Thirty

by Lawrence Block

  “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, wh
en 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.

  February 20

  I have an apartment. In New York, but I don’t think there’s any chance that I’ll run into Howard. His office is on Forty-eighth between Madison and Fifth, his train leaves from Grand Central, and he rarely if ever goes out of that vicinity. (How do I know that, really? For all I know he could have a mistress in the same building I’m living in, and have her for lunch five days a week. But I doubt it.)

  I am living in Greenwich Village. Grove Street, the West Village, very ultradesirable location. I sublet it from some sculptor who’s going to Chile on a grant. I don’t know how he can afford it. The apartment, not going to Chile. It’s one largish room with a tiny kitchenette and a tinier bathroom. And it’s $375 a month, which is scandalous, but I just don’t care. I’d be afraid to live in a bad neighborhood. And I have the money and all the credit cards and money is just not going to be one of the things I worry about now. I have other things.

  I think I was very clever about the car. I parked it in a lot and mailed the parking check to Howard at his office.

  I haven’t had sex with anyone since the shoveler. I haven’t even had the desire to masturbate. Perhaps I’ll manage to get picked up tonight.

  February 21

  I didn’t.

  February 25

  This is the neighborhood I was living in before I met Howard. (Which undoubtedly has something to do with my returning to it. I realized that at the time. Nevertheless, it is the most sensible place for me to be living now.)

  But the point is that I feel as though all of those years have somehow dropped away. I don’t know how to explain this, how to find words to go with the tune. Let me see. It’s as if I’m fitting back into the pattern of living I had then, except of course that I don’t have a job to go to five days a week, and that I don’t know anybody. There was a time when I seemed to know half the people in the Village. I wonder where they all went to. They couldn’t all be living in ranch homes and driving station wagons. Could they?

  I wake up in the late morning, I go to the coffee shop around the corner for a roll and a cup of coffee. I buy the Times, I wander over to Washington Square, I sit on a bench and read the paper. Sometimes at night I go to a movie. Sometimes in the afternoon I buy something at a bookstore and take it to the coffee house on Bleecker Street. I read and drink espresso and watch the people. And I find myself belonging to this and no longer possessed by a house and a car and a husband.

  There is a man who comes to the coffee house frequently. He reads or plays chess by himself. He seems to know everyone there.

  A very exciting man.

  I don’t know why this should be so. He’s not handsome in any of the generally accepted ways. (Whatever precisely they may be.) But there is, oh, something about him.

  What?

  Let us describe him. A long face. Dark brown, almost black hair, and quite a lot of it, lying shaggy on his neck like the mane of a mighty lion. A hawkish nose. Keen, rather intense eyes. A mouth one might describe as sensual. A mouth I might describe as sensual, anyway.

  I don’t quite feel I have created a vivid word-portrait of this man. He must be thirty-seven or so, but it’s possible that he’s a good deal older than that but seems younger because he is in such good shape, very long and lean and capable looking.

  That’s it! The last words, capable looking. That’s what it is about him, his presence, his air of competence, of authority.

  I wonder if I should make an effort?

  Maybe one doesn’t make an effort with such as he. Maybe he summons one when he wants one.

  And maybe, for all I know, he’s a screaming faggot (of which there are certainly enough in this neighborhood) and I’m building him up in my mind for no good reason at all.

  I think I’ll get in bed and think about him.

  Is it progress to reach the point where you can not only plan to masturbate but admit it to yourself in writing? Or is it only a symptom of further deterioration?

  Would I perhaps be better off paying this $375 a month to a shrink?

  Excuse me, I have to think of Tall Dark and Capable while I play with myself. I’m damp already. Quel disgusting!

  February 27

  I finally got laid last night.

  It’s really about time. One begins to feel foolish, all this sexual freedom, an apartment in the Village, no strings on me, and ten days in a row without getting close to anything more exciting than my own finger.

  Nothing has happened yet with Eric. That’s his name. I have learned that much about him, and we are at the point now where we nod and smile politely at one another. Yesterday he brought someone with him, a little blond teenybopper who couldn’t have been more than eighteen, if she was that. She could have been his daughter, and may in fact have been just that, a college girl visiting her father who is divorced from her mother or something. I think, though, that she is his mistress. Or his occasional piece or something of the sort. It doesn’t really matter. I don’t think he’s interested in me, and I don’t think I care very much.

  I was picked up in a bookstore. A couple of times I’ve gone to bars and other places looking to get picked up, and haven’t been, probably because I don’t stay long enough and am so uptight about the whole thing that I don’t come on as very approachable. But the bookstore, I only went to get something to read. The Eighth Street Bookshop. And this young man—I thought at first he was a clerk, but he was just browsing, like me—held this book up to me and said, “Have you read this? It’s really quite marvelous.”

  I hadn’t, and I still haven’t, and I don’t remember what it was but it certainly didn’t look very interesting. I said something and smiled, and he smiled back and I said something about not really feeling like reading but being bored and having nothing to do, which was something of an invitation, the point of which was not lost on him.

 
; “This is a bad city to be lonely in,” he said. “Sometimes I think companionship is the enemy of education. If I weren’t so much alone I doubt I’d have read half of what I have, over the years.”

  He had longish light brown hair (and no doubt still does) and a rather fierce red-brown moustache and soft, liquid eyes. He was about my age, maybe a couple of years younger. He had a teaching fellowship at NYU. Philosophy. He was getting his doctorate, but philosophy was beginning to bore him and teaching bored him even more and he didn’t think he would want to spend the rest of his life doing it, but neither did he see anything else that appealed more. He had some money from his mother’s estate and had thought about going into some sort of business, maybe opening a store of some sort, perhaps a bookstore, except he didn’t know if he wanted the headache of running a business and if he wanted to tie himself down to anything. He didn’t think he would like it.

  He told me all of this over coffee and at his apartment, which was on Tenth Street between Avenues A and B, not a wonderful neighborhood and several flights up, but comfortable enough inside. We drank wine out of jelly glasses, California Burgundy from a gallon jug, and we listened to a mixture of jazz and folk rock, and we screwed on his sagging bed.

  It was sort of nice. He was a nice person, actually. His name is Arnold, which is less sexy than Eric, which figures, because so is he. His penis is long and narrow. He sort of hinted at one point that he might not recoil with horror if I happened to feel like blowing him, but I didn’t particularly want to so I failed to pick up on the hint. I don’t think he was tremendously disappointed. We did it twice. I didn’t come, but it wasn’t frustrating or anything and was in fact quite pleasurable, just that I didn’t come.

  February 28

  I was thinking about Arnold. He called this afternoon and asked if I’d like to have dinner. I said I was busy, which isn’t true, but that tomorrow would be all right. So I’ll have dinner with him tomorrow. And then I gather we’ll go to a movie and then back to his place.