Stopped for a cup of coffee on one of the crooked West Village streets afterward. Not sure precisely where I was. Sat alone and a boy asked if I minded if he shared my table. Long hair and a beard and hippie clothes, so it was hard to tell his age, but I would guess about nineteen or twenty.
Started a conversation with me. Asked if I had an old man. Seemed an odd question but I said no, my father died years ago. He said he meant did I have a husband or a man I was living with. Said I didn’t.
Asked me if I would like to go back to his place. “Smoke, drink some wine, see if we can get it together.” Perfectly straightforward. Said no, I didn’t think so. He nodded and said it was cool and maybe he would see me around sometime, and got up and went and sat at another table.
Had this urge to flee the place immediately, but decided he was right, it was cool, and I sat and took my time finishing my coffee and smoked a cigarette and then paid my check and left. No one else approached me.
He was so open about it, so casual about it. I must have seemed incredibly square in his eyes.
I wonder what it would have been like if I went with him. Doubt I’ll ever see him again. Doubt I could find that particular coffee house if I went looking for it.
Just as well I came home alone.
I got up from the typewriter and read the Times for awhile. I guess I don’t feel like writing about Wayne and Maureen tonight or I wouldn’t have already bothered reporting on Friday night at such length. Wrote about the one because I didn’t want to write about the other — why do I keep doing that?
No, more to it. Also had the conversation with the boy on my mind and wanted to get it down.
Wayne and Maureen.
No, I think I’ll wait until tomorrow. There’s no rush. And if I don’t get to it tomorrow, or ever, that’s all right, too.
The object isn’t to put down everything. The object is to put down what I want to put down when I want to put it down.
If I can write sentences like that, today is definitely not the time to write about Wayne and Maureen. Now is the time to get into a nice hot tub and soak for a few hours and have maybe two drinks before dinner and another drink after and get to bed early. A good night’s sleep would not hurt. Got so little sleep last night, late to bed and awake automatically at eight-thirty, and I have to face Monday morning tomorrow, never that easy to face but easier on a sound sleep.
Night-night, Smith-Corona Electra 110. I am turning off your little yellow light and putting you to bed.
29 March — Monday
Checked my Post Office box during my lunch hour. Nothing. Maybe I ought to call up that “bored housewife’ and see what she’s all about.
Not now, though. One calls bored housewives during the afternoon, when their boring husbands are not at home. Even I know that much.
Should I answer some more ads? Sent six letters, got three replies, two unsuitable. Did get to meet Wayne and Maureen out of the deal, and I’m glad of that. But it’s highly unlikely I’ll see them again. I enjoyed it and so did they, but they were not precisely what I was looking for and I was not at all what they were looking for. One suitable but imperfect meeting out of six letters, one meeting with no future in it, and in return I’ve sent Jennifer’s name all over the place. Jennifer’s name and not mine, but even so I feel a sense of exposure. Three people didn’t answer my letters, gave nothing of themselves, and they know that there is a maniacal voyeur on the loose named Jennifer Starr.
Answer might be to run my own ad. Attract the kind of people who are interested in my thing.
Do I dare?
And putting Jennifer’s name in the ad would be even more public, somehow. There must be a way around it. I can think of several but want time to decide just how I feel about it and just how much chance there is of things working out ideally in this fashion.
Wayne and Maureen.
Mr. Karlman asked me out to dinner again. Told him I couldn’t accept.
“Then have a drink with me after work. The little place around the corner. Arlene, I’m a wreck these days. I just need someone to talk to. You listen good. What does a headshrinker charge to listen to your troubles? Twenty-five an hour? I’ll keep you no more than half an hour and pay you twelve-and-a-half bucks. That’s professional rates and you can be just like them and not say a word.”
“Oh, you’re joking, Mr. K.”
“I’m dead serious.”
“Well, I couldn’t possibly take money for listening to you talk.”
“Then do it for free. Up to you.”
“I just don’t know.”
“I’m such an ogre it would turn your stomach to sit with me for half an hour in a public place? I know I’m not Paul Newman—”
“The thing is, if you told me something personal, then later on you might worry that you had told me too much. And then it might make you uncomfortable having me around the office every day.”
“You worried about your job?”
“I guess so.”
“You get a ten-dollar increase starting with this coming Friday’s paycheck. That’s if you have a drink with me or not. You had a raise coming, you’d of got one if you ever asked for it. What more do you want? You want a three- year contract, noncancellable? I’ll draw it up, I know enough law to draw it up. That way if I’m uncomfortable which I won’t be it’ll cost me twenty thousand dollars to get rid of you. You want me to draw it up?”
“Oh, I’m being silly about this. I’ll have a drink with you, of course I will. But I really can’t stay more than half an hour, forty-five minutes at the most.”
So I stayed for close to two hours. I really hardly said a word. Now I feel like a complete bitch for giving him such a hard time about having a drink with him. All he wanted was a listener, and he really needed one.
Poor bastard.
He loves his wife but he can’t stand her.
How does he love her? Let him, poor bastard, count the ways. He loves her because she is the mother of his children, whom he in turn loves without knowing, as one loves the purple mountain plains while singing America The Beautiful. He loves her because of all the impossible years the two of them have spent together, a bond of contrition the two of them share, like that shared by veterans of a given war, or concentration camp victims. He loves her because loving her defines him; she is his wife, and without her he is cut loose, an island, floating in a sea that terrifies him.
Poor bastard.
He doesn’t hate her. Doesn’t hate her at all, and this is fortunate in some ways and unfortunate in others. Unfortunate in that, not hating her, he is unable to foist any venom upon her — and thus must feel guilty for all the ways in which he does not love her.
And he has a girl friend. Mr. K., Mr. Karlman, has a girl friend.
Whom he also doesn’t love, but pretends to.
And who in turn pretends to believe it.
What a mess. What a truly total mess. The wife does not exist. The girl friend has been deluded, and has deluded herself, into feeling that she is loved. So she wants Karlman to divorce the wife and marry her, and Karlman knows he does not want to be divorced, and resents the girl friend as he has previously resented the wife, and hates himself for both resentments.
“Arlene, I look at myself and what do I see? A man who is young but not so young. You look at the word middle-aged and it’s an impossible word. What does it mean? It means finished. A middle-aged man is someone cut down by a heart attack in what the obituaries call the prime of life, and when you read the obituaries you figure the poor bastard, he was done with life, middle-aged, he was over the hill, he was done with life.
“But I don’t feel done with life. I feel as though I’ve been waiting all these years, being a good person, being first a good son to my parents and then a good husband to my wife and finally a good father to my children, always waiting, always biding my time, always wondering when it gets to be my turn, and then all of a sudden I’m what they call middle-aged and there’s no future in it, no tomorrow in it, not even a today in it, and you’re suddenly supposed to sit around praying for a heart attack that will take you out of it.