For two weeks he didn’t go near a woman. It was a tremendous switch for him, a brand-new approach to the whole concept of a vacation. He lived at the Ruskin, went to concerts and shows, sat in the park and read books. He wandered around the city and stayed away from the bars on Lexington.
What the hell, he could afford it. He had more money than he could spend for a while and he didn’t need to bang his head off to get his hands on more. He wasn’t the kind of man who went through money like a fish out of water anyhow. He spent a lot certainly, but that was because he earned a lot. His expenditures were never as high as his income.
He wasn’t a compulsive spender or a compulsive gambler. And he deserved a vacation. So for those two weeks he ate well, took life easy, did a lot of loafing and a lot of wandering. It was a kick.
He thought quite a bit about Moira during those two weeks. Sometimes he had to laugh. He would look at the whole situation objectively and it would seem hysterically funny to him. The whole idea of a woman paying a guy to be on hand to make love to her and then taking up with a dyke was a pretty hilarious notion. You had to laugh when you thought about it. What the hell — it was funny.
Other times it wasn’t so funny.
Because during those other times he would think that Moira had taken up with the dark-haired dyke because the girl made love better than he did. That was ridiculous, of course — Moira’s problem was psychological, not physical. He could have been Adonis himself and she still would have shown a preference sooner or later for the girl’s style of lovemaking.
So it wasn’t his fault. But still it was galling. He was something of an expert in his field. One session with him ought to turn a devout lesbian into a heterosexual. Instead it had worked the other way around and it was annoying. He had trouble thinking about it without getting more than a trifle angry.
He had the weird feeling that he was coming to some sort of a division in the road. That was one reason he had taken the vacation, such as it was. He wanted to leave himself some good thinking time. He had to be able to see where he was and what the hell he was going to do next.
Where was he?
In a sense he was rich. His two bank accounts totalled almost seven thousand dollars — which was pretty damned high by 99th Street standards. Yet you could look at it another way. Moira probably dropped more than that in a bad day at the roulette wheel. So he wasn’t so rich after all.
Well, what did he want? He’d already managed to learn that he didn’t want a permanent hookup with a woman. That would only drive him nuts. Nor did he want to keep free-lancing, socking more and more money away, until he was rich. What would he do then? Sit around and rot?
There were moments and even hours when he envied the suckers with their nice steady jobs. They had something to do every day, something that interested them, while he had nothing but time on his hands and no real future.
The rest of the time he gave himself mental kicks in the head and asked himself if he was out of his mind or what. He had money to burn, easy work and simple hours. What was wrong with him? Did he want to tie a ball and chain around his neck?
To hell with it, he thought. He’d just keep on the way he was. He was doing a lot of reading, seeing shows, eating well. He was making money. Hell, he was enjoying himself, wasn’t he? Of course he was. So why kick a winner in the head?
Maybe I’ve been reading too much, he thought. Maybe I’m getting a little bit nuts. Maybe the philosophy and psychology and history and literature is too much for my head to take. Maybe I’m looking around corners for little men who aren’t there.
He talked to himself like that but it didn’t work. Not quite.
Because the nagging feeling persisted that he was missing something that was necessary to the full enjoyment of life. He couldn’t help feeling that there was a vacuum-like quality to his life as it stood and he didn’t know what the hell was the matter with him. It was a pain in the neck, he thought angrily. If you just got to feeling rotten when you were a success, what was the point in trying at all?
There were even times when he remembered the days of poverty on the upper west side with something approaching nostalgia. Then he would think about cockroaches and cramped filthy quarters and not enough to eat and he would realize that the good old days hadn’t been so good at all.
Then why did they seem good?
Maybe I was alive then, he would think. Maybe I was more of a human being and less of a machine. But was I a human being then? I never read a book or thought a human thought. I didn’t live like a human being. I lived like an animal. Was I actually more human then?
It didn’t make sense.
Nothing made sense.
If there was only a way to turn your mind off, he thought. To just plain close your eyes tight and not think about anything at all. Maybe that would be the best bet. But it had taken him a hell of a long time to learn how to think.
How did he learn to stop thinking?
It was confusing as all hell.
He went back to work on a Wednesday evening. He had dinner alone, then dressed in his brown tweed suit, white shirt with tab collar, brown foulard tie, and Scotch grain brown loafers. He told a cab driver to take him to Lexington and 58th Street and walked into the Pickled Poodle feeling like a prostitute at the conclusion of her period.
Back to work.
Two hours and forty-three minutes later he was in bed with a forty-year-old woman named Margaret Pennington who had a husband, but the husband was out of town and Mrs. Pennington was consequently on the town. They made a rather dispirited sort of love in Mrs. Pennington’s nuptial chamber and, while Mrs. Pennington seemed to be going out of her mind over the way things were proceeding, Johnny couldn’t have cared less. It was a complete bore from start to finish, and he made sure the finish came as quickly as possible.
An hour later she wanted to play games again.
The thought kind of nauseated him but he wanted to give her her money’s worth. What the hell, she was paying for it.
But something was going wrong.
She was getting excited, all right. If she got much more excited she would go through the roof, which would be fine. But he wasn’t getting excited.
The spirit was willing. But the flesh wasn’t.
This was something which had never happened before. There had been many times when he’d had no interest in making love. There had been many times when he had not enjoyed the process in the least for one reason or another, either because the woman was unappealing or because he was tired or because the woman was about as much fun as a sweaty pillow. This was something else.
Something brand new.
It didn’t take long for him to realize that nothing was going to happen. His first reaction was simple enough. He had to cover himself.
“Margaret,” he said, tender as all hell, “I don’t think I’ll be able to make love to you a second time tonight.”
This displeased her.
“I certainly want to,” he lied. “I want to very much. But I’m afraid I can’t. You see—” he grinned sadly “—you really tired me out. I guess I’m not used to women like you, Margaret. You’re a lot of woman.”
This was the most phenomenal mis-statement of recorded time but it worked magnificently. Since nobody had told Mrs. Pennington she was a lot of woman since the opening of the Panama Canal, she was more pleased than she would have been if he had taken her an even dozen times. She told him at least fourteen times to think nothing of it, it couldn’t be helped, and at any rate their one experience was more than satisfactory.
To hell with you, he thought. You probably haven’t done it twice in one night since they shot Lincoln. So you’ve got nothing to gripe about.