The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  Well, we all die—is that an answer?

  No.

  I need a specific phallic meaning. I will trade you for it . . . I’m not sure she’s not a little sick with vertigo and resistant toward her own power. The license to live is not, in my experience, a promise of silent ease.

  I get a fix on us as a pair: I’m not sure she finds all this exciting so much as—idly alluring. “It’s not an even-steven kettle of fish,” I say. She cannot be bothered with that. I was in a boyish state as of being shattered—that sense of oneself sexually as grief-stricken and ragged and poverty-stricken while being contrarily rich and perhaps winged and light-struck and inordinately, superhumanly willed and yet, in the end, resigned. I feel my state as real and as something I will not escape from. It is factual—as is the structure of the loose mammary flesh of her breast and her bony hips and the taut flesh of the thigh and of her thigh muscle as I clumsily, earnestly caress her there. Feelings are part of her . . . Men are dry.

  I am barely breathing, I am pierced airlessly in my immersion in the medium of motionful saltiness—her victim.

  But, for me, isn’t it self-love that starts the progress toward orgasm?

  Now I am noisily breathing in the realities of too much kinship with actuality itself. Actuality is everywhere. Is time-riddled. Is humiliation, death, courage, and good sense. But nothing is marked with a contractual description of what it will do to you. I don’t like her specific rhythms but I don’t mean to be ungrateful. I’m not wild about the textures of her skin. If I weren’t an orphan, I’d back off now. One of the great resources of chastity is to compare and rate people sexually without knowing a lot about the matter—the real comparison tears you apart, really rends you, no shit. The difficulty of love is that love is, of course, earned, given, cruelly coerced—the animal thing—and is time-ridden as everything else so that the thing of being not-in-agony-for-a moment is agony anyway. I long for my own rhythms; I will nurse myself. No. I impose them by grabbing her hand and moving her hand on me . . .

  This sudden as-if-neat rearrangement of momentums changes everything.

  She goes along for a second or two and then halts. She leans back.

  “You’re a little doggy in the manger,” she says.

  “Sorry,” I said from within an inner spasm of quite real agony.

  She says, “You’re-a-dirty-book . . .”

  “SHUT UP!” I say. Then: “Sorry . . .”

  Thank God, she thinks I didn’t mean it.

  I took her into my arms. “I’m not someone who knows the right thing to do. Are you?” She nestled against me—the matter of rights—and of personal merit—is unstable when you’re in motion unless you’re an Alexander the Great type, all-conquering.

  “Don’t,” she whispered. “Please don’t . . .” She has the upper hand. I had been lifting her skirt and pulling at her underpants—I hadn’t only taken her in my arms: “Please don’t,” I whispered ironically as if, by saying it, I could erase her will—and find my way . . . I started to laugh, a minor jerky noise, kiddish enough or odd enough to scare her. She stared, thinking deeply: you know that state in a woman? In one you’re physically courting right at that instant? Testing and measuring and you don’t know what she’s saying to herself in the chief chambers of her mind: a field of summoned problems, wishes, images, freakish and private . . . like lying in the leaves.

  What is love to her? Death? I mean the real experience of it—an uncle dying of cancer, guys at an airfield, whatever . . . Motherhood? I know she knows about being young and competitive. I figure her ego isn’t much different from mine. Her degree of violence maybe is different.

  I started to laugh some more with less noise but in the uncontrolled manner of no speech but this shivering, half with sexual heat (a coldness) in a sexual situation, a sexual landscape. In a place, or in a story, afflicting and blessing me.

  “You aren’t going to fuck me,” I said.

  “It wouldn’t be a real fuck here.” In the apartment: she said it reasonably. “We’d just be carrying on . . . You’re weird . . . I like you.” Then, “I like you so much . . .”

  Then, abruptly, angrily—with huge regret—I loved her.

  I wrestled with it. I tried to get it out of me . . . Speech sounds stupid—it is stupid. It is risky to talk about anything you care about. Buttock-deep wrestling, then a shrugging—then moving it all against her. And she is, uh, touched, and she moves back . . . Well, that’s where we are . . .

  I hold her butt and move her back and forth in my rhythm: she joins in, in a halfway manner . . . She doesn’t exactly catch on. Even if it doesn’t happen the right way—the way it does in books—the body sort of explodes—and so does the will—and one feels bigger and realer—maybe one is bigger and realer than one usually feels—and the flopping of one’s hair on one’s head and the motions of one’s breath mark the rhythm of this further rage (of action of a kind): one really is not a child anymore . . . But one won’t win the way one wants to, this time either. I won’t.

  She grinned—Leonie. Americans try out a lot of girls—easy come, easy go . . . A kind of leatheriness—a toughness—is in place. Her grin wasn’t sightless: her eyes had a wildly sweet wolfishness. The posture of her neck and shoulders was wolfish, too. It all hurt a lot but it was fun.

  Femininity and nerves: triumph and condescension: I suffered pleasurably in some living-through-something way. I wanted a girl and a situation that would be easier—simpler—than this . . . I took her by the ears and held her close in a kiss—as in the movies—demeaningly—and she yelped in a mean way, scary, a short, high-pitched noise . . . But there was satisfaction here, atonement on her part and on mine a kind of sense of command of a moistly limitless thing. Her response was not male. Weird amusement and silliness-cum-threat with a kind of sense of direction to it, having to do with me . . . She did a real fucking motion down below, not just rubbing, not a fobbing-off, and it scared the bejesus shit out of me . . . “The real thing”—the resonance of—“actual fucking is really something . . . Nature sets it up that way, hunh?”

  “Are you scared? We don’t dare,” she said.

  I said, “Shit . . .”

  She said, grinningly, on my level, or I was on hers for a minute or two, “That’s right.”

  We’re having a good time in a way, aren’t we? Isn’t that right? A still and yet good time, really-a-good-time; it was touch and go and it changed but it was good, wasn’t it? I guess so. I don’t really know, obviously. Lila said to me more than once, I love to swindle you, Wileykins . . .

  Leonie’s hand moves on me. Leonie’s face is false-sisterly inside the strains of her coarse sex-dampened hair. The sexual charge in the grinding thing, the bone and lip mix-up, the blood-mass and flesh-gooeyness and bumpy-collision stuff—my longing to be intelligent about the world is perverse . . . Sexual hallucination here—of her going down on me—is hardly a matter of clarity. A sense of strained something or other might be what a grown man who was intellectual would call sexual terror but I just felt strained. Time was real, had brought me through childhood and past it, as if out of Egypt, and to this. Leonie has devices and talents, tricks, patterns of sexual stuff—bodily emotional speech. She whispers something and I put a prefix on it: This isn’t anything much but “I will never forget you, Wiley . . .”

  “You’re so nice off and on,” I say. I am sadly happy—you know what I’m talking about? You know what I mean?

  “I will never forget you,” I said.

  “Yes you will,” she said; and she kissed me; we kissed some more; it was all mixed up: I surrounded her lips with mine and sucked both her lips with my short tongue in her; and then she ate my whole mouth with her biggish, choky tongue in my mouth, which jolted me and made me a little ill . . . I am shocked and charred, transformed: we lay still briefly, like worms after our mock worm-in-the-earth cohabitation in the dusty body of the immediate air.

  Young and nuts, that kind of thing, we weren’t sloppily s
erious—although we were off and on—but we didn’t care what we did, although we did care, but we didn’t mind it that we were cheating each other and bothering each other in deep ways. We weren’t serious to the point we were really scared—Oh, this is scary . . . you make me feel so much—I feel so much . . . My lips, my throat, my heartbeat, my muscles felt mushy.

  She said, “We’re attracted to each other . . . I see that . . .” Then: “This is terrible . . .”

  “Yeah. We should fuck . . .”

  “You feel that way because you’re young. It will just make things worse. It’s not right for you . . . Not yet.”

  “I’m not exactly a virgin,” I said sourly.

  “Ssh,” she said. Then: “You’re remarkable, Honey . . .”

  “Prove it,” I said.

  The transformation that has come is a heat perhaps as in a tightly wound chrysalis. The strange machinery of change, the actuality of transformation is a darkness of actual time with states of utter otherness in it that you resist: “It’s the same as always,” I say in the deep motionfulness of a new self that moves on chains or tethers or swings at these extraordinary addresses of imprisonment and of repetitive rapture. Or galling capture . . .

  A rehearsal for eligibility . . . You know what I mean? You traverse the new medium, a sad, flirting, undocile boy in a form of personal existence he had not foreseen in any reality for himself. The cagey boy says, “I don’t know where I am with you . . .” Throwing myself backward against the arm of the couch: “Am I here? Am I anywhere? God . . . I don’t know where I am . . .” The jerky movements of awareness have attached to them an odd sense of foreign color which then becomes pictorial, breeding the shape of the ceiling. The somewhat heavy delight (and disorientation) in the protest is facetted, and aerial to boot, with privileged youth, whether the youth is mad or not. And one knows, not in words, that this is romance and mimicry . . . a throb of rivalry. The sudden truth is that the glistening and blurred and reddened (from necking and petting) selves (of the self) toughen and grow both bony and filmy—overtly sexual, vague and horny—courtly and showy. She has not cut me down to size . . . Ah, the uncertain absence of despair, the hope the world is a nice place, at least in your case . . . None of this is like pain in childhood. The motion of thought is slowed—and feels seriously beautiful-and-hideous in a sexual trance and spell that radiated from her. Tall, thin, slightly pinkened, sweaty, partly undressed American girl—no, Jesus, it’s me, the boy, bare feet, bare ankles, bare chest inside an open shirt—do you remember how liquid it was who was who and which was which?

  I looked at her—I hoped fuckworthily . . . “Isn’t this wonderful?” I said.

  “Unh,” she said, not looking at me.

  I remembered feeling thin and meager. “All right,” I said aloud. Strangely tropical, rotting heat and nakedness of not being selfish more than this. I felt dead and strange, rotted really, but okay. The sense of loss was so bad I thought I wanted to die—I’m not joking—but I decided it was essentially okay. She did a thing then of touching me with just one finger and then with a sudden partly laughing clutch of her legs on one of my legs along with ritual breaths that she produced she tried to suggest an orthodoxy—or conventionality—of liking . . . “You’re cuckoo,” I said. I had the feeling that I’d made it possible for her to be nice. Leonie laughed apologetically in the social-class-absolution way of her class—this was back in those years back there, back home, that confession of being a girl and guilty and not rich and daring. She wasn’t being a goody-goody but she was staying okay, not Lutheranly, but ex-Lutheranly and middle-classishly-during-the-war.

  She wasn’t a sweet little nothing (Lila) except in part: disguised . . . a habit. She is really sincere for a moment.

  I am a kind of weightlessness, aerial—I guess I have some weight but not as a last-minute-thing for her to grab at. Leonie is capable of ruining the world for a dumb idea. She is a real person, all shit aside. Here it is the pleasure of her being a boss and more open about my transformation—men always are transformed, leering monsters or into sweetness, or dead-and-limp or manic-and-showy. She has a kind of commonsense seriousness, and then, underlying that, is a kind of crazed-romp thing in her.

  Then there is a kind of little stench of all sorts of madness and pain and she is capable of making a lot of different kinds of threats. The truth is that she is supple-spined and knows a lot and is aware she’s dumb and we are bumbling and improvising and discovering stuff—we are not completely ignorant. I bet she’s seeing (among other things) how much she can control things. “You are a real treat—a boy and a half . . .” She says that, giving absolution . . . She and Nonie talk to each other every day—she sounds like a fake member of a social class the two of them invented.

  I say to myself that this isn’t real love—this is practice. I feel truly rotten. But I was glad, too. She seems weakened behind the softly fluctuating walls of her skin. Hidden electricities flutter—time doesn’t need wings, but it often takes the form of winged creatures in me. I am in love with her, of course. With me, too. With time and adolescence. With our living room. “You are as slick as water,” she says in a local accent, a local ruralese.

  “There’s a lot to you,” I say, thinking she wants to be reassured intellectually. Then: “Yeah . . . hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh . . . oohbuhhhhhhh . . . ubbbbbba . . .” Wartime noisemaking . . . A breath . . .

  She is talking and kissing-in-a-picky-pecking way—a lot of girls back home did that back then—“Oh you, you’re sweet—now behave . . .”

  She is, maybe, an iron soul. And the rubble of war and American-front-porch-wild-and-untamed-and-independent woman—and religious discipline and psychological stuff of sexual pride in her body and in her eyes and in her wit, such as it was. She smells of war, lady-of-war, war perceived. She has gradations of shadow of that. She can half understand death . . . war deaths . . . And male malice . . . rebellion . . . She is slapping herself in the face, sort of, constantly, reducing her hysteria . . . I mean it . . . She really does want to shine with goodness—not all the time: all-the-time would be villainous. She’s sophisticated that much.

  What degree of harm can she inflict?

  “What a brother you would be . . . I’d like to have . . . a brother like you . . . You for a brother? No . . . I take that back . . . Not you for a brother . . . Ha-ha.” She didn’t nuzzle me.

  “You’re cute,” I say with a twisted upper lip—and a raised eyebrow.

  Her breath—as she watches me—her breasts—faint gusts of stale but moist air . . . The Temple of the Cleft Between the Legs . . . (and the dark future and its citizens therein) . . . She says—abruptly—“Are you pussy-whipped? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for that to happen . . .”

  “No . . . Yes . . . I don’t know . . .”

  She pulls her blouse more closely over her breasts and partly openly judges me . . . Partly sentimentally . . . “Are you more bad than good?”

  “I am said to be a demon . . . The Wild Man from Borneo and the Devil . . .” I say this elegantly (in a local way). What I am here is emergent as a youngish man, half-formed, frailly, fragilely instructed . . . new . . .

  Leonie will tell Nonie “all” about what happens here but it won’t seem like this narration.

  And what Nonie learns will be part of her armory, her treasury, of knowledge.

  Leonie was a “responsible” person—only in real life, not in a book. The chief responsibility for meaning here in a bookish way is mine. She says coarsely. not exactly fending me off, just rewarding me and fending me off a little bit. “You’re . . . mmm . . . hot—you’re too hot to handle—you must be Rory Calhoun’s younger brother . . .” An untamed movie star—not a great star or anything like that . . .

  It’s a form of wit to run things and it’s witty to ruin things slightly—it’s grown-up.

  “You don’t know anything,” the tentatively transformed, newly older boy says recklessly. (She quoted that to me twenty years later on the ph
one.)

  “Don’t be a prick,” she says.

  He smiles—and the prick is there—he smiles with a certain dirty glamour—not boastfully, just actively—with a certain male primacy of drama—a silent orator in an oddly congressional moment—at the edge of congress. Of course, it is a sexual moment for him and he is handicapped by the realities of desire, desires and their weird breaking quality of onrushing hallucinatory, mostly extreme, romantic extremism.

  “I can’t have you . . . Oh, I’m so sad,” she said tactfully.

  I say out loud, struttingly bitter, “So I lose it all . . . It is really scary, how completely I get nothing but compliments . . .”

  She said, “Wiley, no one talks like this . . .”

  She is staring at me.

  “I love this stuff,” I say. Then: “Never mind . . . It makes me no-never-mind . . .” The fullness of feeling and the depth of liking are as pungent and as poignantly affecting as the stink of rotten loneliness, the pain—well, nature is extravagant . . . I rock back and forth, my arms wrapped around my own waist.

  The omnipresence of danger in life, the sense of something dreadful in sexuality, too—actually—like a vast haunted estate of sudden inheritance—the duties, the self-sacrifices that go with the new title—increasing staleness and rigidity of torment—deathbound fear, the conviction of being minor, the advisability of dying now—among the sins—I turned my face to her . . . I am newborn from this chrysalis—big deal. I am half a man through her doing. This stuns her and she is flabbergasted . . . Then she says aloud, misusing a certain wartime journalistic term, “No more gobbledygook?” I don’t know what she means.

  “I’m in agony . . .”

  “Oh,” she murmured. What I am, what we are commands her feelings—but not entirely. The slipperiness of the slope is the extent to which we are in agreement—more at her say-so than at mine . . . It is not war.

  “Lover’s nuts . . .”

  She is pitying—and a little angry, too. Lila says it costs a lot to know me . . . Whitely, heatedly flustered, balked, unclean . . . useless . . . unsimple: it won’t simplify—what I am.