Sensuous

24 February — Wednesday

Bought the new issue of Screw today. Went to Times Square for it, which is silly, and sought out my blind news dealer, which is also silly. But bought it directly, walking straight from the bus to the stand, placing two quarters in the outstretched palm and saying, “Screw,” saying the word without hesitation. Carried a larger purse which accommodated the paper easily. It’s probably even easier to buy the Post and tuck Screw inside it, but I’d worry about it falling out.

I read the new issue all the way through. I am still shaky. I have been drinking coffee all night long and cannot be sure how much of my shakiness is from the coffee and how much from what I’ve read.

It is not like dirty books. Some of it is funny and some of it is tasteless and some of it is off-putting but all of it is real, vividly real. It is obsessed as I am obsessed, and it is about all of the things that I am about, and it is real.

It excites me but does not make me want to masturbate. I do so every night before I go to sleep, and the scenarios I write for Jennifer often grow from what I have read, but it gets me hot when I read it in rather a different way. It makes everything real and awakens me to possibilities, possibilities not for Jennifer in fantasy but for Arlene reborn as Jennifer in real three-dimensional life.

The ads.

I knew about the ads. I was not positive Screw carried them but knew they existed in underground sex tabloids of this sort. And in the bulletins of correspondence clubs. They sell those bulletins in the Times Square book stores; if I dared enter them I could buy one. They also sell them through the mail. The addresses are printed in Screw, if only I dared write for them.

(I knew all of this from the books I read. About swingers. About the sexual underground. People who meet each other through the mails. I read about it in nonfiction paperbacks, in cheap novels. And drew up fantasies along these lines. But it is wholly different to read ads placed by real people and know that they exist, that they are only a phone call or a letter away.)

I read the ads over and over, over and over. I know some of them by heart now. I play little games with myself, deciding which ads I would answer if I had the courage.

What am I afraid of?

Getting fucked? I have been fucked. I was fucked regularly by Gary, though less regularly toward the end of our marriage. I never hated it. I partly enjoyed it. Sometimes I had something that seemed vaguely like an orgasm. Never a real one. Just the frigid woman’s equivalent thereof.

It was never me that got fucked. It was something that happened to the body I was wearing at the time. That cock in my cunt never touched Me.

I don’t want to be fucked, or touched, or in any way open to anyone. I want to be an invisible watcher at an orgy. I want to be Jennifer.

I don’t know what I want.

I am so sad.