In a fifteen-year-old way, I feel at home. We’re lollygagging along, wasting time mostly. I am set about inside, all around the chest cavity, with bits of broken music. In a way, for me, it is as if we were inside a wheel of music—cacophonous and loud off and on—a neural and trenchant sweetness almost the same as harshness, the weird toughness of the grammar of what I recognize as a kind of ruthlessness in the procedures of orgasm. Inexplicable and inexpressible principles, uncataloguable, in the category of without-sacrament: standing around: this is in me, the wobbly sexual plane of discourse of that. She kisses in a way that shows she likes me still, even while the question exists of Do-I-like-to-kiss-this-way? Do I like to kiss her? An older woman? Actually I don’t much; it is a substitute, sloppy and not purely anything. That’s my sexual opinion . . . I am a stupid boy whom novelty blinds and caresses. Everything is blurred and fresh, stupid and frustrating—but it is new.
“Sure,” I say, extending to myself no credit for youth but attempting to use it with her. I can feel in her the interest and tie and imprint of the real man, as I said. I mean, the masculine stuff that is not me. “Are you an expert in what is crazy? I’m not,” I said.
“Me neither,” Leonie said in a kind of madness of complicated meaning in the light of the reality. She says: “You have clean lips—no stubble . . .”
“You too,” I say, madly grinning.
I half know her social caste. She isn’t social . . . I can smell it that her dad’s partly a crook: it’s that sort of moniedness that she comes from. The girl has her breasts against me and, well, I’m close to her dad, her boyfriend, her boyfriend-before-last—there’s a kind of stink of other men in a woman that I mostly ignore. I don’t want to know those men through her . . .
The good wicked stink of real life embracings—I am half mad with the flattery of it. And, true to my type, am somewhat sickened.
“Is this real?” she asks—a line. It’s okay.
“Let’s see,” I say, kissing her harder—not with skill. I ask, “IS THIS REAL?” The kiss—blindingly—was not skillful—but it was blinding. “Let’s see how we kiss,” I persist, guessing wrong. “Ha-ha,” I say. The sheer electric wash of the sea of airy meaning of the justice and reward . . . Justice is reward, and without reward the animal will die of sexual permission, hers toward me because of how Nonie was . . . The boyish-lipped, driving, diving clumsiness of my kissing . . . The intimacy of a head near one’s own is like the lights and doorway of a house. The lights and doorway that my kissing presence is, the large, oppressive head of the clumsy kisser, the spaceship-acropolis of the mind, the true sting in an actual moment of candles of sensation, stilled flesh and god-beams, a crazedness . . . the closeness in the sudden jags and jigs and jogs of the kiss mean one will not wake from this event ever: it will be part of my continuing character in a large way . . . This will be partly the example of the tremendous importance of consolatory presence. The specific moment, the real moment, is terrifying and outlines no generality except a biological finality unless you exile yourself from the moment while you are in it . . . I did not ever want to believe in God. I did not want to be a good person . . . The bones of her face and the hair of her head, the moment forms an isthmus thing, with winds and seas on either side. Me, I am peninsular. A committee of selves with an extremity of purpose. An ambition . . .
She is careful and giddy both—an oddly compounded style—sort of femininely cruel by means of a certain daring in her, cruel toward the obvious fragility of the animal in her and in me. We could have been thrown into being civilized—this was in parts of the episodes in her kissing.
She issues a mutual, anti-parental dare, tender, sloppy, and appalled—not exactly sweet—and then she takes it back: fear makes her like a parent. Like a goody-goody in regard to the seas, the dignity and storminess, and the wallow of sexual stuff—well, this is so for her with me, well, that time, in those minutes.
I have half an idea what to do in response; I have an idea of a harshly mannerly assertion while being overwhelmed—do you know? I got the idea of it from books and from watching football. I can’t say I ever executed it even in pretend . . . I have a sense of a broken heart mostly—because I am untrained and not well armed—but I am still glad that this stuff is happening. Memories afterward change stuff: books really are mostly about memories afterward and not about what happened so much—they just pretend to that—but they are made of events changed for the sake of the convenience of someone now, for the convenience of memory and in order to have some halfway convincing sense of success. Or it’s for apology maybe. It takes nerve to go near real moments—are other people like that or is it just me?—the feel of the air; the nearness of her lips: my blank, maybe blankly vile desires. I was so young. I wasn’t certain what I was excluding among my desires in my wish to be sane. Leonie offers a partnering sense to this. She is, by my notions (back then), peculiarly free of guilt—she is escaping it moment by moment—a feminine blasphemy, perhaps. An audacity—this is part of how she is interesting sexually. Her being interesting to me sexually is all tilted and propped up on what has already happened and it is temporary and changeable. She is not afraid of me—of what might happen . . . She really is pretty interesting sexually. If the idea of charming means kind of strugglingly half-magical, partly logical wit, and whatever, then Leonie was really charming sexually. She is genuinely not broken, or not yet; and she is more grim than sad, but sensibly sad—things-being-what-they-are—whereas my state is absurd-high-pitched, high-flown—kind of horrified and trapped-in-quicksand, guilty, exasperatedly grief-stricken, too happy, a lot of too things . . . I know Leonie almost in the terrible way of knowing someone in actuality in the huge scale and sensual clarities and heat of regard and of ignorance and of innocence in childhood, but I know her sexually. Still, it is like in childhood when you know someone (for your purposes) entirely and at once from the way they smell and from the feel of their hands: you know the merit of their touch, so you know them. You know them from how their clothes are ironed—that stiffness: this isn’t sensible; it is more sensible than just being sensible—this acting on the immediate evidence of nerves. I know her from her lips and from the texture of the skin and I know the men she has known. Really.
Immense, intense, frightening, partly unthwarted, partly unfailed intimacy, early intimacy even now, and the end of loneliness (when it still is loneliness contingently) is a sort of death—a dirty death, you bite the dust, all that—and yet it is a good thing, grown-up, a good-bad thing—heartbreaking—you know? And I want it: it’s desirable. I hugged her in the silly-seeming dirtied, gritty-grotty grace of the business-deal-like trafficking just about entirely in present-tense stuff, in the rolling, skin-inflected happening moment, and doing it with some connivance at the appearance of ease—a dirty childhood ease: it is almost that.
But it is also childhood rectified. Is it a genetic swindle? Do I have to be clever, lucky, blessed to handle this, or can I just go ahead without thought?
“Wah, wah, wah,” I say out loud, stupidly, catching my breath; her eyes, then, look at me—my imitation of the infantile—her eyes hold a fogged-over thing of light in them: there are limits even in the momentary heat of our almost passionate agreement to do this stuff. Those limits, though, border, almost thrillingly, the almost fieldlike, oddly lit thing of we-are-about-to-kiss . . .
“Pwease keeisss me,” I say in baby talk.
Her eyes do loosen a bit at the baby talk.
So, our lips come together in the mutual oddity of something like being retarded or having regressed. They touch, a little moistly, chapped. We pause without parting from each other: we listen at our lips to each other’s stuff in the caves of our mouths. I think I hear a buzz of parts of her mind—like schoolchildren—or like the self decomposed in a tomb—the smell of death is here. I am oddly phallically well instructed in my own requirements, although specifically a fool as a Casanova that way. My feelings are an odd pressure, like a muscular pressure,
or clenching, and yet some quality in the feeling, like an edge (as if the feeling were a butterfly wing or a moth wing of a man-moth), rots the surfaces of the lips and into the rot her rot pours and oozes until my eyelids fly open and I look into her eyes and she is there . . . I don’t know who she is but this is an uncontingent end of loneliness—oddly sportive—and yet a fatality. It is like bleeding to death, but that is not what is happening. How odd the world is. I know her. How odd. How odd. How odd. I hold my mouth rottingly to hers and bleed to death emotionally into a ghoulishly after-everything-is-over sense of intimacy. But nothing is over. I intensely mind intimacy—and I wrap myself in it. It scares me. Revenant creatures walk then: the dead. Love and its griefs—you know that shit? The skulls, with the hair and features, of the two deadishly living kids are like lanterns half buried where some sort of breath of wind blows them in such a way that—if I may say this—it is as if the burning stuff inside each skull—sexual hallucination, sexual calculation, sexual wit, sexual selfishness, sexual stupidity, whatever—moves weirdly, dirtily, effectually, from skull to skull and bums each soul up in the magnetisms that arise from such motions.
Stormlike passages then arise in the mind, and one senses this is so in the other person’s mind . . . I must say it hurts to an extraordinary degree to care. And it is dirty . . . the drool and all. It does seem like vice, the chemicaled slop of echo and of taste—the taste of the other person, who is merely human, after all—and . . . It seems rigid unversatility is more informative than I would like.
In the slippery heat and feast of information (as if of a king) it is embarrassing—and wicked—and sportive—and effective (sometimes)—to say, “Suck my dick . . .”
I say it but it is, after all, really a question.
She likes to kiss; she likes to touch; but this is a little different—she pauses now to think. She doesn’t say yes or no: she says, “You have nice arms . . .”
“I’m sorry,” I say. I rushed the other and I intend to be unclear—poetic; sexual poetry is rougher and more political than I would have expected.
Actually, I’m crushed.
She says again, “You have nice arms,” but you know how saying something can be not saying it? By not responding to what I said, she says an unsaid thing more than forgivingly. The liking and dismissal are odd: she is not commanded or overwhelmed and she is not afraid of having things go badly; she is not afraid about losing me—she is not bullied; she enjoys my stupidity. Also, she doesn’t mind it—my not kissing well . . . Or my saying that thing I said.
But she also means, Why go on—you’re not good enough. You’re not someone with traits successful enough in the world for me to breed with . . . Or it’s something complicated like that.
So, I straighten up, kind of, and with my back off the couch, and my muscles all stretched and twisted in this posture, I do kiss her well—speakingly and kind of honestly—accepting the badness in things in general and my own bloodcurdling, wadded-up, cruddy sexual will and putting her in a special category.
But I don’t want her to think ill of me and just dally. I want and need the intimacy I mind. Now the earthen stench and the horror and ghosts I have and which show in intimacy, that interests her as an apartment or weird poem or stuff about menstruation might interest her.
Bringing my head near hers, my whole taut body nearing hers, eyes and crotch, skinny and taut torso—I can see this whole thing affects her in a favorable way. But I don’t know why. Is it all luck? Do I have grown-up character? Her breath quickens on my skin around my lips and in my nostrils. The silk of her femininity . . . I remember thinking with a kind of desperation that I probably liked men more than she did, as things. I didn’t intend a euphemism. The search, or reach, through her exotically to the private shadow of personally manly stuff (and of unmanly stuff)—this part may be over her head but I doubt it—and to distant men, that scared me—and seemed wrong—not exciting—but so did any sort of looking for her. I don’t want to be feminine. I am offered no safety here and no really acceptable naming of sexual stuff: I’m a boy and not all that eligible . . .
Anyway, I feel it, I am wronging a man . . . It matters who you wrong.
Tongues and breath. My skinny arms and hesitations—for her I am almost a version of her. My age, my body, my desires. She likes them in some way that is not like the way I like HER . . . I feel picked at, lightly bitten—it is like someone taking the stitches out of a football or a basketball with a cuticle scissors and stabbing me and slowly deflating me: not the erection but some myth about the sexual brouhaha. Inflation. Deflation. Humiliatingly (hallucinatorily) momentary . . . The assertive orphan is moving his hips against her . . . Does her body read me like a book? Does she?
I wasn’t following her lead, I realized glumly.
She said, “You’re wild . . .”
Her tone meant that I was “impossible . . . No one owns you,” which was something Ora said.
“That’s a compliment,” I say, hoping to be reassured it was a compliment, that, at last, I was normal . . .
Her eyes flash—sort of maybe lyingly—and she says, “Oh YES . . .”
Even so, I hate being judged. It burns and stings . . .
In the hollow spaces of the moment, though, despite the burning-shyness stuff and stinging stuff and what-all, the ripe outdoors thing of the permissiveness of a woman moves me until my motions in time, if I can say that, are happy without being at all like childhood . . . It is PERSONAL . . . Or whatever, this unsmiling, lightly sweaty happiness—it is as if a white searchlight was turned on inside me and illuminated my time on earth, my life, in this way, false stillness and time, anyway—a geography of it.
But it is a geography that is not sitting still.
This sucks at my balance so that I am a force right at the edge of being forceless in an ocean of off-again, on-again white light, illuminating what is essentially a matter of the tissues but which somehow affects the soul deeply. This is supposedly one of the major mysteries of life: I’ve read about it. And here it is. It is in me. And a version is in her. I laugh suffocatedly silently and her body brightens. Can I say these things? She may like sexual seriousness but she has her doubts about it, too. Sexuality is not necessarily amusing: it is not necessarily amusing in an amusing way. My body and my soul are suffocated in the convulsions of laughter and by a kind of stillness—I am an observer and a captain and an actor and a recruit—having a good time thrillingly and darkly while about to be sincere about life and death maybe.
Maybe I am already sincere. Maybe it’s already too late to pretend I’m not sincere. She feels maybe like a star—I am guessing. Her breath bends; it oozes; and then is boardlike and then supple. Seconds pass. Her body is bony, ribby, and strong—this way, that way. What am I going to do next? It’s not as if I wasn’t shocked to be doing this at all. I start to sweat. I am aware that nothing in my movements or in my breathing controls her—I am on sufferance unless I have scared her in some way. She is cheating on a hero.
It’s all choice here. It’s choice stuff: wicked.
God. I am shocked. I am juvenile. I slow down. I am as if frozen with stagefright. I am as if too honorable to go on. Wickedly, she takes over. Sighingly, she releases the imprisoned boy. She kisses me—with a lot of tongue, sloppily but speakingly—nobly and obscenely. It’s a little diagrammatic, but I am not about to look a gift kiss in the mouth . . . ha-ha. I am happy, excited, overexcited, desperate, despairing, aware that I am on trial—and I don’t give a damn . . . This is all partly in sequence and is partly an as-good-as-simultaneous meteoric arc of this stuff, harmonic or clashing simultaneity—pulse, breath, feelings, her moods—this is sexy for me but I distrust her and I try to mislead her about what is happening to me.
I don’t want to comment on my feelings to her, and I don’t want her to go on reconnaissance and see my real feelings.
She fools with me—here is further darkness, further light. I am aware from her smell that she feels this stuff.
You are played on. She intends a partial betrayal of everyone who is not here. That’s how I feel the compliment of sex in the withholding of tacit mocking. I have my hands on the halves of her behind. Is she going to fuck with a kid whether she wants to or not? She expects to laugh at me if I don’t overcome her—she’s a friend of Nonie’s . . . I don’t give a fuck if she laughs at me: she is sad and reasonable and she has a great body. I don’t know. I move my hand in her cleft behind and then I do it with my hand as a fist and then I do it—slide back and forth—touching her mostly with one finger . . . Then I just let my thumb ride on some of the curves of her buttocks while she considers the feelings . . . I feel alone, almost a deathly grown-upness of an irrevocable male rage at being alone . . . Male loneliness is not a joke. The erection, not in one of its states of final fullness, is semi-rigid fluff. The fooling around sets the warm fluff on restless and nervous muscular fire, kind of . . . Meanwhile, my emotional heat is like that of a stinking mattress . . .
I want to belong to the action but I can feel Leonie’s holding back in that no fucking is promised or is included in what is going on, if you know what I mean. Her tight abdomen, its front, the sense of the hollow in it, it’s private there.
But it is a moment of rare and mostly unspeakable interest to us . . . THIS SURPRISES BOTH OF US. THIS ISN’T HAPPENING IS IT? SHE IS RESENTFUL. And surprised. I feel it in her. I don’t want to be in love with her . . . The hallucinatory is a weird playground of the soul—I see that—I start to imagine pleasures . . . My guess is that sexually I was daring-and-lonely, a certain high-school type, a chump of a local variety.
The Runaway Soul Page 90