Spread
Authors: Barry Malzberg
Barry Malzberg
THE
SPREAD
a division of F+W Media, Inc.
I
To come to the point (such as it is), I publish a dirty newspaper: a pornography sheet which sells approximately 100,000 copies an issue. This does not mean, however, that my intent is purely sexual. On the contrary, I devolve upon simpler, darker matters: returns, distributor weakness in the Bronx, judicial reform, the interpreted limits of the First Amendment and so on. Sex is peripheral to all of these issues although without it, of course, none of them could exist. Sex put us to 200,000 copies a week in the first four months and would have taken us further yet had it not been for certain illegal maneuvers in the office of the District Attorney, certain pressures, that is to point out, on wholesale outlets and so forth. Even at our present standing, we make money although things could be considerably better. They could also be considerably worse, matters in this business being relative.
I concede the value of sex while unwilling to be entrapped by it. This is not to say that I lack normal tendencies, normal outlets, I am a devoted husband, a careful adulterer, an admirer of many of the photographs we print and so on. What must be cultivated is a sense of perspective, an awareness of a larger scheme in which we are but one minor facet. The system is breaking apart: somewhere between scatology and revulsion lies the truth around which we will reassemble. I am devoted only to illuminating one pole to the limits of my ability.
In this sense, I have a certain assurance of mission although the realization that I have more in common with those on the opposite pole than with anyone in the middle occasionally induces a complicating headache, a dismal woe. It is not easy. Nothing is easy. But in fifty years, all of these will be artifacts, frozen in perfect and contained time, available to all of those who will care to investigate a past that made them whole. All passion spent, all
amicus curiae
denoted, the pages alone will speak, and they will speak in the calmest and most level of tones: tones of reassurance and hope. Souvenirs of the tour available in the gift shop below; facsimile prints carved upon stone, the stone cool and timeless in the suspended palm.
I have no sense of guilt. All of that was overcome a long time ago. It is a business like any other business. I am performing a service. Masturbation is a harmless outlet for unrelieved sexual tensions; masturbatory materials lend harmless pleasures to lonely millions while saving any number of attractive girls from violent and bestial rape. I see my audience as gentle men in small rooms, surrounded by haze, sinking into wonder as they stare at my pages and with sure, ample strokes, bring themselves past desire to the perfect abscess of memory.
I am having an affair with the secretary in my office. It is a small office consisting of only four full-time employees plus a number of freelancers who provide photography, text, layouts and so forth. The other two members of the staff are homosexuals, I believe, although I am not absolutely sure of this; in any event they pay no attention to the secretary, leaving me a clear, unembarrassed field.
The secretary is named Virginia Nelson. She is twenty-three years old and very pretty, attended graduate school for a while but grew tired of the academic life and came to New York in order to make entrance to the world. Being of a new generation, she suffers from neither guilt nor stifling cultural taboos and took this job when offered because it paid well and was interesting. In addition to taking my dictation, filing correspondence and running the subscriber service, Virginia writes text for the newspaper under a pseudonym, talking about the female attitude toward orgasm, penetration, breast-play, etc. I have no idea whether she has the experience she claims but find her columns consistently rewarding and they are one of the most popular features in the newspapers, judging from the small quantity of reader mail we receive. For these services I now pay her $200 a week plus occasional bonuses. I also copulate with her often, sometimes in the offices after working hours and sometimes, for atmosphere, in a large nineteenth-century hotel several blocks from this building into whose canopied beds we can literally sink, moaning and descending against one another. We are not able to go to her apartment since she lives with two roommates whose hours are unpredictable, and we cannot go to my own apartment since my wife lives there and would be likely to interrupt us just when things were getting started. Also, she would ask questions which I do not care to answer at this stage of our relationship.
Hovering over Virginia — who is really a terrific fuck, the tone of my description of her notwithstanding — feeling her breasts, tonguing her neck, preparing to make that first and last of entrances, I sometimes think that I am on the verge of making some enormous equation; something which will connect the real and the illimitable so tightly that never the gap to be broken again … but then, as the first sureties of orgasm overtake me in the familiar way, I realize that it was all a cheat and that as ever I am suspended, caught in the trap between heaven and earth, trying to piece out that small beneficence which is all we can know of the final connection.
The office contains a huge bulletin board on which are thumbtacked selections of our best pictures. Often, while fucking Virginia, the angle of our conjoinment has me facing this board; prowling into her I see the gape of newsprint cunt, newsprint tits, the open, stunned mouth of a model as she holds her breath, the desperate cleavage of a male ass as it constricts against thighs pinned below. The pictures, at these times, lend urgency to my coupling, and gasping, flowing, unwinding within her, I think of the stricken eyes of the masturbator as, fistward, he plunges himself home over and again toward the very pictures I glimpse and yet, prowling her, can never touch.
My wife does not approve of what I am doing. Our original plan, when we married some years ago, was for her to finance me through graduate school while I took a master’s degree in business, but a false pregnancy and a siege of academic panic spelled the end of that; also I did not want to attend school. Instead I obtained a job as an editor of a men’s mazagine and that led in turn to an executive capacity at a whole chain of men’s magazines until I decided, two years ago, to take the plunge into publishing myself. Now my wife does not know what is going on. “Don’t bring it home,” she says, “that’s all I ask of you, don’t ever bring it home. I don’t want to know what you’re doing.”
“But you’ll take the money, right?” I say, not tactfully. “The proceeds are all right as long as you don’t have to grapple with the source.”
“I never asked you to do this. It was going to be entirely different. You did this on your own.”
“You’ll take the money,” I say. “The money doesn’t worry you in the least.” In the last few years, my wife has picked up rather expensive habits. To a certain degree this is a compensation for loneliness and the loss of central urgency in our marriage which is why I do not begrudge her any of this. Nevertheless, I sometimes like to tease her. “You’re like anyone else,” I say, “as long as you don’t have to face the consequences of your acts or the source from which they come, you’ll do anything. But you’re on a higher emotional plane, of course.”
“You are a disgusting cold man. You have no feelings. All the feelings have been squeezed out of you a long time ago. All you do is analyze; analyze and torment. How can you take yourself seriously? Don’t you know what I think of you?”
“I’m tired,” I say. “I don’t want to discuss it. Am I not entitled to some relaxation on a night home? Do I have to start all over again with pain and accusation? Get me a drink. Give me the newspaper. Sit by and comfort me with caresses. What’s wrong with you?”
“Oh, Walter,” she says and something breaks slowly within her; I can see her surfaces waver, reassemble at a different point, “Walter, I can’t stand this anymore. What’s happened to us? Where are we going? What is to become of us? Oh, Walter, I want children. We must have children, Walter, before what has happened becomes solidified in the cells and then our children would be monsters. We must — ”
“Now you are being naive and sentimental,” I say and stand, go to the sideboard, mix myself a drink. Straight scotch and drink it slowly, feeling the even fires of alcohol burn me cleanly, sever me in two. “We must work out our fate in the present time; it is too late to pass on solutions to the next generation. We live here in this world and in this world we must make our accommodation. I will not allow you to ease the problems along, shelve them once again on abstractions. Do you understand? live in this world.”
This is cruel of me and I am not so beyond feeling for her that I do not know it, that I fail to see what saying this does to her. Nevertheless, I cannot become sufficiently interested in the situation to retract what I have said; the concern that gave me patience is long gone and now, more and more, I feel that we must hasten in our marriage toward endings. Past the balance wheel of a relationship, this always happens. When you get to the center, the urgency is to get outside again.
Pausing at a newsstand to admire the prominent display given our current issue and its competitors, I see my newspaper in the process of being bought. A small, scholarly man carrying a briefcase leans over toward the newsstand, plucks my newspaper from the top of its pile and reaches to hand fifty cents to the dealer. The dealer, however, is engrossed in a magazine and does not, for the moment, see him, inducing a kind of restlessness that verges on panic. The purchaser grunts, shrugs his shoulders, leans forward to tap the dealer on the shoulder. Before he can, I intervene.
“Pervert,” I say in a monotone, pulling the brim of my hat all the way down to the eyeline. “Fool. Idiot. What are you buying that stuff for?”
“Please,” the purchaser says, trying to stuff the paper under his arm, “I’ll thank you to — ”
“Don’t kid me,” I say, implacably. “I saw. We see everything, you know. We’ve got our eye on you people, every single one of you, and we have for a long time. There’s a special branch which does nothing but keep up files on you people. You’re heading for trouble sooner than you think.”
The purchaser puts the paper atop the pile, trembling, and turns to flight. “Hold on,” I say, seizing the sleeve of his overcoat between thumb and forefinger, nailing him into place with a single determined yank of the head. “It’s too late now. You can’t run away, not ever. You might as well buy it. Take it home and perform upon it your unspeakably brutal acts while dreaming of the limbs of the untouched child. Do you think that it would make any difference at this point?”
“You’re blocking my newsstand,” the dealer says, looking up from the magazine. “That’s not allowed.”