“He and I are close—this month,” Nonie says. The thickened, hardened softness of an aging girl . . . “Monkey see, monkey sees too much,” Nonie said and laughed—she was laughing at me. She placed an arm over her padded breasts. “Don’t try to know everything: don’t be a know-it-all: a little human nature is nice in a little brother.” She is chattering.
“I support myself, I’m self-supporting,” I boast to Leonie; I say to Nonie: “I pay board and room—more than you do . . .”
Nonie said dryly, “I’m no fool . . . I don’t make moneys to help you.”
“No. You borrow money from me . . . Well, don’t expect me to make money to help you . . .”
“You’re a sucker, who knows where you’ll wind up,” Nonie said. “I can always get around you . . . You’ll see . . .”
“I don’t know why she talks like that,” I said—wearily—to Leonie.
Nonie says, “Oh you, you’re wrong all the time, no one listens to you . . . Well, what have you two no-goods been up to? Were you being bad people: don’t lie to Mama Bear. I know all about it. I know, I know. You ought to be shot.”
“Ha-ha,” Leonie says. She straightens her clothes some more.
I say, “Ha-ha,” too. But I am hurt . . .
Living-room lamplight in an early-darkening month: yellow and orange and a bit of blue-white reflected light on the glass that covers the paintings . . . and shadows, ununiform shadows: Nonie looks famous and smeary. Her photograph is on two recruiting brochures. One brochure cover showed her alone in sunlight upright but as if tilted back from the camera, which is at her knees and at which she smiles in nervous alarm and with a certain boldness anyway; and, in the other, she is the middle one, with two fliers on either side of her—she is in a polka-dot dress blowing in the wind: she is tossing her head; she has a faintly clenched, bold-brave smile different from the other smile. (Lila told me, The idea is that women of Nonie’s sort like men in the air force and pilots have a good time before they get killed—whether they’re poor in peacetime or not.) Windblown and sunlit in the photographs . . . she is a great girl . . . a sunnily wartime sun-and-wind-touched girl . . . Here she is approximately lit by electric light and her pretty face has an unfinal look. Her eyebrows are plucked in an artificially natural curve, a wartime style. Her pointed bra is padded. She has long, red, celluloid fingernails . . . false. Her straight hair is combed and set—it has long, full, loosely flowing glamour. It was thickened: a wartime hairdo; and its color has been tampered with: it’s red-blond. She is an ad come true—a soldier’s dream actually present.
She is in the same room with me, and her will and mood and the low murmur of her breath—and my chagrin toward her (Who wants to placate her night and day?) and the girdled weight of her selfhood, an anchoring-and-unanchored prettiness floating shiftingly in the shadows. High-moralled, high-moraled girl. Omniscient. Imprisoned. Cheerful and slanderous. Impatient. Indomitable. The reality of plotting and of slander are part of a girl’s career. “He’s a liar, like all men.” Nonie is here. This enforces an absence of charity. God is that which wins.
The air and light in the room, and my sister’s fine, pale skin—her small features are agonizingly sweet inside the twisted postures of her smoking a Pall Mall—I am promised to the war—I am a fiancé, a bridegroom of the war.
“You’re just loco—just plain loony [puff, puff], but there’s a time and a place for everything . . .” Is she a deep person? Her appearance, its falsity, says, Dream me. The bird-skulled, thin-torsoed girl—in her wartime form—and me, six feet, two and a quarter inches tall, fourteen years old, and I weigh a hundred and forty-two pounds. Nonie has bitten nails under the false ones. She wears a tailored jacket with wide shoulders and a nipped waist, a longish pleated skirt, and bedroom slippers. A glamourous scarf is wound around her long neck; the ends are tucked into the lapels of her jacket.
“He’s as pretty as a girl,” Nonie says, puffing on her cigarette. She rises. Now the scarf is around my neck above my skinny (and unbuttoned) chest. She casually did it. I started to fight her off but the heel of my hand hit Leonie in the temple and Nonie said, “BE CAREFUL . . .”
So the scarf is around my neck, serpentine, mauvish-gray, green-figured chiffon. Does she mean me well? I don’t think that is a major issue. It is for me but not for the world. I will go ahead with the evening anyway.
Nonie says, “Here, try my earrings—show Leonie.” I am an affliction, a decoy . . .
I say, “No. I have a headache.”
“You are a headache . . . He is a headache,” Nonie says to Leonie. She says, “I can manage him . . . I’m not ever depressed—I’m a realist. I can handle him. You want a cigaboo?” she says to Leonie.
Nonie, not in high heels, is a bit squat. So far as I know I don’t want sympathy. It is a sad, satisfying joy, an explanation of much of my childhood for me to be with her. Nonie is amused by what I am. I am incautious: my mind takes continuous time and creases and folds it and smothers most memories then—this is part of the folly of oneself in an actual moment.
The dust, the upholstery—This Moment’s Loneliness—do you know? My pitying contempt for myself happens to me more strongly in Nonie’s presence than anywhere. The agitation of her small hands—pale sparrow flicker—she and I, her face and mine—we have a shared vocabulary of facial stuff. She knows my feelings and remembers them better than I do. Her ordinariness is not ordinary to me. Or is so ordinary it is truth itself. She says to me and to Leonie, “Now, don’t move . . .” and she pretends to be taking a photograph of us, using her hands as if they held a camera to her eye.
You’re supposed to be fooled by women . . . It is the ne plus ultra of sophistication. When I go to war, I will commit murder and be treacherous.
“You want to pray for us? Have you prayed for us?” Nonie asks me mockingly—as if I were dressed as a nun and not in her scarf. Her mockery, which my friends think is coarse and badly judged, is subtle and sad if you have known her for a long time. It is subtle and sad to me. She is lovely provincial . . . Not young. I move and twist and follow her as if I were a radar screen in The Battle of Britain. Nonie stands by the couch and pushes and moves my head—now she is showing to her friend whom I have necked with (a little) my profile. It is small-town politeness to let her do this.
Leonie is not pretty, she’s attractive . . . Her hair, bunched up, roughly bouffant, tops an athletic, sensual presence. Hers is a wide face with shallow insets and no deep recession to the jaw. Shadows on her face are summary and move in youthful thrust when she moves her head. A slightly predatory maskiness—like a wolf’s: a degree of costume of a face. I am in an unbuttoned shirt and I have my sister’s scarf around my neck—it is a confused moment, erotic and funnily, excitedly at some boundary or other.
Nonie says, “You be nice to Leonie. I want her to see you at your best—I told her about you. Put on my earrings . . . Show her.”
“No . . . I don’t want to . . .” Naw . . . I dun wannuh . . .
“Be fair . . .” There is no audience. There is only us. Nonie wrestlingly labors to get an earring on me. Abruptly I submit. Why? Hell, I want to be bad . . . I want to know these two women . . . I want to collaborate in a moment with the slick, uncertainty-tinged surfaces on which you might slide into getting laid . . . My face with earrings on aches as the palms of my hand do when I open my hands wide and hold the palms up with my fingers stretched out as hard as I can stretch them. The muscular spreading of my face—I don’t know what I’m doing . . . Well, hell, fuck, shit . . . My eyes are as if splashed on my face. Hotly splashed . . . I practice a willed unclenchedness in travesty. A twitch of the moistly stilled, somewhat swollen genital. Ah. The feel of the scarf, the weight of the earrings . . . the attention of the women . . . I avoid for a second or two and let out the outraged laugh, the violated noise in me—the eerie pleasure and the boredom: not a pleasure—the being made much of and little of. “Is this kinkiness?” I ask. Leonie laughs—a little shocked.
I want to be funny. Nonie and I are testing each other’s intelligence in regard to Leonie. I am illuminated, humiliated, available, engaged in funny business. For all I know, I am contemptibly male, dirty, dirtied . . . awful.
Set right . . . teased . . . Instructed in secrets.
Is Nonie mistaken? She says, “Isn’t he sweet?” Then: “Bad is the word for us—it is what is wrong with us.” Nonie, hysterically bold, speaks in a faintly whispered bird-tone of considerable audacity—a girl hero: “I ought to be shot. I ought to go outside and stand in the street and let a policeman shoot me . . . I ought to be shot like a policeman.” She is smoothing my hair.
“Oh, it’s true—you’re terrible,” Leonie says.
Then I repeat it: “Oh, it’s true—you’re pretty damn terrible.” A mocking imitation, sternly baritone. But I am dressed in the scarf and earrings. Leonie laughs—loudly—but within social bounds—she is startled. Blasé was an important word back then. Nonie says, “You’re not blasé . . .”
I say in a yet deeper voice that cracks some: “Yeah—remember your etiquette . . .”
I see by their faces that I am inside a thing of being displayed that I do not know much (if anything) about. A lack of tact here is almost like a quality of the skin: Here is the burning-skinned young male face, the delicately aimed and spilled and sparking eyes, the splashes, spilled and readable. The readable splashing from interior springs of the What-I-think, now a raw ocular joke . . . perhaps like an actorly beauty . . . I don’t know. But now I see what dignity is for. A raw availability for transgressions is an orphan-politician’s thing. This is a moment of magic bureaucracy for me. Nonie’s manner is a little official (She’s too official—Momma says this of her sometimes). This is official woman-good-bad-girl stuff on the fire stairs—badness as part of romantic authority. It is a strain to keep track of what you’re supposed to know. It is an animal thing to show knowledge. You put some of your knowledge on display to show you are suitable for being a friend . . . Or whatever . . . Nonie the loonily commanding quality of a wartime virgin—Fight for me. An erotic command . . . A flicker of muscle under the skin: an experiment. In that year of my life I saw nothing wrong yet in the destiny of a girl. I don’t understand very much. The nature of female disgust and fear and longing, for instance: those are beyond me.
“Smile for Leonie,” Nonie wheedles.
Clutch-clench . . . I look like a girl . . . But I am okay. It is like the Trojan horse . . . Curiosity and heat crowd me and I breathe in a half-suffocated way. Nonie has fooled me before so badly I spent months recovering but this doesn’t seem bad like those times—so far, I feel only a little ashamed. I hang on to my will.
Nonie sings, “I am so bad tee-hee . . . Don’t make silly faces—be pretty . . . Be nice.” Then: “Wiley, please . . . I saw the casualty lists today . . .” Weekly lists.
I find Nonie repulsive for using that. But I’ll bet that Leonie will make up to me for this stuff.
Nonie says in sensitive angry wheedling: “Don’t be serious, be nice.” She laughs disapprovingly—encouragingly: a sister. She has a light, bird-like look. She often plays the game of being pitiable and yet the boss—it is a technique.
Scarfed and earringed, an impostor-boy, a semi-party thing, his heart pounding, in my stifled-breathed sadness—and curiosity—in a shameful and private way, I smile like a guy in the movies dressed like this to please two women. It is complicated what Nonie does. What Nonie and I are. The earrings are fake rubies set in fake gold.
Nonie says to Leonie, “He won’t relax . . .” To me she says, “Relax and enjoy it . . . We think you’re cute. We’re flattering you . . . Be patient: we like you . . . Wiley doesn’t know about family life . . .” I don’t know what she is talking about.
Her walk, oddly clumsy, is that of a fattening girl athlete . . . In its unskilled reluctances of movement—its girlish massiness and self-announcement. The will in her is Let me have my way in the world . . . Her life shames me . . . Nonie said scornfully-intently to Leonie, in front of her, to the air in front of Leonie, “He’s young: he doesn’t have to think.” I have risen from the seat of the couch and am staying on it in one shoe and one foot barefoot and evading her and fending her off with one hand: she wants to put lipstick on my mouth. “HE doesn’t have to think about marrying—well, you have to enjoy him while he’s nice. He is pretty—like a girl—it won’t last long—” She aims the lipstick while I dodge. “Hold still . . . I like you like this . . . It can’t hurt you: I won’t hurt you.” Nonie half forces lipstick on one of my lips.
“No . . . That stuff feels terrible.”
“Hold still, be nice, let me . . .”
I’m skinny but I’m on the football team. I’m skinny and pretty and owl-eyed—I’m a grotesque person to start with and now I am eerily decorated and silent. The odd, shapeless equation of middle-class, shapeless personal beauty . . .
Leonie says, “PLEASE . . . let her put the lipstick on you.” Then staring at Nonie working, saying this to quiet me: “You have a beautiful mouth . . .”
Nonie says, “It’s a shame to waste it on a boy.” And: “He’s got funny coloring: the lipstick will help.”
I said with pursed-up lips, “I know men with better mouths.” Then: “This is dumb . . .”
Curiosity is a trumping thing that abridges certain impulses. I am not apocalyptic. I want the world to go on. I am a fan of duration. Nonie and Leonie labor—Leonie uses her little finger to straighten the edge of lipstick on my upper lip. I perseveringly submit with a kind of angular amusement. Feeling pools up . . . My skin is itself a pored eye . . . I feel Leonie’s and Nonie’s movements in my skin and in the veins and tendons, muscles and smallish bones of my neck. Nonie mutters, “Hold still—you know me, Al.” Now she is sighing, half-laughing: “Oh, I’m a bad person, I ought to be shot. You know me, Al.”
Dislike, sharp friendliness—busy and maybe practical sexiness: Nonie . . .
“You’re childish,” Nonie says. I have no names inside me for things. For a moment—an actor—a spy—I wonder will things here turn out badly. That concern is in the small of my back. And in my knees. Am I ruined yet? Have I been ruined? What will happen next? I manage not to be too alert. In the straw flutter of the light in the room . . .
“Hold still—you overreact to everything,” Nonie said.
I grab Leonie and pull her to me, like a hostage. “No more of this shit!” I say. Leonie moved the back of her body tightly against me—the ornate boy. “Oh, Wiley,” my sister says, “we are just playing around . . . What’s the matter with you? Are you a sissy?” Speech from a school-playground-recess speech: If you’re not, hold still—you know what they say—put up or shut up . . .
Communal Meaning, soldierly-dirty . . . Unexplained . . . Any verb: like, dislike, tease, love, loathe, desire—it’s funny they all fit. I pose in the scarf and one earring—the other has fallen off—and with lipsticked lips. Nonie says, “Look, I missed one whole part . . .” Leonie titteringly laughs. I tilt my head like a movie star and I have my hands in my pockets. “No. Don’t fix it,” I say. “I like it like this . . .”
I grope for the fallen earring inside the line of my pants—it is wedged there. I toss it to Nonie, who gruntingly catches it. A potency . . .
I had seen old movies where the men wore lipstick. I do a sword fight: I stand on the couch and fence with my shadow. “That’s dumb,” Nonie said. I towered, made-up and scarfed, over the girls. Leonie says, “Oh, you’re so funny . . .”
Nonie says, “Come on, be a trooper—be a good soldier . . . sit down and be a girl now . . .”
A heroine. Of theirs. I smell of sweat. Of adolescent rut. Of lipstick. My head is full of leftover images of petting: I smell of petting and of running around the room—and of youth. Leonie has an unvirgin look: her tight skirt is wrinkled across the triangle of her abdomen.
“Stop that,” Leonie says.
She reaches up and pulls my face to her an
d kisses me on the mouth. In front of Nonie. She says as if to Nonie, “You didn’t finish the lipstick on him—here I’ll do it . . .” Nonie tosses the lipstick to her.
In harem glamour gone a little wild she leans toward me and I lean back on the couch; and Nonie sits next to me while Leonie correctingly paints my mouth.
“The lipstick tastes funny—it’s gloppy.”
“It’s cherry red. Helena Rubinstein.” That’s Nonie.
Leonie is panting and concentrating. She is really something, that new friend of Nonie’s . . . (Lila.) I am agonizedly watchful—lazy, spoiled, sexed-up. I am an advertisement for my sister (and my mother). Fragments of social caste ornament us—Leonie and me and Nonie—differently. It’s small-town money . . . (Lila.) Leonie, looking at me, so pitches her voice it’s clear she is talking to Nonie—the tension and posture of her neck are as if that flesh was erected and the sight of it scalds and as-if-scars me. Leonie says, “Oh, he’s adorable . . .”
It concerns them if I am; it’s not my business, she means.
Nonie said, “Well, you and I are like sisters and, ha-ha ha-ha—now [sigh]—we’re all TWINS!”
Leonie said, “Oh, I don’t know . . .” To Nonie she said, “You think he’ll scare the cattle . . .”
I said suddenly, “I like to gallop!” and I jumped off the couch and cantered around the room, striking the floor with my feet and making hoof noises with my heels and with my mouth.
“Don’t wake Momma,” Nonie said.
The mild pornography, slightly daring, took on a different tonality then, the pornography that I was included in the girls’ world—if I can say that. I was included with them in some category or other for a moment or two.
“Giddyap,” Leonie said to me.
Nonie laughingly said, “Oh, those two . . .” as if to herself. Nonie’s laugh—her open and sounding mouth—the moment has in it the extreme force of the wild streaming of love anyway . . . A local creek in flood . . . No possible acceptable relativism is here. Nonie has her claim of omniscience and of primacy of appetite: real death gives her status—and accreditation. She laughs because I am not a convincing girl . . . Is it funny that I am not? Is it eerie and funny? I don’t know what it costs me to be agreeable. I carry around feelingly the newly incised (visible) muscles of my forearms . . . Nonie laughs and says, “He’s like a lamb—for the slaughter . . .”
The Runaway Soul Page 85