"No, tell her to wait."
I found a large towel and wrapped it about my waist. I walked into the other room. Sara was talking to Debra on the phone.
"Oh, here he is…"
Sara handed me the phone. "Hello, Debra?"
"Hank, where have you been?"
"In the bathtub."
"The bathtub?"
"Yes."
"You just got out?"
"Yes."
"What are you wearing?"
"I have a towel around my middle."
"How can you keep the towel around your middle and talk on the phone?"
"I'm doing it."
"Did anything happen?"
"No."
"Why?"
"Why what?"
"I mean, why didn't you fuck her?"
"Look, do you think I go around doing things like that? Do you think that's all there is to me?"
"Then nothing happened?"
"Yes."
"What?"
"Yes, nothing."
"Where are you going after you leave there?"
"My place."
"Come here."
"What about your legal business?"
"We're almost caught up. Tessie can handle it."
"All right."
I hung up.
"What are you going to do?" Sara asked.
"I'm going to Debra's. I said I'd be there in 45 minutes."
"But I thought we'd have lunch together. I know this Mexican place."
"Look, she's concerned. How can we sit around and chat over lunch?"
"I have my mind set on lunch with you."
"Hell, when do you feed your people?"
"I open at eleven. It's only ten now."
"All right, let's go eat…"
It was a Mexican place in a snide hippie district of Hermosa Beach. Bland, indifferent types. Death on the shore. Just phase out, breathe in, wear sandals and pretend it's a fine world.
While we were waiting for our order Sara reached out and dipped her finger into a bowl of hot sauce, and then sucked her finger. Then she dipped again. She bent her head over the bowl. Strands of her straight hair poked at me. She kept sticking her finger into the bowl and sucking.
"Look," I told her, "other people want to use that sauce. You're making me sick! Stop it."
"No, they refill it each time."
I hoped they did refill it each time. Then the food arrived and Sara bent and attacked it like an animal, just as Lydia used to do. We finished eating and then we went out and she got into her van and drove to her health food place, and I got in my Volks and started out toward Playa del Rey. I had been given careful directions. The directions were confusing, but I followed them and had no trouble. It was almost disappointing because it seemed when stress and madness were eliminated from my daily life there wasn't much left you could depend on.
I drove into Debra's yard. I saw a movement behind the blinds. She'd been watching for me. I got out of the Volks and made sure that both doors were locked since my auto insurance had expired.
I walked up and bing-bonged Debra's bell. She opened the door and seemed glad to see me. That was all right, but it was things like that which kept a writer from getting his work done.
92
I didn't do much the rest of the week. The Oaktree meet was on. I went to the track 2 or 3 times, broke even. I wrote a dirty story for a sex mag, wrote 10 or 12 poems, masturbated, and phoned Sara and Debra each night. One night I phoned Cassie and a man answered. Goodbye, Cassie.
I thought about breakups, how difficult they were, but then usually it was only after you broke up with one woman that you met another. I had to taste women in order to really know them, to get inside of them. I could invent men in my mind because I was one, but women, for me, were almost impossible to fictionalize without first knowing them. So I explored them as best I could and I found human beings inside. The writing would be forgotten. The writing would become much less than the episode itself until the episode ended. The writing was only the residue. A man didn't have to have a woman in order to feel as real as he could feel, but it was good if he knew a few. Then when the affair went wrong he'd feel what it was like to be truly lonely and crazed, and thus know what he must face, finally, when his own end came.
I was sentimental about many things: a woman's shoes under the bed; one hairpin left behind on the dresser; the way they said, "I'm going to pee…"; hair ribbons; walking down the boulevard with them at 1:30 in the afternoon, just two people walking together; the long nights of drinking and smoking, talking; the arguments; thinking of suicide; eating together and feeling good; the jokes, the laughter out of nowhere; feeling miracles in the air; being in a parked car together; comparing past loves at 3 am; being told you snore, hearing her snore; mothers, daughters, sons, cats, dogs; sometimes death and sometimes divorce, but always carrying on, always seeing it through; reading a newspaper alone in a sandwich joint and feeling nausea because she's now married to a dentist with an I.Q. of 95; racetracks, parks, park picnics; even jails; her dull friends, your dull friends; your drinking, her dancing; your flirting, her flirting; her pills, your fucking on the side, and her doing the same; sleeping together…
There were no judgments to be made, yet out of necessity one had to select. Beyond good and evil was all right in theory, but to go on living one had to select: some were kinder than others, some were simply more interested in you, and sometimes the outwardly beautiful and inwardly cold were necessary, just for bloody, shitty kicks, like a bloody, shitty movie. The kinder ones fucked better, really, and after you were around them a while they seemed beautiful because they were. I thought of Sara, she had that something extra. If only there was no Drayer Baba holding up that damned STOP sign.
Then it was Sara's birthday, November nth, Veterans' Day. We had met twice again, once at her place, once at mine. There had been a high sense of fun and expectancy. She was strange but individual and inventive; there had been happiness… except in bed… it was flaming… but Drayer Baba kept us apart. I was losing the battle to God.
"Fucking is not that important," she told me.
I went to an exotic food place at Hollywood Boulevard and Fountain Avenue, Aunt Bessie's. The clerks were hateful people-young black boys and young white boys of high intelligence that had turned into high snobbery. They pranced about and ignored and insulted the customers. The women who worked there were heavy, dreamy, they wore large loose blouses and hung their heads as if in some sleepy state of shame. And the customers were grey wisps who endured the insults and came back for more. The clerks didn't lay any shit on me, so they were allowed to live another day…
I bought Sara her birthday present, the main bit being bee secretion, which is the brains of many bees drained out of their collective domes by a needle. I had a wicker basket and in it, along with the bee secretion, were some chop sticks, sea salt, two pomegranates (organic), two apples (organic), and some sunflower seeds. The bee secretion was the main thing, and it cost plenty. Sara had talked about it quite a bit, about wanting it. But she said she couldn't afford it.
I drove to Sara's. I also had several bottles of wine with me. In fact, I had polished off one of them while shaving. I seldom shaved but I shaved for Sara's birthday, and Veterans' night. She was a good woman. Her mind was charming and, strangely, her celibacy was understandable. I mean, the way she looked at it, it should be saved for a good man. Not that I was a good man, exactly, but her obvious class would look good sitting next to my obvious class at a cafe table in Paris after I finally became famous. She was endearing, calmly intellectual, and best of all, there was that crazy admixture of red in the gold of her hair. It was almost as if I had been looking for that color hair for decades… maybe longer.
I stopped off at a bar on Pacific Coast Highway and had a double vodka-7. I was worried about Sara. She said sex meant marriage. And I believed she meant it. There was definitely something celibate about her. Yet I could also imagine that she got off in a lot of ways, and that I was hardly the first to have his cock rubbed raw against her cunt. My guess was that she was as confused as everybody else. Why I was agreeing to her ways was a mystery to me. I didn't even particularly want to wear her down. I didn't agree with her ideas but I liked her anyway. Maybe I was getting lazy. Maybe I was tired of sex. Maybe I was finally getting old. Happy birthday, Sara.