Felt a great urge to destroy these pages. Like selling the store and fleeing Brooklyn. Running from the past. Satchel Paige — “Don’t look back, something might be gaining on you.” Don’t even think back lest you sense the pursuer’s presence in your wake.
Think this verbal diarrhea may be important. Read one of a series of articles in tonight’s Post on group therapy and encounter sessions. Read something last week on Women’s Lib and their consciousness-raising sessions. Couldn’t handle any of that. If I were invisible, if I could watch and listen, but not to function in that context, not me, never.
Think this may be serving a similar purpose for me, and safe because it is between me and me, with the typewriter as silent permissive nondirective therapist.
I block even now. Wrote nothing yesterday, and so resolved to place each entry where it will be safe not merely from intruders but from my own eyes The radiator has a cover with a hinged top. Beneath the top is a tray, slightly coated with rust, which one may fill with water to raise the humidity on arid winter nights. I’ve turned off that radiator, turned it off when I moved in. The one in the bathroom is enough to heat this little place. Yesterday I put my dozen pages of typescript in that tray, face down, and closed the hinged top. When I finish this, these pages will be added to the stack.
I wish I had written something yesterday. If only a line, a description of the weather, anything. I’ll try to do something every day from now on. It irks me, having missed the 19th of February.
Did today’s Double-Crostic in less than an hour. They’re so much more gratifying to solve than the usual puzzles. It’s a matter of cracking a code, of using the definitions to get words in the text and vice versa, until there is a sudden breakthrough with everything falling together, revealing itself. At the end it becomes a matter of filling in the last blanks as quickly as one can move the pencil. I always finish them, though.
I’m very good at them. I’m a clever person, logical and intuitive, with a quick mind. Though no one knows it.
And I am still not writing about Screw. It’s funny that I still can’t.
22 February — Monday
Worked late at the office. Just got home and too exhausted to bother with this, but I just yesterday resolved to do a line a day at least. It seems too soon to break a vow.
Mr. Karlman left me virtually nothing to do all day, then called me in for two dozen rush letters that had to go out tonight. Didn’t even leave for dinner. He called Smiler’s and they sent over corned beef sandwiches and coffee and we ate at our desks.
He wanted to drive me home. Would have driven me all the way out to Brooklyn but I insisted he drop me at the Union Square subway stop. He let me talk him into it. No one really wants to drive to Brooklyn in the middle of the night. I walked a few steps down into the stairwell, let him drive off, then took a cab home. $1.90 on the meter so I gave the driver $2.25. All to keep him from knowing I had moved to Manhattan.
Next time I’ll know better. Make a fake phone call, tell him I’m staying over with a girl friend rather than traipse to Brooklyn late at night. And have him drop me around the corner from where I live.
Why am I so devious when there’s nothing to be devious about?
Happy birthday, George Washington.
But today isn’t a holiday. The holiday was a week ago yesterday. And it was not a holiday at our office. We all came in, and got an extra day’s pay as a bonus.
Who cares about this? Not I. Just wasting time to avoid what I can’t write about.
Mr. Karlman is a flirt. I don’t know if he does anything about it or just wants to. Never flirts with me, though. Senses the futility of it, or else I don’t turn him on. Or both.
Came closer than ever last night. En route to the subway. Said, “I hate to go home alone on a night like this. My place is so much more comfortable when there’s someone in it with me.”
I said something suitably dumb about what a boon television is for lonely people. Purposely missing his pitch entirely. Caught a glimpse of his face, eyes turned heavenward in an attitude of God-what-a-simpleton-this-one-is. And will surely make no passes again at Arlene the Machine. At Krause the Mouse.
I suspect Jennifer might have handled things somewhat differently.
24 February — Wednesday
Bought the new issue of Screw today. Went to Times Square for it, which is silly, and sought out my blind news dealer, which is also silly. But bought it directly, walking straight from the bus to the stand, placing two quarters in the outstretched palm and saying, “Screw,” saying the word without hesitation. Carried a larger purse which accommodated the paper easily. It’s probably even easier to buy the Post and tuck Screw inside it, but I’d worry about it falling out.
I read the new issue all the way through. I am still shaky. I have been drinking coffee all night long and cannot be sure how much of my shakiness is from the coffee and how much from what I’ve read.
It is not like dirty books. Some of it is funny and some of it is tasteless and some of it is off-putting but all of it is real, vividly real. It is obsessed as I am obsessed, and it is about all of the things that I am about, and it is real.
It excites me but does not make me want to masturbate. I do so every night before I go to sleep, and the scenarios I write for Jennifer often grow from what I have read, but it gets me hot when I read it in rather a different way. It makes everything real and awakens me to possibilities, possibilities not for Jennifer in fantasy but for Arlene reborn as Jennifer in real three-dimensional life.
The ads.
I knew about the ads. I was not positive Screw carried them but knew they existed in underground sex tabloids of this sort. And in the bulletins of correspondence clubs. They sell those bulletins in the Times Square book stores; if I dared enter them I could buy one. They also sell them through the mail. The addresses are printed in Screw, if only I dared write for them.
(I knew all of this from the books I read. About swingers. About the sexual underground. People who meet each other through the mails. I read about it in nonfiction paperbacks, in cheap novels. And drew up fantasies along these lines. But it is wholly different to read ads placed by real people and know that they exist, that they are only a phone call or a letter away.)
I read the ads over and over, over and over. I know some of them by heart now. I play little games with myself, deciding which ads I would answer if I had the courage.
What am I afraid of?
Getting fucked? I have been fucked. I was fucked regularly by Gary, though less regularly toward the end of our marriage. I never hated it. I partly enjoyed it. Sometimes I had something that seemed vaguely like an orgasm. Never a real one. Just the frigid woman’s equivalent thereof.
It was never me that got fucked. It was something that happened to the body I was wearing at the time. That cock in my cunt never touched Me.
I don’t want to be fucked, or touched, or in any way open to anyone. I want to be an invisible watcher at an orgy. I want to be Jennifer.
I don’t know what I want.
I am so sad.
25 February — Thursday
My favorite ad has appeared in both my issues of Screw. Wednesday, when I pay fifty cents to a blind man for a third issue, I’ll be anxious to see if it still runs. As always, I’ll read the paper through from the beginning, skipping nothing, tantalizing myself like a child eating the cake first and saving the frosting for last. And I’ll even resist the impulse to skim the classifieds. I’ll take them in turn, hoping to stumble on his ad.