Begin to Exit Here Read online

  But during the ball games it was occasionally useful to have studied literature, such as when one of the infielders missed a ground ball and I could say to whomever I was pouring a beer for: “He evidently believes a man’s reach should exceed his grasp.” Or one time when the Royals were playing the Yankees, whom Kansas Citians despised, and the Yankees were ahead by one run in the bottom of the ninth inning and the last Royal struck out, I was able to yell, “Rage, rage, against the dying of the ninth!”

  And now everything was ruined again, hopeless and wretched and other appropriate sentiments no one would pay you for knowing, because I was so desperate for work that I was applying to be the toll-free telephone operator at the most amusing and shameful business in Vermilion County: East of Eden Enterprises, a mail-order and catalogue pornography company. I never could be sure why so many people believed that pornography was insidious and evil. The one constant fact of history was copulation. Which reminded me of a good way to enrage people and get in serious trouble. In 1974 when I was a student at Rockwell College in Kansas City, a couple of the more orthodox students there, Catholics, too, were holding a maddeningly pretentious discussion on morality and literature and said Playboy magazine shouldn’t be regarded in any way as respectable, even if it published stories by Vladimir Nabokov or anyone else, because it was prurient and had photos of genitalia. I had a sudden insight and said, “What’s wrong with genitals? Even the pope has those.”

  It was an unwelcome insight, and although I was irrefutably right, one of the students grabbed me by my shirt and tried to throw me down. He yelled, “You son of a bitch!”

  “That’s not scripture,” I said, and put him in a head-lock until a Jesuit priest ran up and threatened to expel us. He asked who started the fight. Unfortunately the student who started the fight was still too angry to be rational, and he pointed violently at me and said, “He said the pope has reproductive organs!” Intelligently, the priest groaned and walked away. Maybe I shouldn’t have been in a Catholic school.

  The future was unavoidable and soon I was driving into the parking lot at East of Eden. I wished I still drank, so I could’ve had a glass of dry sherry before going in, to give me that fake peace and equanimity you can get from a sudden rush of alcohol. But I was starting to believe that being sober was more interesting, like when you’re a kid and the pure weirdness and wonder of the world swarms over you undiluted. Inside the building I met the vice president of the company, who I thought looked strange dressed in a blue business suit at a company that sold videos of naked people licking genitals. The interview was held privately in a windowless room that I noticed had samples of pastel rubbers and, on one wall, a Norman Rockwell calendar. The man looked at my job application and resumé, then, almost smiling, said, “Are you familiar with our product line and our mass market?”

  “Yes. You sell erotic materials,” I said, hoping to sound straightforward and pleasantly terse.

  “Correct,” he said. “For example, we sell therapeutic aids approved by marital counselors, such as three-speed vibrators.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Three speeds. You could get some mileage there.”

  “Indeed. Are you familiar with any of our catalogues?”

  “No, but I have a degree in English. I’m sure I could read them.”

  “All of our business transactions at East of Eden are conducted with full confidentiality and in accordance with all pertinent federal, state, and local regulations.”

  “Of course.”

  “We handle two-hundred to three-hundred phone calls a day from adults ordering primarily color videos of the full range of mature sexual possibilities, excluding any depictions of children, brutality, or domestic animals. We also provide a considerable supply of therapeutic aids used in private practice and national research, such as lifelike Amazon dildos, glow-in-the-dark condoms, portable, vibrating vaginas, and full-size, realistic sex dolls with hair and crack-resistant orifices.”

  “No one likes cracks,” I decided to say.

  The vice president almost looked directly at me, aiming his eyes slightly away, as if from modesty, and said, “Do you find any of this obscene?”

  “I’d say most of it’s obscene, but if the customers don’t mind it, you might as well sell it to them.”

  8

  Depression and shame leaked into me from the instant I was hired, and I imagined I felt like a whore, except a whore had a vagina and I didn’t, which made me say to myself, “See? I can’t even be a whore. The lowness of my condition doesn’t even have an appropriate name for it.” I tried to think of a word, a name, for the kind of person I was who, out of unavoidable desperation, accepted whatever depressing, useless, vile job came along.

  “A human,” I said. “That’s the kind of person I am.”

  When I got to Janice’s apartment that evening, she was slicing some fresh pork to fix us a Chinese dinner.

  “Oh boy. More southern food,” I said in a joking, very quiet voice.

  Janice hugged me and kissed me, leaning her head back and saying, “How’d my boy do today?”

  “Things went badly,” I said.

  “What happened?”

  “They hired me.”

  She smiled a little, gently. “But, Kurt, until another paper or somebody will hire you, you need a job.”

  “I’ll be selling pornography on the phone.”

  “Maybe I’ll call you at work and buy something,” she said, grinning at me affectionately. “What do you sell?”

  “Movies.”

  “Like Snow White?”

  “Not unless Snow White masturbates or something.”

  “Well. This is a strange job. Do they have any of those sicko bestiality videos?”

  “No. They don’t sell wildlife videos. I need to go sit down and feel awful for the rest of my life.”

  After dinner, when I was sitting morosely on the couch, drinking some Coke and smoking a cigarette and watching a documentary on public television about Amazonian piranhas biting each other’s fins off because it was easier than finding other fish, Janice put her head on my stomach and stretched out on the couch next to me, making me wonder if she was going to love me soon, and if I was already in love with her. I wanted it to happen, and I was going to pray then that we be allowed to love each other, but so many things had failed sadly in my life that I never prayed for a precise, exact thing anymore, especially a woman, because I was usually denied everything. So I prayed, Dear Jesus, let something good happen in my life. She’s here.

  “Your lips are moving,” Janice said on my stomach. “What are you saying?”

  I was afraid to tell her. We’d only known each other for three days, and even though we’d made love and we got along naturally, and whatever our days used to be they now were absorbed by each other. Maybe she’d think I was stupid for praying about her, or that I was some pathetic, maladjusted man, and possibly I was.

  “I can’t tell you,” I said, putting my hand on her cheek.

  “Then your lips were moving,” she said with mild pleasure. “I wasn’t sure. Were you talking to yourself? Tell me.”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Kurrrt, you don’t look happy. You look so damn sad. You’re not supposed to be sad after I fixed you Chinese food and you’re at my house holding me in your lap.” She grinned up at me and said, “Don’t you feel good with an adult woman’s head in your lap?”

  I smiled. “Yes.”

  “Then tell me what you were mumbling about. I’ve decided I want to know you as well as I can, so if you mumble to yourself, I want to know why.”

  “I wasn’t mumbling.”

  “But your lips were moving. That means you were saying something, like this,” she said, touching my bottom lip with her finger and moving my lip real lightly.

  I kissed her finger.

  “You’re a very stubborn man, Kurt. What were you saying?”

  So I decided to tell her, in an indirect way, and hope she’d like i
t.

  “I was talking to the son of God,” I said.

  Her eyes widened a little. “Jesus?” she said.

  “Ah. You know his name.”

  “What were you mumbling to Jesus?”

  “I can’t tell you. You’ll think I’m stupid.”

  “I will not. And if I do, I’ll lie to you and say it sounds intelligent.”

  “You’re funny.”

  “You’re pretty. I want to kiss your blue eyes. Now tell me what you were saying to Jesus, please.”

  “Okay. If you think you want to know me, you will.”

  “Of course I want to know you, dammit,” she said, rising up on her arm so her face was even with mine. “I wouldn’t tolerate you in my home like this if I didn’t want to know you, asshole. I wouldn’t let you see me with my clothes off three nights in a row if I wasn’t utterly, fully, wildly goddamn sure I want to know you. Do you understand?”

  “I think I sure as hell better,” I said, staring into her brown eyes and sighing.

  “Yes. You better,” she said quietly. “All right. Now you can tell me what you were saying, please.”

  “Okay.”

  She stared at me. “Kurt.”

  “Okay. I was praying. That’s all. I don’t go to church, for a lot of reasons, and I’m a heretic and I know I’m on my own and that’s fine. It doesn’t scare me very much, or at least I lie and say it doesn’t. But I still pray. I pray every day for things that matter, like you. So while you were lying down in my lap, it occurred to me, just suddenly, to pray that something would work, that maybe something really good could happen to me, and I wanted it to be you. That’s what I was doing. I prayed about you. So there.”

  I closed my eyes so Janice could look at me weirdly or anxiously and I wouldn’t have to see it. Now, now would be it. A small panic was settling into me for being honest, for telling this woman I’d only known for three days that I was praying about her.

  “Kurt,” she said, like she was identifying me, or finding me. “Kurt.” She put her arms behind my back and pulled herself around me, and as she briefly got on her knees to get a new and stronger grip on me, her feet apparently hit things on the coffee table because I heard my glass of Coke break on the floor and the ashtray fell off, but we weren’t in a cleaning mood, and Janice straddled me and pushed me down to the edge of the couch and was lying on me with her cheek pressing on mine as she held my head in both her hands and she said, “Kurt.” For a long time we just stayed that way, without talking or moving, and I quit wondering if I was going to be in love with her because I was light and warm and I felt like I was part of her body and part of her breath. It was too late to wonder anymore. She moved up on me far enough to kiss me, holding her lips on mine, kissing the top lip and then the bottom lip and then resting her face on mine, like there had been an exhausting struggle, a search, and now that it was over, we rested. She said, “You have to stay, now. You have to stay.”

  “Where would I go? You’re here.”

  She kissed my eye and my cheek and said, “I liked you right away when I first talked with you at Annie’s party. I was afraid you’d meet some other woman and like her more than me and you’d be gone. I wanted to take you home with me, like this. Kurt?”

  “What?”

  “Have you thought about falling in love with me?”

  “I think I already did.”

  “You think?”

  “You’re right. Thinking doesn’t do any good. Love isn’t rational. Neither am I.”

  “I’m not rational, either. I think I’ll be in love with you before I blink again.”

  “Blink,” I said.

  I felt her smile on my cheek. “I blinked,” she said.

  “Will you make me stay, now?”

  “I won’t make you do anything.”

  “Then I’m forced to stay voluntarily.”

  “Do you want to make love here, or in the bed?” she said.

  “Both.”

  “That’s the same choice I was going to make. Take off my blouse.”

  “I’m not wearing it,” I said, and we both started laughing, which, because we were so close, made us bonk our foreheads together. The pain wasn’t that severe, and as I kissed Janice’s forehead to repair the injury, I unbuttoned her blouse and unfastened her bra, and I just sighed to see her smiling at me and there were her two breasts, and we weren’t embarrassed or hurried.

  “I tingle when you look at me,” she said.

  “I do, too.”

  Slowly pushing me back down with my head on the cushion at the end of the couch, she kneeled over me with her breasts above my face and her legs at my waist, then put my hand on the snap of her shorts.

  “You’re not finished,” she said.

  “Oh, God.”

  “You don’t need to pray this time,” she said. “And I’m glad you did.”

  As I kissed one of her breasts and pulled her shorts down and then her panties, sliding them along the smoothness and warmth of her thighs, she lifted each knee briefly to pull her shorts and panties off completely. Her breathing quickened, and so did mine, and before I could unbutton my pants, she moved up on her knees directly over my chest, lowering herself so I could kiss the insides of her thighs. She made a moaning sound, like a girl, lowering herself a little more, until my lips were in the warm, soft dark of her.

  9

  Nothing was more depressing than to be thirty-six, look at your life, and realize you’d reached a workable level of ruin. As a white, male infant born in America during the national copulation project following World War II, when men and women who had postponed sex until toppling the Nazis and the Japanese then resumed the universal urge to make love until exhaustion or daylight intervened, I was ostensibly born with unlimited and unfair privileges. That is, I was white, and I had a penis. Those qualities alone had been enough to assure happy measures of money and power and dominance for millions of white men, and out into the patriarchal workplace I, also, was supposed to go, exploiting and oppressing and, like a cheerful Walt Disney character, whistling as I oppressed. The occasionally provable but also mythical advantages of being a white guy in America were so commonly known and analyzed by the 1970s and 1980s that, sometimes when I’d been applying for jobs then, I imagined just saying to the interviewer: “I don’t need a resumé. I’m white and I have a dick.”

  But I was born naive, a disorder more disabling than leukemia, which my father pointed out to me in 1972 when, instead of going to college to study engineering or computers or business, I told him I was going to study English. He looked across the table at me in the dining room of the Kansas City Club, where we were having a family dinner to celebrate my graduation from high school, and said, “English? You already know English. We taught that to you when you were a boy.”

  “I’m going to study literature,” I said.

  “Literature?” he said with scathing distaste, like a bug was on his tongue. “Good Lord, boy. We didn’t win World War II and invent nuclear missiles to make the world safe just so people could read goddamn books.”

  “He’s going to be a writer, Daddy,” Kristen said, smiling at me.

  “We don’t need any more writers,” my father said. “We’ve already got Herman Melville and Mark Twain.”

  “They’re dead,” I said.

  “Dead writers are fine. They write the best stories,” my father said.

  My mother said, “I don’t think Kurt wants to be a dead writer, dear, do you, Kurt?”

  “Not right away,” I said.

  Kristen smiled.

  “Well, you’re an endlessly naive son of a bitch if you want to waste your life studying literature,” my father said.

  “I think how Kurt wastes his life is up to him,” Kristen said. “Someday he’ll be more famous than Dostoyevski.”

  My father scowled at Kristen and said, “Who’s that? Some Soviet defense minister?”

  “No. He’s a famous dead writer,” I said.

  �
�See what literature leads to? Death,” my father said.

  It didn’t lead to death in my case. It only led to anxiety and despair, like being fired from the newspaper, having absolutely no savings, and being forced, out of ugly practicality, to take a job as the toll-free telephone operator who helped the glorious tenets of American capitalism by selling anal-intercourse videos that I didn’t think Patrick Henry died for. While I was talking morosely about this with Janice one night, I said, “As an instrument of capitalism, the penis is overrated.”

  “It has other uses,” she said, patting my leg. “You never really believed your penis was going to get you a job.”

  I sighed and said, “No. In fact, in all of the cover letters and resumés I’ve sent off in renewed futility this week, I don’t even refer once to my dick. I’m too depressed.”

  Janice hugged me and rocked me and gently laughed in my ear.

  “You’re a treasure,” she said.

  “Spend me,” I whispered.

  “Oh, I will,” she said, pushing her cheek against mine and rocking me some more, and I wanted my heart to merge into hers, but there were ribs in the way.

  I held her and said, “Janice? Do you want to become one with me?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “There’s bones in the way.”

  “That’s so you can get a grip,” she said.

  10

  My crucial break allowing me to resume my damaging career in journalism and acquire important experience I didn’t want came to me over the toll-free number at East of Eden. It was an ordinarily slow morning, the time of day when most Americans hadn’t had enough time yet to become prurient and depraved and phone in orders for such movies as Debbie Eats Every Man in Dallas. To show my boss, Mr. Holstner, that I had a superior grasp of erotic cinema, I suggested that morning while we were both drinking coffee that we could have some attractive and morally neutral woman at the University of St. Beaujolais star in a film we’d produce called Debbie Puts Fort Worth in Her Mouth.

  Mr. Holstner smiled grimly. “We don’t do production. Just sales,” he said.