But I can’t have her be nihilistic if I depend on her . . .
God oh God God oh God God . . .
She said, “Don’t you like being close? I hate sleeping alone—(uh, eh: she made little glottal sounds)—my dreams worry me . . .”
She has said that she dislikes being praised because praise is often a way people have of laying unfair responsibility on you. We don’t praise each other, she and I. Instead, I, for instance, fail to believe in her torment—that’s a form of praise. And she believes in our happiness and that I am human—that’s a form of praise. She says, “I was dreaming, I was dreaming of Joe Stalin and Casanova and a cockroach—of Mozart: he was sort of cockroachy—I don’t like him. I was afraid of Stalin. Lillian Hellman shot Charles de Gaulle with a gun she had hidden up her tush . . .” Ora unfocusses her eyes while she recites, or invents, her dream, while she lays herself, drolly, carefully, on top of me again. I start to laugh. I grip her arms. She is not particularly coherent when she is unrehearsed—as in telling a dream. In telling a recent dream, she will often drift into telling an old one for which she has since come up with some coherent language. She resees her dream as she tries to recount it, and it fails to exist; it dissolves as memory; it is like drowning in an empty and somewhat cruel coherence. She can’t help changing the dream to suit the linguistic circumstances of her talking about it so that she does not drown in coherence but manages to display it instead, a little dishonestly. She cheats. I believe you pay an often terrible price for lying—that she will pay a terrible price for her blasphemies. I wish I intimidated her into honesty. I feel I am being used by her. I don’t much mind. I don’t really mind. I’m beginning to mind.
And, so, unclearly, I shove her, limb by limb, off me.
Laughing a little, unwillingly, she submits.
She says, “Don’t be angry with me because of my dream . . .” A New England comedienne, she makes a droll face; she has no sense of shame in making a humble spectacle of herself . . . She says, “If you weren’t so fascinated by me, you’d disapprove of me less . . . Luckily I’m strong . . . I’m the strong, patient type . . .”
I rolled away from her and lay at the edge of the bed, on my side.
She said—vaguely—“Well, it’s probably cathartic . . .”
“I like a woman who uses big words,” I said.
“Words excite me, too,” she says slowly, without excitement. “Can’t we lie closer together?”
“Sure . . . Uh . . . Why not?”
She turns on her side and begins to glide—somehow—over the sheets toward me . . . All at once she is there. I halt her with a finger to her left boob—boobie, she calls it, softish, a little bomb-shaped. I move the pointing finger to her breastbone, between her breasts. Her fearlessness has always impressed me.
“You don’t like me,” she says.
“You don’t like me,” I say. “It’s just that I’m available . . .”
“That’s not true,” she said. “You are so unavailable, it’s horrible . . . Oh, fuck it, I don’t know how to talk to you about things you don’t face . . .”
“That I don’t face? You’re the mad lover of illusions . . .” I move my face closer to her face; “I am facing you,” I say. We are face-to-face in bed in the nothingness of our half-explanations—our half-comprehensions. Our weird semi-ignorance, sweet but scary—I become differently erect, yet once more; it touches her down there . . . The moment is like gliding out into a dark gulf of air in a dream and not knowing if you have wings, not knowing what the dream is and what sort of creature you are, what the rules are for you in this episode . . .
Neither of us is quite blocking the other’s will—so that part is dreamlike. The foreignness of my dreams, from her point of view, and of hers for me, similarly—the fact that the actual smell or tang of her love was unfamiliar to me and mine was strange to her (and so had a pungent and addictive quality of novelty) and the recurrence of the thing of permitted will are something hugely smothering—the as-if-feathered breast of a swan? A Venus-thing? From childhood when bodies and their powers were in a different scale, one has a sense of bodies being giant—this is at once fated and homelike . . . It is also very strange.
Oh, you gigantic ripe emptiness. You. “You ripe girl,” I say: I am a relatively sophisticated talker.
“You turn it on, Wiley . . . It is part of what I like about you,” she says.
It is a quasi-warm terror here. What is immanent here—the sexual stuff—eats you as a whale might in a story. Or a monster in a mythological tale . . . Abduction and jealousy: they might interrupt or result from the thing itself; rage, madness, coldness, metamorphosis . . .
Soothed jealousy. Quieted rage. Almost-placated madness. Shredded, defeated sexlessness. Or us stolen by perversity of desires, someone’s intervention, or the past might intervene, or the thought of money (it nearly always interrupts me inwardly for a few moments), the memory of infidelity—the fragility of closeness—all the ways there are of being stolen, as in old novels and in movies, by ideas, other lovers, illness, fear of life, fear of each other, death, self-sacrifice . . . The somewhat scary do-jigger here of some kinds of stuff not happening after all is itself a momentary blurred story . . .
Ora’s thoughts, her fears, maybe, were different. Ambitions—in the realm of desires and stuff having to do with envy since childhood, her rules as a woman, her sexual methods—“I break all the laws,” she’s said. And intellectual defiance of meanings other than her own? A fear amounting to a French Revolution against masochism—in herself and others? I am stupid and sentimental and not sophisticated in the ways she was—and not as “interesting” as a sexual rebel—all in all, I am tense and I doubt that we are Great Lovers . . .
I could only partly see myself as her rebellious (and Faustian) choice of a lover, as the-one-who-fucks-you, the you being Ora, but I figured I should see myself as that; but when I did, it excited me in a certain hard-edged way; and she looked smug; and the sex got odd.
She was aware that we punished people with the fact of us—I ‘understood’ that only nervously. She wanted us to hide—to avoid people. To inhabit a silence. Us to be pure as lovers, purified, redeemed by silence. I kind of poisoned myself with emotional and sexual cowardice toward that . . .
I thought we needed to be defined by others and that it was her mistakenness, her pride, that saw us that way. I half felt this. I went along with her; I agreed with her, too—it depended on the time of day and on what day it was and how her position had been modified as the days passed; I distrusted her. Face-to-face with her I am embedded with listening sections of myself—listening to her for more information—looking into her smile for an augury as into a disembowelled lamb—it was a gift like winning a medal at a fair (as the fattest pig) to gain her deadpan smile in a moment like, this one. It was very different for me before sex if she wasn’t dead-faced. It wasn’t really surrender on her part to be with me. She wasn’t always intent on us. She had a sleepy look but inside that look was a far-off element of alertness, of worldliness, as though she had been redefined by her cold fortress dreams and the hot fortress air of herself away and garrisoned by thoughts and wit and by the ghostly remnants of her dreams here in the approaches to sex.
I imagine her dreams as self-willed, hiddenly fascist piety of poverty as a woman in a male-dominated world. I have a thing I do of recognizing that in her so that she isn’t alone in her feeling like that. I don’t want to play at taking advantage of her, but that costs me something in terms of sexual presence and makes me, oddly, violent-in-spirit—reformist . . . Not tender so much as companionable. Tenderness has to do with apology—I haven’t wronged her yet . . . I try not to resemble what other parts of life are knowably like for her and which displease her. I want her to give herself—to give herself to me and yet to create me—not as a sign of God but just personally. I don’t want her to dream of something else. I don’t want a dreamed-of Wiley laboring alongside me in her sense of things, every t
ouch, the correcting shadow in every sexual movement, every sexual motion.
She makes a weird sexual offer that I love—and which scares her. She has said I love her traits and my ideas about her and not her; she says that’s fine; and she makes a sexual offer of not letting others vote on us, our rights, our merits as a couple of fuckers or whatever; she keeps others at bay in regard to my flaws and her excellences; she ignores, at times, others’ weirdly political, forceful wishes. But freedom from generalized sex, the idea of which is derived from bad novels and grubby movies, isn’t included; but we were not to be punished for that stuff if we did it: this is part of the sexual offer.
She has a wish not to be unlucky in love; and I love that in her . . .
Like other young people we knew (but people from her social stratum more than from the next level down), she believes that lives contain vast reaches of ‘universal’ luck—there is some sort of competition because of this. A competition actually to have such luck and to live in a state of absolute blessing, Americanly, shrewdly, sagely, passionately . . .
One’s ideals and then one’s place in history and one’s tragedies and one’s great good luck—such glory . . . and it reflects from her limbs and enters my life through my knowing her, you know?
What is not present—and so is present for me as a definition of her sexual offer—are her dark rages, suicidal depressions, mockeries-of-others, tremendous snobberies toward others, a dark preference for the lowest classes—she hid this from me mostly, protected me, protected the image of her I had; I mean 99 and ½ percent of the time.
But I knew about it, sort of. She does not claim to be a good person. I do not think she is a good person. (She has said of me, You’re an optimist, Wiley . . .)
She says, “You have a mocking look on your face . . . You shouldn’t laugh at us, Wiley.”
My intelligence is unlike hers and that worries her: she is rivalrous—of course . . .
“Why should people like us expect to have good luck . . . Ora?” I asked.
“We make our own luck,” she says. In a bold tone. Maybe in a semi-right-wing, superior-person way.
A come-on that is also a sincere thing?
Our ideas at the moment, hers and mine, have to do with our sexual wakefulness, to what we are inside the throbbing of sexual hallucination by way of a maybe collegiate sophistication of sexual realism—may I call it that? We are each being sexually realistic while hallucinating. Sexual realism raced through me like a hot-bodied and scarily thin-boned and nervous-furred little animal; it magically ate me and circled through me and let me alone, somehow, at the same time. There was Ora, young and beautiful (truly), her heart pumping like an uncelestial clock—biologically—she is eccentrically real: Ora; and I am the perpetrator there with her—not her first love; the one she loved just now (if love is the word), if she loved just now.
Let me say that she loved ironically and carefully and with a wry discipline and she didn’t expect me to notice . . . she expected me to hallucinate and daydream a perfect degree of love or of torment or of whatever I wanted. She made a stylish point of the strangeness of her loving me at all . . . Gentile love—God, nature, and man being what they were—yet being loved by a woman like her, by her really: she is bravely, willfully, spiritually trend-ridden in a certain way.
Her experience, her inexperience at love as I understood it, scared me. But I have one vote among two; she may be right; I may be wrong.
It was too real, too personal, too troubled by breath and by the nothingness that lies inside opinions to be comfortable. The nothingness that waits for you in adult life is not infantile but is the child, or the father, of the nothing of the loneliness of a child in a crib waiting to be lifted out.
The emotional reality of a slave crew on a mad ship of breath and desire is pretty much an actuality. Certain movie ads and certain covers of cheap romances in paperback excited her unduly and justly.
I said out loud, to excite her, “Are we a slave crew on a mad ship of breath and desire, Ora?” The cheapness and the understanding (so-to-speak) of how the cheapness of the world aroused her now and loosened her legs and drew oil into her cunt: I could see that all this was reasonable, biologically and metaphysically: I could feel the sexual response in her.
And she could see (in my eyes, say, or in my shoulders) what I felt, or all or some of it, since, I’m pretty sure, in those days we would wake simultaneously in the middle of ordinary moments and sexual ones to a kind of grieving resignation at being there with a degree now of comprehension of the other person.
A realization that neither of us had been stolen or abducted or metamorphosed but was there giving birth to the other’s feelings moment by moment, and that neither of us had absconded, this was a major thing, maybe the most major . . . In the middle of the night in Manhattan. Because of this, we were, I think, political and courtly although naked and a bit heated rather than theatrical. My sexual tastes are untheatrical. Her sexual tastes are decidedly theatrical—camera-and-memory-tropic. She offers me the welcoming committee of her selves, in a rather dry and ironic way, passionate but restrained (for my sake), moistly oiled and vaguely watchful and yet sleepy: this is a power in her as far as I was concerned.
I was wowed, awed, cowed, flattened, flattered, bemused—triumphant—erected in another form (yet another one). For one thing, it was her whole life that was there. This wasn’t rape. Or her doing some daydreaming. It was the totality of mindly welcoming, the degree of physical welcome. One sighs with an immensity of relief. I wanted to resist her power over me though . . . I wanted to be cheap that way. But in a glance—in her eyes—and I mean eyeballs, for God’s sake, irises, pupils, eyelashes, eyelids, and eyebrows—I saw that she was as resentful or even more so at our having become lovers-in-the-way-we-were-lovers-now than I was—and that was a shock. The cheapness of refusal—of the rape by the truth of something—we could, neither of us, breathe with the expansiveness of refusal in us . . . “Ha-ha,” I said.
And then, strangling on my life, I drew breath, laughing seductively, to attract her and to free us of resentment. She closed her eyes: I am the one who has the more beautiful feelings here. The irony is nearby, the fear, the resentment, so to speak, but I was erect—it changes more than a puppet does along the line of action of the sexual story—and I began poking her, trying to gain entry, poked gently, and then used fingers, managing to wedge myself half in the entry, then with a muscular thingamajig in her and in me, I was half in, half out, then with a silent whoosh I was halfway in her, as such things go, and I said, “Whoo,” and “Ah,” and “Whoa, Nelly . . .” A joke.
I did this naïvely, on purpose, an unwittingly hypnotized, half beautiful, unwitting boy: a sweetly violent trespass, a lie, a context for the other, sincere in a way. A literary conceit maybe—an image she maybe accepted.
It wasn’t at all clear what she specifically welcomed. We had been doing this stuff for four years and had worked out some things and were rehearsed and were still startled by the novelty, the edge of darkness of the future here, the darkness of what might happen. She welcomed all of me despite a lot of things. No, that’s not true. She judged; she had reservations. But she went way beyond any kind of bargaining or holding back of anyone I had known sexually. A more if it is more enough feels like an all. It does. But I hate being grateful to a lover. To be welcomed is a little like being barefoot in mud, almost: creepy and tickling and natural and wonderful—and a relief from existing in another state.
It is a little hard for me to believe when it is happening that it is happening.
I am a shade ethereal—a little bit disgusting . . . gross . . . much more interested in fucking than in seduction . . . and this shows right away . . . And she sometimes finds that, feels that, to be, sees that as, truly disgusting. She isn’t sexual; she is seductive—which, considering the nature (and finickiness) of erections is an extremely valuable and important—and sexual—thing to be.
But she responds in this
part of the fuck. I see that she sees (in my chest, in my eyes, in my motions, in the motions and major convulsions and state of a degree of hardness and of a specific kind of hardness of my prick) the foreignness of my sensations and of my reactions to those sensations—she is at the border of my fluttery and so far semi-docile hallucinations and she almost sees them in me.
When I reject them in favor of my sense of her and of my being present to her and with her, she worries: my being like that is a threat in that I demand presence of her at this stage and she would rather that I daydreamed and was alone and did not see her. No-retreat-on-my-part, my not drifting into reaction or into thought and private association, means she is not free. My fear, my defiance, my eerie fearlessness, it is hard to say this in a just way, but Ora deeply disliked my taking charge of things and my giving orders in this tacit fashion. She likes fucking to proceed as it’s supposed to—kind of horribly but cathartically. This was no mild resentment on her part. It was nothing to joke about. She truly loved her own mind—her own senses—her own thoughts. Loved: was deeply attached to, like a child to a horse it owned. And maybe there were horse elements in her—a horse, a house, a property of immense extent. Who knows what range her mind has in these moments? On her horse, her high horse (of beauty and mind), she was not jealous of stony and earthy realities or of me in my fucking but I pulled her away from that into awareness. She was aware of me, of us; I was aware of her—I pushed her into this sort of consciousness. And I hurtled into it. I feel ripeness at the mere thought of her own thoughts, her reality consciously releasing the Midas treasury of the sexual stuff of her rhythms (such as they were), all the stuff between her legs and the punctuation stuff of the sexual dramas of her nipples—then all of it really—breasts, judgment, cunt, eyes and lips and legs . . . fucking, consciously fucking.
The Runaway Soul Page 22