Adios, Scheherazade

But I didn’t have a vocation. Do you know what I mean? I wasn’t planning on teaching for any reason that had to do with self-fulfillment, anything like that. I was just drifting, nobody was at the helm, my life was just following the tide of least resistance.

Which brings me back to Betsy. I went back to the dorm after that first date with her, having cast my seed in some neighbor’s back yard — the Bible is silent on that particular aberration, I believe — and Rod was up, writing a story. He didn’t have the overhead light on, we both hated it. The gooseneck lamp on his desk was lit, he was typing away on his Smith-Corona portable, a machine exactly like this one, also beige. In fact, I have this one because he had that one. I had to have elite size type because my manuscripts had to look like his, so when I was doing the first book, up in Albany, I rented a typewriter from a place on State Street, but when we moved down here I went out and bought one. Naturally, having no opinions of my own on the subject of typewriters, I bought one like Rod’s. Ergo, Smith-Corona.

It’s a pretty good machine, I guess. I do fifty thousand words a month on it, and I’ve had it now two and a half years, and I’ve never had to have anything fixed. It rattles some, it sounds loose when I work on it, but it does the job.

I guess I don’t want to go back to Betsy. If I start doing commercials for my typewriter instead, I guess I really don’t want to go back to Betsy.

I don’t care, I’ve started this I might as well finish it. I don’t know what kind of crazy death wish has me in its grip, today’s the 22nd and I still haven’t started the book, but I’m going to get this junk out of my system for good and all.

Tonight. After dinner I definitely go to work.

In the meantime, Rod looked up at my entrance and said, “How’d it go?”

“Okay,” I said.

“You score?”

“Not yet,” I said. “But it’s a sure thing.”

The thing was, I believed it myself. Partly because I was so horny, and partly because I needed a score on my side of the tally sheet. In college Rod was what we call an assman. He was constantly making out with this girl or that girl, three or four times I had to go spend the night in somebody else’s room because he’d snuck a girl into the dorm, and my few lays were hardly enough to keep me afloat in his company. And here it was January, and I hadn’t so far got into anybody at all in my junior year, and I was feeling really troubled about it.

So I called Betsy the next day, a Saturday, and she had a date for that night, but she was free Sunday. I had to work a double date with Howie again, not having a car, and we drove down to Port Jones, on the Mishkon River, and we went to a bar there called Hiram’s Lodge, where they had a real fire going in a real fireplace, and stag heads on the walls, and real logs everywhere, and all in all a good ski lodge effect. We drank two pitchers of beer there, and necked in the booth, and I got my hand at last up under her skirt, gloveless, and felt her panties for a while. She was getting very hot, panting against my mouth, but when I tried to tug the panties out of the way with my fingers she shook her head and whispered no several times in a frantic sort of way and then pushed my hand away, and that was that.

I didn’t want to get out of Howie’s car at her place again tonight, because I knew nothing was going to happen and it was goddam cold, but I felt locked into the gesture. So I got out, and the warm car drove away, red taillights and white exhaust, tires crunching on the snowy street, and there we were in the snow-white darkness and silence, her house as black as the tomb in front of us. They never left a light on for her, and when I got to know her parents I found out why. They’re cheap. Betsy’s parents are the cheapest pair of miserly bastards the world has ever seen. Their toilet paper, for instance. You wouldn’t believe the hard scratchy rotten paper they use for toilet paper. The stuff must be two cents a roll. I hate to crap at her parents’ house, believe me.

Anyway, I went up on the porch with her again, and kissed her awhile, and took my right glove off, and tried to get my hand up under her skirt, but she pushed me away and whispered, “It’s too cold!” Which it was. I was just doing it, you know? Going through the motions.

I don’t think I ever wanted Betsy. I wanted something, and she was the only thing I could understand. The only thing within reach.

So we made arrangements to meet in the cafeteria at twelve-fifteen the next day, Monday, because she ate her lunch on campus, and then I left, and had lover’s nuts again, and spat in the same back yard, and walked on home. Rod was in bed, asleep, so I didn’t have to answer any questions till the next day.