Frankly I agree with Dick that Adios, Motherfucker is a beautiful title, particularly for the book he’s writing, but I also agree with his editor that this is not the world in which to title a book Adios, Motherfucker.
Anyway, I like Dick, and I think he’s a funny guy and a good writer, probably the best writer I know. But I felt very guilty toward him for a while after kissing Kay. For a couple of months, in fact. Partly because I’d kissed her and partly because I wanted to pick up with her where we’d left off. It wasn’t going to happen and I knew it, and Kay never after that gave any indication that it had even started, but I did a lot of rutty fantasizing about it all, and I think the fantasizing made me feel guiltier than the actual kissing had.
How did I get onto all this stuff? It’s Saturday, the 25th of November, one-thirty in the afternoon. I have five and a half days and I’m still going along just as nice as you please, talking about Thanksgiving and Kay and Dick and all this stuff, as though I had all the time in the world. If I still had the other chapters I did, I could give them to Dick, maybe he could use them for something. “Here you go, Dick, a novel pretending to be a novel.” But I couldn’t give him this chapter, not with the stuff about Kay in it, and I don’t have the other chapters, not after yesterday.
I’m not going into that.
I couldn’t get to sleep last night, after what had happened. I’m sorry if I’m being a cockteaser, it isn’t that I want to build up suspense or anything, it’s just that the whole thing is extremely painful for me. I can’t help thinking about it, but somehow it’s less real if I don’t talk about it or write about it. If I don’t turn it into a wall of words. A stone silo of words, with me on the inside, all alone.
Anyway, I slept badly. I think I dreamed about giant spiders, I’m not sure. Whatever I dreamed about, I woke up shaky and quaky just as though I had dreamed about giant spiders, so we’ll let it ride at giant spiders, that’s close enough. What with the bad dreams, and my general uneasiness, I woke up early. Early for me, I mean. Nine-thirty. I dragged myself out of bed, I’d had maybe four hours’ sleep, it took me forever to get to this typewriter, full of rue and coffee. I mean me full of rue and coffee, not the typewriter. The typewriter is full of shit.
So here I am, miserable, exhausted, panic-stricken, pissing away my substance on another fifteen pages of whatchamacallit that Samuel would never understand, and what am I going to do?
What am I going to do?
I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I am going to outline a sex novel right now, and then I am going to make myself some lunch, maybe watch some football, and then come back here and start the sex novel I have outlined. That is what I am going to do, no ifs, no ands, no buts.
Outline. Girl-on-the-make book. Call it Passion Sinner. Do I have a book called Passion Sinner? I have a list of my titles here, twenty-eight lovely titles. No Passion Sinner. Done. Outline:
1. Sally Maximus, having graduated from secretarial school, has decided to leave her small home town and go to New York City. With her secretarial school training she’s sure she can find a good job, and she wants a little fun and excitement in her life before she settles down to being a housewife. She has done a lot of heavy petting with her boy friend, Barry Gaiter, but she’s still a virgin. The night before her departure, she and Barry go over the line. She gets too hot to stop him and they make it in the back seat of his convertible. She realizes she’d intended to devirginize herself in New York anyway, and she’s glad it was good old Barry who got there first.
2. Sally boards the bus for New York and gets into conversation with Matt Sembling, an actor on his way to try for the big time in the city. They neck in the bus, and she gets hot again, and he fingers her to an orgasm. She didn’t have one with Barry, and this one astonishes her.
3. In New York, Matt introduces Sally to his cousin, Anita Rorschamb, who is a copywriter in an advertising agency. She is a tall seductive brunette, a Vampira type, and she tells Sally she can stay at her place until she finds one of her own. She also brings Sally around to the advertising agency for a possible secretarial job. Sally is hired, and her boss is Archer Frenway, who promptly rapes her in his locked office. When she cries for help, he tells her the room is soundproofed. When she says she’ll tell the police he says half a dozen men in the agency will swear he was in conference with them at the time and he’ll bring a suit against her for slander and libel and malicious mischief. The rape is completed, and he smiles and pats her cheek and says they’ll get along fine.
4. Sally, in a state of shock, goes back to Anita’s apartment. When Anita comes home that evening Sally is shivering in bed. Anita sits beside her and Sally tells her what happened. Anita says she’s heard of such things, but didn’t really believe it. She consoles Sally, and it gradually turns physical and Anita goes down on her and Sally comes.
5. Two weeks have passed. Sally hasn’t gone back to the advertising agency, nor does she have another job. She’s living in a lesbian relationship with Anita. Matt comes by to say he’s gotten a job in an Off Broadway theater, and finds out what’s going on. He tells Sally all men are not as heartless as Archer Frenway, and convinces her to come with him to his new apartment, in which there’s a spare bedroom. He promises to make no sexual moves toward her. She goes with him, and alone in bed that night she thinks about sex straight and sex lesbian and masturbates and comes. She wonders if she can come every way but the right way.
6. Matt has a party for his Greenwich Village and Off Broadway friends. Sally is feeling somewhat better, she’s been at Matt’s place for two weeks, there’s been no sex between them. The party becomes an orgy, which Sally observes but does not take part in.
7. Sally is backstage at the theater where Matt has a small role in an Off Broadway play. She’s alone in the dressing room when Anita comes in, angry at Sally for having walked out on her. Anita starts to beat Sally up, and Rex Kilbrood, the male lead in the play, comes in and breaks it up. He consoles Sally in the dressing room, seems very attentive and compassionate and gentle, and gradually seduces her. While they’re making it she suddenly realizes the whole thing has been mechanical with him, the whole seduction just a well-rehearsed play, he has no real interest in her at all. He comes, but she does not, and she cynically observes how he handles the brushoff afterwards.
8. Sally is in Matt’s apartment, middle of the day. The doorbell rings and it’s Archer Frenway. He is distraught, he hasn’t been able to forget her, he didn’t realize that day in the office that she would become so important in his mind. She sees that he wants to seduce her, more gently than the last time, and she leads him on, going through all sorts of foreplay with him, and when he’s just about to score she runs into the bathroom and locks herself in and tells him he’d better leave because Matt is coming home soon. He batters at the door, but she won’t let him in, and he finally leaves. It’s a triumph, and a revenge, but the taste of it is sour.