A hint of exhaustion-to-come, masculine shame: a cliff edge of performance, in a way; a window ledge. I felt biggened: grown-up-ish, okayed—a little. The semi-educated semi-hick’s slides and little, semi-tactful pushes, lunges, my breaths, her uhs, the sliding around, the reangling, the near-socketing, and her legs widespread like a weird book, her grunting, more or less hospitably—bluffing: this isn’t so great—and then a note of grudging surrender and of admiration for me—showing imagination, I think, or for my obeying her wish—but if I push hard and test her physically and grimace like a bronze athlete, that admiration changes to the real thing, her thing of I-want-you-dead-and-in-chains-you-bastard-but—that feeling ameliorated by inverse sexual grace of some sort—by my own strength and by her mercifulness—I-will-keep-you-alive-for-once-and-for-all-but-for-this-moment-you-and-I-are-not-to-be-trusted.
Ora then opened her inner muscles so that I felt almost nothing, so that I was small in comparison to her. I mean the sex became a mixture of perverse combat and measurement and of comfort for herself. It was not innocent and it was not malevolent; it was innocently malevolent.
If Ora opens too wide inside and if I slap her, she tightens: I did that once. This thing she does, if I feel it in relation to moments in their fluid rush, in ongoing time, is dialogue, is preparing the next moment in which I will act in relation to this thing she does. And then she will react to that. So, it’s major stuff in this scale of things. I squeeze her thighs. She tightens some and loosens again. She doesn’t admire me. She hates me, kind of, or not kind of but really. But it’s not some general hatred, it’s Ora fucking someone she maybe likes—if you follow me—and what she rides sexually then—I mean you can feel it, I can feel it—is my guilt, my early death, my despicability compared to her, to feminine stuff, oh, her comparative decency, her humanity—whatever. She is not necessarily reasonable, but not necessarily at fault either. It depends on what happens—and on what the world is. If she can’t blame me for a lot, really, of obviously awful things, such as drunkenness or violence, she can’t live: what room is there for her if she is not better than I am in a lot of ways? She thinks she is worthless if she is not important. It is all kind of slidy in a dirtied lyrical thing of make-believe and this-is-trouble—it’s okay. This weirdity of stuff is love enough—maybe. It’s not so bad . . .
This is, sort of, the conversationally moral element, or part of it, the give-and-take sentimentality, and with the sentimentality inverted. Ora’s size and my having to keep my knees bent makes the fucking this way kind of hard. The nihilism: she somewhat likes it. She’ll settle for it—she’s a big shot. That inflects the reality and irreality, the hallucinatory part and the slidyness with the uninert terror of the contortions and the oddity of fucking for her sake. It is almost as absolute a terror for me as I know . . . A meaninglessness. From Nonie? From Noniein-us? In her? In me? And pleasure is laced through it. The terror is not of castration of the flesh but of the irreversibility in the quality of one’s soul because of what one is doing here and what she is doing. Who wants to be born again in the same form as before? What one does because of what she does, moment by moment, moment after moment, is what one is—it is my character in a sexual event with her. The working sexual definition of who I am sexually with her has to do with irreparable flickers of associative memory and with losses in my past life. For God’s sake—rough or not-rough in my view or not—to persist without blaming her is forgiveness of a sort. This is forgiveness of a sort, an abandonment of blame and an access to rough comedy, sexual comedy, mean comedy—it’s not clear. But it seemed to me that for all her and my sturdiness—a kind of sturdiness each of us had in the moment—we were being laughed at in our sexual frothing—right into death.
It was both lighter and heavier than I had, when young, expected fucking to be. The second time is not passion, or is a different sort of passion. The terror was of caring, was of caring too much and going hurtling along, a noble beast, or an ignoble beast caring too much—for sex, for pleasure, for myself, for her. The wheels of the moments might then stick and one would go headlong into some then-to-be-obsessedover-forever moment of loss of this rough forgiveness of the past. The fuck was like a board game with different things happening every moment, but the odds had been prepared, had been tampered with. And it was like a board game in that we were not exploring—and hurtling—hurtling—along, with willful blindness and in an agony that it was real. It was like a game in the various ways it was not happening even while it was happening—emotionally as well as in the way it touched on sexual depths and offered promise of release, of rising to the surface after the weight of the water and the breathlessness. In the act, you’re sort of painting a portrait of yourself, and of her, slapping paint on genital effigies—no: that metaphor is impossible, since the genital is the brush. The hell with it. It is happening and it doesn’t mean all that much no matter what depths it reaches—it is special, it is self-conscious and passionate, some, one is oneself, and one is something one has created. It is folly and swindling play and it is as serious as anything even if you think of it as merely biologically general. Some of it, much of it, has a thing, a quality of not meaning anything—are you brave enough for that? It doesn’t mean there is no meaning anywhere or even that this is mostly no meaning. It means nothing even if you name it meaninglessness; and meaning lurks and recurs even if you say it doesn’t. Craven dust fucks craven dust. But then in the event’s happening comes a flash of its meaning something. Sincerity is coming round again. We aren’t in a story of no meaning. Yes we are. We are too chic to be sincere. But here is the blushing and ecstatic fool, physical and without time or knowledge for thought, the generous-souled harmdoer, the mean-eyed harmdoer. Who knows what all the shit that is in play here is? Rattle, buck, quiver, seesaw, subside—and variation. What would we do if all this meant something truly? If the realities of being together overwhelm us? Ora, stage-managing, directing, creating us, actress-fucker, playwright-fuckee, said to me—tacitly, silently—that I was too fastidious . . . too careful . . . Ham it up . . . Be cruder, crueler, madder—be without calculation . . . Don’t keep accounts . . . Don’t keep track of things so that you can give an account to yourself later . . . Do you remember a kind of ecstatic beginner’s rhapsodic brutality of romance, changeable, overexcited, unreliable, human? After childhood? In my version of it—in my being taken over by it—in my submitting to it—in my dressing myself in it (as in a red union suit)—what happened, what she spied on, was that I jerked my hips in an ugly rhythm of assertion and of brute, sly-nostrilled pride. The Minotaur-beast is a runaway. The minus tower in her. Me. Dis. Dis dick . . . disdain . . . Hey, dis, dese . . . dem . . . Me. My dick and my gruntings ripsaw away. In the webbings of muscle of the not-a-goddess, the not-much-of-a-girl: in the beautiful mess—her term for herself. Except that her will was like the prow of a liner with a huge curving wake of the possibilities of fullness—in the webbings of muscle. That she loosened. And a slap—in the slapstick of the moment—or a threat would tighten her? Is this a peculiar curvature of love? Her reality extended mine—my feelings in my back and in the back of my shoulders—can you call those feelings?—the small of my back, then my butt (as it was then), and the abdomen and thighs, upper and lower, and in my mind and in my eyes and in my feet, which were braced—my reality continued on in a kind of hammock of responsive, responsively further extents of me and my body, mirrored and contained in her, permitted and impregnated by her with life, by her body and mind, her wriggling feet, her butt, her cleverness. I’m holding her. Oh, what a sea of effects. Of causes. Of things . . . Oh, what a rapidly flowing river. Of moments . . . I was violently shocked by the ugliness and her lack of simplicity, the lack of demure sweetness and of devotion—by her not being in a state of grace—and I was at home: shocked: scandalized: continuous in a great span of seconds.
Then she moved us to another place—another plane—she put up a hand; she had very beautiful, ladylike hands, strong, quite large
—like a ballerina’s—and she placed one hand on my stomach as if to slow me, as if I were strong enough and vile enough and big enough to hurt and stun her. Although her pride was that I wasn’t. And, so far, I hadn’t. And I was so flattered, I whispered her name, “Oh, Ora . . .” Something I rarely did.
It wasn’t that I was so grand sexually. I am acceptable sexually (which is actually quite a lot), but I make a point of it, of being that, and that doubles the acceptability for some people, that it is something known, and that one tries to be it. Often, then, I am a little bored sexually—that redoubles it . . . Only a little bored . . . “You are the handsomest man in the world”—she says that; it is a metaphor of a kind. She was collecting herself, finding herself, in an inconsecutive way, among the consecutions of our invention of our sexual tone back and forth, and in the faith that in the sequences of moments something might happen and all the moments (all our moments) were unbetrayed so far and would be unbetrayed still at the end, sort of.
The slightest twist of body, depending on the tone of the motion, of torture or of distaste-cum-salt—all of it was vital, was of vital importance for the Meaning—such as it was—or for the Grand Meaninglessness of the Bribery, the Animal Swindle. When you ride a wave, once you catch the wave, once you are in the rush and watery dominion, the whoosh, in the eerie green and bluishly rushing thrill, any part of you that you bend might upset your trajectory and then you might be ground on pebbles and cut up and bruised and forced to swallow water. You might drown . . . If you escape, and you have to sit on the sand above the waterline, exiled from the water, until you recover, you might not want to ride the waves here anymore. So it is risky. You can lose it all—all the past, all the rest of your life. You can win through to a momentum, a coolness, and lose everything else that might be here. In a way, you can’t do much: tenderness forces you to avoid the statistically evil danger of hurting each other. To bore a body that you want to like you is one of the worst feelings there is. Unless it all doesn’t matter from the start. Strong-bodied, strong-nerved, sensitive to the rush of the waves, one way or other, trickily barely managing, thrilled, Ora and the guy—the guy is me.
The way we were doing it—the ironic thing and the physical effort and the showiness and the sincerity—from time to time—and that stuff being shown (rather than the physical mattering most)—well, in bodysurfing, you land on the beach and you’re okay and you think back over your recent ride so you can have it in near-consciousness, so to speak (but the memory is all rushed and a lot of what happened is hidden from you inside the sense of wondering pleasure), you have bits of a conscious sense of ordinary reality and of the thrilling part, the ride in the fairly large-scale surf, and then of being young and bare-fleshed and borne along by the melting green locomotive. Something unhallucinatory, something graspable, the shine of faint sweat on Ora’s face, the faint fakeries of the posture in the first place—I’m not comfortably a showy fucker. I’m hammy. Ora said, Oh, you beautiful man . . . But, see, it was proof of a kind of wrongness—which was okay—it went with the thing of the sex being softly and oozingly mechanical and breath-driven, and unmechanical, and fitting and suitable, and loving and stupid—and not stupid—and grand really only, sublime, a little—as when you were small and were on a swing and went too high and suddenly the sky was there and light and infinite air and a separation from the world which was infinite, infinite—for a second. That was her judgment—her view. I am guessing at it. It’s the body parts and then the motions of them. And of the minds. Glittery, amazed, semi-opaque—like eyes. Two wills, changeable, and then the applause, thunk, thunk, of abdomens. And the permissions, I suppose. The glimmering lights of birth are echoed here, are repeated in a kind of semi-inverted animal talk.
The downward pressure of the weight of her stomach, when I put my arms around her upper waist and lifted her a little, lifted her into an arch—and she held herself weightily at first before she caught on and let the arch willfully, tremblingly, be incontrovertible reality, the sensation now (in the animal conversation), made the prick seem to me to be my realer self with that weight or angle resting on its movements. In “love,” one was a lover not a shadow self. Most of the feeling self was heroically entombed in doing this stuff . . . And genital will, genital sensation ruled. Sensation animated one’s back or was animate, scurrying up and down one’s back—you know . . . The animalled everything, furred, skinned, restless, real? The Kid Fucker, the jerk jerker moved a bit, only a bit. “The yo-yo labyrinth,” I said. She didn’t hear me, didn’t pay attention, didn’t decipher it, didn’t like it—whatever.
She wasn’t scared of sex exactly—not as I was. Not in the ways I was. And I’m not scared of it so much as I am scared of it-with-certain-people-at-certain-times-and-of-what-will-happen-to-me-then. But she disliked a lot of things about it. I recognized that she was sexually uneasy; enraged, I think, at giving in to anything so unabsolute, so unabsolutist, except as romantic crap—she wanted an absolute fuck, a fuck to remember, Honey. But you can’t ever remember the sensations . . . She wanted an “I see rainbows, oh, oh, oh . . .” She said that now.
“Cut the bullshit and just fuck, Ora, okay?”
You don’t have to say things out loud: it’s the heave of the buttocks, in a certain tonality of the breath, the things you’d say if you said them.
Of course, in some ways, I know too much. So I try to fuck without losing heart. Or steam. Whatever. I was embarrassed that her body responded to the remark and that I didn’t know what to do with that response.
Instead I spoke: “A lad in a warm dark suffocating cave FINDS A LAMP . . . AND RUBS IT . . . RUB-A-DUB-DUB . . . THE LAMP IS IN THE LAP OF MY GODDAMNED WHORE-AUNTIE-LAMBIE-PIE . . . POEM . . .”
I don’t know why it was an aunt—ants are laborers; and in faggot talk aunts are older lovers, bald, with paunches. I talked and was doing it; and the talk was the way you hallucinate when you jerk off—this was because of something in me that was maybe unmasculine—no doubt—and it was trying to share with her the thing of my progress toward coming and not the fake thing of the window ledge and her absolutist, and autobiographical, notions of a sexual event flattering in being tremendous and, therefore, worthy of her and giving her life meaning. And so on . . .
I was doing it. In a less kidlike and college way than a few years before. My head was next to hers, to Ora’s; my cheek was against the side of her hair, Ora’s hair, a few silly bits of her hair were in my mouth. The central hallucinating button of the point of decision in the self moved in my throat airlessly.
I still loved her. We both knew it. She was willing. We fucked on.
Of the patterns a fuck can take, some—most—are not possible for me. I was mostly interested sexually in sincerity and truth—a thing of caring what became of the other person. This mounting to the level of self-sacrifice due chiefly to infatuation and the excitement of thinking that if one was okay in bed while fucking, one’s life would be okay—and the world would change: she took those things for granted, and the crap they were punishingly opposed to, she accepted that, too. She’d had men be infatuated with her since she was three years old. Our minds hadn’t married each other (and never would). Our fates were entwined, though. Our eyes, the way we use our eyes, that is, see each other, they’re married.
I don’t know why but I said, “Ora, feel sorry for me.”
She said, “I can’t feel sorry for you, Wiley.” Then: “After all, you have me . . .” Then: “Hee-hee . . .”
“Hee-hee,” I said, moving a little in her.
I guess it was a little interlude as a vaudeville . . . Or as a vaudeville rehearsal—a stage-lighting rehearsal, so that we could do it differently in a second or two.
She said, “It’s your sad eyes . . . It’s that you don’t hate anyone.”
“It’s not that you’re bearably jealous, is it?” That I was someone she could reasonably love and not someone who made her wild.
“Huh—uh—huh—Oh, fuck me,” she
said. Then: “This is bliss.” She said it because it wasn’t bliss . . . It was in a way, but not seriously so.
“Ora, shut up. Does your back hurt?”
“I’d rather fuck in the bed,” she said graciously.
Then dirtily, she said, “Or on the floor . . . We haven’t done it on the floor since Santa Fe.”
We sort of half fell out of the window thing or from the sill or whatever to the carpet.
We landed on our feet. She was at once twice as oily as before and more palpitant inside and I was gasping and pumping while we were standing, bent-legged—I mean I was bent-legged, and anxious to use this warmth in her for myself, in the odd light of the mind then. One knew her, sort of. I knew who she was, not by sight so much, but by the other weirdly set-up sexual senses, those and what my memory gave me as a sense of her—a cold white heart . . .
And I was mostly a large whitely pointing finger.
Us fucking there with more and more lifeless limbs, we’d fall in another minute. We waddled toward the bed. “White folks havin’ us a gooooood tyime,” I said. I moved her. Her legs had a peculiar limpness. I didn’t want to come out and lose erectility or whatever and then have to reenter. I don’t know. Hope, irony, youthful sophistication of a kind, a lot of willing ignorance, a lot of folly, a fresh and resilient heart, a body agreeable to the demands made on it mostly for Ora’s sake. The body in that agreeable stage, that phase of being able to be agreeable for the sake of your feelings about a woman.
“We’re not great in the sack . . . I’m sorry this is an uninspired one . . . Uh-unh . . . nnnn . . .”
“Uninspired is all right,” she said. She was settling in to being the socket. We more or less got into bed—without enmity. We fell in. And then we cautiously straightened out, some. A jumble of stubborn bones. Me holding on to her, her holding me in her was a truceful arrangement, and, moreover, in me and in her were further truceful arrangements in the flesh, inside and out—particularly her flesh inside her. I mean arrangements, certain alignments and orderlinesses of disorderly (pulsing) permissions, for the entry of motions and the added pulse of arterial excitements—exclamations—that were not hers—you know? What an incomplete, grease-slimed wonder of sexual welcome. Sexual reality’s real foreignness is the way it borders on humanly absolute forgiveness while harboring an absolute criminality of will—or stupidity, a stupidity of will—do you forgive someone you’re trespassing on? A foreignness to the mind, to words, to moments when you’re not fucking, when you’re at a distance from the fleshly forms of things, you’re in mid-fuck, then, that year, shocked and senseless to some things in the processes of sensation, an entire mass of boredly cruel excitement, your own self like the act, like Ora, tinged with mystery, with the mysteries of selfishness, loneliness, domineeringness, and cleverness. The bull . . . And the bullshitter. The boyfriend-and-killer and the murderously healthy girl. The kids in the bed, the long-legged, flesh-bearing, tubular-plump-pricked, warm-cunted, bobbling-breasted kids in the bed. Maybe it’s a joke. Maybe it’s not a joke. God, I don’t know . . . I do it . . . fuck-a-dee-fuck-fuck . . . Anyway, the thing that I was envied for then happened in the fuck: people had a sense of this as a possibility for me, with me, if no clear knowledge of it: Ora hinted at it in how she dressed—and smiled—it was there—at other times. Of how we were together for a while in our worth and worthlessness—her conceit came from this: that in bed she would ready herself—she was immensely strong physically—she was as strong as men who were a little smaller than she was or who were her size and weak. Her mother and father had seen to it she did boyish things and tough sports, raise and lower sails on their boat, stuff like that—she would brace herself and I would feel the cross-girdering of webs in her of will and education, physically reasonable, but unreasonably so—I mean it was passionately reasonable—the female musculature—and the privileges of such extreme health—enlisted in this; and I would enter onto a dreadful freedom of personal being, a kind of forbidden sprawl, a devil’s pose—this was with her connivance—a pose in rhythmic motion, a motionful pose—and this was, maybe, a commanding truth, not entirely fake, this freedom-in-a-biological-prison. Stuff in sex can’t be repeated, so you can’t be sure of anything in it in terms of knowing about it for hard, cold statement. The commandant male, commanded, commandeered—by this and that—in his male pumping in the readied girl and he is on her—imagine the strategic and tactical complexity for her, inner, outer, the various geographies, or don’t. He did—I did—imagine it, then and there: IT IS IN HER. I am in her. All boundaries crossed . . . All? Why is it exciting to know what you are doing? Maybe only for me—maybe it’s not exciting to everyone. Really an awful lot of people were in love with me that year—it must have been because Ora liked this stuff. That recommended me to the deepish hallucinatory pulse. You briefly enter some supernal realm of intimacy—oh, not final, but you’re inside the oyster—so to speak. And it’s of great value. But do you want to belong to it? I mean as your emblem? As the thing that is the center of your getting from day to day? When the woman is as independent in spirit as Ora is? Would you prefer a dependent woman pulling you down into lifelong meaning as the center of her life when you fuck? I don’t see that there can be a clear decision judging one thing as clearly more desirable than the other. The two of us, largish, exercised, and muscular in different ways, the male limbs bulking in the foreground of my mind since they were mine, her reality is mostly the jellied bed for containing this odd swarming stupidly charming blossoming—or whatever it is—sweet Eros. Sweet stinging vanity and harbinger. Of illumination. And its own wordless death. You harvest exhaustion and the parenting of yourself—we are the metaphorical real children of our fuck. The crimes of parenthood await us. We did it to ourselves. Squish, squuush. Pushhhhh. Sweatily breathe . . . “I love you, Ora . . .” My sense of something stupid in us, of some horror or other, slows me in affection.
The Runaway Soul Page 38