Authors: Lawrence Block
Thirty (11 page)
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
Today is the fifth straight day this month in which I did not kill myself.
See how I am sustained by tiny triumphs!
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?
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.