You picked a good day to take yourself and Fran out of my life. I got home early that afternoon because they canned me at Ronald Rabbit’s. They finally figured out that I was a captain without a ship, and instead of finding another ship for me they cut me adrift and let me swim. You’d love the story, but I’ve already written it all to Lisa and I don’t want to go through it again. It wasn’t that much fun to live through, let alone to write about. If you ever have an affair with Lisa (after all, there are only three hundred people in the world, and sooner or later they all sleep with each other), maybe you can get her to show you the letter. Or if you ever meet Clay Finch, he’ll give you his side of it.
I got home from Ronald Rabbit’s with my cottontail between my legs, and found that you had hied yourself south with my wife and my fifteen hundred dollars. I know it’s ungallant as all hell for me to say this, and you may not want to show this part of the letter to Fran, assuming you want to show her any of it, but of the two, I rather miss the fifteen hundred more. I had a use for it, what with a drawer full of bills and alimony to pay and no money coming in. I had a use for Fran, but we must face facts. If one takes a walk down the street, one has a much better chance of picking up a woman than of picking up fifteen hundred dollars.
An even harder thing to pick up this late in life is a best friend. Much as my first impulse was to hate you, I’ve decided it would be silly to throw off a fifteen-year friendship over something like this. At the moment you’re near the top of my shit list. There’s no getting around that. But I know that you have a sense of honor, and sooner or later you’ll send back the fifteen hundred and all will be forgiven. If, on the other hand, you keep the fifteen hundred and return Fran, I swear I’ll hunt you down and cut your fucking throat for you.
Jesus, I hope this letter gets to you. I don’t suppose you were expecting mail, but if I know you, you’ll check with American Express in every town you hit, whether anyone knows you’re going to be there or not. And Fran is just about as compulsive that way. I think I’ll put something on the envelope about forwarding it to Cuernavaca if you don’t call for it in two or three weeks. Fran said (well, wrote, actually) that you wanted to go to Cuernavaca to photograph the ruins.
I didn’t know there were ruins in Cuernavaca. For that matter, I didn’t know you had this big thing for photographing ruins. If you wanted ruins to photograph, old buddy, you didn’t have to go all the way to Cuerna-fucking-vaca to take pictures of them. You could have come over to Bleecker Street and worked your shutter to the bone.
In fact, precisely that notion was going through my mind when I finished the letter to Lisa. I put a lot of stamps on it and mailed it, and then I went over to the Kettle of Fish and behaved as though they were going to reintroduce Prohibition on the morrow. I drank Irish whiskey for a while, and then I drank some India Pale Ale. Do you remember the time we got totally wiped out on India Pale Ale at the Riviera, and we wound up taking this cab full of conventioneers to Harlem and pimping for them? Of course you remember, how could you forget, how could anybody forget?
Ah, those were the days, Steverino...
I didn’t get totally wiped out this time, however. I kept on drinking, gradually slowing the pace and letting myself get wrapped up by first the jukebox and then some old thoughts. I’d planned on devoting the major portion of the evening to self-pity. In fact I was looking forward to it. But self-pity is like cops and cabs and women — it’s never there when you want it. I would try to tell myself how classically desperate my situation was, how absolutely everything had gone wrong at once, even to Jennifer having her period.
I know that you know about Jennifer, but I don’t know whether or not you told Fran. I was wondering about that as I sloshed down the India Pale Ale, as it happens, and I tried to put myself in your position. If I were fucking the wife of my best friend, I asked myself, and if I happened to know that said best friend had an occasional piece on the side, would I tell the best friend’s wife about it? I could see one good reason to do so. It could lessen her guilt, after all. I mean, cheating on a cheater is just turnabout, which we all know is fair play.
But on second thought, I decided that if I were fucking my best friend’s wife, the last thing I would want to do is cut down the guilt. I mean, man, without the guilt, what would be left of your relationship? You can both feel guilty about how you’re giving the shaft to old Laurence with a U, Clarke with an E. Your mutual guilt holds you together, no? The day you begin to exorcise my ghost, the day there’s just the two of you in that bed without my ectoplasmic presence to keep you company, that’s the day you two will begin to fall apart.
I’m a sneaky son of a bitch, aren’t I?
Ah, well. If you haven’t told Fran about Jennifer, you might as well tell her now. I’m glad I told you, Steve, and I’m also glad I never introduced you to Jennifer or you might have taken them both along to old Me-hee-co. Who steals a man’s wife steals trash, but he who steals a mistress—
Speaking of trash, I have a thing to tell you, Steve, and I don’t know how to do it without violating the bounds of good taste. The thing is, even without self-pity, I did find myself thinking a lot about my relationship with Fran. Naturally I was seeing it in a new light now. For something like three months she had been having an affair with you, and I was just now learning about it.
(Incidentally, where did you screw? Our apartment or your loft? It’s hard for me to believe that you spent all that much time together. Fran didn’t have too many unexplained absences. Oh, well. If you ever reply to this letter, you might let me know how you worked out the mechanics of the affair. I find myself oddly, even dispassionately, interested in that sort of thing. God knows why.)
What I realized in the Kettle, though, was that although I never suspected anything at the time, anything at all, I could in retrospect almost put a date on the beginning of your affair with Fran.
It must have started just about the time she wouldn’t swallow.
Oh, hell. There’s no way to be tasteful about this. And I could not mention it at all, but the typewriter tells me it wants to discuss it, and I already explained about giving this typewriter its head.
And that’s what this anecdote is about, anyway. The giving of head.
Well, I don’t suppose I have to tell you that Fran gives sensational head, Steve. You probably think the girl is a born cocksucker. Actually, I can say with a certain amount of pride that I taught her virtually everything she knows in that department. When I first meet your mistress, Steveroo, she was a far cry from the Oral Vacuum Cleaner she is today. Oh, she was willing enough to play the flute, you understand, but she kept hitting the wrong notes. But a willing pupil, God knows, who ultimately earned the title Miss Million Dollar Mouth. As a matter of fact, it was her skill in this area which moved me to propose marriage, and at the actual moment when I popped the question (among other things) she was physically incapable of answering, her parents having schooled her not to talk with her mouth full.
Good taste does seem to have gone by the boards, doesn’t it?
But one evening in March, probably a day or two after you two commenced your playlet of star-crossed lovers, Fran and I went to bed, and stroked and petted in the usual fashion, and then I crouched on hands and knees and paid oral homage to the little man in the boat. (We had gradually weeded soixante-neuf out of our repertoire, on the theory that it was better to concentrate on one thing at a time.)
Fran had herself a nice hearty orgasm. I’m sure she didn’t try to tell you that she and I stopped balling in the course of her affair with you, but it’s possible she fed you some shit about not having orgasms with me, or faking them. I wouldn’t blame her for that lie, and neither should you, Steve. Just a white lie, after all. And I don’t imagine you would have been stupid enough to believe it, anyway. You know what Fran’s like when she comes. All those delicious contractions, and the subtle taste of egg white. She could no more fake that than Vesuvius could counterfeit an eruption.