I half know that a dirty social merit consists of pretending to submit to the blackmail arrangements in human goings-on (as Lila understands these things). Lila has taught me what she knows. She has taught me what she wanted to teach me. S.L., too, has taught me, differently from Momma. Looking back into the morning light in the compartment, I think I see that Dan expects to be disappointed but doesn’t quite believe it. I think the boy knows how limited he (the boy) would be in a hug. And he guesses at how Dan would make use of that. I think I see why Benjie usually pretended to confidence and knowledge of my sexuality. Daniel is being cheerful; he is prepared. People are realists, Wiley, more than you are. Daniel is puffy-eyed, rosy-cheeked, respectful, and full of trespass in embryo and a kind of very decent half-hidden resentment. Is he far along in his spiritual death? Is he moving toward rebirth? Does it depend on me? What will it cost me?
I mean either way.
Nothing is ideal when you get right down to it. The hours spent together nonstop in the overstrained precocity of emotion cloudily overlaid with stratagem. People make use of you is all anything is. Nonie said that in 1943 when she was deeply unhappy. The you she meant was partly a general thing, everyone, reflections of her. Does Daniel want a son? Someone bright? Do me a favor and learn to wait to see what happens.
17
I feel I am being rifled spiritually. I am afraid of my savagery, my own sense of justice, of what I might do. My father when he was dying asked me again and again to kiss him in a certain way because he had never kissed a boy or a man that way, but I could not, would not do it. I don’t know. I had taken care of him all those years in a lot of ways—why wasn’t that enough? But why not do more? He wanted in part to tease me. He wanted me to prove I loved him. He wanted still to have sexual power and command even at the end. I am partly stifled with resentment toward men.
An entire life of thousands and thousands of moments is there in the compartment with Daniel. I want to tell him honestly what I think, but I can’t. The unwordedness of nearly everything for me in the moments with Daniel on that trip and my efforts later in life to become articulate are related to the phenomenal and entirely not-credible richness of reality.
I am being slammed back and forth in the oddity of being on the train. Locker-room talk is: Don’t get your hopes up; don’t get your balls in an uproar; don’t think so well of yourself. Guys said, I’m not your slave. Girls said it, and grown women. Some people did get slavish—slavish—some get slavish meanly, upsettingly. Some do it in a way that breaks your heart. People indulge you threateningly. Life’s at the boil, hunh, Kiddo? You like your life now, Pisherkins? S.L. said that before he died when things, were tense between us.
It’s interesting some of the time to live. I feel alive.
“Do you cheat at games, Dan?” I ask him. He is buttoning his shirt.
“No . . . I don’t like games.” A small smile.
Beginning to get an erection, I ask, “But everything is fair in love and war?”
“No . . . Yes . . . Sometimes . . .”
(Well, I certainly won’t trust him . . .)
(Lila said, One thing I’ll say for Daniel is, he is certainly trustworthy.)
The electrical thing of the flirtation—of the question—is like being overdressed. I understand that I have an odd look now because of this stuff at breakfast in the dining car. People stare at us. (I am amused.) I know in the onrush of ordinary time that hour-by-hour in the real world I have no protector and that I am a woods of Dan’s nocturnal hunting. I know that I mostly don’t know what is in the woods—even if the woods is me. The part of me that is prey is not known to me as identity. I don’t entirely mind bad stuff when it happens to me, because then, when that stuff happens, you get to spy on the world in a new way. Am I incredibly BAD? WOW. POW. KAZOW. It depends on who you ask.
Is it a tactic, a hope, a blindness TO ACCEPT THIS SHIT AS NORMAL? I become deadpan, since each thing that I show brings about a responding thing in him, and the number of his responses—he echoes with me—begins to be like babble. God knows what Daniel sees when he looks at me. Moment by moment. Well, I don’t want to be a victim. In any way. Dense, stiff-souled, prickly—me—and then that is the story then.
Ten percent of the world is made up of overt practitioners of the special disciplines of self-consciously semi-public homosexuality. Homosexuality is in part a way of modelling the world—one can spy on men and on women and on language, using your own life and love as specialized versions of the rest. It’s like electric-train stuff (in part). I thought, I’m sorry. I did then think that homosexual love wasn’t real love but was a model of love, well-thought-out and functional. I do now think it is real love. But then I thought any homosexual flirtation must collapse under the weight of any other actuality of love, must fail to outweigh the world. Loss and longing are actuality, though. Love of the second rank is still love. Maybe another ten percent of the world’s population is made up of covert practitioners and of part-time partakers and of people who tried it and chose not to go on with it much or often but who retain a kind of interest. And five percent of the world is uncertain and wavers or pretends to. So, by my estimates, twenty-five percent of everybody is directly implicated. Everyone is familiar with it no matter what they say. A fistfight and then the afterward of such a fight, a wrestling match, anything you do with a brother, the thing of being yelled at by a lesbian teacher who doesn’t like boys: our own feelings off and on: we all know a lot. Or some. We react differently though, each one of us.
What Nonie maybe went through when she got away from our house and the illness in it, the emotional color of her moments when she was rescued, well, the emotional color of my moments were like this. The compartment is khaki-ish or dun, the color of a certain countryside sunlight at this time of day, a travelling light unfamiliar to me. Sand-colored, changeable. The shifting room, swaying, bouncing, moving above the wheels—light is never still—nowhere in the universe is light ever still. It is supposed to be in heaven and it is slowed in black holes maybe. I get a sense, for whatever it’s worth, of a release for Daniel from the inexplicable narcissistic loneliness of the self through infatuation. I mean, the difficult thing for him is to be interested in the world; he has an aching, partial freedom; I suspect him of sudden, capriciously tyrannical reversals, changes of mood, him casting you off morally. His personality. I’m wrong often about life but I think he blurs his drama even when he means to make it sharp and Biblical.
So: is he vain and creepy—a bit reptilian? Gorgeously lizardlike? In courtship? The quick coldness of posture, the perceptible longing for heat? Is he easily affronted?
Lila has pointed out, The world consists of number one’s; people who put themselves second is in short supply.
The hooves of milling and racing horses of heartbeat—a hallucination—What’s the big idea?
What’s the big deal?
I could be completely wrong about everything.
18
The next morning.
Is Daniel a creep? Is he IN LOVE in an unquieted, wild way—I mean a later-than-in-high-school way or a more-uncontrolled-than-a-good-but-emotional-teacher way?
Objective means you are not inside the story. Subjective means you are. The existence of a reader sets up a race between the writer and him or her to see who is more outside the tale. It is the opposite of what the technology of an advertisement does to a product, the opposite of setting up an ideal fantasy, the evaporation of reality.
19
At dawn.
On the rocking-rickety train, the compartment smells of night.
It is barely light, fresh and shadowy, smelly but clement here behind the half-drawn, odorous window shade. The strangeness of travel and of the moment makes me feel myself to be a skinny balloon—that fragile—and that I am proceeding and being carried along in what is essentially a fairy tale, the nowhere-somehow-somewhere of the mental space of a dimensional tale set among objects foreign to my actual experience
.
It is bright and early but it is not bright. I sit up in my bunk and see the shadows here, in this shadowy light, the fur left here by struggling and circling night-wolves—the melodrama of boys’ books affects my wits.
Then, in the already slightly sweaty heat of the morning, I hear Daniel stirring above me in his bunk. He is awake.
Daniel, invisible, a voice near the roof—and the train is noisy—tells me he prays in the mornings, as his father had before him; he puts on the tefillin; but not this morning.
He swings himself down. I look out the window, I lift the side of the shade, and see an immense dew-glittering field and a farmhouse and a running and silent dog far off and small on the field.
Daniel is in white shorts and a khaki T-shirt and has a couple of dog tags. He has too powerful muscles in his legs; they embarrass me; I don’t like them.
But, otherwise, he is thin, almost spidery, handsome and admirable—admirably in condition—and this is noble to my youthful vision.
But not him asking, “And what were you up to all night?”
He goes into the small bathroom in the corner and he lathers his bony jaw and the strong-looking stubble of his face and neck. I stay in my bunk. If I stood up, me being the size I am and him being the size he is, we would crowd the compartment.
His reflecting-me eyes, the periscope-mirror eyes of someone-who-likes-me, that male interest, should be, by my lights, masked. Well, reality is unreal.
He begins to talk about driving lessons he will give me. He does this while he shaves. He is bargaining. Learning to drive is important to me; but his talking about it has the itchy aura of too much feeling; and his body is too near me although it is maybe three feet away. Yet, this is almost standard male wartime camaraderie.
He asks me if I am having a good time on the train; and I say, not knowing why I am saying this complicated and far-out thing, “I don’t know if I’m having a good time but I’m not in pain.”
Then I see it is again a way of seeing if he can bear me and for how long or if I am a shadow image—with adolescent coloring—for him.
I register that he doesn’t listen when he says, “Tell me . . . Tell me what your dreams were . . .”
I feel I am like a child, or almost-a-child, at the foot of a wall around a place he, the child, wants to enter. I don’t know if this is sexual longing or not.
I would like to bump against him and wrestle symbolically but not as if one were on an escalator, an elevator, or a train, a single track of action, but in a field with everything possible including a No.
Or an event that is really a No.
To drive him away—at least I think that is what it was—although I was aware that I would do things with him if that is what he wanted, if he showed signs of knowing how limited those actions would have to be and if he could bear me, my reality, at least somewhat.
“Well, Daniel,” I said, “in the mornings I don’t pray the way you do, I contemplate the presence in the world of something near me that suggests the possibility of the actuality of me having luck-in-the-long-run . . . A favorable outcome—you know? And as for short-term luck, I think about masturbation—”
His face grew smooth. “Yes?” Now he’s listening to me.
“I think about luck and sin, I guess. I think about luck and sin as being like a peony preparing itself for the day’s commerce with insects, you know? A peony wind-rubbed and fluffed early in the morning?”
No one can bear the way I talk. It isn’t all that plausible. I have my hands behind my head in what now seems the warm gloom of the train compartment. Daniel didn’t say, You’re crazy. He merely edited the look in his eyes—his eyes were full of the reality and the pretense of judgments.
I went on, alternately watching him and staring into the air—and at the bottom of the upper berth: “Well, prayer is getting what you want; it has to do with winning out; so it’s funny for a Jew or for a Christian, at least one who loves Christ, a Christ-lover, unless they turn the feeling into the pursuit of vengeance. Prayer mostly has to do with being on top of the world—success, a favorable outcome. I can’t do that. I guess I think God is omnipresent, inside and outside everyone, so that you have no need to address Divinity ever, except for your own sake, for the sake of stuff in you, to exercise it. I think that prayer takes me back toward sleep and dreaming, when my skull seems to contain the whole, real universe and hours of time and millions of inhabitants. Anyway, I like a lot of crappy things: people who lose out and ideas that are no good, you know? And dead flowers? I’m not exactly on the side of nature. Or of sleep. Or of superpeople. I practice a kind of thing of going outward; I focus outside myself and see how long I can hold it: you know—I just stare—it’s no big deal; I vaguely pass out and I feel the presence of God. He’s pissed with me usually—presumably, that’s how I feel. That It’s pissed. The All is pissed. Now that S.L.’s dead, we are kind of negotiating my return, the All and me—I chose S.L. over God. I chose him over everything. I respected my earth-father—the one down here. But it’s not a real negotiation if you do both voices—then it’s just free will playing around. I do both voices, so I don’t know really what the terms are. Anyway, short of that, I just stare at the world and then I think, well, I feel I saw God, sort of, which is hard to make sense of if God is everywhere and is you, whoever you are, among all the others who, and which, are also God, you know? I think it’s just sort of a messy glimpse—maybe a sissy glimpse. Maybe a glimpse for a tough guy—I don’t really know: the feeling is realer than anything I can say about it. Then my eyes—and my hope—get out of hand; they go apeshit. My hopes. Plural. It’s okay. I can hack it. It’s kind of grand and stupid—grand and imbecile—very grand and terrible when you admit how stupid you’re being and how the truth is like seventy thousand infinitudes greater and bigger and more serious and funnier and more everything: you get a glimpse of awe. That doesn’t sober you up; you just fall into this giddy expectation of psychological, maybe spiritual, favor, you know? Love instead of only pain? It’s not just, you know—it’s like being the favorite child—for a moment. You have to sober up but it’s okay so far. See, then I have to disbelieve it, all of it: ALL: Oh what a load of bullshit, right? But it runs in my family—my real family. Another thing I do is I count to seventeen slowly—well, don’t laugh—a vision always comes before I get to seventeen. I don’t believe that vision either. I never believe it. But I like it . . . It appears usually between the numbers 11 and 14—I think I’m afraid of the number 15. It’s not always visual—it’s more a sense of presence, a further thing, a kind of lion stink of not entire invisibility. A breathing-almost-visibility and a stink of that—maybe a cryptic formula, too: Let go . . . Let go . . . It’s probably just a genetic tic, anyway. It’s there now . . . But I know I’m not a prophet. It’s just me. Tick-tock. So it doesn’t mean anything—except it means something to me, just to me, so it’s a team-and-ego thing after all . . . Us versus them . . .”
Although Dan’s told me that he is lonely and would like not to be, I think that is soft soap, and that in real life, he does most of the talking near him and perhaps even all of it.
If he didn’t do all the talking with someone he liked—if all the speeches weren’t to his taste—then it wasn’t a dream come true.
I’m lonely when I talk but I’d met Casey in St. Louis and I really believe it wasn’t paradise for Daniel if Daniel didn’t do all the talking.
If he admitted Casey was real, he would probably explode into brightly burning pieces of who-knows-what.
I think Daniel in his daydreams imagined a dialogue without a second voice, a dialogue between him and someone without his having to listen to the other person; he calculated that someone might want him—his money, his discipline, his looks . . . his body, chest, chest hair, strong legs, dick—throat—enough that that wanting would be the equivalent of a good speech in a book making sense—all that. Then Daniel would make love to that person, making the other person happy—i.e., th
e other person would make that perfect speech; that would be the other person’s speech, the other’s share of the dialogue, the happiness or at least the release, or the relief, the lovemaking would be for her, him, it.
I think he ejaculatingly calculated that in him being wanted a dialogue was occurring in a better way than it could happen in words.
I believe he conveyed this to me over the next several years: this mystically absolute view of sex and of possible happiness within it.
I don’t say he wasn’t right; but I saw something early on when I knew him, even on the train, and I pitied him; he made me frantic and tense—with pity and with silence. I mean it was so unworded that it felt as if I had been excluded from my own story except as the NO that put me into his story and which held his attention.
Nothing was identified or footnoted on the train. The moment was just there; it was just itself—cryptic—and with us in it—a boundaried and not-naked moment.
Anyway, now I knew he would kiss me—I hoped it would be on my hair—him kissing me, unless I made a scene, would be my real speech to take the place of the interior meaning of what I’d just said.
That is, its interior meaning was that it elicited feeling from him.
He was shaving still; he rinses his face and launched into a lecture on Jewish morning prayers—as if I were a Catholic. I sighed at being not all that honestly or accurately lectured—it was propaganda mostly—and then, his face and hair wet, he walked over to me, paused, and he put on his khaki pants, and then, lecturing still, his lips, loosened—sinuous, longish, brick-red—his large brown eyes (with their black centers)—came near me where I lay in the bunk; it was his whole face, his skull; but it was out of focus. He breathed a little noisily; he didn’t hold his breath tactfully; he didn’t tiptoe in approaching me; he seemed almost to semi-roaringly whistle and hiss—and to smack his lips and watch—as he kissed my hair, then my ear.
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