Thirty - Jill Emerson [44]
I didn’t do it simply because he told me to.
Not that I wouldn’t have done it for that reason, had he given me specific directions. If he had told me to go to a certain place at a certain time and do a certain thing I would of course have done it. But he was vague, purposely vague I don’t doubt, and after a day or two had passed with no further word from him I more or less decided that he could go to hell—i.e., I was not going to go around picking up strangers on his say-so, especially in view of the fact that he had not said so in any strong unequivocal terms.
I decided to take things a little easier, to let this whole sex thing ride itself out a little. My life has been getting as thin otherwise as I have. I don’t do anything.
So I decided that, if both he and Susan were going to be out of town for a while, it would at least give me a chance to get myself together. To repackage my life and make it work on an overall basis. So that I live twenty-four hours a day, not just during those moments when I am in someone’s arms.
Or legs, or what you will.
I began planning. It’s surprising in a way that I didn’t write it all down in here. It was that sort of mood, overflowing with the desire to make lists, to draw up plans, to systematize this new approach to life. Sex—oh, sex would play a part, but the whole point was that sex would be kept in its proper perspective. One has to be in a very ebullient mood in order to talk about keeping sex in its proper perspective. What in bloody hell is the proper perspective of sex? And who knows? And who cares? And what difference does it make?
Oh, the hell with it. I just want to get this down and on paper before I finish. Then I’ll go out and get something to eat, maybe that Chinese place on Waverly whose name I never remember. I feel hungry enough to eat two from group A and three from group B, which I suppose is a good sign—I haven’t felt this hungry in ages.
So. Yesterday I went to the Museum of Modern Art and walked around looking at paintings. Then I went and had lunch, and then I went to a movie, and then I stopped for a drink at a place off Third Avenue in the high fifties, and then I promptly got drinks bought for me by a marketing exec who just happened to know an understanding neighborhood hotel, and he bought a bottle of Scotch and we just happened to go to that hotel where I just happened to give him the time of his life.
Not because I was told to, but because from the minute I walked into that fucking museum early in the afternoon I began to feel this twitching in my groin every time a man looked at me, which happened rather often. And in the movie I couldn’t keep my mind on the picture. And when the clown made his play for me I wanted him. I didn’t like him, I didn’t think he was attractive, all jowly and wolfish and popeyed, but I wanted him.
Okay. Acceptable, no? And so easy to do. Nothing to it. Nothing at all. Part of the whole female independence bit, right? A girl should feel free to ball somebody if she decides she wants to. Steady sex, after all, is healthy.
Right?
He gave me twenty dollars.
Can you believe it?
Can I believe it, for that matter? That’s the real question. And I would have been really infuriated by the gesture if he hadn’t been so cool about it, and actually rather nice. We screwed ourselves into a lather, we really did, and I guess he’s used to doing it once and then rushing off to catch the 6:04 to Westport, but I fixed him so he missed his train and a few more besides. I gave him a balling he will not quickly forget, and it was sort of delicious as we left the hotel to see the expression on his face, as if he was trying to convince me that he made out in the hay like this all the time.
He was really turned on by my scrawniness, which he of course did not call that. Slender,