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Our attorneys, then, worked out an agreement with the District Attorney whereby he would withdraw his injunction if we in return would promise not to run offending material in the future. We were not to show couples in the actual act of intercourse, we were not to show manipulation of the genitals and we were not to depict any acts which in the opinion of the District Attorney could be labeled an incitement to riot. Naked bodies, male and female, were permitted, as were pictures of males and females, females and females, or males and males together as long as intercourse, sodomy, or pre-coital play were clearly contraindicated. By agreeing to this compromise, we were able to recover our circulation and eventually paid only a very small fine. Our sales have never returned to the level that they reached at the point of offense, but on the other hand the newspaper has been extraordinarily profitable, and we would clearly be misguided if we were to risk our position for a principle whose finding would come too late to save us.

These are part of the compromises of publishing and I have little guilt or self-recrimination about the action which we took. Nevertheless, now and then, looking at proofs of the pages or the newspaper in actual distribution, I feel a sense of loss overtake me; it is not so much the act of connection that I find missing as a certain expression which seems to come to the faces of all couples engaging in sexual intercourse or even miming it. It is an expression of knowledge and cunning, complex apperception under the fact of connection, and for that which is missing, the pain and knowledge which overtakes even the ugliest and most professionalized model, I feel loss and wish that it could have been different while knowing that this can never happen.

With a priest, a television producer and the moderator, I am sharing a panel on a late-night radio program, broadcast live over a network hookup from a small, shadowy, gutted studio in midtown Manhattan. The subject of the panel is the new libertarianism in the arts, and I have been invited as a demonstration case. The moderator, an ugly man in his fifties who intersperses insults of the most personal and vicious type with off-the-air reminders to us that there is nothing personal here at all and that he is only trying to get a discussion going, the moderator, as I am saying, has momentarily stopped the discussion to read an ad for a hamburger chain in New Jersey which serves a complete meal for nineteen cents and tosses in a hospitalization guarantee. The moderator’s facial gestures are totally out of accord with his material as he speaks; he gives us to know, through a horrid series of winks, twitches and contortions, that he is a serious man given to serious purposes and that all of this nonsense is only the price that he must pay for the boldness of the discussions he hosts, the positions he takes. When he has finished the advertisement, he returns to the issue at hand, which happens to be my sense of responsibility for what I am publishing, and asks me if I would like to have my daughter read an issue of the newspaper I publish.

“I don’t have a daughter,” I say, “but if I did, I am sure that I would not object to her reading anything that happened to be in my home and, yes, my newspaper is often found in my home. I must take a lot of the work with me; what you have to understand is that this is a difficult business.” The priest breaks in to say that he thinks that the moderator is arguing
ad hominem
and is misdirecting the issue which deserves to be taken on its own merits. He is a very libertarian priest, who is in favor of clerical marriages and the breaking down of the old Italian control of the Church although he, personally, observes the vows of celibacy. I hate to say this but I find the priest something of a bore; a bore and a fool as well, he reminds me of nothing so much as certain boys I knew in college who were afraid to go out with girls but had a kind of relentless jocularity about sex in general and believed that their social failures were personal rather than something to do with the scheme of things. That is what the priest is; a dormitory boy who has discovered the reality of sex at the age of forty and now, hopelessly too far behind to ever catch up, can only submit to it by laughing the question out of court. “The tiling you should be asked,” he says, “is not about your daughter because you’re obviously too young to have a daughter who could be influenced by this newspaper in any way, but about your wife. Do you let your wife read your publication? What does she think of it?”

“My wife reads anything she wants to,” I say, “I could hardly control her reading. She reads the newspaper, yes. I think she rather likes it although we’ve never discussed it in those terms. Mature adults don’t feel they have to take
positions
on sexual material, you know.” This is, perhaps, an unfortunate thrust, but it has been a long session, the studio is foul with our breath, and since there is no payment for the broadcast, one must take his compensation where he may.

“Exactly,” says the television producer. He is a stunned little man who, many years ago I understand, directed a loathsome situation comedy into the top ten ratings; when the package changed hands and he was fired, he took a position with a university journalism department and appointed himself an academic critic of television; in due course he became associated with an educational channel from which he was never heard again except for occasional freelance articles in Sunday newspapers deploring the progress of the medium. “That is exactly the point.” Then he folds his hands, takes a look down at an intricate doodle he has been composing and sighs further into the microphone. “I would think that one would ask his wife,” he says. I find it difficult to understand exactly why he was added to this panel although the moderator, before the show went on the air, hastily whispered to the priest and myself that the “original” guest who was far more interesting had taken ill at the last moment and that in the interests of “balance” this is really all the network can produce at short notice. “If his wife is askable of course,” the producer says.

There is a dead spot of silence into which the moderator moves quickly to question my sexual adequacy and wonder whether my newspaper has as its basis a psychic need in me to make sex ugly and degrading and punish all of its participants. It is somewhat subtler than this, of course, but I get the idea. I point out to him that my sexual life or lack of it has nothing to do with the significance or value of my work and that a similar statement could be made about, say, Karl Marx or Ernest Hemingway without in any way managing to come to the point. The priest says that he agrees with this wholeheartedly and the moderator makes a nasty, veiled comment about the code of celibacy. The producer says, “I think that we’re all being dragged down to a gutter level now by our publisher-guest.” The priest says that this is disgusting and offensive, the moderator says that the whole problem with sex nowadays is that the basic sacredness of the act has been utterly lost along with a sense of self-respect, and I feel the program literally beginning to dissolve under me; it is hard to maintain a proper sense of attention anymore and the room is wavering, voices are wandering; sounds are pulsing in the air as in the instants before deep sleep, and when I come to myself, my cigarette is being lit for me by someone who has come out of the control booth and I am talking passionately, floridly, about the reasons for my establishing the newspaper. It seems that I was sick of hypocrisy, sick of cant, sick of the whole insane bent of the culture which made death visible and glamorous yet shielded the act of love and the naked body as something despicable. It was a sickness in the culture which was symptomatic of the whole mad misdirection since the time of the industrial revolution and I had had enough of this, quite enough. I founded the newspaper because I wanted to do my part to tear open the windows and let the cold breath of sanity into the room of America. I realized that often the publication was perverse and offensive, but this was the way that it had to be if it were to have any vitality at all because the price of freedom was pain, the price of liberty was the blasting of cultural cant, and I was willing to do this because through the centuries it had been men like me who had restored human culture, periodically, to sanity through upheaval. I listen to myself with astonished interest; I appear to have a social conscience. Also it seems that I am making very little money from the newspaper, virtually every cent being plowed back to the distributors, the employees, the paper itself and most importantly the legal fund which is reaching massive dimensions as we face the necessity for a large number of court cases to prove that people have the right to their own thoughts and desires. The few dollars which I am making from the newspaper I could have made just as easily and at less strain on a payroll elsewhere and, in fact, did for many years, but decided when I passed the crucial age of thirty that I had to do something useful for my life, take a position at the barricades and try to save America from her own madness. The moderator listens to this with nods and winks reminiscent of the gestures with which he delivers the commercials and says that on that note he will wrap things up for the night and thank you very much all of you for attending; we cannot always agree with one another but we can learn to respect each other’s motives, and this is the purpose of his program, to shed light on issues through people. The priest says that he is moved by my statement and on his own level is trying to do exactly that kind of thing within his impoverished Brownsville parish; the television producer coughs, struggling with a cigarette and says that he has learned through the years to take men seriously only through their acts and not so much through their rationalizations. I show him with a nod that I see his point and may even agree with it and the moderator signs us all off the air with a jingle for Howard Shoes which are not for cowards but for men who want to beat the blues. We stand up stiffly, twitching in the heat of the studio and shake hands. The moderator says that he thinks that this has been a very good show, interesting show, useful show, he must have all of us back soon for another go at it. Eearded men pour from the control booth, giggling, and ask me if I have any spare issues of the newspaper in my attaché case, or failing that, the numbers of any of the models. Once again things dissolve, although in full color this time, and when I come back to myself I am having a martini in an empty bar with the priest who seems to be drunk and who tells me in desperate tones that he was thirty-five years old before he understood that the flesh could no longer be denied, thirty-five wasted years, and another five to struggle through as far as he had come, but I have to understand the terrible guilt of a strict Catholic upbringing and it indeed would have happened to me if I had grown up in his circumstances. I am smoking a cigarette, appear to be agreeing with him, although with a quiet smile now and then for the bartender who appears, however, to be engaged with other business. Later I am in a taxicab alone going home and later than that I am lying in the bed, next to my naked and sleeping wife, listening to the playback of the radio program on which I have just appeared. I listen to my voice with quizzical interest; I have no idea what I am getting at. My wife is a light sleeper and I could, at any moment, reach over and with a touch on her buttocks turn her toward me and reach for her breasts, take the obligatory act of love that at three in the morning comes from whatever source as full of mystery and need … but I do not want to touch her, I am lying bolt upright in the bed at three in the morning, listening to the radio, listening to my voice, trying to understand what I am saying, and it seems that if I could only get to the sense of it, I would come to a sense of myself which would answer all of the questions, but I know that it is not that easy and listening to the bland, shrieking confidence of my intonation, so self-righteous that I could cut it, I begin to come to a different perception, and the perception is one of confusion and loss, and finally I fall asleep although not for a long time and not to an easy awakening.

During one of our afternoons, I ask Virginia to blow me to climax. I confess to her, with some embarrassment, that although my wife is willing to try this she does it so inexpertly that I am unable even to maintain an erection and that never, in my whole life, have I come in a woman’s mouth. “Please,” I say, touched with an awkwardness which I rarely feel with her, “please, I’d really appreciate it if you would.”

“Oh,” she says, leaning over me, her breasts hobbling, her mouth a thin opening line above mine, “oh you poor dear, you don’t have to beg. No man should ever have to
beg.
See, there’s nothing to it at all.” For the first time she puts her mouth on my genitals, my cock uncoils to readiness, a truly murderous need overtakes me, and before I have even attained control of the situation I find that I am pouring semen into Virginia’s mouth, grunting, feeling my body press into the bed, a high whine somewhere between embarrassment and passion overtaking me. Silent, she wags her head back and forth, motions me to quiet with a gesture and then drains me of every thread of semen, leaving me slack and gasping against the sheets. When she is finished, she smiles carefully at me and goes to the bathroom to do something, comes back and joins me under the sheets, a hand falling across my chest, her mouth curling against my ear. “See,” she says, “it wasn’t so much after all. It’s very simple.”

I say nothing. I am in a half-sleep. I want to dream the moments away, establish some connection within myself between what has happened and what I thought it may have been like. If I can do this, I will have come one step further toward knowing what kind of person I am. But Virginia is insistent, talkative. This is usually one of her more endearing traits — I cannot bear silences most of the time — and I am in no position to tell her to keep quiet.

“You have to make a decision, you know,” she says. “This can’t go on. It can’t go on this way at all, we have to reach an understanding.”

“What understanding?”

“Your wife. You have to do something about your wife.”