I assumed Wanda’s position, but without benefit of bonds. Lay there purposely inert. Froze for a moment when he began, then relaxed and let it happen. No gradual game this time, no attention to various parts of my body. He moved at once to my clitoris and began to tongue me.
It felt good.
But that was all. Of course it felt good, it would have to feel good, and my body knew that it felt good, but it was as if it was happening to someone else. When he did it to her, it was as if it was happening to me. Now, when it actually was, it was as if it wasn’t.
I couldn’t get out of my head. Not into it but thinking thinking thinking about it.
Wanda told me to go with it. Forget what was happening. Let fantasy take over. I started to, and after a few moments tried to mime passion with body movements, then stopped abruptly and started to sit up. Her hands, large hands for a girl, eased my shoulders down.
“It’s not real,” I said.
“Then think of something that is.”
“But I don’t want it that way.”
“Try it this way.”
I did. And it worked, I suppose. You would have to say that it worked.
I had an orgasm.
It was like masturbating. It was like jerking myself off with someone else’s lips and tongue, and it was infinitely less satisfying than doing it myself because I could not suit the rhythm of his lovemaking to the rhythm of my fantasy, an improvisation on the theme of Wanda spread-eagled on the bed while I squatted on her face — Jennifer, not Arlene — and Bill fucked her. I thought of this, carefully blinding myself to the reality of his mouth on me, and I did ultimately come.
In the course of this Wanda touched my breasts. This merely got in the way. It did not bother me that she was touching me. I noted the fact and felt warmth for her, gratitude for her kindness, but it got in the way, as did his mouth on my cunt.
Afterward she said, “I told you you could come.”
And I said, “I know, but it wasn’t good that way. It was better before, when I didn’t come.”
She didn’t understand, but Bill did. I caught an unguarded glimpse of his face. Deep sadness, made me very sorry I had said anything.
When Wanda left Bill told me something very interesting, something odd.
21 March — Sunday
Couldn’t type this part yesterday. Don’t know why. Maybe just worn out from so much fast and furious typing; by the time I finished the day’s entry I felt as though I had run a race and couldn’t move another step.
What he told me: The reason he had been abrupt with me on Thursday.
“I have to be careful not to see you too often, Jennifer. You could far too easily turn out to be a preoccupation of mine and that wouldn’t do either of us any good. You’re a special sort of challenge. We excite and fulfill each other and yet I don’t touch you at all.”
More in this vein. I felt a rush of dejd vu. Then recognized it. He feared involvement with me for the same reason I feared it with him. He, too, saw that we could be good for one another, but only if we kept each other at the proper distance. We had to avoid making one another actors in a fundamentally unreal drama.
A reassuring rush for me. Confirmation of my own decision. And more — the realization that we were equal partners in this charade we have devised, that involvement is equally possible and equally frightening for him as for me. No need now to feel that my role in this is exploitative. He wants me (if for unhealthy reasons) just as I want him (if for similarly unhealthy reasons.)
A lazy Sunday again. Either today or tomorrow is the first day of spring. The weather is right for it, mild with showers that cannot make up their minds whether to pour in earnest or give up the whole thing.
I feel bittersweet. Glad that I went through all of it yesterday. That I let him go down on me, and that I let myself use the moment to come.
A breakthrough of sorts, I suppose, in that I had never come before through physical contact with another person. Yet I could only do so by willing him and Wanda out of existence and yielding entirely to fantasy. The fantasy I employed was so gripping I might as easily — or more easily — have come by myself, untouched by anything, my own hands included.
22 March — Monday
I bought some daffodils today. Came home and found I had nothing to put them in, and walked all over the neighborhood looking for a pretty vase. The thing I ultimately found looks more like a cocktail shaker, but the flowers are pretty.
When they die I can throw them out. Flowers are nice. No responsibility. They look pretty for a few days and then wither, and you throw them into the garbage.
Metaphorical of what?
23 March — Tuesday
Checked my Post Office box today. Nervous, this the first time I went to it. Half convinced I would no sooner draw out my mail than a hand would fasten on my wrist and a Postal Inspector would arrest me for obscene use of the mails. I don’t believe the letters I wrote, the six of them, constituted any real obscenity. It’s hard to remember I what I wrote. I think I typed a sample letter into this diary thing but it’s impossible to remember afterwards what I wrote and what I merely thought about. And I have stuck to my resolve not to look at any previous entries.
Any easy resolve to stick to. I fear the embarrassment of encountering old thoughts on a typed page as much as I fear anything.
An interesting thought: What will I do with this diary when I finish writing it? Just leave the pages forever in the radiator’s humidifier tray? Or burn everything unread? Or l present the whole mess to a psychiatrist to save the time of telling him all of it?
Or will I ever finish doing this? Pepys and Evelyn were lifelong diarists, talking to themselves in notebooks. I’ve read both their diaries. Evelyn never wrote a thing he could have been uncomfortable having anyone read (although I doubt he felt that way about it himself). So impersonal in so many ways. What the minister said at services. Details of his various business transactions. Summaries of papers read to the Royal Society.
Pepys a different sort, easier to identify with. Wrote in a cipher so that no one discovering his diaries could readily crack the code. And yet was careful to leave his work with the foreknowledge and evident desire that the cipher would be broken and the work published after his death. An interesting compromise between the need for privacy and the desire for immortality.
I might go on doing this every day forever. (However long my version of forever chances to be.) Or I might give it up tomorrow.
Tomorrow — a date with Bill. We have formalized things, an outgrowth of the mutual realization that we both have the same desires and the same forebodings about our relationship. (Semantic query: Do we relate enough to dignify this thing we share with the term relationship?) And so we save ourselves phone calls and uncertainty by meeting every Wednesday evening, no more or less frequently. I am to call him every Tuesday around dinner time to tell him whether or not I can make it, and to learn whether some appointment or obligation has come up on his end. And I’m to call him again Wednesday before going to him to make sure things are still on. For example, I occasionally have to work late; if this happens I’ll call him from the office.
How would it feel to call him from the office?
He asked for my phone number but I refused. He didn’t say anything but looked at me oddly. I’m sure I could trust him to call only in an emergency and not to take advantage of me by trying to learn more about me. Especially because he gets a kick of sorts out of my secrecy. Still, I’m uncomfortable at the idea of his having my number.