I suppose a first step would be to start thinking of him by his first name.
4 May — Tuesday
Saw Jeff and Claudine again last night. I had never gotten around to calling them after the last time I saw them, and then I got a letter from them saying how much they had enjoyed me and wanted to see me again, and I had had no particular reason not to see them, so I thought what the hell, and I called them and went over there and we spent a very enjoyable three hours.
Two-and-a-half hours, actually.
I don’t even know if I have written about them at all. I don’t seem to remember writing about them, and when I typed their names my fingers told me I was typing them for the first time.
Strange.
5 May — Wednesday
Maybe it’s my imagination but I have the feeling that this is becoming less and less of a sex diary. At the beginning I seem to recall writing down everything sexual that happened to me.
And so very little did happen to me at the beginning. It was always on my mind but hardly anything ever happened. I was so afraid of it.
Now I’m not afraid of it, and three or four times a week I see someone, and I don’t often write about it. I was thinking about this today at work, thinking about last night’s entry when I mentioned Jeff and Claudine and realized I hadn’t mentioned them before. And after all of that I didn’t say anything about what they are like or what it was like with them.
As a matter of fact, I have the feeling this is becoming less and less of a diary all across the board. I have to drag myself to the typewriter most of the time and just type out enough sentences so that I won’t feel guilty about not having an entry for the day.
I’d like to read over what I’ve done so far, but it’s more than my promise to myself that is stopping me. I’m literally scared to see what I’ve written. As though I am afraid to come face to face with the person who wrote it all.
And yet it all seems so futile. This typing, this communion with Smith-Corona Electra 110. What is the point of it, after all? To write about my clothes, and my fantasies, and my fucking, and my philodendron? Literary exhibitionism of the strangest sort, as I am unable to go whole hog and actually exhibit it to anybody, myself included.
Maybe that’s the point. Keep the diary so that you evolve to the point where you don’t need to keep it any more. Like eating so that you won’t be hungry so that you can stop eating until you’re hungry again.
No Chinese meal, this diary. I have the feeling I won’t really be hungry to write more of this for longer than twenty minutes.
More like twenty years.
6 May — Thursday
I had a terrible dream last night. Often dreams disturb me but this was something else. A full-fledged nightmare. I woke up violently, sat up straight in the bed with my mouth open to scream. Didn’t scream, but I must have been right on the verge of it.
Heart pounding fiercely, really hammering away. Body coated with chill sweat and the sheet damp beneath me.
I cannot remember the dream.
Been trying to. Been trying all day, then pushed it out of my mind, then tried to summon it up now while sitting at the typewriter. Just no way at all.
Never really cared much about dreams. About trying to remember them. Feeling now that the dream is a ghost which must be exorcised; it’ll haunt me if I don’t remember it, but memory won’t summon it up.
They say you can recall dreams under hypnosis. I’m sure I could never by hypnotized. Some people can’t. Won’t surrender their will, won’t let themselves go under.
Of course I would be like that. Refusing to surrender the self to a hypnotist just as I refuse to surrender self sexually.
A parallel there?
Probably. Can surrender Jennifer’s unself to strangers because that reveals nothing of me.
I could not be hypnotized, I am sure of this. But carry it further — I could not even bring myself to test this hypothesis. Could not dare to go to a hypnotist on the offchance that I might be wrong, that he (or she) might be able to get me to go under. And the pure thought so upsets me that I would never put the question to a test.
Just as I won’t have sex with anyone who knows me?
The dream. I can’t get back any of it, except for one thing. And I feel it more than I remember it.
That, in the dream, I was about to die. Don’t know how or why, but I was about to die, and I woke up at the instant before dream-death.
I read something somewhere about this. I think it was in a novel. Can’t remember exactly. Something to the effect that people often wake up on the point of dying in dreams. And that if you don’t wake up at that instant when the dream-self is about to die, the dreamer in fact dies.
Legend, it must have been. Because how would anybody know if it is true or not?
All I know is that I am afraid to go to sleep.
7 May — Friday
Couldn’t fall asleep last night.
Expected it to happen that way. Stayed up until two- thirty dreading sleep, and finally got into bed exhausted, and couldn’t sleep. Would be hovering on the point of sleep and would reach out and catch myself and make myself sit up and smoke another cigarette.
Dreading the dream.
Dreading death.
Finally fell asleep a couple of hours before the alarm rang. If I dreamed at all, I don’t remember it.
8 May — Saturday
The quick brown fox jumped over the fucking dog.
9 May — Sunday
The quick brown fox fucked over the jumping dog.
10 May — Monday
The quick brown
11 May — Tuesday
Today Arnie was saying that he...
Odd to type Arnie when I have never called...
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
14 May — Friday
23 May — Sunday
An odd feeling. Sitting again at this typewriter. Blank paper staring in accusation at me. Fingers remembering this particular keyboard. The rest of me remembering the feeling of pouring my head onto the blank paper, dirtying the paper while cleansing the mind.
Hard habit to break, this. Days, I forget how many, of putting off the moment of confrontation as long as possible, then rolling the paper into the typewriter, then throwing meaningless words onto the page, slapping out the fragment of a single nonsense sentence, then stacking the page meticulously on the pile of pages under the radiator cover.
Feeling, as each page joined the pile, that I was paying some sort of curious dues. And feeling too that I was cheating, breaking the spirit of the rule while hewing to its letter, inventing ceremony for myself as meaningless as any I could devise.
Then a couple days off. And one day when all I typed was the date, and then no more entries. I don’t know how long it’s been since I even made an attempt at an entry. Over a week, though, because I think it was Tuesday when I could no longer bear the silent presence of the typewriter, sitting out here endlessly and gleaming like blood on Lady Macbeth’s hands. Put it in its carrying case, closed it, tucked it case and all in the closet.
Out of sight and almost out of mind.
And now I take it out again for as little reason as I ever put it away. Things I want to get down but how to write them? I would say that I have lost the knack, that this recording process is now unfamiliar to me, but am surprised how quickly I am into it as deeply as I ever was. My fingers fly on these keys, throwing letters and words and sentences at the page without my thinking them over first. I have missed this, and realize now how much I have felt the omission, but if challenged I could still not explain what it is that this does for me, what it is that I require of it.