There is a phone. I don’t know why I had them put it in. No one will call me, and I shall call no one. But there is indeed a phone. Its number is unlisted. No one could get my number from the telephone company. They take this trust as seriously as the Swiss take numbered accounts.
I pay extra for my unlisted number. Why? Who would want to call me? And what makes me so anxious not to be called?
Not that I would ever cut my wrists, or otherwise put an end to myself. It cheers me to realize that I have never found suicide attractive. It has no charm for me. Death would be even more boring than the life I lead. And would last longer.
I fell less depressed than these words would suggest. I feel oddly elated and cannot entirely understand why. There is a sense of liberation in this total solitude. There is a sense of liberation in being alone in a new place with no ties whatsoever to the past. A new living situation suggests the possibility of a new life.
Yes. Thus the elation.
I feel — how to explain it? I feel that I am en route to something. That I am about to grow. That the bud of me is swelling and preparing to flower.
I thought of something wonderful to do. Go out and buy a dozen valentines. Send them, unsigned and with no return address, to a dozen strangers selected at random from the Manhattan telephone directory. Or sign each with the name of one of the others, and put on the appropriate return address.
Too late now. Next year, perhaps.
15 February — Monday
It is impossible to see anything interesting from my windows. There are two apartments I might be able to see into but they always keep their shades pulled. I have checked compulsively since I moved in, and the shades have always been drawn. Perhaps they will be up in the heat of the summer. Some people keep their shades drawn in cool weather but leave them up in summer. Neither of the windows in question sports an air-conditioner, so there’s hope.
I have always yearned to watch people fuck.
No, there’s more to it than that. To watch them do anything at all. To be unobserved while observing. When I was a child I dreamed of being invisible. It is a dream I still entertain occasionally in fantasy.
I did not tell anyone at the office that I have moved. So no one knows I live here. And no one will ever know.
Tonight Jennifer and her husband, a swarthy stevedore, will initiate a younger couple into the pleasures of wife- swapping and group sex.
That’s always been a good one.
16 February — Tuesday
I am incapable of action.
Why?
Hell.
This afternoon on the way home from work I saw an underground paper at a newsstand. Screw. I have heard of this paper and have read about it but never saw it before. I don’t believe the Brooklyn newsstands carry it. At least I never saw any of them displaying it.
I wanted to buy it and I couldn’t.
What is the matter with me? The news dealer does not know me. He does not even look at the people who buy the papers from him. Or remember their faces. Why am I incapable of buying a newspaper called Screw? Why, when I am so desperately anxious to read it?
17 February — Wednesday
I bought Screw.
Not from the newsstand where I first saw it. I passed that stand again, and hesitated, but could not do it. Instead I walked almost home. At Eighth Avenue I took a bus to 42nd Street and walked around Times Square.
I did this several times when I lived in Brooklyn. Rode in on the BMT and walked the same blocks over and over again. Oddly elevated every time, frightened yet exhilarated. The book stores, the movie houses, the black girls whoring on Seventh Avenue, the midnight cowboys draping themselves against 42nd Street store fronts.
Men can go to these places. Buy the books, see the movies, move at ease through this world of peep shows and model studios and a thousand forms of tawdry sex. And I yearn to do this. I read the books we carried in the candy store, spirited them upstairs when Mother was not watching, tucked them back into the pockets of the rack when I was done with them. I don’t suppose the books on Times Square are any more candid than the ones I read in my room with the door locked. But it would be good to be able to know. It would be good to be able to see the movies.
To be invisible. Because a woman would have to be invisible to do this, wouldn’t she?
I wonder.
I suppose a woman could go to a book store or a peep show or a movie without being bothered. The men who go there do not seem aggressive. She would be noticed, though. She would be stared at. Violated in the mind, raped by eyes and brains.
Arlene could not go. Jennifer would go, and be picked up, and enjoy herself, but Arlene extends herself merely by walking apprehensively down those mean and bitter streets.
The schemes that grow up in my mind. I could wear men’s clothing and hide my hair under a cap. Frigid, unapproachable Arlene in butch drag, walking with a sailor’s rolling swagger, buying books and sex toys, dropping quarters in a peep show machine, sitting in the darkness of a grubby theater between rows of panting onanists.
Years ago women wore men’s clothes in order to be served ale at McSorley’s. Arlene in male garb, liberating the world of pornography. Arlene in drag, invisible at last.
With my luck I’d be taken for a male hustler, latched onto by some Long Island closet queen who’d want to suck my nonexistent cock.
But I bought Screw. Went there to buy it and stalked three newsstands. Settled on a blind man, delighted to be invisible in his eyes.
How can I be so fully aware of the dimensions of my neuroses and yet so utterly their victim?
Bought it. Picked an issue off a stack. Had the right change, two quarters sweat-dampened in my palm. Dropped them in the blind man’s hand. And said, “Screw.”
Screw, blind man. Screw, Times Square. Screw, fuck, shit, piss, damn, cunt, cock, prick, whore, bitch, hell. Screw!
Folded it small as if to stuff it into a fortune cookie. Crammed it into my purse. Back downtown on the Ninth Avenue bus past shuttered meat markets and produce stalls and tenements. Near empty bus. Visions all the way of my purse springing open and Screw leaping out, unfolding magically on its way to the floor. And every eye turned on me, staring with lust and contempt at her who would purchase filth.
Home, and dizzily proud of myself for buying it. Such a pathetic act to generate pride.
And sat reading it. Reading it over and over and over.
And now sit staring at the typewriter looking at the last sentence and unable to go on. I have to write about all this but I can’t. Maybe tomorrow.
18 February — Thursday
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Was buying Screw that step?
Oh, I don’t know. Don’t know, either, where the journey might lead me. Or if I want to go there. Or if that projected thousand-mile jaunt might not end prematurely, end with that single step.
Things are so much simpler for Jennifer Starr.
21 February — Sunday
No entry since Thursday. Sat down prepared to write and made a mistake. Read through what I had written so far.
Embarrassment at my own words. Not shame. No shame for either the self-revelation or the occasionally forbidden words. Nothing on these pages I haven’t previously shaped in thought.
What I felt was not shame but exposure. Arlene sprawled naked on the neatly typed page. Thighs wide apart, holding her labia open for the camera of her own inner vision.