A Madwoman's Diary

by Lawrence Block

  “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 Mauree
n 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.

  30 March—Tuesday

  Drunk and depressed.

  31 March—Wednesday

  I don’t know exactly what went wrong yesterday. Nothing actually happened. I was evidently reacting to what Mr. K. told me. Both yesterday and today he acted as if nothing whatsoever had happened. I felt that he was uncomfortable around me but had no evidence for the feeling.

  Projection—because I was uncomfortable in his presence, and assumed it worked both ways.

  Not afraid he’ll fire me. Not even afraid he’ll want to fire me.

  I guess I’m afraid he’ll want me to go on being his shoulder to cry on.

  Would that be so bad? In a way, yes, it would. I don’t want other people and their problems. I really don’t want all of this, and yet already I feel an obligation to listen to him if he wants to talk. He was so appreciative Monday night, kept telling me over and over again how much help I was to him by just being there.

  And all I did was be there. Hardly said a word, just nodded in the right places.

  I might as well put down what scares me.

  I am afraid he is going to decide that he is in love with me.

  He’s looking for something and I have the feeling he’ll make the mistake of thinking I’m what he’s looking for. And if that happened I don’t know what I would do. The one thing I’m positive of is that I would be very unhappy about it, and very upset.

  I don’t know what he should do. Go to a psychiatrist? That keeps occurring to me. Would it do him any good? I don’t know. I’m no one to talk—I probably ought to go to a psychiatrist myself. Probably? Definitely. But I don’t want to go and I won’t.

  I don’t want to be a psychiatrist, either.

  Drinking was a mistake last night. Made things worse and kept me from getting any of it out at the typewriter. Today was better. I was more relaxed at the office and feel now that the situation with Mr. K. won’t be as much of a problem as I thought last night. I can probably handle him if he decides he loves me. And if I can’t, it will be easy enough to find some place else to work.

  Oh, hell. I should have left for Bill’s five minutes ago and I want to change my clothes.

  I’ll wear the hot pants.

  1 April—Thursday

  Last night while I was over at Bill’s, Mr. Karlman’s wife died. This morning he came into the office and sold the business lock stock and barrel by making just one phone call. He sent all the other girls home and told me to stay.

  When we were alone he looked deeply into my eyes and something clicked for us. I realized I was in love as never before in all my life. He took me in his arms and kissed me, and it happened just as it happens in trashy novels. Bells rang—I swear they did.

  “Let me make one more phone call,” he said, and I stood impatiently at his side while he called his girl friend and told her he never wanted to see her again. I could hear her pleading with him over the phone, and he held the receiver to me so that I could listen while she wept. But I felt no sympathy for her. She had not fulfilled him and never would. Nor were those tears genuine, because I knew that no one had ever loved this dear kind man as I did.

  I took the receiver from him and replaced it in its cradle.

  “And now we’re really alone,” I said. “Just the two of us, now and forever.”

  “My darling Arlene,” he said.

  We kissed.

  “I can’t leave you,” he said. “How can I possibly leave you, even for a moment?”

  “But you must.”

  “I must,” he agreed, hanging his head. “I have to be with my children now, at least for tonight. And tomorrow I absolutely must put in an appearance at the funeral. I know it’s foolish to let society dictate these things, but it’s better in the long run to be there.”

  “Shall I go with you?”

  “It wouldn’t look right, Arlene. I’ll go now. Tomorrow night I’ll be with you, and I’ll spend every moment with you for as many years as the good Lord gives me. We’ll travel all over. We’ll do everything together.”

  “Will your children be with us?”

  “Screw the little leeches,” he snapped. “Let them fend for themselves. If you want children, we’ll have some of our own.”

  He turned to go. I caught his arm. “You’re not going anywhere until you fuck me,” I purred. And fuck we did, right there on the office floor beside the filing cabinets, fucking like crazy children, and I came again and again and again until I passed out exhausted.

  When we were dressed, as he prepared to leave, I took his arm again. And put my lips close to his ear, and said, in the softest of whispers,

  APRIL FOOL!!!!

  1 April—Thursday

  Well, let’s try it again.

  I must really be flipping out completely. I got the basic idea for that last entry this afternoon in the office and went into a giggling fit right there at my desk. I sat down and wrote that the minute I got back here, and it kept getting more elaborate as it went along. I kept breaking myself up as I wrote, and when I was finished I read the whole thing through from beginning to end and kept giggling like an idiot.

  Then I went over and lifted the radiator cover and added the pages to the stack. A rather thick stack it is, too. And I closed the radiator cover and sat around and laughed some more.

  But what kind of a lunatic plays elaborate practical jokes on a typewriter?

  I went out and had dinner and came back here, and realized I wanted very much to write about last night with Bill. But I had made a rule—no days without some sort of entry, and no more than one entry a day.

  I can’t honestly believe I went through such a mental tug-of-war with myself over this point. I had to convince myself that the first entry, being a gag, was in a sense not a real entry at all, and that it was thus fitting and proper for me to continue writing. Then other questions came up. Should I throw out the gag entry? Should I begin the real entry on the same sheet of paper that I ended the gag entry on? Finally I realized that I was playing idiotic mind games about nothing at all, so I made a cup of coffee and had a cigarette and let my head knit itself back together again, or as close to together as it ever is.

  I wore the hot pants last night. Might not have done this if I had known Bill was going to take me out. Felt very funny wearing them in public.

  Felt very funny being in public.

  Met me on the sidewalk in front of his building. “Come on,” he said. “We’re going out for a change.”

  “Where?”

  “To see a movie.”

  I was disappointed. Instant paranoia—he decided he didn’t want to have any kind of sex with me, so he was taking me to a movie rather than sending me home right off the bat. Instead he got into a cab with me and we rode up to Times Square and went to a porno film.

  “They have better films than the ones I have. I was going to show you one tonight and thought they would be so much better at one of the porno theaters. More attractive people, better production values, a big screen instead of a little screen. Unless you’re nervous about seeing one in public.”

  “I’m terrified.”

  “Too terrified?”

  “No. I think more excited than terrified. The times I’ve wanted to go, but a girl can’t go alone.”

  “Ever try?”

  “Do girls ever go alone?”

  “I knew one who said she did. I think she was telling the truth.”

  “Well, this girl couldn’t go alone.”

  Nervous to begin with, just walking with him in my hot pants outfit. Men really ogling me on the street, looking me up and down. I do get a kick out of this, though. I’ve thought from time to time that a voyeur has to be an exhibitionist as well. If you want to see you al
so want to show, although you may not have the nerve for it.

  Thought I’d be apprehensive about entering the theater but Bill was so matter-of-fact about it that it didn’t bother me in the least. Pitch dark in there. My eyes take their time adjusting to sudden darkness, and I couldn’t see what seats were occupied and what ones were empty. Bill led me. We sat about five rows from the back of the theater. I don’t think there were more than twenty-five rows in all.

  When my eyes got accustomed to the darkness I could see the men in the audience. I didn’t see a single woman. The theater was about half-full and the audience looked like a checkerboard. We were the only two people sitting together, as far as I could tell. Everyone else had an empty seat on either side of him.

  Enormously exciting.

  Not just the movies, although they were even more exciting that I had dared hope.

  But even more exciting was the situation. Being there in the darkness in the midst of all those men. All those men seated like checkers. All those men with their coats on their laps so that they could masturbate in relative invisibility. And I the only woman in the audience, and sitting not alone but with a man.

  The pictures were ten-minute shorts. Some had no sound tracks and the theater played records as background music. Others had dialogue but they must have added it afterward, because one actress was supposedly saying something like “Oh, this is so good, this is so good,” and she had her mouth stuffed full of cock at the time and couldn’t possibly have done more than grunt incoherently.

  After awhile there was a sameness to the films. I began to see the actors as actors. I wonder what a really great pornographic film would be like. One with a story and good dialogue and good acting and real characters and the same kind of hard-core fucking and sucking.

  I think it might be fantastic.

  When the films stopped being as exciting as they had been, I thought of something and decided I wanted to do it. I thought of all the reasons why it was an unwise thing to do, and they made me want to do it all the more. The element of danger was an added thrill.