LOVE NOTE Chapter 6: March 4-9, 1988.


"Will you spread my legs?"

"Sure. How do you mean?"

"Farther, there, to the left. Good."

"Like that?"

"Exactly. Yes."

Faith didn't mind; she liked to help me. Alone after she left--I didn't know she was to come in again later, to ask if I needed anything--, I drafted a letter to Maria, an old friend of Marjorie's who wrote short stories and was now a procurement editor for the sex magazine Forum. Might Forum publish what I hoped I was writing? Might a letter to Maria be a segment of my novel? I'd met her only once, some years ago in Godwin (and before my miraculous disinhibition of feeling). Marjorie had put me to bed and joined me and I had suggested that Maria, who had been sgurding with us and was gathering her things to leave, remain and join us. I thought that if she would it would please Marjorie; I knew it would please me. Maria declined; later she said to Marjorie she'd thought my offer sweet. Now I was writing quickly, feelingly, and didn't pause until I finished a third and last page. (I would write Maria letters dated March 4, 11, 15, 15, and 18 but would send none. I hadn't mailed the letter I'd written Josephine either, nor would I.)

I did another line, smoked two hits, lay back and felt, then pulled myself up, rested on my elbow, and turned to a fresh page in my notebook. I was elated that Faith had helped position me and pleased with the letter to Maria, who seemed an ideal reader for what I was struggling to begin. I'd spent the day reading most of John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist, and had not expected nearly so good a night.

March 4. A depressing day. Reading On Becoming a Novelist my writing seemed utterly false. Now, as I touch myself, I again know it is not, and the knowing is a feeling!

The sensation I had felt as I began to write about my response to the Gardner was not a throbbing but a plain uncolored swelling in my penis; as I wrote “the knowing is a feeling" it grew sexual. Night after night I lie here making love and know my writing will not be forever blocked. In the daylight, worn out and probably down by the coke, I can't tell the story and am tempted to abandon it.

Pot, for me, is a love drug, but love alone doesn't let me masturbate and know. I need lust for that, and cocaine brings me lust.

Since my recent disappointing evening with Lee I had not imagined being with her. Instead, I had mostly been with Josephine and, tonight, Maria. Maria, like Josephine, barely knew me and didn't love me. She, like Lee, like anyone, might see me as deluded, but whereas my delusion would cause Lee, who loved me, pain, it would be likelier merely to offer Maria story material. Art, not personal love, would be our common ground.

It was about ten thirty and I’d finished the hashish Faith had left with me when I heard her in the living room. My already stiffened penis lifted off the bed. I thought that I had read and been told that my erections were a response to purely physical stimuli and unconnected to emotional arousal. My physical response to hearing Faith's footsteps was not the first evidence I'd noticed to the contrary. The footsteps approached my bedroom door, stopped, and she spoke.

"Do you need anything?"

I didn't need, but I wanted.

"Could you put a little more hash in the pipe?"

I looked away from the door as she came in so that, unseen, she could, if she wished, satisfy all unobserved whatever curiosity my erection might arouse.

"Oh my," she said.

She found the pipe. We smoked.

"Anything else?"

"No. Thanks."
_____

The next day, March 5, I finished On Becoming a Novelist. I felt doubly brutalized: by the after-effects of the drug and by what I felt was Gardner's passionate indictment of how I wrote, an indictment with which I agreed. I saw myself as a slug pretending that he was a caterpillar and would be a butterfly. All Gardner asked of the novelist was seriousness, and it was my judgment as I read his book that, as a writer, I lacked it and always would.
_____

March 7 Julia introduced herself to me in the McKale weight room. She was Faith's and Estelle's height, attractive, had short dark hair, and walked with a limp. I'd been lifting weights six weeks now and was eating well. Everything but my writing and my drug-dependent love life was fine. Was I available to Julia? Definitely. Without cocaine? Probably not.

"My name's Julia."

"I'm Arthur. Did you just start the weights?"

"No. I've been doing them at the other gym. It's more interesting here."

"I think so too. I work there every other week."

"Do you go to class? Teach?"

"Neither. You?"

"I'm in the Art Department. I teach drawing."

She drew, wrote poetry, did performance art, was a photographer and film-maker, and seemed smart and unattached. Could I have conjured a purer answer to my need?

"Do you want to have coffee somewhere?" I asked.

"I can't today. What about Wednesday?"

"After here?"

"Okay."

Someone who would hear me?

On Wednesday I'd almost finished my work-out when Julia arrived and told me she had an appointment and couldn't do coffee. "Too bad," I said. "But if I can pay for it, how about we go out some night to dinner?" I knew from our first meeting how little she could afford to spend on entertainment.

"Okay. Monday?"

"Good," I said.

It was spring in the desert and I'd a date for Monday night with an unknown woman to whom I was attracted. Tonight, I thought as I drove through campus on my way home, I'd sgurd.
_____

I was abed before dark and, as she had the last time and would from now on whenever she set me up with the mirror, Faith propped pillows behind my head and spread my legs. I'd known all day that I'd not write in my notebook tonight. Why bother? Finishing the Gardner had driven home to me that I'd never do anything with any of my book-of-feeling notebook work.

But what I knew by day had as little to do with what I knew my special nights as what I knew these nights had to do with what I'd do by day. I’d underestimated Julia’s (and the drugs') effect on me, and within ten minutes of being alone I was writing. I was so anxious not to let the ideas that had come to me go unwritten that, instead of taking time to find the next blank page in my notebook, I turned it upside down and wrote on the blank backs of pages. I had often failed to maintain a thought between its occurring as I lay feeling and my letting go my phallus, changing my position, and taking up my pen. I had to hurry or I forgot.

I knew if she'd film me as I knew I could be filmed, I might use the film to write my narrative. I guessed the filming would be erotic for me, and maybe for her--I imagined Julia the cameraperson--, but I knew that, undrugged, I would not want to watch it and would even be embarrassed by it; I also knew that the embarrassment was a price I was willing to pay for the joy of the live act and in service to imaginationless Writerfellow, Writerfellow long what I had called myself in my notebooks.

It is not yet six, still light outside, and I'm before the mirror. My 'usual self' knows the odds against my coke-lust manifesting joyously are astronomical--and the knowing overwhelms me. Hence my listlessness, my lack of--

I skipped a line and a half, leaving space to describe lacks I didn't enumerate because to do so would require thought and to think would reduce what I was feeling. After the space I wrote My addiction, skipped three and a half lines I imagined I could fill if I ever rewrote, and wrote And, indented. I skipped three more lines, indented almost to mid-page, wrote but, and skipped five more lines before writing Truth, the T under the A in A-n-d and, like it, capitalized.

I skipped two more lines and began a new paragraph: Odds so against. But even my straight self knows that the truth he can't remember does exist, that the drugged knowledge isn't false, just unavailable. Not unavailable now, here, with Julia, nor last week with Maria nor the week before with Josephine nor the weeks before that with Lee, Lee, and Lee, but unavailable tomorrow. As I lie before my mirror, I know what my ideas feel like. As I write, like this, I know.

If Julia will, you will, film---I broke off in wonderment. By directly addressing Julia I seemed again to be asserting that I would show what I was writing to the person to whom it was written, of which I knew there was virtually no chance. I knew it! Still, I felt I would or at least might, and I knew that, however credulously, I was also imagining Julia curious and intrigued and able to take me seriously as I, days, could not. Was there a bridge on which my daylight and night-lit selves might meet? What I am writing, evolved, will be the bridge.

I did another line and smoked another hit of pot. I felt as though I'd written words that might bring Julia to me. I knew what I'd written probably unreadable by me, let alone by this woman perfectly fitted to collaborate with me, make love with me--if not as lover as artist, if not with mutual touch, without. She'd said she was a performance artist. What was it I was imagining before the mirror but performance art?

I wrote: Julia! Julia? Julia? For Art? His addiction killed him. He never did write well. The next page was arranged something like this:

. . .And gave up his drugs

And wished,
In spite of himself, the wish
An ambush; wished

To die.

I stopped, startled. Could it be I wished to die? I did not believe I did but, just now when I had written it, I had written it because momentarily I felt it true--however vigorously I might deny it. I wondered; I pondered. I wrote: To feel oneself a gifted writer, judge oneself a competent writer but write like a sophomore again and again and again is humiliating and demoralizing. I drank some water, again did a hit of pot, and snorted two more lines. Wrote: New lines. Lie down.

I lay back to feel, one idea leading to another, that inspiring yet another, each new idea intensifying the sensation in my groin. In less than a minute, even though I knew that doing so would cost me what I'd begun to feel, end the ecstasy which would, if I lay still and felt, elaborate itself, I rose and wrote, wryly annoyed. I knew stupidness was (not, was not!) all that would remain on the page tomorrow, mute evidence my brain had been fagged, its formulations rigorously logical as an hysteric's. What I'd hoped might be a baby would prove to be a random mass of tooth-peppered fetal tissue and hair, but still I wrote. I finished, turned the page, wrote: Just coke. Stop. Stop! Stop? This writing, for the night but, please, cocaine never!

I found this sentiment as unexpected as my wish to die. I reminded myself that Marjorie had (I thought mistakenly) believed it was cocaine that gave her access to the voices that she heard, her guides, and that to lose them would reduce her. Just what was so important that I needed not to stop my coke use? I couldn't--yet?--say what it was in words which would convey, but knew I needed what I felt just as I felt I did. I suspected, though, true as it was I needed it, I couldn't have it except at a cost which, summed, even I would deem prohibitive. Was I a rat pushing the coke button till it starved? Could be, quoth I, but gee I hope not.

Is tonight's seed different? The notebook glyphs were seed? Some might be viable.

Written, the words and letters themselves were not only what they tried to say and said but themselves as well: objects; facts. Written, they could be written about. Much of tonight’s outpouring had felt perfect and might be, though I assumed it wasn't. I'd felt as I wrote the words; the pervert moralist penning his masterwork had felt. Roll irony, come thunder and lightning, snow. Tomorrow will I even read what I've written? I know I felt it truly but will it open the door to my genius? My usual self despises--and, mid-sentence, I at last was able to stop. Lay back and felt.

Then, driven, was up again and writing at the bottom of another page, so dear to me was my unwritten work. I paused. It was early, not even 8 P.M. I was calm, happy. Writing of despair, of failure, is very different from either. I'd tried to work today at the typewriter but failed, now wrote of my recent efforts there.

This afternoon I couldn't read my March 4 letter to Maria or my latest start--already more than fifty pages--on writing about my feeling. I wrote Dane and Mickey. (Dane and Mickey were my nephews, my brother-in-law Jake's and my sister Ruth's boys.) I was sure I wouldn't write my book of feeling. I'd given up.

Wonderful as tonight has already been--it has!--, I suspect doing coke today was a mistake. I've need of rallying, of choosing very sensibly, of taking care of myself, of seeing where I am and seeing that to forget it, ignore it, not notice it, is--against my will!--to wish to die. My will would have me live and love. Damn the coke, that it makes me so greedy, is so unnatural to do in moderation.

I turned the page and wrote I must stop writing now. Sh Sh. Sh Sh Sh. Sh. Turned the page, addressed myself: Lie back. Sh. Instead, I scribble-scrabbled, ran on as I wished not to--and then wrote about it! I was leaning on my right elbow and my shoulder and shoulder blade hurt--a lot. I'd willingly sacrifice my body to my duty, which was to write--if I could, beautifully. My shoulder pain intense. Must get off arm. Must not write. Stop. Please stop!

I'd been in bed three hours. I did two more lines, smoked, and noted the time on a new page: 8:24 P. M. The house thermostat was in the living room and I was chilly. Was my chilliness a valid reason to call Faith on the phone and ask her to come in? I didn't want to ask her to join me for no reason apart from the pleasure it would give me, as I had or very nearly had March 4. So far, my inhibitions usually prevailed. I decided to call her and if, after turning up the heat, she asked me through the door whether I required further help, I'd tell her yes--but only if she asked. I lay back. I knew now—feeling--exactly the words that I would say should she come in, and this knowing was what, this time, forced me to unhand my penis and pick up my pen--but the transition took too long and I forgot the magically perfect words.

I wrote anyway but soon broke off and turned the page, began anew: Julia Monday. Her part? Wasn't it an omen of beginning that I'd met her? And what of Faith, whose role grew weekly? Again I'd the words to say to her were she to come to the bedroom door and into my room where I lay hard and spread. Again, I lost them. Then had them a third time, or were these new words? Yes, they were. I could think of two things I might say now, thought, "I could use either," and my hard-on jumped, but yet again I lost the perfect words. Thrice I've had words, though I know it madness to think--however I feel--that the words I say as Faith enters my room will magically make her feel the simple love I feel. She is not me. I have to let her know I know she is herself, not me.

I never did call her that night; she didn't find me as I wished she would nor did I speak to her in perfect words. I did a last line, smoked, and felt, rejoicing, Joyce or not; not Joyce, yet feeling, lay, rejoicing.
_____

For the next part of LOVE NOTE click here.
To go to the THE HEALING & LOVE NOTE DISCUSSION FORUM click here. I want to hear almost anything you are willing to say, including whether you have had similar or contradictory experiences. Criticism of my behavior and beliefs is also solicited and will be (more or less!) welcome.