A Madwoman's Diary

by Lawrence Block

  Last night I read all the letters (there were only eleven of them then) and looked at all the photographs, and was immediately supplied with material for a hundred fantasies. Last night I delayed my own private coming far into the night, purposely postponing it so that I could let my mind (and Jennifer’s fantasy-flesh) roam at free rein through realms of mental lust.

  And tonight?

  Tonight there is every temptation to do the same. So much temptation. What frightens me, what truly bothers me, is how appallingly easy it would be for me to use these letters and pictures as fantasy food until they fall apart without ever following up on any of them.

  Oh, it would be so easy to do. So very easy. Right now it is easy to tell myself that I am meeting with Bill tomorrow—my usual Wednesday appointment, my weekly visit to my sexual therapist. And, because I am meeting with Bill tomorrow, it would seem that there would be no need to have active sex tonight. Better by far to let well enough alone and crawl into bed with a headful of ideas and a handful of fingers.

  The bother is that I keep telling myself I am progressing and things like this make me wonder how true it is. I am more active. I am doing more. But the same hangups seem to be present and seem to push me in the same old ways.

  Perhaps they never go away. Perhaps, indeed, they are not supposed to go away. It is one’s hangups that define a person (I think I read that, or an equivalent thereof, somewhere or other) and removing them is like removing the skeleton from the body. Neuroses are the skeleton of the personality.

  The trick, then, is to live as you want to in spite of your hangups. To have the urge to crawl into a solitary bed, but to recognize that urge for what it is and get up and out and do something about it.

  Which, damn it to hell, is precisely what I intend to do right now. It’s too late to call some of them, but it’s not too late to call all of them, and if I make enough calls I should be able to find someone congenial who would like company tonight.

  Goodnight, beloved Smith-Corona Electra 110. I have to make a couple of telephone calls.

  Pleasant dreams.

  21 April—Wednesday

  It’s terribly late.

  (Why am I lying to my typewriter? It’s not even midnight, and I just got back from Bill’s, and I’m saying that it’s terribly late because I want to get right to bed and don’t feel much like writing anything just now. But it’s not terribly late and I’m not terribly tired and I might as well do this more or less right.)

  Went to Bill’s. Nice lazy time. We got undressed and played with ourselves and with each other and told each other stories. He had more stories to tell but for a change I had something to contribute. Told him about the dyke in the Village the other week. Also about the two gay boys last night. I don’t know whether or not I told him about Wayne and Maureen. I seem to remember thinking about them, but may not have gotten around to telling him about them.

  Then he ate me for a while, and then I told him I was on the pill and that it was about time we actually got around to screwing, and he obliged.

  I suppose it went all right. I don’t know exactly. I was glad it was happening and it felt good but that was about all. Didn’t get hot or come or anything.

  Enough.

  22 April—Thursday

  Two more leaves on the philodendron.

  Spikes, both of them, and soon one and then the other will unfold into angular heart-shaped leaves, large and bright green and beautiful, gradually darkening as they age, and other spikes will sprout and unfold, and this will go on and on, with the plant getting larger and larger, more and more and ever more leaves on it. Next spring it will be ready for a larger pot. I have read about potting it, repotting it—one removes it gently from its present pot, spreads out the roots, fits them into the new and larger pot, gradually tamps soil around them, waters the whole thing thoroughly, tamps more dirt, waters again, and lets the thing get itself together in its new home.

  You get to do this every spring as the plant gets larger and larger.

  And then I suppose eventually it dies. The book doesn’t say anything about them dying of old age sooner or later, but everything does, doesn’t it? Nothing is eternal, not even a philodendron.

  Of course it could be eternal in a sense. You can take cuttings from the thing now and then, and root the cuttings in water and then plant them, and presto! you have a new philodendron plant, a son or daughter of the old plant, or an equivalent of the old plant, or whatever you want to call it.

  You can fill up your house with philodendrons that way. Have the whole kitchen cluttered with glasses of water each containing a cutting or two. Litter the apartment with pots of plants, and repot each plant in the spring, and throw away the old plants when they die, and …

  Shit shit shit shit shit

  Oh, what is the point of all of this, of any of this, for me or for all the philodendrons in the world? What on earth is the point of it all? Life goes on and death goes on and nothing adds up to anything.

  I cannot look on the bright side because I do not think there is one. The bright side is done with mirrors, silvered glass, and is no more real than the world Alice found. Walk through mirrors and find a world with a bright side where things make sense, but on this side of the mirror everything adds up to nothing at all.

  23 April—Friday

  Called in sick today. Dear Mr. Karlman, please excuse my absence today on grounds of illness. I am sick, Mr. K. I am worldsick, dying of weltschmertz. I am a good listener, Mr. K., as long as I do not have to listen to the pounding of the surf within my own tired head.

  Have to remember to get my paycheck on Monday. No problem, enough cash to last the weekend. Always enough cash when there’s no place to go, nothing to do, no way to spend the money. Stay inside your apartment all weekend and what do you need but fifty cents for the Sunday Times?

  I have to stop this.

  Have to see someone tonight. Who? Doesn’t matter. Bad phone conversation yesterday that started my bad mood, a letter answering my ad, and I called this man and he was nice enough, decent enough, but anxious to arrange everything in advance, to discuss carefully just who would do what and with which and to whom, and a feeling of—what?

  I don’t know. I should know but I don’t.

  Let us figure it out.

  Of two sick and pitiable creatures mechanically arranging to lick each other’s wounds. Joyless and personless, the meeting of two people who do not themselves exist. Would I be willing to urinate on him? Not that he insists on it, I am to understand, but if I could find it in myself to do so his pleasure would be complete. As for his part of the game, he would be glad to show me anything I would care to examine, to perform whatever little playlets I might require, to contribute to my fantasies as I contribute to his. Quid pro quo, this for that, do that ye might be done to.

  Plummeting me into depression. “I’ll call you back,” I said, knowing I wouldn’t. Piss on you, I thought, cradling the phone, and thought that the phrase should amuse me, and thought then that it did not, and that little if anything did in fact amuse me.

  Made calls to two other correspondents and hung up before anyone could answer. Remembered sitting with my handful of fourteen letters dreaming dreams of fantasies now and forever fulfilled, and now those letters and the fantasies and dreams along with them turned to ashes in my hand, in my mind, in my heart. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, dreams to death and decay, for Jennifer, for Arlene, even as for every philodendron on God’s imperfect planet.

  The mood still there this morning, reinforced by sufficient physical malaise to make the sick call legitimate enough. Stomach upset, head aching dully. Sick and slick with night sweats and feeling bad head to foot. Bad dreams all night. Tossing and turning all night long, sheet damp with sweat.

  Hell.

  Do things, push yourself, take it step by step by step, and then you find out you’re the same person stuck in the same hell. Orgasms with another person are nicer than orgasms all alone, and being able
to bring a man or woman pleasure with hands or mouth or cunt is better than being terrified of so much as a hand on one’s arm.

  But still incomplete, still utterly alone. Still Arlene in one’s heart however many beds Jennifer shares.

  The hell of this is that I at once believe it and disbelieve it. Last night it meant enough to make me mostly wish for death, and this morning it was still strong enough to keep me away from the office, to keep me in bed with the covers over my head waiting for the day to go away. And now I still believe it but also disbelieve it, both at once, disbelieving strongly enough so that I do think it is important that the philodendron is adding leaves, do think it is important that I am growing in certain ways if not in others. And important to seek, and to grab at excitement and orgasms and snatches of pleasure.

  Better to have the black moods, bad as they are, for the sake of having the good times when they come. Before, in Brooklyn, there were no good times and no bad times either. It was bad when I thought overly much about who I was, but these thoughts came less frequently and did not have so much impact when they did. The highs were lower, the lows higher, and life went on without anything happening, inside or outside of the prison of my self.

  I am alive now in ways I never was. Better to be alive. Though it is this state of life that makes one think unhappily of dying.

  The philodendron, eternal or not, does not know that it will one day wither. The Human Condition—knowing that one is born to die.

  I am not good at philosophy. It is not my best subject, nor am I its best object.

  I will call Paul and Gregory, my gay boys. I am not good at philosophy but I am strangely good at pleasure. Not so good at pleasure of my own but surprisingly good at achieving the pleasure of others.

  Whores, I have read, are frigid, turned off, feel nothing. The better they are at satisfying men, the less the likelihood of their ever experiencing satisfaction themselves. They suck cocks magnificently while their heads buzz with thoughts of television programs and hair appointments.

  Fantasy of some day picking a man up on the street and posing as a whore. Taking him to a hotel, bedding with him for money. Pretending to be a whore? If I did it, would it be pretense?

  I’d never do that, though.

  I could call someone new but not tonight. Paul and Gregory. Made a tentative date to call them tonight, though didn’t expect I would keep it.

  Why not?

  24 April—Saturday

  I wonder what I do for them, exactly. I wonder what it is that endears me to them.

  Paul and Gregory.

  Paul, tall and very slim. Must be six-four and slender as a reed. Close-cropped hair like a cap on the top of his round head. Flat buttocks, imperceptible hips. Looks like a penis, standing so straight and reed-like and tall, the round head, the tight cap of short straight limp brown hair. His penis also very long, very thin, but no cap of hair on its tip, not surprisingly. Capped, though, by a foreskin.

  Gregory a few inches shorter but much different in build. Used to lift weights “until I got out of that whole muscle-boy bag and decided just to be a person.” The muscle fetish routine may be immature and narcissistic and sick, but it does leave a man with an attractive body. The ones who overdo it turn me off a little. The supermen who bulge everywhere. I would have difficulty relating to that, I think. I’m surprised they can even relate to each other. Actually I don’t think they can. “The muscle boys aren’t really into sex,” Gregory told me at one point. “They want to be admired, want to be adequate, but when you’re in that number you don’t really want to ball anyone. It’s just the pleasure of being admired that’s important, and admiring in turn someone who’s better at it than you are. I like to stay in shape. It’s a turn-off when a person doesn’t stay in shape, but it’s also a turn-off when you have a guy who spends all his life drinking protein supplements and lifting weights and never having anything more intelligent to discuss than triceps definition.”

  If I didn’t know that a triceps was a particular muscle, what would I think it was? A three-wheeled septic tank, I suppose.

  They are gay, are Paul and Gregory. But neither Gay Lib militants nor closet types. Both have made it with girls, and are capable of so doing. Only problem is that they are incapable of enjoying it.

  Either Paul or Gregory speaking, hardly matters as they are both in very much the same situation here: “I can get off with a girl. It gets hard and I stick it in and move it around until the gun goes off. I can stay hard long enough for the girl to get there. No problem there. But it doesn’t mean anything. It isn’t real. It’s jerking off, fucking a hand or a pillow or a chicken.”

  (Chickens!?!?)

  “I can’t relate to a girl. I read lines instead of talking normally. I feel as though I’m on stage or on camera, being observed by some extraterrestrial intelligence. And the girl, whoever she is. Our minds touch but our bodies don’t touch. Another man is a duplicate of self. It’s easier that way. I’m myself and he’s himself and we can get it together. I’ve read about homosexuality being neurotic, immature. I’m far less neurotic and far more mature in bed with a man than when I try to get it off with a woman.”

  Sex is dirty and women are clean. That seems to be part of it. Sex is a private male thing, and women are (a) likely to disapprove and (b) a challenge and a threat and (c) strange unknowable beings. I can’t understand all the rest of it.

  Not that they want to straighten out. To get away from the gay scene. Not that at all. Paul insisted he could only have a long-term relationship with someone like Gregory. That he could live permanently or nearly so with Greg, while he would never consider sharing a roof with a woman. (Greg is somewhat less committed to this view, or seemed so to me.) The consensus: Being exclusively gay is a hangup and being exclusively straight is a hangup, and they would like to be able to function both ways.

  Really function, as they can function physically with women already. But be as easy with women as they are with each other, which will take some doing, but which they seem to feel is important to them, sufficiently important to make them not merely willing but even anxious to waste their time with me.

  And so, with me posing no threat, with me quite silent and motionless, they make love in my presence.

  A project of theirs, suggested by Paul who has done some extensive if dilettantish reading in psychology and conditioned-reflex therapy. The idea being one that seems sensible enough to me, and that is, come to think of it, not that wildly different from my own sexual self-improvement project. To wit: by having me frequently present, and by on the one hand learning to relax conversationally with me, and to be naked both physically and emotionally in front of me, and on the other hand by so structuring things as to develop an association of my passive and unobtrusive presence and the whole idea of sexual excitement, they will gradually break down the barrier which keeps the two concepts of women and sexual intimacy (not activity so much as intimacy) mutually exclusive.

  So I sit silently watching them stroke and kiss each other, and they pause occasionally to kiss me and perhaps touch my breasts and genitals. Their touches and kisses are essentially passionless. Exploratory, tentative, almost cartographic. They acquaint themselves with my geography without any need to make arduous trips over this terra incognita. And we chat while they do this, and then they kiss and pet and suck each other, and the game goes on in this fashion until it comes to a logical conclusion.

  Hard to say whether I add to or detract from their passion for each other. We have not quite discussed this and I myself am less than certain. I do not seem to inhibit them, but then I’ve no way of knowing what they are like when I am not around. I have seen them twice, and they do seem more at ease with me now than when we first met, but that is inevitable in all such artificial relationships, is it not? I have noticed it myself. It is easier to take off clothes in front of those who have already seen you naked. Psychic clothes or cotton ones.

  My own reaction to them?

 
Harder to pin down.

  Obviously they interest me. Perhaps they do something more than interest me, as I find myself examining my feelings, not only as I type these pages but in other moments as well. As if there is a message written in their flesh that it would profit me to decode.

  Do they excite me?

  In a way of course they do. They are both extremely attractive men and it is exciting to watch two men together. A sort of excitement I had not previously had. The mainstream of pornography does not focus on male homosexual relations. (Inasmuch as mainstreams are inclined to focus. A chaotic metaphor, that.) The porno movies on Forty-Second Street show women tangled up with each other, but never men. When there is a group scene, two men and a woman or several men and several women, the men seem to me to go to great lengths to avoid touching one another. For the benefit of the males in the audience, no doubt; it is presumed that their own inhibitions in this regard would render such scenes a turn-off. Perhaps, too, the actors aren’t into that sort of thing. Or perhaps they are, and go at each other hammer and tongues when the shooting finishes for the day.

  No, it’s not just the actors. All the dirty novels I’ve read are in the same category. Always some lesbian scenes, and never any faggotry. Except for the occasional scene in which some hapless queen makes a play for our hero, and our hero lays him out with a haymaker to the jaw. To prove, beyond doubt, that he (and the writer, and the identifying reader in the bargain, no doubt) is heterosexual as a John Fucking Wayne movie.