An Iliad in him and which includes me—in a way—and which now has become in the chugging and clack-clacking minute part of my innerscape.
That he does not look confident when he does it is manners-of-a-sort and part of the reality that some of the story, while it involves him, is beyond him. He doesn’t admit that. The difference between what he is with me and what his manner is with Lila is the difference between his (maybe Jewish male) disrespect toward most things and then the hint in that of the importance of some other things which he doesn’t examine because he doesn’t want to know their otherness from him. One’s importance for him shows in a sort of smelly way—of nerves. His. Because of the blank spaces in this field of maneuver and of onset and so on. Mine because I’m younger and don’t clearly want this sort of thing to happen but I’m nosy and because his feelings might be a mistake on his part, now—forever: my importance to him . . . Maybe you’re one of the ones who gets remembered . . . Oh hell: things move along before you can disentangle them.
Maybe I care more than he does, at least in this way of adolescent wonder at the phenomenology of large feelings in oneself—I hide this from him. Disrespect and discretion—mine and Daniel’s—echo each other but aren’t alike; his lack of confidence and then the war, the physical moment in its historical version; are jammed in blazingly in what I feel flaringly. In the chug-chugging and click-clacking minute, the verb tenses of my mind—the now’s and then’s in various forms—in the partly natural daylight in the compartment become disaligned in a school sense but more accurately mine in the curious rolling and alighting and yet unalit present tense.
Dimly present are guys in childhood, older guys even before kindergarten, and moments in school, some of them bad moments since, some of them sentimental; and my sister is here; Nonie is here, and my dad, and the locker room at school, and my real dad. I think that, for me, in a certain way, negotiation is the way through the maze of refusal to sexuality even if the drama of certain sexual events for everyone else concerned is of various single-willed acquiescences and single-willed drives. But I am not sure.
It is because I still don’t know. I will this or that, I inherit this or that, I believe this or that. What circumstances seem to indicate as we go along (in the moments) is the politically active thing of my existence as counting for a lot with us (him and me), but he sees things as fixed; he keeps resettling them, reconcluding how things are; and I feel things as a negotiation that is time-riddled and haunted. Not so much that I go mad but enough that my feelings are in spite of him and me not being in sync.
He does not use madness as seduction—or as an excuse—but he did, maybe, use a sense of the peculiar human wish to escape from Ordinary Wakefulness—the OW . . . He had a funny look that watched stuff and triggered other stuff (in me); the politeness or discretion or whatever, the courtship (if it was that) gives me a sort of quasi-absolute rule of the moments through his character, but only maybe. And it depends on my footwork, my guesswork.
Love as a state of particular attachment—to one person—and a marriage to the present tense as it goes on for as long as the love lasts is a little new to me as an ex-middle-class-child with a lot of people around him and concerned with him: I remember the uproar and unpleasantness when I disowned my parents and my sister. Now the concentration of one’s jealous attention shows that one’s freedom is riddled, for a moment, with feelings that have to do with another person in the third person: he, in this instance—but it could be a child, a girl—and one’s sense, my sense of this, is that I know about this stuff—in some ways—and Danny knows it: he knows it from the stories about me with my dad when my dad was well and when he was ill.
Lover’s knowledge is like the theft of fire in the myth. You give someone this fire of criminally singular self-knowledge in you as in a myth: they can’t, however, necessarily reproduce it. But putting that boastfulness (if that is what it is) aside you are aware that you, or the type or idea that you give rise to, gives birth to a sense of life and of the moments in regard to this subject in the real moment in the hallucinatory whistle of sexual beauty. Sexual play—hallucination in the eerie light of hallucination maybe.
It is very real stupidity to be a virgin in any sense—and ignorance is like a soft or hard club slamming you. I can deny the reality of this stuff and of what I thought and felt, deny any sightedness in me toward this subject: I am not sloppy about love: but I am aware off and on that such awareness in me shows as the color of my eyes does and is a large part of the reality—’the historical reality’—of those years, of that month . . . of that particular moment. The reality in me that holds his interest.
In a sense, only a sense, one doesn’t have to be clear. One has a feeling that one burns in his sight; one is a shaky and swinging lantern in the moments for him—the moments of his feelings about himself.
Those feelings involve youth, my youthfulness. He is both right and wrong—one is hardly the perfect object of romance: what is he doing, being such an idealist? The moments come and press against me fleshily and are a weight on, or in, my lap. One can deny the existence of love to oneself but the admission of the existence of emotion within the range of interest called love is forced out of you at moments. You burn with it wastefully.
I tend to assume that older people and really all other people know what they are doing. I often fail to believe that a present moment has a blind edge for everyone . . . The blind man’s buff or bluff sense of life or the midnight and drugged dreamers on the dark(ling) plain stuff isn’t something I can hold as a steady belief. A moment may make a really fatal demand for your heart. The posture of one’s smile, of one’s smiles, absentminded, ignoring the touch, yet acknowledging it as someone much younger might, one has been startled into showing one’s extravagance in regard to love.
As if sticking to the subject, Daniel says, “We all know you loved your father.”
‘“Did I love my father? I forget. I like to be told that.”
“I like you for that,” he says. “I like you, period.”
“You like me too soon,” the boy says stiffly. “I’m a hard person to like.” I remember wanting the subject to be adhered to and not changed.
I remember ignoring Daniel’s reaction to me and feeling fatuous and uselessly precocious.
HE, Daniel, when I look at him, he sits there blankly, without meaning for me; I say now he was perhaps past meaning anything since what I said and my not wanting to end the exchange have pushed us into a silence.
It may have seemed then that I knew what I was doing or that we might as well act as if I did know because of the way I talked and looked. I was hardly fit to be a leader although I did know some stuff because of things that went on between me and my ill father. I feel myself in memory that day knowing consciously certain medical, smelly, imprisoning things about ties between people—pitiable things maybe—and expensive in terms of one’s life. Part of an absurd life. When I decided to be okay with Dad when he came back from the hospital the first time, I was pretty young but I was spoiled and I had guessed it might cost me my life including in this way, oh, not exactly, but in that surprised I I told-you-so way—that keep-the-child-away-from-sick-people way. Knowledge of how you see and notice that stuff moment by moment is given you in an absolute way by a smitten absolutist for whom you are, as you are for a lot of people it now seems to you, a special and dangerous taste, impressive and with powers of command and amazingly ignorant and strange. And perhaps violent in any number of hidden ways. The flapping of the technical dead dull diagrams of one’s power in the moment becomes one’s pulse rate along with the feeling: I would disappoint him (if he knew better, if we get into a thing, a friendship or something more elaborate). One is ignorant but one knows his systems and his beliefs permit nothing to be real, so, of course, he will be disappointed.
The sense of oneself as a YOUNGER boy of a certain sort up to a point and then semi-horrifyingly and embarrassingly and a little melodramatically not a sort at
all but oneself—and oneself in a certain state—a month further on from the day at the river—so that the no in me is like a knot of musculature. Perhaps it is a moral beauty. Perhaps a tease—for certain narcissistic fools. And Daniel sits facing this.
Daniel is sunburned, dark-haired; he is wearing tailored khakis; I don’t know much about him yet. I am not likely to know much about him—how can I judge his feelings? He is crisply shaped, he is confident and condescending, he is sour-and-bitter (the family says this about him) and he is sweet-and-mannerly—a maybe spoiled man (i.e., a narcissist in the sense of having a private existence which has no women in it, no one loving him with his permission; he has contemplation and companionable but melodramatically sweet and impassioned sex and emotion—I am guessing . . . I am guessing about this. The light that is coming through the windows—I don’t mind being brightly lit. Daniel is in a state of tense or as-if-electrified excitement. It is a little as if the moment for him was in a part of a book fairly far along from the beginning. A tense book. I am not reading the same book. Or if I am, not the same part of it.
I don’t know him. I don’t know my position vis-à-vis this stuff—or him. I know this is some kind of romantic thing but this isn’t one of the things I ever focus on—being loved or whatever it is by a grown-up. I am embarrassed. I am middle-class—a kid of the middle class toward this stuff—maybe only wistfully and fantastically so. I am crude—ugly and good-looking both. If I were shorter and had rich parents and we were playing some sort of sport, I would be clearer in my head.
But we have no clear human tie of an ordinary sort: just his feelings which have triggered mine.
I wondered if this stuff was ruinous. I sense each thing he does; and the frame in which I sense his arms, his legs, the tickling hair on his arms, the muscles in his arms, makes that stuff not objects of my regard but subjects for playful and really dangerous male verb forms of attachment . . . Childhood stuff. The ceaseless daily exercise of it, a lifetime’s experience of it, of attachment, means one knows the danger of it; one hates it, the humiliations, the ups and downs, the experience of it. A sense of the neighbors, of people at school, of the others as a measure of the factual nature of this stuff. People lie about feelings and moments and they get hysterical because they’re lying; and then they chop off your head.
An exchange of glances can wipe out the day, wash out the trip, infect the silence for a long time. One’s nerves. One’s breathing. A drawback to my wanting Daniel to like me. Outside the window, Indiana is turning into Ohio. Shit, here it is, emotion-and-tension—boy, it is as if enormous bedsheets were hung in the light between us, making the compartment theatrical and the air whitish. Feeling outlines me on the bedsheet in some giant or some dear and dwarfish size. And he is a distorted shadow, nightmarish—or comic: maybe it’s funny? Is it funny? Jesus.
Nonie often said, I feel sorry for anyone who gets mixed up with you.
In part, though, one is in one’s own home in these matters—like a snail with its transportable shelter.
But it’s also true that one is unroofed, unshelled; one is out in the world. I’m scared.
He isn’t off trying to pick up women on the train. He isn’t reading a book or a newspaper. HE ISN’T TALKING ABOUT WOMEN.
This is better than being ignored. The excitement of this is interesting; this excitement (such as it is) makes life interesting. I’m weird: hate is no amusement for me. What I know may be false and lead to a crash; and I’m tired, often, of being brave and pretending things are okay. His feelings, his attentions to me, his kindness correct defects of my confidence; they correct my vision in my life—they do that for the moment. I’m not a complete dud. I would like friendship and no sex and no complicity—that’s my Utopian notion and I know enough to know it’s probably not possible. I don’t like to admit it’s probably not possible—my dad said I was something of a dreamer. He said, though, too, and others have said, I was cynical. I wouldn’t mind minor diddling if no love was to be involved. Or knowledge would do. I might do something or other if he really wanted. Fun. Gratitude. You know? But I hoped not to do it. I wished I did want to do it. Meanwhile, my youth, my past, my various kinds of heat are being amended as we travel in this sort of fun. The clickety-clacks and jolts of the train and excitement of the possibility add up to a morning of amendment, an afternoon of my history edited and maybe wrecked until I sweatily stir inwardly inside with, uh, the dignity that his behavior toward me all day long grants me.
By four o’clock, we aren’t far from Pennsylvania. The sense of my life as a son, adopted or not, very much like a son in a story, the power of that, the field of mischief granted one, the guarantee of absolution even as a prodigal—at least for a while: real life isn’t exactly a parable—the thing of someone on your side, someone predisposed in your favor for good reason, genetic reason such as what you look like and how you carry yourself—it’s lasted this long, which means nothing in terms of chaining the future to it, but it means you have a certain weight of possibility in the world because other people have feelings about you. The mysterious thing of sexual force, of romantic coercion: who bends to it? Who is tortured by it? Some people are. That sense of things, that such stuff is concerned with you for a few hours, is itself a form of seduction—more so, on some level, once it becomes a topic that a living consciousness feels a lot about in the moments. It involves some plane of reality on which I live and which he sees and which becomes real to me in his attentions, real to both of us but differently. Real although not directly worded. It is part of the knot, part that is partly hidden, of how things are. When others walk past the compartment—and our door is open to let air circulate at this time before there was air-conditioning—when they walk past, they recognize in the scene something, oh, like a brother and a younger brother perhaps. I am recognizably under his patronage here. But what I really am is unrecognizable: who can imagine me? I know it’s hard to imagine anyone—I mean in such a way it’s really someone else and not you—but in the locker room, in the games in the locker room, when someone touches your genitalia, you feel known suddenly; and perhaps you are, not in words, but under the shadow of the fig leaf—pre-sin, ready for sin—or whatever. That may be an ancient thing in the world. Or only in the self from one’s time in the nursery when people played with your body; and now here, in this stuff—but this stuff is more daylit than the locker room. I believe and I don’t believe in the stuff today, the present-tense day, the present-tense day today as it goes along. I don’t believe in love after S.L., in this stuff with Daniel, but I feel real to myself and recognized although a bit secretly; and I am excited and interested but just in the moments, in friendship, not really in this stuff. The stuff is there. I am polite at the boundary of the field of mischief I mentioned—from Dad to here is present in my mind although some of this is an antidote to Dad’s death. The unreality here of what is real and my living through it anyway as through something unreal but real, sort of, this is my form of daydreaming—maybe a result, maybe an end of grief.
I think it was like this for Nonie.
12
On the train, I do not want to start in on the fairly awful struggle to know what one finally thinks the reality here is. The sense of unreality ends at moments in a kind of thump at whatever comes along next in the line of action: that thump brings mostly a sinking sense of realpolitik. Let us say I am a sort of time-knotted (Jewish) grotesquerie—or not truly Jewish but actually pagan—a pagan grotesquerie, then; a knottedly odd, deeply angry, much vandalized boy; anyway, a grotesque version of a boy, a grotesquerie of a boy, actually thirteen and eight months who says he is fourteen, that age of steadily, minutely altering sexuality day by day—almost a holy grotesquerie of phallic torment. Then the thing of being chosen—not lastingly or in legend and yet somewhat like Joseph or David or Ganymede or one of those—the astounded realizations, half-realizations, the disbeliefs, the self-protective meager half-awareness of it is faced realistically, as realpolitik in
the moment, breathingly . . . The stuff here is due to my mother’s complicity and my sister’s actions over the years and my own wish to see the place where Nonie was saved—and it is due to my own cleverness . . . such as it is. This particular part of the moments forms, I think, a kind of kinship for Daniel and me—I think everyone has been through this at some point: blackmailed, coerced by desire of some sort, even if not sexual desire, but partly sexual no doubt, desire uncertainly placed in the people involved, desire when the sense of privacy and of having money at one’s disposal, the sense that it is biologically universal, that stuff one has read about is part of one’s life, that beyond people’s lies it is here in this sort of moment. I mean, one has been a tutor to kids and one has gone as a friend into kids’ families—the worrisome burden of realpolitik operates there; and one runs, perhaps one runs away, into some form of shapelessness, not exactly wait-and-see, not exactly resignation, but from earlier versions of this moment, in their sweet stickiness, their horribleness, their heartbreakingness, their quality of being an opening into caverns and caverns of shadows and of dim light.
But one is half experienced. Somehow one allows him to hurt one; one allows him to make the next move but one doesn’t accede hintingly—it is politeness, it is virtue. One keeps one’s nerve and begins to practice the various, very odd, very hurtful disciplines of the unbearably complicated thing of the rumored or momentarily granted responsibility of the possession of a not entirely androgynous, no-longer-childhood ability to arouse, or be the cause of, feeling: it is a kind of beauty. And one practices the discipline of wanting something that is not entirely necessary to one: this trip to Forestville, a month or two as a kid in this other setting, this paradise, this Utopia . . .
The Runaway Soul Page 61