Thirty - Jill Emerson [15]
Anyway, I took out my lipstick and wrote on the mirror. I wrote Howard and put a dash after it, and then I couldn’t think of anything to write, not a single thing. I was going to wipe it out but I didn’t get around to it, so it’s there to greet him if he comes home tonight after all, or it’ll greet him some other time, whenever he does come home, and I can’t imagine what will go through his mind when he sees it. Just that I’m out of my mind, I guess, which we both know now anyway.
Question: If you know you’re nuts, then are you really?
Answer: I don’t know, I’ve never been out with one.
I closed our savings account, or rather I took all but twenty dollars out of it, so it’s not officially closed but it might as well be. I have almost four thousand dollars in cash plus a purse full of credit cards, so I can go anywhere and do anything and sooner or later Howard will pay for it. Which is not nice of me, and if I figure out whether I love him or hate him or what, maybe I’ll do something more concrete about it. I don’t even know what that last sentence means. I’m slipping into automatic writing and besides my arm hurts.
I’m going to have a few more drinks and go to sleep.
February 20
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.
February 21
I didn’t.
February 25
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