In the spring, my roommate, Joe Adler, gave up his dreams of a free and independent life as an artist after all. His mama had won. She found Joe a well-paying position in Yonkers, and he decided to give up his part of the apartment, and I, mad fool that I am, was suddenly overcome with a desire to take the whole place for myself.

At first Jenny didn't approve. "How are you going to pay for it, Edward?" she reasonably observed when I first told her of my intention. "You don't have a regular job."

Jenny didn't realize that she was in fact going to pay the one hundred and sixty dollars for the other half of the apartment. For I was sure I could easily hook her, so to speak, on the idea of our sharing the apartment together, the apartment serving as a kind of prologue to our shared family life, a place where our children could perhaps play someday. "Our own apartment."

Ours or not, I still had no intention of giving Jenny a key to it. Hell no!

Mama Jenny's maternal heart was of course unable to resist the temptation of having her own nest. Within a few days I had, in addition to my study and bedroom, my own living room with four windows.

My relations with Sarah developed, unfortunately, along the same lines they had with my other girls; that is, she gradually started to irritate me. I was tired of her. When we fucked, I sensed even through my marijuana or alcoholic stupor that she was giving herself to me and was moved by me, which is something I can't stand, in fact. I hate it when other people love me but I don't love them. Looking at her with as unprejudiced and sober an eye as possible, I suddenly realized that she wasn't pretty enough for me. Maybe I understood that earlier too, but the feverish state of mind I was in whenever I grabbed whatever cunt happened to be available just to keep from being alone and masturbating, and suffering the anguish of not having anybody to stick my prick into or take at least a modicum of animal warmth from — that state of mind had passed.

Sarah now seemed to me to be just a crude little slut from Brooklyn — crude and uncultivated, fussy and loud.

She would flop down in my apartment and throw on the floor her trashy boots, underpants, stockings, and other awful things which I turned away from in embarrassment and distaste, just as I had from my mother and her feminine secrets when we lived together in the same room.

Once Sarah appeared at my door in a very agitated state. Rushing in, she immediately demanded bourbon and announced that she was very hysterical that day. She was pretty hysterical every day. Downing the bourbon and pushing her wig back from her forehead, she told me with an insane gleam in her eye that she had gone to see about a job and that the man doing the hiring had made her pull up her skirt and expose more of her bosom.

I said, "I hope he was satisfied; you have nice breasts." And she really did have nice breasts, small and well-formed.

"Really, Edward?" she asked, becoming excited. "You really think I have nice breasts?"

"Yes," I said, "you really do." I didn't add that in my opinion her temperament was too loud and screwed-up; I just said, "Sarah, I'm hungry!" And that was the honest truth too. I didn't have any money and had been dreaming since morning of how nice it would be to have a piece of meat. I could have gone to Jenny's, but I couldn't take that crazy woman with me.

Sarah didn't have any money either, as she happily informed me.

"Let's fuck then," I said, and we went into the bedroom. But it didn't work; Sarah simply radiated craziness that day, and she kept giggling in a silly way. I gave up trying to fuck her and went back into my living room to make myself a drink. When I came back, she was naked and bending over like a monkey to cut her toenails.

"Sarah, it's vulgar to stick out your cunt and cut your nails in front of somebody you love."

"Edward, you're so petit bourgeois!" she retorted, continuing to cut her toenails.

"All right, so what if I am, but you look gross," I said.

She continued to cut her toenails anyway, chattering about something which I stopped listening to, and then she sprawled out on my bed, covering herself up a little, and put her dirty feet on my pillow. I'm not particularly squeamish, but I thought in puzzlement, What the fuck is the little slut lying around here for? What is she doing here? And then I said out loud that I had to meet some friends for dinner and that I couldn't take her with me.

Sarah grew sad and said that she was leaving too, but she had to make a phone call first. "Is that all right?" she asked.

"Of course it is," I said, and sat down at my desk as if I were going to write something…

Despite my indifference to her, Sarah still continued to play a role in my life for a long time. Long after Jenny had left and the traces of other less remarkable girls in my life had grown cold, Sarah still turned up in my bed now and then. Maybe the hope of obtaining me blazed up in her again from time to time. She really tried to win me. Even after I had grown completely insolent and sent her as a sort of living present to a friend of mine who had just arrived from Europe and was living by himself on Madison Avenue and didn't know anybody in New York and didn't have anybody to fuck, Sarah went obediently. I've already said that Sarah was open to any experiment.

We broke up just recently. After supper at P. J. Clark's, we came back to the millionaire's little house and climbed into bed, either to fuck or to sleep. But Sarah was so drunk and stoned that her Brooklyn upbringing started to come out. She accused me of greed (!), of having a middle-class mentality (!), and of other terrible sins as well, and shouted "Shit!" and "Fuck!" and laughed hysterically. She drove me into such a rage with her crazy behavior that I threw her out without fucking her. I am, when it comes down to it, the servant of millionaires. I have rich neighbor-whores living next door to me who sometimes even allow themselves to call up on the phone during parties given by my employer and complain about the noise. I don't much care for noise myself, and so in a fury I hit her naked body and threw her out on the street at three o'clock in the morning. I made her pick up all her rags, and I threw her out without even screwing her. I said, "Get the fuck out of here right now!"

Sarah looked at me with reproachful, sobered eyes and said over and over again, "Edward, aren't you ashamed of yourself! Aren't you ashamed of yourself!" I was ashamed, but I had decided to punish her.

A few days after that episode, I received a letter in the official envelope of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Sarah was working as a photographer. The letter was a remarkable one, and it was obvious that Sarah really did love me, so bitter was her farewell: