The cunt: smelly tepee, warm . . . You put your finger in . . . You goosh around . . . You pull your finger out . . . puritanically . . . out of the home of distraction. I prefer this to being with a boy but I am more scared here. I don’t want to love her but the erectile beauty of the moment and its blasphemously sacramental nature—horsing around in relation to Nonie—is a form of wakefulness more dreamlike—more attractive to the ego—than most things in my life. Men dream their lives. Leonie might discuss sexual stuff with Nonie—ah, Jesus . . . “Yah, yah, yah,” you whisper—stupid jokes in bed are sexy depending on your taste: “The Tour of Bauble,” the boy said, gripping, a little inanely, one of her breasts while moving himself against her leg.
She was quiet. Maybe she is phallically daydreaming. Who knows. Her mind flits, flies: then is here, it lies here. I say then: “I want to learn to fuck.”
She doesn’t answer but masturbatorily pumps at me, reducing my too great success with her—at my age—to a dry fuck. Still, a lovely gift. I buck back, lightly, self-consciously, then in a rhythm (partly rubbing) of as-if-sleeping presumptuousness . . . as if I were doing it in my sleep . . .
She said, “You have a nice throat: you don’t have an ugly Adam’s apple . . .” I swallow noisily foolishly. If she talks that much, this won’t become a fuck. She speaks in pretend mindlessness, supposed sleepiness, though.
She is a little in love with me—though—but not much, I guess.
She says, as if my posturing had shown what I was thinking, “I’m a little in love with you . . .”
It becomes a fact of a sort, not a secret. One has to move on. Someone phallically vain may be disgusting—or interesting.
“I’d kind of like to fuck . . .” Then: “Hey, I WANT TO FUCK . . .”
She didn’t say anything. I kissed her inconsolably, fiercely. She stiffened in unsubstantively relative ratio to the ferocity.
How many times in the course of a year do you give in? Does it have a religious aura, the giving in? Had there been a big scene in her life of force and argument and her being forced to give in?
Would she hope to be the victorious one? I guess so.
Her eyelids flutter. “Please don’t,” she says.
I get the creepy feeling that she sees ME morally. As I said, she loves me some . . . But without hope. I now spurn her love. With my face. With my hurt. Her inner eyes in this landscape recognize the brooding adolescent grief. It is grief: I can’t bear reality. I think, This is only necking . . . Villain-fool, the boy says, “Have it your way—you’re a guest . . .”
Handsome-eyed, sexually-forward Leonie pushed or moved my lips with hers until I kissed her back—a little—and then she let my lips nestle, or alight, or perch, on hers. And then her hardened lips parted slowly; and parchingly we breathed and touched at the mouth—and she licked slowly—I understood the terms—and limits—of her apology . . . I don’t lick—in a nestled way within some rule of it’s-less-pain-this-way . . . We spoke in this way into each other’s mouths . . . This stuff is from the flier—or from her brother: it is deep, sincere, tender, truly dirty stuff: Leonie wiggles and fits her midsection against my belly, against the head of the prick inside my clothes more than the shaft, and then she settles some of her legs’ weight along the underside of the erect shaft where a lot of feeling flutters and moves because of her movements. The sensation for me from the weight of her body of my being almost enclosed is as heavy as the weight of the water in a large river against me. Willful, insolent, and sad, I know this is the real sexual thing, a little stale but stalely magnificent and a gift with some holding back still but way over my head. On both sides, we see our limits . . . Oh, the mutual sadness . . . But you can’t argue that sex doesn’t matter—or that it doesn’t change you—it changes a lot of definitions—such as of the motions of the moments and of the self, of the selves . . . It would be a betrayal to do this easily. I suppose you could close yourself off. I never kissed this way again.
Betrayal? Oh, of physical closeness and privacies and intimacies with a mother, say, unless your mother was cold and careful, but of childhood, always, and of complaints . . . a betrayal of complaints. If one is truthful, one has few rights here. One is set free, as trash-shit; it’s too hard to talk about.
I start to buck, mostly just to be ugly in a restless urge to lessen the progressive weight of evidence and of instruction of The Moment, which has a certain tone hardly less emotionally serious than a kind of seeing what is likely to matter to one the rest of one’s life. A young man in pain—lyingly: truthfully—and Leonie—Madame Polygraph—and her listening and semi-acrobatic and surging and weighing-on-me body, and the inner body hollowly murmuring of truth, untruth, worth and unworth . . . This is awful. And it is interesting, too. Beauty of any sort has an immense kind of fleshiness and an even more immense shadow or conviction or burriness, it sticks to you, and the obscenity, the obscene beauty, the judgments, the holding back, the toying-with-infatuation—Do you love me at all, lover boy? And: Will you die for me or at least destroy your life for me, nice lady . . . I proceed, we proceed, alternately ignoring the beauty, going on, since that is what, in reality, you do. I am bucking, but now I am doing it openly in the light of the beauty—a kind of ugliness, if you can imagine it, half-dissolved, converted, illuminated, and half-resistant and willful—and trying to persuade the inner sight of hers to approve of me and to like this catchy mix of stuff and me, and to bend it, her inner vision, into that of a thrilled I-don’t-know-what—partner-audience, mother-sister giving in? Not thrilled by me exactly but by obscenity itself or by her wish to harm others—I can be fairly ruthless in a way—I wanted her thrilled by what was happening with me. That is too much to hope for. She is reasonably attentive—past the point of just being indulgent and not at a point of older-girl-storminess—or of a hooked boy, hooked on this stuff, either.
This part of us being together was done slowly with small sections of quietness. The avoidance of nightmare is our guide along with our proceeding in a kind of morality of curiosity—in the avoidance of nightmare, I repeat—blindly and with heat toward Let’s-go-over-the-edge—this is as if in stares and blinks—more than blinks, tightly closed eyes and then stares that aren’t regular, aren’t the regular kind from wakefulness but mostly a kind of social madness—loon-eyed, loony-eyed, a politeness in the madhouse—loosened and dirtily and in a way tentatively sexual—as if one was merely being logically mad. As if this stuff was always there. And one had stopped fighting to hide it and control it. And one wasn’t pushing it, either. Manliness, maleness, by permission, in a suspension of doubt, well, I am crossly on a stage, in a proscenium frame being looked at while I stroke her thighs, her belly. I am now proceeding in a style of half swindle, part antagonism, part wishful sexuality in relation to her morality, such as it is, and her judgment, and part love with a secret hidden inner joke in it of male ruthlessness and male tenderness—favoritism—indulgence—toward that considerable beauty which was her spirit here “in bed” and which was also that of her body—that body which was, in part, listening to me, inwardly and outwardly.
“It’s easy to get all fucked up,” she said. “Time out.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“No. I mean it. I need a time out . . .” She put her head back against the couch and coughed into her hand. “Am I the worst person you have ever known?”
“Yeah. Sure. No. Who knows?”
She semi-half-laughed, quarter-laughed, and tousled my hair—she kissed one of my eyelids. “You’re cute. Everything you think you are, well, just double it by four,” she said unmathematically. “You can make someone lose their head, Honey . . .” Then: “Honey Bear . . .”
“Really?”
“You don’t want to do that . . . I might scratch your eyes out,” she said, almost contentedly in regard to her madness of ferocities and to scenes hidden from me.
And she said it shamedly—dirtily—her eyelids fluttering, her lips oddly alive and inde
pendent in her face in regard to language—dirtily . . . “Go and read about it, you pretty little devil of a brain . . .”
“Dig it out of you?”
“Oh you can’t . . . My lips are sealed . . . It’s all so different with you . . .”
“You’re not afraid of me . . .”
She barely smiled. She moistened her lips. She said—her lips sticking, her enunciation sluggish—“No, that’s God’s honest truth, I am not afraid of you.”
Maybe I was a daydream, entirely a daydream . . . Maybe a daydream semi-horror from a radio play she’d heard. Or something. As an orphaned kid I was glad (and may be even arrogant) to have this evidence that I would not be left out of all these stories—certain sorts of sentimental comedy and certain so-called dramas (of those days) and certain sorts of dreams and wishes turned into silly actions as if in a silly play.
She leaned forward archingly—self-lovingly I see now—warm and so bleak: a rocky hotness: and Leonie’s eyes, as we hold each other and nuzzle—and only that—her eyes are old and stony and architectural with experience and practice—this is when they open, when she is present in them—her eyes are architectural structures of murk and light as a permissiveness not entirely true and as a sad gaiety, a somewhat giddy thing of forbiddenness. I think she intends to make up for this: expiate it. She is not finer than I am but she is more worthwhile at this moment—this is something Nonie wants me to admit about her, Nonie, and me. I tickle Leonie faintly, stroke her near her crotch—but I don’t really presume—then, in our lives, this moment is the only real one just now. I know from a residual tension in the long muscles of her thighs and hips and in a kind of cleanliness-toward-me atmosphere in her that going-all-the-way is real to her but is a counterfeit possibility toward me because she is loyal to various things and will have to atone if anything happens.
I mean I am really closed out and can go along for the ride—and try to change things—but it will cost too much. She might do it because I am of a higher social rank than she is—but then she’ll be screwing for the experience of the social rank—do you see? And I am pretty . . . which is useful up to this point but is a bore now . . . Or she might screw me because I am Nonie’s brother . . . I don’t know. If she decides to have a drink and to get really drunk, really truly family-shaming drunk, that might be a kind of usable, shameful, almost neutral fuck—both of us out of our skulls . . .
For me, to see into a moment, and to trust or half trust my judgment, is like when I let go and push myself to run so hard that I know I will pass out of my own control and enter on an appeal to grace in the darkness of will—grace of will if nothing else—grace and, ultimately, forgiveness for the thing of being ambitiously present in the universe, alive in terms of partly willed, partly inescapable motion—and out of control. She isn’t urging me to this or hinting welcomingly or being tricky. But she has, in part, a kind of trash-soul, in which she is “offering” me the madness of her realism.
I am learning about her—and a little about sex and about me from a limited point of view: SHE IS NONIE’S FRIEND. I don’t know that I want to be normal . . . I have a kind of destiny. If I live. Through the war. And the rest of it. She is maybe a quarter theoretically interested in a-man-like-me sexually in love with her, but she is not finally interested in me . . . If she is I don’t want to know it.
Chiefly, though, she can’t picture me. She is less well guarded than before: this is an intelligent and dangerously loony thing some women back home did—offer themselves as bait or lure. Of course, it is a compliment—but it is perhaps an ambush, a trap. The thing is, she is really likable and maybe okay and maybe not, but she is not good . . . She may be good to me. Or good at this stuff . . . I doubt both those things. She and I are approaching—as in an allegory—a poverty of the soul that would make us need each other—that would remove all trace of luxurious playfulness and swindling and setting traps from what we are doing in regard to each other now and would replace it with a reality of need that might erase conscious individuality—and moral judgment—for a while. You can twist your mind and ignite it so that it gives light of a sort in a world of loosened moral effects just beyond your knowledge, just out of the range of your usual sight, but who are you then? Half loosened, a quarter loosened? The same boy as before? An Impostor? To be sexually admired is real hell if you are troubled by a sense of truth, is sexually dull if it limits you and her, and it is a kind of heaven . . . One isn’t in love—or is, or is in love with one’s privileged whatever here. It is hateful, the mess of desire and some love. It gouges me. The half-light in the room in this moment of motion and of steamy necking and streamy feeling—and sensation—is part of a sighing air of the poetry of the time—leopards and emeralds and phonographs and cynicism and other shit: I am choked by her, by styles, by youth, by privilege, by sexual heat, by adolescent maundering. Truly emotions are part of an extraordinary realm of power, which is to say, love, which one, as with any other power, can avoid, can escape from, to some extent. I feel that I have found in this cocoonish closeness with her the evidence of my own sexual invalidity and my future validity—the thing and its boundary—and this is (maybe) a crushing weight of a kind of understanding of Lila and Nonie—of a maybe not exactly distant kinship . . .
At the same time, the physical possibility in one’s bodily reality—this does confer a truly eerie sense of happiness . . . of a kind.
“It’s too risky . . . You’re good at this,” Leonie says, defining me as out to get something—defining me as a force. She is breaking off and breathing but not pulling away from me any farther than necessary to suck in air—air heated by our skins. We are pressed so close we breathe our own heat. Gouged and garrotted and boyish in that—as in a game of volleyball inside the maybe airless gym in late winter—and as if looted—but I have some say—I know her. I know her (and stuff) crazedly: self-judgment and self-ridicule—well, the folly of the erect prick—and the cruelty and bitterness about gradations of sexual merit . . . Well, you didn’t get laid this time either, fuckface . . . And: Leonie is a real dirty ferret of a woman . . . A wolf-ferret-owl? One knows in one’s heart and mind, it depends on the moment, but one tries to be absolute and final. One knows genetically certain shit about this dirty stuff: I am acceptable to Leonie as breeding stock. The gradations of response in her don’t register her as a sexual star of my life or me as a movie lover or worldly gigolo or real Casanova or saint or whatever for her, but, nevertheless, a thing of flickering hairs and maddened muscles and (a wartime phrase) mad lips—she can say she had a thing for me . . . and I was a thing in her life . . . but what she does gives certain hopes of mine credence and defines certain pains (as in being a romantic [or a sexual] object: an adolescent daydream), as my being ungrateful and jealous of life, of nearly everyone in a kind of easiness of spiritual grace which is, axiomatically, a form of loving the world and respecting it . . . This is in conscious knowledge of Nonie but without knowledge of Nonie as emblematic of anything except certain human qualities and contemporary aspects of existence I would like not to be a party to. A sense of evil being inescapably present in anything imperfect, in everything terrestrial, my own feelings seem evil, whether they have a youthful grace of spirit in Leonie’s eyes or not. She looks and listens through various holes and through the vibrations of various thinnesses of skin and various animallike nerves and so on: it is not just possible, it is likely she will kill me (as in saying, You kill me, you really do, when it is true) by enforcing a law of loneliness on me again. I can tell she is kissing a pretty boy, a Romeo, a godforsaken trap for a sensible woman . . . (S.L. said those things.) She is kissing Nonie’s brother, a young imbecile, a bookish boy.
I say aloud to her: “A pretty boy, a Romeo, a godforsaken trap for a sensible woman . . . Nonie’s brother . . .” I was embarrassed and unembarrassed: a boasting kind of exhibitionism I saw with Leonie was to some extent basically sexual . . . a flaunting as part of an obscure contemporary ritual. “See my muscle,” I
said, flexing my arm. “It’s thin. See my other muscle,” I said, pointing. “It’s not so thin.”
My father, before he died, had flirted with me some. I had thought S.L. was joking . . . No, I hadn’t . . . I had believed him in a very diluted semi-childish way and had failed to understand much but had taken it in as information.
I had been afraid to be sensually amused, hopeful, stuff like that . . .
Leonie said, “You’re a terror . . . You’re not what Mother ordered.”
“You guessed it . . . You’re really big-time—you know that? My father tried sometimes to kiss me on the mouth . . .” She stares at me from close to my eyes. I stare back. “I know I scare people sometimes . . . I’m supposed to keep my mouth shut . . . People say they don’t know what I’m going to say next. Big deal. Then they get obnoxious, though—it’s competitive if you ask me.”
“Your father?”
“I made a big deal out of it but it wasn’t exactly a big deal,” I said bravely. “It was part of life.”
“Oh . . . Wiley . . .” My name didn’t exactly spring to her lips. She kissed me as if to erase the pain.
“There’s a lot of life I don’t want—I don’t want war or death or pain either. I’m a difficult BOY . . . The Greeks were crazy: you can’t know yourself.” Then I go way too far: “And my sexual clumsiness is an enticement—to me, too—almost a perverse virtue.”
Her eyes have a foxy peering like something in a pagan story—their architecture of murk-and-light is pagan—she is self-consciously-hiding-stuff-from-me . . . We stare at each other peeringly . . . She wriggled her mid-body on the new drawing-compass (and bludgeon) of the erection and she showed her teeth, devouring my self-possession, but I closed and pursed my lips—and touched her lips with one of my fingers to show it wasn’t working. Then, next, she moves her hand down there as if in great good humor . . . Ooh, oh, ah . . . “How does anybody live?” the boy says, squinting.
The Runaway Soul Page 91