The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  Her dreams, her body and its cleft, are literally inset with my pulse when I come yet closer to her where she lies atop the pillows. The tempo of her dreams, of the scenes she is dreaming, comes from my breath. My pulse is embodied in the night stuff of her dreaming. A sense of her dreams and of her body and our affair tears me, tore me; I felt a moist wholeness and a burning woundedness and sweaty pride and a near-hemorrhage of the ordinariness and specialization of being young; I felt an agonized tingling of the flesh. My no longer independent and not now hidden soul tears since my soul, in some ways, in a lot of ways, my soul prefers her to me. I jerked still closer to her on my side, and I poked her with my forefinger. And I kissed her. And I partly poked her near her crotch with the begging-and-threatening thing. I poked her with my knee, too. The fact of my wakefulness, my factual state, humanly, recognizably, is not like hers. She sat up in bed: abruptly. The mattress throbbed and shuddered with her, with our private motions. Beautiful Ora. Beauty is dimensional and has duration. And it flowers and recedes; it alters with time, quickly, in each second, actually; it is not an empty factor. It is not merely another element in someone.

  I said submergedly, oppressed: “You out of your mind? You’re out of your mind again you’re playing octopus—Ora, I can’t sleep or read if you do that . . .”

  I sometimes can say things the first time I attempt to say them . . . Ora can’t do that. She uses slight variations of inflection and of her eyes to attach the things she’s said before to her present use of them in a somewhat New England–executively-intellectual way; and she doesn’t really say things for the first time. She goes from earlier speeches to later ones.

  She is half-asleep. I have startled her into a kind of automatonlike life. She gives an example of the rehearsed form of her saying something she has said nine, ten, eleven times before: “I was alone too much as a child, I don’t ever want to be alone again.” Then to me, to me, she said, as if I had said something other than the stuff I had said, “DON’T DO WHAT?”

  “You’re lying on top of me in your sleep again . . .”

  Not automatically, she said, “I trust you . . .”

  That is one of a number of things she says to me sincerely and which is not entirely true.

  I can feel in her—as I could when she slept and encroached on me and I observed her exploringly and driftingly—I can feel in her a profound emptiness, depths, depths of willed blankness, a power of The Nothing. In the relentless firmness of her flesh, emptiness is a kind of waiting beauty, part of a tactical will of readiness for adventure—adventures with men and with women and with ideas—of a sort that I cannot have . . .

  Ignorance as the changeable bones of one’s powers of observation and a kind of faith in me equals her thing of being empty and young: a stonelike ruthlessness: cold-nerved will: she’d had a kind of schooling in will as a personage—a social-class thing. I love her. I have a strong will. Behind the insolence of her beauty is the extraordinary inhumility of the enormous waiting of her kinds of ambition—ambition of such a far-flung and far-off, not uncommon but unexpected kind, that it is insulting toward me and toward blighted-lipped intellectual women and others except when she relents; and this is tinged with an inherited (a finely taught) ability-to-rule.

  What she is is mirrored motionfully in me, so we are similar oddly although different in gender—I am stained by maleness—a thief of her, a reflection. What we are is lovers.

  But our being together rests on her will: she is an oldest child. I feel I am unfit for a human tie and I rely on her judgment that I am fit for this one.

  But beyond that was something unexpected: MY insolence, MY arrogance—an odd, not entirely ignorant commandingness, mine from the start: This is the one I want . . . Or: This is the one I wanted . . . And here she is . . .

  One time, when she was sad—her mother had made her sad—and I had made things worse—I’d said, Just tell your mother to fuck off, Ora—she said, “Why bother to live?”

  She hadn’t meant it except to convey a dull hint about the slurry of the stuff she felt. I repeated her remark to her—with a cold inflection, deadpan, meaning I was the reason, and she said, “Oh, I’d live for you if I could—I will live for you.” Back then I said, “No. Don’t do that. I wasn’t saying it to change you—I don’t manipulate people.”

  But I’d stolen that remark of hers, not as a serious question but as an idiom for sadness. I stole great areas of my life from her, as, before her, I had stolen things and mannerisms from others; I stole my ambition and my willingness to live mostly from her lately.

  So now, late at night, having waked her, I said, “Why bother to live?”

  It wasn’t clear even to me what my teasing her meant or if I wanted so badly to be understood and welcomed that I simply used that remark as a warm joke-thing, rebuking her and welcoming her, teasing her into response.

  She hated male ego. And male clumsiness. But, being well-bred as such things go in America, she was not clearly jealous of men—well, maybe of men who were successful and potent without her help. With a kind of ribald mockery and genteel patience, she made room for what she disliked in me (as a man), made room in certain ways and to a certain degree—and this was a big part of what she called LOVE. I couldn’t have said this back then, at least not in this way, but I knew this, knew it in the tissues of my body, and I didn’t think it was LOVE. I knew it as a chemical smokiness of the soul. I was sure she knew it too. Before she could make room for me, I started to laugh in the almost nonstop, occasionally maniac-manic hilarity I felt at being-with-her—some of that was disappointment. I often laugh when I am nonplussed at reality. I am old for my age in some ways and a child in other ways.

  This laugh was weird and baritone—musically elaborate and compelling—sexual, I realized halfway through.

  She said, “What is it? Why are you laughing?” She was sexually stirred by it . . . Stirred? As by a flickering spoon.

  In the complicitous, semi-dissolved, complicated antagonism then, I asked, “Are we normal, Ora?” Still laughing, faking the laughter a little, pushing it along, prolonging it—part of it was real—it was sort of pruned and displayed—I wanted to be earnest, but, ever since college, I was helplessly ironic toward earnestness. It seemed dirty . . . too sexual. Bullying.

  “No: we’re not normal, we’re lucky,” she said in her ruling-class way, a ruling-the-world, thin-flanked, maybe gorgeous dowager-to-be . . . modern . . . aware of the sexual currents now—now pretty much awake, huge-eyed; more maneuverable than I was, maybe faster.

  Maybe falser. I hear the thud of the rough fuzzy boardlikeness of her breath rasp in her throat—sexuality does that. To her. She disapproves of sexual games—foreign la-di-da—and costumes and the like feeling (or thinking) the sexual thing had enough draw or magnetism or gravity or strong or weak-and-dancing force and that, for her, true sex, the truer sexuality, lay in the social identity and beggarlike recession, or retreat, or abdication into simplicity—she longed for no tools or specificity of daydream knowledge or hallucination . . . Perhaps, too, this was a safety thing or a test thing: an experiment—one derived from experience of sexual props and the banishment of feelings and then the authority given the director. She is the older child in her family: Do it in the body—or don’t do it, she has said—theoretically, discussing sexual theory. I had proposed nothing. I am fascinated and stirred by people who dress their lives and their moments in specifically sexual costume—but that includes someone dressing in simplicity and directness, like Ora. For us, her and me, she goes first in certain matters, into them, not as commanding officer, but as scout, as someone of experience and fine nerve endings and whose judgment is part of our judgment overall and is often the deciding judgment: we are each free, however, to be a, or the, commanding officer . . . We work this out as we go along: this was a common form of affair at college with exceptions among the very rich and also among very defensive kids where judgment rested in one of the pair and not in both. Soundless
ly, like her bumping into furniture in a dark room, or avoiding it—she goes first in darkened places because she sees better in the dark than I do and she senses objects with a batlike high-pitched murmurous breathing that she does with a treble edging, or piping, to it; she doesn’t always go first; sometimes she’s frightened and I go first; but one of our (twenty-eight thousand, two hundred and four) arrangements is that she gets to choose when she goes first in the dark and when she follows; and this moment, now, in bed, late, when she has just waked, counts as a moment in the dark; and she stirs, warm-flanked, as powerful a presence as a lioness or horse—or cow as in cowlike Hera, the Queen God, in Homer—in bed.

  I can hear her soundlessly bumping into the thoughts that she is furnished inwardly with about sexuality and us; and—I can hear her mind—she chooses to take the lead.

  I hear her mind existing buzzingly, circling and moving on, humming and thinking in the rigidly undeniable forward (in some sense forward) motion of the moment which nothing in me can ignore just now; and around which are gathered the seemingly unwandering, stone thoughts, or the shadows of such piers and finalities—it is as if she, partly pagan and cowlike like Hera the Queen, is also a dairymaid or child-girl, but anyway she is calculating in a cathedral—stained glass, fine arches and trefoils, the final form of a woods seen as an absolute thing in stone . . . It is unsuitable for the wandering, libidinous thought and for sexual heat, indeed.

  I sense it. Or invent it while sensing something. My own sexuality is crudded up some or hidden or is defended in a labyrinth or by a combination lock; and hers unlocks it; or creates steps for it to emerge, sweet-stinking monster thing, semi-ancient, sloppy, whatever.

  Or hers rolls on the cathedral-bedroom floor and I watch it and see my own body lying there; and it rises and comes over and enters my watchful body here. “Hi there,” I whisper in her ear. I say it so inaudibly she can’t really know what I am saying but she knows in some way. The breath of the syllable, the shape or form of the colloquium, tickles her—as if a wind ruffled her.

  Maybe our minds nuzzle each other on some astral plane . . . Maybe I ought to say she nuzzled at my mind and woke me . . . I am—if you can pardon me for this—often taken as an acceptable sexual presence: for some people a final one . . . People stare at me in certain ways sometimes. Much of this is delusion, sexual hallucination, semi-absurd stuff, and some is not: part of what I look like is that I am the one who has had my life.

  Well, many of her thoughts, the ones that hold pride of place in her, come from books; and some from talk; but a lot is family—family talk, I guess—her dowager grandmothers, her father and mother, her talkative aunts and firm-voiced uncles—the idea of family and of runaways, or an orphan, of a Jew: she has said of herself that she is a woman of opinion.

  But mostly, and oddly, it seems to me that she and I, because we’re young, because we’re together, are, thoughts and all, primarily nothing-so-far, nothingness, uncosturned, solid-bodied, clever nothingness . . . uncertainty and will . . . a freshness of will . . . orchardy nothingness. I reflect her emptiness. A little dirtied on both sides. Also, nerves, hopes, experiences with each other: a little leapy, leapish—like young panthers—what-have-you—wild, a little wild sometimes.

  She says now, as she said before, “You are unsafe, you are an unsafe person,” but she is conflating me with darkness, with male will, with the sexual history of the species, and with her dreams before she woke up and with various things in her anyway and which do not relate to dreams.

  I twitch, flinch, stiffen in potency of a degree—which I appreciate and am kinged by (as in the last row of a checkerboard)—and am unsteady on, as if on one stilt: this is inside the curious bubble of the reality of having a human potency, somewhat democratically—i.e., more gamblingly, less willed than if I were costumed, angrily brutal for real as playacting, and assertive on my own and without her.

  That it is, in that sense, a free erection—as in a free country—and joint—and nice—but, of course, corrupt and based on various deals and inequities, that erects me further—I feel the moments pushing, in a linked way, in a kind of heat of linkage, or with an almost hot, or flame-heated linkage of what might be called sexual effects—the power, say, of her eyes now that they are open and then of the exposed breasts as vulnerability and pride and the thing between her legs like the top of the skull of a small cat and stirring catlike: it is a peninsular half-motion in which everything stirs: the wind of the passage of time lifts us, blows, moves—caresses us as if we were dozing on a train and a stranger or all the strangers there were very lightly kissing and stroking and gazing. I feel my height, my looks (such as they are), my inner strength (such as it is), my sexual opinions, my sexual rhythms and views on coming, my sexual depths as having been chosen by this weird wind of invisible and foreign attention to perform—to perform sexually . . .

  The foreignness is, of course, in me, too . . . I am at some peninsular edge of myself: I blow and circle inwardly and, both, wait to perform and want to see and feel, as the audience, the performance here.

  Her eyes—eyelashes, bony sockets, the warm, faintly oily gaze—meet mine which are—masked as far as my knowing what their gaze is: it is moyen sharp, their gaze, felt from inside—an erectile structure of sight touching a kind of broadcast-receiving thing or sound-receptor thing in her face, in her warmish eyes.

  She says breathingly, “You are unsafe for children . . .” A not uncommon remark in my experience, a flirtatious remark, a lie, sexual flattery: something she’s said to other men; something other women have said to me. She smiles in the light in the bedroom, drowning out the presence of remembered other eyes.

  Her smile is an accomplishment—unhurried, tense, actorly-amused.

  A lot of men have been infatuated with her—in love with her. Older men: some of them famous . . . Younger men. Able ones. She says to me when someone reveals to me part of her past with some man or other: I was an object for him—a teenage trophy . . . She never admits to having been a collector; but she has moods of confession, a bit movielike, of having been an adventurer-adventuress, an explorer of the jungle and a kind of girl Tarzan in these matters among others.

  She has very handsome, unfragile hands—not a raccoon touch at all and not boyish: her eyes and neck and hands are those of a woman as young as some movie stars are who seem to be without age and without social background or social limits.

  She is a hairless, large teddy bear and as-if-great movie comedienne and sexually liberated and partly commanding Scandinavian (or German) movie beauty—her hands have the curious authority of that unanimal thing: their touch—it is so odd—on my legs, on my abdomen, on my chest—suggest not an animal thing but a gift of jewelry—in a jungle—or a commanding companionship: the smallish hands of an intelligent man with some sort of anal-and-oral fixation: it is like that for a moment.

  Then, feeling my breath, my eyes, my glance moving from her to the wall of the bedroom in a kind of embarrassment at her sexual nature and her sexual experiences which led to my having that kind of sense of her touch and after I look back in the oddity of our friendly (not melodramatic) sexuality, she becomes demure-but-forthright, as animal as a movie star who has that style and with hands like Scandinavian birds, coldly (or coolly) exotic.

  This is a feeling, a sense-thing having shape as a name and as an opinion.

  She takes being fucked very seriously—as a compliment and as a really vile insult, both those things; and the two jointly and mostly both present most of the time give off a peculiar radiance of flirtation, of foreplay, and not as a joke but as a form of potency or of potent beauty . . . Or truth . . . And she is very alert to how you take it—her fucking with you, you as the-fucker-of-record—and she can’t express all she feels about this except as posture, and the postures radiate that double-thing, a vibration back-and-forth, so she can’t exactly be honest: she is honest first one way and then the other; and in the alternations she calculates within the cathedral—s
o to speak.

  She says flatteringly, “Christ-who-is-God, we are unsafe people, you and I, Wiley . . . We have to be careful, we have to behave . . . We have to be careful to behave with each other . . .”

  She likes to lay down the law. She likes to lecture. She has the soul of a headmistress in some ways. Her father, a man who talked well—he talked as a man who had gone to the famous private schools and college he had gone to would talk if he meant to be known for his talk; he had a social-class tone; and he was also sort of movie-earthy, sort of like an ex-journalist and lobbyist, someone who had partly given up his social-class stuff, he said, We have no religion in our family anymore; we have only a persistent belief . . . A persistence of—a belief in something: a lot of that is belief in ourselves: we do pretty well in the world—and we have for a number of generations now . . . My ancestors were ministers for two hundred years and then they saw the light and became rich—that’s Calvinism for you . . . I would say my daughter suffers from the profound nihilism of a readiness to live at any price—do you understand me? She includes suicide as an adventure . . . And a broken heart . . . We have many many traditions we’ve gotten rid of; we have some traditions we’ve kept; we can’t be nobodies even if we tried . . . We have abilities, they run in our family, not in all of us, I must say. We have some recognition from the world . . . We ourselves do not care about family or possessions . . . We are merely people who have had our kind of history, our place in history . . .

  Her family? She is unfamilied in a sense. Very familied obviously. She takes no orders from them at all. In her emptiness pulses the extreme isolation of her quite extreme beauty—you don’t have to believe me about its being so extreme: you can wait and see how you feel about it. The history of her looks is a history of events that is told in her tones only—the history of her physical reality. She has the corresponding fortress nature you might expect of blasphemy and of distance—nihilism, education, strength and readiness—nihilism of a kind as an extreme beauty—People don’t act very well, she has told me—not nihilism then as a fashion.