“Yeah. I guess.” Then: “People get bored and say anything—so it gets all very, very funny—know what I mean?”
“Do you think you’re an important person somehow, someday . . . Down the road?”
I shrugged.
“No. Let’s be serious? Do you feel you’ll be important someday?”
“It depends on you—if you ruin me . . .” I said, moving my hand on her leg.
“Don’t be funny . . . I’d like to be important,” Leonie said. “Are you going to be a doctor, do you think? Some people think Jewish doctors are the best . . . I like Jewish comedians, too.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’d like to be a fighter pilot first.”
“How are your eyes? You’re too tall, anyway. It won’t make me silly or mad, but tell me the truth: you think you’re really important—maybe—and I’m not?”
After a while: “No.” Then: “When you were little, you ever kill a fly and ask God to bring it back to life if there was a God and if He cared what you thought?”
“No.” Then: “Yes . . .”
“Did it ever happen?”
“Oh, Silly,” she said, tweaking my nose. “But sometimes I prayed and things happened . . .”
“Me too . . . But it wasn’t clear-cut.”
“Ummm . . . ?”
“It was never a clear sign . . .”
“I know what you mean . . .”
“It’s hard to figure out. I like your mole.” She had a mole on her cheek.
“Say something really intelligent . . . really logical—and let’s see if I can follow it . . .”
“If you think I’m interesting, can’t we fuck?”
“What a strange boy you are . . . You are a devil . . .”
“Well?”
“A well is a hole in the ground . . .”
“Do you think life is crazy?”
“Sometimes. Off and on. Maybe yes and no. I get very sad about it. You have nice lips.”
“You’re only being half serious—you want your own way,” I accused her.
She said, “I like nutty men—that’s my weakness. You talk like a book. I think the things you say are pretty.”
“KISS ME! MY BALLS HURT!”
The air between us shrinks in the odd shapes of us being nearer, until films and fingers of warm air and semi-sweat half glue us. The shapes of her hair surround the carnival lights of bits of her skin so near my eyes . . . Condescension, curiosity: her posture in the lightly huffing closeness, in the deranged coherence of no space between our bodies. Closeness is ungeographically blurred, is casually spendthrift sensually . . . She lacks the power of melodrama which would include me. She says snidely-charmingly (a local kind of charm): “You talk so pretty. Really, you’re sweet—I bet you turn into a really bad person: what are we doing? A pair of idiots is what we are . . . Oh well, who cares? What else is there to do on a weeknight . . . ?”
“You like it when people tell you what to do?” I asked. Snidely, in a high-school form. “So you can do the opposite—and they can go to hell?”
“You’re partly Gypsy, you’re psychic: ha-ha . . . Come on . . . kiss me the way you did at the beginning . . . Don’t look at me like that . . .”
“I hurt,” I said, holding my testicles in a pantomime, only partly faked, but it was too fake the way I did it. “More porridge please,” I asked. Then: “Forget it . . .”
“Try to bear up. Let it hurt you,” she said dryly. “Better you than me.”
“I don’t want to hurt you . . . I don’t like to play with feelings.”
“God, you’re going to be hard for a woman,” she said. Then: “You’re too moody . . . You’re too much to handle: what a handful. Do you care about scoring? Do you keep score? Don’t get too hot . . . I like cool men.”
The fabric of my unbuttoned shirt touches my mostly exposed and skimpy chest in a lonely, pretty way . . .
The lonely self-love of that flows into my thinking that maybe that is how her blouse feels on her.
Does she feel alive and potent? Is her potency a corruption . . . of the world?
“You tell too many lies,” I say.
“Nice lies,” she says. “They’re nice lies . . . Kisses are nice lies, too.”
If I go along with her (as we used to say back home), if I smile (as I do at her), then it is as if we were in the imagery produced by one skull.
She’s Nonie’s buddy. In erotic artfulness, the boy whispers, “No.”
“I’m a fake, Wiley,” she says. “I’m an old woman. If you’re thirsty, you learn to drink from a dirty fountain. I’ve learned to compromise . . . How about you?”
“I don’t know.”
Hers is a small breast. Her mouth is filled with absentmindedness . . . One hollow ballroom-cave breathes into another . . . I keep thinking I love her . . . I already know most of the time that I just like her some.
She says, “Pardon my dirty talk . . . Do you know a lot of girls as sensitive as you?”
I leaned as if into a white fire of memory of her as I felt toward her a while ago. Her face is tethered to her neck, to being shrewd and moody. She is a bit wild. There’s stuff in her to like.
“You get better and better,” she said, pulling away from a kiss. What she is saying is part of her line . . .
“Well, it’s simpler now . . .”
Her mouth is a bit raw. Her breath is short and quick. In her eyes is what seems to me to be her twenty-year-old completeness. I imagine a moral quality in her having lived that long. She says, “You’re sweet . . .”
“I don’t want to be sweet.” I ask her, “Do you play movies in your head when you kiss?”
“I haven’t led you on, have I? I’m sorry if I’ve been a pain . . .”
She’s not of the same social class as before . . . Boy, you really do get fooled . . . Maybe, in some sense, you don’t. Heat rises from her skin. She tickles my bare foot with hers. It is a complicated intelligence test here . . . In her nice self’s voice or whatever, she says in a certain dirty, really scary way, “I’m certainly making myself right at home . . .”
“Mmmm,” I say cautiously, wondering what the hell is going on . . .
“Your hospitality is real nice,” she said appreciatively but not sincerely. Then: “You aren’t talkative . . .”
She is, by virtue of her age in relation to me, somewhat. I cringe inwardly, frightened at how sincerity affects me sexually and what insincerity makes me feel . . . how cruel. Leonie is unphallic—and naïve—in some ways. Someone smarter and more experienced than I am and the leader for the moment isn’t perfectly smart or comprehensively more experienced but is a failed leader: Leonie . . .
In a fit of sane madness, I say in a certain lunatic tone: “You don’t know a lot about getting fucked, do you?”
Leonie bristles. She closes her legs on my hand, which was on her thigh. Her tissues moisten, though . . . An interest in sexual victory isn’t the same as sexual interest.
She says, “I liked you because I thought you were sensitive . . . But I was wrong . . . You’re insensitive . . . Oh you’re too much—you’re impossible . . . Never mind: I’m just an old woman . . .” Her breath, squeakingly-bassoish, is that of a good sport. She hasn’t a wide choice of men tonight . . . My breath is hoarse, too . . . She says, not exactly wearily, not exactly entirely the good self either, and in a fairly deft way that makes me stare at her: “You’re too big: it would matter—even though you’re a kid . . . I can’t take it inside me . . .”
I said, I exclaimed, with a terrible broken heart, maybe in a childish voice: I was out of control and I didn’t listen to myself or aim my voice: “That’s not FAIR . . .”
“It would matter . . . Isn’t this all right?”
“It’s all nothing, nothing, nothing . . . It’s all the same . . . It’s nothing.” I put my arm over my eyes.
She said, “You’re too young. Nonie would kill me.” She placed her hand on my cheek: “When you’re famous, w
ill you remember me? Be nice, okay?”
“I won’t be famous . . .” Then, when she stared off into air, I said, “There’s too much wrong with me . . . I don’t want to be famous: I want to get laid . . .”
“Hih . . .” An odd noise, maybe a grim laugh. “You’re not a bad boy—that’s awfully nice. Oh I have to give you a squee-eeze . . . You’re going to be hell on the ladies . . . Oh hi, there . . . I wish I had a brother like you.” Then, leaning back: “But you are spoiled . . . You’re so young and you’re spoiled already: Nonie’s right about you . . . Lord have mercy on us. Let’s close down the shop, okay?”
“Shit,” I muttered, and took one of her hands in both of mine . . . My head danced with hallucinations . . . Maybe with vanity—absurd, electrical. The tribunal thing of meaning for me hovers at its own madness of distance. Islanded and surrounded by one’s own breath, by one’s eyelashes, by one’s hair, among a plethora of distances . . . alone, anonymous, not widely loved, I hear her speak.
“Are you honest, Wiley?” Leonie asks.
“Hoo, hoo, hoo,” I say. Then: “More than you . . .” Then: “I’m honest sometimes.”
“Hoo, hoo, hoo,” Leonie says.
“Sometimes you have to be dishonest.” Spent-and-expended time is black-space-and-loss, a night shroud, a robe of created spaces of dreams in which you deal with the gleaming bludgeon of emotion . . . Nonie is here . . . She comes silently into the room this time. The kissed boy echoes in his crotch and butt the way a wooden vat echoes if you shout into it . . . from the embraces before. The echoes are tickling, prickled, ticking along. The heart seems to sweat now. The dashing and maddening clatter of one’s pulse: the whispery room.
Real light, not symbolic light: nighttime: electric light—the lamps in the room, powdery white light floating spikily in ovals on the ceiling, light reflections on skin, and on the china bases of table lamps, and on waxed and polished wood—and light floating on the fibers of the deep red Persian carpet. And the light of the mind and the light, shockingly, of eyes. Suburban privacy and the comparative silence of the neighborhood: the day and month: the state of one’s nerves—greed, a modern moment: memory in its motions eerily, merrily, plays in me a thing of the past—it is over now. Hallucinations and the pain of waiting are commonsense elements of love: understand me at your danger; we are the only survivors of the night so far. Oldish stuff, the hidden air is full of childhood sleep: suburban-amorous, nosy: poetry in a suburb is nuttiness—a boy’s sense of the situation, him and the two women: the most complicated imaginable forgiveness-love-and-sex: belated and informed: is that what it is to be redeemed?
Lit and ill-lit and unlit, semi-light, half-light, quarter-light, light as if borrowed from a fuller light and partly broken and smeared and smudged: the nerve-rending and ordinary shadows . . . The light and dark variations of the air: this tiny and unstable community of three: a sense of brownness and a breast freckle. Gradation, graduation, calibration—an idiocy about pain, me in my sister’s presence in this way . . . “What’s your favorite line of poetry?” Leonie asks although Nonie is there.
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me . . .”
“Aw . . .”
“Please . . .”
“You think I’m crazy?” That I would talk like this in front of Nonie.
“I certainly do,” Leonie said in a flirty way.
Nonie is smoking.
“Think of w-o-u-l-d spelled w-o-o-d—would that be crazy or not?”
“You’re not making sense . . .”
“Mmmm,” Nonie says.
I blush and say, “Well, so what? I am strong for my size.”
“You—you aren’t making sense.”
Clear Thought and PURE DELIGHT . . . time—and ordinary romantic sexual thought, an unbothered, burning speed, inept, interruptible thoughtlight, curled, blackish . . .
“Hey there,” Nonie says, “ain’t we got fun? ARE WE HAPPY?” (A famous bandleader used to say that back then.) “You two just flying along? Well, any wood will bum in an oven.”
“Nonie, you’re no help . . .”
“You know about garbage? Garbage ends as garbage . . . You know what garbage is?” Bureaucrat’s tautologies—the wit of a friendly bureaucrat’s affectionate tautology.
“Coffee grounds, old newspapers, orange peels . . .”
“Oh that’s very funny . . . You are a child,” Nonie says. To Leonie: “He’s a nice kid if you like baby billy goats . . . He’ll be buried with the garbage . . . Be careful: he’s the devil . . .” She is strong-speeched . . . In a woman that is like a man’s having a strong back.
Then Leonie says to me, “Oooh, move your arm—the hairs on it tickle me.” Then: “Arf, arf . . . It’s a dog’s life.”
“You’ll never take Bob Hope’s place—you’re just not a national laugh riot,” Nonie said to her.
I said to Leonie, “I’m in the category of Everyone-and-HER-brother.” Leonie looked blank.
Nonie said, “I think very little of puns.”
“God loves his garbage,” I say to Nonie. “That wasn’t a pun, Slowpoke.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about . . . I never know what you’re talking about. Bad feelings are a luxury I don’t let myself have.” The untranslatable tangents of ego in Nonie’s eyes are a stirrable murk, a sociable mud, a shallows subject to what I do—smile, say.
Nonie’s authoritative and strange office voice, grubby with tension, with the absence of real-life courtesies in it, says to me, “See, I told you, you have to like a woman if she goes after you. Learn it now, Little Boy Wonder . . . But no man can protect himself . . . Women are too smart for men: learn it now,” she said scornfully, “Wileykins . . .”
“I HATE this war,” Leonie says.
“I do, too,” Nonie says, shaking her head as if in sadness.
The utterly motionful reality, the most complex medium of a glowing lumber in a rapids—or lumber falling off a lumber truck—an accidental actuality—or the clapping wings of geese—or of a pulse—fate here—Nonie crosses her legs and straightens her bathrobe . . . And a boy partly rebuttoning his shirt . . .
“He has a nice profile,” Leonie says to Nonie.
Is life evil? Is life evil and sweet? The soul’s smell is what? A quality of attraction—as if to moths? A dark-and-light sexual or social murmur or whisper, can the bones and look—the mood—of a face do that? The ordinary is on fire . . . We are mad tonight . . . However, she is present in her own moments. A sheen of watery and powerful reflections. I sit there, breathing a little loudly.
Nonie says, “He doesn’t act like a normal person.” Normill purrrsinnnnnn. “He ought to be put away—he’s disgusting! Ha-ha . . .” A bureaucrat-sister’s joke. It is a locally sophisticated face she has at this moment. The robe, her hair, her look . . . She says, “The awful ones are easy to love but hard to live with—ask me, I know . . . I know . . . Who knows it better?” Then: “I don’t like to think about myself.” Nonie said, “Have you been a good boy?”
I suddenly start in imitating Lila, my mother, in a way: “What is the point of letting people laugh at you? It makes good sense to know how to be funny, but only a fool thinks that’s all there is to it . . . Be funny if you want—but know what you’re doing—be careful about what you really want—there are other ways to skin a cat—there are always other ways. Being popular isn’t what people think it is.” Then: “I have the anger of The Beauty of the Family . . . Ha-ha . . . I’ve had to learn how to take a joke . . . ha-ha . . . Take a leaf from my book—learn to laugh at yourself. A lot of it when people pick on you is that people want to get close to you. Anyone can be bought but some of us are too inexpensive—I was never someone you could pull my pigtail—I was always too proud to live but I lived. I was someone people were jealous of—go ahead, you want people to think you had a bad person for a mother. Wiley, you have to stop saying YOU-KNOW-WHAT-I-MEAN all the time . . .”
Nonie said, “I don’t
want you ever to imitate me . . .”
“Then be nice to me.”
“He’s not so big in the shoulders,” Nonie said to Leonie.
“He’s not so big in the shoulders,” I said, two-edgedly, dismissively and thoughtfully. Then I said, looking at the pretty oval, clunkily made-up, of my sister’s face: “No-no: OW AND HOW . . .”
She threw her lighter at me. Then a slipper.
I said, “She offers feud for fought . . . It would be better to say feud for thought . . . I’m not a pawn,” I said to her.
“Goddamned little know-it-all,” she said. Nonie in her klutzy bathrobe . . . ungirdled . . .
“Are you getting fat?” I ask her. I said to Leonie, “She never forgets . . . not one little-bitty eentsy tiny teeny bit . . .”
How much can someone like her forgive or forget?
Being a boy, you live as a spy and liar. Among menaces.
“He’s like this all the time,” Nonie said. “What can you do? He’s like a machine. He’s just a robot . . . You can’t do anything to him.”
“I think he’s nice,” Leonie said.
I say, “Am I oily, oily, oxen free?”
Leonie said, “We might let you live . . . You want to leave home, you can come live with me—I’m a lousy cook and you have to do the cleaning but you’d be welcome. You won’t like it, but there’s space for you.”
Nonie said to me, “I need a fresh pack of cigs—can you take a hint? Don’t be the sort of fool who always has to have everything clear.” To Leonie, Nonie says, “Doesn’t he have the damnedest attitude? He has a damned funny attitude . . . Do me a favor, Wiley, and keep your mouth shut some of the time.”
“What a joke . . . This is all a joke . . . That’s all it is—a joke.”
Nonie said, “Just be human and it’ll be okay. I hate this war. It’s all so awful. I hate Hitler . . . I wish I had a good brother—I know a lot of girls who have brothers they can be proud of . . . People are just people,” she said, looking at me.
“I don’t understand—what is the war for? What are the laws about . . . ?”
“Oh Wiley,” Leonie said wearily.
The Runaway Soul Page 87