See, I have gone astray. Too much of my life is explained in Momma’s saying, Don’t you throw rocks at her, too; it won’t hurt you to have a heart for once where she’s concerned . . . It’s Nonie’s youth-plumaged lump of a brother . . . An undercurrent of the agonized semi-loony rapturous is in his youth at the moment, a wasp-mass of the unsettling foreignness of him—she cares about me in her hatred-and-love, in her cold passion of that, more than I care about her . . . Lila has said, That puts you in the wrong, Wiley . . . You’re too cold . . .
Her ghost is here: no, it is her body, her settled-on rump, the fated girl, the faded and altered and magically reworked potency. The silent creatures of feelings scamper in me—in the attic of the antic, Attic self . . . The silence of the winglike motions of sensation—of silent emotion—testify: The world is difficult to live in . . . The boy laughs and Nonie says, “Look at him: he does things for no good reason . . .”
“‘The empty laugh that bespeaks the vacant mind . . .”’
“Ask him if he likes to kiss . . . He’s just my long-lost heart’s desire is all”: this is Leonie mixing poetic-sounding stuff with a kind of moistly soft semi-peacemaking—semi-incoherently. She’s nice . . . Not entirely . . . Leonie is a fierce-mooded girl, humbly nervous, complicated—complicatedly many-humored, interesting-willed, unvirtuous . . . partly reliable . . .
“He read about kissing in a book,” Nonie says.
“That’s true,” I said.
Leonie smiles: my nerves flutter in hallucination—a howling hallucination actually, an elucidation of the nerves in a state of desire, in a flaring of sexual opinion untranslated into power . . . But not entirely impotent . . . The neurally lit-up boy . . . The breasts of the women and his own sexual self—a common matter of command and study—are areas of mood and of ignorance—are a class and gender matter—the boy’s mind defends itself with a sense of cunt, but the polemical thrust of that fades and becomes a real sense of the sensitively muscular, sensitively furred thing, fragile and garbage-y (in a way) and fastidious and the source of beauty and of truth as I know it . . .
Leave well enough alone . . . You’re just like everyone else, you want your own way, you want to be in the spotlight . . . Well, everyone wants it . . . I want it on me, too, Mr. Too-Big-for-His-Britches Wiley Silenowicz . . . Little Big-Shot Dream Romeo . . . Learn to like us and you’ll learn to live in the world. You’ll have a home just like everyone else—a home is not a bad thing to have . . .
I tremble a little. Nonie’s reality . . . the assault of comparison—the question how to act: an all-purpose, or omnibus, shame: it is a monkey velocity—I feel a kind of wonder, and shame, and distaste and disgust . . .
Nonie is as if rigorously calm among her purposes, her realisms—her pieties, her stonewall pieties . . .
You ruined her life, Wiley; it was an accident but you did it . . . [But] I [Lila] did the best I could . . .
Nonie does not feel her life has been ruined . . .
“Wiley,” Nonie says—with mocking, unjocular distaste . . . It is dreamlike. I often have bad dreams. I have died in her dreams—she has told me. In the real air I live still . . . She wants me to be tied to her and comprehensibly defeated—like a real man . . . We are enemies in real life . . . Not entirely—it is not an absolute thing. It is fairly steady, steady enough—she has enough character for that. That enmity has a certain recurrent poetry to it: She’s human, Lila says, and so are you . . . Well, I give up. I give up on both of you . . . I’m tired. You go figure it out on your own . . .
At the moment we are living in comparative peace. This is the most peaceful we’ve ever been . . . She bores me . . . Much of this stuff between me and her is in my voice . . . it is the posture of my neck . . . it shapes the expressions on my face . . .
She says, “I’m nervous tonight. Let me sit on your lap . . . Let me sit on your lap, Wiley . . .”
I think a bit. Then: “Okay . . .” Then: “But be nice. Let’s try to make things work: let’s show off for Leonie . . .”
Leonie has already begun to move, to make room on the couch, she so much wants the tone of things here to change . . . Everybody is creative one way or the other, Momma used to say. Nonie sat on my lap and leaned back, against me, in the curious silence of this act—Leonie and me watching: we are the audience—and then Nonie said, “I’m scared. Sometimes I wonder if I can manage . . . I don’t know . . .”
A true thing . . . Partly true . . . She spoke like this in front of me so rarely that I felt, and noted, the moment as important, and it was not ever one of the memories I forgot, even for a day. It always springs to mind at the thought or sound of the name Nonie . . . My life squeezed hers—and so did I, uninnocently. To speak hurts and exasperates her: “I don’t like to talk. Wiley’s the one who talks—he’s nothing but a talker . . . Leonie likes to talk: she barely gets her work done . . .” Nonie’s attitude toward love is governed in part by her “dislike” for it occurring in others. This is her pride . . . These feelings are unnamed, are dismissed Utopianly. I would have liked her to marry some guy who would want to help me in my life, with money, or if not money, then in spirit . . . She meant that she didn’t intend to let anyone help me go to school . . . This, of course, is a very selfish interpretation of what she is saying. From the point of view of Nonie’s squeezed soul, she is asking me to be reasonable—and to die to my own life . . .
Momma said with a sigh of a new boy Nonie was seeing: He meets Nonie’s requirements: He goes through hoops. He’s nothing special. He’s respectable. He has a mother problem: he’s all set for Nonie . . . I don’t know how she’s going to deal with a lifetime of it, how can anyone last in that kind of life for a lifetime . . .
I put my arms around her. “Are you really sad?” Is this genuine—you’re not trying to lead me around by the nose . . .
She said, “I’m scared of what it’s going to be like . . . If it’s really no good [down the road a pace, or a piece], can I count on you? Will you help me?”
“Sure,” I said. I didn’t mean it—except contingently. I was willing to mean it if she was nice to me . . .
“Can I?” she asked. “Say it . . .”
Go to hell, I thought. I mean, her body was rubbery and repellent to me but effectively sexual which I resented: the highly evolved antagonistic rule-i-ness in it, in her body, meant that she didn’t mean to be nice to me . . .
“Maybe,” I said. “Sure . . . I’ll see . . . Yes,” I said. A lie.
She wriggled her fairly big, hardish butt—on me—a girdled biggish thing . . .
She said with a little sigh: “I can manage you like Momma can.”
Leonie coughed—her smoker’s cough.
Nonie said in a mock-childish way to me—I think it was to me—“Give me a kiss.”
My body twisted in a Get-off-me way but I went, “Ha-ha-ha,” in a this-is-friendly way . . . In a democracy you’re not supposed to be appalled by other people . . . And I started scooting around to kiss her if she wanted.
On the cheek, I thought. She presented her mouth, though.
Lila said to me before she died, I never knew why you two hated each other so much. It must’ve been something I did . . . And: You could be patient with her—she’s not so different from everyone else . . . But flesh has a serious memory. A little humor would help you with her . . . Male humorous meanness? But her will, her wishes are unacceptable to my flesh. Lila, dying, said: Dying’s not so bad . . . I’ll be glad to get away from her myself . . . Oh, it’s terrible but what can you do—it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other if you ask me: if you have a life, you have to eat what’s on your plate . . . I won’t blame you if you drop her but if you can, do what you can for her . . .
Nonie says to Leonie, or to the air, I can’t quite see since Nonie is on my lap, “I wonder if a woman’s life is better if she’s a streetwalker . . . I’d like to go on the streets and be a STREETWALKER for a while and find out . . . I guess I’m not the type thou
gh . . . The thing about me is my parents always loved me. I’m normal: I know who I am. I had a happy childhood . . . I don’t know about you—I have always been happy . . . I’m sorry if you’re different from me . . . I’m sorry for you . . . Sometimes when people talk about unhappiness, I just don’t know what they’re talking about. I just feel sorry for them . . .”
I respect her as a fighter—I half respect her. I don’t know. She expects a regularity of response which is hardly more than an automatism but which she can count on and use. She moves in a dream of matchless freedom, her own really, but she is political . . .
“I wish what I had on everybody—I wish everybody could have what I have had—then the world would be a better place . . . I don’t know why everybody just can’t be honest and do an honest day’s work and be nice to people . . .”
(Lila said before she died, At least no one can say I didn’t give her her confidence . . . She’s confident, isn’t she? I did a good job with her in one respect at least . . .)
Nonie said, “I don’t have enough money; if I had enough money and position, I would have a perfect life . . . Ha-ha . . . I’m young, I’m pretty, I’m smart—even if I have to be the one to say so: I know how to live . . . I know how to have a good time . . . I’m lucky—I’m a lucky person . . . My parents taught me how to be happy . . . I’m a very special, very, very, very, very, very lucky person . . .”
I don’t think so. I think it is a tactic on her part to say so.
I say out loud, “I think we should all learn to think . . .”
“Oh he talks,” Nonie said, “but he never makes any sense . . .”
She has an absence of humility among her motions . . . I DON’T THINK NONIE’S MUCH GOOD.
Nonie, on my lap, says to Leonie, “I wish I had his eyelashes . . . He’s selfish but he has nice eyelashes . . .” Then: “He’s selfish, he’s not so smart. He does everything by the numbers. He has to memorize how to pee or he can’t go to the bathroom . . . He’s too spoiled—the air force would straighten him out fast, in no time—whoo-hoo, wouldn’t that be something?”
“Are you interested in the air force?” Leonie asks me: her bold eyes have less boldness when Nonie is there, but something else is in place in her. She promises not to flinch. To endure what happens. You know that kind of promise of the reality of courage in a young woman? In a young woman’s face and manner?
Having seen it, I was, then, ever after, attracted by it whenever it appeared and only by it and never by anything else . . .
LIES! LIES! LIES! TRUTH! TRUTH! TRUTH!—that kind of exclamation, that kind of exclaimed would-be explanation rings silently in the air.
Leonie on the assumption that heroism is a good idea says to Nonie, she asks, “Should I move to a chair?”
Nonie says—knowing she is being odd—“I mind my own business: if you ask me, well, I’m not, I’m not a worrier . . . I’m finishing my cigarette and I’m going beddy-beddy . . .” Then, in a kind of good nature so shocking to me that I feel old and tough all at once and without warning, she grins—she really knew she was in the wrong: “I’ll leave you two lovebirds alone . . .”
No one says anything then. Then we see her flowing hair and body in her blue bathrobe from behind, Leonie and I, as we, Leonie and I, breathe in unison as we watch Nonie leave.
When Nonie is out of sight, down the back hallway, Leonie says, “She’s a great person—we became friends fast but we’re real friends . . .”
My eyes feel slightly blurred. I am always surprised by what people do, by what they say. I look down my body to see how close to me she is: it is nothing much, a sexual sight to me. I don’t know what she will do. The moment is like hiding in the shrubbery, a moment of seclusion, of spying, but I am partly what I am spying on. I am no good as a regular person; I sense Leonie more than I see her; and because of my youth, I sense her as if with my forehead and ears and hair—it’s all crazy—sensorily. When I touch her with my hands, it feels strange and crazy. She is patient, though . . . I have no worded vocabulary for any of this. I get an impression of Leonie as quickened amnesia, judge-y, getting ready to play the game here in a useful (and somewhat sensational) half-forgetfulness—an opinion of Nonie, then some contrary sexual stuff . . .
I turn to her with a kind of revealed sleepiness, an ache, an achy carelessness: a thing of having no past where she is concerned. I even say out loud—trying to be smart and attractive but it probably comes across as dumb—“Who am I?”
I feel a sort of new alertness in Leonie but one partly aimed against me, too, now—a who-are-you-after-all—I mean Nonie defines part of what human reality is. Perhaps because of what Nonie said about me—perhaps because of feeling a lot of things including that I hid some of myself—a lot of myself—from her, from Leonie before . . . Perhaps we’re at that place now in sexual whuh’sit of truth-mongering . . .
Leonie has become the oldest person in the room. A moment without Nonie in the room . . .
Leonie looked at me. In the real world, it is as if one were screen-tested for a kiss. I am innocent—I lower my eyelids . . .
Leonie says, “Don’t put ideas in my head.”
I am somewhat always in error. There is an undercurrent of enmity here, too, now . . . A home-y distrust of the world. A sexual regime in which under-the-surface things flick at me with their heat-steam . . . Lila used to advise me: You want something to happen with people? Let them make a fool of you . . . I am dutifully a fool—now—and I like her; I am interested—with slightly louder breath suddenly, listening to hidden but also really quite visible things if you look hard . . . my dutifulness reeks of free will.
Leonie thinks that she is maybe a champion in knowing what feelings are. She-uh-ahh-rub-a-dubs my chest using two fingers only. Then she uses her palm and leans toward me and says—playing by rules—“Women start by bidding high but they don’t intend to stick to it . . .”
“And men are bastards?” I murmur—youthfully asking . . .
The permissions in her face, her parted lips, had not included the permission to talk. She hadn’t expected me to talk. She braces herself now as if her bones were wing struts on biplanes.
The thing here is of us being like really drunk but undrunkenly—we are outside grown-up police-i-ness, of dirty policing . . . Of course, I don’t believe this is truly happening—I don’t want a scandal and I don’t trust Nonie’s effect on Leonie. It is like a removed echo.
“I give up. Who are you?” she says in a local way. “I want to know you . . . I know who you are . . .”
Her line. She went to Lutheran college for six months and switched to the University of Indiana for two more years and then she gave up and went to work for the army.
This is remarkable: us on the couch. In language, being young can be made to seem absolute, but in life it doesn’t seem absolute at all and isn’t: it’s reliable, though, as a biographical fact for a while, for an evening.
For instance, in my case, Leonie’s glance was veiled or muzzy in terms of superiority. What I am—physically—she isn’t overwhelmed—she likes me—so far, unofficially—but it is the other thing, my being, in some ways, not exactly young . . . Sweet wasn’t a term of sexual praise. It was supposed to be lousy—spineless. But a trenchant sweetness is in Leonie . . . The honied whatevers of an ear-kiss—I tongue the whorls of her ear . . . I say, “May I?” A lawn moment but wild like a moment in a dream, limitless and imprisoned anyway.
She bears it and then moves and says, “No . . . I hate that.” Like Nonie, but with Leonie I understand it is because I am in some ways amateurishly, and with juvenility, formidable.
She shakes her head to clear it of the tickle.
She says an unpolicing-policing thing of “I don’t want us to hate each other . . .”
I say, “I’m not trying to get us into trouble . . .”
She gazes at me until I move my head so near hers that she closes her eyes. Then I kiss the frail curve of her eyelid and the small bristli
ng flutter of her unmade-up and unsoft eyelashes. A precocious and privileged use of her face.
She stirringly withdraws her presence . . . A clattering and flattered and maybe nervous loudness of breath in me means I have no idea of her degree of amusement as I persist. The flutter of her eyelids, the eyelashes, the quirk of her lips: a short way of saying that we don’t deal in real approval.
In the motion of the moment, courtesy and co-conspiracy and a degree of specific wit in each of us became the felt shock of courtship collusion: a dirty approval with possibilities of sudden absolution if it widens into devotion, say, or some sort of love, not any sort of love, though. It is incessantly uninnocent and yet romantic: one is asking nothing: one is expressing a hope . . . You don’t have to go on. Or be practical.
When a thing has no price, it has a chance to be taken as priceless—so Lila told me . . . The Diamond as Big as the Sky . . . Clear but stylized megalomania and greed in this matter, the amusement quotient of that, well, no one is being RESCUED. I get up on one knee on the couch, then—as a joke sort of—on both knees—a somewhat spaghettilike boy—and I dive, or keel over, forward onto her, boylike—but not heavily, not asking for major patience in her. She jerks—and braces herself again. I find her mouth. The other tongue of mine, the tonguelike meat-staff, still pantsed, is against her side, not squirmingly but tickingly—involuntarily so, complimenting her (except I am young . . .). Stupid, nearly blissful, crude pantomime . . . This echoes from body to body, but I don’t know what sounds the echoes have in her. And her hands and arms go partway haywire, sexily-sweetly (i.e., far down the hierarchy of strongly sexual responses), petting me, patting me. She says, into my mouth, “Ha-ha.” Then she grunts and moves away from me and then back again. Leonie strokes the back of my head with electric worms, skinny fingers . . . She says in a pause, “You’re so crazy.” She says it sweetly, abandonedly, submissively to life and whatnot, and rulingly . . .
The Runaway Soul Page 89