Spread (8 page)
Authors: Barry Malzberg
I replace the receiver on the stand and walk to a side cabinet in which a sample of the prophylactic cream has been placed. As a matter of policy, recommended by our lawyers from the start, we obtain a sample of every product advertised in the newspaper. Most of them have never been opened but certain of the photographic materials have given me endless amusement and have been placed in my private stock at home, one which not even my wife knows about.
I remove the tube from the box and shake dust off it. Opening it I am assaulted by a peculiar smell midway between glue and wax, oddly penetrating and somehow refreshing to the nostrils. I squeeze the tube and a small, deadly squirt of grayish jelly lands in my fingers, cold and only faintly sticky to the touch. I rub the jelly between thumb and forefinger and then examine. Everything looks pretty much the same in the translucency of the jelly although it is possible that I see miniscule cuts and bruises on the fingers. It is hard to tell. So much of the efficacy of these preparations has to do with a matter of attitude.
I wait five minutes and my fingers neither wrinkle nor fall off. They do not seem to feel any pain under pressure and remain firm when pressed. I use the treated hand to put the tube back in the box and the box back in the cabinet, and then I close the cabinet and take Virginia to lunch. We discuss our relationship. I tell her that I am beginning to reach a point in the situation with my wife where I think things will break the other way very quickly now and it is only a matter of timing. In a good mood, sipping her second Gibson, she looks at me with wonder and says that that will be fine, she is willing to be patient. She has, after all, not even truly begun her life.
The ad stays.
We run an advisory column, something in the lonelyhearts tradition but strictly for laughs as most of the queries are invented in the office and the few that aren’t are too dull to print. (
What is the difference between a sadist and a masochist? What is shrimping? Is there any street action on the East Side? Are streetwalkers dangerous; would it be smart to go with one to a hotel?
) I write the questions and answers myself and to the degree that I have any writing talent at all or interest in personal expression, believe that I have found the outlet here. Today, however, a letter arrives in the offices, addressed to our advisory service, which puts me at something of a loss for one of the few times since I got into this branch of publishing.
The writer is a twenty-eight-year-old white male of Jewish extraction. He lives in New York City, has a college degree in accounting from one of the city university, drives a fairly new automobile and is well employed by a large firm which specializes in accounting for the jewelry trade. The writer works with several female secretaries in his office, he attends mixers and parties advertised in the columns of the evening paper, he goes to dances and has essayed singles weekends at the resorts. He makes, before taxes, $11,500 a year. He has never had intercourse with a girl in his life. He has never had “heavy petting” (his phrase) with a girl in his life. Because of a deadly fear of sudden impotence, he has never used prostitutes although now “more and more I find myself looking at scarred black women of the streets with desire.” He finds it difficult to procure dates; girls seem uninterested in him, but on those occasions when he does pick up a girl at a mixer or by prearrangement, he finds that he has nothing to say to her and absolutely no idea of how to make a date progress. Sometimes he will make a sexual advance, but despite everything he has read and heard about the “New Morality,” he finds that these advances are repulsed as violently as they were ten years ago when he was in college and trying to get girls in dormitories to neck with him before curfew. At other times he has tried to take a more direct approach, telling the girl he is with about his problem, his sexual suffering, his loneliness, his deprivation, in the hope that the girl will have sympathy for him and, as he has read in certain publications, then try to “protect” and “mother” him and “prove his adequacy” out of her own ego. He has found, however, that this approach is even less successful than direct advances since it fills the girls with unspeaking, uncomprehending horror and they obviously no longer want to be in the company of someone as abnormal as he.
He masturbates frequently — two or three times a day, in fact, on weekends, and almost once a day during the week — but has found a slow decline in his sexual powers over the past few years; whereas he could once have thirty orgasms a week he is now lucky to have ten or fifteen and furthermore the masturbation is no longer satisfying since he finds himself possessed after climax with a “strong psychic urge to have intercourse” which the masturbation has in no way reduced. Also, masturbation is now beginning to make him feel increasingly inadequate; he is convinced that something in his life has been irretrievably taken from him, and sometimes he is so full of bitterness and loss that he finds himself crying in his sleep, something that he never used to do. He cannot believe, in this age of easy sex and relationships, that something like this can be happening to him, and he is driven mad by the sight of men far uglier than he in the company of attractive women who are obviously having sex with them.
Our newspaper is “probably the only breath of fresh air in my life at the present time because I see in your pages something that I have never seen in any other publication or admitted in public, namely that there seem to be a large number of men in my condition, men seemingly normal in appearance and manner, who simply cannot get a woman and for whom masturbation is their only sexual outlet. That you can take for granted the fact that this is so and that masturbation is a perfectly sane activity under the circumstances gives me hope; for the first time you have begun to show me that I am not the only one in my condition, and if this much is so, then there mast be another conclusion: that there is hope. No one could have the philosophy expressed in your newspaper unless someone working there had been through the same thing and had passed through it. When I was eighteen people told me not to worry because some people matured socially later than others and eighteen was very young. When I was twenty-three I reminded myself that many men had their first real involvements in their late twenties. Now at twenty-eight, the only thing I find I can remind myself is that George Bernard Shaw did not have sex with a woman until he was over thirty, but this somehow is no comfort to me. What I want to ask you is this: how can I get out of this? How can I find a girl who will have sex with me and who is not repulsively ugly? I am perfectly willing to get married if that is the price of sex; in fact I am dying to get married, but since I cannot establish a relationship with a girl for even a second date I obviously find it very difficult. Can you help me? I promise that if something changes in my life and if I am able to stop masturbating for release, I will not stop buying your newspaper. I will in fact buy it faithfully, all the time, as a reminder of my origins and a constant reminder to me that no matter what happens, where I go, how things work out, how much I am suffering, I yet have much to be grateful for and will never suffer in this way again.”
I looked over the letter for a long time and then I dug up an envelope from the drawer, addressed it back to him (as expected he included his full name and address and I settled quickly with the phone directory that it was real) and stuffed it back into the envelope. Then I took a sheet of letterhead stationary and typed this note to him:
Dear Sir:
I have read your letter with much interest. Your condition is ineradicable, your suffering is eternal and there is nothing that can be done to change your circumstances. Certain men are doomed to suffer in this way, just as others are born with clubfeet or low intelligence. It is your cross to bear. Nothing will ever change for you as long as you live. You will never have a woman as long as you live. At thirty-five you will still be standing on pavements outside the Hotel New Yorker on Saturday nights, watching the girls go in by twos and threes and wondering how such attractive girls could obviously be lonely and desperate, but these wonderings will not enable you to get any nearer to them than you are at that moment. Whole generations of girls with whom you tried and failed will get married, bear children and be divorced while you remain outside the Hotel New Yorker. At fifty-one you will be trying to look forty-six with a flower in your lapel as you go to a college graduates mixer in a Fifth Avenue hotel, and when you go to a girl to speak to her, something within you will unwind and you will be without words. At sixty-five you will still be jerking off although by then far, far less and more as a matter of habit than anything else. Like certain old married couples, you will obligatorily engage in sex with yourself once or twice a month just to prove that you have the capacity which you will deceive yourself into thinking is interest. At seventy-five you will look like any other old man and when you sit with the old men on benches in the park will be able to nod and talk of your sexual experiences as you look at the young girls with them and none of them, by that time, will be able to tell the difference. They will believe that you have had a lifetime of sex and love and will ask you no questions. This will give you, finally and at great costs, a perverse sense of relief and belonging, and I urge you to look forward to this because it is about the only thing you have to look forward to. At eighty-four you will die and neither your ashes nor the worms will have any interest in the fact that at the age of twenty-four you screwed up a date in the front seat of your car by begging a girl to have sex with you. Neither your ashes nor the worms will know the difference, either biologically or metaphysically speaking, so you see in the long run you really have no problem at all and must instead cultivate the resignation that, like peace, passeth all understanding. Your friend
,
I took the envelope to Virginia and asked her to mail it for me. “I don’t understand,” she said, “what’s the difference? The stuff all goes into the out box and at the end of the day the messenger picks it up and dumps it down the chute. What is this?”
“It’s personal,” I said, “don’t worry about it. It’s just something that I want you to mail yourself. It will take you just ten seconds, go to the chute and drop it down there, will you? I’d appreciate it.”
She gave me a look and took the envelope and stood and walked out the door of the office holding the envelope delicately in her hand. A fine graceful hand, tapering fingers, fingers meant to grasp the cock with the most fragile of caresses and move it toward its yearning explosion. A fine ass, fine bearing, fine nervous tilt to the curve of her ass as she swings it ever so gently behind her. Long, drooping breasts, nearly down to her navel in certain naked postures, but surprising in their fullness, the arc in the mouth during suckling. Dark, gentle taste, her odors swimming up to me as I immerse myself in her.
On an otherwise boring Tuesday morning, I write myself a letter of complaint. DEAR SIR, I address the publisher,
Your publication is one of almost indescribable filth, pandering to the darkest and most evil human impulses. Do you not understand that the body is the Temple of the Holy Spirit, that mild vessel in which God makes himself known to man? To hold the body up in your display of decadent, prurient filth is to distort the word and name of God. Have you no shame? Do the tortured and demented creatures which allow themselves to pose “naked” in your publication have no understanding of the hideous roles to which they will be assigned in hell? Have you no sense of responsibility? There are not only millions of innocent children who can be twisted and injured by your disgusting pages, there are hundreds and thousands of blameless adults, children of God every single one of them, who can be done unspeakable damage by your irresponsible and disgusting greedy attempts to play upon their needs.
A terrible judgement awaits you
, I finish,
unless you repent now and turn toward the paths of righteousness. Repent now! lest you spend an eternity in purgatory where it is too late for repentance.
I sign the letter
very hopefully yours
and then consider it for a while; consider the round curvature of the arguments, the lean tautness of phraseology, the dry immediacy and crackle of its rhetoric. It makes the case well and something within me vaults to meet it, to embrace this truth as if the truth were a lover, thrash with the lover truth on some bed of understanding and finally reach a climax of comity and grace. I
accept, I accept, I
murmur, and hasten to post the letter on the bulletin board where I can consider it for the rest of my days.
Later, Virginia sees it, becomes furious, and rips it off. “I don’t see why you pay any attention to these ravings,” she says as she curls it neatly in a delicate hand and grinds it into the wastebasket. “You may think it’s funny, but I don’t think it’s very funny at all, Walter.” I think about explaining it to her but decide that it will be entirely too complex, let it go then and write myself another such letter in the morning. But in the morning I am tired and have other things to do and I do not pass that way again.
I am out with my wife on a Saturday and for once we are having a pleasant time. Part of the reason for my good mood is the wine in the Italian restaurant where we have come for a late supper after the play, and the other part has to do with the fact that I was recognized in the theater lobby by a crowd of people who pointed at me and whispered among themselves to identify me as the publisher of
The Spread.
My face is becoming increasingly well-known, not only because honesty compels me to publish it in the newspaper weekly over the masthead as an attestation of conviction, but because I have appeared at a number of lectures, seminars, panels, radio shows and so on around town although not yet on television. The recognition in the lobby was utterly without laughter; there was a time when strangers who knew my face from the newspaper would giggle but now, more and more, they are becoming respectful I am a figure of some solidity and weight; the test in America is to be substantial, the origin of your substantiality hardly mattering anymore. Also, my wife was not in the least embarrassed by my identification; she did not turn away but, instead, took my hand with a thin edge of defiance and returned their glances levelly. This is something new and augurs well; it means that she is coming to terms either with herself or with me or even perhaps both but in any event the time of conflict seems to have been put behind us and drinking good wine in the restaurant, listening idly to the piped-in music, I can even feel small surges of my old feeling toward her, a feeling which at the time was the most profound I had ever known and even now, when I am older, stands up well. She is an attractive girl, intelligent, faithful, worthwhile in many ways, and I have no interest in leaving her, something which I admitted to myself early in the relationship with Virginia when things seemed for a tiny instant about to get serious. It is unthinkable for me to leave my wife; I would leave all of my accumulated adult history with her and she would make a very poor custodian. She is not merely a wife; she is a projection of myself and for that, if for no other reason, I could love her a little.
