Thirty - Jill Emerson [43]
Those would seem to be the two logical alternatives.
I wonder if I have it, whatever the hell it’s called. I don’t suppose I can get very much thinner without dying. Except that’s not exactly true. Maybe it’s all in my mind, the way I perceive myself. I don’t think I’m really as scrawny as I think I am.
I will go out now and have a big plate of spaghetti (ugh!) and somehow eat it all. Well, maybe not spaghetti, now that I think about it. But something, somewhere.
Everything will be all right, she said bravely.
June 21
“Jan, you ought to go out more.”
“Go out more?”
“Yes. You should meet people. You should talk to men, get acquainted with them.”
“But you told me otherwise, Eric.”
“Times change.”
“So it seems.”
“One reaches a new stage in one’s development.”
“And have I reached a new stage?”
“You are about to.”
“You know, I never understand what this is all about. What the point of all this is. You know that I’ll do whatever you tell me to do.”
“Yes.”
“Though sometimes I wonder why that is.”
“Because you want it that way, Jan.”
“Do I?”
“You’re here, aren’t you?”
“Am I?”
“Don’t be oblique.”
“I—”
“You have to be owned and directed. That’s very obvious. And you’ve come a long way, you know.”
“I’ve certainly come a lot, anyway.”
He turns, walks to the window, addresses his remarks in its direction.
“I think you should move about more. Go to some bars and cocktail lounges. Dress attractively. Affect an open personality. Smile warmly.”
“You mean let myself get picked up.”
“If the opportunity arises, why not?”
“You told me you didn’t want me to go with any other men.”
“That was at another stage in your growth.”
“Eric, what happened to those boys?”
“Boys?”
“David and Arnold.”
“Oh, your two fairies. Why, I don’t know what happened to them. Why do you ask?”
“They disappeared.”
“Fairies have a propensity for disappearing. They do it all the time.”
“What happened to them?”
“How should I know?”
“Did you . . . do something to them?”
He looks at me, stares into my eyes until I turn from him. Then, briskly, “I’ll be unavailable for a while. I’m leaving town, I may be away for some time.”
“And Susan—”
“Susan is also unavailable.”
“I see.”
“So you might find it profitable to develop some other contacts. With men or women, as you prefer.”
“Profitable?”
“Yes.”
“Does that mean I’m supposed to fuck men for money?”
A raised eyebrow, more of the smile. “Is that what you think you want to do, Jan?”
I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what he wants of me, what he really wants of me. I don’t know . . . anything.
Oh.
June 24
I thought, oh, that it would be completely mechanical. It wasn’t that I didn’t think I could do it. Not at all. I knew I could do it.
I can do anything, can’t I? All the things I thought I couldn’t do. There was a time when I didn’t think I could sleep with anyone but Howie. (Sleep with—what a strange euphemism! And yet I really have not slept with anyone but Howie. I had this thought a few days ago. It’s absolutely true. I have never slept with any of these people since Howie. I screw, I suck. I receive them in all the orifices of my body, but when the sex part is over for the time being I then go home to my own apartment and sleep, at last, alone. Ah, Howard Kurland, I have slept with no one since leaving your home and hearth. Fidelity of a sort, my sweet. Make of it what you will.)
No, there’s nothing much I can’t do. Perhaps that is the message of this education that Eric has so often spoken of. That I am to be educated. Of course there has been a certain purely physical education; there are things I can do now that would qualify me to be a two-dollar whore in Port Said. I don’t have to sit around reading Sir Richard Burton any more. I could write a book of my own.
But the true education, perhaps, is the realization of my own potential for, well, for this sort of thing. I thought I could never permit my asshole to be penetrated, that I could never willingly swallow sperm, or embrace two men at once, or enjoy sex