The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  I kissed her beautiful nose in the dark, its tip.

  “Things are exciting here,” I said. “Ora . . .”

  “I’m not your slave,” she said.

  She and Johnno and Guy and a few other people (Bern Kellow, for one, and the woman who worked for me part-time) said that from time to time—suggesting a mental submission, with limits.

  “I don’t want a slave,” I said bewilderedly. “I would like to become so famous I could make people be coherent my way when they talked to me.” Then: “Now that you’re not working, are you enjoying your feelings, Ora?”

  “Miserably,” she said.

  “Oh no!” I exclaimed. I don’t know the exact second I recognized her joke—maybe even before I exclaimed.

  She laughed. She said, “Oh, it’s so wonderful not to be tired of someone . . .”

  “We aren’t tired of each other but maybe we’re wearing down . . .”

  “God, don’t talk like that!”

  “Sorry . . . Well, we aren’t free of being concerned about each other’s opinions . . .”

  “People don’t stay in New York who have real feelings. You go somewhere else if you want to be sincerely together with someone. It’s asking for trouble to stay in New York. It’s like a jungle of appetites here, Wiley.”

  “Do you, as a general rule, root for the underdog? Are you unfair to people you don’t look down on? Is that what’s wrong with New York, Ora?”

  “Here, everyone is in a mood . . .”

  “The city as a huge storm of will and uncertainty—epigrains and albatrosses: you know how I know I love you? I would interpose myself and take the death blow from a robber. I admit I get more hot and bothered with arousal when we’re not in the city. Here, love is a convenience—sort of . . . but twilight is quite carnal.”

  “You’re showing off,” she said. Then: “I like that.”

  Kellow and Higgins. They both objected to my style as a writer—yet they admired my work, they said. They objected to me—yet they spoiled me and courted my company. Years later they confessed they’d “loved” me. Or did. I mean still. I couldn’t listen. I had longed so for them to like me . . . I mean I couldn’t bear the realer story. Kellow was considerably older than I was and much more sophisticated. He owned three magazines and was a tyrant and was also a complete charmer—charitable, energetic, a small-boned bully-arriviste, well-informed, cagey, the complete instructor, the completely coldhearted and interesting companion-and-instructor—the doting hyena-cobra and an exposed cold heart (in New York). He had a kind of dragonfly-and-lion-beetle way of talking: a little flutter; and he would alight; and then he would carry the subject off to a burrow, a dark one.

  Once he caught sight of Ora—and of, uh, ah, oh, our love—he was, for all his wriggling, power, money, and extreme cleverness, almost mine to do with as I wanted—especially since I asked him for nothing, preferring to observe his fascination and his reactions, preferring that to making any profit from any of this or to cementing the friendship through obligations on both sides. Preferring being with Ora to submitting to the obvious history.

  Of course, that tempted him.

  He had an awesome amount of personal authority—it came from having made people famous and from having guessed the temper of the times and from having made a good-sized fortune and so on.

  He said, “New York is not a place for true love.” And he looked at me sharply. “True love is not how you get your picture taken.” I think I understood a little of what he was saying—of how you had to be emotionally available to the machineries, the apparatus of becoming someone in public consciousness. He said, “Not true love that lasts very long.”

  His wife said, “Oh, true love doesn’t last . . . Psychoanalysis lasts . . . And money, sometimes money lasts.”

  And so on . . .

  He was not like Johnno. Neither was Higgins who was a nouveau old-line Wasp—the first generation of such pretension, up from small-town-hood. A Johnny-come-lately Sensitive Gentleman, so utterly dishonest, so tricky that it was a form of dearness that was dear even while it set your teeth on edge. He asked for charity all the time—as a form of his own Christian humility. “Love is one-sided,” he said. “One person suffers. One person is bored.” He was much too selfish to be interested in anyone’s loving him—Ora pointed this out. He was my literary adviser and could talk really well: the beginning of a story, he said, no matter how much light you try to cast in the first sentence, is really no more for a reader than light under a door in a dark hallway.

  I like men who talk . . . I’m scared of men who have too much real power . . . presidents and army generals and billionaires . . . I dislike being an accomplice . . . and being emotionally slain or owned: employed, I guess that is.

  Ora said I loved both men but was hopelessly evasive and suspicious—and a know-it-all. She said I believed them more than I believed her, but that’s not true, at least about emotional matters. Or about metaphysical issues. Or aesthetics. I did not let them talk about Ora. Or whether ours was true love—hers and mine.

  “You despise your friends,” she said.

  Those two. “Well, what I’m interested in feels to me to be beyond stuff those two know about. And they fight dirty,” I said to her. “It would be odd if someone like me knew what true love was—or experienced it.”

  “We’re very lucky, Will.” A nickname. She (and Johnno) didn’t like the name Wiley. It wasn’t romantic.

  “I’m independent—I’m lost,” I said.

  “Hush, hush, you want me to make us some cocoa?”

  “A lot of what we feel for each other is fairly real. At least that.”

  “It would be realer out of New York . . . New York is for people who are really not able to be serious, Wiley, about anything much except seeming to be central while boring everybody to death.”

  “Yes? We’re better than everyone?”

  “We don’t do things because they’re subject matter, Wiley . . .”

  “No? We do them because they arise in the soul?”

  “Yes.”

  “The soul is bent by ambitions—whatever they are.”

  “How do you know about the soul?”

  In Ora’s presence, everything was real. She watched me to see if I loved her still, I watched her to see what she felt now—it was amusing in a dark, full sense.

  “Are the halls of self-consciousness like the halls of Montezuma?” That was from Johnno. “I didn’t say that right. The soul is the totality of what one is—what one has done—of what has been done to one and what one has done in return. But the soul can be used—puritanically, promiscuously: it hardly matters that being Puritan and being promiscuous are so much alike in the moments. It is almost an irresistible pleasure to lower oneself, one’s soul, and to become the propagator of the fame of one’s name. A kind of swindler . . . The wit of success . . .”

  Ora, a little drunk, or drunkenly dryly sober, and a little cross, said, “They do a big P.R. number here about their feelings, but it’s all a creepy lie. I’d like to leave: I’d rather live in the country—or in Hollywood or Paris—I’d rather live in New Jersey.” Her family, being New York State and Massachusetts and Connecticut and Maryland, was contemptuous toward New Jersey.

  I was sure of myself in some ways—maybe not realistically.

  “And us?” I asked.

  “You and I are mostly real, Wiley.”

  “Yeah . . . sure . . .”

  “DON’T BE CLEVER! DON’T BE A FOOL OF THAT SORT—NOT NOW—I CAN’T STAND IT. You thought ahead—you planned it all—coming to New York—us—all the things that have happened here.” Including her liking me more after a while than she had in the beginning. “You told me what would happen and it happened.”

  I had a dim memory of predicting these things.

  “Ora, I’m not that smart. Maybe you plan things out . . . I don’t. It was a gamble. I thought you might be entertained in New York. I thought we might have an ‘exciting’ tim
e. I knew I could go on being reasonable from time to time with you and I figured you’d like that.”

  “But you don’t know how your unconscious mind twists things so that the prophecies come out crazily, Wiley.”

  “Life always surprises me, Ora . . . You can’t predict the whole thing, the flavor or whatever, of a real thing.”

  “My analysts said they could.”

  She said now in the dark, “I can’t have a career”—she was a little drunk, more than a little sober—she sounded faintly like Millie: “You have to sleep your way up. It’s better if you’re droll-looking—droll-looking and crippled—it’s a lot better. People don’t have to crush you. But if you’re real, they try to hurt you and you fight back. They don’t want to learn from you. And that’s that . . . That’s the end of that . . . It’s quite, quite, quite awful. In our lifetime, what we have are people who are clever amateurs . . . It’s the Decline of the West.” She had shifted to quoting from her father.

  I said clumsily, “In a lot of careers, Ora, like logging and exploring and medical research, you know when what you’re looking for will kill people, but in most work, if you fake it, everyone is safer in a way, even if the world falls apart. Real work can kill everyone else.” She looked blank. I often left out data or words that would explain things to her. I thought I was obvious and dumb when I talked. I said, “People get hurt. So you hold back . . .”

  Her eyelids silently twittered. Her eyes gleamed. You ever see swallows in a canyon, hunting? Her eyes flickered. Then she got it, got something—

  “It’s about being dangerous—the dangerous young—and envy—rivalry—the myths of the species.”

  She said, “I don’t have the slightest Jewish streak . . . I have no guilt . . . No guilt at all . . .”

  “I hate the word guilt: I always hear gilt, as in gold-leafed and airless. How about responsibility? You feel responsibility?”

  “The dullest word of tongue or pen,” she said, quoting someone, quoting a joke. “I’m ruthless, Wiley.” She was in earnest and yet roguish . . . she managed it. “Listen, Wiley”—she put her hand on my arm: she really liked talking in bed—“listen hard,” she said as if we really had been making real sense as in a very good book.

  “The Lady John Wayne,” I said.

  “I am a very very very moral person . . . But I don’t expect to be understood . . . They can all go to hell.” Then she muttered like a movie star (very audibly, very well recorded, very central—I didn’t see enough movies to know if it was Ingrid Bergman or Edwige Feuillère she was influenced by here), “The maimed, the scarred, the freakish aren’t going to be kind to us. And they do the work. Everyone else is just fucking the time away. But what can those other people know that we know, Wiley?” The ones who didn’t have looks, the competent ones? “I don’t want to be wrong but I don’t think they count.” She was talking about someone’s loving her best? Putting her first in this area, too. Me doing it. “I believe in what John Adams said: Things are run by the rich, the well-born, and the able . . . I grew up tough . . . I never worry about Jack and Millie.”

  I only partly knew what she was saying and that filled me with despair. “Oh God, Ora, you’re not any of the things you just said. You’re such a liar it scares the piss out of me . . .”

  “It scares you that I put love before politics, Wiley, but I know that in the end politics is everything. Love comes and goes. ‘It is like an untamed bird . . .‘“That was from Carmen. “But our love is mythological,” she said obstinately.

  “I see what you mean,” I said earnestly—to make her laugh. “I see that,” I tried again. “That’s what scares the piss out of me.”

  “Ha-ha,” she said then.

  “I want a drinky,” she said.

  “Go ahead.”

  Ora drank before we went to parties when she was getting dressed and putting together how she would look. She drank a lot, a vast, huge, legendary amount during parties and dinner parties. And then among the eyes, the lives, and the voices of other people, fuelled but not visibly drunk, she would become deeply silent and amused and often almost sweet-tempered. She would talk in the sense of holding forth—but never that I knew of in New York City.

  “I’m glad we don’t do la-di-da stuff in bed.” She had risen from the bed and was pouring herself a drink from the bottle on her vanity table. “I don’t like that la-di-da stuff,” she said.

  She meant I didn’t ask her to compete with whores or with more sexual women.

  In the dark, I see her flesh, her body: the semi-stilled waves of flesh . . .

  She had private reasons of the sort that are generalized during analysis . . . the emptiness and misery that are not here—well, some is here. “I am cerebral, Wiley—it’s a flaw,” she said as she came back to bed, sipping at her uniced Scotch in a plain glass. “I’m honest, Wiley . . . Liars implode.” Jack’s word. “I hate imploded liars.” With alcohol, she spoke to me with fewer, or with different, pretenses—taking more risks. And then, an amazing thing—and clear, all things considered—it was from one of her college papers: she quoted it now: “What would be the point of permanent but inconsistent social reason? It must be to be human.” An argument in favor of frivolity. She sat on the edge of the bed. “A gentleman never talks about being not corrupt,” she said. “Anyway, real Americans aren’t gentlemen . . . I don’t like gentlemen. I love you—and I believe in America.” Some of that was from Jack. She said, “I could never be a Stalinist or a Trotskyite . . . But some of those people are fun to be with.”

  Her looks. Her courage. To see her at the dinner table was to see Marxism die . . .

  “Oh God, I shouldn’t be drinking—I’ve been naughty . . . I feel sick.” She went into the john and closed the door. “Don’t come in,” she said through the door. She ran the water, obscuring the sounds. After a while, she came out, wet-faced, washed, not looking tired. “You still love me, Willsy?”

  “Sure. Less, but, sure, I still love you.”

  She said, “Love me simply.” She meant it.

  “I can’t.” Then: “You didn’t let me nurse you . . .” Then: “Sure, simple is as simple does. You too. Love me simply.”

  “Uh,” she said. Then: “I don’t believe in justice,” she said. “Not for women . . . Those ideas of even-steven? They’re not for women. People hold those ideas for the publicity.”

  She wasn’t the prettiest or loveliest woman or the most charming—but she was oddly logical and bold within her tactical cowardice and her illogic—she was the most seriously beautiful person—perhaps the most naughtily alert.

  A thief, a usurper of my life. A pallor of intense shadow. She has a deep and deeply physical soul—a soul like a gulf, a cleft in the dark . . . She half hated it, this thing of being of interest to me. An affair. A belated fling. She said, “You’re pretty in the dark—you look sensitive when I can’t see you; would you give up what you look like if you could write like Milton?”

  I was smart-alecky and I said, “No.”

  She sighed and said, “I wouldn’t either . . . But some days I would . . . Oh, it’s too sad; I’m so trivial: I can’t bear myself . . . I wish I’d been an orphan . . . Like you . . . Like Moses. Would you be willing to be awful-looking if you could be a Moses?”

  “And give you up?”

  “Bullshit in the bulrushes,” she said in a delicately willed, foolish voice. Then, in a stronger voice: “Yes,” she said.

  “No.”

  A long silence. She put her drink down and lay across me, perpendicular to me. My arms went over her breasts. She stared at the ceiling. Finally, she said, “What would you do if you could write like Shakespeare?”

  “What would I pay for it? I don’t know. What would I do for fifty million dollars?”

  “I wouldn’t do anything for fifty million dollars,” she said.

  Of course, she’d had the choice.

  So, in a way, had I.

  A silence then.

  I looked at her
fine-boned, heavy-skinned, powerfully affecting profile—in the dark. Really, beauty in someone is a trial of your ego. “I could forgive you for affecting me . . . If I could write like Shakespeare—if I knew that I could . . . I would do it easily if it was a sure thing I wrote like him. After all, knowing that, if you could know it, would be pretty damn cheering.”

  “Yeah, I see your point,” she said, lying on me.

  “But how can you tell it’s not illusion? Would you give up your face to be Shakespeare?”

  “In a minute. Less than a minute.”

  “And lose me?”

  “‘Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.’”

  “Come on, stick to the rules.”

  “What rules? I would still have an interesting face, whatever it was, if I wrote like that.”

  “Oh . . . I see . . . But I’m used to your present face.”

  Ora’s face—the sedate and educated and yet large and naughty mouth, softish and smart-ass mouth, luminous with health and mind? with intelligence? And her amazing eyes, suffering and empty and deep at the same time, with an unfortunate hurrah element: Come on, let’s not be suicidal. I ‘loved’ her in part. I really had no idea if she was a serious person. She was a person.

  I said, “I can’t daydream like this . . . I can’t be a Marxist either . . . We can’t be Shakespeare.”

  “Well, don’t say that to a Trotskyite celebrity writer who’s no good,” she said, suddenly becoming my instructor. “Agreed?” She had been a Trotskyite one time for almost a year—but no one had believed her. She said, “I hate myself, Wiley . . .”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be . . . I have you.”

  “Ora, I have my notions of love—they’re not yours—yours are based on the power of jeal—”

  “Jealousy can make YOU crazy—fast enough.” She said it darkly—she was, abruptly, at the edge of a sea of rage, more memory than directed at me.

  “I don’t believe jealousy is the sign of love. Proust lied. Unless everything is love.”

  “Oh, you’re so competitive,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”