Adios, Scheherazade

So I looked at Sabina’s thighs. Milky white, shadowed above. Eyes too. Gray, milky whites, shadowed above. I wondered if Rod neglected her. I hoped so. I began to fantasize: One o’clock in the morning. A phone call. Sabina. “Rod just passed out in the car, you know how he drinks, I can t do anything with him. I wouldn’t bother you, Ed, but I don’t know anyone else in Albany.”

“No trouble at all. I’ll be right over.”

Betsy: “What’s the matter, Ed?” Half asleep, sitting up in bed, blinking at me.

Me: “Rod’s passed out drunk. I won’t be long.”

Over to the motel. Sabina worried, wringing her hands. Rod lying in his vomit. I carry him into the room, undress him, put him to bed. Sabina: “Ed, I really appreciate this.”

Me: “Not at all.”

Some conversation ensues, too boring to fantasize, and we next come into focus with the two of us sitting on her bed — twin beds, right? — drinking scotch out of water glasses. She is telling me how unhappy she is. She starts to cry. I put my arm around her. She cries against my shoulder. I put my hand on her thigh, it’s so cool, so smooth, so gentle, so civilized, so absolutely insane-making. I slide my hand up to white panties. She sighs against my throat. We lie back on the bed. I’ve got a hard-on a pole vaulter would envy. We get our clothing off, she’s a tigress, she moves like an exploding mainspring, I come too soon, she says, “Is that all?”

Damn it. Why do all my fantasies turn against me? My trouble is, I never manage to get them hermetically sealed. A little reality begins to creep in, like mist under a door. Like tear gas around the edges of the mask.

I was talking about money. I’m having the same trouble concentrating on money instead of Sabina that I had that day in January of 1965 in my mother’s living room in Albany, New York, a very crappy city in which I grew up, but in which I was not born.

I was born somewhere in the South Pacific, in point of fact, on the aircraft carrier USS Glenn Miller. It was the high point of my life so far.

“When the price goes from a thousand,” Rod told Betsy, “to twelve hundred, the phrase is, he Jewed them up.” Rod always treats Betsy with exaggerated courtesy and overfull explanations, the sort of contempt you can’t call him on. Even if I disagreed with him, which I don’t.

Anyway, he then turned back to me. “You use my pen name,” he said, “so it’s a guaranteed sale. You get a thousand, I get the two hundred. Less commission, ten per cent commission. That makes your cut nine hundred.”

“To do a book a month,” I said. My mind was full of Sabina’s thighs and my need for money. I was too excited to make decisions.

“To do a book in ten days every month,” he said.

“I’ll never do a book in ten days.”

Well, I was wrong. I’ve done twenty-eight books, and twenty-four of them were done each in ten days. The first one took almost three months, but that’s because I was learning how, and Fred was born then, in March, and up till then I’d never even thought about being a writer.

“If you can write a grammatical letter,” Rod told me, “you can write a sex novel.”

“Rod,” I said, “you are a writer. When we were freshmen you were a writer. You came to college and you said, ‘I’m a writer.’ I’m not a writer.”

“You don’t have to be a writer to write sex novels,” he said. “I know half a dozen guys doing this, they aren’t writers, they never will be writers, they’re making ten grand a year doing it.”

“That’s a lot of money,” I said. I was making seventy-one twenty-five at Capital City Beer Distributors. A week. That’s three thousand seven hundred and five dollars a year. My mother, waiting table at Limurges Restaurant, was bringing home over a hundred a week, but that was still only five thousand a year. Ten thousand, my God, ten thousand is two hundred dollars a week! That’s why I said, “That’s a lot of money.”

“That’s why I think you oughta try it,” he said.

Which is when it occurred to me that ten thousand a year is what he was offering me! What with Sabina’s thighs and my mother sitting right in the same room with her hands full of argyle socks and that red MG out front and Betsy giving everybody her furrowed brow expression of being lost forever at sea, I hadn’t done my arithmetic up till then. Nine hundred dollars a book, he’d said. A book a month, he’d said. That was ten thousand eight hundred dollars a year. That isn’t divisible into weeks, it comes out two hundred seven dollars and sixty-nine cents with.0023076923076923076923076923 etc. left over.

“Will you try it?” he said.

“What can I lose?” I said, being cool because I was so excited I was about to froth at the mouth.

He explained what I was supposed to do. There was a formula and a system. There was practically a blueprint. It was the closest thing to carpentry you can imagine. As a matter of fact, I don’t see at all why I couldn’t write up the formula and sell it to Popular Mechanics.

Here’s the way it goes. There are four sex novel stories, which we will number 1 through 4: