At least I don’t think I do.
Would it be different to be eaten by a girl? How?
Could one just have that or would one be expected to return the favor? It would seem that there ought to be girls who would prefer to eat, while others like oneself would instead prefer to be eaten. Is there a whole body of rules of etiquette for this sort of thing?
And why do I care?
Do I?
I don’t think I do. This is silly. I’m not a lesbian, I don’t want any girl or woman touching me, I don’t want any of that.
Or do I?
Sometimes it seems as though I just don’t know anything anymore. As though all I really get in my travels through whatever it precisely is through which I’m traveling is more confused than ever.
If I have reached the point where I can write sentences like that last one I think it is time to stop.
March 5
Eric spoke to me this afternoon. I looked up from a Nero Wolfe mystery to smile at him, as I often do when he comes in, and he gave me the smile back and came over to my table.
He said, “The Mother Hunt? I think I missed that one.”
“You could borrow it when I’m done.”
“I’d appreciate it. I enjoy Nero Wolfe. I prefer to believe that he exists, you know, and that some day I could be invited to that West Thirty-fifth Street brownstone for dinner. And then I would know that I had made a success of my life.”
I laughed pleasantly. The one time I would have liked to say something bright, and all I could manage was a laugh. Eric smiled somewhat warmly and then went on to his usual table.
Big deal.
I wonder if he’s fucking that teenybopper.
March 6
I dragged The Mother Hunt to the coffee house. He never even showed up today. I’m seeing Arnold tomorrow.
March 15
Nine days since the last entry?
Doesn’t seem that long.
I’m a little depressed. Also maybe a little drunk. A little fuzzy in the head.
Last night was terribly frustrating. Things were going along on a nice even keel, I was seeing Arnold a couple of times a week, and nothing was too exciting but everything was loose, easy. I don’t know.
I’m having trouble making this come out on paper. I keep blocking and just staring at the page. I took a pill earlier today, one of my antidepressants. I have been trying not to take them but I thought it would be better for me in the long run to take the pill than to cut my wrists.
Not really.
But I took it, and you shouldn’t drink when you’re on those things. They don’t go together very well.
Last night we went to a party. A horrible place a couple of blocks from Arnold’s apartment, a really foul, filthy cockroach trap. Cracked plaster and broken pipes and genuine filth all over the place. Everybody seemed to be stoned, mostly I guess on pot but there were also some speed freaks.
Frightening. I felt at least a hundred years old and hopelessly square.
We didn’t stay long. Arnold smoked some grass. I didn’t. Why? Because I didn’t want to be high, I guess.
We went back to his apartment and had a scene. I guess I provoked it. It was a marriage game — Let’s Have a Fight So We Won’t Have to Fuck.
Stupid. Stupid and self-destructive. Why do something like that? We had a good relationship developing. It didn’t have a future but the last thing I need right now is a relationship with a future. Instead it looked as though it might have a long and pretty good present.
I can’t write any more of this, I have to go to bed or something.
March 16
I have a hangover. Well, I came by it honestly. I got what I deserved.
Eric returned the book and we talked about it. There is something about the way he looks at a person that suggests that he is having thoughts about one which are totally unrelated to what he is saying. As though while we chat blithely of Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe and the orchids on the roof, he is really looking right through my clothes and counting the hairs on my cunt and guessing what I am like in bed.
He terrifies me. I can’t avoid the feeling that he could make me do absolutely anything he wanted. All he has to do is ask. Absolutely anything.
I know why I had the fight with Arnold. Not to avoid going to bed with him. It was deeper than that. I was trying to break off the relationship permanently.
Because of the way it scares me.
The two of us have been getting much more deeply into sex the past week or so. Doing things we hadn’t done previously. We go down on each other, for example, lunching in marathon bouts of sixty-nine. Which is not scary in and of itself. It’s the conversations we have before and after and the effect they have upon the sex.
How to explain?
Oh, he talks about threesomes and group sex, not only in an effort to convince me to try it but also because the talking stimulates him. (Be honest. Stimulates us.) He talks about things he’s done and things he’s seen others do. Sometimes he’s almost blindingly graphic and other times he is annoyingly oblique, so that my own mind finds itself sketching in the details he has omitted, enlarging the fantasy.
And then, when we make love, the fantasy of what we have discussed slips in on the heels of the actual sex we are having. It is very strange. I clutch his buttocks in my hands and take his penis in my mouth while he gobbles away between my thighs, and somewhere in my mind behind my closed eyelids he is a girl eating at me and—
I can’t explain it. It’s something that was happening more in the mind than in the flesh and I don’t know how to make words out of it.
But it was scary, and I knew we were going to do scarier things as time went by. And that I wanted to do them, and would let them happen.
So I started a fight in an effort to break up with him, and I haven’t heard from him.
So I guess it worked.
I don’t know whether I’m glad or not. I really don’t know. I wish he would call and I hope he won’t call and, oh, maybe I should just go out and find somebody to ball to get my mind off all this.
I know one thing. If he called now and said he had a male friend over and why didn’t I just come over and join them, I would go. No question. I would go and I would do everything. I hope it doesn’t happen but if it did I would.
Sick sick sick.
March 17
Happy Saint Patrick’s Day.
March 23
Sitting in the coffee house absolutely all strung out. This black pit of depression has been deepening all week, a really fragmented sense of self. Sitting and turning the pages of a book and not retaining anything of what I was reading. My mind wandering all over the place.
“Jan.”
I look up. It is Eric.
“You are ready, aren’t you?”
“Pardon?”
“I have been watching you. You’re ready now.”
“For what?”
“To be yourself.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I think you do.”
The power of his eyes, his voice. He draws me and mesmerizes me.
“Come with me.”
I stand, put coins on the table, grab up my purse and book. He takes my arm. We walk through slushy gray afternoon streets. He strides. I have to walk very quickly to keep up with him.
“Where are we going?”
“My apartment.”
He lives south and west on a block I don’t know. His building is drab brick. It looks dismal. He unlocks doors and I follow him inside, up one flight of stairs. He unlocks a door. We walk into another world, a complete departure from the neighborhood, the buildings, the stairway, the hall.