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.”