Like things from those murky books by Burton. The long ago Richard Burton, not Elizabeth’s mad Welshman. I read those books over the years, and there were certain things therein to inspire one in fantasies and other things to add a soupçon of curry powder to one’s married life (I’d like two soupçons of curry powder, s’il vous plait, and a partridge in a pear tree.)
But I always thought Burton was a big put-on. Sir Richard is sending us up, I thought. The dear boy’s having us all on. People can’t really dangle from the chandeliers and bugger one another while drinking glasses of spiced tea and masturbating pet dogs with their toes.
Well, we haven’t done precisely that, but I couldn’t swear that it’s not on tomorrow’s agenda. Already there are things I never dreamed I was capable of. There are ways of controlling one’s responses, of developing muscular control and physical agility. According to Eric, it is all a matter of discovering oneself, of making the acquaintance of one’s body.
All of this sounds desperately clinical, does it not? Like a class in karate or something. And at times it does seem quite cold and austere, and would be literally ridiculous but for the particular personality of this man and its effect upon me. I suspect that, were I not so completely his property whenever I am in his presence, there are moments when I would laugh. But the impulse never even occurs to me at the time.
And there are enough times when the passion is real enough and the classroom turns back into a bedroom like Cinderella’s coach at midnight. (Why did I put it that way, Doctor? Not at all like Cinderella’s coach at midnight, I don’t properly think. Verrrry interesting.)
He can set me on fire with a touch, a kiss, a glance. And when we fuck it is a shaking, shattering experience. Always. There does not seem to be such a thing as a casual take-it-or-leave-it fuck with Eric. Always starbursts, always mountain peaks, always the usual purple metaphors apply.
There’s often some pain, but I don’t seem to mind it at all these days. In fact—
Oh, well. Yesterday there was no pain, and I missed it.
It bothers me to write this.
April 20
I thought I saw Arnold on the street. A comic moment, I suppose. I ran up for a closer look, and the man turned and gave me a what-seems-to-be-wrong-with-you-little-girl look, and of course on second glance it did not look like Arnold at all, not at all. I muttered something and turned away, feeling out of sorts.
The two of them have entirely disappeared. No trace. I only hope, well, that nothing happened. Would he do anything awful?
I am positive he has killed people. I think he would kill people as people kill flies.
No, wrong. He’d take some pleasure in it.
April 24
“You’re a sadist,” I said.
“DeSade was a bore,” he said. “A madman with a single preoccupation and an extremely limited grasp of logic. I can’t imagine anyone reading him except for titillation, and there are so many more effective pornographers of that sort.”
I looked at him.
“A sadist? A disciple of his? Could you honestly believe that of me?”
“I meant you take pleasure from inflicting pain. Sadomasochism. That bag.”
“Everyone does,” he said briskly. “It has nothing to do with that French idiot.”
April 27
He tied me up and spanked me on the bottom with his bare hand. Spanked me.
As hard as he could. It wasn’t a game, and it still hurts hours later.
I came, just from that. A completely different type of orgasm from the usual. It burst upon me rather without warning. Very strange.
May 1
Another month.
Four of them gone in this my thirtieth year. Eight of them yet to go.
I haven’t felt much like writing in this book. (Or in anything else.) In the past couple of weeks my world has closed up. Or closed in on me. There are great stretches of time in which nothing seems to happen. When I am not with him I hardly seem to exist.
I force myself to eat, but still continue to lose weight. I have never been really thin before. Thin in the sense that another would look at me and say, “That girl is too thin, she ought to gain a few pounds.” Thin enough so that, if the present trend continues, I will begin to look like something out of Dachau, and not long out of Dachau at that. I think I like being thin, actually. I think I like my body very much. There is nothing superfluous about it.
How do I spend the hours? The odd thing is that I hardly seem to know myself. When I am not with him — and I only see him every few days, and only for several hours at a time — life loses its color and becomes a black-and-white movie, colorless and lacking in dimension.
A book I read, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. About a teen-age schizophrenic, and she didn’t see depth or colors in real life, only in her self-constructed world of imagination.
Is it possible that I am schizophrenic? That Eric and his entire world are a hallucination, a trick of my own warped mind? That he does not exist?
Prove to yourself, Giddings, that you are not deluding yourself.
A syllogism or tautology or conundrum, one of those things of which I can never remember which is which, meaning that you can’t prove any such thing. No, I am not schizophrenic. Yes, Eric exists.
I just started writing this because it’s May. What do I care about writing this?
I get up, I lie in bed several hours dreaming. I eat or don’t eat I have coffee. I walk and walk and walk, endless walks all over Manhattan. I never talk to anyone while I walk. Sometimes I buy something. Not often. When I do — a book, a magazine, a souvenir, an article of clothing — I most often leave it somewhere. Either because I consciously decide I don’t want it or because I just lose it, forget it, and then it is gone and I am somewhere else.
I can’t write any more of this.
May 5
Today is the fifth straight day this month in which I did not kill myself.
See how I am sustained by tiny triumphs!
May 7
Sex is a drug. A habit-forming drug on which one can get hooked.
I was a candidate for this sort of habit. A sexual compulsive. Looking for something.
Question: Which is worse, to spend your life looking for something or to find it?
Answer: I don’t know, I’ve never been out with one.
Long as you hang on to your sense of humor, love, you’ve still got a chance in this too-cruel world.
Oh?
May 9
He called at five minutes of three. I was still in bed. Why? I don’t know. This happens so often lately. I go to sleep around midnight and wake up every four hours or so, have a cigarette, then slip back down under the covers and pull the blankets over my head like darkness itself, snuggling back under a blanket of sleep and drifting off in dreams for another four hours. And there are days when I do this for sixteen hours at a stretch. God knows why, or how.
After a point it isn’t really sleep. A long waking dream. It just seems that there is nothing worth getting up for.
A memory — I had days like that in Eastchester. Days of long sleep. I guess it was a way of avoiding things. Housework, things I did not want to do.
I have none of those responsibilities here.
Then what? Sleeping the long sleep to avoid being awake and facing — what? The fact that I have nothing to do, arduous or otherwise? The fact that life is empty?