“Being in bed with me.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Sort of like hearing an old song on the radio that was popular when you were a kid. An oldie but goodie.”
I couldn’t see her face in the dark, but I guess she raised her eyebrows at that one. She had that tone in her voice, saying, “You making fun of me, Chip?”
“No.”
“I think you were, at least a little, maybe. Yeah, like hearing an old song, in a kind of way. The way a song or anything like that makes you feel the way you used to. Sometimes I’ll walk outside during the late summer when there’s a wet wind blowing off the lake, on like a really warm lazy night, and I’ll walk around the block or something and the air will be the way it is in Florida. Just the right temperature and humidity, I suppose. What’s the word? Sultry? But before this can even go through my mind, I’ll get this feeling of being seventeen years old again, because I spent a summer in Florida when I was seventeen.”
“You were in Florida? I thought you were always in Chicago.”
“Oh, I would travel from time to time.”
“What were you doing in Florida?”
“Fucking.”
“That was a straight question.”
“Well, it was a straight answer, honey bunch.”
“At seventeen? I guess I’m retarded.”
“Worry about it, why don’t you?”
“I do, I do. When did you start?”
“Huh?”
“When did you start making love?”
“What are you, Mr. District Attorney? I never started. I’m a virgin, baby doll. Handle me with care.” And, huskily, “If we keep on talking we’ll wake Greg, and he might take a dim view of this. So let’s not talk anymore. Why don’t I just lie here and you can lick different parts of me and see whether or not I like it? Sort of what you might call a scientific experiment.”
(I was just thinking, looking at the last part, that I’ll bet it’s word for word the way that conversation actually went. Obviously, since I’m putting all of this on paper after it happened, I’m just getting the dialogue as close as possible to the way it happened. I didn’t wander through life with a tape recorder hanging around my neck, and I’m not the total recall type. I’m not absolutely convinced anybody is, and there are times when I think people who pretend to be are full of crap. But this one conversation stuck in my mind very vividly. I can hear her speaking the words even now, as if I were playing myself a record of the conversation.
(I guess that’s because I thought about it so many times since then. And it struck me, and strikes me now, that it was a strange combination of games that Aileen was playing. First there was the bit about feeling like a girl, a virgin. And at the same time she kept coming on with the older but wiser routine and a heavy dose of the mother image. I couldn’t understand how she could be a virgin and a mother at the same time. As far as I know, that only happened once.)
During the six weeks of trading orgasms with Aileen, her genius of a husband never suspected a thing. I’m just about a hundred percent certain of that. I went on working with him, and I saw him at meals and during the evening, and neither of us acted any differently toward one another than we did before. I had thought for a while that I would be eaten up with guilt over what I was doing with Aileen. No such thing. It may be that I’m just not the type for guilt, that I’m of such low moral character that I can live under a man’s roof and take his money and share his bread and not feel bad about taking his beloved wife to bed. I think, though, that there’s more to it than that.
After all, I wasn’t doing a thing to Aileen behind his back that I hadn’t done to her right in front of him, with his approval. (Well, that’s pushing it, I guess; we did enlarge our bag of tricks, after all, and we went at them with a hell of a lot more enthusiasm. But you get the idea.) And she was still being faithful to him as far as their joint idea of fidelity was concerned. And, more than anything else, I knew damned well that I wasn’t taking anything away from Gregor. Just by listening to the creak of his bedsprings I could tell he was getting all the use he wanted out of Aileen.
I was like a conscientious kid with the family car. I never used it when the old man wanted it, and I always brought it home in as good condition as I took it out, with gas in the tank and air in the tires.
I suppose it must go without saying that I stopped picking up odd jobs on the days when Gregor didn’t need me. When it came to a choice between slipping cents-off coupons under doors or slipping fingers into Aileen, it was the world’s easiest decision for me to make.
I also stopped helping out in the darkroom. I think Gregor was surprised, but I let him get the impression that I was losing interest in photography as a lifetime career. Since he didn’t pay me for help, he couldn’t really bitch about it very strenuously.
I had never gotten around to finding out about getting my diploma by going to night school, and of course I couldn’t really do anything about it at that time of the year, it being the middle of the term, but I had planned to find out what I had to find out and write away to Upper Valley for transcripts of my record so that I could start taking courses during the summer session. I didn’t bother doing any of this, and when I thought about night school at all, I more or less thought in terms of starting in the fall instead of rushing things.
And I stopped going to the library as often as I had, and I stopped wandering around Chicago looking for women, and what it came down to, really, is that if I wasn’t working or sleeping or sitting around with Gregor and Aileen, then I was in bed with her. Those were just about the only four choices during that period of time.
I spent some money on clothes, and I bought things like new shoelaces and a nail file and like that, but even without working the other jobs I was saving money. I would earn between forty and fifty a week helping Gregor, and my room and board cost me twenty, and I still didn’t eat lunch, and it wasn’t at all hard to save fifteen or twenty dollars out of each week’s earnings, especially because I never left the house unless I had to. There was really no way for me to spend money, so I saved it.
This meant that by the end of May I had almost two hundred dollars, including the fifty for the modeling session. And because the money was accumulating with no strain at all I had the feeling that I was really getting somewhere and really making the kind of progress I had sworn I would make that first night at the Eagle Hotel.
When I think back on it now I wonder if maybe all of that sex was rotting my brain, because if there was one thing I wasn’t doing, it was getting ahead in the world. Not in any way at all. I mean, a good long look at the pattern my life had taken would make Horatio Alger throw up.
Instead of a job with a future, I was, let’s face it, working as sidekick to the world’s most pathetic photographer. That’s what he was, really. Taking candid pictures of morons on State Street and every few months making a big score by selling dirty pictures of his wife. And the dumbest part of it was that he worked harder for less money than if he’d been swinging a pick on a road gang, for Pete’s sake. He took risks and put in long hours on his feet and just took nickels and dimes out of the street photography business. The dirty pictures made his real income, and he would have to space out the cash over a period of several months until Mark called him up and asked for more.
Now and then I wondered why he didn’t go into the dirty picture business in a bigger way, hiring a variety of models and finding a way to distribute the pictures and making some real money. Not that I think being a pornographer is the best way to sail through life, but if you’re going to be one anyway, why not be a successful one? It seems to me that if a girl is going to be a whore, she might as well be an expensive one. Right? So if Gregor had been the Kingpin of Filth in Chicago, or if he at least tried to be the Kingpin, I would have respected him. Or if he was a complete bum who just tried to coast along on the least possible amount of work, that would have at least made sense. But he wasn’t lazy and he wasn’t ambitious either, and this was the guy I was working for, this was the man teaching me his trade.