I don’t understand the emotions. The range of her attentions and the unimportance of some of them and the importance of some others are a kind of careless grandeur of will, nervous and reluctant, with a power of attraction like that of some shapes of bone under pretty skin: her nervousness, her boldness—her “boldeur”—her touch, the spirit in it, and what I knew. What she intends I half know from a general report from before we started: she is a friend of Nonie’s; she is older than I am . . . She is not a whore . . . She is not a stranger on a train. But the ceaselessly stirring electric feel of her touch is a little as if I had been taken prisoner by some primitive people and I was being overrun by small mammals and nudged by their snouts and nipped by their little teeth and tickled insanely and inwardly by their dirty disease-carrying little paws, their gentle and maddened and wild gnawing as in some book about being inhibited and then being a prisoner dirtily of sexual event.
One is young-and-romantic . . . at least in this sense. Is this an awful sense? Not romantic as in a book that trafficks in such matters, but young-and-eaten, young-and-dirty, knowingly conceited but contingently, depending on how things come out, half-instructed, scared-and-fearless, YOUNG-DIRTIED with this reflecting certain possibilities—of sexual ambition outside of what books say about the matter. The moment’s factuality is restlessness and odd resistance (and contempt) toward time, that foliate fusillade of sensation, blows and trespasses—one’s existence lurks and leaks a bit—the blindness in the motion of the thing—the story of trespassed-on nerves, the ripples of the passion of blond childhood extended to here. “Oh wow . . . Oh my,” the boy says, startled and somewhat in control of himself and wanting to be droll.
The relative nature of an embrace—of really kissing—lies in the relative imprisonment in a change of scale when you come close to someone.
Then the exclamatory explosions and bursts of response—milkweed pods of feelings—are bits of neural light and enormities of heat. One’s larger bones and this other flesh are me, and they shudder in close proximity to other bones even more unfamiliar and exciting and unknown and scary other flesh in this new scale. My mother is dying but childhood curiosity, that staring from outside grown-up moments into them, exists now as a sense of new and as yet uncommonly-experimented-with capacities of feeling where one was in the midst of horrors or not—war, illness, greedy whoredoms. The stalky, semi-towering, blond (perhaps sensually stupid) kid hopes for a charitable representation of one of the styles of local affection from her, measured and focussed, not foreign, not bookish, not overdone.
It’s just her and me—it’s just me and her . . . And social caution and psychological wariness and then a thing of looking askance at the nudity of immanent chagrin—this wholly new area of struggle in which one is judged and beaten or neutral or something of a winner—this exists in the distanced attention of that part of me not trembling in the actual moment. The kid is a huge newborn except for a bookishly worded tribunal part of myself, a lunatic, would-be sane but mad owl-clock-and-huffing-judge part—the God’s-child part—which is not fully grown.
It judges the part of me that reaches out a real hand to touch the curly hair of the girl alongside her cheek—judges like a kid at the movies. Is that a good idea, is that a good version of a good idea . . . Her mouth opens and eats air waiting near my mouth, moves into a heated nearness and toward the savor of what is left of her lipstick and the rudely uneven grooves of her lips.
An erection, one eye—I I—a branch of flesh—during the kiss—I am off and on aware of the as-if-heavy weight of my spine and of the torsion and twist of muscles of my back and side with my arms around her, and of the other complication—in my lap. I transfer my attention to this state, from the kiss, from her: I sometimes think transformations of states is a horror. Other times it seems okay. I laugh and resist inside the kiss, the joined lips, inside the technique, the peculiar matter of the suburban technique of kissing—which, in my case, includes no-calculation . . . no attempt at manipulation . . . no ordinary surprise: nothing grabs you as in a darkened hallway or as in a joke but, rather, it approaches, barefoot, and is there, in the silence of being new to you.
I mean to me.
She says, “We aim to please . . . Ha-ha.”
The twitchingly shifting reality is utterly all that surrounds me and it sucks at my heart as if a mouth were inside my chest. My enlarged, swollen, oddly rhythmic heart—life has this in it, the attention blinkingly filled. I realized bit by bit from my sensations of her too active other mouth that she dominates me—I can’t bear to be dominated, at all. The thrill of my near-virginity is of not being dominated. My burdened studious attention has a fresh and misty but also a burned quality of airy hallucinations—as if by accepting an accompaniment of music on a piano for a show that you have to put on—the physical realities of kissing. Some of the hallucinations are slants and beams of memory, bits of motionful memories coming and going, oneself and other women and oneself alone (masturbating) and guys talking dirty and boasting . . . maybe flattering me, encouraging me. A time when I ran for a touchdown and then the stuff afterward in the locker room. The sensitive, ill-defended reaches of the face-mouth and of the almost hidden palate and of the mind and of one’s confidence: the tongue crosses the teeth and the invasive excitement is displeasing; it gutters; so, one is odd; but her pulse can be felt and mine and my prick pulse and the pulse in her belly—electric or mechanical—a warehouse roar of a weighty thing (like a stack of filled cartons) being shifted and an auditorium sense of hollowness make it that I am uneasily happy in a curious reflexiveness—or openness—my interior self is a place of laboring toughness. I grip her arms probably too hard and am astonished and scared how my erectile velocity strengthens and becomes more assured with sadism and toughness and sweat. I am upset at being, as it were, perpendicularly mounted on sinful event . . . a violent attitude . . . Partly undefended—and unaccused—her female (cunted) reality makes me a villain—and this erects the boy finally—the axiom of this fleshly geometry resting on theorems of undomination as clear-cut law, for a while.
Accident and nature provoke a sense of fateful individuality. The boy is of a size such that degrees of full erection, perhaps five stages of it, exist for him. The erection has become sufficiently involving among its stages at the present time—if I can say this—that it is almost inviolate in regard to my will: but whether this is Genetic Nature or merely mine, or even more merely mine at this age or even just at this moment; I was in speculative and also skeptical awe of it, as of a train chugging and hooting without noise and proceeding down the tracks toward me.
My own erection has a mind of its own. I keep muttering yeah, yes, yeah, yeah, yes, as I kiss her and I laugh inside the motions of tongues, in there, in order to act out the thing of being undominated, but I am as if locked in the curtains of the stage at school in the auditorium . . .
My sense of time—of motion—shows when I pull back from her and mutter, “The History of a Kiss . . .”
“Ha-ha,” she says.
Another arc of sensation—of feeling in motion—involves the somewhat intrusive arrow movements of the recurring and always odd and oddly new actuality of the couch. Love and pleasure and then idea and the study of truth—the show of feeling has in it two chief currents, the current of steamy reality, the mob scene of the now, the mob of sensations—and then the tribunal thing, the blink of judgment. Doubt, shyness, nerves—heat and the attempt of judgment, blinkingly as I said, form a stained piece of biography: one loves the history of one’s St. Louis kisses, the kisses of Western Man—and Woman—for a moment.
And for a moment nothing is stale, or if that is too strong, what was in the air, to use an old and sentimental term, was not so much the possibility of sexual pleasure in a grown-up way, not the possibility of distraction in such a way, but, rather, this hot, imbecile mitigation.
Comfort for Ma’s briefly nelly son—the dirty kiss, tonguingly, lippily, prowlingly—me passive in the mouth
toward her and my hand on her breast a little cruelly: I never kissed Nonie on the mouth once I began to speak—words permitted no possible feeling of that sort in me for Nonie. Leonie’s breast: part of a program of escape. I want Nonie to respect me sexually. The Air Corps girl’s kiss. I don’t want Nonie to laugh at me.
Leonie ends the kiss. I as-if-wake to her—Leonie, a smoker, is coughing a little; she puts two fingers on my cheek and says—coughingly—“Not bad.”
I had ignored her, lost sight of her, hadn’t known how she condescended to kiss me—how unpierced, how unthreatened by me she was. I associate this moment in which I woke to my sexual existence with her, I associate it with childhood ripening. A ripeness in an appetite for her fear? Nonie watches from the archway. One would have spit in the face of reality to abjure all this. Nonie did not fuck before marriage that I know of—some, maybe even much, of her sexual experience lay in watching me. And others. She said of sex to people sometimes, Why settle for what’s less good when you can wait and have the best? Tom, one of Nonie’s almost-fiancés, had said to me that Nonie was a clean girl (i.e., it was easy for him to be with me, to meet her family). What does honest mean in real time? The reality of companionship is not like some fictional or metaphysical example of companionship. The clear colors of great speed require cloudless light. Time moves differently in the spaceship . . . In school, lab experiments never come out exactly. A teacher—it is not vanity that says this—a woman who wanted to flirt with me—said of students who claimed their experiments had come out exactly, They are lying.
Ah, how shocking is a memory of specific sunlight—and heat—at a swimming pool—inside the new-boned and adolescent skull of the boy in University City.
Behind the newishly older, not entirely honest eyes is a polite thing, a sense of old chastities—and of substitutions now.
“Let’s smile and kiss,” I said. “Keep the smile on your face.”
God, the look of patience on her face . . . With my youth . . . Like my dad, sometimes, in the last year before he died.
She tousles my hair and says, “I know how to arm wrestle . . . I’ve watched my brothers do it.”
“From up close?”
Pallid, phallic arms . . . one imagines this abruptly . . . harsh with effort.
“Life is just too sexy,” I say in a falsetto, imitating no one but pretending I am imitating someone. The possession of male beauty . . . it is realer and yet unactual in lovemaking . . . curiously veiled in the sequence of phenomena . . . an emotional-technical basis for grudging and lie-torn, persecutory approval.
“Kiss me, my fool,” she says. It is a joke from her mother’s day. Reactions . . . Be tough or die . . . A leader . . . Nonie in the shadows in the hallway . . . I fuck for the household—do you?
Leonie says, “You have a nice mouth.” She is being older. Invulnerable. Invulnerably she says, “Pretty, pretty, pretty . . .” making it all a baby-talking joke about how much nerve she has . . . cutely denying the actual and palpable intimacy—removing it from its place in the arc of having a settled-on sexual future—then to stare at someone’s lips—to stare at someone’s lips unsmilingly and then to smile willfully—at him—that’s bold.
Reality does not have to be plausible. It’s not a dream. It goes its own way. You can yell, HEY WAIT FOR MY CONSCIOUSNESS, but hearing you isn’t its business . . . reality’s. In the shadows, fingertips are braced against the rise of the couch and the other set of fingertips touch the faintly gritty waxed floor. My shirt is partly unbuttoned.
I say, “It hurts . . .”
She says, topping that, “It’s scary.” Then turning her face upward: “You have to wonder—is this real?” A kind of automatic tone . . . It is a line. She touches my chest—flutteringly. Her mind is elsewhere. She is thinking about her own desires. And I fight not to breathe or smile flutteringly. I fight to be deadpan—the most sexual thing for me is to be in a territory of phallic will—not necessarily active but active in the sense that embarrassment is constrained—it is a territory where I can presume. I poke and push against her. Readiness—good-sized . . . I don’t know—locker-room randiness—a thing of being a strong, silent type? It is not a settled matter. Because of rivalries—with all other men sexually—my masculinity maybe is emblematic . . . Perverse . . . “I wish we were drunk . . . It HURTS to be wide awake.” My line: an automatism of sorts, like hers. What is it we want? “Lila keeps no liquor in the house. She checks my bureau to see if I hide any. A lot of kids at school are drunks.” Nonie drinks too much—and passes out—and claims to be a teetotaller and unused to liquor.
If I am undominated, am I then dominant? If I am free and she is not—I don’t mean in relation to me—am I dominant by comparison?
Cruelty here is to be inwardly absent, busy differently from the other person. The just-getting-it-to-happen—that other stuff—doesn’t mean you’re there.
To be there is a little like bartering your soul in some kind of anxious and maybe overfull drunkenness for pottage . . . for sex. I want my soul for later—Socratically. Who cares what I want? I’m not rich. You have to fit in, Wiley . . . If I give off some sense—some aura—of being endowed with abilities, having a future, and of regular (and irregular) naïve merit and humor—if I give off some sense of being lucky—or blessed—endowed that way, it might have the effect of my being rich—or princely—and then it would matter to Leonie what I wanted. It would matter what became of me. That might make her perverse and kind of violent—I might not be able to manage. I often couldn’t manage.
The gestures of fate, sexual fate, how these things work is that then I really looked at her.
But a lot of what I feel is fear and unease, curiosity and desire and envy, and some confidence. The male-female equity-inequity is lawful within the illegality of her being so old—proud-chested, fine-necked, exhibitionist Leonie—she is cleverer than I am: I am outmanned, outgunned . . . I don’t feel guilty. She is all concealed and all exhibited—I am as if all exhibited like a kid on a porch with older girls or with women observing his maleness—caution seems suicidal and is suicidally present. An athletic-and-spoiled-rich-boy’s and tough-lower-class-kid’s and little kid’s alternation of roles, gimmicks, spyings, self-displayings, submissions, independences, assertions? I am a spy on my own life. In the war years, to be lecherous was to be a wolf.
Leonie knows I have waked to her.
Leonie says—in what is a local high style in a certain milieu—“I’m not sure I like liking you. I’m not sure you’re as sweet as you look. Are you likable?”
This is compliment-sugar in reverse . . . I am dangerous and not entirely sweet.
It also has the other meaning of: she isn’t afraid and has room to play in . . .
Am I likable? “Is that just a line or do you mean it?”
She says, “Don’t hate me . . .”
“I don’t hate you . . . Ha-ha . . .” Then: “Guys lie about sex.”
“What do they say?” she asked.
She was too interested. I said, “They lie like rugs . . . You like madmen?”
“Do you talk like this all the time?”
“I talk a lot of crapola . . . A lot of it is malarkey. It’s blarney . . .”
“You have a big vocabulary.”
“I don’t know . . . When you fuck older men, do they make weird faces?”
“I don’t want to talk about that . . .”
“Real Men are the most important people in wartime.”
“Don’t ask too much of me, Wiley.”
The persiflage section of getting to know each other while necking . . .
The skin of her face—faint fuzz and bits of makeup—and her neck and the parts of her body, a bit sweaty, jointedly melty, amused and heated—a little—there is a limited (and semi-domestic) fire in her . . . Like a coal grate with a low fire. I wasn’t completely ashamed. I didn’t know enough to be consciously flattered, either.
I said, stiffly, leaning back and covering m
y forehead with my forearm—but my other hand was around her back and emerged on her waist on her far side, which it lightly, a little loonily, palped—just her waist—“I’m sorry.”
“What are you up to?” she said, laughing.
“I know what I do is young,” I said. I said gloomily, “I’m a child.”
“So what?” Then: “What are you trying to say?”
“I’m afraid we’re not going to go on.”
“Whew . . . You speak right up and you’re so pretty.” The tone was of a milieu unknown to me.
I made a face—I felt endearingly and familiarly tormentedly grotesque to myself. “Are you a turtle?” I said. It was a semi-secret remark at high school: some of the kids in fraternities and sororities, Gentile kids, made it at school, high school: it was a fad.
She looked at me blinkingly. “I’m out of my shell—I’m turned over and can’t get a move on . . . what is it?”
“I don’t know . . . It’s just a thing to say . . . Like mairzy doats . . .”
She blinked some more. Then she said, “I . . . like . . . you.”
The Runaway Soul Page 83