How Simon Got His Bureau

He Met Tessa through furniture. As a result of furniture. In the aftermath of furniture.

In an Eighth Street bookstore he told the clerk his problem about a bureau. The shirts and sheets he kept on an open shelf in the bathroom collected so much soot, many went back and forth between laundry and shelf without stopover on him or under him. He thought he might get more use from his linens if he had a bureau, something with drawers.

The clerk knew of somebody with a bureau for sale. Tessa Mayo. When Simon called, Tessa said sure, come over and see the bureau, any time after midnight. It was a peculiar time to visit a stranger to discuss furniture, but Simon went that midnight.

Tessa Mayo lived at the top of a brownstone on East Ninth off University Place. Floor through, skylights, rear roof patio. Scraps of silk and wool materials in piles, threads of different colors on the rugs, tissue-paper patterns heaped around. Tessa designed high-fashion clothes for Gordyanne's tony midtown department store.

"Hello, I'm Simon Dwire," he said.

"I've seen you around," she said.

"Didn't I hear you were a writer?"

"Specifically, I'm a ghostwriter."

"Really? You don't write anything on your own?"

The question always annoyed Simon.

"On my own what? On my own typewriter? Yes, I do all my writing on my own typewriter, but it's all ghostwriting."

"You mean you don't put your name on anything you write?"

"I couldn't, I'm hired to put other people's names on it. Besides, I'm hired to write bad books, so I couldn't put my name on them if I wanted to. I'm a good writer, so I wouldn't want my name on bad books. Is that the bureau you want to sell?"

"Yes, like it? It's an old Amish piece, good one, people tell me, but it's left over from my marriage, it was picked by the man I was married to and I'd just as soon get rid of it. Also, I go more for Saarinen and Eames furniture."

He looked her over as she pulled the bureau drawers out. She was close to five, ten in her stocking feet, in heels she would be at least a six-footer. She had the thinness, not a model's short-rations look, the bag-of-bones look, just a scrupulous paring, to keep her unusual length from the Amazonian. Her face he liked right away. Blooming. Circus busy. The nose, while not thin, which was most to his taste, was dramatically shaped, long, with an interesting bump, and the nostrils were given to quick flares, also interesting. She was animated, talked fast, with sweeps of hand and heaves of shoulder. This highness of spirit Simon was to discover came less from animal larkiness than a constant half drunkenness, plus amphetamines.

"Isn't this a little late for a business call?"

"Oh, I've got a thing, I just can't sleep when the sun goes down so I sleep days and work nights, I don't really come awake till midnight."

"I thought therapy with Pandro Harlow was supposed to give you better habits, including sleeping habits."

"How'd you know I did therapy with Pandro Harlow?"

"You've got all his books in your bookcase. People who collect his books usually have been in therapy with him."

"Well, yes, that's bright of you, I was, for almost a year. It didn't change my sleep patterns, though, the minute the sun goes down my eyes snap open. All the same. I got something out of my sessions, a whole new slant on the either-ors, that's valuable. Don't you think Pandro's books are marvelously written? The last two anyhow. Particularly the last one, Sex Without the Either-Or."

"I think he sees too many eithers and not enough ors, but, yes, the last two books are very well written."

They found they had more in common than their feeling about Pandro Harlow's prose. Simon had taught English at Dimody before the ghostwriting money opened up. Tessa had spent two years at Dimody before going to Paris to study designing. Her class had broken all records to that time for unplanned pregnancies. Give or take a year, she said, they might have met at Dimody. Simon doubted it, because at Dimody he had no sheets and only two drip-dry shirts and so would not have gone looking for a bureau. No, no, seriously, she said, she might very well have been in one of his classes. Hardly likely, she was in a class by herself, Simon said gallantly. By this time they had both had several vodkas. Who was the Mayo she'd been married to, Simon asked.

"Mayo's my maiden name," she said. "I don't use my married name professionally, my things are called Tessa Mayo Designs. My married name was Chisworth, I was married to a man named Stephen Chisworth."

"The Stephen Chisworth?" he said.

"God wouldn't make two Stephen Chisworths. He's probably still trying to figure out what got into Him to make Him make one misshapen ooze of a blob like that. Yes, the Stephen Chisworth."

"I'm beginning to remember. Wasn't there some messy trial, a scandal?"

At this Tessa began to cry. She sank to the floor amidst the tissue papers and fabrics and let the tears out. She told him the whole story. She'd met Stephen Chisworth in Paris. He was attending some World Youth for Peace Congress in Stockholm sponsored by the satellite countries. She didn't care about all his money or his offbeat politics, he came on strong and she responded strong. They were married in Paris and came back to Long Island to live in a big house with big grounds outside of Roslyn, near his family's estate. They had two children. She was kept busy running the house and minding the children while Steve went off to his meetings in Manhattan.

Word came to her that Steve wasn't only going to meetings, he was running around with girls, for the most part Negro girls. Steve had a thing about and for Negroes. Lots of Negroes came to visit them in Roslyn, political friends, but Steve had more Negro friends in Manhattan, ones he never brought home, girls, he had this sexual fixation on Negro girls. This situation near drove Tessa crazy. It got so she wasn't married anymore except on paper but stuck in Roslyn like a married woman while Steve went catting in Manhattan. Naturally she began to brood.

Talk about desperate. She got so desperate that at one point she went out to a punky booze joint in a working-class neighborhood near Roslyn with the express intention of picking up the worst bum or animal she could find. She did pick up such an animal, a bricklayer with black nails and bad teeth, but once she had him home she couldn't stand to have him touch her and it was tough getting rid of him, it was ugly, but it showed flow close she was to swallowing her pride and her taste, too.

By this time Simon and Tessa were side by side in bed with the covers half over them. As her narrative developed, Simon had suggested they could talk more comfortably if they were lying down, and after a time he pointed out that they'd be more comfortable yet if they didn't have their clothes on. Besides, it was late, way past his bedtime, this late he found clothes oppressive. She offered no opposition when he undressed eressed her, stopping him only when he went after her last item of clothing, her bikini-type briefies, on which Simon found a label reading Henson Kickernicks.

He liked her breasts a great deal. They were not large, but they stood pleasingly high and had large boldly colored nipples. She did not mind when he stroked them, she was caught up with her story.

What he liked especially in her long body were her very long legs. It was true that there was a discernible triangle of air high up between the inner thighs, a feature which generally bothered him, but the over-all length of the legs was so impressive as almost to compensate for this skimping in just one place. She did not mind when he stroked her legs either. She went on telling her story. From time to time she took a drink from the vodka bottle and passed it to him.

So she was just about going out of her mind, had no man and no possibility of getting a man while her so-called husband was having his Negro girls in wholesale lots. One night she got drunk, she was beginning to drink a lot, and when Steve came home toward morning she drove him out of the house with a Smith 8; Wesson automatic. She knew she'd have to pay for that. She drank and prowled the grounds with a rifle in case he tried to sneak back. One night he tried to come in through a side road with two men from the sheriff's office and she began firing at them, crawling through the snow from tree to tree and firing, she was so worn down she didn't know what she was doing.

What Steve was after was the children. He'd already made overtures through his family's attorneys to get the children. The Chisworths meant to brush her aside and keep the kids to be raised as snooty Chisworths. She was having none of this, of course. She agreed to move out of the big house in return for their not pressing charges for the gunplay. The house was sold so a property settlement could be worked out. But when she moved to Manhattan, to the Village, matter of fact to this very brownstone, she originally rented the top two floors so there'd be room for the kids and a sleep-in maid. This was when she went back to the designing, to have something to do and also to supplement the far-from-large support payments Steve was grudgingly making.

Then came the trial. The Chisworth lawyers were out to prove Tessa was no fit mother because of loose morals, and their proof of her looseness of morals was that she went around in a carnal way with Negro men. They had just enough evidence to make the charge stick, of course. One man had befriended her through the tough times, a Negro man, the baritone in a vocal group that sometimes entertained at Stephen's functions to lift the embargo on Castro or ban the bomb or whatever. This man saw what a knocking around Tessa was getting and, politics or no politics, took her side. Sure she was making it with him. He was at the time the only male in the Western Hemisphere who gave her a kind look, he was a good friend and a good guy, and furthermore, if she knew Negroes it was through her husband's knowing all these Negroes politically and sexually.

She wasn't even allowed to testify in court about Steve's politics and catting around, because she didn't have proofs, she couldn't afford to hire squads of private investigators to get proofs. But Steve's lawyers had proofs against her. So Steve Chisworth, with his nonadmissible fixation on Negroes, used the bugaboo of her hanging out with Negroes to crucify her in court. Also, they put that bricklayer with the dirty fingernails on the stand, and he was not a good character witness. She was nailed to the cross in a way to stay nailed. The horrified jury found against her all the way. Steve won custody of the kids. The Chisworths settled $25,000 on her to appease their consciences and that was that.

Her designs were clicking, she had a good-money contract with Gordyanne's, she didn't need money. But here she was, 31, mother of two kids, not allowed again in her life to see the kids. Here she was, living in the Village like a punk kid herself, having to do it all over, one fat decade dropped out of her life, nothing to show for that all-important decade, condemned to knowing no more about the two flesh-and-blood things that had come out of her body than what she chanced to read in the papers. She was drunk. Damn right she was drunk. She'd been drunk for a long time and planned to stay drunk longer. Pandro Harlow really helped her get the either-ors out of her head and live a more liberated life, but no Pandro Harlow could liberate her out of this soap opera she was stuck in. She wanted those kids. She needed those kids. Her kids were dead to her. A bigger medicine than Pandro Harlow for this kind of soap opera that wouldn't end was booze and thank God booze was available in quantity. How'd Mr. Simon Dwire like this tale of marital stresses between the lady marksman from Dimody and her Negro-oriented millionaire lefty spouse in their big old Roslyn love nest? Touching, huh? Was it for Joan Crawford? Could Bette Davis maybe play it with a fuller quiver?

...

He stroked her long legs.

"I remember the story now. It was in all the papers."

He leaned her heavy jutting nipples this way and that.

"You've had it tough."

"Without those kids I'm going on one lung."

A grayish, impoverished, reluctant light was staining the windows. It was morning. He had been listening to her story for seven hours, occasionally dozing, more often stroking her breasts or legs.

"There isn't much I or anybody can do. I could make love to you."

"You listened and that's doing a lot."

"I'd like to do more. Are you sure you wouldn't like me to make love to you? It might take your mind off your troubles."

"You're a nice man, but I can't." When his hands went at her Henson Kickernicks she pushed them away. "They called me promiscuous, an animal, it blackens all my thoughts in the area of men."

"Tessa, making love with me won't make you promiscuous. I'm one man, not an army."

"They're all one man, each one's one, but they add up. Wild how you keep it to the ones and pretty soon it's an army and you're an animal."

"If we make love I won't think you're an animal."

"You're very nice, I mean that, but it's the first thing I would think and all I would think. No, I can't, it would just prove their case against me and depress me more."

"They don't have to know about it, Tessa. Nobody would know but me and I certainly don't want to prove any cases against you. After all, we're here already, and undressed. You might say we've bypassed several days of preliminaries. We're practically making love right now. We might just as well round it out, we're that close, it's a shame to come this far and stop. See how close we are? See? It wouldn't take more effort, we're practically there, all you have to do is----"

She arched high to roll him back to her side.

"No, please, Simon, don't." She was beginning to cry again. "I lost my two sweet tiny babies this way."

"I might remind you you made those babies this way. Let me ask you something, did you go to Pandro Harlow long?"

"Close to a year, I told you. Not to his group-therapy sessions, that was maybe for six or seven months, but for private treatments just about a year, I guess."

"Did he really help you, Tessa?"

"Oh, a lot, I'd say. In the private sessions more than in the group ones. In the private sessions I would strip and he would manipulate me in different places to release the trapped orgone energies in the different sets of muscles and make me, well, orgasmically freer. It worked, too, I'm orgasmically much freer."

"Not with me, you're not in the least orgasmically free with me and I've been manipulating you in various places for I'd say seven hours."

"I don't see that there's any parallel. Simon, this isn't therapy."

(continued on page 78)

Simon got his Bureau(continued from page 70)

"Because you won't let it be, Tessa. Let me point something out. You went to Pandro all that time, but you never got the real message, the central Harlow idea didn't get through to you. I want you to listen carefully now. This could be the therapeutic breakthrough."

He shook his head as he got to his feet. He was unusually drunk, and dizzy. He wavered across the room to the bookcase. He ran his finger across the nine books, the nonwriting of which had made Pandro Harlow rich and famous. He took out the last and most famous of the Pandro Harlow books not written by Pandro Harlow, Sex Without the Either-Or. Then he got into bed next to her. He opened the book and almost with eyes closed found the especially therapeutic passage.

"Tessa, here's the heart of the Pandro Harlow doctrine. He's talking about the feeling a lot of people get that they're animals when they let out their orgone energies in a more than monogamous way. Follow this, now, it's in Pandro's own words."

He was aware that as he began to read his voice automatically went into the old lecture-hall drone. This irritated him, but he read:

"'To imagine that some ways of conducting the sex life are clean and others dirty, and to shy away from the dirty ones in favor of the clean ones, this is to introduce still another either-or, into sex, possibly the most vicious of all. In nature there is no either-or, only a both-and. Nature makes no distinctions between right and wrong, its one rule is anything goes. In nature there is no dirty sex and no clean sex, there is simply sex. The dirty-clean polarity is another irrelevancy introduced into sex by certain societies to prove that their ways with sex are excellent and all other ways horrible. But the fact is that all sexual ways, all without exception, the dirtiest as well as the cleanest, will be found practiced by human beings somewhere on earth as the official, sanctioned ways. The principle of all-that-is-possible-is-natural will in time pulverize that final clamp on the natural sexual appetites called monogamy. The institution of monogamy is not in the least a clean way of channeling sex, as its practitioners believe. It is merely a way of perverting what in nature is an instinctual liberty into what in society becomes a proprietary right. The law of nature is a simple one: When you want, you reach. The person who has a sufficiently healthy animal appetite to explore all orifices and outlets ...'"

He read for some time, his eyes often leaving the page to see what effect these words were having on Tessa. They seemed to be having some effect. Her long legs twitched from time to time and her nostrils seemed more active.

Only a few times in his life had he taken such a dim view of himself as he was doing now, but he continued to read, charting his progress in her legs and nostrils. He had better than seven hours of his life invested here and seven hours of his life were as important to him as her lost decade was to her.

Besides, though she had told her story with quite high style, avoiding the staler notes of self-pity, what she had filled the seven hours with, essentially, was seven hours' worth of melancholia, downbeat stuff. It was time to introduce another tone, make some elbowroom for positives, for affirmations, some reasonably hopeful view of the breathing condition. All very well to enumerate the misfortunes when they are severe and many. But you have to remind yourself, or be reminded, that at moments respiration is more than a chore, the life span more than a sentence to serve. Still, satisfied though he was that he was after a good for her as well as for himself, he disliked the major part of himself when he saw how she was responding, the melt in her eyes.

"I forgot, I forgot the simple truths." she whispered when he put the book down. "Thank you for reminding me, oh, thanks a billion times. It's just what Morris was always explaining, but I forgot this wisdom."

"Who's Morris?"

"The baritone I was telling you about."

With these heartfelt words she pulled the very tight and very brief Henson Kickernicks down over her gazelle legs, kicked them for a nick, clutched him to her rousing high breasts with both long arms. Her hold on him was so spirited he thought his encomium to breathing might become elegy.

"There's one either-or left in my head, you fine reader, either you make me feel damn good or I'll break every bone in your body," she whispered in his ear, then bit it. "You very smirchy thing, you coaly article, you."

She was apparently confusing him with Morris or her picture of some Morris. He did not point out that in her reversal she had not adopted the Pandro Harlow view, only decided to be dirty for a while instead of clean: the same old either-or, with a more positive estimation of the or.

Much later, somewhere along in early afternoon, as he was trying to see his way to the door, she stirred her legs and said sleepily, "Oh, Simon, I'm glad you read those classic words to me, you straightened me out, I see again, it's good to have a body. Thanks for reading to me!"

"Never underestimate the power of the written word, Tessa, goodbye," he said as he went out the door.

Simon had written Sex Without the Either-Or from first page to last for Pandro Harlow for a fee of $20,000. He had conned her open by quoting himself through another man's mouth. Words that in his own mouth would have made him gag, though they had come originally from his fingers, the two fingers he typed with anyhow, the other eight standing by not lifting a finger to stop them. The power of the ghostwritten word. Breaches of monogamy, no matter what he'd written for Pandro Harlow, did leave him feeling somewhat dirty. Not because it was bad to have more than one woman, because it was bad to lie. Not even bad. but tiring.

What he had done with the words he had written for someone else but could not have written for himself, though he was not above quoting them, what he had done to get a taste of a superior body, this left him feeling particularly smutted. Thank you. Pandro Harlow, for taking the words out of my mouth.

When he was two blocks away, plodding along West Tenth toward his own place, he remembered he'd gone to Tessa's to look at a bureau. He remembered that she had an Amish bureau, but couldn't recall what it looked like.

...

Tessa he liked fine. Tessa was a good girl. He had two first-rate months with her, not especially bothered by the less-than-slim nose and the small but detectable triangle of air between her upper thighs. But then Foster Danelian told him about another girl. Jordan Wherry. He sometimes went over to the New Center for Cultural Research, to Foster Danelian's life class, to check on the girls who modeled there, and he saw no reason not to take a look at the new model. Jordan. She was smaller and daintier than Tessa, and though she, too, had the triangle of ventilation between the thighs, she had the kind of nose he particularly admired, thin and very straight, with the thinnest shells for nostrils. It was the archetypal nose with all marks of race and locale cleansed from it. If you took the 100,000 best noses of the Western world and made them into a composite nose, the result would be Jordan's nose, the best, the purest, the straightest, the cleanest in line. The nostrils did not move at all. To make them move, make them come to life close to your eyes as you made all of her come to life, that would conceivably be something. He decided to go after Jordan Wherry. That meant doing something about Tessa Mayo, since, by his standards regarding monogamy, the road to Jordan necessarily led through, not around, Tessa.

So he asked Foster Danelian to have (continued on page 150)Simon got his Bureau(continued from page 78) dinner with him. He picked up Foster at the New Center, took one more look at Jordan's body, found it still of worth in spite of the uncombed tumble of honey hair and the dirty, badly bitten fingernails. He and Foster walked down Sixth toward Bleecker, talking.

Foster Danelian, where he didn't look like Gig Young, looked like Louis Jourdan, with an over-all sprinkling of Cary Grant. Designed as a gigolo, he had the nerve to call himself a painter. Simon sometimes lectured him on vocational matters, pointing out the danger in bypassing your true calling for one more prestigious. Foster argued that a gigolo had as much right to stand at an easel as anybody else. Simon tried to make him see that a gigolo looked ridiculous at any standing occupation.

"I finished the portrait," Foster said.

"Of who?"

"You. You sat for it."

"Me and my bad aim. I meant to sit on it."

"Try not to be a shit. Want to see it?"

"Nope. I don't want to see myself as Two Lesbian Nudes Disembarking from a Model T. that's all you ever paint. I get no insights seeing myself that way. I don't even have a driver's license."

"It's a brilliant painting."

"I always say you've got a special thing going for you as a painter, Foster. Vapidity. You have a vapidity all your own, Foster."

"I'll ask you one question: Why bother?"

"What do you have reference to, Foster?"

"Why bother going after Jordan? Why bother going after any of them? You keep them all ten feet away and you know there's little of true interest you can do with a girl ten feet away, I don't care how well endowed you are."

"There're lots of things you can do with a girl ten feet away, Foster. Play ping-pong. Exchange recipes for marijuana brownies."

"I like your concept of a courtship, Simon. You'll make some girl very happy across a ping-pong table if you feed her enough psychedelic brownies."

Pretty soon they were at Bleecker Street and entering the Italian restaurant called The Grotto. When the bar-dolino came and their drinking was under way, Simon broached the subject.

"You were in the main right, Foster, I have some interest in Jordan Wherry. Though I have some reservations, I've decided to go after her. That presents certain problems. not problems exactly, tactical considerations. The first consideration is Tessa Mayo."

"Tessa Mayo isn't a consideration, she's a conflagration."

"She does fire up certain people. I'm wondering if one of them isn't you."

"I don't get the implication there."

"What's your opinion of Tessa. Foster?"

"Nice looking, but wears capes."

"Look, Foster, I'm not accusing, but there are facts that should be faced. One is that I'm going around with Tessa. Another is that often, lately, when you look at Tessa you begin to slobber in a Pavlovian way. I think we can consider it established that you would like to do things with Tessa that can't be done from ten feet away. Isn't it possible that your bringing Jordan Wherry to my attention had something to do with your slobbering interest in Tessa Mayo?"

"I do get the implication there, and I'm considering whether to punch you in the mouth for it."

"There's no need to punch anybody, Foster. If you've got an appetite for Tessa, it's no crime. You can say so like a man and we can discuss it man to man, if you can force yourself to the male role for the length of a discussion."

"If you're discussing facts, let me point out you've got the facts a little twisted, Simon. Your claim to be going around with Tessa won't hold up. You're hanging around with Tessa. That's another category entirely."

"What my category is with Tessa is none of your business, Foster. The fact is that I'm the guy she spends her nights with when she spends nights, and this has been making you slobber for some time now. This explains the gift of Jordan. When a Greek bears gifts look to your wallet."

"I'm not a Greek, I'm of Lebanese extraction. Besides, why would I want your wallet? I make more money than you do."

"Many counterfeiters do. Here's the point, Foster. I've made up my mind to go after Jordan, but I can't do it without clearing the air with Tessa. I simply can't be involved with two girls at the same time, it does bad things to my nervous system. You gulp them two at a time, but I'm a monogamist--"

"A sequential monogamist. You play around in time rather than in space, the coward's way. To be sure. this may only say something about your potency."

"You and I are constituted differently, Foster. One of us is made of shit and the other of pure gold. I leave it to you to tell which is which, if you know the difference between the two materials, which your painting and your whole personality suggest you don't."

"Let's see if I can't translate this windy and wildly offensive statement, Simon. You're saying you're going to break it off with Tessa so you can go after Jordan with a clear mind?"

"You've got it. I'm planning to do what you planned for me to do, Foster. I'm going to tell Tessa the exact score so I won't be doing anything behind her back, those are my intentions with Tessa. What I want to know is, what are your intentions with Tessa?"

"Any intentions I may have with Tessa are with Tessa, not you, so don't start prying, Simon. I'll tell you this much, any intentions I have or may have with Tessa, or any girl, won't involve ping-pong tables."

"Oh yes they will. Your system is to get two girls playing ping-pong and you're the ball, only you like to think you hold all the paddles. What I want to know is, are you involved with any other girl right now? If you are, Tessa is out."

"What's this high moral position you take on the binary mathematics of sex, Simon?"

"I can't handle two girls at once. It's not for me, not because it doesn't feel right, because it doesn't feel good. You may say it doesn't feel good because it doesn't feel right. No. There's no moral basis for the feeling. It doesn't feel good because it's complicated, and I'm simple."

"Well, it feels good to me for the very reason that it's complicated. I thrive on complications, Simon. My theory is that simple things are for simpletons."

"I know, and my judgment in this connection is that you're full of shit. That's not a moral judgment, it's a judgment about the most efficient use of an individual's energies. You like complications because they eat up your energies. You spend so much energy on the maneuverings around sex, Foster, I'll tell you frankly, the suspicion arises that you don't have much left over for the sex itself, or aren't much good at expending energy in that area."

"I'll ignore the insults and just discuss the thermodynamics, Simon. You have one girl at a time, yes. But you dole yourself out with your one. I generally have two and go all out with both of them. I conclude that I have a more passionate nature and you have to be miserly with your energies because you don't have many."

"Foster. look at the arithmetic. If you've got two girls you can't go all out with both of them, that would mean there's two hundred percent of you and no matter what an inflated idea you've got of yourself, there's not two hundred percent of you. The best you can do is go half out with each girl, fifty percent out. No. I'll give you a better formula. You split yourself into two halves and each half goes all out with its girl."

"No. you haven't got it right, Simon. I really do go all out with the girl I'm with at the moment. then there's a change in personnel and I keep on going all out with the second girl. I'm wholehearted no matter which girl I'm with. It's just my nature to be whole hearted while the recipients of my whole heartedness alternate."

"What you're doing is putting on the act of being wholehearted. Though even if you were wholehearted it would add up to halfheartedness in normal terms, because you've only got half a heart. You haven't answered my question. Are you involved with anybody right now?"

"Suppose I am, and suppose I decide to go after Tessa even so, how can you stop me?"

"I'll just give her the straight dope about you. That'll scare her off, take my word for it, she's a sequential monogamist, too, very much so."

"In answer to your question, Simon, no, I have no involvements at the moment. I'm curious about something, though. Just how are you going to break the sad news to her?"

"I'll put it to her in several ways. One is. I think she should be with somebody taller than herself for a while."

"You've got a theory about the respective heights, of course."

"Of course."

"For a minute there I was afraid we'd stumbled into an area where you didn't have a theory."

"I have a theory. Want to hear it?"

"I can't wait to hear it. I mean, I can't wait to hear it, because I've got to get home and practice some new madrigals on the recorder."

"You don't have a recorder, Foster."

"I know, that's why I have to practice so much. It's tough when you don't have the proper equipment."

"The toughest thing is to use your head when you don't have the equipment. Don't bother practicing the use of your head, Foster. Here's my theory. Size is taken to mean strength. When the woman's taller than the man, people think she's the stronger. American women tend to rule their men anyhow, but this is more or less covered. The woman who's taller than her man feels she's lost her cover, her secret's out. Tessa's not a big offender, of course. She's at heart a feminine girl. All the same, she's embarrassed walking into restaurants and other places the taller of the two, she thinks people are saying she wears the pants. It'll do her good to go with a taller man for a while, even a sickeningly weak one."

"It could be taken the opposite way, Simon. People could figure the shorter man's got to be damn sure of himself to risk people thinking he's a milksop and probably impotent. Obviously because he bangs his taller woman blind, or beats her, or supplies her with cocaine, has such a hold over her he doesn't mind the implications of being physically overshadowed. In your case, I imagine the secret's cocaine."

"No. I don't supply Tessa with cocaine, and I don't beat her, and I don't bang her blind either. I don't want you doing these things to Tessa either, though if you bang her just short of blind, if you bang her just very myopic, I think you'll have a good relationship and she won't need beatings or cocaine. Treat her well, will you, Foster? She's had it rough and she's worth something, more than most."

"Which is why you're giving her up with such equanimity."

"This is despair, Foster. I hide it well. Listen now, let's understand one another, I'll help you arrange it with Tessa on one condition, no third parties, that would break her up. If you raise a scent somewhere else you've got to cut it with Tessa first. Devote three months to her exclusively and see if it isn't worth it. It won't kill you. This girl isn't a hardship."

"And what are your plans with Jordan, Simon?"

"To bang her blind, Foster, what else?"

"You've got it made. Simon. You don't have to bang any girl blind. If a girl goes for you you know she's blind to begin with."

That same night Simon went to see Tessa. He came right to the point.

"Tess, we ought to talk some things over."

"Sure, Sime, like what."

"I mean, there's something I'd like to get out in the open."

"Go right ahead, Sime. I like the things you get out in the open. You get them out and we'll tuck them right away again, certain things shouldn't stay in the open too long, might catch cold."

"Be serious, Tess, this is important. Maybe you could stop sewing for a while."

"You get the right things out in the open and I'll stop sewing."

"Please try to be serious, Tess. I think we should try to assess just what it is we've got between us."

"You've got it, you assess it."

"Tess, haven't you ever stopped to ask if we're going anywhere?"

"I know where we're going. You want to go right now or can I finish this seam?"

"Here's what I'm getting at, Tess. We get along mostly fine, but we're two very different people. It's time we talked about our differences. Suppose I run through them quickly. One, your sleeping days whereas I sleep nights. Two, your wanting sex in the morning and my wanting it in the evening. Three, your equation of sex with something very black, which I'm not. Four, your being five, ten, and my being five, eight. Want to talk about them in that order?"

"No. let's get the thing about the tallness out of the way first. I don't get that point at all, Sime. You're five, eight, or whatever you are in restaurants, maybe, not in bed. You're not any particular height in bed."

"That's not facing the problem. Tess. See, we both like sex before going to sleep, it's the best sedative. Well, if we go to sleep at different times. we naturally want sex at different times. If we have it in the morning. it leaves us both sleepy, which is fine for you because you're just going to sleep but makes it tough for me because I have to work and I can't keep my eyes open. That's the other point I was mentioning. my wanting sex at night and your wanting it in the morning. That's basically the result of our different sleeping schedules. so we can subsume the sex-timing problem under the sleep-scheduling problem."

"You subsume if you want to. I've got to finish this sewing. Unless you'd like to stretch out and be subsumed for a while. if that fits in with your scheduling."

"You can't laugh the problem away, Tess. Look at it in terms of work output. When we have sex in the morning and I sit down at the typewriter too sleepy to work well. my work output gets cut. I mean, I've been working. but somewhat more slowly because I'm drowsy. I work on a piecework basis, so much per page, so our sex. though it's very good in other terms, is costing me money. At a rough guess I'd say sex with you over the past two months has cost me in the neighborhood of thirteen hundred dollars. You can see that if sex costs a man that kind of money he's bound to build up resentment."

"We could work that out, Sime. All it takes is a little good will on both sides. Look, having sex on a regular basis has been good for me, it calms me down and makes me sleep better. so I've been working better. too. and as a result my income is up. I'd say it's up by a fair amount over thirteen hundred dollars. To make things equitable all I've got to do is compensate you for the thirteen hundred dollars you've lost in making me work better, I'll gladly do that, I still come out ahead moneywise and in nervous-system terms both."

"Wouldn't work out. Tess, liberated though we are, I'm not liberated enough to take money from a woman, not on a regular basis anyhow, and not for sex services certainly. Besides, this is still not taking into account the third and maybe most serious of our differences, your view that sex is a very black thing, practiced in blackness with a very black partner, whereas no matter what I may be I'm not in the least black."

"You trying to tell me, Sime, that I've really got the hots for Negroes and we don't really make it because you're not a Negro?"

"I'm not nailing it down to that extent as regards personnel, Tess, I'm just saying in general terms that you've got sex equated with unwhite and no matter how well we get along sexually, I'm in the realm of white. What comes out of your personal story is that one reason you were attracted to the man you married was that he was close to so many Negroes. Another thing. one who listens attentively when you talk about your past comes away with the impression that in addition to the Negro baritone you very likely had some involvement with the basso of that vocal group. too, and maybe even for a brief period with the tenor. I'm not saying you've got a fixation anywhere near your husband's, but we can make out a trend there, a cultivated taste, maybe something we could go so far as to call a leaning. Now what I'm trying to point out is that though you've got a really warm feeling for me, and it's one I appreciate. it's not the warmest, because with my fair skin and blond hair I'm so much Dutch Cleanser in the hot night you need----"

"Sime, couldn't we stop the circular talk, what is it with you, you meet another girl?"

"That's a factor in the picture, too, if we're looking at the whole picture. Yes, I have met a girl. though it's still in the preliminary stages. These other factors I've been talking about rank first, definitely, they exist whether or not there's another girl, but if we're to round out the picture, yes, I've met another girl----"

"Why didn't you say so, for God's sake! Sime, for a writer you sure have got a funny way of saying everything with words but what's on your mind!"

"It was definitely my plan to mention this girl. Tess. but I didn't want to give her an exaggerated place in the list of problems. She's problem number five, that's why I wanted to run through one, two. three and four first----"

"Right. now in reference to number five. how do you propose we handle number five?"

"That's the question I'm bringing up for discussion. Tess. As we've agreed many times. we're both sequential monogamists, that is, while we don't seem to have sex with one person permanently, we have it with one person at a time. I've about made up my mind to go after this girl, Tess. and if I went after her while having you, that would place my promiscuity in space rather than time, which doesn't sit well with my type of mentality. So----"

"So you'd like to stop having me so you can get on with your sequentials."

"This is just what I was hoping to avoid, Tess, the note of bitterness----"

"You don't read me right, Sime, I wasn't being bitter, I'm even relieved, sort of. We've had good times, and I'm grateful, you've got to know that, but my God. even without problem number five I've been aware for some time of numbers one through four. Besides, to be perfectly honest, I should tell you there's a problem number six. I've been thinking lately I'd really like to change my sleep pattern, so I'm back in therapy with Pandro Harlow. His manipulating isn't doing anything to my sleep pattern, but his talk is making me think about my involvement with you. Sime. Pandro seems to have heard about you some where. He's been warning me quite a bit about you. He thinks there's something sort of psychopathic about a ghostwriter, untrustworthy anyhow. I've been defending you all I can, Sime. but he's got real strong views about you and I can't ignore them when he's my therapist. I've got to trust him when it comes to literary things, Sime, he's such a brilliant writer. you said so yourself."

"I didn't say he was a brilliant writer, I said his books were brilliantly written."

"Well, whatever. Anyhow. Sime, I'm genuinely sorry we've reached the end of the line, I think you know that without my saying it, but I certainly understood this wasn't for keeps. Besides, do you want the absolute truth? We've always leveled with each other, I won't start keeping things from you now. The plain honest truth is. I've been thinking a bit about my own sequentials. I've been wondering if it wasn't time for me to find myself some more monogamy. I'd never go for a space promiscuity, Sime, not while you were around, I think far too much of you, but where time is concerned----"

"That's another thing I wanted to get into with you, Tess. I don't like the idea of your being alone for any period of time. You need a special sort of man, you deserve one that's right, more right than I am. Now, I have somebody in mind, a fellow who should suit you, particularly in the areas we've been talking about. I mean, this is a fellow who works nights and sleeps days. too, is taller than you are. and more than that----"

"It's nice of you to be thinking of my needs, Sime, but it's all right, you don't have to fix me up. The fact is, I already have somebody in mind, sort of."

"Don't settle for just anything, Tess, you're too good for that. I want to see you with somebody who deserves you, the fellow I had in mind----"

"I think mine could work out fine, Sime, I've been giving this a lot of thought and I really think he's a good choice."

"May I ask who this fellow is? Is it somebody I know?"

"I don't see any reason why I shouldn't tell you. You bet it's somebody you know."

"My God, Tess, not Pandro Harlow. not that jerk. This I absolutely forbid, Tess----"

"What're you talking about, Sime? You don't know Pandro, do you?"

"I know enough about how he is with the girls, from the girls. The way he knocks off his lady patients in the name of therapy, this guy ought to be locked up."

"Well, he hasn't done any knocking off with me, and I can see you're awfully biased on the subject of Pandro, so let's not discuss him further. I'll just say the man I have in mind is not Pandro, it's somebody a lot closer to you, Foster Danelian."

"Foster."

"Yes, Foster Danelian."

"I see."

"You don't approve?"

"I wouldn't say I don't approve. I'm surprised, that's all."

"Foster certainly fits the bill in the respects you were mentioning. Sime. He teaches and paints nights and sleeps days, so it's fair to assume his sex timing would be pretty close to my sex timing. Also, he's definitely taller than I am."

"That's right, Tess."

"Also, these last weeks he's been giving me very intent looks, he practically eats me up with his eyes and that definitely interests me. Out of consideration for you, because I think so much of you and when I'm with you I'm with you period, I haven't looked back at him, but I've been aware of his salivation, if you can call it that, and I've found myself salivating some, too."

"That's certainly a good sign. I might point out further that though Foster's not a Negro, he's a lot darker than I am, he's got a noticeably dark aspect from his Lebanese origins, and that's to the good. Also, he's not Pandro Harlow, which is a plus."

"Foster's dark looks were what attracted me from the first, though naturally I put this out of my mind, being with you every time I saw Foster. But Sime, I don't want you thinking I'm ungrateful. I wouldn't want you feeling hurt because I never even considered your selection. If you think your selection stands up against my selection, why, tell me about him. Who'd you have in mind, Sime?"

"I don't think it's worth going into now, Tess. I think the move you've got in mind is a good one."

"No. look, I mean this, Sime, if this fellow stacks up in any way alongside Foster, of course I'm interested."

"My feeling is, Foster should work out fine, I'd say it's worth a real try."

"Wow, am I glad to hear those words from you, Sime! Oh boy, what a relief to get it out in the open! I swear, the way Foster's been looking at me I've been getting goose-pimples in the damnedest places! Boy, what a weight you've lifted from my shoulders! Think I'll give you a great big kiss for lifting all that weight off me!"

"Easy now, Tess. If we're going to be sequential, let's stay in sequence."

"Mm, touch me right here, yes. I don't think we're going against any of our convictions, Sime, I really don't think that. Here, mm, that's right."

"We shouldn't take one step forward and two steps back, Tess."

"Now here, yes. Let's take one little step back, come on. We can always come forward again. Yes, move around a little. Here's how I see it, Sime. You've got to know how absolutely I agree with you that when you're having one person you shouldn't have a second because that involves lying and spreading your energies thin. You know I'm with you on that. But you're not having this other girl yet, no, and I'm not having Foster yet, no, so it isn't as if we already took the steps, we're just thinking about taking them. Meantime we're right here where we always were, don't take your hands away. I'd like to say goodbye to you real nice, Sime, I feel sentimental about you, I'd like you to know what a big warm feeling I've got about you, yes, do that, please. Isn't it funny, Sime, yes, there, please, the way you came in here one midnight way back, oh, two months ago to look at my Amish bureau, say, there's a thought, we never did get around to deciding about that Amish bureau, do you still want it, tell you what, if you still have any use for the bureau for your shirts and things I'd be happy to give it to you, I don't use the thing and I'd like to make you a present of it to show what I think of you, don't say another word, it's yours, yes, Sime, right there----"

...

He saw Jordan Wherry just once. He took her to dinner at The Grotto. It was a disappointing evening. She said she'd been attracted to him, yes, that was why she agreed to have dinner with him. But some things were more important to her than passing attractions. The book Sex Without the Either-Or had been a revelation to her. Maybe the biggest thing to happen in her life since beginning to menstruate. She thought she could be somewhat freer orgasmically. Due to the book, she entered therapy with Pandro Harlow. Naturally she told him everything that was coming up in her life day by day. When he, Simon, came up, naturally she mentioned the dinner date to Pandro. Pandro took a very negative attitude toward Simon. As his patient hoping to become orgasmically freer, she naturally had to listen to him. Pandro Harlow said that emotionally blocked people such as ghostwriters, who couldn't even write under their own names, were dangerous and probably blocked in bed, too. If she wasn't going to listen to her own therapist----

...

The following week Pandro Harlow sent for Simon. It was a business meeting and he got right down to business.

"Sime, Sex Without the Either-Or is going great guns, it's selling like hot cakes."

"I'm glad it's a success both military and culinary."

"This just shows again what a mass market there is for the sex-liberationist psychology. It follows that we have a big responsibility, because we're the frontline spokesmen for this psychology. I mean to discharge that responsibility, Sime, I'm going to write another book under the title The Both-And Revolution in Sex, and I'd like you to start on it this week if possible."

"I'd like to help out in this work any way I can, Pandro, I really would, but I don't think I can take the assignment."

"Do you think you'd find it somewhat more possible if, in addition to the regular fee, I cut you in for twenty percent of royalties?"

"That would certainly make the project more inviting, Pandro, though the figure would have to be thirty percent, I already had it in mind that I would need at least a thirty-percent participation in royalties to keep my enthusiasm, but even so, I couldn't do it, the problem's not primarily money."

"What is it primarily, Sime?"

"I think you'll agree, Pandro, that in our sex-liberationist essays if we're not strictly scientific we're nothing, if we don't follow scrupulously scientific procedures we betray our trust."

"I've never deviated from scientific standards, Sime, you know that. I'm not writing from the uninformed layman's point of view, I have a Ph.D. in business administration and follow all the technical journals."

"The problem's not on your side, Pandro, it's on mine. This is a scientific collaboration. All right. That means that if we're not to violate the canons of science, there should be science backing up the source of the words as well as the source of the by-line. Well, as things stand now, there couldn't be any science backing up this particular source of words."

"Would you care to elaborate on that?"

"Sure, Pandro, I mean just this. The first rule of science, I think you'll agree, is that the man making the scientific judgment should restrict himself to firsthand observation, have ample field data at his command. Well, always in the past when I was writing this or that statement for you about this or that problem of sexual either-or. I had plenty of field data to draw upon, I mean, I was always involved with some girl and considering a second girl and therefore richly informed as to the either-ors. Recently, however. I had occasion to cut things off with one girl in anticipation of starting things with another girl, and it hasn't worked out, I lost the first girl but didn't start anything with the second. If I had both girls I'd be in the ideal position to write a book for you about the both-ands, and if I had either one or the other I would at least have some firsthand materials on the either-or problem to draw upon, which by extension would equip me to write about the both-ands. As things stand, though, I've got neither the one girl nor the other, so it's the neither-nors that I'm currently an expert on, and it would be very unscientific of me to take on an assignment to write about a matter essentially alien to me. I'm sorry, Pandro, truly, but I've never been the kind of writer who can write in a vacuum."

"I see. Just what is the problem with the girl you expected to start things with and didn't, Sime?"

"Well, she's somehow gotten the impression, I don't know where, that ghostwriters are less than adequate emotionally and maybe even sexually. That's shaken me quite a bit, I may even give up ghosting altogether, I don't like having my capacities questioned."

"You mustn't do that, Sime, you're outstanding in your profession and fill a definite need."

"That's what I always thought, Pandro, but apparently some people feel differently. The point is that I have needs, too, and sometimes they have to take priority."

"I think I appreciate your position. Sime. It can't be denied that we all have needs. Well, I see no reason for you to despair about this girl, Sime. Something might happen to make her see ghostwriters in a more positive light. I don't think you should lose hope about that, you know, faint heart ne'er and all that."

"My coronary situation is excellent. Pandro, but it can't prevail against certain stereotypes certain people absorb about people in my profession."

"It's an ancient and honorable profession, Sime, and stereotypes can be broken through. I suggest you give these particular stereotypes about a week to get broken through, and then contact the young lady again. I think there's a good chance you might get a more positive reaction."

"I certainly hope so, Pandro, that would inspire me to take on this new job with zest, and then I could follow scientific procedure, too, I'd have some pertinent field data."

"I can hope, then, that if things take a favorable turn with this girl you'll take the job?"

"I'll be delighted to have both the girl and the job Pandro, that's a situation that would really inspire me to write about the both-ands knowingly."

"You'll have your both-and situation, Sime. I want this book to be done as scientifically as possible."

"You know what I like about you, Pandro, you're neither unperceptive nor a bad loser."

Things worked out fine. Simon got his 30-percent cut of royalties and two weeks after he started work, Jordan moved in with him.

The Both-And Revolution in Sex was a runaway best seller, as it had every right to be.