Adios, Scheherazade

“You’re here to enjoy yourself, dear,” she said, and closed her eyes and set her jaw, and with a look of total concentration on her face, the smile gone for once, she began to do fast, hard, intricate work with a lot of muscles in her lower torso, and my peashooter shot, and I groaned, “Damn it!” and fell full weight on top of her.

After that, I had the feeling she was counting to a hundred and would then tell me it was time to get up, so I got up when I figured she was at about eighty-five. She washed my cock again, and then squatted over the basin to wash herself, and I thought now that she looked like a mongrel dog in an African village, and I thought the bouffant hairdo was pathetic and ridiculous, and I knew I’d been successfully humiliated, and I was horribly afraid that was what I’d gone out for.

I was also sober.

Thus ends my first infidelity. Do you hear that, Betsy? My honest to God one and only first. All others existed only on the thin mattress of my mind. Or possibly the mind in Oscar.

I left, without having been beaten all the way to death, and drove home with my groin itching, I don’t know why. I drank myself to sleep, and that ended Friday.

Saturday I was numb. I woke up late, I wandered around, I tried to write a letter to Betsy but didn’t really want to write to her, and finally I wrote that chapter about kissing Kay and Dick’s literary theories and Thanksgiving Day and all that other stuff, never once mentioning what had happened, what had really and truly happened. I’m not sure why I did that. I think Saturday was just the day between the shock and the reality, a sort of eye of the storm. I seemed sure of myself and gutsy and brisk and capable of steering my craft safely through all shoals, or at least I seemed that way to me. I think I knew it wasn’t real, but it was all I had.

I seem to have done another fifteen pages. Another fifteen useless pages, of course.

No. Not entirely useless. Tonight I will write the real Chapter 2, in which Paul gets drunk, angry, laid and maudlin, and I will be able to use a lot of the sex scene description from this chapter. I’ll just switch it from first person to third person and leave out the pornography.

I think Paul will make her come.

2

Paul was mostly drunk, but not entirely drunk. He was just sober enough to know he was drunk, which is what saved him. Because he was also driving the car, and if he hadn’t been sober enough to know he was too drunk to be driving the car he would almost surely have had an accident.

As it was, he reached New York safely, drove crosstown through the grid of streets from the Midtown Tunnel, and parked on West 47th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues. He got out, locked the car, and went looking for a whore.

It was well after midnight by now. The first shock of Beth’s disappearance had worn off, he had made his first frantic useless attempts to contact her — a call to her parents upstate had done him no good since she hadn’t arrived yet and hadn’t even told her parents she was coming — he had drunk himself into a state of partial anesthesia, and he had decided he was angry.

After all, a man had a right to privacy, didn’t he? Didn’t he? So what if he kept a make believe diary full of make believe affairs and seductions. In a way, Beth ought to be thankful they were make believe. It was entirely possible that having had this outlet for his polygamous impulses over the years had been good for their marriage. It might have helped the marriage, in fact, by using up all his stray impulses to stray, giving him a safe and unimportant outlet for those natural feelings that come over every man on earth at one time or another in his married life.

And Beth had instantly believed the diary, that was another thing. She hadn’t given him the benefit of the doubt, hadn’t asked him for an explanation, hadn’t done anything but stalk off into the night and leave him standing there with egg on his face.

How could she have believed it? Didn’t she know him, hadn’t they been married for six years, couldn’t she have known instinctively that the things in the diary couldn’t possibly be true?

So he’d decided, once he was drunk enough, to be angry. Angry at Beth, both for believing the worst against him without question and for punishing him for something that was actually beneficial to their marriage together. Whether either of these indictments would hold up or not wasn’t the question; he was full of them, full of liquor and righteous indignation, and he had decided that by God he would be unfaithful. If he was going to have the name, by George he was also going to have the game.

So here he was in New York, walking around the Times Square area with only a slight list to betray his drunkenness. He walked up 7th Avenue, and there they were.