Sensuous

23 March — Tuesday

Checked my Post Office box today. Nervous, this the first time I went to it. Half convinced I would no sooner draw out my mail than a hand would fasten on my wrist and a Postal Inspector would arrest me for obscene use of the mails. I don’t believe the letters I wrote, the six of them, constituted any real obscenity. It’s hard to remember I what I wrote. I think I typed a sample letter into this diary thing but it’s impossible to remember afterwards what I wrote and what I merely thought about. And I have stuck to my resolve not to look at any previous entries.

Any easy resolve to stick to. I fear the embarrassment of encountering old thoughts on a typed page as much as I fear anything.

An interesting thought: What will I do with this diary when I finish writing it? Just leave the pages forever in the radiator’s humidifier tray? Or burn everything unread? Or l present the whole mess to a psychiatrist to save the time of telling him all of it?

Or will I ever finish doing this? Pepys and Evelyn were lifelong diarists, talking to themselves in notebooks. I’ve read both their diaries. Evelyn never wrote a thing he could have been uncomfortable having anyone read (although I doubt he felt that way about it himself). So impersonal in so many ways. What the minister said at services. Details of his various business transactions. Summaries of papers read to the Royal Society.

Pepys a different sort, easier to identify with. Wrote in a cipher so that no one discovering his diaries could readily crack the code. And yet was careful to leave his work with the foreknowledge and evident desire that the cipher would be broken and the work published after his death. An interesting compromise between the need for privacy and the desire for immortality.

I might go on doing this every day forever. (However long my version of forever chances to be.) Or I might give it up tomorrow.

Tomorrow — a date with Bill. We have formalized things, an outgrowth of the mutual realization that we both have the same desires and the same forebodings about our relationship. (Semantic query: Do we relate enough to dignify this thing we share with the term relationship?) And so we save ourselves phone calls and uncertainty by meeting every Wednesday evening, no more or less frequently. I am to call him every Tuesday around dinner time to tell him whether or not I can make it, and to learn whether some appointment or obligation has come up on his end. And I’m to call him again Wednesday before going to him to make sure things are still on. For example, I occasionally have to work late; if this happens I’ll call him from the office.

How would it feel to call him from the office?

He asked for my phone number but I refused. He didn’t say anything but looked at me oddly. I’m sure I could trust him to call only in an emergency and not to take advantage of me by trying to learn more about me. Especially because he gets a kick of sorts out of my secrecy. Still, I’m uncomfortable at the idea of his having my number.

In that same conversation we outlined what our Wednesdays would do. He will extend the boundaries of my experience. He knows what I require and will enjoy supplying it. I don’t have to do anything that I don’t want to do. We both understand this. Yet I’m not worried about that sort of thing with him. Touching his penis was a giant step forward, more significant by far than letting him go down on me. (And more thrilling.)

I think I’d probably let him fuck me if he wanted to. I could probably do something like that. I never refused Gary, even sometimes encouraged him. And because he wouldn’t expect me to enjoy it I would be less inhibited than otherwise.

Better way to put this. Could let him fuck Jennifer. Not me but Jennifer. (It was Jennifer’s hand on his cock.) Could perhaps even enjoy it through his excitement while feeling no excitement of my own.

He approves of my letter-writing. Very relieved to hear about it. Didn’t specifically say so, but was as apprehensive of my becoming overly involved with him as he was of becoming hung up on me.

The one question I can’t answer is whether I am getting progressively saner or progressively crazier. I’m making good time but wonder now and then if I’m Wrong-Way Corrigan, flying to Los Angeles and landing in Ireland.

It’s a nice trip, though.