Literal stuff was hard for her—it made her mind tremble—halfway beyond willfulness. “We are fucking at the edge of the bed,” she said aloud. One could feel it in her body—the naming, the adventurousness—the trembling of mindshadows half rounded into actual breasts and real haunches. The cautious, even small-minded, distancing from the things here was shaved into a sense of herself here: one could feel the next day’s terse or coded phone calls in her—the confidences to her friends, her role in converting this to legend of a sort, foolishly, unfoolishly.
Or telephone calls not made but only imagined: a kind of fidelity in that.
I was not particularly faithful or reliable in our years together, although I was careful of her ego and, on the whole, respectful of her capacity to feel pain.
So we watch each other to see what we can see—my father used to say that—and to see what the day has brought us, what the world has done to us, what our moments amount to, and what we have done to ourselves. We watch silences and tensions in the body. And techniques. We distrust techniques—la-di-da is what she calls them. We watch in the light of her inventive, Anglo-Saxonish, anti-Napoleon-Napoleonness, her storytelling. And we watch me. We watch each other fucking.
This is between moments of inspiration and of sincerity, when we watch something else entirely. It is cruel to notice some things—I mean it is cruel to speak about them. To notice in words is to remember differently. Without surprise.
It is part of an old game between her and me, this stuff. I say to myself as I fuck—I say to myself in fuck-rhythm—Can the truth be cruel? Isn’t truth a relief?
“Get me away from the edge of the bed, oh, oh God, tee-hee, stop it, STOP IT I DON’T LIKE IT . . .”
“Tighten on me, Ora, tighten on me . . .”
She wouldn’t. Or couldn’t. She could be bought—half bought—but not coerced. She had a weird shyness, a strength, a code, a notion, a realistic idea about defeat for her and the phallus. She punitively, or helplessly, widened inside. She couldn’t grip it (the phallus) and respond to it and be intense and loving or obscene. Passion for her came from giving in to the power to hurt—in the other—to my standing-in-the-world—so it was a giving in to being hurt even in avoiding hurt for the moment, within reason. So, she loved my butt—and the nape of my neck . . . And my lips somewhat, the not-hurtful things. I’m big enough phallically that some people do what she did and widen helplessly. Maybe that is really common. Really, she loved my prick, too—as she would a child, who, if I loved it, she would compete with it and she would vie for its attention and then she would treat it harshly if she was second to it in my regard.
But she hated the prick’s autonomy when it was really set in its course; its full readiness she turned into a comment on herself.
More than that, she had a thing which, while she knew about pricks and noticed them in men’s clothes, she had to erase in order to care about the man in the grand way she did care—death-y, death-filled, generous, and final . . . And perhaps not very real. The rod of hallucinatory absolutism . . . The immediacy of bodily caring was not part of her repertoire toward others except as an extension of herself. One could call this narcissism but why bother? One could call it anything one wanted. Anglo-Saxon individuality and pride. She manicured my hands—and my feet—humbly, for instance. She fitted herself into how I looked. She never asked me to react to her visually—her outfits or her walk or her as an icon in naughty dress. We were a couple of a neutral sort. She never lost herself, or not very far, in our being with each other visually or naughtily—she lied about this all the time—but with us it was physical intimacy, ours, I mean, and then the world, and the friction of that ignited us, or me, and then for her, it was in the contemplation of her own fate, her fatedness, in being here with me, it was in that that she lost herself.
On the edge of the bed, she cried out, “I love you, Wiley!” But she didn’t tighten on me . . . Was it a compromise?
“You don’t love my body or my prick,” I said, letting her slide to the floor—slowly but a little fast so that she was jolted. She tensed all over—but not inside the cunt. The temptation was to slap her, but if we had gotten really violent, it would have horrified me and I would have left her—not because of moral stuff—just in terms of our souls and our desires and what the story was likely to be if we met head-on in that way. I mean, the sexual issue would have been resolved in a way I would have despised and exploited. Instead, a different story had been set up; it had fastened the screws of romance in place. The issue for us was how much was she under her own control—I mean, since her own will let her be uncontrolled? And how naughty was I, ultimately? How much was this stuff hidden from her? I can’t be uncontrolled—or controlled by someone else; she would be hurt in more than one way. Fatality is everywhere—of course. The abundance of fatalities makes me odd in these matters. She lied about this to herself—much of what we were was covered over, but I think she knew quite a bit about it on her own terms.
“Goddamn you! You son of a bitch! I LOVE YOU!” said the strong-muscled, superbly supple, healthy bitch in her disorder THUMPING onto the rug—but well within the tones and echoes of anecdote . . . of daydream—as we fucked on. But also at the edge suddenly—of feeling things now—of a different order of deep, even profound readiness as for getting pregnant—or as for being hit and hated and, then, for her and my dying in all or in part (as young people of a certain sort)—for having the power to tempt, to allure, to upset, upend, and to arouse, and no real conviction, for twenty years so far, of being deeply attached to safety—or perhaps never. It was and it was not smart to satisfy anyone more than she did by presence and patience, good temper, strength and inventiveness. It was clear that she needed to—for her own sake or social well-being or whatever.
But perhaps the profundity of the joke in her—the giggling flesh in her cunt and in her mouth and in her jiggled breasts and in the trembling muscles of her abdomen and thighs—had to do with the nonsexual nature of where we stopped in this trajectory or trek or whatever. She sometimes hinted at her mushily wallowingly falling into the next step of resignation, or ugly patience, with an extorted and aching satisfaction—a scream of the abandonment of the flesh to the somehow dirty satisfactions of the will.
Innocence? An innocence? So that one might feel in one’s haunches—one’s back, one’s balls and shaft and (forgive me) hard-headed prick—not just an anxiousness to come but a truly terrible and fierce, even overwhelming sadness and pity—as if the other stuff had happened: as if, peeked at, it was still real—a hateful pity and charity—at what she had experienced or might experience with other men, including her father and grandfathers and male cousins—and, which, in my being a Jew, she had expected to find a tradition or some familiarity of expectation of this stuff, male stuff . . . I don’t know. I heaved her up . . . I held her lengthways in my arms. On this journey at the center of the night, I got her back on the bed, past the edge of the bed. “This is Anecdotesville, Ohio, Ora,” I muttered.
“Smart-ass . . . Oh, you smart-ass,” she mumbled, odd-eyed—glaucomaish, cheaply blissed—i.e., interested, not satisfied, but satisfied enough for a while—to love me for a while, to be unwilling to be unfaithful or too horrible. One of her immense charms for me was that she never minded not getting what I said—she did not often accuse me of being crazy.
On the edge of the bed but facing the other way, not slanting down to the floor or over the edge but merely at the edge, she was on her back. I had my arm under her legs. I stood on the floor and she was on the bed. She said, “Oh, I never did this . . . This is pure Kama Sutra, Wiley.”
Again, one could see—feel—bargains in her, the boldness, the reluctances—and in oneself as well—edges like the edge of the bed or the edge of some sort of inverted smile.
I think it was assumed between us that I could destroy her—if I wanted—even if she resisted. She had caught herself in some sort of trap—like a wolverine or a vixen—and I had some sort of
inner (or outer) advantage.
That this must be acted out in the dark—and with me as oddly juvenile—and her as if she were aging—is part of what is unspoken between us at other times and perhaps not even remembered. Or I don’t remember it . . . the Perseus or some other thing where the boy slays the woman-thing.
The not acting-on-it somehow is yet an acting it out anyway. I parted her upreared legs by ducking my head and shoulders between them. She grunted the way a girl with a different sort of soul might cry out . . . Or might be silent. I got my body between her legs. Each of my arms held one of her legs. I reentered her—mock-brutally—movieishly maybe? It was just a little real—so it wasn’t friendly and it wasn’t just a reference to entry. It was real.
But, see, the trespass then explained her loosening—explained a thousand times over her systems of defenses. The shaft had gone a little mashed-potato-y but she was so mushy and loose it was like putting it in a greased-up laundry bag. You didn’t even have to say, Your body is mine . . . Or: Give me your body. She had, in some primal Christian way, with her soul quivering like a huge mouth in a fairy tale or a death-grin of the flesh (with a flutter of a wicked departure of the spirit toward knowledge like a glossolaliac mumbling of a tongue), already accepted the ‘practical’ necessity of these emotions in a fuck. She is phallic in the way she is unphallic—that FEELS like a mistake in her calculations. And while her body welcomed me with a sigh and a further spreading of the grin—so to speak—it was as if she wept with the release of despair as in infancy: she oozed and gushed namelessly. I didn’t keep count of the ways. She didn’t tighten on me except mentally with her satisfactory readiness, so that then if I said, “Tighten on me, Ora,” she would, she did; and I said it; but then she loosened again with a waitfulness of say-it-again or go a little further that altered the scene and drove it toward being systematized—toward a kind of escape for her in its being that, if that indeed was the case—but it was me who was her lover, it’s me in that role so far: an acceptance—almost bridal . . . almost romantic . . . wells up in her, although she is scowling when I become laboratoryish about entering and going in and out watchfully, thoughtfully—it is sexual thought, though. I exclude her leatherishly, her expectations—she cries out . . .
And I laugh—more or less naturally: just a sort of grunted thing almost of I’m busy as I seat it or go partway in and adopt a jiggling rhythm—phallic ragtime—but not steady, a kind of stop-and-start streaminess: “OOh—whee . . . ahhhh . . . uhhhh . . .”
“I’m all topsy-turvy,” she said, mingling romantic satisfaction with complaint and doubt to get my attention.
I grin and persist, aware of my standing here.
Then, in a sort of amused and mean way, and wary, and weary of her but too young to be really weary, I say—I mumbled, as an aside, “Shut up, Ora . . . You matron.”
That means I like her.
“Don’t be cruel, Wiley,” she says, and she loosens.
“Christ,” I mutter, and pat and lightly slap her haunches until she tentatively, tremblingly tightens—coerced by curiosity and good sportsmanship as much as by sexual impulse, if you ask me—and, see, this within the tight cuntal clasp—and clapping (sexual, and horrible, and final) of her historical abandonment to the truths of what it meant to satisfy the wills and longings of able and wellborn and monied men and boys and now me, and who knows what others as well—and within the liquidy, deathily sticky sexual rhythms (such as they were) of her flesh and her pleasure (such as it was) is the incalculably cruel thing of the extraordinary trespass in her of my unsharable and slightly far-off (in my head, in my balls, in the small of my back) pleasures, taken from her and burning or reflectant (like Christmas tree ornaments in front of a fire) in relation to the extraordinary and abominable pelvic lovelinesses of her, of us, of love, of lovemaking, pelvic loneliness still present—still we are of different construction, she and I—the whole thing abominable with sexual smells and secrecy and a sense of maybe having gone too far even if we did stop short and of youth and too much looseness in her and too much playing around in me and a wild, and wildly racking oiliness and the jerk of far-away (loosened) inward motions, the fisher-woman’s jerking net, in which my fatherliness is trapped, and the surface motions—ah, what a joke: the pelvic loveliness, pelvic loneliness, the not inconsiderable loveliness of the marvelous head and marvelous hands and wonderful shoulders and marvelous voice and wonderful mind and too big but yet admirable butt and the lovely, lovely, miraculous ladyish musculature and the marvelous inventiveness toward daily life—all of it—rolling downhill—while I ascend toward orgasm again.
And one’s own, so to speak, upper-class and dirty will, that she permits here, the abominations of jealousy and knowledge, calm choice, resignation, fury, and semi-addiction—now love—the reality of fucking, the bicycling flight or whatever, the claptrap for young lives—it’s permitted—
And her judgment of us as enviable carries us along. And her judgments of reality. And my own harsh ineluctable tendency to deduction. And my sense of things, unworded, hard to hold, yet present in my flesh—the evil and the retreat from evil in me—it’s ACCEPTABLE—I insist on it; she decides to agree—and the thing of pleasure elicited, cajoled—the prick, the lonely body, and the farfetched and far-flung mind—she okays it, she does—soul and heart, if you will let me say this: we are at home—failures, penetrations, successes, cowardices . . . I don’t think she ever let me forget what it was like to be a man in a world of rivals, men, women, and her—and in that world her being my most reliable friend, who would kill me if I left her. Or if I humiliated her too much or too often.
Or if sex did. The sense I had as I fucked—in that posture (i.e., bent-legged, rodeo-showy, chest visible: she had begun to say the year before that I had a beautiful chest), the prick going in and out of the magic (greasy) shopping bag—was of the world of social ambitions and of aesthetic ones as a readiness for rage that could be utilized in sex or transposed, more commonly, whatever un-Bohemian provincials thought, into conceit, either of surrender to despair (at the world) or of one’s having, as a form of that, literally a furious rage to live now, to exist, mentally, phallically, willfully, famously—as if one were already entirely or merely largely and famously dead . . . or as a caution-haunted life-thing, full of trails and hints, half-scenes—a hallucination or a dream.
This was womanly in a certain way . . . like living inside the dreams of a woman. One was entombed most of the time or buried and then was briefly free—like a vampire . . . I cannot make it clear, It was not clear to me that among the rivalries and the, er, revelries, among choices—wittily (within terms of what was given for Ora and me)—I ascended, we climbed, she sank, we fought, we scrambled, we failed. I hurried toward orgasm—to give her raw pearls, pearls in a raw and milky state . . . my adorable swine . . .
“Don’t ever write about us,” she said, grunting and working away at the sex.
One could feel her refusing to be destroyed (an idea she used often: her own destruction), even while a sad, wild conviction of a readiness in me to be destroyed, or a resignation, or tropism, or inclination grew strong: as if a door were banging on a cabinet made of flesh: the banging door is flesh, too, in this sensation. One’s best fate might consist of using oneself up.
I couldn’t open myself to her . . . in front of her.
She had to guess at my secrets. Her body—her cunt—had become eyes of some kind, small fingers, guessing. Did I trust her? Was I a coward? A queer? Her refusal to be destroyed was maybe the main reason I lived with her. Is that an odd thing to “love” a woman for?
Imagine a universe of hotly breathing Nonies, all of them having different traits, though: they’re not exactly like her. Or imagine a man troubled with hallucinations in his bottommost vocabulary of what life is.
“Hold me tighter with your cunt, Ora, if you love me . . . One if by land, two if by sea . . . HELP ME . . .”
And she did—for one, two, three strokes
. . . part of a fourth—
“Is that all?”
She grunts, “Do what you want, Wiley . . . I’m okay . . .” Then: “That’s all.”
How much more can one ask of her? She refuses to be destroyed. Jealousy . . . and love . . . do not cow her. She has refused so far to murder me. Or anyone. Physically. Mentally and spiritually she has harmed a dozen people. A hundred. Who hasn’t? She was aware of it, though. What I want from her would be the same as melting and recasting the skeletal structures of her mind where the bones are speed of attention and of memory and are, in a way, made of light—and of words—and odd, mirror bits of the soul.
“DO YOU LOVE ME!” she calls out, cutting into the private part of the fuck.
“Yes,” I muttered disgruntledly, sticking it farther in than it really could go, socketing it blinkingly, wondering why there isn’t more phallic feeling and why there is so much feeling in my chest and butt—and in my harshly breathing mouth and in my mind and in my somewhat agonized soul—oh, I want to come—and is all this her taste, her doing somehow?
Her legs are on my shoulders and are sliding off. I am, forgive me if you can, deadpan, knowing I am fine-faced in a somewhat electric way. “This is a silly kingdom,” I say in a muttery voice, knowing her to have literary interests and a weakness toward language. I pinch her vaginal lips—I hold them on me—I don’t hurt her. I don’t mean to hurt her—maybe I don’t care.
She said—wildly—“You are a titan . . .” Or a tight ’un: I don’t know. She is, except in the cunt, tight: stingy: careful-breasted: not entirely present—scribbling in some light-racing diary.
“You are titan[t]ic,” she said, maybe the word, maybe saying tight-and-antic. Then—incomprehensibly—“Give in, give in . . .”
It is confused but it is not incomprehensible.
The Runaway Soul Page 40