Thirty (6 page)

I finally got laid last night.

It’s really about time. One begins to feel foolish, all this sexual freedom, an apartment in the Village, no strings on me, and ten days in a row without getting close to anything more exciting than my own finger.

Nothing has happened yet with Eric. That’s his name. I have learned that much about him, and we are at the point now where we nod and smile politely at one another. Yesterday he brought someone with him, a little blond teenybopper who couldn’t have been more than eighteen, if she was that. She could have been his daughter, and may in fact have been just that, a college girl visiting her father who is divorced from her mother or something. I think, though, that she is his mistress. Or his occasional piece or something of the sort. It doesn’t really matter. I don’t think he’s interested in me, and I don’t think I care very much.

I was picked up in a bookstore. A couple of times I’ve gone to bars and other places looking to get picked up, and haven’t been, probably because I don’t stay long enough and am so uptight about the whole thing that I don’t come on as very approachable. But the bookstore, I only went to get something to read. The Eighth Street Bookshop. And this young man—I thought at first he was a clerk, but he was just browsing, like me—held this book up to me and said, “Have you read this? It’s really quite marvelous.”

I hadn’t, and I still haven’t, and I don’t remember what it was but it certainly didn’t look very interesting. I said something and smiled, and he smiled back and I said something about not really feeling like reading but being bored and having nothing to do, which was something of an invitation, the point of which was not lost on him.

“This is a bad city to be lonely in,” he said. “Sometimes I think companionship is the enemy of education. If I weren’t so much alone I doubt I’d have read half of what I have, over the years.”

He had longish light brown hair (and no doubt still does) and a rather fierce red-brown moustache and soft, liquid eyes. He was about my age, maybe a couple of years younger. He had a teaching fellowship at NYU. Philosophy. He was getting his doctorate, but philosophy was beginning to bore him and teaching bored him even more and he didn’t think he would want to spend the rest of his life doing it, but neither did he see anything else that appealed more. He had some money from his mother’s estate and had thought about going into some sort of business, maybe opening a store of some sort, perhaps a bookstore, except he didn’t know if he wanted the headache of running a business and if he wanted to tie himself down to anything. He didn’t think he would like it.

He told me all of this over coffee and at his apartment, which was on Tenth Street between Avenues A and B, not a wonderful neighborhood and several flights up, but comfortable enough inside. We drank wine out of jelly glasses, California Burgundy from a gallon jug, and we listened to a mixture of jazz and folk rock, and we screwed on his sagging bed.

It was sort of nice. He was a nice person, actually. His name is Arnold, which is less sexy than Eric, which figures, because so is he. His penis is long and narrow. He sort of hinted at one point that he might not recoil with horror if I happened to feel like blowing him, but I didn’t particularly want to so I failed to pick up on the hint. I don’t think he was tremendously disappointed. We did it twice. I didn’t come, but it wasn’t frustrating or anything and was in fact quite pleasurable, just that I didn’t come.

February 28

I was thinking about Arnold. He called this afternoon and asked if I’d like to have dinner. I said I was busy, which isn’t true, but that tomorrow would be all right. So I’ll have dinner with him tomorrow. And then I gather we’ll go to a movie and then back to his place.

He is not what I’m looking for. I don’t know why, any more than I know what it is that I
am
looking for.

Eric?

Oh, shit, Eric’s a fantasy, let’s face it. I don’t
know
him. But what Eric is to me is what I think maybe I am looking for.

I would love to blow Eric, and I don’t think I want to blow Arnold.

I wonder what that has to do with it. I think it must have a lot to do with it. I know that was what I wanted to do with the kid who shoveled the driveway. He made me stop, he wanted to screw instead, but I hadn’t wanted to stop. I wanted the whole thing. I wanted to suck his cock, I wanted to suck him off. I am getting myself excited right now writing the words and hearing them inside my head. I wanted to suck him off.

Howie always wanted me to do it and I did it some of the time but I didn’t enjoy it. Just as I know instinctively I wouldn’t enjoy it with Arnold.

Why is this?

March 1

This is a sex diary. Believe it or not, I didn’t quite realize it until today, when I skimmed through it and read some of the earlier entries. I think I should make a point of not doing this in the future. It’s important to write all of this down, and sometime it will be important to read it (prefatory to incinerating it, I should think) but in the meantime I don’t want to read it because it’s not finished yet and reading it might keep me from writing any more, or might even lead me to stick the thing in the fire. Which was an impulse I had this afternoon, as a matter of fact.

It’s funny. I have no trouble writing this stuff, but it’s like pulling teeth to read it. Agony. I’m naked on every page, and in more ways than one.

But it’s a sex diary. No question about it. And it’s not as though that’s all I think about, or all I do. Far from it. There are other aspects to my life which seem to take up far more of my time and interest, but when I sit down with this book and get ready to put pen to paper these other matters aren’t there and sex is all that concerns me.

I think—think? I damn well know—that I have sexual hangups which are presently coming out into the open. Which is what this whole separation business is I guess all about. So be it.
The Sex Diary of Jan Giddings Kurland.
Available wherever bad books are sold.

I’m going out with Arnold tonight, so I suppose I’ll have something to write tomorrow.

March 2

Arnold is really weird!

Who would have guessed it? Not I. He seemed (and truly is) so nice, so simpatico. Not that there is any reason why weird people should be other than nice and simpatico, but one has these stereotypes in mind.

We had dinner, as planned. An Italian restaurant on I think it was Carmine Street. Checkered table cloths and Chianti bottles with dripped candles in them. The usual sort of thing. He talked me into having
calamari,
which is squid, which is octopus, which turned out to be ever so much more palatable than I had dared to anticipate. From now on when I go to restaurants I am going to try to pick out something I have never had before.

After dinner we went not to a movie but to bed, and not to his bed but to mine. There was a long line in front of the movie, so we gave each other meaningful looks and I said something about my apartment not being very far away. He bought some wine and we went back and talked a little and necked a little and went to bed.

The necking part was really great. It brought it all back. Being young and dating and just feeling each other and groping toward sex instead of getting undressed and putting on a diaphragm and getting in bed together and mechanically gliding into the old husband-and-wife number.

When we wound up in bed it was like two happy kids playing with sex, very loose and sweet and nice. We sort of moved from position to position, and it was loose and lazy, no urgency. I think the wine probably had something to do with it. He was able to go what seemed an incredible length of time without coming and without losing his erection. We took turns being on top, he took me from the rear, we sat facing each other, and the whole thing was purely physical, pure bedroom gymnastics, with no complication of how did we feel about each other or where is our relationship going or any of that oppressive crap.

I hadn’t thought, on the basis of the other night, that he was that good a lover. I think maybe there’s a certain amount of getting used to each other that people have to do before they can really groove on each other’s bodies.

I could have come a couple of times before I finally did, but I waited, and we got there together. Strangely enough after all of that it was not overpowering, not designed to knock me unconscious or anything like that, but very enjoyable and clean feeling and happy making all the same.

Revelation: Sometimes one (i.e., me) does not want to have a big orgasm because it is too much of a surrender of self. Of ego. The little part of you inside your head does not want to let go all the way. Question: Is that why women are frigid? That same kind of holding back?

I am learning things about myself and the world. Maybe they are things everyone else already knows—I sometimes get that feeling, that I am in fact some sort of retarded child. But I am changing. I feel myself changing. Every day I find myself somehow no longer the child I was yesterday.

Scary.

But Arnold and his weirdness. Afterward we were lying on the bed together. I have naturally told him things about myself, not hiding anything in particular, merely being a little reticent about details. Now he begins to ask sex questions.

“Can I ask you something, Jan? Ever make it with a girl?”

“No.”

“Honestly? Not even once?”

“Of course not. I’m probably a lot of things, but not a lesbian. Why?”

“I wondered.”

“I impress you as a lesbian? I’m not sure that’s a compliment, love.”

“Oh, as a matter of fact, you’re wrong.”

“Really?”

“Mmm-hmmm. Most really sensual women have had a homosexual experience somewhere along the line. High school or college. A drunken thing with a roommate or a crush on a teacher or some sort of thing.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Your observation or Kinsey’s?”

“I suppose mine, but I don’t think it’s original with me, or that it strikes a blow at established theories. Everybody’s supposed to be basically bisexual, you know.”

“I’m sure I never felt anything that way.”

“Maybe not. Ever have any experience with group sex?”

“You mean wife swapping? Suburban sin clubs? I suppose some of that does go on—”

“You better believe it does.”

“But I never had firsthand evidence of it. In our crowd there was some occasional groping at parties and there may have been some affairs on the sly, but no Westport Roulette.”

“Is that what they’re calling it now?”

“Isn’t it? You know, with the keys in the hat?”

“I guess so.”

“Is that what you meant?”

“Not exactly. I meant, you know, more than two people in the bed.”

“Like an orgy?”

“Well, like three.”

“No, never.”

Looking off into the distance, “I knew this girl with an absolute passion for going to bed with two men at once. She told me she had done it a couple of times and it was fantastically exciting to her.”

“Two men at once?”

“Yes.”

“You mean one right after the other?”

“I mean two at once.”

“I don’t see exactly what sort of thing they would do.”

“Well, use your imagination.”

“I’m sorry, I’m stupid tonight. But they couldn’t both get into her at the very same time, could they? I don’t see—”

“There is, how to say this, there is more than one aperture in a girl, love.”

“Oh, one in the mouth.”

“Or one here.”

“I never thought of that.”

“Haven’t you there?”

“Never. It’s painful, isn’t it?”

“Not if you know what you’re doing.”

“I’m not sure I see the appeal.”

“You weren’t sure about the
calamari,
either.”

“Touché.
I must admit I’m interested. I don’t know if I’m personally interested or if it’s just that I like to hear what different people do in bed. They would both make love to her?”

“And to each other.”

“Oh, then they were queer?”

“Everybody’s bisexual, they say.”

“Do you really believe that? I’m not sure I do.”

“Well, that’s the new sexual freedom. The new morality. The kids coming along these days are very open about it. They do whatever feels good.”

“I don’t think I could ever have anything to do with a girl.”

“Maybe that’s
your
hangup.”

“Maybe.”

I put out a cigarette, and looked down at him, and he was quite urgently erect. “Oh,” I said, and he chuckled, and we made love quickly, just a rapid urgent bang, and I made it seconds before he did.

Then, lying together facing each other, I looked at his now-little penis (his is absolutely tiny when it’s soft but respectable enough when it’s not, a complete transformation) and I thought how innocent it was now, how soft and innocent, and I looked up at his face, and all at once I knew.

I didn’t stop to think it over or I might not have said anything, but instead voiced the thought as soon as it came along. I said, “You were one of the men. With that girl. You were one of the two men.”

“Why do you say that?”

“It just came to me. I don’t know why. It’s true, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And you would want me to do that. With you and another fellow.”

“Maybe you would like to think about it.”

“Oh, God. I really don’t know.”

“It excites you, doesn’t it?”

“Oh, damn it, yes, of course it does. Anything sexual excites me if it’s just a matter of thinking about it. I don’t think I could do it. I really don’t. I don’t even think I could let anybody screw me In the bottom, as far as that goes. I don’t think, oh, I don’t even know what I think. I can’t imagine being in bed with you and having you do things with another man. What do you do with him, anyway?”

“The usual things.”

“I just can’t take all this in, Arnold.”

“Why don’t we have some wine and talk about something else?”

“Yes, maybe we should do that.”

And we did, and he hinted that he wouldn’t at all mind sleeping over, it being cold outside and all, and I said no, that I had to be independent now and that I had made up my mind that one part of my independence was that I would not spend the whole night with anyone. That this was one of the things I had been running from when I left my husband. I had not previously decided any such thing, but I didn’t want him to stay overnight I guess because I wanted to be alone when I woke up and also because I frankly didn’t want to hear any more about group sex until I had a little more chance to digest what he had told me.