Thirty (3 page)

I just went over the last entry. It’s odd how I had to stop writing. I suppose you could say that I blocked. I remember the feeling that if I put it all down on paper just as it happened I would be stepping off the edge of a cliff and falling into darkness. I don’t know why.

He was, as I guess I said (as I
know
I said) rock hard, utterly virile. While I have never much understood the appeal of phallic statuary, there is something magnificent about the penis in full erection, when absolutely every cell of the man’s body is devoted to single-minded sex, when the penis leads and the rest of the body follows. Which is to say that Howie had what you might call an ultimate hard-on.

(Three days ago I was embarrassed. Now—admit it—I’m getting a kick out of this. Maybe I’ll masturbate later. God, it’s working, though, this diary; it opens me up, to myself if to nobody else. I wonder if this is good or bad. I read or heard that all meaningful analysis is self-analysis, and I don’t think I could bring myself to go to a psychoanalyst anyway, even if we could afford it, but I wonder if it is perhaps risky to do this oneself. Maybe so. But I don’t think it is any riskier than not to, if you follow me. Hah!
I
follow me. That’s what matters.)

So where was I? Ah, yes. In the privacy of my own bedroom, getting fucked by my husband. And, in keeping with the perfection of his erection (an unconscious rhyme, I swear) he had that total control which he has now and then and which was wholly in keeping with the perfect maleness of his erection. In and out, long whistling rippling strokes, in and out, so hard, so big, and with such sweet confidence. I know where the word cocky comes from. I never knew before. I just realized this moment. Cocky. Oh, he was cocky, and he fucked me with these long rippling slow strokes, in and out, in and out, and I suppose I’m being intentionally literary now, arranging words purposefully to create a mood, to create a rhythm, but thus it was, thus indeed it was, in and out, in and out, and the sweet pressure of his body on mine, and his chest just pillowy pressing on my breasts, and his tobacco and booze taste in my mouth, his mouth on my mouth, and fucking me so marvelously well!

And I was so hot, probably as hot as I’ve ever been, if one can keep track, if one can analyze in the heat of the moment the comparative degrees of hotness. And, a-tisket a-tasket, somewhere along the way I lost it.

This is hard to write not out of embarrassment but because I still don’t understand exactly what happened. I had it and I dropped it. It wasn’t anything he did or didn’t do. I’m positive of that. And it wasn’t a matter of getting turned off, actually. It was just that the way things started there was no question in my mind that I would make it, which is to say that I would come, have an orgasm, call it what you will. And then, after I had been fucked long enough and well enough for the average girl to have had several orgasms, and with no letup in passion, I came to realize that I wasn’t going anywhere, or that I wasn’t coming anywhere, or something.

I wasn’t going to make it.

Poor Howard. Whether out of gentlemanliness or male pride, he wasn’t going to let himself go until I was ready to go with him. And somewhere along the way I sensed that he was finding the whole thing frustrating. Here he was, hammering away at me, building up a full head of steam, so to speak, and we just weren’t making it.

So what I ultimately did was fake it.

Not for the first time, although on previous occasions it was passion that was feigned in the bargain. Show me a wife who has never pretended and I’ll show you a wife who is a lot less of a whore than I am.

Oh. . . .

He came like gangbusters, predictably enough, and I hummed along with him, and afterwards I heard a lot of
Oh honey oh baby I love you,
which is the way the male animal announces that he has enjoyed getting his rocks off. Then he fell asleep and I fell awake. I lay there with his come oozing out of me I wonder if we made a baby. How could one create a good child with a phony fuck? It would seem impossible.

All right, let’s put it all down. Therapy. Afterward I walked to the bathroom, dripping on the carpet as I walked, and cleaned up, and went back to bed, and lay there. And—say it!—finger-fucked myself easily and expertly to a frustrating, demeaning, easily reached little climax.

January 24

It’s the middle of the night but I can’t sleep. Howie is asleep now. He bubbled through breakfast, called me once from the office, and was positively bubbling when he got off the train. What ever happened to
post coitum tristesse?

I thought we would have another hop in the hay with all that well-being on his part, and I didn’t think I would be up to it. He had felt so good he had a couple of drinks on the train, and two more after he walked in the door, and to fit the festive mood we had a bottle of Montrachet with dinner and brandy afterward. So he told me I was the bestest little girl in all the world, or something along those lines, and then he went upstairs, let his clothes fall where they may, and passed out on top of the bedspread.

Why am I such a bitch?

January 27

Marcie came by but didn’t stay long. One of her boys requires orthodontia. If she told me which one—and one would think she would have—then I don’t remember.

Or much care.

Is that all there is? Children with braces on their teeth, meals to prepare, dishes to wash, things, acres of meaningless things to do.

February 2

I went shopping this afternoon. To Pathmark for groceries. They were out of leg of lamb. How can a supermarket be out of something like that? Everyone knows it all comes in cellophane packages and they store it in a warehouse in the back.

Enough cuteness.

The same boy carried the bags to the wagon. Absolutely nothing happened, nothing at all, except in my own mind.

(Why am I bothering to write all of this? I just stopped and looked back through what I’ve written.
The Chronicle of a Totally Uneventful Life.
That’s what I could call it. Why am I bothering to write it all down? Why, for that matter, am I bothering to
live
it? Oh-oh, girl. Easy, now. There are certain questions one is better off not asking oneself. In college I went with a boy named Ray who told me never to ask a question unless I really wanted to hear the answer, whatever it might be. I had just finished doing unto him what I had done unto no man before, and only to Howie since, and, with the taste of his seed still lingering rather pleasantly, if the truth be known, upon my tongue, I asked him if he loved me. He said that he did not. I, predictably if illogically, cried. Ever since then I have tried to avoid asking such questions, which means that, in the space of a few minutes, Raymond had taught me two things. I wonder which was the more valuable?)

In the supermarket parking lot, then, following this boy ten years my junior, and watching his buttocks move as he walked, and chatting lightly with him, I found myself wanting him to resume the flirting, to say something mildly unpardonable to me. Not, of course, that I intended to do anything about it. Or to let anything happen.

Am I becoming sex obsessed?

The question seems laughable. Sometimes I play with myself. Sometimes I may let my mind wander a little when I do this. Having fantasies of things that—

February 17

It has been, let me see, more than two weeks since the last entry. Fifteen days, to be precise.

I never thought I would come back to the book. I didn’t even finish the last entry, I see now. I don’t remember what happened, whether I was interrupted by a jangling telephone or what. Probably what, she said archly.

Come to the point.

Yes, Doctor. Yes, you there in the mirror. The point. The point is that there is no point. I wonder how I expected to end that last entry. Having fantasies of things. Oh, yes. All manner of things.

I want to get this all down and make it right. I want to get it down right now as fast as I can. I don’t know what is going to happen next. I’m in this plastic motel that I don’t remember the name of, a Holiday Inn or Howard Johnson’s and I can’t remember which, and writing in this book, and trying to get it all down before it gets away.

Friday I was supposed to meet him in the city. Howie, that is, in New York. We do this occasionally. When we first made the move to Eastchester we swore we would do this once a week. After all, it’s simple enough to come in from the suburbs for a night on the town. Especially when you don’t have children. You just drive in and meet him after work and have a drink and dinner and a show and more drinks at a nightclub and then drive back to your happy little home in the country. The best of both worlds.

We did this every week at first, and then it gradually tapered off to once or twice a month. But Friday it was all set, he had tickets to
I Love You Under the Olive Trees,
and we were meeting at Gatsby’s at five-thirty.

It got called on account of snow. The worst storm of the season, and the Central canceled trains, and I couldn’t get the car out anyway to meet him at the station. Scratch Friday.

I don’t remember very much of Saturday, during the day. We stayed around the house mostly.

It doesn’t matter.

Saturday night there was a party at the Cargill’s. Edgar and Marcie were there, and Bill and Missie, and Walter and Lenore, the usual crowd.

There was nothing wrong with the party.

Just as there had been nothing wrong with the daytime, some sort of postseason exhibition football game—the fucking football games never stop, all weekend long whenever I look at the set he is in front of it and a football game is on it, it used to be just in the fall but now it never stops, preseason and postseason and season and training, nothing but football.

But there was nothing wrong with this, you see, that’s the whole point, that there was nothing wrong with it. That it was all perfectly normal, perfectly usual. The usual people at the usual party, the usual conversations, the usual drinks. Good New York suburban conversations. Wasn’t the President a horse’s ass, and would the war ever stop, and how the price of absolutely everything was going up, and some learned commentary on the wage-price spiral by Herb Gardenia, and Missie leasing Walter because Walter had once announced that he had smoked marijuana a couple of times, and general agreement that we would all like to try it, and unspoken certainty shared by all of us that of course we never would, or if we did it would be in the privacy of our own homes, away from each other, like masturbating. Does pot give you pimples? Or make you go blind?

(I smoked in college. Didn’t everybody? Didn’t we all of us smoke a couple of sticks of pot in college? And now we all pretend it never happened, each of us shielding ourselves from each other and I don’t care about the grammar in that sentence, I couldn’t care less about it if you want to know the truth. I smoked one time, a boy named Eddie turned me on. It was no sex thing, my roommate and I turned on with him. It was supposed to be this great experience. It was nice. Maybe we didn’t have enough of it. I remember being involved in words, caught up in what people said, finding new levels of meaning in everything.)

Nowadays I guess all the kids smoke. They all do everything these days. We were all born too soon. Five or ten years too soon. Everything is changing, completely turning inside out. Kids do all the things we sort of reached out for, and they do them easily and beautifully and without any guilt. And we live in Eastchester and drink too much and play with ourselves.

I just went to the bathroom. I thought I was going to throw up but it seems not to have been in the cards. I think it’s probably better to throw up than to want to throw up and not be able to. I think I shouldn’t have brought the liquor here with me. I think I shouldn’t drink at all.

I drank too much at the party.

I necked with Edgar Hillman.

The thing is that I had never thought of Edgar as attractive. He must be almost forty, and he’s lost about as much hair as he’s kept. The one attractive thing about him is that he has gone bald in front, his hairline receding more and more, and this doesn’t look so bad. It’s when a man has a bald spot in the middle of his head, an island of skin in a sea of hair, that I find it slightly ridiculous. But Edgar also has a spreading waist, and little eyes which are closer together than they might ideally be, and a nose with big pores in it. They told me that if I squeezed my pimples I would get enlarged pores. I squeezed any number of them and never got one.

What must have rendered Edgar attractive, I guess, is that Marcie had already told me that Edgar fluttered like a bee from flower to flower. (More precisely, she said that he would screw a snake if someone would hold its head.) The knowledge that he’s out there screwing all those snakes evidently got to me. Perhaps it’s a case of being unable to trust my own taste. If all those other women find Edgar attractive enough to have affairs with, they must be right, and he must be attractive, and thus I must be attracted to him.

There’s also the fact that I drank too much at the party.

The drinking helped cast a fine haze over everything, both at the time and in memory. I don’t know how we got into the room where they kept the coats. The bedroom, that is to say. The coals were piled on the bed. But somehow it’s a good deal less compromising lo think of oneself being in the coatroom with one’s best friend’s husband than in the bedroom.

“Jan, Jan, Jan,” he said. When people have nothing to say they repeat one’s name pointlessly. “Having a wonderful time, you wonderful girl?”

“Well, it’s a party.”

“It is indeed.”

“And people always have wonderful times at parties.”

“They do if they know what’s good for them.” He grinned owlishly, except that owls have their eyes spaced much farther apart. “You know,” he said, “I’ve had my eye on you for a long time now.”

“Which one?”

“Eh?”

“Which eye have you had on me?”

“Clever,” he said, moving toward me, eyes atwinkle. Both eyes atwinkle. Both beady eyes atwinkle. “I like women with something in their heads, you know. I like clever women.”