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“Well,” he says; “what are you staying around here for? You got what you came for, now get out.”

So I get out. I do not know exactly how I feel, it is not precisely liberated but then, as my own articles in the newspaper have pointed out, too much liberation at a single time would undoubtedly kill us. It is better to take things in small doses. Unconsciously I have been limping, I realize. The desk clerk gives me a knowing, sideways look as I stagger past him and I push my stride into its usual free-form float as I hit the pavement, although unquestionably my toe
does
now ache a bit as I come into Greenwich Village.

The vegetable man is standing by his cart mumbling as I pass. No one is around him. All of his produce seems to be gone; all that remains on the cart are some wrinkled ears of corn, a few brown radishes and a rotting pumpkin, a face carved into it in an inept rotting grin which seems, eyeless, to wink at me as I pass.

My foot tingles unpleasantly for several days thereafter and I go in for epsom salt baths. They do no particular good but induce sufficient tenderness and sensitivity in the foot as a whole to make the toe no longer an object of special concern.

Tony from the Bronx has a new system. His brother has been fired from the racing sheet in a general shake-up and cutback maneuver which is part of the economic depression, and now Tony will play on his own hunches and inspiration. “He was never any good anyway, the lousy son of a bitch,” he confides to me over the phone. “Every now and then he’d give you a little something but more often than not it would pay a low price or lose; and the real good stuff he was always holding back for himself. He was the same way when we were kids; I was a couple years younger than him, and I was always getting the girls that he dumped. By the time he ran through them, they wasn’t good for nothing. I was running on seconds; until I was twenty years old I thought they was loose inside.” Tony has an excellent hunch that Prophet’s Bell in the feature will run in at 7–1 or more. He wants me to go out and play a $100 to win for him and apply the profits to his bill if he collects; otherwise I can carry it on for him. And he will, of course, pay my car expenses, admission and even a very small lunch.

“But listen,” I point out to him, “I don’t want to go there anymore. I don’t want to run your bets, Tony. I’m a publisher; not a runner. I’ve got better things to do in the afternoon than run out to Aqueduct.”

“It isn’t Aqueduct any more, you dummy, it’s Belmont. They run at Belmont until the middle of October and
then
they go to Aqueduct because that’s the winter track. You don’t keep up, do you?”

“I’m not a horseplayer. I really don’t find that it interests me. If it’s all the same to you, Tony, I’d just as soon not be a runner.”

“Now you listen to me, kid,” Tony says over the phone in a rather ugly tone of voice; although I have never seen him (this is a fact), I can picture the convolutions on his face as he gathers the mouthpiece close to his lips. “You listen to me; I been floating your lousy stinking little operation up here on the Concourse for two years. If it wasn’t for me you wouldn’t
have
a Bronx circulation. Everything you make out of the Bronx, every penny, you owe to me, and furthermore I got contacts in Brooklyn and Richmond Hill, too. I can cut you off just like that, you understand me?”

“I understand you.”

“Listen, kid,” Tony says, “I really don’t like to talk to you like this. It breaks my heart. You seem to be a nice kid from our conversations and you got a nice little rag there; nothing sensational, you understand, but a lot of fun, and personally I enjoy reading it. I don’t mind pushing it around. But you got to understand in this business exactly who your distributor is and what he means to you and what he can do, and you got to show a little common respect. Now I’ve taken it easy with you because you obviously ain’t been around very much yet and a lot of these things you got to pick up by being in earshot. But sooner or later, you got to get the point across. It really hurts me to have to talk to you like I did. Make believe I didn’t, huh? Just forget the whole thing.”

“All right,” I say. “It’s forgotten.”

“Just go out there and bet the horse for me and I’ll finance a little bet for you, too. Say you put five on his nose and charge it on my account. Win
or
lose. If he comes in, you can get to keep everything, even the original five. All right?”

“All right, Tony,” I say.

“That’s a good kid. And you can call me from a luncheonette outside the track right after the race and tell me how it all worked out. I don’t like to wait for the wire, it takes forty-five minutes and gets you all distracted. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“What I think you ought to have in that sheet if you don’t mind my saying so, is more young girls. I mean, a distributor just takes the stuff out, he doesn’t have the expertness that you have and I don’t want to presume because you probably got a hell of a lot more education than I do, but I got good taste and I know what really interests people. You ought to get some young girls in that sheet, like thirteen, fourteen years old, you know what I mean? Young stuff with just half-formed titties spreading it open for you. That’s what the guys like to see. They don’t like to look at a whole lot of hippie whores about forty years old.”

“I appreciate that, Tony,” I say, “but there are certain problems when you start printing pictures of kids. They can get you for corrupting the morals of minors and so on, even if you have signed releases. Of course we can try to get some models who
look
like kids and get them in there. I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Well, sure. Whatever you say. You’re gonna make that bet for me now, are you?”

“Yes,” I say, “I’ll make the bet for you.”

I hang up the phone after more courtesies and editorial comment and get my coat and go off to the track. At least the job as it has been developed leaves you with a certain mobility, there is no question of that. It is a long drive to Belmont — much longer than to Aqueduct — and I lose my way several times, but I manage to get there by the seventh race and put a hundred on Prophet’s Bell for Tony, five on Prophet’s Bell for myself. Then I stand in the garden, drinking beer under the toteboard, waiting for the call and hoping that the horse will lose. If it loses I can look forward to less Belmont errands in the future.

The horse wins and pays $9.60. A lot of people seem to have been in on the information. I apply the three hundred and eighty dollars profit to Tony’s bill but it turns out that he still owes us several thousand dollars. I begin to have a vague understanding of how Tony plans to work that off and of who exactly is going to do the working for him.

New sales figures, tentative, but highly trustworthy, indicate that circulation has dropped off alarmingly within the past month; from 110,000 to 80,000 or perhaps even a little less. Everyone seems at a loss to understand this; the newspaper has remained in the same format for two years and the quality of the last issues did not vary from the standard we have established. It is true that the book reviewer quit, saying that he had run out of books to review, but this can hardly be called an outstanding feature and otherwise the mix has held to its previous level.

I have a series of conferences with myself — there is really no one ese to talk to about this, Virginia is nothing more than a secretary and the faggarts are purely mathematical types — and decide that I can do nothing but ride on as before. The basic soundness of the package has been proven, even if the District Attorney took some of the strength out of it at the beginning. Perhaps it is a reflection of the overall economic situation and people, cutting back on their purchases, are reusing materials to jerk off to. This is plausible and means that when the stock market and employment begin to curve upward again, masturbation will begin to occupy its role once again as a joyous release in the lives of our consumers and sales will move far beyond the initial curve.

Part of the problem could be solved by a sophisticated advertising campaign to upgrade masturbation; make it as status-mobile an activity as full-dress suits and new automobiles. There is no reason why a persuasive, well-researched advertising campaign could not accomplish this within a very few months — the potential is certainly there — but we simply lack any kind of a budget for promotion of this sort and will have to make do with our present standing.

The afternoon after my conference, I fuck Virginia savagely and she takes it all without making a sound.

Virginia announces she is quitting. She has found an interesting job as promotional director of a magazine for college girls and in addition is beginning to become bored with her work here which, she now feels, never gave her a true creative outlet. “I’m just fortunate,” she says when she breaks this news to me at the end of work one day, “that they didn’t hold my experience here against me. I mean, I couldn’t conceal it or anything; I had to tell them what I’d been doing for the last year and a half, I couldn’t say I was traveling
all
that time. But you know something? They kind of liked it. They didn’t think there was anything wrong with it at all. Of course I told them that I was the editor; I know you’ll back me up if they check. I’m starting a week from Monday. They want to start a new campaign then, so I can only give you a week and half’s notice. That’ll be all right though, won’t it? I mean, it’s not as if you’ll have trouble finding someone who can do the job just as well as I can.”

All of this is said with such stunning casualness that it takes me aback, leaves me for one of the few times in my life without anything approximating an attitude. Furthermore, she has already put on her coat and is obviously in the process of leaving, casting distracted glances toward the door, chewing gum (a new habit). “But for God’s sake, Virginia,” I finally say, “what about us? What about what we have between us? Surely you can’t walk out on — ”

“Oh, listen, Walter,” she says, “about that. I’ve been meaning to say something for quite a little while now but I thought you understood so I didn’t have to. I mean, it doesn’t matter, Walter. You go through certain things in life; they’re all stages, you follow what I mean? First this stage and then that stage and then you wind up where you’re going, or maybe you never do, you just keep on changing. Anyway, it was all part of a stage here: working for you, having sex with you and so on, but I’m kind of out of that bag now. I’m interested in like other things and I’ve got to move on.”

“But Virginia — ”

“Oh, look,” she says, “for heaven’s sake, Walter, it doesn’t have anything to do with
that
if that’s what’s on your mind. We can go right on fucking until I leave. I’m not cutting you off or anything like that; even when I’m in the new place we can see each other now and then. We can ease out of it gradually if that’s how you want it to be. But of course it’s best that it end sooner or later.”

“But you wanted to get married. I was even going to break up with my wife, we were — ”

“Oh,” she says, “oh, that part. Well, that’s insecurity, Walter, that’s all it was; I come out of this very rigid background full of guilt, you see, where sex was ugly and dirty and I could only enjoy it if I felt it was sanctified or something. Like if we were going to get married. But I’m getting over a lot of those hang-ups now, I really am. I’m just as glad you played me along the way you did because it would have been a really bad scene if you had gotten divorced; I don’t want to get married now after all. I’m just beginning to live. I think that the whole thing worked out the best way, and anyway your wife must be a very nice girl.”

“I can’t spare you, Virginia.”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous. You can spare me very nicely. You can get in some very pretty girl here who can do everything that I was doing and probably even better because she’d have less hang-ups. But I’ve got to move on. Stages, you know? It’s time for a new thing.”

“I know who it is,” I say. “You’ve been talking to those two accounting bastards. I should have known it all along. They’ve filled you full of this crap, they’ve been whispering to you like old ladies — ”

“They happen to be very nice people and I’m disgusted with you, Walter,” she says; “and if you do anything to Don or Jim because you think that they’re to blame I’m going to get very upset, I’m going to have to talk to a few people about you. They’re very good friends of mine but that’s all they are. There are all kinds of relationships between men and women, you know, and sex is just one part; there can be lots of other things, too. But they’ve had nothing to do with my trying to get this new job; I decided that all on my own.”

“I’ll call them,” I said. “Tell me who you’re going to work for, and I’ll call them and kill you for the job. I’ll tell them that you were our model. That we’ve published your cunt in every centerfold for two years, your cunt hanging out through your fingers.”

“Don’t be crude, Walter; it isn’t like you at all. Anyway, they may really be calling you to check, and if you say a single thing like that to them it’ll get back to me and I’ll have to get very unpleasant, Walter. You listen to me, I’ll have to get very unpleasant.”

“You can’t do this to me.”

“Just cut it out, Walter. I’ve been working here for two years, don’t you think I know what’s been going on? I’m a college graduate, I keep my eyes open. I read a few files here and there, I keep up contacts. I know what you’ve been up to. Don’t even make me say it. Don’t even make me
hint
it. But you don’t want to make any trouble for me at all, Walter. You really wouldn’t be smart even thinking about it. Oh, dear, I really meant what I said; I wanted this to end pleasantly and I’d be happy to go on having sex with you, but I can see that you don’t want it that way at all. You don’t have to look at me that way you know, you haven’t exactly been walking on water for the last couple of years.”

“You bitch,” I say. It is quite a rare lapse of control; this kind of thing is not my style at all. “You lousy bitch. How could you do this to me?”