A Madwoman's Diary Read online

  A Madwoman’s Diary

  Lawrence Block

  Writing As Jill Emerson

  Contents

  13 February—Saturday

  14 February—Sunday

  15 February—Monday

  16 February—Tuesday

  17 February—Wednesday

  18 February—Thursday

  21 February—Sunday

  22 February—Monday

  24 February—Wednesday

  25 February—Thursday

  26 February—Friday

  27 February—Saturday

  28 February—Sunday

  1 March—Monday

  2 March—Tuesday

  3 March—Wednesday

  4 March—Thursday

  5 March—Friday

  6 March—Saturday

  7 March—Sunday

  8 March—Monday

  9 March—Tuesday

  10 March—Wednesday

  11 March—Thursday

  12 March—Friday

  13 March—Saturday

  14 March—Sunday

  15 March—Monday

  16 March—Tuesday

  17 March—Wednesday

  18 March—Thursday

  19 March—Friday

  20 March—Saturday

  21 March—Sunday

  22 March—Monday

  23 March—Tuesday

  24 March—Wednesday

  25 March—Thursday

  26 March—Friday

  27 March—Saturday

  28 March—Sunday

  29 March—Monday

  30 March—Tuesday

  31 March—Wednesday

  1 April—Thursday

  1 April—Thursday

  2 April—Friday

  3 April—Saturday

  4 April—Sunday

  5 April—Monday

  6 April—Tuesday

  7 April—Wednesday

  8 April—Thursday

  9 April—Friday

  10 April—Saturday

  11 April—Sunday

  12 April—Monday

  13 April—Tuesday

  14 April—Wednesday

  15 April—Thursday

  16 April—Friday

  17 April—Saturday

  18 April—Sunday

  19 April—Monday

  20 April—Tuesday

  21 April—Wednesday

  22 April—Thursday

  23 April—Friday

  24 April—Saturday

  25 April—Sunday

  26 April—Monday

  27 April—Tuesday

  28 April—Wednesday

  29 April—Thursday

  30 April—Friday

  1 May—Saturday

  2 May—Sunday

  3 May—Monday

  4 May—Tuesday

  5 May—Wednesday

  6 May—Thursday

  7 May—Friday

  8 May—Saturday

  9 May—Sunday

  10 May—Monday

  11 May—Tuesday

  14 May—Friday

  23 May—Sunday

  24 May—Monday

  27 May—Thursday

  1 June—Tuesday

  5 June—Saturday

  6 June—Sunday

  9 June—Wednesday

  10 June—Thursday

  13 June—Sunday

  14 June—Monday

  15 June—Tuesday

  17 June—Thursday

  18 June—Friday

  20 June—Sunday

  21 June—Monday

  22 June—Tuesday

  24 June—Thursday

  A New Afterword by the Author

  A Biography of Lawrence Block

  13 February—Saturday

  Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. It is also Sunday, which means that no mail will be delivered. But Monday’s mail will bring me no valentines. I have sent none. I will receive none.

  My twenty-seventh Valentine’s Day. On my twentieth Valentine’s Day I got a present, a silver chain bracelet from the boy who would marry me four months later. On each of the next two Valentine’s Days he gifted me with candy.

  I never liked candy. Hate gifts of it. Here, the box shrieks. Here, eat me and get fat! You might as well. No one cares if you’re fat or lean. No one.

  Typical of Gary. So anxious to please and so incapable of it. Never flowers, which I would have loved. But candy, which I hate.

  Typical, too, that I never told him. Two of us under a roof for two years and three months, neither of us ever able to take the clothing from our minds.

  No one ever sent me flowers.

  No one ever sent me a valentine.

  I found the silver chain bracelet while packing things. On the floor in the back of the dresser. Tarnished, which seemed symbolically correct. Always—Gary. Always Gary, but not always Arlene’s Gary. Gone now four years and five months. Gone forever, and good riddance to both of us.

  Is this going well? I wonder if this is going well. I wonder, for that matter, if it is in fact going. Or if I am going anywhere but mad.

  Mother is almost a month dead. (All of this preoccupation with time. Mother is a month dead, Gary is four years and five months divorced, Daddy is—what?—twenty years dead, Arlene is twenty-six years old, twenty-seven in September. Time, time, time.)

  Mother is dead and the store is sold and the apartment above it, home for all my life but for those years and months of marriage, quite vacant now. Mother is dead and in the ground, and she and Brooklyn join Daddy and Gary in the limbo of past time. Once part of my life and part of it no longer.

  So I sit at a new Smith-Corona Electric Portable in a new apartment in a done-over brownstone on West 19th Street. I like this typewriter, so much faster and smoother than the rickety old Underwood, somehow sleeker than the Royal Standard in the office. And I like the apartment, clean, starkly clean, fresh, compact, looming with possibilities. And I like Chelsea better than Brooklyn.

  But Arlene is the same Arlene. Mirrors tell her she’s pretty enough, dark of hair and fair of skin, long of leg and slim of waist and round if not protrusive of bosom. Pretty enough, mirrors say, but no one seems to notice. Arlene passes not merely in crowds but in near-empty rooms. Arlene turns no one on, and no one turns on Arlene, and she dreams her waking dreams of aching lust in secret. And does her finger exercises, the nightly ritual of lazy-fingered masturbation while her mind has her doing things that Arlene, poor thing, would never, never do.

  Is this working?

  A new typewriter and a fresh ream of bright white bond paper. Thick, twenty-pound paper, twenty-five per cent rag content. Crisp, clean paper to be covered by the tale of an idiot, full of sound and fury and loneliness and frustration.

  I have kept diaries before. I never typed them. Almost invariably I began them with the new year, buying one of those lockable red diaries with the pages edged in gold. I never kept one for a full year.

  And never wrote anything real in one.

  They were the jottings of an utterly imaginative record keeper. Books I read, movies I watched, subjects in school, marks on tests. Never an entry that meant anything. Because I have always been so secretive a person that I could not reveal anything that anyone might someday find.

  But now for the first time in my life I am alone. I have always been alone in many ways. Now I literally live alone, and no one but I shall ever be in this apartment. It seems unlikely that a burglar would read this diary, or care what he read. (Interesting, though, that the remote prospect does bother me. But I can chance it.)

  I have no one to talk to. I have never had anyone to talk to. So I talk to my typewriter, and to myself.

  I am alone and hate being alone and have always been alone and will al
ways be alone and will always hate it. I am pretty and look plain and dull. I am bright and think of clever turns of phrase and never send my brightness past my lips, so everyone thinks me dull and witless.

  I am passionate. Alone, in my mind’s eye, I am passionate. Obsessed with sex. Driven.

  When anyone is near me I freeze.

  Plain dull witless Arlene Krause. How I hate her. I even hate her name. Arlene, plastic and sprayed hair and no brains and boring. Krause, stolid and solid and thick and stupid, fat ankles and pimples and colds all winter.

  The beautiful and bright and passionate Me has another name. Her name is Jennifer Starr and she has large breasts and tawny skin and a golden mane, and makes unbridled love with men and women, romping guiltless and shameless and joyous through my fantasies.

  When I touch myself, and close my eyes and ears, and get slightly and briefly out of myself, it is never Arlene Krause whom I see behind my eyelids.

  It is Jennifer Starr.

  I think I shall go to bed now. Jennifer will be whipped tonight, I think. Ankles and wrists lashed to the X of a Saint Andrew’s cross. She will be beaten by a man and woman, and at first the pain will seem more than she can bear, but as the whipping continues she will find pleasure in the pain, and Jennifer will eat the woman while the man fucks her brutally in her asshole. And she will come gloriously, over and over and over.

  I have never typed these words before. I have read them often, in deliciously filthy books that fuel the fires of fantasy. And I have occasionally written them. A dozen years ago there was a time when I would write every dirty word I knew, making meaningless obscene lists in pencil on ruled white notebook paper, then tearing the list into confetti lest anyone even suspect I knew those words.

  I never talked to my mother. I don’t care that she’s dead. I never knew her. I don’t miss her. I am not glad that she is dead. Neither am I sorry.

  I’ll probably throw all this shit away in the morning.

  14 February—Sunday

  Hello.

  Hello, Smith-Corona Electra 110.

  I didn’t throw all this shit away in the morning. In the morning I got up and made myself instant coffee. I went out and bought the Times and lugged it all home and read most of it. I did most of the crossword puzzle. There was no Double-Crostic. Just a pair of diagramless puzzles. I’ve never understood how one does them. I’ve a feeling no one in the world really knows how.

  Then what did I do? Went out for a walk. Had beef lo mein at a Cuban Chinese restaurant on Eighth Avenue. Walked some more. Came back. Played the radio. Let disc jockeys talk to me. Didn’t talk back. Didn’t even listen.

  It is now somewhere past nine o’clock in the evening of my first full day in my new apartment. So far today I have spoken perhaps ten words to the waiter in the restaurant, all of those words having to do with my dish of beef lo mein and my eventual desire for the check. I did not have to say anything to the news dealer. I picked up the Times, handed him a dollar, took my change. He may have thanked me. I don’t remember.

  If I were to get up from the typewriter right now and cut my wrists, no one would know until the smell of my rotting corpse scurried under the door. They might miss me at the office—and they might not miss me at all—but they do not know that I have moved, and I left no forwarding address in Brooklyn.

  There is a phone. I don’t know why I had them put it in. No one will call me, and I shall call no one. But there is indeed a phone. Its number is unlisted. No one could get my number from the telephone company. They take this trust as seriously as the Swiss take numbered accounts.

  I pay extra for my unlisted number. Why? Who would want to call me? And what makes me so anxious not to be called?

  Not that I would ever cut my wrists, or otherwise put an end to myself. It cheers me to realize that I have never found suicide attractive. It has no charm for me. Death would be even more boring than the life I lead. And would last longer.

  I fell less depressed than these words would suggest. I feel oddly elated and cannot entirely understand why. There is a sense of liberation in this total solitude. There is a sense of liberation in being alone in a new place with no ties whatsoever to the past. A new living situation suggests the possibility of a new life.

  Yes. Thus the elation.

  I feel—how to explain it? I feel that I am en route to something. That I am about to grow. That the bud of me is swelling and preparing to flower.

  I thought of something wonderful to do. Go out and buy a dozen valentines. Send them, unsigned and with no return address, to a dozen strangers selected at random from the Manhattan telephone directory. Or sign each with the name of one of the others, and put on the appropriate return address.

  Too late now. Next year, perhaps.

  15 February—Monday

  It is impossible to see anything interesting from my windows. There are two apartments I might be able to see into but they always keep their shades pulled. I have checked compulsively since I moved in, and the shades have always been drawn. Perhaps they will be up in the heat of the summer. Some people keep their shades drawn in cool weather but leave them up in summer. Neither of the windows in question sports an air-conditioner, so there’s hope.

  I have always yearned to watch people fuck.

  No, there’s more to it than that. To watch them do anything at all. To be unobserved while observing. When I was a child I dreamed of being invisible. It is a dream I still entertain occasionally in fantasy.

  I did not tell anyone at the office that I have moved. So no one knows I live here. And no one will ever know.

  Tonight Jennifer and her husband, a swarthy stevedore, will initiate a younger couple into the pleasures of wife- swapping and group sex.

  That’s always been a good one.

  16 February—Tuesday

  I am incapable of action.

  Why?

  Hell.

  This afternoon on the way home from work I saw an underground paper at a newsstand. Screw. I have heard of this paper and have read about it but never saw it before. I don’t believe the Brooklyn newsstands carry it. At least I never saw any of them displaying it.

  I wanted to buy it and I couldn’t.

  What is the matter with me? The news dealer does not know me. He does not even look at the people who buy the papers from him. Or remember their faces. Why am I incapable of buying a newspaper called Screw? Why, when I am so desperately anxious to read it?

  17 February—Wednesday

  I bought Screw.

  Not from the newsstand where I first saw it. I passed that stand again, and hesitated, but could not do it. Instead I walked almost home. At Eighth Avenue I took a bus to 42nd Street and walked around Times Square.

  I did this several times when I lived in Brooklyn. Rode in on the BMT and walked the same blocks over and over again. Oddly elevated every time, frightened yet exhilarated. The book stores, the movie houses, the black girls whoring on Seventh Avenue, the midnight cowboys draping themselves against 42nd Street store fronts.

  Men can go to these places. Buy the books, see the movies, move at ease through this world of peep shows and model studios and a thousand forms of tawdry sex. And I yearn to do this. I read the books we carried in the candy store, spirited them upstairs when Mother was not watching, tucked them back into the pockets of the rack when I was done with them. I don’t suppose the books on Times Square are any more candid than the ones I read in my room with the door locked. But it would be good to be able to know. It would be good to be able to see the movies.

  To be invisible. Because a woman would have to be invisible to do this, wouldn’t she?

  I wonder.

  I suppose a woman could go to a book store or a peep show or a movie without being bothered. The men who go there do not seem aggressive. She would be noticed, though. She would be stared at. Violated in the mind, raped by eyes and brains.

  Arlene could not go. Jennifer would go, and be picked up, and enjoy herself, but Arlene
extends herself merely by walking apprehensively down those mean and bitter streets.

  The schemes that grow up in my mind. I could wear men’s clothing and hide my hair under a cap. Frigid, unapproachable Arlene in butch drag, walking with a sailor’s rolling swagger, buying books and sex toys, dropping quarters in a peep show machine, sitting in the darkness of a grubby theater between rows of panting onanists.

  Years ago women wore men’s clothes in order to be served ale at McSorley’s. Arlene in male garb, liberating the world of pornography. Arlene in drag, invisible at last.

  With my luck I’d be taken for a male hustler, latched onto by some Long Island closet queen who’d want to suck my nonexistent cock.

  But I bought Screw. Went there to buy it and stalked three newsstands. Settled on a blind man, delighted to be invisible in his eyes.

  How can I be so fully aware of the dimensions of my neuroses and yet so utterly their victim?

  Bought it. Picked an issue off a stack. Had the right change, two quarters sweat-dampened in my palm. Dropped them in the blind man’s hand. And said, “Screw.”

  Screw, blind man. Screw, Times Square. Screw, fuck, shit, piss, damn, cunt, cock, prick, whore, bitch, hell. Screw!

  Folded it small as if to stuff it into a fortune cookie. Crammed it into my purse. Back downtown on the Ninth Avenue bus past shuttered meat markets and produce stalls and tenements. Near empty bus. Visions all the way of my purse springing open and Screw leaping out, unfolding magically on its way to the floor. And every eye turned on me, staring with lust and contempt at her who would purchase filth.

  Home, and dizzily proud of myself for buying it. Such a pathetic act to generate pride.

  And sat reading it. Reading it over and over and over.

  And now sit staring at the typewriter looking at the last sentence and unable to go on. I have to write about all this but I can’t. Maybe tomorrow.

  18 February—Thursday

  A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Was buying Screw that step?

  Oh, I don’t know. Don’t know, either, where the journey might lead me. Or if I want to go there. Or if that projected thousand-mile jaunt might not end prematurely, end with that single step.