The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  “You want to have a better love life than Proust did . . .”

  “Well, he wasn’t happy, Ora . . . He died young.”

  We are naked . . . The night sky in the window is visible in the mirror of her vanity table. If I stood, I could see up and down Madison Avenue.

  Ora looked a little, oh, quiet and improper, lovely and a little drunk, startlingly alight and not young in a way.

  “It’s all degrading,” I said. “It’s more sensible to be a woman . . . I believe that famous athletes, dictators, actors want to duplicate what you are—want to have your kinds of knowledge of life in this world. People talking to you—your parents, grandparents, teachers, analysts . . .” Then swallowing (and choking a little), with a slight pause: “The men before me . . . I’m a little crazy. I’m still drunk. You are The Library at Alexandria.”

  “It was burned down, Willsy . . .”

  “Yes, it was . . . That’s the point. You can’t trust me. Rightly or wrongly, I see you as a symbol—a real person who is a symbol—one of a number of examples—people study people like you: what our part of New York is about is unhappy people who become the equivalent of a beautiful woman.”

  “I’m not beautiful . . . You’re just in love with me.” Then: “You’re beautiful . . . Bern Kellow calls you the smart Farley Granger.”

  “That’s affectionate meanness—he thinks Granger is revolting. He sees me as your lover—lucky in having the life and body—” Of someone who loved a woman. “He can’t see beyond that. I don’t have that life, that body, but how blessed it feels to fool him—the imposture. I mind the hatred and mischief . . . in him . . . toward us. And the affection. I wish he weren’t such a poisonous little monkey.”

  “You’ve had a sweet youth,” she said, not unenviously.

  “Me?” A sweet, honied youth? “That’s interesting . . . Like a treat I gave myself?” She said nothing. “I know I’m in good shape lately—I can breathe. I can smell odors. I can see colors.”

  Suddenly she said, “I’m inferior goods . . . I’m terrible . . . I’m a cheap cunt.”

  “Are you going to confess something?”

  “You saved me . . . Promise me you’ll go and save me some more.”

  “Christ, Ora: you’re funny. You’re so snotty and then you’re some kind of masochist crawling around like I was the Pope or King Freud or A Clever Daddy.”

  She said, “You’re this subtle and cowardly hick . . . And powerful—now with a heart-on—” I did. I called it heart-on and not hard-on. “And so it’s hard to be near you.”

  “Are you humble—and loose up between the legs—or between the ears—my darling, believe me, you’re-one-of-the-wonders-of-the-world.”

  “Thank you, Wiley. I know you love me . . . You’re blind. Love is blind—you know, you’re not everyone.”

  “You always argue . . . Do you feel a lot of fear of what would happen if you ever really listened to me, if you ever really talked to me like it mattered?”

  “It matters. Yes. Oh God. Truth is so sexy. It turns me to jolly jelly. I can’t bear how much it matters to me,” she said, draping herself looseningly over my thigh. “If I listen to you, I will break in two—like my heart.”

  “Yah-tuh-tee-yah-tuh-tee . . .”

  “It’s true: my heart is broken . . .”

  “And jealousy is the tie between us. Stop playing with my feelings: I’m a violent orphan, Ora.”

  “Ah . . . ah . . . ah,” she said. Pause. Then she giggled quietly.

  “You’re always huffy toward my prick—like you’ve known better ones . . .”

  “I have,” she said daringly.

  Pause. “I am choked up with rage . . . I could kill you for that . . . Christ: are we happy? Well, if we are, it’s in this way. Is it good enough, Ora?”

  “You’re getting even, aren’t you?”

  “Ask me no questions, tell me no lies, I tell you none,” I said, seeing Lila—and Nonie—briefly, phantasmally, in the dark.

  “Now we have sexual desire, somewhat painful . . . sore-pricked,” I said. Then ironically: “And a few eensy-weensy seconds of melodramatic breath,” I said as I turned her over mostly on me but partly to one side. “Every time I touch you, my touch kind of burningly churns inside me, inside itself and then in me . . . What does any of it mean? Does my violence interest you?”

  “No. But I can be patient with what you are.”

  I was balked and scared, both, by the sexual reality—the feeling in a real moment of lives—permissions—and so on.

  I said, “You’re my ghost lover and I’m your virgin male . . . You’re so clean . . . I am spiritually almost like a virgin.” Here, as I spoke, masculine ambition centered on her being the darker one of us, the more violent actually, the one more free, the one with nothing of the virgin in her.

  I held my cock in the hope she would admire it.

  She said satirically, looking at it idly, “One in every pot? Like Herbert Hoover? À la?” Then, moving her head, she kisses my reasonably muscular abdomen. Not the cock.

  “God, not Herbert Hoover.”

  She touched the cock with her hand.

  “Oh, it’s so pathetic trying to live, oh, oh,” I said, amused. We’re breathing not quite in unison.

  She says, “I don’t follow that—that description is out of kilter . . .”

  “I can’t concentrate,” I said. “I want to explode and die . . . I’m sorry for the CLICHÉ.”

  “That’s all right; you’re caught in your persona. Producing what-becomes-cliché is the mark of an important writer.” She was quoting a professor we’d had in college.

  She stopped and said, “I want a cigarette.” She just looked at me, though.

  “There you are,” I said, “an unsymbolic version of beauty.” I didn’t hit her. “I’m scared: you play with things and you play at things . . .”

  She turned away from me and took a cigarette from a pack on the table and she lit it, and she turned back, holding the ashtray near her breasts, and I moved away from her, covering my crotch and pubic hair against bits of ash, fiery coals.

  She said, “I like to veil myself with smoke.” Then: “I am a deeply serious person: I never play at anything . . . I’m like some men that way . . . Why do you have that look?”

  “It’s so startling: the real thing. You were grovelling a minute ago.”

  “I have a fat tushy,” she said.

  “Not really . . .”

  “I have enough for a spare if part of me got shot off,” she said. A rehearsed line: I’d heard it from her twice before.

  An odd hopefulness mixed with a particular grimness of a to-be-carried-out action—a sexual grimness at the slapstick deadline—filled me; but I can sometimes—I could at that age—if I want to, slide into my other feelings as a young man and feel my skin and the reality of my erection in the moment, the moments—and the amount of sincerity, sort of a dominating flavor in the reality with its tinge of American luck and awful realities of happiness-and-sadness here—again in an American version in the middle of the night.

  A plane of discourse.

  She said, “It’s so wonderful knowing a man I can talk to.”

  Quick: let me know the name of these moments. The sincerity was like a gaping, gulping mud rut pulling at me—the variable sincerity—I am not a man sad enough to matter in the history of the language. But in the expenditure of nerves, you yet keep your nerve while you throw your life away. The sincerity caught me. The sense of drowning and of flying upward both. Our eyes met in the confusion of the passage of time and the actuality of feelings.

  She put out her cigarette. I moved toward her then—one hand covering my pubic hair and part of my prick against the vanished cigarette. “Ah,” I said, touching her breast.

  The warm, oddish reality of an actual breast affronts me and empties me of affront. She waits this out, my pulse and eyelid—and breath—thing, the dit-dit-dit of these. My reactions to her breasts, mine, don’t intere
st her much, almost-peace, an odd, taut immanence, sexual. This closeness or intimacy is not two-sided.

  I said, “Your breasts bore you?” Actually, I was a dullard in this part of sex.

  “I’m a sick person in some ways,” she said gravely, fondly. “I’ve never been someone people thought was normal.”

  “Aw, Ora, fuck—I don’t want to go to bed with a sick girl.”

  At first she scowled. Then she laughed—semi-delightedly. “You don’t like badly damaged, crazed women, do you? In the end, you idealize me?”

  “I’m a sissy . . .”

  “Don’t say that!”

  “Then don’t say you’re sick . . . Let’s think highly of each other—what do you say to that?”

  She said mysteriously, “I can see where that game would interest you . . . Yes. Anyway, it’s true.”

  “What’s true?” She said nothing. “Ora, let’s shut up.”

  “I like to talk, but okay, if you want . . .”

  “Ora, I hate the master-slave thing.” But it did establish the erection yet more tautly.

  “Oh, don’t be critical now—you’re very self-absorbed, Wiley. Don’t glare at me; if the shoe fits . . .”

  “The shoe fits the tit.” I tried my hand on it. “Ora, you don’t like being a sexual object . . . You’re weird,” I said, laying my face facedown on her right breast.

  “Oh, I get sloppy . . . But I’m a powerful person, Wiley. Jack is right about me: I’m hard to take.” She held my head inside her arms.

  She took one arm away and lit another cigarette and puffed on it and ashes fell into my hair.

  “Let’s fuck again,” I said, sighingly moving my head away.

  She said, “I hate that: can’t you say something romantic?”

  She began to dispose herself for entry.

  “No,” I said, getting up on my knees, straightening my hair with both hands.

  “I get to say yes,” she said dryly. “And smile: oh goody, let’s fuck. I like more imagination than that. It’s not attractive, Wiley. You cause me constant pain—you’re a terrible person. But I can stand it: I am very, very strong.”

  I snorted against her skin and licked her vaguely. “You sound like a mother . . .”

  “Men marry their mothers first—then their daughters. Don’t get mad if I laugh—I’m ticklish.” Then she roared . . . With a kind of amused pain. I am a talentless licker . . . I tickled her then with my fingers and tongue, nose, ears, and hair . . .

  She said, “DON’T! I’LL COME!” Then: “STOPPPPPPTTTTTT, I HAVE TO PEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE . . .”

  I stopped. When I stopped, she said, “It is VERY low-level eroticism to tickle a woman, Wiley.” She said it sadly. She was disappointed in me, truly.

  “Don’t break my heart, Ora,” I said.

  She said, “Now I do have to pee.” She got up and walked, wavery-whitish, only half-visible, beautiful—into the john. She left the door open. “You don’t really love me: you’re in love with me is all. That’s a lesser thing. I have a bigger soul than you—you’re very petty . . . I love you more than you love me.”

  “Ora, don’t break my heart.” Then: “My mother told me always nurse the pride of the fuckee . . .”

  She washed afterward and flushed.

  She said as she neared the bed, “I’m a boring person . . .”

  “I’m only slightly famous.” Then: “I don’t want to fuck a boring woman who loves me more than I love her.”

  “I’m a good fuck . . .”

  “We’re white and middle-class, Ora.”

  “So? I don’t believe all of that racial shit . . . Only some of it.”

  “All right, Ora, time to shut up; time to fuck.”

  “Oh, be romantic . . .”

  “NO!” Then: as I put two fingers in her somewhat slowly: “Leave us alone . . . You’re readier than I am.” I rose up on my knees. I looked at her for a second or two—romantically, I hoped . . . romantically-ironically—tempestuously, coolly . . . I don’t know. I said, “This is a romantic gaze . . .”

  She said, “It is not. It’s creepy and dirty. You’re cruel.”

  In the fuck proper, I wouldn’t be able to see her. Even now I didn’t exactly see her. The sight of her—the beauty—was the ground, or base, for hallucination. And wonder. Sexual self-congratulation. Sexual conviction. And will. I doubted that it was the same for her, seeing me erect, but maybe it was, or similar. Her face was odd with what I took to be the change of consciousness when one fills with sexual realities. She is more alert, more watchful, more guarded than I am—less successful in a way in these moments than I am.

  “Lie down,” I whispered. But she already was. I walked kneelingly on the bed and bracketed her thighs with my legs, touching her thighs. I was on my knees above her. I saw her. She was in that state of slapstick grimness before sexual acts in the dark but smiling-bodied: readied. She “loved” the atmosphere, the reality of the agreement-in-her-favor before a fuck. Or so I think . . . She loves to test and wreck things—everyone but me says she is nightmarishly difficult . . . I say she’s smart and restless.

  One’s life has this much meaning. These kinds of meaning, opinions, actions mutually permitted. At least to this extent. I expect this carries over person to person, country to country.

  She said, “If we had only this one time, what would you say to me? How would you look at me?”

  “Ora, you have no sense . . . That is not an artful request.”

  “It was, too . . . You don’t know everything . . . DARLING.”

  “I KNOW MORE ABOUT SEX THAN YOU DO.”

  “Not statistically . . .” She had been to bed with more people than I had. And more seriously. I pushed the knobberhead against her lower lips, in a little. Maybe barely. I put my hands on her ribs. She was amused . . . a little. This stuff among the sour and corrupt velocities of the self . . . Shadows slickly inundate her face.

  The sexual stuff at my crotch begins to pulsate. Don’t let’s hurt each other is what I feel. But that’s not a simple thing given the appeal of strength and the licenses in sweetly-grandly or earnestly or meanly living down there—in nature. She hadn’t much interest in fighting for anything, really—I mean in that moment. She died when she was fifty-eight. Pancreatic cancer. She refused all treatment. She was married then to a man I didn’t much, or entirely, like. He told me she shouted and wept and screamed after she took the suicide pills. But she wouldn’t tell him what she had taken. Then she told him, I changed my mind: I want to start over . . .

  She protested and yelled until she died . . . SHE KILLED HERSELF NOISILY.

  They are all dead.

  She said now, “We’re an aphrodisiac couple . . .”

  Almost my best friend at that time was the actor-playwright Bertrand Millier, who had become famous at the age of twenty. He was handsome, intelligent, well paid, and, as I said, famous. He treated me like an older brother. He was insanely likable. I’d go backstage and some big-time movie star would be there. Bert would be saying, “My prick is too small for this part.” He had a thing about that. He’d say, “This is Wiley Silenowicz: he’s not insane; he has hair on his chest.” He was enormous genitally, but he had been seduced when he was fourteen by his mother, then by some of her drunken friends, and he had some sexual doubt or unreality thing. I don’t know if men had been included or not. One time we were talking and I was showing off what I could drum up in myself to say, and he said abruptly, “I would rather go insane than go on living.” He tried to make trouble for me and Ora: he pimped for her—unsuccessfully. Finally, we came to blows—sort of. He went nuts for ten years.

  In bed I kissed the side of Ora’s face. She was slightly twisted under me. I twisted a little to get the head a tiny bit farther into her. My breath was like a tee-hee. To hide that—I never wanted Ora to know my real secrets—about what I really felt—I said: “My mother always said it wasn’t worth going through the contortions.”

  Ora
said nothing at first. Then she said, “Let’s turn out the light and fuck on the window ledge.” The window had a deep sill and rose up and was high in the high room and a little narrow. We walked over to it, our arms around each other. At the window, below us, was a tide of lights. Some noises rose. City noises . . . I helped dispose her on the windowsill. Standing, I fitted it partly into her. The city—our city, New York, Manhattan—buzzed below us and it shone with lights. As always, at the moment of fitting it in, I felt slowed, solemn, freed, and giddy. “I love you,” she whispered. The words were slightly far away compared to the somewhat grand conversation of the bodies beginning their lovemaking in a sort of white shyness of sensation and of expectation and of somewhat experienced carefulness. I was shy and not sorry to be present and doing this thing.

  A moment.

  I am slightly ashamed of my lovemaking—it’s stodgy, I guess, and opinionated, obstinate, a little conceited. I will say I haven’t ever been laughed at in bed. Never? I’m not sure about never. How strange. I expected it for years—I had a sense of that vulnerability . . . of that possibility in people, for me. The window ledge was her way of adding imagination, fantasy to my stodginess. Well, why not? I suppose for physical reasons I found her presence and the moment to be a marvel and yet ordinary, but with a degree of unreality such that a hallucination when masturbating—something that much in a mind, in a single mind—was, in some ways, more real, more plausible to one’s consciousness, less strange, less dreamlike . . . less frightening than the feeling-filled linkage of the crotch things of two people with the hallucinatory element present anyway. It all rocked with time, with comparisons to other times, with luck. Something loosened in me and I found it hard to believe that reality was really occurring in the flood of the ungeometric fragility of inward sensation. I don’t want to call it that: it had no label: a heat, a heated thing: soothing: soothed. Sly . . . The second one . . . The phallic tinge of my life goes along with an increase-in-strength, a validation, along with this secret, other way. Ora has enticed the future and it is here. She is in the form of a doorway goddess of approval—semi-approval in reality—a doorway to the future, the future in shadowy form.