ten to twenty years, and then it can cause insanity, it can cause paralysis, make you a paralytic. It can also affect your eyes, lungs and liver. So you see, my dear, you’re shit out of luck.”
Janelle said, “You’re just telling me this to keep me from going out with other men. You’re just trying to scare me just like my mother did when I was fifteen by telling me I’d be pregnant.”
“Sure,” I said. “But I’m backing it up with science. I have no moral objection. You can fuck whoever you want. You don’t belong to me.”
“You’re such a smart-ass,” Janelle said. “Maybe they’ll come up with a pill just like the birth control pill.”
I made my voice sound very sincere. “Sure,” I said. “They have that already. If you take a tablet of five hundred milligrams of penicillin one hour before you have contact, it knocks out the syphilis completely. But sometimes it doesn’t work and it just reaches the symptoms and then ten or twenty years later you can be really screwed. If you take it too early or too late, these spirochetes multiply. Do you know what spirochetes are? They’re like corkscrews and they fill up your blood and get into the tissues and there’s not enough blood in your tissues to fight it off. There is something about the drug that keeps the cell from increasing and blocking off the infection, and then the disease becomes resistant to penicillin in your body. In fact, the penicillin helps them grow. But there is another thing you can use. There is a female gel, Proganasy, that’s used as a contraceptive and they found that it destroys VD bacteria as well, so you can kill two birds with one stone. Come to think of it, my friend Osano uses those penicillin pills whenever he thinks he’s going to get lucky with a girl.”
Janelle laughed scornfully. “That’s all right for men. You men will fuck anything, but women never know who or when they are going to fuck until an hour or two hours beforehand.”
“Well,” I said very cheerfully, “let me give you some advice. Never fuck anybody between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. They have about ten times more VD than any other age bracket. Another thing is before you go to bed with a guy, give him a short arm.”
Janelle said. “That sounds disgusting. What is that?”
“Well,” I said, “you strip down his penis, you know, like you’re masturbating him, and if there’s a yellow fluid coming out like a drippage, you know he’s infected. That’s what prostitutes do.”
When I said that, I knew I had gone too far. She gave me a cold look, so I went on hastily. “Another thing is herpes virus. It isn’t really a venereal disease and is usually transmitted by uncircumcised men. It can give women cervical cancer. So you see what the score is. You can get cancer from screwing, syphilis from screwing and never even know you’re infected. And that’s why women can’t fuck as freely as men.”
Janelle clapped her hands, “Bravo, Professor. I think I’ll just fuck women.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” I said.
It was easy for me to say. I wasn’t jealous of her women lovers.
Chapter 41
On my next trip back a month later I called Janelle, and we decided to have dinner and go to the movies together. There was something a little cold in her voice, so I was wary, which prepared me for the shock of seeing her when I picked her up at her apartment.
Alice opened the door and I kissed her and I asked Mice how Janelle was and Alice rolled her eyes up in her head, which meant I could expect Janelle to be a little crazy. Well, it wasn’t crazy, but it was a little funny. When Janelle came out of the bedroom, she was dressed as I had never seen her before.
She had on a white fedora with a red ribbon in it. The brim snapped over her dark brown gold-flecked eyes. She was wearing a perfectly tailored man’s suit of white silk, or what looked like silk. The trouser legs were strictly tailored straight as any man’s. She had on a white silk shirt and the most beautiful red-and-blue-striped tie, and to top it off, she was carrying a delicately slender cream-colored Gucci cane, which she proceeded to stab me in the stomach with. It was a direct challenge, I knew what she was doing; she was coming out of the closet and without words she was telling the world of her bisexuality.
She said, “How do you like it?”
I smiled and said, “Great.” The most dapper dyke I ever met. “Where do you want to eat?”
She leaned on her cane and watched me very coolly. “I think,” she said, “we should eat at Scandia and that for once in our relationship you might take me to a nightclub.”
We had never eaten at the fancy places. We had never gone to a nightclub. But I said OK. I understood, I think, what she was doing. She was forcing me to acknowledge to the world that I loved her despite her bisexuality, testing me to see if I could bear the dyke jokes and snickers. Since I had already accepted the fact myself, I didn’t care what anybody else thought.
We had a great evening. Everybody stared at us in the restaurant, and I must admit that Janelle looked absolutely smashing. In fact, she looked like a blonder and fairer version of Marlene Dietrich, Southern belle style, of course. Because, no matter what she did, that overwhelming femininity came off her. But I knew that if I told her that, she would hate it. She was out to punish me.
I really enjoyed her playing the dyke role simply because I knew how feminine she was in bed. So it was a sort of double joke on whoever was watching us. I also enjoyed it because Janelle thought she was making me angry and was watching my every move and was disappointed and then pleased that I obviously didn’t mind.
I drew the line at going to a nightclub, but we went and had drinks at the Polo Lounge, where for her satisfaction I submitted our relationship to the stares of her friends and mine. I saw Doran at one table and Jeff Wagon at another, and they both grinned at me. Janelle waved to them gaily and then turned to me and said, “Isn’t it wonderful to go somewhere for a drink and see all your old dear friends?”
I grinned back at her and I said, “Great.”
I got her home before midnight and she tapped me on the shoulder with her cane and she said, “You did very well.”
And I said, “Thank you.”
She said, “Will you call me?”
And I said, “Yes.” It had been a nice night anyway. I had enjoyed the double takes of the maitre d’, the doorman, even the guys who did the valet parking, and at least now Janelle was out of the closet.
There came a time soon after this when I loved Janelle as a person. That is, it wasn’t that I just wanted to fuck her brains out; or look into her dark brown eyes and faint; or eat up her pink mouth. And all the rest of it, the staying up all night telling her stories, Jesus, telling her my whole life, and her telling me all her life. In short, there came a time when I realized it was her sole function to make me happy, to make me delight in her. I saw that it was my job to make her a little happier than she was and not to get pissed off when she didn’t make me happy.
I don’t mean I became one of those guys who are in love with a girl because it makes them unhappy. I never understood that really. I always believed in getting my share of any bargain, in life, in literature, in marriage, in love, even as a father.
And I don’t mean I learned to make her happy by giving her a gift, that was my pleasure. Or to cheer her when she was down, which was just clearing obstacles out of the way so that she could get on with the job of making me happy.
Now what was curious was that after she had “betrayed” me, after we started to hate each other a little, after we had the goods on each other, I came to love her as a person.
She was really such a good guy. She used to say like a child sometimes, “I’m a good person,” and she really was. She was really so straight in all the important things. Sure she fucked other guys and women too, but what the hell, nobody’s perfect. She still loved the same books I did, the same movies, the same people. When she lied to me, it was to keep from hurting me. And when she told me the truth, it was partly to hurt me (she had a nice vengeful streak and I even loved that too), but also because she was terrified I’d learn the truth in a way that would hurt me more.
And of course, as time went on, I had to understand that she led a hurtful life in many ways. A complicated life. As who indeed does not.
