“I don’t want to die. I don’t want it to be over. I don’t want to sit in front of God and he says, Karlman, you had your chance and what did you do with it? And I say, God, begging your pardon, I kept waiting for it to be my turn and all of a sudden it was over. I missed my chance, God, and I regret it.
“Arlene, I don’t want to regret it.
“Arlene, I don’t want it to be over. Arlene, I sit looking at my watch and it makes me want to cry. My watch makes me want to cry. Is that something for a grown man to admit? A successful man? An established man? That he looks at his watch and tears come to his eyes?
“The second hand. The sweep second hand. I watch it go around and it’s my life being ticked off. Each one of those seconds. I watch them go by and know they’ll never come up again. I’ll never see those seconds again. Once they happen, once they flash by me, once they pass me by, they’re gone forever, they’re over and done with. And I watch that sweep second hand and there’s nothing I can do about it and I can’t even stop watching it, my eyes are riveted to it and there’s nothing on earth I can do.
“My life passing me by.”
Mr. Karlman, you have to live it yourself.
“Arlene, why am I telling you this? What’s the children’s phrase — Why am I laying this trip on you? You know something? I’m taking advantage of you. I know it. I knew it all along. Telling you I would pay you for this half hour, which is already a good deal more than a half hour. I knew then that I would be taking advantage of you. But I can’t get past the feeling that you can listen, that you can hear me out. That you can do me some good.
“I don’t love her. This girl I’m seeing. I don’t love her, I don’t care for her.
“I’ll tell you something. I want to love someone. When I first started up with her, when I first got involved, I thought I loved her. Not from anything she did. Not from anything she was to me. But because this was a need within me. I wanted to love somebody and it was like a game of tag, I reached out and touched her and she was It. She was the one I decided to pretend I loved.
“And I’ll tell you something else. I believed it. For the longest time I believed it. Because when the two of us went to bed together it was magic. Forgive me for talking on the subject. Forgive me, but it was beautiful, it was magic. In bed together, the two of us, it was magic and I told myself that because it was magic it had to be love.
“I had to believe that.
“I’ll tell you something, Arlene. Something I couldn’t tell this person, this girl, that I have been seeing. It was never love. It was needing to be in love. It was being with someone who was not my wife. It was being with someone new and fresh and different. It was taking this good sex and believing this good sex could only happen with a beloved person, and putting the whole thing into love.
“So I look at myself. So I look at myself, and I look at this girl who I have been seeing for a few years, and I think that I owe her something. And I look at my wife and I think that I owe her something, too. And I can’t give anything to either of them. Because if I divorce my wife and marry this person what do I have? I trade one person I don’t love for another person I don’t love, and all I do is make complications for myself. And I almost wish and hate myself for wishing that this girl will become upset with me for stalling, for telling her I’ll get a divorce and not getting one.
“That she’ll be so upset she will refuse to see me any more. Because I am afraid to break off with her. I want to break with her, and I am not afraid for the cheap reasons, that she will tell my wife, that she will expose me. I am afraid because I do not want to do anything bad to her. Because I feel very guilty about her. Several years now, and she was good for me, and what did I give her? I didn’t, all I did was take from her, and I want her to leave me but I cannot bring myself to leave her.
“You know where I am, Arlene?
“What I want I can’t have. Well, all right. Everybody’s like that, what they want they can’t have. Everybody reaches and can’t get his hand around what he thinks is out there.
“But also, what I have I can’t want.
“And it drives me crazy. I look at myself. I say to myself, Schmuck, you have everything. You have a business that pays you a good living just putting in your time. You go to the office five days a week and you do the automatic thing and you make more money than you need. You have a wife who is always there, you have children that you know are your children and belong to you, you have this thing and that thing, you have your comforts, you name anything and you can go out and buy it if you decide you want it — Schmuck, what do you think you want of life that you don’t already have?
“Arlene, I want.
“I don’t know what it is but I know I want it.
“I look at the future and I see a desert. A blackness. My future is all in the past. This is how I see myself, as a man with his future behind him. And I could live a good many years yet. I could also drop dead tomorrow, God forbid, but I could live a great many years. I don’t feel old. I feel like a young man dressed up as an old man. I look at kids on the street, those crazy kids with the hair everywhere, and I want to call to them. ‘Hey, I’m not like your parents. I’m like you. Where are you going? Wherever it is, I want to go along. Take me with you, I want to go along.’ I have thoughts which if I said them people would point at me and say I was a crazy man. But which is crazy? To me it’s crazy to feel this way and stay with the life I’ve been living.
“That to me is crazy.
“Arlene, there has to be Something.”
I didn’t think I was going to type all that. I really didn’t. I started to put a little bit down and I could hear his voice in my head and just typed what my mind was hearing.
Poor Mr. K.
Is That All There Is? Stupid song that says all of it. A man reaching out to grab what he wants and his hand closes around it and he opens his hand and finds nothing inside it.
I was going to write about Wayne and Maureen but Mr. Karlman is more on my mind. Let me type something about Wayne and Maureen to get it out of the way. I met Maureen at the cafe and went directly to the apartment with her. Met Wayne. Maureen had offered to go back alone and have Wayne meet me in case I was turned off by him, but I said we could skip that part. She had already shown me a picture of him. From certain angles he looked a little like Gary, though not in the photograph.
Sat and talked with them, mostly them talking and me listening. How they got into swinging and their various experiences. Why they like threesomes. Very interesting stuff but no point in recording it.
After awhile they began necking a little. They wanted me to sit with them. Said I was comfortable where I was. Wayne wanted to kiss me, so did Maureen, but I said I couldn’t handle it. Both of them disappointed but game.
More necking, and I got undressed, which seemed to please them. Very embarrassed undressing. I think largely because of Maureen. Her figure better than mine, breasts bigger. Didn’t feel this nearly as strongly with Wanda at Bill’s apartment. Wonder why? Maybe sensed that Maureen competes with other woman in threesome. Just a guess.
Watched them make love. Thought it wouldn’t work for me at first but it did.