“I’m looking for the golden mean,” she said often. Darkly.
I think she felt she had the right to show jealousy. We were living together the first time she read Proust’s novel, with its stuff on jealousy and love. The oaks on her parents’ place rustled in the country wind. She sat on a side porch and read, a box of Kleenex beside her: she cried and cried and read and read. She said, “He writes well . . . He’s deep.”
Jealousy
In spasms of it, she would be insane—she would spit out vituperation toward her father. She threw towels at me. She cried. She was partly a collagiste as a personality—she was jealous more in the way of a man. I knew from the start that a lot of what she was was recognizable from my having read certain books, certain magazines, from my having gone to the same college. I knew some of the same people she knew.
Her voice was a brilliant mélange of breeding and intellect (as intellect was considered at Harvard, short of the minds of the College Fellows)—and a further mélange of education and social-class energy, rich, deep, and full, a little formal, unexpected in someone so young—and in someone who looked like that, as she did. She often had a rich person’s grave summer manner—youthful tomboyish seriousness-of-intent, a bit important, collegiate if you like.
But she bellowed when she was jealous. She wept and twisted and turned. Or she was cold and stiff-backed and shadowy-eyed and noble—and more than sort of unclean.
Her voice was so hideous with will, so tin-can-ish, that it was like a license plate she wore identifying her as not-what-you’d-expect—as capable of murder or of killing: those hours of pistol practice—and the rest of it. A lady of a curious type—not girlish or demure or guilty and hardly safe for you and clearly capable de tout—her phrase. She said it was “typically Anglo-Saxon to say that in French—if you don’t learn about such things when you’re young, you never learn them—it’s all in the details.”
“Hey, Ora, you going off the deep end again?”
“I am someone who is hobbled to the golden mean!” She was famous at college for her bitcheries. A professor, known for his sadism, courted her and went too far, I guess, and Ora was heard to say, “You stay away from me, you ratty little girl-torturer, stay away from me or I will have you run out of town on a rail.”
She said to me, “I am capable of anything and I am glad of it.”
People took her side—not because she represented virtue and judgment, but because she was in her temper, well, nobly squalid: they rooted for bad stuff. She was a part-time kleptomaniac—mostly only when she was jealous and needed consolation. She was given to slandering girls who galled her—or even just sweet-faced girls with freckles. She hauled off and slapped a woman who was insulting her and pawing her. A number of women adored her as a female hero.
She had a particular loathing for ungenerosity of any kind. If a guy she was with left too small a tip for a nice waitress—or a sad one—Ora would throw it in his face and say, “You fucking tightwad,” and she would empty her purse on the table.
She was often drunk. Often jealous and maniac. Premenstrual . . . Always, however, UNASHAMED. She had a gold-and-jasper cigarette holder. After sex, she’d load up her holder; she might go barefoot, smoking with her holder, to the john or to the kitchen, or she might go naked, but in high heels, clickety-clacking, smoking, bobbling. She might have an air of tragic self-importance and satiety or of impatient fear of punishment. “I’m the whore of Babylon,” she said. “You’re innocent by comparison . . . Not psychologically, though.” Then: “I’m not really the whore of Babylon . . .”
The energy, the élan of her showiness made you realize how unshowy a lot of girls were. How careful even if their voices were snotty or full-of-display—how careful in a world of violence—and of mean-throated social opinions. Or how smart and shadowy they were and how bitter or how funny . . . Or how capable of love they were. Ora was sort of a super-brat of beauty, but ladylike and well read—and impossible. She was ninety-percent audacity. I indirectly got a shivery sense of how different women were one from another and how they hid that—and of a type—beautiful, or would-be beautiful, or some equivalent, equivocably beautiful and mad, mad in rebellion—and courage she was courageously noticeable: she was, I said, but Johnno stole it, Madame Charge-of-the-Light-Brigade. Courage, or nerve, not symmetry, is beauty. Men, women, professors, homosexuals. She was snottily interested in ads and snottily and defiantly affected by them: she wanted sort of to actualize those fantasies of pleasure—or of horror—and then she’d begin to go numb and just watch what happened, seeing some of it, blanking out quite a lot. Ora was showy, determined, and yet indeterminative, a drinker, a pagan-feminist mistress of despair, saltily not Christian, physical as hell, suicidal and resigned, unresigned, murderous and nuts . . . indomitable.
Johnno called me a “man-moth” in a poem: he stole it from another poem by a poet, a woman. Ora would eye me and semi-grin and say, “Man-moth . . .” Johnno came to dinner one night and when he came in the door, he kissed my hand and said, “Oh, hi,” to Ora.
Older writers who chased her, more famous than me and Johnno put together, irritated and angered her. She was jealous of their reputations and sexually unyielding toward them. One of the most famous critics of the time, Cory de Haddon (who had slept with Betticent, who claimed she had to bite him so hard to get him to come she cracked a tooth), pursued Ora at a dinner party and telephoned and sent her books. Ora told him, Lose twenty pounds and try me again—or wait until I write a book.
She also told him to save his energies for the untalented women writers who slept with him to get blurbs: she went really far; she was really temperamental.
I often said to her, as I did that other night, the one I’m writing about, “I like your realism, Ora.”
Did I want her to flirt with Cory de Haddon so that he would write about me? Yeah. But not enough to ask her to. Or to begin even slightly to maneuver toward it. I figured we would never recover from it, she and I. I mean, consider my need for her to be around to calm that infant sense of irrecoverable loss—that sense of loss was now revoked. Consider the hours of the day and my moodiness. Consider my jealousy of her. My self-destructiveness. My ambition. Ora said to me once, faintly excited by the wickedness, “You want to sell me to him . . .”
“No. But suit yourself.”
Opt for happiness, such as it is, or not, is what I meant.
It is my opinion that what her face registered then was startled love for me: it startled her—it heated my blood. She had often accused me in her life of whoring her, of not caring what she felt about herself. She burned with an appetite of contradictory lust for privacy, evasiveness, but she was mostly, even essentially, an exhibitionist.
“The two of us are just narcissists who like each other . . .”
“I’m an exhibitionist, too,” she said. A doubting one who made flaunting entrances at parties and then more or less caved in uninsolently, or semi-insolently; but she didn’t pad in, or sidle in, as I sometimes still did . . . when I wasn’t carried along in her style.
The energy with which she was Ora Perkins moved me. The energy with which she made trouble for herself was half an elegance of contempt for the world and how it treated her—her mother—and poor people—this was so although she was a right-winger at bottom. She was half made of a curious sort of longing for and absorption in a kind of honey of common notoriety—not the sort that kills but the sort that leads to your being mentioned in common talk . . . Life after all. “I’m not dead meat,” she says on the night in New York, not averted-eyed but looking at the wall, daring it to show shock. “As sure as shootin’,” she said in her extraordinarily fine voice. And she added, shamelessly, “Ultimately I’m okay . . . past all argument . . .” Then: “Your sex is never Wham, bam, thankee ma’am . . .”
“The greasy slide . . . the Hour of Equipment . . . the Hour of Enchanted Equipment . . . Excerpts from the Kama Sutra.”
“Putting thoughts into words
is very odd,” she said.
She was going to try it. Her mind was set but it worked well even so. The structures of her belief were not open; she wouldn’t change them because of argument—or for a book . . . Or for a man. A certain amount of polish was finish: she was finished. She said, “Love for you and me is a kind of miracle.” I guessed in the dark that ideas and thoughts, partly unmediated, were in play now. She was set up, like a tent for a mood in this odd place, this odd climate—she was as strange to me as a pyramid in some ways. (Mostly, this is being written in the tones of the language I had available to me at the times I am writing about.)
She assumed people had the same fixity in them that she did . . . and similar uncertainties. She seemed to know to what extent she was eccentric (and now this is a tone of feeling I had but not the language I had at my disposal), a soul bold and striding, the amount and direction and digressions of time that a soul is, swimming and flying, running and walking, breasting time—and catching its breath: one says, My soul is catching its breath—the interrogated and strained soul, interrogated by life; she moves toward fame, or toward forgetfulness; a set of magic syllables in a famous name or someone forgotten and relegated to oblivion. She saw herself as that more clearly than I saw myself as that.
She had a kind of virgin’s rage, also a whore girl’s amusement—after all, to be invited somewhere for your looks is to be whored—she had a bloodied and maybe unappeasable bitterness, and she was semi-almost-satisfied and patient with me, with us, with the world: she controlled the universe with her style—with her daring—not with prayer. Her moments of giving in or of being overwhelmed, her moments of stylelessness, so to speak, were a kind of prayerless prayerfulness: a grudging submission. It really was a circus of ideas with her, and then it was her body, cleft and buttocks, breasts and waist, her hands and neck, and then her face. It was a little like being in a dirty French movie of backstage life to be with her. She saw meaning in thinking of us, her and me, as clowns, serious clowns, among semi-criminals—others. And our being sexual she saw as purity and as a theme of insistent pre-nostalgia, so to speak. I forget what else she saw in us. The formal elements she had taken from her instruction, schooled and familied, in the world, she had folded into a confessional tone of considerable sad go-to-hell audacity—vivacity, too—and odd, almost heartless moments, of obstinate charity, toward herself first, then toward others. Talking in bed in the semi-dark—“semi” because so much light came through the windows, the city late at night, and from the moon—well, for me, it was Ora talking to me, her beauty there, her voice in play, and her not laughing at things; and her being a bitch, her keeping the bitchery retracted, her making us a thing of joy (if I might say that), it was really something. That glorious, thickish, glossy skin of hers, and the profundity of her eyes: her sweetly honied stench of rebellion—and of horror, the horror that afflicts women as an immanence—and her powers of creation—of moments, of feelings, she was serious and not serious, lost and found. In love? Well, it all had some reference to style—not a style of the first rank in the history of the world. She spoke almost entirely in referential language, referring to things in a slantedly educated, social-class, social-group way—not reverential but jocular at a slant of near-reverence, this side of her violence of rebellion, lyingly twice over despite whatever truthfulness was there, so a lot of her was really hidden. She wanted to manage life, to get even with it, to keep up, to be a fox and not a fool. It touched and maddened me, scared me, struck me as large-souled, wonderful really, in a real room, what she was. I thought so, anyway . . .
A way of putting it is that she didn’t mean much of what she said but she always meant something by it; and much of what she meant showed although not simply or directly. She was enough of a personage that her meaning something meant more than that she meant something: it had a public resonance. You were being tested. This had become different in spirit—and principle—lately, recently, in the last two years, when the world held it to be the case that I was of more public importance than she was. Then she upheld her meaning as the Great Right . . . Or as the Great Light . . . the light of intimacy, the light of two people as opposed to the single nature of thoughtlight. She never chattered: that’s only half a virtue, not to chatter. She always had a purpose, she was always a presence, she shared her strength with you; but there was no real peace because of the testing and the actuality of her character and the nature of affection in real time, at least of my affection. She treated me as if we were two bandits with a semi-forbidden sexual tie between us—semi-forbidden, not really workable; but maybe you could work it out in some sort of joint blasphemy (that was also a sacrament, a secular one, besieged). It was like that: that was how it seemed to me: her sexual anger, her sexual power, in this part of things, was tremendous . . . TREMENDOUS. In real life, it seems pushy of someone—and bold—to come and go, in presence and in focus, into overt truth of self-display and of will and then out again. She was like that but mostly she kept things at a slant—which was maddening, too. “I can’t win,” she said in the semi-dark; “but I don’t give a fuck . . . I’m strong.” She was the single most beautiful person I had known until then, and, by far, the most envious individual I had known. I wondered if it might be the source of her health (and a form of privilege) to be avid. Everyone I knew showed envy. I was aware of it in myself. Envy. Ambition. A certain will-to-live. A constant thing, or a thing constantly recurring, inevitable, a part of waking—perhaps even the core of things.
I figured, kind of cloudedly, that as long as she felt she would envy someone their having me, she would be interested in holding on to me. But I offered her a deal: “Let’s not make each other jealous—” We worked at it. She rewarded me for that: it freed her for a while—and that freed me.
I had bouts of integrity, of being myself and letting her stay or go as she chose. I was cool-nerved at times. She settled her butt on the bed that night. I said to Johnno, who was vituperative about my feelings for her, that Ora mattered to me as an American war would. She overshadowed everything in my life: “I’m not proud of it,” I said. “It’s not like loving a cripple or someone very noble—or someone useful . . .”
But he was not mollified.
So far Ora and I had been together for a thousand and a half days. I had begun to model myself on her largely—or on her in reverse—or on what she knew about men and my contradiction of that and my identification of myself as contradicting that. This was weird and intrusive—I had entered quite deeply into her life, and I was a force there—and, although I wasn’t the only force in her life, it was as if I had eaten her up in some dreadful mythical procedure. I wasn’t in style Lila’s son anymore or S.L.’s (or my real parents Max and Ceil’s): I was a guy who lived with Ora Perkins. She knew she had, in part, educated me into being Wiley-Silenowicz-Now. This was capricious and arbitrary—maybe it was ordinary. It felt like a regular fate, one that happened to other men.
It wasn’t symmetrically two-sided. When, because of my writing, I became a young-man-of-talent—in the eyes of some people—she modelled herself on me differently from before. She wanted that stuff. She became me at times, as if it were a common thing to be someone who wasn’t you. She’d done this with other people, I think, roommates and grown-ups, analysts and guys and women—and people in her family—but so powerful was the initial image, or so valuable to her, the initial pattern of her life, that none of the other stuff led her into art or, really, into orphanhood. She hadn’t really left home; and she didn’t leave now into caring for me or caring about me or, in some ways, being me.
A collagiste. She used junk in people, stuff she saw as being successful. She took over things I said. I said to some people that New York was “raw envy acting as if it were intelligence . . .” Then: “God, maybe it is intelligence.” And a few days later she’d made it, “What I like about New York is that here, at least, people know envy is intelligence . . . It’s the core of New York seriousness . . . It’s the core of up
per-level SALESMANSHIP.”
But then not long after that she said it mostly in my words: “New York is envy acting as intelligence . . . “And so on.
When I laughed at her she said strangely, “But I didn’t say that New York was self-pity at a critical pitch.” As if she hadn’t borrowed anything if she hadn’t borrowed that.
“But I didn’t say that—I got that from Patrizia di Gustino, who got it from Bernie Kellow—maybe he got it from her: you never know . . .”
“Yes, yes, you told me.”
“Yeah, but, Ora, you didn’t say that either.” Sometimes she is flattered when I try to bring her remarks into a coherence she associates with the biographies of famous women.
“I did now,” she said. “To you . . . And you aren’t blaming me.” I had, and have, no idea what she was getting at. I was blaming her, wasn’t I? I wasn’t asking her advice on real existence, was I?
“I won’t use it,” I said confusedly. I am a blunderer and rather easily outwitted: a large, dumb young man. With some abilities.
Ora has a strong sense of how real other people’s lives (and minds) are to them. I’m stupid for a while in my life (and mind) but I’m not entirely helpless in the long run.
“Men always steal from women, Wiley.”
The Runaway Soul Page 34