Of course, the obstinate (sly?) fucker was conscious, too. She was fucking someone she thought a blind, conniving, tyrannical, wise fool—a good fool? Maybe. A good-at-it fool? I doubt it. I don’t know. A good-enough-at-it fool maybe. But a Machiavellian fool, weird-thoughted. Her views of me.
I felt heroic—in a way—and odd-footed, an insect or a cripple—I had the feeling she felt as something flying around oddly like light inside her skull and absolutely (and Jewishly and mirroringly) known by her—and pathetically in regard to—what? Ego? Evil? Social logic as she knew it? Sexual and personal reality?
In these days, when she self-consciously readied herself inside the act of fucking—when she settled into it—I often thought that what I felt, my sense of pleasure, my sense of homecoming was that it was as if she asked me what I wanted and I could answer in pantomime, almost doing it, but doing it socially, so to speak, or as a performance—she accepted me to some degree of reality in a kind of intimacy of that stuff, a lessened antagonism.
She accepted one’s being lost in genetic egoism . . . In one’s abilities . . . In what one represents in that natural madness of generation . . .
Language and dreams. Dreams are too self-centered for language. And what is the point of carting dreams into reality? Dreams represent enormous experiments in grammar based on no one else being present—on the unreal, time-skewed grammar of no listeners; only the speaker is there. Real presence wakes you. The skull behind the face and under the hair is the white bone of a moon sadly out-of-place or not out-of-place in the real-life logic of what one feels in a fuck. The oddity of being a creature, the oddity of the homecoming thing, and the intimacy in her crotch—front gate and grassy lawn and porch in the genital grasp—they are also terrifyingly present, magnified and obvious, on her wide-cheekboned, short-strong-nosed face. Her deep-socketed-eyed, warm-mouthed, genuinely beautiful face. And her adventures. One time, I walked into a barn in the countryside and was blinded in the shadow after the sunlight and something came swooping and fluttering toward me, beaked, eyed, striped, and huge. I never really saw it: I felt it. So I see her face—and her—and her interest and contempt . . . contempt for death, for pricks, for complaints. She lives. Bravely? With audacity really? Her face is partly turned aside. She has the neck and the posture of someone grown-up. Contempt, interest, love—fear and love. She clings to me without touching me except inside the cunt. We are touching only in there and only slidingly just now. In this moment in me is a premonition, a prediction of the sexual more-to-come—and of my tiring of her. Some kisses came next. Her hands moved to my shoulders. Then to my butt. Then she put her arms around me, her fingers palping my back. Me, I touch her—but lightly—she is too startled inside the balances in the power thing just now for me to want to touch her heavily. Then, oh, then, there are enormous awards, enormous, maybe poisoned with ego, there is her beauty and the beauty of the sensations and of the psychological reality of homecoming.
So many people have strutted for her, blackmailed her, pursued her throughout her past (and still, or rather, at that time, too) that it is not purely a private thing to be with her. The element of choice here goes very deeply—genetically. We don’t want children yet but we are breeding stock. This is part of the odd semi-professional sensual grammar and sexual vocabulary of lovers—lovers now dirtily joined—alone, the two of us, with each other in the queered circle of intimacy. We were as if in a hotel room or a room in a pensione—she doesn’t smile when I say—when we are already fucking—“Want to fuck?”
She doesn’t always find me seductive through my humor—she preferred seduction to anything—but she accepted this.
I became impossibly overweening and temperamental—excited, overexcited—overbrimming—spermatically: and opposed to all her opinions. So that Ora, who contemptuously loathed and dismissed selfishness in me, is faced with this opposition to her having so many opinions. I am so set in my course of sensation—and of sensational will—that I feel myself as having a face of bronze bones and heavy, marbled eyes and canvas skin, eyes of willed nothingness heavily willful. I am on top of her, phallically overbrimming.
It is rottenly delightful. Then, briefly, I become human again. I fill with a sense of her. I am reasonable in a New York bedroom; and I heave in this other, pedalling-slowly way—but I am so densely compact with sexual will that I am a hell-figure—this is maybe a sexual hallucination and maybe a scary truth . . . I feel I am able to kill merely by falling on someone. But that she can bear this, that I think she can, is one reason I care for her.
But she has not been able to bear this in me as well lately, now that I have the rank of being known while she, in her career as a woman (or whatever), is mostly an adjunct. I think she is generally addled with stick-to-it-iveness in regard to things, to sex which is good, and to her “career”—her becoming a legendarily important woman. Stick-to-it-iveness was a word she said she got from her “horrid” grandmother—the bitchy, very rich one. During a fuck, Ora has a thing of lapsing openly from the sexuality in the stop part of the stop-and-go of excitement, in the blinking part of the blinking advance, which shocks me. Essentially shrewdness is sexually grating—it depends on how it’s combined with letting go. She is not ethereal or transcendent during this but it was a form of shrewd idealism, what she was, it was her form of being a real person.
I say, “Okay, Ora?” And she nods. I am in a phase more all-the-way, more out of reach, more unreasonable and violent-in-spirit than the phase is that she is in.
“I have what I want, Wiley—go ahead . . . It’s okay . . .”
“Move your hips on me, Ora,” I say; my voice, like my face overall, feels far away from her, a million miles away; she is at the mouth of a tunnel, over there, so to speak.
She says—oddly—“I guess you’ll never understand that I am the kind of woman I am.” And she kisses me. But she doesn’t move her hips.
And then, just as I am saying, “So what?” she moves her hips semi-violently and not seductively, but graspingly along the prick—angering me, soothing me, blindingly making me stare.
I don’t know if I liked it or not. We often have agreed not to be alert and just to fuck (blindly) but that agreement doesn’t hold all that often, or perhaps ever; it just means we don’t do postmortems at all; and often, off and on, we are alert, although we then often pretend we are not alert. But, sometimes, we just admit it and go along with it, jolting each other out of it from time to time, into unalertness.
I have as general principles these rules: All our fucks are imperfect. All our fucks are merely human.
But, see, I knew when I was in her in that phase and I pushed and pulled back, half out, gasping, I knew two things: that I was averse to struggle as sexual shenanigans (or as sincerity) and that what I was silenced her wit. Witless, she was violent, too—like the rest of us. This silenced her and built up a debt of a kind of anger owed me for distressing her.
Which was like, but not as great as, my debt to her. Sexually, I mean.
Her pride was such, her independence was such that the smallest triumph for me was like stuffing her mouth with sand or with dead leaves. She knew this better than I did, and the knowledge of this made her clumsy—with me—sexually often, more often than not.
I say now, “Ora, one of these days, you will kill me.” Reversing the “truth” of my killing her. The reversed fearsome image is exciting for her. She quivered with an excitedly, eager, somehow muddy, muddied, passivity—on-the-edge-of-attack—a hasty masochism, with assault held back; this self-offering has in it some penalty half-invoked now of future revenge for this—maybe in the near future: this is the dimensionality of the reality of the mood as I see it, her kind of hinted-at and partly performed clutch at me to balance what I do to her. The imagery of her touching me through the prick, the prick of the Jew, is scary, the vain boy who thinks he is so smart . . . The long-legged blond boy with his odd, blinded eyes and the queer variations of sightedness in him instead . . . Fuckin
g with her, fucking her, being fucked by her: it doesn’t matter which; I enter her fully then.
It is all the way in. It is clasped and held. Then she loosens. I don’t know why this means so much to me. I don’t know why it isn’t written about more—the ways women fuck. Someone—a lot of people—have lied to me about women. Not just Ora but her, too, sometimes.
I say it again—“You will kill me—this will kill me. This is killing me.”
“Too many words for a fuck, Wiley,” she says.
“Don’t tell me what to do . . .” I say that.
On some dark level—on a thrusting level—the idea of bossing me around pleases her.
She, Ora, grows silent, purposefully depriving me of the sounds she might make to show me what she is feeling. I feel a superstitious reverence at this genital stage of feeling a lot. The homecoming-and-intimacy thing, I feel it poignantly. And Ora’s silence is poignant. I am as if pierced by a sense of her depth of will and oddity of mood, the furtherness of her temper.
She is moving nicely. Killingly. I am responding—writhing a little, breathing hard. I like truth. The two bodies, the two souls naked at the skin, just behind it; and you hear each other’s presence . . . The sexual bells and ding-dings and lights and sweats in reality are not as interesting to me in her as the other thing of sexually being present.
I gripped her haunches and moved her in a different rhythm from the ones she had erratically been doing. Once or twice, in quarrels, she has accused me of being intrinsically infinitely bossy but of hiding it behind an ideal of something or other, but when I am bossy she often—sufferingly—accedes.
Ora was much more conscious of herself than she was of me—that wasn’t a sign of no-love—it was just what you should expect as natural. But it indicated what kind of love we had. She wasn’t mad with focus on me.
For a moment—whether I’m bossy or not—for a moment there was some weirdly profound, easily fractured simultaneity of mutual listening. I’d call it a ripeness. Then it stopped. It felt as if she took it away, but it could be that it burned itself out. She offered her body more or less coolly for a few seconds and less like stuff in the movies and more like suddenly unchaining her spine and her muscles and just being there, moist, dark—honest—earthen and outside any story she knew, any hallucination . . . any wish . . . any fantasy. But not mutually: with separate destinies. A rival’s gift. Then she slides away from that; I know there are pleasures for her unlike any that I feel.
She has often said to me that she liked a man who talked during sex. Jealously—I was jealous of her odd pleasures—I said—as we fucked—“Are you a realist, Ora?”
“Oh yes. That’s. What peo[ple]. Find so hard. To bear. About me.” Then: “No one. Ever. Liked me. But you. Wiley . . .”
These are sexual remarks for her. She is not exactly in alignment with me but she is not off alone inside herself.
I say, “I don’t like you either . . . I’m just caught . . . I’m a butterfly broken on your wheel . . .” I love sexual power so much when it’s mine that I get silly with having it.
We are thrusting or oozing around.
“Oh you like me now . . . It’s our time now . . .” she says in a highish, peculiar voice. Our youth.
She inflicts a kind of romance on our sexual do-jiggery—a kind of romance which is foreign to me. I remind myself she may be right—sexually.
I say to her, “Oh my yum-yum, oh my fuckable woman, oh fuckables . . . fuckables . . .” She has said she likes jokes—and some disrespect—some forms of it . . . I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference whether she really does or not, but we grow closer in the strange oddity of this real and half-real stuff.
She was maybe a masochist looking for a master, for a while, and I was maybe a master not interested in mastery but in long-term collusion, but what I was sure of was that she wanted no defeats at all, not even glancing ones, and that she would fight back to the death—that is, it was a whole cycle, a whole history for her, now and to come. I live differently from that. And to defeat me was obscene, was a delirium for her, truly, a satisfying vileness, a form of violence—which she often abjured. She often policed herself. But she longed for it, maybe only as the other shoe that had to drop, but also, I think, as justice and as the triumph of devilry—of her view of life; and she’d let go and just do it—triumph over me one way or the other. The fantasy in that actuality was in the social thing of my superiority over her which she rectified—the romance lay in that fantasy . . . I thought it was fancy stuff . . .
That and the further fantasy of her giving sexual fulfillment to me, me being the other for her—Ora as a great whore. My God.
“Go ahead; fuck me as you like—I’m strong,” she said.
The reality-illusion, the stage-setting, the home-away-from-home (or tenting-out-tonight-thing) or whatever it was we had—the paper city of a fuck—rustled then with harsh performance—romantic-harsh—I gripped her like a pirate in a poem or a movie, a little realer than that maybe—she stiffened in a real way—but also as a daydreaming actress—or girl; it was sort of things collapse, things-get-out-of-hand . . . girl apocalyptic; the performance reality of not-respectable. Will, cunt, and sensibility—soul and phallus and cunt . . . and rhythmic—and gestural—disreputability.
My sense of what was going on came from sexing around before now (with other people) and from sports and so some of it concerned guys. But I am in her cooze; and this stuff comes complete with a sense of two genders and of her committing suicide, of lovelessness, of the real risk of violent meaninglessness after all—or not risk, inevitability—lives-down-the-drain, death—the-death-of-this-and-that, murder, sexual murder, cancer, death overall, the death of the soul. Well, she has a violent recklessness toward all of that—a drunken bravado and a cold attitude toward it—toward the shit women have to accept—and toward the shit men have to accept—and this animated her and she did this other rending—maybe heartbreaking—thing of kissing me sloppily and saying, “I am ready to die . . .”
It wasn’t stupid of her. But it was partly fake inside the game of what she is doing with someone who is not a gangster. It isn’t fake inside the further reality of what she might do . . .
Or what I might do if I am as dangerous as she thinks I am.
I warn her: “Ora, don’t test me . . . I’m ill-bred . . . I haven’t got that kind of class . . . I can’t feed myself with shadows—with fantasies . . .”
She never believes me—not quite. It is her fate to love me as someone superior but with her family being finally superior and deaf-and-superior to what I say.
“I don’t have fantasies, Wiley,” she said in a deepish voice.
“No. You just have . . . ideas. . . . Big ideas . . .”
Then to be nice but also to mock her Big Ideas, I pull her hair a little then, and she says—not playfully—“No! No!” She doesn’t like that. Or my tone. Maybe she has more depths of feeling than I have . . .
I feel—judging from the lovely oiliness and soft grippingness of her cunt as I move in her and do such other things as grip her hair—that she cannot listen to me very often. It hurts her to hear me unless I speak on some sociable to-be-possibly-heard-by-her way. That now it was pure fantasy-elaboration-of-hallucination pushed into reality by my prick and my male smells—and the oddities of male temper—in me—reminding her of men she’d known: and she heard that and moved among her memories of that and of them, so that I took on the full properties of my size and age and of who I was in these moments. Nowadays in New York, then, I become largely invisible to her—off and on—and an enemy: the invisible man, no-lunged, silent, audible only when and if his speech diverged into clichés dealing with this stuff in a way palatable to her. The invisible man among the others. Unless I was wrapped in bandages, in pitiability. And she was armored against that. I mean she “loved” me—and she refused most of me. My ideas, my voice, my body—prick and balls—
My individuality. My character.
&n
bsp; “Don’t think . . . don’t think tonight,” she said—she is sweaty-faced, a nice girl—or woman . . . in mid-fuck.
I hate her for the abrupt simplification of herself that she did just now. The solo sonata effect, not the duo and tutti thing—all of nature joining in.
“Fuck off, Sweetie,” I say. Not each word in the same key . . . instead, each is tied to motions. She is amused, not challenged or angry—I always felt it was kind of her to be amused; it was a radiance in her—as if I were, somehow, a lucky sexual fate for her . . . romantic and amusing now.
(It was vainglorious of her to be so egotistic but who gives a fuck? The idiom means a fuck is not important.)
She is changeable and she makes a funny noise. I think she wants more violence. I hesitate—since she will pull back if I do something or if I do nothing . . . She wants to prove herself to herself. She wants me to be guilty toward her. But I don’t want to be that. I don’t want to be ashamed. Those satisfactions. That dirtiness. The shuddery and shivering and mostly unlikable and violently-to-be-hated voice of violent masculinity—I was merely an unideal example of it in a way, and I was her destiny for a while.
That she has no clear twinship: that irritated her even while she was loosened by it and even a little awed by it . . .
So, I arouse zones of silence in her, unsettlingly—not exactly sexually. She watched the veins in my forehead and neck—I could see her checking my breathing and my rhythms in the fuck and my pulse—she is seeing-through-me; she was some kind of peering-eyed, infinitely proud, dirtied CRITIC—at a distance. CHRIST, I loved her. Maybe not enough. Maybe I didn’t love her at all . . . Maybe I was in my soul (and asshole) queer . . . Promiscuous. How do you really know? I was sensible of her unhappiness—her unhappinesses—in her pleasure (if it was pleasure, if she wasn’t faking)—as the elements of a fire of almost sentimental unsentimentality in her, a version of reckless murderousness, something un-Hamlet-y, ungrateful, active and dangerous. I doubt that her body ever lied much.
The Runaway Soul Page 23