A Madwoman's Diary Read online

  Of course they have faggot pornography. Books and pictures and movies and everything. They advertise tons of this stuff in Screw. But it’s kept to itself, a gay ghetto. Bill tells me that the Times Square porn shops keep the gay stuff separated, give it one wall or bin to itself.

  Strange.

  How did I get off on this tangent?

  Paul and Gregory.

  I don’t know. I guess I enjoy it. I don’t come or anything. I don’t get hot exactly.

  I don’t know.

  Maybe it’s the comforting feeling that they’re as mixed up as I am, and that I’m having some sort of therapeutic function in my relationship with them. The reverse of my role in what I have going with Bill.

  I suppose this might be worth puzzling out, if anything’s worth puzzling out, but now doesn’t seem to be the time for it. I’m not getting anywhere, not typing anything that hasn’t occurred to me before, not coming up with anything I haven’t been able to get together in more eloquent form in my private musings. I feel very inarticulate at the moment, and less given to profound introspection than normally.

  I think I’ll wash my hair.

  25 April—Sunday

  It’s raining.

  I could open the window and let the rain water my plant, but I think the rainwater in this city is even worse than the tapwater. It gets filtered by all that pollution overhead and comes down positively black. If people -in New York washed their hair with rainwater, it would fall out.

  26 April—Monday

  Had dinner with Mr. Karlman tonight. As an American lieutenant said recently in quite another context, it was no big deal. He dropped me at the subway and I took a cab back here.

  We didn’t talk about anything important. Had the feeling he wanted to talk about something more personal, but he never made any move in that direction.

  I wonder what I would do if he made a pass at me. The funny thing is that I have gradually come to the point, almost without realizing it, where I could sleep with him without any real trouble.

  At least I think I could.

  It doesn’t mean that much to me. I don’t know that I could enjoy it, but I could go through with it and feel generally good about it, and good about doing something nice for him. As I do sort of like him as a person.

  Reasons against sleeping with him:

  (1) How he might take it. How he’d want to be closer with me, might think he’s in love with me, might worry that I would be in love with him, all of that. Or that he would dislike me for taking it casually, or that I in turn would be crushed (though I don’t think so) if he took it casually. If we could both just do it with no strong feelings on either side, just something nice to do for two people who sort of like each other, it would be fine. But how could that happen or how could one be sure it could happen?

  (2) Jennifer could sleep with him but could Arlene? I am Arlene with him and Jennifer with others, and Arlene is still a virgin, still a prude, still all these things.

  Sudden question: Is it Arlene or Jennifer who writes this diary? Arlene the obvious answer, but I am not entirely certain as I think about it. Could be that it varies, that sometimes Jennifer and sometimes Arlene sits at this typewriter. At the moment I am Arlene, I would say, but how can Arlene conceive of balling Mr. K.? For that matter, why would Jennifer be inclined to offer any objections?

  Thing that occurred to me. Happened a couple of days ago in some context I no longer recall. Was musing on the nuisance of making it impossible for Jennifer’s friends to get quickly in touch with her. Even the people that I see have to write to me at the Post Office box, can’t call me on the phone, can’t come to my apartment. Am still unwilling to change this, but thought came to me suddenly that I could move to another apartment which I would take in the name of Jennifer Starr. And have telephone installed in the name of Jennifer Starr. And quit my job and get another job somewhere in the name of Jennifer Starr. And then all of Jennifer’s life could be lived quite openly.

  Astonishing that the thought could even occur, as the whole thing is completely irrational. Makes not the slightest bit of sense when considered for a couple of seconds.

  Because what would I be accomplishing? Just a name change, really.

  What I have now is two separate lives, the life of Arlene and the life of Jennifer. I am not even sure that it is schizophrenic, although I often regard it as such. In one real sense, however, I am always Arlene. Jennifer is the psychic makeup I wear when I let my life touch the lives of other men and women.

  If I changed Arlene Krause’s name to Jennifer Starr, I would be changing only a name. And if I were open to people, whatever name I chose to wear, it would be the same as if I gave out my phone number now, and had people to my apartment. If I were ever able to do that, I might as well do it as Arlene as go through the mechanics of a change of identity.

  The only thing that fundamentally keeps me from sleeping with Mr. Karlman is that he knows me. My life touches his, and that is what will always stop me.

  Why do I write sleeping with?

  I have slept with no one since Gary and I separated. It is not that I am an habitual user of euphemisms in this compulsive exercise in meaningless automatic writing. It seems to me sometimes that no day goes by without the word fuck appearing in these pages.

  Why the evident implication that I fuck these other people, these people who know me as Jennifer, but that I would be sleeping with Mr. Karlman? Obviously I would also fuck him, or be fucked by him, or both.

  Make sense of this, child.

  Guess: There is a special intimacy in the phrase sleep with, just as there is an intimacy in the literal realization thereof. I.e., I could not possibly sleep with any of the people I have been fucking. Could not close my eyes and drift off to unconsciousness in their various beds. Could not permit myself to do this.

  But Mr. K., who knows me as Arlene, who knows one version of the Real Me (albeit not the other), unconsciously suggests a deeper level of intimacy to me.

  All of this must mean something.

  I think I have an idea what it means but I cannot fit words to my idea. This may be because I am unwilling to type it all out but it seems to go deeper than that. I think I am unwilling even to arrange the thought intelligibly in my head.

  At this point, quitting my job and finding another would be either the best or worst thing I could possibly do. One or the other, certainly. But there is no way for me to be sure which, and I would rather put off doing the best thing than risk doing the worst thing. Postponement is easier to remedy than action.

  I wonder what will happen.

  27 April—Tuesday

  I was thinking about Mr. K. all day today.

  Nothing happened. He talked to me and had something going on in his voice, but no reference to dinner last night and no personal touch in anything.

  It came to me that it would be interesting if I could merely push a button and the act of pushing it would have Mr. Karlman knowing all there is to know about me. The knowledge would merely leap into his brain. Telepathy, and in a total way; he would not find out about me as much as he would suddenly possess knowledge of me.

  Why does this fantasy appeal?

  I remember the old ethical question—suppose you were confronted with a similar button, and if you pushed it fifty thousand strangers in China would die painlessly, whereupon you would get a million dollars. Would you push it?

  I wouldn’t. Because I don’t want a million dollars and wouldn’t know what to do with it if I had it. But editing the question and designing it for me, it becomes trickier.

  Push the button and the Chinese strangers die and you, the button pusher, get whatever it is that you want.

  Let’s put it that way. And let’s leave out the corollary question of What do you want, bitch?

  Would I push the button?

  I don’t know. Nobody can answer the question because nobody knows, do they? I am reminded now of two curses, and I think they are Chinese curses but I’m not
sure.

  (1) May you live in interesting times.

  (2) May you get what you want.

  I live in interesting times. Lord, do I ever live in interesting times.

  I don’t know, though, if I’m getting what I want.

  Why did I get into this? To get away from Mr. K. and that other hypothetical button. I guess if he knew everything about me then I could have an affair with him, if he wanted one. But there is no such button, which saves me just as the other non-button saves the fifty thousand Chinese. And I could no more tell Mr. K. about the real me than I could go over to China and slit fifty thousand throats with a pen knife.

  I must call Bill and confirm our usual date for tomorrow night.

  28 April—Wednesday

  No time. Just a compulsive note to say I’m on my way to Bill’s and the philodendron is growing beautifully and I bought a new chair for the apartment during my lunch hour and now I won’t have to write anything when I come home later tonight and that’s just as well.

  29 April—Thursday

  I think Bill and I are beginning to bore each other.

  I guess I’m still a challenge to him, but not a challenge that engages all that much of his interest any more.

  I don’t know what he is to me.

  I think, though, that what he is becoming is an old friend. I had an urge last night to tell him any number of things I have never told him.

  But didn’t.

  30 April—Friday

  Dinner tonight with Mr. K.

  I keep staring at that sentence. Wanting to amplify on it and not amplifying on it. Fuck it.

  1 May—Saturday

  Another month.

  Started this in mid-February, day before Valentine’s Day I think it was. Pissing and moaning that nobody sent me a valentine.

  Next Valentine’s Day I can send cards to all of Jennifer’s playmates. I wonder if any enterprising manufacturer has developed a line of pornographic valentines. A lovely idea, that.

  Could make my own. Get a Polaroid camera with a timer and take color close-ups of my cunt.

  “Happy Valentine’s Day. Wish you were here.”

  2 May—Sunday

  The hell with it.

  3 May—Monday

  I suppose I’m going to fuck Mr. Karlman sooner or later but I don’t know which it ought to be. Sooner or later. I guess I ought to do it because the sooner it’s done the sooner I can stop thinking about it.

  On the other hand, the longer I put it off, the more chance it’ll never happen.

  I suppose a first step would be to start thinking of him by his first name.

  4 May—Tuesday

  Saw Jeff and Claudine again last night. I had never gotten around to calling them after the last time I saw them, and then I got a letter from them saying how much they had enjoyed me and wanted to see me again, and I had had no particular reason not to see them, so I thought what the hell, and I called them and went over there and we spent a very enjoyable three hours.

  Two-and-a-half hours, actually.

  I don’t even know if I have written about them at all. I don’t seem to remember writing about them, and when I typed their names my fingers told me I was typing them for the first time.

  Strange.

  5 May—Wednesday

  Maybe it’s my imagination but I have the feeling that this is becoming less and less of a sex diary. At the beginning I seem to recall writing down everything sexual that happened to me.

  And so very little did happen to me at the beginning. It was always on my mind but hardly anything ever happened. I was so afraid of it.

  Now I’m not afraid of it, and three or four times a week I see someone, and I don’t often write about it. I was thinking about this today at work, thinking about last night’s entry when I mentioned Jeff and Claudine and realized I hadn’t mentioned them before. And after all of that I didn’t say anything about what they are like or what it was like with them.

  As a matter of fact, I have the feeling this is becoming less and less of a diary all across the board. I have to drag myself to the typewriter most of the time and just type out enough sentences so that I won’t feel guilty about not having an entry for the day.

  I’d like to read over what I’ve done so far, but it’s more than my promise to myself that is stopping me. I’m literally scared to see what I’ve written. As though I am afraid to come face to face with the person who wrote it all.

  And yet it all seems so futile. This typing, this communion with Smith-Corona Electra 110. What is the point of it, after all? To write about my clothes, and my fantasies, and my fucking, and my philodendron? Literary exhibitionism of the strangest sort, as I am unable to go whole hog and actually exhibit it to anybody, myself included.

  Maybe that’s the point. Keep the diary so that you evolve to the point where you don’t need to keep it any more. Like eating so that you won’t be hungry so that you can stop eating until you’re hungry again.

  No Chinese meal, this diary. I have the feeling I won’t really be hungry to write more of this for longer than twenty minutes.

  More like twenty years.

  6 May—Thursday

  I had a terrible dream last night. Often dreams disturb me but this was something else. A full-fledged nightmare. I woke up violently, sat up straight in the bed with my mouth open to scream. Didn’t scream, but I must have been right on the verge of it.

  Heart pounding fiercely, really hammering away. Body coated with chill sweat and the sheet damp beneath me.

  I cannot remember the dream.

  Been trying to. Been trying all day, then pushed it out of my mind, then tried to summon it up now while sitting at the typewriter. Just no way at all.

  Never really cared much about dreams. About trying to remember them. Feeling now that the dream is a ghost which must be exorcised; it’ll haunt me if I don’t remember it, but memory won’t summon it up.

  They say you can recall dreams under hypnosis. I’m sure I could never by hypnotized. Some people can’t. Won’t surrender their will, won’t let themselves go under.

  Of course I would be like that. Refusing to surrender the self to a hypnotist just as I refuse to surrender self sexually.

  A parallel there?

  Probably. Can surrender Jennifer’s unself to strangers because that reveals nothing of me.

  I could not be hypnotized, I am sure of this. But carry it further—I could not even bring myself to test this hypothesis. Could not dare to go to a hypnotist on the offchance that I might be wrong, that he (or she) might be able to get me to go under. And the pure thought so upsets me that I would never put the question to a test.

  Just as I won’t have sex with anyone who knows me?

  The dream. I can’t get back any of it, except for one thing. And I feel it more than I remember it.

  That, in the dream, I was about to die. Don’t know how or why, but I was about to die, and I woke up at the instant before dream-death.

  I read something somewhere about this. I think it was in a novel. Can’t remember exactly. Something to the effect that people often wake up on the point of dying in dreams. And that if you don’t wake up at that instant when the dream-self is about to die, the dreamer in fact dies.

  Legend, it must have been. Because how would anybody know if it is true or not?

  All I know is that I am afraid to go to sleep.

  7 May—Friday

  Couldn’t fall asleep last night.

  Expected it to happen that way. Stayed up until two- thirty dreading sleep, and finally got into bed exhausted, and couldn’t sleep. Would be hovering on the point of sleep and would reach out and catch myself and make myself sit up and smoke another cigarette.

  Dreading the dream.

  Dreading death.

  Finally fell asleep a couple of hours before the alarm rang. If I dreamed at all, I don’t remember it.

  8 May—Saturday

  The quick brown fox jumped over the fucking dog.
r />   9 May—Sunday

  The quick brown fox fucked over the jumping dog.

  10 May—Monday

  The quick brown

  11 May—Tuesday

  Today Arnie was saying that he …

  Odd to type Arnie when I have never called …

  The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

  14 May—Friday

  23 May—Sunday

  An odd feeling. Sitting again at this typewriter. Blank paper staring in accusation at me. Fingers remembering this particular keyboard. The rest of me remembering the feeling of pouring my head onto the blank paper, dirtying the paper while cleansing the mind.

  Hard habit to break, this. Days, I forget how many, of putting off the moment of confrontation as long as possible, then rolling the paper into the typewriter, then throwing meaningless words onto the page, slapping out the fragment of a single nonsense sentence, then stacking the page meticulously on the pile of pages under the radiator cover.

  Feeling, as each page joined the pile, that I was paying some sort of curious dues. And feeling too that I was cheating, breaking the spirit of the rule while hewing to its letter, inventing ceremony for myself as meaningless as any I could devise.

  Then a couple days off. And one day when all I typed was the date, and then no more entries. I don’t know how long it’s been since I even made an attempt at an entry. Over a week, though, because I think it was Tuesday when I could no longer bear the silent presence of the typewriter, sitting out here endlessly and gleaming like blood on Lady Macbeth’s hands. Put it in its carrying case, closed it, tucked it case and all in the closet.