The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  Her speech had a brittle effect of echo, maybe even a faint staleness, of earlier success.

  But this was balanced by the excitement of her presence and of her bold manner, by my interest in what she intended now. It was a curious and workable balance. Love—you know? Maybe it was.

  She said in the dark, in bed that night, “You keep your amateur standing by making up your own speeches as you go along—that’s an interesting way to be.”

  “Amateur morally? Uncollusive?”

  She sighed: she didn’t associate it, my doing that, I mean, with any merit in the use of language. By repeating her remarks, she gained almost a laboratory sense of language, her language, her purposes, people and their sense of their own reality. Then she bronzed that, made it absolute. But her remarks trembled with the differences in their meaning each time anyway, different from other times. The same remark made by her dressed in some way and then naked saying it to me, and then her making it again dressed and saying it to someone else, not to me—her being sexually not really available or slidingly—she regularly gathered such data: I watched her: she knew a great deal. She was weirdly a forward edge to my own mind. She was a master-mistress of echoes and of measurement of social echoes. She was a laboratory, technician of social and sexual arousal-of-interest—of well-being because existence took on a certain tone. She credited herself for this. Johnno Fynner had a phrase: “repulsive and terrific heroisms.” He used phrases for a while but when they came to a certain pitch of use in his life, he dropped them—this was in general.

  And he spoke of “all the horsepower in you getting out of hand and you become a runaway . . . The art is life, boyo.”

  Ora said, “I like him . . . he is truly interesting . . . I’m a talent scout . . . Well,” she sighed, “but because of you liking me, he’ll never forgive me. Not now. He would have liked me otherwise.” He never did like her; he died without liking her; he imitated her though. He thought it unjust that she had the powers of attraction she had and the kinds of merit she had. He “liked” wretched, mostly plain, “witty” women. Or pretty ones wildly having sexual careers. He wanted it to be the case that only one sort of person had merit.

  Ora’s rank: the most beautiful creature I ever saw . . . Or as really beautiful . . . And independent: you can see the glamour of it—and the youthfulness. Then, this year—the year of the night I am writing about, she had chiefly the rank of who-Wiley-was-living-with. A New York rank of that kind.

  It was a kind of filthy thing, not something she was likely to accept. It was kind of like a series of scorpions people dropped on us.

  I could tell from the responses of her body to me that she didn’t sleep around or fool around with other people much in order to get even for this stuff—not yet. As I would have. And occasionally did. We’d had no arrangement that included being faithful to one another, but she wanted to change that lately—as I said. She said to Bern (or Bernie) Kellow—a stylish magazine publisher we saw—that she wasn’t free enough of worrying about what I felt toward her to fool around. I think she found actual sex puzzling. So did Johnno Fynner—but differently. One night when he was drunk and importunate—and I was drunk and confident and easy and had been amused—a lot, I had laughed a lot—by him and some of his friends two evenings in a row, I sort of leaned back and let him start on me down there, but he had no feelings in his mouth. It was creepy.

  Or even in the moments of friendly (but nerve-ridden, still amused) drama, unzipping and so on. Not even longing: I mean, it was all meaning, meaning short of words, this side of being worded by him, this side of his attempt to put it into words, and the longing was to understand—and to be humbled and to be conceited and beautiful. I mean nothing was there but his sorts of hallucinations. Nothing was there for me but Johnno—and a curiously deadened power of my bodily realities, my measurements, my youth—I don’t know how to say this: a strangely breath-riddled coffined reality—one in a coffin and on display, spider-bitten, scorpion-destroyed—well, sort of.

  I think I mean no sense of the present tense was there—only a sense of dreams and, I guess, their painless time, their pain of longing—the strange cardboard flutter of the presence of dream-longing in a guy’s head and face and neck—Johnno’s—and the pain and rage in abeyance—as in Ora and me in that other way—the way life is in a wildly demon-riddled, angel-wing-thrust-at-courtship truce, or whatever it was . . . Say it again: The way life is. He would never believe me about anything—hell, and fuck it, even my body was a dream for him. He is a nearly pathic narcissist who in his sense of things writes everyone’s dialogue for them—he is more and more isolated—as in a control booth. “You love me,” he insists.

  “No, I don’t . . . You gonna suck it . . . or not?” Then: “The deal is clear, Johnno.”

  But it wasn’t . . .

  Ora, at least, let me mostly be someone who had some separate will of response and language from hers. She was not as formula-ridden as Johnno was. She was braver than most women, too. Maybe foolish. Johnno was made of metal, he was so dense with a loathing of time and of himself maybe, and of the-way-life-is. He so loathed time that he made himself into a kind of metal. He accepted real time as itself a rapist of boys, him being a boy. He had brick hutments of words he hid his metal self in—sort of. Of course, I did love him . . . But in this way which was as invisible (and lost to him) as some collapsed bridge in a distant continent—or in a legend. His mouth was like metal. He was a hero—he was heroic—but the agony in him was poisonous—poison ivy or a pit of scorpions or of snakes—all those images—and ones of festering wounds—and of beggary, beggary pulling you down into a gutter or into a dirty alley. The agony was extreme and not neutral or powerless—the agony in him. I don’t mean only that it was contagious, unless it is understood contagion rests on an ambition in the germs or viruses . . . I mean they want to live. Ora wasn’t like that. Or, rather, the agony was self-consciously obliterated in her by her having a hell of a cheap good time—or an arty one—or one that represented what the world has to offer. The agony in her showed less. It was moderated by blankness—by a stylelessness of consciousness . . . A differently conceited beggary—sunnier. She wasn’t as ambitious as Johnno. He, like me, stood often in a rain of words. Of consciousness. It was the will-to-affect. The will to be pierced and to affect. It was purer in him than it was in me. His happiness was of the most curious, spiritual, and somehow semi-lower-class kind—a conceited and proud and vanity-ridden grovelling. Ora’s varied wildly but her happiness was mostly like an elbow nudging her suspicious knowledge of things. Mine? Mine was like, oh, I’ve said this in my life: a startled bird. Ora was sexually real. Or almost real. Johnno was not. For neither of them was sex a source of light—so far as I know, painlessness was the source of light for them—the source of life as opposed to mere rush and maddened velocity. One time, drinking with Johnno, I accepted it that things were the way they were for me—I hadn’t done that ever before, or if I had, it had been childish, or young. After that, it happened for me with Ora, and with books, and even with Guy, but with him in silent, unimportant moments—as when we were painting a house, say, for a friend. The first time, with Johnno (that I accepted my life), I accepted it in drunkenness and for a while: self-pity, rage, conceit, luck, moments of happiness, predestination, and the moments of flickers of free will, all of it. The drunkenness was simply an excuse for the vanity of believing myself for once. “I am entirely a fool and I am not entirely a fool,” I said. “Dawn . . . see, that’s dawn . . . It’s dawn . . . Dawn is the model of painlessness after terror.” I spoke much more elaborately when I was drunk. Johnno wrote a poem sequence on this idea. I can claim to know a little, but the truth is that I can’t know, with any statistical finality, what is or is not true sexually for other people. Or morally. I was glad Johnno stole, or used, the idea . . . I was free to breathe . . . I theorize and guess at other people. His mouth wasn’t always like metal, but it mostly was. Sexual charity is like murder, of h
im, of them—of you, too: you get hung, they get hung up on the emptiness; you are hung, bedecked with the cruelty of no response to them—a curious definition. I don’t know. Johnno’s lips were almost lips—but not quite. Sex was almost a source of light mentally, but not quite. Johnno became intent on his own further claims to justice—to justification. He really did rule the universe—as he saw it. Its laws, its rules . . . You couldn’t survive it, either of you, his absolute sense of how things worked—he swept you onward toward sin-and-friendship—sacraments he ruled—and into his personal doctrines of getting ahead in the world—the team—and his notions of love—as if you were a Catholic housewife. Or a bricklayer. It seemed a terrible sort of onrushing cruelty that he opened himself and you to, that he broached.

  Fynner said, “You are a genius and a hick . . . Like Cézanne.” His cocksucking was as if he was stropping my prick with the inner mechanisms of his mouth. “It’s too bad you’re beautiful, it’s too bad I love you . . .” Now, in America, in my day, few people talked, women either; and such statements were startling—even more so if you weren’t dreaming, if it wasn’t dreamlike.

  “Hey,” I said, after a time lapse—sort of like a double, triple, quadruple take of a comedian in a movie. “Say that stuff again, will you?”

  He froze—I think because I was real. “All you want to do is paint apples,” he said with contempt. I was interesting-looking: as I said, people would come into the dining hall at college who didn’t belong there and they would stare at me and then leave. Johnno said that flattering stuff about me and I heard in my head my father’s voice saying, What do you think of them there apples? and As sure as God made little green apples. And I didn’t know what any of this meant except that I was arguing with my father and being nice to him somehow, long after his death, in what I did—or passively allowed—with Johnno.

  Later, when I refused to accept the event in the romantic terms he proposed for it—madly, loonily, autocratically proposed, I thought—I said to Johnno, “As sure as God made little green apples, you just want to talk about it, I’m just a notch you want to cut in your belt, you want to make it all words and collusion. But I—I can’t do it.”

  “You’re a know-it-all—”

  “What’s wrong with that? You think you’re omniscient. You’re only talking about yourself . . . You call me a know-it-all when I say no.”

  Johnno said, “You’re an incredible bastard.”

  “You’re just being Catholic. Look, I don’t know: I CAN’T do it . . . I don’t want to, but the point is, Johnno, I CAN’T.”

  The odd thing was how merciless he became: “Of course you can: you’re lying.” Any offer of truce I made, he treated as the vestibule to my defeat. It’s possible that this was the way he negotiated things. It’s possible that he wanted me to hit him—the way he was pushy, the faces he made, the abrasive, comically effeminate, goading voice he used. Hit him and comfort him—in some eerie and vague combination or variation. Or perhaps even more, not to comfort him.

  He had a fevered quality of wanting something I could not guess—unless I was a sort of criminal negligence in underpants—or something. It’s probable that the likable thing to do was to grind-him-under-my-heel and then live with the consequences, more or less lifelong. My mother used to say, I’m not a mind reader . . . But she was. People are mind readers. A written page of gestures, of colors of the voice, skin colors and features in motion, uttered in that sense, statement, muttered aside, assertive vocatives, questions, trick things, tales, sales pitches . . .

  Johnno held his body very stiffly—with a Catholic heaven-and-hell elegance—not of money, but artful in a private way. He improvised weird scenes, wild ones for you and him, and friends of his, in art and in life . . . sketches. He used the actual light in real restaurants, and he used the light in your mind—in mine anyway—to pose you in, and him, so that, if you will bear with me, he got a poem, or a possible poem, or a phrase, out of his turning you into a sense of you as a handsome young man (in some maybe mostly Irish way), or even a handsome-young-man-who-lived-with-Ora-Perkins-who-was-a-beauty, so that all the associations, the corridors, the big stores or malls in your head opened up of you being treated a little the way some women were and of how you’d treated women when you were young, or still—and of him, Johnno, as A Grand Figure—a master of ceremonies of knowledge and of life in this way—and you couldn’t get this in any other way. I couldn’t. You had to pay for this. In various living-breathing ways. He held back. He doled stuff out. He went crazy—typhoonesque—and then you were in Kansas or in Oz. It wasn’t so different with Ora. I was envied as I had never thought I would be. I had a somber grinlessness, a kind of singing grimness of being young and male that was like a triumphant grin. I felt it burning in the lower quadrant, but almost the center, of my face. The whispers, the weird mixture of anonymity and of notoriety. One is rewarded. And used by others. Or one exploits them. One is pawed and indulged. Worshipped, actually. Although not all that much. Remarks about Ora and me as Beauty and the Beast. It is lousy and amazing . . . and all that. X loves me because Y does. I was modest—in a way. I lay on the grass in Cambridge Common one day, in my pink Brooks Brothers shirt (of that era), and I looked at the sky and I wished I was tall. I don’t know how many seconds passed before it occurred to me that I was tall—and had been by then for years. I was living inside some sort of marvel of luck that was not clear to me or even entirely present, truthfully, or half-accurately, in my consciousness, in actual moments. Later, with Ora, I was known for writing with a brute straightforwardness of the acceptability of life, ipso facto, a priori, religion or no religion.

  Or, rather, my work was technically admired, as a display of voice and lyricism. A falsified persona, not despairing. An Artist. Does love (being loved) make you narcissistic? Praise and love? Death and destruction and love? Does it confer value on you arbitrarily? Undeservedly? A cruel endorsement . . . Huge white clouds, the whitish Manhattan light . . . Thoughts change from moment to moment. Try to know less and be happier . . . I had usually been less sad than my mother. So what had she meant? It is some sort of scary, frighteningly slidy, superior-inferior condition. All is turnabout and fair play—among independent wills. The “superior” one is outwitted and slain, dried and made into a trophy, driven crazy. Time-ruined . . . Penalized in the sequences of popular tastes—styles change . . . Moments go by . . . go bye-bye . . . Everyone is richer, smarter, handsomer, happier. But one is the one—the one the host and hostess wait to see . . . The heat of special attention . . . Ora . . . Oh God . . .

  In 1956, that night, ah: it’s warm—it’s late spring—the adopted and quivering and troubled child—he’s spoiled; he’s here—what does it mean? Dear God, I promise not to enjoy this too much and not to become smug, but let it go on for a while. Help me to be smart enough to see that it goes on for a while longer . . . Please . . .

  “We’re spoiled. And smug, Ora . . .”

  “You’re spoiled. And smug,” she said.

  Ora wasn’t trying to be famous. She’d stopped. She wasn’t fucking around (so far as I know). That stuff was in suspension. She wasn’t writing movies with monocle-wearing countesses or liberated semi-princess girl-Jews with intelligent eyes who disliked me or who liked me and pawed me when she wasn’t looking. She wasn’t painting or designing clothes. Those things were in suspension. Real feeling? Feeling real enough to her? For us? I wanted her to work. We needed the money. I was afraid of what free time would do to her.

  She said, “Wiley, I just want to stay home for a while—I just want to have my feelings.” She said a little shyly and a little boldly, “I want to specialize in my feelings, Wiley, for a little while.” Then: “I want to be an artist like you.”

  I didn’t want her to. I didn’t want a mirror of me. And what was that stuff worth, her feelings and me? Was I so great? Were we so lucky, really? And if I was enviable in the ways she was, then why was she imitating me? Well, I got drunk soberly on the thi
ng that it was worth a good deal, a great deal to be me—or at least it sort of was. But I’d given it up to become Ora-and-me. “Real feelings,” she said, “are special.” Real feelings? I didn’t think she would stay interested in this stuff or in me for long or that it was innocent, what we were. It was all work. And mirrors.

  And luck . . .

  luck . . .

  luck . . .

  luck . . .

  Or God’s will . . . Or an American accident . . .

  Anyway, we didn’t have enough money for sincere affection. We had to work at things. Ora’s sin cere and uncertain but proud affection—reliably proud, testingly proud, expensively proud—her proud obsessions—were an art. My overexcitement was a kind of lunatic freedom. Her freedom lay in her being the better artist in this sense. She wasn’t a better artist as far as art went.

  I said, “I wish you’d work. I feel stronger if we have two incomes than if we have only me bringing home the bacon . . . I have to be too flexible, too politic—I can’t think. So I don’t want you to be merely a girlfriend.”

  “Welcome to the real world, Wiley,” she said. “I love you. You. You. You know, it’s the first time for me . . .”

  “I keep pointing out to you we’ve been together four years now . . .”

  It hurt: it was a daily pain, an hourly one—the value, the not-value of our lives, of us in this way, the pressure in actual moments.

  “Are you thinking of Sam’s movie?” I then asked her. A guy we knew had directed a movie in which he used stuff from our apartment, he’d used our lives, some of our mannerisms.

  Ora said, “I want to leave New York.”

  “I don’t know, Ora . . . I bet what we have is realer here—I bet that we are realer in New York pressure . . .”

  “Oh, confess you have secret reasons . . .”

  “Maybe I’m just being ambitious? Or nosy? Or self-destructive . . . so I can get away from you and be promiscuous?”