Jill Emerson
Sensuous
To JOHN WARREN WELLS
a jack-of-all-trades
and master of me...
13 February — Saturday
Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. It is also Sunday, which means that no mail will be delivered. But Monday’s mail will bring me no valentines. I have sent none. I will receive none.
My twenty-seventh Valentine’s Day. On my twentieth Valentine’s Day I got a present, a silver chain bracelet from the boy who would marry me four months later. On each of the next two Valentine’s Days he gifted me with candy.
I never liked candy. Hate gifts of it. Here, the box shrieks. Here, eat me and get fat! You might as well. No one cares if you’re fat or lean. No one.
Typical of Gary. So anxious to please and so incapable of it. Never flowers, which I would have loved. But candy, which I hate.
Typical, too, that I never told him. Two of us under a roof for two years and three months, neither of us ever able to take the clothing from our minds.
No one ever sent me flowers.
No one ever sent me a valentine.
I found the silver chain bracelet while packing things. On the floor in the back of the dresser. Tarnished, which seemed symbolically correct. Always — Gary. Always Gary, but not always Arlene’s Gary. Gone now four years and five months. Gone forever, and good riddance to both of us.
Is this going well? I wonder if this is going well. I wonder, for that matter, if it is in fact going. Or if I am going anywhere but mad.
Mother is almost a month dead. (All of this preoccupation with time. Mother is a month dead, Gary is four years and five months divorced, Daddy is — what? — twenty years dead, Arlene is twenty-six years old, twenty-seven in September. Time, time, time.)
Mother is dead and the store is sold and the apartment above it, home for all my life but for those years and months of marriage, quite vacant now. Mother is dead and in the ground, and she and Brooklyn join Daddy and Gary in the limbo of past time. Once part of my life and part of it no longer.
So I sit at a new Smith-Corona Electric Portable in a new apartment in a done-over brownstone on West 19th Street. I like this typewriter, so much faster and smoother than the rickety old Underwood, somehow sleeker than the Royal Standard in the office. And I like the apartment, clean, starkly clean, fresh, compact, looming with possibilities. And I like Chelsea better than Brooklyn.
But Arlene is the same Arlene. Mirrors tell her she’s pretty enough, dark of hair and fair of skin, long of leg and slim of waist and round if not protrusive of bosom. Pretty enough, mirrors say, but no one seems to notice. Arlene passes not merely in crowds but in near-empty rooms. Arlene turns no one on, and no one turns on Arlene, and she dreams her waking dreams of aching lust in secret. And does her finger exercises, the nightly ritual of lazy-fingered masturbation while her mind has her doing things that Arlene, poor thing, would never, never do.
Is this working?
A new typewriter and a fresh ream of bright white bond paper. Thick, twenty-pound paper, twenty-five per cent rag content. Crisp, clean paper to be covered by the tale of an idiot, full of sound and fury and loneliness and frustration.
I have kept diaries before. I never typed them. Almost invariably I began them with the new year, buying one of those lockable red diaries with the pages edged in gold. I never kept one for a full year.
And never wrote anything real in one.
They were the jottings of an utterly imaginative record keeper. Books I read, movies I watched, subjects in school, marks on tests. Never an entry that meant anything. Because I have always been so secretive a person that I could not reveal anything that anyone might someday find.
But now for the first time in my life I am alone. I have always been alone in many ways. Now I literally live alone, and no one but I shall ever be in this apartment. It seems unlikely that a burglar would read this diary, or care what he read. (Interesting, though, that the remote prospect does bother me. But I can chance it.)
I have no one to talk to. I have never had anyone to talk to. So I talk to my typewriter, and to myself.
I am alone and hate being alone and have always been alone and will always be alone and will always hate it. I am pretty and look plain and dull. I am bright and think of clever turns of phrase and never send my brightness past my lips, so everyone thinks me dull and witless.
I am passionate. Alone, in my mind’s eye, I am passionate. Obsessed with sex. Driven.
When anyone is near me I freeze.
Plain dull witless Arlene Krause. How I hate her. I even hate her name. Arlene, plastic and sprayed hair and no brains and boring. Krause, stolid and solid and thick and stupid, fat ankles and pimples and colds all winter.
The beautiful and bright and passionate Me has another name. Her name is Jennifer Starr and she has large breasts and tawny skin and a golden mane, and makes unbridled love with men and women, romping guiltless and shameless and joyous through my fantasies.
When I touch myself, and close my eyes and ears, and get slightly and briefly out of myself, it is never Arlene Krause whom I see behind my eyelids.
It is Jennifer Starr.
I think I shall go to bed now. Jennifer will be whipped tonight, I think. Ankles and wrists lashed to the X of a Saint Andrew’s cross. She will be beaten by a man and woman, and at first the pain will seem more than she can bear, but as the whipping continues she will find pleasure in the pain, and Jennifer will eat the woman while the man fucks her brutally in her asshole. And she will come gloriously, over and over and over.
I have never typed these words before. I have read them often, in deliciously filthy books that fuel the fires of fantasy. And I have occasionally written them. A dozen years ago there was a time when I would write every dirty word I knew, making meaningless obscene lists in pencil on ruled white notebook paper, then tearing the list into confetti lest anyone even suspect I knew those words.
I never talked to my mother. I don’t care that she’s dead. I never knew her. I don’t miss her. I am not glad that she is dead. Neither am I sorry.
I’ll probably throw all this shit away in the morning.
14 February — Sunday
Hello.
Hello, Smith-Corona Electra 110.
I didn’t throw all this shit away in the morning. In the morning I got up and made myself instant coffee. I went out and bought the Times and lugged it all home and read most of it. I did most of the crossword puzzle. There was no Double-Crostic. Just a pair of diagramless puzzles. I’ve never understood how one does them. I’ve a feeling no one in the world really knows how.
Then what did I do? Went out for a walk. Had beef lo mein at a Cuban Chinese restaurant on Eighth Avenue. Walked some more. Came back. Played the radio. Let disc jockeys talk to me. Didn’t talk back. Didn’t even listen.
It is now somewhere past nine o’clock in the evening of my first full day in my new apartment. So far today I have spoken perhaps ten words to the waiter in the restaurant, all of those words having to do with my dish of beef lo mein and my eventual desire for the check. I did not have to say anything to the news dealer. I picked up the Times, handed him a dollar, took my change. He may have thanked me. I don’t remember.
If I were to get up from the typewriter right now and cut my wrists, no one would know until the smell of my rotting corpse scurried under the door. They might miss me at the office — and they might not miss me at all — but they do not know that I have moved, and I left no forwarding address in Brooklyn.