Jill Emerson - I Am Curious (Thirty)

Then again, I’ve never been pregnant before.

This isn’t supposed to happen to girls on the pill. Everybody said the pill would put abortionists out of business. What is it, some sort of mad suicidal or self-destructive streak in me? How can you run around the city fucking absolutely everybody and forget to take your pill first thing in the morning? And it isn’t as if I have such a full schedule that I can’t find time to take a birth control pill. It isn’t as though I have so many other vital things to remember that little trivial things like not getting pregnant are too much to remember.

As a matter of fact, there have been days when taking my pill was just about the only thing I did do. There were also days when it was one of many things I didn’t do. Which is why I am presently knocked up.

When Howie and I were trying to have a baby, nothing happened. The river flowed red like a clock. Red like a clock? What is the matter with me today? And what’s with cutesy little euphemisms for menstruating?

What do I do now?

Who do I know who would know where to go for an abortion? The funny thing is probably just about anybody. Of the old gang in Eastchester I’m sure there were a lot who went under the knife. If this had happened before I left Howard, I would just have asked Marcie. Nothing simpler. If she hadn’t had an abortion herself she would certainly know somebody who had, and it would all be very intelligently arranged, and it would cost whatever it is that they cost, which I guess is a thousand dollars (which means I could have afforded it if I hadn’t had the robbery, and of course people become paranoid, why shouldn’t people become paranoid, because it’s pretty obvious that the world is conspiring against me. I mean, how else would everything happen this way, as if on schedule? It can’t all be luck. Somebody up there hates me.)

The same question, over and over and over. What do I do now? I wish I knew the answer.

There’s not even any point in looking for an abortionist now because I don’t have any money to pay him with. The way things stand now I’ll have the rent when it’s due and probably a couple of hundred dollars beyond that, but I don’t know how long I can go before it’s too late to have the abortion.

Maybe I should have the baby.

Oh, that’s just what I need. And if worst comes to worst I can take it back to Howie. Here’s somebody’s baby to bring us back together again.

Solid.

Liz says she knows someone who will do it for three hundred dollars. She insists he’s reliable and that he operates under sanitary conditions. I hope so. I really don’t want to die. I’d rather have the baby than die.

I wasn’t so sure about this the other night. I sat in the bathroom making lists of the different ways to kill yourself. Myself, to be specific. One was worse than the next. There was a Dorothy Parker poem about that, wasn’t there? All the different ways to check out and what’s wrong with each of them, and it winds up You might as well live. That was the conclusion I came to, and for about that reason.

Maybe I should write something about Liz. I just got to know her the past couple days, although I’ve seen her around ever since I started to work the bars off Lexington.

(How professional that phrase sounds!)

She is a Lady Clairol blond, and her hairdresser is only one of many who know this. I think you could say (at least I can) that she looks like a whore. I say this not to put her down but realistically. The bleached blond hair, the hardness around the eyes and mouth, the way she struts when she walks, the slight and excusable tendency to overdress. Maybe, for all I know, it pays to look as much like a whore as possible, so that men will know what you are. Why confuse potential customers? Where’s the percentage?

We had taken to nodding to each other, and then one afternoon I was watching a daiquiri evaporate when she came over and asked if the other seat at my table was taken. It wasn’t, and she sat in it and studied me intently.

“We’ve seen each other around,” she said.

“Sure.”

“What I’m going to say, I don’t want you to be offended.”

“All right.” I had, at this point, the feeling that she might want to recruit me for her pimp. I had had such suggestions before from girls. I had invented a pimp of my own, a West Indian spade named Mickey with a huge knife scar on his cheek, but very gentle deep down inside. After I spoke of him once or twice I almost came to believe in him.

But what she said was, “I have this John, don’t stare but he’s the third stool from the left end, the one with God-help-us-all a straw hat. You see him?”

I did. An inoffensive little man with wire-rimmed glasses and a quizzical smile. He looked like somebody’s uncle, a bank vice-president or a retired druggist or something.

“He likes two girls at once. You know the scene?”

“Uh-huh.”

“There are two girls I can ask to split a trick like this with me, and they’re neither of them around. I thought it wouldn’t hurt me to ask. It’s fifty each. He wants a real party, but it’s fifty each.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I don’t know if you ever made a scene like this—”

“I did. But never as, you know, as a trick.”

“You mean for kicks?”

“More or less.”

“Like you dig it both ways?”

“Well—”

“That makes it easier. Me, too, matter of fact. But a lot of girls don’t. Matter of taste.”

“Literally.”

“Huh? Oh, right, I dig. You’re a funny girl, you know that? You say one word to my thirty, but you’re funny. You’ve just been around recent. New in town?”

“In a way.”

“New in business, then. Well, that’s cool. You want to make half a bill? I’ve tricked him before, his name is Claude, he’s really a lamb. He’s no trouble at all.”

We gave the lamb his money’s worth. He was a sly old bastard, all right. He had a whole script worked out. It went this way — first he would hide in the closet, then Liz and I would neck and pet and one of us would go down on the other while he watched. Then he would come out and surprise us, and we would beg him to keep our secret, and finally we would bribe him with our bodies. The phrase, believe it, was his.

So we did. It was kind of fun, in the way that agreeable tricks are fun. It wasn’t real because those things never can be. And working from a script that way. The beginning was nothing but stagey, the kissing and petting and undressing. I felt foolish, and didn’t even get any enjoyment out of the fact that it was a kinky scene. Sometimes I can dig kinkiness in and of itself, but this time nothing.

Liz gave me a good tonguing. She could have faked it easily enough and the lamb would not have known the difference. Unless he asked to smell her breath afterward or something. She could have just come close and he would have had the same trip, but either she felt it was easier to do it than to fake it or else she was enough in the mood to want to, because she really gave me the treatment.

A funny bit — I remember lying there giving a real Oscar-winning performance of a girl torn with passion, and what was going through my mind was the thought that this was really a great muffing I was getting, and wasn’t it a shame I couldn’t turn on to it and enjoy it? But I couldn’t. It just wasn’t sex, it was a performance, and I was too busy playing a part to feel anything. I think she could have done it forever without really getting to me in any substantial way.

Of course after enough time had gone by I managed to have a nice theatrical orgasm for Lamb’s benefit, and he came storming out of the closet, and we all played our parts the way we were supposed to. He made us lie down side by side on the bed while he inspected us in turn, holding our labia apart and looking inside, even sniffing inside, rolling us over, looking between the checks of our asses.