But if she put that aside and you kissed HER you found that the inside of her mouth was sweet and not clutching or acidy with nerves. She accepted it, who she was—she almost accepted it . . . A pummelled and frighteningly outsprawled and life-loosened girl, of extreme intelligence and quasi-extreme wildness, mostly practical and physically very adroit and well-informed . . . A low-level artist of will and discipline. Of character. An incredible searchlight of feminine in this form played on the world—or as an observatory observed it; the information was doled out by Mother Ora who was socially of that caste, of the segment of that caste that knows it deals in information. Newspaper people, history writers, people who want to eke out their upbringings. Socially well-placed women with troubled sons, women with a great deal of money and often of wit and style, twice, according to the stories, sought out Ora for their sons, to save them. It was just her—she had to steal some underpants to go to Nahant for one of those things. She was able. She was clumsily expert at a lot of different kinds of politics. She had unbitten fingernails. She said when I first knew her, I don’t ever want to be pitiable . . . I plan to kill myself when the juice is gone. She said, Some people think I’m an interesting person. The drugs she experimented with did not capture her. Or wreck her. Certain books of ideas, books self-flagellant and conceited, she carried with her everywhere; and if you thought she was a snob for liking the writers she liked in her sophomore year, Aristophanes, Vita Sackville-West, Ortega y Gasset, and Jane Austen, snappish and comic, elitist and comic further, romantic and comic yet further, she would say, Go fuck yourself . . . I don’t discuss literature on first dates . . .
And then her programmatic submissiveness to some of the women writers of her own time, the tinkling awfulness of the styles, the opinions, the spun sugar of will or the iron of it, the rage, the hideous vaginal gothicisms, the unreliable intelligence was very like that of guys with the clunky styles, and staggeringly stale opinions, and pocketknife things of will, the rage, and hideous phallic lament or triumph. She was impressed by Hemingway but she thought his stuff was jejeune.
And all the time, the glow of what the girl was, the uneven and troubled radiance, stained and irregular, her hands, her tempers, her sudden amusement, the way the dirtiness and the stupidity touched her.
And then all she already knew.
I said, “God your life is interesting. I tried to go to an analyst: he was interested in me until he asked me about money, and when I said I had none, I was on a scholarship, he started telling me I was normal . . .”
I was grateful that my nerves held up when I was with her.
“You had an analyst who told YOU YOU WERE NORMALLL . . . OH MY GOD, OH MY GOD, OH MY GOD . . .” She laughed then in a strange tone.
I never saw her burn her mouth on coffee. She was physically hyperconscious. She couldn’t keep track of all she knew; and she’d become bemused. She knew I was infatuated with her. Then she said, I ‘loved’ her—she saw or at least named the stuff differently after a while. Our madness and reclusiveness as a couple were her idea, were part of her style ab ovo—prep-school lovers going off to be alone, being social but belonging to the affair: in our case, at first because I wasn’t from a prep school, we did that more and less both; and then we heavily did it. At some parties we went to, she slept in the middle of everyone. She more flatly rejected professors and the like—despite a new sweetness in her face, she still looked like fate, or fatedness, to a lot of people.
She said, “You and I are twins.”
“No we’re not. I wish we were. But we aren’t.”
Imaginary twinship is how she got past self-centeredness—she believed that solipsism was the truth of things. But she was aware of people: she said, “In the country of the blind, the one-eyed woman is king . . .”
She couldn’t always hold a job—people were hard on her. She usually picked one man, married, but he only occasionally protected her.
A person is, of course, limited and is caught up in the unyielding motions of everything, including her own. Stubbornly wronging, often wrong, awash in the mornings—in heartbeat, in desire—she chooses to be loneliness enlarged and partly eased echoingly.
She leans over and fiddles with my mouth with her fingertips. For a moment I have a queer glamour of being ministered to. She declared herself mine in this bossy way—she did it in public and in private. I was grateful but not always pleased. I was amused by her, however. She is jealous of everything she doesn’t cause.
“What do you dream of, Ora?”
“I dream of peace and of catastrophe. You’re not so different from other men.” I was man enough, ordinary enough, extraordinary enough in a regular way, that I could be with her. She said, “Your eyes—you never come forward inside your eyes, you always stay back—in the bandit territories. You know you like to hurt people, Wiley. You’re too self-righteous to be honest. You will hurt me in some way that will last me the rest of my life . . . But it’s all right; I’m very strong. It’s worth it not to be alone . . . for once.”
A love speech . . . from a narcissistic solipsist? I don’t know. My mood was lightening. Privileges and all, she’s human. My heart clenches, then pounds in the elevation of my luck. When we first started to be together, I’d said that I would risk being hurt or humiliated by her or others and that I would risk harming her, bearing that guilt. I would do it in order to be with her . . . for a while. “Fancy-shmancy Harvard speeches,” I say now, as she said four and a half years back.
She said, “Don’t laugh at us anymore just now, Wiley.”
I know from the fuck, as she does in a different vocabulary in her, how we feel. This isn’t final. The extraordinary self-violation, self-squandering of love that goes on, my flesh gropes along in the swirling boxcar-rustling arrival and surround of the multiplicity of slightly sequential arriving and fading in these lucky and troubled circumstances. Her breath testifies, terrifies, soothes, confesses, and lies. Her nighttime relentlessness of personality—I mean, the absence of fear in her when we are alone at night, toward me, toward us (I am always a little frightened about us and of her—and of an individual moment and how it might slide this way or that for me)—the evidence of the fuck offering a temporary modification of the infatuate’s terror—this has worn beauty.
Ora says suddenly, “You know, Wiley, guilt is a cliché.”
I say, “Touché . . . Yeah, I know. Is it?”
She says, “I think you ought to admit I am mostly a sincere person. You know something? You’re not typical . . . You’re not a Wandering Jew—not really. You’re not like other men. Are you worried about the Jews?” Because of the Holocaust.
“No . . . Not right now . . . Not at the moment.” I am in a way. I’m haunted by ghosts. A phrase gets into my mind—They’re all dead—and won’t leave for a while.
She says, a little Radcliffe-ishly, “The Catholics are right: despair is really a no-win cul-de-sac. Why do you want to be good . . . It’s not possible.” She offers this, at this hour: “You’re like Julius Caesar.”
I say, “You like names becoming historical words . . . I like some act or ritual or quality of person that indicates, I don’t know, grace . . . I’d feel better then . . . I feel all right now but I’d feel better—especially if tough times are coming . . .”
“I don’t know. I’m not afraid,” she says. “Now a name that people would use for all time, Wiley, I don’t know—maybe it would indicate love.”
Our vague blind sociability at this hour suddenly opens, for me, into deep fear: a pit of meaning but part of the meaning is my own meaninglessness and error so far, so far during my life; I say, “What do you know about it? I try to be strong for you. I show off for you. I lie to you all the time about how strong I am. Let’s go to sleep.”
“Okay.”
“It’s not good to be tired in New York among the MONSTERS. You don’t understand; you never get tired . . .”
“That’s because I’m not ruthless. What are you really a
fter? I think you’re a Napoleon type. After all, all I am is someone who is going to be destroyed by you . . .”
“Ah, your destiny . . .”
“Well, it matters . . .”
“I told you, Ora. I told you my great secret: when I was a child, people said I was a genius and that it would push people around.”
“Oh I love minds. I love the human mind. Just hush up. Really, you come from a small town after all. I’m a thinker, Wiley. I’m prepared. I don’t think your mind is so strange.”
It’s strange about city darkness; it is made of specks of light and smears of shadow and then deeper darkness, and then of dots and dashes of quiet grayness, some of them bunched; and all of it together forms a shadow-riddled whitish late-night iridescence, phosphorescence, luminescence.
She went on with emphasis at first, “I AM a thinker, and I think a lot of what a man is is he is not a woman. I understand you,” she said.
“I understand that boasting at bedtime is a little like a lullaby you sing yourself . . . Or it’s maybe like hugging your pillow . . . I understand nothing,” I say.
“You’re putting on weight. You’re pretty, still. We can’t understand things, Wiley . . . People can’t . . . We do what we have to do—we obey categorical imperatives. I think you’re sentimental about understanding stuff. The world is everything that is and is not the case—if it is the case then we know it is not the case,” she said collegiately, quietly-hugely. A statement can be like a pole for a pole vaulter. From some mental position, some authoritative and watched aeriality, she said, “I don’t know what you want . . . You don’t know either . . .” Then: “I don’t want to know now anything.” She is only dimly visible. “You think other women are as good as I am but they are not. I am more peaceful now than I have ever been . . . Even as a child I hated sleeping alone in a bed.” Hers is an assertive, creating-life beauty.
“Oh, don’t be so human, Ora,” I say. “It’s an uphill battle living with the way I see things.” Then: “It is strange about even small distances—how they dilute stuff. If I am right next to you, I can’t remember much or see much beyond you, past you.”
“You’re the only person who knows how sweet I am,” she says somberly. Then she laughs in an odd way—a smallish but drawn-out lengthways laugh . . .
The reality of being empty, of being defiled by grown-up life—by love among other things—the distillation and concentration of love is the heart of long-term fucking, perhaps too of the efforts on one’s part to rule one’s life. To understand one’s choices, even that one has made choices, and the Connections and parallels, the threads and gimmicks of the foreseen: all that happens in a certain, somewhat literary, French tone, in emptiness. She, Ora, fights to see that we love, that I do . . . I really don’t know why: I know it is a human and not an absolute thing. It scares me . . . makes me uneasy . . . makes me ironic and superior . . .
“What is one to do about one’s lostness-in-the-world? Lie about it? I suppose you have to when you have children—all the little reasons crawling around the floor and yelling their heads off . . .”
“Are you going to sleep?” she asked.
“I am going Nowhere,” I said. “Bye-bye: will you miss me?”
“Yes . . . Do you want a cover over you?” Ora asked.
“When I get cold. But soon your hip will creep over me, then your arm, the big hot stones of fire-baked arms and legs . . .”
“Am I too heavy? A shallow girl like me? Oh, I’m shallow as a puddle . . . Why should I be heavy,” she shook her head with nounderstanding and as if with self-loathing, comically. It is a joke . . .
“Ha-ha,” I say.
She says then, putting her head on my chest, “Tell me the truth: is my skull too big?”
“No. Yes-after-a-while . . . See how untrusting—and nervous—we are.”
“Oh, Wiley, tell me what you’re thinking: do you see the future? Is everything all right?”
“No. Let’s just guess. It would be so nice to be real. Ora, I’m too apologetic—and embarrassed—to be anything much.”
“You’re real.”
“Thanks . . . The measure for love that I use is middle-class; it is the limits we set to how much we let ourselves hurt each other and when we knock ourselves out not to hurt the other guy . . .” Now there is a thing in speech that someone has to see through what you’re saying. They have to do the opposite of what you say you want—otherwise, they can never see what you’re talking about. I could feel myself unconsciously but I observed it now a little after the fact daring her to test our tie. “I shouldn’t have said that . . . If I were more like my sister, if I were more like Nonie, I’d lie so you’d react in another way . . . She’s more suitable for these kinds of moments than I am . . . She’s sort of freed to try them out.” I am not Nonie. I said it out loud. “But I am not Nonie . . .”
Ora stirs where she lies next to me and on me; a tension is in her body; I sigh and think, What next . . .
Nonie in Love
Pain, the murder at waking: the murder of dreams (and the obliteration of the populace in dreams) that waking is: a cough, a fever: a sudden emotion making itself known as unbearable: Nonie said to me once, “You never get hurt. You’re not human. You don’t have feelings. You don’t know anything . . .”
She said of herself, “I’m a strong person, things just roll off my back, I guess: look at me, I’m just bright and shiny and raring to go—”
The body remembers pain. A stick, a belt, a person. An effectual taunt. In duration pain can seem to represent an aspect of eternity. One’s own pain. Someone else’s. I’m not sure what difference someone else’s pain ought to make in the moral scales of determining what you do—so many people, so much pain. Because of the statistics, this isn’t something that should be put to a vote, probably.
But my own pain—I remember the first time my arm was twisted: Tell me the truth and I’ll let you go . . .
The shock, the disbelief at the sensation didn’t keep me from calculating whether I could afford to give in: Owwwwww . . . I’ll tell you the truth . . . The unfortunate self-revelation then, the unmasking of this technique, this other plane of reality when you’ve lost, lost out, is this part of normalcy? Is fear? When I was very little, I fell down a flight of stairs, and I remember the pain and shock and the curious absence of fear . . . Oh, you little idiot, did you hurt yourself? I remember my strangulated and agonized silence, I had knocked the air out of myself and I couldn’t breathe or speak. The immediate memory of wheeling and cartwheeling walls and ceilings as I fell, the nausea, the devastation of my breath and mind, the dissolution of the ordinary reality of my strength in pain, and, still, I wasn’t afraid.
Do you want to kill yourself? Have you no sense? I think I did feel fear for someone else before I learned it for myself. I think it was my nurse, Anne Marie. Did you ever wake early and move silently and come on someone who was close to you and who had been awake all night, in a bad state, and was wounded, scarred, at the last gasp? I felt fear then. Did you fall silent? Did you feel like a child on a battlefield?
Often, when I was a child and I was hurt, Daddy would say, in sympathy, You’re breaking my heart . . . I can’t go on until you feel better . . . Will you help me feel better, PISHER? Sometimes it’s fine with me then—truly—if his heart breaks . . . I don’t care what becomes of him. I don’t love him. The abstract and as-if-universa darkness of hurt, the sharp wretchedness, the delirium of defeat, make it hard to go on; it is like walking in fire; and Dad says, It’s not fair to punish me like this. I’d prefer it if you hit me in the head with a coal shovel, Pisherkins. Just learn to keep on going. It’s time for you to learn to live to fight another day . . .
It’s scary how it matters who loves whom and what love is in someone and how that burns and stings and stinks and tears you and then how it doesn’t matter. Ma said, perhaps on this matter: “Nonie is of the world, worldly . . . Well, we all have to learn to grin and bear it . . .”
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S.L. said, “We’ll fix it, we’ll fix it . . . The U.S.A. is the land of hope and good medicine.” He was a Utopian. “It’s the home of the cure . . .”
Momma said, “S.L. is impatient with the least little unhappiness . . .” Momma said of that, as she said of a number of things, “I tell you that can be A NIGHTMARE.”
Do you treat your soul like a child? Do you guard it from the sight of blood? From the knowledge of unkindness?
The point at which my speech could goad a grown-up or a child my own age to violence was one of the things I studied in my childhood . . . I tested and observed and tried out various things.
In the first second of falling, Katie didn’t believe she was falling, that it was happening. She didn’t know what she should believe. Katie withheld her belief. Katie had no factual sense that she was falling. She didn’t think it was plausible. She asked, Am I falling? She didn’t answer herself; she saw that she was—the trees suddenly moved in such a way that she knew she was falling through the air. She hoped she was dreaming . . . This is how it had happened to me; I change it and apply it to her. I saw her fall down her front steps. I don’t really know what she felt . . . She saw that time had gone funny . . . I mean she knew it was real because it didn’t rearrange itself to seem plausible. It just went on. She—or I—when I fell, I thought, Oh, oh. I had no certainty yet that I would come to irreversible harm. I mourned the day’s dreamlike and racing and skidding peaceableness, the world’s upside-down and spinning beauty as I turned over as I fell. I mourned my lost safety. The light darkened for me. In the nostalgic and sickened nowhere that the moment is for me, now, she’s bouncing on the steps and grass: her shoulders and back strike and slide. Her head jounces, too. The grass tears and slides beneath me and gives off its own disturbed, odorously lamenting odor. It’s real.
The Runaway Soul Page 26