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Gary Cooper Beau Geste on the ceiling, "you really are famous."
She didn't want to break her date that night with her roommate and another
girl friend. I took all three of them out. She mentioned she was going to look
for work as a restaurant hostess. I left her at three in the morning, went
home and masturbated till I went blind. Next morning, early, I
called her and suggested she come to work for me, as an assistant to my office
assistant. She said she didn't take charity. I said it wasn't charity, that I
needed someone, that the work load was getting too much for Lynne, what with
all the fan mail. She said she didn't believe me. I called
Lynne out in Santa Monica. A guy answered. I said, "Let me talk to Lynne."
After a second a muggy voice came on. "What time is it?" she asked. I told
her. She groaned. "Call Katie," I said, on the verge of hysteria. "Tell her we
need her." She wanted to know who Katie was. I told her the whole story. She
continued groaning. I badgered her. She held out. I gave her a six dollar a
week raise.
She called Katie.
That day Katie came to work for me. She didn't go home. That night we fucked.
I'd like to say we
"made love" or that we "slept together" but the simple, unadorned truth of the
matter is that I
was blind with Technicolor passion and I went at her the way a troop of
backpacking Boy Scouts fresh off the Gobi Desert would go at a six-pack of
Hostess Twinkies. There is no firm memory anywhere in my head of what happened
or how long it went on, though I keep getting a recurring vision of myself
hanging upside-down from the shower curtain rod. That can't possibly be an
accurate recollection.
She moved in two days later.
I ingratiated myself with her ex-roommate, her parents, her friends from
Price, her hairdresser, and the mechanic who serviced her Fiat, just to be on
the safe side.
That first month we went to Denver and Boulder on a lecture tour; I took her
to New York (it was her first time out of the state) and turned her loose with
my credit cards; and when she came back with a superb silver choker for me,
and told me she'd bought it with her own money, I was hopelessly, desperately,
irretrievably hooked through the gills. I put the ordering of Cokes with duck
l'orange out of my mind. This was no kid, this was a woman; the one I'd been
waiting for through three scungy marriages and forty-one lonely years. Thus
doth Cupid make assholes of us all.
What's that? Oh, so I finally said something nice about you. It's all nice.
Except the Coke thing, which I keep harping on because it's supposed to
portend ugliness to come. I know it's not important. Look out, you're going to
drop that ornament ... oh shit, now look at it, all over the floor, and I'm
barefoot. Merry Christmas, with me in Mt. Sinai, my foot rotting away from
gangrene. No, don't get the vacuum, it'll tear it up inside. Get the broom and
the dustpan. Nag, nag, nag: it's my gangrenous foot we're talking about here!
Okay, where the hell was I?
What do you mean, "get to when it started to go sour"? Oh. That's what you
mean.
Well, it was a dynamite three months from the starting gate. We went
everywhere, saw everything, did everything, and I started falling behind in
the writing. So I had to spend a lot of time behind this typewriter. Katie
started getting antsy. She wanted to go out and go to the beach, go water
skiing, take a drive up the Coast to San Francisco. I kept promising, but I
was 'way behind and my publisher was screaming at me long distance from New
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York every day. Right on the tick of seven A.M., ten o'clock in New York, the
phone would ring and it would be Norman, calling me a rancid pyramid of pig
shit because he was missing printing deadlines. I would tell him I was
working, which was true, but it wasn't coming fast enough.
So I was locked into the house. And Katie started hanging out at school longer
each day, started going to evening rehearsals of "A Midsummer's Night Dream,"
took a flying lesson with some guy, spent lots of time in some restaurant with
the "theatuh crowd" and I knew something was going on, though she kept
volunteering the information that everything was cool and she loved me. She
talked an awful lot of good trash at me.
Now understand something: as a card-carrying loner, I prefer, no I insist on a [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]