Sensuous

5 June — Saturday

Last night Arnold kissed me.

Not for the first time, but more seriously than ever before. Stopped the car and sat looking at me for a long moment, and I met his gaze, and I guess we got the tiniest bit lost in one another’s eyes. Then he heaved a sigh — heaved it halfway across the room, chuckle chuckle — and leaned across the seat, arms out for me, and I went properly into his arms and caught his mouth with mine.

A long, warm, intense, both-mouths-closed kiss. Then a pause, with our mouths still close together, and then his arms tightening around me and another kiss and his tongue probing, testing the enemy’s resistance.

I let him pry my lips apart. His tongue snuck inside, and I gave a sigh of my own and opened my mouth to accept him entirely, and we held that pose for perhaps a minute before I gently disengaged myself.

His voice was hoarse when he spoke. How sweet I was, and how warm, and how good it was for him to spend time with me. Nothing I hadn’t heard before, but never this much strain in his voice.

A Goodnight, Arlene, from him, and a Goodnight from me. Not a Goodnight, Arnie, which is what I am to call him. I find it quite impossible to call him this. I cannot even think of him as Arnie, though I made the effort awhile ago. I think of him as Arnold but do not call him that, either.

As a result I call him nothing at all. Mr. K. in the office, of course, and Arnold inside my head, but when we have dinner together I do not put any name to him. Since there are only the two of us together on such occasions, names are not enormously necessary; he knows who I’m talking to.

Whom. To whom I’m talking.

He dropped me at Eighty-Fourth and East End. I was supposed to see them at ten o’clock and it was just past nine-thirty when he let me off, so I went to a bar on York Avenue and killed a few minutes. I could have been picked up if I had wanted to. I didn’t, I was already set for the night, but it is very reassuring to know that you can be picked up. I suppose a woman can get used to that sort of feeling, and suppose it is a nice sort of feeling to get used to, but I am not yet used to it and enjoy it each time it happens.

Had a couple of drinks and walked back to their place. Nice plush apartment, expensive graphics on the walls. A Leger I liked, a Chagall I didn’t much care for. Both of them in their forties and into bondage and light discipline, but I was merely to observe and assist, which I did.

Fun.

Won’t see them again, of course. Never see anybody a second time these days. Almost told them as much but why do that sort of thing? Why make people feel bad? Let them think I enjoyed them, as in fact I did. Any explanation of why I don’t see them again would merely leave them thinking they had somehow disappointed me.

Which they did not.

So I have dinner with Arnold and we talk and talk and talk, and it is not merely a matter of him talking and me listening, not any more. We both talk. The difference is that he pours out his heart to me while I edit everything I say, packaging it all to exclude the parts of me that are a secret from him. He is the only person on earth who knows Arlene Krause now. And he knows only the part of her that no one else knows. The rest of her is utterly concealed from him.

Dinner with Arnold, and then I go meet strangers and have some unorthodox form of sex with them with Arnold’s kiss still on my lips.

And then home and to bed.

So strange. All of this, so very strange.