Thirty - Jill Emerson [47]
“Oh, nothing important.”
“No, I’d like to know.”
“You wouldn’t be interested.”
“I’d be very interested.”
“Oh, the usual thing. Sex stories, to be quite blunt about it, that you were raising all kinds of hell here in New York, you know, sleeping around.”
“But you don’t believe that.”
“I believe that what everybody does is their own goddam business and nobody else’s goddam business.”
“Amen to that.”
“Damn right.”
“You know, the closest I came in Eastchester—”
“Yes?”
“Was with you.”
“That so?”
“Yes.”
“There’s this story, something about a kid who came to mow the grass or something—”
“Shovel the snow.”
“I guess that’s what it was.”
“There’s not that much grass that needs mowing in the middle of the winter.”
“Stands to reason.”
“But that was something else. On the way out the door, so to speak. Before I left Howard.”
“Damn right.” His eyes focused owlishly upon me, and he smiled suddenly. Well, I thought, why not? When you start something, sooner or later you ought to finish it. A dry hump at a party is nice, but one ought to do things properly.
“Edgar?”
“Huh?”
“All those stories about the life I lead.”
“I never paid any attention to them.”
“You should have. See, they happen to be true.”
“Huh?”
“If you’ve got an hour to spare—”
“You have a place?”
“Well, not exactly. See, I’m living with these two colored fellows, and if I brought you there they’d have a fit. They’re junked up all the time and anything could happen. You know, they have knives, and when they get some cocaine in their systems anything can happen. And the one thing they don’t want is for me to bring any white men home.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“But they never come up north of Fourteenth Street, so if you know a place uptown, there’s no problem.”
“Jesus fucking Christ.”
“Is something the matter?”
“You live with a couple of niggers?”
The Eastchester liberal. Sad, sad. I looked skyward and waxed rhapsodic, saying things like Skin like black velvet and like that. I thought Edgar was going to have cardiac arrest. His face got slightly purple.
I thought, too, that this would turn him off. Not that that was my intention, but once I got into the spirit of the game I stayed with it, and judging by his reactions he wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me. Not quite the truth of the matter, however.
“Listen, I know a hotel.”
Are there any men who don’t know a hotel? I’m sure Howard knows a hotel. It occurred to me at the time that perhaps, as we stroll through the lobby, we will meet Howard and the girl with the plastic nose-cone tits.
By the time we got to the hotel I was sort of hoping this would happen. There has always been about Edgar Hillman and the idea of balling Edgar Hillman something that appeals to my sense of the ridiculous. And it was odd, all of this, because here I was going to get fucked for the first time in quite a while, not counting that Italian kid the night before last, because that didn’t really count, it was just a quick thing for both of us because we were both lonely, and I’ll never see him again and probably wouldn’t recognize him if I did, just a quick tumble in the last row of the theater that meant no more to me than it did to him, and I didn’t even come or get especially hot, so in a sense—
There is just no way out of that sentence. It’s one of those sentences that keeps coming to new commas and never has its period. A pregnant sentence, that’s what it is.
Anyway, the point was that I had not done much lately sexually, and here I was with Edgar, and I was driven not by the desire for sexual pleasure or by any deep compulsion but merely because I thought it would all be ridiculous and funny and all, which, come to think of it, is a better reason for balling someone than a good many.
We took a cab to this hotel that he knew, which was silly because we could have walked there in less time. The cab ride did give us a chance to sit in silence. Otherwise we would have had to talk to each other, which right then would have been more than difficult.
It occurred to me that it