about that, wasn’t there? All the different ways to check out and what’s wrong with each of them, and it winds up You might as well live. That was the conclusion I came to, and for about that reason.

Maybe I should write something about Liz. I just got to know her the past couple days, although I’ve seen her around ever since I started to work the bars off Lexington.

(How professional that phrase sounds!)

She is a Lady Clairol blond, and her hairdresser is only one of many who know this. I think you could say (at least I can) that she looks like a whore. I say this not to put her down but realistically. The bleached blond hair, the hardness around the eyes and mouth, the way she struts when she walks, the slight and excusable tendency to overdress. Maybe, for all I know, it pays to look as much like a whore as possible, so that men will know what you are. Why confuse potential customers? Where’s the percentage?

We had taken to nodding to each other, and then one afternoon I was watching a daiquiri evaporate when she came over and asked if the other seat at my table was taken. It wasn’t, and she sat in it and studied me intently.

“We’ve seen each other around,” she said.

“Sure.”

“What I’m going to say, I don’t want you to be offended.”

“All right.” I had, at this point, the feeling that she might want to recruit me for her pimp. I had had such suggestions before from girls. I had invented a pimp of my own, a West Indian spade named Mickey with a huge knife scar on his cheek, but very gentle deep down inside. After I spoke of him once or twice I almost came to believe in him.

But what she said was, “I have this John, don’t stare but he’s the third stool from the left end, the one with God-help-us-all a straw hat. You see him?”

I did. An inoffensive little man with wire-rimmed glasses and a quizzical smile. He looked like somebody’s uncle, a bank vice-president or a retired druggist or something.

“He likes two girls at once. You know the scene?”

“Uh-huh.”

“There are two girls I can ask to split a trick like this with me, and they’re neither of them around. I thought it wouldn’t hurt me to ask. It’s fifty each. He wants a real party, but it’s fifty each.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I don’t know if you ever made a scene like this—”

“I did. But never as, you know, as a trick.”

“You mean for kicks?”

“More or less.”

“Like you dig it both ways?”

“Well—”

“That makes it easier. Me, too, matter of fact. But a lot of girls don’t. Matter of taste.”

“Literally.”

“Huh? Oh, right, I dig. You’re a funny girl, you know that? You say one word to my thirty, but you’re funny. You’ve just been around recent. New in town?”

“In a way.”

“New in business, then. Well, that’s cool. You want to make half a bill? I’ve tricked him before, his name is Claude, he’s really a lamb. He’s no trouble at all.”

We gave the lamb his money’s worth. He was a sly old bastard, all right. He had a whole script worked out. It went this way—first he would hide in the closet, then Liz and I would neck and pet and one of us would go down on the other while he watched. Then he would come out and surprise us, and we would beg him to keep our secret, and finally we would bribe him with our bodies. The phrase, believe it, was his.

So we did. It was kind of fun, in the way that agreeable tricks are fun. It wasn’t real because those things never can be. And working from a script that way. The beginning was nothing but stagey, the kissing and petting and undressing. I felt foolish, and didn’t even get any enjoyment out of the fact that it was a kinky scene. Sometimes I can dig kinkiness in and of itself, but this time nothing.

Liz gave me a good tonguing. She could have faked it easily enough and the lamb would not have known the difference. Unless he asked to smell her breath afterward or something. She could have just come close and he would have had the same trip, but either she felt it was easier to do it than to fake it or else she was enough in the mood to want to, because she really gave me the treatment.

A funny bit—I remember lying there giving a real Oscar-winning performance of a girl torn with passion, and what was going through my mind was the thought that this was really a great muffing I was getting, and wasn’t it a shame I couldn’t turn on to it and enjoy it? But I couldn’t. It just wasn’t sex, it was a performance, and I was too busy playing a part to feel anything. I think she could have done it forever without really getting to me in any substantial way.

Of course after enough time had gone by I managed to have a nice theatrical orgasm for Lamb’s benefit, and he came storming out of the closet, and we all played our parts the way we were supposed to. He made us lie down side by side on the bed while he inspected us in turn, holding our labia apart and looking inside, even sniffing inside, rolling us over, looking between the checks of our asses.

Liz said later it was like being searched for a heroin stash by a police matron.

Finally, after he had done all of his little things, and after we each gave him a little hand-and-mouth action, he screwed me while Liz gave him a rim job.

He had a surprisingly large cock. I have to get out of the habit of expecting that large men will have large ones and vice versa, or that sexy men will be well hung while nebbishy shrimps will be small and shriveled. There doesn’t seem to be any correlation at all as far as I can see. Anyway, the Lamb had a whang on him that the Lion would have been proud of, long and thick as a walking stick. He didn’t last too long, but with all that preparation, how could he?

He finished, and then he huffed and puffed a little—I still can’t help always expecting these old farts to drop dead at the crucial moment, and I know sooner or later it has to happen—and then he chatted embarrassingly with us about what sweet girls we were and how much he enjoyed being able to talk with us, and then he got dressed and handed us each an envelope. Fifty bucks for each of us, as she had said. And then he went away.

We were in Liz’s apartment, on East Fifty-fourth. Small but very comfortable, and a building with a doorman and an elevator and such things to keep burglars from taking a poor girl’s life savings. Two small rooms, a living room and a bedroom, and a sort of kitchen. We were in the bedroom, logically enough, and about half-dressed.

“He’s a character,” Liz said.

“You know something. They all are. Every one I meet is at least a little bit nuts.”

“That’s for sure. You going out again?”

“I don’t know. What time is it?”

“Almost six.”

“I made a hundred dollars already. A couple of quarter tricks earlier, and now this. I suppose I should make a few more dollars. I really should, I could hustle and make another hundred but I just don’t feel like it.”

“I know what you mean.”

“But I really should.”

“You got a money problem, Jan?”

“That says it, all right.”

“An emergency or something? Or have you got a man who expects a lot?”

I considered and rejected the West Indian pimp. “No man,” I said.

“Thank God for that. I didn’t think you were the type. Some of these girls are crazy. I mean they’re really crazy. What they go through to earn money, and then they give it all to some son of a bitch who what does he give them but abuse. I’m sorry but I don’t see the point.”

“Neither do I.”

“You take a girl like Barbara Jo, she’s the little red-haired kid who sometimes calls herself Barbara Jo and sometimes BJ?” I nodded, knowing who she meant. “She gives me a lot of shit about how I don’t know what love is. Now nobody should have to listen to lines like that, right? I don’t know what love is. But she, she’s the authority. She ever talk to you about her man?”

“She wanted me to meet him. I told her I had a man of my own.”

“Very intelligent, Jan. Very smart. I happen to know a little about this man of hers. His name is Maurice. He’s a shriveled-up little spade about the height of a fireplug with this comical wrinkled-up face. I swear what he looks like is a monkey. It’s comical to see him with Barbara Jo, who’s little herself, but when you see him walking down the street with a pair of six-foot blonds it’s too much. He looks as though he’s walking a pair of Great Danes on leashes.

“I’ll tell you something about her Maurice. He has I think it’s eight girls now, all of them hustling like mad and dealing back every time to Maurice. And in return for this Maurice doesn’t even throw them a friendly fuck from time to time, pardon the language.” Pardon the language! “Because he can’t, the little brown jerk. He can’t get hard, this top stud. He can come if you suck him for a month or so, but without getting hard. That’s what BJ gets for her money. That’s how come she knows all about love, and I don’t.”

“Well, girls like that are crazy.”

“Yeah. But you’ve got a money hangup where you don’t know if you should quit after you make a hundred dollars in a day. What’s the problem?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Right, and I’m too nosy.”

“No, it’s not that.”

“Whatever you say.”

Why keep it a secret? For what? I put out one cigarette and lit another and started talking about it. It all came out in a flood. Diarrhea of the mouth, once I started. I couldn’t stop. She was the right kind of listener, not getting in the way or anything.

When I was done she said, “Well, the important thing is to get you an abortion. I know this doctor, he’s really a doctor, not a butcher. Believe me I know about some of those. I’ve had what, four abortions. You would think I would learn what’s causing it, wouldn’t you?”

“Why don’t you take the pill?”

“And get cancer?”

“Jesus, everything gives you cancer. Smoking, soda pop, the stuff they put to keep the bread from getting moldy. Everything in the world gives you cancer.”

“I’ll tell you something, I think the world itself is getting cancer.”

“Maybe. But I’ll take the pill.”

“If you’re going to take it, Jan, take it all the time.”

“Yeah, that’s a point.”

“Anyway, he’ll do this for three hundred dollars. He’s good and he’s clean and he’s safe, and if there are complications afterward you can call him and he’ll come. That’s what kills girls, bleeding afterward and they can’t reach the abortionist and don’t have the brains to call somebody else or go to a hospital. Although I think of hospitals as places to go if you don’t care what happens to you. You wouldn’t get me into one unless they already had the priest for me. Are you a Catholic by any chance?”

“No.”

“Neither am I. Just an expression, having the priest for me. Look, do you have three hundred dollars? Then your troubles are over.”

“Except then I won’t be able to make the rent.”

“So when the landlord comes around you’ll ball him.”

“The landlord is a corporation.”

“Same thing here. That’s some hunk of rent you have to pay. Look, get the abortion first and then you’ll worry about it, right?”

I suppose she’s right. I’m seeing her tomorrow and then we’ll arrange a time and place for the abortion. The thing that bothers me is I’m sure I won’t be able to work afterward for at least a few days and maybe a few weeks. I don’t know how long it takes before one’s plumbing is back in working order. Are all abortions the same?

That’s obviously a stupid question. There are obviously at least two kinds of abortions, the ones where the girl lives and the ones where she doesn’t.

Cheerful thought.

July 29

Today’s the day.

I know it’s stupid to be afraid. So I’m stupid. I can’t help it. Somebody’s going to reach up me and cut something out. Of course I’m afraid.

And I’m reaching the point where I start wondering about the kid. The one that’s getting cut out in a few hours. I wonder which fuck caused it and whose kid it is. Whose kid it would be, that is, if it were going to get the chance to be a kid.

I’ll tell you something, my kid that I’ll never get to tell anything to, I’ll tell you this much. You’re not missing a hell of a lot. The game’s not worth the candle.

What bothers me more, frankly, is the question of what kind of abortion I’m going to have for three hundred dollars when the going rate is supposed to be something like three times that figure. According to Liz, this is a class doctor, but if so why am I getting a bargain basement abortion? She says he’s an occasional John and gets a kick out of aborting hookers. I suppose that’s possible. There’s nothing too odd or unusual for it to be some man’s personal kick.

Actually if he bungles the job and I die I think I’m ahead of the game. If nothing else it would certainly take some of the pressure off. Because I don’t see how I’m going to be able to make the rent. It’s due the first of the month, which is like three days from now. I’ve got three hundred for the abortion and another hundred and a half, and I won’t be earning anything for a week after that. (Maybe I could at that. Such a high percentage of tricks are simple blow jobs that I could probably keep body and soul together without using my snatch at all. Not the first day, of course, but pretty soon.)

Oh, everything will work out. I know it will. Liz keeps insisting she’ll lend me the money, and alternately invites me to move in with her until I get back on my feet. I hate to borrow from her but I also hate to give up this place. I know it costs more than it’s worth and more than I can afford and all that but I still like it.

I guess I’ll stay with her after the operation, though. I gather it’s a bad time to be alone. If anything does go wrong (I keep telling myself nothing will go wrong, but myself doesn’t even begin to believe this), you want to have someone else around to call for help.

Also they say it’s a dangerous time emotionally. You can have a perfect operation and be recovering very nicely and you get hit by this fantastic wave of depression and do yourself in. I don’t find this hard to understand. I’m pretty depressed and I haven’t even gone in yet.

August 9

How frustrating! This fucking book (and looking through it, that’s exactly what it is, a fucking book, since that’s what most if not all of the entries seem to be about) is habit-forming. A week or two can go by without an entry, but when I want to write something and the book’s not around, that’s something else again. I go into insulin shock.

The abortion was a breeze. (I suddenly get the lovely image of a column of cold air tunneling up my cunt and aborting me, the abortion as breeze.) It was not nearly the horror I kept anticipating, and it was over and done with quickly, and then I napped for an hour and he examined me and sent me on my way, along with a couple of bottles of pills.

I stayed with Liz. Stayed there until today, as a matter of fact, which is why I’ve been having withdrawal symptoms over the damned diary, which I couldn’t get to.

There were all sorts of things I wanted to record, but that’s the thing about a diary, if you don’t put them down at the time the impulse gradually diminishes, and by the time you have a chance you wonder what it was about, the whole thing that was fresh in your mind.

Of course Liz went right on tricking during this time. Even the first day, when I had to stay in bed. The couch in the living room is a Castro, and she opened it up and turned a couple of tricks on it while I lay in bed in the bedroom and listened to the springs squeaking and wondered whether I was going to live or die. After the first day I wasn’t stuck in bed anymore and I would sit drinking coffee in the living room while she balled her tricks in the bedroom.

There was something interesting that happened that would have gone into the diary but it has become very vague in my mind since then, so the hell with it.

Liz paid my rent. She insisted, and I didn’t argue very hard. She says I can pay her back once I’m back on my feet. Once I’m back off my feet is more like it. I can’t earn any money on my feet.

Anyway, I’ve been on them since yesterday. I took far too long to go back and work the bars again. It didn’t have anything to do with the abortion, I don’t think. I don’t see how it could have. The doctor said four days before resuming relations, and I took twice that length of time, and there were no complications and no pain, so I obviously was stalling.

Yesterday I made eighty dollars. I took my tricks to Liz’s place. Her idea. You really have to have a place to take these men, and having a hotel you can get into easily the way I did is not the answer. A lot of men just don’t like the idea of going through the aggravation of checking into a hotel, and then they’re in some sterile hotel room and they don’t care for it. I can understand this.

Liz wants me to move in with her. I guess we’re pretty close, and there’s a sexual thing between us that seems fairly strong. Although except for that one phony baloney trick where we put on an act, we haven’t really done anything.

While I stayed there of course we slept together in her bed. And naturally we would cuddle and touch a little, and sometimes sleep in each other’s arms.

Hey! The first person, first and only person, that I have literally slept with since Howie!

As far as living with her goes, I am tempted. It would be nice to have someone around. And Liz is someone I could stand living with.

But I also like this place, damn it. It’s ridiculous for the amount of time I spend here to be paying almost four hundred dollars a month. I could move out. I’d lose the month’s security, but the hell with that. It wouldn’t matter.

Or I could keep this place and split the rent on Liz’s apartment so that I could spend the night there occasionally and use it as a place to take Johns. But if I did that I’d be spending a fortune on rent. It just seems ridiculous to spend that much money on rent.

Actually if there were a two-bedroom apartment in Liz’s building that we could both take, that would be perfect. Or, and this would be even better, now that I think about it, if there were a small apartment in her building that I could take by myself. Because her place isn’t really big enough for two girls to bring dates to at the same time, and also because I think I would like a certain amount of real privacy. A place to sit and write in this book, for example. And have whatever thoughts I want to keep to myself.

I just took a walk around the neighborhood and I felt like a complete stranger. Not just since the abortion, but when I was tricking uptown I found myself spending less and less time around here.

I guess there’s no real point in having an apartment down here anymore.

I wonder where Eric is. And Susan. People keep walking in and out of my life. He might be around—I haven’t been here to answer the phone.

I could go over to his apartment and ring the bell and see what happens. But I won’t do that because I’m afraid he might be there.

There’s an argument for moving. I would just as soon be unfindable by him.

Though I have this irrational feeling that if he really wanted to find me there’s no place on earth I could hide. Like he has this all-seeing eye. I know it’s nonsense but I can’t dismiss the feeling.

August 11

There’s a vacancy coming up as of the fifteenth in Liz’s building. The superintendent showed it to me this afternoon. Just one room and a vestigial kitchen. The bathroom is big enough to turn around in if you plan your moves carefully in advance. Not a bad view, though, of Fifty-fourth Street.

It’s two hundred and ten dollars a month, and I have to take it as of the fifteenth, and my place downtown is paid through the first, not to mention the security, so there’s a lot of money I’m throwing away. But the hell with it, I’m taking it.

If the super had his way he’d rent to no one but whores, according to Liz. She told me how much she gives him at Christmas, and the doormen, and everybody else connected with the place. She really throws money around, and as a result they fall all over themselves to do her favors and open doors for her, and of course she has no hassle about men coming to her apartment. The respectable tenants, meanwhile, sometimes have to wait three months to get a leaky faucet fixed.

I went crazy yesterday and made a hundred and thirty-five dollars.

August 17

I met Howard yesterday. Walking downtown on Lexington between Forty-eighth and Forty-seventh. He was walking uptown, I was walking downtown. And there he was.

Talk about awkward.

Miss Plastic Tits was nowhere to be seen. He was alone, carrying that attaché case that I used to think was welded to his hand. We just stopped in our tracks and stared at each other, each waiting for the other to be the first to say something. When we finally started a conversation it went something like this:

“Well, what do you know.”

“Well, hello.”

“I always wondered when I’d run into you, Jan. A few months ago there was a time when I kept thinking I saw you around town, but I would look and it was never you. You’re looking good.”

“Thank you. You look good yourself.”

“You’ve lost a lot of weight.”

“I’ve been gaining a little back lately.”

“Well, you look good.”

“Well, I—”

“I’ll buy you a drink.”

“Actually I have an appointment.”

“I said I’ll buy you a drink. We have some things to discuss, Jan.”

“I have this appointment.”

“I’ll make a scene.”

“Huh?”

“Listen, bitch. You walked out without looking back. You gave me some bad nights, bitch.”

“I’m sorry about that. Let go of my arm.”

“I will like hell let go of your arm. We have some things to talk about. I want a divorce. I don’t want to wait to talk about it until we happen to run into each other again. No, you can’t brash me, Jan. I’ll raise my voice, I’ll attract attention, I don’t really give a damn.”

“You want a divorce?”

“I’m sure it’s impossible for you to believe that anybody could want a divorce from you. Jesus, you’re sick, do you know that? You’re a sick person, do you know that?”

“Of course I know it.”

“Huh?”

“I don’t especially want a drink, Howard. We can go across the street for coffee. All right?”

We went across the street and had coffee. He had to have my lawyer’s name and address. That was nice, except I didn’t have a lawyer.

“Just a minute.”

“You’re not going anywhere yet.”

“Oh, fuck off, Howard. I have to make a phone call. I won’t go out of your goddamned sight.”

I called Liz. She was back at her place and had just finished turning the first trick of the day. She works a lot by telephone, and gets morning people quite frequently. She calls them the coffee-break crowd.

“Who’s my lawyer?”

I told her why I wanted to know, and she told me the name of her lawyer, who she said is reasonably good. Jason Silverblatt. I love that name. I like to write it, the way it looks on the page. Jason Silverblatt. Jason, wherever you are, whoever you are, I’d ball you for free. I love that name.

“Jason Silverblatt,” I told Howie, and gave him the address. He wrote it all down. “And what else is there to say besides See my lawyer?

“I want your address and phone, too.”

“Up yours.”

“I don’t see how in hell you’re the injured party, Jan. Why come on so strong?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re the one who walked out. Not after a fight, not because I did anything that I know about. You just walked out.”

“I know. You were right before, I’m a bitch.”

“Well, people have problems.”

“Problems. Are you getting married again, Howard?”

“Eventually, I suppose.”

“I mean is that why you want the divorce?”

“Oh. No.”

“Just to get it over with, I suppose.”

“To get rid of loose ends.”

“Sure.”

“There are some girls that I see, one more than the others, but I suppose I’m a little reluctant to get too deeply involved with anybody right now, Jan. Once bitten and all that.”

“Sure.”

“Well, I don’t want to keep you—”

“We might as well finish our coffee.”

“All right.”

So we sat there and finished our coffee, but nothing much else got said. And then he paid for our coffee—poor men, they always pay for everything. And we went our separate ways.

I haven’t even called Silverblatt myself yet. I suppose I ought to. I told Liz I don’t want any alimony from him, or even anything from the house. She told me to take a cash settlement then.

“If you don’t take it, you’re throwing money away. You know what you could get? About half of what he earns from now until the day you remarry, and you’re not going to remarry.”

“But I’ve treated him badly enough already.”

“Men and women always treat each other badly. It’s a law of nature.”

“You know, I think that might be true.”

“Of course it’s true. Would I lie to you? Listen, at least talk it over with Jason Silverblatt. I’m sure you can get five or ten thousand dollars in cash just for signing a paper saying good-bye, Charlie.”

“I looked at him today and I wanted to take him home with me.”

“You’ve got the hots for him all of a sudden? For your own husband?”

“No, it wasn’t that. A pity thing, I guess. He looked so pathetic.”

“Terrific. You screwed him up and you feel sorry for it and now you want to screw him up some more.”

“I know it doesn’t make sense. That’s why I didn’t do anything about it. It was just an impulse.”

“You have to watch these impulses.”

“I know.”

“You take the money. He had the best years of your life, the son of a bitch.”

Maybe she’s right.

August 22

I had an orgasm whipping a John.

I thought it would be impossible to come with a John. It isn’t. Every once in a while one of them gets to you. Of course they never know the difference, because you fake it anyway, so it all comes to the same thing.

I don’t too much love the S-and-M stuff. I had this one a few days ago who wanted his balls spanked. That was what he wanted. I was supposed to suck him into a state of magnificent erection, then take my mouth away and hold his cock out of the way with my one hand and slap him across the scrotum with the other until he got his gun. He kept wanting me to hit him harder, and I was certain I was going to hit him too hard and ruin him for life. I kept hitting him and eventually he got where he was going. He shot all over himself, the hair on his chest and everything. I let him take a shower, the poor son of a bitch.

This one today, it was more ordinary. I whipped him with his leather belt across the behind. Maybe because I wasn’t touching him and he was just whimpering quietly I was able to trip way out on my own private thoughts and associations, and I got into various similar experiences I had had, things with Susan and Eric, and it got to me, and surprise! I came.

It’s funny when that happens when you didn’t expect it.

August 25

The weather has been really impossible lately. It’s just too hot to breathe. Of course the apartment is air-conditioned and so is Liz’s place but even so the heat has to get to you. You take one step out of doors and you literally wilt.

You would think, or at least I would think, that the men would wait for cooler weather. Who wants to screw in weather like this?

But nothing stops them.

August 29

I can almost pay Liz back already. Not for the kindness, that will take a long, long while to pay back, but for the actual cash.

It constantly amazes me how much money there is in this line of work. There is really a tremendous amount of money involved. I keep thinking about those jobs I once considered, five days a week of nine to five for a hundred and ten dollars a week.

Girls prettier than I am have jobs like that, and for what? Self-esteem?

September 1

Still no break in the heat.

I keep thinking, when I’m with one man or another, that here’s one I’ll want to write about in my diary. A couple of times I find myself sitting down determined to write about one of them and then I change my mind and don’t write anything at all, I close the book and go out or go upstairs and talk with Liz or something.

Evidently I don’t want to write about them.

I guess what it amounts to is they cease to have anything going for them, any aura, that has sufficient impact upon me to leave me with something I have to get rid of by getting it all down in pen and ink. I mean getting it down in black and white. Pen and ink is what I use to get it down in black and white. (Except that the pen and ink are sort of a stable entry, this being a ball-point pen, so that when you’re out of ink you’re out of pen. And the ink is more blue than black. Technology kills clichés.)

Today is the day I’m officially delinquent in my rent down in the Village, which is nothing to worry about since I moved out of there two weeks ago. I wonder what happens now. Is the sculptor hung for the dough because it was a sublet? Well, if he’s in Bolivia or wherever the hell he went to, I don’t see how they can bug him for it. Let them worry.

You know what I miss most about the place? That there were a few dozen cheap restaurants close by that you could go to without worrying how you were dressed. Little Chinese and Italian and Spanish places you could go to in slacks. Here it’s either plastic coffee shops (home of the dollar eighty-five hamburger!) or class restaurants where you have to be dressed and you wind up spending ten dollars, and you feel awkward going there alone anyway.

All in all, though, I like it better here.

September 4

I had a nice high last night. I had a John during the afternoon, an advertising man who decided that he would rather bitch than screw. Mainly about his wife and his ingrate kids and life on Long Island, the whole suburban trap. By the time he got around to balling I was very depressed.

Why, I wonder. I guess there were just too many echoes, it was as if he was Howard talking to me, or even a male version of me talking to me. I don’t know. He brought me down very badly and I didn’t see anyone else that afternoon and didn’t go to the bars that evening.

Around ten the phone rang. It was Liz asking me to come on up if I had nothing better to do. What I had plenty of was nothing better to do, and I went.

She gets this sensational grass from one of her steady Johns. He’s something in advertising or public relations and he’s also a constant pot-smoker, and he’ll come over now and then and get high with her and leave her a couple of ounces of grass because he buys in quantity and has it to spare, and then she’ll fuck him for free. Tit for tat, you might say.

“Come on,” she said. “We’ll get high.”

“I don’t know.”

“You look like you could stand it.”

“I could. I’m so low.”

“Anything special?”

“I don’t know. Looking in mirrors. I don’t know. I had a trick that was a real bringdown.”

“Something he made you do?”

“Something he said.”

“I know the type.”

“No, it wasn’t like that. He didn’t bad mouth me. It was, oh, he got me thinking. I don’t want to talk about it, it’ll just get me deeper into it.”

“So we’ll get high and cure all that.”

“The last time I got high all I got was low.” The last two times, actually. I had bad-tripped, thought I was dying, having a heart attack, everything. Very scary. “The mood I’m in, who knows where it’ll go?”

“I will guarantee a good trip.”

“How?”

“Simple. First we smoke, then we take us some ups. Nothing easier.”

“I thought speed and grass were a bad combination.”

“Then so are carrots and peas. Believe me, Jan, would I do you a bad turn?”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Because we love each other like sisters, right?”

“Right.”

“And even more.”

“Right.”

“And believe me, I am very anxious to ball you. I am very anxious to do something related to sex that doesn’t have a man or a dollar involved in it. Let’s smoke.”

“Sure.”

“Gimme a cigarette.”

I told her she only likes to smoke with me because I have the cigarettes. I gave her one and she dumped all the tobacco out and replaced it with grass. We smoked it in deep desperate drags. I started to feel it almost instantly and knew it was going to be good.

We got giggly high and laughed about everything. Liz got us each a small handful of pep pills and we washed them down with wine. They were Dexamyls, with the Dexedrine balanced by a tranquilizer so you don’t get too paranoid or jittery. I swallowed them and drank a little wine and smoked a tobacco cigarette and sat there waiting for the ups to hit. They hit like little bombs going off in the forehead. Kapow! Kapow!

We just couldn’t stop making love. We haven’t been doing it much lately. Most of the time neither of us seems to have any real desire. A librarian doesn’t want to spend the night with a good book. Mailmen don’t go hiking on the weekends.

But a good orgy once in a while is nice. And oh, it was nice last night. We were behind all that grass and we had the speed to focus everything, and there was nobody around but the two of us, nobody taking advantage, nobody to be taken advantage of, no money changing hands, no worries, none of that shit. Just the two of us in bed making lazy girl sex.

She has this vibrator she uses on Johns. It fits on the back of your hand and vibrates. (So what else would a vibrator do, dimwit?) We took turns giving each other massages. I used the vibrator on her breasts and behind and she came like constantly and then did the same to me. It’s a fantastic thing. You can’t help responding, it’s an involuntary reaction whether you want it or not. Really fantastic.

All squirmy and loving together.

I love eating her. I love it sinfully much. Her thighs around my head and my hands holding onto her ass and my mouth just gobbling away. Like an infant at the breast. And her mouth on me at the same time, circulating sex back and forth, back and forth.

I get this image in my head of the Yin and Yang symbol, each half feeding into the other. Yin and Yang and Sixty-nine.

Now it’s the next afternoon and I still haven’t gotten to sleep. We were at each other all night and with all that speed we couldn’t get to sleep at all. I think it should wear off sometime tonight. In a minute I’ll go out and earn my daily bread. A guy called, he’s coming over at four-thirty, the usual quarter trick, but I ought to be able to turn a couple before then and one or two after he goes. Get the money home before the pills wear off and it’s time to crash.

September 6

I know it’s just a reaction to the speed. At least I have the intelligence to know that much. But what good does it do me to know it?

I wish I were dead.

Was dead. Were dead. Who the hell cares?

I just drag myself around. All I can think of is what a fucking mess I’ve made of my life. What a complete mess.

Jason Silverblatt called. I couldn’t talk with him. I simply couldn’t bring myself to talk with him. I can manage a trick because that’s automatic, but I couldn’t talk to my lawyer. I told him to call back sometime.

I wonder if he’ll waste his time with me. Lawyers must be used to dealing with crazy people. They must have this sort of thing all the time.

Something Liz said. I should get a good settlement from Howard because I gave him the best years of my life. What a worn-out expression!

But it’s probably true. The best years of my life. The best years of my life are over now.

What’s left?

September 9

I’m a little better.

Silverblatt says we can get alimony of around ten thousand dollars a year or we can get a full cash settlement of somewhere between twenty-five and fifty thousand dollars. That seems much too high to me. Why should Howard have to pay me that kind of money? It would be different if I had his children. But I don’t. And I’m fully capable of supporting myself. In fact I think I can probably earn more than he does.

I didn’t know what to say. Silverblatt also said he thought we should settle as soon as possible, and should go for the cash, because if Howard happened to smarten up and find out what I am doing for a living and spend a little money on detectives he could probably divorce me right off the bat and not pay me a cent.

I suppose I’ll tell him to take the money. But I don’t even know what I’ll do with it.

September 12

Liz says a John of hers is perfect if I come into a lot of cash. He’s a broker and he does fantastically for her, and another John took some of her cash and put it into an apartment house in Borough Park that she never sees but gets money from four times a year.

September 23

Went shopping, bought clothes I’ll probably never wear. Why bother?

Oh, it’s something to do. I didn’t feel like a movie.

Wow, what a glamorous life.

October 2

Saw David on the street today. I don’t think he saw me, or if he did he didn’t recognize me, which is possible. I have changed since I knew him.

I really thought he and Arnold were dead. That Eric had killed them. I couldn’t ever figure out a reason why that might have happened, but I believed it.

I wonder why they disappeared.

I almost went up and said something. Like hello, for example. But I don’t know, I didn’t really have anything to say to him. What was there to say? There was a time when I really would have wanted to spend more time with those two, but they weren’t around then, and now—

I have to feed Herringbone.

Herringbone is my kitten. I’ve had him for a week and I’m doing everything possible to spoil him. It’s amazing how intelligent cats are. When I brought Herringbone home he was six weeks old and small enough to fit in an evening bag, but he knew instantly that he was supposed to pee and crap in the litter pan. And he never makes a mistake.

Herringbone doesn’t have any balls. If a cat has balls when he grows up he runs around pissing on everything and it stinks. The faggot at Precious Felines explained all this at great length. He was a good deal more cultured about it, let me add.

I wonder if he knew I was a whore?

Of course I don’t wear a sign. Nor does he wear a sign announcing that he’s a faggot.

Anyway, you have to castrate cats to make them behave. Same as men, I guess.

Why did I write that?

Oh, stop looking for hidden meanings, Giddings. Haven’t you figured out yet that the more you learn about yourself the less you like yourself?

This is boring. I’ll go feed Herringbone. He loves me and I love him.

Everybody needs somebody, right?

October 12

You’ve come a long way, baby

To get where you got to today.

You’ve got your own cigarette now baby.

You’ve come a long, long way.

I heard that on the radio today, not for the first time, and suddenly I can’t get it out of my head. I thought I would drag the book out and write it down in case it’s trying to tell me something. If so, I can’t get the message.

It’s Columbus Day.

January 5

Yes, you’ve come a long long way, all right.

All the way to the end.

When I found this and opened it and started to read I didn’t remember exactly when I had given up writing in it. There was no sudden decision to stop making entries.

It was more like an unanswered letter. At first you just put off answering it, and then you try to avoid thinking about it and file it in out-of-the-way places because you’re embarrassed and angry at yourself for not having answered it yet, and in the long run it never does get answered. I don’t know what it was in particular that made me stop writing in this diary after the Columbus Day entry.

Actually there’s nothing surprising about it. What’s surprising is that I kept the diary going as long as I did. Talking to myself through this book.

Much good it did me.

I can hardly recognize the woman who wrote those early entries. She expressed herself differently, she saw the world and herself differently.

She was so afraid of growing up.

Or growing old.

Or something.

Thirty. Magic number. Well, today’s the day, and I don’t feel any different. And if the mirror thinks I look any different than a day ago, well, it keeps the secret nicely.

Thirty.

What an odd document this is, what a record of what a fractured life. Howie has his divorce now and I have my money in the bank. In the bank? In the hands of experts who will turn money into more money.

Wonderful.

But what’s the money for?

I know why girls have pimps. To keep themselves broke. Because if they aren’t broke they won’t go out and hustle, and if they don’t go out and hustle they take too-long looks in their mirrors, and they see too much, and they have nothing to do but brood about it.

I guess I don’t like being thirty.

I guess I don’t like being me, at any age.

Oh Jesus fucking Christ, why was this book there today, why did I have to pick it up and read it? Howard and Edgar and the kid with the snow shovel and Eric and Susan and David and Arnold and everyone else, the ones I wrote about and the ones I didn’t, the ones I remember and the ones I’ve forgotten. And that last entry, You’ve come a long, long way. I really needed that shit today.

It’s all downhill from here. It has to be, where the hell else can it go? What do I look forward to now? Grandchildren? A trailer camp in Florida?

Not bloody likely.

Be a good time to end it. Get off the stage while they’re still applauding.

Why not?

No guts.

Guts? It doesn’t take guts. First you dope yourself up a little with a couple of Dilaudids and then you have a few drinks of wine and then you swallow the sleeping pills. Once you’re drunk enough to be brave there’s nothing much to it, and you don’t hate yourself in the morning because there’s nobody around to hate.

But who’d take care of Herringbone? And it wouldn’t be fair to involve him in a suicide pact. He should have some choice in the matter.

I don’t think I’ll do it. The hell, I’ll wait until next year.

A New Afterword by the Author

Jill Emerson was born in 1964, in Tonawanda, New York, where she wrote a sensitive novel of a young woman’s emerging sexual identity as a lesbian. Midwood Tower published it as Warm and Willing. Later that year I moved to Racine, Wisconsin, and wouldn’t you know it? Jill came along with me, and in due course Midwood published Enough of Sorrow. Same theme, different characters, and a dandy epigraph in the form of a poem by Mary Carolyn Davies. Another of Ms. Davies’ poems is quoted in one of my Bernie Rhodenbarr books, and all of this leads me to the suspicion that Jill Emerson and I are the only persons left who could even recognize the woman’s name.

Then Jill went into retirement.

It wasn’t hard for her to disappear. No one but an editor or two at Midwood ever knew she existed, and they had no idea she was me. I agented those two books myself, submitting them over the transom, and some day I’ll have to publish the letters Ms. Emerson and her publishers exchanged. I haven’t held on to much of my correspondence, but those were keepers.

A few years later I was living on twenty-two rolling acres in West Central New Jersey, a mile from the Delaware River. There was a new frankness to be found in mainstream American fiction, and a number of prominent writers were using words and describing actions that were well beyond the pale of the old Nightstand Books /Midwood/ Beacon Books days. Berkley Books, a paperback arm of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, decided that what the literary world could use was a line of candid erotic novels, and my agent, Henry Morrison, figured this would be right up my alley.

He peddled me to them as one Lawrence Josephson. I don’t know how Henry picked that name but suspect he wanted to guard against the possibility of referring to me as Larry by mistake. (It is a propensity of the nonwriter, incidentally, when forced to devise an alias, to choose a first name or variant thereof as a surname. Williams, Andrews, Thomas, Davidson—that sort of thing. Don’t ask me why.) I don’t know who Mr. Josephson was supposed to be, but unspecified circumstances in his life required that he employ a pen name and I told Henry I’d use the name Jill Emerson. That was OK with him, and OK with Berkley, and the first book I wrote for them was this one, which I called Thirty.

Around this time I was having a problem with fiction.

I wasn’t having a trouble writing it, and I wasn’t even having trouble selling it—although I sometimes had difficulty living on what I earned from it. No, the problem I was having was a little different.

I was having trouble believing in it.

I mean, here’s this novel, any novel, and what am I to make of it? Who’s telling us this story? If it’s in the third person, whether single- or multiple-viewpoint, where did these words come from? What are they doing on the page?

And even if it’s the most natural sort of presentation, with a first-person narrator recounting his story to me, where’d he come from and why is he nattering in my ear? And in fact it’s not his voice in my ear, it’s his words on the page, and how did they get there?

Yes, I know. It’s a convention. In the Soviet Union, a worker explained the system thus: “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” In the novel, there’s a comparable mutual pretense in effect.

Still, it bothered me.

And I found myself more interested in works of fiction in which part of the premise held that they were documents. I was impressed by Sue Kaufman’s Diary of a Mad Housewife, and Mark Harris’s brilliant epistolary novel, Wake Up, Stupid. A couple of my novels pretended to be true-life novels authored by their protagonists, and Such Men Are Dangerous (by and about one Paul Kavanagh) and No Score (by and about Chip Harrison) are examples thereof.

Thus Thirty. Although this book wouldn’t pretend to be other than the fictional creation of Jill Emerson, it would be written in the form of a diary.

One of the currents of thought that gave rise to Thirty was the notion that turning thirty was an epochal point in a woman’s life, that it was some sort of line of demarcation. If nothing else, a thirtieth birthday was surely an event.

How well the book I wrote elaborated on this premise is not for me to say. But it was enough of a part of the fabric of the book so that I never doubted what I wanted to call the thing.

Thirty, of course. And the title had an extra little measure of significance. In the newspaper business, this is what you put at the end of your copy, to show that it was finished:

-30-

Now I don’t know where this came from, although you can Google your way to a couple of explanations that seem at least half-plausible. Thirty—an end, a beginning, a turning point. Whatever.

Then some moron changed the title.

All right, these things happen. And in the world of paperback originals they happened rather often, and the author was rarely consulted. Often the first he knew of it was when he held a copy of the printed book in his hands.

Here’s what they changed it to: I Am Curious Thirty

That makes little enough sense on the face of it, and even less when you know the reference. A year or so before the book came out, a sexually adventurous Swedish film was released in America with the English title I Am Curious—Yellow. That title didn’t mean much of anything, as far as I can tell, although it may be just plain terrific in Swedish. But Thirty’s new title was designed, I guess, to make people think of this Swedish film, which by then had pretty much disappeared from this country’s consciousness, not to mention its theaters.

Oh, never mind.

Jill Emerson followed Thirty with a book she called Three. That was changed to Threesome, which was probably an improvement, truth to tell. Next came A Madwoman’s Diary, another shot at diary form, and that title was changed to Sensuous. Next came a novel in the form of letters to and from the protagonist—but so many people who read it liked it so much that I put my own name on it instead of Jill’s, and sent it not to Berkley but to some hardcover publishers. Bernard Geis published it with my title: Ronald Rabbit is a Dirty Old Man.

But that’s another story. In fact it’s a whole batch of other stories, to be recounted elsewhere.

I hope you enjoyed this one.

-30-

—Lawrence Block
Greenwich Village
Lawrence Block (lawbloc@gmail.com) welcomes your email responses; he reads them all, and replies when he can.

A Biography of Lawrence Block

Lawrence Block (b. 1938) is the recipient of a Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and an internationally renowned bestselling author. His prolific career spans over one hundred books, including four bestselling series as well as dozens of short stories, articles, and books on writing. He has won four Edgar and Shamus Awards, two Falcon Awards from the Maltese Falcon Society of Japan, the Nero and Philip Marlowe Awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, and the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association of the United Kingdom. In France, he has been awarded the title Grand Maitre du Roman Noir and has twice received the Societe 813 trophy.

Born in Buffalo, New York, Block attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Leaving school before graduation, he moved to New York City, a locale that features prominently in most of his works. His earliest published writing appeared in the 1950s, frequently under pseudonyms, and many of these novels are now considered classics of the pulp fiction genre. During his early writing years, Block also worked in the mailroom of a publishing house and reviewed the submission slush pile for a literary agency. He has cited the latter experience as a valuable lesson for a beginning writer.

Block’s first short story, “You Can’t Lose,” was published in 1957 in Manhunt, the first of dozens of short stories and articles that he would publish over the years in publications including American Heritage, Redbook, Playboy, Cosmopolitan, GQ, and the New York Times. His short fiction has been featured and reprinted in over eleven collections including Enough Rope (2002), which is comprised of eighty-four of his short stories.

In 1966, Block introduced the insomniac protagonist Evan Tanner in the novel The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep. Block’s diverse heroes also include the urbane and witty bookseller—and thief-on-the-side—Bernie Rhodenbarr; the gritty recovering alcoholic and private investigator Matthew Scudder; and Chip Harrison, the comical assistant to a private investigator with a Nero Wolfe fixation who appears in No Score, Chip Harrison Scores Again, Make Out with Murder, and The Topless Tulip Caper. Block has also written several short stories and novels featuring Keller, a professional hit man. Block’s work is praised for his richly imagined and varied characters and frequent use of humor.

A father of three daughters, Block lives in New York City with his second wife, Lynne. When he isn’t touring or attending mystery conventions, he and Lynne are frequent travelers, as members of the Travelers’ Century Club for nearly a decade now, and have visited about 150 countries.

A four-year-old Block in 1942.

Block during the summer of 1944, with his baby sister, Betsy.

Block’s 1955 yearbook picture from Bennett High School in Buffalo, New York.

Block in 1983, in a cap and leather jacket. Block says that he “later lost the cap, and some son of a bitch stole the jacket. Don’t even ask about the hair.”

Block with his eldest daughter, Amy, at her wedding in October 1984.

Seen here around 1990, Block works in his office on New York’s West 13th Street with, he says, “a bad haircut, an ugly shirt, and a few extra pounds.”

Block at a bookstore appearance in support of A Walk Among the Tombstones, his tenth Matthew Scudder novel, on Veterans Day, 1992.

Block and his wife, Lynne.

Block and Lynne on vacation “someplace exotic.”

Block race walking in an international marathon in Niagara Falls in 2005. He got the John Deere cap at the John Deere Museum in Grand Detour, Illinois, and still has it today.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

copyright © 1970 by Lawrence Josephson

cover design by Elizabeth Connor

ISBN: 978-1-4532-0933-2

This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media
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New York, NY 10014
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