There was no heading and no signature, but of course neither heading nor signature was needed.
Paul stood there holding the paper in a trembling hand. He had to do something. His wonderful world was in ruins around him, his new-found delight had come crashing to earth.
He had to talk to her. He had to convince her. There had to be some way to convince her of the truth.
If he could prove to her that the seductions in the diary were false, then wouldn’t he be able to claim that the diatribes against her were also false? He would be shamefaced, he would say it was a novel he was writing, something like that. He would explain it away somehow. The important thing to do would be to prove to her that the affairs with other women had not really happened; do that, and there was still a chance.
And it was certainly provable enough. All she had to do was ask, ask any one of them. The baby-sitter, for instance, or any of the other women mentioned in this diary, just ask...
Ask? Go to the baby-sitter, go to any one of them, show her this diary, with its blunt words and pornographic descriptions, with her own name in it? He wouldn’t dare, he couldn’t do it. They might call the police, but even if they didn’t he couldn’t do it. It would be too shameful, he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
There had to be some other way. Couldn’t he say to her, “Beth, think about it. I couldn’t have done it, I couldn’t have had all those affairs and slept with all those women. I’d have to be Hercules. Can’t you see that? It’s physically impossible. You were around me all those years, would I have gotten away with all that without you knowing, suspecting, becoming aware of something? Don’t you see, it has to be make believe!”
But would she listen to him? He thought of calling her, if she was going home that would have to be her parents’ house upstate, and in fact he actually turned and started toward the living room and the telephone when he realized it would do no good. Her parents would answer the phone, and she would refuse to speak to him.
Write her a letter?
She wouldn’t read it.
Go there, to her parents’ house?
Her brothers would kill him, if they believed her story, and they surely would.
What am I going to do? he thought.
What am I going to do?
2
Paul Trepless got drunk, angry, laid and maudlin, in five thousand words.
You write it, I can’t. He sits around his house, see, feeling sorry for himself and frustrated and all, and gets to drinking. Then he drives in to New York and goes to Times Square and picks up a spade hooker and pays her twenty dollars and has a very unsatisfactory fuck, during all of which the hooker gives every appearance of laughing at him and not giving a damn whether he notices or not. Also, she won’t take off her bra. So then our hero drives in his drunken state back out to his home on Long Island and begins to feel very sorry for himself, and cries himself to sleep.
And wakes up and it’s Monday morning and he’s got a fucking fuck book to write by Thursday.
I did Chapter 1, though, by God. I now have Chapter 1 and nobody can take that away from me. I also kept the garbage I wrote Saturday, but I doubt that any of it is useful.
As for the rest of it, I burned it all Friday. No, I kept a couple pages I thought I could use, like the beginning of the chapter with Dwayne Toppil and Liz, that I used part of in Paul’s flashback.
By the way, now that I have actually done a chapter we can continue our seminar on writing sex novels. Wait till I get my pointer, pardon the sexual reference.
Got it.
Now. If you will notice, not a hell of a lot happens in fifteen pages. The hero goes home on the train and his wife has left him because of something he didn’t do. Also there’s a sex scene in a flashback. Not very much. How do we manage to stretch that for fifteen pages.
Well, there are several ways. One of the several ways is to say everything twice, like I’m doing now. What I’m doing now is saying everything twice, which is one of the ways we get fifteen pages out of practically no action at all, plus flashback.
And this is another.
One-sentence paragraphs.
One-phrase paragraphs.
They fill up the page.
They fill it up something beautiful.
I know a guy.
This guy writes sex books.
Every sex book he writes is full of sex scenes like the following.
“Deeper!” she cried.
“Deeper!”
“Deeper!”
He thrust.
And again.
And again.
All of which gets you to the bottom of the page in jigtime.
It fills up the page and requires no effort.
Also, if you are writing a paragraph and you see that that paragraph is going to come to an end way over at the right end of the line, you add a few more words, it doesn’t matter what words, just enough to make the paragraph round the corner.
And get you another line.
These are all trade secrets now, so pay attention. This is better than answering one of those ads in the crappy magazines that says EARN BIG MONEY WRITING.
I think I’ll start the Infamous Writers School. How to write soft-core pornography for no fun and little profit.
Make big money. Graduates of our system earn ten grand a year and have a tendency to feel they are becoming invisible.
Another way to get fifteen pages out of a paucity of plot is the interior monologue, also known as Good Christ He’s Thinking Again. Characters in sex novels think all the time. They stand around with their fingers in their noses and think for pages on end. Sometimes they think about what to do next, and sometimes they think about what they’ve just done, and sometimes they think about something somebody else has done, and sometimes it’s hard to tell exactly what they’re thinking about.
When I woke up Friday and Betsy was gone and Elfreda was gone, I didn’t know what anybody was thinking about. That’s the way it happened in real life, you know. I wasn’t coming home from anywhere on the train. Pete and I got soused Thanksgiving, last Thursday, after dinner we really tied one on, the two of us. Betsy was understanding and Ann was disapproving. Ann disappointed me, I figured she’d be understanding too, but she wasn’t. But Betsy was. She said I’d been working very hard, I heard her tell Ann that, and that I needed a break of some kind, a breather. And that Pete probably did, too. To which Ann remained disapproving, but neither Pete nor I gave a shit.
It was long after midnight when they left, Ann driving, and Betsy poured me into the rack, which I very vaguely remember. She’d been feeling very lovey since the fight was over and we made up, so she began trying to arouse me, kissing me and playing with Oscar and so on, but I was too totally out of it and I gradually drifted off to sleep with the light and half a hard-on.
Oscar is a private joke. Apparently I’m telling everything now, I’m boiling the whole thing out, so what the hell. Oscar is a private joke from early on in our relationship. I said one time that I was there to give her the award for being the best lay on the North American continent, which at the time I believed, and of course the award was an Oscar, so from then on we called my cock Oscar, which I grant you is foolish but it’s the little foolish pleasantries like that that make life worth living, and all the serious horseshit is what makes life not worth living.
Yeah, we had a name for her witsy bitsy private part, too, but I can’t mention it as it is the name of a well-known real-life motion picture star. You get the idea, we’re giving the Oscar to...