I start it; she jumps in—I’m tense and nutty; she is out to persuade; her laugh is swindly. We amuse each other? We laugh, nervously bold, not quite in synchrony—I think with clear audacity until we have a simplicity I said I don’t have in myself; I wriggle my bedraggled, abandoned, useless, clownish-courtly dragonfly abdomen which has failed, to implant anything in her. I am cautious, a newborn male—sexually—sort of as if in the trenches, in a foxhole, in the stench of normalcy . . . that is what is here, maybe. Newborn, sincere . . . This may have a kind of airy beauty compared to the darker stuff she has of her fiancé, who has seen real combat and who is a real man to start with, willy-nilly.
She stops laughing, leans back, and says, “It’s almost as if you’re slapping me.” She says it almost crossly, sighingly—from behind her arm.
I lean back similarly. Similarly but in a grossly male way—a sincere imitation of guys—and I say, “Yeah? So what: none of it matters—probably . . .” Then: “My heart is broken—” She and I look at each other and start to laugh again—not all that explicably. “Life is really hell,” I say.
“Life is such hell,” she says, correcting me—clichéward, I feel.
I scowl—scathingly, really. “I see my whole life: it is a dumb life—it is not typical—it is all no good—it is not even all that friendly . . .”
With my fingers I smooth her pretty ass’s, horse’s skull below the hairline, the broad forehead, the hair at the edge . . . She smiles sleepily. She has an exclamatory smile—her smile switches to that. I feel goaded. When Nonie introduced us, Leonie, not like an older woman, but laughing and teasing, said, “Oh, he is good-looking . . .” She says it now, pityingly, “Oh, he is good-looking . . .” I think she means it would be better if I were a different type, she would go further. What I am is, in a practical sense here-and-now, unfortunate—ill-starred—not the most appropriate thing. I get the quick sense, confusingly, that if I made faces and grunted and was appalling, stuff would be easier, better.
I ask her, “Why can’t I get what I want?”
She says to this very young guy which I also am and who she has permitted all sorts of liberties—she says to the privileged libertine kid and not to the denied boy—she says condescendingly pitying (in another tone or class of pitying me), “Wiley, that’s a selfish question . . .”
“I can’t handle this glass-half-full and not the glass-half-empty stuff, and then you’re nice to the other, then you talk to the glass-half-empty guy and I’m lost . . .”
“Don’t talk like that! Those are awful things you’re saying.”
I lower my head. Not looking at her, I feel suddenly and deeply that she and I are not exactly talking to each other—it hurts.
She says then to my lowered head, “You can knock me over with a feather . . . You’re not what I expected . . . Nonie is not what you’d call a good describer . . .”
I look up, smiling, in a sickly way, and yet in a weird sense I’m pleased: “I’m a disappointment?” I say.
“Yes and no,” she says with a smile of a friendly sort—it’s steeply friendly.
All at once a different mood is back. I am at her side: I cover my face with her hair; her hair and mine mix and tangle. “Should I be homosexual . . . ?” I ask. I’ve heard that sometimes works with sensitive older girls.
Leonie is maybe ALL sexual comparison where men are concerned—and then behind that she is ignorant, she is maybe ignorance itself, as I am, but I feel, in my heated blood, I feel it coldly in my heated blood, that the ignorances don’t match—at all.
That is really scary, really steep: that is arroyo-and-gun-at-my-head stuff—that kind of fear. But then on top of that she is brilliance and total recall of an older person’s experiences of tough moments like this one, and of body tissues and of flesh and of other lives. The bright light of insight in her may be a constant light and not unsettled and jumpy and off-and-on, as it is in me.
And now the total of what I am—by her measurement—is reflected in her body and face and lidded eyes—is the shadow there, in the light and paler shadow of what she is. I am too naïve and too palely odd and too clever—too young in that fashion—and I am different socially—so she cares too much to care at all: I mean to the extent that she has curiosity in her, social and sexual about guys, she cares: her curiosity cares about me; her eyes care about me; her mouth half cares—it is balked and wicked. Her hands emerged as if from under blankets—that’s her inner distance. I am a monster—a petty monster—and must fare ill among larger monsters—I am not a champion—but I am dear to her. But the overall thing is that that is too much for her to care about—and it is the wrong thing for her to care about—and she is sorry and she does care but she doesn’t care—and then something malicious steps in, at that point in her feelings, and she would just as soon have me dead and not her and not her real boyfriend and so on . . . What a description for a feeling—painstaking and stupid.
Anyway, how in hell can I be supposed to understand this stuff in her—but I can see in her face, she does expect it because of all the reasons why she is too sharp to care about me—unless I swindle her and am morally pathetic—morally piteous—like other men—in the way she is used to.
So, I am staring at her and she is gazing back, but I don’t do anything; and, so, she says: “You’re so smart and you’re so dumb.”
“FUCK OFF!” I cry in this complicated whisper—of sorts. And I turn away from her; and then I turn right back: she is not specifically interested in me but she is interested in what I do and in stuff I know—in what I represent?—and I turn back into that: it’s like a neural surf. “Flood alarm,” I say. Then: “It’s three days and three nights away by choo-choo train—the ocean . . . Little turtles—of feeling . . .” Then: “This stuff I’m saying,” I say as I walk my fingers over her right breast and part of her collarbone, “is all from audio-visual aids—at school.”
“I know,” she says sagely. She says, “Never force me, never force a woman: women hate you for that.”
“I know. I have a sister,” I say with a kind of courtly condescension. Then, sadly (because who knows what this means?): “If I don’t force you, nothing will happen.” I don’t mean rape: but, rather, pushing at certain barriers and tetherings—judgments, stuff like that. I say, “I don’t mean rape . . .”
“That’s still rape,” she says. Then: “And so on . . .” She partly loves me. Loves, though—not wants . . . She can forgive certain things, and be patient or tolerant, but she can’t want those things . . .
I can feel her body withdraw, harden a bit. It would be better to say the neural aura is of a kind of ebbing away of approval and of permission and, so, a rockiness emerges. A living death.
It is a mindly moment—I mean I die into consciousness and am a mechanical, or bodiless, robot of it—periscope-binoculars, an array of metal eyes—metal to avoid the impact of the fear of what nature has fashioned as the kind of open-ended destiny of darkness we are faced with . . . Or I am.
And it is in my face, on my face, this stuff . . . Hers shows she sees this. She cleans the space between us of the filaments of hair. She uses one finger—in a sage way. She shifts her head. She blows at the remaining hair. Miserable as I am in my robot state and with her being like a rocky shore, I am glad to be here. I love it, all of it—even though I hurt like hell; I am hurt and I feel a lifetime of starvation ahead of me. But I am glad to be here. In a way. Her head—and all that is in it—rises; it stirs on her long, strong neck: that bony Colosseum contemplates me . . .
With a start, I realize that this moment is set on the moment before: it has evolved from it—like one room from another through an open archway. The burning “immediate” memory of the recent past is sort of as if from the lawn and woods—the more physical moments—but (or so) the woods and lawns have lighthouses and flaming buoys and lightning in them—discontinuously: sexual memory is even more discontinuous, even more disjunct and incoherent than physical memories of being t
ackled or of wrestling or of fighting. The phosphorescent bursting into life at hot distances is unsteady and rhythmic but not sexually rhythmic—more askingly or remindingly. Anyway, it is the demarcation of desire . . . of desires . . . as, some of them, being too real . . . outdoorsy . . . too male . . . too given over to danger—and to self-assertion.
The use of unlikelihood, of implausibility—here, in the hallucinatory reaches of a sexual reality where one is the newborn one and frivolously sexual, not serious; and one’s not-newborn soul hurts—here one sees it is a dream that one will ever fully understand other people—or one other person . . . She may get there, a woman, through some intensity of focus and of mind—and safety of a kind—and through pregnancy, the other life actually living in her. She may escape loneliness. I am sincere and I am passionate and I will never escape it—it will always be like this; I will return again and again to this crossroads.
And I am not well defended toward life. I shatter in a way—and turn to metal. I have sincerity at a readiness—a readiness of sexual stuff—of a nudity—a readied spirit that way and an almost obedient (but really truly reluctant) body. And I have a great deal of stupidity; and an absence of thought—I am a monster accompanied by the silence and confronted by the rage and curiosity that accompanies the newness of anything when it appears to the sensoria and arouses the reactions of another (but related) species.
Still, I am not entirely sincere—you know? I am, was, a boy.
“Wiley, you want me to jack you off?” She knows a lot.
“No. You know I don’t—that would be boring.” I was hoping for more.
“Please don’t be childish—please be considerate of me . . .”
“That’s what my mother says . . . Are you dying of cancer?”
“You are so petty—and just think, a person like you, even you, you have to be petty . . .”
“Now you sound like my biology teacher . . .”
She paused, she swallowed. “I don’t want to fuck up the good stuff . . . I had a good time with you—I really do like you—let’s round things off and be nice to one another . . .”
“A good time? I’m glad. But a lot of good it does me.”
“Don’t try to do everything by TALK!” she said in a muted, compressed-lip, almost exclamatory way. And she kissed me.
What was the identity of that kiss? It started out like a pair of typewriter do-jiggies locked together—her lips were sort of locked together or were toughly muscular or some such thing—and then they strike the white paper—that’s me—me? lips and breath: I become a platen, dark, and white and flat with reception.
Then, see, this is where being athletic comes in—and young: I can feel freshly soon after her lips part and her tongue touches me that I can feel the texture of her tongue and sort of rollick in the dirtiness or I can go, flashingly, down the other path into startled feeling: the heat there is in light and the atoms of the flesh—the summer-foliage thing of some woods (in the Midwest)—or the light at the window of a summer house at a lake where I went to stand, half-undressed, feeling myself at the edge of puberty—at the window where the light and heat have a kind of precocity of meaning . . . a kind of precocity of something or other—reciprocal affection, quasi-suicidal things . . . of We will die . . . and: It is real . . . I.e., we’re not kids.
And then, beyond that, her limits—at the moment—the edge of the woods, the lawns, the house—so to speak—and the meanness in it and the self-preservation as the absence of strong love—it’s all just glimpsed—painfully—and it’s burning: no, it’s felt burningly . . . “I’m okay. I’ll do what you want: you don’t have to do anything: I’m okay—you want me to go into the john and cheer up?”
It seemed like fate was undone, was sidestepped. It seemed nice. I resented it all, but I was relieved, too.
She smiled. “I don’t mind helping—I’ve gotten a lot out of today,” she said.
But something had happened: I think it was that I had begun to reflect her feelings; I was less good at knowing about this than she was about her reflecting feelings in other people: she was almost pondlike—or puddlelike—in that way—but I felt it was too dangerous to owe her real pleasure: I might not ever get over it; I felt it was dangerous to do anything with her—to feel too much or too little—to be sincere or to be insincere—and what we now felt was haphazardly a kind of unison but more really, a shared vote—two ponds voting, or a pond and a glassy pool—except that the atmosphere of us was so uproarious and dense—with desires and holding-back, and with tactics and liking and dislike and curses and anathemas toward each other kept at bay, and threats, overt and oblique and haplessly there—and yet it was, no matter its compoundness, still this side of major: it was maybe so minor that good wishes still, at this moment, mattered more than temper, realism, doubt, desire, or sin (or whatever you want to call it)—good wishes mattered more than the uproar . . . a pleasant outcome more than really fucking . . . even to me.
I was maybe lying about that: I will never know. I was trying to be subtle, but part of the joke was that the wishes of good temper and a happy ending were also bribes, lies, demonic courtship shit . . .
Maybe it was all okay—maybe it was all really flattering . . . Maybe it was no good but maybe it was all I would ever get and so I’d better adjust to it, rapido.
The balance of things is tricky—you don’t ever know for sure quite what is going on in you or in someone else. In the wallowing tumult of feeling, among the elements of self-defense—of realism—in this realm of interchange—light seemed to be here in not proceeding and darkness in going on; but there were no captions—no footnotes—only feelings and the tacit or ocularly overt agreement between us . . . audible, visible in our breathing, in the semi-permissions and holding-back (as described above) of our bodies. I had no sense of its being immortal light, immortal goodness—or a blessing to not go on—or that it was a manifestation of some giant principle that showed that God’s will or nature’s intentions were here. I wasn’t that malely spiritual about fucking—and begetting children: I was a sort of beggar-orphan in a musical dream—but among real odors, too. I had a sense of wanting her to love me on her own, if only for this, and to feel sorry for me or whatever, and to give herself to me but with everything being clear if we did fuck that I wasn’t guilty. And this other thing where you break each other’s hearts and shatter each other’s lives and control memory and its motions later . . . And the evanescent limitlessness, of giving in, and of revenges, and of forgiveness and of no forgiveness at all, that scared me and was not what I wanted, but it seemed the realer landscape behind the scrim or thin copse of woods or behind the walls of the room where we were and where we were catching our breath (a local phrase).
“Don’t help,” I said.
She laughed because the implication was that she was dangerous to me because she was so attractive to me.
She said with real satisfaction, “Oh, you’re so hot . . .”
Because she was so attractive to me and because I seemed to her to be what I wasn’t, a hot young kid.
I walked self-consciously into the bathroom, feeling her watch my back, feeling her as aware of me. She whispered, “You don’t have to do this,” but she didn’t sound to me as if she meant it; she sounded as if she preferred it. I felt tragic and ashamed of that. What the hell . . . And: Jesus Christ, show a little perspective, will ya? CHRIST ON A CRUTCH . . .
But shortly after beginning, I did not think of her much or have daydreams—or hallucinations—or of anything unreal or real or recognizable except the pain of it, the rawness of sensation, the initial resistance and then almost sensationless ease—and then the quivering and sudden materialization of as-if-tall, gawky SENSATION, AND I MEAN IT WAS QUIVERING, IT WAS QUIVERING WIND, wind on a sandy plain . . . I had all I could manage then in not yelping so loudly and sharply it would have been funny and then a scandal.
O life . . . I more or less enunciatorily thought, regarding the toilet bowl and the cl
oudy stuff in it, in the water, and on the seat and the back and on the porcelain of the bowl above the water. I wasn’t consciously addressing it—the spermatic life: I was thinking of the overall situation, the white tile, the phallic nature of consciousness—some consciousness—sins, stupidities, me: it really was like I was beginning on a soliloquy.
I tend to forget how much of masturbation is tied to hallucination—my friend Remsen collects stuff to use, hot stuff, goading stuff. I have a friend. Leonie is in the other room.
I’m not asleep. I move without moving. Je suis in motion—it’s a genital thing—I’m hallucinating and remembering (girls, guys, books, whatever); I’m hallucinating among the physical facts—Leonie is in the other room—but I’M HERE . . . It’s me in the world: moving along: fate has given me this: this isn’t a good one—hallelujah and a dulled Wowee—
But here is a moment flashingly taut—as all hell (the sensation[s]). Wow—all charged-up . . . half-unbridled, boy-bridal, partly loathsome, partly lost, racking.
It’s of a puzzling enormous interest (to me), my inner stuff, the fluctuations of attention—and of judgment—at getting that sensation—that sensation, heated and mercurial and yet also, in part, cool, cold, deadened—the touch of my own hand on me, the hintful indication of the non-hallucinatory act . . .
I am unsheltered, deathless in a glumly exhilarating triumph of shadows—a feely-movie of hallucination—with a girl (woman) in the next room—this is painful morally.
Among the facts of existence is that no one is here but me. It is amazingly foolish, the peculiar wonder of this circumstance, the bathroom drama of it—a local insanity—a sanity if I don’t cry out.
Boy, the insanity of pleasure in this form—moored, unmoored. Sexual pleasure, sexual reality, the momentarily overripe thing of sensual reality—a silliness kind of—it tugs and pushes: me: strongly: sensations, rhythm, workmanlike-sensational rhythm, images passionately almost present, the blurred now in the white-tiled bathroom, the time-out thing, actual but not in the usual sense of idleness or of sleep or of napping: it is like and not like dreaming—I guess one’s consciousness blinks from this to the world and then back again: concentrate, concentration: a camp thing—like making a lanyard.
The Runaway Soul Page 93