The Cambridge Chronicles

Simone has gone down the street to meet with a new friend. She met him last week while waiting to see if she would be on jury duty. He was there for the third time and hoping to get out of it. They went to lunch. He is very romantic. Bought her flowers, sang songs to her while they had lunch. He is an actor, plays the saxophone, and is a condominium developer. A nice Jewish man. The sort her mother would be proud of. She met another man at the court. He was an assistant district attorney. He's going to be in Washington for two weeks. A postcard from him says he thinks of her and can't concentrate on his work. And what does this do to me? Sometimes it makes me feel a little bit jealous. Mostly I try to make fun of the whole thing. It does not seem to be working. It becomes very serious. She says something sharp back to me and I get overwhelmed with rage. Not often. But enough to make my treatment of these situations suspect. For me it is possible to see how these things might come out and make things bad for her as she tries to develop other relationships. I notice that its not always a tight ship for me. It leaks a bit. Some little things get through. How to catch myself doing these convoluted things. They are backwards from what is best. I need to work more to put her at ease, and to make the situation better for the other person. Its getting a bit abstract. Shit. I don't want this tension from other relationships. How do I want it to go? I don't want to feel trapped or panicked when another chance comes along. I want to be free to change things to fit circumstances. Somehow it is still trapped inside me. I can't get it out. I don't really see it. More of this bullshit.

It is getting more and more difficult to write. On the one hand the pace of things here is moving a little faster. We are at least chaotically confronted with more of our inability to live together in peace. The war in us is coming out. The desire to dominate and win is becoming more obvious. We both try to control the social flow of things. She is more skilled. But it is like guiding by the numbers. I am more crude and threatening to people. I always blunder into and introduce forbidden things. Like to night with the joke about Lotti possibly being pregnant. It is obvious that most people got it. They pretended to ignore it. It's the same with most charged items that come up. But I don't really see how to guide these things. Sometimes I ask myself, what would Otto do? I can sometimes mimic what he seems to be doing but it doesn't ever lead, only rarely, to the sort of resolution he achieves with people. But I feel the need to continue to try. It is almost so hard sometimes that I wish myself back at FH so I can fall down. It is not something I can do here.

She comes back to tell me about how he has asked her to sleep with him tonight. What are you thinking, he says. About how you would look, all wet, in the shower, she answers. Fucking is the most beautiful thing people can do together, he says. He's a smoker. The first crack in his seemingly impenatrable armor. He won't give it up for her. It is all downhill from here! Its no contest. Unless, of course, he is only playing a Richard Gardner trick on her. He drinks coffee with two sugars, eats meat, and drinks a case of coke every week. He is sure of his relationship with her and knows they will sleep together within the week. Hm, what to make of this, and her playing hard-to-get. He likes this even more, and gets an erection at just the thought of it. He has started out on a good note. Saying how she is going to know she's in a relationship with him. Exactly my line. Not bad. This is a man who shows real promise. Character, fortitude, integrity, straightforward, and a bit aggressive. So she thinks. Still not able to recognize it. What will become of the new three mousketeers? Stay tuned! She stands behind me reading this and rubbing my tummy. Kissing my neck. Every now and then stopping to read what I've just written. Putting the tongue in my ear. Rubbing my crotch. Well, this has lightened up considerably from the academia of the last page. She has booze on her breath. Snookie, Richie, she whispers, in that soft way of hers, Tell me a story, she implores, as the little girl in her starts to come out.

Now a new subject. Bonnie, her therapist, thinks we play sadistic games. What they are who knows. Now she slowly gives me some old news. Bonnie wants me to separate from her. And why? Who knows. She has very little to go on. Her own failed relationships? What has she seen in other failed relationships? How can she really know about successful relationships when there are so few available. What we know about them is usually hidden. The best thing about our own is how so many things come out of it. Every day has some new volcanic eruption of long hidden tensions, repressed desires, hidden and self-thwarted longings. From this we can learn more than what we see from others. And always the crank and crackpot analysis, so little basis in reality. The things that get talked about being only the scum on the surface of a large swamp. The iceberg is no good. Its more a swamp. Teeming with life and fantastic things that everyone is capable of, but held down by this thin layer of scum. Even for me, there is an entire world of things that never see the light of day, except maybe in my writing or ideas. And the ideas don't get such a good treatment in real life. The art show being one of them. It seems to be staggering along. Last week we were going to do some art on Thursday night. Just now another chink in the singer's armor. She has told him about meeting the ADA. Are you going to date him, he asks, in a slightly defeated, deflated tone of voice. Or at least that's how I imagine he is going to sound. The ADA is more of a threat to him than me. He might be thinking something along these lines: well, if she has gotten interested in me so quickly, then maybe it is a sign that they are on the way downhill in their relationship, and I only have to wait here at the bottom of the playground slide. Into my arms she will slide. But the ADA, on the other hand, is also at the starting gate, just like me. So he's the one to watch. She wouldn't really be going out to see me this evening if things were going so well between them. This open relationship nonsense never works anyway. Its going to be one of the other of us in the end. And I think my chances are better than the ADA's. He's only got his career. I've got my boyish good looks, I'm Jewish, a very good amateur actor, a saxophone player, a darn good singer, romantic, and many other things that women go crazy over. This one's a little bold and outspoken, a little bit too upfront about sexuality, but that probably means she really likes it and wants to fuck all the time. But I can handle this. If only there was something I could do about that fucking ADA. At least he's going to be out of town for two weeks. That gives me somewhat of a head start. He will never be able to make up the difference. That turkey she's with has still got her tied down. I've got plenty of time to work on things. No lawyer type for the state can take off all the time I can to do things with her. This guy she's with is a total nothing turd. He's not romantic. He's sexually boring. He doesn't do as many interesting things as I do. He won't even take her out to a nightclub like I do. This guy is definitely on the way out. Any woman with gumption and a half-decent man would not be out carousing this time of night, just down the street from where she lives, and the man knows about it. Nah! It doesn't add up. She's going to leave him. I know it. And I'm just the one for her after its over.

I notice that a lot of the tension has left my body. My face no longer has the feeling of a sunburn. The warm feeling is going away. How does this work so often for me? I only have to write what comes out even and smooth. The part in me that fits it goes away. At the beginning of these pages I wrote in stops and starts. It was difficult to go more than one sentence without stopping to think of what's next. At the moment everything is coming out just fine. At the beginning of each sentence I have the feeling of falling. But halfway through the next sentence begins to come into my head. For a moment I thought this would be the last. But I can amble on for some time like this. It doesn't matter what I say. The feeling of falling continues. What will come out next I don't know. But on the other hand its beginning to get a little silly. Time to go on to something else.

Back to the situation with me, Simone, and Linda. She came a day early last week. It was very hard for her in NYC. She is not enjoying the apprenticeship with the guy who does restorations. She wanted to come a day early and spend some time with me and have us sleep together Thursday night. Simone was bullshit about this. An endless stream of criticisms of Linda. Everything that anyone, including Linda, ever did wrong, gets dumped on Linda. She does not like it. Everybody gets called about it. Everybody gets to hear what's wrong with me and Linda. Everybody tells her to leave me. They don't understand why she won't do it. She keeps coming into my room and trying to read this. I don't let her. Go back to work, I say. When they won't let you see it, they really want you to, she replies. The mood here has been like an earthquake, tornado, and hurricane, all at once. There is rage and counter-rage. Fight and counter-fight. We tear at each other. Tomorrow we will go to see this therapist we saw last week. It was my idea. It seems that some sort of neutral third party needs to hear what's going on. More about all this tomorrow.