With Ora in New York—in 1956—far from Nonie in Alton in 1932 and the early specifics of pain—I am in the invented unreason of love with the past left behind like an acquaintance who has moved away and who writes and calls irregularly. I am twenty-six; one’s youthful self is burning in the heavyish wind of one’s momentum—one is aflame a bit, in a way, in the narrow streets of Manhattan among the car fumes and in the sight of others and their judgments.
At this time my life felt dreamed to me, dreamed by others as well as by me, while being clearly, achingly, brightly real, a shiny and civilized actual life, shopwindow-mirrored, and daily experience here near the dreamed-of skyline and in real air.
Tonight Ora wept in her sleep. I was awake and lying beside her, nude, reading a book I didn’t like, making theories about why it was bad, drawing contingent conclusions about its notions and its technical lacks . . . And I was thinking about fame as a branch of politics and about prowess at making money as a branch of good sense and about determining opinions and setting ranks for things as they come into existence in the culture as a curious branch of ambition. And what flashed into my mind for a tiny portion of a moment was that it was Nonie who was weeping. I knew it wasn’t Nonie. I knew by then in my life that my mind played games, that my mind, my memory—even my prick—my eyesight, my speech and dexterity at games—each of my attributes had a degree of independence from my direct will. My self, mysterious and busy, manages to function almost as a junior commander—at least, mine did. I repeat: I was twenty-six years old.
It seemed that one’s basic self was Nonie-esque, or Ora’s was; and Ora and I had graduated, not quite to selflessness, but to something in regard to one another; and she might grieve for any of a number of reasons . . . But for that graduation, that nakedness of dependence, she might grieve over that, particularly . . .
It was rational, but it wasn’t any sort of solid thing of a sensible sort, the queer presence of Nonie in that intimate moment; her brief presence was more a bodiless film, a definition of the human (and of possibility and of despair)—it defined us as imperfect.
Or as not-angels.
It seemed an important negation, semi-hallucinatory, scary—that Nonie was in my head. My independence seemed slight, at least in the rush of the ‘truth’ if I can call it that—of exigencies of breathing and of sanity, so-called, in the real world. I cannot readily believe that I am alive. Or that I am real to others. I am startled that I have lived long enough that how I feel about things is a grown-up matter. I never expected to last to this age. Ora, weeping in her sleep, is lying partly on top of me, asleep, and not a small woman, and saltily weeping. Ora, almost every night really, that year, sleeps on top of me. Was it that Nonie-in-me persecuted Ora? Did Ora pay because of my past with Nonie? For a brief, escaped, maybe ludicrous and pointless fragment of time, I saw Ora as Nonie-esque herself—not entirely—but would I have loved her otherwise? It is Ora weeping—unheartbrokenly—industriously . . . Ruminatively. When I say Ora slept-on-top-of-me, I mean, really, her torso rested, most of it, not on the mattress but on me—on my ribs, my legs. Ora is five seven or so, a biggish young woman, and big-boned. She is boldly bony. And a good sleeper. I was reading (as I said) and she was deep inside her body beside me, asleep. She stirred, and then, in her sleep, she moved a silken-skinned, fine-limbed arm over me—my ribs, my chest, my neck. Dreaming flutters in her veins, in her fingers. The ache of someone else’s reality being near me hustles me into feeling my own ignorance—it is my ignorance that seems solid to me, to be my bones and reliable, to be like the banks for a creek that rushes by me in the dark. My ignorance seems untime-ridden but it is time-ridden . . . It was my degree of ignorance-that-night that heard Nonie crying in Ora.
Knowledge in an actual moment shivers and shimmers—and changes. Are you decisive? Knowledge has a feel: moist and dark, a slippery darkness, or eellike, or like a ghost—or an unsteady light . . . The contingent rebelliousness of the light of opinion: everyone attacks my opinions. The absurd adventure of paying attention to what one thinks, that means having a career, that means being a grown-up in a scale of would-be masterful agency and urgency—a childhood sense—but this refers to one’s present size and one’s present circumstances.
The knowledge comes to a child as if in a vacant lot in a permanent twilight, probably uncertainly wondering what happens if one is right, wondering at the metallic electricities of the mind, wondering if one is crazy.
I never saw Nonie cry. I wanted to look inside Ora’s head to see what she felt—if her crying in her sleep was related to something in Nonie. Was she like Nonie? I wanted to know with some certainty what her lying on top of me signified. And her tears. My knees ached with my sense of vulnerability at my being ignorant and susceptible to accusations of ignorance . . . Do I love her? This goes to my knees; my knees get shaky. I don’t know enough to answer . . . In the end, I don’t know much . . .
The week before, I had been reading The Great Gatsby again, a young man’s book. Young Fitzgerald, in his twenties then, had written of glamour. Ignorance was not glamourous or was it? And Ora’s leg, which was lying like a drugged boa constrictor without scales or menace, on top of mine, moved. I was prickly with restlessness at our closeness—the remembered text in the mind and the one I was reading that night more erratically like the sight of trees in an orchard in winter when one is running down a row of them, between two rows of trees, actually, twigs and wintry light like the alphabet and words. And this other moving, shifting thing of the flesh, of our bodies, hers and mine in contradistinction . . . Her leg lifted a bit and climbed and swung itself over my farther knee and the lower thigh counting from the central Rome of my face. Her sleeping, warm-skinned leg lay across both my legs, pinning me. Absurd. Was this the association with Nonie? I laughed a little. Ora was socially unlike Nonie. Ora’s father owned a house in New York in the Village and a shabby plantation with a run-down house and half a dozen tenants’ cabins on it—this was on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. One of her grandmothers had a large place on an island near Cuttyhunk. And the other a handsome little place on the top of a ridge in Connecticut. Sometimes her smell—actually, the array of her odors suggested, or even were, those of places and things such as those places, places where she had lived—dim rose-garden odors or budded oak-leaf smells or an odor of something like locust bark and a lawn—the smells of different parts of her body. Odors from her grandmothers’ houses—of sheets aired in the sun and salt air and I don’t know what, woods and a quarry pond—and me in “love” and caught between intimate things and large things: now the odor of nipples—of armpits—of abdominal skin . . . Her lower self was delicately semi-squeezed by her bent behind in its ladyish amplitude against me; she shifted her weight in her sleep, pressing heavily on one cupped wing of my pelvis behind the surface of skin and muscle. She was arched, one leg still on the mattress and one arm and most of the rest on me.
Distant states of intimacy and an accompanying world of discourse and opinion, inward shouts, inner exclamations, interior whispers—and accompaniment inside my head—as mysterious in me as in her. Further motions hide a certain shabby interest.
The nerves, the mouthy eyes (eating the sight of her) relay to noisy surfaces in the mind, decoded, half-interpreted sexual thoughts which echo as if they were inside tunnels of comparison or in mineshafts of associations. She moved thoroughly on top of me, her odors, heats, bones, flesh, body orifices, protrusions. And mine. One notices this stuff. I grunted with the reality. Naked and slightly odorous—and more than a little available sexually in her sleep—she breathed; her muscles, the exudations . . . her odor . . . An almost farfetched suppleness possessed her in her sleep.
Her sleep is altered by what we are to one another.
Naked Ora. Naked Wiley. But then she wept—in her tampered-with sleep.
“Ora! Ora!” I whispered and then I spoke more loudly. I was unsure what I was feeling. “Love”—intimacy—as a slightly foreign consternation,
a little boring, perhaps; hallucinations are approaching, real to the flesh, perhaps, but are they welcome just now? Like a general observing the topography of a place, I observed her from above although I was mostly under her, but an aerial view is what I had, as if I were floating in the dark air outside the sphere of light around me and her in the bed. She was faintly on her side but her shoulders and cunt were flatly on top of me. Sexual hallucination hummed quietly in me—or imagination, if you prefer. Her arm that extended over my chest touched the bed on the other side of me: that arm rested on the side of its wrist. Her hand was bent ineffectually and curled upward into the air. And her breasts and ribs, the odd skin-covered motioniness of that warm and complexly vibrating and slightly oozy-tissued and somewhat hottish group of structures pressed against my own chest—my half-athletic, pectoralled, sometimes-praised chest . . . I mean some kids at college had commented on it. But I was saying her torso on me was warm, or even hot. There was her futilely cupped and sleeping hand; and here was her hair—long, straight, dark hair—some of it in my mouth and on my eyelids and tangled in my eyelashes and tickling my ears . . . Her head rested on my neck—and partly on my chin and lower cheek. I bent my lips sideways to kiss her hair and forehead experimentally. In those days, I often prayed usually for the will and stamina to see to it that an outcome to events did not come about only through my weaknesses. Now I prayed more questioningly: Is this going to turn out okay? For me, for her—for long-term designs of history or Deity toward meaning. Give me a sign—if you can bear to. What does she want? (Ora.) Partly that meant what-did-she-intend . . . Her breath, her mouth—are a giant, fluttering moth—are an infant thing.
Me as waker and her sleeping, I was aware, tremendously, of the tremendous opposition between our states—it is almost as if we had two different kinds of flesh. Or money and fame as wakefulness and flesh as sleep . . . And then the thought past the one of Dear God, I don’t understand my life, to the sense that truth and a book were all very well but reality was real. This wasn’t as simpleminded as it sounds since I’d been advised, perhaps dishonestly, of one’s greatness, so to speak . . .
I am here in the moment; her breath flicks—on my skin—it is Ora’s breath. Her breast moves wobblingly with her breath. Her left nipple presses and recedes beneath my right nipple. Is this love? Is this true love? Am I lucky? Are we part of A REAL LOVE STORY? Her breath in the odd silence of the room has in it that further odd quality of sleep—of innocence . . . I am less suspicious of her than when she is awake. The peculiar unevenness of her uneven breaths in the shatteringly empty silence of her inattention, it was as if one exploded rhythmically in a confused dreaming about her when one was awake. Her body is a softish, anatomical coral reef in which bits of dream flittered . . . Not innocent? Adult and meritorious in the world? Her sleep is a form of truce, an unconscious scrimshaw of breath, semi-peaceful, an artifact of a false peacetime.
I am a bony young man. Her distance—from me, inside her sleep—marks an actual vulnerability: I am not afraid of death, Wiley. She has said that but I know she is afraid of death . . . I know she is afraid of it sometimes—does her fearfulness stop entirely when she sleeps? The factual part of the moment allowed me no observation of this fearlessness in Ora. The sun, the season, the climate of the moment, Ora with her faint veining of peace and then the graining of restlessness-in-sleep and of past stuff between us and then on, by association, to Nonie are an obscurity that becomes an insanity of tickling her, half waking her. I push her off me. Me breathing through my nose and only half noticing this idle, unwicked, uncivil contact with her body, her dreams. I am fastidious as a villain. Unmasculine. Unable to live. My own sane, separate, somewhat desperate, but unpersuaded breathing is unlike hers . . . I wait for her to wake . . . The twin elements of plausibility and of wish are loosened in her . . . This thing of being merely real—whether I am or not—is like holding onto a dock when you are swimming at night, say. To understand, to see, to feel, as (now) half-asleep with obscure impulses and concerns about personal meaning is to feel privately, uncorrectly that I love her: it balloons in a vacuum of no comparison with her feelings, in a vacuum of her not being there. Its quality as feeling is thicker but less actual than feelings I have when she is awake.
She and I as embodiments of romantic or sexual love: well, I am unpersuaded of our fatedness; but as revealed now, tonight, in the reality of this intimate moment, in the light of this intimacy we have, I am persuaded of life’s offering me a momentarily happy ending which is remarkable.
Or not a happy ending but an episode of Reward (with some penalties built in).
What, as I blinked and breathed, was real in bed—on the white sheet alongside the partly-wakened brown-skinned (dark-complexioned, tanned) Ora, her weight, her breath touching me—and she was already shifting her weight onto me again—was not that the moment announced itself as supposedly happy, or happy (or as something in between), it had announced itself as redolent of, or stained with, Nonie-in-the-past: or as if rectifying the past. Ora is weeping in her sleep a second time, and her leg is on top of my leg and her head is on my chest and neck again. The nature of the self now—one’s self as Dearly Beloved, one’s first child—does not permit a sacrament of escape. One is anxious to have one’s experiences. This is not an idolatry of the real so much as it is an attempt to locate (or just to peek at) earthly meaning. A breast squunched against an abruptly self-consciously flexed pectoral, her nipple moving on my skin—as does her sleeper’s breath . . . a continuing somber hilarity . . . really a seriousness, her hair, youthful and rich, she is part of me, my hand strokes the fine hair of her upper legs, touches the magically darker, wounding reality of her hairy cleft, moistly sweaty, oiled . . . ready . . . I do see that I am, for a while, here with this extraordinarily beautiful woman whom I distrust.
I pushed her away. I built a barrier of pillows, all the while breathing with sexual lightness, that approximately earnest unlaughing giggle of sexual authority that contradicted the tonality of not-fucking and which suggested the different—and other—hilarity of the act which one is holding back from.
Her prompt encroachment on the pillows—was it heat? companionship? that drew her? She proceeds with unalert wit: a sea anemone, a dreaming octopus of a woman, Ora in her odd sleep.
She does not subside into semi-indifference. God, here comes her hand, right across the intervening space to where my balls lie on my thigh; the bulbous flicker of sexual reaction becomes male sexual availability, often a complicated matter. Manhattan is the place for this sort of sexuality—sexuality is subject to place . . . She and I, she dreamed and I hallucinated in incomplete agreement—and in rebellion to ordinary, unsexual life. Or we dreamed in tandem. We give each other clues—with our breath—about what we feel; we engage in mutual education terrifyingly; she is almost awake; we frightenedly share a widened sensorium now, a widened sense, binocular—two-souled, unspecifically gendered, not well-trained . . . What sort of joining did we have? An eerie sexual contagion. An uneasy rivalry of different consciousnesses? The affection-riddled reality of proximity? As on a school playground?
The overlap (and dependency) of the moment—conscious man, semi-conscious woman—was weird enough that some adviser in me warned, Don’t look, don’t look. I was at some limit of mine of sexual bearability—like an apprentice surgeon watching an operation in a hospital and wanting to join in there, in the bright, hideous light, the liquescent reality, the insult, the trespass, the intrusion.
Are you real, Wiley? You’re inhuman . . . Before birth, in the symmetry of electric dramas between child and mother, the vast nervous respond of her around me, it was a question, a reality, whether I was human or not. The nervous resolution of uneasy appetite, the wobbling and ebbing of breath and of the body’s state, the sudden warming in desire, the increase of it, of response—it is a breathingly murmurous rhyme of companionship . . . The eeriness of being dreamed is part of the “joke” that when she wakes I will be here in my bod
y, not banished like a figure in a dream.
And I am not constrained by the plausibility requirements of her sleep. By the structures of riddling storytelling of her dreams. I am independent and strange to her mind—I am goddamned real.
Sleep on. Sleep on, Ora.
This one night was after I had started to become famous—no, I had begun to be known, merely known. Her theft of my autonomous heat to feed the plausibility requirements of hallucinatory romance in her semi-dreams or in her dreams—in those weird gardens, the theft of me—for her life—in her mind—why should this become apparent to me as a dare on her part? The reality of the fernlike murmuring and dispersions and malproportions of the metrics of her breath as a sleeper, contrarily, tames me. The half-melted walls of my independence reflect the ridiculous rhyming of the murmurously sensual grammar I have with earlier events in my life: the unlikely uncrude music of a mammal’s tie to an ocean, salty and pulsing—a somewhat shared blood and heat—to something beyond that ocean and heat—I was afraid of it—of us . . . of her. I was disdainful and warm . . . a comic snob . . . and at home in it all—or half-at-home in it with her. I was not afraid and did not feel odd. Partly erected and in a kind of muttery-buttery heat, I hear Ora breathe—and think how in this affair, her mouth and body are half mine—they are shared with me. I can do what I like—in a way.
When she wakes a bit more, I will have to deal with the presence of her will. The thing of our being like Holland, with great walls closing us off sacramentally from the wills and true histories of others in the world.
Her body and mouth and sleep are half my own mouth and body and sleep—I breathe loudly, I sort of sigh, to locate and identify, to reclaim myself. It is a marsh; one practices a husbandry toward a reedy commingling of land, sea, sky, in a fen, an unclear place. I have my own, independent footing, entangled. It is as if I, or we, drowned, in a way, at times in this morass. Now we breathe each other’s stale air—our mouths are close—and anyone’s sense of the separation of our wills, of our having separate destinies, is mistaken. But we are jealous of each other. We are separate.
The Runaway Soul Page 20