Sensuous

29 March — Monday

Checked my Post Office box during my lunch hour. Nothing. Maybe I ought to call up that “bored housewife’ and see what she’s all about.

Not now, though. One calls bored housewives during the afternoon, when their boring husbands are not at home. Even I know that much.

Should I answer some more ads? Sent six letters, got three replies, two unsuitable. Did get to meet Wayne and Maureen out of the deal, and I’m glad of that. But it’s highly unlikely I’ll see them again. I enjoyed it and so did they, but they were not precisely what I was looking for and I was not at all what they were looking for. One suitable but imperfect meeting out of six letters, one meeting with no future in it, and in return I’ve sent Jennifer’s name all over the place. Jennifer’s name and not mine, but even so I feel a sense of exposure. Three people didn’t answer my letters, gave nothing of themselves, and they know that there is a maniacal voyeur on the loose named Jennifer Starr.

Answer might be to run my own ad. Attract the kind of people who are interested in my thing.

Do I dare?

And putting Jennifer’s name in the ad would be even more public, somehow. There must be a way around it. I can think of several but want time to decide just how I feel about it and just how much chance there is of things working out ideally in this fashion.

Wayne and Maureen.

Mr. Karlman asked me out to dinner again. Told him I couldn’t accept.

“Then have a drink with me after work. The little place around the corner. Arlene, I’m a wreck these days. I just need someone to talk to. You listen good. What does a headshrinker charge to listen to your troubles? Twenty-five an hour? I’ll keep you no more than half an hour and pay you twelve-and-a-half bucks. That’s professional rates and you can be just like them and not say a word.”

“Oh, you’re joking, Mr. K.”

“I’m dead serious.”

“Well, I couldn’t possibly take money for listening to you talk.”

“Then do it for free. Up to you.”

“I just don’t know.”

“I’m such an ogre it would turn your stomach to sit with me for half an hour in a public place? I know I’m not Paul Newman—”

“The thing is, if you told me something personal, then later on you might worry that you had told me too much. And then it might make you uncomfortable having me around the office every day.”

“You worried about your job?”

“I guess so.”

“You get a ten-dollar increase starting with this coming Friday’s paycheck. That’s if you have a drink with me or not. You had a raise coming, you’d of got one if you ever asked for it. What more do you want? You want a three- year contract, noncancellable? I’ll draw it up, I know enough law to draw it up. That way if I’m uncomfortable which I won’t be it’ll cost me twenty thousand dollars to get rid of you. You want me to draw it up?”

“Oh, I’m being silly about this. I’ll have a drink with you, of course I will. But I really can’t stay more than half an hour, forty-five minutes at the most.”

So I stayed for close to two hours. I really hardly said a word. Now I feel like a complete bitch for giving him such a hard time about having a drink with him. All he wanted was a listener, and he really needed one.

Poor bastard.

He loves his wife but he can’t stand her.

How does he love her? Let him, poor bastard, count the ways. He loves her because she is the mother of his children, whom he in turn loves without knowing, as one loves the purple mountain plains while singing America The Beautiful. He loves her because of all the impossible years the two of them have spent together, a bond of contrition the two of them share, like that shared by veterans of a given war, or concentration camp victims. He loves her because loving her defines him; she is his wife, and without her he is cut loose, an island, floating in a sea that terrifies him.

Poor bastard.

He doesn’t hate her. Doesn’t hate her at all, and this is fortunate in some ways and unfortunate in others. Unfortunate in that, not hating her, he is unable to foist any venom upon her — and thus must feel guilty for all the ways in which he does not love her.

And he has a girl friend. Mr. K., Mr. Karlman, has a girl friend.

Whom he also doesn’t love, but pretends to.

And who in turn pretends to believe it.

What a mess. What a truly total mess. The wife does not exist. The girl friend has been deluded, and has deluded herself, into feeling that she is loved. So she wants Karlman to divorce the wife and marry her, and Karlman knows he does not want to be divorced, and resents the girl friend as he has previously resented the wife, and hates himself for both resentments.

“Arlene, I look at myself and what do I see? A man who is young but not so young. You look at the word middle-aged and it’s an impossible word. What does it mean? It means finished. A middle-aged man is someone cut down by a heart attack in what the obituaries call the prime of life, and when you read the obituaries you figure the poor bastard, he was done with life, middle-aged, he was over the hill, he was done with life.

“But I don’t feel done with life. I feel as though I’ve been waiting all these years, being a good person, being first a good son to my parents and then a good husband to my wife and finally a good father to my children, always waiting, always biding my time, always wondering when it gets to be my turn, and then all of a sudden I’m what they call middle-aged and there’s no future in it, no tomorrow in it, not even a today in it, and you’re suddenly supposed to sit around praying for a heart attack that will take you out of it.

“I don’t want to die. I don’t want it to be over. I don’t want to sit in front of God and he says, Karlman, you had your chance and what did you do with it? And I say, God, begging your pardon, I kept waiting for it to be my turn and all of a sudden it was over. I missed my chance, God, and I regret it.

“Arlene, I don’t want to regret it.

“Arlene, I don’t want it to be over. Arlene, I sit looking at my watch and it makes me want to cry. My watch makes me want to cry. Is that something for a grown man to admit? A successful man? An established man? That he looks at his watch and tears come to his eyes?

“The second hand. The sweep second hand. I watch it go around and it’s my life being ticked off. Each one of those seconds. I watch them go by and know they’ll never come up again. I’ll never see those seconds again. Once they happen, once they flash by me, once they pass me by, they’re gone forever, they’re over and done with. And I watch that sweep second hand and there’s nothing I can do about it and I can’t even stop watching it, my eyes are riveted to it and there’s nothing on earth I can do.

“My life passing me by.”

Mr. Karlman, you have to live it yourself.

“Arlene, why am I telling you this? What’s the children’s phrase — Why am I laying this trip on you? You know something? I’m taking advantage of you. I know it. I knew it all along. Telling you I would pay you for this half hour, which is already a good deal more than a half hour. I knew then that I would be taking advantage of you. But I can’t get past the feeling that you can listen, that you can hear me out. That you can do me some good.

“I don’t love her. This girl I’m seeing. I don’t love her, I don’t care for her.

“I’ll tell you something. I want to love someone. When I first started up with her, when I first got involved, I thought I loved her. Not from anything she did. Not from anything she was to me. But because this was a need within me. I wanted to love somebody and it was like a game of tag, I reached out and touched her and she was It. She was the one I decided to pretend I loved.

“And I’ll tell you something else. I believed it. For the longest time I believed it. Because when the two of us went to bed together it was magic. Forgive me for talking on the subject. Forgive me, but it was beautiful, it was magic. In bed together, the two of us, it was magic and I told myself that because it was magic it had to be love.

“I had to believe that.

“I’ll tell you something, Arlene. Something I couldn’t tell this person, this girl, that I have been seeing. It was never love. It was needing to be in love. It was being with someone who was not my wife. It was being with someone new and fresh and different. It was taking this good sex and believing this good sex could only happen with a beloved person, and putting the whole thing into love.

“So I look at myself. So I look at myself, and I look at this girl who I have been seeing for a few years, and I think that I owe her something. And I look at my wife and I think that I owe her something, too. And I can’t give anything to either of them. Because if I divorce my wife and marry this person what do I have? I trade one person I don’t love for another person I don’t love, and all I do is make complications for myself. And I almost wish and hate myself for wishing that this girl will become upset with me for stalling, for telling her I’ll get a divorce and not getting one.

“That she’ll be so upset she will refuse to see me any more. Because I am afraid to break off with her. I want to break with her, and I am not afraid for the cheap reasons, that she will tell my wife, that she will expose me. I am afraid because I do not want to do anything bad to her. Because I feel very guilty about her. Several years now, and she was good for me, and what did I give her? I didn’t, all I did was take from her, and I want her to leave me but I cannot bring myself to leave her.

“You know where I am, Arlene?

“What I want I can’t have. Well, all right. Everybody’s like that, what they want they can’t have. Everybody reaches and can’t get his hand around what he thinks is out there.

“But also, what I have I can’t want.

“And it drives me crazy. I look at myself. I say to myself, Schmuck, you have everything. You have a business that pays you a good living just putting in your time. You go to the office five days a week and you do the automatic thing and you make more money than you need. You have a wife who is always there, you have children that you know are your children and belong to you, you have this thing and that thing, you have your comforts, you name anything and you can go out and buy it if you decide you want it — Schmuck, what do you think you want of life that you don’t already have?

“Arlene, I want.

“I don’t know what it is but I know I want it.

“I look at the future and I see a desert. A blackness. My future is all in the past. This is how I see myself, as a man with his future behind him. And I could live a good many years yet. I could also drop dead tomorrow, God forbid, but I could live a great many years. I don’t feel old. I feel like a young man dressed up as an old man. I look at kids on the street, those crazy kids with the hair everywhere, and I want to call to them. ‘Hey, I’m not like your parents. I’m like you. Where are you going? Wherever it is, I want to go along. Take me with you, I want to go along.’ I have thoughts which if I said them people would point at me and say I was a crazy man. But which is crazy? To me it’s crazy to feel this way and stay with the life I’ve been living.

“That to me is crazy.

“Arlene, there has to be Something.”

I didn’t think I was going to type all that. I really didn’t. I started to put a little bit down and I could hear his voice in my head and just typed what my mind was hearing.

Poor Mr. K.

Is That All There Is? Stupid song that says all of it. A man reaching out to grab what he wants and his hand closes around it and he opens his hand and finds nothing inside it.

I was going to write about Wayne and Maureen but Mr. Karlman is more on my mind. Let me type something about Wayne and Maureen to get it out of the way. I met Maureen at the cafe and went directly to the apartment with her. Met Wayne. Maureen had offered to go back alone and have Wayne meet me in case I was turned off by him, but I said we could skip that part. She had already shown me a picture of him. From certain angles he looked a little like Gary, though not in the photograph.

Sat and talked with them, mostly them talking and me listening. How they got into swinging and their various experiences. Why they like threesomes. Very interesting stuff but no point in recording it.

After awhile they began necking a little. They wanted me to sit with them. Said I was comfortable where I was. Wayne wanted to kiss me, so did Maureen, but I said I couldn’t handle it. Both of them disappointed but game.

More necking, and I got undressed, which seemed to please them. Very embarrassed undressing. I think largely because of Maureen. Her figure better than mine, breasts bigger. Didn’t feel this nearly as strongly with Wanda at Bill’s apartment. Wonder why? Maybe sensed that Maureen competes with other woman in threesome. Just a guess.

Watched them make love. Thought it wouldn’t work for me at first but it did.

Later they made love to me a little. Couldn’t get into fantasy and stopped trying. Went through the motions anyway. Did a variety of things with both of them at once. He wanted to fuck me but wouldn’t let him. He didn’t insist.

I guess I enjoyed that part of it, too. Never got at all hot. Found it exciting in a way. Mentally but not physically. The newness of it, the idea that I was extending myself, extending experience.

Also because of watching them beforehand and getting excited then, I seemed unbothered by not being excited when we all made love together. (Bad use of the term — whatever we may have made, love wasn’t part of it.)

I think this means something. I don’t really think there’s anything I couldn’t do now. Had no inhibitions about Maureen’s being a woman, about having sex with a woman. Would have let Wayne screw me except for fear of getting pregnant. Maybe I’d better go to a doctor and go on the pill again. Or else I’ll never know for sure if I have a hangup about it or not, and I feel I ought to know

I’ll tell the doctor my name is Jennifer Starr.

Reminds me: Wayne and Maureen are not their real names. Told me as much the minute I walked in the door. Real names are Warren and Marsha. I never stopped thinking of them as Wayne and Maureen and referred to them that way all through this entry. I think in other entries as well. Of course I went on being Jennifer Starr for them.