Pete used to do these, you know. Not this, nobody’s ever done anything like this before in the history of the world. I mean the sex books. Rod knew him through the agency, and I met him at Rod’s apartment one time shortly after we moved down from Albany, and we kind of hit it off. Dick is the only one of us who’s a native New Yorker, so the rest of us are sort of limited in our social circles to people we manage to meet now, so just about everybody I know in New York is a writer. There’s a couple make-believe writers like me, and the rest are all writers, like Rod and Pete and Dick.
Pete Falkus, his name is. He’s got a ghost, too, the way Rod has me. He’s a magazine writer now, Pete, not a fiction writer at all. I think he never wanted to write fiction in particular, he’s the kind of guy picks up the New York Times and reads it and gets seven great ideas for articles that he can sell to Ladies’ Home Journal and True and TV Guide. Back at the beginning he was selling articles to crappier magazines, I mean lower-paying magazines, and Lance was his agent, so when this sex novel market opened up Lance looked around at all his steady-producing low-money boys and got most of them to doing sex novels, including Pete.
I wish I’d been in this at the beginning. If I had, I’d be one of the guys with a ghost now.
The hell I would. Pete was in this at the beginning because he was a writer, and he’s got a ghost now because he’s writing other things for more money. And the same with Rod. I was never a writer, and never thought I was a writer, and never even wished I was a writer until I was already neck deep in this shit. And if I did all of a sudden get a ghost, like a sublet, a subghost, what would I do? To what brilliant new ends would I turn this here typewriter?
I think I’ve been answering that question for the last several days. When I don’t do sex novels I do long boring descriptions of Thanksgiving Day dinners with Pete and Ann Falkus. Except I’m not going to. All I’m going to say is that Ann Falkus confuses me, because I admire her and I don’t lust after her. I’ve been known to lust after female chimpanzees, I have never been accused of a great selectivity in my lusts, but I don’t lust after Ann Falkus.
And it isn’t that she’s a beast. She’s very plain-looking, and she doesn’t do much with makeup, but she’s always very neat, and she’s slender, and she’s got a pretty good shape. And she has nice hair, short, worn close to her head in a kind of helmet design.
I don’t know what it is about Ann. I think about her now, and I realize there’s absolutely no reason on earth not to lust after her, but I can’t even fantasize making a pass at her, much less actually do it. It’s like there’s something inside my head stops me before I can get started.
She’s an editor. She edits juvenile books at a hardcover house called Mastro-Fairbanks. In fact, a year or so ago she asked me why didn’t I try a juvenile book, and I actually sat around for a couple of weeks trying to think of one. I did think of one, too, about six months ago. The same month I was first late with a book, I think. It was about this boy who becomes a clown in the circus, and he can’t get his makeup off, and the point of it was that you can’t tell what people are like from the outside. You can’t tell a book by its cover, that one, right? Like, this boy looked like a clown but he was really a boy.
I suppose that could work the other way around too, couldn’t it?
Anyway, I tried to write the book, and it was rotten. It sounded stilted and stupid. I could never figure out how to tell the story, and I finally had to give up on it. I never told Ann about it, figuring if I could do it I’d do it and then surprise her with the manuscript, and if I couldn’t do it there was no point humiliating myself talking about it.
It’s funny how I don’t lust after Ann, I don’t understand it. It isn’t that I don’t get letches for my friends’ wives. God knows it isn’t that. Kay, for instance, Dick’s wife
I was about to tell a lie. A fiction, maybe. Which could be my basic problem after all, that I tell fiction when I should tell fact, and fact when I should tell fiction.
The truth is, I kissed Kay once. Well, I kissed her four or five times, but it was all in the same incident. It was at a party at Rod’s, when he had the place on East 78th Street. That was before I gave up smoking, and I finished a pack, and I knew I had a fresh pack in my coat pocket. The coats were in the bedroom, at the back of the apartment, piled up on the bed. I went back there and didn’t bother to turn on the light, mostly because I was about half in the bag. I wasn’t used to the idea of parties where you didn’t bring your own bottle, and the notion of free booze was in the process of laying me low. So I just stood there in the semi-dark, half bent over the bed, pawing through the coats, looking for mine, and then a drunky girl’s voice behind me said, “Are you a burglar?” Joking.
I turned around and it was Kay, standing in the doorway. I couldn’t see her face because all the light was from behind her, but I got the impression she was grinning. She has a very sexy full-bodied shape, when she wears a form-fitting knit dress men tend to walk into doors and walls. I was seeing it in silhouette, the nice narrow waist, the full hips, and so I immediately responded, “No, I’m a rapist.” Because she was sexy, and I was half drunk.
“Oh, goody,” she said, and came trotting over and threw her arms around my neck and kissed me.
In fantasy, you see, and in the sex books, I would be the one to kiss her, and of course she would immediately explode with sensual response. But I would be the aggressor, it would be my idea and my move.
So much for fantasy. She kissed me, and I was the one who immediately exploded with sensual response. I put my arms around her and kissed her back. “Mmm,” she said, liking it, so I probed a bit with my tongue. Her teeth parted and she received the tongue with a great deal of obvious pleasure. She wasn’t quite as engulfing as Charlotte used to be, but she was all right.
We kissed four or five times, with me nuzzling her neck in between, and then I slipped my right hand from the small of her back down past the borderline of waist and over the strange alien contours of her behind, so unlike Betsy’s behind, my fingertips on the deepening groove of her ass, headed down and around, intending to slip down between her legs and come upon her cunt from behind, but before I was halfway to Moscow she said, “Uh uh,” and smiled to show there were no hard feelings, and pushed on my shoulders, separating us.
For one second I saw myself pushing it, overpowering her weak defenses, stroking her and kissing her and rubbing against her till she was too passionate to refuse me, and then mounting her atop the pile of coats and humping her till her cries of ecstasy brought the other guests on the run...
There. I did it again. My fantasies turn against me, they go bitter and rancid every time.
The point is, I had one instant where I might have refused to take no for an answer, at which point she would surely have hauled off and belted me or maybe even hollered, but not in ecstasy, and then the next second came along and brought gloomy old sanity with it, and my hands slipped away from her hips, and I hunted around quickly in the bottom of my prop bag for a smile, tacked it in place, and said, “Come back when you can spend more time.”
“Maybe I will,” she said, in a manner perilously close to a Mae West parody, and turned around and left the room. She paused just outside the doorway to give me a toodle-oo waggle of her fingers, and then she was gone.
I had that old dinosaur, penus erectus, of course, and I briefly considered going into the john and casting my seed in the toilet, but I had made a point of refraining from masturbation since my marriage, on the basis that I was ridiculous enough as it was, and the Mae West touch at the end had added just the right aroma of burlesque, thereby toppling me from the peak of my passion, and I was sure the dinosaur would briefly wander away by himself, so I simply went back to looking for my cigarettes, and in fact old dino did die, and I thought no more of him.