Adios, Scheherazade

1

She used to be in show business in New Orleans until the pony’s platform broke.

Now what?

I’ve been wanting to use that as the opening sentence in a sex novel for over a year now, but I could never think of a line to follow it so I never typed it out before. Now I’ve typed it out, and I still can’t think of a line to follow it.

I promised myself I wasn’t going to do this. I sat around for the last half-hour pointing out to myself that every time I sit down and start writing this junk I get stuck in it and I seem absolutely unable to get back out of it again until another fifteen pages has gone fluttering into oblivion. So I said I wouldn’t do it, I definitely would not do it.

So here I am doing it. And I can’t afford to, I really can’t. I’ve only got six days left, counting today. I didn’t do anything at all yesterday, yesterday was a screwed-up day, I don’t want to go into it. Yesterday is draped over this house like a gray Army blanket, blotting out the sun, and I am here insisting I won’t notice it.

So I won’t notice it. There was no Friday this week, that’s all. There was Monday, my last day of sanity, the day before I started trying to write book number 29. Then there was Tuesday, I did a lot of writing on Tuesday, oh, yes I did. Then Wednesday. Well, Wednesday wasn’t so good either, it was Wednesday that made the mess for Friday. There wouldn’t have been any mess on Friday if I hadn’t made a tiny error on Wednesday.

I’m not going to talk about it. The world is collapsing, that’s all, but the details are a) my business, and b) boring, as well as c) not going to be gone into. Now or ever. Or ever.

Thursday. That was Thanksgiving, the kind of cheap irony of which only God is truly capable. Even a soap opera writer wouldn’t have made the day before yesterday Thanksgiving, I mean it’s pouring it on too thick.

That was the last time I wrote anything, Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, in the morning before everybody got here. Another chapter like this, that was, useless, pointless, not at all one tenth of nine hundred dollars.

It is Saturday now, it is the 25th day of November, I have till next Thursday to get a book done. A book, not this thing.

I’ve never done a book in less than eight days, and only once did I do one that fast. I know Rod did a book once in five days, and there’s a couple other people doing them that fast all the time, but I’m not one of them.

You know what sticks in my craw? Rod sticks in my craw. That bastard did seven of these books, seven of them, and I’ve done twenty-eight, and he still gets two hundred bucks every time I write a book. Why can’t I have my own pen name? How come he rates? Seven lousy books is all he ever did, he’s never done another one and he never will. And look at me.

I’m just in a bad mood today, that’s all. Sitting here day after day, not getting anything done, that would put anybody in a bad mood. Not to speak of yesterday, and I’m not going to speak of yesterday.

I’ll speak of Thursday, though. After I finished my non-work on Thursday, about twelve-thirty, I went and watched football on television, Rams versus the Lions, which the Rams won, 31-7. During the halftime Betsy and Fred came back, Fred bitchy and crying because she was overtired, Betsy bitchy and not quite crying because it’s raining out and the traffic was crappy and all, and I wanted us to keep the good feeling toward each other we’d gotten to the day before that, so when she put Fred to bed I put her to bed, and we screwed, and we had fun, and it was almost like being back in the dorm at college, the door locked, middle of the day, sneaking her in and screwing and horsing around, giggling, keeping the giggles down then because it was illegal for her to be in the dorm, keeping the giggles down now because we didn’t want to wake Fred. But it finally had to come to an end, and she went to the kitchen to get to work on Thanksgiving dinner, and I went back to the living room and watched the last quarter of the game, and then switched over to Channel 4 and watched college ball awhile, Oklahoma against Nebraska. I don’t know how that came out because about twenty after three Pete and Ann showed up. I knew Betsy didn’t want me watching football on television with guests in the house, which is a perfect way to make me hate the guests, but because I was going all out to be a good guy and have Betsy and me continue with our good relations I turned off the set and made everybody a drink, and Ann went out to the kitchen with Betsy, and Pete and I sat around the living room and shop-talked.

Pete used to do these, you know. Not this, nobody’s ever done anything like this before in the history of the world. I mean the sex books. Rod knew him through the agency, and I met him at Rod’s apartment one time shortly after we moved down from Albany, and we kind of hit it off. Dick is the only one of us who’s a native New Yorker, so the rest of us are sort of limited in our social circles to people we manage to meet now, so just about everybody I know in New York is a writer. There’s a couple make-believe writers like me, and the rest are all writers, like Rod and Pete and Dick.

Pete Falkus, his name is. He’s got a ghost, too, the way Rod has me. He’s a magazine writer now, Pete, not a fiction writer at all. I think he never wanted to write fiction in particular, he’s the kind of guy picks up the New York Times and reads it and gets seven great ideas for articles that he can sell to Ladies’ Home Journal and True and TV Guide. Back at the beginning he was selling articles to crappier magazines, I mean lower-paying magazines, and Lance was his agent, so when this sex novel market opened up Lance looked around at all his steady-producing low-money boys and got most of them to doing sex novels, including Pete.

I wish I’d been in this at the beginning. If I had, I’d be one of the guys with a ghost now.

The hell I would. Pete was in this at the beginning because he was a writer, and he’s got a ghost now because he’s writing other things for more money. And the same with Rod. I was never a writer, and never thought I was a writer, and never even wished I was a writer until I was already neck deep in this shit. And if I did all of a sudden get a ghost, like a sublet, a subghost, what would I do? To what brilliant new ends would I turn this here typewriter?

I think I’ve been answering that question for the last several days. When I don’t do sex novels I do long boring descriptions of Thanksgiving Day dinners with Pete and Ann Falkus. Except I’m not going to. All I’m going to say is that Ann Falkus confuses me, because I admire her and I don’t lust after her. I’ve been known to lust after female chimpanzees, I have never been accused of a great selectivity in my lusts, but I don’t lust after Ann Falkus.

And it isn’t that she’s a beast. She’s very plain-looking, and she doesn’t do much with makeup, but she’s always very neat, and she’s slender, and she’s got a pretty good shape. And she has nice hair, short, worn close to her head in a kind of helmet design.

I don’t know what it is about Ann. I think about her now, and I realize there’s absolutely no reason on earth not to lust after her, but I can’t even fantasize making a pass at her, much less actually do it. It’s like there’s something inside my head stops me before I can get started.

She’s an editor. She edits juvenile books at a hardcover house called Mastro-Fairbanks. In fact, a year or so ago she asked me why didn’t I try a juvenile book, and I actually sat around for a couple of weeks trying to think of one. I did think of one, too, about six months ago. The same month I was first late with a book, I think. It was about this boy who becomes a clown in the circus, and he can’t get his makeup off, and the point of it was that you can’t tell what people are like from the outside. You can’t tell a book by its cover, that one, right? Like, this boy looked like a clown but he was really a boy.

I suppose that could work the other way around too, couldn’t it?

Anyway, I tried to write the book, and it was rotten. It sounded stilted and stupid. I could never figure out how to tell the story, and I finally had to give up on it. I never told Ann about it, figuring if I could do it I’d do it and then surprise her with the manuscript, and if I couldn’t do it there was no point humiliating myself talking about it.

It’s funny how I don’t lust after Ann, I don’t understand it. It isn’t that I don’t get letches for my friends’ wives. God knows it isn’t that. Kay, for instance, Dick’s wife

I was about to tell a lie. A fiction, maybe. Which could be my basic problem after all, that I tell fiction when I should tell fact, and fact when I should tell fiction.

The truth is, I kissed Kay once. Well, I kissed her four or five times, but it was all in the same incident. It was at a party at Rod’s, when he had the place on East 78th Street. That was before I gave up smoking, and I finished a pack, and I knew I had a fresh pack in my coat pocket. The coats were in the bedroom, at the back of the apartment, piled up on the bed. I went back there and didn’t bother to turn on the light, mostly because I was about half in the bag. I wasn’t used to the idea of parties where you didn’t bring your own bottle, and the notion of free booze was in the process of laying me low. So I just stood there in the semi-dark, half bent over the bed, pawing through the coats, looking for mine, and then a drunky girl’s voice behind me said, “Are you a burglar?” Joking.

I turned around and it was Kay, standing in the doorway. I couldn’t see her face because all the light was from behind her, but I got the impression she was grinning. She has a very sexy full-bodied shape, when she wears a form-fitting knit dress men tend to walk into doors and walls. I was seeing it in silhouette, the nice narrow waist, the full hips, and so I immediately responded, “No, I’m a rapist.” Because she was sexy, and I was half drunk.

“Oh, goody,” she said, and came trotting over and threw her arms around my neck and kissed me.

In fantasy, you see, and in the sex books, I would be the one to kiss her, and of course she would immediately explode with sensual response. But I would be the aggressor, it would be my idea and my move.

So much for fantasy. She kissed me, and I was the one who immediately exploded with sensual response. I put my arms around her and kissed her back. “Mmm,” she said, liking it, so I probed a bit with my tongue. Her teeth parted and she received the tongue with a great deal of obvious pleasure. She wasn’t quite as engulfing as Charlotte used to be, but she was all right.

We kissed four or five times, with me nuzzling her neck in between, and then I slipped my right hand from the small of her back down past the borderline of waist and over the strange alien contours of her behind, so unlike Betsy’s behind, my fingertips on the deepening groove of her ass, headed down and around, intending to slip down between her legs and come upon her cunt from behind, but before I was halfway to Moscow she said, “Uh uh,” and smiled to show there were no hard feelings, and pushed on my shoulders, separating us.

For one second I saw myself pushing it, overpowering her weak defenses, stroking her and kissing her and rubbing against her till she was too passionate to refuse me, and then mounting her atop the pile of coats and humping her till her cries of ecstasy brought the other guests on the run...

There. I did it again. My fantasies turn against me, they go bitter and rancid every time.

The point is, I had one instant where I might have refused to take no for an answer, at which point she would surely have hauled off and belted me or maybe even hollered, but not in ecstasy, and then the next second came along and brought gloomy old sanity with it, and my hands slipped away from her hips, and I hunted around quickly in the bottom of my prop bag for a smile, tacked it in place, and said, “Come back when you can spend more time.”

“Maybe I will,” she said, in a manner perilously close to a Mae West parody, and turned around and left the room. She paused just outside the doorway to give me a toodle-oo waggle of her fingers, and then she was gone.

I had that old dinosaur, penus erectus, of course, and I briefly considered going into the john and casting my seed in the toilet, but I had made a point of refraining from masturbation since my marriage, on the basis that I was ridiculous enough as it was, and the Mae West touch at the end had added just the right aroma of burlesque, thereby toppling me from the peak of my passion, and I was sure the dinosaur would briefly wander away by himself, so I simply went back to looking for my cigarettes, and in fact old dino did die, and I thought no more of him.

I had just completed my task, in fact, had found the right coat and the right pocket and had the Luckies in my hand, when the light came on. I’d been in there long enough by then for my eyes to have adjusted to the gloom, and the sudden glare of the overhead light made me squint like a mole. I also jumped like the guiltiest footpad of all time, which for some reason is what I felt like. I turned around, squinting and blinking, my heart thumping, and it was Kay again.

She was squinting, too, and I saw that her makeup was smeary and that the flesh of her face was sagging a trifle, from tiredness or drink or both. She made an indefinite sort of gesture with one hand and said, with artificial brightness, “I forgot to get what I came for.”

Of course, that was a perfect straight line, but I knew she hadn’t intended it as such and I also saw she was terribly embarrassed and ill at ease, and then I realized I felt the same way. We were like two strangers who, having met and together done something despicable, never expecting to see each other again, suddenly come face to face in the street.

It was one of the most acutely embarrassing moments of my life, I’m still not sure why. Holding up the pack of Luckies like a spieler on television, I said, my brightness as artificial as hers, “Well, I finally got mine. See you.”

“See you,” she said, and her smile was so painful it made me notice her lipstick, which made me think I might be wearing some of that lipstick myself right now. So I waved the cigarettes again, and stumbled hurriedly from the room, and stopped off in the john on the way back and checked myself in the mirror. Yes, there it was, the scarlet evidence. It was very difficult to remove, a faint pink layer of it seemed to have settled into my skin, but finally I rubbed and scrubbed my face so much that the rest of it was the same pink shade and it could no longer be noticed. With which, I went back to the living room, where I found Betsy talking with Dick, the husband of Kay, a circumstance that gave me a start until I realized that symbols are things that happen in novels. So I joined them, and I too talked with Dick, and a while later I saw Kay on the other side of the room talking with another group of people.

I think Dick was working on The Captain’s Pearls then. I think that’s the night he was discussing his theories of literature, which I find sort of boring. I’ll grant you the result is fine, The Captain’s Pearls was a funny book, but the theories behind it strike me as unnecessary. It seems to me Dick could have written that book without ever dreaming up a theory for it at all.

All right, I’ve mentioned the theory, I might as well explain something about it. I won’t go into the sort of detail that Dick does, because I’m not here to bore me either, but I’ll give it a skim.

What Dick says is, the conventional artifices are breaking down between the work of art and its audience. He says it’s most apparent in the movies, where the moviemakers are increasingly acknowledging within the movie that what you’re seeing is a movie, but that it’s happening in the other arts too. His examples are mostly movie examples, though. Like a movie called The Troublemaker, where, when Buck Henry goes to see this Chinese prostitute, the camera starts to follow him into the room, in fact he can’t close the door because the camera’s in the way, and he finally turns and looks at the audience in an exasperated way and tells them to go away. The camera backs up, and he shuts the door. Or in Tom Jones, where the characters stop every once in a while and talk to the audience. Or in the Bob Dylan movie Don’t Look Back, and the other movies using the cinéma vérité technique, where the camera frankly exists as an eavesdropper. He has examples from the theater, too, in fact he has examples from all over, but those are the ones I remember.

Anyway, he says the same thing can be done with novels. You have a novel that claims to be a novel. His own book The Captain’s Pearls is a perfect example. The lead character is this submarine captain on a two-month cruise under the North Pole, and what his big fantasy is, this captain, is that actually he’s a giant in belles lettres, like Carlyle or somebody like that. His big dream is that three hundred years from now one of the main literary things from the twentieth century to be treasured and remembered is his log, so he fills the log with literary criticism and free verse and political essays and all sorts of stuff, all intermixed with the regular notations that are supposed to be in the log, and even those things, latitude and longitude and speed and who was on sick call and like that, even those things are done in very flowery sentences, as though with a quill pen. In fact, the captain’s name is Captain Quill. And what he writes, his log, is the book The Captain’s Pearls. So what Dick has done is, he’s written a book that doesn’t claim to be actions in a submarine, he’s written a book that claims to be a book.

His second book is the same way. He’s still working on it, I guess he got enough money from the movie sale of The Captain’s Pearls so he can really take his time. He told me about this new one, and it’s even nuttier. It’s about this Negro junkie and this psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist has gotten interested in the junkie and wants to try out a lot of new theories on him, and the junkie is going along with it because the psychiatrist is keeping him out of jail and supplied with dope. And the basic thing in the psychiatrist’s theory is self-understanding, so what he’s having this illiterate Negro junkie do is write his autobiography. So the book is the autobiography.

Except there’s more to it than that. The junkie turns out to be this total put-on type, whose whole purpose in the book is to put on the psychiatrist. He doesn’t want the psychiatrist to know one true thing about him, not even his name, so he weaves all these falsehoods, lies inside lies, then sticking the truth away in one little corner, or other times putting part of the truth right out in the open where it looks like a lie, or telling a lie the psychiatrist will be sure to catch but doing it in order to lead the psychiatrist to believe a different lie, doing all these things chapter by chapter, and of course after every chapter the junkie and the psychiatrist have a talk, and what they say gets mentioned in the next chapter. Also, the psychiatrist has footnotes throughout the book telling what he thinks is the truth and what he thinks is lies, or explaining other things the junkie left out, or defending himself when the junkie has made remarks about him and like that. I read the first couple of chapters a few months ago and it was very funny stuff, even funnier than The Captain’s Pearls, but it was also weird stuff, too, and I think after a while it might turn out to be hard reading.

About the title for this one, Dick says it’s time for another legal breakthrough. He says it’s been established in the courts you can put anything you want inside a novel, now it’s time to establish you can have the same leeway in your title, so he wants to call the book Adios, Motherfucker. But his editor told him there was one big trouble with calling a book Adios, Motherfucker, and that is, he won’t get any reviews. The editor says nobody can possibly review a book if they can’t mention what book they’re reviewing, and Dick says he understands that, he can see the problem, but worrying about reviews to the point of changing your book for them is the tail wagging the dog, and the absolutely best and right and perfect title for his book is Adios, Motherfucker. So the editor suggested he call the book A. M. and inside on the title page there would be an explanation of the title in parentheses, but Dick says that’s an awful cheat and a cop-out, and if he’s going to cop out he wants to go all the way and use his alternate title, which is Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.

Frankly I agree with Dick that Adios, Motherfucker is a beautiful title, particularly for the book he’s writing, but I also agree with his editor that this is not the world in which to title a book Adios, Motherfucker.

Anyway, I like Dick, and I think he’s a funny guy and a good writer, probably the best writer I know. But I felt very guilty toward him for a while after kissing Kay. For a couple of months, in fact. Partly because I’d kissed her and partly because I wanted to pick up with her where we’d left off. It wasn’t going to happen and I knew it, and Kay never after that gave any indication that it had even started, but I did a lot of rutty fantasizing about it all, and I think the fantasizing made me feel guiltier than the actual kissing had.

How did I get onto all this stuff? It’s Saturday, the 25th of November, one-thirty in the afternoon. I have five and a half days and I’m still going along just as nice as you please, talking about Thanksgiving and Kay and Dick and all this stuff, as though I had all the time in the world. If I still had the other chapters I did, I could give them to Dick, maybe he could use them for something. “Here you go, Dick, a novel pretending to be a novel.” But I couldn’t give him this chapter, not with the stuff about Kay in it, and I don’t have the other chapters, not after yesterday.

I’m not going into that.

I couldn’t get to sleep last night, after what had happened. I’m sorry if I’m being a cockteaser, it isn’t that I want to build up suspense or anything, it’s just that the whole thing is extremely painful for me. I can’t help thinking about it, but somehow it’s less real if I don’t talk about it or write about it. If I don’t turn it into a wall of words. A stone silo of words, with me on the inside, all alone.

Anyway, I slept badly. I think I dreamed about giant spiders, I’m not sure. Whatever I dreamed about, I woke up shaky and quaky just as though I had dreamed about giant spiders, so we’ll let it ride at giant spiders, that’s close enough. What with the bad dreams, and my general uneasiness, I woke up early. Early for me, I mean. Nine-thirty. I dragged myself out of bed, I’d had maybe four hours’ sleep, it took me forever to get to this typewriter, full of rue and coffee. I mean me full of rue and coffee, not the typewriter. The typewriter is full of shit.

So here I am, miserable, exhausted, panic-stricken, pissing away my substance on another fifteen pages of whatchamacallit that Samuel would never understand, and what am I going to do?

What am I going to do?

I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I am going to outline a sex novel right now, and then I am going to make myself some lunch, maybe watch some football, and then come back here and start the sex novel I have outlined. That is what I am going to do, no ifs, no ands, no buts.

Outline. Girl-on-the-make book. Call it Passion Sinner. Do I have a book called Passion Sinner? I have a list of my titles here, twenty-eight lovely titles. No Passion Sinner. Done. Outline:

1. Sally Maximus, having graduated from secretarial school, has decided to leave her small home town and go to New York City. With her secretarial school training she’s sure she can find a good job, and she wants a little fun and excitement in her life before she settles down to being a housewife. She has done a lot of heavy petting with her boy friend, Barry Gaiter, but she’s still a virgin. The night before her departure, she and Barry go over the line. She gets too hot to stop him and they make it in the back seat of his convertible. She realizes she’d intended to devirginize herself in New York anyway, and she’s glad it was good old Barry who got there first.

2. Sally boards the bus for New York and gets into conversation with Matt Sembling, an actor on his way to try for the big time in the city. They neck in the bus, and she gets hot again, and he fingers her to an orgasm. She didn’t have one with Barry, and this one astonishes her.

3. In New York, Matt introduces Sally to his cousin, Anita Rorschamb, who is a copywriter in an advertising agency. She is a tall seductive brunette, a Vampira type, and she tells Sally she can stay at her place until she finds one of her own. She also brings Sally around to the advertising agency for a possible secretarial job. Sally is hired, and her boss is Archer Frenway, who promptly rapes her in his locked office. When she cries for help, he tells her the room is soundproofed. When she says she’ll tell the police he says half a dozen men in the agency will swear he was in conference with them at the time and he’ll bring a suit against her for slander and libel and malicious mischief. The rape is completed, and he smiles and pats her cheek and says they’ll get along fine.

4. Sally, in a state of shock, goes back to Anita’s apartment. When Anita comes home that evening Sally is shivering in bed. Anita sits beside her and Sally tells her what happened. Anita says she’s heard of such things, but didn’t really believe it. She consoles Sally, and it gradually turns physical and Anita goes down on her and Sally comes.

5. Two weeks have passed. Sally hasn’t gone back to the advertising agency, nor does she have another job. She’s living in a lesbian relationship with Anita. Matt comes by to say he’s gotten a job in an Off Broadway theater, and finds out what’s going on. He tells Sally all men are not as heartless as Archer Frenway, and convinces her to come with him to his new apartment, in which there’s a spare bedroom. He promises to make no sexual moves toward her. She goes with him, and alone in bed that night she thinks about sex straight and sex lesbian and masturbates and comes. She wonders if she can come every way but the right way.

6. Matt has a party for his Greenwich Village and Off Broadway friends. Sally is feeling somewhat better, she’s been at Matt’s place for two weeks, there’s been no sex between them. The party becomes an orgy, which Sally observes but does not take part in.

7. Sally is backstage at the theater where Matt has a small role in an Off Broadway play. She’s alone in the dressing room when Anita comes in, angry at Sally for having walked out on her. Anita starts to beat Sally up, and Rex Kilbrood, the male lead in the play, comes in and breaks it up. He consoles Sally in the dressing room, seems very attentive and compassionate and gentle, and gradually seduces her. While they’re making it she suddenly realizes the whole thing has been mechanical with him, the whole seduction just a well-rehearsed play, he has no real interest in her at all. He comes, but she does not, and she cynically observes how he handles the brushoff afterwards.

8. Sally is in Matt’s apartment, middle of the day. The doorbell rings and it’s Archer Frenway. He is distraught, he hasn’t been able to forget her, he didn’t realize that day in the office that she would become so important in his mind. She sees that he wants to seduce her, more gently than the last time, and she leads him on, going through all sorts of foreplay with him, and when he’s just about to score she runs into the bathroom and locks herself in and tells him he’d better leave because Matt is coming home soon. He batters at the door, but she won’t let him in, and he finally leaves. It’s a triumph, and a revenge, but the taste of it is sour.

9. When Matt comes home, Sally tells him about Archer’s visit and what she did, and how she’s afraid she’s becoming as heartless as Archer himself. Matt begins to kiss her and gradually they make it, with tenderness and caring on both sides, and for the first time Sally has an orgasm with a man the primary way. She’s still bathed in the glow of this, of knowing that she is normal after all, when the mail comes, with a letter from Barry saying he’s coming to New York to see her. She knows she’s going to have to choose between Barry and Matt.

10. Walking down the street, Sally meets a couple of sailors who engage her in conversation. They smuggle her aboard their battleship and when they are on the high seas she blows the entire Seventh Fleet until, bloated with come, she is harpooned by a passing whaler and sinks without a trace.