who, upon being fired, became enraged and shouted at the chairman, “What do you want? Ten books? I’ll write ten books. Twenty books? I’ll write twenty books.” Our friends didn’t expect to survive, but didn’t stop imagining they might. None of them published anything. Eventually, one by one, they lay before their senior colleagues who, like ancient Mayan priests, cut out their hearts. To their credit, they tried to destroy themselves first with drugs.
I was afraid that marijuana would intensify Sylvia’s paranoia, and I pleaded with her not to smoke it unless I was there with her in the room. She would hide cigarettes and pills that came to her when I wasn’t around. A few times she confessed that she’d smoked while I was in New Jersey or visiting my parents. I became outraged, I made puritanical scenes, but I wasn’t consistent. If she took pills, I did, too. It was a way of being close, and as everyone knows, dope makes sex dreamy and long, when it doesn’t just kill desire. We spent a three-day weekend in the apartment, eating speed, smoking grass, and reading and rereading
The Turn of the Screw
, for the evil feeling in this gruesome masterpiece. We ate no meals, didn’t answer the phone, and we had bouts of hard, compulsive sex, after which we lay there aching for more. Toward the end of the third day, Sylvia began saying, “Open the window,” as if these three words made a marvelous little poem:
O-pen.
The win-dow.
I asked her to stop, but she repeated it about a thousand times, in singsong tones, before collapsing beside me in a stupor, and then she told me what
The Turn of the Screw
is really about. Not the excruciating pleasure, taken by Henry James, in the fairy-tale tradition of tortured children. Sylvia was going on and on, both of us overwhelmed by her luminous ravings.
“I’ll tell you what it’s really about. Oh, my god, it’s so obvious.”
“I think you’re right. That is it. That’s what it’s about.”
She was so terrifically brilliant we had to have sex immediately. Later, neither of us remembered what she had said, not one word.
Sylvia told me that Agatha thinks of herself as being emotionally mature because she suffers no guilt for sleeping with anyone, male or female, friend or stranger, or for having sex in public, as she does with her girlfriend from the madhouse. “The two of them fondle each other while getting laid by their respective partners. At the same time.”
“Emotionally mature?”
“She thinks.”
“Agatha is depraved. I think.”
Sylvia said angrily, “Agatha wouldn’t hurt a soul. Shejust can’t refuse herself anything. If she sees a pair of shoes she likes, she buys four pair. Same with sex.”
“She’s also a terrible gossip,” I said. “No more idea of privacy in her mind than between her legs.”
Afterwards, I regretted talking that way. I like Agatha. Maybe I was jealous. Sylvia and Agatha need each other. Agatha wants to talk, Sylvia wants to listen. Agatha’s confessions are probably less depraved and more pleasing to her than her life, and they have kept her close to Sylvia. They are close even in their looks—same height, same shape. I found them asleep together, on the living room couch, one black-haired girl, one blonde. The difference only showed how much they looked the same, two girls lying on the couch in late afternoon. They looked like words that rhyme.
JOURNAL, APRIL 1963
In the conversational style of the day, everything was always
about
something; or, to put it differently, everything was always
really about
something other than what it seemed to be about. A halo of implication shimmered
about
innocuous words, movies, faces, and events reported in the newspapers. The plays and sonnets of Shakespeare and the songs of Dylan were all equally
about
something. The murder of President Kennedy was, too. Nothing was fully resident in itself. Nothing was plain.
Stoned on grass or opium or bennies or downers, lying side
I was afraid that marijuana would intensify Sylvia’s paranoia, and I pleaded with her not to smoke it unless I was there with her in the room. She would hide cigarettes and pills that came to her when I wasn’t around. A few times she confessed that she’d smoked while I was in New Jersey or visiting my parents. I became outraged, I made puritanical scenes, but I wasn’t consistent. If she took pills, I did, too. It was a way of being close, and as everyone knows, dope makes sex dreamy and long, when it doesn’t just kill desire. We spent a three-day weekend in the apartment, eating speed, smoking grass, and reading and rereading
The Turn of the Screw
, for the evil feeling in this gruesome masterpiece. We ate no meals, didn’t answer the phone, and we had bouts of hard, compulsive sex, after which we lay there aching for more. Toward the end of the third day, Sylvia began saying, “Open the window,” as if these three words made a marvelous little poem:
O-pen.
The win-dow.
I asked her to stop, but she repeated it about a thousand times, in singsong tones, before collapsing beside me in a stupor, and then she told me what
The Turn of the Screw
is really about. Not the excruciating pleasure, taken by Henry James, in the fairy-tale tradition of tortured children. Sylvia was going on and on, both of us overwhelmed by her luminous ravings.
“I’ll tell you what it’s really about. Oh, my god, it’s so obvious.”
“I think you’re right. That is it. That’s what it’s about.”
She was so terrifically brilliant we had to have sex immediately. Later, neither of us remembered what she had said, not one word.
Sylvia told me that Agatha thinks of herself as being emotionally mature because she suffers no guilt for sleeping with anyone, male or female, friend or stranger, or for having sex in public, as she does with her girlfriend from the madhouse. “The two of them fondle each other while getting laid by their respective partners. At the same time.”
“Emotionally mature?”
“She thinks.”
“Agatha is depraved. I think.”
Sylvia said angrily, “Agatha wouldn’t hurt a soul. Shejust can’t refuse herself anything. If she sees a pair of shoes she likes, she buys four pair. Same with sex.”
“She’s also a terrible gossip,” I said. “No more idea of privacy in her mind than between her legs.”
Afterwards, I regretted talking that way. I like Agatha. Maybe I was jealous. Sylvia and Agatha need each other. Agatha wants to talk, Sylvia wants to listen. Agatha’s confessions are probably less depraved and more pleasing to her than her life, and they have kept her close to Sylvia. They are close even in their looks—same height, same shape. I found them asleep together, on the living room couch, one black-haired girl, one blonde. The difference only showed how much they looked the same, two girls lying on the couch in late afternoon. They looked like words that rhyme.
JOURNAL, APRIL 1963
In the conversational style of the day, everything was always
about
something; or, to put it differently, everything was always
really about
something other than what it seemed to be about. A halo of implication shimmered
about
innocuous words, movies, faces, and events reported in the newspapers. The plays and sonnets of Shakespeare and the songs of Dylan were all equally
about
something. The murder of President Kennedy was, too. Nothing was fully resident in itself. Nothing was plain.
Stoned on grass or opium or bennies or downers, lying side
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