Thirty - Jill Emerson [7]
January 24
It’s the middle of the night but I can’t sleep. Howie is asleep now. He bubbled through breakfast, called me once from the office, and was positively bubbling when he got off the train. What ever happened to post coitum tristesse?
I thought we would have another hop in the hay with all that well-being on his part, and I didn’t think I would be up to it. He had felt so good he had a couple of drinks on the train, and two more after he walked in the door, and to fit the festive mood we had a bottle of Montrachet with dinner and brandy afterward. So he told me I was the bestest little girl in all the world, or something along those lines, and then he went upstairs, let his clothes fall where they may, and passed out on top of the bedspread.
Why am I such a bitch?
January 27
Marcie came by but didn’t stay long. One of her boys requires orthodontia. If she told me which one—and one would think she would have—then I don’t remember.
Or much care.
Is that all there is? Children with braces on their teeth, meals to prepare, dishes to wash, things, acres of meaningless things to do.
February 2
I went shopping this afternoon. To Pathmark for groceries. They were out of leg of lamb. How can a supermarket be out of something like that? Everyone knows it all comes in cellophane packages and they store it in a warehouse in the back.
Enough cuteness.
The same boy carried the bags to the wagon. Absolutely nothing happened, nothing at all, except in my own mind.
(Why am I bothering to write all of this? I just stopped and looked back through what I’ve written. The Chronicle of a Totally Uneventful Life. That’s what I could call it. Why am I bothering to write it all down? Why, for that matter, am I bothering to live it? Oh-oh, girl. Easy, now. There are certain questions one is better off not asking oneself. In college I went with a boy named Ray who told me never to ask a question unless I really wanted to hear the answer, whatever it might be. I had just finished doing unto him what I had done unto no man before, and only to Howie since, and, with the taste of his seed still lingering rather pleasantly, if the truth be known, upon my tongue, I asked him if he loved me. He said that he did not. I, predictably if illogically, cried. Ever since then I have tried to avoid asking such questions, which means that, in the space of a few minutes, Raymond had taught me two things. I wonder which was the more valuable?)
In the supermarket parking lot, then, following this boy ten years my junior, and watching his buttocks move as he walked, and chatting lightly with him, I found myself wanting him to resume the flirting, to say something mildly unpardonable to me. Not, of course, that I intended to do anything about it. Or to let anything happen.
Am I becoming sex obsessed?
The question seems laughable. Sometimes I play with myself. Sometimes I may let my mind wander a little when I do this. Having fantasies of things that—
February 17
It has been, let me see, more than two weeks since the last entry. Fifteen days, to be precise.
I never thought I would come back to the book. I didn’t even finish the last entry, I see now. I don’t remember what happened, whether I was interrupted by a jangling telephone or what. Probably what, she said archly.
Come to the point.
Yes, Doctor. Yes, you there in the mirror. The point. The point is that there is no point. I wonder how I expected to end that last entry. Having fantasies of things. Oh, yes. All manner of things.
I want to get this all down and make it right. I want to get it down right now as fast as I can. I don’t know what is going to happen next. I’m in this plastic motel that I don’t remember the name of, a Holiday Inn or Howard Johnson’s and I can’t remember which, and writing in this book, and trying to get it all down before it gets away.
Friday I was supposed to meet him in the city. Howie, that is, in New York. We do this occasionally. When we first made the