I Am Curious (Thirty)

February 17

It has been, let me see, more than two weeks since the last entry. Fifteen days, to be precise.

I never thought I would come back to the book. I didn’t even finish the last entry, I see now. I don’t remember what happened, whether I was interrupted by a jangling telephone or what. Probably what, she said archly.

Come to the point.

Yes, Doctor. Yes, you there in the mirror. The point. The point is that there is no point. I wonder how I expected to end that last entry. Having fantasies of things. Oh, yes. All manner of things.

I want to get this all down and make it right. I want to get it down right now as fast as I can. I don’t know what is going to happen next. I’m in this plastic motel that I don’t remember the name of, a Holiday Inn or Howard Johnson’s and I can’t remember which, and writing in this book, and trying to get it all down before it gets away.

Friday I was supposed to meet him in the city. Howie, that is, in New York. We do this occasionally. When we first made the move to Eastchester we swore we would do this once a week. After all, it’s simple enough to come in from the suburbs for a night on the town. Especially when you don’t have children. You just drive in and meet him after work and have a drink and dinner and a show and more drinks at a nightclub and then drive back to your happy little home in the country. The best of both worlds.

We did this every week at first, and then it gradually tapered off to once or twice a month. But Friday it was all set, he had tickets to I Love You Under the Olive Trees, and we were meeting at Gatsby’s at five-thirty.

It got called on account of snow. The worst storm of the season, and the Central canceled trains, and I couldn’t get the car out anyway to meet him at the station. Scratch Friday.

I don’t remember very much of Saturday, during the day. We stayed around the house mostly.

It doesn’t matter.

Saturday night there was a party at the Cargill’s. Edgar and Marcie were there, and Bill and Missie, and Walter and Lenore, the usual crowd.

There was nothing wrong with the party.

Just as there had been nothing wrong with the daytime, some sort of postseason exhibition football game — the fucking football games never stop, all weekend long whenever I look at the set he is in front of it and a football game is on it, it used to be just in the fall but now it never stops, preseason and postseason and season and training, nothing but football.

But there was nothing wrong with this, you see, that’s the whole point, that there was nothing wrong with it. That it was all perfectly normal, perfectly usual. The usual people at the usual party, the usual conversations, the usual drinks. Good New York suburban conversations. Wasn’t the President a horse’s ass, and would the war ever stop, and how the price of absolutely everything was going up, and some learned commentary on the wage-price spiral by Herb Gardenia, and Missie leasing Walter because Walter had once announced that he had smoked marijuana a couple of times, and general agreement that we would all like to try it, and unspoken certainty shared by all of us that of course we never would, or if we did it would be in the privacy of our own homes, away from each other, like masturbating. Does pot give you pimples? Or make you go blind?

(I smoked in college. Didn’t everybody? Didn’t we all of us smoke a couple of sticks of pot in college? And now we all pretend it never happened, each of us shielding ourselves from each other and I don’t care about the grammar in that sentence, I couldn’t care less about it if you want to know the truth. I smoked one time, a boy named Eddie turned me on. It was no sex thing, my roommate and I turned on with him. It was supposed to be this great experience. It was nice. Maybe we didn’t have enough of it. I remember being involved in words, caught up in what people said, finding new levels of meaning in everything.)

Nowadays I guess all the kids smoke. They all do everything these days. We were all born too soon. Five or ten years too soon. Everything is changing, completely turning inside out. Kids do all the things we sort of reached out for, and they do them easily and beautifully and without any guilt. And we live in Eastchester and drink too much and play with ourselves.

I just went to the bathroom. I thought I was going to throw up but it seems not to have been in the cards. I think it’s probably better to throw up than to want to throw up and not be able to. I think I shouldn’t have brought the liquor here with me. I think I shouldn’t drink at all.

I drank too much at the party.

I necked with Edgar Hillman.

The thing is that I had never thought of Edgar as attractive. He must be almost forty, and he’s lost about as much hair as he’s kept. The one attractive thing about him is that he has gone bald in front, his hairline receding more and more, and this doesn’t look so bad. It’s when a man has a bald spot in the middle of his head, an island of skin in a sea of hair, that I find it slightly ridiculous. But Edgar also has a spreading waist, and little eyes which are closer together than they might ideally be, and a nose with big pores in it. They told me that if I squeezed my pimples I would get enlarged pores. I squeezed any number of them and never got one.

What must have rendered Edgar attractive, I guess, is that Marcie had already told me that Edgar fluttered like a bee from flower to flower. (More precisely, she said that he would screw a snake if someone would hold its head.) The knowledge that he’s out there screwing all those snakes evidently got to me. Perhaps it’s a case of being unable to trust my own taste. If all those other women find Edgar attractive enough to have affairs with, they must be right, and he must be attractive, and thus I must be attracted to him.

There’s also the fact that I drank too much at the party.

The drinking helped cast a fine haze over everything, both at the time and in memory. I don’t know how we got into the room where they kept the coats. The bedroom, that is to say. The coals were piled on the bed. But somehow it’s a good deal less compromising lo think of oneself being in the coatroom with one’s best friend’s husband than in the bedroom.

“Jan, Jan, Jan,” he said. When people have nothing to say they repeat one’s name pointlessly. “Having a wonderful time, you wonderful girl?”

“Well, it’s a party.”

“It is indeed.”

“And people always have wonderful times at parties.”

“They do if they know what’s good for them.” He grinned owlishly, except that owls have their eyes spaced much farther apart. “You know,” he said, “I’ve had my eye on you for a long time now.”

“Which one?”

“Eh?”

“Which eye have you had on me?”

“Clever,” he said, moving toward me, eyes atwinkle. Both eyes atwinkle. Both beady eyes atwinkle. “I like women with something in their heads, you know. I like clever women.”

“Do you really?”

“I’ve always admired you, Jan.”

Then he kissed me. I didn’t discourage this. Quite the reverse, I guess. I opened my mouth and wrapped my arms around him, and he, the cute little rascal, stuck his tongue in my mouth.

We clung like that for what I think was a rather long time, neither separating nor quite managing to spill ourselves onto the bed, where we could have had a choice of fucking on Marcie’s silver-blue mink or Lenore’s beaver. Instead we just clung, and he groped me a little, and then we broke apart, both of us a trifle breathless.

“Jan,” he said.

“Oh, I don’t know, Edgar. Maybe we ought to go join the party.”

“We’re the party, doll.”

“I just don’t know about all this, Edgar.”

“I’m crazy about you, Jan.”

“Oh, and Marcie’s my friend and all—”

“Marcie doesn’t understand me. I’m really crazy about you, Jan.”

It was the talk that decided it. I just wasn’t stoned enough to handle that dialogue. He was crazy about me and his wife didn’t understand him. Bullshit, she explained. No, at that very moment Edgar made my decision for me. We were not going to have an affair.

But we did have a little genteel struggle. We did roll around on top of Marcie’s mink, and he did sort of lie on top of me and agitate his hips in a not unfamiliar motion, and I could feel his penis rubbing against me through his pants, and did, if the truth be known, handle it a little. It was large enough to impress me favorably, but not so monstrous as to be desirable in and of itself, separate and distinct from its owner.

And he did put a hand under my dress and a finger where one puts fingers, and we did rock and roll a bit in harmony, and ultimately he quivered and stiffened and said something actionable about loving me, and then relaxed, which I took to mean that he had come in his pants. So I guess we had what we in my lamented youth used to call a dry fuck. It wasn’t much fun now, but then it hadn’t been much fun then, either.

Edgar rolled off me, found his breath again, and put his hand back under my skirt and said something gallant about making me come. I said something about letting me go instead, which I guess was fine with him. I went to the bathroom and washed up, feeling a little like Lady Macbeth. All the perfumes of Arabia—

There were no kicks with Edgar. The kicks came back with the others, feeling a little soberer now but remedying that with a fresh drink, and fitting myself back again into the inane conversation, and looking around the room and thinking to myself that I had a secret from all these wonderful people. I know something you don’t know — do kids still chant that? Their parents do.

It felt good, having the secret. For about the same reasons it does when you’re a kid.

But then a thought came to me and almost knocked me over. Because, just as a little earlier I had wondered how many of my good friends and true had smoked pot at one time or another and now pretended it had never happened, well, I found myself wondering how many of the women had necked with Edgar. Or with Howard. And just who had slept with whom, and if anyone was currently sleeping with whom, and—

See? No major revelation. Just a new way of looking at things.

It seems as though I keep coming up with new ways of looking at things and I still have only the same old things to look at.

I don’t particularly remember the last half hour or so of the party. Neither did Howie. One of us drove us both home — probably him, because I think I was higher than he was for a change. And we went to sleep. The next day was Sunday, and instead of a football game there was a basketball game, and I called out for a pizza for dinner, and we watched some shows on television and went to sleep early.

Monday was today. Today, that is, is Monday. And it started with yet another snowstorm, which piled new snow on the old snow and new snow on the few places Howie had shoveled. We made the trip to the train station before too much of the white garbage came down but by late morning the driveway was socked in fairly solid again. Not that I had anyplace to go.

Quit stalling. Get to the point.

But this is the point, or part of it. I was sitting around thinking that I couldn’t go anywhere, and thinking that I had no place to go, and thinking, finally, that this was what it all added up to, that I was free and white, and twenty-nine and had no place to go. And that it was going to go on like this forever.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

I mean, I hadn’t originally planned a life of nothingness. It was never my idea. I don’t suppose it ever is, is it? Life has a strange way of happening to people. I don’t know many people who, at about this time of life, thirty or so, are doing what they originally set out to be doing. Doctors and lawyers, yes — but people who had vague ideas and who went to college and drifted through it and then got a job and quit it and got another. Or girls, in particular. We wanted so much not to be mere housewives that even now we join discussion groups and take evening courses and do all sorts of things to convince ourselves we are not mere housewives, and when all is said and done that’s precisely what we are, and the dumb little games we play only prove it.

I just went down the hall for some coffee. They have a row of machines, coffee and cigarettes and candy and soft drinks and ice. A person could stay here forever if she didn’t run out of quarters. I think I need the coffee.

He came to the door at a quarter after one. When I opened the door I looked at him and thought it was the bag-carrier from the Pathmark. Looked nothing like him on second glance, but even I can see the implications. You don’t need a psych degree. He was tall and rangy with a shock of once-combed black hair and the healthily stupid (or stupidly healthy) face that athletes have at Midwestern colleges. I couldn’t imagine what he wanted. He was holding an aluminum snow shovel over his shoulder, so I should have been able to figure it out, but the old mind wasn’t working all that well.

He said, “Shovel your walk, ma’am?”

I absolutely hate being called ma’am. As must everyone.

“Oh,” I said, cleverly. “Oh, yes, that would be good.”

“Walk and driveway?”

“Yes.”

“And I guess the path to the front door?”

“Yes, fine.”

“Right,” he said. He was wearing a sheepskin jacket with the hood thrown back. No gloves. His hands were quite large. Designed for gripping a football or basketball. Or a breast.

“Well,” I said, and he turned to begin the job, and I started to close the door. Then something occurred to me. I had forgotten to settle a price.

“It’s ten dollars,” he said.

“It’s that much?”

“That’s the going rate, ma’am.”

“Oh. Well, I guess that’s all right, then.” It seemed exorbitant, and none the less so because it was the going rate, but one learns to rely on order in an ever-changing world. I seemed to remember boys shoveling paths and walks and much longer driveways than ours for just a dollar. But everything else had gone up, and my memories were of longer ago than I cared to realize. I wonder, now that I think about it, how much he could have demanded without my objecting? Twenty dollars? A hundred? The keys to the car? What?

I went inside, I closed the door. And, between cups of instant coffee and half-smoked cigarettes, I kept finding myself sneaking to the window to watch him. At first I honestly didn’t realize what I was doing. Then I did, but that didn’t make it easier to stop it. Au contraire, mon cher.

I spilled a cup of coffee on the table. I mopped it up with a dish towel, which was slightly brainless. I stopped myself on the way to the window.

I felt — I don’t know how to describe it. Drunk? Maybe. It was a little like being drunk, like occasional states of drunkenness in which you can almost feel another mind taking control of your head. I was still me, but somehow it was a different kind of me, and the everyday me was still in there, watching, taking it all in, but not able to do much about anything.

Is that schizophrenic? I don’t know, I’ve never been out with one.

(This coffee is terrible.)

I went to the bathroom and stood under the shower for a while, letting the hot spray hit me on the back of the neck. This is usually better than a tranquilizer, and it sort of worked; I could feel the tension literally draining from my flesh. I got out, I dried off. I shaved my legs and armpits (I love that word, it’s so wonderfully crude), and fantasied shaving my pubic area. I have never done this but have often wanted to. To recapture youth? I don’t think so. I think it conjures up visions of Oriental cathouses or something. If I did it, I wonder how long it would be before Howie noticed.

I didn’t shave it. But I did put a little cologne on it, and some more between the breasts and under the arms and behind the ears. And did all this still thinking in at least one part of my mind that I wasn’t actually going to do anything, that this was just playacting, a costume for a role I would not perform.

I put on a terrycloth robe. Nothing under it. Except, she said vampishly, me. Then I went to the bedroom and put on my diaphragm. I had stopped taking the pill when Howie and I decided that we had to have children to go with the house and the station wagon. I didn’t want to have children, but if I was going to have them it seemed only fair to let Howie father them.

I watched him finish shoveling the path. The walk and driveway were already done. I checked myself in the mirror, looking to see if there was a gleam in my eye, a telltale gleam in my eye. I checked both eyes and saw no gleam, but I did seem to look younger and fresher than I had lately. Imagination? Wish father to the thought?

He came to the door. So did I, from its other side, and opened it. If he noticed that I had changed from sweater and slacks to bathrobe he chose to ignore it.

“All done,” he said.

“You did a good job.”

“Be no trouble getting the car out now.”

“You must be tired.”

“Well, it’s pretty hard work, but I don’t mind.”

“Why don’t you come in and have a cup of coffee?”

“Well, uh, thanks, but I don’t really care for coffee.”

I think groaned inwardly is what I did then. It seemed vital to get him inside. What could I offer him? Milk and cookies? Did we even have any in the house?

“How about a beer?”

“Well—” A tough decision for him. He didn’t want to come in but he really wanted the beer. The beer won.

We sat at the kitchen table. There was just one goddamned bottle of beer left in the refrigerator. Howie drinks it when he watches ball games, never otherwise. I guess it fits his self-image then. He also is apt to take his shoes off and pick his feet. One trouble with marriage is that when people are truly relaxed in one another’s company they let down their defenses and become genuinely disgusting.

I gave him the beer and made another cup of coffee for myself. We talked. The conversation went something like this:

ME: Do you go to school?

HIM: Over at East Central.

ME: I suppose they closed the schools today.

HIM: No, I cut when there’s a lot of snow. See, I can make thirty or forty bucks in a day. My old man gives me a note that I was sick.

ME: And you just go door to door looking for work?

HIM: That’s right.

ME: You must meet a lot of interesting people that way.

HIM: Well, just people, you know.

ME: A lot of lonely women.

HIM: Well, see, all I do is I shovel their snow, see, so I don’t really get to know too much about them.

ME: Oh, I’m sure a lot of them make a play for you.

HIM: I wouldn’t say that. And you know, most of them are pretty old, see, and there’s usually kids around the house or something.

ME: As old as me, for instance?

HIM: You’re not old.

ME: How old do you think I am?

HIM: Oh, I don’t know. I’m terrible at guessing ages. But to me a person is old or they’re not, see, and I would say that you’re not.

ME: Do you think I’m attractive?

HIM: You know, I’m getting funny feelings from this conversation. Like a little lost, if you know what I mean.

ME: Aren’t you going to answer my question?

HIM: I think you’re very attractive.

ME: (opening her robe): Do you really think so?

HIM: Jesus Christ.

If there seem to be parallels between this and The Graduate rest assured that I was painfully aware of them at the time. But if I was less adept at this than Mrs. Robinson, he was neither as sensitive nor as reluctant as Benjamin, which made things somewhat easier. We went to the bedroom (I almost wrote upstairs) after a couple of urgent kisses in the kitchen and another in the hallway. He was in a fantastic hurry and seemed hard put to decide whether to undress or to have me as soon as possible. He sat down on the edge of the bed and took off his shoes and socks, then his pants, then his shirt. He had his underpants on still. I got out of the robe and kicked off my slippers. He was staring at my breasts almost as intently as I was staring at the bulge in his underpants.

I said, “You’re wearing too many clothes.”

He looked down at his underpants and blushed.

And took them off.

His penis was good sized and oddly shaped. At least it looked unusual to me. I haven’t seen that many cocks. Howie’s, three boys in college, and a few pictures and statues, but the pictures and statues were never of erect ones. I suppose they must show erect ones in the little pornography shops around Times Square. I suppose there are some women who are ballsy enough to go into one of those shops and buy a magazine with pictures of men’s cocks. I am not one of those women.

This particular cock was sort of cone-shaped, much thicker at the base than at the tip, sort of like an inverted ice-cream cone.

I got on my knees in front of him and kissed the tip of it and then took its head in my mouth.

“Oh, Jesus! Oh my God!”

He was enormously excited, and worried I guess that he wouldn’t be able to make it last. He reached for me. I climbed on top of him. His hands went immediately to my breasts. I hardly noticed them. I didn’t want to be handled, I didn’t want him to touch me at all. In fact I didn’t want him to do anything. I wanted to do, I wanted to fuck him and not the other way around, I wanted to do it.

I got on my knees and I straddled him and I took his cone-shaped cock in my hand and rubbed it across myself (say the word! rubbed it across my cunt) and lowered myself on it and it sank in, sank all the way in and this feeling went through me, all through my body, and it was like losing my virginity it was exactly like that and I came instantly the instant he was inside me I came and came through my entire body, a total orgasm that hit me without any real prior excitement, there was no getting hot first, there was just this quick rush of orgasm. I came in a flash, that is what it was, that is exactly what it was, I came in a flash.

He was starting to move his hips.

I said, “No, lie still, please, lie still, let me do.”

He did and I did. He lay still, and I lifted and lowered, up and down, up and down, and at first it was mechanical, which is not to say that my heart was not in it because it most definitely was, but that I was getting nothing out of this but the aesthetic pleasure of fucking him well. But I had every desire to do just that. And somewhere along the way there was more than a spirit of amateur professionalism on my part, more than the delight in craftsmanship, and I knew that I was going to come again. I felt excitement mounting up again and knew I was going to make it, and I ground faster and faster against him, leaning way forward so that the top of his shaft rubbed against my clitoris (what a sweet word, except I don’t honestly know how to pronounce it, whether you accent the clit or say it so that it rhymes with Horace and Boris and Morris, it being a word you read more often than you speak it aloud) and I kept doing that so that I was using his cock to masturbate with, that is what I truly was doing, and I knew it at the time, and that somehow added to the excitement of the act. He was a tool, his tool was a tool. I was using him. Which was probably why I wanted to be on top and why I wanted to do everything and not be touched by him. The dominant female.

Sometimes I have fantasied while abusing myself that I was one of those women in the pervert magazines all done up in leather corsets and high heels and having sex with a man tied in a chair. I don’t think I would really like that but I like the fantasy. Maybe I would like the act also.

I liked this act, though. I was just about to make it, and I was looking down at his face, and his eyes were closed and his teeth clenched, and he started to twitch and he made it and I felt his come spurt into me, jets of it, he must have been saving it up for weeks, and I watched his face as he came, and that did it, that sent me over the edge, and I came with him and fell forward and almost passed out on top of him, his cock still inside me, still reasonably hard, and I almost blacked out.

It was hard to get rid of him, because he wanted to talk and he wanted to be tender (God forbid!) and he also wanted to do it a second time. I wanted nothing more than for him to get out of my bed and my bedroom and my house and my life. I figured it was easier to lay him than to talk to him, so I put my finger to his lips and got back in bed with him. I was smoking a cigarette, and I lay back on the pillow smoking the cigarette while he stroked my breasts and kissed them. He wasn’t very good at this, but it excited him, which was probably why he was doing it. He couldn’t have had much experience with girls. I don’t suppose he was more than seventeen, and maybe I was the first woman he had ever screwed, although I doubt this.

The second time wasn’t terrific. He took a long time getting hard, didn’t really get very hard after all, got on top, and came after four or five strokes.

It wasn’t the world’s greatest orgasm for him. It was nothing at all for me, but I made a little pretense of coming along with him. One gets in the habit, I suppose.

He got a little cocky afterward. “I suppose I can come around from time to time. Even when there’s no snow on the ground, huh? Say, do you do this a lot? You know, delivery boys and all that? I mean, I’m just curious. Not to pry into your affairs or anything. Your affairs, that’s a good one, huh?”

I almost forgot to pay him the ten dollars. For the snow, the ten dollars for shoveling the snow. As a matter of fact I did forget, but you can bet your sweet bippy he didn’t forget, but he didn’t mention it, either, and when he was dressed and ready to be on his way he shifted his feet and looked at the floor, not knowing how to ask for the money after he had just romped in my bed, but at the same time not wanting to go off without it, and I at first couldn’t figure out what in hell he was having trouble saying, and then I remembered and almost laughed aloud. I gave him the ten dollars. He blushed. He went away. I went to the bathroom. I took off my diaphragm — which you are not supposed to do for I forget how many hours, but what you are supposed to do is leave it on until morning, however many hours that is. I just didn’t really care. I stood there douching like Lady Macbeth washing her hands, but no, I don’t guess it was like that, because I didn’t feel that kind of guilt. I don’t know what it was exactly. What it was was strange.

I took another shower and I changed the sheets and put the dirty ones in the washing machine and made a cup of coffee and poured it out untasted and made a drink, vodka, the housewife’s friend. I drank it while I was washing and powdering and putting away my diaphragm. Then I made another.

I don’t remember exactly what was going through my mind then. A lot of things, I guess.

When the phone rang I knew exactly what it was. I have never had so strong a premonition. I knew just what had happened. I knew, without the slightest room for doubt, that my husband Howie was dead. That he had been killed in some sort of traffic accident in New York and that they were calling to tell me.

It was Howie. “Just called to tell you I’ll be a little late. I’ll probably catch the six-oh-four or the next one after that if they cancel it.”

“You’re alive.”

“What?”

“Howie, I won’t be here when you get back. I can’t be, I have to go away.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m leaving.”

“Jan, what are you—?”

“I can’t talk now. A boy came to the door to shovel the snow. I let him do it, I gave him ten dollars.”

“Seems a little high, but I guess—”

“He said it was the going rate.”

“Well, fine, then. I’m glad you got it done. Honey, I don’t quite understand—”

“I let him fuck me.”

“What?”

“I let him fuck me. Twice. In our bed.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Maybe you ought to stay in the city. In a hotel. I won’t be here when you get back. I suppose I’ll have to take the car, so maybe you should stay in town.”

“Well, if I stay in town you can stay at the house. But I still don’t see—”

“No. No, I cannot. I absolutely cannot stay in this house. I cannot stay in this house for another moment. I can’t. Howie, I don’t know what’s happening to me but I have to let it happen by myself.”

He was saying something else. I didn’t let him finish. I hung up and broke the connection, and then I took the phone off the hook so it wouldn’t ring again.

After that it was amazing how cool I was. I mean that it amazes me now that I think about it. I packed a suitcase. I threw clothes into it. I found the birth control pills that I had stopped taking when we decided I would stop taking them, and I took one right away and put the rest in my purse. I had dressed after making love (I don’t mean making love, we didn’t make love, we screwed) and I was wearing — oh, really who cares? Who cares what I was wearing?

I almost forgot this book, my diary. I haven’t written anything in it in two weeks. (Until now, when I seem intent on filling the whole thing at one sitting.) I had been keeping it on a shelf in my closet, a shelf Howie was unlikely to browse over. I came across it while gathering up clothes, and something made me realize I would want it. So I put it in the suitcase.

I lugged the suitcase out to the car — I wouldn’t have any trouble getting out, he had done a superb job of snow shoveling — and went back for my purse and the bankbook. I stopped in the bathroom and had a long look at the mirror. I had virtually had an affair with that mirror since my jump in the hay with what’s-his-name (my God, I really don’t know his name, we really never did get around to names, isn’t that hysterical!) and I kept running to look at myself in the mirror to see if I looked different. It really was like losing my virginity. I had kept looking in mirrors then too, just as I had done years earlier when I got my period for the first time. You always look to see if you look different, I guess everyone does that. I don’t think I look any different now but I keep checking.

Anyway, I took out my lipstick and wrote on the mirror. I wrote Howard and put a dash after it, and then I couldn’t think of anything to write, not a single thing. I was going to wipe it out but I didn’t get around to it, so it’s there to greet him if he comes home tonight after all, or it’ll greet him some other time, whenever he does come home, and I can’t imagine what will go through his mind when he sees it. Just that I’m out of my mind, I guess, which we both know now anyway.

Question: If you know you’re nuts, then are you really?

Answer: I don’t know, I’ve never been out with one.

I closed our savings account, or rather I took all but twenty dollars out of it, so it’s not officially closed but it might as well be. I have almost four thousand dollars in cash plus a purse full of credit cards, so I can go anywhere and do anything and sooner or later Howard will pay for it. Which is not nice of me, and if I figure out whether I love him or hate him or what, maybe I’ll do something more concrete about it. I don’t even know what that last sentence means. I’m slipping into automatic writing and besides my arm hurts.

I’m going to have a few more drinks and go to sleep.