If Howie wasn’t getting laid, that might be something to worry about.
But the hell with being rational. I’m really anxious to do some wild screwing tonight. Which is the attitude every properly brought up young lady should have, I guess, when she’s on her way to do precisely that.
May 20
Three in bed is nice.
I am too tired to write. Hours and hours of fucking and sucking, to be crude about it. And why not be crude about it? Lewd and crude and rude and nude and never never never a prude. Lewd and crude and rude and nude and never a prude. Lewd and crude and rude and nude and thoroughly thoroughly thoroughly screwed!
Everybody doing everything to everybody else. The entire production choreographed by Eric.
I would say that I would hate myself in the morning except it’s the morning now and I don’t, not really. All I want to do is get into my own bed and sleep for a hundred and fifty hours, give or take a minute. I imagine there are other things I ought to do first.
Like bathe some of this sweat and sex off my skin. Like douche, like brush my teeth, like use a mouthwash. Like drink about three quarts of mouthwash. My mouth has done some odd things in the past few hours. Days. Weeks. Months.
Good night.
May 27
We tied up Susan. I ate her while he beat her with his belt. She was really screaming and it scared the life out of me. She swooned when she had her climax. Passed out and didn’t come to for about twenty minutes. I panicked, thought she was dead, for God’s sake. Eric told me not to be stupid.
When she came out of it she kept saying how good she felt. She touched her bottom gingerly now and then and joked about the pain.
The beating didn’t leave any marks to speak of.
June 14
Enough is too much.
No one can live this way. I have looked deep into the mirror and am falling into it. I will drown in the mirror. One day and another day, over and over.
I am dirty inside and out. I cannot go on this way and I do not deserve to go on.
June 15
I woke up this morning.
I generally do, but I guess I wasn’t supposed to this time. Last night I drank wine and slipped deeper and deeper into depression and ultimately wrote that last entry. At least I assume I did. It’s in my handwriting, and it’s consistent with the mood I was in. I do remember having some of those thoughts, whatever they might have meant at the time. I just don’t remember writing them down.
Nor do I remember taking the pills, but it’s evident that I did. I suppose I must have thought I was taking sleeping pills. I don’t own any sleeping pills, and after last night I think it might be a good idea never to own any sleeping pills. I had never considered myself as potentially suicidal before. I thought about suicide the way anyone with a sense of reality is apt to think about it, but it was like Mark Twain and the weather, I thought about it but never did anything about it. (Like Mark Twain and the weather, Gracie?) But last night I was not only stupid enough to try to kill myself but stupid enough to go about it wrong. Judging from the empty bottles on the bathroom floor, I must have swallowed about fifty aspirins and a dozen antidepressants. I have no idea what the cumulative effect of antidepressants might be — I suppose they could just sort of lift you off into euphoria or something. Except they aren’t exhilarants (if there is such a word, I bet that’s not how you spell it) but just antidepressants that neutralize a bad mood.
Well, none of this matters. Judging from the little pill-studded pool of vomit by the side of the bed, which I will have to feel much better than I do now before I can bring myself to clean up, I might as well have taken sleeping pills or even cyanide for the amount of time it stayed with me.
So you have to call it a bona fide suicide attempt, but whether or not you call it a close shave I do not know.
I haven’t been writing in this book much lately. I haven’t even been thinking much lately. I see Eric, I see Susan, I see the two of them together.
I think I’m coming unglued. I can be flip here today, I have to be flip here today, if I am less than flip here today I might try walking out the fucking window (or fucking out the walking window? Heh-heh, heh-heh), but I do not feel flip. What I feel is sick, awfully sick, sicker than I remember ever having felt before. Sick in mind and body. A sick mind in a sick body.
I have to go out and have something to eat. I absolutely have to eat. And the thought of food turns my stomach. Absolutely turns my stomach. There’s a word for this but I don’t remember what it is. A medically recognized condition in which the poor schmuck gets nauseous at the thought of food and simply doesn’t eat, getting thinner and thinner until he or she either recovers or dies, I think.
Those would seem to be the two logical alternatives.
I wonder if I have it, whatever the hell it’s called. I don’t suppose I can get very much thinner without dying. Except that’s not exactly true. Maybe it’s all in my mind, the way I perceive myself. I don’t think I’m really as scrawny as I think I am.
I will go out now and have a big plate of spaghetti (ugh!) and somehow eat it all. Well, maybe not spaghetti, now that I think about it. But something, somewhere.
Everything will be all right, she said bravely.
June 21
“Jan, you ought to go out more.”
“Go out more?”
“Yes. You should meet people. You should talk to men, get acquainted with them.”
“But you told me otherwise, Eric.”
“Times change.”
“So it seems.”
“One reaches a new stage in one’s development.”
“And have I reached a new stage?”
“You are about to.”
“You know, I never understand what this is all about. What the point of all this is. You know that I’ll do whatever you tell me to do.”
“Yes.”
“Though sometimes I wonder why that is.”
“Because you want it that way, Jan.”
“Do I?”
“You’re here, aren’t you?”
“Am I?”
“Don’t be oblique.”
“I—”
“You have to be owned and directed. That’s very obvious. And you’ve come a long way, you know.”
“I’ve certainly come a lot, anyway.”
He turns, walks to the window, addresses his remarks in its direction.
“I think you should move about more. Go to some bars and cocktail lounges. Dress attractively. Affect an open personality. Smile warmly.”
“You mean let myself get picked up.”
“If the opportunity arises, why not?”
“You told me you didn’t want me to go with any other men.”
“That was at another stage in your growth.”
“Eric, what happened to those boys?”
“Boys?”
“David and Arnold.”
“Oh, your two fairies. Why, I don’t know what happened to them. Why do you ask?”
“They disappeared.”
“Fairies have a propensity for disappearing. They do it all the time.”
“What happened to them?”
“How should I know?”
“Did you... do something to them?”
He looks at me, stares into my eyes until I turn from him. Then, briskly, “I’ll be unavailable for a while. I’m leaving town, I may be away for some time.”
“And Susan—”
“Susan is also unavailable.”
“I see.”
“So you might find it profitable to develop some other contacts. With men or women, as you prefer.”