Donald E. Westlake

Adios, Scheherazade

This is for Norman Mulonet

1

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.

I’m supposed to write a dirty book now. It is one-thirty in the afternoon, Fred is asleep, Betsy is at the A&P, it is the 21st day of November, the year of my God! 1967, and I have ten days in which to write Opus Number 29. In E flat. Scherzo, please.

What the heck am I doing? I put the paper in the typewriter, I typed the number 1 midway down the left margin, I quadruple-spaced, I indented five, and then I was supposed to write the first sentence of this month’s dirty book. So what do I think I’m doing? I’m sitting here typing nonsense, I’m supposed to be typing sex.

I can’t think about it, that’s the problem. I sit here and I look at the paper, the typewriter keys, the desk, the Bic ballpoint pen, the yellow Ticonderoga pencil, the round red eraser with the bushy green tail, and I wind up thinking things like how many words are in Ticonderoga. Ago. Tide. Recoating.

What kind of crap is that? It’s sex time, lust time, time to get the old cottage industry in high gear. I have till three p.m., November 30th, this year, to get this book written and delivered to Lance or it’s all over, I am up the flue, down the chute, in the dustbin and out on my ear. Lance does not tell jokes, and he does not make empty threats. “I’m sorry, Edwin,” he said, and he sounded sorry.

That was on the phone. I never see Lance except on the phone, if you know what I mean. Maybe he knows he’s more effective that way, with nothing but the calm sincere persuasive voice, the voice that belongs with the name Lance. Lance Pangle. You’d think he’d have changed the last name too. Rod says he had to keep it for tax reasons or business reasons or something like that, but I say no. I say the bastard’s too egotistical to become a pen name for himself. Maurice Pangle was horrible, and because (grudgingly I admit) the rat does have brains he knew it was horrible, he knew it would be a disadvantage in business dealings. And I can see why he didn’t keep the first name; Maurice itself is horrible, and the only name on earth it goes with is Evans, and that’s taken. So he changed his first name. Lance Pangle. The front half of a cowboy hero and the back half of his horse.

The voice invokes the front half. It is a gentlemanly trombone, the softest baritone in the world. The moods it implies are gentle, quiet, civilized. He can call out the firing squad and then say, “I’m sorry, Edwin,” and really and truly sound sorry.

“I’ll get it in on time, Lance,” I promised, and I wanted to sound determined and responsible, but I have the bad feeling I sounded like somebody already on the chute.

I’m a square peg in a round hole, that’s what it is, forgive the sexual reference. I’m no more a writer than I am an astronaut. I’m no more a writer than I am a—. (Fill in the blank with your three favorite occupations.)

Rod warned me. “Nobody can do this shit forever,” he said. “You gotta remember it’s only temporary.”

How could I pay any attention? In the first place he was saying “shit,” in my mother’s living room, with my mother sitting right there. In the second place he’d come up from New York with Sabina Del Lex, and they were staying together in the same motel room out at the Howard Johnson by the Thruway exit, and all I could do was try not to look at Sabina’s thighs. And in the third place I didn’t intend to do this shit forever.

A year and a half, that’s what I said. Rod came up to Albany in January of 1965, late in January. I got his letter the first week in January, and I wrote back and said hell yes I’m interested, and he drove up in that red MG with Sabina sometime toward the end of the month.

It was the money he kept talking about, and it was the money I was most interested in. I was a college graduate (class of ’64 gang!), and I was married, and I was living at home with my mother and working for Capital City Beer Distributors. And Betsy was seven months pregnant, which is another reason I was refusing to look at Sabina’s thighs.

I’ve had a letch for Sabina Del Lex ever since Rod first brought her up to Albany and introduced her to me. Me to her. No, since before that. When I’d seen her on TV on that General Electric clock-radio commercial, she was so obviously hot to grab that clock-radio and shove it in that I quick ran off and humped Betsy. And now here she was in my house — my mother’s house — and Betsy was just a few days from the beginning of the six weeks of nothing, and was as big as a hippopotamus anyway, and I was damned if I was going to look at Sabina’s thighs.

Where was I? Money. Rod said they paid twelve hundred dollars for one of these books. “It used to be a thousand, but Lance Jewed them up.”

Betsy said, “That isn’t a phrase, is it? Isn’t it Jewed them down?”

So I looked at Sabina’s thighs. Milky white, shadowed above. Eyes too. Gray, milky whites, shadowed above. I wondered if Rod neglected her. I hoped so. I began to fantasize: One o’clock in the morning. A phone call. Sabina. “Rod just passed out in the car, you know how he drinks, I can t do anything with him. I wouldn’t bother you, Ed, but I don’t know anyone else in Albany.”

“No trouble at all. I’ll be right over.”

Betsy: “What’s the matter, Ed?” Half asleep, sitting up in bed, blinking at me.

Me: “Rod’s passed out drunk. I won’t be long.”

Over to the motel. Sabina worried, wringing her hands. Rod lying in his vomit. I carry him into the room, undress him, put him to bed. Sabina: “Ed, I really appreciate this.”

Me: “Not at all.”

Some conversation ensues, too boring to fantasize, and we next come into focus with the two of us sitting on her bed — twin beds, right? — drinking scotch out of water glasses. She is telling me how unhappy she is. She starts to cry. I put my arm around her. She cries against my shoulder. I put my hand on her thigh, it’s so cool, so smooth, so gentle, so civilized, so absolutely insane-making. I slide my hand up to white panties. She sighs against my throat. We lie back on the bed. I’ve got a hard-on a pole vaulter would envy. We get our clothing off, she’s a tigress, she moves like an exploding mainspring, I come too soon, she says, “Is that all?”

Damn it. Why do all my fantasies turn against me? My trouble is, I never manage to get them hermetically sealed. A little reality begins to creep in, like mist under a door. Like tear gas around the edges of the mask.

I was talking about money. I’m having the same trouble concentrating on money instead of Sabina that I had that day in January of 1965 in my mother’s living room in Albany, New York, a very crappy city in which I grew up, but in which I was not born.

I was born somewhere in the South Pacific, in point of fact, on the aircraft carrier USS Glenn Miller. It was the high point of my life so far.

“When the price goes from a thousand,” Rod told Betsy, “to twelve hundred, the phrase is, he Jewed them up.” Rod always treats Betsy with exaggerated courtesy and overfull explanations, the sort of contempt you can’t call him on. Even if I disagreed with him, which I don’t.

Anyway, he then turned back to me. “You use my pen name,” he said, “so it’s a guaranteed sale. You get a thousand, I get the two hundred. Less commission, ten per cent commission. That makes your cut nine hundred.”

“To do a book a month,” I said. My mind was full of Sabina’s thighs and my need for money. I was too excited to make decisions.

“To do a book in ten days every month,” he said.

“I’ll never do a book in ten days.”

Well, I was wrong. I’ve done twenty-eight books, and twenty-four of them were done each in ten days. The first one took almost three months, but that’s because I was learning how, and Fred was born then, in March, and up till then I’d never even thought about being a writer.

“If you can write a grammatical letter,” Rod told me, “you can write a sex novel.”

“Rod,” I said, “you are a writer. When we were freshmen you were a writer. You came to college and you said, ‘I’m a writer.’ I’m not a writer.”

“You don’t have to be a writer to write sex novels,” he said. “I know half a dozen guys doing this, they aren’t writers, they never will be writers, they’re making ten grand a year doing it.”

“That’s a lot of money,” I said. I was making seventy-one twenty-five at Capital City Beer Distributors. A week. That’s three thousand seven hundred and five dollars a year. My mother, waiting table at Limurges Restaurant, was bringing home over a hundred a week, but that was still only five thousand a year. Ten thousand, my God, ten thousand is two hundred dollars a week! That’s why I said, “That’s a lot of money.”

“That’s why I think you oughta try it,” he said.

Which is when it occurred to me that ten thousand a year is what he was offering me! What with Sabina’s thighs and my mother sitting right in the same room with her hands full of argyle socks and that red MG out front and Betsy giving everybody her furrowed brow expression of being lost forever at sea, I hadn’t done my arithmetic up till then. Nine hundred dollars a book, he’d said. A book a month, he’d said. That was ten thousand eight hundred dollars a year. That isn’t divisible into weeks, it comes out two hundred seven dollars and sixty-nine cents with.0023076923076923076923076923 etc. left over.

“Will you try it?” he said.

“What can I lose?” I said, being cool because I was so excited I was about to froth at the mouth.

He explained what I was supposed to do. There was a formula and a system. There was practically a blueprint. It was the closest thing to carpentry you can imagine. As a matter of fact, I don’t see at all why I couldn’t write up the formula and sell it to Popular Mechanics.

Here’s the way it goes. There are four sex novel stories, which we will number 1 through 4:

1 — A boy in a small town wants to see the world. He screws his local sweetheart goodbye and goes to the big city. In the big city he gets a job and meets a succession of people, mostly female, and lays them all. Typical sequences are hitching to New York and being given a ride by a bored but beautiful wife in a convertible, or getting a job in a store and meeting a nymphomaniac in the stockroom, or going to pick up a date and meeting her nymphomaniac roommate instead. At the end of all this crap the boy can do one of three things. He can go back to the small town and the local sweetheart. He can marry one of the big city girls. He can become ruthless and shaft one of the big city girls and wind up alone. It doesn’t matter which of the three, any one of them will give your sludge that redeeming social significance which will prohibit the cops from confiscating it. All resolutions are emotional — sad, happy, pointed, poignant, cynical, sentimental or whatever — so take your pick. You can’t lose.

2 — The same as 1, except with a girl. She leaves her little home town, pausing first to fuck with her little home town boy friend, and then it’s off to the big city for her. The reason she shacks up with her lesbian roommate is she was just raped by her boss. Fill in the details and a few more studs and you’ve got a book. Same jazz about the ending.

3 — La Ronde. Chapter 1 introduces George, who screws Myra. Chapter 2 switches to Myra’s viewpoint, and she makes it with Bruno. In Chapter 3 we follow Bruno as he climbs into the rack with Phyllis. And so on, and so on. The finish here is either to have the last character in bed with the first character, or the last character decides to stay with the next-to-last character and end this chain of meaningless sex. Either way will do.

4 — A bored husband and a bored wife. The chapters alternate between their viewpoints. We watch them having bored sex with each other and less bored sex with other characters. If we make one of them, husband or (more usually) wife, the heavy, we can finish with the heavy getting his (her) comeuppance and the good guy (girl) getting a better girl (guy). If we make them both merely confused and troubled but basically nice, they get back together again at the finish. Redeeming social significance either way, if you’ll notice.

Of course, there are other sex novels that can be written, but why strain? I’ve done a few with a college campus background, but they wind up essentially to be variants on numbers 1 and 2. Rod gave me these four basic outlines, and Rod is a writer and knows what he’s doing. Got his own spy series with Silver Stripe now, under his own name and everything. One of them sold to the movies.

But I’m not done with the formula for sex novels. Your book is one of the four basic stories outlined above, right? Right. It is also fifty thousand words long, and the easiest way to do it is in ten chapters, each five thousand words long, and with a sex scene in each chapter. This means that ten times in every book there are euphemistically described sexual incidents. Generally the incident is a straight fuck between a man and a woman, but sometimes it’s a near fuck with a lot of foreplay, or sixty-nine, or a lesbian interlude, or a girl masturbating. (Boys don’t masturbate in these books, they masturbate on them.) This means that up to today I have described sexual congress or orgasm or some sort of sexual act two hundred and eighty times. It may not surprise you to hear that I’ve tended to repeat myself.

I’m losing the thread again. Ten chapters, five thousand words each, one sex scene each. Once you’ve established which of your four basic plots you’re going to use, the necessity to find somebody for your viewpoint character to get into bed with every five thousand words helps enormously in working out the details of the individual book. You say to yourself, Okay, here we are in Chapter 5, which is told from Maud’s point of view, since her chapters are alternating with Adolf’s. Are there any characters established in the first four chapters with whom Maud could possibly go to bed in Chapter 5? No? Well, what if she went to a bar, see, and got sloshed, and started to tell her troubles to the bartender. Then the bar closes, and the bartender says...

So. Given the formula, and (as Rod says) the ability to write a grammatic letter, you too could write dirty books for a living.

This typewriter uses the smaller size type, elite type, and five thousand words in elite type runs fifteen pages. My manuscripts are exactly one hundred fifty pages long, my chapters exactly fifteen pages long. I do one chapter a day for ten consecutive days, and there’s another book. I was a pretty fast typist before I started doing these books, and I’m a faster typist now, and after the first few books the formula made things very easy for me, so I work an average of four hours a day when I’m doing a book, for a total of forty hours. My pay is nine hundred dollars, and that’s twenty-two dollars and fifty cents an hour.

Where are you going to make twenty-two dollars and fifty cents an hour?

I was making two dollars an hour at Capital City Beer Distributors, and I was working forty hours a week. Riding around in the truck with Jock Dench, rolling the kegs into the bars, carrying the cases of bottled beer and canned beer.

This is the life, you’ve got to admit it. Twenty days a month I don’t have to do anything at all. Ten days a month I do some typing, four hours a day. That’s a soft life.

So why am I screwing it up?

It’s what Rod said: “Nobody can do this shit forever.”

You look at the typewriter one day, and you say to yourself, I don’t want to write about people fucking. I don’t want to write about people going down on each other, I don’t want to write about people fingering themselves and each other, I don’t want to write all those deadly dull preliminary conversations (“I just arrived in New York today,” she said, laughing self-consciously), I don’t want to write pointless stories about pointless people who live in a gray limbo of baroque sex and paper-thin characterization, I don’t want to do this shit any more.

Then you’re in trouble. You do that and you’re in trouble. Do you want to know why you’re in trouble?

Because where are you going to go, clown? If you don’t write these stinking sex novels what are you going to do? You know and I know, Ed, that you cannot, you cannot, you cannot take your wife and baby and move back to Albany and live in your mother’s house again and get your old job back at Capital City Beer Distributors. And you know and I know, Ed, that you cannot do anything else either. You were an English major in college, you studied American Lit, you could have learned to be a refrigerator repairman or a heavy equipment operator but you had to go in for American Lit, you nonsurvival type you, and what are you gonna do now?

I was going to teach. I was planning to go on to graduate school and get my master’s and then teach, preferably at the college level. But the problem was money. Well, money and influence and luck and a lot of other things.

My mother is a waitress, currently at Limurges Restaurant on North Pearl Street in Albany, New York, capital of the Empire State. My father, Hubert Topliss, Army PR man, died in a jeep accident in Hawaii on April 25th, 1944. My stepfather, Ralph Harsch, disappeared toward the end of March 1946, shortly after the birth of my sisters. The family has not exactly been rolling in wealth in the last several years. So that’s one problem.

Another problem is, I picked a college without a graduate school. If I’d gone to a college that had its own graduate school I might have been able to suck around some teacher and wind up with a grant or an assistantship or some damn thing and make it into graduate school that way, but by having been dumb enough to go to a college without a graduate school I had no influence anywhere. Also my marks were not exceptional. They were good, somewhere around a B-minus average, but that isn’t good enough to have anybody put you through graduate school for free.

Actually, my having gone to Monequois College was not entirely the result of stupidity. Being part of the state university, it was almost tuition free, and there were various assistances open to indigent students, so it was possible for me to go to Monequois College, where on the other hand it would not have been possible for me to go, for instance, to Harvard.

So there I was, I graduated from college and I knocked up this girl. I married her, being as noble as I was stupid, and then I had two going on three mouths to feed, and no connections at a graduate school, and no money, and forget it. So I wound up in my home town, Albany, at my mother’s house, and working for Capital City Beer Distributors. Saving eleven or twelve cents a week toward graduate school.

And along came Rod Cox, my college roommate all but our freshman year, and he offered me ten thousand dollars a year for easy lazy work, and I said to myself, It is now January 1965. If I learn how to do these books by April, and then I do a book a month until August 1966, that will be seventeen books, which will be fifteen thousand, three hundred dollars. I can live on four thousand dollars a year, which means my expenses between now and August 1966 will run to about six thousand dollars, which will leave me a cool nine thousand clear. I can get to graduate school with nine thousand dollars, and then do a book every three or four months while I’m in graduate school plus a couple in the summer, say six books a year, that’s fifty-four hundred dollars a year, anybody can go to graduate school on fifty-four hundred dollars a year.

It sounded good. You have to admit it, it sounded good.

Well, August of 1966 came around and I didn’t have nine thousand dollars. I didn’t have nine hundred dollars. What did I have? I had a car, and a lot of furniture, and books and records and clothing and things like that. I had four new inches around my waistline. I had a rented house in Sargass, Long Island, this house in which I am now seated at this Smith-Corona typewriter. I had beer in the refrigerator and scotch in the pantry. I had three hundred seventy-five dollars in the bank.

That was August of 1966. It is now November 21st, 1967, and what do I have?

Two hundred twelve dollars in the checking account.

Where does it go? I don’t know where it goes, I swear to God I don’t know where it goes. Betsy takes money out of my wallet and goes to the A&P and that’s the end of it. I say, “Honey, what did we eat when we used to live in Albany?” She doesn’t know.

I don’t mean she’s extravagant. Hell, I’m more extravagant than she is, I walk into Korvette’s and walk out with two AR-4 speakers. But still and all, ten thousand dollars a year. Where the hell does it go?

The graduate school idea dies hard. I keep saying, “All right, the major expenses are behind us now. We have a car, we have furniture and clothing and all this other junk. Betsy is on the pill, so we won’t have that problem again. So now we can start putting some money aside. If we’re careful we can save six thousand dollars in the next year, and even on six thousand dollars I can surely get into graduate school.”

But it never happens. The money comes in, the money goes out. Baby-sitter, trips to the city, nights out, guests in for dinner. Then there’s the car. It’s a 1964 Buick and there’s always some damn thing wrong with it. Nothing big, never more than twenty or thirty or forty dollars at a time, but it’s all the time, it’s every time.

And I have nobody to talk to about it, you know? If I tried to talk to Betsy she’d either be blank with incomprehension or she’d get terrified and weepy and be sure doom was just around the corner and I was blaming her. So I can’t talk to Betsy and I never could. And the closest my mother and I ever were was back on that aircraft carrier. We never write to each other, but every once in a while one of us phones the other — phone bills, there’s another expense, all those calls to New York, to Rod and Pete and Dick, to Lance, to everybody in the world — where was I in this sentence? I’m not a writer, and even after twenty-eight books I still do that, I get myself into a run-on sentence or an involved sentence where it’s like walking into an enchanted forest. There’s no way out, the entrance is lost in the mist behind you, and there’s nothing to do but keep pushing forward into die quicksand.

Was I talking about my mother? Yes. I reread the last paragraph, not with pleasure, and I see that I was indeed talking about my mother. We see each other at Christmas and other pagan feasts, but we don’t talk to each other. What do I have to say to her? What on earth does she have to say to me? She had a youth with some vivacity in it, she had fun. Part of a girl quartet, the Melogals, off on USO tours, one thing and another. Face it, I’m a drab son. What do I do but sit here in this room and write about people fucking. And before that college. And after that?

The chute. Oblivion. I can’t even think into the future. My past was uninteresting, my present insoluble, my future unimaginable. And unimportant, I suppose.

Shit.

Anyway, what I was saying was that I have nobody to talk to. Not Betsy. Not my mother. Certainly not my sisters. Night and day, those two. Hannah is too incredibly square and righteous and a fucking prig to listen to anybody, and Hester is some sort of insane acid head out in San Francisco or somewhere. They’re twenty-one, and already Hester’s lived five times as much as I ever have or ever will.

The point is, Hannah’s a nurse, the kind of a nurse where the starch starts at the forehead and ends at the toenails. The kind of a nurse that you can tell from looking at her she thinks enjoyment is a sin. She’s consecrated her life, you know what I mean? A shriveled-up virgin at twenty-one, probably a hell of a good nurse, one of these tight-lipped efficient bitches you’d like to dip in a vat of lye.

And Hester’s just the opposite. They’ve got the same face, being twins, and it’s amazing the different things they’ve done with it. You look at Hannah, you know she’s a virgin and always will be. You look at Hester, you know right away she puts out because she loves the cock. It’s in her eyes, in a kind of loose blow-job quality in her smile, in the kind of wave she has in her hair, pretty long hair with a long wave over the right side of the forehead that she’s always pushing back with a movement of arm and head that makes her breasts move. Hannah’s breasts have never moved.

Could I talk to Hester? I don’t know, I suppose I could, I suppose she’d be sympathetic. But at the same time, I can’t help thinking what a schmuck she’d think I was. She’d say, “What the hell’s the matter, Ed? You’re all constipated, honey. Relax. Take it easy. Have a ball.”

Have a ball? How can I have a ball? I have responsibilities, I have Betsy and Fred, I have a house full of furniture and a garage full of Buick. I have a deadline I’m supposed to make.

If I don’t get this rotten book done by the thirtieth, Lance will drop me. I know he will, I am positive of it, there is no question in my mind. He told me so, and he doesn’t make idle threats. Besides, he said, “I’m sorry, Ed.” In that mellifluous voice.

I’m on page 14. This is ridiculous, it’s twenty-five minutes after four, I’ve been sitting here all afternoon typing away and I don’t have a goddam thing done. This isn’t a sex novel, this isn’t anything. This is a piece of shit.

What’s the matter with me?

Betsy’s back. I heard her drive into the garage about an hour ago. She’s out there in the kitchen now, moving around, she hears me typing in here, she thinks I’m doing the November book. What am I going to tell her?

I’ll have to come back in tonight. I mean, no matter how you look at it, this isn’t the first chapter of a dirty book. Although there is a kind of a sex scene in it, the fantasy thing with Sabina.

No. In the first place, I’d have to retype it in order to change the names, I couldn’t use everybody’s real names, and that’d be almost as much trouble as doing another whole chapter. And in the second place, even if this was my first chapter where the hell is my second chapter? You couldn’t have an entire book of crap like this. A fantasy sex scene in each chapter. Lovely.

Besides, the sex scene with Sabina isn’t done at the kind of length we need. Two or three pages of sexual description, that’s what we have to have. All the euphemisms. D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller and all those alleged literary types can say cunt, but us dirty book writers have to say “the hot pulsating core of her being.”

How would you like to write shit like that all the time?

Well, I’ve got to write some shit like that, and I’ve got to do it today. No more fooling around. I have wasted an entire afternoon, I have typed fifteen pages of gibberish, that’s an end on it. Tonight I’ll come back in and start the dirty book.

1

I can’t think of a title.

I’ve been sitting here for half an hour with this sheet of paper in the typewriter, it’s going to come out all wavy, and I’ve been saying to myself, Ed, all you need is a title. Think of a title, then see which of the four basic plots that title makes you think of, then look in the Nassau County phone book on the floor beside your desk, pick a name at random out of it, make that your lead character, and start for God’s sake to write.

But I can’t think of a title.

What I’ve decided is, I’ve got writer’s block. Some of the other guys have talked about it, I’ve heard some wild stories about writer’s block hitting this one or that one, and what everybody says is, when you’ve got writer’s block the only thing you can do to break it is write something. It doesn’t matter what. Sit down at the typewriter and type out names of cheeses, a political speech, anything that comes into your head. It sort of primes the pump, and pretty soon you can go and write the thing you’re supposed to be writing, which in my case is a filthy book.

So what shall I say? My name is Edwin George Topliss, I am twenty-five years old, I was born on August 7th, 1942, on the aircraft carrier USS Glenn Miller. My mother was then Mabel Swing, part of a girl quartet called the Melogals. One of the other Melogals, Laverne LaRoche, became a big star around 1946 and sank without a trace around 1950. I don’t think it had anything to do with the blacklist or anything like that, I think she just wore out her welcome. She was a recording star, and some other recording stars came along and she got shoved off into Hits of Yesteryear. My mother used to have some of Laverne LaRoche’s records, and some sheet music with her smiling face on the front. A sort of long horsy face with very big white teeth. Mouse-colored hair that blooped on top and hung down straight at the sides and blooped again at the neck. Padded shoulders that made her look as though she was wearing a crepe coffin. “My Saturday Love,” that was one of her big hits. Remember that one, gang? Da de da, de da da, my Saturday love. I always thought it stank. Particularly when my mother sang along with the record, thereby giving me a weird version of half the Melogals, one-quarter recorded and the other quarter live.

I don’t know how it worked out, exactly, I think maybe my mother wrote to Laverne LaRoche when Laverne LaRoche was on top of the heap and never got any answer. And then Laverne LaRoche wrote my mother a letter, or called her on the phone or something, along about my senior year in Albany High, which would be around 1959, and my mother either didn’t answer the letter or if it was a phone call she told Laverne LaRoche to go fuck herself or something like that. Anyway, the Melogals don’t have reunions. But my mother kept the records, and I can still remember coming into the house unexpected every once in a while, nobody home but my mother, and she’d be singing along with one of the old 78s. “You took my heart, but you wouldn’t take me, you wanted my love, but you wanted to be free.” This is when I was in high school, and later on during summer vacations from college, and every time it would happen my mother would right away clam up and play some other record and not sing along any more.

Frankly, I don’t think that much of my mother’s voice, but she assures me it used to be better. She still thinks it’s pretty good, or she thinks it’s still pretty good. You know what I mean.

Do writers have trouble like that? At fifty thousand words a book, with twenty-eight books under my belt — in more ways than one — that’s one million four hundred thousand words I’ve written. And I still get screwed up in the sentences. And that’s the basics, you know? Being a writer, I mean a fiction writer, I mean a real honest-to-God storyteller like Rod or Pete or Dick, means having so much by way of imagination and ability to invent character and incident, all these talents and abilities that are as complicated and wonderful as the working of a pinball machine, and I’m so far down the ladder I even get the sentences screwed up.

These things are done once, you know. Every once in a while, if I’ve really done something horrible with grammar or a run-on sentence, I’ll take that page out of the typewriter and start again, but mostly this stuff is one draft. I mean, it’s bad enough to write it, I couldn’t possibly read it. So I go along, fifteen pages a day, ten days a book, all of it first draft, all of it pushing along as fast as I can go, whatever comes into my head next, which is almost invariably something very stock and banal and expected and ordinary and imitative of a thousand books before me, and it all pours like a runny nose onto the paper, sheet after sheet, one hundred fifty sheets of paper when I’m done. Plus an extra sheet of paper to the left of the typewriter on which I jot down important things like the characters’ names and any other facts I may have to refer to again later on in the book.

I was talking to a girl at a party once, a party at Rod’s place when he had the place on East 10th Street, and she asked me what I did, which gave me my usual trauma, and when she finally got it out of me that I write dirty books in ten days each she said, “How do you remember all of the things that are in the book? How can you go back to it the next day and still have that whole world clear in your mind?”

The answer I gave her was that when I wrote a book in ten days I didn’t get a chance to forget anything in it, but of course that isn’t the real truth. The real truth is, the whole world in one of my books is so narrow and thin and untenanted there’s practically nothing to remember. The characters’ names, any occupation or make of car or address that I might give them, and that’s about it. As for characterization, forget it. I don’t even usually do caricaturization, the old Dickens bit of giving a character a tag. You know? I got this in college, the idea of giving a character an odd quirk, a funny phrase or a mannerism of some kind, and then every time he comes on the scene he does his thing and you remember him and you say, “That’s characterization, by Neddy Dingo!” Like Queeg in The Caine Mutiny saying, “Kay,” all the time.

I wonder how much longer this is going to go on. The fact of the matter is, I may sound calm and rational on this page but in reality I am terrified. I mean, I have to do a dirty book, I have to write book number 29, and I have to get started on it. I have ten days.

June of this year was the first time I missed a deadline, and I haven’t made a deadline since. That was book number 24, Raving Passions, and it was three days late. June 30th was a Friday, and I didn’t get the book in till the next Monday. I brought it in and gave it to Samuel in Lance’s office and Samuel said, “What happened Friday?”

“I got a little hung up,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t want to make a habit of this,” Samuel said. He’s a nasty snotty kid and I hate him. I’m sure he reads all the manuscripts we write before sending them to New Orleans, reads them all in the men’s room down the hall from the office there, jerks off ten times per book and then sends them out covered with his smear of approval. How else could he be so skinny, the little bastard? He looks nineteen, he’s a year younger than me. Which irritates me anyway, that he s in the dominant position in relation to me and I’m older than him. And heavier. And better educated. And smarter. But he s Lance’s assistant, and since Lance almost never makes personal appearances anywhere, that means it’s Samuel that I have to deal with.

If I wasn’t so goddam apologetic with him all the time. Like saying I was sorry when I brought Raving Passions in three days late, one working day late, when it was the first time I’d missed a deadline and before that I’d turned in twenty-three consecutive books on time. But I apologized, and I was all nervous and upset about it, and I get mad at Samuel and hate him and it’s all because he’s in a position of dominance and I’m in no position at all and he’s too much of a sleazy creep to refrain from rubbing my nose in it.

I mean, after all, what am I? I write, but I’m not a writer. I don’t write under my own name, I don’t even write under my own pen name. Dirk Smuff, that’s how I sign myself, and Dirk Smuff is a creation of Rod’s, it’s his pen name, he wrote the first seven books under that name, I still pay him two hundred dollars a month for the use of it.

About a year ago I went in to talk to Samuel to ask him what he thought about me doing two books a month for a while. I mean, a month has thirty days and I only use up ten per book. What I had in mind, I thought I could start a pen name of my own, do two books a month for a while until I had the new name established, and then Rod could get somebody else to take over the Dirk Smuff books and I’d go on just doing my own books. I had the name picked out, too: Dwayne Toppil, it’s a sort of a variant on my own name.

I mean, I wasn’t doing this for the two hundred bucks. That wasn’t the point at all, but naturally Samuel couldn’t see that. The point was, for God’s sake, I’m not real. I’m gray, I’m translucent, you can see daylight through me. What am I? I’m a ghost, I’m Rod Cox’s ghost, I’m Dirk Smuff’s ghost, I’m sort of a pornographic Kukla, activated by the hand of the masturbating high school boy, piping rotund obscenities into his waxy ear.

Some of the other guys, they can look ahead and see daylight, they can see a way out of this cave, but honey I’m Injun Joe and I’ve got no place to go. Like Rod. He started doing these sex books while we were still in college, but all the time he was doing other stuff, too, short stories and articles and finally other books, and now he’s got this spy series going with Silver Stripe, it’s a paperback house but he’s doing the books under his own name, Anthony Boucher in the Sunday Times reviewed one of them, the third one I think, and said it was pretty good, it showed the kind of vitality the paperback originals can come up with these days. And he gets translated into French and published by an outfit over there called Gallimard, all the books have black covers. And some other countries, too, I think Italy and Japan and at least once in Mexico.

And Pete Falkus. He kept doing these magazine pieces at the same time he was writing sex novels, and he had a sale in Playboy and a sale in True and a sale in Holiday, all these fact pieces, and now he’s got a ghost too and he’s doing nothing but the magazine pieces and he’s making all kinds of money. He’s got money in a mutual fund, he was telling me about it a few months ago. Saving money, investing money in a mutual fund.

Of course, Ann Falkus is no Betsy.

But that isn’t fair. It isn’t Betsy’s fault the money disappears, it isn’t anybody’s fault. As a matter of fact, if it’s anybody’s fault at all it’s mine. I’m the one bought the car, I’m the one goes out all the time and buys records, books, all this crap. We came down here from Albany in August of 1965 with three suitcases to our name, we furnished that apartment on East 18th Street out of the Salvation Army store on West 46th, and now we could fill a moving van. Every once in a while I say, “Why do I need all this stuff?” but then I look around and there isn’t one thing in the whole heap I want to throw away.

Except Betsy.

That isn’t fair. It isn’t fair, it isn’t fair. I don’t mean it, and it isn’t fair.

I was talking about writers. Real writers, like Rod and Pete and Dick. They knew they couldn’t do this shit forever, but they could do it as long as they had to because all the time they were working on something else, something more, something better. They knew they were headed somewhere, they were going to move up.

What a trap that is. I tried it myself, I tried to be a writer. You make your living writing novels, it doesn’t matter what kind of novels they are, you begin to think maybe you are a writer after all. So I tried some mystery stories. I read Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and I tried some stories. One sold, for a penny a word, to a magazine that isn’t around any more, called Shock Action Detective Tales. The other three nobody wanted. Samuel said, “Ed, I don’t think you’re comfortable in the short story form.” With that dead frog expression on his face. Meaning, stick to the sex books, sonny, that’s all you’re good for.

I tried articles, too. That was even worse, I never even got anything in shape to be submitted. I discovered Reinhard Heydrich, the beast of Belsen, and Samuel said, “He’s been done too much, Ed.” I didn’t know he’d been done at all.

That’s the trouble, you can’t try to sell to magazines you don’t read, because you don’t know what’s old hat to them. But the magazines I felt I could take a stab at were all too crappy for me to read.

The point is, I’m not a writer. Or have I made that point too much already? I don’t give a damn, it seems to be the only point of my life. Through a fluke of fate I have been let into a room where a fantastic feast is being presented. All around me people are moving up the line of the table, the food’s getting better and better. I wasn’t hungry before I came into this room, but smelling the smells of the food, seeing the other people eat, now I’m hungry. But the only problem is, you can’t get any of the food unless you ask for it. And I don’t speak the language, all I can do is point. And if all you can do is point, all you get is boiled potatoes. So here I stand, eating my boiled potatoes, watching the feast going on all around me, and wishing I knew the language.

Well, it’s midnight. I have a small white plastic clock on my desk, we got it with Plaid Stamps, and it says midnight, twelve o’clock. November 21st is gone, absolutely gone, and I haven’t written a word of the sex novel. Just this junk, this feeling sorry for myself.

I came in here at ten-thirty, full of ambition, determination and terror. After I finished this afternoon’s wasted effort I went out to the kitchen and got into a stupid argument with Betsy. One of our stock stupid arguments, the one about Fred.

Fred was in the kitchen, sitting at the table and eating a vanilla yogurt, and she said, “Hello, Daddy.”

I said, “Hi, Fred.”

Betsy turned around from the refrigerator and said, very cold, “Her name is Elfreda. She is a girl.”

“When you want a fight,” I said, “you jump on that, or something else, or whatever you want. When you don’t want a fight, I call her Fred and you never say a word.”

“We won’t discuss it,” she said, “in front of Elfreda.” And she turned her back on me and went back to the refrigerator, whatever she was doing there.

I didn’t need that, I really didn’t. It isn’t my fault if something went wrong at the A&P or she hates the Buick or whatever set her off, and I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to pay for it. So I kept it up, in front of Elfreda, and pretty soon she was crying and Betsy had those white marks on her cheekbones that meant she was enraged beyond endurance and I was ready to murder everybody in sight and make page 3 of the Daily News. That’s my big threat around here: “You want to make page 3 of the Daily News?”

The thing is, I have no respect for myself.

Maybe if I call Lance tomorrow and explain things, I’m having a little trouble, I may have to skip a month, but I’ll be back as good as ever, I just need a little time off...

Maybe he’ll say, “I’m sorry, Edwin.”

Five books in a row have been late, that’s the problem. Raving Passion, due on Friday, in on Monday. Then in July, Beachcomber Sin, two days late, due on Monday, in on Wednesday. August, Summer Sex, five days late, due on Thursday and I didn’t get it in till the following Tuesday. That was when Samuel said, “This is three times in a row, Ed.”

“Oh,” I said, with my foolish grin. “Are we keeping track?”

“Yes,” he said. “Spack called Lance yesterday afternoon, he said the shipment’s one book missing. He wanted to call Rod, he wanted to know what’s the problem.”

“Oh,” I said, with my foolish grin dying. “I’m sorry about that.”

Because Spack is the publisher, down in New Orleans, and he’s paying the twelve hundred dollars every month because he thinks these Dirk Smuff books he’s getting in are still being written by Rod Cox. Why he would think somebody with a successful spy series at Silver Stripe, getting three thousand a book, plus a thousand from France, money from Italy, Japan, Mexico, all those places, plus one of the books sold to the movies for twenty thousand dollars, why Spack would think somebody with all that would keep turning out this garbage for him every month I don’t know, but he does. And Rod has already told me, the one thing he doesn’t want is for Spack to call him on the phone sometime and start talking about the books. Because Rod doesn’t read these things, why should he?

I have no readers, you know. I mean, among people I know, friends of mine. Rod can hand me a book and say, “Here, I just got copies of this one,” and then I take it home and read it and it’s great and I call him and say, “It’s great,” and he says, “Thanks.” Who am I going to hand Escape to Lust to? Even Betsy stopped reading these things, about a year ago.

Escape to Lust was the September book and I really tried to get that one in on time. After what Samuel had said when I brought in Summer Sex. And I missed. September 30th was a Saturday, which meant the 29th was the deadline, which meant I started the book on the 19th, and I didn’t turn it in till Monday, October 2nd, three days late. I needed that extra weekend again.

This time, Samuel called me on Monday morning, a little after nine. I was still in the rack, I tend not to get up much before noon, but Betsy woke me and Samuel said, “Are you going to have the book in today, Ed?” He sounds just as snaky and nasty on the phone as he looks in person, which is his big difference with his employer, Lance.

“Sure,” I said. “I finished it last night. I’m really sorry about not—”

“Try to get it down here by eleven,” he said. “We held up the package so we could put your book in with it if you got it done over the weekend.”

“I appreciate that,” I said. “Thanks a lot, Samuel. You know I really tried to—”

“We have to ship it out by eleven,” he said.

So it wound up with all of us going into the city, me driving, Betsy beside me, Fred in the back. Betsy never let me forget that she had wash to do, she had things to do. But there’s nothing you can do with a car in midtown, and the car was the only way we could get in there on time, and I didn’t want the Buick towed away, so I needed somebody to sit in the car while I parked it on Madison Avenue between 47th and 48th Streets and dashed into the Solinex Building and up in the elevator to the seventeenth floor and into the door with Lance Pangle on the glass and gave Samuel the manuscript.

Then I had to stand around while Samuel gave me a lecture. “Everything is supposed to run smooth, Ed,” he said. “Spack doesn’t buy from anybody else, we supply him exclusively. Do you know he puts out sixteen books a month?”

Yes, I already knew that. Spack puts out sixteen books a month and pays twelve hundred a book, of which Pangle gets ten per cent as the agent. That makes Pangle better than twenty-three thousand dollars a year. Plus all the other writers he has, other stuff he has, Rod and Pete and Dick and some science fiction writers and all sorts of people. Anyway, out of the sausage machine of which I am a part, twenty-three thousand a year for Lance Pangle.

Is Lance Pangle going to risk twenty-three thousand a year because Ed Topliss has hang-ups? Would you? Would I?

Anyway, I had to stand around while Samuel read me the riot act. “There are any number of young writers coming along, Ed,” he said. “If you feel you’d rather stop doing these books, we’ll be happy to find a replacement.”

Stop doing the books? And do what instead?

I gave him all sorts of assurances, and his expression never changed. The oak door on the other side of the office remained closed, but I could sense Lance beyond it, a fat spider, and I felt like a fly in the outer reaches of the web, safe as long as I kept buzzing, dead as soon as I stopped to rest.

I was up there ten minutes, and when I came down the Buick wasn’t there. I stood around in a panic, not knowing what to do, and then I saw it turn the corner and come down toward me, Betsy behind the wheel, and even through the windshield I could see she was in one of her cold rages.

It turned out a cop had come along and told her she couldn’t stand there, so she had to circle the block, and she got into a traffic jam on Park, and her nerves were frayed to the breaking point. The only trouble was, so were mine, so the third or fourth time she said, “Did you have to stay up there that long?” I started to shout and get angry and incoherent, and then Fred started to cry in the back seat and I turned on her, and then we drove out the Long Island Expressway in silence and nobody said a word around the house for two days.

And after that I was nine days late with the October book, Passion’s Prisoner. I just couldn’t think about that book, I couldn’t plot it, I couldn’t do anything with it. I finally opened up old books of mine and copied out sex scenes word for word, but the stuff between the sex scenes I couldn’t copy and that was absolutely impossible. I was calling Samuel every day, in more and more of a panic, promising I’d get it done tonight, tonight, tonight, and when I finally did bring it in he didn’t say a word at all. He looked as cold-faced as Betsy, all he did was say, “Thanks,” when I handed him the manuscript. I stood around a few seconds, waiting for him to say something, to give me the word again, but he didn’t say a thing. That’s when I really got scared, that’s the first time I thought it might really happen, they might drop me and get somebody else to do the books. Anybody else. Granted that nobody is indispensable, I am more so, if you follow me. I’m one of the least indispensable people on earth. They don’t even have to find a writer to replace me, they can replace me with some other semi-educated fairly literate buffoon just like me.

That was November 9th, which was a Thursday, and the next day Lance called me. That was when he gave me the ultimatum: miss one more deadline and bye-bye. And said, “I’m sorry, Edwin.” In that bishop’s voice.

Maybe that’s one of my problems now, having been so late with the October book. I didn’t finish that till November 8th, and that’s less than two weeks ago. I’m not ready to do another book.

Well, I better do another book, ready or not. This jazz I’m doing here isn’t going to pay the rent or make Samuel happy or keep Lance from chopping off my head.

I started to talk about Dwayne Toppil, my attempt at a pen name. In order to give myself a feeling of substantiality, of being somebody. I went in and talked to Samuel about it, and he said, “Ed, I don’t think you’re ready.”

“Ready?” I said. “I’m doing a book a month now, I’ve done them for a year and a half, I do them in ten days. So I take another ten days, I do one of my own.”

But he shook his head. “What you’ve turned out so far,” he said, “it’s the Dirk Smuff name that sold them. They’re acceptable sex novels, there’s nothing wrong with them, but they don’t have any flair, they don’t show anything special. Spack does sixteen books a month, and we’ve got people for all sixteen slots. And we don’t deal with anybody but Spack, because most of those other guys are shoestring outfits, you can’t get your money out of them, it’s one problem after another. So we don’t have a slot for a second book a month from you, we’d have to dump somebody else. And frankly, Ed, you aren’t that good that we’d want to drop somebody to sell two books for you every month.”

I felt stupid, but I said, “Would you mind if I tried to sell a book to somebody else on my own?”

“Go right ahead,” he said.

“That’s what I’ll do, then,” I said.

But of course I didn’t. In the first place, one book a month was about all the vicarious sex I could stand. I’d think, Now’s the time to start the second book, but I wouldn’t do it. And in the second place, I was chicken to try peddling sex books on my own. I know there’s half a dozen publishers right here in New York that put these things out, but how do I go about selling to them? I’ve never submitted any writing of any kind to any publisher. All I’ve done is the sex books and the mystery stories and they all went through Lance. Or through Samuel, actually.

Besides, if somebody as sharp and bastardly as Lance doesn’t want to try to do business with those people, what sort of luck would I have with them?

Anyway, I never did it.

It’s after one o’clock in the morning, and I’ve done practically a whole chapter again, and this still isn’t a sex book or anything else. This chapter doesn’t even have a fantasy sex scene in it.

Betsy isn’t talking to me. Not that we talk even when we’re talking to each other, but now we aren’t even saying words. Which is just as well, in fact I’m better off that way. I won’t have to lie about the thirty pages I’ve done today.

We ate dinner in silence, and then I read the paper. The Times. I didn’t read it this morning because I was going to come in here and do the first chapter of the book, so after dinner I took it into the living room and started to read it while Betsy did the dishes. Then she came in and turned on Red Skelton, which she doesn’t really like but she knows I can’t stand Skelton and when she’s mad at me she keeps doing little things to needle me and make me uncomfortable. So I came in here and read the paper in here. England just devalued the pound last Sunday, so the paper was full of that, but the thing that caught my eye was a strange item on page 20 about a circus clown that was murdered. He was beaten to death in his hotel room last October, and the guy that did it was just sentenced to life in prison. It said there was a prostitute in the room with the clown and she opened the door for the killer, who beat the clown to death when he wouldn’t give him any money. The clown worked for Ring-ling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus.

I also did the puzzle, and read the book review, which was of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, by Harold Cruse. The review said it was a tough book. Grove Press had a half-page ad pushing four books, one called Numbers by the guy who wrote City of Night, and a first novel called Sheeper, and something called Freewheelin’ Frank about the Hell’s Angels and a book of short stories by LeRoi Jones.

If Rod had never come up to Albany I wouldn’t be here now. I wouldn’t want to be a writer, I wouldn’t even think about it. I wouldn’t have made twenty-five thousand dollars in the last two and a half years, and I wouldn’t need nine hundred dollars to keep tottering forward one more month.

That’s the ridiculous thing, of course. You can’t want something until you know what it is. When I made two hundred a month I lived on two hundred a month. When I hadn’t ever written anything I didn’t want to ever write anything.

I’m Caliban. I’m Frankenstein’s monster. I’ve been shown how nice human life is, and I’ve been allowed to be almost human, and I’m hanging in here neither fish nor fowl, merely a poor foul fish with no place to swim.

Betsy’s in bed and asleep. I have no letch for her at all right now. Maybe once or twice a month I get a generalized letch, a real need to get my rocks off, and the other times we do it it’s simply to maintain appearances. I think that’s probably the way it is with her, too.

Tomorrow I’ve got to start the book. I’ve got all this stuff off my chest, now I can get to the book. And if I could do ten thousand words of this crap today I can damn well do ten thousand words of useful crap tomorrow and get caught up.

Maybe I can do something with that clown story. Clown, whore, killer. Only he wouldn’t get killed.

What do I know about circuses? Nothing.

I could call it Circus Lust. Carny Lmt. Passion Under the Big Top.

Sure.

1

Roscoe Bardle was tired. He sat at the dressing table removing his makeup, seeing beneath the cheery red and white clown face his own lined and tired face gradually emerging. Around him was a hum of activity as the other clowns changed out of their costumes and faces into the drab appearance of the everyday world, but Roscoe felt as though he sat in a cocoon of silence. Like a glass bell placed around him, keeping out all the noise, all the life, all the camaraderie, but at the same time permitting him to see what he was missing.

Why was he so tired? He knew the reason: Margo.

They should never have married, that was the whole thing in a nutshell. A clown and a bareback rider, the combination was too foolish even to consider. Margo didn’t need a clown, she needed a lion tamer.

And Roscoe was afraid she’d found one.

Sitting there at the dressing table, looking into his hurt and tired eyes, he thought back to the first time he’d ever made love to Margo, and how he had foolishly believed that that bliss could go on forever.

The circus had been playing Madison Square Garden in New York City, and everything was the same as usual until the night Margo’s favorite horse, frightened by a firecracker thrown by a mischievous child, jumped awkwardly from his platform and broke his leg. He’d had to be destroyed, of course, and it hadn’t really surprised Roscoe, later that night, to see Margo sitting brooding in the last booth of the little bar a few blocks north of the Garden where Roscoe had been spending his own lonely nights since the circus had come to town.

Roscoe knew Margo slightly, and he knew about what had happened to the horse, Champion, so he went over to commiserate with her, and she invited him to sit with her at the table.

She was already more than a little drunk. “You have a kind face under your clown makeup,” she said. “I’m not used to men looking at me the way you are.”

“How do men usually look at you?” he asked her.

“You are a clown, aren’t you?” she said.

“Well,” he said, “Betsy still isn’t talking to me.”

“Which you probably deserve,” she said.

“You would say that,” he said. “We have people coming out for Thanksgiving, too. Pete and Ann. How can we have a fight in front of other people?”

“So you’ll make it up tonight,” she said.

“I am feeling kind of horny,” he said.

“For Betsy?” she said.

“For something with a cunt,” he said.

“Betsy has a cunt,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “She’s gone to the store again. She’s always going to the store. Every time I turn around Betsy’s going to the goddam store. I’m in the wrong business. I ought to open a store.”

“I know you’re in the wrong business,” she said. “Besides, Betsy has to buy things for Thanksgiving dinner.”

“What the hell have I got to be thankful for?” he said.

“Don’t you love Betsy?” she said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I honest to God don’t know. I try not to ask the question, if you want to know the truth.”

“You used to love her, didn’t you?”

I used to want to fuck her all the time, if that’s what you mean. She was a freshman when I was a junior, and she was a local girl up there in Monequois, she didn’t live on campus at all. She lived with her parents and her brothers.

I’m not going to use quotation marks any more. If I’m going to talk about Betsy and her family and how we met and all that shit, what do I need Roscoe and Margo for?

Why don’t I start again, try again?

Not with Circus Lust, though. I don’t know anything about the circus, I can’t write that shit. Even Spack draws the line somewhere. Dick told me about that guy that was ghosting for him, that guy whatsisname out in Denver, and he did this book with the Martians suddenly landing in the middle of the book, sex scenes between Earthwomen and Martians, all this weird stuff out of nowhere, the first half an ordinary sex novel and then insanity after that, and they rejected it, Spack rejected it, and Dick had to get on the phone with Spack and say it was just an experiment he’d been trying and he wouldn’t do it any more. And they had to find another ghost.

They had to find another ghost.

I can’t do a book about a clown married to a bareback rider who’s fucking a lion tamer on the side. I just can’t do it, the whole thing would turn into farce and stupidity and I’d be out on my ear.

Betsy must think I’m hard at work on the book. All I do is type.

She was a blind date. A friend of mine set it up, he said she was a local girl. I said, “Will I score?” and he said, “How do I know?”

We went to a movie, The Miracle Worker, about Helen Keller. Four of us, two couples. Afterwards, I did a pretty good imitation of Helen Keller myself, because basically I was bored stiff with this blind date chick and I had the feeling I wasn’t going to be making out very much at all. We sat in the back of Howie’s car, driving out of town to a bar on the old Montreal road, and she kept making conversation, doing freshman-type talk about how exciting everything was. The campus, and the teachers, and the classes, and the basketball team. I barely knew we had a basketball team, but this chick had tried out to be a cheerleader. If we’d had a football team she would have gone nuts for that, too, but we didn’t have a football team so she was limited to basketball. Which is too bad, in a way, because basketball players aren’t sex symbols like football players, they’re too long and lean, they look like illustrations of sinews in anatomy class, they’re almost as overspecialized and sexless as track stars. If we’d had a football team, maybe Betsy wouldn’t have settled for me.

Betsy. Is that a great name? Betsy Blake. She sounds like something out of Archie Comics. The Blake part she couldn’t help, of course, and Blake by itself isn’t a horrible name, but Betsy? Of the six thousand different things that Elizabeths are called, Betsy is the absolute worst.

You know, that’s true. Two out of five girls are named Elizabeth, and they all wind up with one of the Elizabeth nicknames, and it tells you an awful lot about the individual girl which one of those nicknames she gets for a label. Like Liz is almost always a real whory swinger, a gutsy good-time girl, unless she’s very bony and has the clap, in which case she’s Lizzie. Bess is respectable but she puts out but she feels guilty about it. Beth saves herself for one man and works in the library and is very square but also reliable and intelligent and a rock in an emergency. Bett is bitchy and expensive but a great lady. Elsa is a ski-weekend swinger, but when she gives her word she keeps it. Eliza hasn’t been seen since the ice floe broke up, but before that she was a whiner. Elsie is lower class, cheerful, big-mouthed, big smile, she doesn’t get laid much because nobody wants to take advantage of her. Ella has a lot of physical female complaints and can’t hold her booze and is very quiet and if things go right she’ll mother you. Lisa has the self-image of a D. H. Lawrence heroine and likes horses and night clubs. Betty is an all-American girl and gets married and has two point four children and lives in one of these crappy suburban developments like where I am right now and it’s her kitchen where the kaffeeklatsch is held and she collects for muscular dystrophy. Betsy is a moron.

I don’t suppose that’s fair, but I don’t give a damn. All I know is, on that first date it had been seven months since I’d gotten laid, I was horny as hell, she was a fairly good-looking girl with all the necessary parts, and in the back seat of Howie’s car I was very bored. Also, at North’s Bar we ordered and drank a pitcher of beer. So on the way back to town I started to kiss her. It was January, we were both encased in tons of coats, it was like a stunt on Truth or Consequences. Finally I put my gloved hand on her knee, which even then struck me as ridiculous, and she let it stay there. She also didn’t object when I poked my tongue in her mouth. She didn’t respond either, but she didn’t object.

I have since then kissed two girls who understood that french kissing is a mutual matter. Betsy just sits there with her mouth open, but both Charlotte and Kay sort of went down on my tongue, which is pleasanter to do than describe.

Anyway. Since my gloved hand had not been repulsed from her knee, and since my tongue had not been repulsed from her mouth, I suddenly decided I was going to get laid. I got very hot and tried to find a way to get my hand inside her coat to her breasts but it was impossible. Also, she didn’t help. Still and all I was convinced that tonight was the night, the drought was over, old Ed was about to get his ashes hauled.

Sure.

Since she didn’t live on campus and everybody else in the world did, naturally she had to be let off first. On the way up to the bar she’d pointed at a closed Esso station and said that was her father’s gas station, but it turned out she didn’t live in the house next to the gas station, she lived in a house in town. Which, as it turned out, was just as well.

She gave Howie the directions, and we finally stopped in front of a totally dark house on a totally dark street. Except for street lights at the corners. I was trying to say there weren’t any lights in the windows of any of the houses. A writer would have worked it out.

Anyway, I said, “I’ll get off here too, Howie.”

“Oh, that’s all right, Ed,” Betsy said.

“No,” I said, doing the gallant number. “You’re my date, I’ll see you to your door.”

Howie, looking at me in the rearview mirror, said, “Should I wait?”

“Naw, you go on,” I said.

Howie’s date, a girl named Dora, sort of grinned at me from the front seat. “Have a good time,” she said. Did you ever notice how the other guy’s girl always thinks you’re hot stuff, how she’s always looking at you like you-devil-you? Never your own date, always the other guy’s date. I have no idea why that should be true.

Anyway, we got out of the car. There was snow all over the place and the air was freezing. Happily, there was no wind. We walked up the cleared slate path to her front porch and up the stoop and over the porch to the front door and then she said, “I had a lovely time, Ed. Thank you.”

“I’m glad,” I said, and kissed her again. You know, with the coats and all. And standing up, so I couldn’t even put a gloved hand on her knee. But I stuck my tongue in her mouth again, not so much because I was getting anything special out of it as that I hoped it would inflame her. Since then I have learned that Betsy considers one tongue in her mouth enough, that she gets nothing from the arrival of my tongue in there except a faint gagging feeling, and all in all she would prefer sex to be like a duel: held at ten paces.

That January night in 1963, however, I was still ignorant of these fine points of my wife-to-be. All I knew was, I wanted to fuck her. Desperately.

So when we broke that kiss, she said, “Good night, Ed.”

I gave her a sort of panicky grin and said, “So soon?”

“It’s awful cold,” she said.

Which I thought gave me the opening I needed to get to the opening I needed. Visions of sofas dancing in my head, I said, “Then why don’t we go inside for a while?”

“Oh, we couldn’t,” she said.

“Why not?” I said.

“My father’s a very light sleeper,” she said. “He’d be awful mad if he woke up and found us.”

Which I interpreted as I saw fit, my interpretation being that this was a very sexy girl and I was going to make her but not tonight. I would have to borrow a car or something, or at the worst wait till spring. We would screw, but not in her house.

All right. If we weren’t going to fuck I didn’t want to stand around talking to her. I had a long walk ahead of me, through town and two miles down the old Montreal road to the campus, and I was cold and horny and anxious to get started. So I kissed her once more, to keep her from thinking I was hurrying away, and then I hurried away.

I felt the lover’s nuts starting when I’d walked about two blocks. I hadn’t had them for months, and they really hurt. My whole groin was starting to ache, and that was going to be a bitch for walking, so what I did was, I went into somebody’s back yard and leaned against the side of their garage — white clapboard — and jerked off. It was a painful come, but afterwards I felt better, with only a slight general ache between my legs. Then I walked on back to the campus.

I got there around two-thirty, and Rod was working on a short story. He and I were roommates, we roomed together all but our freshman year. As of then, he hadn’t sold any short stories yet, but he wrote them all the time, sent them out to the magazines, got the rejection slips when they came back, sent them out again. He had a chart showing the titles of all his stories and which magazines had been sent which manuscripts. Finally, just before the end of our junior year, he sold a story to some magazine I never heard of, some Playboy imitator. He got a hundred twenty-five dollars, and very drunk.

But at the time of which I speak, to get literary for a minute, he was still an unpublished writer, and I never took him really seriously. I mean, writers aren’t people that you know. The people you know work at Montgomery Ward or drive an oil truck or have a good position with the state, right? The people you know aren’t movie stars and they aren’t deep sea divers and they aren’t pilots for TWA and they aren’t writers. Right? So I didn’t take Rod very seriously, and neither did anybody else. He wrote these short stories all the time and I thought they were crap and nobody bought them.

It’s hard to remember my attitude toward him then, to tell the truth. My attitude now is so different. Now I envy him, I think he’s this fantastic guy and there isn’t any part of my life that he doesn’t have better. He’s my friend, I like him very much, even though we’re the same age I think of him as a big brother, and at the same time I hate him.

Do I? If I hate Rod, I swear to God I didn’t know it until just now. And if I hate him, it’s stupid. It isn’t his fault I don’t have it made as good as him. He spent all his life practically, trying and trying and trying, always pushing in the same direction, always wanting to be a writer and trying to be a writer and kind of demanding to be a writer. Always writing.

I never had any direction. I liked to read, I always liked to read, so when I got to college and I saw they had a major in American Literature I fell into it, like falling into bed. I’d already read most of it anyway: The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick and “Bartleby,” Leaves of Grass, some Poe, The Red Badge of Courage, A Farewell to Arms, The Catcher in the Rye.

It’s very strange, really. Some people know what they want to do with their lives, so they pick the major that matches the goal. But other people, like me, are just drifting along, and just drift into one major or another, and finally pick a goal that matches the major. And what can you do if your major is American Lit? Nothing but teach. So I was going to teach.

But I didn’t have a vocation. Do you know what I mean? I wasn’t planning on teaching for any reason that had to do with self-fulfillment, anything like that. I was just drifting, nobody was at the helm, my life was just following the tide of least resistance.

Which brings me back to Betsy. I went back to the dorm after that first date with her, having cast my seed in some neighbor’s back yard — the Bible is silent on that particular aberration, I believe — and Rod was up, writing a story. He didn’t have the overhead light on, we both hated it. The gooseneck lamp on his desk was lit, he was typing away on his Smith-Corona portable, a machine exactly like this one, also beige. In fact, I have this one because he had that one. I had to have elite size type because my manuscripts had to look like his, so when I was doing the first book, up in Albany, I rented a typewriter from a place on State Street, but when we moved down here I went out and bought one. Naturally, having no opinions of my own on the subject of typewriters, I bought one like Rod’s. Ergo, Smith-Corona.

It’s a pretty good machine, I guess. I do fifty thousand words a month on it, and I’ve had it now two and a half years, and I’ve never had to have anything fixed. It rattles some, it sounds loose when I work on it, but it does the job.

I guess I don’t want to go back to Betsy. If I start doing commercials for my typewriter instead, I guess I really don’t want to go back to Betsy.

I don’t care, I’ve started this I might as well finish it. I don’t know what kind of crazy death wish has me in its grip, today’s the 22nd and I still haven’t started the book, but I’m going to get this junk out of my system for good and all.

Tonight. After dinner I definitely go to work.

In the meantime, Rod looked up at my entrance and said, “How’d it go?”

“Okay,” I said.

“You score?”

“Not yet,” I said. “But it’s a sure thing.”

The thing was, I believed it myself. Partly because I was so horny, and partly because I needed a score on my side of the tally sheet. In college Rod was what we call an assman. He was constantly making out with this girl or that girl, three or four times I had to go spend the night in somebody else’s room because he’d snuck a girl into the dorm, and my few lays were hardly enough to keep me afloat in his company. And here it was January, and I hadn’t so far got into anybody at all in my junior year, and I was feeling really troubled about it.

So I called Betsy the next day, a Saturday, and she had a date for that night, but she was free Sunday. I had to work a double date with Howie again, not having a car, and we drove down to Port Jones, on the Mishkon River, and we went to a bar there called Hiram’s Lodge, where they had a real fire going in a real fireplace, and stag heads on the walls, and real logs everywhere, and all in all a good ski lodge effect. We drank two pitchers of beer there, and necked in the booth, and I got my hand at last up under her skirt, gloveless, and felt her panties for a while. She was getting very hot, panting against my mouth, but when I tried to tug the panties out of the way with my fingers she shook her head and whispered no several times in a frantic sort of way and then pushed my hand away, and that was that.

I didn’t want to get out of Howie’s car at her place again tonight, because I knew nothing was going to happen and it was goddam cold, but I felt locked into the gesture. So I got out, and the warm car drove away, red taillights and white exhaust, tires crunching on the snowy street, and there we were in the snow-white darkness and silence, her house as black as the tomb in front of us. They never left a light on for her, and when I got to know her parents I found out why. They’re cheap. Betsy’s parents are the cheapest pair of miserly bastards the world has ever seen. Their toilet paper, for instance. You wouldn’t believe the hard scratchy rotten paper they use for toilet paper. The stuff must be two cents a roll. I hate to crap at her parents’ house, believe me.

Anyway, I went up on the porch with her again, and kissed her awhile, and took my right glove off, and tried to get my hand up under her skirt, but she pushed me away and whispered, “It’s too cold!” Which it was. I was just doing it, you know? Going through the motions.

I don’t think I ever wanted Betsy. I wanted something, and she was the only thing I could understand. The only thing within reach.

So we made arrangements to meet in the cafeteria at twelve-fifteen the next day, Monday, because she ate her lunch on campus, and then I left, and had lover’s nuts again, and spat in the same back yard, and walked on home. Rod was in bed, asleep, so I didn’t have to answer any questions till the next day.

The reason she ate lunch on campus, of course, was because it was cheaper. We paid for lunch a semester at a time, and got monthly cards, and the cards were stamped every day when we went in for lunch. The state paid half the cost, or more than half the cost, and we paid the rest. Thirty-five dollars a semester, which isn’t bad. Otherwise, I’m sure Betsy’s parents would have made her walk home for lunch every day and then walk back to school. They were too cheap, you’ll notice, to let her go to college away from home, and think how much trouble that would have saved me.

She was sort of an oddball, actually, being a local citizen at the college. I know there are lots of colleges where the student body assays high in locals, but up in Monequois there were practically none. I think that was because Monequois didn’t produce many college students at all, either for the local college or to ship out. It’s a poor town, tucked away in a northern corner of New York State, and I think most of its citizens don’t even bother to finish high school.

Anyway, we had lunch, which was a cheap date, even cheaper than paying for half a pitcher of beer, and I had a lot less walking to do afterwards. I tried to subtly suggest she might find it fun to sneak into the dorm sometime, simply as a lark because girls were forbidden there and all, but she didn’t rise to it. She didn’t rise to anything, but I was so inflamed by my idea that we were headed for the rack that I didn’t pay any attention to the real girl sitting across from me at all. So I asked her for another date, for that Friday, and she said yes. We also managed to meet in the cafeteria again for lunch the next day.

I think basically she was lonely. Because she didn’t live in the girls’ dorm she didn’t have any real girl friends on campus, and of course being a college girl separated her from the other locals, so who did she have? I was easy to get along with, I told jokes, I was somebody to talk with at lunchtime in the cafeteria three days a week (Wednesdays and Fridays our schedules conflicted) and I was a date on weekends. So what she was doing was pretty much what I was doing: not paying any attention to the other person at all, but only thinking about his/her usefulness.

Well, she got a lot more mileage out of me than I got out of her. Three days a week in the cafeteria. Two or three dates every weekend. After a while, because I was getting bored and nothing was happening, I cut it to one weekend date by claiming I couldn’t find anybody with a car to double with. We were always dependent on other people, we were always the couple in the back seat. The only good thing to come out of it was the exercise, three miles from her house back to the dorm every time, unless it was either snowing or raining.

The night I made her come in the back seat of Chuck Marifolio’s car on the way back from the North Bar I thought, Wow, at last I’ve got it made. We’d been necking more and more insanely, it was March by now, and this night at last I got her panties hooked out of the way and my finger inside and she didn’t repulse the attack at all. In fact, her arms tightened so hard around my neck I could barely breathe. It was a very uncomfortable position, my elbow bent wrong, and in that position I poked my finger around till I found the man in the boat and I tickled his ears until all of a sudden she jerked, one little involuntary jerk, and said, “Uh-aaahh,” in my ear. And when we separated a little while later her eyes shone like tiny white Christmas tree lights.

Oh boy, I thought. Now you owe me one, I thought. I make you come, you make me come. Hot damn.

So we got out of the car and up onto her porch, and nothing was different. I kept trying to figure out some way to phrase it, to mention this debt she now owed me, but everything I thought of sounded too crude, so it wound up with me stopping at that back yard again on the way home.

I stopped there almost every time, I’d been doing it for months now, and as spring came along I began to wonder what sort of flowers would blossom there. But as April and May lumbered by nothing grew in my fertilized ground — isn’t come a fertilizer? — but weeds, which should have told me something, but didn’t.

I know how this should end. We’re into the age of the absurd now, and all characters have to become clowns, with the makeup and the colored lights and all. The way this should end, some night I’m out in that back yard jerking off and all at once a thousand lights go on, the neighbors have alerted the police who’ve been lying in wait for me, and I go prancing and leaping away across the back yards with my cock hanging out like a dog’s tongue and my background filling up with policemen on horses.

Well, that isn’t what happened. What happened was, one night in late May, a Friday night, I called Betsy and broke a date because I was disgusted, saying I couldn’t find anybody with a car to double with, and she said, “You can drive, can’t you, Ed?”

“Sure,” I said. “If I had something to drive.”

“I can borrow my brothers’ truck,” she said. “If you want.”

“Sure,” I said, not wanting to say sure, but trapped into saying sure.

“I’ll meet you at the west gate,” she said, “at eight o’clock.”

“Sure,” I said, and at eight o’clock I was standing by the campus’s west gate, waiting for the object of my lust to drive up in her brothers’ truck, and wondering how come she hadn’t ever borrowed that truck of theirs in the past. The truth, of course, was that she’d decided it was time to get laid, but that idea never entered my head. I didn’t know until much later that occasionally girls want to get laid. I thought that every once in a while they agreed to it, but I didn’t think they ever wanted it.

Anyway, ten minutes late this truck appeared. Ten years old, Dodge, black cab with a former company name smeared off the doors with white paint, rattling wood-slatted sides of the body, no top on the body, it looked like a junk collector’s truck. And there in the cab, shifting gears like a pro, my Betsy.

It turns out her brothers, two of them, Birge and Johnny, drive Christmas trees to New York for a living, and this is their truck. It now being May and no Christmas trees being handy, and Betsy having decided to get laid, we have the use of the truck.

When she made up her mind, she really went whole hog. There were blankets on the floor in back which I’m sure were not usually there, and when I slipped my hand up under her skirt at the movies she wasn’t wearing any panties at all.

But I’m getting ahead of my story. I’m skipping over the part where I don’t know how to drive the truck. I keep stalling it, and not being able to shift the gears, and it turns out Betsy has to drive. Is that a crock?

So all right, we go to a movie. Critic’s Choice, with Bob Hope and Lucille Ball, a comedy about people not getting laid. Fortunately it wasn’t very funny, so up went my hand and panties had she none, and I made her come three times during the movie, and even I began to believe that maybe tonight was the night.

If only, I thought, she’d touch my cock. I was all over her like Sherwin Williams Paints over the globe, and not once had she ever touched any part of me below the waist. Not that I was hot to have her touch my ankle, for instance, but with me having her come all over New York State every weekend it seemed to me only fair that sooner or later she repay the favor.

Which she did, later that night, surprising the hell out of me. She still didn’t touch the cock, not with her hand, but that was okay with me.

But I see my time is up. Another fifteen useless pages down the drain. All I’ve gotten out of it is now I’m horny, remembering those early times with Betsy, and I think it’s time to go out to the kitchen and make up with her. We’ve been fighting too long, and we haven’t screwed for almost two weeks, not since I finished Passion’s Prisoner.

Maybe that’s the problem. As soon as Fred goes to bed I’ll dip my wick in Betsy, and come back here refreshed and calm and at peace with the world and ready to go to work at last. Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving, I’ll be lucky to get a chance to do any work, I wasted yesterday, I haven’t done anything useful today, I better get on the stick.

I should be able to use some of the sex stuff from here tonight. I’ll do a boy-on-the-make book, I can use some of this stuff in the first chapter, where he lays his home-town girl goodbye.

Sex on Wheels I’ll call it.

1

When Dwayne Toppil slipped his hand under Liz’s skirt in the darkness of the movie theater, he couldn’t at first believe it. She wasn’t wearing a thing under the skirt, not a thing!

In the dim light reflecting back from the Technicolor movie showing on the screen, Dwayne saw Liz’s eyes gleaming with mischief, saw the amused grin on her lips. She pulled his head closer, till her lips were by his ear, and then whispered, “A going away present.”

“Mmm,” he said, kissing the throbbing pulse in her neck. “It almost makes me not want to go away.”

“Just so you don’t stay away too long,” she whispered back and rolled her hips slightly, moving herself against his probing fingers.

Dwayne felt a sudden wave of guilt when she said that, knowing that he intended never to return to Smithville, but the passion welling up within him kept the guilt from turning into action. And he knew that was best. It was best he leave Smithville, best he leave Liz, no matter how much they had come to mean to each other since graduation from high school two years ago.

Somehow it seemed incredible now to Dwayne that he could ever have thought of making his life here in Smithville. This wasn’t the place for him. No, and it isn’t the place for me either. I hate Dwayne Toppil and his fantasy fuck Liz and Smithville and everything.

So I got laid, and I saw a movie, it’s tomorrow, and here I am back on the old treadmill again. I saw a book once, in a used bookstore I went to with Pete, called Treadmill to Oblivion, by a radio comedian called Fred Allen. The title was so great, so beautifully great, that I right away bought the book; and discovered that Fred Allen was a great man. He spent his entire life in the wrong place, simply because that’s where circumstance put him, and he always knew it was the wrong place, and he never knew how to get the hell out of there. Treadmill to Oblivion. Right.

Every once in a while there’s a movie on Channel 2 at four-thirty in the morning with Fred Allen in it, and I wait up and watch it. It’s usually terrible, but Allen is fascinating to watch. You can see him acting out his dilemma, being a basically nice guy who doesn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings but who thinks he and all the other people around him are involved in a piece of shit, which they are.

Which aren’t we all.

The movie I saw last night was called Point Blank, which could also be the title of my life, particularly if you reverse the order of the words, and it was about Lee Marvin being a gangster of some kind and the gangster syndicate owes him ninety-three thousand dollars and he wants it. The whole movie is about him trying to get his ninety-three thousand dollars. It was sort of spoiled for me because all the way through I kept thinking, Lee, what if you get the ninety-three thousand dollars? Do you think that’ll make you happy? It won’t. You’ll just spend it, and then next month you’ll need ninety-three thousand dollars more, and you’ll have to go through all this shit all over again, and after a while you’ll just give up and move to San Francisco and jump in the bay, because San Francisco has the highest suicide rate in the nation, and I know why. It’s because when people are desperate they move somewhere else, and because the sun goes from east to west so do people, and eventually they wind up in Los Angeles, where they either go crazy or to San Francisco. If they go crazy they can live in Los Angeles for the rest of their lives, but if they go to San Francisco there’s no place to go after that, the only thing westward is the ocean, so plunk they go. So forget the ninety-three thousand dollars, Lee, you and me and all of us we’re just rats in a maze, the only thing to do is stop the world I want to get off. Therefore, Lee, go to San Francisco, go directly to San Francisco, do not pass Go, do not collect ninety-three thousand dollars.

The movie left it open, at the end, whether or not he got the money, which was the truest thing about it. Anyway, after Betsy and I made up we thought it might be a good idea if we went out to a movie, take a break from work (no, she doesn’t know the truth, she thinks I have two chapters done) and come back to it refreshed and with a better attitude. I said fine, and this Point Blank was playing at the Floral in Floral Park so we drove over through the rain and saw it. We got Angie to baby-sit, and the girl in the movie with Lee Marvin was Angie Dickinson, which is one of those pointless concidences life is full of, and I don’t even know why I mention it.

Well, I suppose because I laid Angie. Her father drops her off here when she’s baby-sitting for us, but I drive her home, and a couple months ago we started in necking, me feeling her up and like that, and this new generation of kids doesn’t seem to mind doing its own grabbing. I mean, the first time I felt her fumbling around between my legs I about fell over. I’m not used to the girl being aggressive. She’s seventeen, she’s only eight years younger than me, but I feel ancient with her. She’s part of the hippie generation, which I just missed, and I miss having missed it, if you know what I mean. Anyway, the point is she gave me a blow job a couple weeks ago, and tonight I finally got it into her. What a nice little body. We were in the back seat of the Buick, all cramped up, and she still managed to be great. Smooth legs, nice tight ass, good muscles. I lasted, which is sometimes a problem, and she had a good loud come. I can hardly wait to have her baby-sit again.

In the meantime, Betsy and I had made up and the idea was we were going to put the icing on the cake in bed, so driving back from Angie’s place I was a little worried. Would I get it up twice in a row? But it was all right. It had been a couple weeks since we’d made it, so Betsy was kind of horny too, so the whole thing worked out just fine. Except, of course, I didn’t get back to work last night.

Today, frankly, I’m a little bitter about that, and it’s just as well she’s out of the house. She took Fred to see the parade, and I’ve got the house to myself for a few hours.

The parade, gang. It’s Thanksgiving, let’s count our blessings. Well, it’s raining, how’s that for a blessing? Raining all over the parade. And I really don’t think I’m going to make nine hundred dollars out of Dwayne and Liz, I don’t think I can write that book again.

It’s funny, but every once in a while when I’m making love to Betsy I smell Christmas trees, but seeing a Christmas tree doesn’t necessarily make me horny for Betsy.

I know why I smell Christmas trees, of course. It’s that truck of her brothers’, Birge and Johnny. Have I mentioned how Birge and Johnny make their living? They drive Christmas trees to New York.

Do I hear you say that this seems unlikely, that there’s maybe six weeks a year when there will be a call for Christmas trees to be driven to New York, and that Teamsters’ Union or no Teamsters’ Union a truck driver cannot possibly earn a year’s living in six weeks of driving Christmas trees to New York, is that what I hear you saying, partner? Then let me tell you the surprise. Inside every truck load of Christmas trees there are other things. Radios. Luggage. Television sets. Typewriters. All sorts of things like that, on their way to New York City for the Christmas season.

Stolen.

I don’t mean that Birge and Johnny steal things, because they don’t. But other people steal things, and when they do they take them to Birge and Johnny, who have a barn north of Monequois on the old Montreal road, not far from their father’s Esso station, which by the way is doing rotten business since the new Montreal highway was put in and old man Blake would love to sell the station if you’re interested. He lives at 216 Clinton Street, Monequois, New York. I don’t know the zip code. His first name is Chester.

Anyway, all year long that barn of Birge and Johnny’s fills up with stolen goods, and at Christmastime the stolen goods are packed in the truck with the Christmas trees, load after load, and all driven down to New York, and sold to some people there.

When I first heard about this I said, “Is nothing sacred?” and laughed and laughed, because I thought that was funny. Christmas being sacred, you see, but the Christmas tree actually being pagan and not part of the religious aspect, so when I said, “Is nothing sacred?” I meant it as a joke, and I myself thought the joke was very funny. Betsy didn’t. First she didn’t get it, and then when I explained it to her she didn’t think it was funny. Neither do I, looking back at it. I see the humor of what I was trying for, but I don’t think I made it.

How I got to this, I was remarking how sex with Betsy sometimes makes me smell Christmas trees, and that’s because that truck of Birge and Johnny’s, since it rarely carries anything but Christmas trees, smells like Christmas trees all year long. So the first time we had sex, in the back of her brothers’ truck on a warm May night in 1963, was with the smell of Christmas trees all around us.

Betsy was very cold-blooded in setting that up, now I come to think of it. Up to and including whispering to me, as we stretched out on the blanket in the back of the truck, “It’s okay. It’s safe.”

I didn’t know what she was talking about. “What’s safe?” I said.

“It’s a safe time of the month,” she said. “I can’t get pregnant.”

“Oh,” I said, and felt a chill finger of belated apprehension run up my back. Pregnant. I hadn’t even thought about it.

I think that was when I decided I loved her. Not because I finally got into her, though that was a lot of fun at the time too, but because she’d remembered about getting pregnant, which I thought meant she was being considerate of me. I know, I know, but that’s what I thought. Also, I took her word for it. I took her word for it that night, and on every occasion after that for thirteen months, and then one night in June of 1964 I took her word for it once too often, and along about March 21st, 1965, along came Fred. Elfreda.

I don’t mean we played Vatican roulette all the time. Times she said it wasn’t safe I wore a rubber, but I always hated to wear one and she didn’t like it much either, so whenever she thought it was safe I’d go at her naked. Boom, Elfreda.

Anyway, after that night in the truck I couldn’t get enough of Betsy, and for a while she couldn’t get enough of me either. We were at each other every chance we got, and as the spring got warmer and warmer the chances got more and more frequent. I finally did sneak her into my room in the dorm, in the middle of the day, and on two memorable occasions she snuck me into her bedroom in the middle of the night. Also I didn’t go home to Albany for summer vacation, I got a cheap furnished room in town and a job at the makeup factory that was Monequois’s only attempt at local industry, and I spent all summer rutting atop my Betsy.

I also, because I was around her house all the time, got to know her family. Her father wears railroad engineer overalls, and is small and wiry and sour-looking, and is one of those people with so much grime encased in his skin if he stands still you feel like planting rows of beans up and down him. Her mother is fat, and wears flowered dresses that I believe she buys already faded. Pre-shrunk and pre-faded. She’s fat in the mind, too, being one of the dullest women on earth, who talks in a very slow monotone about things she saw on the television. What she talked about before television is anybody’s guess, but these days one hundred per cent of her conversation is what she saw yesterday or last Sunday or Tuesday afternoon on the television. Not on television, on the television. That’s how she speaks of it, the television. Like the Bronx.

I suppose, come to think of it, before television she used to talk about what she’d heard on the radio. But what would she have done if she’d been born a hundred years ago?

Anyway, besides those two there’s Birge and Johnny. Birge is eight years older than Betsy, and Johnny is five years older than Betsy, and they’re both big and ugly and rangy and mean-looking, and they hunt a lot, and they wear the kind of clothes worn by people who hunt a lot. They have both of them always intimidated me, Birge mostly but Johnny too. They stopped in here once last Christmastime, the middle of December. They drove the truck out from the city after delivering a load of Christmas trees, and they sat around and drank beer and we tried to find something we could talk about. We managed to talk about pro football for a while, but naturally Birge used to play semi-pro ball in Canada and all he wanted to talk about was ripping people’s nostrils, and against that my talk about watching the Giants screw up the game with the Packers on television last Sunday was pretty damn tame. As a matter of fact, I always have the feeling with Birge and Johnny that sooner or later they are going to get exasperated and then they’ll come over and stomp me to death with their boots because I’m soft. They make me nervous, and I’m glad they only came by that one time.

But I was talking about fucking Betsy. After that first night, we both of us got this terrible letch for each other, we’d stand around with our hands shaking waiting for a chance to get at each other again, we screwed and screwed and screwed, we tried every position I’d ever heard of, and Betsy was so hot she actually began to grab hold of me. In places like standing on line in the cafeteria. She’s in front of me, we’re holding our trays, and subtly she backs up, slips a hand behind her, gives me a squeeze. I jump, and look embarrassed, and she giggles at me with sidelong looks, and we rush through lunch and go over to the dorm and I sneak her in and lock the door so Rod won’t break in on us, and we hump all over the room.

Rod. Of course, I was reporting all this to Rod. Betsy doesn’t know it, naturally, but I told Rod everything. I told him how she liked it, what she did when she came, how many times I made her come, how she tasted the first time I went down on her, I told him everything. I was making up for all those times I had nothing to tell, of course, so I was overdoing it a little. In fact, I even lied a few times, exaggerated this and that. Like, I told him she was blowing me months before she was.

Then all of a sudden I was marrying her, and I wished I’d kept my big mouth shut.

But I am, as we writers say, leaping ahead of my story. First I have to leave Betsy forever, then we get married.

I graduated from college in June of 1964. My mother and Hannah came up. Hester was supposed to, but she disappeared that day. She disappeared frequently, so my mother didn’t worry about it, she just took it for granted Hester didn’t want to go see her big half-brother graduated. For which I don’t blame her, particularly since that was also the year Hannah and Hester had their own graduation, from high school. It was two weeks after mine, and I suppose Hester figured one graduation a June was sufficient evil unto the year thereof, or whatever.

Anyway, I introduced Mom and Hannah to Betsy, and Hannah and Betsy hit it off right away. They started talking about making your own clothes, and if that wasn’t enough to alert me to start running I don’t know what would have done it. Hester’s the only one in my family with the sense to disappear when the disappearing’s good.

I’d like to call Hester, but I don’t know exactly where she is. Somewhere in San Francisco, last I heard. If she has a phone, she’s probably pawned it.

Anyway, Hannah and Betsy got along like a house awater. Mom and Betsy were sort of cool to each other, I’m not sure why. It might have been a simple generational gap, or Mom might have had that mother thing about competition with the son’s girl friend, or maybe she just looked at Betsy and said to herself, At that girl’s age I was a swinger, and this one’s a bore. Whatever the reason, it was nervous-making to be around them, so for the two days that Mom and Hannah were up it tended to be Betsy and Hannah going off shopping together and Mom and me walking around town and the campus and all and looking at the sights.

Anyway, I graduated. I got the diploma, I shucked out of the black robe, I told Betsy I’d write every day I was in Albany and I would come up in August to see her, and I went away with Mom and Hannah and planned never to see Betsy again as long as I lived.

Because it was over. My lust had gradually worn itself out inside her, and once the lust was gone there wasn’t anything else to take its place. We had talked about marriage once or twice, or that is to say Betsy had brought the subject up, and every time I had talked about the unsettled state of both the world and my career, not knowing if I’d get to graduate school or not, and so on. And Betsy still had two years to go at Monequois, which I knew she would be only too glad to give up for a husband, but I refused to see things that way. I was trying to avoid the commitment without losing the steady lay, which was, I suppose, a sort of practice for fiction-writing. And my ultimate argument was that by August I’d know a lot more about what the future had in store for me, so I’d come back up to Monequois and we’d talk things over and decide our rosy tomorrows together.

Sure.

My mother and Hannah and I went back to Albany, to the house at 50 Slingerlands Street, and there was Hester, smoking cigarettes. She gave me a hello smile that was worth forty of Hannah’s dutiful trips, and she also right away arranged a double date for us, her with some football player she was screwing and me with a friend of hers called Charlotte, with whom I learned why the french kiss has become so popular. That was the first date. On the second date, Charlotte went down on me in the back seat of the football player’s Chevrolet while the football player and Hester were doing various obscure things up front, and Betsy receded in my mind like Smithville as seen from the observation car of the Twentieth Century Limited.

When the phone rang about suppertime one day and Hannah answered it and came out to the kitchen and said to me, “It’s for you,” and I walked into the living room and picked up the receiver and said, “Hello?” and this thin voice said, “Hi, Ed, how are you?” I had no idea at first who it could possibly be.

Then she said, “I know you have a lot of things to think over, Ed, and I wouldn’t have called you, but I thought it was important,” and then I knew who it was.

“Oh, hi, Betsy,” I said, trying for delight, and feeling very nervous because it hadn’t occurred to me it might be difficult to split from Betsy. It still hadn’t occurred to me it might be impossible.

But it very soon did, because the next thing she said was, “The thing is, Ed, I think I’m pregnant.”

We now have silence, the kind of silence that follows the last receding thud of a landslide that has just covered an Alpine town with several tons of rock and snow. No hope for survivors.

But hope doesn’t know there’s no hope. “Are you sure?” I said.

“Pretty sure,” she said.

All I could think of at first was her brothers. I knew Betsy had sort of broken with her family when she’d insisted on going to college, I knew none of them had looked upon her as being entirely respectable after that, but I didn’t know how deep this animosity ran. Would they decide that higher education had already so sufficiently ruined her that out-of-wedlock pregnancy was hardly worth considering, or would they decide she was still a Blake and family honor had been trampled in an affair that could only be settled with shotguns?

The silence ran on and on, and finally she said, in a very small and very thin voice, “I’m sorry.”

And my mind melted into my throat. I cleared it, and, “I’ll come up,” I said.

“Ed—” she said, and I knew she was going to give me an out, she was going to make a gesture and give me an opportunity to crawl through the letter slot and take off.

But I didn’t want it. Ten seconds earlier, yes. Ten minutes later, yes. But not then. I interrupted her. I said, “I’ll be there tonight.”

“All right,” she said.

We said a few more words, one at a time, and then we hung up and I went back to the kitchen and sat down and put some mashed potatoes in my mouth and they sat there on my tongue like a ball of mud. Mom was looking at me and Hannah was carefully not looking at me, both waiting to hear what the call had been, and Hester was drinking beer with dinner, which she said she was doing because she wanted to put a little weight on her hips.

Finally I swallowed the potatoes. I said, “Remember Betsy?”

Mom nodded. “A nice girl,” she said, noncommittally.

Hannah looked at me. “Did something happen to her?”

“She’s pregnant,” I said.

Hannah recoiled, and Hester said, “Hah!” She laughed, Hester did, and said, “You better pack, Ed.”

I grinned weakly at her, as though I thought she was joking, but I knew she was absolutely serious and absolutely right and I was absolutely not going to do anything about it.

Mom, with something grim in her voice, said, “You are going to marry the girl, aren’t you?” I suppose she was remembering my father, who’d maybe had second thoughts in his time, too.

“Oh, sure,” I said, as though nothing else had even for a second occurred to me. “I’m going up there,” I said, and looked at Hester, hoping to see understanding on her face, but she was drinking beer and it was several weeks before I could catch her eye again and then there was nothing in it.

Would it be ridiculous to say Hester is my father figure?

That evening I took the eight-ten bus out of Albany, and Betsy met me at the bus stop diner in Monequois at eleven-forty. She had her brothers’ truck, which I had never learned to drive. We didn’t kiss, and we looked at each other very solemnly, and I thought vaguely about murdering her. But then I thought. Could I get away with it? And then I thought, I know damn well I couldn’t. If I can’t even get away with fucking her, I’m certainly not going to get away with killing her.

She drove me to the Northway Motel, where Mom and Hannah had stayed in June, and I got a room, and she came in with me, and we talked. We discussed things, different people’s attitudes, where and when we would get married, that we were going to live for a while with my mother in Albany, and all the time we sat side by side on the single bed without touching, without very often looking at each other, and we didn’t kiss. I had no more desire for her than for a goat. Finally she asked me if I was hungry and I said no and she said she’d see me tomorrow and she left. She paused in the doorway, and I understood she wanted me to kiss her then, not because she wanted to be kissed exactly, but because at that moment that was the required gesture, and I couldn’t do it. I had come up here, I would take the blood test and get the license and marry her, but I couldn’t kiss her. I just couldn’t do it. And I didn’t.

The marriage took five days. The day before the wedding, in the early afternoon, I was over at Betsy’s house and her father said his first complete sentence to me. He said, “Can you spare a few minutes?”

“Sure,” I said. I wasn’t doing anything, I was just standing around waiting for the cement to harden.

“Good,” he said. “Come on.”

I followed him out of the house, and his dark blue Edsel station wagon with the greasy metal things lying in the back was parked out by the curb. You understand that that Edsel was at least fifty per cent of his character, or anyway I hope you understand that. An Edsel, for God’s sake. What was it then, eight years old? I understand he has a Pontiac now, so if you have any GM stock maybe you ought to sell.

In the meantime we got into the car. It was very huge inside, the seat seemed to be impossibly far back, and of course everything in the car was grimy and greasy and looked as though it was carefully rubbed down every day with used crankcase oil.

Betsy’s father started the engine and pulled away from the curb and looked out the gray windshield as he said, “I told them we were going. I told them we’ll get back soon.”

“Good,” I said.

He’s a lousy driver, of the sort who is somehow too far removed from the actions of the car. The car seemed to lumber through Monequois on its own momentum, sagging around the curves a little too fast, drooping along the straightaways a little too slow. After a while I stopped looking through the gray windshield and spent my time studying instead his right thumb.

Betsy’s father has a habit of chewing the nail of his right thumb, gnawing on it while the complexities of life wash sluggishly over him, and as a result that right thumb is clean. He is five feet four and a half inches of unrelieved grime in baggy engineer’s overalls, with right in the middle of it this pink thumb tip. It’s like a beacon, like Rudolph’s nose. If he were ever totally demolished in an automobile accident, which seems to me only inevitable, and I was asked to identify him, I’d say, “Let’s see his right thumb.” It wouldn’t even have to be on his hand, it could be torn off in the collision and I’d know it. They’d open this little box like you get a pen and pencil set in, and there would be this jointed penis sort of thing, all greasy and grimy with a gleaming pink tip, and I’d turn to Betsy and say, “I’m sorry, Betsy, but I’m afraid there’s no hope. It is Dad.”

So that was what I looked at, his right thumb, and after we’d driven three or four minutes he abruptly said, “You took a lot off my mind, you know.”

I thought I knew what he meant, so I said, “I did?”

“It’s been tough, the last few years,” he said. “Prices going up. And that goddam highway.”

Then I understood. In marrying his daughter I’d eased his economic burden. Isn’t that wonderful? It’s what they always say, every cloud has its silver lining.

I said, trying to appear sympathetic because I felt it necessary to be on good terms with my bride’s parents even though they were as alien to me as Martians, I said, “I guess it has been kind of rough.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” he said. “Sometimes, I don’t know what to do. I can understand those Jewish businessmen in New York that burn their places down for the insurance. I can understand them.”

Why Jewish businessmen? Why New York? But he was my father-in-law to be, so I said, “Sure, I can see how it happens, a businessman gets in a bind.”

“That’s right,” he said. “That’s right. You can see it.”

I looked out the windshield, and we were turning now onto the old Montreal road, and I had a sudden numbing thought. I thought, he’s going to bum the gas station down, and kill me, and make it look as though I was the one did it.

Not too paranoid. I even looked out the back window to see if Birge and Johnny were following in the truck to help out, but of course they weren’t.

But we did stop at the station. He parked against the picket fence at the back of the property and said, “Come on,” and got out of the car.

You understand this gas station, I hope. White tile front, the normal thing, with red trim, Humble over the door and Esso here and there. Blacktop out front, and the pumps. All as grimy as the owner.

There’s a halfwit named Buck who’s Dad Blake’s only employee, and who was changing a tire when we came in. Had it mounted preparatory to taking the tire off the rim and was banging away at it with several sledges.

As we walked in, Betsy’s father patted the outer wall and said to me, “Tile. Over concrete block.”

We went into the garage part, where Buck was bludgeoning the tire. Betsy’s father put his mouth close to my ear, pointed at the floor and shouted, “Concrete!”

We walked into the office part and he shut the door and things were quiet. “Well,” he said, “you see the problem.”

“I’m not sure—” I said.

“You’re a college boy,” he told me. “You got your diploma, didn’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“You know all about this science stuff,” he said.

I considered trying to explain to him what an American Lit major is, and gave it up at once. “I studied some science,” I admitted, thinking of the biology course I’d been required to take.

“Okay,” he said. He made an exasperated gesture with his right hand, the one with the thumb. “How do I burn this fucking place down?” he said.

1

She used to be in show business in New Orleans until the pony’s platform broke.

Now what?

I’ve been wanting to use that as the opening sentence in a sex novel for over a year now, but I could never think of a line to follow it so I never typed it out before. Now I’ve typed it out, and I still can’t think of a line to follow it.

I promised myself I wasn’t going to do this. I sat around for the last half-hour pointing out to myself that every time I sit down and start writing this junk I get stuck in it and I seem absolutely unable to get back out of it again until another fifteen pages has gone fluttering into oblivion. So I said I wouldn’t do it, I definitely would not do it.

So here I am doing it. And I can’t afford to, I really can’t. I’ve only got six days left, counting today. I didn’t do anything at all yesterday, yesterday was a screwed-up day, I don’t want to go into it. Yesterday is draped over this house like a gray Army blanket, blotting out the sun, and I am here insisting I won’t notice it.

So I won’t notice it. There was no Friday this week, that’s all. There was Monday, my last day of sanity, the day before I started trying to write book number 29. Then there was Tuesday, I did a lot of writing on Tuesday, oh, yes I did. Then Wednesday. Well, Wednesday wasn’t so good either, it was Wednesday that made the mess for Friday. There wouldn’t have been any mess on Friday if I hadn’t made a tiny error on Wednesday.

I’m not going to talk about it. The world is collapsing, that’s all, but the details are a) my business, and b) boring, as well as c) not going to be gone into. Now or ever. Or ever.

Thursday. That was Thanksgiving, the kind of cheap irony of which only God is truly capable. Even a soap opera writer wouldn’t have made the day before yesterday Thanksgiving, I mean it’s pouring it on too thick.

That was the last time I wrote anything, Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, in the morning before everybody got here. Another chapter like this, that was, useless, pointless, not at all one tenth of nine hundred dollars.

It is Saturday now, it is the 25th day of November, I have till next Thursday to get a book done. A book, not this thing.

I’ve never done a book in less than eight days, and only once did I do one that fast. I know Rod did a book once in five days, and there’s a couple other people doing them that fast all the time, but I’m not one of them.

You know what sticks in my craw? Rod sticks in my craw. That bastard did seven of these books, seven of them, and I’ve done twenty-eight, and he still gets two hundred bucks every time I write a book. Why can’t I have my own pen name? How come he rates? Seven lousy books is all he ever did, he’s never done another one and he never will. And look at me.

I’m just in a bad mood today, that’s all. Sitting here day after day, not getting anything done, that would put anybody in a bad mood. Not to speak of yesterday, and I’m not going to speak of yesterday.

I’ll speak of Thursday, though. After I finished my non-work on Thursday, about twelve-thirty, I went and watched football on television, Rams versus the Lions, which the Rams won, 31-7. During the halftime Betsy and Fred came back, Fred bitchy and crying because she was overtired, Betsy bitchy and not quite crying because it’s raining out and the traffic was crappy and all, and I wanted us to keep the good feeling toward each other we’d gotten to the day before that, so when she put Fred to bed I put her to bed, and we screwed, and we had fun, and it was almost like being back in the dorm at college, the door locked, middle of the day, sneaking her in and screwing and horsing around, giggling, keeping the giggles down then because it was illegal for her to be in the dorm, keeping the giggles down now because we didn’t want to wake Fred. But it finally had to come to an end, and she went to the kitchen to get to work on Thanksgiving dinner, and I went back to the living room and watched the last quarter of the game, and then switched over to Channel 4 and watched college ball awhile, Oklahoma against Nebraska. I don’t know how that came out because about twenty after three Pete and Ann showed up. I knew Betsy didn’t want me watching football on television with guests in the house, which is a perfect way to make me hate the guests, but because I was going all out to be a good guy and have Betsy and me continue with our good relations I turned off the set and made everybody a drink, and Ann went out to the kitchen with Betsy, and Pete and I sat around the living room and shop-talked.

Pete used to do these, you know. Not this, nobody’s ever done anything like this before in the history of the world. I mean the sex books. Rod knew him through the agency, and I met him at Rod’s apartment one time shortly after we moved down from Albany, and we kind of hit it off. Dick is the only one of us who’s a native New Yorker, so the rest of us are sort of limited in our social circles to people we manage to meet now, so just about everybody I know in New York is a writer. There’s a couple make-believe writers like me, and the rest are all writers, like Rod and Pete and Dick.

Pete Falkus, his name is. He’s got a ghost, too, the way Rod has me. He’s a magazine writer now, Pete, not a fiction writer at all. I think he never wanted to write fiction in particular, he’s the kind of guy picks up the New York Times and reads it and gets seven great ideas for articles that he can sell to Ladies’ Home Journal and True and TV Guide. Back at the beginning he was selling articles to crappier magazines, I mean lower-paying magazines, and Lance was his agent, so when this sex novel market opened up Lance looked around at all his steady-producing low-money boys and got most of them to doing sex novels, including Pete.

I wish I’d been in this at the beginning. If I had, I’d be one of the guys with a ghost now.

The hell I would. Pete was in this at the beginning because he was a writer, and he’s got a ghost now because he’s writing other things for more money. And the same with Rod. I was never a writer, and never thought I was a writer, and never even wished I was a writer until I was already neck deep in this shit. And if I did all of a sudden get a ghost, like a sublet, a subghost, what would I do? To what brilliant new ends would I turn this here typewriter?

I think I’ve been answering that question for the last several days. When I don’t do sex novels I do long boring descriptions of Thanksgiving Day dinners with Pete and Ann Falkus. Except I’m not going to. All I’m going to say is that Ann Falkus confuses me, because I admire her and I don’t lust after her. I’ve been known to lust after female chimpanzees, I have never been accused of a great selectivity in my lusts, but I don’t lust after Ann Falkus.

And it isn’t that she’s a beast. She’s very plain-looking, and she doesn’t do much with makeup, but she’s always very neat, and she’s slender, and she’s got a pretty good shape. And she has nice hair, short, worn close to her head in a kind of helmet design.

I don’t know what it is about Ann. I think about her now, and I realize there’s absolutely no reason on earth not to lust after her, but I can’t even fantasize making a pass at her, much less actually do it. It’s like there’s something inside my head stops me before I can get started.

She’s an editor. She edits juvenile books at a hardcover house called Mastro-Fairbanks. In fact, a year or so ago she asked me why didn’t I try a juvenile book, and I actually sat around for a couple of weeks trying to think of one. I did think of one, too, about six months ago. The same month I was first late with a book, I think. It was about this boy who becomes a clown in the circus, and he can’t get his makeup off, and the point of it was that you can’t tell what people are like from the outside. You can’t tell a book by its cover, that one, right? Like, this boy looked like a clown but he was really a boy.

I suppose that could work the other way around too, couldn’t it?

Anyway, I tried to write the book, and it was rotten. It sounded stilted and stupid. I could never figure out how to tell the story, and I finally had to give up on it. I never told Ann about it, figuring if I could do it I’d do it and then surprise her with the manuscript, and if I couldn’t do it there was no point humiliating myself talking about it.

It’s funny how I don’t lust after Ann, I don’t understand it. It isn’t that I don’t get letches for my friends’ wives. God knows it isn’t that. Kay, for instance, Dick’s wife

I was about to tell a lie. A fiction, maybe. Which could be my basic problem after all, that I tell fiction when I should tell fact, and fact when I should tell fiction.

The truth is, I kissed Kay once. Well, I kissed her four or five times, but it was all in the same incident. It was at a party at Rod’s, when he had the place on East 78th Street. That was before I gave up smoking, and I finished a pack, and I knew I had a fresh pack in my coat pocket. The coats were in the bedroom, at the back of the apartment, piled up on the bed. I went back there and didn’t bother to turn on the light, mostly because I was about half in the bag. I wasn’t used to the idea of parties where you didn’t bring your own bottle, and the notion of free booze was in the process of laying me low. So I just stood there in the semi-dark, half bent over the bed, pawing through the coats, looking for mine, and then a drunky girl’s voice behind me said, “Are you a burglar?” Joking.

I turned around and it was Kay, standing in the doorway. I couldn’t see her face because all the light was from behind her, but I got the impression she was grinning. She has a very sexy full-bodied shape, when she wears a form-fitting knit dress men tend to walk into doors and walls. I was seeing it in silhouette, the nice narrow waist, the full hips, and so I immediately responded, “No, I’m a rapist.” Because she was sexy, and I was half drunk.

“Oh, goody,” she said, and came trotting over and threw her arms around my neck and kissed me.

In fantasy, you see, and in the sex books, I would be the one to kiss her, and of course she would immediately explode with sensual response. But I would be the aggressor, it would be my idea and my move.

So much for fantasy. She kissed me, and I was the one who immediately exploded with sensual response. I put my arms around her and kissed her back. “Mmm,” she said, liking it, so I probed a bit with my tongue. Her teeth parted and she received the tongue with a great deal of obvious pleasure. She wasn’t quite as engulfing as Charlotte used to be, but she was all right.

We kissed four or five times, with me nuzzling her neck in between, and then I slipped my right hand from the small of her back down past the borderline of waist and over the strange alien contours of her behind, so unlike Betsy’s behind, my fingertips on the deepening groove of her ass, headed down and around, intending to slip down between her legs and come upon her cunt from behind, but before I was halfway to Moscow she said, “Uh uh,” and smiled to show there were no hard feelings, and pushed on my shoulders, separating us.

For one second I saw myself pushing it, overpowering her weak defenses, stroking her and kissing her and rubbing against her till she was too passionate to refuse me, and then mounting her atop the pile of coats and humping her till her cries of ecstasy brought the other guests on the run...

There. I did it again. My fantasies turn against me, they go bitter and rancid every time.

The point is, I had one instant where I might have refused to take no for an answer, at which point she would surely have hauled off and belted me or maybe even hollered, but not in ecstasy, and then the next second came along and brought gloomy old sanity with it, and my hands slipped away from her hips, and I hunted around quickly in the bottom of my prop bag for a smile, tacked it in place, and said, “Come back when you can spend more time.”

“Maybe I will,” she said, in a manner perilously close to a Mae West parody, and turned around and left the room. She paused just outside the doorway to give me a toodle-oo waggle of her fingers, and then she was gone.

I had that old dinosaur, penus erectus, of course, and I briefly considered going into the john and casting my seed in the toilet, but I had made a point of refraining from masturbation since my marriage, on the basis that I was ridiculous enough as it was, and the Mae West touch at the end had added just the right aroma of burlesque, thereby toppling me from the peak of my passion, and I was sure the dinosaur would briefly wander away by himself, so I simply went back to looking for my cigarettes, and in fact old dino did die, and I thought no more of him.

I had just completed my task, in fact, had found the right coat and the right pocket and had the Luckies in my hand, when the light came on. I’d been in there long enough by then for my eyes to have adjusted to the gloom, and the sudden glare of the overhead light made me squint like a mole. I also jumped like the guiltiest footpad of all time, which for some reason is what I felt like. I turned around, squinting and blinking, my heart thumping, and it was Kay again.

She was squinting, too, and I saw that her makeup was smeary and that the flesh of her face was sagging a trifle, from tiredness or drink or both. She made an indefinite sort of gesture with one hand and said, with artificial brightness, “I forgot to get what I came for.”

Of course, that was a perfect straight line, but I knew she hadn’t intended it as such and I also saw she was terribly embarrassed and ill at ease, and then I realized I felt the same way. We were like two strangers who, having met and together done something despicable, never expecting to see each other again, suddenly come face to face in the street.

It was one of the most acutely embarrassing moments of my life, I’m still not sure why. Holding up the pack of Luckies like a spieler on television, I said, my brightness as artificial as hers, “Well, I finally got mine. See you.”

“See you,” she said, and her smile was so painful it made me notice her lipstick, which made me think I might be wearing some of that lipstick myself right now. So I waved the cigarettes again, and stumbled hurriedly from the room, and stopped off in the john on the way back and checked myself in the mirror. Yes, there it was, the scarlet evidence. It was very difficult to remove, a faint pink layer of it seemed to have settled into my skin, but finally I rubbed and scrubbed my face so much that the rest of it was the same pink shade and it could no longer be noticed. With which, I went back to the living room, where I found Betsy talking with Dick, the husband of Kay, a circumstance that gave me a start until I realized that symbols are things that happen in novels. So I joined them, and I too talked with Dick, and a while later I saw Kay on the other side of the room talking with another group of people.

I think Dick was working on The Captain’s Pearls then. I think that’s the night he was discussing his theories of literature, which I find sort of boring. I’ll grant you the result is fine, The Captain’s Pearls was a funny book, but the theories behind it strike me as unnecessary. It seems to me Dick could have written that book without ever dreaming up a theory for it at all.

All right, I’ve mentioned the theory, I might as well explain something about it. I won’t go into the sort of detail that Dick does, because I’m not here to bore me either, but I’ll give it a skim.

What Dick says is, the conventional artifices are breaking down between the work of art and its audience. He says it’s most apparent in the movies, where the moviemakers are increasingly acknowledging within the movie that what you’re seeing is a movie, but that it’s happening in the other arts too. His examples are mostly movie examples, though. Like a movie called The Troublemaker, where, when Buck Henry goes to see this Chinese prostitute, the camera starts to follow him into the room, in fact he can’t close the door because the camera’s in the way, and he finally turns and looks at the audience in an exasperated way and tells them to go away. The camera backs up, and he shuts the door. Or in Tom Jones, where the characters stop every once in a while and talk to the audience. Or in the Bob Dylan movie Don’t Look Back, and the other movies using the cinéma vérité technique, where the camera frankly exists as an eavesdropper. He has examples from the theater, too, in fact he has examples from all over, but those are the ones I remember.

Anyway, he says the same thing can be done with novels. You have a novel that claims to be a novel. His own book The Captain’s Pearls is a perfect example. The lead character is this submarine captain on a two-month cruise under the North Pole, and what his big fantasy is, this captain, is that actually he’s a giant in belles lettres, like Carlyle or somebody like that. His big dream is that three hundred years from now one of the main literary things from the twentieth century to be treasured and remembered is his log, so he fills the log with literary criticism and free verse and political essays and all sorts of stuff, all intermixed with the regular notations that are supposed to be in the log, and even those things, latitude and longitude and speed and who was on sick call and like that, even those things are done in very flowery sentences, as though with a quill pen. In fact, the captain’s name is Captain Quill. And what he writes, his log, is the book The Captain’s Pearls. So what Dick has done is, he’s written a book that doesn’t claim to be actions in a submarine, he’s written a book that claims to be a book.

His second book is the same way. He’s still working on it, I guess he got enough money from the movie sale of The Captain’s Pearls so he can really take his time. He told me about this new one, and it’s even nuttier. It’s about this Negro junkie and this psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist has gotten interested in the junkie and wants to try out a lot of new theories on him, and the junkie is going along with it because the psychiatrist is keeping him out of jail and supplied with dope. And the basic thing in the psychiatrist’s theory is self-understanding, so what he’s having this illiterate Negro junkie do is write his autobiography. So the book is the autobiography.

Except there’s more to it than that. The junkie turns out to be this total put-on type, whose whole purpose in the book is to put on the psychiatrist. He doesn’t want the psychiatrist to know one true thing about him, not even his name, so he weaves all these falsehoods, lies inside lies, then sticking the truth away in one little corner, or other times putting part of the truth right out in the open where it looks like a lie, or telling a lie the psychiatrist will be sure to catch but doing it in order to lead the psychiatrist to believe a different lie, doing all these things chapter by chapter, and of course after every chapter the junkie and the psychiatrist have a talk, and what they say gets mentioned in the next chapter. Also, the psychiatrist has footnotes throughout the book telling what he thinks is the truth and what he thinks is lies, or explaining other things the junkie left out, or defending himself when the junkie has made remarks about him and like that. I read the first couple of chapters a few months ago and it was very funny stuff, even funnier than The Captain’s Pearls, but it was also weird stuff, too, and I think after a while it might turn out to be hard reading.

About the title for this one, Dick says it’s time for another legal breakthrough. He says it’s been established in the courts you can put anything you want inside a novel, now it’s time to establish you can have the same leeway in your title, so he wants to call the book Adios, Motherfucker. But his editor told him there was one big trouble with calling a book Adios, Motherfucker, and that is, he won’t get any reviews. The editor says nobody can possibly review a book if they can’t mention what book they’re reviewing, and Dick says he understands that, he can see the problem, but worrying about reviews to the point of changing your book for them is the tail wagging the dog, and the absolutely best and right and perfect title for his book is Adios, Motherfucker. So the editor suggested he call the book A. M. and inside on the title page there would be an explanation of the title in parentheses, but Dick says that’s an awful cheat and a cop-out, and if he’s going to cop out he wants to go all the way and use his alternate title, which is Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.

Frankly I agree with Dick that Adios, Motherfucker is a beautiful title, particularly for the book he’s writing, but I also agree with his editor that this is not the world in which to title a book Adios, Motherfucker.

Anyway, I like Dick, and I think he’s a funny guy and a good writer, probably the best writer I know. But I felt very guilty toward him for a while after kissing Kay. For a couple of months, in fact. Partly because I’d kissed her and partly because I wanted to pick up with her where we’d left off. It wasn’t going to happen and I knew it, and Kay never after that gave any indication that it had even started, but I did a lot of rutty fantasizing about it all, and I think the fantasizing made me feel guiltier than the actual kissing had.

How did I get onto all this stuff? It’s Saturday, the 25th of November, one-thirty in the afternoon. I have five and a half days and I’m still going along just as nice as you please, talking about Thanksgiving and Kay and Dick and all this stuff, as though I had all the time in the world. If I still had the other chapters I did, I could give them to Dick, maybe he could use them for something. “Here you go, Dick, a novel pretending to be a novel.” But I couldn’t give him this chapter, not with the stuff about Kay in it, and I don’t have the other chapters, not after yesterday.

I’m not going into that.

I couldn’t get to sleep last night, after what had happened. I’m sorry if I’m being a cockteaser, it isn’t that I want to build up suspense or anything, it’s just that the whole thing is extremely painful for me. I can’t help thinking about it, but somehow it’s less real if I don’t talk about it or write about it. If I don’t turn it into a wall of words. A stone silo of words, with me on the inside, all alone.

Anyway, I slept badly. I think I dreamed about giant spiders, I’m not sure. Whatever I dreamed about, I woke up shaky and quaky just as though I had dreamed about giant spiders, so we’ll let it ride at giant spiders, that’s close enough. What with the bad dreams, and my general uneasiness, I woke up early. Early for me, I mean. Nine-thirty. I dragged myself out of bed, I’d had maybe four hours’ sleep, it took me forever to get to this typewriter, full of rue and coffee. I mean me full of rue and coffee, not the typewriter. The typewriter is full of shit.

So here I am, miserable, exhausted, panic-stricken, pissing away my substance on another fifteen pages of whatchamacallit that Samuel would never understand, and what am I going to do?

What am I going to do?

I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I am going to outline a sex novel right now, and then I am going to make myself some lunch, maybe watch some football, and then come back here and start the sex novel I have outlined. That is what I am going to do, no ifs, no ands, no buts.

Outline. Girl-on-the-make book. Call it Passion Sinner. Do I have a book called Passion Sinner? I have a list of my titles here, twenty-eight lovely titles. No Passion Sinner. Done. Outline:

1. Sally Maximus, having graduated from secretarial school, has decided to leave her small home town and go to New York City. With her secretarial school training she’s sure she can find a good job, and she wants a little fun and excitement in her life before she settles down to being a housewife. She has done a lot of heavy petting with her boy friend, Barry Gaiter, but she’s still a virgin. The night before her departure, she and Barry go over the line. She gets too hot to stop him and they make it in the back seat of his convertible. She realizes she’d intended to devirginize herself in New York anyway, and she’s glad it was good old Barry who got there first.

2. Sally boards the bus for New York and gets into conversation with Matt Sembling, an actor on his way to try for the big time in the city. They neck in the bus, and she gets hot again, and he fingers her to an orgasm. She didn’t have one with Barry, and this one astonishes her.

3. In New York, Matt introduces Sally to his cousin, Anita Rorschamb, who is a copywriter in an advertising agency. She is a tall seductive brunette, a Vampira type, and she tells Sally she can stay at her place until she finds one of her own. She also brings Sally around to the advertising agency for a possible secretarial job. Sally is hired, and her boss is Archer Frenway, who promptly rapes her in his locked office. When she cries for help, he tells her the room is soundproofed. When she says she’ll tell the police he says half a dozen men in the agency will swear he was in conference with them at the time and he’ll bring a suit against her for slander and libel and malicious mischief. The rape is completed, and he smiles and pats her cheek and says they’ll get along fine.

4. Sally, in a state of shock, goes back to Anita’s apartment. When Anita comes home that evening Sally is shivering in bed. Anita sits beside her and Sally tells her what happened. Anita says she’s heard of such things, but didn’t really believe it. She consoles Sally, and it gradually turns physical and Anita goes down on her and Sally comes.

5. Two weeks have passed. Sally hasn’t gone back to the advertising agency, nor does she have another job. She’s living in a lesbian relationship with Anita. Matt comes by to say he’s gotten a job in an Off Broadway theater, and finds out what’s going on. He tells Sally all men are not as heartless as Archer Frenway, and convinces her to come with him to his new apartment, in which there’s a spare bedroom. He promises to make no sexual moves toward her. She goes with him, and alone in bed that night she thinks about sex straight and sex lesbian and masturbates and comes. She wonders if she can come every way but the right way.

6. Matt has a party for his Greenwich Village and Off Broadway friends. Sally is feeling somewhat better, she’s been at Matt’s place for two weeks, there’s been no sex between them. The party becomes an orgy, which Sally observes but does not take part in.

7. Sally is backstage at the theater where Matt has a small role in an Off Broadway play. She’s alone in the dressing room when Anita comes in, angry at Sally for having walked out on her. Anita starts to beat Sally up, and Rex Kilbrood, the male lead in the play, comes in and breaks it up. He consoles Sally in the dressing room, seems very attentive and compassionate and gentle, and gradually seduces her. While they’re making it she suddenly realizes the whole thing has been mechanical with him, the whole seduction just a well-rehearsed play, he has no real interest in her at all. He comes, but she does not, and she cynically observes how he handles the brushoff afterwards.

8. Sally is in Matt’s apartment, middle of the day. The doorbell rings and it’s Archer Frenway. He is distraught, he hasn’t been able to forget her, he didn’t realize that day in the office that she would become so important in his mind. She sees that he wants to seduce her, more gently than the last time, and she leads him on, going through all sorts of foreplay with him, and when he’s just about to score she runs into the bathroom and locks herself in and tells him he’d better leave because Matt is coming home soon. He batters at the door, but she won’t let him in, and he finally leaves. It’s a triumph, and a revenge, but the taste of it is sour.

9. When Matt comes home, Sally tells him about Archer’s visit and what she did, and how she’s afraid she’s becoming as heartless as Archer himself. Matt begins to kiss her and gradually they make it, with tenderness and caring on both sides, and for the first time Sally has an orgasm with a man the primary way. She’s still bathed in the glow of this, of knowing that she is normal after all, when the mail comes, with a letter from Barry saying he’s coming to New York to see her. She knows she’s going to have to choose between Barry and Matt.

10. Walking down the street, Sally meets a couple of sailors who engage her in conversation. They smuggle her aboard their battleship and when they are on the high seas she blows the entire Seventh Fleet until, bloated with come, she is harpooned by a passing whaler and sinks without a trace.

1

Sitting in the commuter train on the way home to Long Island, Paul Trepless found himself smiling at his vague reflection in the window beside him, smiling at it and thinking about Beth. Thinking very sexy thoughts about Beth, remembering sexual moments with Beth, getting excited at the very thought of Beth, and smiling at himself both because he was pleased with life and because he thought it was funny and silly in a good way to be so worked up all of a sudden over Beth.

Over his wife.

An old married man, married six years, with a daughter and a house and a job and all the appurtenances of staid family life, he wasn’t supposed to get as excited about his wife as a teenager about a girl on their first date. Life was supposed to be more settled for him than that, and until very recently it had been. Until very recently he’d been living a sort of placid, bored, contented but not exciting life, and he hadn’t much minded it, and he’d neither looked forward to each succeeding day nor dreaded each succeeding day. He’d simply lived each succeeding day, finding it essentially the same as the day before it and the day after it and all the other days on both sides, stretching away into infinity. And if Sunday was somewhat different from Thursday, it was nevertheless true that Sunday was no different at all in any essential respect from any other Sunday, and no Thursday could be told with complete assurance from any other Thursday.

Until recently.

Until just the last few days, in fact.

Paul Trepless had no clear idea himself just why everything seemed suddenly so changed. Nothing had changed outside him, he still had the same job at the advertising agency, Beth was still the same ordinary housewife, his home was the same, his daughter Edwina was certainly no different, he had met no new people nor lost any old ones. No, there was no explanation in the outside world for the change that had taken place.

The change was inside him. Somewhere inside his head a relay had clicked over, like a long distance telephone call being completed, and suddenly the world was a new and different thing, and he was new and different, and Beth was new and different, and everything suddenly seemed much brighter and happier and gayer and younger and somehow more possible than it had seemed only the day before, only a few days before.

It was hard to define any specific instant when the change took place. The closest he could come was one night last week, after Beth had gone to sleep, when he had been lying awake in bed, thinking about his life, and suddenly he had started to think about the first time he and Beth had ever made love, back when they were both still in college.

It had been late spring, a Saturday night, and they had gone to a movie together. They had been casually dating all semester, starting with a blind date arranged by a mutual friend shortly after Christmas vacation, and over the course of the months since then the relationship had gradually deepened. They were spending more and more time with each other and their necking sessions in his car, an old secondhand Buick convertible, had grown more and more intense. She had told him one night that she was still a virgin and that she wanted to save herself for the man she would marry and he had respected that, but it had been hard sometimes to come so close to the object of his desire and then have to turn away, but he never tried to force his attentions on her, she being more valuable to him than any momentary gratification. Besides, there was another girl, not a coed like Beth but a girl from the town, who was known to be easy. When the demands of nature grew too intense to be withstood, Paul always knew he could go to Carol, and from time to time he did, but in his heart and in his mind he always remained true to Beth.

It had never occurred to him that Beth herself might decide to end the stalemate of their relationship, and he hadn’t supposed for a minute when they entered the movie theater that night that there would be anything between them but the usual petting.

The movie wasn’t very good, and they sat in the rear row of the balcony unobserved, and kissed and petted till Paul began to feel the passion rising in him like heat in a furnace. He could see that Beth was caught up in it, too, more than she’d ever been before, but he didn’t think that meant anything in particular, so when he slipped his hand under her skirt in the darkness of the theater he couldn’t at first believe it. She wasn’t wearing a thing under the skirt, not a thing!

In the dim light reflecting back from the Technicolor movie showing on the screen, Paul saw Beth’s eyes gleaming with mischief, saw the amused grin on her lips. She pulled his head closer, till her lips were by his ear, and then whispered, “Patience should be rewarded.”

He couldn’t say a word. His hand was touching her beneath the skirt, cupping the hot pulsating core of her being, and all at once he understood that tonight was going to be the night, and that the reward he was being offered was precious indeed.

“The heck with this movie,” he whispered throatily, suddenly feeling overpowering desire for her, the need to have her now.

“Yes,” she said, and he could hear the same throatiness in her voice, the same need, the same passionate unwillingness to wait another minute, another second, the same violent desire to have it now.

They got up from the seats, fumbling for their coats in their haste, and hurried from the theater. Paul had parked the convertible down the block to the right and they walked down there with hurrying steps, climbed aboard, and Paul started the engine and steered the car away from there.

It was a pleasant night, late May, warm enough to drive with the top down. A full moon rode high in the sky, which was clear and full of stars, with here and there a small fluffy cloud, its outlines etched in silver by the moonlight shining on them.

Whenever Paul glanced across at Beth, sitting beside him on the front seat, he saw the moonlight reflected in her eyes, saw the lovely smile on her lips, saw the fresh soft body waiting there for him, all for him, waiting impatiently only for him.

He exceeded the speed limit, but there was little traffic. He drove out of town along the old river road to a turnoff he knew, a place where a dirt road angled down toward the river. He drove down there and stopped the convertible near the bank of the river. He switched off the headlights, and in the light of the moon the river looked like a silver highway, and the girl beside him in the car looked like a goddess.

He approached her delicately, made suddenly shy, and when he kissed her he felt her lips trembling against his. “I’ll be gentle,” he murmured against her lips, and she murmured back, “I know you will, Paul.”

Slowly he undressed her, calm and patient within his haste. Having her here, having her surely his, he no longer had to rush, he could savor every moment of pleasure with her.

She had already removed her jacket. She was wearing a sweater that buttoned down the front with what seemed like hundreds of buttons and now, as he continued to kiss her lips and her eyes and her throat, murmuring love words to her, he slowly opened all the buttons, until at last her sweater folded open and his palms caressed the rough cloth texture of her bra.

She leaned forward slightly so he could slip his hands behind her and unhook the bra, and then gently he lifted the bra from her luscious breasts and gazed at them for a long silent moment in the moonlight.

“Kiss me,” she whispered. “Kiss me, Paul. There.”

He bent forward and kissed her breasts, cupping them in his hands, and she writhed softly in delight, her eyes closing, her head falling back on the top of the seat.

He didn’t remove her skirt. He put his hands on her legs and slowly slid them upward, pushing the skirt higher and higher. She lifted up from the seat and he pushed the skirt up almost to her waist. He touched her, then, in love and desire.

“I love you, Paul,” she whispered.

“I love you, Beth,” he answered.

She turned sideways in the seat, opening to him, and gently he lowered himself on her, being as careful as he could, knowing this was the beginning for her and wanting it to be good for her, wanting it to be better than her dreams could have imagined.

She sighed as they came together, and closed her eyes, and folded her arms around him, and slowly, gently, without haste or fury, they consummated their love, their passion rising gradually, building up for both of them at the same pace, building slowly but inexorably to a peak and then suddenly thundering, opening, and they gasped in unison and remained rigid for a long pulsing second together, and finally they sighed, their bodies relaxed, and a warm breeze seemed to waft over them, bringing with it the clean smell of pine trees from across the river.

That was how it had started, and it had been wonderful then for both of them. Paul supposed now that it was inevitable that they should gradually slide down the slope from that peak, but however inevitable it might have been it still saddened him.

And the decline had been so gradual. It had been so gradual that neither of them had ever noticed it, not for years, not until the other night when he’d been lying there awake thinking about the past, and he’d remembered that first night, in the convertible, beside the river.

And he’d suddenly realized how incredibly good that had been, and how little of that first gentle fire was still alive between them. Sex was still good with Beth, but somehow it was good in a perfunctory manner, they were going through the motions because they were married and they loved each other and this was supposed to be what they were doing.

And realizing that, seeing what their lives together had become, Paul was first saddened and then inspired. There was a moon that night, too, gleaming in through the bedroom windows, and in its pale light he could see his wife’s sleeping face, and he realized he did still love her and he did still want her just as much as ever, and that familiarity and habit had not changed his feelings but had merely disguised them.

Looking at her there in the moonlight he was suddenly taken with such a surge of love and desire that he kissed her on the lips. It wakened her, slowly, and her arms came around him, and he was back at the beginning again, with the same ways of touching her, the same murmuring love words to place in her ear, the same deep passion, calm within urgency, gentleness within fire.

And she responded. She responded the way she did in the old days, she too returned to what it had once been. They made love together, she smiling and soft and beautifully his, he gentle and strong and proud to have her and to deserve her.

That was the beginning, the new beginning. In the days since then it had just kept getting better and better, like a flower blossoming, opening, coming at last alive. The first time it had been flowerlike, but differently, starting with the flower already ripe and at its peak, the flower then going into its gradual decline, the aroma fading, the petals drooping, the stem bending, a bit more each day, withering slowly toward death.

But not this time. This time things were only getting better. Only getting better.

So that now, riding the homebound train, he smiled at his vague reflection in the window, and he thought happy sexy anticipatory thoughts about Beth, and when the train finally reached his station he was the first one off and down the platform and through the narrow station building and out to the blacktop lot where the wives waited, where Beth would be waiting in the family car to drive him home.

And she wasn’t there.

He didn’t believe it at first, he walked left, walked right, while the other men streamed by him, while the cars pulled away in a trickle, a stream, a trickle, and he was alone.

She wasn’t there.

He was afraid then of nothing worse than accident, automobile accident or maybe something with Edwina, maybe Beth had had to rush her to the hospital. It hadn’t occurred to him there might be anything else, anything worse than that sort of worry.

He went back into the station, rooted in his pockets for a dime, called home.

No answer.

He went back outside, and now he was really scared. He hurried across the blacktop to the cabstand, where two gray and yellow cabs waited as though lonely, as though not companions for each other. He got into the lead cab and gave his home address, and sat back in the cab with his brow furrowed and his worried eyes looking out the side window at the familiar scenes of the town. Because they were so familiar they should have reassured him, but they didn’t. The very banal familiarity and known quality of everything he saw seemed to imply some disaster, some horror, some unimaginable break in the fabric of his life, like the deceptively quiet village scenes in the opening minutes of science fiction movies about invasions from outer space.

The first thing he noticed when the cab pulled to a stop in front of his house was that the car was in its accustomed place in the driveway, and the second thing he noticed was that, even though twilight was darkening rapidly toward night, there were no lights on in the house.

What was wrong?

He paid the driver, got out of the cab, hurried up the walk to the house. The door was locked. He unlocked it, went in, switched on the living room light.

Well, she wasn’t dead on the living room floor, murdered by some prowler, some sex maniac.

He called, “Beth?” Thinking it could be a simple matter still, she could have taken a nap, overslept.

No answer.

He called her name again, stood listening to the silence. With the furniture and the drapes and the carpets, there was no echo of his call. Nothing. Silence.

He moved through the house.

There was nothing strange in the kitchen, nothing at all out of the ordinary. He opened the door connecting the kitchen with the garage, and everything was also as usual in there.

Looking out the dinette window, he switched on the outside light, the back yard springing into instant existence, empty and normal and unchanged. He switched off the light again and went to check the bedrooms.

Here he began to find the odd things. In the master bedroom first, the one he shared with Beth, there were dresser drawers open. And the closet door open. Were there things missing? He looked, and it seemed to him Beth’s drawers were usually fuller than that, though they were by no means empty now. And there seemed to be a few empty places on the rack in her closet.

The suitcase was missing.

The red suitcase with the gold handle. He’d bought it for her birthday the first year they were married, and it had stood on the shelf in the closet ever since they’d moved into this house, and now it was gone.

Gone.

What was the matter? What in the name of God was the matter?

Paul moved on, to Edwina’s room, and here too there were the same signs of hasty packing, not much taken, but enough things gone to be noticeable. She hadn’t packed more than the one suitcase, that was sure.

Winky was gone.

Paul looked all over Edwina’s little bed, and underneath it, and Winky was definitely gone. Edwina’s stuffed teddy bear, with one felt eye missing, Winky was indispensable to Edwina’s sleep. She would never go anywhere without it, and it was no longer here.

Why?

He stood in the middle of his daughter’s room, arms spread out as though asking someone to explain things to him, and he looked around in a great circle without finding the answer.

But he did find it, a minute later, in the last room in the house. In his den.

It was the third bedroom, actually, but he’d set it up as a den for himself when they’d first moved in, with a desk, a chair, a filing cabinet, and a sofa on which he could read the paper or take a snooze. He occasionally brought work home from the agency, and it was in here that he did it.

He looked in almost automatically now, switching on the overhead light, not expecting to find anything, looking here simply because he’d already looked everywhere else, and at first this room seemed totally normal, unchanged, exactly as he’d left it.

And then he saw the open desk drawer.

And the papers on the desk.

And he understood.

He walked in, moving slowly, like a man pole-axed, because in a sense that was exactly what it was.

She’d read the diary.

The diary was his secret, and he understood now that it had been a shameful secret and a symptom of the long decline in his relationship with Beth. But he’d made no entries in it in the last week, not since the rebirth with Beth. He hadn’t even thought of it since then, and he now thought it likely he never would have written in it again.

It wasn’t an ordinary diary. It was a very special sort of diary, not reflecting reality in the way that an ordinary diary reflects reality.

This diary was a wish-fulfillment diary.

As with all men, Paul Trepless occasionally lusted after one passing woman or another, occasionally had fantasies in which he actually seduced this woman or that woman. A baby-sitter, a friend of his wife’s, a secretary at the office, someone seen on the street.

Paul Trepless had a very vivid imagination, and his lecherous fantasies were sometimes very broad and detailed, and in about the second year of his marriage he began to write them down.

In a diary.

As though they had happened.

He had woven entire affairs, completely imaginary, into the true fabric of his real life. Innocent trips to the store became assignations. Business trips became orgies. Afternoons at home alone became the scenes of fortuitous seductions.

All false. But all mixed together with his real life.

And mixed also with his feelings about Beth. His feelings about her had been increasingly negative in recent years, and at times he had worked out his feelings toward her the same way he worked out the feelings toward other women, by recording them in his diary. The diary was full of reminiscences, of their meeting, their early dates, their marriage, their life together since they married, all colored by sarcasm and dislike, all putting Beth in the worst possible light.

All of this was the very bottom of him, the very worst of him, bled away harmlessly on pieces of paper, a secret diary hidden away in his desk, like the portrait of Dorian Gray tucked off in an attic, the evil portrait allowing the real man to appear good. Only in this case, the diary, recording all his evil thoughts, all his gripes about Beth, all his letches for other women, made it possible for him in reality to be something very close to the model husband, in deed if not in thought.

The fact of the matter was, he had been faithful. Once, at a party, he had kissed the wife of a friend, but that was all. Other than that, he had never actually done anything of which Beth could disapprove, and he had certainly never gone to bed with another woman since their marriage.

The diary had gone a long way toward making all this possible, in the years of the long decline, those years when the first flush of their romance had paled toward gray. Now that the romance had been rekindled in his marriage, of course, he would have no further use for the diary, and it would probably have lain forgotten in the bottom drawer of his desk for twenty years, no longer of any use whatever.

Except for one thing.

Beth had read it.

Paul could see how it had happened. Beth had never taken much interest in this den of his, because for several years she hadn’t taken much interest in anything concerning Paul, but Paul’s rekindled enthusiasm for her had met an answering spark, her own reawakening, and she had become once again passionately concerned with him, with everything he did, everything he touched, everything about him.

He could see it, as though it was happening in front of him. Beth walking in, coming in here to his den, where she had practically never been before, except occasionally to remove half a dozen coffee cups or beer glasses, after they had piled up sufficiently to have their absence noticed in the kitchen. He could see her coming in, looking around, this time looking at things with interest, because they were his.

Sitting down at his desk.

Touching her fingers to the keys of his typewriter.

Opening the drawers of his desk.

Not to be nosy, not to snoop behind his back, he knew it hadn’t been that at all. She’d come in here out of a desire to be close to him, closer and closer, to be somehow in his aura even when he wasn’t in the house. It had all, he was sure, been perfectly natural.

She had opened the center drawer, the side drawers. The bottom drawer would have been last, and the manuscript box in there would have piqued her interest. She would have taken it out, opened it, glanced at a few of the pages inside...

...and then she would have started to read it all, from beginning to end, every mythical affair, every slighting reference to herself, every passing seduction.

And how could she possibly have believed for a minute that it was anything but the literal truth? How could she have been expected to suppose that all of it was invention? How could she have found her way through the weaving of truth and falsehood, in her moment of shock, to be capable of picking the truth from the falsehood?

But even if she had, what then? He had told lies when he should have told the truth, but he had also told the truth when he should have told lies. Those things he’d said about Beth, he’d believed them at the time, he thought they were true, he thought she’d trapped him into marriage and that he didn’t really and truly care for her.

Now, standing in stunned horror in front of the desk, he looked down at the open manuscript, the diary in its loose typewriter sheets open in front of him, and he saw that she had stopped reading at the point where he had described making love to his baby-sitter, an attractive young girl of sixteen, a local girl he often drove home late at night after her baby-sitting chores were done. It was true he had found her a suitable subject for his fantasies, and had ultimately described a seduction of her in his diary, but he had not been telling the truth.

It was not the truth!

He had never seduced his baby-sitter, he had never kissed his baby-sitter, he had never said a suggestive word to his baby-sitter. Never. Not once. Not in any way. And he never would have.

Beside the diary, now, he saw another sheet of paper, written on hastily in ink, and he recognized Beth’s neat crisp handwriting, though larger and somewhat looser than usual.

He picked up the paper, read the brief and chilling note:

“I am going home. I want nothing from you. I never want to see you again. If you try to come near me, my brothers will kill you.”

There was no heading and no signature, but of course neither heading nor signature was needed.

Paul stood there holding the paper in a trembling hand. He had to do something. His wonderful world was in ruins around him, his new-found delight had come crashing to earth.

He had to talk to her. He had to convince her. There had to be some way to convince her of the truth.

If he could prove to her that the seductions in the diary were false, then wouldn’t he be able to claim that the diatribes against her were also false? He would be shamefaced, he would say it was a novel he was writing, something like that. He would explain it away somehow. The important thing to do would be to prove to her that the affairs with other women had not really happened; do that, and there was still a chance.

And it was certainly provable enough. All she had to do was ask, ask any one of them. The baby-sitter, for instance, or any of the other women mentioned in this diary, just ask...

Ask? Go to the baby-sitter, go to any one of them, show her this diary, with its blunt words and pornographic descriptions, with her own name in it? He wouldn’t dare, he couldn’t do it. They might call the police, but even if they didn’t he couldn’t do it. It would be too shameful, he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

There had to be some other way. Couldn’t he say to her, “Beth, think about it. I couldn’t have done it, I couldn’t have had all those affairs and slept with all those women. I’d have to be Hercules. Can’t you see that? It’s physically impossible. You were around me all those years, would I have gotten away with all that without you knowing, suspecting, becoming aware of something? Don’t you see, it has to be make believe!”

But would she listen to him? He thought of calling her, if she was going home that would have to be her parents’ house upstate, and in fact he actually turned and started toward the living room and the telephone when he realized it would do no good. Her parents would answer the phone, and she would refuse to speak to him.

Write her a letter?

She wouldn’t read it.

Go there, to her parents’ house?

Her brothers would kill him, if they believed her story, and they surely would.

What am I going to do? he thought.

What am I going to do?

2

Paul Trepless got drunk, angry, laid and maudlin, in five thousand words.

You write it, I can’t. He sits around his house, see, feeling sorry for himself and frustrated and all, and gets to drinking. Then he drives in to New York and goes to Times Square and picks up a spade hooker and pays her twenty dollars and has a very unsatisfactory fuck, during all of which the hooker gives every appearance of laughing at him and not giving a damn whether he notices or not. Also, she won’t take off her bra. So then our hero drives in his drunken state back out to his home on Long Island and begins to feel very sorry for himself, and cries himself to sleep.

And wakes up and it’s Monday morning and he’s got a fucking fuck book to write by Thursday.

I did Chapter 1, though, by God. I now have Chapter 1 and nobody can take that away from me. I also kept the garbage I wrote Saturday, but I doubt that any of it is useful.

As for the rest of it, I burned it all Friday. No, I kept a couple pages I thought I could use, like the beginning of the chapter with Dwayne Toppil and Liz, that I used part of in Paul’s flashback.

By the way, now that I have actually done a chapter we can continue our seminar on writing sex novels. Wait till I get my pointer, pardon the sexual reference.

Got it.

Now. If you will notice, not a hell of a lot happens in fifteen pages. The hero goes home on the train and his wife has left him because of something he didn’t do. Also there’s a sex scene in a flashback. Not very much. How do we manage to stretch that for fifteen pages.

Well, there are several ways. One of the several ways is to say everything twice, like I’m doing now. What I’m doing now is saying everything twice, which is one of the ways we get fifteen pages out of practically no action at all, plus flashback.

And this is another.

One-sentence paragraphs.

One-phrase paragraphs.

They fill up the page.

They fill it up something beautiful.

I know a guy.

This guy writes sex books.

Every sex book he writes is full of sex scenes like the following.

“Deeper!” she cried.

“Deeper!”

“Deeper!”

He thrust.

And again.

And again.

All of which gets you to the bottom of the page in jigtime.

It fills up the page and requires no effort.

Also, if you are writing a paragraph and you see that that paragraph is going to come to an end way over at the right end of the line, you add a few more words, it doesn’t matter what words, just enough to make the paragraph round the corner.

And get you another line.

These are all trade secrets now, so pay attention. This is better than answering one of those ads in the crappy magazines that says EARN BIG MONEY WRITING.

I think I’ll start the Infamous Writers School. How to write soft-core pornography for no fun and little profit.

Make big money. Graduates of our system earn ten grand a year and have a tendency to feel they are becoming invisible.

Another way to get fifteen pages out of a paucity of plot is the interior monologue, also known as Good Christ He’s Thinking Again. Characters in sex novels think all the time. They stand around with their fingers in their noses and think for pages on end. Sometimes they think about what to do next, and sometimes they think about what they’ve just done, and sometimes they think about something somebody else has done, and sometimes it’s hard to tell exactly what they’re thinking about.

When I woke up Friday and Betsy was gone and Elfreda was gone, I didn’t know what anybody was thinking about. That’s the way it happened in real life, you know. I wasn’t coming home from anywhere on the train. Pete and I got soused Thanksgiving, last Thursday, after dinner we really tied one on, the two of us. Betsy was understanding and Ann was disapproving. Ann disappointed me, I figured she’d be understanding too, but she wasn’t. But Betsy was. She said I’d been working very hard, I heard her tell Ann that, and that I needed a break of some kind, a breather. And that Pete probably did, too. To which Ann remained disapproving, but neither Pete nor I gave a shit.

It was long after midnight when they left, Ann driving, and Betsy poured me into the rack, which I very vaguely remember. She’d been feeling very lovey since the fight was over and we made up, so she began trying to arouse me, kissing me and playing with Oscar and so on, but I was too totally out of it and I gradually drifted off to sleep with the light and half a hard-on.

Oscar is a private joke. Apparently I’m telling everything now, I’m boiling the whole thing out, so what the hell. Oscar is a private joke from early on in our relationship. I said one time that I was there to give her the award for being the best lay on the North American continent, which at the time I believed, and of course the award was an Oscar, so from then on we called my cock Oscar, which I grant you is foolish but it’s the little foolish pleasantries like that that make life worth living, and all the serious horseshit is what makes life not worth living.

Yeah, we had a name for her witsy bitsy private part, too, but I can’t mention it as it is the name of a well-known real-life motion picture star. You get the idea, we’re giving the Oscar to...

Yeah, well, so much for that.

I go to sleep Thursday night with Betsy’s hand wrapped around Oscar and I wake up Friday morning and she’s gone. Friday noon. And she’s gone.

I wandered around the house for a long time before I realized something was wrong. In the first place, I had a hangover, a really beautiful hangover, with the kind of headache I think of as cold stone. There are different kinds of headaches in this world, you know. There are brown wax headaches, which usually accompany clogged sinuses or a stuffy nose. There are thin wire headaches which come from eyestrain. There are green cotton headaches when you’re constipated. And there are cold stone headaches when your brain is loose inside your skull and grating against the bone. Those are the worst, and that’s what I had Friday morning, which is one reason I didn’t think much about Betsy’s absence, except to feel sorry for myself that I had to make my own instant coffee and pour my own orange juice, which was all the breakfast I could even think about.

Another reason is that Betsy and I live at different schedules, she locked into Fred’s sleeping and rising habits, me locked into the fact that I usually work best at night. It’s early afternoon now, about one o’clock, but I’m running scared this month and I’m talking about usually. Usually Betsy goes to bed at twelve or one and I go to bed at three or four. She gets up at eight or nine and I get up at eleven or twelve. So a lot of times she’s already out to the store when I get up, and I make myself a cup of coffee and wait around for her to come back and make breakfast.

That was the way it was Friday, though I wasn’t exactly waiting for breakfast. I was mostly waiting to find out whether or not my skull was going to crack open from the top of my nose up over my head and down to the back of my neck. I would have taken three to two on the positive. As a result, I was up an hour or more before I began to spot the odd signs, the drawers half open, the things gone from here and there.

I didn’t get it. I was just as baffled as Paul, I couldn’t figure out what had gone wrong. It had been so long since Betsy had read any of my books it never even occurred to me that she might have gone in and looked at the new manuscript. It never entered my mind.

But that’s what she did. I don’t know if she did it Thursday night after I fell asleep or Friday morning when she got up. In either case, I know why she did it, and that only makes it worse.

In Chapter 1, I mean the real Chapter 1, the one that counts, I have Paul having this great rebirth of feeling toward his wife, which isn’t exactly the way things worked in real life. I have that rebirth now, since she left, but there wasn’t anything special in my feelings before then. I was glad the fight was over, but that was just about all.

It was Betsy that had the rebirth first, I see that now. That was why she was taking the lead Thursday night, and that was why she decided she ought to start reading my manuscripts again. Also, I suppose, because I’d let her know in a vague sort of way that I was having trouble with this book, and she knew about me being late the last half-dozen times, and I suppose she meant to read it and say some nice things about it and give me some encouragement.

So she read it.

The note she left is the one I quoted in the last chapter.

The rest of Friday was just this horrible day. I did try to call her at her parents’ house, but she hadn’t arrived yet and they didn’t know she was coming and they didn’t know what it was all about. She’d left me the car, so she must have called a cab to take her to the station, and I considered hopping into the car and driving up there after her but I couldn’t do it. I was afraid of Birge and Johnny, for one thing, and I was also afraid of myself. I was afraid to get into the car, I figured I’d kill myself in the first fifty miles. My nerves were shot, my attention was shot, my morale was shot, everything about me was shot.

So I just walked around, and every once in a while I’d make a phone call to somebody and tell them Betsy left but not tell them why. They’d always ask, and I’d always say I didn’t know. I called Rod, and I called Pete, and I called Dick. Dick wasn’t home and Kay answered and I told her, and she asked me if there was anything she and Dick could do. I said no. She asked me did I want to come into town and stay with them. I said no. She asked me did I want her to come out and talk with me for a while, and I understood she was offering me the follow-up after all, the way a certain kind of woman responds to tragedy with chicken soup, and I said no. I said no for two reasons. First, because I didn’t want Kay, or anything that Kay implied, or any of the emotional complexity of Kay, or any woman like Kay, or anybody else at all but Betsy. And second, because I had this nutty idea that if I demonstrated my saintliness by refusing Kay I would eventually get Betsy back.

I called other people, I called my mother in Albany and Hannah answered the phone and I told her and she sounded very sympathetic, but she can’t help the ice in her voice. Her sympathy sounded like the sympathy of a cold nurse for a terminal patient she doesn’t much care for. I asked her if Mom was around, but Mom was at work at Limurges Restaurant. She asked me if I wanted the restaurant number, if I wanted to call Mom at work, but I said no, what had happened to me was a disaster but riot an emergency, I could talk to Mom some other time. I asked her if she’d heard from Hester recently, and she said Hester had a new address, somewhere in San Francisco. She gave me the address, it was c/o Blench, and I wrote it down with the feeling that it was very important, though I wasn’t sure why.

A little later I called San Franciso information and tried to get a phone number for Hester, but they had no phone for either Hester Harsch or anybody named Blench at that address. She didn’t figure to have a phone, anyway, she’s too much of a gipsy. It’s a big day for her, I think, when she’s got a tent.

Finally Friday night I called Betsy in Monequois again, and Birge answered. She had gotten there by that time and told her story, because when I said who I was and asked if I could talk to Betsy, Birge said, “Why don’t you come on up here and talk to her?” The invitation in his voice was the kind only a suicidal masochist could have accepted. I said, “It isn’t the way she thinks, Birge, honest to God.” He said, “Come on up and explain it, Ed.” I said, “You’ve got to know me better than that, Birge, none of that stuff in the book was true.” He invited me again, and I said some more, and he kept inviting me, and after a while I realized he wasn’t listening to me at all, he was just letting me talk and every time I’d come to a stop he’d invite me to come up and talk to him where he could see me face to face, and then I’d say something else that would bounce off his mind like a tennis ball off a brick wall, and he’d make that invitation again. Finally I hung up.

Friday night I started to drink. I also tore up all the stuff I’d done, all those useless chapters that had caused the whole trouble, and threw them away. Then later on I rooted through the ripped-up pieces and found the few little bits I thought I could use, and put them on the desk, and threw the rest into the garbage. And meanwhile I kept on drinking.

About one o’clock in the morning I drove the Buick into the city and parked it on West 47th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues and went walking around looking for a whore. I found one up across the street from the Americana Hotel, a skinny black panther with her hair piled up in a big airy bouffant on top of her head, hardened into place with several quarts of hair spray. She had eyes so full of obvious contempt for me and everybody else in the world that I almost turned around right there and went back home to Sargass and stuck my head in the oven. Except it’s electric. Also, I agreed with her eyes’ opinion of me.

I think she was young, she had the young-old look of the really tough alley cats. She had a very soft seductive voice, like radio weather girls, and she was smiling a little private smile the whole time. It took me a while to realize the smile didn’t have anything to do with me, it was just the expression she wore. I mean wore, the way you wear a sweater, or a hat. She wore that smile, it had nothing to do with her real face or her real feelings or anything else. It was something she put on before going out, and kept in the refrigerator in between times.

I said how much and she said twenty and I thought we were supposed to bargain so I said that seems a lot for a quickie and she did a little kissing thing with her eyes and mouth and said, “Bye-bye.”

I said, “Wait a minute,” because her eyes had lost their focus on me and she was looking away down the street as though there wasn’t anybody standing in front of her at all. “Wait a minute,” I said. “I didn’t say no.”

The eyes refocused on me. Nothing ever changed about the smile. She was wearing a thin, I mean narrow, black coat with a gray fur collar, and black slacks, stretch pants, and silver high heels which were mostly straps on top. And black stockings under the stretch pants, the things they call panty hose that are stockings that come all the way up to the waist. Just a little showed, at her ankle. Also, she had very long fingernails with silver nail polish. I suppose they were false nails. I know for sure the eyelashes were fake.

Whores are supposed to be blowsy and sort of loose, like rag dolls, but this one was as lean and hard and self-controlled as a rifle. Except that’s supposed to be a male symbol, isn’t it? The similes that keep coming to mind are all feline: cat, panther, cheetah. The old joke about a pussy with teeth. Panther is the one that works best, I suppose. Because of the color, naturally, but also because panthers seem somehow leaner and bonier and more stripped down to the essentials than other cats. And panthers are silent most of the time, they move around graceful and silent. And they’re deadly. And their expression is very cynical. Unlike tigers, for instance, who seem always to be either vaguely irritated by body lice or vaguely surprised to discover that they are tigers. Panthers are irritated, but there’s nothing vague about it, and nothing will ever surprise them.

I can see why the word whore isn’t used very much around New York any more, why the word hooker has taken its place. These spade machines hitting the sidewalks up and down the West Side in the forties are too cold and deadly and well constructed to be whores. They’re hookers. They hook you, they turn it around, you don’t stick the hook in them they stick it in you. In the back, high up between the shoulder blades. The hook goes in and bends up through your neck and into your skull, and they hang you on a nail in the closet of their contempt. You spurt your little gray jism inside the felt-lined box they keep for the purpose, and you zip up your pants and go home, but at the same time you’re still back there in that closet, dangling from the hook, arms hanging, legs slightly bent, head drooping forward and sticking out that clown face with the dead white skin and the red circles on the cheeks and the big thick-lipped red smiling mouth that can’t quite hide the truth that the real lips are curved the other way.

So when it was settled that we wouldn’t haggle, she took me over to 8th Avenue, to a crummy tenement that called itself a hotel, where I paid seven-fifty for a room. Seven-fifty. In addition to the twenty. So the hooker already had the hook in, because although I knew I was being taken I didn’t argue the point, I paid and followed her up the green-walled stairs to a room on the third floor to which she already had a key. I paid for the room, and she already had a key to it. They didn’t even bother with any play-acting about the desk clerk handing me a key. I was just paying a thirty-seven and a half per cent tax, that’s all.

The room had a ceiling fixture with one bare twenty-five-watt bulb. Or maybe a fifteen-watt bulb. In any case, a very dim bulb. It also had a tall narrow dresser with a doily on top and some things on it like a plastic tray with bobby pins, things like that. It also had a rag rug on the floor, and a window with Venetian blinds shut over it, and a sink in the corner, and a white enamel basin — need I say chipped? — under the sink, and a kitchen chair that had long ago lost its paint and all but one of its back rungs, so that the back looked like a picture frame with a line running down the middle of it.

It also had a bed. Double. Hollywood. Covered with a very faded thin pink blanket, tucked in tight all the way around. Two pillows in yellowish pillow cases.

I stood in the room while she shut the door behind me and pushed home a bolt lock. I remembered the clown in the paper, the one who’d been beaten to death by a man let into his room by the whore he had with him. The hooker. I wondered if I was here to get myself beaten to death, and then, since in actual fact I did not lay my baby-sitter nor ever do anything at all to her but in truth made it all up, I wondered what the hell I should feel guilty about and want to be punished for. For telling the truth about my feelings about Betsy? For having those feelings? Or for something of which Betsy and that whole miserable farce were only a part?

The hooker waggled a finger at my belt. “Go ahead and drop ’em,” she said. Same soft seductive voice, same smile, same mocking eyes. Eyes like pieces of dark glass, colored glass. Like marbles, the marbles we had when I was a kid, the tiger-striped ones, black and brown and amber.

I took off my shoes and then my pants and then my shirt and then my underpants, while she went over to the sink and filled the basin with warm water, into which she put a cake of soap and a washcloth. Light blue washcloth. When I was standing there in T shirt and socks she came over and held the edge of the basin against my legs and washed my cock, which repelled me. I began to hate her then, for depersonalizing me before we ever got to bed, for turning my despairing lust into a simple exercise in slum hygiene, and when my cock, limp until then, began to rise at the touch of her hand and the feel of the warm water and the gentle abrasion of the blue washcloth I began to hate that, too. To hate my cock. As though I was like one of those old-time dinosaurs with two brains, only in my case one brain was in my head and the other in the head of my cock, and all the important decisions, all the decisions that changed my life or screwed up my life or complicated my life were made by that brain down there.

She was still dressed when she washed me. She’d taken off her coat and hung it on a hook on the door — the chair was now draped with my clothing — and under the coat she was wearing a bright pink sweater of very fuzzy material that zipped down the front. Inside there, her breasts were a trifle small, and high, and hard. They looked as hard and uninviting as knuckles, but for some reason I craved them. To see them, touch them, gnaw the dusty dry nipples. That was the thought that brought me up to a full erection and made me hasty.

“You, too,” I said, my voice uncertain, gesturing vaguely at her clothing.

“Well, of course,” she said, still smiling, looking up at me through her eyelashes. She turned away and poured the soapy water into the sink, put the basin and soap and washcloth away, rinsed her hands, dried her hands, and unzipped the sweater.

She undressed without looking at me, neither rushing nor dawdling, undressing as though alone and simply preparing to take a shower or go to bed. Beneath the sweater was a yellow bra. She folded the sweater and put it on the dresser top, and then she took off her shoes, carefully with each one, and put them together under the dresser. Then she took off her black stretch pants and there was the black panty hose with white panties peeking through. She folded the stretch pants and put them on the dresser and then took off panties and panty hose together, and stood there naked except for the bra while she pulled the legs of the panty hose straight and put the panties on top of the stretch pants and draped the panty hose down the front of the dresser as though the bottom half of a clown was going to sit on the dresser and watch us in the act.

Her body was hard-looking. Her ass, which I saw first, was round and smooth and looked as hard as a football player’s shoulder. There was a deep cleft between the cheeks, as though she were in a permanent clench, but there was none of the muscle rippling that goes with clenching.

Her legs were graceful, but slender, tapering away to narrow ankles, looking like a runner’s legs, lean and graceful and functional. Her belly wasn’t merely flat, it was slightly sunken, with a knob of bone on either side, way down near the top of the leg, like mountain peaks on either side of a crater of the moon.

Her pubic hair was thick and black and snarled, but when she lifted her arms in folding the stretch pants I was surprised to see that she shaved her armpits. People use the word underarm these days, because armpit sounds ugly, but if you’ll look at one you’ll see that it is ugly, that it is the only part of the human body, bar none, that nothing can make less than ugly, and you will see that it is in truth an armpit and it doesn’t matter what anybody says. And she had shaved hers, which I think had more to do with self-image than any attempted impact on the customers. She didn’t care about the customers, they barely existed for her.

Once again I was barely existing. Translucent, perhaps even transparent. And terribly unimportant.

It is the worst thing in the world to be unimportant.

She gave me her meaningless smile when she was done arranging her clothes, and reached for my hand to lead me to the bed. I gestured at her bra, saying, “What about that?”

“That doesn’t matter,” she said, and put one knee on the bed, and moved forward over the knee, bending over it as she got onto the bed, and then I knew I wanted to fuck her that way, but I was embarrassed to ask.

Besides, there was still the bra, and I was already in that conversation. I said, “I want to see them,” and tried a smile of my own.

“They’re just titties, dear,” she said.

I just remembered that I left something out. The minute we walked in the door she held her hand out for the money. I gave her two tens and she put them in the top drawer of the dresser. Then everything else followed as I said.

I wonder why I left that out?

Anyway, she said, “They’re just titties, dear,” and beckoned to me to come up and get on top of her.

I did, and she put her legs on either side of me. I put my right hand along the side of her left breast, against the cloth of the yellow bra, and I said, “I want to suck them.”

“I don’t do that, dear,” she said. Still with the smile, still with the soft voice. But her eyes said she didn’t want to be argued with.

So did her hand. She reached down between her legs to where my cock was hanging and grabbed it and gave it a surprisingly hard yank. It hurt, and it felt good in a weird way, and it surprised the hell out of me. “Come on, dear,” she said. “Stick that thing in.”

So I stuck that thing in. Her cunt was so different from Betsy’s, that surprised me too. Betsy’s cunt is soft and warm and moist, but the hooker’s cunt was hobnailed, it seemed to have hard little bumps all over the inside that really worked against my cock. It was the loveliest sensation Oscar ever experienced.

It was too lovely. She was about to earn her money at a rate of about five dollars a second, so after a couple of strokes I bit my lower lip and I stopped moving, leaving it inside her to the hilt.

I was lying on top of her now, my face buried in the pillow beside her head, my eyes squeezed shut. When I stopped she said, “What’s the matter, dear?” and because of our positions it sounded as though she was behind me. It was strange to feel her under me and hear her behind me.

I lifted up on my elbows and smiled down at her, trying for some empathy, some human contact, some compassion and understanding. “I don’t want to come too soon,” I said. My lip hurt where I’d bit it.

“You’re here to enjoy yourself, dear,” she said, and closed her eyes and set her jaw, and with a look of total concentration on her face, the smile gone for once, she began to do fast, hard, intricate work with a lot of muscles in her lower torso, and my peashooter shot, and I groaned, “Damn it!” and fell full weight on top of her.

After that, I had the feeling she was counting to a hundred and would then tell me it was time to get up, so I got up when I figured she was at about eighty-five. She washed my cock again, and then squatted over the basin to wash herself, and I thought now that she looked like a mongrel dog in an African village, and I thought the bouffant hairdo was pathetic and ridiculous, and I knew I’d been successfully humiliated, and I was horribly afraid that was what I’d gone out for.

I was also sober.

Thus ends my first infidelity. Do you hear that, Betsy? My honest to God one and only first. All others existed only on the thin mattress of my mind. Or possibly the mind in Oscar.

I left, without having been beaten all the way to death, and drove home with my groin itching, I don’t know why. I drank myself to sleep, and that ended Friday.

Saturday I was numb. I woke up late, I wandered around, I tried to write a letter to Betsy but didn’t really want to write to her, and finally I wrote that chapter about kissing Kay and Dick’s literary theories and Thanksgiving Day and all that other stuff, never once mentioning what had happened, what had really and truly happened. I’m not sure why I did that. I think Saturday was just the day between the shock and the reality, a sort of eye of the storm. I seemed sure of myself and gutsy and brisk and capable of steering my craft safely through all shoals, or at least I seemed that way to me. I think I knew it wasn’t real, but it was all I had.

I seem to have done another fifteen pages. Another fifteen useless pages, of course.

No. Not entirely useless. Tonight I will write the real Chapter 2, in which Paul gets drunk, angry, laid and maudlin, and I will be able to use a lot of the sex scene description from this chapter. I’ll just switch it from first person to third person and leave out the pornography.

I think Paul will make her come.

2

Paul was mostly drunk, but not entirely drunk. He was just sober enough to know he was drunk, which is what saved him. Because he was also driving the car, and if he hadn’t been sober enough to know he was too drunk to be driving the car he would almost surely have had an accident.

As it was, he reached New York safely, drove crosstown through the grid of streets from the Midtown Tunnel, and parked on West 47th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues. He got out, locked the car, and went looking for a whore.

It was well after midnight by now. The first shock of Beth’s disappearance had worn off, he had made his first frantic useless attempts to contact her — a call to her parents upstate had done him no good since she hadn’t arrived yet and hadn’t even told her parents she was coming — he had drunk himself into a state of partial anesthesia, and he had decided he was angry.

After all, a man had a right to privacy, didn’t he? Didn’t he? So what if he kept a make believe diary full of make believe affairs and seductions. In a way, Beth ought to be thankful they were make believe. It was entirely possible that having had this outlet for his polygamous impulses over the years had been good for their marriage. It might have helped the marriage, in fact, by using up all his stray impulses to stray, giving him a safe and unimportant outlet for those natural feelings that come over every man on earth at one time or another in his married life.

And Beth had instantly believed the diary, that was another thing. She hadn’t given him the benefit of the doubt, hadn’t asked him for an explanation, hadn’t done anything but stalk off into the night and leave him standing there with egg on his face.

How could she have believed it? Didn’t she know him, hadn’t they been married for six years, couldn’t she have known instinctively that the things in the diary couldn’t possibly be true?

So he’d decided, once he was drunk enough, to be angry. Angry at Beth, both for believing the worst against him without question and for punishing him for something that was actually beneficial to their marriage together. Whether either of these indictments would hold up or not wasn’t the question; he was full of them, full of liquor and righteous indignation, and he had decided that by God he would be unfaithful. If he was going to have the name, by George he was also going to have the game.

So here he was in New York, walking around the Times Square area with only a slight list to betray his drunkenness. He walked up 7th Avenue, and there they were.

This part of 7th Avenue was neither bright nor dim, the lights seeming to illuminate the street while leaving the sidewalks in semi-shadow. And there, along the sidewalks, standing in store entrances or under the dark marquees of theaters, were the whores. Some of them strolled slowly along, but others just stood where they were, almost blending into the buildings behind them, their clothing dark, their eyes containing a cold glitter.

Paul walked for three blocks among them, seeing here and there other men stopping to talk with one of the whores, but it took him a while to build up his courage. He walked past several girls who gave him meaningful glances before he took out his paint can and brush and painted a big round target on his ass. With his funny red nose and his great big yellow bow tie and the huge flappy shoes and the puffs of smoke coming out of the hole in the top of his barber stripe top hat, he was just the cutest little devil in the center ring.

This is not to happen. Start the paragraph again, get swinging again, retype this page when were back in the saddle. And:

Paul walked for three blocks among them, seeing here and there other men with clear plastic balls, inside which the blue and red gears could be seen failing to mesh.

Paul walked for three blocks among them, seeing here and there other men stopping to talk with one of the whores, opening their shirts and skins and cutting out various organs and handing them over, dripping and steaming and oozing maroon goo, to the hookers who dropped them in black shopping bags to be delivered to the beauty parlor early next morning.

I will not. I will not. Paul walked for three blocks, he would have been better off going home and jerking off in his back yard. Or some neighbors back yard. Here, Paul baby, jerk off to this book here, by this fella Dirk Smuff. He isn’t the best of the grubby pornographers, he isn’t the worst, he’s one of the fuzzy brown ones in the endless middle. Show him a filthy book with no name on it, he wouldn’t be absolutely sure whether it was or was not written by him. Maybe one of the early ones, he’d say, musing, thinking it over, trying to remember. Did I write that sentence?

Paul Paul Paul Paul walked those three fucking blocks.

I don’t want to go through it again. I don’t want to describe it again, not even in third person, not even through Paul.

And it would be worse to make Paul win, I’d never respect myself again if I wrote it that way. Or changed the hooker to a different type, it wouldn’t work, she’d keep ripping off the mask and showing she was the same ebony stiletto.

I miss Betsy. God, how I miss Betsy.

What if she was here now? If it hadn’t happened, if she hadn’t gone away, hadn’t read the book, nothing. What would I be doing?

The same thing. Probably the same thing, though maybe I’d be more securely into doing the dirty book by now. But I’d still be in here, she’d be out there in some other room. It’s a little after nine in the evening, the dishes would be done, she might be watching television. Doing something, how do I know what? The point is, we wouldn’t be physically together in the same room. We might not have said more than half a dozen things to each other all day, we might not have been actually together in the same room more than an hour all day long. So why should I miss her so much?

What difference does it make? I do, that’s all.

It was strange, eating dinner alone. I heated up a frozen pot pie and some other stuff, sat there alone in the kitchen eating it. The light seemed dimmer somehow, I don’t know why.

I didn’t read the Sunday Times yesterday, so I read it tonight, during dinner. Trying to distract myself, but of course I should have known better.

Like the first thing I did was the Sunday puzzle, which was full of things like “Woe is me” and “just desserts” and “not up to it” and “fat chance” and “Start it now.” My favorite was “But is it art?” and the whole damn puzzle was called “After the Feast Is Over.”

So much for the puzzle. This week there was a special Jazz Recordings section, full of that recent assumption that jazz is art and should be taken seriously, which makes me very nervous. Reading about people who have learned a craft and consider that makes them artists always makes me nervous, because it makes me wonder if I’m supposed to make noises of similar stripe. After all, may there not be noteworthy bits of business in my various sex books?

There may not.

Reading the news is even stranger, I mean the stuff they call “hard news.” All about the Cyprus crisis, and the devaluation of the pound, and Vietnam, and racial strife, all this stuff that has about as much relevance to me as a dog throwing up in Nairobi. I mean, on page 37 of yesterday’s Times there is the following headline, and I am not kidding:

USE OF FIREARMS IN RIOTS DEPLORED

There. Is that happening in the real world, I mean in your real world? Pinch yourself. Is that headline at the same level of reality as the feeling when you pinched yourself? Of course not.

The Book Review. That’s where it begins to get to me. Starting right on page 2, where there’s a cartoon of a middle-aged man at a typewriter and a muse has appeared with miniskirt and boots and is about to play the lyre for him, and the man is saying, “Are you sure you have the right man, miss? My stuff is pretty square.” It’s signed Interlandi, and what did I ever do to Interlandi?

Or how about page 4, where there’s a review of a book called Writers at Work, which is a series of interviews with famous writers like Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg, and the review is mostly about the characteristics of the writer in the twentieth century, and I keep trying to find myself in there. Is that me, fourth row, third from the left, it looks like I’ve got a smudge on my nose?

I keep doing phantom interviews with myself. I whisper my answers, declaiming on life and love and art and my writing methods.

But I’ve saved the best for last. Way in the back of the Book Review, page 76, there’s a review of a book of photographs of Africa called African Image. Some of the photographs are shown, and do you know what is the main central photograph taking up almost one-third of the whole page? A bunch of female spades with their tits hanging out. Right. In the Book Review of the New York Sunday Times, November 26,1967. Not 1867, and not the National Geographic.

So I guess I am in there after all. No matter what the hard news up front, no matter what the self-image we’re all pushing this week, back in the back of the Book Review there am I. All the grubby old attitudes are still alive, all the sneaky little scatological sniggering nastinesses, all the little-boy-pulling-his-wee-wee dirtiness is still inside your head and mine and the head of the New York Times, and it always will be. Because if those had been white women they would not have run the picture.

Now I know why that hooker wouldn’t take off her bra.

Why do I say that’s me back there, weeping and sniggering on those dusky boobs? Because it is out of the adolescent garbage in men’s heads that I have made my living for almost three years. The adolescent garbage in my head feeding the adolescent garbage in their heads, a real meeting of minds, a real communion, so when you come right down to it what I have been doing is closer to the definition of art than anybody in that jazz section will ever get in his entire life.

Phooey. That’s garbage, too. I have never risen above the material any more than my readers have, and if you can’t rise above the material you ain’t an artist. And it’s tough to rise above quicksand.

Only now it’s tough to get down into the quicksand. Am I going to write this Paul chapter or what am I going to do?

I’m going to wander around for fifteen pages, same as ever. Same as before Betsy left, in that way her leaving made no change at all.

You know what I’ve been thinking about? The time Betsy and I got married, the day after the day her father took me out to the gas station. I wrote about that earlier, in the part I threw away. “How do I burn this fucking place down?” Remember?

You thought that was a gag. I swear to God, it’s the absolute truth. I know I did it like a joke, making it the chapter ending and all, but that was just because fifteen pages worked out to there, I was planning on telling about the wedding then and everything. Also, I must admit I have enough respect for a punch fine to want to give it some breathing room if I can, and I know damn well “How do I burn this fucking place down?” is a grade A punch line. About the only real punch line of my life, and I suppose it’s meaningful that it was said by somebody else.

Anyway, when I finally convinced Betsy’s father that I didn’t know how to burn down his gas station, he wanted no more to do with me, and in fact he didn’t even come to the wedding. He pretended to have an ulcer attack, and Betsy believed it, but I knew the truth. He was disgusted with me, he was gaining a son who combined higher education with abysmal ignorance, and he couldn’t see the point of it.

So it was Johnny, Betsy’s brother, that gave her away. A funny phrase, that, gave her away. They didn’t exactly give her away, her family, they sort of let her get away. She became an alien, as separate from her family as a flower from a tree. I’d look at Betsy and I’d look at her family and I could just never draw the lines between them. In fact, I wondered sometimes if she was adopted, but knowing how cheap her folks are that seems unlikely. Of course, she might have been kidnaped from her real family, that might make a degree of sense. Born to this cultured and well-to-do couple, kidnaped by desperate men in thin black suits and hats that need blocking, men who smoke roll-your-owns, who turned the baby over to the Blake family for safekeeping. But then something went wrong, the ransom wasn’t paid or the kidnapers ran away, and the Blakes were stuck with this little kid. They couldn’t give it back without admitting their own complicity, and they’re too feebleminded to work out any indirect way — like leaving the kid in a church — so they’re stuck. And Betsy grows up, a flower on a dungheap, the colors showing through the shit, and she strains toward better things, and goes to college despite the Blakes’ disapproval...

And marries me?

Do you suppose — this is a brand new thought, now — do you suppose she felt as trapped as I did when we got married? Do you suppose she called me not because she wanted to but because there wasn’t anything else she could do, she married me not because she wanted to but because there wasn’t anything else she could do?

Maybe it was over for her, too, back there in the summer of 1964, maybe she was just as glad as I was that the school year was over and I was going home to Albany.

Maybe she was just as much of a poor fish wriggling on the line as I was.

That’s a sort of a lonely thought. I know I have never in my entire marriage given myself completely to Betsy, I’ve always held myself back, I’ve always been alone on the inside, but I never thought the same might be true of her. And if it is, how lonely I feel. How cold and thin-skinned, shivering in this wind. Is this how it always was for her? Has she been living on this thin gruel for over three years? Or did she never know it till she read those chapters?

Oh, I’m sorry, Betsy, I am honest to God sorry, if I could have reversed the roles before this, understood things before this, a lot would have been different.

Or would it?

We should never have married, that’s all. We were going through ritual tribal motions, like the characters in a Greek tragedy, slowly and methodically and portentously doing senseless things because they were required by the script. On learning she was pregnant, Betsy should not have phoned me. There were other things she could have and should have done. On getting the phone call, I should not have offered marriage. There were other things I should have and could have done. (Hester understood that, she has always been the one to understand the multiplicities of possibility.) And on our seeing each other again in Monequois, Betsy and I should both have known the whole thing was doomed.

For five days, from the time of my arrival in town till we walked into that church together, Betsy and I were as silent and distant and indrawn from each other as strangers sitting together on a bus. If the minister hadn’t been such a silly ass, we might have gone into the honeymoon that way, but he saved our bacon, though inadvertently and perhaps not permanently. Perhaps not for good, I might say, punning a bit.

Anyway, this minister, the Reverend Doctor R. Eugene Plunkett, was the white-haired, round-faced, steel-spectacled, mild, gentle, inoffensive moron sort of country minister, and I met him for the first time on the day and the hour of the ceremony. We trooped into the church, Betsy and her mother and Birge and Johnny and me, and Rev Plunkett shook everybody’s hand, smiling and nodding and just as pleased as punch to see people happy, and then he asked Betsy and me to come into his office with him a minute while the others waited outside.

(My family wasn’t represented, as perhaps you already noticed. Mom couldn’t get away from her job at the restaurant, Hannah had started already at the hospital, and Hester didn’t give a reason. She didn’t have to. I was just as glad none of them were there, anyway.)

Rev Plunkett’s office was neat and fussy, with a rolltop desk and a squeaky swivel chair. There was a bench with a slat back, and on this we sat, while Rev Plunkett sat in his swivel chair and squeaked around to face us.

I wish I could remember dialogue, I wish I could recall every word of that meeting, but I can’t. My mind doesn’t work that way, which most of the time is a blessing but which right now is a loss, because the build-up was what did it, the listening to his soporific talk in the too-warm office, almost going to sleep with him talking along, earnestly and incomprehensibly, and then beginning to wonder what he was leading up to, and then waking up again because he had to be leading up to something, and it was taking so long, he was talking about “sailing into the future” and “braving life together” and “solving the problems of marital stress” and “planning not only for yourselves but also for your children” and all this stuff was going on and on, every sermon he’d ever preached all shuffled together into one fifteen-minute brand X brainwash. After a while I began to think, Well, he’s building up to the fee. I had a five-dollar bill folded and tucked away in my shirt pocket where it would be easiest to get at, because I was nervous myself about that part of it, sure it would be an awkward moment, and if it was going to be awkward for Rev Plunkett too, God help us all.

But that wasn’t it. He kept talking and kept talking and kept talking, and I could see that behind the bland cheerful exterior he was very very nervous, very very embarrassed and ill at ease, and when it finally occurred to me what he was talking about I couldn’t at first believe it.

But he didn’t know about us, you see. The facts of the case, I mean.

The Reverend R. Eugene Plunkett was talking to us about planned parenthood!

I looked at Betsy and she hadn’t gotten it yet. She was sitting there looking at Rev Plunkett with glazed eyes, and I knew she wasn’t hearing a thing. Inside there she was asleep, drugged, mesmerized.

I suddenly felt close to her, I felt as though we were a team, I felt combined with her. For one of the few times in our life together, I felt as though it was us against the world.

I wanted her to share the feeling, I wanted our eyes to meet and our understandings to merge. So I put out my hand and closed it over hers.

She started. Her eyes suddenly focused, a change so great that Rev Plunkett faltered in his maundering, looking at us with bovine alarm. I gave him a reassuring smile, and I guess Betsy did the same, and he smiled back and went on.

Under cover of his fog, I turned my head and looked at Betsy again and now she was looking at me. I still held her hand. In her eyes I could see the question: Why did you wake me? I winked the off-eye, the one Rev Plunkett couldn’t see, and turned to look at him again, meaning Betsy to understand that she should listen to what was being said, there was something in there of interest.

I don’t know if she followed my meaning or not, but she did listen, because when Rev Plunkett, getting closer and closer to the heart of his topic, said “the importance of the size of the family,” her hand, still held in mine, suddenly jerked, then turned and gave my hand a squeeze of comprehension.

I looked at her again, and around the corners of her lips she was grinning. Her eyes were full of mischief, but only I would have known her well enough to recognize it.

So there we were, a team, united by the absurdity of anybody pushing planned parenthood to a girl two months pregnant and her shotgun beau. The delight this gave us cemented us just barely in time for the ceremony and the honeymoon.

Honeymoon? Yes, we had a honeymoon. Birge and Johnny owned a fallen-down shack up near the Canadian border, and Betsy’s family stocked this with booze and canned goods and blankets. Johnny drove us up there after cake and coffee at the house following the ceremony and we were left there three days. Then Johnny came up and got us again, told a lot of dirty jokes, and drove us back down to Monequois in time to get the Albany bus.

The glow of union the minister had so unwittingly given us — the marriage ceremony itself was a bore — carried through the wedding, the bitter coffee and dry cake back at the house, the drive through twilight and night up to the shack, and the first few moments of silence and solitude when we were (at last?) alone.

The shack was one large square room. There was water, but no toilet, that being a privy out back, complete with halfmoon slit in the door. Only time in my life I ever used an outhouse. There was no toilet paper, so we used some old True Detective magazines that were lying around under the bunks.

There was a sink in one corner, with ice cold water coming from the single faucet. Near the sink there was a gas stove, and beyond it a gas refrigerator, both served by the big canister of bottled gas against the outer wall. There was no electricity, so we made do with kerosene lamps and the light from the fireplace. On those rare occasions when I managed to get a fire going, that is.

The shack was slab-sided, so that it looked like a log cabin on the outside and like an ordinary wooden shack on the inside. There were two double bed bunks on opposite walls, wooden, built in. There were a couple of old dressers, an old library table with four kitchen chairs in the middle of the room, and a stone fireplace against the wall opposite the door. The whole thing was very rustic and woodsy, and looked like the set of half the vaudeville routines and stage melodramas of all time.

What we were engaged in was a vaudeville melodrama, though neither of us more than barely suspected it.

Why do I speak for Betsy? How do I know what she suspected, what she thought, what she knew or didn’t know? I can’t speak for her, and there’s no sense acting as though I can.

So. I didn’t more than barely suspect what I was involved in, and I didn’t spend any time thinking about it. Johnny lit a couple of kerosene lamps as I carried our luggage in from the car, then he leered one or two bits of country humor and left. Betsy and I stood in the doorway, watching his red taillights flicker away through the trees, jouncing along the grassy dirt road back the two miles to the highway, and then he was gone and we were alone and the overcast night was pitch black everywhere except for the dim yellow glow of kerosene lamps in the room behind us. We stood looking at the darkness, stood in the doorway with our arms around each other’s waist, and the knowledge of being alone and being tied together and being shackled suddenly for life began to creep in toward us from the dark — began to creep in toward me from the dark — sanity coming out of the darkness (which is the only place you ever find sanity, and why the lost and the crazy and the screwed-up need so much light), and I felt myself thickening, like a can of paint when the lid’s been left off.

Then Betsy, far too brightly, said, “Well! Guess we better unpack!”

So that was the beginning of it. Busy work. Doing things. Bather than stand in that doorway and face the darkness and think our thoughts until we came to truth and comprehension, we turned our backs, we shut the door, we began to scurry about and do things. Unpack the suitcases. Study the refrigerator. Build a fire. Show each other the kerosene lamps. Poke the fire, that’s something you can do often when your wood is so green it hisses. Look at the food in the cabinets. Plan a snack. Cook the snack. Eat the snack. Make love. Make plans. Busy busy, that’s the ticket.

I wonder how many people there are like that. They made a wrong turn somewhere back along the trail, they are hopelessly lost in the woods, and so they keep busy busy busy so they won’t have time to notice. Because noticing won’t do any good, noticing will just make you feel bad, since there’s nothing to be done. Nothing to be done.

And after a while you get used to the wrong road, you get to like it, it’s the only road you’ve got. So then, if something else goes wrong and you lose that road, too, you begin to miss that road. Like I miss Betsy. I shouldn’t have married her, she shouldn’t have married me, whatever love we had for each other was too fragile and too febrile to build anything on, but I got used to the wrong turning, used to the life we lived together, it was the only life I had, most of the time it was pleasant, it was easy, if it wasn’t great at least it wasn’t horrible, and now there’s a great empty hole in the world in front of me, a hole in the future, and I’m marching into this great black pipe with nothing in it but me. All alone. Me.

There was one great thing that happened in the shack. I’d rather think about that than about the future, so that’s what I’ll think about.

The shack had no windows. The nights up there were cool, but this was August, remember, and the days were pretty hot. In the middle of the day, with the sun beating down on the roof through the trees, the inside of the shack could get really hot. What we finally worked out, we left the damper open on the fireplace and opened the door, and that caused enough movement of air to make the interior livable.

There’s somebody at the door. Now, I mean, present tense, not back there in the shack. They rang the bell just a second ago and now they did it again.

It wouldn’t be Betsy. The door’s unlocked, and Betsy would just come in, she wouldn’t ring the bell. And if it isn’t Betsy I don’t care who it is.

The windows here face the rear of the house, and I don’t have any lights on anywhere else, so they can’t be sure I’m home, whoever they are. Would it be Kay, come out to comfort me? I hope to Christ it isn’t, I might be just stupid enough and lonely enough to take her up on it.

I’m not going to answer. It’s long after midnight, Monday the 27th of November is down the drain for good, I have three days left in which to write nine chapters, this current episode on the treadmill is almost over, I’m not going to break into it by answering the door. I don’t want to know who’s there.

Besides, maybe they’ve gone away by now.

I was talking about the great thing at the shack. Most of the time up there was kind of dull and boring, though we both had ourselves about half convinced — I had myself about half convinced, I mean — that it was all very romantic. Living in the woods, completely on our own, nothing but us and a cozy fire and a big cozy bed. We screwed a lot, and the rest of the time we spent in busy work, not having anything to say to each other. I chopped down two trees and sawed them into lengths, showing masculine prowess and giving myself aching muscles I was too young to mention to Betsy. She, on the other hand, insisted on preparing gourmet dishes on a seven-hundred-year-old gas stove, none of which came out edible and all of which I ate, beaming ecstatically while she hovered in worry all about me.

As far as screwing is concerned, we’d already covered the ground in that subject, we knew what positions we liked, what foreplay we liked, what would turn us on and what would turn us off, so it was simply a matter of running through the entire repertoire in three days. We didn’t have that much of a repertoire, actually, so it was easy.

On the third day, our last day there, we were screwing in midday, the door open, two kerosene lamps burning because the interior of the windowless shack was always dark, and we were building up a good head of steam, the two of us. The position was — this is important, or I wouldn’t mention it — I was lying on my back and Betsy was sitting astride me, facing me, her knees along my sides. She was kneeling actually, and had settled back onto her haunches and my cock. I was pushing upward, and she was grinding her belly around, doing most of the moving. We called it Ed’s rest position, and did it whenever we wanted to screw but I was sort of tired.

Anyway, we were going along and all of a sudden Betsy stopped. I looked up at her, and she was staring at the door with a startled expression on her face. Oh, Christ, I thought, some hunter or somebody is looking in. I twisted my head around and looked at the door and what was standing there was a deer. Taller than I would have thought, and thick-bodied, but with big soulful brown eyes, looking in at us.

Tableau.

Me trying to think of something funny to say.

The deer abruptly bounded away, and I looked back at Betsy, still trying to think of something funny to say, and Betsy smiled at me in a rapt visionary sort of way and said, “God is happy we’re married.”

Oh, Christ.

The doorbell’s ringing again. Could it be her? Kay?

2

Driving north out of New York City, Beth Trepless fought to keep the tears out of her eyes. She wouldn’t cry, she refused to cry, and if the tears that wanted to come were at least as much tears of rage as they were tears of sorrow it didn’t matter, she did not want to cry and she would not cry. She wouldn’t let Paul have the satisfaction. Whether he knew about it or not.

What a fool she’d been! She drove north out of the city, taking Route 9 instead of the Thruway because she had practically no money with her, and the same thought kept circling and circling in her head. What a fool, what a fool, what a fool.

How could she not have known? How could she have lived with him so long and never suspected the sort of double life he was leading?

When she’d started to read that terrible diary this afternoon she hadn’t at first believed it could possibly be true. He had to have made it up, she thought, and she kept thinking that as long as she could. But the details were so complete, and when they referred to instances she could remember, absences and so on, they were so accurate that finally she d had to admit the truth to herself, that what she was reading was a factual, gloating, lustful account of her husband’s infidelities.

How many had there been? It seemed incredible to her that she’d never realized what he was up to, that he’d managed to hide his true nature from her so long.

And what now? Edwina was asleep in the back seat, the car was pointing north toward her parents’ home, up near the Canadian border, and what in the world she was going to do with herself now she had no idea. Her marriage lay in shattered shreds at her feet, and her marriage was her life, so it was her life that had been shattered.

She had been living a lie. Paul’s lie, not her own. She had been living it without knowing it, and now the lie had been exposed and could no longer be lived with any more. And there was nothing else to take its place, nothing at all to take its place.

She wished she could stop thinking about it but the thoughts just kept circling and circling in her head, spinning around the perimeter of her despair, outlining over and over the disaster that had befallen her.

When she saw the hitchhiker, she knew she shouldn’t stop for him, a woman alone in a car — Edwina was less than company — should never pick up hitchhikers, but she craved companionship, conversation, someone to help her take her mind off the horrible events of the day, so when she saw the hitchhiker she drove right on by.

No, God damn it. She picked him up.

I can’t do it. I don’t want to write a chapter about Betsy fucking with somebody else, no matter what alias she uses.

But it’s the only way out. Even if I manage to write the chapter about Paul and the whore, I have no place to go from there, no third chapter. I either have to make this an alternate-viewpoint book, back and forth between Paul and Beth, or I have to make it La Ronde. In either case, Chapter 2 has to be from Beth’s point of view.

I prefer La Ronde. Beth and the hitchhiker. Then Chapter 3 is the hitchhiker and some other girl, and so on until Chapter 9 is Paul and the whore told from the whore’s point of view, and Chapter 10 is Paul and Beth getting back together again.

But first I have to write Chapter 2, and in Chapter 2 Beth has to make it with somebody. And I don’t want to write that. I don’t even want to think it, so how can I write it?

This is ridiculous, I can’t go on like this. Things are going to hell all around me, here I am at Rod’s desk, using his typewriter, I don’t even have Chapter 1 any more, and I can’t write Chapter 2 because apparently I believe in sympathetic magic or something.

What a day this is. Ten o’clock in the morning and already it’s been too much day for me, and I can see from here I’m off on another useless chapter again. How many of these things have I done now? Thousands. And out of them I have one useful chapter and a couple of useful chapter beginnings.

I’m too rattled to work, that’s what it is. After Birge and Johnny—

That’s who was at the door last night. I finished my fifteen pages of what-is-it and left the office and walked down the hall and into the living room, turning on lights as I went, and through the picture window in the living room I saw the truck in the driveway.

And they saw the lights go on, because all at once they switched from bell ringing to door pounding. Any second, I knew, it would occur to one of them — probably Johnny — to try the knob, and then they would find out the door wasn’t locked, and then they would come in and turn me into a veal cutlet. With tomato sauce.

So I ran. Through the kitchen and out the back door and across the back yard and across the back yard behind mine, and around that house, and out to the street there. I turned right and ran three blocks, and then I walked a block, and then I ran another block, and then I decided it was ridiculous to be chased out of my own house like that, and besides they were probably gone, so I turned around and walked back, and when I was a block away I could see the truck parked in front. So they were still there. Waiting in the house for me to come back.

I couldn’t do it. They might not actually kill me, I might survive an encounter with Birge and Johnny, but they would definitely put me into the hospital for a while.

I almost went on back just for that reason. It might solve everything. If I was in the hospital, I couldn’t be expected to meet any deadlines anywhere. And if Birge and Johnny beat me up badly enough to put me in the hospital, it might make Betsy feel sorry enough for me to come down and see me and then I could tell her die truth about the baby-sitter business.

But I just couldn’t do it. The idea of walking back there deliberately to get my bones broken and my teeth knocked out and my eyes blackened and my skin bruised just wouldn’t do. No matter how pro-survival it might be from an intellectual standpoint, from an instinctive standpoint the idea was anti-survival and that was that. We know by now what happens with me when mind says do one thing and instinct says do another.

So I turned around again and left there. I walked five blocks to the all-night grocer and called a cab there and took it to the railroad station and called Rod from the station to ask him if I could stay at his place tonight and he said yes. There wasn’t a train till four in the morning, and I kept expecting Birge and Johnny to show up any second, but they never did, and by six I was here at Rod’s place, drinking scotch and telling him my sad story, and only once or twice did he let it show that he thought anything was funny.

Rod has a new place now, on 9th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues. It’s a five-room apartment in a prewar building, fourth floor, windows facing the street. He has a living room, very large, a small galley kitchen, a small dining room, and two bedrooms. One of the bedrooms, the one I’m in right now, is set up as an office, with a sofa bed so it can be converted into a guest room. It has a nice view of 9th Street, a huge desk, and all in all is a better office than I have out at the house, but frankly I’d rather be at the house.

Rod is there now. I told him my time problem, how I was failing to make the deadline, so he offered to take the train out to the house, see if Birge and Johnny were still hanging around, and try to get a few essentials for me. Like a toothbrush and some clean underwear and my usable first chapter and the Buick. It sounds like a real friendly thing he’s doing, going out there like that, and I’m sure it is, but also I believe he’s intrigued by the thought of Birge and Johnny, a couple of real-life heavies, people who beat up people — they’ve done it before, beaten people up and put them in the hospital, I’m not scared for no reason at all — people who buy stolen goods and transport them to New York in truckloads of Christmas trees, people on the fringe of the law, tough nasty mean men, the kind of men he writes about in his spy series with Silver Stripe. I think he wants to see them for himself and compare the real version with the version he makes up.

I don’t mean to take anything away from the gesture, it is a friendly thing he’s doing, putting me up, going out to the Island for me, but I still think this other thing is part of it.

I’m just very cynical today, that’s all. If I sound like I’m putting Rod down, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to. I’ll try not to.

Anyway, I got about four hours’ sleep in here, getting up a little before noon, and Rod and I went over to a place on 6th Avenue and had breakfast, and then he went up to Penn Station to take the train out to the Island, and I came back here and started to work. Did one page about Beth and went all to hell with myself.

How can I show this garbage to Rod?

Can I stop it? Can I pull this sheet of paper out and start page 17 again? I’d love to, I’d love to try it, but I know it won’t work, I know I can’t stop till I’ve got it all said.

Got what all said? For the love of God, what am I saying here? Nothing, not a damn thing. How I’ve filled all these pages I don’t know, because there’s nothing inside me to be said, nothing to be brought out, nothing there at all. I m an empty attic, squirrels live in me.

It’s funny, but I’ve always been fascinated by books without content. Like the phone book, for instance. How big and fat, and there isn’t a damn thing in it. You know what I mean. No thought in it, nothing happening.

The Sears Roebuck catalog, there’s another. Huge book, fat, monstrous, full of things, full of everything, full of nothing.

Like, take a look at this bookcase here, on the left side of this desk. It’s full of stuff like that, it’s got a ton of the stuff. Manhattan phone book. Manhattan classified yellow pages phone book. Sears Roebuck catalog. Roget’s Thesaurus. Official Guide New York World’s Fair 1964–1965. Dictionary. Five-language dictionary giving words in English, French, Italian, German and Russian. The Complete Street Guide to New York. Washington, D.C., classified yellow pages phone book. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and Mencken’s Dictionary of Quotations, all of which are bits and snippets from real books, like cutting fingers off dead men and throwing them in a box and when the box is full you shut the lid and put a hat on it and call it George Spelvin and claim it’s a man.

Rod uses all this stuff, of course. What he writes isn’t books, it’s carnivals. He writes well-lit night entertainments, constructed out of muslin and paint and Roget’s Thesaurus and the five-language dictionary and the Sears Roebuck catalog. He writes black-light rides where the tableaux are spies shooting each other with rifles from the Sears Roebuck catalog in front of addresses from the Manhattan and Washington yellow pages. And the amazing thing is, because God damn him and God damn me twice, my friend and mentor whom I envy so badly I could bite my tongue off in vexation is a writer, a writer writer writer, and because that’s what he is the books are good, they’re fun, they have more life than he puts into them, the sum is greater than the parts.

It’s like those two-color reproduction systems where they only use like yellow and blue, but the eye sees red and green and all sorts of stuff. They aren’t there, but they are.

That’s what a book has to have! A book has to have something more in it than what was put there, or what’s the use of it? All these things, big and fat, using up the space, they don’t have a thing in them but what was put there. But Rod’s books, this spy series with Silver Stripe, they’re good books, he constructs them the way you’d construct a sideshow booth at a carnival, all pine boards and nails and jerrybuilt, tacked together in a hurry, and when he’s done there’s magic takes place, the pumpkin he wrote becomes a coach and you can ride off on that coach into a world nobody ever made, including Rod.

I guess my failing is, my books are attempts at imitations of Rod’s, but they’re really only the yellow pages. What I have when I’m done is what I wrote, no more. Sometimes less.

Like now, for instance.

I really have to do a sex book, you know. Half of my life has suddenly crumbled into the ocean, if the other half goes what’s left? All I had was a family and an occupation, and now the family is gone and the occupation is fading fast. So I’ve got to get back to work. I mean work, real work. A dirty book.

The question is, what’s my second chapter? God help me, I do want to use that first chapter, I need that feeling of accomplishment, I need to believe I’ve gotten something done in this week of furious peckery.

But I can’t do the Beth chapter, I just can’t. I absolutely cannot write about Betsy in bed with somebody else.

Do you think she’d do that? She wouldn’t do that, would she? There was a local guy she’d gone with in high school, but she hasn’t seen him for years, not since we started going together. She wouldn’t look him up, would she? Back up there in Monequois, mad at me, thinking I was unfaithful to her, wanting to get back at me, she calls this guy, he takes her for a date, the first thing you know he’s screwing her in the back of her brothers’ truck, the smell of Christmas trees perfuming the air around them.

I just went and called her. On the phone. So now I’m the kind of house guest makes long distance calls when the host’s away.

She wouldn’t come to the phone. Her mother answered and insisted she wasn’t there. She sounded frail and embarrassed and fading away, the way she always does, but more so. And the situation is so severe she didn’t even tell me about anything she’d seen on the television.

I kept saying, “Would you please tell her it isn’t true, what I wrote isn’t true and I can prove it?” I said that, with variations about a dozen times.

So what did she say to me? “If you see Birge and Johnny, would you ask them to call me? There’s a couple of things I want them to get for me while they’re in New York.”

I said, “They came to beat me up, Mrs. Blake. I just barely got away from them.”

Bland and mild, she said, “They always have had a strong feeling for their sister, those two.”

“So have I,” I said. “Would you please tell her—”

And so forth.

Well, it didn’t do any good. I’m back, and I look at the last page I wrote, and I must admit it seems likely. Betsy and some other man.

But not in the truck, of course, the truck is out on Long Island. The guy probably has a car of his own, maybe even an apartment of his own. Maybe he’s a dentist now, and they’ll make it on the couch in his waiting room.

I can’t stand thoughts like that.

The phone is ringing. Rod has an answering service and they’re supposed to pick it up after four rings, but this time it’s going on and on. It’s rung a few times in the course of the day and the service has always come on after four rings, or at least the ringing has stopped after four rings, but this time it’s going on and on. Very distracting. I’m counting rings, I can’t help it. Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty.

I should be doing those numbers as paragraphs, fill these pages up fast. Like so:

Twenty-three.

Twenty-four.

When the hell is it going to stop?

I just turned the radio on, WNCN, longhair music so the interruptions are widely spaced. They’re playing Vivaldi now, it drowns out the ringing.

So let’s think about the sex novel I’m failing to write. We’ve established pretty well, I think, that I can’t do a husband-wife alternation book and I can’t do La Ronde, because they both require a second chapter from Beth’s point of view, which is impossible. Impossible. In fact, I’m not even going to think about it.

Can I do the chapter about Paul and the hooker? I don’t think so. I really don’t think I can do that.

So I need something else. Paul calls a friend, and the friend’s wife answers, and she comes over to console him, and they make it.

That’s Kay. I can’t do that either.

I need something away from me, damn it, I need Paul to do something that isn’t full of associations in my own life.

He could shoot himself in the head.

The baby-sitter!

Why didn’t I think of that before? Chapter 2 is the babysitter, we meet her necking with some guy at a drive-in, we find out she’s a real nymphomaniac and she’s had a sort of a secret letch for Paul. She screws with the guy at the drive-in, he takes her home, and there’s Paul. Then the third chapter is Paul’s point of view again, he’s there to ask her to tell his wife it was all false. He stumbles along, explaining and explaining, and gradually the baby-sitter seduces him.

That’s it! I’m saved, I’m saved, I can do it! Chapter 4 is the baby-sitter, she calls Beth but instead of telling her what Paul wants she says that she and Paul have been having an affair forever. She masturbates while she’s on the phone, we get our sex scenes from everywhere.

Chapter 5.

I’ll worry about that when I get to it. The point is, I can still do this. I can do Chapter 2, that’s no sweat, and I can do Chapter 3, and I can even do Chapter 4. By then I’ll have thought of Chapter 5.

There’s no reason I can’t do Chapters 2 and 3 today. It isn’t even three o’clock yet. I’ll take a little break now, make myself a cup of coffee, be back to work by three-thirty. There’s no reason on earth I can’t get Chapter 2 done by eight o’clock, take another break, go out to dinner with Rod or something, be back to work by ten, have Chapter 3 done by two in the morning. Go to bed, get up before noon, do 4 and 5 and 6 tomorrow. Then—

I can’t do it. The thing’s supposed to be in Thursday afternoon. That’s the day after tomorrow, and no matter how I push it I’ll never get farther than Chapter 6 by tomorrow night, which means four chapters left to do on Thursday. All in the daytime.

Impossible.

What if I talk to Rod? What if I ask Rod to talk to Samuel? Tell him I’ve been having problems, it’s not my fault, my wife left me, I’ve been run out of my house, I’m probably having a nervous breakdown — you know, I probably am — and so I’ll be a little late with the book. One day.

Now there’s somebody at the door. And the phone’s ringing again, I can hear it through the Vivaldi.

I’ve got to answer the phone.

Good Christ. It was Rod. He was calling from my house, he sounded upset, I’ve never heard him upset before in my life. Rod never gets upset, but he sounded upset on the phone. He said he’d talked to Birge and Johnny, they suspected I was at his place, they were coming in, they were probably here by now, I shouldn’t answer the doorbell. I said it was ringing right now. He said don’t answer it. He said call the police. I said I didn’t see how I could do that, they hadn’t done anything yet. He got more upset than before, he said CALL THE POLICE, he said I DON’T WANT THEM THERE WHEN I GET THERE, finally he said he’d call the police himself. I said fine, I hung up, I made myself a cup of coffee.

The doorbell stopped ringing, then the phone rang again. I almost answered it, thinking it might be Rod again, but then I realized it would have to be Birge and Johnny.

Rod thinks he’s upset. How can I think? How can I write? How can I do this stinking chapter about this stinking babysitter with all this stuff happening around me? Birge and Johnny. Betsy. And Rod acting peeved at me, as though the whole thing was my fault. He volunteered to go out there, it wasn’t my idea, he wanted to look at the lions close up, he wanted to be Edgar Rice Burroughs swinging from a real vine. Okay, baby, go ahead, but when you land on your ass don’t get mad at me.

I wonder what happened out there. He wouldn’t tell me. He said he was driving my car in and bringing my stuff, he said Birge and Johnny had spent the night in the house and ate a couple of meals there but hadn’t busted anything up, but he wouldn’t tell me what happened between them and him.

Obviously they mean to hang around till they get me, Christmas season or no Christmas season. With Thanksgiving safely out of the way, they should be busy driving Christmas trees and hot gifts down from the wild north country, but I suppose they figure first things first and I’m a first thing.

If they want to fight so bad, why don’t they go to Vietnam? They’re hawks, of course, that goes without saying, they want to bomb everything the other side of Hawaii.

No. I am not going to describe my own attitude toward Vietnam, that’s one digression I refuse to digress to. I’m a dove in ostrich’s clothing, but I suppose that’s just as obvious as Birge and Johnny being hawks.

Why don’t I write the chapter about the goddam babysitter? It’s a simple matter, a sex scene at a drive-in movie, I’ve done it ten or fifteen times already, winding up back at her house and the arrival of Paul. Simple. I could do it with my eyes closed.

If I could do it.

Why can’t I? For God’s sake, there’s no personal involvement with that, is there? I wouldn’t make the baby-sitter anything at all like the real Angie, there’s no connection at all.

Maybe I’m just too far into the habit of going off the tracks by now. How many of these things have I done?

I can’t remember. Somewhere around ten, I think, I don’t have them with me.

If only they were sex book chapters. Do you realize, if these were only sex book chapters I’d make the deadline? I’d beat the deadline, I’d bring the goddam book in tomorrow, a day early.

Is there any way to do it? Change the names in ink, take out words like cunt and fuck—

I don’t have the first few chapters. It wouldn’t work anyway, but even if it would work I don’t have the first few chapters.

I shouldn’t have gotten rid of them.

Do you suppose I have a death wish? Do you suppose I want to fuck up, I want to do things to destroy an intolerable situation? The intolerable situation being the deadline, I suppose. Or generally writing the sex books. Or generally everything. In general.

Like people who secretly want a war, a great big war, because maybe a great big holocaust of a war will change their lives. Like the grocery clerks and assembly line workers that join the Minutemen and go practice Army crap on weekends, because they believe they would be much more successful and happy as guerrillas, and they really and truly and actively want a huge war that blows up all the cities and everything because that’s the only way they’ll ever get to live in a cave in the woods and shoot people. But they understand enough to know that most people wouldn’t be very sympathetic if they came right out and explained that what they really wanted to do with their lives was live in a cave and shoot people, so they coat the pill in red white and blue sugar and they swear up and down that what it is, they’re patriotic.

Yeah. And maybe I’m up to the same thing. “Oh oh, I have to do a sex book now,” I say, but when I sit down to the typewriter, what do I do?

Did I want Betsy to read those chapters? Did I leave them around so she’d read them and leave me?

Whoa. Hold on there, enough of that, that’s horseshit. Betsy hadn’t read a word I’d written for over a year, there was no reason at all to suppose she was going to read anything I was writing this time. So let’s cool it with the five-and-dime psychoanalysis. I may be neurotic, but I’m not crazy.

At least, I don’t think I’m crazy.

What I think I am, in fact, I think I’m regressing. Here I am rooming with Rod again, it’s college days all over again. I’m nineteen, I’m a sophomore, I never met Betsy, Rod and I are roommates, the cold weather and the campus life are fun even if I am broke, and nobody’s a writer, not even Rod. He types, but he’s not a writer.

Rod was an Army brat, his father’s a Colonel in the Air Force, he grew up all over the place. His father’s in Washington now, but when I first met Rod his folks were stationed in Germany. Their official residence was Syracuse, New York, so Rod could get into the state university at the state resident rate, so that’s what he was doing there.

He’s a lot different guy now than he was then. He used to be very silent, very self-contained. He still has the same aura of self-containment, self-control, but there’s more outgoing assurance to him now. He used to make me think of a tight spring, of something packed too tightly into a long thin box. That pressure is gone now.

I think it’s because he’s more sure of himself now, or he has more stability or something. The thing is, growing up all over the place, one air base after another, it was a new school every couple of years, a new country even, new kids around him, if he’d made any friends in the last place they were gone for good. So he was lonely, I believe, though he was never the type that would show it. He was always proud, very cool, always acted sure of himself.

I don’t know whose idea it was that we be roommates after our freshman year. Probably mine.

Why do I say probably mine? It could have been Rod’s idea, too. I always think of myself in the secondary position, I always think of the other person as dominant.

You know that’s true? I put myself at the wrong end of the pecking order with everybody I meet, and there’s no need for it. No matter how much of a clown I am, I’m not that much of a clown. I mean, if I was I wouldn’t be able to function at all.

Come to think of it, I’m not functioning very well.

Back in college, one time when I was being particularly lazy, I remember Rod said to me, “Ed, if you ever have a fit, it’ll be catatonic.” But wouldn’t that be nice? You just sit there. Somebody else feeds you. Somebody else wipes the drool from the corner of your mouth. Somebody else wipes you. Somebody else takes care of you.

No, I can’t do that. I’m just feeling glum because so many things have happened, everything’s gotten so screwed up all at once. I’m not even in my own house any more.

And I’ve done another fifteen pages of gumbo, which is enough to make anybody long for the green pasture of catatonia.

Rod will get here soon. I’ll read the Paul chapter, he’ll give me a pep talk, I’ll ask him to call Samuel tomorrow and get me a stay of execution, and then I’ll come in here and I’ll really and truly write Chapter 2. I still have all evening, I can get Chapter 2 done with no trouble at all. Granted I’m a little tired, I only had four hours’ sleep last night, but I can surely stay up long enough to write another fifteen pages.

The funny thing is, this stuff is going faster than the sex books ever went. Three hours, some of these chapters, which is really fast. Of course, I suppose that’s because I don’t have to worry about plot or continuity or sex scenes or anything like that. All I have to do is open my head and spill the brains onto the paper.

Brains?

3

Brock Stewart hefted his suitcase and watched the red taillights of the car disappear down the road, headed due north into the mountains. Cold mountains. Wintry mountains.

“Go on, lady,” Brock said under his breath. “That country’s too cold for me. And it’s too cold for you, I can guarantee you that. I can guarantee it, you won’t like the cold nights up there.”

She had been fun, an unexpected bonus on this trip, but now that the lady fleeing her husband was out of sight she was quickly out of Brock’s mind. He looked around at where he was, trying to decide what to do next.

And so am I.

Oh, come on. It’s Brock Stewart time. I hate this, I swear I do, I hate these fucking interruptions all the time. Get out of here, Ed, it’s time for the hitchhiker chapter.

You see, I figured I’d skip over the Beth chapter and go straight to Chapter 3. Do the hitchhiker, have him meet another woman, sex scene, take that woman into Chapter 4, and so on. Then, when the book was done, I could go back and write Chapter 2, it would be less emotional a problem for me by then. At least that’s the way I had it figured.

I’ve had second thoughts about the baby-sitter. I sat here for a while thinking about the beginning of the chapter. I even had a name for her, I called her Donna Warren, and I gradually began to see that it wouldn’t work out, I’d be painting myself into a corner even if I did manage to write a chapter about the baby-sitter, because the two characters just aren’t that connected, Paul and the baby-sitter, and there’s no way to get a whole book out of the two of them.

I seem to have millions of ideas for Chapter 2’s that I can’t write. That’s why I decided to go ahead and do a Chapter 3 and maybe even finish out the book, leaving Chapter 2 until last.

And now I can’t even do Chapter 3. And I have to. If I have any last chance at all, this is it. Rod says he will call Samuel tomorrow, and he says he thinks he can talk Samuel into taking the book one day late, on Friday instead of on Thursday, but it won’t do any good unless I write the hitchhiker chapter right now.

All right. I’m going to write it, that’s all. I’m going to go back to it as soon as this paragraph is done, I’m going to repeat the last usable paragraph I wrote and then I’m going to continue with Brock Stewart until I’m done. And if I drift away again I’ll come back again. I don’t care if this chapter takes a hundred pages to write, fifteen of them are going to be concerned with Brock Stewart. And when I’m done, all I have to do is retype.

What the hell, I can’t leave this room anyway, not for several hours. I’m stuck in here, because of Rod and—

No. I said I was going back to Brock, and I am.

She had been fun, an unexpected bonus on this trip, but now that the lady fleeing her husband was out of sight she was quickly out of Brock’s mind. He looked around at where he was, trying to decide what to do next.

He’d gotten out at a crossroads in the middle of nowhere, and with night falling fast the place had a really bleak and empty look. There was a gas station on one corner and a diner diagonally opposite, but the other two corners were just fields, and more fields stretched away on all sides toward the horizon, broken here and there by small copses of trees.

There was no traffic at the moment. Brock hefted his suitcase, thought things over, and decided a hamburger might be a good idea for next. He ambled across the road toward the diner.

From outside, the diner looked warm and comfortable and inviting. Steam misted the windows, softening the light within. And after a while I begin to hate all these descriptions.

That’s all I do, month after month, is describe things. If I’m not describing sexual congress I’m describing some mist-windowed diner. Or a bedroom. Or an office. Or a street. Or a car. Description description description, and who gives a shit?

You see, Brock’s going into the diner and it’s going to be empty except for this young girl behind the counter.

I don’t even want to talk about it.

Outside, it’s really taking place. Beyond that door over there. That’s why I have to stay in here. If she stays the night, I’m locked in here till tomorrow sometime. Rod said she’s unlikely to stay the night, but I feel pessimistic.

Actually, I considered it a good thing when he told me about it. “You can stay,” he said. “I know you have to get the book done. But I’ve been setting this chick up for a month and tonight’s the payoff.”

We tested, and my typing can’t be heard anywhere else in the apartment with the office door closed. So I’m in here, and Rod is out there feeding some girl a dinner he prepared himself, and after that he’s going to seduce her. He knows in advance he’s going to seduce her, and I know it, and the girl probably knows it too. Nothing like that has ever happened to me, and it never will. So look who’s writing sex novels.

Yeah, and look who doesn’t have to write sex novels.

My two hundred bucks a month is nothing to Rod now, you know that? I mean the money he gets every month for my using his pen name. That’s only twenty-four hundred dollars a year, less agency commission, leaving two thousand one hundred sixty dollars a year. Two thousand dollars a year. He’s making forty, maybe more. My two thousand doesn’t mean a thing to him.

I wonder what really happened out there on Long Island this afternoon. He won’t talk about it, he won’t even make jokes about it. The idea of Rod not making jokes, particularly about people like Birge and Johnny, is mind-shattering.

I think they pushed him around a little. On the left side of his face there was what looked like a faint bruise, near the cheekbone, as though maybe he’d been slapped there or something.

Why does that give me pleasure? It does, and I know it’s small-minded of me, but it does.

Just as it gives me pain that he read the chapters. All of them, not just the one about Paul. He read them out at the house, in between ringing me on the phone.

He thinks I’m flaking out, I know he does. I can see him torn about it, too, wanting to go in two opposite directions at the same time. Part of him still thinks of me as a friend, and feels sorry for me (which makes my skin crawl) and wants to help me (which is fine by me), but another part of him thinks of me as a loser, somebody on the chute, somebody he shouldn’t get his life snarled up with. He himself is a winner, he’s proved that by now, and whereas winners will pal around with all sorts of people before they become winners, once it’s established what they really are they tend to club together and leave us also-rans out in the cold.

Not that I blame him for it, I don’t. I hate him for it, but I don’t blame him for it.

I wish I was nineteen again, we were in college again, he wasn’t a winner yet and I wasn’t a loser yet and Betsy didn’t exist yet and nobody had ever even heard of sex novels. That’s what I wish.

We left one thing out in our calculations, by the way, Rod and I, when we locked me up in here like a virgin in a wall. There’s no head. I pissed out the window a little while ago, but what if I have to crap?

Don’t walk down 9th Street tonight, that’s all I can say.

I am going back to Brock Stewart. Enough digression.

From outside, the diner looked warm and comfortable and inviting. Steam misted the windows, softening the light within. There were no cars parked on the gravel out front, but the tall neon sign by the road was already flashing:

FOUR

CORNERS

DINER

EAT

Brock pushed open the door and went in, and the air inside was so moist you could almost swim in it. He grinned and shook his head and shut the door, then went over and sat at the counter. From the inside, the light was much brighter and harsher and more glaring than it had seemed through the fogged-up windows as he’d crossed the highway.

At first, he thought the place was totally empty, as empty as my mind. I am pushing at myself as though I was shoving a sack of mashed potatoes up a hill. My mind just doesn’t want to concentrate, I can’t force myself to think about Brock Stewart and the diner and all that garbage at all, not at all.

That diner sign got me four lines, though. Did you notice that? We sex book writers aren’t happy with a book until we put a couple of good space-consuming signs in it.

Do you know my college isn’t there any more? I’m part of the alumni of a nonexistent college, what do you think of that? Monequois College was a state school on federal land, the land having been an Army training camp back in the First World War, and with the current state of the world being what it is, our nation being more concerned with the military arts than the liberal arts, the feds decided they wanted the land back. The whole thing started the year after I graduated, and various committees to save this and committees to protest that began sending me things through the mail, wanting me to march on Washington or send money or some other improbable thing, but of course I was involved in my own problems — as I always am — and I never did anything about it. There was some talk about the college relocating somewhere else, but that didn’t happen either, for political reasons as I understand it, so in June of 1966 Monequois graduated its last senior class, the one Betsy would have graduated with if she hadn’t fucked up, or if I hadn’t fucked up, and the school closed forever. It’s now something called NorBomComDak, it’s an Army base, and I’ve been told the Army uses it for a training school, teaching commandos how to pacify civilians.

I don’t know, for some reason I find myself thinking about Hester, asking myself what Hester would do in a situation like this. And I wonder also if I overrate Hester. After all, she is in San Francisco, which I think of as Last Stop Town, where the drowners go before hitting the ocean. Could Hester possibly be running away from herself the same as us ordinary mortals?

No. Hester is one of the other kind, the kind who run away to be themselves, because they have selves they can’t possibly be at home. Hester’s all right. She always knew when to disappear and when to appear again.

I remember her high school graduation. It was two weeks after I graduated from Monequois, and though she hadn’t attended mine I did attend hers. And Hannah’s, of course, they graduated together. Hannah moved through it all like the Walt Disney robot of Abraham Lincoln, correct and realistic but somehow horrible, while Hester treated the whole thing as though it were a gigantic put-on. It was the only time in my life I ever saw her shamble. She went across the stage to get her diploma, and she was doing a perfect Stepin Fetchit. Which I suppose simply means they were both consistent in doing their thing. Hannah has reduced herself to a set of laudatory responses, and Hester has reduced herself to a put-on of the human condition.

I’d rather be Hester.

The question is, what do I want? God knows I don’t want what I have at the moment, locked into somebody else’s room, pissing out the window and typing garbage instead of meeting a deadline, but what do I want? What’s my goal, what purpose do I have in life?

To have things nice.

Yeah yeah, that’s what everybody says. But what about specifics? Specifically, what do I want? For instance, how do I want to earn my living?

I dunno.

Okay. Where in the world would I most prefer to live?

I dunno.

Fine. Where would I like most to be at this very moment?

In that girl in the living room.

Dummy, you never even met that girl. You don’t know what she looks like, you don’t know what her personality is, you don’t know anything about her. So how come you’re sitting here getting a hard-on over her? And you are, buddy, you know, you are getting a hard-on, and it is because of that girl out there in the living room. Why?

Because she’s going to get laid.

Beautiful. For months you’ve had a woman of your own, lying night after night in your own bed, right there for the taking, guaranteed score, and you haven’t been as horny as you are right now in years, not in years. And over a girl you don’t even know, have never even seen.

But isn’t that what sex is all about? The unknown, the mystery within the as-yet-unbreached cunt. Rod is out there working his ass off to fuck that girl and when you come right down to it he probably doesn’t know a hell of a lot more about her than I do. Her name and phone number and two or three topics of conversation in which he knows she takes an interest, and that’s about it. He knows as much about her as I know about my characters in the sex novels, and you know how much that is? Just enough. Not one fact more, not one thing more of any kind.

If that girl started to tell Rod about her secret dreams and fears, about who she is it would just confuse him.

I wonder if he has his finger in her now.

They’re just a couple of walls away. He’s got a dimmer switch on the living room lights, he’s turned this apartment into a make-out pad, but he’s done it quietly, coolly, without any of that overt boorish Playboy obviousness. No bearskin rugs, you know. No suggestive paintings on the walls. The apartment is constructed to be the place where he lives all the time, but he’s just seen to it there’s nothing in it to distract from a nice quiet seduction from time to time.

I’m talking about it, frankly, to try to reduce it of its significance. In case you haven’t discovered that for yourself, it might be handy to know. You can ultimately reduce anything of its significance, anything at all, absolutely anything, by simply talking about it.

Except this time. This baby won’t reduce. There’s only one thing to do that I can see.

What we do in the sex books in order to indicate the passage of time within a chapter, we put an asterisk in the middle of the next fine, like this:

* * *

I wish I could say I felt better, but I don’t. The fact of the matter is, I feel worse. It’s as though I’ve just admitted that Betsy and I aren’t married any more, we’re never going to be married in the future, it’s all over.

How do I feel about that?

I really don’t know.

All I know for sure, I just killed more than an hour since I put down that asterisk, it’s almost midnight, and when I came back here and sat down did I go back to Brock Stewart and Chapter 3 of Round of Lust, which I’ve decided is the title of the book if I ever write it? Did I?

You know I didn’t.

You know what I was just thinking about? The first time I got laid. That was a nice depressing experience, I should have thought of it before the asterisk.

Shall I tell you about it? All right, if you insist.

I was in high school, a senior, seventeen years old, and had been claiming loss of virginity for two years. One night a guy I knew asked me if I wanted to come along on a gang bang. I said how many guys, and he said just three. He said because it was his car he had first, and the other guy and I could choose up who was going to get sloppy seconds and disgusting thirds. I said okay, being cool and nonchalant because I was excited out of my mind at the prospect of really losing my cherry, and nine o’clock that night he came by for me in his father’s car, which I believe was a Rambler. The other guy was already in the car, and as we drove away we chose and I won, so I got sloppy seconds.

See that? I win, and I get sloppy seconds.

The girl we were on our way to pick up didn’t go to Albany High, which is where I went, but to a different high school which shall be nameless, and the story on her was she’d already been sent away twice, once to have a baby and once to be institutionalized for a while, and now she was back again and the same as ever.

Anyway, the story is she was the same as ever. I don’t know, I’d never seen her before in my life and I never saw her again after that night and I’m not entirely sure what her name was. Joyce, I think, but maybe not. Joyless Joyce. Maybe. Maybe not.

There was a street corner, and we were supposed to pick her up there, and she was actually there, one of the few times in my life when the next step has been where it was supposed to be. The only snag was, she had her little brother with her. She was sixteen, he was seven. When she got into the car with us, she explained her parents wouldn’t let her out any more unless she took her baby brother with her, the theory apparently being she couldn’t do too much fucking with a baby brother along to cramp her style.

All theories are false, that’s my theory.

We drove out to this huge vacant lot where baseball is played sometimes and carnivals used to set up in the summertime, O. C. Buck shows and outfits like that, and this guy drove the Rambler out over the lot and came to a stop where it was very dark, and we all got out and walked around, and the girl whispered to us the plan, which was that two of us were to keep the baby brother occupied while the third one was back in the car with big sister. Done.

So big sister and the guy whose car it was faded away, and the other guy and I started bright idiotic conversation with the baby brother. I remember it was a very starry night and I started trying to point out various constellations to him, the Big Dipper and this and that, and the kid seemed to take an interest and then again he didn’t. Maybe it was my own supersensitivity, but I felt as though the kid knew exactly what was going on, even though he was seven years old, and he felt sorry for us and didn’t want to embarrass us by tipping the fact that he was onto us, so he was craning his neck back and looking up at the sky just to humor me. That may be wrong, but that’s the impression I had.

After a while guy number 1 came back, and winked at me, and started talking to the kid about baseball, of which the kid knew nothing but the Albany Senators, and he started telling us how his father had taken him out to see the Albany Senators play a few times, and to be perfectly honest I would have preferred to stay there and listen to the kid, but pleasure called and so I drifted unobtrusively — I think — away, and went over to the car, and the windows were all steamed up.

You think I’m making that up? The windows were all steamed up, they were.

I opened the front door on the passenger side and there wasn’t anybody there. With the windows steamed up, and the night pretty dark as it was — the sky clear but moonless — I couldn’t see much of anything inside the car, except she wasn’t there.

Then she said, “Back here.”

“Oh,” I said, and shut the front door and opened the back door and got into the car.

It smelled funny. Musty, and green. I don’t know why, but the smell made me think of rabbits. And all I could see was her pale skin. Her dress was up around her waist and her panties were off and she was half lying, half sitting cattycorner on the back seat, her head below the level of the window, and her belly was narrow and flat and pale, and her pubic hair was dark and mysterious.

Things were kind of cramped back there, and I had a little trouble getting my pants and underpants off. I left them wrapped around my left ankle, and tucked my shirttail up inside my T-shirt, and then very awkwardly I mounted her, and for the first time in my life a girl touched my cock. She put her hand on it and pointed it to the right place — which was farther down and back than I’d thought it would be, as I remember — and of course the ways had been well greased, and I slid in, and sort of hunched over her with my back breaking, and she began to grunt, panting, breathing faster than I ever heard anybody breathe before or since, and her hands clutched at my sides and back as though she was afraid I would try to get away, and her hips moved so fast I couldn’t keep up. I tried to, but it was impossible, so what I did was half-time, stroke in on a complete pulsation of hers, stroke out on a complete pulsation, and so on.

I came in less time than it takes to tell about it, but so did she. At the time I wasn’t sure what was happening exactly, but my experience since then tells me she came four or five times in the short period of time I was inside her, and then I came, and abruptly she became practical — all women do after sex, no matter what the marriage guidebooks say — and started stuffing wads of tissues here and there. There was a blanket over the seat to protect that.

This is a terrible memory. That’s all right, it’s almost done. I’d just like to point out how after guy number 3 had his turn and we all drove back to drop her off again nobody remarked about the funny smell in the car, including the baby brother. That’s all. Including the baby brother.

And now I am going to get back to Brock Stewart. You think I’m not? I am.

At first he thought the place was totally empty, but then he saw the girl standing behind the counter, down at the far end, her white dress and fair hair blending with the decor behind her.

She came walking slowly toward him when he sat down, and he gave her an easy smile, noticing the sensual way she had of walking, the slightly pouty look to her lips, the way her blue eyes seemed to smolder as she looked at him through half-closed lids. And there was something faintly suggestive about the way she said, “What would you like?”

“To finish the book,” he said.

She smiled, lazily and without malice, and wiped the counter with a filthy damp rag. “Not a chance of it,” she said. “You won’t even finish this chapter.”

“I’ve got to,” he said.

“Why?” she said.

“Because,” he said, “if I don’t manage to succeed at something in the course of this horrible week I may kill myself. Everything is collapsing around me, I have to prove I am still capable of triumphing over adversity as a result of my own efforts.”

“Prove to who?” she said.

“To whom,” he said.

“All right,” she said patiently. “Prove to whom?”

“To me,” he said.

“Who made you judge?” she said. “I mean, whom made you judge?”

“For Christ’s sake,” he said, “you have to do, don’t you? You can’t just give up, can you?”

“Sure you can,” she said.

“Well, I’m not going to,” he said. “Who would I be if I gave up?”

“You mean where would you be.”

“No, I don’t. I mean who would I be? Whom would I be?”

“You’d be you,” she said.

“I can feel the ground crumbling away beneath me,” he said. “I’m terrified.”

She said, “What is the worst possible thing that can happen to you?”

“Everything stops,” he said.

“You mean, you die?”

“No,” he said. “I mean I don’t get the book done, and Betsy doesn’t come back, and I don’t live in that house any more, and all of the things that I have been and roles that I have played and personas that I have assumed will come to a stop.”

“And what is left,” she said, “will be you.”

“As naked as a shaved puppy,” he said. “And as defenseless, and as shivering, and as doomed. Who can I be if I don’t have somebody to be?”

“That makes no sense,” she said.

“I’m not asking for sense,” he said. “In the world of the New York Times there’s no sense, only a progression of events. If the progression of events stops, we are doomed. The same thing is true in my life. If the progression of events in my life stops, I am doomed.”

“Nonsense,” she said. “If the progression of events stops, another progression will start.”

“What progression?”

“We don’t know yet,” she said. “But one will. Remember when you were working for the beer distributor and the letter came from Rod? That brought a progression of events to a stop and started another one.”

“But that old progression was intolerable,” he said. “I was married and living at home with my mother, working on a beer truck—”

“Isn’t the present progression of events intolerable?” she asked him.

“Of course it is! But that time I had Rod’s letter, I had someplace to go. This time there’s nothing but the chute.”

“Won’t it be interesting to see where the chute leads?”

“Into the cold black water.”

“Oh, that’s dramatizing. In fact, that’s melodramatizing.”

“There’s no such word,” he said.

“Well, there goddam well ought to be,” she said. “And especially for you. How do you know things are going to be worse after you’ve failed to turn in the November book?”

“They’ll drop me,” he said.

“So what?” she said.

“It’s easy for you to talk,” he said. “You’ve got this diner. What have I got?”

“About forty-five years of life, according to the Bible,” she said. “Your wife has left you, which increases your options already. You can go after her—”

“And be killed by Birge and Johnny.”

“If you want Betsy, Birge and Johnny won’t be able to stop you from getting to her. The question is, do you want her?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “That’s the worst part of it. Before this there weren’t any decisions to be made. Everything was set, orderly, determined. Now I have to make decisions, and I don’t know what I want. How can I tell what I want?”

“You can want Betsy, if you want,” she said. “Or you can choose not to want her. She’s given you the choice. She’s gone home to her parents, who will take care of her and Elfreda if you cannot, and that means you are free.”

“Exposed.”

“Free.”

“Exposed.”

“It’s the same thing,” she said.

“I’m going to stop now,” he said. “I’ve done fifteen pages.”

“You aren’t going to try to finish the Brock chapter, no matter how many pages it takes?”

“I can’t. I just don’t have the juice for any more of this, forgive the historico-sexual reference.”

“If you stop now, you have admitted defeat. You will never finish the book.”

“I don’t care. I’m too tired to worry about it. And besides, I hate to mention this, but I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Pee out the window. You did it before.”

“I don’t have to pee,” he said.

“You poor wistful bastard,” she said.

4

I don’t want to do this. I hereby announce that I am playing this game under protest.

I’d just rather do this than the other.

Welcome to the Y. Why the Y? Why this stinking room approximately six feet wide and ten feet long, with maple furniture? Why maple? A single bed, a single chair, a big-shouldered ugly bureau. A mirror on the back of the door into which I have so far refused to look and a throw rug thrown on the floor beside the bed, a bed in which I have so far had no occasion to sleep. The window, blinded by Venetians and draped by Omar the tentmaker, looks out on ugly black roofs. The sun is shining somewhere, but the late afternoon shadow of the Y lies like death on the ugly black roofs, softening their angularity but hardening their meaning.

Rod threw me out, if you have to know. This morning. He came in before I was awake, and read what I’d written last night. He woke me up and told me I should seek psychiatric help, which is nothing to tell a boy when he first wakes up out of too little sleep. And troubled sleep, at that. I had these dreams, Doctor, but I can’t remember them. Something about running as fast as I could to stay where I was.

So I suppose I was a little out of sorts, and I said one or two things I shouldn’t have. So did Rod, when it comes to that. Frankly, it is my belief he didn’t get laid after all last night, and that was why he was so short-tempered this morning.

I wonder what I said about him in the chapters he read. Have I done a Betsy again?

Speaking of Betsy, I saw Birge and Johnny. Rod threw me out, as previously reported, and I got to the street carrying a typewriter and two shopping bags, the shopping bags full of manuscript and underwear and other luxuries, and across the street was the truck.

All I hope is, when I pissed out the window last night I hope it landed on them.

Anyway, they saw me when I saw them, and they started to get out of the truck, and one of those lovely coincidences you can’t use in fiction popped up, in the form of a police car ambling down the street. I hailed it, and it stopped, and I walked over to it. Birge and Johnny got back into their truck and drove away, and I asked the cops where Grand Central Station was. They told me, and drove on, and next came a cab. Into it I popped and told the driver, “The YMCA, please.”

“Which Y?” he said.

“I don’t care,” I said.

So he brought me to this one, and I still don’t care. I’m here until I figure out what to do next. Now that I’m wanted by the cops, my freedom of movement is pretty well narrowed down.

Oh, yeah, that was the other thing. The reason Rod was up so early, he got a phone call from the fuzz. They’re looking for me, and they wanted to tell him — and all my friends, I guess, ruining my reputation (what there is of it) for miles around — the best thing for me to do is turn myself in. Statutory rape is bad enough, they said, I shouldn’t also be a fugitive from justice.

Statutory rape. That’s what I said. Apparently, what happened was Betsy decided to call Angie’s father. Remember Angie? The baby-sitter? You remember. Anyway, I guess Betsy thought the woman in the case ought to get some trouble, too, so she called Angie’s father and told him his daughter has been fucking with me, though probably in different words, and then the balloon went up.

I should hope Angie denied it, since it isn’t true, but her denials are apparently not worth the paper they’re written on, since it turns out the little cunt isn’t a virgin. How do you like them apples? They had her examined by the family doctor, and that sweet-looking little kid puts out. To think I could have—

Except I probably couldn’t. Some high school football player, not an elderly grandfather like me.

Anyway, the father called the cops, and now the law wants me for statutory rape. Can you see me beating that rap?

Of course, there’s no evidence any more, there’s nothing but my wife’s word for it that I ever wrote anything down about it. Angie will deny it, and I’ll deny it, and for Christ’s sake it’s only justice that I beat the rap. I mean, I didn’t do it, I really didn’t do it.

Really.

But somehow I don’t see me winning that round either.

I wonder what I’m going to do now. If Birge and Johnny don’t get me, the cops will, and if they don’t get me either, what am I going to do with myself? I can’t ever go back to that house in Sargass, and now I can’t even go home to Albany. The cops would be sure to pick me up there.

I guess I’ll stay here for a while. I have about fifty dollars on me, and a Diners’ Club card, so money won’t be a problem for a while. Rod also brought my checkbook in with him, but I’m not sure I could cash a check now without getting myself picked up.

So here I stand. There was no place to put the typewriter except on top of the dresser, so that’s where it is. And I’m standing here typing this stuff, shifting from foot to foot, standing here. Typing. I don’t believe it myself.

Tomorrow the sex book is due, but Rod has probably already phoned Samuel and told him not to expect it, old Ed isn’t available any more. We need a new ghost, a slot is free, send out the call.

Ghost wanted!

Ten thousand a year, very easy work. Just a little typing every month. But remember, nobody can do this shit forever.

How could I hear him when he said that? Betsy was big as a house, I was broke, and Sabina Del Lex had these smooth white thighs, smooth white thighs.

I ought to be altered, that’s what I ought to be. A good case of the mumps, that would cure what ails me.

I feel like the world is this big rattletrap wagon with everybody crammed on every which way, and I didn’t like my position, I was down too low, everybody was stepping on me, so I tried to get higher, or at least more comfortable, and in thrashing around all I’ve succeeded in doing is knocking myself off the wagon.

I have friends on that wagon. How can they go on without me? They have to notice I’m gone, they have to know something’s happened to me. Don’t they care? Doesn’t anybody care? Am I the only one in the world, in the whole wide world, who cares about me?

Well, Ed, who do you care about? Besides yourself, that is.

Hester.

Fred.

Maybe Betsy. Maybe.

Then that’s who cares about you, Ed. Hester. And Fred. And maybe Betsy. Maybe.

That’s fine. That’s wonderful. I’m lying here in the roadway, I’m lying here in the dirt, and there goes the wagon, bouncing and rattling along, over the next rise and gone.

I can’t even hear it any more.

Listen. Listen how quiet. Nothing but the click-click of this typewriter.

But now I get up, now I get up and brush off my behind and pick up my hat and put it on my head and adjust my great big polka-dot bow tie and touch my big red round nose to be sure it hasn’t fallen off or gotten dented, and I take out a huge red handkerchief and blow my nose in it and then use it to wipe the dust off my size twenty-eight shoes and then use it to wipe the lenses of my spectacles and then poke it through the spectacles to show they don’t have lenses after all, and then put it back in my hip pocket, and I bow my head and smell the white and yellow foot-wide daisy in my lapel and it squirts water in my face and I jump back in surprise and take the huge red handkerchief out of my pocket again and wipe my face with it and then go through wringing motions with it and water dribbles onto the ground and then I put it away in my hip pocket again, and then I start looking through the deep wide pockets of my baggy check trousers with the wide yellow suspenders, and I begin to find strange things in the pockets, like a puppy and a ham sandwich and a mousetrap that snaps shut on my fingers and a gun that when I pull the trigger a flag pops out that says FUCK! and an American flag and a potted plant with a flower that when I smell it squirts water in my face, and I throw everything away and take out the huge red handkerchief again and wipe my face with it again and go through wringing motions with it again and this time feathers flutter out which I do not react to and then I put the huge red handkerchief away again and look around and I am all alone.

Even the puppy’s gone.

Nothing is happening.

Wouldn’t it be nice if somebody complained to the desk about the typing, and they made me stop? But no such luck.

I’ll tell you what got me started again. After I checked in here I went out and had lunch, tasteless terrible food in which the only thing even vaguely recognizable was the french fries, which kept sliding off my fingers. I also went to a newsstand and bought the Times, hoping to see titties, and in a way I did, and I’ve been evading mentioning it, probably because I feel a moral ambivalence toward the whole matter, and I’m afraid if I start to talk about it I’ll get smug and holier-than-Times, which I really wouldn’t be able to stand from a semi-pornographer like me.

All right, the Times. Are you ready? Main headline first page, second section: “For Lonely G.I. Wives, More Than Wind Is Chill.” Story: A housing area maintained somewhere in Kansas by the Army for the families of men assigned overseas. It’s like a little town, like a suburban development, and there’s nothing there but women and little kids.

Of course the Times had to in a very sober and straight-faced and we-aren’t-being-at-all-dirty-minded-about-this way talk about the “problem” of some of the wives bringing men home. It’s not much of a problem, they decided, and that was at least partly because the wives themselves exert what some Army social worker called “social control,” because any man in this housing area has got to be a stranger and cause comment and the word will get back to the Army. In other words, most of the women’s attitude is, if they aren’t going to get any, nobody’s going to get any.

The social worker also said some of the wives tended to “hit the bottle,” which I suppose in the cage they’re living in is the best way to survive.

Anyway, I read this article, which was a long one, with pictures of some of the wives, and you just know my mind was turning it into a sex novel before I was well past the headline. I was reading the piece, and while one part of my mind was busy working out plot details another part of my mind was thinking, I can go ahead and peddle a book under a pen name of my own now, I can do this book — Sex Hungry, that’s the title — and try one of the other outfits, one of the companies that Lance won’t deal with, a New York company where I can actually go to their office and deal with them direct and avoid getting myself screwed, and then I got to the part where the Times mentioned the “problem” and the social worker talked about “social control,” and all at once I was ashamed of myself. I mean, really ashamed of myself.

Because those are people. Those women are individual human beings, with husbands, with children, with lives of their own. Personalities and problems of their own. Dignity of their own. How cheap and shabby to take the bad situation they’re in now and turn it into glib lies for some retarded geek to masturbate over.

And that’s what I’ve been doing, isn’t it? Maybe not as directly as this, something taken straight out of the paper, but indirectly it’s just as bad. Every one of my books has been a shallow lie about serious pains, and I could write them because I lived my own life the same way.

Whoa, I’m going off the deep end again. I always overkill, particularly when the target is me.

The point is, I read the article and I thought of doing it as a sex novel, and it turned my stomach. But I was in this room here, and the typewriter was here, and the blank paper was here. I wanted to leave the room, but I didn’t want to do anything all alone, and I’m afraid to call Dick or Pete or anybody because surely the cops have talked to all of them by now and they probably all believe the story and think I’m sick and will turn me in for my own good, which I’d rather not have.

How many mystery novels have I read where the hero is unjustly accused of some crime, and instead of going to the police he goes out and solves the crime himself because it’s the only way he believes he can get himself off the hook. Well, here I am. I’ve been unjustly accused, and I haven’t turned myself in.

Of course, there are differences between me and the mystery novel hero. In the first place, I’m not a hero. In the second place, the mystery can’t be solved because nobody did it.

Well, that isn’t true either, apparently at one time or another someone has rung little Angie’s register, but I’m hardly in the position to go grill a lot of high school students and find out which one it was. And even if I did, there’s still another difference between this and a murder mystery, in that Angie hasn’t been murdered, she’s only been laid, and whereas you can only be murdered once you can be laid millions of times, so coming forward with some blushing linebacker isn’t going to help me much.

So I can’t go solve anything, because there’s nothing to solve. If I run — if I continue to run, I mean — it is running for running’s sake, nothing more.

Digression. I was talking about the article in the Times. How I read it and disgusted myself. How I sat around here with nothing to do and nowhere to go and nothing to occupy my mind.

So I put paper in the typewriter. I didn’t type anything, but I did put paper in the typewriter.

After a while I did go out, leaving the paper in the typewriter, and bought myself three paperback books, and came back here with them, and tried to read. I tried all three, and none of them helped at all. I would look at the page with all the words on it, and I would think about tomorrow. What am I going to do tomorrow? How will I support myself in the tomorrows to come? Will I try to get Betsy back? Will I go to the police? Will I try to write a sex novel? Will I try to write anything? Will I write Sex Hungry?

Finally I went and took a shower, which involved walking down a very long hall wearing shoes and overcoat and carrying soap and towel. I was propositioned while drying myself afterward, and if you promise not to tell anyone I will whisper to you that I was tempted.

Not by the overwhelming sexual magnetism of the poor faggot who approached me, believe me. He was about thirty, and very short, and soft-looking in a decayed-dumpling sort of way. His approach was so sad-eyed and forlorn and defeatist and fatalistic that for the first time in days I felt like a winner myself, a doer and a decider, a giant among men.

Well, I might not be a giant among men, but I was a giant among that guy. He mumbled something pitiful about the weather, asked me if I had television in my room, and offered to let me come and watch his. Television. “While you’re drying.” In other words, no need to go back to my own room and dress first.

I hesitated, I didn’t give him an immediate get-lost-cocksucker, and though the reason for the hesitation may have had something to do with personal loneliness, or incipient loneliness, or the prospect of loneliness, I think mainly my reason was something else, and I think it had to do with belonging to something.

I understand that the theory of herd instinct in human beings, having been in for a while, is now out, and I suggest it be brought back in again at once, because something inside my breast wants me to be able to define myself by something other than my name. By occupation, perhaps. By something which states my group affiliation.

I’ve always had a group affiliation. First student. Then for a while I was one of the guys that worked at the beer distributing company. For the last two and a half years I’ve been a writer. Well, maybe not a writer, but at least a sex book writer. “I write paperback sex novels,” I would say, and however cheap and embarrassed it made me feel to say that, at the same time there was a good feeling in it, a knowledge of belonging. A feeling of identity.

Speaking of identity, I have sometimes thought my first name is actually an ironic question, and that it should be written thus: Ed, win? And my last name is the answer.

Is Topliss any sort of name? How could I have been expected to do anything with my life, bearing a name like that?

It was bad enough in grammar school and high school, where all the jokes based on my name had to do with stupidity and having no head and things like that, but in the last few years, since the topless waitress craze — think how insecure so many Americans must be, that they want their food brought by women with bare breasts — the jokes on my name have become very obscene and even less funny than the old ones.

I’ve thought about changing my name, I’ve thought about it a lot, and if my father hadn’t died when I was two years old maybe I would have changed it by now, but as things are it would seem too disrespectful somehow, too much of a slap in the face of my father. I understand that’s ridiculous, honest, I do realize that, but it’s the way I feel.

Sometimes I wish my stepfather had adopted me before abandoning my mother. Edwin Harsch is a pretty good name. With a name like Edwin Harsch I might be owning the waterfront by now. But he didn’t, and of course after he ran out on my mother she wasn’t at all happy with the name or the fact that she had two daughters wearing it, and even now I think I’d get some static from her if I suggested switching to that name. She herself is using her maiden name these days, Mabel Swing.

What if I called myself Edwin Swing? No, I don’t think so. The only images I get out of that name are being hanged and turning fag, neither of which I find very appealing, despite having been tempted by the dumpling in the shower this afternoon.

When I was in high school I thought for a while of just using my first and middle names, and calling myself Edwin George. Maybe I should have. Edwin George. That isn’t a bad name. It would save me a lot of mammarian humor, let me tell you.

I suppose I’ll have to change my name now, what with the cops looking for me and all. I registered here as Dirk Smuff, my sex book pen name, but Dirk Smuff isn’t a name I can see myself carrying around for very long. Besides, it does belong to Rod.

What, then? A brand new name? Something totally different, something to help me switch to a better personality, a winner personality, get rid of this loser mentality.

Brock Stewart.

Oh, shit, that doesn’t sound right. That’s as phony-sounding as Dirk Smuff.

Or Ed Topliss, really.

Maybe Ed Stewart. Edwin Stewart, that’s bland without being weak. Ed Stewart is a GI sort of name, a nice-guy sort of name, a friendly reliable sort of name, a name for a guy who’s a winner in a quiet and non-pushy kind of way. No loser mentality for Ed Stewart.

Maybe it ought to be Edgar. Edgar Stewart. A little stronger, that.

Yeah, but it’s for me. Maybe it ought to be Edsel.

Wait a second. If I’m going to travel, I can’t use a phony name. I’m going to have to use my Diners’ Club card, and that has my name on it, right there in raised blue plastic letters, with my illegible signature scrawled above, and that means I’m going to have to travel under my own name.

How much effort are the cops going to put into looking for me? Statutory rape isn’t going to make that much noise in the world. They’ll contact my friends and relatives, they’ll probably put something in the paper — I didn’t see Newsday but there wasn’t anything in today’s Times — and they’ll check my house from time to time, but that should be about all. Oh, they’ll put out a wanted circular on me, I suppose, so if I’m picked up by the police somewhere else for some other reason they’ll know not to let me go, but I really doubt they’ll be blanketing the airports and railway stations and running house-by-house searches of the world. With any luck I should be able to travel for a few days at least on my card, and what with the speed of transportation these days in a few days I can be anywhere in the world. I can go to Ulan Bator, or Mérida, or Brazzaville. I can go anywhere.

No, I can’t. I don’t have a passport.

Well, I can go anywhere in this country and Canada, and that’s territory enough for anybody to disappear in, surely. Particularly with a Diners’ Club card to keep them alive until they get settled somewhere.

Having the Diners’ Club card is mostly a fluke, by the way. I noticed that whenever I got together for dinner in the city with any of the other guys, they always struggled over who was to get the check. Not because they wanted to pick up the tab, but because they wanted to pay the bill with their credit cards and then collect our share from the rest of us. I didn’t understand this, and one evening I asked Pete about it, and he said the reason was because the guy who got the bill onto his credit card could then use it as a tax deduction on his income tax. Business deduction, a business dinner with other writers. Perfectly legal.

Well, what the hell. I had to pay taxes, too, and I’ve always been very interested in ways to keep my money from the government, so I promptly sent in an application to the Diners’ Club, and the first thing you know they sent me a card and I was a member.

That’s a digression. I was talking about my day, and how I was offered a group membership but reluctantly turned it down, and now that I think of it I suppose coming to the Y instead of going to a hotel was a symbolic gesture of the same sort, an indication of my desire to belong to a group or association of some kind. Also it demonstrates how seldom I think about the potential of my Diners’ Club card, because of course I could have stayed anywhere at all on Diners’ Club, any hotel in the city, I wasn’t locked into using my cash in hand, and in fact using cash for shelter wasn’t particularly smart, now that I think of it. Since if I take off I will be a fugitive from injustice, there’s no point my paying the Diners’ Club, and in fact I won’t even be getting a bill from them.

That’s weird. Do you realize I’ve been sitting around seriously contemplating being a man on the run? Freight cars. Panting dashes through the woods. All-night diners and coat collars turned up against the chill. Unshaven cheeks. “Who sent you?” “Max.” Half-empty labelless bottles passing from hand to hand. “Cheez it, the cops!” Running down alleys. Cars with running boards. Cheap hotel rooms with an electric sign outside that goes on-off/on-off/on-off. “Halt, in the name of the law!” Bang! Bang!

You’re dead.

Except that isn’t how it would be. How it would be would be Howard Johnson’s and Holiday Inn, turnpikes and thru-ways—

To where?

I can’t stay here forever, that’s for sure. Another couple of days like, this and I’ll be sixty-nining with the dumpling just to pretend I’m somebody else.

I was talking about my day, God damn it. God damn my day. I was talking about it, and I keep digressing. I feel as though I’m becoming more and more fragmented, I can’t keep a coherent train of thought for anything. It’s like I’m on a centrifuge, and as things get spun away from me I have a harder and harder time keeping hold of what’s left. My wife and kid have spun away, my livelihood and career and occupation have spun away, my friends have spun away, my house has spun away, I’m down to a typewriter and some paper (some of it soiled) and some spare clothing and a Buick and about forty dollars and a Diners’ Club card, and maybe my mind, except my mind seems incapable recently of keeping hold of any thread.

Like now, for instance. I was talking about my day.

Actually, I don’t have anything to say about my day.

It was just that the paper was in the typewriter, and I finally had to do something to keep myself from writing Sex Hungry. Does that sound stupid? I don’t care, it’s true. It’s as though I’m in one of those addiction movies, and I can’t take the cure cold turkey, I have to taper off. I do fifteen pages of What Is It? as methadone to keep me from the heroin of Sex Hungry.

Except I don’t have anything to write about. When I started this, nine days ago, I was full of things to say, absolutely full, the things I had to say kept crowding out the book I was supposed to write. So now I’ve given up entirely the book I was supposed to write, and I no longer have anything to say.

I keep thinking of Rod. I probably ought to call him and warn him, but frankly it would be too embarrassing.

What am I talking about, you wonder? What have I switched to now? Remember last night while I was stuck in Rod’s office I began to feel the call of nature, it was bowel-moving time? Well, I didn’t crap out the window, though I did consider it, and if I’d known Birge and Johnny were down there I might have done it. But I didn’t, and to be perfectly honest about it the reason I didn’t was mostly because I was afraid of falling backwards out the window, and also because I prefer if possible to avoid the more obviously ludicrous postures for myself, among which I would count squatting on somebody else’s windowsill four stories above West 9th Street in Greenwich Village with my bare ass sticking out into the cold November air. So I didn’t crap out the window.

If Rod opens the bottom left hand file drawer of his desk, he’s going to get a surprise.

Well, it was empty, and I didn’t want to stink the place up, so I had to leave it somewhere where I could cover it up somehow, and as the pressure in my bowels mounted I wandered around and around the room in increasing panic, and finally in desperation I began to open drawers, and that one was empty. So I filled it.

Well, I didn’t fill it, but I did make a deposit.

Why would he look in an empty drawer anyway? There’s no smell, the drawer being closed cut that off completely, and there’s no other reason for him to look in there that I can see, so I’m probably safe.

I really don’t want to call him and tell him I shit in his desk drawer.

I don’t even want to talk about it, not even here. It shows how desperate I am for material to fill fifteen pages that I even brought the subject up at all. Forget I mentioned it.

5

Dear Hester,

Never mind the numbers, it’s just a thing I’m going through. I may be coming out to see you, or that is I may be coming out that way and if I do I’ll drop in and see you, and if I do drop in and see you I’ll tell you all about it. In the meantime, take my word for it that the 61 and the 5 don’t mean a thing. Nothing. It’s just a part of a compulsion I seem to have lately.

I also seem to still have some of my older compulsions, like foolish lying. Like if I come out to San Francisco it won’t be for any reason at all except to see you and talk to you and tell you about my problems, so it’s hardly accurate to say I’ll “drop in.” That was just another of my attempts to cover myself. As though if I don’t look as though I’m really extending my hand, then maybe I won’t be so exposed to a rebuff.

I wonder if you know what my attitude is toward you, and I wonder if it would shake you up to know. I admire you, and I envy you, and I look up to you, and for God’s sake you’re four years younger than I am. But you have always had one thing that I have never had, and that I called recently the awareness of the multiplicity of possibilities, by which I mean you have never allowed yourself to be locked into anything, you never stayed where you didn’t want to stay, you never went where you didn’t want to go. I’m not sure that’s a program you can get away with all your life, but for people your age and my age it’s the only way to fly, and I only wish I’d realized it years ago. God knows you were always there to set the example for me, but it isn’t until now, when I’ve painted myself into the corner, that I’ve finally stopped to think things over and come to the realization.

The fact of the matter is, Betsy has left me. You will probably say three cheers to that, or why didn’t I leave her, and I know you never did approve of Betsy. Or maybe that’s too strong a word, maybe I simply mean you didn’t much care for Betsy. You never pushed any idea that you should have approval or disapproval over how I run my life, it was my own idea to give you that authority, and why I’ve done it I don’t know.

I don’t even know why I’m writing you this letter. I had to write something, I suppose, and you were on my mind, so I’m writing you. But if I come out, there’s no point in this letter, because I’ll tell you all this stuff in person, which will be better, and if I don’t come out, then there still isn’t any point, because I don’t expect a letter back from you and there really isn’t anything you could possibly say in reply to all this crazy stuff.

So maybe I’m not writing you a letter at all, maybe I’m just making believe to. Maybe what I’m doing is, I’m making believe to tell you the situation so I can try to visualize what your attitude is toward it all. For instance, if you were me right now, what would you do? Would you go to the police? Would you go to Betsy? Would you go to Hester in San Francisco?

Yes, the police. I’m wanted for a statutory rape I didn’t commit, and wouldn’t you just know I’d get the name without the game? Yes, it is funny, but it isn’t just funny, it’s also very serious. Betsy has left me and the cops are after me and I’m not writing the dirty books any more.

I just changed typewriters. Can you tell? This is also a Smith-Corona, just like the one I did the first two pages of this letter on, except this one is beige and the one in Macy’s was blue.

I’m in Gimbels now. See, what happened, I signed in at the YMCA as Dirk Smuff, that’s my dirty-book pen name, and I guess when the cops sent out their man-wanted thing on me they listed Dirk Smuff as an alias of mine — meaning Rod or Samuel or somebody really finked on me — and by God if the Y didn’t suddenly swarm with cops last night. Literally swarm with cops.

Luckily, I wasn’t in my room, I was down the hall in this dumpling’s room, this faggot that picked me up in the shower. For Christ’s sake, don’t get the wrong idea, I haven’t turned queer or anything. I was just not acclimated to being absolutely alone, that’s all, and after dinner, sitting around with a lot of ketchup and greasy hamburger smeared around inside my stomach, looking at the four walls, I began to get miserable, really miserable.

I didn’t even have my typewriter. I’ve been having a thing about the typewriter lately, a sort of minor neurotic problem (that’s the reason for the numbers), so what I did when I went out for dinner, I donated it to the Y.

Well, it was driving me crazy, it was like an evil spirit in an old fairytale, forcing me to write write write, fifteen pages at a time, five thousand words at a time, it wouldn’t let me stop, it kept getting me in trouble and making me say things I didn’t particularly want to hear, so I finally decided, Let somebody else inherit the curse. So I left it at the desk on the way out, a donation, no don’t thank me, I want to be anonymous, just a little token of my esteem, a little acknowledgment of my appreciation of the good work you boys are doing here. So when I came back and the silence set in, the emptiness set in, I couldn’t concentrate on reading, there was nothing to do, I didn’t even have the lousy typewriter to save me.

Then I remembered the dumpling saying he had a television set, and I figured I could handle myself in the situation okay, forgive the sexual reference, so I went down to his room to watch television for a while. And there wasn’t any trouble or anything, he didn’t try any physical pass at all. I think he’s just lonely, too, the faggot business is simply because he figures in order to get companionship he should pay for it somehow.

Anyway, I was in there watching television with the dumpling when we heard this racket out in the hall. There was a Bob Hope special on, from UCLA, it made me think of you, that’s what we were watching. One of those groups of plastic clean youths was singing, I think they honest to God call themselves The Kids Next Door, it was that kind of show. But later on the late show on Channel 2 was going to be Look Back in Anger, I was kind of looking forward to that.

Only I didn’t get to see it. When the ruckus started in the hall, the dumpling got a kind of prissy expression on his face, the busybody look, you know, and went out to see what people were doing in his hall. He was gone a couple minutes, and when he came back he was pale. He shut the door and whispered, “It’s the police.”

I knew right then. I didn’t say anything, didn’t ask questions, I just looked at him.

He whispered, “They’re in your room.”

“They must know I’m in the building,” I said. “The clerk must have told them.”

He was popeyed, in a muted way. He whispered, “What did you do?”

“You wouldn’t believe me,” I said. I got wearily to my feet. In a way, I was glad the decision had been taken out of my hands. I was prepared to go out and meet my unmakers.

But the dumpling rushed forward to close both hands around my forearm, whispering, “I’ll hide you! I’m sure you couldn’t have done anything really bad, I’ll hide you!”

“They’ll look in all the rooms up here,” I told him. “You’ll just get yourself in trouble.”

He looked around, trying to find a hiding place. He wanted to repay me for my silent companionship in front of the TV, I suppose. Also, he was apparently a fan of the kind of television show where people hide each other from the police all the time — Run for Your Life was going to be on after Bob Hope, a fact he’d announced with an expectant sparkle in his eye — so I guess it was a big moment for him, participating in the same kind of plot in real life.

I know I’m being snotty about the poor guy, but who else do I have to feel superior to?

Anyway, his eye finally lit on the window, and he cried, “The fire escape!” When I pointed out this was the front of the building, and the street below was well traveled, he quick told me to go up to the roof and down the fire escape on the back of the building.

I’m turning this goddam letter into a chapter, complete with action and dialogue. I tell you, I’m cracking up. And the clerks here are beginning to give me the fish eye. The typewriters are here for prospective customers to type on, and here I am on my third page, and they’re beginning to think maybe I’m not a prospective customer after all. I only lasted two pages at Macy’s, but they weren’t as busy over there.

All right, let me rush this. I did like he said, up and over the roof, and I felt like a nut. Particularly with that slight fear of heights I have, you know about that. Remember the time I was a kid and I couldn’t get down from Mr. Armbreiter’s garage roof? And they had to call the fire department? That’s all I kept thinking about, up there on that roof in the dark. Here I am a grown man, and I’m running around on a YMCA roof in the middle of the night — actually, it was about twenty to ten — with policemen under my feet, searching for me, my wife gone, my livelihood gone, and now my typewriter gone.

I am now at Stern’s. These tiny ironies keep tweaking my nose. I typed the phrase “my typewriter gone,” and just as I finished, a snotty clerk came over and asked me if I was considering a purchase. So I left Gimbels and walked up 6th Avenue to 42nd Street, and here I am at Stern’s. I’ve got to finish this letter soon. It can’t be fifteen pages long, it just can’t.

I don’t want to tell you any more about last night. I got away from the Y, I slept in an all-night movie on 42nd Street, the gunfights kept waking me up, and today I just wandered around not knowing what to do with myself. They’ve got my car now, of course. And my manuscript, pages and pages of insanity I’ve been typing for the last ten days. And my clean underwear, I’m walking around in dirty underwear.

Everything’s getting stripped away, everything. I’ll be naked before I know it. And here I am going from department store to department store writing you a letter I probably won’t mail to tell you that I don’t know whether or not I’m coming out to see you.

Hester, I don’t think I am. The more I think about you, the more convinced I am that you’re a figment of my imagination, in real life you’re probably just a kooky girl on a spree, you don’t have any more answers than anybody else, and it would only baffle and confuse you to have your older brother pop up out of nowhere trailing a whole soap opera full of complications in his wake.

I can imagine your life. You’re probably on pot and LSD, your sex life has surely grown more complicated since last we met, you’re probably engaged in anti-Vietnam demonstrations and all that hippie business, and in its own way that’s as much conformism as any other army.

Or am I being unfair? Having made you my one hope, the finest thing on earth, here I am debunking you, guarding myself against disappointment.

Hell, I don’t know who you are, and I don’t suppose you know who I am or much care. I may come out to see you, but probably not. And I definitely won’t send this letter, so there’s no point going on with it.

Thanks, anyway,

Ed

It didn’t run fifteen pages! I’m cured!

Dear Betsy,

Ignore that number, it doesn’t mean anything.

I want to tell you that I understand your feelings, and that I understand that in the last analysis it doesn’t really much matter whether or not I had sex with Angie. I didn’t, and that’s God’s own truth, but it doesn’t matter, not really.

What matters is you and me, and who we were with each other, and I have to admit that who we were with each other was strangers, and I also have to admit that most if not all of the fault for that lies with me. I lived a very shallow life all my life, and it took the events of the last few days to make me suddenly wake up and look around me and see what I was doing. I was never a good husband to you, because I never opened myself up completely and said to you, “Look, here I am, this is who I am and everything I am and the whole thing belongs to you, with the warts and all.” I never did that, and I’m sorry.

The stuff that you read about you, the things I put in those chapters about you, were things that I believed at the time, and I’m as sorry about believing them as I am about you reading them. That must have been an awful moment for you, but believe me my moment was just as awful when I finally understood that I hadn’t been describing you at all. I’d reduced you in my own mind to manageable proportions, I’d robbed you of your individuality and personality so I wouldn’t actually have to deal with you. I tried to make you a sort of dumb toy, because then I wouldn’t ever have to consider your feelings or your desires about anything, and I suppose the reason I did all that was because I didn’t think I would be able to succeed if I did make the effort. It never got up to conscious thought, it was just instinctive self-protection, so all I can do is make guesses about myself and my motivations, but those guesses feel right and I think they’re probably at least close to the truth.

The question is, what now, and believe me that question hasn’t been far from my mind for a second since you left. When I first discovered that you were gone I wanted you back terribly, but that was just reflex, just the normal human desire for the status quo, the normal human terror of change and the unknown. After that began to subside a little I began to really study the question, and try to decide whether I wanted to get back together with you or not, and I didn’t know. In fact, I still don’t know. Sometimes I think I do want you back, but then other times I think that feeling is just the status quo thing and has nothing to do with the personalities involved, with who you are or who I am or who we could be together. I’d like to talk it over with you if I could, and maybe between us we could come to some sort of understanding of ourselves and our marriage.

Of course, I know that right now you’re very angry, and you never want to see me again, and all the rest of it, and I don’t blame you, but as I told myself the other day, if I really want to get through to you I think I can, I think it would still be possible for me to make you hear me and listen to me. I could be wrong about that, too, but it’s what I think.

So what I want to do, or what I think I want to do, is come up to Monequois and see you. I’d send this letter first, special delivery, and then phone you when I got to Monequois, and we could maybe arrange to meet somewhere and talk. If you wanted to. Or you could say you’d meet me and then call the police instead and tell them where they could pick me up. You could do that, too, if you wanted to.

I’m still not sure in my own mind what I want to do. I might hitchhike out to California to see my sister, or I might fly out there, which would be faster, or I might do something entirely different, something I haven’t even thought of yet. I might go up to Albany and see my mother, though that seems doubtful. I honestly don’t know if I want to get back together with you or not. I don’t even know if I want to talk with you or ever see you again.

If I send you the letter, you’ll know I’ve made up my mind. I realize I’m not being politic talking this way, but I want you to understand the confused state of my mind. And I think the reason I want you to understand that is that I want you to believe that whatever pain I inflicted on you I did inadvertently and without ever wanting to hurt you. I’m sure the hurt is just as severe no matter what my intention, but I’m hoping that forgiveness will be easier if you know that I hurt you only because I’m a fool and not because I consciously wanted to bring you pain.

And I also want you to know that not only did I never have sex with Angie, I never had sex with anybody but you for the entire length of our marriage. I’ll tell you the total truth, I kissed Kay once. At a party, when we were both high. Kissed her, and that was the end of it. Felt uncomfortable about it afterwards. That was the only time I ever did anything at all outside our marriage, and that was no more than a kiss. I swear it.

I wrote foolish things in those chapters you read, and the business about Angie was the most foolish. I was feeling lousy, I had that deadline hanging over my head again, I was failing to write the November book, and after a while I was writing just anything that came into my head. Mean things, stupid things, and lying things. Some of them out and out lies, like the Angie thing, and some of them lies I thought were truths, like the stuff about you.

Did I ever love you? I think so. I can’t be sure. I didn’t love you when I married you, that’s the truth, but before that I think I did, and at times afterwards I think I did. Never enough, though, I know that. I do know it, and I’m sorry.

I’m sorry for everything. For lousing up your life as well as my own.

I don’t know if I’m going up there or not, and if I do I don’t know what you’ll do, and if we get back together again I don’t know that it won’t be a mistake.

If you get this letter, you’ll be hearing from me by phone.

Hesitantly,

Ed

Dear Rod,

I’m suffering from some sort of Smith-Corona psychosis, I have to type all the time, all in fifteen-page segments, and this segment appears to be letters to different people, so I thought I’d drop you a fine and let you know what’s happened since we parted company.

At the moment, by the way, I am in an office building on Madison Avenue, on the ninth floor, in the offices of something called Tex-Chem. I wandered into this building, after having been thrown out of Bloomingdale’s while finishing a letter to Betsy there, because I couldn’t think of any other handy department stores with typewriter departments. And up here on the ninth floor I found this huge office full of women typing, rows and rows of women typing, with here and there an empty desk, a typewriter lying fallow. So what I did, I walked in as though I belonged here, I sat down at one of the typewriters, and here I am writing.

The unfortunate thing, this is pica type, and I’m used to elite type, so my word count is getting screwed up. Is it still all right for me to do just fifteen pages, even when some of them are in pica type? That’s the kind of question I’m struggling with now, Rod.

I’ve wandered around today with a pad of cheap typewriter paper in a large manila envelope, going from store to store, typing gloomily at demonstration machines, not knowing exactly what I’m doing or why. I keep thinking one of these letters will be the final one, I’ll be able to end it all at last and go do something. Something other than type, I mean.

I think when I finally decide what I’m going to do, the decision will free me from this typing mania, and then I’ll just bundle up all these letters into the manila envelope and send the whole batch off to the same recipient. Maybe you. What the hell, you’ve read all the rest of this junk, except for the chapters I threw away, so you might as well read the finish. If this is the finish, which I earnestly pray it may be.

I want you to know — this is the reason for this letter — that regardless of anything I may have written in the stuff you’ve already read, and also regardless of anything I may have said to you yesterday morning when you threw me out, I do not blame you for any part of my current mess. I blame no one but myself, actually, but if I did hanker to blame other people you would not be among them. “Nobody can write this shit forever,” you said, which was fair warning, and if I didn’t listen, for this reason or that reason, it was nobody’s fault but my own.

Down at the far end of this room there’s a woman who looks like the kind of battle-ax that always used to want to put Little Annie Rooney in an orphanage — not Little Orphan Annie, Little Annie Rooney — and she’s glaring at me skeptically. She’s going to start walking this way very soon.

All right, I’m leaving.

My mistake was ever leaving college.

Sis boom bah, buddy,

Ed

Dear Authorities,

If I do send this letter, I have no idea where I should address it. Maybe the Nassau County District Attorney’s office.

Well, wherever it’s addressed, these words are meant more generally. It is to all authorities everywhere to whom I am now writing. Sorry about that sentence there, but my mind is a little flaky at the moment.

If you get this letter, it will be because I have decided to take my chances on running, and if I have decided to take my chances on running it is not because I am guilty, and it is not because I am afraid I would not get justice in your courts, it is because my life is very complicated at the moment and I just don’t have the time to spend going through your rituals. Being arrested and standing trial and all that stuff, it’s the same as when I got married. I shouldn’t have hung around for that, what I should have done was faded slowly into the shadows until it all blew over. Well, I didn’t that time, and I lived to regret it. As a matter of fact, I would say that it is a direct result of my not running away that time that has me in my present situation now.

But even if I do run away, I am still sufficiently bound by respect for authority and respect for ceremony and ritual to want to try to appease you all in some way, and that’s the reason for this letter. In this letter I will attempt to explain what really did happen, and make you understand why I don’t believe I have the time to spare for your concerns right now.

In the first place, I am innocent of the charge. If I was guilty of the charge, it would be a different matter. Then I should certainly stick around and stand trial and take my punishment, go through all the tribal rites, sit and stand and kneel, shuffle out with the congregation, the whole bit. But I am not guilty, absolutely and totally not guilty, and therefore I feel no need for the expiation of ceremony, and therefore you may be getting this letter and I may be on my way to parts unknown.

That’s one of the things that makes the current situation different from when I got married. That time I was guilty, and I hung around and took my punishment, did all the right things, made the appropriate ceremonial gestures and all. I want you to notice that, to see that I do take my punishment when I’m guilty. That I’m not sticking around now is already a pretty strong indication that I’m innocent.

All right. Here’s what happened. For the last two and a half years I’ve been writing paperback sex novels under the name Dirk Smuff. These are the books with titles like Sex Sorority and Warped Passion, to name two of my own, that are sold on 42nd Street. You probably have the chapters I left at the YMCA, so you know the kind of thing I’m talking about.

I realize it doesn’t look good for me to have been writing that kind of book for the last two and a half years, but I assure you my own life has been a lot tamer than that of the characters in my books. In fact, I have never once been unfaithful to my wife, and that means with anybody, and that means especially with my baby-sitter, Angie.

You see, the fact of the matter is I was having a lot of trouble writing the book for November. My mind was very worried, because if I missed one more deadline I’d be out of a job, and in the course of writing a lot of other meaningless stuff I wrote what I did about the baby-sitter. But there wasn’t a word of truth in it.

But the result is, now my entire life has been shattered, and I have to try to pick up the pieces and decide what to do next. Do I want my wife back? Do I want to go on writing, either the dirty books or something else? What do I want to do with myself?

Well, these are serious questions, and at the moment I have absolutely no answers for any of them, and if I am to find any of the answers it seems to me I’m going to have to have calm and quiet for a while. I can’t just keep running around with everybody chasing me or giving me a bad time, one way or the other. I have to work things out, and I can’t do it if I have to worry about talking to the police, and being put in jail, and having meetings with lawyers, and going to court, and all the rest of it. So that’s why I think I’ll probably mail this letter and take off for terra incognita, so I can figure things out about myself and my future in calm and quiet and leisure.

But on the other hand I get to thinking about ritual, about ceremony, about being put in a cell and moving slowly and majestically through the stately dance of judicial procedure, and sometimes that seems like the way to get leisure and the opportunity for calm and quiet self-appraisal. So maybe I won’t mail this letter, maybe when I leave here — I’m writing this in the Soldiers’ and Airmen’s Club — I’ll just take the train out to Long Island and give myself up.

I wish I knew what to do. If I give myself up, of course, I won’t really have to worry about anything, at least not for a while. The authorities, you people, will decide what I’m going to do and where I’m going to be. You’ll take over all my decisions for me, and that might be very nice.

Of course, that wouldn’t do me much good either, would it? I mean, I’d have all that leisure to think things out, I could hand the reins over to you guys to run things while I got matters straight between me and my mind, but what about when leisure time was done? What about when I was ready to take the reins back in my own hands? Would you give them back? Or once you had me would it be your decision when I could go again?

No. You people are just people, the same as me, screwed up and trying to work out your lives and full of your own problems. You’ll process me like a green bean at Bird’s Eye, and who I am or what my disasters might have been won’t matter to you in the slightest.

I think you’re going to have to catch me.

Sincerely,

Edwin Topliss

Dear Samuel,

Enclosed please find the final chapter of the November book, in on schedule after all. The seven chapters preceding this one are currently in the hands of the cops, having been confiscated I’m sure in their raid on my lair in the YMCA last night. I suppose I have you to thank for tipping them to Dirk Smuff.

Anyway, that makes eight chapters. There were four more, but they’ve been destroyed. However, I believe you can find them engraved in my wife’s brain. Perhaps hypnosis would bring them out intact. If so, you’ll have a book two chapters longer than usual. If not, two chapters shorter. You win a few, you lose a few.

The manager of this movie theater gave me permission to use the typewriter in his office, but now he tells me the sound is waking his customers — it’s four in the morning, and there’s nobody in the building but the manager, a dozen winos, and me — so I’ve got to cut this short. Besides, it’s my fifteenth page.

Personal considerations make it necessary, Mr. President, for me to tender my resignation at this time. I want you to know I have been proud and pleased to be a member of the team and will forever treasure the memory of our association. Your warmth and understanding have been a constant help to me in moments of stress.

Adios, motherfucker,

Ed Topliss

Content

Donald E. Westlake
Adios, Scheherazade

1

1

1

1

1

1

2

2

2

3

4

5