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I live in this furnished room; it is far more convenient, contiguous with the offices, and having as it does only a bed, desk and chair, it imposes no housekeeping problems. Once a week the landlord, for a fee, sends up a chambermaid to clean out the refuse and put on fresh sheets; every third night or so a hasty bump and thump from the adjoining room, a cry of sheer passion, remind me that the tenants here, no less than anywhere else, are possessed by common desires. My wife’s lawyer contacted me shortly before I left our apartment and worked out a rather equitable, generous settlement which provides that she get no settlement fee and nothing weekly in alimony for the rest of her life. I understand that a quick, uncontested divorce has been worked out somewhere or the other and this is for the best. My wife was always a highly moral type; it would be expected that she would seek a divorce to sever a marriage as quickly as a marriage to cement a relationship; there is something surgical and merciless about her, for all her talk of living flexibly toward the inconsonant future.

My single companion is Lindy the Inflatable Companion whom I took home from the offices last week and who now keeps me company in the room when I am home and not engaged in professional tasks. I can perch her atop the desk to witness me while I lie on the bed; I can place her on the bed to see me while I struggle with an article at the desk; I can put her between the bed and the desk to see me pace as I work out the details in my head. She is not lovable, but she makes few demands; she is hardly attractive either but there is something to be said about the solidity and sheer sanity of her presence: she engages in no dialogues, makes no arguments, has no sting to relationships, has no questions about the future. I still feel her faintly horrid to the touch and pity those men to whom she has been sold as a masturbatory object (and at the same time am perversely jealous of those men, thousands of them possessing copies of my Lindy in small rooms dotted throughout this and the other nations), but my interests go far beyond the blatantly sexual: I have not attempted sex since the night my wife left me. Desire seems to have been excised surgically too; something else burns within me in exchange but it is nothing which has to do with human beings or the huffings and heavings of ejaculation. Lindy knows of this and the other things quite well; she regards me with a smile as I work and sleep, she may, for all I know, be making up a set of observations for her memoirs. She has all the time in the world. Built to last at a rugged fifty-two inches out of solid latex with a tough inflatable base, Lindy will undoubtedly survive me and all of those who made her. In that sense alone, she is not to be dismissed out of hand.

I have, I understand now, been in a furnished room all my life. Sometimes the furnished room was occupied by another person, sometimes by fifty-two, sometimes by three or four in the special services division. But it was always the same furnished room and huddled under the covers nearby, observing everything, saying nothing, waiting until this moment to reveal the aspect of her presence was Lindy the Inflatable Companion.

The two faggarts announce that they are quitting. It is high time because I was on the verge of firing them. The most recent sales circulation figures have been more disastrous than ever; we are down to 40,000 copies and sinking. No one seems to know the answer although the cutback in the personals and the loss of the pulling power of the B&E ads is suspected to be part of the reason. The faggarts want to get out before things collapse underneath them and they become hopelessly identified with a disreputable enterprise that has failed. The disreputability is fine; it is the failure which is the problem. “I was about to fire you, you know,” I say to them on their last day as they stand over their neat unoccupied desks, mournfully stuffing papers into identical briefcases.

They nod sadly. “I know,” Donald says. “I know,” Jim says. “It had to be that way. We did what we could but in the last analysis I guess we couldn’t pull it through.”

“I can’t give you any notice, you know, or any severance pay. That’s the way it is.”

“That’s all right,” Donald says. “We understand We’ll live on unemployment until things get straightened out a little bit. We’ll work it out.”

“How’s Virginia?”

“What’s that?”

“How’s Virginia?”

They look at one another. “We don’t see Virginia anymore,” Donald says cautiously. “We haven’t seen her for a long time. She stopped coming around soon after she quit. We hear she’s all right though.”

“Yes,” Jim says, “she’s all right. I think she’s getting married or something. I don’t know, though. It’s just a word you hear around. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“You haven’t seen her?”

“No,” Donald says, “we never had that kind of relationship. It was just one of those office things. She’d bitch to us and we’d bitch to her. It was a fun thing but when the office goes it all goes.”

“And I guess you were bitching about me, right? That was the subject of the bitching, huh?”

They look at one another and then at the floor. “I guess we’d better go,” Jim says. “No point in hanging around. It’s getting late and we really aren’t needed.”

“Yes,” Donald says, “I guess we should get going. It’s been great, Walter.”

“Tell me,” I say, “what is it like to have a cock in your mouth? What does it feel like to suck another man off? Does it really make you feel good when you see his balls start to quiver under your tongue? What is it like to open up an ass and stick it all the way in there and reach around to grip a nice sturdy prick?”

They back toward the door, their eyes round. “Tell me what a prick tastes like!” I shout. “Tell me what it’s like when he comes in your mouth! Do you really feel like a man when you make another man come off? Is that the secret of the whole thing, having another man in your power makes you a man at last? What is it like when the two dicks rub together and they’re hard and you’re both about to come?”

They open the door and step outside. “Cocksuckers,” I say. “Stinking, lousy, self-righteous, son of a bitching cocksuckers, that’s all you are. Do you hear that? Cocksuckers!”

I hear their sounds on the steps and the slamming of a door. There seems little to think about so I return to my office where the blond machine has been sitting, hunched over a file cabinet, trying to get some of the back correspondence in shape. She looks up at me brightly, a pencil clutched between her teeth, as I come in.

“I heard that,” she says. “I heard every word of it. I don’t think I like you very much.”

“It’s none of your business.”

“You’re damned right it’s none of my business. I don’t
want
it to be my business. I don’t think I want to work here anymore if it’s all the same to you. I don’t like your goddamned attitude.”

“You don’t know the background.”

“I don’t want to know the background.” She stands, uses her calves to slam the cabinets, walks to the door. “Who do you think you are?” she says. “Just exactly who?”

I have never seen so much passion in her. “Forget it,” I say. “Tough times here. It goes back before your time. It doesn’t matter.”

“I quit.”

“You said that already.”

“I mean it. I don’t do anything for effect. I don’t want my check or anything. You can keep the day’s pay you owe. I just want out of here.”

“So go,” I say.

“This is a disgusting vile place. You’ve made it that way and you’re a disgusting vile man. Not because it has to be but because you’ve made it turn out that way. You only feel happy if you’ve made it ugly because it’s only the ugliness you can understand. The ugliness and cheapness of it. No, don’t you turn away, you listen to me.”

“I don’t have to,” I say. “You quit.”

“You still have to listen to me.”

“No I don’t you stinking, lesbian bitch,” I say and seize her by her shoulders, push her toward the outer door, snatch her coat from the rack and hurl it over her as I fling the door open and shove her in the hall. “I don’t have to listen to a fucking thing you say, not ever again, as long as you live. Get the fuck out of here.” I slam the door on her, hard enough to make the glass buckle and then lock it. I am in the office alone, it seems, and the clutter overwhelms me. I sit at the blond machine’s desk for a while, going through her drawers, but there is nothing personal in them; nothing I can learn about here to nail her. The faggarts’ desks I don’t even bother with; I know them too well.

I get up and go around the office throwing out files and inventory. Back correspondence is pointless, back advertisements are history, past bills have been paid or never will be, and the majority of the submissions are worthless. The mechanicals have no significance. All of it into the wastebasket. I find that I am shaking and spitting into the wastebaskets in a state somewhere between grief and laughter, so I say enough of this, a day’s work is all that can be asked of any man, and lock the place the hell up and go home. At home, however, I find that there is nothing to do, and so, much later, on a couple of drinks, I come back to the offices and spend the rest of the night reconstituting the place, putting back all the materials I discarded, neat in blank rows in their separate drawers, making the office faceless again. Only then do I go home to sleep and when I wake up I realize that I have missed a whole day and what the hell is the difference?

I call Virginia. The phone rings only once and she answers. “Hello, Virginia,” I say, “this is Walter.”

“Walter?”

“I wanted to find out how you were doing. What was going on. I miss you Virginia; I — ”

“Walter? I don’t know any Walter.”

“Virginia, come on.”

“I never heard of anyone called Walter in my life. Are you sure you have the right number?”

“Virginia? Virginia Nelson?”

“That’s me, but I don’t know any Walters. You have the wrong number, friend. You have the wrong number.”

“Please, Virginia. I’m suffering. You have no idea. You just couldn’t understand what’s happening.”

“I’m sorry that you’re in such bad shape, friend, but you’ve got yourself the wrong ear here. I can’t help you. I never heard of you.”

“Virginia, please listen to me, I was all wrong. I see that now. I was wrong, I admit it. Listen, we’ll get married.”

“Once is a joke, mister, but now it’s not so funny anymore. I’m going to hang up on you.”

“I said we’ll get
married
, Virginia.”

“You are into the wrong switchboard, pal,” she says and hangs up on me. A ringing, hollow sound in the ear. Clank. Total disconnect.

I dial her again but the phone is busy. I dial once more an hour later and the phone is not answered. I dial her at four in the morning and a male voice says that he is going to call the police. I do not dial again.

Lindy the Inflatable Companion. Lindy the Inflatable Companion knows. To Lindy, then. To Lindy.

I receive a brief, handwritten letter from Tony in the Bronx. He is sorry but he is pulling out of the distribution chain. Business costs, change of retailers, other factors. He has enjoyed our relationship. He will be happy to do business with us in the future should we get into another branch of publishing. He does not mention the several thousand dollars still owed and unearned from horse bets but then, as the letter makes clear, Tony is something of a functional illiterate and cannot be expected to have any kind of precision about financial matters. The unschooled in our society must be protected from their own inadequacies; this is one of the functions of a democracy.

I phone Tony but find that he is out for the week. There is something to do with a change of office locations and also a matter of shifting personnel; in any event, he will be out of contact for a long time. The operator, who sounds vaguely sympathetic, says that she will leave any message which I care to drop off with her, and I say that this is not strictly necessary, I only want to convey to Tony my thanks for his assistance and his willingness to stand by me at a difficult time. She says that she knows that he will appreciate this.

I should hire more staff but inertia rules; there seems no reason to. The newspaper runs on momentum. I have been cutting out old pages for the mechanicals and am reprinting many of our best features. It is impossible that any of our readers will note that he has read something a year or two ago and is thus reconstituting his experience. I inform the freelancers that we will be cutting back on our use of material for a while, but they hardly seem to care. Almost no one comes by to see us any more. It is very lonely in these offices although somewhat airy.

In the afternoons I amuse myself by calling numbers at random in the phone directory and making indecent proposals. My favorites are those names which include only a first initial; this is a dead giveaway to be young girls living alone since the phone company and police advised several years ago that this was the best way to cover their identity. I tell J. Nichols that I have been watching her for a long time and will make my move at any instant; she will never know from whence it comes. E. Cohen and R. Peters seem to be at work for the afternoon but K.L. Scott picks up the phone herself and I tell her that the end is very close now; one of these evenings very soon I will crawl through her window and launch myself upon her like a hand grenade, all splinters and fragmentation within. K.L. Scott seems somewhat interested and asks me if she might know me from somewhere at which point I hang up and go for afternoon coffee, not wanting to make too much, so to speak, of a good thing. This approach must be saved for emergencies.

I telephone Rona Milliken at her offices. She sounds embarrassed for a moment and even then seems to have a little difficulty recalling me. “Oh, yes,” she says, “oh, yes. Look, I’m sorry that the piece didn’t run with your interview. There was a change in policy upstairs. I didn’t have anything to do with it. They decided they wanted to upgrade and have a look at the social issues in a quality way and they cut out almost all of the interviews. Listen, I have nothing to do with that at all.”