And which is which is not a fixed matter either. He, or she, often retreats into a bomb shelter and abandons the frontier—and you altogether.
An able guy there, he can only deduce my reality—he cannot feel it directly—I am unassuaged, unfed in the real sense. But I’m half pleased; it’s not an either/or thing except in the neighborhood of the yes-or-no of the suck my cock? The suck-my-cock as a joke order, jocular command. Or just the diddling with each other with hands—or the eyelid game. It’s no there, in that game, but that makes the kid sad. He is amazed that in Dan—in such people as Dan—these things are fixed and yet are breakable. Wiley imitates and absorbs some of Dan’s reliance on categories, some of his absolutism: this is part of being with him, part of talking to him—well, such talk as we had—it is part of being companionable. It is also theft and spying and perhaps treachery.
But I feel Dan as wooden, as a blindness (a term of Dan’s for the uninitiated, an uninitiate, an outsider), a blindness out of which develops an amazing sensitivity of the hands. A woodenness that leads to caution. But to a liveliness of the voice. It is kind of remarkable . . . a sign language among the sophisticated and systematized, a kind of area of pain in which some degree of education takes place.
But unless it is revolutionary, that education, unless it is a complete overturning—through love, say, through my desire to shock him, say, assuming that I could shock him, hour after hour until he was upended, bouleversé, remade—if it is not that, then what he learns is promptly applied to what he feels is nobly religious belief. One is attached, he, his mind attaches what he learns about you to what he already knows . . . which is stuff you know, too, or will know soon.
I think of him as Danny, Dan, Daniel depending on the curve of feeling in me toward him in a given moment.
8
Cousin Dan was actually appallingly handsome. His lips were a deep red color. He had sleek, brownish skin with heavy stubble closely shaved, glossy, geometrically stippled blackness, ornamental and curiosity-provoking—what causes that effect, compound and orderly, of beauty? He has enormously long, rather structural-and-yet-caterpillary eyebrows that go almost to his. hairline over large, big, eyelashed brown eyes of immense yearning, long black lashes, huge eyelids. He has a tiny, very thin nose under a wide brow topped by clustering curls—really too much.
And enormously long, faintly hairy fingers, and fingernails which, although cut short, were on the finger phenomenally long, starting as they did almost at the knuckle. He had a cleft in his chin and a widow’s peak and small neat ears. He spoke with a good accent, a good deal of sarcasm (or irony in an ideal and educated way), a good deal of sinuous lip curling—he had an extraordinary voice, drawly and Southern, with repressed but still extremely deeply felt vocal postures, operatic, almost beautiful. Perhaps beautiful: it is a matter of taste. Only that, after all. A sense that he must have a sense of his own (stylistic and economic and social) superiority is goading, willy-nilly sexual, if you find struggle and rivalry sexual, if you want to bring him down a peg.
Some of what he feels comes from the thing that while I respect his monomaniacal structures of absolute knowledge and the immense conceit of such things—such claimed lineage from the maker and soul of the universe—I hardly believe in it at all. I do not love God in him or through him—through Daniel—or my own safety through him by order of God, so-to-speak. I love my safety and would like to have it from Daniel if he would negotiate it, but I do not see it as safety under the seeming terms of the so far with him which is all that is present in the moment and is all that can be present in the moments. I see it as suffocation of the worst kind—an immense cowardice on my part if I go after it—the falsely offered counterfeit safety here.
I don’t know why I am the way I am. My life has led to this. I love the possibility of these things, it is true, and being on the train with Dan, I kind of love that; but mostly I sort of slyly and also a bit purely love him—for his kindness, for his audacity, for his wrongness, for his being so slick and yet a klutz or schmuck, after all. I love the amateur thing, the semi-amateur thing of a lot of the stuff, most of the stuff in him.
Well, see, he feels that “love” in him for me as a ghost, a kind of blur of heat, a heat mirage in a feelingly inhabited air, a heat of possibility. The self that holds the ideas—the basket, not the genital basket, the human self overall, the secular prow of the soul, of the soul part—the part that is the overall whole—well, he sees the punished kid, the freed kid, whom he, Daniel, freed—I see those terms on his face. All the moments until now of him with me his functioning mind sees as a story detached from the moments. To an absolutist such stuff as what is going on in a minute can’t exist except maybe pathetically in someone unenlightened, unenlightened and wrong. What truly exists are the conclusions, the ideas.
For me, though, it’s a thing like jazz. The moment is real. He is measured by the moments in a jazz way. In a warfare-and-battle way as well. War depends on time. He is punishing Nonie. He is taking me to Carolina with him; in having someone there he “likes,” in “loving” me, of course, other stories are involved. One senses those only vaguely. But fooling around—diddling around—at my age certainly—or ‘flirting’ or making friends, when it is NOT part of the H-group stuff, denies being part of a fixed story and denies being anything but parenthetical, temporary, closed off from ordinary meaning in the passages of middle-class time and attached to jazz meanings, in a way, or emotional ones, or, in my opinion, real and not fake ones.
His “love” intellectually includes such a clear and then such an unclear honest estimate of itself, of the emotion in him, of the acts, of who he is in such a state, that it is a wonder to me how he can find terms, all of them empty of time, of time moving—and chugging along. When will his “love” occur? When will it act itself out? It seems to me that my life when he is in this state, we, me, my life, and I hardly exist for him . . . we are expendable—for the sake of a clarity that consists of him snooting time, the universe, and the reality of feelings, the reality of everything.
But maybe he feels the pagan breath of the reality of existence with love in it—love in it and unacknowledged. He wavers some: he is drawn to it, or toward it, the pagan existence of love as a reality, but maybe only as his own reality, with me omitted, him and his jealousy, his jealousy being an almost living breathing simulacrum, or Frankenstein monster, or shadow thing of me, or not me, but the boy I looked like just then, that day.
But jealousy is him dreaming of me, with him asleep in a state in which he is the universe.
He has no momentum going: I suppose it’s not certain, though, if he does or not. Sometimes if you don’t get a word in edgewise, if you don’t get an oar in edgewise, you don’t know where you are—puppet strings, puppet strings . . . You have to watch out, Wiley . . . I sit up straight again and lay my sweater across my lap. Lila told me a lot of stuff, advice, before I left home: Don’t show off . . . Be smart: hide how smart you are and hide how dumb you are. Whew. Tricky. “Beep-beep-a-deep,” I say, and look at Daniel. Then I raised my eyebrows. Momma told me cryptic stuff about Daniel. And his mother, Casey. They’re strange, Wiley: they’re strange people: they couldn’t negotiate their way out of a paper bag: they’re religious; they couldn’t, neither one, be president of a dog-and-cat society . . . They’re people have to have their way. She said, Be patient with him but don’t lose your self-respect. And remember that self-respect is not the be-all and end-all—but use your head. Now, listen, Wiley, don’t be a fool and think Daniel means it when he says he likes intelligence: what he wants is someone to be nice to him. Take my advice and play dumb: Be reasonable—that’s what he thinks intelligence is. And: Be careful not to show how conceited you are.
“How conceited am I, Momma?”
Enough . . . Enough that it’s a problem, Wiley. No one’s prepared for anything . . . You expect too much of people—do me a favor and don’t disapprove of anyone this trip . . . Daniel thinks very well of hi
mself . . .
He falls back into being himself—a man who knows what he does. He is asserting himself as the ruler of the household-at-this-moment, it’s sort of that—him foisting me on his family. This is in the air. He’s easily bored is his problem, Momma told me before I left St. Louis. Life is very simple, Wiley: be nice to people and they will be nice to you.
I say to Daniel, “Being nice to people isn’t simple. Being nice to people is not a simple matter, no. Since I got to be taller than my mother, she begins talking to me with Sit down, Wiley, even if she is standing up—she does this invariably.”
As an adopted kid I have no basic language. My language does not originate in the shadows of this family. It is a clear structure of falsity and of deduction—playacting with a more or less good-hearted sincerity involved, playacting at being part of the family, but it is a bit problematic, questionable.
What I think and feel is mostly unworded. The light from the window plays on the starched and angle-y front of Daniel’s khaki shirt. Daniel leans forward, leans back . . . Gusts of something-or-other form and blow this way and that, not so much where they list as where the geography in me permits passage. The inclinations of a landscape in a person can’t easily be talked about.
I permanently have an interior voice talking, even when I am asleep. I used to think that originated in genetic solitude—in being abandoned by the families, both my families, unless I did as they asked. That voice is like a false day, a recent day, the chief yesterday, a family, a mother, a brother, a careful father . . . such voices as those . . . but they become one voice and not willed or full of aim but merely instructive, as when you were little and people said things to you while they held your hand and you walked alongside and their minds wandered some and they enjoyed your innocence.
This inner voice only indirectly explains things—it may be seven steps off from a translation into words of what has happened, but it tends to cry out, YOU’RE JEALOUS OF HIM or YOU’RE BEING TOO ANALYTICAL, YOU’LL FREEZE HIM TO DEATH.
But unexpressed-as-yet thoughts often exist as feelings and as internal postures of excited attention in a certain direction or a group of directions known almost as if from a list on a treasure map, so many paces here, so many there, then look up at the magic owl, and so on.
“She’s okay,” Daniel said, eyeing me—rescuingly . . . With overtones.
“She looks seriously upset.”
“She’s actressy.” Then: “She’s a ham.” Testing me, testing the connections I might have to people . . . At Daddy’s funeral, Momma wore no makeup and was a plain-faced and tousled tragedy queen. “A Hecuba,” Daniel said, eyeing me and testing my classical education as well—not eyeing me sharply, though: he wasn’t dominant . . . or dominating: he was polite . . . permissive . . . respectful or bribe-y . . . or all of those. Usually, in the U.S., doing antique-classical stuff is a way of making a sort of a pass. He said, “The good times are over for her . . . I feel sorry for her . . . You are the Helen of Troy of the family now.”
“She wouldn’t agree,” I said, starting to laugh, then becoming somber and looking down at my knees.
9
Some people, not many, spoke in that extravagant way to me. Enough did it that it was part of my life.
“I don’t know how you stand it,” Daniel said, squinting in the light that came so pulsingly and lurchingly through the window of the compartment: he was riding with his back to the engine—for my sake. You could use a little nursing . . . Use your head and you’ll get it: the reason (one of them) that I am here . . . A sort of middle-class moral reason. The tremor in my nerves was that it was such an uncertain thing what I really felt—the moment was improvisational and yet it was habit-ridden, systematized in ways I don’t know about. I am maybe not an able saxophonist.
“I think my mother is interesting to talk about, but do me a favor and don’t talk about St. Louis.” I smiled politely, perhaps youthfully. Then I tested the moment by going pretty far conversationally: “Do me a favor and shut up about St. Louis.” He said nothing and I went on, not watching him, “Lila talks to me better if I sit on a stool with my head no higher than hers. But if I talk about her I feel funny. I’d just as soon be a different person.” I slouched down in my half of the compartment, I cross my legs and tilt my head back and look down my face at him, at my cousin, very vaguely, very shyly—in an abstract or pale version of a kind of metamorphosis because of his interest.
A lot of what I think I know here comes from certain boys at school. I don’t know every boy, after all—I know certain boys. “Personal questions are like necking . . . I hate tongue-kissing.”
Daniel, on the train, exploded with hooting laughter, staccato, amused, shocked, quickly silent. “You talk in a very fancy way”—Daniel on the train, in an exploring tone.
I grin nervously—I can only think ahead so far. “I don’t want to talk about the stuff at home . . . Nothing real happens the way I think it will . . . I sound weird to myself.” If I register reality, I usually realize that I’m proceeding blindly no matter whether I think I see ahead or not. “Things go haywire . . . In me . . . It’s a strain—it’s okay. Trying to talk is like taking a walk in a minefield—things you don’t want to say explode . . . you get exploded, I get exploded.” Ha-ha . . .
“You know about the Scots regiments at El Alamein, walking in kilts and bagpipes skirling, into the minefield? The explosions?” Guys who use good grammar, or girls who do, and guys who talk about kilts—it’s flirting, you know? It’s a pass. He says, “The Germans called them the Ladies from Hell, they were such good soldiers, the kilt wearers.” The response to excitement—to things at risk in a real moment—means you flash from one of your senses to another—the chattering and clicking and clattering and chugging of the train—to the heat of the window glass—to the sight of a small river in the distance—to a sense of dirt because of the dirt-covered surface of the earth rocketing past the windows on your trembling fingers, trembling because the train vibrates, and the dirt on the windows: another dirt-covered surface. This chokes my throat, so I fly, take refuge in, the feel of new, lightweight pants on my fingertips running up and down the trousers crease past the sweater on my lap.
I can hardly trust him. I have an irritating sense of him sexually. I don’t want to explore this stuff—one can’t fool around with that stuff and learn about someone without learning too much. Brutal self-risk, amatory self-risk—all that. The desperation that underlay (and might still if he were here in the compartment) this sort of stuff with certain boys when I was pursuing an imbecile, hot mitigation in St. Louis—that stuff might recur here with him, in this compartment. I hoped to avoid that by not discussing St. Louis.
And the associations, the recurrence of old feelings modified now, vestigial, rudimentary, with the fresh edge of now, the fighting with other boys, for instance, and the thing of despising the other person, boy or girl, because you’re not sentimental, a thing of being committed in advance because the stuff is not carnal, not really, and involves a different politeness, so to speak, this stuff; and the maybe stupid courage of the other stuff is not required here, the maybe immoral carelessness (of an immortal kind) of other kinds of love—the dexterities of will and of self-forgiveness, of drunkenness while sober, and anger and ironic despair, I want to avoid that stuff . . . Almost certainly love and infatuation are here . . .
But to some extent—changeably.
10
I can see, as I curve through a mental arc inwardly (in an actual moment), the shape of how I sort of kind of hate people who make me say no.
11
I can force myself to say yes. I can be enticed. I can be perverse. I bumble along in “what I feel” among possibilities. Of course, it’s interesting to live through stuff, but it’s nerve-racked in the moments when you do it, it’s fraught—too fraught for me to be anything but a little hoity-toity toward it as well as overexcited and kind of grinny. We are about the same height, Daniel and I. Daniel’
s got that look I sometimes arouse, the Wiley’s-not-a-real-man-sort-of-boy look that moves back and forth into the opposite thing of A-REAL-MAN-SORT-OF-BOY. I’m kind of a sexual joke, maybe, a regular boy with a serious face.
He leans forward and touches a regular boy with a serious face—I remember his khaki sleeve, the cuff of it, starched; the button, cracked; his watch—a cheap metal watch with a cheap band—the hairy wrist, its shape, the kind of slanted shadow and dimple of the thin musculature of the wrist; and the ornate human thing of fanned-out tendons and the archipelagic row of knuckles; and the muscle in the bay curve between the thumb and the forefinger—it is the back of a hand, his; he touched me in a carefully ordinary way; but if I remember the moment correctly (the moment given to me), the twist of the air then is for me almost like the twist of language in a story I didn’t write—I mean at one point; it can be even inside a sentence when a reference to another world of almost entirely other reference offers the wit of relativistic juxtaposition. One’s feelings, words, and opinions are not immortal, are not part of an immortal law-and-disobedience thing. They last varying lengths of time—even as art (so-called).
But the twist then of meaning is toward a burden of feeling which is more intensely meaningful as meaning or which is meaning in a grander or more grandly useful state. A cloud is advancing along the ground with something in it—a fox, a swan . . . who knows? Temporary love, a sudden maybe mostly unwanted knowledge of things—I knew a girl who said that the sensation of recognizing feelings in the touch was like undergoing a test or a fire drill in school; and I agree if you combine it with being hit in the head—a useful amnesia, a useful concussion or enforced moment of dreaming while awake, a startled hallucination not at one’s own hand.
And it is like a battlefield, a real one, and it is like an episode in a real war; you are in a blurred and as-if-fatal terrain in which the events have the massive independence from one’s will of a battle. Of course, one has one’s will anyway—to lie down, to be brave, to keep on. You can immerse yourself in the weird story line, things happening in a sequence in real life. You will encompass what you do although there is force and there is strategy and swindling. The thing is that here is a story very different from any attempt I might make to understand it.
The Runaway Soul Page 60