Nonie’s laugh, at times, its sound, its reality could make Lila say, “I give up,” and she would rise from her chair and leave the room.
Nonie said to Leonie—intimately—“We won’t make good mothers.”
(Lila said of Nonie to me, Her secret weapon is she’s in charge of herself no one HAS to take care of her—and that’s attractive in somebody . . .)
Tomboy . . . freed girl . . . Legs. Cunt. Breasts. Mouth.
Inside me, my jolted sense of things is sportive—and hard-willed—vain and physically aware—cleverly docile. I am part of a motionful photograph—some pix—this is memory. Nonie’s nighttime, not-on-a-date face, her manner with Leonie, I bear all this, I enjoy it, but it is not actually particularly bearable for me.
It may be that this is just before her period. She has not been denied the reality of love stories. She says to Leonie—I think of me and Momma—“They want me to save them . . .”
“I will do what I want—you shut up . . .” I imitate her.
“Tom ought to marry Wiley. Tom could be a politician—you’d be surprised . . . But I don’t know who would elect him . . . Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.”
“Nonie, you are never nice,” Leonie says.
“I am too. Yes, I am, to nice people. I am a very nice person to you . . .” The reality of prettiness—she is perhaps too proud . . . “I am famished . . . I am starving to death like in India . . .”
Nonie had an angrily pathetic look. She has a feeling of waiting—it shows in her face now. “I have to go watch Momma take her medication . . .” Already drugged, Momma needed a witness to make sure that she didn’t take too much more morphine in her grogginess. Nonie said to me and Leonie, “Busy, busy, busy. Why don’t you two neck and see if you like it? Ha-ha . . .”
She is a sensible virgin—superior to us: the lipsticked boy, the vaguely wolfish twenty-year-old girl.
“She’s nifty—she has really a lot of common sense,” Leonie says.
Lipsticked-sticky-lipped, I say, “Oh you two are good at a lot of things . . .”
She brought her face to maybe within six inches of mine. In the moment, snub-boned (wolflike), her sharply jutting-nosed central face, the tightly-fitted-to-her slicked, competent movements, the showy teeth when she grins—a striking and likable girl—a nobody, Lila says.
Of course, I don’t know the worst about her. Strong-lipped, she places a pretty kiss on the mouth . . . She says, “I don’t know. I suppose it’s not important what becomes of you if you live in St. Louis . . .” I see the top of her head when I hold her close. I swing back and forth. “Ha-ha,” I murmur. Our feet are way down there . . . The nerve, the toughness in her: you know that physical whisper of a strong female body—of a strongly boned spirit of a young woman who is partly male in spirit . . . Possibly a whore-to-be . . . Or a-girl-who-will-be-a-suicide . . . A doing-things-at-the-last-minute girl . . .
I sat on the couch. Leonie sat in my lap, put her arms around my neck, and said, “Please talk to me with that pretty mouth . . .” Then, eyeing me, she bends backwards and sideways—nuttily—she is in motion—with the help of me holding her—my strained arms hold her and let her down slowly—she topples back slowly to being horizontal on the couch . . .
I say, “QUIZ: Do you feel your palms getting clammy when you are alone with her? Did you feel lucky? Do you feel superior to other people? Her breasty-poos are the meaning of the occasion. Take a look at the world.” Addressing her nipples . . . “For God’s sake, whoopee . . . It’s mostly really okay . . . Tell me if she likes me: she likes me, she likes me not . . .”
“Ow,” she said. I was biting her, first on one breast, then the other.
“She loves me not. Tell me,” the boy said breathlessly, lying mostly on top of her, “is this meaningless? Are you ashamed of us? Are you ashamed of yourself?” I ask from on top of her.
“I have thought about it backwards and forwards for the last six years and I’ve been engaged since I was seventeen and I just haven’t time to be ashamed of myself, Wiley . . .”
She had a mussed mouth and cluttered (but shrewd) eyes and a Vacation-with-Me-from-the-Grimness-of-War quality.
“Well, it is the END-OF-THE-WORLD—you should see the photographs,” I say. The almost post-hallucinatory judgment of the milky and light-smitten applause—of the pulse in a state of desire—is that I am lucky to know Leonie . . . “Madam, my pulse greets you”—showing her the erection: a greeting (a return after interruption) covered over by underpants except for some of the head and some of the balls.
The daily, vulgar whisper of history; I am being ill with history—with wartime. I am so lonely that I don’t use the word lonely at all anymore. Everyone in the world is busy . . . I am lipsticked, earringed, and erect.
We are half safe.
Leonie whispers in my ear, “I call Nonie The Dragon Lady—” Then: “Don’t tell her . . . Don’t wipe your mouth: leave a little for me to taste. Do you like your sister, Tiger-brother?”
“My dad has said: Don’t be a fool . . . don’t be cannon fodder . . . Lipstick and earrings and this stupid scarf—for CANNON FODDER . . .”
Leonie says, “I don’t understand,” and tongues my cheek . . . The illogical, weird amusement . . . My internal oohs, ohs, ughs, ihs . . .
The words, the terms first, at first sight, at once, right away, right now, now—those are hers. The hurry in her is at-the-last-minute. She is loose-faced, erotic-tactical. Procedural: speedy . . . a word in style among us that year. She kisses me briskly, wetly on the side of the nose . . . A small tickled snort . . . God . . . My love such as it is—agonized, sensational, sensationally present—personal and tinted and cooled and brought to a flood by an agony of half-comprehension—I want to feel less . . . Time flowers into the recognition on my part of my mood as painful—and manipulated—infatuation . . . an amusement.
She probably senses this . . . She loves me for a moment . . . I think I recognize the odd curvature of that heat—that peculiar wit . . . the lovely girl-woman propped, spread—but not available. I tug lippily at her breasts. The minute like a wasp buzzes in my sweaty nose . . . June bugs of appetite itchily hop outside and inside my throat . . . My cheek is against hers. “Our hair marries each other,” I say. She is silent.
Then she repeats it, a joke in the hoarse, hurried voice of hers which I as-if-hear for the first time: “Our hair marries each other, does it?”
My breath spills at my lips already different and stained by love—the escaped, pale, dragonfly-monkey’s-paw breath tugs at her hair, at her eyelids . . . Escaped breath . . .
She says, “Do you swear a lot?”
“Fuck-a-dee-fuck-fuck, camel turd . . .”
“Kiss me . . .”
“Fun-tongue,” I say. “Fuun-tongue soup . . .”
“You’re so corny—”
“Corned beef. I have a short tongue . . .”
“I have a big one,” she said.
“Don’t show me,” I say, pulling back.
“I love your lipstick—I like you in lipstick—it’s very flattering,” she said with “intellectual” hysteria—a shyness toward words . . . Push her away and hack and haw-hiccckkk . . . And cough some . . .
The physical sense I have of her: a girl-woman with a lyingly abandoned loosened face and a fast or rushed and businesslike and commonsensical, shrewd, undoomed heat. Her skin smells of cigarettes. You see why I sort of love her and half wish this wasn’t happening?
I confess I have an emptied smile, a drooping smile. It is a sexual compliment to her, semi-grinning insignia of a sergeancy of the enlistee-recruit. The corporeality of the moment, the motion of sensation: is it of moral consequence that she is five seven and has a wide rib cage (one narrow from front to back), has small breasts like sachets (or quilted pockets), and that she is not rich? Her neck is luscious—strong, throbby. In her is a range of shadows—hidden stuff. Hidden stuff shows, but I cannot read it. Me: in one earring and with th
e scarf on, I hold her in my skinny arms. She strokes me—like a pet . . . Truth is godawful. Shadows listen at the walls of the skins for each other’s whispers. Pulling back, she says something that she has heard: “You know who the great pornographer is? God is . . . God’s a pornographer.” She said it madlysanely, explanatorily, to my nearby face.
The odd flooring of limitlessness in a moment: what-the-hell . . . My stomach: I have a kiddy’s belly. A boy’s death-loving stomach . . . In wartime . . .
“We’re all home-front soldiers here,” she says, making a joke. Then: “Nonie says you’re not the good-provider type. You’re a good-time Charlie . . .”
“I don’t know . . .”
“I think you’re an ace.” Leonie repeats, “You’re an ace.”
My chest burned with the accidental reality of events . . .
“Yeah, well . . . Who knows?” I said to Leonie.
Leonie said with the impoliteness of no-marriage—said to the walls of the room, “Stick this in your pipe and smoke it . . .” And she stuck her big tongue, grossly and suffocatingly, chokingly into my mouth. I didn’t choke for a second or two. She is not looking for a proper man just now. I am guessing. She is looking into the darkness in a stuffy closet.
I am weighted suddenly with heat and blood; it is phallic weightedness and an appetite for finality . . . with infatuated flashes of translation toward sheltering in it.
A degree of love . . .
She pulls away and is smiling and nodding her head. “You’re so clean!—look/uh/kccck/ng,” she says: her mouth is strained—and strange—from the necking. I get the sense that she is so far along in having a grown-up life that she has already become mental about being a woman. That is, ideas command her. I say, “Ha-ha,” scared-excited . . . A little forceful. Leonie’s face is heat and gaudy parts, and gooshy parts and bone . . . Etcetera, She said in the third person to my shoulder, “Why isn’t he ten years older? And horny from being overseas? And mad for me . . .”
“I am mad for you . . . ha-ha,” I say. “Why is this called necking?” And I kiss her neck.
She kisses my neck boringly . . .
The heavy persuasiveness and allure of sexual sensation is a separate consciousness. I kiss her coarsely. I let my tongue rest like a strange flexible small rib on her lower lip. I began to write her name across her face with my tongue sweatily—high-schoolishly-dirtily . . . My sweaty please-think-I’m-trash face kissingly rode in the various milieus of this stuff—the membranous smell of the (delicate) skin of her neck—these are kisses in bad faith . . . She wasn’t laughing at me in a superior way. The fragility of the self here explained itself as the fragility of events in the present tense, in the only actuality there is. I said, “I’m on my good behavior”—not meaning it as I put two fingers on her down there and groped my way into her . . .
“You’re on your bad beHAVIOR,” she said. She wasn’t really startled. Something like a bird-flutter down there and a kind of slimy stickiness came to her mouth in a set of tremors . . . The surprisingly hurtful aggression of sensation—nothing can defend ignorance . . . I know better than to say to her that necking is a friendly grief with babies-and-grown-men’s inner cries and urgencies in it . . . the noble trashiness thing of throwing your life away because of meaninglessness or some sort of mistake in you about meanings . . . The availability of animal faith—eyelids, hearts, bared chests—one is hopelessly excited.
“I’m out, I’m out of my mind, I’m out of my head, I’m far out,” she said, politely.
I want to say, Oh, thank you, but I don’t.
In her breath and eyelids and in the odd, faintly glaucous spill of opacity over the irises of her eyes—and over mine—in those circumstances, the stench is almost of bearskin—sweat and rut and mussed clothes . . . And the wrinkled couch . . . I am in a true rage of private velocity in a moment of intimacy with someone else who is modest-and-immodest complicatedly. The kind of tragic intimacy of sexual confessions . . . a dirty and intimate deliciousness—also, a bit sickening . . . We do this in silence: among soft breaths—neighborhood sexual bullies—people blackmailingly tacitly saying to the other person, You better cooperate . . . She is not thinking.
“Are you scared?” she asks.
“I am scared shitless—I can barely hold my water . . .”
“Oh you . . .”
We will fuck . . . That is what her mood means. I gaze at her . . . Attention is dear—is love of a kind. Nothing has vanished, not our feet, not our shoes, not our ages or odors, but attention edits and presents, stages and permits pure-seeming meaning for a second or two, here and there. The sensible reality vanishes in blinks and she is somehow ideal: this is called back home not thinking . . . The poetry of hallucination is of shrewdness being hidden. Leonie’s spirit has withdrawn . . . Then she is there, she returns—her conscious attention returns to her mouth and eyes like birds to the openings of a birdhouse . . .
She sighs. One is found to be okay in a real verdict in a real court, romantic enough anyway . . . A provincial and skeletal approximation of physical flirtation . . . Maybe I can live in the real world . . . I said to her, “I bet your father liked you . . .”
The lashes and lids of her eyes . . . sanely . . . real. We are fooling around . . .
I felt gazingly but behind my suddenly lowered eyelids, I Love You . . . I said to myself, BOY, DON’T SAY THAT OUT LOUD . . . One is being transformed, for better or worse, into someone who has now done these things. Veeringly, I began to hate myself and to be more urgent physically.
She said, “How do you know that about my father?”
“I don’t know . . .”
I hold her arms with my hands and I show her my face. Nonie’s scarf is sloppily every which way over my shoulders.
“Oh God, you’re the limit,” Leonie said stiffly. She said, “If you were older, I’d make you marry me.” Then: “WOULD you marry me?”
“Sure,” I said. The hand (or fin) of boyish casualness, the thing of not being serious about the possibility—I felt only pain suddenly—she is superior again . . . out of reach . . .
“You’re a devil,” she said—tactically—tactfully undoing the excitement.
“I’m no pussyfooter,” I said. Another nail in my coffin . . .
“Oh, kiss me,” she said wildly and strangely, impatiently—being sorry—who knows, who can tell me what it was? The world is faulty and crowded and full of lousy teachers and inept confessions that don’t tell you much of anything.
“Are you, kind of, a bad person?” she asked me.
“Oh yes,” I said impatiently.
“Tell me how . . .”
Ah: I shake my head now.
She moves her head forward, through the intervening air . . . But it is an automaton’s thing. I make a face—I pull away—sloppily—and lean back against the back of the couch. I see the appeal of simple onrushingness . . .
Oh God . . .
“Talking to you is so interesting,” she said—she is sort of someone else. She says, “You’re fifteen.”
She smiled.
A kind of bustling noise in the hall is Nonie. “Am I interrupting?” she says. She is in a blue bathrobe.
Leonie says to Nonie, “Your brother is a devil . . .” Leonie kind of jokingly says to me in front of Nonie: “Is it all over between us, Wiley?” She sighs and looks at Nonie and shrugs her shoulders; she doesn’t really straighten her clothes much, but she covers herself up with her blouse and skirt. “I should’ve been loyal to the air force . . . He’s a killer-diller . . . He’s just a heartbreaker . . .”
Nonie’s a smoker; she has loud panting breathing.
Nonie said, “Watch out . . . He bites.”
“Oh shut up,” I said stiffly.
Leonie said to me, “Do you bite?”
“No . . .” The two of them have a private speech. I don’t really know what they are talking about. “No,” I say again. Then: “Am I supposed to?”
“No . . .”
I look at Nonie, and then I put my head in Leonie’s lap. Leonie puts her hand on my chest inside my shirt . . .
Saying, “Uh,” Nonie got up, stood still a half second, and left the room . . .
Leonie’s hand waitfully sits on the almost idle heat of the new skin of my chest. I was as if covered with kisses as when you’re a child and hide in a pile of raked leaves and the leaves touch and tickle and poke and smother you. I am more odorous and staler than a child.
“Is it a good thing if you bite?” I ask, looking up.
Leonie said to me, “Oh, you’re YOUNG . . .”
Her blouse, now again open, shows thin ribs and the smallish cotton brassiere crookedly placed on the unevenly globular breasts.
I free her breasts—and feel their presence—and that of the fierce liveliness of her hair.
Leonie takes hold of my hands, stopping me. She says, almost defeatedly, “I’m getting to be an old person. It’s nice to be with you . . . I like the way you look at things.”
Close-pressed body parts. Damp . . .
“What’s your fiancé like?”
“Oh . . . This isn’t a time for hard questions . . .” Then Leonie sighingly said, “Nonie said you were a know-it-all.” Then, shifting her weight, a bit heavily: “Nonie said you read a lot of books—do you?”
I don’t answer.
She leaned forward, somewhat moisty-bodied, and she tickled my skinny ribs. “Talk to me—don’t sulk . . .”
“Am I being stupid?” I asked her.
“Well, how do you mean that?”
“With you . . .”
She gave up straightening out what I meant. “No,” she said alertly. “You’re interesting.” Then: “Nonie says she can’t understand you half the time . . . People say you have tragedy in your background . . .”
The Runaway Soul Page 86