She disconnects our agreement of sexual freedom in mid-fuck. I pause and breathe with an attempt at some discretion of the lungs and throat. I am still in her. She says, “I will poison you if you ever leave me, Wiley.”
“We’re fucking, not talking, Ora,” I say in a crudded-up voice.
Fucking, we could, I thought, second by second, transpose cruelty and privilege into mere contingent conceit, mutual and laughable, somewhat ironic. Fidelity then would be blasphemous. To confuse the stuff we did with anything sacramental was ironic no matter how unironic and scary it felt.
I suppose it sounds odd, but she would writhe outwardly and flex inwardly dizziedly under male self-love and sexual conceit and the self-protective irony and the rest of it of the guy—I mean in ways that would be stilled if she was the direct object—the star at the center of the sensation of light here—the real center of this part of the act—she could do that if I was not flawed by having too many perceptions. Well, I hated it that she knew so much about me. She felt the same way toward me. I refused to believe her—about me, about us. I wanted us to be different, to be simple folk in a country tale . . . I did and did not wish this . . .
I could not believe yet how much psychic and sexual and physical reality she could stand and actually needed . . . It was a lot. I never had a simple coed comprehension of the physical-emotional-spiritual realities of our fucks. It was always just-Ora-and-me and not in a frame of psychoanalysis or of movies or of the-fucking-of-our-era-around-us.
Everyone important in this book so far (but me) will die fairly young. These aren’t long-lived examples of the real. Oh well . . . That’s what I’m interested in because of my adoptive parents, I guess . . . A short life but a happy one . . . People who embody that.
In the moments of fucking, us awake in these partly dreamed, partly disowned hallucinatory moments, the reality of will and daydreaming in the real world becomes, again, chiefly, the thing of us checking up on each other, of feeling the degree of feeling for the other in each of us (that funny complicity in the funny business of fucking). In the back-and-forth shenanigans of just about all the meaning one finds in sex (if one finds meaning in it, impure meaning but convincing even when it’s laughed at)—well, in that current of stuff, I was aware of Ora’s body, of her cunt, of the pleasures or, in the labors, of the almost boredoms of the moment, and of the bodily reality of her abdomen and of her noises—of the angle and shapes of noises in her throat as intelligibly loving; the body stuff, too, but I was not aware anatomically or sensually of her as a whole but of her love as love-as-jealousy-eased-here—love as jealousy-eased ‘love,’ a category—in this moment, by these means. The jealousy in her did not need to be of me or of her as she might have been. It could be of others, of their tales of perfect fucks, of ripping clothes off each other and of the ecstasy they had known—blah, blah, blah. It was of movies. Of happiness or completeness in sex as promised by stories and charlatans and evil troublemakers (so to speak). I didn’t have to be great here. I mostly Just Had to Be Here. And then something-sexual-had-to-happen . . . Authentically . . . It saddened me that this was what life gave her and, through her, us. But the sadness defined the okayness—which was a happiness. What she felt was socially wittier than if she’d felt the other stuff—dependency, say. It was wittier than other forms of love. Shapelier. It was more intelligent, I thought.
I associate it with and with being a more likable form of IT WANTS TO HURT ME . . . GO LET THE LIGHTNING GET YOU GO STAND ON THE LAWN WHERE IT CAN GET YOU. I associate it with its being not that—willfully.
Ora loved ME in a complicated and complicatedly honorable and corrupt and, in a sense, self-protective, annealing, selfish way—well, what the fuck is new about that? Real love—is it fit for a book? I mean, books are so self-important about exaggerated purity—about abstractions. Will readers be interested in ‘love’ that’s daily and partly lied about by the participants and yet is so shockingly real to them that it shocks them? Will readers give up? Maybe it’s not real love . . . I’m just guessing, after all. How would I know whether love was real or not? It’s just my opinion, after all.
Men have a sexual thumb, an organ of grasp of the sexual universe. Women have a living, breathing receptacle setup that opens onto still other receptacles closer to their hearts and throats. The drama continues in them while we sort of die off. So the drama, or melodrama, in the early stages is different. The universe, the future, time and all its currents and its remorselessness, the souls of other creatures nest in them, land in them . . . in a dream-and-real funnel. I don’t find envy simple . . . Hell, sometimes I even envy myself. Sometimes when I’m in her, I envy myself as I was in the past or as I would be in some other, more hotly sexed cunt. Or as I am here—that it won’t last. That it’s not just me. I envy different lovemaking—other pleasures. Hers. Anyone’s. I envy the absence of pleasure. Whatever. But above all, me now doing this and being somewhat lucky and this being finite. I don’t know how to say it: I wanted to receive my own attentions, not because I was vain, but because I wanted to know what I was envious of: I wanted to part the bony curtains and see into her head . . . I wanted to understand this male thing.
Some universal and original thing is involved here in me actively as it is in the private receptacles in her. A debt and then another debt and then an underdebt and linkages to stuff widens out the cavern, the moment, the mushy on-movingness of the actions. And the leakages! She licks the side of my face: cubbishly? Nothingness makes its way laboringly through me and in seconds out of me into minor and major gasps of actual air in eerily pious-almost impious existence. I am transformed into being darkly concerned with her, and her at a great and honorable distance, her as audience and mother and as lover unstably enough that through depressions of clouded no-light and bursts of neural light something in me begins to turn toward ordinary light longingly: not quite the dark and light actually in the room, but a foreseen afterwards light. A light yet to be invented. An old light newly appreciated. A sanity of light to be newly found, found again, found for the first time. I don’t dare die. Among notions of expensive harm done to the selves of the past—to two amorous warriors of a sort—(or in the afterward or in the course of the fuck itself as it takes place) is a scorekeeping thing of an expensive avoidance of any final harm to each other tonight. She thought such care or holding back was merely avoidance, was merely holding back . . . But she was cautious and unbelieving as well.
I should say here that her certainties were bluffs, but were bluffs based on her experience and on her certifications and on her code as a woman, known through keeping a (stupid) diary and through seeing an analyst (analysts) and through talking to women, through reading and comparing, and through dreaming: these things that I have listed were the source of the alphabet and the vocabulary and the syntax of her code—such as it was.
She believed in letting men go fuck themselves. But she refused to harm me. She has the nature of someone who is an athlete of sorts—a rock in a way—“Are you the Rock of Gibraltar?” I say in the fuck, moving her to the edge of the bed. She has said at other times, Oh me, I’m the Rock of Gibraltar.
If I balance her—or half balance her—on the bed edge and then stay on the bed, I mean that if she is sliding off the bed except for me holding her on to me, she will, in her uncertainty, start to laugh, and perhaps she will partly respond in a naïve way merely because I control her balance, such as it is, her physical balance at that moment of oily and sweat-tinged and slightly smelly in-and-out carryings-on in a broken, personal rhythm.
All this can be written complainingly. But that would be a lie.
By respond, I mean not according to her own code and will but to me, freshly, startledly, inventingly. It will be just us. Ora is truly good-looking and she has a habit or mannerism or tactic or strategy of fucking with a loosened cunt after a certain point . . . She does what she wants to do; the man can go fuck himself (as I said). I consider this an unresponse, an emptiness, a cu
rse almost maternally laid on the lover, her lover, me, her emptiness enclosing his whatevers . . . My voyage here.
At the edge of the bed, me pushing her legs up—which she doesn’t like much—and me clasping them—she starts to laugh—a little—and to say, “Wiley . . . Wiley!”
She is undefeatable, indomitable . . . Whatever . . . So she is careless about interim defeat . . . A little careless about it. It isn’t only that. She is someone who denies she is good-looking—or luckily born or educated. She says she is sexy: and self-made. I half know what she means by this—the place of the will; and then the shadow self and one’s shadow history; and one’s using that inside reality separately from time-and-the-real, so it seems a cleverness, a matter of breeding, almost that. Her looks in physical reality are not those of a toy, but they become a toy for her mind—as well as a fleshly reality—this way. She is genuinely disturbingly beautiful, really beautiful—which means she is not anyone’s toy. I mean she is not sexlessly beautiful—and, so, she is ashamed, and fearlessly afraid—if you know what I mean—but her chief sexual quality is one of patience rewarded, of waiting, of waiting and of strength and of impatience rewarded. A kind of exploding huntress thing . . . But her pride in her sexual adventures is of her being finally sexless in them—not subservient to God, nature, or the prick—she doesn’t use these terms in describing herself; this is me describing her. But she has to be the dominant judge of her own life-silencing efforts in the shadow realm. She silences her parents, her doctors, their theories. Her lovers and would-be lovers. She silences all the fuckers. Ora learns slowly—and mightily—if at all. But she learns, although in a sense she never has to learn. She has said (and I agreed with her), I know too much, more than is good for me. She is almost a matron that way, in that sense. A woman too smart to fuck—she has said that of people screwing with her and her screwing with people. A long time before me she found a road to freedom-of-a-sort, a calculation, of being sexier than her mother and grandmothers and her aunts, perhaps not really, but in her own view; and that amounted to something quite serious: a temporary but truly profound ability as a strong-bodied, very young, extraordinary-looking, and fairly brainy and nervy girl to live among men in the real world, in their world, and even, in part, to see what they saw—at least she looked in the same direction. In a certain era, in a certain part of the world, she was important in ways that I was not and could never be. Her sense of personal greatness was, if you will forgive me, Napoleonic; it was that of a prep-school boy from a noted family . . . un-Jesuslike, unfeminine . . . Bold . . . Knowledgeable . . . Legendary early (I think) and not without reason in what she did . . . Although it sounds odd, looks are something politically settled; and in that frame they do vary. Every face varies every hour: so do one’s postures in relation to one’s looks. And so do people’s tastes. Of the people I have known, Ora was the one whose looks were most generally granted, including movie stars (who, in those days, were said to have looks that lacked distinction or which were too public)—but the judgments by people of Ora always held provisos of her lacking this or that—I disliked the shape of her breasts, for instance . . . I am reasonable often. She never acknowledged me physically—at least directly—once a fuck started. Ahead of time, some. In words now and then, although not often. Mostly whatever she expressed along these lines verbally was expressed as negation: Thank God you don’t have a fat ass . . . I will never, never fuck a man with a fat ass. (I don’t believe she ever did.) And: Thank God you don’t have silly looks. That is, she reflected back part of her fate. She had a physical reaction to me, though, and she lived with me and behaved in a certain way—that all ended partway into a fuck. If I understood her tales of her past, she tended to accept the attentions only of men or boys who were in certain categories of the enviable—family and looks, or family looks, or leader of a social crew, a social crowd, or known for their looks but as a personality as well, sweet looks or harsh looks or the looks of a hero. They wouldn’t punish me all the time—I thought (she has said this). They would know who they were, I thought . . . I only did that because I was ignorant . . . I was getting on my feet as a person.
It seemed to me her life was interesting, glamourous, and had its dramas. But, then, in a fuck she cannot very often be physical and have her life. She cannot throw her life away truly. If she did, then she cannot save herself. She would have to trust the guy and accept her own woundedness. She tends to love-and-despise the guy and to worry about her woundedness. The mind charts the course of the shadow event mostly. Physical common sense is hard to come by. Hence the showiness of the window embrasure and then the edge of the bed. And the reflection of me as reflecting her luck. She can respond to that, not to the body of the man she is with—me—this is so in this year of her youth . . .
Of her life.
I don’t see this as a fault in her but as part of the expense of knowing her. I minded it at moments in the fuck—minded it to the point of feeling the heart had been ripped out of my breast—minded it that she was not otherwise, less glorious, more uneasy, more likely to respond—but enough other stuff went on in me, in her, between us that what was there seemed sufficient most of the time, although, to be honest, always at the edge of a general bankruptcy of all of it, luck and blessing and no luck, and reality and hallucination, our romance.
But, again, she swivelled (her soul) and posited, or created, this-sort-of-romance-at-the-edge-of-the-cliff (of her being left or her being found to be unsatisfactory or of the fuck itself not working or her being left out) as romance because of other women’s having romances. Maybe that was it—I think that was it. It was a created thing. She created and invented it—the way a great-grandfather of hers invented some part of the flush mechanism of industrial boilers—maybe it was toilets and her family lied—and then he marketed his invention. She was an industrions-creative-rebellious-independent-individual-and inventive American girl of a high degree of social privilege—an American lay.
The Runaway Soul Page 39