And if I were to speak to them, at the moment of completion I know this: that I would look up toward their faces yearning and would see spreading from eyes to cheek, brow to mouth, the most perfect expression of querulousness, and they would say to me, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Get out of my life before I call the police.” As if they were not an incitement to riot. As if they were not glittering stone against which a man could break himself for desire, savaging the polished surfaces, looking for the smallest crevice into which he could sink his fingers, grab hold before the Fall.
XV
In the Army, in Germany, three whores came to us on field maneuvers and took customers on in a tent a few hundred yards from the main bivouac area. We were in training for a fortnight in the field, cold and snow driving the days to flatness underneath us, and it was inconceivable that the whores could survive that German winter without protection, but somehow they did. No one knew where they came from or where they went after they had hustled a weekend’s work; it was certainly not to the tent which they broke and abandoned, but there was no town within many miles of the bivouac area and no way, seemingly, in which they could be out again in the early morning, preparing for a quick, covert fuck before reveille. Nevertheless they survived; they were part of the training maneuvers, as consequential as the rifles, the snow or the helmets, and as we were apt to do in the Army at that time, we took things for granted. If Germany provided us whores, we (or some of us) would use them; if Germany wanted its slab of reparations in this manner, we would pay them. There was very little to do with the money and the whores were reasonable; $5 American, fuck until you come, quick or slow one price, all means and methods utilized, if it were necessary. The whores were libertarians who did not understand American cunning. I was not the only man who masturbated an hour before going to their tent and who spent half the afternoon inside, staring at the tent wall in the act of fucking, trying to embarrass the mind out of all thought, canceling any question of sexual imagery as one shoved it into the German cunt as one might have pressed it against the rough impassive surfaces of the tent. The whores were not pretty, but under the circumstances this hardly mattered; they had hard, useful bodies and the absence of prettiness meant that the question of emotion would not enter into and complicate the matter. I was never able to get their identities straight; they all had thick, Teutonic names, closed their eyes while in the act of copulation and squeezed with small, grunting yanks of the pelvis to urge the semen forward.
The whores had one interesting effect upon the company; they converted all of us — married, unmarried, young, middle-aged, talented, untalented — into whores ourselves because like prostitutes we began to think and live solely in terms of the sexual act, and there was very little else that interested us at that time. Gambling fell off, so did insults and jockeying for favored positions among the men, goldbricking fell off, the only thing that was important and which involved people were the whores and the question of arranging for their time, making sure, days in advance, that a guaranteed fuck was there. Fucking has never been as important to me as it was during this time, which may have something to do with the metaphysics of proximity or then again only with the dull, numbing effect of the German landscape upon us in that cold, diminishing winter.
Of the two hundred in the company, only seventy or so were actually cohabiting with the whores; the others talked wisely of disease or loyal wives or the cheapening effects of paid, predictable sex or the danger of consorting with ugly women who, for all we knew, might have been spies… but this majority was as affected by the whores as those who were actually using them; they were forced to reexamine, no less than the customers, the question of their lives as controlled by the whores, and it was not a cheap period in anyone’s life. If one of the benefits of the Army is its ability to provide a heightening of experience, a continuing reappraisal of action under the influences of pain and boredom, then surely the whores were as effective as any platoon sergeant or insane colonel in making metaphysicians of the least of us. They were also wholly unconcerned with question of rank; officers and enlisted men alike paid the $5 fee, and officers received no preference in making appointments. It was like the open latrine privileges during combat.
Hunched over my whore, working toward the slow throes of orgasm, certain vicious German insects buzzing wintrily around us in the night, I opened my eyes to the burlap and had an apprehension, a vision so dark and full that it explained all consequence, fixated me in time and space, made clear the question of my destiny, and I reached toward it groaning, but as I was on the verge of touching it, something broke within me and spasmed out along with helpless seeds of climax, and the lights behind the vision faded; I found it yanked from me before I could touch it and was left with only the small clutching whimpers of the whore against me as she touched my face and wished me good; staggered then from the bed in the lamplight to find my clothes but, stumbling on the dirt, fell to Earth and lay there for a time too weary to get up, post-coital tristesse locking my limbs, and when the whore said to me in the darkness, “hurry, hurry,” I did not know for a moment from where her voice came or whom she was talking to, and the vision of the Captain’s wife came upon me; the Captain’s wife as she must have looked under him as she spread and took his agony within, but before I could get a glimpse of Her face it all winked out again and I was struggling with my boots and thinking helplessly of the Captain’s wife who in no way could be equated with the whore … but the captain’s wife is a different story altogether and does not fall within the context of this memoir.
XVI
A small, disheveled girl from one of the consumer magazines comes to interview me in my offices. She cannot guarantee that the magazine will be doing an article on us, but our kind of publishing is becoming an increasingly important phenomenon, affecting increasing numbers of people, and the magazine, which is devoted to covering the whole panorama of American madness, is beginning to gather material for a feature. Perhaps they will run it; if so I can look for it in about three months. On the other hand, if I do not wish to cooperate with the interviewer, that is perfectly all right with them; they have already obtained interviews from several of my competitors and the article will cover the whole spectrum of sex publishing, meaning that one element more or less will not affect the overall veracity of the piece. This is a summary of this magazine’s attitude toward publishing. I tell the girl, whose name is Rona Milliken, that I am perfectly happy to cooperate with the magazine in any regard they ask, and that there was no need for her disclaimer or explanation. At this she relaxes a trifle although a continuing jangle afflicts her wrist-bracelets, a jangle that increases slightly in tempo as I lock the door of my office for privacy and sit behind my desk in a position of modified alertness. “When did you start the newspaper?” Rona Milliken asks. “And precisely what did you have in mind when you started it? Were you merely trying to exploit the new libertarianism or did you have larger purposes in mind?”
“I was the first, you know,” I say. “I opened up the doors to the whole genre. If I hadn’t had the courage to yank the shoestring, none of these other thieves would have come in behind me. They’ve just used my convictions without giving anything back to them. They merely wish to exploit. I have a definite philosophical purpose. I was the first of them all you know.”
“Yes,” she says, “I know that. I mean, we’ve done a lot of basic research already. We don’t go out on a story until we know enough about it already to feel that we want to give it full coverage.”
“Well then what do you have to say about it?”
The jangling stops and she gives me a trapped, birdlike twitch of her head. “About what? What do you mean?”
“About our newspaper being the first? Doesn’t this count for credit? Just as your magazine was first in its field, we were first in ours. This should induce some sympathy, no? I wouldn’t want you to do one of your sarcastic, satiric articles on us, you know. We’re entitled to a little
respect.”
“I don’t set editorial policy. I’m simply a researcher and interviewer. Then I turn the findings over to someone else who writes it.”
“You mean you don’t even write?”
“I write” Rona Milliken says with an uneasy twitch of her feet, “it’s just that I don’t write for the magazine, if you follow what I’m saying. I do a lot of writing on my own. Short stories and articles. I’m trying to get a novel started but it’s very hard.”
“Maybe you’d like to do some writing for us.”
“Oh, no,” she says, “they wouldn’t permit that. Under your employment contract you can’t sell anything until you leave employment. The short stories that I’m writing are just for the future.”
“We can give you a pseudonym. No one ever has to know that you did some writing for us. You can do it under a pen name. We could use some feminine first-person stuff. The trouble is that almost everything we publish lacks vitality. Sex writing is an unexplored field. Almost everybody doing it is there because they can’t make it anywhere else or just to turn a few dollars until they can do something useful. No one takes it seriously.”
“I don’t think I could be a sex writer,” Rona Milliken says and puts her pad in the other hand, brings down the pencil, tries to look businesslike. A slow, uneasy flush spreads out over her cheekbones bringing for the first time the taint of sexuality to her face. Her breasts heave slightly. I begin to understand how a man could, after a fashion, have sex with Rona Milliken and not feel that his time was entirely wasted. Might, as a matter of fact, see it as a Significant Experience.
“I’m sure you could,” I say. “I’m sure you have the talent and I have no doubt but that you could bring some very interesting background to your writing. Certainly you’d have a lot of interesting first-person material to share. Where did you go to college?”
“Wellesley,” she says and then shakes her head, focuses on the pad. “Listen,” she says, “I’m supposed to be interviewing you. Now if you don’t want to cooperate, if you don’t want to talk about yourself — ”
“It’s all nonsense,” I say, leaning forward, slipping the pencil from her fingers with the most delicate of gestures, fixing my eyes upon her face and then moving them slowly downward toward the thrusting slope of her breasts, nicely supported by an expensive brassiere which gives them a tilt I was sure they could not have in the real … and am nonetheless excited for all of that. “You’re making a $105 a week after taxes and you’re restless. Unhappy. You feel somehow that your talents are not being utilized, that you are wasting the most capable years of your young life in foolish tasks presided over by uncaring, bloodless men. Every now and then you wonder if you have any purpose whatsoever; if what they taught you in Wellesley applies at all. Then you try not to think about it and tell yourself that you’re beginning to come to grips with the world. But the thoughts still will not go away. Sometimes at night you can’t sleep; you get up and stare out the window for hours, looking at New York and wondering if you can survive it or whether it is only using your hopes to destroy you. Sometimes, quite often as a matter of fact, you spend the evening with men, in their places or yours, but it is not satisfying. There seems to be no future to it. Also, they never slip out of gear. What you are looking for, although there is no way that you can understand this, is for something irrevocable to come into your life and to change it past the possibility of redemption.”
“Get away from me,”
“No, I will not get away from you,” I say, moving my hands gracefully up her soft thin arms, twirling my fingers in her careless, fine hair, blowing my breath upon the bland sheen of her forehead. “I will not get away from you because you don’t want me to, you see. Not at all. Actually, I entice and excite you; my tasks are mysterious, my person disturbing to you. You don’t know if it’s me or the very ambiance of this office; the half-bared pictures you can see peeking out from spaces on the desk blotter, the displays on the wall of some of our most notable centerfolds, the obscene sampler on the wall behind me. You find this unbearably exciting because it comes utterly outside of the confines of your life and functions as some externalization of your need. The truth of the matter, Rona, is that you want me; you want me desperately. They all want me, all of them. Now put that pad down and stop acting like a child. Begin to seize your life. It is the only life you have,”
And I go toward her then, strip the pad from her palms, drop it with a crash and crinkle on the floor and falling across the chair where she is poised, pin her toward the rear, then, slowly, slowly, begin to ease her toward the couch itself. And all the time, with small whimpers and gurgles she works with me, her fingernails scraping my chest in small convulsions of assent, her mouth unevenly taking in air and exhaling it in sighs of cooperation. “I won’t, I won’t,” she says, “this can’t be, you’re crazy, this is impossible, what do you think you’re doing; who do you think you are?” And at last, onto the couch itself in which her moans transmogrified into caws of submission and finally triumph and in the end it is her flesh that overcomes mine, I lying perfectly stunned and open on the couch, looking once again at the ceiling as huffing and humping she forces me to climax, the small freckled breasts of her bobbing me into small shrieks of woe as I stare at the pictured newsprint on the wall and imagine myself seized by a giant fist, a fist gone mad, yanking the last drops of fluid out of me and the fluid dry, wrenching sputum of the soul as I heave and moan into the very center of Rona Milliken.
There is a whole new brand coming out of the women’s colleges nowadays. Afterwards, we finish the interview. It is a good one and she says that she is sure that we will be given due credit in the final treatment.
XVII
Out to the track again on Tony the distributor’s second tip. Poor information, a crooked jockey, an inept stable source contributed to the disaster on the first, but this time the word is that things are straight and that amends are made. Out in the subway special this time, I look at the people with interest; they stare, quivering, at tipsheets and the Morning Telegraph, occasionally mumbling “bastards” to themselves. Once I took this kind of hatred for granted, but now I see it as unique and motivated; I am beginning to see their point. Life examined from their point of view is eliciting some very sane responses. At the track I go directly to the windows, make the bet on the first race and walk to the rail, a sense of purposefulness overcoming me. No waste this time around. People make way for me, smoking cigars, picking their noses, examining the lights on the tote under the shade of hands. The horses break from the gate and the tip wins by seven lengths, galloping, in near track-record time, paying $21.40. I collect Tony’s $2,140 and then go to the $5 show window to collect my own winnings of $14. I feel that I have learned something although I am not sure exactly what. Tony’s two thousand will apply to his long-standing debt to us so that part of it is all right. No, it is something else I have learned, something that is either subverbal or beyond the poor artifices of words. It has to do with the question of timing, and if timing is merely another word for mortality, then I have learned almost all of it, although it will almost certainly take me several years to get it straightened out in mind and codified to a set of principles which will do me any good at all.
XVIII
About the two faggarts of whom I have said little there is even less to say. One is circulation director and the other accountant although their jobs are often interchangeable and they actually work as a team in performing those mechanical, mathematical tasks, which permit us to remain on the newsstand week after week, adding our own dosage of liberation to the general mix which is contemporary America. I hired one on the recommendation of the other, and when I saw them take to twittering in the corridors and exchanging meaningful, yearning looks over papers in the midday, understood that I had been utilized, but since both of them are competent at their jobs and since neither engages in any questionable activities in the office, I have no reason to complain. One advantage of their conditio
n is that I have a clear field with Virginia (who despises them) and another is that they lend a certain rococo elegance to the offices; a tired tilt of the finger bringing back to me centuries of medieval or baroque charm, a hint of classical music wafting through the air when they whisper to one another. Homosexuality is a convenience these days, perhaps even a minor social asset, and although I have never been able to comprehend men who want one another’s flesh, I do not sit in judgment of them and find the activities themselves unremarkable. There is so little to visualize that I do not even speculate. The faggarts keep the office going, they provide our lawyers with unending lists of figures to show the District Attorney, and they lend my life a certain smugness, a certain low security which I accept without probing deeper. I do not think that either one of them has the slightest comprehension of what is actually going on in the newspaper or has ever done more than scan an issue or two. They seem to think that we are in one branch or another of trade publishing. One of them is named Donald and the other is Jim. We all call one another by our first names in these offices.
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