I said Good-bye, Mom out loud but I suddenly realized it was what I wanted that mattered now. So I straightened her hair a little and lay my cheek on her forehead as if tenderness was the chief force in the world or had been for us—as perhaps, comparatively, it had been—and then I thought to myself, letting myself be honest, I’m through (with a lot of stuff) and I’m glad; and I went to find a doctor or a nurse, someone to tell that Lila was dead.
The doctor said, “Yes, well it’s been a miracle . . .”
I went to the waiting room where Nonie and Lila’s younger sister and one of her brothers had been waiting for three days, and I told them, but I mostly looked at Nonie, who said, “I don’t believe you . . . I’ll wait to hear it from the doctor . . .”
And that was really the only time I made any real effort to keep my deathbed promise to my mother (by adoption).
I was ill off and on for a year after her death and then I resumed my life. I experimented with homosexuality—partly because I could not bear the sadness of women or the memories in trying to be strong and to be a partner, partly because I couldn’t bear to saddle them with me or with my thoughts; and the silence then when I was with them suffocated me and made me cruel—and evasive . . . I saw some women, though, always. Perhaps they were the main part of my life. I set about building some trust for myself in myself so that I might become a scientist or a writer. The approximations in science which then were taken as facts when they were only slightly better than squinting guesses—and my failure to be able to bear the eyes of an audience on me if I tried to be an actor—drove me to try to write.
But I’d always known I would try.
Daniel sold the family business and became a painter, failed, and went back to school and studied various useful things and led a useful and charitable life among the poor but sometimes among tough pioneers in various countries, ending piously in Israel, a pious man and a pioneer working hard in a number of agricultural settlements and vacationing in Paris, Rome, and, on occasion, Berlin. I believe he did a considerable amount of good but then I want to think it: I don’t really know. Summaries are not ever really true enough genuinely to matter.
LEONIE
or The History of a Kiss
On Almost Getting Laid
But, see, inside a present moment, among the enormous eyelids of the unfinal and sailing rose, a gangling boy comes and sits on a couch. Under my shirt is a hairless chest—there is this mad thing some older girls do, Nonie’s friends, that year, when I was fifteen, the year Nonie was almost engaged to Tom, and the next year, when I was sixteen, Nonie’s friends, they poke their fingers between the buttons of the shirt—Well, it’s wartime: I guess I do wild things—and they stroke their own and yours to see how much yours is like or unlike theirs, the skin, the reality of touching it.
Sometimes then I find it hard to breathe. Often they keep their heads turned away or their eyes are unfocussed while they talk and giggle and chatter and do that. But sometimes, though, they look at you, at me, while they do it, and you try to look back at them, I do, their equal; I’m bluffing; sometimes it works. And the two of you stare at each other unblinkingly-and-as-if-sophisticatedly and it gets hot—a wartime term for combat or for sex—it is an intense and an unblessed moment.
I get this kind of immense and frightening-to-me feeling then, when their fingers are on me, perhaps a demonic rush of a lot of feelings—me, still gawky, different-faced, almost used to things, and yet, one did formally change almost every day, and certainly, with every event—sometimes when you’re looking right at a girl and trying to be tough-for-your-age and she’s touching you, your eyes fade as existent entities; they become dim marble things like the eyes of a statue. And you feel the hot, blurry, milk-hazy, statue-y eyes in your face when they’re in that form as some absence of fragility and some presence of metamorphosis.
What makes fooling around possible is being made of stone—I think some guy I know said that; maybe it was my mother. Wistfully-toughly made of stone—not too humanly serious—not too frail—this might be me in Carolina—this is something I learned early on—I’m a bad guy—trash of a certain kind—girls can fool with me. It’s not like it’s walking on eggshells, Wiley . . .The world loses nothing if I’m ruined—or silly—here, in this moment, if I’m obsessed and stupid for a while—or always.
I’m not talking about love you daydream of but it’s love—sometimes . . . here and there . . . for a moment . . .
In the moment are oddly opposed and yet simultaneous things. In my half-blindness, I sort of half see the girl’s eyes are woodland sharp—in a story—blindness and taking this risk having eyes anyway—in this woodland dusk. Your skin, your arms, your cock are staring—and the odors, the sexual style of the moment, the fox eyes—the owl’s eyes, the goggling fish eyes . . . the seaweed hair—or hair-in-a-windstorm, blizzard-white at its edges where the lamplight is like snow glare on dark threadiness—sometimes their teeth show, and mine: mermaid and ferret shit. Momma has accused me of wildness; she is dying: This isn’t one of your good years, Wiley . . . one of the years when you’re good to me; if you ask me, you’re out of control . . . You don’t care what happens to you.
My uncaution. My being Nonie’s goat . . . or under Nonie’s influence was what she talked to me about.
A good time in the shadows . . . It depends on the girl, my degree of danger . . . so to speak. Tonight the girl is Leonie Sminship Midder—I am ready and willing to sacrifice others to my intention to live—but that includes other selves within me, other than the one that wants to live.
You know that reaching, unhappy, restless thing some girls have about flirting? The thing of because it’s you it’s nothing serious . . . Nonie said Leonie was kinky . . . a joke, not a joke—I had no clear notion of kinky except it was what Nonie said of anyone who liked me.
Puberty sometimes produces amazing effects using you. Fresh and glistening, barely unwrapped, I knew some things from experience and about some things in obscene comics and in some great books—The Decameron and Ovid’s stuff and The Golden Ass and James Joyce. I took a couple of breaths and I found myself staring at Leonie because of what she’d said when we were introduced by Nonie: “Ooooh, cute . . .” Something like that. “So tall . . .” Then I probably misheard: “Pretty spaghetti . . .” Because I was so thin and had such weird posture . . . A boy . . . an idea.
I start to laugh—comedy takes the place of some kinds of modesty modesty—but the buttock-deep shivers and the partly involuntary shrugs of the upper back are kind of anguished foolishly, hideously, with early amusement and toughness—as in football. She grinned, more or less sightlessly staring at the idea—a fresh-faced boy—in wartime.
She laughed, too, a short, high-pitched yelp: “I am kinky, I guess.” The mid-body Midwestern restlessness, deep-dirty, semi-doomed, modesty stupid—you know what I mean—older women show that a lot.
Nonie said, “Well, why don’t you two neck . . . ha-ha.” Nonie’s using her old chirping voice—the legs-tied-together, cloud-of-small-birds, fixed-in-tone voice—sometimes she does that at home, but mostly it was gone. Mostly her will, nowadays, was dressed in a wholly other voice, another range, fastidious-wartime-lady-manly-(lighting-a-cigarette) brutal feminine-authoritative. In some ways, the voice of an unsuccessful athlete: a serious person. Was she a serious person now?
She said that, and Leonie and I didn’t start guiltily and didn’t, either one of us, take a step backward.
“I have to go change my shoes,” Nonie said. “Ha-ha,” she said to herself.
Leonie puts her tongue in her cheek, which then really sticks out out—this is all wartime stuff: you can see it in movies that came out that year.
She moves her head and then says, “How old are you?”
“Let’s sit down,” I said dirtily. I was amazed, always, at this point, that nearly everything said in English can be dirty. I had much more nerve that year than maybe I’ve ever had since. We made room for each other on th
e couch.
She said, amusedly and sympathetic, too, “You’re breathing funny.”
“Dirty breathlessness . . . I talk fancy . . . Wanna mess around?”
The fragments of a second of the encroaching messing around . . . the players (us) being good sports—or maybe not . . . our torsos self-consciously separated by air . . . are temple-precinct time—but then Leonie says, “You are old enough to take care of yourself?” Then: “You’re funny-looking, you’re all legs.” Her head has moved a little toward me.
“What does that mean?” I ask, already slightly tousled—and with obscenely readied breathing—I’m ready to hold my breath in a kiss.
“It doesn’t mean a thing if you haven’t got that swing,” she says.
I remember Leonie’s smeared face and my hot nervous guilt—and my exhilaration—when we are really close together, our heads, but then she licks my nose and backs away; she glances at me superiorly, down her nose a little—she has a small nose—authoritatively, a superior officer. What does this mean?
Leonie says to the air, “He’s a cross between Gary Cooper and Bud Abbott . . .” It’s not true. That’s not true. What does it mean, her saying an untrue thing? Then she says, of me arid Nonie, “You look like brother and sister.”
“Tweet-tweet,” I say.
“What’s that?”
“Lovebirds . . .” Then: “Everything pretty much is a joke on me . . .”
“Poor you,” Leonie said. Leonie had long legs . . . In those days I rarely noticed things in such a way that I could give form to what I noticed. I was not clearly aware what I looked like—I had some pride in the matter but no clear or cogent reason or sense—but merely a historical sense of how other people acted—and so I had little sense of other people’s looks formally but mostly of how people acted toward them . . . including me. The odd tonality of sexual flirtation—the immanence of the idea and physical sense of real, if limited sex—the antagonism and fear at the start of the lesser story of dirty romance—a tragicomedy—my comparative innocence, even as a sharp boy: that was a term back then that meant astute—it smelled scarily, some, and even a lot, of metamorphosis in the woods.
I looked and saw that Leonie had a boy’s face and coarse hair the color of bronze and dully brown-yellow dead leaves in autumn—and some kinds of sexual cowardice in her are visible even to me when I was fifteen—and I can see some sexual snobbery peering out from below the dead-leaf coloring . . . at me. I hadn’t heard or read the phrase sexual terror. I thought of my nervy and nerved-up state as smelly or as a smelloid deal. I didn’t use deodorant . . . I trusted to virtue and some sort of honesty toward nervousness to prevent stench. It is a matter of eyes to show you mean it—that you value the pleasure . . . and then it is a matter of luck.
“Oh you, you’re too young to have bedroom eyes.” Pause. “But you have them.” She kissed me on my nose—then licked me again. My lips slip up onto hers.
Shyness and weakness, and some slyness and some not-weakness . . . She pulls away: “I like truthful people,” she says.
“I’m fairly truthful,” I say.
Each of us straightens ourselves slightly.
She says, “Do you like me or do you think I’m an old hag?” Then: “Let’s swear we will never lie to each other—don’t lie to me now.” The rural now, Be good now, you hear . . . The Don’t laugh at me . . .
“I’m honestly attracted to you . . .”
“I’m honestly attracted to you, but let’s not get into trouble.”
“We won’t get into trouble . . .”
“I’ll tell you about me . . . I’m a little bit wild: I like to kiss. Don’t be mad . . . Don’t be mad at me.” For putting this on an impersonal level: I’m just there, it isn’t me she is chasing—don’t be angry because of that.
“I don’t take anything seriously,” I said.
“Oh. Well, contact, roger, over and out,” she said. Then, breaking the first touch of our lips: “You confess something: it’s your turn: I confessed about myself.”
“I confess I want . . .” I put my lips back on hers and we breathed. She rubbed me with her foot with her shoe on.
She pulled away and said, “I’m a kind of foot freak . . .”
I kiss clumsily. I am too shocked by how real-seeming, except it’s not just seeming, how real lips and minds and the whole person are. I’m too far into a state of shock to kiss well . . . or easily. For instance, I feel in her mouth her sadness at not being a boy.
I kissed her—i.e., I moved my lips—with a vague sense of familiarity with her since that thing of her stroking me with her foot with her shoe on. I remembered that as a little-boy thing I had used my shod foot as a fist in fights with people bigger, or in fights with a lot of kids in the then physically comic world of heroic changeability, weird odds, and bits of patience toward me as a little kid. I think I feel in the hot movements of her breath, as our lips maneuver on each other, her amusement at my sissy hairlessness and at my beginner’s shoulders. At my height cum inexperience. The clumsiness of the way I am phallic.
Early phallicism.
It was locally conceivable—as dirty—with underneath stuff about death and war (around here) influencing people’s lives. I was interested in this stuff. I was someone half-girlish now but at a crossroads and about to be a man—maybe. So to whatever extent she was like me, she could imagine a man’s reality sprouting from her . . . her becoming a man . . . sort of . . .
This between her and me was a success thing but dark—and it felt deep and drowny, exhilarating, weird . . . like being in waves . . . deep water. I’m in deep—no safety—silent feelings. The kind of tone her lips had—what was conveyed in the touch of her lips in the so-called kiss—was that she was thinking about herself and she was kissing me.
She placated the boy with a certain notable potency of temporary affection . . . not an overwhelming weight of it. She wasn’t the testing kind—the kind that tested you with finality and huge hints of fucking. The first kisses only lightly—tactfully, cutely—touched on the scandal of my being male, if I can say it like that. I felt a little bit kidnapped by feelings. My lips and her lips, her voice and my voice were silenced except in kissing and in the feelings aroused by kissing—you crawl into the small, damp, shadowy tunnel of this stuff . . . the conduit of other stuff that moves toward you and in you until, in a sense, you are professionally male although as a beginner in the black tunnel of the moment at the edge of an obscure future . . .
I knew myself as male largely through sports—most other things were shared. Not sports or clothes . . . Not clothes entirely . . . A person not remotely phallic but held by the phallic compass point—a young man—an apprentice and a bit obscure as to character. One is being tested and one is not allowed to look at the answers at the back of the book. I am rewarded ahead of time even if she backs out at any moment. She wants me not to be rambunctious.
We are giving birth to one another—I am giving birth merely to an element in her—but it is a pair of stories.
I don’t want her to know me. Except as what I pretend to be. I don’t want her to know what I really feel. I don’t want a final attachment. But I do, inevitably, love somewhat when these things happen. I lied in my account about Carolina: how much I loved the house, the sunlight, the people . . .
In a sexual moment one is partly wooden—a puppet—the genetic and social power of sexual event is greater than one’s own powers: the webby framework of that.
Isobel said boys, “The mean boys—their bodies are like, oh, I don’t know—big toys . . .”
I think she wanted a man to be as strange as she felt life to be—a man represented life-outside-the-house, maybe. She wanted partly an automaton paralyzed in mood or with a set mood, a painted one. The absence of visible will—no, the absence of idiosyncratic will—an obedience to acting out having a general will—the thing of free volition in her is pity, a voluntarism. Neural helplessness—no display of physical power—a mean boy—a c
ollusive toy . . . an ambition of hers.
I guess Leonie reminds me of that.
“Oh, we’re mad, this is so mad,” Leonie said, brushing her coarse dead-leaf hair back from her faintly moist forehead.
“I like this a lot—” Then: “A very great deal,” I said, attempting to be droll and mannerly—serious.
It is hard to describe sexual style honestly and not be sarcastic or else do it as an advertisement for sex and purity and for yourself.
But what it is is a posture and a velocity in a moment of attention to entering in on the lax gaiety of a submission to sexual reality—whatever that is for you.
And whatever that is, it is important in nature. The segments of those moments, marked by breath and the excruciating melodramas of changes of posture—her pushing back your hair or hers and your resettling yourself on the couch—make up a section of your life of flutters of modest and immodest dilutions of scariness in a wilderness of possibilities. Knowing yourself here is like knowing yourself in the permutations of a baseball game or mountain climbing—the structures of suspense are fraught—lip to lip. Of course, you can be cool. The difference of the bodily structures—breast, chest, prick, cunt—is the key to the thrills moment to moment and the way stuff is fraught, all of it blurred with actions and meanings and with the guy attempting to ignore things and the woman paying attention.
But both of you are lying: she’s not really paying attention and you’re not ignoring things . . . The real tonality of a kiss and of an undone button in this situation is melodramatically unsayable in terms of who is paying attention and who is thinking, sometimes willfully, of something else. Too much momentum spoils the possibilities of absolute stuff and of any simple nature of the flight from the absolute to the mind-wandering stuff. The course of the event, the blurred thing, the biological rehearsal, the decency (or indecency) and the lunatic individuality of it cannot be exemplified in any single action or term—this is of the thing unlied about—the actual intensity or unintensity of the touch of her five fingers or her ten fingers if both hands cup my obstinately trembling chin—I mean this is the most startling, and astounding, form of counting that I know of, more astonishing than when you bet hits and slaps and someone coldcocks your deltoid twenty-five times and you grunt and groan and half laugh and count argumentatively, loudly, to hurry them up, to measure the comic horror or whatever it is—but how are you going to symbolize this touch? It’s her and you, it’s one moment, it’s specialized and personal, temporary (and even skidding), an electric thing, sparks, a gateway of sparks defining dead and undead passages of one’s arcs of motion among all the motions.
The Runaway Soul Page 82