I say to Leonie, “I don’t understand. I really don’t. All the meaning of civilization is that we can’t say we’re all good people here—aren’t we?”
“No one’s good—they’re just courting you. A lot of people are afraid,” Nonie said.
I had a posture of listening, almost an air of complicity—that complicity of comprehension of long familiarity—or of the truth of something.
I say to the voices in my head, Silence in the courtroom: monkey wants to speak . . . Then, for no reason clear to me, I say it out loud, “Silence in the courtroom: monkey wants to speak . . .”
Nonie said, “This is enough; I’ve had enough from a smart aleck. It’s cruel to make a tired civil-service rank three listen to a baby’s bull.”
Leonie said to me, “Be nice.” Then: “I’m not tired.” It took me a while to realize she meant she’d stay up after Nonie went to bed. She said to Nonie, “He’s impossible but he has bedroom eyes . . . I think I like your pest of a brother, Nonie.”
“Life, life, life,” I say, imitating everyone—sort of. I say, “We’re not flirty—we’re enemies.”
Nonie says, “You think you have a mind of your own but what it is is you’re crazy . . . I’m going to the kitchen: anyone want a glass of milk and a graham cracker?”
“A Happy Ending . . . A Certain Joy on a Quiet Occasion for Chosen Protagonists . . . Nonie leaves the room,” I say to Leonie. “What now? Do I get to choose?”
“Say something fancy. Let me hear how you talk . . .”
“The ghost machine wants you, gobble, gobble, gobble . . . Bits of fate for the geese subdue the sense of wartime alarm. Avoid the ancient forms of wishes.”
“Does that mean anything? You didn’t make that up.”
Nonie reenters the room. “Here comes the milkman . . .”
Leonie says to Nonie, “I feel so old in relation to him.”
“Well, I’m not old,” Nonie says. “He doesn’t deserve special treatment for being young. You could lift my morale if you treated him with a little caution.”
“I’m a caution . . .”
Leonie blinks. “Well, I’m not in the middle . . . I’m a neutral party.”
On Nonie’s earnestly pretty face—at this moment—contempt flickers, and then is quickly held back. “Isn’t he funny-looking? He’s all legs.” She said it in her chirping voice, the legs-tied-together, cloud-of-small-birds, fixed-in-tone voice—an underdog. She is tired . . .
“Well, hi,” Leonie says—guiltily—to me. Peacemaker—sexy Leonie. “Hi, hi, hi,” Leonie says a little acidly, charmingly, smartly-nervously bossy.
“Hi,” I say. Hu(h)-eye . . .
In a sudden as-if-cawing silence—a drama of some sort is in it—Nonie’s careless, to-hell-with-things look—a look of knowingness—is squelching and arrogant. I am the parvenu omniscience in her world, a small example of junior observation.
It is soon after childhood for me.
My sister: I’ve known her all along.
Leonie’s Fiancé
I know about him . . . When I kiss her, I kiss stuff from him in her—stuff about being a young man in combat. His hairy chest—I know it approximately, not in its singularity, in how she reacts to me being hairless. His solitude, his silliness, his horrors . . . His kinds of response to her and how she, in turn, responds and feels lousy or great, like a great person . . . I don’t know . . . How can you get near someone without getting the shadowy stuff of a lot of other people and interrupting nearly everything. It’s like becoming a historical figure in the world, isn’t it, but it’s in someone’s life . . . I’m an orphan; and, in a way, I’m clearer, clearer-outlined, less rooted than most men, and a lot more like a bandit you might meet in a woods; but if you come near me, you come near my history . . . I can see where it would be advisable to lie about one’s history in order to think certain things of oneself—things about, oh, the absence of evil or why one should shut up.
I know this stuff viscerally and not in words. But later in one’s life, one might transfer this knowledge of the viscera to the strings-in-the-labyrinth mind and then, slowly, into the words of a given era, of a given profession . . . What one knows . . .
And you might be teased by the omissiveness in that stuff, by the jiggy-jogging of memory itself you might want to make sense of something; and you start to make fictional constructions—things that never happened, people you never knew—and they interfere, interrupt things that go on in language—or so to speak—and come near other histories; and sometimes they seem true and sometimes they don’t.
I say now that what I felt in her as well as what she was partly was him—you educate yourself, you are educated by other people—and gray-mooded and ruthless (in a girl’s way); one has to shift that only some to imagine him in his perpetual male strategy, man at rest and on leave, a fighting man at play so to speak, and scared in the world and somewhat obedient—how strange he is to her!
And his sense of how strange he is, his control over his emotions—incomplete but complete enough for him to fly and go into combat—him sweatily befouled with feelings and wanting to live, him fighting and maybe beyond comfort and capable only of distractions—the chemical electricity states of those things—he is aware: and he kills and remembers . . . How strange the realities of life are . . . How unhappy he is . . . That exists in her, contagion, spillage, stain, echoes imprinting,—like me and Nonie. Her defiant sense of independence—the mix of blasphemy and faith—the grubby and yet almost sublime inconsistencies bordering on loony incoherence—her defiant sense of sin and of herself and of you . . .
The hidden man is realer in my view than I am. In his duties, in his life, he is sternly unclean—he is not everyone, not a general male, although I tend to feel it (him, his presence in her, in me through my episodes with Leonie) that way. I know I’m not him and, still, I am him in part. I bet he has a repertoire of phrases—an armament . . . I bet . . . Fuck ’em, luck ’em all, punch ’em, pinch ’em, pitch ’em into jail, Pardon-me, make way for little boy Death . . . Now you die, you fucker . . . as a real statement in combat and as a joke. And so on . . .
A lot of life consists of paying-no-attention even while you pay some . . . The self as like a cast stone dancing from area to area of a lake . . . but not really. You turn into an I-spy, a peekaboo, an I-will-learn . . .
Fighting a war means everyone is infected one way or another. I can’t see this guy as a separate person but I am stained by him, and in wanting to get along with Leonie, I suppose I vaguely imitate the ghostly presence of him in her; and, so, I am older than I was earlier in the evening.
At this point, Leonie and I have smeared faces and nervously guilty-and-guiltless attitudes . . .
Nonie—a threatening but acceptable soul—I am better than she is: it is important to me that this is somewhat so: isn’t this important to me? Embarrassment and charity—Nonie is trying to live, of course . . . I get a sense of a real moment in memory when what is going on seems crazily guessed at by the figures in the scene, even while it is partly clear that being assured—like someone in a book or in a movie—the thing of being absolutely certain is nice—or horrible—the way it works in reality. The body’s sense of things—the guessed-at in actual time in an immediate stillness of the mind blinking away from watchfulness and recapitulating—or calculating—the moment—is of embarrassed and charitable or hardened and berserker herohood . . . “Well, what happened—or shouldn’t I ask? What’s been going on, the two of you . . .” Nonie asks.
“Nonie is impressed by stuff in ads. You can scare her by saying we had a perfectly good time—like in an ad. Or in a musical show.”
Happiness is a frightened obsession with her, although maybe what she maybe likes best in people as an emotion reflecting her reality: a frightened obsession in them toward her forming a kind of steel web like that stuff in suspension bridges. She is practical about how people act; and when I said that thing, her face got odd: she was thinking about th
e reality of me and Leonie, not as a taunt or as a sad exposé, but just as that: a reality . . . If she fails with you, to get that frightened obsession in you with what she’ll say and do next and with what she feels, how can she be a boss in her office or a mother and run a household? You laugh about this—as you might at a creepy ad—and you can feel her as being raw and cold in temperament, but she is also hot and goaded—in the end it is the compounded complexity of stuff with her for me that drives me away from her. I am not as a narrator necessarily an honorable or discreet judge of character—I do what I can in the tribunal of prose narrative, but my voice is not without elements of hers and of elements inherently opposed to hers in it . . .
Just so, I hear elements of Nonie in what Leonie says and I see elements of her in what Leonie does—not just imitation but human overlap.
It is partly a matter of the blessing who is listened to.
Nonie was the hand of The Absolute for me—this was a casual idolatry and not a matter of making her into an emblem, although it meant that when I thought about her, part of what thought ascribed to her—like giving an x or a y a mathematical quantity or a real-world or classic reality—was emblematic . . .
I mean the emblematic thing called up a memory of Nonie and a memory of Nonie called up a certain opinion of reality, of the universe. Some of what she is is in everyone. Nonie believes in God frantically at times. Some people love her. Love tends to be an off-and-on-again thing: “Oh shut up: you talk like a boy . . . Shut up and make a song out of it.” Her motions are gooselike—in flight or waddling—the movements of her mind and of her emotions. I think she stinks of staleness . . . because she loves systems and methods so much: God is what wins . . . She has all these triumphant methods, you know . . . I want to leave this house and her, and have since I was ten years old. But maybe not purely. I want to love and embrace her and in so doing accept the world and myself and my life and the war and the deaths of my parents. A cage fits over her but leaves her weeping head free, and I want to enter that cage with her and I want to kiss her weeping head but I am afraid and sickened and I am tired: I am fearful—like the pilot. In frightened hatred, she comes alive a little—that is when she comes alive and feels her own excellence—her own adequacy. What she is determines my politics. I said to Lila: You want me to throw my life away for her the way you did?
Don’t do this to me, Wiley. Don’t ever speak of these things to me—or to other people: promise me . . .
Nonie is saying, “What a person is matters . . . You should get some manners, oh Brother Mine.”
“Thank you, Nonie . . . That explains the world . . .”
“Oh, leave me alone—you’re no fun. You’re too big for your britches.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“You think too well of yourself—do me a favor and don’t answer any more questions until I ask you.”
“I don’t take orders from you, in case you hadn’t noticed . . .”
Nonie, Lila’s daughter, says: “You’ve ruined your face—you look like something the cat dragged in—ha-ha: you’ve been thinking again . . . Fix the scarf: you’re ruining it . . .”
I listen to her with a sort of wildness. I risk comprehending all sorts of things—up to a point.
It actually is quite a risk.
Nonie says—gently—” I hope the way you are turns out well for you, I really do . . .”
“If I’m worthless, don’t ever ask me to help you,” I say coldly—angrily—justice-mad.
“Oh you’re logical, aren’t you? Well, you fool a lot of people, Wiley, but you don’t fool me. I’m practical . . .”
“You’re civil-service three . . .”
She sighed: “He likes everyone more than he likes me. There isn’t anything I can do about it . . .”
I can’t establish the value of anything with Nonie except through the most strenuous imaginable warfare. My experience of language—of truces during the unfolding of sentences, the thing of being a herald under a flag of truce—is worthless. My mother has said that if a stranger was struck by gunfire in front of me, I would rescue him—or her—and not Nonie. I have talked about this some (incoherently) with boys my age—and with Lila: But what is she worth? Goddamn, Momma, look what she manages to cost ME. And Lila said, DON’T talk like that! Have a heart when you talk! It’s like you’re hitting me with a club when you talk like that. She’s my child . . . Like her for my sake . . . Please . . . I haven’t been a good mother: help me, Wiley. I feel terrible . . . Help me die and feel I was all right in the end . . . Tell me you’ll stand by her—family is family . . .
The hell it is. The fuck it is. You don’t want to live because of her and you said you would never die for Nonie and—
No one means everything they say, Wiley.
What do they mean, then? I don’t like her . . .
Be fair to her . . .
That won’t work out in her favor.
Oh my God, what sort of person are you? You share many things with her, Wiley . . .
Not enough, Momma, she lies—Momma, there would be no problem if she was halfway fair to me . . . I can’t afford her . . .
YOU CAN . . .
I can’t . . .
A lot of people say you’re selfish, Wiley.
A lot of people say it of everyone.
You’re not the only who knows what the true story is—you should learn to make room for other people—people don’t have to be careful of your feelings all the time for them to have rights, Wiley, or to be worth a lot of kindness in the world . . .
But I have rights too . . .
I love you, Wiley . . . I.e., you have no rights compared to the rights of those I don’t love in this manner . . . You think I don’t know what Nonie’s like? She’s not a good sister—but don’t think about it—do this for me—you’ve been good to me . . .
She wants that dutiful part of me to continue after her death—I mean she wants it to be part of her estate. She liked having me to fool around with in the sense of dispensing my favors.
Well, the hell with it. Sure, Momma . . . okay . . . Whatever you say . . . And I will try . . . I won’t be like the bad brother in books that women write . . . But it won’t work . . . She’ll want to own me. She lies and steals . . . She would steal from Momma’s deathbed. And insulted Momma: which is why Momma had ordered her to be kept from the room. She never said good-bye to Nonie . . . She wouldn’t have her at her deathbed. Momma said, “I’m sorry but enough is enough.”
But she didn’t want me to say it . . . And, dying, Momma wanted to give orders . . . She wanted to be potent up to the last minute . . .
Nonie’ll manage it that I can’t afford her—you’ll see . . .
You have a trick, Wiley . . . You encourage people to go too far and be awful and then you walk out on them and leave them to stew in their own juices . . . She burst out into a deathbed gurgle, a laugh, kind of: You taking care of her will be no picnic for her, I CAN assure you . . .
When I was little, S.L. shouted at me more than once about Nonie, LOVE HER, DAMN YOU, LOVE HER! SHE’S YOUR SISTER!
I said more than once—when I was little—“I wish you’d put Nonie in a home.”
The gangling boy on the couch—the flaming, half-grown child—sees Nonie’s eyes as alive and secretive: she does not intend to be visible in the war between us . . . Look and look, you will never see her. In a sense, you mustn’t ever see her. “Oh, look-at-there . . . Mr. Good Guy, Mr. Tom Mix . . .”
I hate her—help me . . .
It’s just brother-and-sister stuff . . .
The boy’s memory is sporadic in its operation—it comes and goes and what it deals in are fragments, not of reality, but of long-ago opinions of what had taken place still earlier: it flies from hilltop to hilltop in that sense, imaginary hilltop to hilltop, across England, like the heliograph system in the days of Napoleon. The boy’s sense of now is based on a closed-off sense of evidence and opinion in a cabinet and behind a
closed door and now reduced to an odor so that his muscles, the fibers of his identity react. It, his reactions have to do with something like someone’s meaning him no harm . . . or someone’s meaning him well . . . or someone’s meaning him nothing good, I can assure you . . . And you never know how mild or how strong those feelings are . . .
I have at least fifteen feelings—twenty, thirty, a thousand . . . A bureaucrat is halfway a voyeur. By profession. I always more or less forgive her, whatever that means, up to a point. Sometimes when I am unhappy, my unhappiness binds me to her and some kinds of pain make me a star in regard to her wanting things from me. But I don’t want to be drawn into being in pain in order to be free of her importunities.
She knows I am useless, worthless for her when I am ill, and she doesn’t nurse me, she taunts me. I want you to die, she’s said. I think she means it. I don’t know if she has other feelings down the chutes and past the crossroads. It is not clear where she will wind up in attitude toward me, or, rather, I think it is clear and I don’t intend to test it. She is tied to wishing me harm.
And that wish will keep her afloat—or will sink her.
I had the sense that my eyelids were thickening into stone—do you ever get that? You come to a final opinion—not as in logic or as in geometry—but as in life: you close off a subject you dream about it even when you are awake and even when you are in its presence: you use an emblem of an emblem; someone real and emblematic for you like a mother or a sister or a girl you know becomes a flag . . . Not just momentarily but eternally now . . . that is, for a long campaign . . .
Disliking her, fearing her, protective toward her in a way, hating her underlyingly, loving her, I perhaps paralyzingly am the same way toward mostly everybody underneath all the chitchat, geegaws, and froufrou (my cousin Benjie . . .) as I am toward her. And perhaps I am this way toward much of what goes on in the world . . . The mood (of the soul) stretches and flaps its wings and squawks—or sings—as in an Irishman’s poem. But moral neutrality-cum-complicity—a complicitous appeasement—a negotiated affection . . . not quite a human acceptance, not quite a warmly felt charity . . . that defines her and her life and makes her unhappy enough and with such a profound implication of meaning that, see, it perhaps pushes her over some edge or other . . . You don’t really wish her well, Momma says. Not deep down. It was always a war between the two of you . . . Which one of you was worse I can’t say, I can’t begin to think about it. You’re a cold, mean player—no: it was the ghost of your mother [that] did it . . .
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