Adios, Scheherazade

“I’m glad,” I said, and kissed her again. You know, with the coats and all. And standing up, so I couldn’t even put a gloved hand on her knee. But I stuck my tongue in her mouth again, not so much because I was getting anything special out of it as that I hoped it would inflame her. Since then I have learned that Betsy considers one tongue in her mouth enough, that she gets nothing from the arrival of my tongue in there except a faint gagging feeling, and all in all she would prefer sex to be like a duel: held at ten paces.

That January night in 1963, however, I was still ignorant of these fine points of my wife-to-be. All I knew was, I wanted to fuck her. Desperately.

So when we broke that kiss, she said, “Good night, Ed.”

I gave her a sort of panicky grin and said, “So soon?”

“It’s awful cold,” she said.

Which I thought gave me the opening I needed to get to the opening I needed. Visions of sofas dancing in my head, I said, “Then why don’t we go inside for a while?”

“Oh, we couldn’t,” she said.

“Why not?” I said.

“My father’s a very light sleeper,” she said. “He’d be awful mad if he woke up and found us.”

Which I interpreted as I saw fit, my interpretation being that this was a very sexy girl and I was going to make her but not tonight. I would have to borrow a car or something, or at the worst wait till spring. We would screw, but not in her house.

All right. If we weren’t going to fuck I didn’t want to stand around talking to her. I had a long walk ahead of me, through town and two miles down the old Montreal road to the campus, and I was cold and horny and anxious to get started. So I kissed her once more, to keep her from thinking I was hurrying away, and then I hurried away.

I felt the lover’s nuts starting when I’d walked about two blocks. I hadn’t had them for months, and they really hurt. My whole groin was starting to ache, and that was going to be a bitch for walking, so what I did was, I went into somebody’s back yard and leaned against the side of their garage — white clapboard — and jerked off. It was a painful come, but afterwards I felt better, with only a slight general ache between my legs. Then I walked on back to the campus.

I got there around two-thirty, and Rod was working on a short story. He and I were roommates, we roomed together all but our freshman year. As of then, he hadn’t sold any short stories yet, but he wrote them all the time, sent them out to the magazines, got the rejection slips when they came back, sent them out again. He had a chart showing the titles of all his stories and which magazines had been sent which manuscripts. Finally, just before the end of our junior year, he sold a story to some magazine I never heard of, some Playboy imitator. He got a hundred twenty-five dollars, and very drunk.

But at the time of which I speak, to get literary for a minute, he was still an unpublished writer, and I never took him really seriously. I mean, writers aren’t people that you know. The people you know work at Montgomery Ward or drive an oil truck or have a good position with the state, right? The people you know aren’t movie stars and they aren’t deep sea divers and they aren’t pilots for TWA and they aren’t writers. Right? So I didn’t take Rod very seriously, and neither did anybody else. He wrote these short stories all the time and I thought they were crap and nobody bought them.

It’s hard to remember my attitude toward him then, to tell the truth. My attitude now is so different. Now I envy him, I think he’s this fantastic guy and there isn’t any part of my life that he doesn’t have better. He’s my friend, I like him very much, even though we’re the same age I think of him as a big brother, and at the same time I hate him.

Do I? If I hate Rod, I swear to God I didn’t know it until just now. And if I hate him, it’s stupid. It isn’t his fault I don’t have it made as good as him. He spent all his life practically, trying and trying and trying, always pushing in the same direction, always wanting to be a writer and trying to be a writer and kind of demanding to be a writer. Always writing.

I never had any direction. I liked to read, I always liked to read, so when I got to college and I saw they had a major in American Literature I fell into it, like falling into bed. I’d already read most of it anyway: The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick and “Bartleby,” Leaves of Grass, some Poe, The Red Badge of Courage, A Farewell to Arms, The Catcher in the Rye.

It’s very strange, really. Some people know what they want to do with their lives, so they pick the major that matches the goal. But other people, like me, are just drifting along, and just drift into one major or another, and finally pick a goal that matches the major. And what can you do if your major is American Lit? Nothing but teach. So I was going to teach.