Adios, Scheherazade

1

Roscoe Bardle was tired. He sat at the dressing table removing his makeup, seeing beneath the cheery red and white clown face his own lined and tired face gradually emerging. Around him was a hum of activity as the other clowns changed out of their costumes and faces into the drab appearance of the everyday world, but Roscoe felt as though he sat in a cocoon of silence. Like a glass bell placed around him, keeping out all the noise, all the life, all the camaraderie, but at the same time permitting him to see what he was missing.

Why was he so tired? He knew the reason: Margo.

They should never have married, that was the whole thing in a nutshell. A clown and a bareback rider, the combination was too foolish even to consider. Margo didn’t need a clown, she needed a lion tamer.

And Roscoe was afraid she’d found one.

Sitting there at the dressing table, looking into his hurt and tired eyes, he thought back to the first time he’d ever made love to Margo, and how he had foolishly believed that that bliss could go on forever.

The circus had been playing Madison Square Garden in New York City, and everything was the same as usual until the night Margo’s favorite horse, frightened by a firecracker thrown by a mischievous child, jumped awkwardly from his platform and broke his leg. He’d had to be destroyed, of course, and it hadn’t really surprised Roscoe, later that night, to see Margo sitting brooding in the last booth of the little bar a few blocks north of the Garden where Roscoe had been spending his own lonely nights since the circus had come to town.

Roscoe knew Margo slightly, and he knew about what had happened to the horse, Champion, so he went over to commiserate with her, and she invited him to sit with her at the table.

She was already more than a little drunk. “You have a kind face under your clown makeup,” she said. “I’m not used to men looking at me the way you are.”

“How do men usually look at you?” he asked her.

“You are a clown, aren’t you?” she said.

“Well,” he said, “Betsy still isn’t talking to me.”

“Which you probably deserve,” she said.

“You would say that,” he said. “We have people coming out for Thanksgiving, too. Pete and Ann. How can we have a fight in front of other people?”

“So you’ll make it up tonight,” she said.

“I am feeling kind of horny,” he said.

“For Betsy?” she said.

“For something with a cunt,” he said.

“Betsy has a cunt,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “She’s gone to the store again. She’s always going to the store. Every time I turn around Betsy’s going to the goddam store. I’m in the wrong business. I ought to open a store.”

“I know you’re in the wrong business,” she said. “Besides, Betsy has to buy things for Thanksgiving dinner.”

“What the hell have I got to be thankful for?” he said.

“Don’t you love Betsy?” she said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I honest to God don’t know. I try not to ask the question, if you want to know the truth.”

“You used to love her, didn’t you?”

I used to want to fuck her all the time, if that’s what you mean. She was a freshman when I was a junior, and she was a local girl up there in Monequois, she didn’t live on campus at all. She lived with her parents and her brothers.

I’m not going to use quotation marks any more. If I’m going to talk about Betsy and her family and how we met and all that shit, what do I need Roscoe and Margo for?

Why don’t I start again, try again?

Not with Circus Lust, though. I don’t know anything about the circus, I can’t write that shit. Even Spack draws the line somewhere. Dick told me about that guy that was ghosting for him, that guy whatsisname out in Denver, and he did this book with the Martians suddenly landing in the middle of the book, sex scenes between Earthwomen and Martians, all this weird stuff out of nowhere, the first half an ordinary sex novel and then insanity after that, and they rejected it, Spack rejected it, and Dick had to get on the phone with Spack and say it was just an experiment he’d been trying and he wouldn’t do it any more. And they had to find another ghost.

They had to find another ghost.

I can’t do a book about a clown married to a bareback rider who’s fucking a lion tamer on the side. I just can’t do it, the whole thing would turn into farce and stupidity and I’d be out on my ear.

Betsy must think I’m hard at work on the book. All I do is type.

She was a blind date. A friend of mine set it up, he said she was a local girl. I said, “Will I score?” and he said, “How do I know?”

We went to a movie, The Miracle Worker, about Helen Keller. Four of us, two couples. Afterwards, I did a pretty good imitation of Helen Keller myself, because basically I was bored stiff with this blind date chick and I had the feeling I wasn’t going to be making out very much at all. We sat in the back of Howie’s car, driving out of town to a bar on the old Montreal road, and she kept making conversation, doing freshman-type talk about how exciting everything was. The campus, and the teachers, and the classes, and the basketball team. I barely knew we had a basketball team, but this chick had tried out to be a cheerleader. If we’d had a football team she would have gone nuts for that, too, but we didn’t have a football team so she was limited to basketball. Which is too bad, in a way, because basketball players aren’t sex symbols like football players, they’re too long and lean, they look like illustrations of sinews in anatomy class, they’re almost as overspecialized and sexless as track stars. If we’d had a football team, maybe Betsy wouldn’t have settled for me.

Betsy. Is that a great name? Betsy Blake. She sounds like something out of Archie Comics. The Blake part she couldn’t help, of course, and Blake by itself isn’t a horrible name, but Betsy? Of the six thousand different things that Elizabeths are called, Betsy is the absolute worst.

You know, that’s true. Two out of five girls are named Elizabeth, and they all wind up with one of the Elizabeth nicknames, and it tells you an awful lot about the individual girl which one of those nicknames she gets for a label. Like Liz is almost always a real whory swinger, a gutsy good-time girl, unless she’s very bony and has the clap, in which case she’s Lizzie. Bess is respectable but she puts out but she feels guilty about it. Beth saves herself for one man and works in the library and is very square but also reliable and intelligent and a rock in an emergency. Bett is bitchy and expensive but a great lady. Elsa is a ski-weekend swinger, but when she gives her word she keeps it. Eliza hasn’t been seen since the ice floe broke up, but before that she was a whiner. Elsie is lower class, cheerful, big-mouthed, big smile, she doesn’t get laid much because nobody wants to take advantage of her. Ella has a lot of physical female complaints and can’t hold her booze and is very quiet and if things go right she’ll mother you. Lisa has the self-image of a D. H. Lawrence heroine and likes horses and night clubs. Betty is an all-American girl and gets married and has two point four children and lives in one of these crappy suburban developments like where I am right now and it’s her kitchen where the kaffeeklatsch is held and she collects for muscular dystrophy. Betsy is a moron.

I don’t suppose that’s fair, but I don’t give a damn. All I know is, on that first date it had been seven months since I’d gotten laid, I was horny as hell, she was a fairly good-looking girl with all the necessary parts, and in the back seat of Howie’s car I was very bored. Also, at North’s Bar we ordered and drank a pitcher of beer. So on the way back to town I started to kiss her. It was January, we were both encased in tons of coats, it was like a stunt on Truth or Consequences. Finally I put my gloved hand on her knee, which even then struck me as ridiculous, and she let it stay there. She also didn’t object when I poked my tongue in her mouth. She didn’t respond either, but she didn’t object.

I have since then kissed two girls who understood that french kissing is a mutual matter. Betsy just sits there with her mouth open, but both Charlotte and Kay sort of went down on my tongue, which is pleasanter to do than describe.

Anyway. Since my gloved hand had not been repulsed from her knee, and since my tongue had not been repulsed from her mouth, I suddenly decided I was going to get laid. I got very hot and tried to find a way to get my hand inside her coat to her breasts but it was impossible. Also, she didn’t help. Still and all I was convinced that tonight was the night, the drought was over, old Ed was about to get his ashes hauled.

Sure.

Since she didn’t live on campus and everybody else in the world did, naturally she had to be let off first. On the way up to the bar she’d pointed at a closed Esso station and said that was her father’s gas station, but it turned out she didn’t live in the house next to the gas station, she lived in a house in town. Which, as it turned out, was just as well.

She gave Howie the directions, and we finally stopped in front of a totally dark house on a totally dark street. Except for street lights at the corners. I was trying to say there weren’t any lights in the windows of any of the houses. A writer would have worked it out.

Anyway, I said, “I’ll get off here too, Howie.”

“Oh, that’s all right, Ed,” Betsy said.

“No,” I said, doing the gallant number. “You’re my date, I’ll see you to your door.”

Howie, looking at me in the rearview mirror, said, “Should I wait?”

“Naw, you go on,” I said.

Howie’s date, a girl named Dora, sort of grinned at me from the front seat. “Have a good time,” she said. Did you ever notice how the other guy’s girl always thinks you’re hot stuff, how she’s always looking at you like you-devil-you? Never your own date, always the other guy’s date. I have no idea why that should be true.

Anyway, we got out of the car. There was snow all over the place and the air was freezing. Happily, there was no wind. We walked up the cleared slate path to her front porch and up the stoop and over the porch to the front door and then she said, “I had a lovely time, Ed. Thank you.”

“I’m glad,” I said, and kissed her again. You know, with the coats and all. And standing up, so I couldn’t even put a gloved hand on her knee. But I stuck my tongue in her mouth again, not so much because I was getting anything special out of it as that I hoped it would inflame her. Since then I have learned that Betsy considers one tongue in her mouth enough, that she gets nothing from the arrival of my tongue in there except a faint gagging feeling, and all in all she would prefer sex to be like a duel: held at ten paces.

That January night in 1963, however, I was still ignorant of these fine points of my wife-to-be. All I knew was, I wanted to fuck her. Desperately.

So when we broke that kiss, she said, “Good night, Ed.”

I gave her a sort of panicky grin and said, “So soon?”

“It’s awful cold,” she said.

Which I thought gave me the opening I needed to get to the opening I needed. Visions of sofas dancing in my head, I said, “Then why don’t we go inside for a while?”

“Oh, we couldn’t,” she said.

“Why not?” I said.

“My father’s a very light sleeper,” she said. “He’d be awful mad if he woke up and found us.”

Which I interpreted as I saw fit, my interpretation being that this was a very sexy girl and I was going to make her but not tonight. I would have to borrow a car or something, or at the worst wait till spring. We would screw, but not in her house.

All right. If we weren’t going to fuck I didn’t want to stand around talking to her. I had a long walk ahead of me, through town and two miles down the old Montreal road to the campus, and I was cold and horny and anxious to get started. So I kissed her once more, to keep her from thinking I was hurrying away, and then I hurried away.

I felt the lover’s nuts starting when I’d walked about two blocks. I hadn’t had them for months, and they really hurt. My whole groin was starting to ache, and that was going to be a bitch for walking, so what I did was, I went into somebody’s back yard and leaned against the side of their garage — white clapboard — and jerked off. It was a painful come, but afterwards I felt better, with only a slight general ache between my legs. Then I walked on back to the campus.

I got there around two-thirty, and Rod was working on a short story. He and I were roommates, we roomed together all but our freshman year. As of then, he hadn’t sold any short stories yet, but he wrote them all the time, sent them out to the magazines, got the rejection slips when they came back, sent them out again. He had a chart showing the titles of all his stories and which magazines had been sent which manuscripts. Finally, just before the end of our junior year, he sold a story to some magazine I never heard of, some Playboy imitator. He got a hundred twenty-five dollars, and very drunk.

But at the time of which I speak, to get literary for a minute, he was still an unpublished writer, and I never took him really seriously. I mean, writers aren’t people that you know. The people you know work at Montgomery Ward or drive an oil truck or have a good position with the state, right? The people you know aren’t movie stars and they aren’t deep sea divers and they aren’t pilots for TWA and they aren’t writers. Right? So I didn’t take Rod very seriously, and neither did anybody else. He wrote these short stories all the time and I thought they were crap and nobody bought them.

It’s hard to remember my attitude toward him then, to tell the truth. My attitude now is so different. Now I envy him, I think he’s this fantastic guy and there isn’t any part of my life that he doesn’t have better. He’s my friend, I like him very much, even though we’re the same age I think of him as a big brother, and at the same time I hate him.

Do I? If I hate Rod, I swear to God I didn’t know it until just now. And if I hate him, it’s stupid. It isn’t his fault I don’t have it made as good as him. He spent all his life practically, trying and trying and trying, always pushing in the same direction, always wanting to be a writer and trying to be a writer and kind of demanding to be a writer. Always writing.

I never had any direction. I liked to read, I always liked to read, so when I got to college and I saw they had a major in American Literature I fell into it, like falling into bed. I’d already read most of it anyway: The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick and “Bartleby,” Leaves of Grass, some Poe, The Red Badge of Courage, A Farewell to Arms, The Catcher in the Rye.

It’s very strange, really. Some people know what they want to do with their lives, so they pick the major that matches the goal. But other people, like me, are just drifting along, and just drift into one major or another, and finally pick a goal that matches the major. And what can you do if your major is American Lit? Nothing but teach. So I was going to teach.

But I didn’t have a vocation. Do you know what I mean? I wasn’t planning on teaching for any reason that had to do with self-fulfillment, anything like that. I was just drifting, nobody was at the helm, my life was just following the tide of least resistance.

Which brings me back to Betsy. I went back to the dorm after that first date with her, having cast my seed in some neighbor’s back yard — the Bible is silent on that particular aberration, I believe — and Rod was up, writing a story. He didn’t have the overhead light on, we both hated it. The gooseneck lamp on his desk was lit, he was typing away on his Smith-Corona portable, a machine exactly like this one, also beige. In fact, I have this one because he had that one. I had to have elite size type because my manuscripts had to look like his, so when I was doing the first book, up in Albany, I rented a typewriter from a place on State Street, but when we moved down here I went out and bought one. Naturally, having no opinions of my own on the subject of typewriters, I bought one like Rod’s. Ergo, Smith-Corona.

It’s a pretty good machine, I guess. I do fifty thousand words a month on it, and I’ve had it now two and a half years, and I’ve never had to have anything fixed. It rattles some, it sounds loose when I work on it, but it does the job.

I guess I don’t want to go back to Betsy. If I start doing commercials for my typewriter instead, I guess I really don’t want to go back to Betsy.

I don’t care, I’ve started this I might as well finish it. I don’t know what kind of crazy death wish has me in its grip, today’s the 22nd and I still haven’t started the book, but I’m going to get this junk out of my system for good and all.

Tonight. After dinner I definitely go to work.

In the meantime, Rod looked up at my entrance and said, “How’d it go?”

“Okay,” I said.

“You score?”

“Not yet,” I said. “But it’s a sure thing.”

The thing was, I believed it myself. Partly because I was so horny, and partly because I needed a score on my side of the tally sheet. In college Rod was what we call an assman. He was constantly making out with this girl or that girl, three or four times I had to go spend the night in somebody else’s room because he’d snuck a girl into the dorm, and my few lays were hardly enough to keep me afloat in his company. And here it was January, and I hadn’t so far got into anybody at all in my junior year, and I was feeling really troubled about it.

So I called Betsy the next day, a Saturday, and she had a date for that night, but she was free Sunday. I had to work a double date with Howie again, not having a car, and we drove down to Port Jones, on the Mishkon River, and we went to a bar there called Hiram’s Lodge, where they had a real fire going in a real fireplace, and stag heads on the walls, and real logs everywhere, and all in all a good ski lodge effect. We drank two pitchers of beer there, and necked in the booth, and I got my hand at last up under her skirt, gloveless, and felt her panties for a while. She was getting very hot, panting against my mouth, but when I tried to tug the panties out of the way with my fingers she shook her head and whispered no several times in a frantic sort of way and then pushed my hand away, and that was that.

I didn’t want to get out of Howie’s car at her place again tonight, because I knew nothing was going to happen and it was goddam cold, but I felt locked into the gesture. So I got out, and the warm car drove away, red taillights and white exhaust, tires crunching on the snowy street, and there we were in the snow-white darkness and silence, her house as black as the tomb in front of us. They never left a light on for her, and when I got to know her parents I found out why. They’re cheap. Betsy’s parents are the cheapest pair of miserly bastards the world has ever seen. Their toilet paper, for instance. You wouldn’t believe the hard scratchy rotten paper they use for toilet paper. The stuff must be two cents a roll. I hate to crap at her parents’ house, believe me.

Anyway, I went up on the porch with her again, and kissed her awhile, and took my right glove off, and tried to get my hand up under her skirt, but she pushed me away and whispered, “It’s too cold!” Which it was. I was just doing it, you know? Going through the motions.

I don’t think I ever wanted Betsy. I wanted something, and she was the only thing I could understand. The only thing within reach.

So we made arrangements to meet in the cafeteria at twelve-fifteen the next day, Monday, because she ate her lunch on campus, and then I left, and had lover’s nuts again, and spat in the same back yard, and walked on home. Rod was in bed, asleep, so I didn’t have to answer any questions till the next day.

The reason she ate lunch on campus, of course, was because it was cheaper. We paid for lunch a semester at a time, and got monthly cards, and the cards were stamped every day when we went in for lunch. The state paid half the cost, or more than half the cost, and we paid the rest. Thirty-five dollars a semester, which isn’t bad. Otherwise, I’m sure Betsy’s parents would have made her walk home for lunch every day and then walk back to school. They were too cheap, you’ll notice, to let her go to college away from home, and think how much trouble that would have saved me.

She was sort of an oddball, actually, being a local citizen at the college. I know there are lots of colleges where the student body assays high in locals, but up in Monequois there were practically none. I think that was because Monequois didn’t produce many college students at all, either for the local college or to ship out. It’s a poor town, tucked away in a northern corner of New York State, and I think most of its citizens don’t even bother to finish high school.

Anyway, we had lunch, which was a cheap date, even cheaper than paying for half a pitcher of beer, and I had a lot less walking to do afterwards. I tried to subtly suggest she might find it fun to sneak into the dorm sometime, simply as a lark because girls were forbidden there and all, but she didn’t rise to it. She didn’t rise to anything, but I was so inflamed by my idea that we were headed for the rack that I didn’t pay any attention to the real girl sitting across from me at all. So I asked her for another date, for that Friday, and she said yes. We also managed to meet in the cafeteria again for lunch the next day.

I think basically she was lonely. Because she didn’t live in the girls’ dorm she didn’t have any real girl friends on campus, and of course being a college girl separated her from the other locals, so who did she have? I was easy to get along with, I told jokes, I was somebody to talk with at lunchtime in the cafeteria three days a week (Wednesdays and Fridays our schedules conflicted) and I was a date on weekends. So what she was doing was pretty much what I was doing: not paying any attention to the other person at all, but only thinking about his/her usefulness.

Well, she got a lot more mileage out of me than I got out of her. Three days a week in the cafeteria. Two or three dates every weekend. After a while, because I was getting bored and nothing was happening, I cut it to one weekend date by claiming I couldn’t find anybody with a car to double with. We were always dependent on other people, we were always the couple in the back seat. The only good thing to come out of it was the exercise, three miles from her house back to the dorm every time, unless it was either snowing or raining.

The night I made her come in the back seat of Chuck Marifolio’s car on the way back from the North Bar I thought, Wow, at last I’ve got it made. We’d been necking more and more insanely, it was March by now, and this night at last I got her panties hooked out of the way and my finger inside and she didn’t repulse the attack at all. In fact, her arms tightened so hard around my neck I could barely breathe. It was a very uncomfortable position, my elbow bent wrong, and in that position I poked my finger around till I found the man in the boat and I tickled his ears until all of a sudden she jerked, one little involuntary jerk, and said, “Uh-aaahh,” in my ear. And when we separated a little while later her eyes shone like tiny white Christmas tree lights.

Oh boy, I thought. Now you owe me one, I thought. I make you come, you make me come. Hot damn.

So we got out of the car and up onto her porch, and nothing was different. I kept trying to figure out some way to phrase it, to mention this debt she now owed me, but everything I thought of sounded too crude, so it wound up with me stopping at that back yard again on the way home.

I stopped there almost every time, I’d been doing it for months now, and as spring came along I began to wonder what sort of flowers would blossom there. But as April and May lumbered by nothing grew in my fertilized ground — isn’t come a fertilizer? — but weeds, which should have told me something, but didn’t.

I know how this should end. We’re into the age of the absurd now, and all characters have to become clowns, with the makeup and the colored lights and all. The way this should end, some night I’m out in that back yard jerking off and all at once a thousand lights go on, the neighbors have alerted the police who’ve been lying in wait for me, and I go prancing and leaping away across the back yards with my cock hanging out like a dog’s tongue and my background filling up with policemen on horses.

Well, that isn’t what happened. What happened was, one night in late May, a Friday night, I called Betsy and broke a date because I was disgusted, saying I couldn’t find anybody with a car to double with, and she said, “You can drive, can’t you, Ed?”

“Sure,” I said. “If I had something to drive.”

“I can borrow my brothers’ truck,” she said. “If you want.”

“Sure,” I said, not wanting to say sure, but trapped into saying sure.

“I’ll meet you at the west gate,” she said, “at eight o’clock.”

“Sure,” I said, and at eight o’clock I was standing by the campus’s west gate, waiting for the object of my lust to drive up in her brothers’ truck, and wondering how come she hadn’t ever borrowed that truck of theirs in the past. The truth, of course, was that she’d decided it was time to get laid, but that idea never entered my head. I didn’t know until much later that occasionally girls want to get laid. I thought that every once in a while they agreed to it, but I didn’t think they ever wanted it.

Anyway, ten minutes late this truck appeared. Ten years old, Dodge, black cab with a former company name smeared off the doors with white paint, rattling wood-slatted sides of the body, no top on the body, it looked like a junk collector’s truck. And there in the cab, shifting gears like a pro, my Betsy.

It turns out her brothers, two of them, Birge and Johnny, drive Christmas trees to New York for a living, and this is their truck. It now being May and no Christmas trees being handy, and Betsy having decided to get laid, we have the use of the truck.

When she made up her mind, she really went whole hog. There were blankets on the floor in back which I’m sure were not usually there, and when I slipped my hand up under her skirt at the movies she wasn’t wearing any panties at all.

But I’m getting ahead of my story. I’m skipping over the part where I don’t know how to drive the truck. I keep stalling it, and not being able to shift the gears, and it turns out Betsy has to drive. Is that a crock?

So all right, we go to a movie. Critic’s Choice, with Bob Hope and Lucille Ball, a comedy about people not getting laid. Fortunately it wasn’t very funny, so up went my hand and panties had she none, and I made her come three times during the movie, and even I began to believe that maybe tonight was the night.

If only, I thought, she’d touch my cock. I was all over her like Sherwin Williams Paints over the globe, and not once had she ever touched any part of me below the waist. Not that I was hot to have her touch my ankle, for instance, but with me having her come all over New York State every weekend it seemed to me only fair that sooner or later she repay the favor.

Which she did, later that night, surprising the hell out of me. She still didn’t touch the cock, not with her hand, but that was okay with me.

But I see my time is up. Another fifteen useless pages down the drain. All I’ve gotten out of it is now I’m horny, remembering those early times with Betsy, and I think it’s time to go out to the kitchen and make up with her. We’ve been fighting too long, and we haven’t screwed for almost two weeks, not since I finished Passion’s Prisoner.

Maybe that’s the problem. As soon as Fred goes to bed I’ll dip my wick in Betsy, and come back here refreshed and calm and at peace with the world and ready to go to work at last. Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving, I’ll be lucky to get a chance to do any work, I wasted yesterday, I haven’t done anything useful today, I better get on the stick.

I should be able to use some of the sex stuff from here tonight. I’ll do a boy-on-the-make book, I can use some of this stuff in the first chapter, where he lays his home-town girl goodbye.

Sex on Wheels I’ll call it.