And considering her feelings, and the grounds for them, there was no way she could be the most important thing in the world to me, short of being willing to give up her life and concentrating on me . . . And that was not what she had in mind.
This wasn’t vanity on my part; or not exactly: this was the truth inside a certain mood. I would die for her—her giving up the importance of other things in relation to me. A peculiarly wrongheaded truth inside some steeply shadowy feelings of respectable life as hard work . . . Meanwhile, I loved her anyway—obviously. But don’t ask too much of me . . . okay, Leonie?
Was that lousy? Sure it was.
But that becomes fair if she is doing it, too, even if she is doing it more deeply and more wholeheartedly and wildly than I am and, also, more cold-bloodedly and more intelligently.
I am selfishly whole-skinned with reason . . . with the help of reason and for the sake of the future of my family (and of me).
I am selfish but not completely if I am also unselfish, passionate, spendthrift, and glorious with stupid onrushing into love and whatever—isn’t that what she is imitating in this phase of the necking-and-petting?
Something here is unfair and evil—Nonie-esque . . . but what is it? The horrible extravagance of totality—the all or nothing of what is not ambiguous as time rushes on? The rending thing in real life of any form of almost unarguable emotional clarity of gesture—of a giving of the self to a thing, if not to a person, and then the holding back or the implicit limits of it at the moment and then in the next moment and how those can be broken through . . . And then your responsibility, your guilt, your being joined to the other person through the acts you both have engaged in, Leonie’s kisses and actions in this part of what we did, the abortive, adolescent, thinly fleshed-out and thinly experienced reality, even of her completeness (compared to my boyishness), it is off-putting, upsetting, hideously real—truly scary . . . The self is too skimpy for truth. Nothingness is easier—much easier.
But what kind of murder of the world is it to say that this stuff is nothing? Nothing much? Another example of nothingness?
“Shit and crap,” I said from the depths of these feelings—which were quite blurred in me—as if by rain, long slanting lines, dot-and-dashed, like a field of weeds to an ant. I hoped I sounded older and deep and sensitive.
“I’m a cradle-robber and you’re a heartbreaker,” she murmured.
I grimaced: I respected her soul . . . I did love her. I loved her as much as I loved myself—just not more than myself.
She knew it, I bet; I bet she felt her “love” deeper than mine was for her—she wasn’t just protecting herself as I was protecting myself: she was protecting her fiancé and her father . . . I started feeling I was protecting Lila and Nonie: I sort of squared my shoulders and was self-sacrificial and sort of a family kind of guy, or familied.
She didn’t say anything, not this that I claim was implicit in her sigh then: HAVE YOU NEVER BEEN LOVED BEFORE, YOU COLD SLIPPERY (BOY-) MAN?
The sexual stuff was incomplete! I was sulky—and astonished by her sigh. The next moment, in the peculiarities of the skinny boy—and of emotions and time—I’d forgotten that and was at sea—aimless and warm—lost in a fog on the Indian Ocean—one of two souls—licking, groping, fondling the seaborne, sea-y destiny—two souls ocean-tossed, moved along, castaway, disparate—and ill suited to this adventure.
This may not matter very much . . .
Leonie was a foot freak—it reminded me of the little-boy thing of using a foot as a fist—A Great Warlike Phallus, maybe. She bent her leg at an impossible angle and she was stroking me there with her foot—toed phallus to underpanted and sated-but-refreshing-itself phallus . . . sort of.
Jesus! People really do live like contortionists.
I kind of kept remembering (as I said) by association and so I felt as a memory the sadness of a child sometimes at not being bigger and more powerful, the sadness at not being a flying thing (so to speak), the sadness at not being everything conceivable . . . bird, flower, snake, whale . . .
Man.
Now, though, for me, everything but being a boy was inconceivably dirty. Everything tested you—everything was a test. Reality in its flattery was a horse kicking you to death. I liked people who understood this. A lot of women’s interest in women is a kind of unspoken thing in them of being sickened by failure in men and at their own not having grown into a man and done things without failing all the time. Of course, if they are defeated by men, that stuff takes on a different cast in them. Sometimes women are men of a sort. All the velocities: our clothes and the couch are fondling us . . . The evening is a pimp. The finality of the sexual terrain is terror-cum-outcry in the scandal of being male, not as a preliminary, as in my experience so far, but at being given a huge white world, whitelit, brief, briefly comprehensible, in regard to others’ destiny—a gambler’s intrusion on further time—and on life . . . Romantic distances are not real distances—not like time or like going out into a river. Romantic distances ache with their breakability. There’s something unwilling to be looked at in me, then comes a half-willingness to be loved. This is a malleable masculinity—momentary—absurd. Then comes the as-if-simple (or merely simplified) pleasure at being liked, at being played with: like light captured in interlocked fingers over my eyes not in a grim way. The childish part of me, the leftover blondness of what I am, is a dirtiable, naughty sunlight warmingly touching her. She was supple—some girls I’d fooled around with had collapsed after a while into woodenness and fluster, into being rooted and heaving twigs and leaves in a wind, sexually. The clumsy intimations of how anarchic and ungeneral the power is in love in each person—love in regard to one’s own self, which is all one can know from immediate experience—one’s own powers and defenselessness in regard to that interfere with one’s perceptions: the sickening and deliciously sticky sense of guilt and innocence fixes one’s eyes, inward and outward—not everyone can bear this stuff . . . It is now a little as if we were jammed into a dovecote, a pigeonhole thing; in her sexual, aimlessly sexual—partly sexless—explorations, we are as if in a flock of fluttering birds, that smell and the cooings . . . I am not a genius of sexual touch or of sensual, or of sexual or of sensual momentum. Or if I was (or am), it is only at moments of being in love with the person I was with. I was good at registry. The question for her of all-that-I-am is present in the intimacy, such as it is. The question is as it is in sports: What is she worth—on a team? What am I worth—in the wotld? What are our opponents like? How are we going to end up? This includes a sense of moral possibility . . . how much forgiveness we will require and what degree of banditry we will share or turn against each other. Real self-sacrifice for each other . . . for the team . . . how much? This is in the fluttering kisses.
Or something like that gets mixed up with the uncensoredly fluttering famous amusement—of this sport. The deeply amused, scared thing, mystically, semi-mutually hysterical: THIS IS GOOD! she whispers. And I say, half-meaninglessly: ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! And she says: THIS IS NO GOOD . . . meaning almost the same as when she said it was good: it was good but . . . An active wolverine sniffs at you in ferocity and with a capacity for loyalty, and it sniffs at your crotch and growls at it and then at its own crotch and then yours again and so on . . . Voici les animaux . . . The whole funny and stinking sexual-excess feeling is of a sense of the future given away. And I think one feels the oddity of death then, the little sexual death that people have written about and that I have read about—and one’s becoming a genius here although not at this but in this isolation . . . And this is stinking and comic, too, and it is too much . . . The fragile, sneaky moments . . . I whispered that I found unloving people interesting. Well, what I said is “Too much, too much . . . enough, too much . . .” This was more pecking than necking—that was a joke a guy I know used—a form of wit, I thought it. What I said I didn’t really mean. I didn’t intend for her to listen. I guess I was asking to know less about her—to be
allowed my lies in my sense of things—especially there, on the couch. It was true that I found unloving people interesting—“like a recess,” I said out loud. She still doesn’t have to hear me. My purposes are unclear to me. I think one hears purposes more than words. The withdrawal from the use of power in the light of what Leonie was doing and maybe of what she felt—her feelings at her not being a boy, at her fiancé not being a boy—my retreat into that recurring neutrality of mine—was a coital-postcoital sadness, maybe a form of cowardice, gendered, maybe an attempt at virtuously seductive behavior . . . I DON’T KNOW . . . A lot of what I am is hidden from me. She can tell at once, or pretty soon; and something creeps into her manner: I think she is relieved somewhat in that lax gaiety, that it is only a little intense.
In order not to be a fool—and in a kind of anxiety to dominate in part—and because of its being wartime—I stopped being good while I went on with the lax gaiety part—I was a sort of evil, limp boy—oh, I had it up; but it was rawly and sorely up; I was sort of mental-and-perverse sexually: a bad guy: and I would bet that it showed in my breath and face—a dark flicker of the eyes—and a kind of pinching grip of the lips. Somehow this suggests a near-equality of fate in men and women, or in one guy and one woman, not equal and well-matched stupidities and metamorphoses but an equality of hellishness and of punishments and of guilts and of lesser and larger pleasures for a while.
And she is startled and her face flickers and she falls in love, but not permanently, for a moment . . . contingently, if I am young and largely simple but then have this evil side as well.
I don’t know what Leonie was As A Person in that I don’t know how her life came out. I can’t compare it to other lives. Her magnificence—her sexual quality that so impressed and imprisoned me—was like a mixture of common sense—of coldness—with an unfrightened depth and width of (and curiosity about) lawlessness in her—it was that lawlessness which was favorable to me, sort of bandit-to-bandit . . . and which set limits to what she felt: He’s only a kid . . . She said it out loud, “You’re only a kid . . .” She said it mysteriously. It had depths. She had a generosity toward living with a completeness and a fullness in the moments that was way beyond me. The rushing reality of that girl.
The evening. The boy. We are gamblers and guessers.
She said, “I’d like to get to know you. I’d like to spend more time with you.” And she lay back, ending that passage of her sexual aggressiveness.
“I’m not very special,” I said grouchily. Then I said, “I’d like to get to know you: I’d like to spend a lot more time with you . . .”
“I’m not very special,” she said, not with mockery either.
It is possibly the case that maybe I am half in love with everything to start with . . . that year. She hid her competitive self, her criticizing self, her destroying self. She was being a courtship marvel, “nice” and “bad”: nice-and-bad: wonderful. And she credited me with inspiring her to want to do it and to do it. And me with her: it was personal: it wasn’t just adolescent hominess and her being acceptable-looking.
The other, darker stuff shows in her lips and on her shadowy and semi-gouged and slightly used and puffy face and in the way her head sits inside the tousled, coarse hair and on her long neck.
Evilly, I wonder if she cut the kissing short before the other stuff could be found out for certain about her . . . The way she loosens and spreads and gets sly-eyed . . . “You know too much,” she says to the air. “I want a cigarette.” She felt me looking and noticing . . .
I wasn’t realistic . . . I didn’t want any Nonie stuff . . .
She may have felt I thought her to be old and dirty. The sexual wish for orgasm is as if, for me, we stand in a mouth of flame, and kiss and quench the sense of being attacked by flames which then, when we stop, is worse—you know that sense of being burned and stung by flames? You can call it jealousy if you want. It is like that, a kind of anguish toward otherness—other outcomes, other folks’ minds and feelings . . . knowledges . . . experiences.
The agonized and amazing succession of kisses and touches they might know.
Immediate memory was growing too painful. A careless and semi-ceaseless (because of memory) and semi-causeless (we-were-only-fooling-around-so-how-did-this-happen) sexual grandeur forms. This seems typical. “I don’t know about you but I find all this agonizing,” I said.
“But you came,” she said.
“That doesn’t help one whole hell of lot.”
“You want to come again?” she said, interested. Then a moment or so later—her arm over her head again—“Kids . . .” Then, still another moment further on, or in, or more deeply in, “You run with the ball for a while . . .”
Heaving myself up on my elbows, semi-lightly, I said, “With the blue balls . . .” Then: “I run . . .” I guess it was for the first time in my life, this next kiss, my full will in it, my full-willedness, and in this moment of touching her breast, the slightly prickled areola, the foreign-to-me nipple . . . I say it out loud: “Nipple . . .” and something in me explodes, not nicely, at me naming it . . . A lot of linguistic theories are very sexual, I bet.
But I am in a full regalia of will—I might as well have been wearing an Indian chief’s headdress of turkey feathers with a long tail: that’s how I was holding my head. The core of it at that time was not that I was kissing her, but it lay in an extreme but tortured pleasure at my being, for a while, a boy like any other of the bossy, nakedly-an-Indian-chieftain type.
I took her wrist and moved it so it and the heel of her hand went down the front of my still-fastened pants. And touched the head of my hidden prick. I said—unforgivably (I was saying no to her)—“I have no money; I have to be careful . . .” I had a coldly chagrinned sense of my own loony momentums. I didn’t care if she loved me or not.
A ritualized freedom, a partly predictable terror, a restless and careless animal prowling—a dirty heroism, a championship matter: reality is where you die for real, where the killer air is too weak to hold me and the resistant cry of “Please, let’s not—” I hear and obey and—at the same time—bury in a flood of hallucinations. In her this causes a form of enraged humor felt oddly, in her breasts as I touch them and lie, shirt opened, atop them (skin to skin), and in the roof of her mouth as I kiss her, and it is visible in her eyes and in the changed odor of her heat and in the mischief (and kindness) of her giving in and going on a while longer in spite of this distancing of rage and humor in her.
But it makes her feel dry. Something abrasive slows the boy. Thereupon, a sense of her importance, sexual-maternal, whorish, rests in part on my seeing that she is NOT in the presence of someone stronger-willed—or more powerful—than she is. It is only me. I am the one who is there. She loved me in that way . . . With that dismissiveness . . .
Her moods are less strong than mine but deeper—she was not so remote or so immediate or so ruthless or absolute in mood as I was. She did not gamble so much in order to be or seem typical for a while. She was, within reason, typical in whatever state she found herself. She was not unselfish. But she avoided too much selfishness—I don’t know why. If I say I felt she knew me as someone smelly (from sweat and rut in parlor sex) and anarchic and difficult—someone no good in certain ways—then what I feel is her presence as a star’s glow after all—an actress’s quality of doing this stuff for effect—and doing it to good effect.
In this fashion she felt-up the dick. She wasn’t theatrical but she was boyishly female. He felt a priced generosity in her, an American thing: I remember it . . . I remember that he felt his prick ran him. He felt happy—cured—silly—endangered. There was no way to escape morally by that point. He is pawing her—and he is dry-fucking her legs—and he wants to enter her now a lot so that he can say he did. Really, how can meaning be concentrated, obliteratingly, on this? And if it is like that for you, what the fuck kind of philosopher are you? In the animal sense of things?
The strained, thin, early-adolescent body o
f the boy knows this ghastly—blowsy—comfort—this comfort of a sort.
Whatever happens, one resists it, at least a little, in order to name it, except maybe in the moments of a rush of love or of hate (as in combat). In the near-infinity of details (of structure) of the self is the thing that the self has so many complex balances that it, or part of it, is insulted by anything that happens, insulted at least for a little. Whatever it is that happens doesn’t matter. Somebody by nature insulting, somebody by nature often insulted, sometimes has an air of action and of suitability for going first—it’s odd. The quilt of purposes being torn by complicitous stupidity—by this animal permission based on a complete lack of claims, a sort of equality of lowness, lowness and villainy of a kind—can be lovely as well as insulting. Moments take on a structural reality of a sexuality of fingers, dick, stomach, of one’s breath, known in this way. One is horrified and excited—by life—and consoled: what a trio, horror and excitement and consolation: it’s like certain murder mysteries, some horror movies, some suspense and adventure movies, some public football games. It feels like a recurrence of mercy . . . And like a joke . . . This intimacy in the light of, oh, I would say ordinariness, but I am kind of a freak . . . Another part of me—sort of from deeper down, farther in, floatingly higher up but in a glade or on a planet farther away inside me—sees it as a kind of communal breakfast of corruption: See, I’m alive . . . And: See, I’ve lived this long . . . And: I’ve lived this long with Nonie and Lila—and S.L. and the world-as-it-is . . . In some intimacy, you lie too much—as with a parent—or with a child you’re tutoring: you have a play world. But this moment, even as a moment in a play world, it is a definition of something kind of real—but it is private. You turn your back on her and see her as THE WOMAN or as HOW I FIRST HAD THAT SORT OF SEX (sexual carryings-on) . . . or you choose a theme: betrayal-of-the-male—of the guy—or: the role of the demure in the life of a girl her age and of her social class (in wartime): to know her by. I really mean to not know her while being with her, while being familiar, while being intimate. In this secret way (as in being in a closet and hiding when you are a child) of good-and-bad mixed. Us: we’re not being pure in relation to ordinary things—or even to things in the house. And her fiancé-lover: what of him? I didn’t know about things like screwing in the ass and the woman-as-animal or cow yet. Or, if I did, it was semiconscious. We had a thing back home, at home and in school, of Don’t give it houseroom or Don’t give it houseroom in your head . . . It’s not like repressing it: you just don’t look at it: you don’t take it home with you . . . But the violence, if I might be allowed to use that word, of the contact, the sexual contact between the two of them, and what he required of her, or what she was bent on doing, or aroused to by him, the nursing abasement, for instance, or the awe at the raw pain, or the flagellation and rending of her for her by her being in the presence of such extreme cowardice and bravery, such pain as that—none of the fliers I knew was lighthearted about going into combat or about having been in it—the weird realities of experience blended with the weirder actualities of identity, of sexual identity—but I am omitting the will—the onrush of the self: the black and violent streams of that, and the plunging boulders and logs, the upset and the overset, or the tentative but willful tendernesses, silences, collusions, complicities—and, above all maybe, the way the heroic includes murder, murder and acceptance of it, killing and ignoring—I mean as well as not giving it houseroom, we had a thing of Open up, open up a little bit, it won’t hurt you to open up for once; and drinking was supposed to help you do that—you open up rooms in the head and doors into the rooms; and you also leave yourself and float disembodied among moods and similarities, translations, bridges, isthmuses in and out. It’s scary and lost, you’re lost as in a woods, a woods set in the middle of your life, and people come and go, in you really, or you’re flayed and sensitive to them . . . I don’t know. Sometimes, back home, people said, Be big . . . Like being pregnant with someone else’s life-and-feelings—for a moment—or with the whole community. Of course, a lot of that is fake; you can hide behind mottoes. But you can also feel, in a kind of hidden anguish, with a kind of hideousness—as if there really was a deformity of the self in comparison to how you passed yourself off during the day—what you comforted your parents with in yourself when you were a little kid, the ways in which you were another world, or a flag of innocence, of innocence and purpose, really, and how that partly continued into this moment but in this hopelessly other impure way—I guess I mean the way this part of her life compares to the rest of her life, and then what that life is—as darkness and smell—as what I don’t know—and as what I must put my arms around. Must? Well, it’s like that if you open up . . . if you loosen up . . . And you feel her astonished pain and the rushing thing of her—wind in the leaves of olive trees turning over the silver undersides: her breath—the wings and bird odors—of the female? of the feminine? is that it—some horrid sense of deformity and death, submission, humiliation—monsters in the street—Nazis, gangsters, things like dragons, HUGE ILL LUCK—or guys like you if you’re cold and don’t open up—I DON’T KNOW—and the safety or the decency, the thing of providing a home or protection—and the way guys hate that and tear it apart to get at you, to get even with them—or the death-tinged, death-dealing, shot-at, shot-up pilot scoffing—and me making use of her and then her making use of me: as of arbors, crawling into arbors, leafy nooks—I DON’T KNOW—the absence of a sacrament—of permission—the logical realities of merely personal permission to be bad to this extent—to describe it perhaps psychologically (and morally—or theoretically), the mutual, or shared, rudeness of the now undone pants, of the sight of the thing, of the boy stilled, of the older girl toying effectually with it, her having a comparatively simple power over it compared to her relation, god-damn it, to the prick of the crazed and maybe sexually overwrought or sexually feeble or sexually great but overweening pilot—or of Leonie’s boss in the office, or her dad—or the spiritual whatever of Nonie—or of the shadows of the world—what anguished semi-irony in the counterfeit presence of me feeling her as a pirate and me as a bandit on this queerly astronomical voyage around a world—a world in place, existent and seemingly stilled, while I move, but actually it moves, too, it whirls and dances and slides, kind of menacingly, kind of meanly—this stuff happens . . . The integrity of the mind’s connections to certain of its lies and some of its truths is lost in the yo-yo-joke-not-a-joke of the not greatly adroit but pretty god-damn effectual up-and-down of Leonie’s after all amateur hand.
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