1 June — Tuesday
Another month.
Nothing I feel much like writing, actually, but it is another month, the First of June, and it seems somehow essential to celebrate the fact upon this poor unfortunate typewriter. A happy First of June to you, Smith-Corona Electra 110. And many more, if I don’t pound you to pieces before another June First rolls around.
June.
About as good as months normally get in this city. June and October are usually the best months. June is sometimes too hot, but if every day is like this one no one will dream of complaining. Temperature around 65, less soot and crud in the air than usual, and the sky (visible, for a change) had a distinctly blue cast to it.
I like New York in June, how about you? I’m not sure I actually like New York in June, but I like June in New York. June and October, with a slight nod to October, but since June is here and October isn’t, let’s forget about October. New York in June and a Gershwin tune and ice cream and motor trips and how about you, anyway?
Actually everybody prefers October, but hardly anything rhymes with it. Except sober, which is less than a dynamite word in a song, and which is what I will cease to be if I have one or two more drinks, which I intend to have as soon as I put this drivel under the radiator cover. If winter comes, can spring be far behind?
5 June — Saturday
Last night Arnold kissed me.
Not for the first time, but more seriously than ever before. Stopped the car and sat looking at me for a long moment, and I met his gaze, and I guess we got the tiniest bit lost in one another’s eyes. Then he heaved a sigh — heaved it halfway across the room, chuckle chuckle — and leaned across the seat, arms out for me, and I went properly into his arms and caught his mouth with mine.
A long, warm, intense, both-mouths-closed kiss. Then a pause, with our mouths still close together, and then his arms tightening around me and another kiss and his tongue probing, testing the enemy’s resistance.
I let him pry my lips apart. His tongue snuck inside, and I gave a sigh of my own and opened my mouth to accept him entirely, and we held that pose for perhaps a minute before I gently disengaged myself.
His voice was hoarse when he spoke. How sweet I was, and how warm, and how good it was for him to spend time with me. Nothing I hadn’t heard before, but never this much strain in his voice.
A Goodnight, Arlene, from him, and a Goodnight from me. Not a Goodnight, Arnie, which is what I am to call him. I find it quite impossible to call him this. I cannot even think of him as Arnie, though I made the effort awhile ago. I think of him as Arnold but do not call him that, either.
As a result I call him nothing at all. Mr. K. in the office, of course, and Arnold inside my head, but when we have dinner together I do not put any name to him. Since there are only the two of us together on such occasions, names are not enormously necessary; he knows who I’m talking to.
Whom. To whom I’m talking.
He dropped me at Eighty-Fourth and East End. I was supposed to see them at ten o’clock and it was just past nine-thirty when he let me off, so I went to a bar on York Avenue and killed a few minutes. I could have been picked up if I had wanted to. I didn’t, I was already set for the night, but it is very reassuring to know that you can be picked up. I suppose a woman can get used to that sort of feeling, and suppose it is a nice sort of feeling to get used to, but I am not yet used to it and enjoy it each time it happens.
Had a couple of drinks and walked back to their place. Nice plush apartment, expensive graphics on the walls. A Leger I liked, a Chagall I didn’t much care for. Both of them in their forties and into bondage and light discipline, but I was merely to observe and assist, which I did.
Fun.
Won’t see them again, of course. Never see anybody a second time these days. Almost told them as much but why do that sort of thing? Why make people feel bad? Let them think I enjoyed them, as in fact I did. Any explanation of why I don’t see them again would merely leave them thinking they had somehow disappointed me.
Which they did not.
So I have dinner with Arnold and we talk and talk and talk, and it is not merely a matter of him talking and me listening, not any more. We both talk. The difference is that he pours out his heart to me while I edit everything I say, packaging it all to exclude the parts of me that are a secret from him. He is the only person on earth who knows Arlene Krause now. And he knows only the part of her that no one else knows. The rest of her is utterly concealed from him.
Dinner with Arnold, and then I go meet strangers and have some unorthodox form of sex with them with Arnold’s kiss still on my lips.
And then home and to bed.
So strange. All of this, so very strange.
6 June — Sunday
Yesterday the anniversary of Bobby Kennedy’s death, today the anniversary of D-Day. May you live in interesting times. May you get what you want. And God help you, my sweet...
9 June — Wednesday
“You never call me Arnie.”
“I know.”
“How come?”
“I guess I don’t think of you as Arnie. I think of you as Arnold.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. But I even have trouble calling you that. I guess because of calling you Mr. K. in the office, and it’s hard to change after hours.”
“I’ve never had trouble calling you Arlene. Oh, but then I call you that in the office, I call all the girls by their first names, I always did. You’re the first one I ever dated.”
“The first girl?”
“Nope. First one from the office. Well, wait a minute, that’s not the exact truth. A couple of times over the years before you came to work for us I would take a girl out and give her a tumble. I think it happened maybe three times all told, three different girls that I was with one time each.”
“You never saw them again?”
“Let them go. A big bonus and a beautiful reference so there was never any hard feelings, and an explanation that I wasn’t a cheater and didn’t want to get involved and it would be better for all concerned if we weren’t around each other any more. Which it was, better for both of us, all parties, I mean. Those three times were each a case of breaking a personal rule of mine. Not that I would eat my heart out because rules are made to be broken, but I decided in the first place never to have anything to do with anyone who worked for me. You were afraid of that, weren’t you? Remember you wouldn’t go out with me?”
“I remember.”
“And all I wanted was an ear to pour my troubles into. But you were afraid of losing your job.”
“It wasn’t that so much.”
“Then what? Getting involved?”
“Yes.”
“And what are we now? Answer that for me, Arlene. Are we involved?”
“I don’t know.”
“Lots of girls I’ve been to bed with, and the closest I ever came with you is a couple of kisses in the front seat of a car. And here I am feeling closer to you than I ever felt to anybody else. The girl I used to see, damn near living with her on week nights, and I never felt the closeness with her that I feel with you, and here we’re not sleeping together and what’s more I’m not trying to get us to sleep together, and you figure it out because I’ll tell you something, I can’t. Am I involved with you? Are you involved with me, Arlene?”
“Maybe we should change the subject.”
“Maybe we should. Arnold. I’m trying to think who was it used to call me Arnold. Nobody in more years than I can remember. That’s some name, Arnold.”