Thirty Read online

  I must, then, summarize.

  So.

  She kissed and licked and sucked her way down my body and then she ate my cunt until I nearly died from pleasure.

  See how much time and space we save that way?

  But oh, oh, how fantastic it was. On a purely physical plane there should not be very much difference between being eaten by a man and being eaten by a woman. It is, after all, the same general thing. One’s eyes are closed, and it could be any disembodied head gobbling away between one’s thighs. There are few things nicer than being soundly eaten by a man who enjoys that sort of thing. It is best, of course, if he is either immaculately clean-shaven, or, praise God, equipped with beard and moustache. (Whenever I see a man with beard and moustache I find myself assuming that he likes to eat cunt, and is considerate of his partner. But I’m sure there must be some men who wear beards and moustaches because they like the way they look. Odd.)

  A girl’s face is softer, and her mouth is a little softer, and that should be all the difference there is.

  Not so.

  How to explain it? How can I tell you about it, Mirror Girl, when I don’t understand it myself?

  Never mind. It happened, it was divine, and I know as much as I need to know about it. Afterward, while I bubbled blissfully in afterglow, Susan’s sweet face lay briefly on the pillow of my loins. Then she came up and rested her head on my breast, and I put a hand on her back and a hand on her head and rocked her, cradled her, and she purred and told me she loved me, and I told her I loved her, and she purred some more. I patted her head, stroked that silken hair. Those earlier inhibitions seemed so utterly foreign to me now, just as her presence in my arms seemed completely natural.

  (Once you jump in, and find the water fine, you wonder why you shivered so long on the bank.)

  “Oh, Jan,” she says.

  “And to think I didn’t want this to happen.”

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t let it.”

  “I almost didn’t.”

  “We didn’t even need drinks.”

  “No.”

  “We could have them now. You don’t need it, you showed that much, so now it would be all right to have them just to give us that extra drive, don’t you think?”

  “I think so.”

  “I’ll get them.”

  “No, let me.” She rolls off of me and lies on her back, eyes wide, smiling sleepily. I get up, then bend over to kiss her mouth. She tastes deliciously of me, of my cunt. I do not turn from the taste but kiss her deeply, my tongue working past her lips and into her mouth, tasting myself as I taste her. How good the taste of sex, of men and women!

  (When I first learned to suck men’s cocks I lived in horror that some of their seed would be swallowed before I could spit it out. How awful, to spit out the essence of a man! Now, a new woman, I greedily suck up and swallow every precious drop.)

  I leave her reluctantly, leave the bedroom, go to the kitchen. There is a decanter of the red liquid on the counter top. And two glasses. I fill the glasses. In the living room I stop to gather up my cigarettes and a pack of matches.

  I return to the bedroom. I hand her a glass, keep one for myself. We drink them straight down. It is the same liquid he has given me before. The scent is of rose petals, the taste sweet and sour.

  I set my glass aside and light a cigarette.

  “Susan?”

  “What is it?”

  “I want to make love to you.”

  “In a few minutes.”

  “Would you like that?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I wish I knew what was in this drink.”

  “Something kicky.”

  “Some kind of drug.”

  “Uh-huh. You really never made it with a girl before?”

  “Never.”

  “It’s good, isn’t it?”

  “It is.”

  “It’s not as powerful as with a man, you dig what I mean? No thrusting and heaving and everything. Nobody getting under your skin. Can you dig it? A man gets inside of you, he gets under your skin. Girls, it’s different, girls just get themselves together, like.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know which is better. You were so many things when I ate you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In my head, like. The different hats you wore. You were my mother and my sister and my daughter, you know, all those female roles.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “I tend to trip out that way. Role playing and sex. I’m a little crazy, I guess.”

  “Who isn’t?”

  “There’s a question. Nobody I know.”

  “Eric?”

  “I don’t suppose you could really understand Eric. Not you, personally. I mean like anybody.”

  “Do you understand him?”

  “Not for a minute.”

  “You’ve known him a long time.”

  “All my life, it feels like. Three years, not quite. More like three hundred years. I don’t know him at all.”

  I draw on the cigarette, inhale. The smoke unaccountably makes me slightly dizzy. I breathe out, butt the cigarette in an ashtray on the bedside table.

  I say, “What does he do?”

  “Eric?”

  “I mean for a living. Does he work?”

  “No.”

  “Did he inherit money or something?”

  “I don’t think so. I think—”

  “What?”

  “He never said this, it’s just a guess, and maybe I shouldn’t say anything, so if you’ll keep it quiet that I said it—”

  “Of course.”

  “I have the feeling, it’s just a feeling, that he’s like some kind of a criminal.”

  “That’s what I think.”

  “Really?”

  “But I don’t know what makes me think so.”

  “Neither do I. He goes away on these trips. He doesn’t say anything, he just goes away. And then he comes back. I get the feeling that he steals money on these trips, or gets money illegally one way or the other. Maybe it’s just that I couldn’t picture him doing anything else. You know, he’s a man who when he wants something like he takes it.”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  “And I don’t think he would do anything respectable. He would never work for somebody.”

  “God, no.”

  “And he wouldn’t have a business. He’s not the type. I’ll tell you one thing, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I would never cross him.”

  “No.”

  “I would not want him to be upset with me.”

  “I have the feeling, Susan, he would just kill anybody who displeased him.”

  “He could do that, yes.”

  “Without a second thought.”

  “Don’t even say it, it gives me chills. I can’t stand that.”

  “What?”

  “Talking about that kind of thing. About killing or dying. The whole idea of death. I wouldn’t smoke a cigarette because of the idea that I might die of cancer fifty years from now. Fifty years is like forever but even that far off I can’t stand to think about death. And when you say like that about Eric, and I think about him killing a person, and then inside my head it becomes me that he’s killing, and it does things to me, it makes things happen in my head. Look at me—” holding out a hand, straight out, the fingers spread, and the tips it is true are trembling “—look at me, I’m actually shaking, that’s what this kind of talk does to me. Now that’s not normal, is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “To be that frightened. I mean you would have to be sick not to be frightened of dying, but to be this frightened of it for no good reason, that has to be a kind of a sickness too, right?”

  “It’s something you’ll grow out of.”

  “Do you think so? I hope so. Jan—”

  I kiss her.

  “Oh, groovy. Yes, let’s love each other. When that happens all of the fear goe
s away.”

  “My turn, though.”

  “Huh?”

  “To do you.”

  “Oh, we can do each other.”

  “First just me. I’ve never done it, I want to, I want to get lost in you.”

  “That’s pretty, to say that.”

  “I love you.”

  We kiss. We hug each other as if clinging together for mutual warmth and protection. (And perhaps we are doing just that.) She lies down and I kiss her mouth and her throat.

  And her breasts.

  And through it all one corner of my mind stands back aloof and notes all of this with interest and a measure of surprise. How extraordinary that I am capable of all this! How unexpected my enthusiasm for this girl’s breasts! See me now, curled at the breast as at another breast twenty-nine years earlier, eyes lidded, earnestly sucking.

  When I crouch between her taut plump thighs and inhale her musk and taste her bittersweetness, it becomes something else again. For a time it is Susan I am loving, and then, somewhere lost in time and space, it is as if this disembodied cunt to which I pay homage is in fact my own, as if I am doing this to myself. I am at once giving and receiving—

  (Hard to recapture this, hard to define. You say you were eating yourself, ma’am? With a spoon, no doubt. Unless you’re some kind of bloody contortionist, ma’am. Would you care to let us have that one again, ma’am?

  (Never mind.)

  I come while eating her, feeling in myself what I arouse in her. And we do more things, we find many things to do. There is nothing exhausting about this sort of lovemaking. We could go on forever. There is a wholly different rhythm to this sort of sex.

  It is late at night when we finally agree to call it a day. Eric has still not returned. I sit on the couch finishing a cigarette, then drop the butt on the coal fire. Susan says we should not be seen leaving the building together. Why? But I do not ask this question. I go alone, and hurry back home.

  Enough.

  May 12

  It is hard to believe that she is so young.

  I gather she has had any number of men since Eric. I’ve picked this up between the lines, so to speak. She doesn’t like to talk much about what she has done. I’ve tried to get her to say how Eric seduced her in the first place. She was no more than a child at the time. She could not have been like me, sex-struck and just waiting to be asked. Did he rape her, I wonder? Or drug her? Or merely mesmerize her into seductibility, which, if it isn’t a word, jolly well ought to be.

  May 14

  All those cruddy novels about sensitive young girls looking for meaning in life and finding it between their roommate’s legs, I begin to appreciate them now. Not that it’s really like that, exactly, but—

  Just what are you trying to say, Giddings?

  Okay. Just that there is something basically innocent, I guess, about what girls do in bed. Maybe it’s because of the basic gentleness of it, the fact that no one really enters anyone else, that there is none of this high-pitched passion, none of this violent spurting of seed. One can be a lesbian and still remain a virgin.

  So?

  So I don’t know.

  May 15

  We went to a movie last night and held hands. Incredible. Susan and I holding hands in the balcony. And we didn’t make love at all before or after. I am having my period, but we could have found any of a number of ways around that, had it mattered much. But no, we just wanted to go to the movies together, and then she had to go shopping or something and I had a book at home I wanted to finish, sort of, so that was that.

  Very pleasant, really.

  Eric seems to be out of town. The other night I managed to convince myself that he’s some sort of superspy. But I don’t really think so. It’s easier to see him as some kind of very cool, very successful professional criminal. A top jewel thief, perhaps, or an armed robber specializing in banks and armored cars.

  There was a holdup in Queens the other day, a branch bank, robbed of almost a quarter of a million dollars. But that was a few days ago and I think Eric was around at the time.

  I don’t really know a thing about him.

  May 16

  For that matter, what do I know about Susan? Not very much. I can’t imagine where she goes when she leaves me, what she does when we’re not together. Which is ridiculous to waste time worrying about, I suppose.

  But she is very secretive, whether by design or automatically I cannot say. She won’t tell me her address and says that she does not have a phone, so there is no way to find her or get in touch with her. She is vague about where she has come from or where she is going at any given time.

  Oh, what do I care, anyway?

  May 19

  Saw Howard this afternoon.

  He didn’t see me. I went uptown to look at some slacks but didn’t find anything I liked. Walking up Fifth Avenue I saw him about half a block ahead just getting ready to cross the street. He was holding a girl’s arm, a secretary type with one of those elaborate plastic hairdos and tits like missile nose cones. Those huge plastic tits that either don’t entirely belong to the girl or when you take her bra off they hang to her knees, or they will by the time she’s thirty.

  Christ, listen to me, putting down a girl I never did more than look at. And why? Because she’s helping to clean up the food I left on my plate? If they enjoy each other, more power to them.

  Why should I be jealous?

  I seem to be. But I think it’s just a reflex, a knee jerking when the hammer hits it. I watched them a little. They must have been going to or from lunch. (Or to and from bed.)

  He looks fat and stupid. I wonder what I ever saw in him. Really. That’s a cliché, I know, but what on earth did I see in him?

  Or he in me, for that matter?

  Does he miss me? There’s a question for the ages. Again, why should I care?

  Funny. I remember one time when we saw on the street the car we had traded in on our station wagon. A fine car, but we had wanted the wagon. Because it went with the house, of course.

  Anyway, we were driving along in the wagon, and there was our car. Unmistakably ours. There was a little dent the size of a teacup that I had put in the bumper once, and that of course no one had been able to do anything about, and that made the identification absolute.

  And Howie and I began to hate the man who was driving the car. Typical dog-in-the-manger crap, but people are like that. Once something has belonged to you and you are done with it you automatically want it to cease to exist, or at the very least to have no life separate from you.

  Oh, Eric’s back. From robbing banks or subverting the government of Australia or whatever he does. He called a few minutes ago.

  I’m seeing him tonight.

  Will Susan be there? And what scene will we play now?

  Funny. Having seen Howard fires me up for this evening. I want wild things to happen. I don’t care if he strips us both bare-ass naked and takes after us with a leather whip.

  One doesn’t entirely get over people in a hurry. Even shallow people that you would think wouldn’t take a lot of getting over. Howard, let us face it, didn’t have all that much to say. And it was I who left him, and good riddance. And all that happened today was that I saw the dumb son of a bitch crossing Fifth Avenue, which is probably something he does at least a couple of times a day, and the fact that he was walking with a girl with big tits suggested to me that maybe he hasn’t been faithful to our marriage vows since I ran out on him months ago. (Months! My sense of time is completely fucked up. It seems like years, and other times it seems like a matter of days.)

  If Howie wasn’t getting laid, that might be something to worry about.

  But the hell with being rational. I’m really anxious to do some wild screwing tonight. Which is the attitude every properly brought up young lady should have, I guess, when she’s on her way to do precisely that.

  May 20

  Three in bed is nice.

  I am too tired to write. Hours and hours
of fucking and sucking, to be crude about it. And why not be crude about it? Lewd and crude and rude and nude and never never never a prude. Lewd and crude and rude and nude and never a prude. Lewd and crude and rude and nude and thoroughly thoroughly thoroughly screwed!

  Everybody doing everything to everybody else. The entire production choreographed by Eric.

  I would say that I would hate myself in the morning except it’s the morning now and I don’t, not really. All I want to do is get into my own bed and sleep for a hundred and fifty hours, give or take a minute. I imagine there are other things I ought to do first.

  Like bathe some of this sweat and sex off my skin. Like douche, like brush my teeth, like use a mouthwash. Like drink about three quarts of mouthwash. My mouth has done some odd things in the past few hours. Days. Weeks. Months.

  Good night.

  May 27

  We tied up Susan. I ate her while he beat her with his belt. She was really screaming and it scared the life out of me. She swooned when she had her climax. Passed out and didn’t come to for about twenty minutes. I panicked, thought she was dead, for God’s sake. Eric told me not to be stupid.

  When she came out of it she kept saying how good she felt. She touched her bottom gingerly now and then and joked about the pain.

  The beating didn’t leave any marks to speak of.

  June 14

  Enough is too much.

  No one can live this way. I have looked deep into the mirror and am falling into it. I will drown in the mirror. One day and another day, over and over.

  I am dirty inside and out. I cannot go on this way and I do not deserve to go on.

  June 15

  I woke up this morning.

  I generally do, but I guess I wasn’t supposed to this time. Last night I drank wine and slipped deeper and deeper into depression and ultimately wrote that last entry. At least I assume I did. It’s in my handwriting, and it’s consistent with the mood I was in. I do remember having some of those thoughts, whatever they might have meant at the time. I just don’t remember writing them down.