Jill Emerson - I Am Curious (Thirty)

Big deal.

I wonder if he’s fucking that teenybopper.

I dragged The Mother Hunt to the coffee house. He never even showed up today. I’m seeing Arnold tomorrow.

Nine days since the last entry?

Doesn’t seem that long.

I’m a little depressed. Also maybe a little drunk. A little fuzzy in the head.

Last night was terribly frustrating. Things were going along on a nice even keel, I was seeing Arnold a couple of times a week, and nothing was too exciting but everything was loose, easy. I don’t know.

I’m having trouble making this come out on paper. I keep blocking and just staring at the page. I took a pill earlier today, one of my antidepressants. I have been trying not to take them but I thought it would be better for me in the long run to take the pill than to cut my wrists.

Not really.

But I took it, and you shouldn’t drink when you’re on those things. They don’t go together very well.

Last night we went to a party. A horrible place a couple of blocks from Arnold’s apartment, a really foul, filthy cockroach trap. Cracked plaster and broken pipes and genuine filth all over the place. Everybody seemed to be stoned, mostly I guess on pot but there were also some speed freaks.

Frightening. I felt at least a hundred years old and hopelessly square.

We didn’t stay long. Arnold smoked some grass. I didn’t. Why? Because I didn’t want to be high, I guess.

We went back to his apartment and had a scene. I guess I provoked it. It was a marriage game — Let’s Have a Fight So We Won’t Have to Fuck.

Stupid. Stupid and self-destructive. Why do something like that? We had a good relationship developing. It didn’t have a future but the last thing I need right now is a relationship with a future. Instead it looked as though it might have a long and pretty good present.

I can’t write any more of this, I have to go to bed or something.

I have a hangover. Well, I came by it honestly. I got what I deserved.

Eric returned the book and we talked about it. There is something about the way he looks at a person that suggests that he is having thoughts about one which are totally unrelated to what he is saying. As though while we chat blithely of Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe and the orchids on the roof, he is really looking right through my clothes and counting the hairs on my cunt and guessing what I am like in bed.

He terrifies me. I can’t avoid the feeling that he could make me do absolutely anything he wanted. All he has to do is ask. Absolutely anything.

I know why I had the fight with Arnold. Not to avoid going to bed with him. It was deeper than that. I was trying to break off the relationship permanently.

Because of the way it scares me.

The two of us have been getting much more deeply into sex the past week or so. Doing things we hadn’t done previously. We go down on each other, for example, lunching in marathon bouts of sixty-nine. Which is not scary in and of itself. It’s the conversations we have before and after and the effect they have upon the sex.

How to explain?

Oh, he talks about threesomes and group sex, not only in an effort to convince me to try it but also because the talking stimulates him. (Be honest. Stimulates us.) He talks about things he’s done and things he’s seen others do. Sometimes he’s almost blindingly graphic and other times he is annoyingly oblique, so that my own mind finds itself sketching in the details he has omitted, enlarging the fantasy.

And then, when we make love, the fantasy of what we have discussed slips in on the heels of the actual sex we are having. It is very strange. I clutch his buttocks in my hands and take his penis in my mouth while he gobbles away between my thighs, and somewhere in my mind behind my closed eyelids he is a girl eating at me and—

I can’t explain it. It’s something that was happening more in the mind than in the flesh and I don’t know how to make words out of it.

But it was scary, and I knew we were going to do scarier things as time went by. And that I wanted to do them, and would let them happen.

So I started a fight in an effort to break up with him, and I haven’t heard from him.

So I guess it worked.

I don’t know whether I’m glad or not. I really don’t know. I wish he would call and I hope he won’t call and, oh, maybe I should just go out and find somebody to ball to get my mind off all this.

I know one thing. If he called now and said he had a male friend over and why didn’t I just come over and join them, I would go. No question. I would go and I would do everything. I hope it doesn’t happen but if it did I would.

Sick sick sick.

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day.

Sitting in the coffee house absolutely all strung out. This black pit of depression has been deepening all week, a really fragmented sense of self. Sitting and turning the pages of a book and not retaining anything of what I was reading. My mind wandering all over the place.

“Jan.”

I look up. It is Eric.

“You are ready, aren’t you?”

“Pardon?”

“I have been watching you. You’re ready now.”

“For what?”

“To be yourself.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I think you do.”

The power of his eyes, his voice. He draws me and mesmerizes me.

“Come with me.”

I stand, put coins on the table, grab up my purse and book. He takes my arm. We walk through slushy gray afternoon streets. He strides. I have to walk very quickly to keep up with him.

“Where are we going?”

“My apartment.”

He lives south and west on a block I don’t know. His building is drab brick. It looks dismal. He unlocks doors and I follow him inside, up one flight of stairs. He unlocks a door. We walk into another world, a complete departure from the neighborhood, the buildings, the stairway, the hall.

Extreme modern furnishings, but with everything exquisitely selected. No straight lines. Everything curved, flowing. Everything perfectly rounded. Bold colors, black and white and a deep red. A black, high-pile fur rug on the parquet floor. A massive white couch, white velvet. Scarlet draperies.

“How beautiful!”

“I’m comfortable here.”

“I’ve never been anyplace like this.”

“You are going to go to many places you have never been.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I’m—”

“Yes?”

“Afraid.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-nine.”

“Yes. Twenty-nine years in the bud. And now you are going to open yourself up. You are going to become a flower.”

“Who are you?”

“Eric.”

“I mean, oh, what do you do?”

A rich smile. “You’ll see.”

He leaves me momentarily, brings two glasses of a dark red liquid that matches the drapes. I take a glass. The scent is of rose petals.

“What is it?”

“Drink it.”

The taste is sweet-and-sour, not unpleasant but quite unusual. There does not seem to be any alcohol in it. I am aware that the drink probably contains a drug. But it does not occur to me to refuse.

There is music, something faintly Oriental. There is the aroma of rose petals lingering after the drinks are gone. He touches my shoulder. I look into his eyes. They have infinite depth. One could drown in them.

We kiss. His hands are firm, gripping my shoulders, drawing me close. His mouth is hard against mine. I open to him entirely and his tongue is deep in my mouth, searing me, shooting flames. I am alive in every part of my body. I can feel his legs against mine, his chest against my breasts, his hands on me, his mouth on mine. I feel everything at once and am aware of everything at once, the taste of him, the feel of him, the music, the rose scent, everything.