Adios, Scheherazade

I don’t know what it is about Ann. I think about her now, and I realize there’s absolutely no reason on earth not to lust after her, but I can’t even fantasize making a pass at her, much less actually do it. It’s like there’s something inside my head stops me before I can get started.

She’s an editor. She edits juvenile books at a hardcover house called Mastro-Fairbanks. In fact, a year or so ago she asked me why didn’t I try a juvenile book, and I actually sat around for a couple of weeks trying to think of one. I did think of one, too, about six months ago. The same month I was first late with a book, I think. It was about this boy who becomes a clown in the circus, and he can’t get his makeup off, and the point of it was that you can’t tell what people are like from the outside. You can’t tell a book by its cover, that one, right? Like, this boy looked like a clown but he was really a boy.

I suppose that could work the other way around too, couldn’t it?

Anyway, I tried to write the book, and it was rotten. It sounded stilted and stupid. I could never figure out how to tell the story, and I finally had to give up on it. I never told Ann about it, figuring if I could do it I’d do it and then surprise her with the manuscript, and if I couldn’t do it there was no point humiliating myself talking about it.

It’s funny how I don’t lust after Ann, I don’t understand it. It isn’t that I don’t get letches for my friends’ wives. God knows it isn’t that. Kay, for instance, Dick’s wife

I was about to tell a lie. A fiction, maybe. Which could be my basic problem after all, that I tell fiction when I should tell fact, and fact when I should tell fiction.

The truth is, I kissed Kay once. Well, I kissed her four or five times, but it was all in the same incident. It was at a party at Rod’s, when he had the place on East 78th Street. That was before I gave up smoking, and I finished a pack, and I knew I had a fresh pack in my coat pocket. The coats were in the bedroom, at the back of the apartment, piled up on the bed. I went back there and didn’t bother to turn on the light, mostly because I was about half in the bag. I wasn’t used to the idea of parties where you didn’t bring your own bottle, and the notion of free booze was in the process of laying me low. So I just stood there in the semi-dark, half bent over the bed, pawing through the coats, looking for mine, and then a drunky girl’s voice behind me said, “Are you a burglar?” Joking.

I turned around and it was Kay, standing in the doorway. I couldn’t see her face because all the light was from behind her, but I got the impression she was grinning. She has a very sexy full-bodied shape, when she wears a form-fitting knit dress men tend to walk into doors and walls. I was seeing it in silhouette, the nice narrow waist, the full hips, and so I immediately responded, “No, I’m a rapist.” Because she was sexy, and I was half drunk.

“Oh, goody,” she said, and came trotting over and threw her arms around my neck and kissed me.

In fantasy, you see, and in the sex books, I would be the one to kiss her, and of course she would immediately explode with sensual response. But I would be the aggressor, it would be my idea and my move.

So much for fantasy. She kissed me, and I was the one who immediately exploded with sensual response. I put my arms around her and kissed her back. “Mmm,” she said, liking it, so I probed a bit with my tongue. Her teeth parted and she received the tongue with a great deal of obvious pleasure. She wasn’t quite as engulfing as Charlotte used to be, but she was all right.

We kissed four or five times, with me nuzzling her neck in between, and then I slipped my right hand from the small of her back down past the borderline of waist and over the strange alien contours of her behind, so unlike Betsy’s behind, my fingertips on the deepening groove of her ass, headed down and around, intending to slip down between her legs and come upon her cunt from behind, but before I was halfway to Moscow she said, “Uh uh,” and smiled to show there were no hard feelings, and pushed on my shoulders, separating us.

For one second I saw myself pushing it, overpowering her weak defenses, stroking her and kissing her and rubbing against her till she was too passionate to refuse me, and then mounting her atop the pile of coats and humping her till her cries of ecstasy brought the other guests on the run...

There. I did it again. My fantasies turn against me, they go bitter and rancid every time.

The point is, I had one instant where I might have refused to take no for an answer, at which point she would surely have hauled off and belted me or maybe even hollered, but not in ecstasy, and then the next second came along and brought gloomy old sanity with it, and my hands slipped away from her hips, and I hunted around quickly in the bottom of my prop bag for a smile, tacked it in place, and said, “Come back when you can spend more time.”