RENUNCIATION

There was a stranger in my bed

NEW YORK, JANUARY 1947

Shock—

Gore had told me that he made a wonderful portrait of me in his third novel, The City and the Pillar, the ideal woman, and I discovered instead a caricature, a cheapened, superficial, distorted image, in his own terms.

I am being forced to face the mediocrity of his writing—he is almost a pulp writer. This is the reality of Gore and the loss of my dream. The other Gore is ruthless and cheap. This is the first inkling that I was mad, that I was inventing people! Such pain at the betrayal and, worse, his unawareness. He does not know what he killed. Why do I pity him?

Staff agrees it would not have been right to strike Gore down with the full strength of my anger:

1. He is only twenty years old

2. He has lived in the cheapest worlds: society, Hollywood

3. He is not conscious

4. He has been crippled by his mother

So I forgave him. He is a lost soul. Why does he cling to me or love me? Why doesn’t he have a Hazel McKinley? He cannot distinguish between this sort of vulgarity and me, and yet he makes me his ideal. But I am the one who can destroy him.

The relationship is now a lie. I have to conceal my real opinion of his writing (I had hoped for a change). Nicholas Wredon, my editor at Dutton said, “It is a book on one-dimensional love, sex in a void,” and he hated it. Gore is overwhelmed by the reactions. He calls on me for help, “Please tell me it is my greatest book, my biggest book.” So I have to defend the motherless boy while hating the vulgarity of his work.

At the Gotham, he crystallizes his personae for the world: arrogance and egotism. A nice little monster I have taken to my breast, whose only human feelings are for me, but who is still capable of harming me in his writing. His mother said: “You are full of venom. You love no one. You are grey and cold.” And this is what I take into my warm breast and love, reflecting on him my own glow.

Anaïs, tu es folle. Bon. That is finished. His telephone call every day has lost its magic. I see him as he is, a very sick boy. Staff saved me. I realized the incredible extent of my romanticism, my sentimentalism.

I write every day, all day. Something is seeking to break through, to flood me, to destroy my art form: my humanity. Something is seeking to live richly after being denied: my sensuality.

I try again to make a larger, more inclusive relationship with Hugo, whom I trust.

In the eyes of the world I am happy.

When there is a party going on, someone is sure to name me, discuss me. There is always someone who knows me, whom the others envy and ask to be introduced to me. There is always “someone who wants to know you.” They come, they are grateful, they are worshipful. It is a stream. I enjoy the friendships, but it is not enough.

Terrible depression. I lie like a dying animal, but then I flow. Staff helps. I write, I write, I hope, I revive, I try again.

This evening Bill Howell was going to come. We were going to make love. He called me up in the afternoon, elated, to make sure all was well. Then at seven, when I expected him here, he, upset and unhappy, called to tell me that his old girlfriend is back, pregnant. This has happened before—he married the first time in such an emergency and then divorced, never loving the woman. Now he once again feels trapped and miserable, and instead of a lover, I have an unhappy young man taking refuge in my understanding.

Hugo is my jailer and my lifesaver. My need of him is my own weakness. The child in me in need of kindness is more important than the woman in need of passion—la fatalité intérieur…

JANUARY 1947

Something marvelous has come of analysis, of the bitter struggle against neurosis: the loss of tension and a state of flower-like ease which I have only known intermittently. After we searched the bottom, Staff and I, raking all the murky walls of masochism, I reached relaxation. This melting which I only felt at moments—usually erotic moments in the presence of the relaxed men I did not fear, or the gentle ones, the feminine ones—I reached naturally.

I was relaxed about lecturing and reading, absolutely calm. I was relaxed when Carlton came for a visit and we went to the Vanguard to watch Josephine while Albert and his wife were there. Carlton brought me home, and at the door he had a coup de passion. After I answered him physically, we went to his hotel where I enjoyed his violent thrusts, his lack of caressing, his male sexual act. At one moment (as with Wilson) I felt that it was too rough, that it would bruise me. But I took my pleasure and he his, and I felt like a man, as I was a little irritated that he kept saying, “Oh, my darling,” when I did not feel any tenderness. I want my older men hard, and I want to be hard with them (Carlton is only thirty-one, but behaves like a man of fifty).

Next day a party. Pablo questioned me about the bruises on my shoulder, and then all of them sought to surpass Carlton’s bites, so they bit me hard. It was like an orgy without final climax. I danced deliriously with everyone, feeling a true gayety, wildness. I looked very beautiful that night, my hair with bangs, great animation, my violet Hindu sari, shoulders bare, waist very slender.

It was Hugo who spoke like a voice from the past, echoing my romantic dissatisfaction: “I watched you, and you did not belong there. You are so much more. You must find your level…”

No. I must first find ease and pleasure—anywhere—by surrendering my fantasies, exigencies, sorrows…

I expect nothing.

But this is the miracle: the loss of tension affects the others—they feel more at ease, they come nearer. A few weeks ago I felt no one desiring me. Suddenly, because of the ease, Carlton became passionate. And then today Bill Howell (whom I had given up on) was so simple, so warm, so direct, that he began to talk of why we couldn’t have a relationship. He sat near. I lay back quietly, and when his hand touched my breast I experienced this rare moment, one so valued, so marvelous, of sudden blind impulse and passion—joy. So lovely. He is like a woman—he is tender afterwards, does not retract or feel anxiety.

“I am very happy,” said Howell, and he talked about himself, his dancing and acting careers, his relationships.

Such mysteries! Mysteries, endless mysteries of the life of desire!

This act remained in me, penetrated me.

I went to dinner with Gore. Same place, same dinner as Gore likes it, but I am free of him. I feel compassion, but I am free.

Letter to Bill Burford:

My feelings became so strong and clear this time through a dream I had: I feel such a deep, devoted, total love of your writing (which is the essence of you), but more than that I feel a kind of communion or marriage between our writing, and the only incertitude which clouds my elation at this is one created by your silence or perhaps something like a non-participation in you in this elation, so I do not feel a confirmation of my feelings. Bill, this is a rare form of love, and if (because of my own incertitudes) you could only help me to believe in this magic unity.

I feel that it would give you and me all of love’s power, for there are times when I want to cry out in desperation: if no one hears me, if no one answers this, I cannot go on. Oh Bill, this, if you would know it (and it is why I must say it to you!), would establish your faith forever. In this communion of the writing (because that is all we are permitted to have due to the obstacles) there is such richness. If you only knew that every word, every thought is echoed, echoed, echoed. If you could know this as I do, you could write against time, against circumstances, against every obstacle.

FEBRUARY 1, 1947

Bill Howell: an afternoon of passion and sweetness.

Dinner with Gore: compassion, but awareness of a difference of levels when he said, “Someone said you and I should write a book together, for you overwrite and I underwrite; you are too warm and I am too cold. I have all you lack…”

My first true unfaithfulness to Gore: I postponed the evening with him to be with Burford the day before Gore leaves for Guatemala for six weeks.

Last night a party.

I met Nancy Harman first at one of my book parties, took an interest in her writing, and promised to invite her over. Finally, they came one day, and I was struck by her husband Carter, who is a composer. He has an open, quiet friendliness, intelligence, a contagious simplicity. He is about twenty-six or twenty-seven, slender, blue-eyed, natural. Carter, through the experience of war, is without neurosis and is composing music for the Ballet Society. He is immensely likable because he so open, so unretracted. He was moved by my writing, which he understands and wants to set to music.

My immediate feeling for him was total. He is a person I could give everything to, but this is suspended by his marriage and its unity. They are close and so right together in their youth and physical appearance—it is a marriage of children. So I lay aside the curious feeling that I could live for him. But why would I die for him? It is because he is so complete, not inhumane and incomplete as Bill Burford and his homosexuality, or Bill Pinckard and his hollow shells.

Last night we danced together for the first time, and it gave me joy. Not the joy of eroticism, but the joy of a balanced completion in which fire, feeling and intelligence are in accord.

The rigidity and tension in Burford would make love so difficult and painful even if it were not impossible because of his homosexuality. His tension constricts me. I can no longer love constricted beings with the hope of melting them. They harm me and I cannot change this constriction into flow. That was the harm Hugo did me, why the elation in me died in the marriage.

I understand better now my need of expansiveness, dilation, my pleasure with Pablo, my feeling for Carter, who is not exuberant but flows easily, naturally.

How one’s taste changes, and with it one’s fatalities.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 1947

At ten o’clock last night I was reading at the Poetry Center from the House of Incest, with a power and dramatic intensity I have never reached before, a real actress’s performance, where face and body and voice fused into a new art, reading with passion, fervor, and yet restraint.

At ten o’clock Pablo was listening to a concert of French Renaissance music with Nouche, a French-Spanish girl of his age who attracts him.

At ten o’clock Hugo sat listening to me and wept.

At ten o’clock Bill Howell sat waiting for us to pick him up after the lecture to go to the Haitian party together.

At eleven o’clock I touched Bill Howell’s sensitive hand, looked at the modulations of his face and desired him as I desire the remote, the elusive, the adolescent, the unformed, the gentle, the passive, the beautiful woman with a phallus.

At eleven o’clock we came to the Haitian party and waved at Albert in a red shirt, and when he and I danced together, the current of desire welded us together. He has a purity and childlike passivity in him too. He sings and plays the drum, but he is married and rarely sees me, so I continue my relationship with Howell, courting him as he demands to be courted, yielding and faithless, easily won and easily lost, tender, beautiful, and not deep.

I will no longer seek a whole love, for I know now my match in creation and imagination is among the sick ones, such as Burford, and my body, unlike theirs, is not sick and can only find a match in Albert, the sensual ones. This is my renunciation of the immense dream of a match on earth. I accept everything new, but let me at least have the sensual life, pure and free, and then I can create.

How clear it was last night: Burford is homosexual, guilty, frustrated, and frustrating; Albert is a beautiful, virile plant; Howell is a pretty woman.

Carter, Nancy, Hugo and I tried to create a new opera. As we listened to Carter’s records of songs written to e. e. cummings’ words, which are very beautiful, poetic, lyrical and remote, I read from House of Incest and Hugo cast shadows on the walls.

Carter is intuitive. I could love him deeply. He moves me. He completes me in music, and he feels the same about my writing. There are those one feels close to without effort…naturally.

Hugo is leaving Friday for three weeks.

What I feel now is the loss of interest in the difficult, the courting of mollusks, chestnuts, snails. Courting Burford mystically and rejoicing over abstract victories, seeking the most remote ones and finding joy in winning them obliquely no longer lures me.

Oh, to be cured of the impossible, the unattainable, the myth. Staff says these pursuits are an evasion of big fulfillments, the fear of being swallowed, swamped, overwhelmed.

Unable to find in Burford a passionate friendship, I turn away. Unable to obtain from Albert a passionate continuity, I turn away. Or else I measure exactly what I can find, as in Howell, a small sweetness, narcissism. At thirty, he is like a boy of seventeen, with a frustrated violence, drinking, yielding, postponing. But I just like to caress him, to see his body like Pinckard’s, his face like Paanacker’s.

As Gonzalo is living out the consequences of his laziness, self-indulgence and lies (oh, the lies he has told me, his constant lying which I would not see, so many that Staff and Bogner have diagnosed him as “pathological”), at first I had guilt. If I ate in a good restaurant with Gore, I had difficulty in enjoying the dinner while thinking of Gonzalo sinking, his shoes torn, his suit worn out, etc.

Tonight for the first time, as I prepared the candles for Saturday’s party, I felt free of guilt because now it is clear Gonzalo created his own destiny as I created mine. Even today he lies. His reactions are utterly selfish. But Staff says he would ruthlessly cling to me and suckle my breast until I died if I permitted it, that he does not care, that he idealizes what he calls his “bad luck.”

But what a painful irony: Hugo will no longer give me $5 for Gonzalo’s food every day, so somehow I must find it, by seeking orders to print writing paper, or by selling books, magazines, etc. So when Gonzalo went to the bookshop where I sent him to sell some books, the bookseller gave him a printing job to reprint my preface to Tropic of Cancer! That was a Dantesque punishment for his attempt at destroying my writing (he accused me of being a decadent reactionary writer, but his life is so decadent that his criticism cannot affect me).

Now, with all illusions lost, I see his selfishness starkly, the terrible weakness of his mouth, his sloth all revealed in the limp lines of his body, a body that has not held its firmness at fifty years old. His attempt at pride now seems infantile.

Hugo left Friday morning, and by sheer coincidence Chinchilito telephoned in the afternoon, “May I come?” So my holiday began with fireworks—violent lovemaking, the opening of a symphony of sensuality and frenzy.

A curious incident while Chinchilito (earthy, vulgar, violent, animal) was making love, came the hour for Carter’s children’s songs to be heard over the radio, and as I had mentioned this to Chinchilito, during a pause in the lovemaking he said (so sure his eroticism would continue), “Go and turn on your young friend’s composition.”

I leaped up, naked, and turned on the Carter songs, and to this delicate, innocent, playful music, we made love.

Strange, because in this new life of pleasure, this shallow life, I have moments when I wonder whether my capacity for feeling has been killed by too much suffering. But when I heard Carter’s songs, lying beside Siegfried, the Tarzan who would give me the violent climax, my feelings were all in Carter’s music, which has the same acute, nostalgic sadness, the same soulfulness that touches me when I listen to Debussy’s Sonata. So my feelings are not dead.

Now I want to write about the party, not to achieve enjoyment or reality by way of the writing as I did before, but to enjoy it twice.

A group of thirty-five came, and many were vulgar, ugly, and uninteresting. But among them were three striking and unusual figures in contrast to this frustrating homosexual world, three Don Juans: Arthur, Anatole and Vincent. Arthur has negro or Jewish blood and is tall, handsome, dashing. Anatole is New Orleans French, handsome, sensual, ironic. And Vincent is tall and dark, like a Spaniard (he is of Italian origin). Three woman hungers.

Vincent, captivated by my writing and legend, had first met me at my book party. He told Anatole, “She has a beautiful body.” Anatole asked permission to bring him to the party.

Being, as usual, dressed too early (I wore a clinging white dress without any underclothes, my heavy gold Arabian necklace, bangs and hair up—I was en beauté, soft, relaxed, luminous—I looked, as everybody said, like Cleopatra) and impatient, I decided to telephone Anatole, who has a book shop, to tell him to come before the crowd so I could speak to Vincent. Anatole was not there, and it was Vincent who answered, “But I am coming!”

Up the stairs came Vincent with his curly, jet black hair, dark eyes, slim body. We did not talk. He put on African-Cuban records, and we danced. He is a professional dancer, lascivious, smooth, undulatory. And instantaneously there was a strong sensual current established. Each dance exhausted us. He drummed on my back, he dug his nails into me, he lowered his hands over my hips, and we pressed against each other until it was unbearable.

The mood was set. All evening we either fled from the violence of the welding between us, or we yielded and made a striking couple, dancing deliriously, fused together. A delirious party, all in candlelight, sensual, full of incidents. Dick, who was rejected by Pablo in favor of Nouche, became utterly drunk and nearly fell off the terrace to his death, but Vincent, at the risk of his own life, held him back. Others were drunk, bestial and vulgar, demanding to be taken right then and there.

Fortunately Carter and Nancy did not stay late enough for the dregs to appear. I danced with Carter with such a piercing sweetness, gentle warmth, yearning to possess him rather than Vincent, but I was relieved when he left because then I could allow my body to hold sway.

Everyone stopped me to say I have never looked more beautiful! Two of the women said, “You make me wish I were a lesbian.”

Candlelight, alcohol, violent music, dancing.

Vincent stayed until the end, but the lovemaking was not as violent or as good as the eroticism of the dancing. He was nervous. He kept saying: “I’m not used to your delicacy, your expertise, your style. I’m used to…roughness.” Every word he said was foreign to me, and with the violent magnetism gone, there was a stranger in my bed. When I awakened at dawn, I had a moment of repulsion, of shame. When my feelings aren’t touched, I feel shame, as man does with the whore.

We had breakfast. He dressed, stylishly, smoothly, and we parted. No echo left in the being.

I cannot have Pinckard, or Burford, or Carter—and here I am lost among strangers.

FEBRUARY 1947

The morning after the party, so different from the one described in Ladders to Fire, which was suspended in unfulfillment and romanticism. This one left stains of wine, candle wax on the floor, cigarette stubs, broken glasses, crumbs from sandwiches, empty bottles, ashes, dregs, devastation. The record of Debussy’s Sonata for violin and piano, which I call the saddest piece of music ever written, was broken… I had to clean the apartment, take a bath, find my purity again before I could sleep. Yet, I found sensual fulfillment in this debauchery. This same taste, the bitter taste of desecration, must have struck Rimbaud, Beaudelaire.

When the dream dies…the romantic becomes unattainable… I thought I would die, too, die with it, be buried with it like the Inca aristocrats with their jewels. But I am alive. I am in reality. This was what I sought to attain? Reality.

Alone in my rarified house. Everything is in order. Cities of the Interior lies on my table. I have to write the end.

Vincent telephones, “Think of me a little!”

Bill Howell runs away from the conflict between his girlfriend and me, his unattainable job, home, broken relationships. “I have to make a decision. It can’t be you and Patsy. I feel torn apart.”

Bill Burford, who takes up the theme of my diary at twelve years old, “Mon journal, un jour je pourrais dire: je suis arrivée au fond,” writes me desperate letters from au fond of the abyss.

Aging is not a physical phenomenon. It comes when one wearies of repetitious motifs. I am beginning to know the next move, the next word, too well—to know the gesture that is coming, the themes, the motifs. Yet I find myself responding to Burford’s despair with a deep letter. So I am not aging, but perhaps ready for a new experience, a new world, a new lover, a new passion…perhaps for the biggest one of all!

FEBRUARY 19, 1947

I rushed to borrow a Spanish dress from Tana, whom I recently met, for the Haitian carnival. We went to the cellar together. I kissed her childishly with delight at the beauty of the dress, and she responded with passion. As I walked in front of her she came up behind me and encircled me. I turned my head to face her and we then kissed as lovers, violently and wildly.

Up in her apartment we went to her bathroom to try on the dress. After I undressed, she dressed me herself in the Spanish costume and again we embraced wildly, mouth to mouth, body against body. She pulled my skirt away. She said, “Eres una niña, como una niña, like a child,” and fell with frenzy upon me. Her husband was playing a record loudly in the next room…the music, loud, strong, and these kisses! Tana is beautiful, and like June—the same sun coloring her red-gold hair, tawny, burning eyes, softly curved, but so active, holding my body as a man would. Drunk on desire.

“I’m afraid,” she said.

And I came away feeling I want to live like this. This is the way I am! Even if it means death and destruction.

So many desecrations.

Burford’s answer to my letter is filled with devotional, fervent friendship, and a wonderful poem he wrote for me. I am happy as if he had made love to me. He has said I am a wonderful woman. To extract this acknowledgment from him I used most intricate, subtle, mystical courtship. I courted him with all the splendors of my brocaded words, of my true compassion for his suffering, with my clairvoyance and my eyes. I courted him and won him, spiritually.

So today I awakened feeling like a flower, suave, smooth and gentle, with the innocence, the confidence, the pure aloneness that is not loneliness. I looked at the clock. Nine. There is a page in the typewriter—page 45 of the polished version of Cities—work awaiting me. The party stirs up comparisons in my head.

Burford’s poem on my lap, the day is opening, there are pages to write, coffee to make, and then the telephone:

“Bonjour, Anaïs. C’est Albert. Are you free today?”

“Oui, Albert…”

At six o’clock he arrives. We try to talk, but the nearness of his firm, rounded, full, compact, sun-browned body, his full, firm mouth, his face…and my nearness. When reaches for me, the blood rises instantly. Kneeling over me, he cries, “You have awakened in me a terrible sensuality!”

With Albert possession is all enroulement, undulation, rhythmic smoothness. It’s the seeking of curve to curve, like snakes, a possession without air in between, without empty places, a welding of sinuosities, a tropical, voluptuous fusion. It is in the evenness of the rhythms, in their completeness, like two perfect negro dancers making one body. No need of violence.

It is as if we did not have enough ways of touching and taking each other, as if we wanted a thousand openings, a thousand thrusts. The tip of his penis around the tip of my breasts. His hands everywhere. My mouth everywhere. His flesh is so soft and firm, rich, dense. He is virile and voluptuous. He arouses me frenziedly. He arouses something close to love, a passionate feminine submission, a desire that he should take me and no one else, that he should keep me.

I lie here alone

content

Plant, flowers, mystic, creation, woman

all blooming

I want to live alone!

alone!

And not lonely!

FEBRUARY 20, 1947

I had lunch with Caresse, who confesses how, before his marriage, her son Bill acknowledged his love and possessed her physically twice, with happiness. Caresse said, “Now I have had everything!” I was moved and felt that this was so utterly right, so primitive, to return as a man to the womb from where he was born. How complete and human, how tremendous the feeling, as when Pinckard took me. Caresse is the mother of my erotic self, the one woman who truly made one impulse of the heart and womb and opened them simultaneously.

I hate to witness the death of my great passion for Gonzalo. I cannot be tender with him, because I feel he destroyed it. He wore out my courage, my faith, my love. I feel that if I soften he will crawl back to me. His clothes are wearing out. He looks old now, worn, sad and bitter.

Since Gonzalo savagely attacked my books, I have refrained from discussing them with him. One day I forgot myself and, bathed in the warmth of my work, began to talk about an idea I had. Suddenly, realizing the hopelessness of it, the wreckage caused by his violence, the blindness of my faith, the death of my faith and trust, I broke into a violent, agonizing sob, which Gonzalo did not understand.

FEBRUARY 22, 1947

Yesterday my birthday.

A snowstorm.

I went out at ten o’clock with my typewriter, which had started to skip frenziedly (the right metaphor for my typewriter) to get it repaired.

I went to Gonzalo’s house to take him $5 to keep him from starving. His kiss on my cheek is a child’s kiss. I cannot bear his expression of innocence, his expression that “It is not my fault. I do not understand the cruelty of the world.” It is because I still believe he is blind and cannot see his own demon that makes me want to help him.

Came home to iron my Spanish dress, to read a cable from Hugo.

I had forgotten bobby pins for my flowers. Millicent was going home, but climbed five flights of stairs without my asking her, to bring me some. This pleased me more than any present, that after six years of serving me, Millicent, tired and not well, should want to do this for me, that she does not want to stop working even through her children are grown, that it is out of faithfulness to me that she keeps coming. The children say to her, “Not until Mrs. Hugo goes to Europe will you give her up.”

Then I work on Cities of the Interior, now named Children of the Albatross. At eight-thirty Pablo came over in his Panama shirt and said, “You look ravishing, Anaïs! Oh, you look so utterly feminine!” And, “In your book you showed a startling insight into homosexuality.” And: “Oh Anaïs, what you become when Hugo is not here. You are like an open flower! You are so free and relaxed.”

Oh, my diary, may I be granted the wish to live alone like this. May it happen that Hugo may feel free without me, for I would not have the courage to desert him. May it happen simultaneously and painlessly, for then my life would match my writing and my writing my life, and it would all be integrated.

At the Haitian carnival, I danced deliriously with Pablo and once with Albert. A Haitian invited me to dance, and then a group of other young Haitians began to cut in, ravenously, one after the other, and each one immediately began a sexual dance, rubbing their hard sex against me. I could not completely submit for fear of losing Albert. At this moment I realized that what had blocked, harmed, enslaved, and tormented me in the past was not Hugo, or Henry, or Gonzalo, or my homosexual loves, but the fear of my own sensual nature. But I am no longer afraid. I have used even my dreams against this, and last night I used Albert as a defense against the others…

I came home at four o’clock in the morning and had this dream:

Bill Burford and I were talking on a divan. He had said something, and as so often happens in reality, I had already written his exact words. Such a twinship of thought, which I acknowledged. I lay back utterly passive, and suddenly he kissed me passionately. I was exultant, surprised, in ecstasy. We kissed, and he wanted to take me. I said, “Not here, we must find a room of our own.” The apartment we were in had an empty wing. I said: “Come here, away from Hugo. We’ll move in a bed and close the door.”

Each time I brought something for our room—a bed, a curtain—I was met with an obstacle. People came in. I sent them away. I tried to lock the doors, but there were too many of them. Someone was cooking. I sent him away. I was angry at the invasion, the lack of privacy. I fought against it. Then I went into a bathroom and looked in the mirror. A dreadful growth had appeared on my chest almost between the breasts, a pale pink protuberance. I realize now it was like a rubber penis, growing right out of my chest. I pulled at it. I wanted to yank it off. I couldn’t go to Bill this way. I had to tear it off. Then I saw a man was in the bathroom with me.

He said, “I am a doctor.”

“Then take this off,” I said.

He clipped it off but left a stub with roots. Then he said, “You must come with me.”

I followed him out. “But where are we going?”

“To get an examination. A special test. Something you need badly.”

“But what, what? I can’t do it now anyway. Someone is waiting for me. He will leave. I’ll come tomorrow. Any other time, but not now.”

He agreed, but then he said: “I’m afraid I can’t do anything for you for three weeks. I’m too busy.”

So I left and returned to the apartment. From the view out the window, this wing seemed terrifically high up, too high, precarious. It made me uneasy, dizzy. I said, “I must get used to it.” But it was like the top of the Empire State Building.

I awakened horrified by the realism of the penis on my chest.