Adios, Scheherazade

5. Two weeks have passed. Sally hasn’t gone back to the advertising agency, nor does she have another job. She’s living in a lesbian relationship with Anita. Matt comes by to say he’s gotten a job in an Off Broadway theater, and finds out what’s going on. He tells Sally all men are not as heartless as Archer Frenway, and convinces her to come with him to his new apartment, in which there’s a spare bedroom. He promises to make no sexual moves toward her. She goes with him, and alone in bed that night she thinks about sex straight and sex lesbian and masturbates and comes. She wonders if she can come every way but the right way.

6. Matt has a party for his Greenwich Village and Off Broadway friends. Sally is feeling somewhat better, she’s been at Matt’s place for two weeks, there’s been no sex between them. The party becomes an orgy, which Sally observes but does not take part in.

7. Sally is backstage at the theater where Matt has a small role in an Off Broadway play. She’s alone in the dressing room when Anita comes in, angry at Sally for having walked out on her. Anita starts to beat Sally up, and Rex Kilbrood, the male lead in the play, comes in and breaks it up. He consoles Sally in the dressing room, seems very attentive and compassionate and gentle, and gradually seduces her. While they’re making it she suddenly realizes the whole thing has been mechanical with him, the whole seduction just a well-rehearsed play, he has no real interest in her at all. He comes, but she does not, and she cynically observes how he handles the brushoff afterwards.

8. Sally is in Matt’s apartment, middle of the day. The doorbell rings and it’s Archer Frenway. He is distraught, he hasn’t been able to forget her, he didn’t realize that day in the office that she would become so important in his mind. She sees that he wants to seduce her, more gently than the last time, and she leads him on, going through all sorts of foreplay with him, and when he’s just about to score she runs into the bathroom and locks herself in and tells him he’d better leave because Matt is coming home soon. He batters at the door, but she won’t let him in, and he finally leaves. It’s a triumph, and a revenge, but the taste of it is sour.

9. When Matt comes home, Sally tells him about Archer’s visit and what she did, and how she’s afraid she’s becoming as heartless as Archer himself. Matt begins to kiss her and gradually they make it, with tenderness and caring on both sides, and for the first time Sally has an orgasm with a man the primary way. She’s still bathed in the glow of this, of knowing that she is normal after all, when the mail comes, with a letter from Barry saying he’s coming to New York to see her. She knows she’s going to have to choose between Barry and Matt.

10. Walking down the street, Sally meets a couple of sailors who engage her in conversation. They smuggle her aboard their battleship and when they are on the high seas she blows the entire Seventh Fleet until, bloated with come, she is harpooned by a passing whaler and sinks without a trace.

1

Sitting in the commuter train on the way home to Long Island, Paul Trepless found himself smiling at his vague reflection in the window beside him, smiling at it and thinking about Beth. Thinking very sexy thoughts about Beth, remembering sexual moments with Beth, getting excited at the very thought of Beth, and smiling at himself both because he was pleased with life and because he thought it was funny and silly in a good way to be so worked up all of a sudden over Beth.

Over his wife.

An old married man, married six years, with a daughter and a house and a job and all the appurtenances of staid family life, he wasn’t supposed to get as excited about his wife as a teenager about a girl on their first date. Life was supposed to be more settled for him than that, and until very recently it had been. Until very recently he’d been living a sort of placid, bored, contented but not exciting life, and he hadn’t much minded it, and he’d neither looked forward to each succeeding day nor dreaded each succeeding day. He’d simply lived each succeeding day, finding it essentially the same as the day before it and the day after it and all the other days on both sides, stretching away into infinity. And if Sunday was somewhat different from Thursday, it was nevertheless true that Sunday was no different at all in any essential respect from any other Sunday, and no Thursday could be told with complete assurance from any other Thursday.

Until recently.

Until just the last few days, in fact.

Paul Trepless had no clear idea himself just why everything seemed suddenly so changed. Nothing had changed outside him, he still had the same job at the advertising agency, Beth was still the same ordinary housewife, his home was the same, his daughter Edwina was certainly no different, he had met no new people nor lost any old ones. No, there was no explanation in the outside world for the change that had taken place.