But, truly, it is a world, an inner room—a nook—of an entirely different order of distinctions.
“Oh God . . . Oh God . . . Leonie . . .”
Villain. Dier. Tyrant. Tyrant-hero . . . Winter-of-discontent guy—Crookback—with his back crooked—that is, arched—someone’s brother, someone’s child . . . letting judgments go—among the blowingly weedy black richness of the tolerant brutalities of the sexual world—you know?
“I’m sorry if I’m not a nice person,” she says idly . . . sitting up: not quite sitting up: she is going to stop—or not stop. She stops. She says, leaning back, gazing off into the air after looking at my prick—which leaps, salmonishly, at being looked at—at being looked at by her—she says somewhat mysteriously, “It matters . . . how much money a girl has.”
“Mmmm?” I am staring at her. I am with her among the shadows—sort of with her—and I am only partly among the lamps or among my own shadows—and lightedness—or memories of it—and expectations, wishes, anxieties for her to go on . . .
I know she is comparing us—our lives—our skins, our minds—I know she is occupied with knowing us and herself and herself-in-her-life—and I know it is a matter of comparisons slidingly, a slide-rule thing, in her head, relatively-we-are or you-are—it is that stuff in some sort of violent and limitless and as-if-coldly-rational vocabulary in her: “What she can do, what she will do, what she wants to do, she can do what she wants to do,” she says owlishly. “Well . . . I like that . . .” Again she says it owlishly—but it’s a different owl, I guess. I know it is a compliment but I don’t know on what terms: I would like to pound a hole in her head and put in a glass window and make her think in visible words that I could read. I’d like to tie her up and chain her to the couch as in a laboratory experiment so she’d be thinking something I could logically guess: so her mind and her associations would be limited . . . One breast peers idly out of her partly undone blouse. Her hand, her princely hand is stilled. Does she want me to ask her to do it some more? WHAT THE CHRIST FUCK DOES SHE WANT? I would like to say inwardly it doesn’t matter but it does matter, it matters to me, and it colors the universe; the tinted glassy dust of this will go flying off into space and become a big datum that changes the weight of everything-there-is . . .
Taking time to think, half think, think a little, I say, “I have a good friend who believes meaninglessness is the only meaning. He’s ambitious. He’s a Nihilist-Marxist. He doesn’t enjoy sex but he has a lot of it—by hand.”
She takes my remark as indicating an obsession with sex, the sex we were having; and she resumes her hand movement, but she is still sitting up and the hand movement is without concentration. Even so, her hand in its postures and its motions as mock-cunt or whatever does bring on in me the neural light of sexuality, until I then see the untinted splotches of light inside me and then the tinted and real ones on either side of her nose in the half-light of the room. I see the mock graves and tubes of her nostrils and of her mouth past her shiny teeth while I sort of rock and roll up a silvery ladder or off-and-on whitelit flight of stairs—or tilted sea—toward those seconds of sexual wakefulness . . . if I can put it like that. Here is her animal smell—I am in her hand(s). Oh, it is all actual. It is real and all of them are dead. It is arousal and burial . . . or lightedness and lapse-into-darkness . . . up, up, sink back—I want her lap. She is specifically repelled by this aspect of me and amused at herself for being here. And she wants her power and I want her to have more power—to thrill me, that is. Oh, the twisted geographies and the gravity, the weight, the weightedness, oh, the higher purposes . . . look at what is here . . . I LOVE HER NOW! She says—why does she say this?—why does she continue her conversation with me?—“I know it matters how much money a woman has—I wasn’t born yesterday.” Then: “If I were rich, we could run off for a day or two and everybody would keep it hushed up.” Why must she make me feel how minor and sociable this fucking around is. Oh. . . . . . . . . . . . . Oh oh . . . OH . . .
Her eyes, her mouth reject me. I am as if gouged at in the middle. Harried. I say to you, Carry me. The line of hair on the boyish abdomen—the cone of it—hairy? hairy’d . . . Hurry? Do you care for me? If you say it fast, it comes out care-eee . . . The rhythm is too slow, too unsteady: hurry care-eee . . . If I am rendered helpless—as when I’m tackled in football practice and a half-dozen guys leave their weight on me—I laugh, I laugh loonily; I cry, too, I cry overshadowingly. I am loose in her own life—as an image—but I am tied down, weighted, floored by the surf and the light, I am moored to her erratic movements.
I am a specific size and shape phallically and of a specific order neurally and psychologically in relation to rhythms—and her touch is a little general . . . There is a gender thing . . . I mean she won’t be cross in the way I would enter her if I could. I am privileged wildly-vividly in this imparted suicide. It hurts and is apparent that she has no overriding wish to fill her spaces, her mouths—the mouths in herself—with me.
The dance of no’s and yeses, the almost numberless sorts of inner doors, the steps and the lights in the boy—sexually—and the veilings and willow branches and sheets that the sexual-spiritual light comes through, and her will, erected but not phallic; in fact, it is unanimal largely and likes its bleakness and its self-consciously visible, rehearsed, common and already familiar-from-other-times nakedness and its ordinary bravery more than the natural sexual treacheries toward the world and the entirety of depths and the transparent limitlessness toward the future of the more literal sexuality of real fucking—the weird mixture of gaiety-ungaiety, the grudging novelty of it—she persists . . . Leonie’s limited beauty is more than I can bear . . . You asshole . . . Love her. Actually, the spirit hasn’t a lot of choice, even knowing this is a scarring, scary thing. She was surprised, not surprised, lackadaisical—not weary—well, a little weary—hardworking, knowing—and dubious—an employee of some company that showed you this sexual courtesy—you know? Everything, infuriatingly—infatuatingly—having to do with my prick in her hand is grounds for vengeance of some sort and is reason to forgive the moment and everything else and is a pretty good reason for gratitude—for affection, tolerance, what-have-you.
Brotherhood. She leans over and puts her lips on it—on the head: she feels really guilty toward me . . . She doesn’t suck it . . . I once went down on a boy at YMCA camp after the five other guys had gone down on me, they having lost to me at poker: but then they had sort of ganged up on me in complaint and then in wrestling: so I went down on one guy—the biggest one . . . You’re snotty and biting, he said . . . She’s being a little nice to the poor, blue-balled boy . . . And she’s being snotty-and-a-little-biting . . . Memory tries to repress this. Or the mind tries to repress memory and to assign this to some other part of myself—to my wicked banditry . . . I’ve tricked her into this . . . I’VE TRICKED HER! HOT SHIT! I can boast to guys, maybe.
I try to assign to all this another weight . . . not its present weight.
She stops. She is sitting up. She says, “I admire men who are sensible about money. Well, I have some. If you got me pregnant, I have enough: I could send you to college: I would make you marry me in spite of your age.” Then she said, “Whoop-de-doo . . .” She said this in a not very playful voice. She knew she had scared the living shit out of me. I didn’t want to be stuck with her for the duration of the rest of my life . . . I didn’t know enough . . . She wasn’t too sane.
Neither was I—maybe . . .
She breathed—she breathed in that offering way—and then when I said, “I don’t want to go to college,” she breathed in a cutting and mean tone; it had a dismissive quality—she didn’t take no lightly.
I hadn’t said no clearly, had I? She was jumping-the-gun . . . Well, never mind. It’s all right to be scared. It’s even all right to run away . . . I started to do up my pants—even back then, I was tired of fake, pathetic moralists. I say that out loud, bookishly: “I’m tired of fake, pathetic moralists,�
� in the inner, dry rattle and inner unitariness of longing for orgasm—you know? But I’m telling her to go to hell: I don’t feel guilty. I don’t feel I owe her my life from now on. Or any masculine-slavery-to-principle-for-her-sake, either . . . Then I said, “No. You wouldn’t marry me.” She made a face. “You wouldn’t either—unless it was a good thing socially.” Hell, she was a friend of Nonie’s, wasn’t she?
“You’re a bastard,” she said idly—in these knowingly bandit reaches of our little get-together.
“I was saying you were a nice person . . . too nice to do that stuff for me.” I pinched her behind: I didn’t want to seem to be angelic.
She bit my ear. “You’re terrible,” she said.
“You don’t want me,” I said—it started out okay but it went fast into another mood—a mode: sincerity in the bandit territories? It’s kind of a terrorist moment: back then, the word was German, from Hitler’s panzer tactics: Schrecklichkeit—the infliction of terror through being terrible.
But here the terrible thing—the slash with an old-fashioned beheading sword—the whistle of the descending bomb—was the honesty, or, if you like, the sudden sincerity—of a boy, sure, but of me, a specific guy: a voice stripped of generality. So, slash, slash . . .
Faint pause. Breath. You know how the sound of a girl’s breathing can be like the drip, drip, drip of blood? “You want me to feel sorry for you?” she said, and she laughed dryly and sort of idly almost patted my dick which was mostly back in my pants which I hadn’t fully fastened but had, with a certain loony style, left partly undone—insultingly.
I did and didn’t know what I was doing. I knew what was going on in the sense that I had a very good sense of the history of the last several moments and then of larger blotches and splotches and splashes of time and then all the way back to my opening the front door for her and Nonie when they arrived at the house. The apartment.
But I knew it within the framework, the limitations of what I knew at that age plus—if you will forgive me—the sexual inspiration—or even inspirations—of the moment.
This is a kind of trumpery assurance.
But, still, it is assurance and it has the glamour of sequins and glittery stuff and black paint: semi-knowledgeability.
She stared at me.
I said in a really gravelly and grown-up voice—it, uh, thrilled me to hear anything so real and old coming out of me—“I’m no good. I am not a regular guy. People would laugh at you.” Then: “Stop making me feel like an asshole, okay?”
She gazes at me in a way that shows that beyond the shit she is a little like me. I am an orphan who joined a circus but most of the people in the circus are ghosts—are ideas. She is sort of a runaway soul of that type, top. But as a girl of that type.
She said, in a funny voice, “Do you want to finish, Wiley?”
She wants me to say no—to snub her. She half respects me—you know what I mean?
I stroke the back of her hand—coolly, a little madly—“Do it some more,” I say, not as someone bribed, or like a kid, or in any way that’s possible, but as if I were sitting on a stool and was really handsome and huge-pricked—and was laughing at her. I wasn’t clear in my head about those things—those details—of the scene: I felt I was like a truly great bomber pilot—or fighter pilot—or outfielder—or a truly great, great quarterback.
I didn’t really think I would get away with it.
Which of us is the madder? The meaner? How could we characterize what we would feel or do next?
The runaway soul goes groping—and plunging—flying and lying—and trying—and dying . . .
“Oh, I’m not afraid of people,” she says; i.e., she is attracted by the nature of my soul, which she now, sort of as if finally for the moment, for the occasion, sees: I feel strained and sweaty and like I’ve been acting this part, posing or whatever—for her liking me this way which has in it a quota, a modicum, a soupçon of sexual respect. See: watch: she is reaching nicely for the prick . . .
Hot shit.
“OH . . .”
She wants access to my soul: she talks: she runs this exchange: “I’m a hateful person—very shallow. My mother says I’ll change when I have children . . . You’re very young, but I’m shallow.” It is insulting—and noble—in a world of insult and of ignobility.
I wanted something else.
She insulted us both in that she meant: You don’t really matter yet—and I don’t matter as your girlfriend.
She was omniscient and stupid now. I SAW IT.
“My eyes hurt!” I was too angrily potent in my pain (and it was a complex and compound pain) not to say, “Nothing has happened to me yet!”
The Runaway Soul Page 97