Authors: Lawrence Block
Thirty (13 page)
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.