He consulted his wallet and handed me first a hundred-dollar bilclass="underline" "I earned that just this afternoon, playing ring around the maypole with a Vassar graduate, class of '09"; then a card: "And this is how I met the lady. How I meet them all. Men. Women. Crocodiles. Fuck for fun and profit. At any rate, profit."
The card read: THE SELF SERVICE. PROPRIETOR, MISS VICTORIA SELF. It listed an address on West Forty-second Street and a telephone number with a Clrcle exchange.
"So," said Woodrow, "clean yourself up and go see Miss Self. She'll give you a job."
"I don't think I could handle a job. I'm too strung out. And I'm trying to write again."
Woodrow nibbled the onion in his Gibson. "I wouldn't call it a job. just a few hours a week. After all, what kind of service do you think The Self Service provides?"
"Stud duty, obviously. Dial-a-Dick."
"Ah, you were listening—you seemed so fogbound. Stud duty, indeed. But not entirely. It's a coed operation. La Self is always ready with anything anywhere anyhow anytime.
"Strange. I would never have pictured you as a stud-for-hire."
"Nor I. But I'm a certain type: good manners, grey suit, horn-rimmed glasses. Believe me, there's plenty of demand. And La Self specializes in variety. She has everything on her roster from Puerto Rican thugs to rookie cops and stockbrokers."
"Where did she find you?"
"That," said Woodrow, "is too long a tale." He ordered another drink; I declined, for I hadn't tasted liquor since that final incredible gin-crazed session with Kate McCloud, and now just one drink had made me slightly deaf (alcohol first affects my hearing). "I'll only say it was through a guy I knew at Yale. Dick Anderson. He works on Wall Street. A real straight guy, but he hasn't done too well, or well enough to live in Greenwich and have three kids, two of them at Exeter. Last summer I spent a weekend with the Andersons—she's a real good gal; Dick and I sat up drinking cold duck, that's this mess made with champagne and sparkling burgundy; boy, it makes me churn to think of it. And Dick said: 'Most of the times I'm disgusted. Just disgusted. Goddamn, what a man won't do when he's got two boys in Exeter!"' Woodrow chuckled. "Rather John Cheeverish, no? Respectable but hard-up suburbanite shagging ass to pay his country-club dues and keep his kids in a proper prep."
"No."
"No what?"
"Cheever is too cagey a writer to ever risk a cock-peddling stockbroker. Simply because no one would believe it. His work is always realistic, even when it's preposterous—like The Enormous Radio or The Swimmer.
Woodrow was irritated; prudently, I deposited his hundred dollars inside an inner pocket, where he would have had some trouble retrieving it. "If it's true, and it is, why would anyone not believe it?"
"Because something is true doesn't mean that it's convincing, either in life or in art. Think of Proust. Would Remembrance have the ring that it does if he had made it historically literal, if he hadn't transposed sexes, altered events and identities? If he had been absolutely factual, it would have been less believable, but" — his was a thought I'd often had—"it might have been better. Less acceptable, but better." I decided on another drink, after all. "That's the question: is truth an illusion, or is illusion truth, or are they essentially the same? Myself, I don't care what anybody says about me as long as it isn't true."
"Maybe you ought to skip that other drink."
"You think I'm drunk?"
"Well, you're rambling."
"I'm relaxed, that's all."
Woodrow kindly said: "So you've started writing again. Novel?"
"A report. An account. Yes, I'll call it a novel. If I ever finish it. Of course, I never do finish anything."
"Have you a title?" Oh, Woodrow was right there with all the garden-party queries.
"Answered Prayers."
Woodrow frowned. "I've heard that before."
"Not unless you were one of the three hundred schlunks who bought my first and only published work. That, too, was called Answered Prayers. For no particular reason. This time I have a reason."
"Answered Prayers. A quote, I suppose."
"St. Teresa. I never looked it up myself, so I don't know exactly what she said, but it was something like 'More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.'"
Woodrow said: "I see a light flickering. This book—it's about Kate McCloud, and gang."
"I wouldn't say it's about them—though they're in it."
"Then what is it about?"
"Truth as illusion."
"And illusion as truth?"
"The first. The second is another proposition."
Woodrow asked how so, but the whiskey was at work and I felt too deaf to tell him; but what I would have said was: as truth is nonexistent, it can never be anything but illusion—but illusion, the by-product of revealing artifice, can reach the summits nearer the unobtainable peak of Perfect Truth. For example, female impersonators. The impersonator is in fact a man (truth), until he re-creates himself as a woman (illusion)-and of the two, the illusion is the truer.
Around five that afternoon, as offices were emptying, I found myself trawling along Forty-second Street, looking for the address listed on Miss Self's card. The establishment turned out to be located above a ground-floor pornographic emporium, one of those dumps plastered with poster portraits of dangling dongs and split beavers. As I approached it, an exiting customer, someone of respectable and unimportant appearance, dropped a package, which opened, scattering across the pavement several dozen black-and-white glossies—nothing extra, the usual sixty-niners and marshmallow gals getting a three-way ride; still, a number of pedestrians paused to stare as the owner knelt to recover his property. Pornography, in my opinion, has been much misunderstood, for it doesn't develop sex fiends and send them roaming alleyways—it is an anodyne for the sexually oppressed and unrequited, for what is the aim of pornography if not to stimulate masturbation? And surely masturbation is the pleasanter alternative for men "on the muscle," as they say in horse-breeding circles.
A Puerto Rican pimp stood sneering at the stooped man ("What you want with that when I got nice live puta?"), but I felt sorry for him: he looked to me like some youngish lonely minister who had embezzled the whole of last Sunday's collection plate to buy those jack-off snaps; so I decided to help him pick them up-but the instant I began, he struck me across the face: a karate chop that felt as if it must have shattered a cheekbone.
"Beat it," he snarled. I said: "Jesus, I wanted to help you." And he said: "Beat it. Before I bust you good." His face had flushed a red so bright it pained my eyes, and then I realized it wasn't exclusively the color of rage but of shame as well—I thought he'd thought I meant to steal his pictures, when really what had infuriated him was the pity implicit in my proffered assistance.
Though Miss Self is a most successful businesswoman, she certainly doesn't squander on display. Her offices are four flights up in an elevatorless building. THE SELF SERVICE: a frosted-glass door with that inscription. But I hesitated (really, did I want to do this? Well, there wasn't anything I'd rather do, at least to make money). I combed my hair, creased the trousers of a just-bought fifty-dollar Robert Hall herringbone two-pants special, rang, and walked in.