Thirty - Jill Emerson [16]
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!
February 27
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