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“I love my wife,” I say and realize that this is true. “My wife has seen me through all ages and stages. There is nothing simple about what we have constructed, where I have come from.”

“Did your wife ever do this for you?”

“No,” I say, “but that isn’t the most important thing. The important thing is what you build up through the years; you owe a relationship something, it has dimension you know. Anyway, I don’t know if I liked it.”

“You wanted it, didn’t you?” she says. “And she wouldn’t do it for you. It’s always going to be this way. You’ve got to make a decision, Walter. Things can’t go on this way; they have to reach some kind of a resolution sooner or later. Try to think of me.”

“You didn’t have to come to work for me,” I say, “You knew what the situation was. You knew what you were getting involved in. If you don’t like the job, you’ll have to get yourself involved with something less degrading.” This is cruel of me, I know, but I take a certain pleasure in punishing Virginia and never so much pleasure as when she has just seen me in moments of great vulnerability. It is perhaps the only weapon I have, this ability to make her vulnerable emotionally as she renders me helpless sexually. “You didn’t seem to have any objection,” I say.

“Oh, Walter,” she says, putting her cheek against my neck, raising herself with a slow motion that puts her breasts against my chest, running her hands up and down my stomach until I feel something intricate within break and begin to spill out in small, shocking waves, “Walter, you don’t have to be this way if you don’t want to. There’s so much pain in you; we should try to cleanse the pain rather than make you hurt. You don’t have to hurt, Walter,” she says and comes against me. I can feel the wetness of her box as she flexes and unflexes her legs. Momentarily limp, there is nothing that I can do but hold her, look at the walls, look at the window, look at the outlines of the city as I listen to the creak of the hotel elevator and wonder how many scenes have been enacted in this very bed, scenes that to be sure, all of the participants felt to be consequential, and now many of those participants dead, locked in ashes, facing the sky, all passions resolved in the simple cloak of renunciation and mystery.

The most popular feature of our newspaper and its competitors is the “personals” section, five or six pages of classified material at the end of the issue in which a diverse group of individuals and corporations advertise services or make pleas for companions. Most of the acts or goods solicited are obscene, of course, but a network of euphemism has grown up around the suggestions over the past decade and since the newspaper itself emphasizes that it takes no position on its advertisers and no responsibility for outcome, we stand well within the law of obscenity on this point.

The ads, for all their seeming diversity, break into two groups: there are corporations which (under several different names) advertise sexual goods and satisfactions, masturbation machines, dildoes, creams to retard orgasm, life-size inflatable female dolls to take into the shower and so on … and then there are individuals (almost always male) who conceive of sexual connection as a more random, less systematized kind of affair; they call for companions of various inclinations and advertise their own qualifications which usually have to do with the size of genitalia although the question of emotional sensitivity is not to be overlooked. The ads come in steadily, a mournful stream of mail, checks for advance payment enclosed, across my desk, and replies to the mail come in as well to the box numbers which our newspaper maintains at an additional charge to facilitate communication between interests. The mail to the box numbers seldom equals in volume the number of original ads, and there are whole strings of advertisements (usually taken by single men in search of afternoon female companionship) which never receive any replies whatsoever, filling me with a kind of vagrant sadness. It seems to me that for an individual, the act of placing an ad is in itself such a difficult admission that our advertisers are entitled to all the help they can get. Of course this may be projecting a trifle; I cannot conceive of placing such an ad myself at any stage of my life although it is true that I found Virginia herself through an open call for employees published in the classified section of the newspaper. In this way, I was sure that I would find someone preselected, so to speak, for the job.

As I occasionally do, I opened a letter at random the other morning and found that it was an advertisement requested by a young man in search of a homosexual partner. (Homosexuals in the columns of this newspaper seem to severely outnumber heterosexuals although the paper itself is purely heterosexual; I do not know exactly what to make of this. Are our homosexual readers settling for second best in their choice of reading material or in their selection of a sexual partner? This might be worth working out at length at some time in the future although I hardly have the time to come to grips with abstractions.) The text of the advertisement read:
Young man, 29, slim build, well-hung, is a member of the rear-guard. Seeks similar partner for fun and games, possible longer-lasting relationship. Interested in French and Greek cultures as a sideline and also has some curiosity about water-sports. Call NNFGOST anytime.

I was alone in my office at the time, Virginia at one of her long lunches and the two homosexuals involved in a legal conference having to do with true sales figures and the exact percentage of purchases to returns. (This is difficult ground to walk; on the one hand we want to show the District Attorney that there is very little profit in the newspaper and that his illegal actions have severely hurt our business; on the other hand we do not want to circulate the impression that we are not doing well or are in any kind of financial trouble. The true sales figures, of course, are a mystery and we can only seek a figure which would be an appropriate metaphor.) Nevertheless, I locked the outer door and then closed the door of my office before I picked up the phone and dialed NNFGOST.

A wavering, uncertain voice answered. This is to be expected; the more insolent or outlandish the ad, the less can be expected from the proprietor. “Hello,” I said, “I saw your ad in the new issue. I’m calling up in reply.”

“Oh,” he said with a giggle, “I didn’t even know that it was out yet. The new issue. I just placed the ad a couple of days ago.”

“Well it is,” I say. “What do you mean about water sports? Exactly what did you have in mind?”

“Oh, that was just an extra. Something that I put in. A lot of the fellows are interested in that kind of stuff. It really isn’t my thing, but I’d be happy to cooperate. Are you, uh, interested in water sports?”

“What are water sports?”

There was a thick, clamoring pause on the other end, then the voice said, “I thought that everyone knew.”

“I don’t know. I’m very interested.”

“You haven’t told me anything about yourself. You’ve got my number and know what I want and everything and I don’t know anything about you at all.”

“That’s perfectly all right,” I said. “You think that people take pleasure from being pissed on. Is that what you mean?”

“I don’t,” he said rather hysterically. “It isn’t my kind of thing at all. French and Greek — ”

“French and Greek,” I said, “I bet that it’s French and Greek. Listen you lousy, stinking pervert, we’ve had our eye on you for a good long time. You don’t think that you can live unobserved in this country, do you? You don’t think that there can be any secrets from us, do you? Think of the most private, unspeakable act you have committed, the act which is locked deepest in your memory and which you are sure no one but yourself can ever know and
that act
, that very act, is written down somewhere in a file folder in black and white in an alphabetized drawer and can be reached by us anytime we want to look you up. You think that we can take this kind of thing seriously?”

“You’re a prankster,” he said weakly, his voice modulating now to the perfect and predictable faggart’s shriek, just as I had expected. “You’re just out to torment me, to take advantage because I have the courage to come out in the open. I’m going to hang up on you and call the police.”

“Don’t give me that gay liberation crap,” I said. “You’re a lousy stinking homosexual, that’s all you are and that’s all you’re ever going to be and you can dress it up with French and Greek and water sports all you like but you know exactly what you are. You disgust me. You are committing a crime against nature and God, do you know that? You are placing your soul in jeopardy, you are risking your eternal future because you don’t have the strength to control your bestial and stinking impulses. Well, you take a tip from me, friend, we are watching you with the closest and greatest interest and the biggest favor you could do yourself is to get the hell out of the newspapers. Your private nightmare is your own affair but when you start pandering — ”

“You’re crazy,” he said in a shaky, quavering voice. I could see him, the bastard, trembling over the telephone, his thighs and mouth caving open, his whole body curved to a position of entrance, the sheer weakness of him oozing from every pore. “You’re crazy. This can’t be real. This is America.”

“Yes,” I say, carefully meshing an older concept with a newer, “yes, my friend you are right. This is America.”

Then I hang up on him, chuckling from a sudden weakness of my own which causes me to stagger to the window in search of fresh air. Through the vents the city pours over me, the clear, stinking gray of it clearing my head and giving me a better orientation. I put the phone back in the center of my desk, toss the ad into the out bin, take the check to give in to accounting and then for a while I merely sit, hands behind head, chair tilted toward the window, looking at New York spreading out underneath me like a fish abandoned on shore, gasping for air.

This is no easy position into which I have gotten myself, but it has certain narrow compensations which, after a fashion, can keep one going.

On the streets in the summer I am overcome by seizures of lust, follow strange, pretty girls for blocks on end muttering to myself and watching their bodies move ahead of me as if they contained all light, all purpose, all sense and structure. In their dresses the girls look un touchable, the vulnerability of their flesh and soft breasts masked by a slow hardness which begins at the eyes and descends through all areas and levels of their faces, ending at last around the waist from which fulcrum they move in urgent, contained motions that simulate but have absolutely nothing to do with intercourse. I have noted this hardness more and more in recent summers; it seems to me that girls, when I was younger, did not look this way but faced the streets with demureness and fear. Now there is something else, something almost shattering, an air of malevolence which marks them as both dangerous and desirable. The hardness only makes them more sensual; I yearn to touch, to cleave myself against them, to tell them secrets.

Following them in stunned gaze, my whole body poised to attention, the mind only a numb chatter in the midst of the sensibility, I feel that if I could only somehow go up to them and lay before them my fear and desire, my uniqueness and pain, they would submit to me, for I know that what goes on inside of me when I look at these girls is the churnings of an emotion more profound than ever they have known before. I am sure, at the moments of pursuit, that I love them more than their parents or boy friends, fiancés or husbands, children or employers; if only given the chance I could sculpt out for them that love in a way which they could not refuse … but I find it impossible to speak to them. Sometimes, heads swinging from side to side, they nail me with a gaze, and in that gaze is such complacence, protectiveness and contempt mingled that it is all I can do to keep from gasping on the street and holding onto my sides for comfort. I cannot speak to them. There is no way, I understand this, no way in which I could ever establish myself with these girls, for the messages they send out in midsummer casualness are not those which can take any reply.

“Listen here,” I want to say to them, pinning them against a wall, holding out my hands, showing the streaked, innocent palms, the fine, intelligent crinkle of my forehead. “Listen here, I am a college graduate, thirty-four years old, highly intelligent with a good income, and I feel for you more deeply than you could ever know. I have wit, a good deal of background, have had my small successes with women and am considered good in bed. Perhaps you would not approve of my occupation or source of income
in toto
, but the fact is that I am doing very nicely and am less corrupt than any of the account executives or copywriters who catch your attention; I am at least meeting existing desires rather than trying to create them, and I am meeting those desires on their only level of comprehension. I had a terrible time in the Army, almost losing my life when in Europe, I had high marks in college, I was a successful editor, I performed a unique and courageous act in giving up all of that to found my own business two years ago. You can be led to appreciate this. It is not only your breasts and eyes which engage me, not your hips and walk, the fine density of your upper arms bare to the sun, no, no, it goes far beyond those perversities and has to do with necessities of the spirit. But even if it did not, what is the difference? Do you think the account executives or copywriters who are laying you steadily on Friday and Saturday night within the context of a relationship, do you think that the aspiring writers and artists with whom you are shacked up in a meaningful situation, do you think that any of them are thinking of your
mind
when their hands encircle your breasts and, groaning, begin to take possession? Have none of that my dear; they are informed only by the basic lusts and urges which sent me into flight after you… but there is so much more to me than lusts and urges, there is a whole range and depth to my personality which you will never understand unless you give me a chance, a chance, that is to say, to explain myself to you, to connect to you on my own terms. Oh, God, give me that chance.” And I would throw myself in front of their hard little shoes for love and necessity’s sake, would have them stamp the very life out of me with their magnificent knee-length leather boots but none of that, of course, not a bit of it; after a time, I tire of the hopelessness of it and duck into a sidestreet or a store, return to the office to perform my sullen tasks.