I come to the stage and take the microphone, point out that we are living in very difficult times but that the whole complex range of them must be understood. That perhaps the three of us do not represent the ideal types but then again freedom was what you made of it and if it came down to people such as us to stand for freedom, then we would. It made a pretty poor case for decency, perhaps, if it was left to such as us to defend it, but that is the condition of the times today and so be it. This takes some of the momentary pressure off us; the audience is forced to some applause by this and when it comes back it is without the previous energy; for the first time I see a passageway through the evening and out the other side and with desperate glances and motions manage to induce the moderator to bring the session to a close. It closes with a sense of accommodation, even approval, oozing up from the audience in slow waves, but just as I am congratulating myself and the others for getting out of that one in a single piece, just before we leave the stage and the stage lights come up, someone shouts from the audience, “Well, you may have done pretty good, Walter, but the shit still stinks; I remember you from way back when and it’s the same old jive.” I turn toward the voice but the lights come up suddenly, dazzling me, and it is lost in the exiting rumble and shuffle of feet. There is absolutely nothing to do but to leave the stage with the others, shaking slightly. I have recognized the voice; that is to say that the voice connected to me in some profound way, a voice out of history this, a voice from the Army, and if I were only able to reach it and find who carries it, I might have the explanation which would make everything all right, justify everything for once and for all, but the voice is gone, whoever carried it is gone, the audience is gone and the past is gone and I am left with the pornographic publisher and the cinema director at midnight, staring into convivial glasses at the bar next door and wondering how, in the face of all this liberation, we have wound up there at that time, sitting in the best place we can be in at that time, nothing solved and everything questionable, no matter how many question periods we have survived.
XXVIII
Finally, in the subway, coming home one night during rush hour, I do it. It is sweltering in the car, hundreds of us packed against one another; a dull rumble of fear and assault moving through the tunnels and I am jammed against a tall blond girl, around twenty-four or twenty-five with a briefcase under her shoulder, a fine moistness coming from her forehead, a fine heat seeming to come from the damp of her underarms. The car lurches, we press against one another, smile, turn away, slam into one another again at a halt, uncouple, smile, move, smile, jerk, slam, grunt at one another, move away unsmiling, slam to a halt, drive into one another, smile, and I cannot take it anymore, literally cannot take it, her left breast is resting against my forearm, her right less than an inch from my nose and I say, “I could love you, you know, I could really love you, it wouldn’t be difficult at all, you have no idea of what goes on inside me, but if I could only make you see, I know that the two of us could somehow come together; you’re really extraordinarily beautiful, sensual arms, beautiful breasts, but more than beautiful you’re sensitive as well, I can see from your face how sensitive you are and furthermore from the briefcase you are carrying that you are a consequential person, an artist perhaps, or a fashion designer, possibly a model carrying around shots of herself or a writer turning in brilliant crisp samples of her prose style to the top magazines. I am thirty-five years old, a college graduate, industrious, intelligent, I am making approximately fifty thousand dollars a year from my own business, I have lived an interesting life and am really at the verge of my best possiblities. What do you think? Do you think that we could manage somehow with one another? It would be no problem to disentangle myself from my home life and as far as you, a girl so beautiful could have formed no entanglements that she could not break without the others thinking that they were blessed to have known her on whatever terms for however short a time. What do you think? Will you make love to me?” and then, shyly look up at her for the first time as the train pulls into the Fifty-ninth Street station, yawns to a halt, flings open its doors and begins to evacuate passengers.
She adjusts her briefcase, gives me a smile, prepares to join the passengers on the way out. “I think,” she says, looking at her watch, “I think that it’s about five twenty. But I’ve been slow for weeks, maybe you’d better ask someone else.” Her ass waggles a slow, sad good-bye to me as she steps to the platform.
Before I can get really involved, however, in thoughts about modern alienation, the train gets jammed in the tunnel outside Seventy-second Street, and for half an hour I have nothing to contemplate but the smell of smoke and my own terror, both rising like the winking lights of an incoming New Lots Express bearing out of the tubes, and by the time we finally get going again, a good share of the passengers in the train have panicked or fainted or begun to curse about being late for dinner on the fuckin subway, and comforting the wounded, healing the sick, and talking with the afflicted keeps me quite busy almost all the way home.
XXIX
My wife has now taken an affair. She is not loathe to tell me anything about this although, of course, she will not reveal his identity as a “matter of common decency” and she refuses to give sexual descriptions or comparisons. A long time ago, however, we decided that we would have total honesty within and without our marriage about all of our involvements, and she has kept her part of the bargain. He is a “wonderful English teacher” whom she met at one of the women’s liberation meetings; the estranged husband of “one of the girls” who remained on friendly enough terms with her to come discuss himself during “consciousness-raising.” After he and my wife were introduced, they began to see one another a bit although the affair itself was not actually consummated until two weeks ago in his furnished apartment near Columbia where he teaches three courses on the modern novel and also gives a seminar on Byronic poetry. Now she sees him three or four times a week, for sex “and other things,” usually in his apartment although occasionally in ours; she had no “particular plans” about how their relationship might go but thinks that things are “pleasant enough the way they are right now.” This is the second time my wife has committed adultery but only the first time she has had an affair; the other time was at college during the first year of our marriage, when she, an old roommate of mine and I sat around until late hours getting drunk, and when the lights went out and in her drunkenness, she swore, she thought that he was me. I had no reason to disbelieve her, having certain vague scatological memories of that evening in which it seemed to me that I might have thought that he was her. This is something entirely different, however, and I do not know precisely in what way to take it.
In the first place I hardly have any right to complain, and in the second place our marriage has obviously not been right for many years now, at least five or six, and it is a testimony to something or other that she did not go into adultery years ago, and in the third place I am extraordinarily upset, more so than I ever thought I would be. “But why?” I ask her. “Why, of all people with a goddamned English teacher. I mean, I can see how you might want to try something different and I can see where you’ve been unhappy for a long time, but an English teacher? Why that’s death! Haven’t you had enough literacy over here with me?”
“You don’t understand, Walter,” she said, “you don’t understand how certain things can be with two people. And the women’s lib was a very good thing for me even though I see how I can’t take it seriously anymore. It made me look at things in an entirely different way. To begin to see myself in terms of my own preferences, my own needs, and not as they were regulated with others.”
“You’re so damned reasonable,” I say. “How can you sit there and be so calm about it?”
“We promised each other when we got married, Walter, that we’d never use faithfulness as an empty ritual and that if either of us at any time wanted someone else, he or she was free to do so and the other one would understand. You were the one
who wanted it that way, remember? I would have settled for a perfectly normal conventional-type marriage vow but you felt that marriage canceled freedom and that you had to have control of your options. Control of your options, remember that, Walter? Anyway, I don’t think it’s very serious. We’re just having good times together, it’s not going anywhere. The trouble with you, Walter, is that you’re utterly unprepared for the future, you know that?”
“Tell me who he is. Just tell me who he is, that’s all I ask.”
“Of course I won’t. You just aren’t ready for the future, Walter, and yet it’s all around you. You’ve got to learn, you understand?”
“Goddamn it, you bitch, stop giving me aphorisms,” I shout, and overtaken by a high old rage, leap upon her right there in our conservative, neatly furnished living room, find myself filled with the raging need to show her that if I cannot reason with her in one way, I can connect with her in the other; I want to pound her senseless under me but something very strange and peculiar happens; she opens her arms to me and takes me in and before our clothes are even off I find myself utterly out of control; I ejaculate not within her but upon her thighs with a high wail that surely cannot be me, a wail compounded of foolishness and submission, and she gathers me in the aftermath against her breasts and strokes me carefully, comfortingly; I want to rise up and strike her, but I am too drained, too stunned, and so I only lie in the circle of her arms and take small greedy peeks at her face from time to time; her face is implacable, compassionate, the face of a madonna, and I take her breast into my mouth, suckling myself into sleep that way, the stroking all around me, and for several hours I know nothing but the motion and the blankness. When I wake up it is morning and she is gone.
XXX
The priest whom I met on the radio panel show has gotten in touch with me and has invited me to appear at his Church for a weeknight discussion of the new trends in morality and publishing. It is all part of his program to make the Church more relevant and timely, and haunted by the possibility of some young relevant ass seeking topicality, I decide to go. When I appear at the Church, however, it turns out that I have somehow misjudged the situation; the congregation appears to be not young but very old and somewhat demented as well: forty or fifty men and women over the age of sixty are sitting in rows in the vestry mumbling to one another. Now and then amidst the pensioners I see a younger face, maybe thirty or forty, but these faces have the demented, fanatical cast of the kind of people who go to churches because they have nothing else to do, and I take little comfort from them or from the priest himself who greets me with nervous, public cordiality and motions for me to sit beside him at the table at the front of the room. The church is located on a rather elegant sidestreet in Greenwich Village, filled with restored brownstones and quiet mansions, and as I sit beside the priest, I can hear the sounds of a street violin staggering in through the windows to say nothing of the noises of people fucking. That is, I can imagine that up and down this block, attractive young New Yorkers are performing highly relevant sexual acts upon one another while I, publisher of the hippest pornographic weekly in the history of the western world, sit in a church basement surrounded by applicants for the Golden Age Club. It is a very discomfiting phenomenon and leads me to a precarious understanding which is something new for me: relevance is where you make it, and it is, perhaps, wiser to exercise more discrimination than I have been recently. I notice that the priest has turned the meeting over to me, talking about the need for a fresh perspective and new trends in publishing, and it seems that I have to say something. I stand, uneasily, and two issues of the newspaper, open to the centerfold, fall from my lap and to the floor. I scramble for them, hoping that they have not been noticed, and stuff them into my briefcase with the horrid feeling that I have split my pants in bending over. “I thought the best thing would be to simply take questions,” I say to the senior citizens. “I mean, I don’t have anything really formal to say, I just thought that we could kind of discuss the issues together.” What issues? I think but put the thought away; issues are everywhere, everywhere you turn nowadays there is at least one new issue to incite concern and possibly three, and the senior citizens no less than any other segment of the population are surely interested in becoming Involved. “If you want to,” I add, realizing that this sounds foolish, and then I snake my fingers around to the crotch, find that I have indeed split my pants. A thin line assert itself to my forefinger, opens slightly under fumbling. I decide to ignore it as best as possible and keep a full face to the audience at all times.
“Father said that you would have some issues of the paper with you,” an old woman says, “so that we could see what you’re doing. Could we look at them?”
“I’ll pass them around later,” I say and with a foot push the attaché case further out of sight under the table. I make a decision to leave as soon as possible, with a violent illness if necessary. “Do only perverts read your paper?” someone says after a pause, having apparently given up hope on examples for the time being.
“Certainly not,” I say. “The interesting thing about the paper to me is that it is read by a total cross-section of the population. College professors, taxi drivers, barbers, truckdrivers, artists, writers, models, businessmen, advertising executives, all of them and more read our newspaper. We are talking the language of the streets; we are talking the language that people understand; we are finding people on a common denominator of need. We are, in short, fulfilling a function that was lost to American journalism half a century ago; we are telling a wide range of people the absolute truth in ways which they can understand.”
“You don’t mean the lowest common denominator,” the priest says jovially. We exchange a rapid look of sheer loathing, his face convulses, and he whispers, “Only trying to get a discussion started.” and I say, “Let me handle this my way.” He retreats to a seat shaking his head. I observe for the first time that he wears a large jeweled cross around his neck even though he has taken to a relevant business suit for the occasion. “Just trying to get a discussion going,” he says again rather hopelessly and looks down at the table.
“Yes, but exactly what does your newspaper publish?” the old woman asks. “No one here seems to be quite sure; nobody has seen it, you see. You’re some kind of a radical paper, right?”
“We’re a sex newspaper, ma’am. We publish articles and photographs dealing with sex.”
“Oh,” she says with a giggle and sits. “Oh.”
“There’s nothing wrong with sex,” I say rather defensively. “You know that.”
“Of course not,” an old man says, “but how much is there to say about it?”
The gentleman is apparently popular and this remark incites a large patter of applause, cheers, scraping of chairs against the floor. A tall girl with mad eyes, somewhere in her forties, wearing tinted glasses, stands in the midst of the applause and says, “Exactly what do you think you’re going to accomplish in this way?”
“Accomplish?”
“What do you hope to do?”
“The liberation of the culture,” the priest says. “The blasting of old myths and shibboleths, the removing of magic from the unknown by making it comprehensible. Isn’t that right?” He smiles, sweats, takes off his glasses and wipes them, gives me a nervous grin. “I think you’ve made that pretty clear.”
“Well, not exactly,” I say, filled with a sudden mad apprehension that I know exactly how the evening must end, “not exactly. It isn’t quite that way at all. Excuse me, all of you, but I just remembered a previous appointment that I had forgotten about when I arranged to come here and I must get to it. It’s absolutely crucial, this appointment. I’m sorry I forgot about it and that I’ve got to do this to you but I can’t afford to miss it. It isn’t quite that way at all,” I say, seizing my briefcase, patting the clips into place, reaching for my coat which I have flung across a chair. “It’s something else entirely.”
The meeting seems to have broken down int
o confusion. Some people are standing, shouting at me that I have no courtesy, others are urging me to go quickly. The room is full of shrieks and breath, small hobbling motions. It is a wonderful thing to see that senior citizens still have left so much energy and involvement. “All that I wanted to do,” I say when I get to the door, poised on the parapet to flee, “all that I really wanted to do was to make a buck. The rest was secondary, wouldn’t you say? Wouldn’t you say so, Father? You have to, after all, focus on relevance.”
Then I am gone. Out the door, into the night, briefcase slamming against walls with a clatter. But before I go, for an instant, the senior citizens and I exchange a single look at the door, and it is a look of such total understanding and communion, a look of such utter connection that I feel shudders passing through me as I hurtle down the streets. Never have I felt greater understanding than at that moment. The senior citizens, the priest and I, holding out in the basement, discussing matters while outside conditions persist. What are we holding out against? What is truly going on outside? What did we hope to gain?
I decide to limit my public appearances.
XXXI
Virginia admits to me that she has become friendly with the faggarts. She had dinner at their apartment one night last week and for the past couple of weeks Donald or Jim has been calling her in the evenings for advice on personal matters. Also, they often have lunch together, the three of them. “They have a lovely apartment, quite a large apartment up on Riverside Drive, Walter. And they’re really sensitive men. The fact that they are what they are doesn’t mean that they can’t be nice human beings, you know.”
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