I Am Curious (Thirty)

July 3

Edgar Hillman, for the love of God!

I was standing on Forty-second Street between Sixth and Seventh, trying to get up the courage to climb a flight of stairs to one of the employment agencies, and Guess Who came out of one of the Dirty Books and Peep Shows places? None other than Edgar Hillman, the Lothario of Eastchester. Husband of Marcie, father of her children, and Dry Humper and occasional Finger Fucker of one Jan Giddings Kurland.

I didn’t notice him at first, being at the time lost in a reasonable facsimile of thought. A voice said, “Jan? Jan Kurland? Is that really you?”

I turned, and it was really me, just as it was really Edgar.

“Edgar,” I said, as if I were pleased to see him. Oh, stop the bitchiness — I was pleased to see him, the first familiar face since I had taken myself away from all those familiar faces.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “I was just thinking about you.”

“Now there’s a compliment. In there?” With a nod of my head for the peep show parlor.

He blushed interestingly, then saved it with a wink. “Oh, just like to keep an eye on what they’re publishing these days. But you look great, Jan! Though you do look about half-starved. Have lunch with me?”

“I just ate.” A stand-up hamburger and malt just after I got off the subway.

“A drink, then.”

“Well, sure.”

“Because it’s really good to see you. Marcie was saying—”

So he told me what Marcie was saying, and what was new with who, and this and that, none of it memorable. I’m afraid I didn’t pay quite as much attention as I might have. Not that I wasn’t interested. I wanted to hear about these people, this life I had for so long belonged to, but at the same time the specifics were not particularly interesting because these were not very interesting people, nor did they do very interesting things. So I kept finding myself tuning out great hunks of the conversation, listening to Edgar the way you will sometimes listen to a song on the radio, hearing the tune but not paying any attention to the lyrics.

“But tell me what you’re doing, Jan.”

“Oh, nothing very much.”

“Do you think — I mean, is there any chance you and Howie might get back together again?”

“No, I really don’t think so.”

“You know, that’s a shame. But I guess everybody at one time or another feels the need to kick over the traces. To get away, to have a shot at some new kind of life. I’ll tell you something, you were lucky that you didn’t have any kids at the time. If you had had children it might have been a great deal different.”

“Yes, it would have made a difference.”

“Of course it would. If it weren’t for my own kids—”

“Yes, Edgar?”

“Oh, what am I talking about? Marcie and I have a good thing going. We’re really very happy together.”

“I know you are.”

He ordered us another round of drinks, our third, I think it was. I was drinking Scotch sours, he was drinking vodka martinis. I think they were beginning to get to him. I think that was what he had in mind when he ordered them. Nobody drinks vodka martinis because he likes the taste. They don’t have any taste. They just do the job.

Vodka, the housewife’s friend.

How long ago was that?

“Jan.”

“Yes?”

“You know, I can see just looking at you that you’ve got your life pretty much under control. I can see that, and you know something? I’m damned glad.”

“Why, that’s nice of you, Edgar.”

“I never did believe the things I heard about you.”

“Oh?”

“Not for a minute.”

“Just what sort of things did you hear?”

“Oh, nothing important.”

“No, I’d like to know.”

“You wouldn’t be interested.”

“I’d be very interested.”

“Oh, the usual thing. Sex stories, to be quite blunt about it, that you were raising all kinds of hell here in New York, you know, sleeping around.”

“But you don’t believe that.”

“I believe that what everybody does is their own goddam business and nobody else’s goddam business.”

“Amen to that.”

“Damn right.”

“You know, the closest I came in Eastchester—”

“Yes?”

“Was with you.”

“That so?”

“Yes.”

“There’s this story, something about a kid who came to mow the grass or something—”

“Shovel the snow.”

“I guess that’s what it was.”

“There’s not that much grass that needs mowing in the middle of the winter.”

“Stands to reason.”

“But that was something else. On the way out the door, so to speak. Before I left Howard.”

“Damn right.” His eyes focused owlishly upon me, and he smiled suddenly. Well, I thought, why not? When you start something, sooner or later you ought to finish it. A dry hump at a party is nice, but one ought to do things properly.

“Edgar?”

“Huh?”

“All those stories about the life I lead.”

“I never paid any attention to them.”

“You should have. See, they happen to be true.”

“Huh?”

“If you’ve got an hour to spare—”

“You have a place?”

“Well, not exactly. See, I’m living with these two colored fellows, and if I brought you there they’d have a fit. They’re junked up all the time and anything could happen. You know, they have knives, and when they get some cocaine in their systems anything can happen. And the one thing they don’t want is for me to bring any white men home.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“But they never come up north of Fourteenth Street, so if you know a place uptown, there’s no problem.”

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

“Is something the matter?”

“You live with a couple of niggers?”

The Eastchester liberal. Sad, sad. I looked skyward and waxed rhapsodic, saying things like Skin like black velvet and like that. I thought Edgar was going to have cardiac arrest. His face got slightly purple.

I thought, too, that this would turn him off. Not that that was my intention, but once I got into the spirit of the game I stayed with it, and judging by his reactions he wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me. Not quite the truth of the matter, however.

“Listen, I know a hotel.”

Are there any men who don’t know a hotel? I’m sure Howard knows a hotel. It occurred to me at the time that perhaps, as we stroll through the lobby, we will meet Howard and the girl with the plastic nose-cone tits.

By the time we got to the hotel I was sort of hoping this would happen. There has always been about Edgar Hillman and the idea of balling Edgar Hillman something that appeals to my sense of the ridiculous. And it was odd, all of this, because here I was going to get fucked for the first time in quite a while, not counting that Italian kid the night before last, because that didn’t really count, it was just a quick thing for both of us because we were both lonely, and I’ll never see him again and probably wouldn’t recognize him if I did, just a quick tumble in the last row of the theater that meant no more to me than it did to him, and I didn’t even come or get especially hot, so in a sense—

There is just no way out of that sentence. It’s one of those sentences that keeps coming to new commas and never has its period. A pregnant sentence, that’s what it is.

Anyway, the point was that I had not done much lately sexually, and here I was with Edgar, and I was driven not by the desire for sexual pleasure or by any deep compulsion but merely because I thought it would all be ridiculous and funny and all, which, come to think of it, is a better reason for balling someone than a good many.

We took a cab to this hotel that he knew, which was silly because we could have walked there in less time. The cab ride did give us a chance to sit in silence. Otherwise we would have had to talk to each other, which right then would have been more than difficult.

It occurred to me that it would really be a scream if the cabdriver was the same one I had gone down on. I snuck a look at him, and Guess What?

It wasn’t him.

At the hotel, Edgar was a little less smooth about things than he might have been. I was supposed to wait in the lobby while he handled things at the desk. I’m sure the desk didn’t care, but maybe he didn’t want me to see what name he used, or something like that. And then there was a lot of business with hand movements and head nods designed to clue me in that I should get on the elevator ahead of him. For a guy who had done this before, he was acting like a guy who hadn’t done this before.

In the room, he gave me this long look. I prepared myself for the news that Marcie didn’t understand him. I had news for him. Marcie understood him.

Instead he said, “You know, I always liked you, Jan.”

“We always liked each other.”

“Yes. Whenever the gang got together—”

“We responded to each other.”

“Exactly.”

Poor little Beady Eyes, I thought, and closed my own eyes and waited for him to kiss me. Which he proceeded to do. Ah, Marcie, I thought, savoring the kiss, rubbing my body against him, ah, Marcie, I wish you were here to watch.

Who would have guessed that he would turn out to be so oral? Kissing everywhere, hungry, desperate to kiss and lick. Not very good at it, and a rank idiot at missing the clitoris, but ravenously eager to please. And who would have guessed that, after he heaved himself out of the crouch and onto me, after he plunged squishily into me, after he gave the requisite number of thrusts and splashed my insides with his seed, he would pass out on me and give every evidence of having succumbed to a massive coronary?

I went through this whole trip about what to do next. Call the desk? Call a doctor? Call the police? Hello, I was fucking this fellow, the husband of a girl who used to be a very close friend of mine, when all of a sudden he happened to have a heart attack and die, and if you could just send up a couple of male nurses to sort of roll him off me, I’d be very grateful.

I could just sneak out, I decided. And leave him like that? And then what would happen?

God only knows what I might have done, but of course he opened his eyes and told me I was fantastic, the best there ever was. How would he know? All I’d had a chance to do was open my legs and lie there for a while.

We sat up in bed smoking cigarettes. “I’ll bet you’ve made some crazy scenes, Jan.”

“Oh, you could call it that.”

“I don’t blame you a bit. Same thing everybody would do if they had the guts. Who wants to spend the rest of your life with a millstone around your neck, right?”

“Right, Edgar.”

“Crazy scenes. Down in the Village, I know about the Village, you don’t have to tell me about the Village. Before I married Marcie I used to go down there all the time. I moved around, you know. I kept in motion.”

“I’m sure you did.”

“That was a lot of shit about living with a couple of shfoogs, wasn’t it?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You had me going for a few minutes. You live alone?”

“No, as a matter of fact, I have a roommate.”

“Oh, a roommate.”

“You’d like her.”

“Her.”

“A Chinese girl a couple years younger than I am. Really beautiful.”

“Is that right.”

“And if you think I’m wild, you should see her. I could tell you stories.”

“Really?”

So I made up some stories. I knew it would get him excited. What he really wanted was to screw my Oriental roommate, but she wasn’t available, so he settled for taking it all in and then screwing me while he pictured her. It was sort of fun.

There was one more pretty good moment, after we were dressed again, after he had taken down my address and phone number (the wrong address, and the wrong phone number). He asked if there was anything I needed, anything he could do for me, anything at all, just ask, anything.

“Well, now that you mention it—”

“You’re a little short?”

“Well, if you could spare a few dollars.”

“Jan, you should have said something. Whatever you want, whatever you need. Just pick a number.”

“Well—” trying it on “—well, see, I generally get twenty-five dollars.”

I wish I had a picture of his face to paste here. Out of sight. He was really a study.

“A joke,” I said, cutting it off, taking his arm, laughing so that he could gratefully join in my laughter. “But I had you for a minute, didn’t I?”

I wonder if I’ll ever see him again. The only pleasure I got out of balling him was the humor of it. The sex wasn’t good or bad. It was — how to put it? I was not taking part in it. It was going on, and there was certainly nothing about it that I didn’t like, but neither was there anything the least bit involving about it.