She whispered, “It is to the death . . .”
God knows what I thought she meant, but fear grabbed my balls. Ora liked women who had a crush on her, lately a monocled Polish countess, one, and, two, an American heiress, and, three, a movie woman, a wife mostly—to a producer.
“You’re wonderful, Wiley,” she said oozingly—a little phonily.
“Christ, I’m not!” I got truly weird. “It’s an accident—let’s be nice, Ora . . .” This was along with fuck motions, in and out . . . The syllables were broken . . .
“Oh shut up,” she said like a heroine in a comic movie and bouncing on the bed. “Don’t keep on giving lessons . . . I know—about—the real world . . .” It was in an affectionate tone.
She grinned, smally—sweatily seductive . . . Then all at once, again, and in a way, I was generally content. But I let the mood in me be one of contempt—this helped hurry orgasm; it was to get to my orgasm. It was the pirate captain fucking dispensable Ora . . . It was Captain Sin Cold Ruthlessness fucking poor ordinary Ora . . .
Bleak, black, blank power—hatred-of-a-sort . . . It’s okay . . . She often said she could handle all that stuff.
“Fuck, Ora, fuck . . .”
She did it in some sincerity but not a bone-shaking huge amount—her body had become silent—by that I mean detached from its own circuits of orgasm; it wouldn’t have an orgasm. She wouldn’t. She moved in a kind of dreadfully dutiful way, a foolish, freed, generous way, “lesbian” and dear, unsatisfying, and yet okay, if you didn’t go crazy with longing for what she wasn’t doing. In the peculiarly arctic silence, her perhaps involuntary withdrawal from orgasm—I may be disgusting or too sensitive or any number of things—love of this sort—if it is love—and because of some wry cheapness of cruelty and forgiveness and some considerable fatuity here—it seems like a ruling-class fuck to me.
I approached orgasm. Taut and faintly hulking shoulders and tautly backwards-curved spine—and she bore me along and she bore with me with extraordinary Gentile cruelty-companionship: she-loved-a-fool. That kind of thing, a fool who yet was superior to her in some way she established, took care of, and accepted and got even with: she was in a romance of that sort. I don’t know how much she really minded anything. Private dramas did not bore her. She minded boredom more than she minded death. Boredom, meaninglessness, emptiness tortured her.
I paused and wiped sweat out of my eyes and off my forehead. I sat up while I was in her. While I stayed in her. Still, it is not clear to me what I want sexually.
“I don’t want to come,” I said—maybe to mock her, maybe to get her into a mood of mutuality, maybe to apologize for not having handled things better.
So I came. Two movements. Three. A jazz piece. A riff on convulsions, genital convulsions. She backed off and let me alone while I came. But it felt like a punishment, her doing that.
I said crossly, “You fuck like a mother . . .” A woman with other people she cared about more.
“Don’t be cruel—my mother is a dolt.” Ora didn’t precisely mean stupidity so much as, in a rather high-handed social sense, she meant someone who’d failed to be legendary—to have a biography written about her. “I have sold my soul to you.” Then she corrected it: “For you . . .”
I thought I was in condition to hear her . . . I could see what she was saying . . . She was saying she was more thoroughly orphaned than I was . . . She hadn’t had much (or any) interest in being a daughter . . . This orphan of ladies’ freedom in the half-dark. Our breath creaky—like the springs of the bed—the fluster of us settling back and holding each other’s hands after a fuck. Us having affrighted death. We lay on our sides, looking at each other for a moment; and then I turned away, wanting to be alone. Or at a remove anyway from her particular courage and insolence toward life, toward death, toward reality.
I had a postcoital sense of a madness underlying and creating her beauty . . . A fan fluttering in front of her eyes. She had this other rank, a form of modesty in her, a boast of identity. To avoid horror—and she was not open about her feelings about horror but she accepted horrible social situations—she advocated romance-and-sex as a red-hot given. She lied about her sexual interests enough that her sexual heat was, in part, a device that was a serious modification of chatter blending with serious talk. It was not to be loved or trusted. (How you judge a fuck determines the next part of the story.) Her display of desire was in favor of your being willfully selfish. A semi-demi-abandoned display of male will—some fantastic hallucinations—is that bliss? Luck? Pain? Betrayal? I muttered out loud, “That was an unjudgeable fuck, Ora . . .” A sudden reality of love, falsified, dramatized, and the reality of our odors—we stank of the cunt-fish and of sour lemon sperm and of sweat and rut—made the acceptance of lies and of betrayal, betrayal of the self, and so on (as breeding stock) factually okay. She might be childlike, childlike-adult-cold about it, despairing but undefeated, but the honor we had came from me, the man, not from her, and I betrayed it every time I spoke and upheld it in my lying there, in my wobblingly accepting the fuck as sufficient. I didn’t bargain or defend myself or attack her . . . This was my sexual honor, to do this . . . She sighed. She was beyond rules. I don’t mean she behaved dishonorably. I mean she indulged herself in honor, sweetly, tragically, while being realistic after a fuck—well, after my orgasm. She was carefully sexual while being carefully not sexual. Ora’s eyes, famous since she was a child for beauty, are discreet, maybe a bit argumentative, I notice coldly, postcoitally. In the slipperiness of life after a fuck, she had a slidy directness; she lived out her hypotheses about love. She showed her ability to bear risk-and-mess . . . She was sighingly good-tempered. Patient. But in an operatic way that suggested madness, drunken love, scenes of lust, but earlier. And people getting hurt—an overrich category of experience. One was aware that another woman would be very different and that she was very different each time.
I ‘loved’ her too much to play certain games, and not enough to be careless and without thought or concern. I loved her changeably. I was sorry I loved her. I was pleased. I was a little desperate at being caught in this tie to her.
Each of her breaths is betraying me if I am my ideals. She is who she is and each flicker of my thought as a writer who was clear-minded betrays her.
So, my selves agree in committee, even now, let’s consider a female hero to claim ours is real love.
I do not want a life of struggle with her. I would like to have areas of firm agreement with her.
“Men are fools,” she said. Then: “We’re lucky to have each other—do you know that?”
She, too, wants areas of firm agreement between us but other areas, not the ones I care about.
She had submitted to fate, to reality, and she wished I would—to myself, however as fate and as reality—and to her as love. To the pressures she submitted to, including those from other people, men and women—so that we might be twins . . .
“I wish you would try to be like me,” I said. “Just a little. Fit in. All that jazz.”
She hadn’t ever submitted to a social group or to a man ever, or a woman, a mentor. Perhaps she hadn’t ever adopted personal or professional discipline except as a beauty, some of the discipline of being beautiful. We met as bandits in that sense. She put up with life, with reality, is what it was that she did. She adopted current fashions in thinking about life. She had her own twist, or view, in reacting to things. She was Radcliffe-Harvard, Maine, upper-level New York (but not the best level because of her father’s mésalliance). She was isolated by her beauty and her independence of spirit but not by originality or independence of mind or of soul. The terms, the way in which we were together and alike were up for discussion: who fit in, who wandered free, who was perversely himself, or herself. Those are specific dramas.
She put up with things. Each thing that happened, if she chose to, she put up with it. Me and that now and then the servants went mad, literally, in her rich grandmother’s house—she h
ad a brute of an extremely socially powerful grandmother whose social standing was considerably higher than her granddaughter’s. And Ora had a grandmother who was fairly sweet and very pretty, someone who read a good deal and who talked well, someone socially-successful-in-that-way.
So Ora, if you adjusted to her—whatever that means—you adjusted to this heaving and changeable grab bag, to bone-snapping surprise, to surprises in who she was; and not only that, who-she-was with an air of having always been it even if she hadn’t been it at all the night before. She put up with passes from men accompanied by threats and often violent scufflings and with semi-rape attempts from relatives. She bore with married men, sad, desperate, well-to-do, or poor, or very rich and stunningly famous, and with older sons who wrestled with her doomfully, tiptoed into her room at night or after lunch and had to be shoved out or tricked or partly given into or who shoved her off the sailboat in the middle of the cold green waves in Penobscot Bay. Or she pushed them off. And so on.
But it was not simple moral reality you adjusted to in her if you did adjust or if you could. Slander and weird remarks by jealous women and enamored ones. Blackmail and betrayal as commonplaces in ritzy surroundings and chic ones. Her careful social lying about certain of these matters, darkening them if she wanted or lightening them as normal among smart people or whatever, kind of set off with a frame of foil my own games of semi-innocent hickdom and boy-from-out-West (sort of) and orphan-who-has-found-a-(glamourous-)home-at-last. She was not exactly a femme fatale so much as a young woman of sufficient beauty and intelligence and background that she was a young woman of romantic and social and lustful fatality purposefully and now going straight—so to speak—now being a nice girl in any of a number of various ways, on top of the past, as reformation, or as a variant always present in the past. Or not being a nice girl—she tried various things. Time goaded her, as it does everyone. People would exclaim sometimes, But she really IS beautiful! She had kept her nerve this long. In the oddity of her moments, her unamused ironic acceptance was a toughness that she had.
Being sold fairly often had made her sensitive to being a commodity that people dealt in—sold by guys to other guys, by her parents or half sold by them and her social grandmother and by her favorite aunt and her least favorite aunt and by her godmother—and then her weaseling out of it or storming out of it, she felt herself as failed but superiorly knowledgeable. Failed but lucky and of high caliber. To be listened to—except when she wanted privacy and was busy imitating or even usurping me, being me: she walked like me at times. Her sense of failure—and her truly mad pride—covered the more or less accepted thing that she, her parents, her friends, at any given moment, and me perhaps, would ignore, would even favor some celebrity’s assault on her, some ex-general’s hots, some semi-billionaire’s wish to whatever, some politician’s or some famous actor’s pinching her breast, her bottom, following her into the john . . . But if I meddled, as I did, from the start, when she asked, she blamed me for being possessive—and for ruining her life: she did it patiently, argumentatively. One could imagine the steamy sense of possibilities in her head—or in her breast.
Then her sudden uncringing telling-everyone-off stuff—her telling the truth in a way—her being the editor of the lifey text or the long-lost narrator—her refusal (usually) to be sold, her half-agreeableness toward it at her own say-so at times that had nothing to do with me, this gave her a moral-amoral, ethical and personal tone—one of hatred, of rage-ready-to-go-off, and of a kind of sexual grief, a sexual tearfulness, as in being in the hands of a cruel owner.
But then the queerly pitched laughter of her not expecting sympathy, her attitudes toward her weird notoriety (which lasted most of her life): that’s normalcy for her although she does not give it that name.
But it and certain lying romanticizations, romancings about things, tincture what she does, not all the time, but much of the time when time itself is spread out, like a corridor, say, and isn’t an intimate boxcar thing, although this stuff in her is present then, too: normalcy known with terrific honesty and ease as a crazedness, as peculiarity and as a peculiarity of hers, as uniqueness—Ora is unique in her hurts and in the ways her being hurt is socially sought after by this or that person for this or that reason. This gave her the conviction that she was talented—a Lady van Gogh. This beauty—self-willed, insistently alive—bridged the rush of such oddity in herself with the further eeriness of her persisting in being a beauty—a somewhat more portable and self-governing thing than being a talent is—beauty considerable and persisted in and envied: she accepted the stories of that, the enmities and people getting even and the praise and the romance, and that made art unnecessary.
She was maybe on the make in regard to what-was-envied—she moved solely among things-that-were-envied—and this aspect of her was not paled or hidden but was nervily flaunted as a kind of okay personal elitism. Her education at the hands of people infatuated with her left her with an avidity (echoing theirs) which was her special rank, her special arrogance, a special pathos in the human flavor of her.
And to accept the consequences of this in herself: that, too, was part of her. She did that—accepted what results—or did so except when she collapsed. And this acceptance allowed her to choose her life up to a point. Was the world universally infatuated with her? No. It wasn’t a unison sort of thing. But you had to defy the world if you wanted to be with her—but it wasn’t considered chic to admit this. Her circumstances limited her powers to choose her life while creating those powers, choose her life or her men or her women, but she could sort of choose anyway.
She had powers which were like rights. Rights of story and rights of revenge. People banded together to assail her, to make her an outcast. And not a power. Often, even in New York, when she came into a room, into a party, a silence would commence. Men and women would choose their reaction—would embark on certain trajectories of partisanship or of rivalry or of pursuit or of who-knows-what. She had an American velocity; she was a young woman of affairs. She was no one’s type. She wasn’t owned or constrained that way. Her beauty was her own. Nothing of what I was could constrain her or own her; I was an act of willfulness on her part; I said this to her once and she said it was true of me with her, or more so, “because life is even harder on a man than it is on a woman, Wiley,” she said.
So then, what she and I did sexually had tag ends to it that smacked of being leftovers from her intense—and glamourous—experience. And mine. And it smacked of her having comparatively free will. She said more than once that she and I had more free will than a lot of people did—or I said it and she took the remark on; it became primally hers.
Her sense of sin and of right and wrong, of Faustian sinning in our being in love, so to speak, against the will of the heavens and the dictates of intelligence—Faustianly not sinning—and with reasonably giant social difficulties down below—this included her belief that she sinned in her free-willed and betrayal-laden submission to mastery in me—not a real one, but the one she imagined romantically, not steadily, but romantically and unsteadily. This was not a conventional sin. It was an Ora-sin. She was in a sub-Ora, sub-love way, Longing’s daughter interested in dirty submission, but you couldn’t count on that. She was hugely exercised, like a fighter, for real love . . . “You know a lot, Wiley, but you can’t really win an argument with me.” Real love—i.e., final love, death, death as the last and ultimate and greatest act and which made you a genius . . . She was kind of self-consciously at the edge of being a genius—she toughly played at it often with a tone of realism, changeably . . . She wasn’t realistic about that . . . I don’t know the sources for her terms for love as she imagined or saw that subject. I don’t know the whispery forms of her ideas or the extent of her mind or the scope of her feelings. But she believed that love was not specific and changeable but that unchanging LOVE had entered our lives, the real and only thing, the mythical thing.
I have a mythical sense of her that quivers and
moves. But a real sight of her face means that all her face is not clearly visible. So much value was compacted in her for me that I wonder how does all that I knew her to be come to be compacted into value, period, or does it dissolve it, value being a dream thing and imaginary? Her mind, her will, her decencies, her face, her mood, her nuttinesses of a low kind, she was often startlingly unkind to others. Often. She was startlingly charitable, too. She would support the pride of the defeated . . . not mine but poor people’s. She was clear about their value. Her willingness to die for love—die in certain ways—in a certain exuberant exhaustion—with me, with love, to get the whole bloody, elaborately awful-and-wonderful mess over and done with, she was impressive.
Do you love whoever creates you? Do they have to be nice about it?
Some people are regarded so romantically when they are young that the knowledge of childhood romance is part of how they look—ideas and hallucinations in a real past of love . . .
The fall or tumble of her—uh—glorious hair around her stunningly boned, rather wisely warm face—the effect of her face burned in you. You could not duplicate or portray the bones or the eyes or mouth, the life in them, in her, or her mind. Anyway, she was ready for self-pity and temperament in herself and others and for faulty sex and for a degree of violence as a measure of a man’s appreciation of her. Or a woman’s. She was remarkable—but worriedly: with a sense of failure—with a sense of scandal. With a small laugh, or with almost any mannerism, she made it clear that she was under the threat of her own boredom and that she had a history of flight. She was infinitely conceited, infinitely and despicably A Beauty.
She said that, in a bizarre way, I was that, too.
She accepted the scandal of what she was, not all the time though. When we talked late at night, she compared herself to darkness. “I’m like the night.” The wind was mumbling outside. “I’m dark. I know you will hurt me . . . I’m a grown-up. I know what you want . . .” She liked aristocratic English lady writers. In her bad moods, she knew herself as deformity and fault, ordinariness, un-Christian, as pagan meatiness-and-death; and then again, at bottom—au fond, she said—repicturing herself as a mightiness, a meaty mightiness of majesty, I guess—“I am not conceited, Wiley, but I am really of high caliber.” Then she said again, “I’m grown-up.” This is not the time to say this but in boredom with her life as it had been, after the first year with me, she wanted me to be the Beauty and herself to Wiley.
The Runaway Soul Page 24