Adios, Scheherazade

Do you know my college isn’t there any more? I’m part of the alumni of a nonexistent college, what do you think of that? Monequois College was a state school on federal land, the land having been an Army training camp back in the First World War, and with the current state of the world being what it is, our nation being more concerned with the military arts than the liberal arts, the feds decided they wanted the land back. The whole thing started the year after I graduated, and various committees to save this and committees to protest that began sending me things through the mail, wanting me to march on Washington or send money or some other improbable thing, but of course I was involved in my own problems — as I always am — and I never did anything about it. There was some talk about the college relocating somewhere else, but that didn’t happen either, for political reasons as I understand it, so in June of 1966 Monequois graduated its last senior class, the one Betsy would have graduated with if she hadn’t fucked up, or if I hadn’t fucked up, and the school closed forever. It’s now something called NorBomComDak, it’s an Army base, and I’ve been told the Army uses it for a training school, teaching commandos how to pacify civilians.

I don’t know, for some reason I find myself thinking about Hester, asking myself what Hester would do in a situation like this. And I wonder also if I overrate Hester. After all, she is in San Francisco, which I think of as Last Stop Town, where the drowners go before hitting the ocean. Could Hester possibly be running away from herself the same as us ordinary mortals?

No. Hester is one of the other kind, the kind who run away to be themselves, because they have selves they can’t possibly be at home. Hester’s all right. She always knew when to disappear and when to appear again.

I remember her high school graduation. It was two weeks after I graduated from Monequois, and though she hadn’t attended mine I did attend hers. And Hannah’s, of course, they graduated together. Hannah moved through it all like the Walt Disney robot of Abraham Lincoln, correct and realistic but somehow horrible, while Hester treated the whole thing as though it were a gigantic put-on. It was the only time in my life I ever saw her shamble. She went across the stage to get her diploma, and she was doing a perfect Stepin Fetchit. Which I suppose simply means they were both consistent in doing their thing. Hannah has reduced herself to a set of laudatory responses, and Hester has reduced herself to a put-on of the human condition.

I’d rather be Hester.

The question is, what do I want? God knows I don’t want what I have at the moment, locked into somebody else’s room, pissing out the window and typing garbage instead of meeting a deadline, but what do I want? What’s my goal, what purpose do I have in life?

To have things nice.

Yeah yeah, that’s what everybody says. But what about specifics? Specifically, what do I want? For instance, how do I want to earn my living?

I dunno.

Okay. Where in the world would I most prefer to live?

I dunno.

Fine. Where would I like most to be at this very moment?

In that girl in the living room.

Dummy, you never even met that girl. You don’t know what she looks like, you don’t know what her personality is, you don’t know anything about her. So how come you’re sitting here getting a hard-on over her? And you are, buddy, you know, you are getting a hard-on, and it is because of that girl out there in the living room. Why?

Because she’s going to get laid.

Beautiful. For months you’ve had a woman of your own, lying night after night in your own bed, right there for the taking, guaranteed score, and you haven’t been as horny as you are right now in years, not in years. And over a girl you don’t even know, have never even seen.

But isn’t that what sex is all about? The unknown, the mystery within the as-yet-unbreached cunt. Rod is out there working his ass off to fuck that girl and when you come right down to it he probably doesn’t know a hell of a lot more about her than I do. Her name and phone number and two or three topics of conversation in which he knows she takes an interest, and that’s about it. He knows as much about her as I know about my characters in the sex novels, and you know how much that is? Just enough. Not one fact more, not one thing more of any kind.

If that girl started to tell Rod about her secret dreams and fears, about who she is it would just confuse him.

I wonder if he has his finger in her now.

They’re just a couple of walls away. He’s got a dimmer switch on the living room lights, he’s turned this apartment into a make-out pad, but he’s done it quietly, coolly, without any of that overt boorish Playboy obviousness. No bearskin rugs, you know. No suggestive paintings on the walls. The apartment is constructed to be the place where he lives all the time, but he’s just seen to it there’s nothing in it to distract from a nice quiet seduction from time to time.