“What a hero,” I said—still jealous of real men.
“You’re nice. I hate to be part of a score—of scoring,” she said; and I sighed. She said, “Huff, huff, puff, puff, you want me to blow your house down.”
I didn’t know until a year afterward that she might mean blow with the meaning of oral sex. She meant for me to laugh.
“I want to fuck . . .”
“Oh. Babe, don’t try so hard.” Her body lay oddly, as if pecked and struck by a horny bill. Bruised. “You have perfect health . . .”
“Hunh? That doesn’t matter.”
“It does if someone’s tastes run in that direction,” she said.
“Oh,” I said, thoughtfully. I got carried away with a notion of excited, and exotic, parody of the flattery she put out: “Well, you’re terrific,” I said sadly.
My heart and pulse, my heatedness, there is a whole up-and-down thing as in a costumed amusement park in a surreal dream—free-willed automatism—so to speak—means you pick the ride you go on. Pick your terror and your scream. I hear a kind of clicking in her breath . . .
“Can I unbutton your blouse . . .”
She just breathed as I unbuttoned one button . . . I am dry-mouthed. And my body bucks a little. “I seem like a fool,” I said, fumbling idiotically with the next button.
“Will you go to a good college? I think you’re smart.” Her odor is faintly working-class . . . the soap, her underwear. She says as I palp her brassiere, her breast in it, “Are you a Communist?”
“No. I don’t know. Maybe. I wouldn’t mind.”
She says, “Sometimes I say no to things because I really don’t care, I just say no, but sometimes it’s part of a line. Do you do that? Do you understand what I am saying?”
I didn’t, no. But “Yes,” I said.
“You’re very sure of yourself.” She lightly clambers up on top of me: she says, “Oof . . . Am I like a sister to you?”
“No . . . Unnnh . . .” A grunt. I touch her . . . down there. My more or less sore erection seems to whirl with light—itchy, hot: a hallucination but eerily actual heat . . .
She says, “Isn’t this French? You like French stuff?”
I unbutton my pants, I undo my pants from the top—only a few pants had zippers in those days—I unbutton while looking at her; I assert myself in this local way—conventional. A lot of the sphinx shit of the veering and slippery reality of before-a-fuck is snapping at me and offering puzzles you solve or you have to die. I mean it was hardly certain that she’d fuck . . . I mean only that the feelings in me were a tensed leaning of a juvenile and giddy and a bit grim . . . boyish . . . readiness . . .
“It is Leonie here,” she said. “Over and out . . .”
“It is Wiley here,” I said—gently wild-man-smart-ass-fresh . . . ?
She partly gives in. We do, she does a tongue-and-lip kiss with me . . . I attempt a little toothplay—some mild lip-biting. I bite her lip . . . like a big shot . . .
Nothing. Nihil. Nil.
I become orally passive. I have found that my being passive lures people—their curiosity. I am passive and bossy . . . She was carrying out local wartime sexual practices—in a wartime style, curt and self-conscious, folkishly studious, and argumentatively challenging, high-morale-triumphant—a bit dishonest. A still-unexpressed obscene self lurks: dirty older girl. She has a good deal of physical discipline—she is athletic—I feel her nervous half-amusement and wish to hurt me to prove how relatively strong she is. I don’t know if that is different from my wish to prove how strong I am in comparison or not . . . She is engaged to a fighter-plane pilot who has flown a number of missions—all that fear and adrenaline . . . I believe he had three kills to his credit at this time.
She said, giggling some: “I think you’re very French—oh, you make me wild.” It was sort of like a joke—you know? She meant almost the opposite of what she said. If I were strong, clever, and beautiful, I could wreck her life.
I looked at her out of sad, dumb eyes—kind of alive.
She had a density of being jam-packed with a psychological carelessness of some sort. I could hear it buzzing in her, dirtied and treacherous and unkind—authoritative, unguardedly so, a kind of final, i.e., devilish ambition in her. But I am rescued from-the-ashes . . . By this sphinx-gnawing-at-you-and-snapping-(and-whispering)-at-you and careless almost-sex. Glory may lie in the passionate criminality of me twisting this stuff and swindling her into a fuck while not being in earnest about my own feelings.
Leonie, smacking her lips, says, contemptuously-admiringly-condescendingly, “You’re a wonder . . . Oh, we’re in trouble.”
If it was true, she would be silent and amused in a deep way.
I touched both her breasts.
I took off her barrette and said with apology, “I have a small tongue.”
“Yes? I think that’s all right,” she said in a grown-up voice; she had a local accent. “You’re very sensitive . . .”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Do you have a hard life?”
“Oh, you know . . .”
She said, “I bet you’ve had a good time with girls . . .”
I didn’t know what was smart to say—I said, “Sometimes I do . . . In a lot of ways . . .”
Her slightly swollen lips—fluffed—had a kind of oral erectility. She touched my underpants with one finger, her finger touched my erect, aching thing under the white cotton behind the ship’s wake thing of the parted pants. I was sincere . . . And hopeful. Much of the time, sexually, that year. It is not a dream. One is awake. A boy in his shocked, slightly self-awed-and-female-awed readiness . . . There is no justice if you want to be grand about it, but there is some justice. Here is some justice. By comparison. Some acceptable logic was here. One continues into the moment by invitation or by really strenuous and abrasive will. You laugh doubtingly, mockingly; but, then, as feeling arches itself, one’s self is no longer interested in one’s own story but takes on a natural abnegation and is focussed on her soul, her eyes, her sense of this stuff here, the fooling around. Your heart starts to pound and you get literally hot, sweaty—a woman’s liking you enough for this intimacy kind of changes the light; and the falcon heart (and mind), the predator nurses her. You want to protect her from yourself.
“You reeeeally are something,” I say to her.
“You’re something, too,” she shoots right back, but kind of whooshily, with an oddity of the eyelids that is encouraging in re going on.
“Momma, Momma, pin a rose on me,” I say and kiss her now odd-acting eyelids.
Her body inside some of its entrances and her skin studies the evidence that accident-and-hallucination here have become reliable delusion. That is one measure of sex. It is remarkable, and maybe one should despise it, the amount of measurement that goes on in a sexual moment. The ambition . . . The hope . . . In the cage of splashingly unstopping, heat-ridden, shuddering air. The ins-and-outs of sexual privacies are unfolded and glimpsed. I don’t know how general this is . . . I think it’s common. The bedouin mind—and the sandy moment . . . nameless crimes—nameless virtues. I gamble with my conscience and with her judgment of things. The lion in the treetops screams at this as juvenile. Leonie’s tongue past a certain shallow point in my mouth chokes me. She stroked the back of my neck while we kissed but I choked on her tongue anyway. I rub her invisibility with various powders in microscopic and semi-shattered attentiveness until she is dimly visible. As a body . . . She rubs me with one hand and she held me at the neck with her other hand—I am in a void of her owl-darkness . . . depths and heights in a woods and above the woods.
“Is this what you do with men?” I asked.
She didn’t answer.
Then, after a while, she lifted her head, moved it to move her hair, and she said, “I like you, Wiley . . .” I.e., she didn’t love me. She said, “I am a wise old owl . . . Wiley . . .”
She took the shoe off one foot, using her other foot, and she stroked me wi
th her stockinged foot—which irritated me—and I kneaded her breast, which I was too young to know was beautiful; but I handled it as if I wasn’t as young as all that.
Still, I thought it was a typical breast. I liked it a lot but I thought my liking it came from my naïveté. I wanted to be a real man (who knew which breasts were great and which were not). The somewhat flattish-planed but globular breast—beauty has an odd quality . . . It is almost a stupidity to recognize it. If you recognize it, you kowtow to it. I rubbed my skimpily muscled, boyishly pink (I guess) chest against her breasts . . . I don’t know . . .
She generalizingly says, “Boys your age are interesting.” Then: “You smell good.”
I say, “What do you know about boys my age?”
She says, “Touché.” Then: “You’re nice.”
“No. It’s you,” I said. She looked as if she understood—her vanity was conceited about her English.
The poetry of hallucination asks for orgasm—it is a formal command in the bent universe among miracles of racing bits of light.
“Here, I’ll lick the back of your neck,” she said. She said it to stop me from licking the back of hers. I stopped. “Why do you say that?” she said, suddenly leaning back and not licking me after the first second.
“I didn’t say anything,” I said. Her movements weren’t sudden—she was talented motionally. I lay still and said, “I don’t know—why would I say anything? Are we going to go on?” Then: “Ha-ha,” I added to cover up the ways in which I was young.
“Ha-ha,” she said agreeably. Then, putting her head back, she said,
“Ha-ha,” some more.
She was LISTENING, actually, to something. She had an air of brave doom. The rushing kind of inventories you do cause an injection of shopkeeper’s cunning into the affection overall but it (the moment) is mostly lazy in regard to cunning—who gives a fuck really? So it’s like a cliff’s edge. It’s like kissing underwater. Affection—at the edge of love.
The issue is of going too far . . . over the edge.
“Wheeeeeee,” I murmured.
Sometimes I know that what I am saying doesn’t make sense to the other person. If they’re absolutists, they say, Speak up . . . If someone likes you, it can feel to them that you’ve stolen the narrow path to God . . . My dad used to say to me, You’re the absolute McCoy, and then, often, he would walk away from me. (Sometimes he would tickle me and make me kiss him, though.) Do you ever get the feeling that it’s not too smart to turn against your own fate? I was pleased shitless that things were going so well and I felt that a lot of my earlier failures in the world hadn’t been my fault.
This making and not-making love—sort of avoiding love—look, she is more male than I am at the moment. I know that. I am more sincere and less deathish than her fiancé. She and I look at each other and we almost understand and the gaze is warm babble—us lying to each other. It is a matter of feelings. We avoid scandal. I am half lost, half okay here. What was love to Leonie as a child? A dirty and intense ha-ha silence, two-sided, so that neither her parents nor she could picture love and event as continuous in the generations and inside one’s life?
Will her sexual rage become religiosity? A secular silence? Her boyfriend perhaps is humiliated by his own odor of fear in the cockpit of the noisy plane—he pisses on himself each time he goes into combat. Perhaps he quietly weeps most of the time he is aloft. Perhaps his sphincter shames him—pilots have told me about this stuff.
A slantedly romantic sympathy, erotic and with a heavy smell of death, is this sympathy? Reality goes too far. I hurry after it—like a child after a nurse. Tenderness and the crushing guilt of desire—Eat me, suck my prick—one is overly human—I sit up, and pull her up into a thinribbed kiss—thin-ribbed on both sides—holding her, I topple sideways in play but I make fuck motions as we fall. “This is like sports,” I explain to her. It is like friendship and alliance in sports.
One slips her panties down . . .
“No, no,” she says. Then: “You’re barely in high school.”
“I’m college material.”
She laughs—it is illogically valuable, that laugh.
Leonie says something but I don’t hear her—I am fingering her cunt. The glorious horror of it . . .
“Oh, you are delicious!” she says, removing my hand from down there. “Someday someone is going to just kill you . . . And eat you right up . . . How come no one has killed you yet?”
A field of nowhere-silence: a male blossoming of breath: I say, “Dingdong dingdong bell.” I push up her blouse and shove her bra up and nuzzle her left breast.
“Hunh, you’re some little brother,” she says.
In terms of my “behaving” in order to preserve the status quo (a big-time term that year), I was as female as she and Nonie were.
One’s breathing—and hers—and the colors of her face—and the heat of mine—and the heat in my abdomen—and my breath-laden weird sense of my arched back—me being this guy—and my complaisance and hers—and my erection—a boy’s erection—I collapse into sudden listening . . . I am like her as she was earlier.
This is a minor pleasurable happiness for her, not a goring excitement, not a gorgeous darkness—it’s not part of the deaths of the self. We are like our lying notions of other people.
She says, “Our feet are getting muddy . . . Let’s slow down.”
I lay down beside her. “That’s what a mother says.”
“I know,” she says. The pride of the lioness. Leonie established an automatic rivalry, a looking for insult and a lesson at the hands of the universe . . . A Lutheran truthfulness.
Her clothes are rumpled. She says, “This is heaven . . . You’re heaven.”
I say—idly (my arm over my face)—“You’re the world to me.”
“You’re laughing at me.”
“Yeah,” I said, holding one arm up toward the ceiling of the living room. “You’re right.”
“Ha-ha . . . Are you funny, too? Umm.” She rolled over and kissed me wetly and condescendingly.
“You have pretty hair,” I said, afraid, and affronted by her mood.
“Oh, I have problem hair,” she said. Taking away my right to talk. “My hair is difficult and requires a lot of work: it is too straight and too off a brown and too fine.”
She has her wit, her body . . . she is standing thigh-deep, so to speak, in the blood river of the feminine. She is not particularly happy. The conscious attempt at growing up by an adolescent boy perhaps, wisely, lacks a sense of individuation. One crawls through women’s depths—the depths of nearby women—toward the almost inconceivable pain of the realized individuality of one’s fate. I am scared of being of no value. Of her being of no value: Me, me on the couch, bleary-faced me, touched and praised, fourteen-year-old-eyed, fire-chested . . . Youth: I am grateful to be included, an apprentice in sexual reality.
Then Nonie’s footsteps, the sounds of clothes. Here comes zeroness. I am startled truly and stilled. I hide myself with a couch cushion. Momentum and dark life—and gradations of feeling when she enters the room: “I’d thought I’d see how the two of you are coming along . . . Are you behaving yourselves . . . ?”
Nonie pretty much claimed to have absolute knowledge of the world. In that knowledge, she wasn’t so crazy (her term) as to be self-sacrificing. Part of her knowledge was knowledge of me—and through me, through my existence . . . Nonie’s overall sense of knowledge was that it was omniscient, and that it was a piece of Omniscience. It was all and part at the same time. Her contempt for her own looks as she got older—she wasn’t sexually excited by her own flesh. A term of brightness had ended in disdain for her own eyes and for her hair. Her pride went on, though—a nearly unhoused omniscience. Her sexuality always seemed to me to be exploding in a vacant place—not unseen quite but in a walled and mostly empty place.
She emanates feelings—an air of conscious cleverness and tolerance toward us while being wearily oppressed by what we do. The empti
ness of her methods disperses any sense of a plentitude in her. I glance at Leonie to see what way she is going in the bleakness and general bleariness of the sad focus of being in her presence—and a kind of familiar excitement that I feel. I don’t have to be just to Nonie. I’m not her judge—I’m her brother.
She has a civilized and commanding air. She smokes a long cigarette—it is an excited but sad, even gloomy dismissal of excitement, tragicomic, semi-tragic, living-room-enormous, the depression, the defeat . . . the she-is-betrayed—this stuff plays about her wonderfully pretty, tired face . . . perhaps a bit leaden-set.
“I’m in a bad mood tonight. Well, what can you do: easy come, easy go . . .”
“Yeah,” Leonie said.
Is it traditional that I have little sense of Nonie, little sense of her story, I mean beyond my knowledge of her capacity to lie? It is common enough in novels—and in movies—to know a woman only to that extent. Love. Lovelessness. Loneliness. Nonie liked being persuaded that happiness existed. She liked happy-go-lucky movies. Her existence lies beyond and around and under and over that stuff—amusement and acceptance, hers, the other motions of her consciousness—an almost marriageable girl. I had a lesbian teacher whom I liked a lot who said, What is the game here? She would say, You see that is an interesting and subtle question.
Nonie puffed at her cigarette—a pretty empress and her pieicing gaze—is the game for keeps now?
“You’ve got really big boobs tonight,” I said. She padded them.
Leonie kicked me and murmured, “Oh, Wiley . . .”
On a scale of one to a hundred for people being dangerous, how dangerous was Nonie? Two? Seventy-two?
Nonie said, “Wiley, you have more imagination than is good for you . . . He’s the bucket that went once too often to the well. I hate it when he talks about me . . . The two of you are a sight for sore eyes . . . Pretty funny: I have to laugh—you make me laugh, ha-ha.”
We laugh some, too.
She’s not young anymore. She is a girlish Lear. She says, “Oh, Wiley, do up your pants; no one cares about a little brother.”
“I like him,” Leonie says in a tone that comes from the office probably.
The Runaway Soul Page 84