In a natty and gentle way—lingering, a bit feminine—not male roughhousing—not with contempt although it was a bit don’t-fool-with-me (I’m-sensitive-and-rich) and it was also YOU can’t judge me.
I was amazed though—he is a different soul from me; it’s not just the distance between our ages; it’s an incredible extent of Difference—as if he were another species, or was a dancing thing, a rock that came alive in the mornings, say. It was that amazing—It was nothing, don’t make a big song-and-dance out of it—it was affection and of the sort I’d seen dozens and hundreds of times but it was aimed at me differently—across some other gulf.
It had a sort of inelegant elegance—as if he felt a lot—one way or the other—disapproval or shock, shocked liking—and, so, he walked off physically (a step or two) and mentally further than that while he was standing there: his mind went some distance away; his feelings did too. Well, what happened in the kiss and after was that he was daydreaming. I should have been a blond toy with good legs and all that—all that shit of being malleable—toward a limber and lithe monkey wrench of a kind of iron man—but I wasn’t of that sort.
And he was glad I wasn’t—this was maybe my first recognition of sexual taste as oddity—as a perversity in itself and toward oneself, him feeling it, and me feeling it as it emanated from him.
I laughed. Sometimes I think I want to write about love as envy—as Let me harm you and ruin your life . . .
Or asI envy the grown-ups . . .
Or I envy the pederasts.
And then the inebriation of this—partly in its allowing me a deep silence to rest in from speech. The thing of being chosen or settled for—or idealized and yet seen clearly enough all in all to have your faults on the list—is oddly secretive and unsettling.
Also, if he says nothing and if I don’t look at him but down at the railway blanket covering me—What the fuck am I going to do now?—it’s possible I’m loony tunes bar none all by my lonesome, that I’m making all this up.
I kind of hear his heartbeat—perhaps not really in the noise of the train in the compartment.
A stiffness of focus in me means what? That his body, his peculiar chest, narrow from front to back and not wide, but large-muscled—and a peculiar tense rigidity of his hips—oh, I half recognize the basic derrick with the cantilevered or upright lever thing of an erection—but I am too shy and I lack style (and humanity) and do not realize it with any fullness . . .
I mean I don’t hear his speech delivered that way—it is like his not hearing my speeches, the ones I make in words.
The long-legged possessing thing of a man you feel as spidery and as not inwardly generous but as caught in the singular ego thing of the dream-of-romance—a peculiar disorderliness of loneliness and of his experience search for companionship—this isn’t at all like the disorder of being suckered or sucked in by a woman or a girl: you enter nowhere—you enter yourself with the curious quality of logic of a dream—or of a hallucination while jerking off—and this distorts the air with some sense in that state of a power that I have (over his blood? over his prick?) and which I dislike but which makes me grin inwardly and sweatily—in an odd way—and which sets me free to think . . .
I mean it: it has the quality of reverie.
“Uh,” I say. “Well, hey.” I have already begun to sit up in the complicated way enforced by the presence of the upper bunk; I sit at the edge of my bunk, in my underwear but with the blanket pulled over me, in part, not too unpleasantly I hope . . . But, see, it is absolute, unbearable hell to be touched physically by an absolutist . . . The feeling, the what-it-feels-like, the meaning is piercing—and really horrible.
It isn’t homosexuality that I mind. It’s the trespassed-on self-reverie thing and a sense of being clumsily looted while one is semi-pseudo-blissfully silent . . .This is me, not a general principle.
He touches the nape of my neck. What I felt then, what I knew I was feeling, was that I didn’t want to blame him or have tragedies or scenes come about. And I didn’t want the spermatic-milk derrick to release—or discharge anything—and that, contradictorily, I liked, in a blackened, despairing, semi-amused way, having power over his body.
Well, when things get complex (complex was a term of disapprobation in U. City among adolescents), I just sort of say to myself, Just pay no attention . . .
And: I don’t want anyone to talk to me about this . . . (That meant Daniel, too. I wanted no description, no advice—no witnesses.)
I wanted, in an odd meaning of the term, to be innocent—on examination, not necessarily at sight—and I wanted that in the worst way—not like a child but like a guy in a locker room or like the character in some famous love stories who is a visitor and hears or sees the story but isn’t in it; the guy is taking shelter in a haunted house in a storm or something; and he will survive the attack or the seduction by the bloodsucking vampire in his (or her) promiscuous love of gore: but he won’t hate the vampire—or the lovers if it is a different type of story—or himself if things work out that this, too, is love.
The thing of wanting not to be a part of a maybe mean story is a peculiar thing in life, upperish or ordinary, super-potent or cowardly. A brave guy is clearly not cowardly—do you know what I mean? A nose is not an eye. An eye is not a cheek. The iris is not the white of the eye. Bravery is often a really obvious, habitual thing. What I do is maybe cowardly. It’s possibly brave. I don’t know. He has chosen me to be in a story, and I don’t want to be in it in the way he proposes—this isn’t final but he’s not a flexible guy. He’s spoiled.
But he had maybe a certain amount of trouble when he was young: pain can train you, can lead you to try changing unless you have a thing against changing and think it’s awful.
In real life he maybe felt this as part of my youth and as a ground for him feeling stuff: that I hoped, kind of, that pain would change him, that I felt nothing favorable about his sexual nature, and not a lot about him.
He touched the nape of my neck as I said. Then I think he touched the nape of his own neck, the back of his neck. Mine, then his. Like he was planning a decapitation—of a sort. I couldn’t see this except out of the corner of my eye as he walked to the corner where the tiny bathroom was. I looked up into the air and then at the partly shaded window and the motionful stuff under the bottom of the partly lifted shade. I didn’t sigh; I had some kind of feeling or other—what would happen if I made a face now and muttered, Don’t do that . . . ?
So, I muttered it. Well, everyone gets a shock now and then—mine was that it seemed, weirdly and terribly, that I, tired and semi-ill as I was from stuff at home in St. Louis, was stronger in some way than he was. What the fuck. He came back out of the john almost right away, he had his toilet kit in one hand; his razor was in his other hand; both hands held things. He dropped the stuff in my lap. His hands were scratched, blood-flecked—the nails were bitten and bleeding here and there along the cuticles.
Add it up? I can’t.
It was a moment leery of itself. The moment is, for me, my realer dress, my clothes: it blows or moves or stirs in some overly passionate silent storminess of electric power . . . I have a huge amount of shyness about myself. A moral shyness? A feminine one? A fear of scandal? No. Yes. One can throw off the blanket, see what happens—and one can say it was all a joke. One might get sent to college . . .
It is the offer of one life curling itself like a wind, an image in a mind, toward another life, a body and an image in a mind, toward an eventual, disillusioned, further passionate, often hate-filled closeness. I know what happens for me with people. To know someone well, to be permeated with them when you have had a history: this stuff can make you shy.
The prick is an unlikely structure. As is any finger but especially the thumb. And so is a neck unlikely. The prick is elongated, changeable, and boneless, tethered, full of feeling, pallid in color—willful—a willful elephant trunk, a guy’s own sensitive puppy-or-puppet sausage, dead meat, a mysterious and un
opposed thumb for the grasp of sensation—it is small flesh, proud, white and shy; it is shy and meaty; shyly meaty whenever I say no and the no is listened to.
The power in me laughably fills the wind sock—and feels the air currents, images, and hallucinations here.
Its connections to people and to events are wrapped in shyness. All discussions of force are oddly obscene. Who and what is infatuated with it with any force of feeling now? Who and what is it infatuated with? Am I the policeman here—me, my strength, my luck, some mysterious element of what I am?
Am I in love with my own dominance or domineering chances, even if such dominance is a lie? Or with the force of money? Bridling it? Being a bride of it—or a groom?
The force of being normal—plus or minus a few events?
Or with the defeat of the Nazis—myself as an officer in the army (in a few years)?
The Germans are nowhere near the train. The Japanese hold no fields outside the moving window. The names of war-torn cities—Rangoon, Stalingrad, Salonika—offers a kind of license? Who would suspect a bony, thin-armed adolescent of having a sexually anonymous soul? (Actually, anyone would; but no soul is anonymous in this world . . . How strange that is.)
I was dealing with the readiness with which absolution is given, almost without exception, to someone like me. In a few minutes a decision will appear and time will go on.
Nonie has exclaimed in my hearing, Things don’t have to be named! They’re not what you say they are! And: It’s a lot easier to talk about marrying a rich man than it is to live it out.
You swing out and around and back and up and then off into the dark of not-knowing only a little. Of course, I did love Daniel (off and on) and at that moment: with juvenile exasperation and impatience. He knew. It wasn’t unfamiliar. He expects this. To be liked in this way. Love, so to speak, comes out of the corridor—or out of the sunlit air outside. In the perspective in the compartment, Daniel’s deep-socketed, unmildly-colored-by-feeling eyes wear a mask of shadow. Do we start guiltily? Does Daniel? I am not guilty yet, so far as I know. I am glad to think he knows that if I love him, I have to spare him knowing me; I have to forgo the interruption of the sensual-and-personal dialogue which is paradise for him (if it is). I am glad to say I would never permit or allow nor can I live out his fantasy.
The agony of loving the wrong person . . . Well, Jeest, that’s not uncommon—is it?
Still, it feels uncommon and secretive and privileged to say no while saying nothing in words, merely by sitting in a stiffened way.
The intensity of this particular moment fades into something which is echoed in the stridently ironic cast his version of fraternity (or maternity) and of hospitality takes—at the sight of me in the next moment over, plus one. An outburst-in-a-glance—that’s disciplined, kind of—his look of being well-mannered and driven to the breaking point. A rich man’s martyrdom is not necessarily a joke but it is free of pathos. Daniel is not innocent or sweet, quite. Or a victim. One doesn’t suspect him of molesting a child—just of being careless toward me, whom his father chose for him, sort of—or told him to take a look at—perhaps in opposition to his mother’s liking Nonie, which may have irritated both men. I will never know. Here we are in this curve of the story and I don’t know the terms of the account on his side, the factors of the other plot that pertain here.
Generalizations are unreal to me; I can see why Nonie might be effectual and useful and me not.
I sort of gawp—inwardly. Outwardly I am mannerly.
20
Dan is tautly built, as taut as a trout, but politer. The sun was bright on flat farm fields and on rolling wooded hills—Oh-here-you-are’s, oh-here-he-is’s, and ha-ha’s and tee-hee’s (take that), the inner babble, the letdowns, the resurgences of tension.
“What do you think of Lloyd C. Douglas?” Daniel asked me in the khaki light, with a kind of kindliness on top of a sourness that scared the bejesus out of me.
“I like religious best-sellers,” I said with tactful hopefulness.
“Isn’t it a waste of time to read them?” He is being tricky or pious . . . Or both.
Or he wants to stop being pious for a while. “I read fast: two hundred and fifty pages an hour, three hundred if I skip the descriptions. I like Pearl Buck and Hervey Allen better than Lloyd Douglas.” I looked at him and showed I was willing to talk. People who refuse to talk refuse you a certain amount of stuff, but silence helps you stay maybe within the category of being young. I say, “I like reading about women in bestsellers.”
“I like Khalil Gibran,” he said. “Do you know a book of poetry called This Is My Beloved?”
“Is that the one with pubic hair like lettuce leaves?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah. Some guys were reading that in the locker room.”
He closed his eyes. “It’s trash,” he said. “My sister reads it.” I knew. She’d been in St. Louis and we’d flirted; she’d quoted some of it to me.
He’s real; he’s not my opinion of him. I am real, too.
Daniel’s saddened face shows that my remark about women affects him while his taut posture shows, though, that he allows callowness, callow playing around. Callow cruelty. At least he does if I do it. I slouch where I sit, a form of self-display.
“I’m a slow and steady serious reader,” he said. “I like Sholem Aleichem: I read Yiddish . . . Yiddish, French, Hebrew, German, a little Latin, Greek . . .” He waits for a response.
“I read only in English. I like James Joyce—the family stuff and the dirty stuff he does. I like Tolstoy. I’m saving Dostoyevsky for college.”
“That’s a good idea. You don’t look like a reader,” Cousin Daniel said. I am deadpan then. It’s funny how in everything you need training and luck—and courage.
I don’t care if you like me or not, but I like you if you can accept me as I am.
Bribes, pleasantries . . . Money . . . Looks . . .
His leg sort of slid until his knee was alongside mine itchily not touching. I twitched—involuntarily—and he moved his knee away. I never make the first move in sexual matters. But to behave well is asking for trouble. I feel embarrassed and apologetic, and I feel a grimly embarrassed hilarity.
“Do you like simple things?”
“I am simple,” I say.
With someone closer to me in age, we might match dirty words; we might show each other ourselves pantingly if it didn’t mean anything, if it was literal information and not part of another sort of personal purpose—such as for the purposes in a perhaps real and perhaps lasting feeling. I mean you settle for it and for the memory of it and for the recurrence of it.
If Daniel was a regular guy we’d be wrestling or something. It would be who gives orders and to what extent the other obeys for a while, erotically or not erotically, sort of . . . Who likes who, who runs the thing in the compartment. The taking turns. Or whatever.
The glare outside makes me squint. The train curves on bent stretches of track and exposes our windows to direct light. I tell Daniel in answer to a question: “I am a better wrestler than a boxer; a better pitcher than a first baseman; a better batter than some guys who are really better batters because I can place-hit. I can swing for the fence. I know how.”
The questionnaires of social life . . . The train passes through the cold shade among very tall trees in an allée in a run-down stretch of countryside. These moments of almost and deeply and not deeply and glancingly and holding back. I strike myself as being contemptible. Even selfish passion is more of a sacrament than the stuff I do. But passion is pretty bad stuff. I maybe teasingly—and sadistically—“love” him . . . just not passionately. Anyway, it was masculine youth that was an object of deeply sacramental feeling for him, not me—or only partly me. The study of furthemess in male reality is what he’s doing. I think this is part of an adolescent tradition of meaning, but I don’t really know. To move, to change into that . . .
Meanwhile, the dragon-breath of his attention as we
joggle and vibrate and chug rapidly along is sort of as if he was affected by the sight of me as if I were a girl. I have a light of conferred importance—maybe. Two flies buzz in the heat and jostle each other at a corner of the dirty window. I don’t know if this train ride matches the experiences of my dead mother or S.L.’s when he was young. I think so. I don’t know for sure—is the world sexual or not?
The immoderate occasions of youth are common.
21
Toward noon, Daniel said, “We’re Jews . . .”
“I find it interesting to be Jewish.”
He said, “That’s a bad thing to say.” He says metaphorically, “I will be a door to proper Jewish instruction for you.”
I say, “Torah-door . . . You—right?” And then bite my tongue, but then I started humming the song from Carmen anyway; being out of control, I found myself doing that.
He looked shocked, and briefly sulky, and then interested. Carmen is a story of fatal passion . . . Lolita had not yet been written as a sort of gloss or commentary on Carmen, as another Carmen, sadder and purposefully sillier about this stuff.
“We play Three-thirds of a Ghost when we travel: you ever play that?” he asks.
“S.L. doesn’t like that game. We never played that. S.L. couldn’t spell.”
After we flip coins to see who begins Three-thirds of a Ghost—Daniel was to match me, and he did—he says, “O . . .”
“P,” I say.
A faint aura of scandal attends every moment.
“E,” he says.
“‘’OPE,’” I say. “The cockney fyth, ope, un chariteeee. R.”
The differences in our ages. His money. His looks. The oddity of his self-possession . . .
“A.”
“Opera. You lose.”
“You like opera?”
“I don’t know—do you?”
“Yes. Too much . . .”
“Why do you say too much?”
“There are other things to do—and opera is very, very—I don’t know . . . It sets you apart from people.”
“Oh . . . B . . . If you want to go on . . .”
The Runaway Soul Page 64