Drunken Angel (9781936740062)

by Kaufman, Alan

  74

  NOW ENSUED ONE OF THE STRANGEST PERIODS OF my life. Jew Boy received splendid reviews. Editions appeared in American paperback and British paperback. Holland bought it and issued Jew Boy in a Dutch translation. In a front-page review in the San Francisco Chronicle, James Sullivan called it “a classic American coming of age story.” I now had more “game” and money than I’d ever known before. In 12-step meetings, I became a kind of hero. People all over the world contacted me. I flew to England on a book tour. In San Francisco, my profile jumped into prominence and I was stopped on the street, even asked for autographs. I was a “known” author. Fred Jordan and Barney Rosset teamed up to nominate me for membership in PEN American, the authors’ organization that included among its ranks almost every major American writer.

  In response to all this success, my sponsor smiled wryly and said: “Do you know what’s even harder for an alcoholic to deal with than failure?”

  “No, what’s that?”

  “Success.”

  “Leave it to you to piss on my parade.”

  One day, I encountered an exquisite, heart-stopping woman in her thirties, blonde, blue-eyed, with a face like Candice Bergen and a figure like Joey Heatherton: Pia.

  She was new in the building, riding the elevator to the third floor. Not one word passed between us and I fell in love with her. By the way she smiled at me as she exited I knew that I had made an impression on her as well. Even in that first brief wordless exchange, there was palpable fire between us.

  As Lana slept beside me, I lay awake thinking of Pia. Lived for our chance encounters. She was a Vargas girl stepped out of the pages of Playboy, circa 1967. Wore her blonde hair drawn back in big Viking knots, stood in a miniskirt on tall thigh-high heeled boots, body sheathed in a stretch pullover that contoured her breasts like plastic injection molding. Pia. Just the sound of her name made me tumescent. Filliped me from this dimension through the walls into her room, where I nailed her pink-white body to the mattress with ruthless excited thrusts. My libido was turning into a cheap paperback. I wrote my sexual narratives in hack prose.

  Just by existing in proximity to me, Pia made me see that I needed out of my life with Lana, which had grown into a well-furnished rut. The way Pia smiled at me. Lust. Amusement. Tenderness. Vitality. By contrast, Lana returned home from kindergarten depleted, sexless. We were fast becoming like an old couple. Soon we’d be sleeping in separate beds. When we made love, we paused to chat, exchange jokes and pleasantries, but then repaired to our separate solitudes where we each grunted and sweated our way to orgasm without any real dance to it. And when we finished we forgot about each other altogether, turning away on a shoulder or rising and going to another room. We were not even good friends anymore. Barely spoke. We were each other’s loneliness Band-Aid.

  75

  I TOLD LANA IN THE NICEST POSSIBLE WAY THAT after long reflection I’d decided to separate our households. I cited her long-standing wish to live someplace that was spanking brand-new, flawlessly clean. That was certainly not the shambling, comfortable, but well-worn bookish flat that we occupied, with its painted bathtub and cracked walls. I told her that as a writer I felt a need for greater solitude. That I now saw the years ahead, given my late start and advancing age, as years of continual literary production with little or no time for personal involvements. I told her that, to be perfectly honest, I really didn’t have time any longer for love.

  She cried and agreed. She too had thought that we needed a break but hadn’t imagined something permanent.

  I agreed to see a couples counselor once a week, to air issues that were keeping us apart.

  In each session Lana sat helplessly, watching it all crumble, as the therapist and I bandied mutual agreements back and forth, mostly confirming the health of my decision to exit. Lana, still hopeful, was willing to work on it. I, disinterested, wasn’t. For a time we did develop a nice little routine after therapy, shopping together in a Chinese supermarket, which served to reassure her, I think, far more than therapy. Her school health insurance covered the sessions.

  Alone, secured in my new fortress, I began planning the conquest of Mount Pia. All sense of aimless existential angst was gone. I had a mission: to win for myself the sort of Playboy pinup blonde who had fueled my masturbating fist as a sex-starved impoverished Bronx adolescent dreaming of future literary fame. That day had come, if much later than I’d thought and by a route that I could never have imagined. I was a somewhat mangy, flea-bitten literary lion, to be sure, but my lust batteries were still fully charged and I would have Pia for myself if it was the last thing I’d ever do.

  It quite nearly was.

  Placed a note in the door of her third floor studio.

  Hi Pia! Alan here. Your neighbor in 605. May I invite you to my home for tea and cakes? Sunday afternoon, from 2–4 p.m. It would be so nice to have the opportunity to know you. One should know one’s neighbors, don’t you think?

  Sincerely,

  Alan

  Left my phone number for her to call. She did. Her voice high-pitched, giggly, anxious. Did my best to sound reassuring, as though the note were a summons to appear at Buckingham Palace, not at the bachelorized flat of a lusting middle-aged letch intoxicated with his first important authorial breakthrough and feeling entitled to plunder as many delectable blondes as he could get his hands on.

  She readily accepted the invitation.

  I had never “courted” a woman before. In the past, my approach had been, typically, to wait around until they made the first move. Or else to say: “Hi. Let’s have sex and move in together.” Sensed that Pia would require more. The prospect of the chase excited me. She had an aristocratic look. I learned that she worked as a librarian. A book lover! I saw the hand of destiny in this, my chance for success rising incrementally—and with that thought, something else rose too. I had the powerful sense that she was already mine, that all this was predestined. Still, to reinforce the feeling, I did something I’d learned about setting goals from a self-help book. I cut out pictures of beautiful bikini blondes from magazines, glued them onto a big piece of white construction paper, and wrote in banner-sized block letters affirmations like:

  PIA CAN’T KEEP HER HANDS OFF ME!

  I AM EVERYTHING PIA HAS EVER DREAMED OF HAVING IN A MAN!

  BLONDES FIND ME IRRESISTIBLE BECAUSE I AM TALL, DARK, AND MYSTERIOUS!

  I AM A BROODING BYRONIC TYPE!

  And so forth.

  Every morning, as part of my prayers and meditations, I sat gazing at this visual affirmation aid, a sandwich board for my lust, letting it soak deep down into my unconscious, until it was not something I hoped for but something I already had. And all through the day I recited to myself: PIA IS MINE! I AM IRRESISTIBLE TO PIA. PIA IS LIKE PUTTY IN MY HANDS!

  Convinced myself that God must be in full accord with all this. Look how enthusiastic I felt! My joyous sense of anticipation. My bursting energy and single-minded determination to possess her. I must be in love. Of course, I mentioned not a word of this to Old Ray or anyone in the meetings.

  Went to a large purveyor of foreign home furnishings and hung exotic draperies depicting elephant trains and Hindu gods. Put around huge vases with bas-reliefs of mysterious Third World entities. Tossed velvet throw blankets over chairs, black and emerald, green and crimson, pillowy erotic colors, and throw cushions with cute kitty faces, rugs of subtle minimalist design. I bought a ceramic tea set from Provence, complete with Provençal cart and several varieties of the costliest tea blends on the market; went to the bakery at Whole Foods to purchase exquisite little confections with precious names like “Mozart nipples” and “Klee cupcakes.” She would think, seeing the homey tea set, that I did this sort of thing all the time. Would never suspect that I was setting the stage for a seduction that would grow more elaborately bizarre as it proceeded.

  On the day, at the appointed hour, there came a faint knock on my door.

  76

  HER HAIR WAS COI
FFED IN A TALL GOLDEN KNOT from the back of which protruded a long silken pony tail extension that draped over one shoulder, the way foxes arrange themselves when cozy in their lair. Her high perfect breasts swelled a tight autumnal sweater flecked with soft gold hints. Her slender legs in tight black miniskirt and tall brown leather lace-up high-heel boots. Her only jewelry demure silver earrings. I took note of this: she likes earrings.

  The flat was scrubbed spotless. Had removed every book from its shelf and wiped free years of dust. One prominent wall contained my published works, my books as well as anthologies, magazines, and newspapers in which my writing had appeared. It looked impressive, even if it really wasn’t. I positioned us in the living room, she on a small love seat, I in an armchair that I’d stationed in front of the bookshelf containing my works. I sat there smiling in what I imagined must be baronial splendor. Had placed, strategically, on a coffee table directly in front of her lovely knees two newly purchased and exotic looking volumes of tasteful erotica: Richard Kern’s New York Girls, in which astonishingly hot naked New York women are posed in every conceivable kind of bondage kink, and a manual, published by Taschen, illustrating every form of sexual perversity known to humankind. So placed, they seemed like favorite perusal items of a well-heeled connoisseur. In fact, they were part of the seduction scheme—intentionally transparent conversational pieces to get us moving in the right direction from the get-go. It must seem at once an elaborately staged seduction and an innocuously safe landing pad for a nice girl’s hovering erotic urges.

  “I was surprised by your note,” she said with a gently disconcerted smile in which the palest hint of coyness signaled unmistakable encouragement.

  “I admit,” I said with boyish shyness, “in this day and age it’s not really done, as a rule.”

  “But an invitation to tea?” she teased with borderline disdain, and something inside me moved. I had experienced this with women before, recognized provocation but never answered the challenge to be a steel fist in a velvet glove, firmly show who’s boss, in bed at least. This time, I would not fail. Felt a stirring in my privates, the snake aroused by the nearness of prey.

  My face composed itself into an expression of noble detachment. I said: “It may seem strange, perhaps even socially archaic, but I strongly believe that people ought to reach out to each other in this way, neighbor to neighbor, stranger to stranger, because our failure to do so has warped the social fabric into one of conjoined loneliness and all its attached sufferings.”

  She looked riveted. “Conjoined loneliness. Attached sufferings. That’s so beautiful!”

  “Thank you.”

  Pia looked around at my extensive library. “So many books. What do you do?”

  “I’m an author,” I said grandly.

  “A writer? A real writer?”

  “As opposed to a fake writer, yes.”

  “You’ve published?”

  I waved my hand at the shelf directly behind me, containing all my published works. She stood up. “Those are yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve never met—I mean—I’ve met many authors—I’m a university art librarian and I’m always invited to their release parties, but they don’t write—your books look like real literature. The ones I’ve known are mainly academics. I’ve never known a real out-in-the-world writer personally.”

  “You now do,” I said handsomely. “Out in the world, and would you like some out-of-this-world tea and crumpets? And some other confections?”

  “I would!”

  Her eyes, as I wheeled out the tea tray with the beautiful tea set and the crumpets and other confections with extraordinary names and a jam server with many different and exotic jams, told beyond all doubt that I had her.

  After the expected oohing and aahing and polite little gasps of surprised pleasure as she ate and drank, she saw the erotic books—actually, she had first noted them when seating herself—and, leaning over while majestically masticating a piece of tea-dunked crumpet, she carefully turned the pages of the Richard Kern book, eyes widening, a high rosy hue warming her cheeks.

  “You’re looking at my favorite photographer right now,” I said.

  (A complete lie. Before two days ago, I’d never heard of him.) “Let me come over there next to you and we’ll have a look together.”

  Before she could object, I slipped down beside her, which caused the cushions to sag into a little valley into which we both slid. We were pressed close, thigh to thigh.

  “Old sofa,” I said. Smiled. “Well, let’s have a look.”

  I smoldered with lust as she paused, spellbound, at the photo of a woman tied spread-eagled on a bed.

  “Interesting,” I said in a voice of cool detachment. “Nice composition. I love Kern’s use of a limited light palette.”

  She turned to other photos. Her cheeks flushed a deeper rose color.

  “Here,” I said, handing her a fat book of lurid images printed on glossy stock. This is a really interesting little volume. From the standpoint of art, I mean. It shows how certain forms of kink played a key role in surrealism and later art movements.” I flipped through the pages like someone shuffling a deck of porn. “Which image… appeals to you, frankly? We each have our erotic side. We’re in San Francisco. It’s almost an expected conversation to have.”

  She stared at the book, not knowing what to say.

  I turned to a drawing of a young piano student fellating her mustached teacher on a piano stool. “This?”

  She swallowed hard but gave no sign.

  “This?” A woman dressed in a dominatrix costume, all black leather and skin, rode a submissive man around like a pony.

  “No!” She laughed. “Never that!” she said firmly, to my great relief.

  I turned the pages for her slowly until we came to a voluptuous illustration of a buxom woman in a maid’s outfit, her bare rosy bottom crosshatched by whip marks.

  “This,” she whispered.

  77

  WE SET A DATE. SHE WOULD COME BY. NOTHING more planned. We both understood what the absence of specifics meant: sex.

  About S/M or bondage I knew nothing beyond what the lurid stag mags of my youth had offered. So I assembled my “dungeon” from fantasy. Found a large sturdy table with collapsible legs that could be easily stored and quickly brought out of my closet on a moment’s whim; hauled it up six interminable flights. It stood in the living room with the bizarre air of a serial killer’s paraphernalia. Looked at it and realized that I was crossing some line into fetish, an outlaw realm of libidinous darkness that could prove to be an innocuous sexual experiment or a portal into unspeakable depravity. Wasn’t this how serial killers got their start? First a single fly’s wings plucked. Next a cat strangled. Then a human “harvested.” What would follow the first welt to bloom across Pia’s lovely ass? An abused child, would I explode into savage violence at the first blow? What about my old stabbing phobias? Would they return? Did I possess the instincts and wherewithal to be a proper Dom? All my life, I’d fantasized about it. It was time to give it a try.

  She appeared at the appointed time wearing a formfitting black dress, black high heels, rope pearls. There was nothing to say. I kissed her in the doorway. She took my hand. Led her into the living room, stepped behind her, and encircling her waist with my left arm, pressed her to me, lifted her blonde hair with my right hand and inhaled the fragrance of her skin. Her hand folded over mine as she pressed against me harder.

  “Close your eyes,” I said. She did. I stepped away. “Don’t move.” She remained still, arms obediently at her sides. Returned with a blindfold. “I’m shutting off one of your senses,” I said in a low, sleazy voice, “because it is the sense that judges and most induces fear. But you have nothing to fear. Do you believe that?”

  She giggled nervously. “I hope so.”

  I lifted the dress over her head. Underneath, pure creamy skin in black bra and panties. I left these on for now, to enhance anticipation. My fingertips p
layed peekaboo with the panty line, probing but not entering, feeling, exploring, skirting the edge, floating over the crotch, which grew increasingly warm-soaked. Now and then pressed up against her from behind, and ran my hands along her face, neck, breasts, pausing at the cups to calmly, firmly pinch her nipples through the cloth, then placed my hands between her thighs and spread her legs.

  “Are you wet enough? Let’s see?” I checked. “Yes,” I said. “That’s very good. You’re almost ready. Don’t move.” Returned with two neckties, pulled her hands a little roughly behind her, bound her wrists. Came around to the front of her to examine what I had.

  Removed her bra and panties. Stepped back.

  There she stood, pinkish white, naked blondness strapped into black high heels, sensual, lovely, to do with as I pleased.

  Thank you, sobriety!

  I climaxed with her two, three, four times a session. When she orgasmed upright her knees folded and she lost the power to stand. Her entire body shuddered, trembled.

  Her eyes showed no love at first. They showed mischief, surprise, uncertainty, fear, doubt, greed, authority, submission, admiration, even veneration, but not love. All we did, initially, for several encounters, is have sex, with ropes and spanking integral to our exchange. But by the seventh encounter, all devices fell away. We made straightforward love, which I preferred. Sex the other way, with ropes, cuffs, blindfold, paddles, operating table, rosewater body wash, felt grotesque, preparations for a vestal stag-mag sacrifice to a bloodthirsty newsprint religious fantasy sprung from the masturbating minds of pulp writers long dead and in their graves. Nonetheless, she was the dream of my adolescent libido, the Vargas girl I had prayed to someday have in my Bronx bedroom reveries of future literary fame.