Thirty - Jill Emerson [34]
How do I spend the hours? The odd thing is that I hardly seem to know myself. When I am not with him—and I only see him every few days, and only for several hours at a time—life loses its color and becomes a black-and-white movie, colorless and lacking in dimension.
A book I read, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. About a teen-age schizophrenic, and she didn’t see depth or colors in real life, only in her self-constructed world of imagination.
Is it possible that I am schizophrenic? That Eric and his entire world are a hallucination, a trick of my own warped mind? That he does not exist?
Prove to yourself, Giddings, that you are not deluding yourself.
A syllogism or tautology or conundrum, one of those things of which I can never remember which is which, meaning that you can’t prove any such thing. No, I am not schizophrenic. Yes, Eric exists.
I just started writing this because it’s May. What do I care about writing this?
I get up, I lie in bed several hours dreaming. I eat or don’t eat I have coffee. I walk and walk and walk, endless walks all over Manhattan. I never talk to anyone while I walk. Sometimes I buy something. Not often. When I do—a book, a magazine, a souvenir, an article of clothing—I most often leave it somewhere. Either because I consciously decide I don’t want it or because I just lose it, forget it, and then it is gone and I am somewhere else.
I can’t write any more of this.
May 5
Today is the fifth straight day this month in which I did not kill myself.
See how I am sustained by tiny triumphs!
May 7
Sex is a drug. A habit-forming drug on which one can get hooked.
I was a candidate for this sort of habit. A sexual compulsive. Looking for something.
Question: Which is worse, to spend your life looking for something or to find it?
Answer: I don’t know, I’ve never been out with one.
Long as you hang on to your sense of humor, love, you’ve still got a chance in this too-cruel world.
Oh?
May 9
He called at five minutes of three. I was still in bed. Why? I don’t know. This happens so often lately. I go to sleep around midnight and wake up every four hours or so, have a cigarette, then slip back down under the covers and pull the blankets over my head like darkness itself, snuggling back under a blanket of sleep and drifting off in dreams for another four hours. And there are days when I do this for sixteen hours at a stretch. God knows why, or how.
After a point it isn’t really sleep. A long waking dream. It just seems that there is nothing worth getting up for.
A memory—I had days like that in Eastchester. Days of long sleep. I guess it was a way of avoiding things. Housework, things I did not want to do.
I have none of those responsibilities here.
Then what? Sleeping the long sleep to avoid being awake and facing—what? The fact that I have nothing to do, arduous or otherwise? The fact that life is empty?
But is it empty? It does not always seem that way. It seems—oh, I don’t know.
But I have to write about Susan.
I bathed and depped and perfumed. Depped—the word I have been using inside my head. Used a depilatory on my legs and armpits. Went to him, clean and hairless and sweet to smell. He opened the door, looking quite dramatic—tight black pants, a black silk shirt, a scarlet ascot.
“Come inside, Jan.”
In the living room, Susan is sitting on the couch. The teenybopper, fluffy blond hair, a quietly beautiful little girl face. She looks toward me and tries on a smile.
This rattles me. We have always been alone together in this apartment, Eric and I. I know there are other people in his life, as there were others in mine, but all our meetings have been one-to-one. I look at Susan and am unable to speak to her, nor can I speak to Eric. I wait.
He takes my hand, leads me to her. “Jan, this is Susan.