A Madwoman's Diary

by Lawrence Block

  Bill: Take all the time you want.

  Me: Hello?

  Bill: I’m still here, Jennifer. Is it Jennifer or Jennie?

  Me: Jennifer.

  Bill: You sound more relaxed, Jennifer.

  Me: I am, a little. Just let me plunge in and say this. I am a passionate person. I am, I am. But I cannot let go. When I am with someone I freeze. Your ad. Something about it gives me hope. Oh, I don’t know. If I could believe you, trust you.

  Bill: All I want is whatever you want, Jennifer.

  Me: Just to be—I can’t say it. Why can’t I say it?

  Bill: Take your time.

  Me: To be eaten. There. I said it. To lie back and drift off and be eaten. But nothing else. And knowing you wouldn’t want anything else and wouldn’t be disappointed.

  Bill: Fair enough.

  Me: And that I could walk out afterward and never see you again if I didn’t want to. And that you wouldn’t try to find out where I work or where I live or my phone number. That you won’t even ask those questions.

  Bill: Understood.

  Me: You must think I’m crazy.

  Bill: No.

  Me: You ought to. I know I’m crazy. Being so obsessed with secrecy when there’s no one to keep secrets from. No one knows me. No one knows who I am.

  Bill: We all have our hangups, Jennifer.

  Me: Including you?

  Bill: Christ, yes.

  Me: I guess I trust you.

  Bill: Good.

  Me: I would like to see you.

  Bill: When?

  Me: Not tonight.

  Bill: All right.

  Me: I’m too keyed up and it wouldn’t be good. And it’s late. I have to get to work in the morning.

  Bill: You work Saturdays?

  Me: Oh, tomorrow’s Saturday. No, no, I don’t. But even so. I couldn’t come tonight.

  Bill: Let’s set a date, then.

  Me: Sometime tomorrow?

  Bill: I’m afraid I’m going to be busy tomorrow. Are you free Sunday?

  Me: I’m always free Sunday.

  Bill: As soon as you finish the Double-Crostic.

  Me: In pencil.

  Bill: Absolutely, Sunday afternoon?

  Me: I, oh, yes. Sunday afternoon. Around two o’clock?

  Bill: That’s perfect. Do you want to take down the address? 98 East 35th Street. That’s between Fifth and. Madison. It’s apartment 3-J. The last name is Cubbins. William Cubbins, known to the world as Bill.

  Me: Jennifer Starr.

  Bill: One “R” or two?

  Me: Two.

  Bill: That’s a beautiful name. Jennifer Starr. I think it fits you. Two o’clock. And if something comes up—

  Me: I know. If you can’t come, call.

  I looked him up in the phone book. Cubbins, Wm, 98 East 35th Street, 868-9413. I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep tonight. But I hardly ever have trouble sleeping. Even when I’m like this. I get into a fantasy and the orgasm works like a Nytol commercial.

  Sunday afternoon. I shall bathe just before I leave the house. And soap my pussy until it is squeaky clean. And perfume myself. I’ll buy perfume tomorrow. Something musky. And dress as prettily as possible.

  Should I get my hair done tomorrow? Not much to be done with it. It’s long and straight and suits me this way.

  I can’t write any more now.

  6 March—Saturday

  All Saturdays are long but none so long as this. I should have gone to him last night. I think I knew as much the minute I hung up the phone. I should have gone to him directly to save myself this waiting.

  I play our scene tomorrow over and over in my mind, writing dialogue for both of us. For Bill Cubbins and Jennifer Starr.

  Time rushes and crawls, all at once. Tomorrow’s entry should be more gripping than today’s.

  7 March—Sunday

  “Hello.”

  “Bill, this is Jennifer.”

  “So it is.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “No problem.”

  “I feel terrible.”

  “Don’t be silly. Things happen. I’m glad you called, though. I’m about ready to have dinner and I didn’t want to go out and miss your call.”

  “I don’t know what to say. I was all ready and I couldn’t leave the house. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. And I felt so embarrassed and guilty I couldn’t call you. And that made me feel worse, the thought of you sitting and waiting and wasting your day waiting, and finally I had to call. I’ll promise that you’ll never hear from me again.”

  “Don’t do that. Call anytime you want. Even just to talk. I’d rather you do that than disappear on me completely.”

  “You’re a strange man.”

  “No argument there. Your average run-of-the-mill Nicholas Normal doesn’t advertise in Screw.”

  “And Nellie Normal doesn’t answer ads in Screw.”

  “Not as a general rule. There’s nothing wrong with being a little weird. The thing is being able to live with your weirdness.”

  “I feel so guilty.”

  “Well, you’ve got every right. I turned down a date waiting for you.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of.”

  “Nothing to worry about. You’re sorry you didn’t come over, aren’t you?”

  “Of course. I was sorry yesterday that I didn’t see you Friday night. I always miss my chance and I’m always sorry afterward.”

  “You could come over now.”

  “I don’t think I can, Bill. I’m afraid to say yes because I couldn’t stand myself if I stood you up again, and I’m afraid that’s what would happen.”

  “Well, maybe some other time.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. What are you going to do now?”

  “Have dinner.”

  “I mean after that. You had the expectation of having sex with me and then you didn’t get to. You must be, I don’t know.”

  “Frustrated? A little.”

  “Will you call someone else?”

  “I don’t think so. Not tonight. I’ll probably just jerk off.”

  “Are you joking?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Will you really do it?”

  “Probably. Why?”

  “Do you often?”

  “Not often. I used to. Now I usually have something better to do, but if I’m in the mood and there’s no one handy. Don’t you ever do it?”

  “Every night.”

  “Then—”

  “Do it now.”

  “Huh?”

  “Do it now. Over the phone. Do it and talk to me while you’re doing it. Tell me what you’re doing, what you’re thinking about. How it feels.”

  “Sure.”

  “God. All at once I’m so hot. So fucking hot. The strangest thing. Tell me what you’re doing. Are you naked? Do you have a hard on? Is it big and hard? Are you touching it? Tell me, tell me.”

  The most extraordinary thing. I was completely out of myself. He told me everything he was doing. He said he had my image in his mind as he played with himself. He said he could feel my lips around the end of his cock. He told me how his excitement was peaking, and when he was going to come, and he moaned and cried out when he came.

  I came without touching myself. A full and honest orgasm seconds after his.

  He enjoyed all this. Said it was freaky and kinky and he liked it. Got real pleasure out of the scene that he would not have gotten masturbating by himself. But we didn’t talk much afterward. I was drained, couldn’t talk. Went and soaked mindlessly in the tub. Dried off, sat down, typed this.

  I’m to call him tomorrow. There are things we can do, he says. Things that will thrill me without frightening me. Things that will let me remain an outsider. His word for it.

  Why it worked, maybe: I was watching him jerk off. And I was invisible. A fantasy realized.

  For the first time it seems faintly possible that I am perhaps gradually and tentatively becoming Jennifer. />
  8 March—Monday

  I called him after work. He told me things about myself that I probably knew before. That I do not want to have my flesh touched because I do not want to have myself touched. To have myself known.

  Knowledge. Adam knew Eve. I do not wish to be known, in the usual or in the biblical sense. (And the point is that both meanings of the word are identical. To fuck is to know, to be fucked is to be known. I am secret and invisible and not to be fucked.)

  I had been thrilled yesterday, hadn’t I? Yes, I said, of course. His acts thrilled me, didn’t they? And I could enjoy them because I was not a participant in them, couldn’t I?

  Yes, of course.

  He asked if I would like to watch him in person. If I would like to see him naked. He would enjoy masturbating in front of me. He will not touch me, will demand nothing from me. I can watch. I can touch myself or not, as I please.

  It is a quarter after nine now. We arranged that I would come over to his place at ten o’clock. I went out to dinner and bought a bottle of Scotch on the way home. Filled a water glass half with whiskey and half with water. I’ve been sipping it. It’s almost gone now.

  I don’t much like the taste. Maybe it would be better with bottled spring water. The tap water is terrible and I can taste it through the whiskey. I ought to use bottled water all the time. The tap water makes awful coffee. It seems irksome, though; to have to pay for water when you can get it free from the tap.

  If the whiskey affected me at all, I haven’t noticed it yet. I’m not nervous but wasn’t nervous before. Excited but not nervous. I trust him. I trusted him before but not down inside as I do now. I feel safe with him because I truly know now that it is my response that turns him on, my enthusiasm and excitement that delights him.

  Time to end this and go. I should have something very interesting to write tomorrow. I’m almost afraid to find out what he’s like in person. I have a picture of him, vague in definition but real to me. Suppose his appearance turns me off? What then?

  A cover, I guess, for my real reservation: Suppose my appearance turns him off?

  What then?

  9 March—Tuesday

  We did not turn each other off.

  It’s been raining all afternoon and evening. There was still snow at the curbs from the other day, and the rain at least is washing it all away. But it’s been a gloomy day and it’s a gloomy night.

  I had a drink tonight when I got home from the office. I was right—it tastes much better with bottled water. I picked up a jug of Great Bear water. It was cheap enough, really. I made coffee a little while ago and the difference was remarkable.

  I don’t think one drink a day when I get home from work will do me any harm. Or any good either, probably, but it seems a nice and civilized custom. I’m sure I’m in no danger of becoming a real drinker. I don’t get that kind of a kick out of it.

  10 March—Wednesday

  We did not turn each other off.

  I believe I started yesterday’s entry with that sentence, and then I lost the handle and started bitching about the weather. It’s better to do that, though, than to skip a day entirely. I have to make this diary an absolute part of the routine or it will become easy to rationalize skipping first a day and then two days and then abandoning it entirely. I must at least put something down, if I do nothing more than type the notation that I am in no mood to write anything. Or else this diary will fail its purpose.

  Whatever its purpose is.

  And whatever good it may be doing.

  Something is doing good. Or doing harm. Something is either making my life improve or opening the gates to ruin. I am on either the right or the wrong track, and while I am none too confident which it is, or confident at one time but not consistently, I still think …

  Oh, hell. Better to be on a track, for better or for worse, than to live out one’s life on a siding. Better twenty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay. Better to have failed one’s Wassermann test than never to have loved at all. Better to be rich and healthy than to be poor and sick. Better bitter batter butter biter bit.

  Get down to it, dammit.

  Things Bill is not: handsome, dynamic, charismatic. Things he is also not: disquieting, upsetting, nervous-making.

  Things he is: pleasant in looks, voice, manner. Better- looking clad than unclad, slightly potty at the belly, skin white with New York pallor. The concentration on appearance is because one expects dramatic beauty, mentally endows him with these features on the basis of a telephonetic relationship. It was not that I was disappointed. Adjusted at once to the new reality.

  And reality is the key word here. Yes, definitely. Eyes on him as he drew the door ajar, welcoming smile on his face, eyes blue and bright and alert, and he became real. Scary, that. Talking to him while seeing him, hearing him directly with no phone wires between us.

  His eyes are his best feature, a benefit unexpected; the fantasy I’d evolved to complement the telephone voice had less reassuring orbs.

  But the scariness of reality. We were together in his apartment and a drama was to be enacted, and unlike my midnight finger-thoughts I could not write this script. I could play a part in it, but only one of two parts, and one I’d have to improvise. And yet my part was essentially minor in certain ways. He had to direct this production, but it would fail unless he directed it along my lines, and I could not tell him my requirements; he had to intuit them.

  And did so perfectly.

  I want to reconstruct this and get it right. I’m tempted to leave it for tomorrow but each day the experience slips further into past time. The edges of memory are already slightly blurred. I wanted to type it out Monday night when I got home. It was late, and sounds travel in this building, and too I had already typed out one entry for Monday and one a day ought to be a maximum as well as a minimum. (Arlene’s Rules for Diarists, Ch. 3.)

  Sat in an Eames chair in his apartment, a single very large studio room furnished as tastefully as possible considering its Playboy influence. Cunning lamps, travel posters, a large white fake fur rug. A king-size water bed, electrically heated to body temperature and swaddled in royal blue satin sheets.

  He sat on a couch across from me. I complimented the apartment. He said it looked like what it was, a place to fuck in. It lacked subtlety, he said, but he was interested more in sex than subtlety.

  And began talking sex. Eased in with brief mention of his marriage, a bad one which dragged on for the sake of the children, then ended when he couldn’t take any more of it. An affair which almost led to marriage on the rebound, then broke off when he discovered that what he wanted, at least for the time being, was extreme sexual variety. His sex life had atrophied during his marriage.

  “I found I can make women happy, turn them on, thrill them. Something within me needs to do this. I can recognize it as neurotic, a hangup. Overcompensation for a virility anxiety. Need for the admiration of females. Granted, all of that. So I live out my anxieties, act them out, and the result is that I have a life style I can groove on. Getting older, of course, and fighting it the way every man fights entering his forties. Again, granted—but by God I’m having fun.”

  Then talked about a woman he had seen recently. Described her physically, especially the sexual details. “She had a plump cunt. A skinny girl, almost bony, but a lot of meat on the pubic mound. And abundance of pubic hair, and very silky. …”

  I didn’t have to say anything. I could simply listen. He described a sexual encounter in detail, using all the right words, talking in very straightforward and matter-of-fact fashion. Just the right attitude for him to take, just the right way for him to have gone about it.

  Called me Jennifer throughout. Does he think that’s my name? If not, he’s perfectly willing to go along with my game. Not even a hint that he knows my name is something else.

  More conversation along those lines. Then, patting the front of his pants familiarly, “You know, this conversation is kind of getting to me. As a matte
r of fact, I think I’m getting the beginnings of a hard on.”

  He looks at me. I meet his eyes, avert mine, then meet them again. Wanting to reply, feeling called upon to reply, but can’t form the words.

  “In fact, I think this conversation is getting both of us worked up. You’re getting hot yourself, aren’t you?”

  Of course I’m hot, but can’t say so. I do manage a nod.

  Cunt throbbing and can’t even say so.

  “And it’s more than the conversation. You’re getting me hot, Jennifer.” Touching himself more openly. “You’re a very exciting woman. Because you’re passionate and untouchable at once, and I’m simultaneously touching you and not touching you. You have beautiful skin. Are you the same perfect complexion all over? On your legs? Your ass? Your tits? Is your cunt hair the same color as the hair on your head?”

  All so casual, so relaxed, and yet all so intense. Talking about his cock and its rigidity. Talking about my heat and my flesh, the heat of my flesh, the delicious heat of my flesh. Standing up, unbuttoning his shirt, taking it neatly off, kicking off deerskin slippers, unbelting his slacks and letting them drop to the floor.

  No underwear. A shock because I had expected underwear and instead the pants fell abruptly and I was confronted with the sight of his erect penis. Fully erect, thrusting upward, engorged with blood.

  I am at all times such a confusion of contradictory wants. I ached to fall on my knees in front of him and suck that magnificent cock. Ached alternately to have him grab me, strip me, rape me violently.

  And felt an unbearable tension at the back of my neck from fear that he might expect the first or attempt the second. How can such passion and such fear coexist? How can I want what I dread and dread what I want, and experience both emotions to so great an extent?

  He sat down. Talked about how he could feel my eyes on his cock. Wrapped his hand around the base of his cock and moved it up and down as if it were my cunt moving up and down around him, and he said that his hand was my cunt in his mind, and I watched him, stared wet-eyed at him, and my cunt felt—felt—as if that monster cock was sliding in and out of me, in and out, in and out.