Isobel had gotten big-eyed in a way which hinted that she didn’t like Coral Emma-Jean Marie—it hadn’t occurred to me that Isobel hated Coral Emma-Jean Marie. I hadn’t really blamed Casey and didn’t care that others did for things. But I didn’t see that a lifelong friendship, sentimental or not, between Casey and this powerful woman could be innocent enough in any reasonable terms to console Isobel.
Casey’s actions toward me and toward Daniel took on a tentative dimension of a cast of light—as did Daniel’s actions—maybe falsely registered now.
I don’t mean I blamed them. In U. City, where I grew up, homosexuality among women was really okay, even admired. And among boys it was mostly accepted if it didn’t make them too crazy. Furthermore, it was held that it granted on its practitioners access to time and thought enough to be more cultured and stronger-fibered morally than ordinary people. Not only that: they were not the enemy at all. You didn’t tell some men this, however. An idea that Casey loved Daniel now or liked him and hadn’t long ago and had made him distrust her and now she was sorry but she refused to think about the past, and so, her rudeness now—or her dislike—could be seen, in part, as her attempt to get on some footing with him too late—all that had a different meaning; and his responding to her would be a certain sort of bad fate—maybe . . . I didn’t really know; but as a fortune-teller, I got to judge things . . . Not always and not seriously. But I was a reporter or a journalist giving an account from a war zone of a situation; and I had my opinions, my abilities . . . my wildness . . .
“Whale now . . . Uh, Casey keeping you amused?”
At second sight, Coral Emma-Jean Marie was not what you saw at first sight: she was, in some ways, ordinary-looking—smallish clear gray eyes, little nose—but past the first impression her face resolved itself into the face of a Christian and a melodramatic person. This was my opinion.
Her somber face on second sight (like rehearing a sonata) was, perhaps, hauntedly conscience-driven, perhaps capricious as a form of denying what she felt to be too-much conscience. Her drunkenness permitted will and action beyond ordinary calculations—an odd duck, maybe a great soul. An owner.
The wild unchartedness of a kiss in a territory of untraditional and equivalent response. Originally a truancy—a blasphemous going-too-far—a youthful sentimentality or a rhyming sexual diction that somehow became tied to or combined with a sense of hell and of lawlessness—such a kiss rehearsed, repeated, echoed, and growing into a history of such kisses, that kiss might take any shape at all and might be felt in the air as a weight of, oh, Southern air, heat waiting for rain—guilt and passion in a story and the capacity for action becoming, in that story, a real-life thing of superiority in an escape-of-a-kind, ruling certain lives . . . Again, I did not know that—and do not know it now. But it seems likely in the light of reality, this hidden structure becoming built-in to pretty much successful lives and those lives become structurally part of everything around me, of how everyone lives—it is no mean achievement to shape a local world. But human feeling is often mean. A kiss which is not given a predictable aim, a kiss not patently romantic or maternal but which is now surrenderingly naughty-maternal, then footnote-y, then oddly mirroring, then an exploration of odd dissimilarities in someone anatomically semi-equivalent to you—like the terms of an equation on the other side of an equals sign—but naughtily so, seriously naughtily—like the elements of a simile or of a metaphor to some such poet as Baudelaire or Rimbaud—greedy-hearted, subterranean, a kiss of the resistance: such a kiss might be outright wicked or driftingly a bad thing wishing everyone ill and it might still leave a lot of virtue in place, might permit a lot of well-behaved mindliness, a lot of decent or semi-decent madness. I can imagine the interest of a kiss of that sort. But I would imagine that the call of badness, madness, and self-assertion would be more interesting, both in the daydreaming and in the whipping control of the maybe otherwise too tame hallucinations of an erotic moment. Pull down the world? In a kiss that goes on for a lifetime in its variations? Much of the time, only success, success only, only that will free you. Sometimes only failure will. If you doctor your own soul, you have to guess; you do it alone. Casey was a brute in a lot of ways—I didn’t mind that; I liked her cool unintelligence and then her being intelligent anyway and having character. She is a sort of laughing knife of a woman, quick to react, to respond—not a good person. I don’t mind that. I don’t judge that. But I imagine a kiss too aimed, too knowledgeable: it becomes a shall-we-go-on kiss; an astounding fluster of implications and hints accruing in the gestural elements of such a kiss—brainy and shrewd and with character—and danger in it—and with an animal intelligence that might be like the cooing of a pigeon, then and there in the past and then and there on the porch, Venus’s bird, or the soft whoosh in high air of a hawk gliding, or the thin breath of a transparently camouflaged, waitful, then almost silently wing-whirring owl advancing among the resinous-stinking trunks in an airless pinewoods—I felt them in the world of effectual actions, each of them differently, being discreet and feeling, Lila would say (as Ora did), her oats.
I can imagine the actions springing from such a lifelong, often interrupted kiss might haunt Daniel—or the kiss itself as the mysterious particle-cum-wave of alliance—might haunt him partly in admiration, partly in mystery and in mystification as the blasphemously knowable center of the secrets of the universe . . .
But not necessarily. What is political and personal and sinful for Coral Emma-Jean Marie is angrily rebellious and anathematized for Casey and purified in various personally moral distilleries, so to speak, for both of them by loyalties and kinds of social intelligence in each of them—stuff beyond me and of which I am jealous, I believe. This purified and anathematized liquor pleases Casey and Abe—in different ways, maybe in related ways—and Daniel sees it, or feels it, feels his ma’s disapproval of parts of him guide him into being something that doesn’t interest him but which has glamour: his father’s approval and disapproval similarly—so, it was not a simple equation.
It is a weight perhaps not weighty enough, and perhaps, only, in the end, a kind of force of love. Perhaps he approves of himself being passed over or struggles to learn how not to be or struggles to solve the why-he-feels-that-way, struggles repetitively; he does it over and over . . . He is looking for the why?
But among the secrets—among the secret things: physical laws and amounts of money, theological principles and body parts, the actions and moral quandaries and moral filth and moral compromises in the power of childhood and in the power of being rich, in the power of looks and in the power of being the oldest child—Daniel forcibly amalgamates the bottles and flasks, the flashing machines and oddly cooled poles of electricities-in-the-flesh until they are trained to merge everything into a single tree, a channel, a spire, a system with a single final secret—a lie, of course; Daniel can’t summon God or ascend to heaven at will—even in hallucination as it happens—or love, or find such a kiss, the time-stretched center of a not-bad childhood—or perhaps a bad one. I judge but not in every way; and Casey is more of a person—Daniel is a better one.
Below the stars-and-moons and movie screens and Sinai and potent words of such a sense of wholeness, of light and of shadow as one thing, of a kiss of a certain sort holding the light and shadow of the great chief-one-thing, is Daniel’s actual stuff of infatuation and mood and of judging people (and even genders) and of mooded finaglings and power-things until, for me, the orphan, who was taken into another house, another family, the fleshly (or meaty) boy with his needy mind, such kisses in their permutations having in them the hope or claim of singleness rather than the admission of singularity and of my presence in the dialogue, such kisses have no personal recognition for me if they are given to me. Daniel kissed me three or four times—on the forehead, on the ear, on the hair. One can read the history of such kisses as those—such a kiss—before the history has occurred. One sees the denial of actuality—and of history—in such a kiss and i
n such a history of a kiss. Denial is what I see, I am a voice that took on a shadow reality as a boy, denial is what I see if I see others kissing in that style—denial of the moments, of the heart, of the child, of the music of their kiss itself. It has no pornographic draw for me. I do not dare generalize in the light of theology or of Darwin about myself about this. The subject of the comparative absoluteness of sexual response, sexual wish, and the banishing or disciplining of sexual terror, sexual horror, sexual no-saying, the supremacy of the romantic ins-and-outs if they are separate from gender. The appetite is not aroused but is quenched in time as if time did not exist. Dangers sprout and branch and flower from what one resists—which is time. One engages in the other, in the time stuff, because of one’s hopes. Time will tell which thing works out.
I mean I made one comparison, one test, one experiment having to do with my embarrassment toward actual life. When Casey saw Ora, seven years further on, not long after my first meeting Ora, Casey, after saying, How do you do, did not say another word in the meeting except to say, I have to leave now.
And she said that within a few minutes: she did not stay and talk or admire Ora—it was nothing like that. Daniel was not there. Isobel and Benjie were. And a month later Dan came to New York and telephoned and came to dinner, which Ora and I made; I thought then, watching him, that he and Casey had by then spoken to each other of their respective sexual adventures, spoken to some extent, and in some way—it was pointless to try to guess—they had a treaty and they did not like each other. The moment for rapprochement for them had been lost.
I bet Casey and Isobel and Benjie had spoken of Ora. I didn’t really like Daniel (or Dan or Danny) and he was not a friend to me. Whatever his love was, his interest in me, was both boring and dangerous—but dangerous without any flush of adrenaline—an offered kiss in a moment called In the Castle in a Stables, a moment in which the echo of similarity of scale, the possible clarities of touch—glances, statements made by the eyes—as between two women—defines mostly only a theft, mostly a truncated lesson—desirable whether truncated or not—mostly only the putative and temporary evidence of one’s superiority to something, Mother or me, his parents’ secrets, the general populace—it matters and it doesn’t matter since all superiority in the light of the one-direction nature of time and the dream-ridden intelligence of someone like Daniel, of someone so romantic and so pure and so classical as Daniel-who-is-dear-because-he-liked-me-once, is part of what seems to him, what feels to him to be an entire course of superiority which must, in the nature of things, take him, as if on a flight in space, as an angel or as in a spaceship, or in one’s head sitting at the dinner table with one’s family, at first up to and then past the person you are with or the people and on toward starry—and starring—revelations of a hateful and yet blessèd order, vile with the promises of ugly history to come and with intimations of salvation. These are the things one hears in hearing someone’s breath—the peculiar similarity in a reality of there being two people of almost a single type of somewhat interchangeable existence can begin a procedure so mightily, if you take the scale of things to be Greek and to be centered on individuals, that it becomes a story of fate and of fatedness . . . Daniel will act out, I believe, over and over his dramas with his mother and his father—kindness to the male and exploitation of and rivalry with it; and he will give parts of himself—but mostly hold back. I want to cry. One doesn’t know that life can be better or that it should be—one sees him as self-righteous and a carrier of destruction. In slightly mad moments, I hear the Odyssey and its sense of multiplicities crash into the slaughter at the end as when I wake from a dream and all the figures and characters in the dream have been obliterated and I am home.
Or I see a man carrying his father on his shoulders from a burning city. It isn’t blame. It isn’t the thought that one can escape fate or being unideal. It is a mad and fairly giddy grief—something intrinsic to my character, I bet. In a dream once I came on an owl the name of which was Fate-maker and it grabbed me in . . .
You go in and out of the strange-to-you sounds: no: the novel syllables swell and bubble and fly into your ear—wasps and clouds of enunciation, culture, and purpose.
A voice heard for the first time is almost a monstrous thing.
The rules, or laws, that I use in regard to speech are: (1) No one is without will so long as she or he is alive. (2) No one is humble or defeated for real, short of death. (3) Part of speech is accidental, and part is cultural, inheritance and education but those things taken as genderal and individual, but most of it is the immediate sense of emergency.
The main theory of talk that I use (desperately but amusedly) is that whether or not it is intimate or wandering (or maundering) you (one, I, or really you) can enter it somewhat if you think of it as occurring in a book with a plot—a murder mystery or a murder novel or a war novel (like the Russian ones) or a sailing-ship novel—in which an adventure and an emergency are concerned.
With a woman, if she speaks, any of a whole lot of social categories become the ground of emergency. She is taking a measure of my breeding, of how freely and naturally I respond, whether I answer like a swindler, from the lower reaches of the prep-school class or even lower—or with grandeur and ease or whatever, like some accomplished black kid or the kid of a sharecropper—those are the aggressive elements, the shadow-boxing elements, the bossy ones.
The passive ones are the poetry of soul and then of her sense of language—mother-tongue and father-tongue—and of fame and of ideas—and of social class.
Coral Emma-Jean Marie was not ladylike in a European way. She was American of the to-hell-with-you Southern variety, hooty-voiced and assertive in spite of her calm face—and her kindness, such as it was; she was kind of ladylike but overwhelming, not classical, not anxious to pass herself off as typical except insofar as she needed it to have her rank and her position function here. Ora had a kind of geometry of wanting to pass herself off as the general rule and public truth and not as someone social: she had caught on from the movies the thing of a woman being successful but not so enviable that one hated her on-screen. Coral Emma-Jean Marie sure as shit wasn’t pitiable or warm or a nobody risen to fame. For one thing her children were here, three of them. She was careless in a real-life way—or like a movie star giving a performance that will end her career—but, see, for Coral Emma-Jean it wasn’t a career; it was her inherited and earned life.
Then too, even while she was going full steam ahead, and not giving a damn for anyone or for what they think, while she was being socially high-up in that way, she was careful toward Casey—little glances and checking up to make sure Casey was okay.
Too much went on between them—also too little for there to be ordinary meaning or no meaning between them. They were experienced . . . And they were a pair; those two were those two: those two people had that quality. Casey as a landowner, first and last a defender of family, God, patriotism and the state of Carolina—that came from this house, from Coral Emma-Jean.
Coral Emma-Jean’s confidence in its final, absolute and (unpolitical) form—its therapeutic form, keeping C.E.-J. alive—that was from Casey. That was a disguise and a bluff. She was a person pretending to be, and dressed as, a collection of semi-absolutes, local, and coming to a point of the put-upon final absolute. She was too proudly unconquerable when, as a matter of course, as a matter of Protestant upbringing, everyone is, of course, conquerable, is conquerable anyway, and is protected by favor and grace—by luck, politics, and American armament.
She had that in her, uneasily, jiggling along with the other.
Both women would, I bet, give up each her inner life to preserve her outer one, to keep things going in the way they were going: they agreed on that.
While being absolutists.
Daniel had opposed himself to them and was apocalyptic . . . ready to end their world; and he was apoplectic—dangerously romantic in social-life-sacrificing ways they wouldn’t go near. Sex for him was a
tearing-everything-down—a revolutionary act—a twisting of the world off its axis, a way of mounting furniture on the ceiling . . . He insisted on his inner life; and his outer life was ascetic inside a baroque degree of inheritance. I’m on Casey’s—and Coral Emma-Jean Marie’s—side to a certain degree; I am more of their faction than I am of his.
But I’m not of their faction either. I’m a know-it-all. Coral Emma-Jean Marie gave an impression of having an emotional range of two degrees of liking and seventeen of controllable dislike and a thousand of uncontrollable dislike: this was effective with dogs and horses and a lot of people; and she had the air of a monarch—absolute and loony, of course—with a lot of property; she had that thing of being a model for others: someone who shaped fashion; she was a democratic, aged tomboy, all shrewdness and anxiety, “drunkenly” wanting to let her hair down and to be deep in front of children and everybody like an artist or like a performer onstage while being a lady. She wanted this for the hell of it—because it was a hell of a thing to want—and because of a wish, maybe arrogant, to rule the shadow kingdom—the shadow kingdoms of everyone reduced to the single thing of an audience for an art thing or a piece of written declamation—and she wanted to do it absolutely and without limit: she didn’t understand how relatively open art was to the mind’s wandering and to casual erections and to capricious intrusion. She wanted a final kingdom on the grounds of her merit—perhaps as a dreamer, perhaps as an heiress, perhaps as a representative of a bloodline, a people, a specific childhood among people she honored unduly and had come greatly to dislike but had no intention of abandoning.
And she had some sort of spiritual merit—and a profundity—of perdition, if you ask me. She was no two-bit ordinary sinner.
But Daniel was at once more logical and more open; he wished to enter the shadow kingdoms—and perhaps to rule there—but he granted those kingdoms independent existence, independent of him.
The Runaway Soul Page 70