Spread (6 page)

Out to the track again on Tony the distributor’s second tip. Poor information, a crooked jockey, an inept stable source contributed to the disaster on the first, but this time the word is that things are straight and that amends are made. Out in the subway special this time, I look at the people with interest; they stare, quivering, at tipsheets and the
Morning Telegraph
, occasionally mumbling “bastards” to themselves. Once I took this kind of hatred for granted, but now I see it as unique and motivated; I am beginning to see their point. Life examined from their point of view is eliciting some very sane responses. At the track I go directly to the windows, make the bet on the first race and walk to the rail, a sense of purposefulness overcoming me. No waste this time around. People make way for me, smoking cigars, picking their noses, examining the lights on the tote under the shade of hands. The horses break from the gate and the tip wins by seven lengths, galloping, in near track-record time, paying $21.40. I collect Tony’s $2,140 and then go to the $5 show window to collect my own winnings of $14. I feel that I have learned something although I am not sure exactly what. Tony’s two thousand will apply to his long-standing debt to us so that part of it is all right. No, it is something else I have learned, something that is either subverbal or beyond the poor artifices of words. It has to do with the question of timing, and if timing is merely another word for mortality, then I have learned almost all of it, although it will almost certainly take me several years to get it straightened out in mind and codified to a set of principles which will do me any good at all.

About the two faggarts of whom I have said little there is even less to say. One is circulation director and the other accountant although their jobs are often interchangeable and they actually work as a team in performing those mechanical, mathematical tasks, which permit us to remain on the newsstand week after week, adding our own dosage of liberation to the general mix which is contemporary America. I hired one on the recommendation of the other, and when I saw them take to twittering in the corridors and exchanging meaningful, yearning looks over papers in the midday, understood that I had been utilized, but since both of them are competent at their jobs and since neither engages in any questionable activities in the office, I have no reason to complain. One advantage of their condition is that I have a clear field with Virginia (who despises them) and another is that they lend a certain rococo elegance to the offices; a tired tilt of the finger bringing back to me centuries of medieval or baroque charm, a hint of classical music wafting through the air when they whisper to one another. Homosexuality is a convenience these days, perhaps even a minor social asset, and although I have never been able to comprehend men who want one another’s flesh, I do not sit in judgment of them and find the activities themselves unremarkable. There is so little to visualize that I do not even speculate. The faggarts keep the office going, they provide our lawyers with unending lists of figures to show the District Attorney, and they lend my life a certain smugness, a certain low security which I accept without probing deeper. I do not think that either one of them has the slightest comprehension of what is actually going on in the newspaper or has ever done more than scan an issue or two. They seem to think that we are in one branch or another of trade publishing. One of them is named Donald and the other is Jim. We all call one another by our first names in these offices.

My wife has joined some kind of feminine activist movement whose meetings and rallies she attends once or twice a week, and in the evenings she is home, she moves about with a new sullenness, a kind of grim determination around the mouth and eyes that is new although not entirely discomfiting. “Now I understand,” she says, “exactly why I’ve lived with you all these years; why I’ve put up with this kind of thing from the first. I’m afraid that this is the best that I can do and my training is to unquestioningly accept the supremacy of the male ego. What a fool I was! but it is of course never too late,” And a wise expression causes her mouth to purse. “Never too late,” she says, “although all of us have a long, long way to go.”

I find the whole thing vaguely uncomfortable, but we have had too much trouble ourselves with the feminine activists recently to make me anything but very cautious in all of my dealings with them. The feminine activists assaulted our office in a body, some weeks ago, three or four miserable girls who said that we were degrading the female form and figure and pandering to the chauvinist impulses of diseased men to use women as mere outlets for their poisonous desires. I pointed out calmly enough that both males and females were shown nude in our pages and that women were as free to masturbate in or upon the newspaper as men; it was sheerly a matter of choice or taste. This seemed to satisfy the girls or at least to confuse them. They withdrew, mumbling to one another and stealing several copies of the current issue which happened to be available at that time. I thought that our difficulties were resolved, but it seemed that they were only biding their time; very shortly after that they got my wife, and now things around the house are more difficult than ever, although I try to spend a minimum of time there in the first place.

“You went into the business to degrade women,” she says, turning after an hour of silence in the bedroom, to face me across the covers. “It was as simple as that. All your life you were looking for an image of degradation and you found it. It was so simple, really. I should have figured it out a long time ago.”

“You take the money,” I say, but with a feeling of tiredness; the standard response no longer seems appropriate to the circumstances.

“It was male power mania,” she says. “The whole thing is so easy to understand when you look at it the proper way. I was a fool. It was in front of me all the time.”

“We print naked men, too.”

“That’s rationalization. And men are always pictured as the aggressors.”

“What do you do during the days, Dorothy? I don’t even know any more. You never tell me.”

“I do a lot of things. Recently I’ve been going to meetings. What do you care? You never ask me.”

“That’s because you never tell.”

There is something of a silence and then she says, “We are going to have to re-evaluate our entire life together. Things can’t go on this way. We’re going to have to have a long look at this and then put it together in another way. It can’t be taken for granted anymore.”

“You have no idea of the pressures.”

“All our lives we’re trained to be inferior. To be submissive and docile. We learn that the tactics of inferiority will be rewarded, that those of assertion will be punished. We’re nothing but the new slave class.”

“It works two ways.”

“They pay off on submission. The other things don’t interest them at all.” She twists in the bed, moves her face from side to side, an old symptom of distress although, strangely, it also occurs during moments of passion. “I don’t even know why I’m talking about this to you. It doesn’t serve any purpose. I wish I didn’t feel that I had to talk to you.”

“Go to sleep then.”

“It didn’t work, did it Walter?” she says quietly. “It just didn’t work out the way we hoped it would, did it?”

“No,” I say, “but then it never really works out for anyone.”

“I believe in female liberation, but it’s not the whole answer.”

“No,” I agree, “it isn’t the whole answer.” I run my hands up the panels of her body, feel her small breasts curve into my palms; she whimpers against me with a helpless jerk. “No,” she says, “not now. Please don’t do that to me now. I don’t want to.”

“Yes you do. I do.” I feel her nipples rising with a slow sting against my fingers. “I know you do.”

“Oh, nothing works out,” she says with a cry and comes against me. I feel her body opening up all along the line, I lean over her and begin to remove garments; in due course, naked, we press against and into one another, her thin cries at climax falling like birds into the spaces of the room. I withdraw slowly, inching my way out, feeling her close behind me and then for a while lie against her, looking at the pattern of the night lights against the wall, hearing the rumble of trucks on the highway. In the distance my wife is weeping softly, the sounds so faint that, near as she is, I can hardly hear them; far as she is, I cannot misunderstand why she is crying.

Consorting with the enemy. Moving across the lines. The cowardly spy, the faulty saboteur. Ruined espionage and a campaign destroyed.

An unusual advertisement comes into the classifieds and I decide to check it out. An attractive blond divorcée 42-24-38, is seeking male companionship in her home by appointment with people who can show their appreciation for her in the establishing of a meaningful relationship.

Prostitutes rarely advertise in the newspaper. The majority of our readers either are looking for something more bizarre or are oriented entirely toward masturbation, the idea of contract-and-expense somehow repellent to them. The day the issue comes out I phone the number she has given and make an appointment. She lives on the fourth floor of a building in Greenwich Village and tells me that the fee will be $20 for a quick engagement, $50 for all night. We settle for an afternoon rendezvous and at the proper hour I tell Virginia that I am going out to appear on a panel and leave the office. I must explain my days to Virginia as I must explain my evenings to my wife — there is no end to the little cubicles I must construct for myself, you see — but fortunately Virginia has no true conception of the internal workings of the business and will accept any explanation as plausible. Besides that, she enjoys being in the office by herself; the faggarts are usually with the attorneys or out in the field scouring up business, and with the doors closed and shades drawn, Virginia can imagine herself to be, somehow, an empire maker. She has total control anyway of the assignments made to the freelancers and over the piles of manuscripts which we receive daily on submission, but this is not enough for her. The fact is that she wants a feeling of total control over a business situation, some sense that she is connecting with and influencing a whole series of lives. This trait of hers makes me sentimental and indulgent because in my own life I have no feeling of control whatsoever and am happy to turn it over to almost anyone who thinks that he does.

The apartment turns to be a walk-up in a dismal building jammed between a psychedelic shop and an Italian restaurant, flooded with sounds and grease and small deadly implements which the tenants of the building seem to have left on the stairs. The prostitute turns out to be strikingly attractive, twenty-five or so, with breasts truly as large as she has advertised, a waist only slightly thickened through dissipation and an astonishing pair of hips which manage to be simultaneously hard and soft as they jut out of the thin pants she wears. She is also wearing a sleeveless sweater without a brassiere. Her name, she says, is Rochelle, and she is an actress who finds New York almost impossible although she will not allow the city to defeat her. She does not consider herself a prostitute but merely someone who is performing a service as legitimate as any other. “I could go to television work,” she says, removing her sweater, “commercials, you know. There’s always a call for people to do commercials, but to me that’s the worst thing. To turn your art into something to sell products that people don’t need and don’t want. It’s not honest, you know what I mean? This way at least I can do something honest which makes people happy. I’m not helping them to make further lies of their life.” Her breasts are enormous, descend only a little in movement, the nipples as large around as tea saucers, glinting at me. She is chatty, distracted, as she moves around the studio apartment, taking off the remainder of her clothes, flicking spots of dust off the wall. “I hate to ask you this but I have to, like, make you pay me first, if you know what I mean. You don’t mind, do you? It’s just better that way.”

“How much?”

“I told you over the phone. It’s twenty for a straight and fifty for an all night. That’s very reasonable. You can’t get a good-looking white head for that kind of price in New York. Even semi-pro action costs more than that to promote. Twenty and fifty, that’s it. Those are my only two prices. And none of the S-and-M bag. I don’t like dig that stuff at all. Otherwise anything goes if you make sure that you take care of me.”

“But it isn’t night yet. So how can we have an all night at three in the afternoon?”

“Well,” she says, putting the cigarette out, looking from side to side, then taking another cigarette and lighting it, “it’s like this. All night is just a euphemism, if you understand, for a longer session. Now, the way we’d do it if you wanted an all night is that you’d stay here until seven or eight in the evening. Or for an extra ten, sixty altogether, you can stay until midnight. You have to leave at midnight, though. I make it a rule that no one can really stay overnight with me; it’s just better that way. So what do you want, it’s your choice?”

“You have large nipples.”

“Yes, I do. I always did, but when I was eighteen they started to grow so fast that I thought they’d never stop growing, if you know what I mean. I thought I’d have two breasts that would just be all nipple, and I was embarrassed because I didn’t think that men liked that. Of course they stopped after a while, and I learned that lots of men do. It must have something to do with the milk supply. What’s your bag by the way?”

“Oh,” I say, “I’m a businessman, I guess.”

“I didn’t want to get personal. I mean, you don’t have to take offense. I just find that it’s a little better if you, like, get to know each other first, then it’s like you’re fucking someone instead of just doing it against the wall. That’s why I told you I’m an actress.”

“No, I really didn’t take offense,” I say. “I am a businessman of sorts, that’s the truth. I work for the government and the government is the biggest business we’ve got.”