Jill Emerson - I Am Curious (Thirty)

I’m going to have a few more drinks and go to sleep.

I have an apartment. In New York, but I don’t think there’s any chance that I’ll run into Howard. His office is on Forty-eighth between Madison and Fifth, his train leaves from Grand Central, and he rarely if ever goes out of that vicinity. (How do I know that, really? For all I know he could have a mistress in the same building I’m living in, and have her for lunch five days a week. But I doubt it.)

I am living in Greenwich Village. Grove Street, the West Village, very ultradesirable location. I sublet it from some sculptor who’s going to Chile on a grant. I don’t know how he can afford it. The apartment, not going to Chile. It’s one largish room with a tiny kitchenette and a tinier bathroom. And it’s $375 a month, which is scandalous, but I just don’t care. I’d be afraid to live in a bad neighborhood. And I have the money and all the credit cards and money is just not going to be one of the things I worry about now. I have other things.

I think I was very clever about the car. I parked it in a lot and mailed the parking check to Howard at his office.

I haven’t had sex with anyone since the shoveler. I haven’t even had the desire to masturbate. Perhaps I’ll manage to get picked up tonight.

I didn’t.

This is the neighborhood I was living in before I met Howard. (Which undoubtedly has something to do with my returning to it. I realized that at the time. Nevertheless, it is the most sensible place for me to be living now.)

But the point is that I feel as though all of those years have somehow dropped away. I don’t know how to explain this, how to find words to go with the tune. Let me see. It’s as if I’m fitting back into the pattern of living I had then, except of course that I don’t have a job to go to five days a week, and that I don’t know anybody. There was a time when I seemed to know half the people in the Village. I wonder where they all went to. They couldn’t all be living in ranch homes and driving station wagons. Could they?

I wake up in the late morning, I go to the coffee shop around the corner for a roll and a cup of coffee. I buy the Times, I wander over to Washington Square, I sit on a bench and read the paper. Sometimes at night I go to a movie. Sometimes in the afternoon I buy something at a bookstore and take it to the coffee house on Bleecker Street. I read and drink espresso and watch the people. And I find myself belonging to this and no longer possessed by a house and a car and a husband.

There is a man who comes to the coffee house frequently. He reads or plays chess by himself. He seems to know everyone there.

A very exciting man.

I don’t know why this should be so. He’s not handsome in any of the generally accepted ways. (Whatever precisely they may be.) But there is, oh, something about him.

What?

Let us describe him. A long face. Dark brown, almost black hair, and quite a lot of it, lying shaggy on his neck like the mane of a mighty lion. A hawkish nose. Keen, rather intense eyes. A mouth one might describe as sensual. A mouth I might describe as sensual, anyway.

I don’t quite feel I have created a vivid word-portrait of this man. He must be thirty-seven or so, but it’s possible that he’s a good deal older than that but seems younger because he is in such good shape, very long and lean and capable looking.

That’s it! The last words, capable looking. That’s what it is about him, his presence, his air of competence, of authority.

I wonder if I should make an effort?

Maybe one doesn’t make an effort with such as he. Maybe he summons one when he wants one.

And maybe, for all I know, he’s a screaming faggot (of which there are certainly enough in this neighborhood) and I’m building him up in my mind for no good reason at all.

I think I’ll get in bed and think about him.

Is it progress to reach the point where you can not only plan to masturbate but admit it to yourself in writing? Or is it only a symptom of further deterioration?

Would I perhaps be better off paying this $375 a month to a shrink?

Excuse me, I have to think of Tall Dark and Capable while I play with myself. I’m damp already. Quel disgusting!

I finally got laid last night.

It’s really about time. One begins to feel foolish, all this sexual freedom, an apartment in the Village, no strings on me, and ten days in a row without getting close to anything more exciting than my own finger.

Nothing has happened yet with Eric. That’s his name. I have learned that much about him, and we are at the point now where we nod and smile politely at one another. Yesterday he brought someone with him, a little blond teenybopper who couldn’t have been more than eighteen, if she was that. She could have been his daughter, and may in fact have been just that, a college girl visiting her father who is divorced from her mother or something. I think, though, that she is his mistress. Or his occasional piece or something of the sort. It doesn’t really matter. I don’t think he’s interested in me, and I don’t think I care very much.

I was picked up in a bookstore. A couple of times I’ve gone to bars and other places looking to get picked up, and haven’t been, probably because I don’t stay long enough and am so uptight about the whole thing that I don’t come on as very approachable. But the bookstore, I only went to get something to read. The Eighth Street Bookshop. And this young man — I thought at first he was a clerk, but he was just browsing, like me — held this book up to me and said, “Have you read this? It’s really quite marvelous.”

I hadn’t, and I still haven’t, and I don’t remember what it was but it certainly didn’t look very interesting. I said something and smiled, and he smiled back and I said something about not really feeling like reading but being bored and having nothing to do, which was something of an invitation, the point of which was not lost on him.

“This is a bad city to be lonely in,” he said. “Sometimes I think companionship is the enemy of education. If I weren’t so much alone I doubt I’d have read half of what I have, over the years.”

He had longish light brown hair (and no doubt still does) and a rather fierce red-brown moustache and soft, liquid eyes. He was about my age, maybe a couple of years younger. He had a teaching fellowship at NYU. Philosophy. He was getting his doctorate, but philosophy was beginning to bore him and teaching bored him even more and he didn’t think he would want to spend the rest of his life doing it, but neither did he see anything else that appealed more. He had some money from his mother’s estate and had thought about going into some sort of business, maybe opening a store of some sort, perhaps a bookstore, except he didn’t know if he wanted the headache of running a business and if he wanted to tie himself down to anything. He didn’t think he would like it.

He told me all of this over coffee and at his apartment, which was on Tenth Street between Avenues A and B, not a wonderful neighborhood and several flights up, but comfortable enough inside. We drank wine out of jelly glasses, California Burgundy from a gallon jug, and we listened to a mixture of jazz and folk rock, and we screwed on his sagging bed.

It was sort of nice. He was a nice person, actually. His name is Arnold, which is less sexy than Eric, which figures, because so is he. His penis is long and narrow. He sort of hinted at one point that he might not recoil with horror if I happened to feel like blowing him, but I didn’t particularly want to so I failed to pick up on the hint. I don’t think he was tremendously disappointed. We did it twice. I didn’t come, but it wasn’t frustrating or anything and was in fact quite pleasurable, just that I didn’t come.