In the supermarket parking lot, then, following this boy ten years my junior, and watching his buttocks move as he walked, and chatting lightly with him, I found myself wanting him to resume the flirting, to say something mildly unpardonable to me. Not, of course, that I intended to do anything about it. Or to let anything happen.
Am I becoming sex obsessed?
The question seems laughable. Sometimes I play with myself. Sometimes I may let my mind wander a little when I do this. Having fantasies of things that—
February 17
It has been, let me see, more than two weeks since the last entry. Fifteen days, to be precise.
I never thought I would come back to the book. I didn’t even finish the last entry, I see now. I don’t remember what happened, whether I was interrupted by a jangling telephone or what. Probably what, she said archly.
Come to the point.
Yes, Doctor. Yes, you there in the mirror. The point. The point is that there is no point. I wonder how I expected to end that last entry. Having fantasies of things. Oh, yes. All manner of things.
I want to get this all down and make it right. I want to get it down right now as fast as I can. I don’t know what is going to happen next. I’m in this plastic motel that I don’t remember the name of, a Holiday Inn or Howard Johnson’s and I can’t remember which, and writing in this book, and trying to get it all down before it gets away.
Friday I was supposed to meet him in the city. Howie, that is, in New York. We do this occasionally. When we first made the move to Eastchester we swore we would do this once a week. After all, it’s simple enough to come in from the suburbs for a night on the town. Especially when you don’t have children. You just drive in and meet him after work and have a drink and dinner and a show and more drinks at a nightclub and then drive back to your happy little home in the country. The best of both worlds.
We did this every week at first, and then it gradually tapered off to once or twice a month. But Friday it was all set, he had tickets to I Love You Under the Olive Trees, and we were meeting at Gatsby’s at five-thirty.
It got called on account of snow. The worst storm of the season, and the Central canceled trains, and I couldn’t get the car out anyway to meet him at the station. Scratch Friday.
I don’t remember very much of Saturday, during the day. We stayed around the house mostly.
It doesn’t matter.
Saturday night there was a party at the Cargill’s. Edgar and Marcie were there, and Bill and Missie, and Walter and Lenore, the usual crowd.
There was nothing wrong with the party.
Just as there had been nothing wrong with the daytime, some sort of postseason exhibition football game — the fucking football games never stop, all weekend long whenever I look at the set he is in front of it and a football game is on it, it used to be just in the fall but now it never stops, preseason and postseason and season and training, nothing but football.
But there was nothing wrong with this, you see, that’s the whole point, that there was nothing wrong with it. That it was all perfectly normal, perfectly usual. The usual people at the usual party, the usual conversations, the usual drinks. Good New York suburban conversations. Wasn’t the President a horse’s ass, and would the war ever stop, and how the price of absolutely everything was going up, and some learned commentary on the wage-price spiral by Herb Gardenia, and Missie leasing Walter because Walter had once announced that he had smoked marijuana a couple of times, and general agreement that we would all like to try it, and unspoken certainty shared by all of us that of course we never would, or if we did it would be in the privacy of our own homes, away from each other, like masturbating. Does pot give you pimples? Or make you go blind?
(I smoked in college. Didn’t everybody? Didn’t we all of us smoke a couple of sticks of pot in college? And now we all pretend it never happened, each of us shielding ourselves from each other and I don’t care about the grammar in that sentence, I couldn’t care less about it if you want to know the truth. I smoked one time, a boy named Eddie turned me on. It was no sex thing, my roommate and I turned on with him. It was supposed to be this great experience. It was nice. Maybe we didn’t have enough of it. I remember being involved in words, caught up in what people said, finding new levels of meaning in everything.)
Nowadays I guess all the kids smoke. They all do everything these days. We were all born too soon. Five or ten years too soon. Everything is changing, completely turning inside out. Kids do all the things we sort of reached out for, and they do them easily and beautifully and without any guilt. And we live in Eastchester and drink too much and play with ourselves.
I just went to the bathroom. I thought I was going to throw up but it seems not to have been in the cards. I think it’s probably better to throw up than to want to throw up and not be able to. I think I shouldn’t have brought the liquor here with me. I think I shouldn’t drink at all.
I drank too much at the party.
I necked with Edgar Hillman.
The thing is that I had never thought of Edgar as attractive. He must be almost forty, and he’s lost about as much hair as he’s kept. The one attractive thing about him is that he has gone bald in front, his hairline receding more and more, and this doesn’t look so bad. It’s when a man has a bald spot in the middle of his head, an island of skin in a sea of hair, that I find it slightly ridiculous. But Edgar also has a spreading waist, and little eyes which are closer together than they might ideally be, and a nose with big pores in it. They told me that if I squeezed my pimples I would get enlarged pores. I squeezed any number of them and never got one.
What must have rendered Edgar attractive, I guess, is that Marcie had already told me that Edgar fluttered like a bee from flower to flower. (More precisely, she said that he would screw a snake if someone would hold its head.) The knowledge that he’s out there screwing all those snakes evidently got to me. Perhaps it’s a case of being unable to trust my own taste. If all those other women find Edgar attractive enough to have affairs with, they must be right, and he must be attractive, and thus I must be attracted to him.
There’s also the fact that I drank too much at the party.
The drinking helped cast a fine haze over everything, both at the time and in memory. I don’t know how we got into the room where they kept the coats. The bedroom, that is to say. The coals were piled on the bed. But somehow it’s a good deal less compromising lo think of oneself being in the coatroom with one’s best friend’s husband than in the bedroom.
“Jan, Jan, Jan,” he said. When people have nothing to say they repeat one’s name pointlessly. “Having a wonderful time, you wonderful girl?”
“Well, it’s a party.”
“It is indeed.”
“And people always have wonderful times at parties.”
“They do if they know what’s good for them.” He grinned owlishly, except that owls have their eyes spaced much farther apart. “You know,” he said, “I’ve had my eye on you for a long time now.”
“Which one?”
“Eh?”
“Which eye have you had on me?”