The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  She passed herself off as plain: “I lived before you came along, Wiley. I had my books. I had my philosophy. I had my interest in the theater. I believed in the death of God. I was not jealous of artists then.”

  “Is that a quote?”

  She liked extreme theater but she quoted speeches from middlebrows and from movies that had impressed her when she was thirteen.

  The postcoital whatever—the white mist of sadness, bored, fleshless, fancifully exact, terrestrial and classroomy, sadness so-called—brought doubt.

  “You don’t ask for the whole kit-and-caboodle when you have oodles,” she told me. “My godmother said that.”

  Her godmother had been a Creole temptress from the Dominican Republic with a right-wing political leaning and a large circle of Washington acquaintances—including the last few presidents and their families.

  She was married to the chief of the Washington bureau of The Newsman, probably then the most politically important magazine in the country. When Ora and I started living together, Kiki, the godmother, had said it was okay. She was fat and clever, very good-looking, an insomniac rumored to be insane off and on. Ora said so.

  Later her husband had a stroke when he was sixty; and she nursed him for a year; and then she had a heart attack and committed suicide, leaving her husband who said he understood what she had done and why she’d done it. She was a coldly and powerfully entertaining madwoman, quite sane socially. An alcoholic.

  Ora was a victim to my degree of fame—take this on my say-so—say-so—this was a half-polite form of anti-Semitism. It wasn’t entirely unpleasant—she established it in the rough social equations of people-she-knew (who accepted delusions with Christian patience) that I was a sexual powerhouse beauty—as a man—the one who had hunted Ora down and now Ora was stuck with him and behaved well toward him in order to keep him. You know? The modish male, daring and potent, potently aggressive, competitive—whatever? Her fantasy lover? The man whose sexual-hallucinations-as-sexual-reality she dealt in? Well, that was one of the sexual stories she told. I don’t know why she chose it except that she figured it would travel well. People who know what lies will work feel they have a strong sense of reality. Why you? Guys—and some women—would say that to me and start a fight with me over Ora and my reputation and my work and who knows what-all? My rank includes this stuff.

  The sexual stuff: orgasm—when I came in her, she was freed and free so long as she didn’t come, free to be my victim while having her own will and so on. The issue arose in some circles whether she had stolen me and she half acceded to that story, too . . . She liked having that said of her.

  She lies in bed postcoitally, the hardworking thief, her long neck at an angle and her extraordinary face starring in the moment’s dramatic quietness. You can see her power as a real thing—the power of a freaky, social monster, the looks, the naked thighs, the amazed temperament—the mind, her experiences, education, dreams, deductions—you can see the sometimes upsetting power in her.

  Her astounding, intelligent, sturdy, enticing lips: she said, “I’m bad mad Ora but I feel peaceful now . . . I’m on my best behavior—I’m on parole . . .” Perhaps the vast snake-dragon Medusa-deathgiving stuff in her said more stuff silently: I love him, I am submissive, he’s the master, he’s the beauty . . . Partly a game and partly an analysis of male-dominated reality out there and up close.

  See, it is a game. A matter of style. And of will. Love as the will and style of a beauty interested in love has what merit? “I must be nice in some ways: no one ever calls me a cunt. A lot of people said I was a bitch: I said no a lot,” she giggled. It was sort of a giggle.

  A castrater, people said of her.

  “I was never part of men’s fantasies—of anyone’s fantasies,” she said proudly. Such tremendous untruthfulness—and inaccuracy—was not an issue with her. In the contractions and fadings and arrivals of the moment, her pride, her impotence-causing gorgeousness, her self-presentation hold hints of her being whorelike at times and of her having a genteel nursing streak now; she is trickily self-abnegating. She offers a human tie, expensive, helpful, dangerous.

  “Jesus, what a world,” I say. “Beauty in a democratic age—wow . . .”

  “I’m not beautiful . . . You’re in a state of illusion because you love me . . . Power and position and rank are more important, Wiley . . .” Sweet gorgeous nice girl in love for a while, free from male voices, more or less, the confessions: I’m not happy with my wife . . . my mother . . . my life . . . my daughters . . . I’m a premature ejaculator . . . I won’t take a minute of your time—ha-ha . . .

  Ora’s suitors . . .

  The daily surround, or hourly, of such drama gave her incredible merit as someone who reflected part of the society. She was like some slowly turning, very powerful, slowly focussing mechanism with a power of entry and a giant capacity for attention. Her strength was quite real. She was, herself, an entire corner of the world—oldish people invariably liked her and came alive talking to her.

  She says, “I know what people think of me. But people like me—I’m no good—I’m a terrible person, Wiley. People are okay . . . I like people . . . I’m not a hermit . . .”

  I echo with the reality of her and with the reality of our tie. She is not similarly scoured postcoitally. By association I echo with the reality of women. I have to stop loving her if I want to love her sensibly. If we are to live together, live and breathe. Of course, nature arranged just that very thing. I loved her best by going in and out of focus, by having moods and distraction, by failing her, by seeing her postcoitally—I’m being ironic—but it was also true so long as it was love. Acrobatics. A set of contortions.

  “God, life is hard,” I say, not really meaninglessly, but maybe repetitive and meaningless in her view.

  Ora turns those knowledgeable eyes of hers on me, eyes which are pure pools of life shadowed by death-at-bay-for-the-moment—and she says, “You fucking son of a bitch, you really don’t have a lot to complain about—do you know that?”

  I can’t make an absolute image of love or believe that an absolute love exists.

  It’s the tug and yank of the recurrence of love which makes it so oppressive. After sex, a politic shrewdness and an embarrassment with private images arrives in my case. I feel the force of her in the world, the bowsprit quality, the phallic or spiritually phallic do-jigger, but I see her as a pain in the neck and our tie as wrong for us both. I mind that. But I mind it only sadly. I am constrained by the ways men have rested their lives on her and then rebelled against that and revelled and spat and wallowed in knowing her, and were silent and cautious, and so on. I don’t want to be part of that in regard to her.

  The thing about the absolute and the artists who made art out of it is that the only structure they have which generates emotion is the structure of the awesomeness of the absolute and then the curiously moving pain and comedy of the mind wandering as it inevitably does in real moments, in the immensities of the real; and I prefer the structures of actual emotion and the reality of moments.

  The false absolutes of false laws don’t jolt me with their humanness. Jealousy is a universal thing and perhaps sex is, too, but then sexual or romantic or erotic jealousy have to be specified. I mean to say that jealousy, when all is said and done, is a way of thinking about the role of the other in one’s life rather than about the other. You go on thinking mainly about yourself the whole time you are jealous. But if you think about the other person, that doesn’t clearly happen; it’s not the chief thing.

  But I’ll tell you this: the absence of the universal jealousy has a sense of monstrousness about it—and of monstrous cruelty—as if you were sublimely confident or blessed and had great faith or some such thing. I don’t know that this is forgivable—this form of warfare with the entire rest of the world.

  What I do know is that you can feel love without jealousy being the chief or major or fundamental part of it.

  I have no readiness for nightma
re. My arm beneath my head on the pillow is asleep; it tingles. My skin is goose-pimpled. I thought that a guy with Ora has this reflection of himself from her and it’s as if history had already singled him out to be famous-in-a-way.

  This is not illusory magnification. And it is not all there is to love, either.

  It gave maybe a strange shape to my life for me to be with her. The little breathy currents of a thought, postcoital, in their cleaned-up-of-life form included the thought that this semi-comprehension, too, was momentary.

  She has turned her head and is watching me.

  “Don’t peek,” I say. Then, insultingly—but this is a tradition of asking for trouble between us because I am fragile after sex and take the offensive rather than shatter as if I were made of glass—I say, “You’re the mud I roll in . . .” A joke. Of a kind.

  “Wiley, you ever notice the whiteness-of-things? The way they have an outline even in the dark?” She refuses the bait.

  “No,” I say, although I have. “Why do you ask?”

  She sniffs and doesn’t answer. She may know I am being odd toward her. She has slept with two of her analysts, one of whom attempted suicide when she told him she thought he was disgusting. She’d been eighteen then. Kiki told me this.

  Kiki said, Be kind . . . She has been very hurt . . .

  “Your life insults me,” I say to Ora. (Hidden in that is a compliment: that I am not equal to being near her life.)

  “Your life insults me too,” she said adroitly. Then she said, erasing that: “I know the world, Wiley—I’m not sentimental, I assure you . . .”

  “I didn’t know it would be like this,” I said idly.

  “Don’t laugh at us, Wiley. This is once in a lifetime. No one else will love you the way I do . . .”

  “Others have. Others will.”

  “Christ, you’re a bastard. Why are you talking like this tonight?”

  “Because you were getting noble . . .”

  “Oh, shut up, shut up, shut up—you can’t always be right.”

  We understand each other, sort of.

  I take her in my arms in the postcoital scoured whiteness of acknowledging that my powers in the world are at the moment greater than hers.

  She says, “Love proves the world has value.”

  Her body in my arms adopts a reality of a pose of living, breathing death that I did when I was child and my dad held me in his arms.

  My boss—I work for a television network to pay the rent—has told me he will get rid of me if he can’t have Ora. My literary editor says he is infatuated with Ora although I am reasonably certain he is mostly queer. A friend of mine wants Ora to work for him: he wants to control for hours and hours of the week the woman I am close to. People approach me to see if I will double-cross her. They measure what they are against what she is in this way. Ora has a bunch of phrases she tosses around: “So be it,” she says now. “THIS is the stuff dreams are made of. It matters. We love each other—and love is rare. To hell with God and Mammon—go to hell, God and Mammon . . . Other people are such shits . . .”

  Even if you don’t do the Gestapolike mutual interrogations of each other, holes open up, shadowy pits, fear in what she says. I am always a little afraid because of her. I say, “Am I your top hat, Ora?” People choosing their men for a board game, for Monopoly.

  Her breath seemed to say she felt what I felt; she often faked such agreement. I often did, too. Do you ever fake that stuff? I said to her, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we were utterly truthful?”

  “I am happy for the first time in my life, Wiley . . . Leave us alone. For the first time I can see that might be partway just. So leave it all alone . . .”

  “Okay but no one can leave things alone for long.” Then: “What if we’re wrong about each other?”

  “Are you losing your nerve?”

  It requires death finally if you really want to know about your life, perhaps. You can try to know about it even if it kills you.

  She went on, “I’m not crazy, Wiley.”

  But she is; we all are; she has an extreme soul; she’s a madwoman really; she’s young, self-willed, valuable and kind of morally awful off and on but practical.

  She is quite a jealous person. We were in some sort of parallel synchronicity, Ora and I, but it wasn’t clear if it mattered a lot—a state of an abeyance of major pain, not totally, and a thing of being not lonely but incompletely so. It wasn’t clear what the merit was. It felt meritorious though, a truly weird mixture of pity and envy and desire and nerve—an acceptance—and a slightly mythical charity toward people but toward her especially and she toward me, and a charitable but heated contempt for life itself, maybe . . .

  She says, “Our passion is like a naked dahlia, Wiley . . .”

  “What the fuck does that mean?”

  “Oh, you know what that means.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then you’re even more of a Jewish puritan than I thought—don’t act insulted: that was not an anti-Semitic remark.”

  “Why would I say it was, Ora?” I said snakily-nobly . . . wearily.

  “You did last time . . . You know it shows on your face—that you love me . . .”

  The intelligent justice and profound sadness and oddly toned (labored over as unjeering, willfully sincere) merriment of her eyes and the silliness and calculation in her, these things are persuasive in her; they make her persuasive to me. Her bluff.

  “What is love?”

  “I am physically for you what the smell of a baby’s skin is for a woman who likes babies.”

  “Is you is or is you ain’t my baby, Ora?”

  She shakes her head and says, “I’m hard as nails, Wiley.”

  Part of me loves her.

  One time she wrote a play titled To Hell with Olivia. In it a sensitive Irish guy is in love with this coarse, earth-mother type named Olivia who gives in to his whining and they go to bed; when he can’t get it up, he pushes at her head to make her go down on him to get him going; she wrestles very strenuously and carries on in words—it’s not quite a good play—and she says, Do it or don’t, it wasn’t my idea, it’s no skin off my nose . . . It wasn’t her responsibility; and the boy says, You’re hard, Olivia, you’re hard.

  I didn’t like the play overall but as far as the lines went I felt I’d never seen anything so truthful written by a woman before and I was scared, pretty much, of Ora.

  Of character opening off of her looks and life and mind of that sort.

  Her father told me, We were always an ugly family and then Ora came along . . . She’s a swan. Hissing and trumpeting and of enormous wingspan, and an inhabitant, in a sense, of Swann’s Way, a book about jealousy and will and social-human cruelty in France. My father-in-law said Ora came from a line of powerful women, social duchesses, cityruling. A shadow hovered in Ora, of feelings narrowed and specialized, of a specialized American life, its choices, its moral style, with a frame of the humane, kind of, and of being a beauty: Oh my God look at her, she is really beautiful—she hasn’t lost HER nerve . . .

  Part of me doesn’t love her. And never will. One loves the pattern, the model, more than the specific example, the picture in the catalogue and not always the thing sent to you—at least you don’t care in the same way. You can, I think, hold the Platonic idea in the present-tense woman willfully. Ora was faintly worn, faintly soured. She said of her nerves once: They’re like dirty piano wires now; I wish they were clean as when I was young. I met her when I was a sophomore at Harvard and was trying to get free of a girl who, to punish me (as a moral and ethnic duty) and also just to see what would happen, to see if I had any ranking with with other girls, insisted she would let me alone and not hound me in front of other people if I would let her introduce me to Ora. At first sight, I was blistered and blinded and overcome—for a lot of seconds. I thought confusedly, Oh Christ, this is the one. And: I’d put up with a lot of shit if I could live with her for a while . . . When feeling ran cold, that meant I’d
hang on in return for now. And: Jesus, is this ever the wrong one for me, but who gives a fuck, I want this one . . . Love at first sight takes various tones. A lot of other people felt that way too, not about the tones, about her—Ora.

  It wasn’t special to like her. She and I almost ran off together the night we met; we stared at each other, talked, went off to be unobserved—people had gathered flatly around us to watch—and we talked alone, outside, for hours, but she decided against me; I had too many opinions, was too young, too poor—and Jewish; she sort of said she’d already had her Jew—and she put me on her list instead. She got around to me two years later. I thought I’d live monkishly. A bachelor of uncertain tastes. But when she came after me, I gave up all my ambitions, intellectual and military—I’d wanted to go into the army—and I thought I’d try her. I’d never been drawn to anyone as I was to her—electrically, harshly, wearingly. But so were a dozen other people. Dozens. It was vulgar and hardly unique to be drawn to her. She said I had my followers too. That had been four and a half years ago.

  She was superb at physically taking care of herself, doing her nails, her hair, bathing, tending her feet. Expert. Expertly knowing how to breathe, how to sleep. She never complained of hangovers, never seemed to run out of strength. The soft tissues of her breasts and cunt were scandalously independent; unmeek, they seemed to generate irony and amused complaint: she defended herself. Every moment. Oddly. If she didn’t defend herself with notions of her being pathetic or being evil-and-scary, then in an ordinary busy way, but finally in a kind of scarifying truthfulness, why she was busy, who you were, her state of mind, whatever . . .