She bounded a little in place as if struck by an arrow or a flaming coal.
“Should I go faster? Show me . . . Show me what to do . . .” My complaints didn’t make her sexual—they made her nervous—and pliable.
“Is there a Kleenex around?” I asked . . . wearily . . . an as-if-sophisticated kid (of the sort my cousin Isobel admired: I wasn’t that sort, even in the slightest).
“Everything has happened to me today,” she said. “I had an attack of allergy . . . I used my Kleenex up.” It was scarce anyway. She got hers from the PX. “Use the inside of my coat sleeve . . .” Her jacket on another chair.
“Okeydokey,” I said, nuttily giving up all my feelings and my rank: God knows why . . . It was her having a runny nose all day. “I really like health,” I say out loud, getting up, holding my partly fastened pants with one hand. “My sick parents and all . . .” I am partly back into my role—my rank. The hand I’m playing. It is all eerily jocular . . . a comedy with sexual music.
“Show me,” she said as I returned to the couch. Then: “Think of me ’n . . .” Think of her while I showed her? I asked her with my face, with my eyebrows, what she meant. “Keep it romantic,” she said—as if from an inferior position.
I shook my head no.
She pursed her lips. “Show me,” she said.
I showed her.
By the way, if Nonie said of a boy that he had a ghetto look, she meant he would be unfair to women.
Leonie would sleep with Nonie that night in a double bed.
“Here.” I put her hand on me and, holding her wrist, set the rhythm . . .
It hurt at first . . . Then the light started up but rawly and kind of selflessly, the way it does when you’ve already come once. Then all at once I was horrified. Why? I had no power to withstand the horror or the reality or to comprehend it: I had no comprehension at all and I had acres, a whole ranchful of will—fanciful will? Kind of. But realistic, too. The lust maybe, the burning actuality of lust, the boyishly shocked exercise moving toward satisfaction . . . me being bossy and yet being more and more tied down, more and more vulnerable, to the slash-flash of lighted sensation—the magnesium flare . . . “The bouncing balls,” I said: in the movies, sometimes they had short films with songs you sang: you followed the bouncing ball. The absence of unhappiness is incomplete . . . The incomplete absence of unhappiness is a queer state. A practical one, I guess. Leonie and I for now disliked each other, but it was affectionate—kind of—and we pretended we didn’t dislike each other but the pretense didn’t go deep . . . But we, er, had a lot of respect for each other . . . Or maybe not. The pain and thwartings and the half-love and the indifference—and the passion behind the indifference—and the real bumingness of the pain—the weird toppling-icity of feeling good . . . “FEELING GOOD, GEELING FOOD, FEELING BETTER . . .” How do people stand it? I didn’t know at that time, at that moment, if I would survive that stuff or not.
Nonie is in the hall—a strange presence—I feel her suddenly. She can’t see us: maybe she is listening to us. Did you ever feel that putting your clothes to rights was like a sarcastic speech or a poem of mockery of someone? I mean, if I got us, Leonie and me, ready for Nonie’s entry, who would be mocked? I felt guilty-as-hell—really as if I represented hell and hellfire and a lurid light in the living room—or as if I had come from hell and smelled of inward screams—of pain, of rage—but, fuck it, I didn’t care. I felt a big So what? Now, though, writing this, I ask, what could she hear or understand?
Leonie is laughing. I am more fastened than before but still not entirely.
And I am full of damning her . . . Of a kind of nudity of defiance—not as the visiting lieutenant from hell but as someone entirely innocent—compared to her.
It is a ruse. I never felt entirely innocent in my life except under questioning as a device to get through the period of being questioned.
Nonie says, entering the dim, now slightly smelly room, although the windows are open, “How are you two coming along?”
That driea up Leonie’s jollity or embarrassment. I grew both stern and lyrical—you know? Nonie had a sense of humor; it showed at times: you couldn’t be sure when she was joking and when she was being insensitive—or dumb. As I said, my pants were mostly fastened: she took a good sighting; she checked them out. I was real to her—that is what is hardest for me to admit: the other ghost book that she wrote about herself being there, and me on the couch with Leonie. Leonie knew that book better than she knew anything at all about me.
With Nonie in the room, very little in Leonie has to do with me—it is all carom shots and rebounds, reactions . . .
She gets up and pats my hair and moves to a chair and puts her legs over the arm of the chair and she addresses her attention to Nonie. I start to laugh under my breath—then I can’t stop . . . I am unwell . . .
Something I left out from earlier when my dick was in the open air: I said, “Now-now . . .” It could have meant Now? Now? or Now, now, laughingly, don’t do that but do it, or Oh my God, now it’s real—do you see? After I said that, Leonie said, “You have a funny face.” Aw. Oh. Ow. Not now. Now now, I said. “Are you being a good boy?” Leonie asked. I said, “My mother and father have said that to me and I never know what it means.” She said, “I feel—I’m talking to you—I’m kissing you—when I do this to your thing . . .” I said, “I feel—but I don’t want to tell you this—I feel that you are taking my picture . . .” Then I look at her, I hear her intent breathing: I say, “ . . . our picture . . .”
“IT TAKES SO MUCH ENERGY TO BE ALIVE I DON’T THINK I CAN STAY AWAKE ANOTHER MINUTE.” Nonie says this.
“Why not just die and get it over with?” Leonie says in a grown-up way, lighting a Lucky Strike from the big lighter that Nonie hands her.
They talk this way at the office. The office—and the war—get them down.
A flash, a flare of MEMORY: My hand crawls onto the back of her neck. My hand (the other one) crawls onto her butt—her buttocks. Beautiful semi-hard—tense—sloppy—there, and sweaty—sweatily present—
power and helplessness—
“I wish we had instructions for things written on our bodies,” I said earlier and saw (in the third person almost but also felt it in immediacy) and heard it now . . . Ooooh shit, the pain, the pang, the SHOOTS OF WILD MATTER OF LOST SENSATION RETURNED . . . in a way . . . hallucinatorily, historically . . . without rhythmic force . . .
Shit . . .
Well, it doesn’t matter.
It does though.
It was frightening to have been born of her, of Leonie, as a man; and then to have her turn to Nonie, and Nonie being so much more important to her than I was: frightening and truly painful—even though the pain had been foreseen. The ballooning of it, the shifting of the ground of one’s being until one is in what is at first a sharp, semi-silly pain, then into more pain—that is, it isn’t trivial (to the boy); he is in the pain continuum—he is on the other side of the living border of life as a history, more or less, of more or less pain . . . He sees things grayly. It may very well be minor: he may go crazy . . . this pain—the shifting as of smoke of its curling patterns, the shifting-around shittiness of the pain of being in their hands—in terms of pain—and ultimately in Nonie’s hands, as a human matter, as the given order of things in this moment—the thing of being born by her, Leonie, and, so, by them, Leonie-and-Nonie, as a man, and then the rhythms, hidden or overt, of them in their lives, the hidden reality of their moods, the bodies, sexual realities in the room at the moment, mine, too, my sexual reality for them, the reality of my life—of my spirit . . . the muscles of my hands . . . my arms . . . my legs . . . the birdlike flutter of ideas around my head and in their talk . . . I button my shirt. I whistle under my breath: that’s as if to say they bore me—those two. Those two mothers . . . I will not let them see my pain . . . Fuck them . . . Do I cause them pain? Have I given birth to them in their moments now? To the sense of inferiority in each one of
them—and to the sense of compensation—of them managing themselves and their lives—and what I have caused them to feel . . . I smile and whistle Beethoven, from one of the late quartets—music that is over their heads, maybe, maybe not—Nonie is at times profoundly musical: she likes Brahms and early Stravinsky . . . Meanwhile, the pain ebbs and flows and floods in me—vile cramps . . . Burning bile in me . . . I am in the neighborhood of hell . . . Hell-and-death . . . I know why pilots paint devils on their planes . . . Or why some troops, the Scots for instance, call themselves The Ladies from Hell . . . The mad unobstinacy of battle when it has gone on so long no one can stay sane—no one . . . The few surviving nearly sane judges are two-eyed and everyone else is blinded—more or less. It is foolish to keep on being torn . . . By battle. By women—the Harpies—mad goddesses . . . It is stupid to go on being born into being a man . . . But what can you do? I want it. In the departure of sexual light and in its replacement, trainingly, purposefully—unknowably—by a kind of gentlemanly, adolescent exhibitionism, and then by a somewhat slyer shyness—slyer than the exhibitionism and less friendly—in this is wartime survival and obstinate malice (a common thing) and hellishness.
But malice mixed resentfully with forgiveness, with an acceptance of things, of life, one’s being a sport, a good sport—ah, you know this evokes love, even among those hell-bent on constraining you and your influence and your powers.
Perhaps one remembers Nonie saying, I don’t know about you but I am happy . . . Or perhaps she said that because you had done it to her when you were little, and that was quite a weapon. If X is happy, is Y visited by envious recollections of bits of lost happiness? Or by a sense of X’s happiness as being beyond Y’s luck? His—or her—possibilities? “This is all so so-to-speak. I’m going to bed,” the boy says—i.e., watching them, being in the presence of their hips and eyes and hair is no pleasure—isn’t pleasure enough.
I am destroyed. And I am made of fragmentary recollections of grace—this is in a bile-ridden, torturingly regretful way. But I am ONE HELL OF A GOOD SPORT . . . No: I am it quietly: one hell of a good sport . . . And I get up quietly—and stretch—male, a male creature, tall, skinny, young—you know? Not entirely fastened. Or buttoned. It is as if I wear laborers’ overalls in A State of (Masculine, Endurance-riddled) Grace for a while . . .
Kind of . . .
And they—the two middle-class girls—are punished in a way . . .
But I am innocent of punishing them—practically speaking . . .
How do you set the value of one moment? In a story or in life?
Do you consciously choose one moment and exalt it? By the choice of it for the role of measure and example or of watershed? Are you skeptical and ruthless as some kids are with their air of a shadowy and squinting Here we are . . . What are YOU going to do? I mean, in the moments.
“It’s okay,” I said to Leonie with a half-smile in the darkness of the back hall. It is hard to admit how unforgivingly I forgive people. Leonie is spending the night, Leonie in her bathrobe, me in mine—a hand-me-down from a cousin . . . My face is bent backward out of her reach . . . A smile boyishly recopying the incomplete momentum of earlier . . . an uneasy, unevenly partial momentum, forgiveness, dismissal—a persistent lifeliness: I pinch her butt through the robe—trying for humanity . . .
She looks at me with angry, jocular, pitying feeling: with a twisted affection . . . I have failed her. She is older and differently forgiving from me—very forgiving . . . I am pretty sure she is lying . . .
In the darkness in the hall:
“It was perfect . . . you’re just PERFECT,” she says with a sort of touchingly smart-assed enthusiasm, almost a well-judged kindness.
Leonie had a slow, half-bored, kind of sick tonguing system of kissing sometimes. Why not forget that? My tongue moves reminiscently in my mouth. When I speak, the speech is blurred although I try for exact enunciation—unexpected at my age: “No, you’re perfect . . .” Then: “I’d say everything was perfect but what purpose would that lie serve?” I said this, using my intellectual potential—to put her in the category of momentary things. Her face brightens and darkens oddly. “Anyway, I have to get my sleep—I’m in training . . .”
“You don’t need any more training,” she said.
I shake my head wearily—delightedly—like some seventeen-year-old boys at school, the better athletes . . . I am being old for my age . . . You can’t catch me that way is part of what that gesture of the head means. I am bare-legged, long-legged. I move past her in the hallway and feel the sting of her watching me and waiting for yet more evidence of what I am as someone she did not sleep with.
I feel this with all the nerves of my back—perhaps with all my heart and all my soul such as they are.
Leonie in memory does not speak in real words but in rather precise, almost enclosed speeches, suddenly heard with a clarity unlike anything during the actual hearing: “It’s a snafu—a real fuck-up—we’re a real pair of real fuck-ups . . .”
She talked sort of accidentally; she slid and skidded in speech and sort of fell into what she was saying—I saw it now.
“You don’t love me—you’re excitable in a nice way.” Her wolf eyes shone with her accepting what she said: devourer’s eyes she had . . . Moral disorderliness . . . The reality of the tiny street or sheath of air—sweat-flecked (on eyelashes) between us, warmed, spiky, shiftingly curtained friendliness . . . “I shouldn’t do this . . .”
I wish memories of her would leave me alone but they erect me and tug at my skin and shoulders and eyes . . . I guess you’re going to be my torment of the month . . . The prick ticked, moved against her upper leg, tickingly.
Memory is a hot-lantern thing, spilling burning, sticky stuff on you . . .
“Go to hell,” I said, maybe only in an amendment of reality: the memory is emended, edited . . . Too much feeling ruins things . . . I wish you were easygoing as a person . . . I see that. I wish you were.
Borrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr-ingggggggggggggggggggggg.
“Leonie knows what’s what: I hope you didn’t let your feelings get out of hand . . .” Nonie, able-willed in the flicker of the seconds, speaks . . . Or Nonie in a premenstrual fit pointing her finger at me screams: I DON’T WANT HIM TO SLEEP. I DON’T WANT HIM TO GO TO SCHOOL. EVERYONE OUGHT TO HATE HIM. HE’S A TERRIBLE PERSON . . .
What happens if she doesn’t calm down?
Oh, don’t be LOGICAL now—just help me: I have all I can handle as it is . . .
Nonie feels contempt for things and remains herself and is unseduced . . . Lila said, Nonie wants her chance to live—it’s her turn—I don’t blame her . . . The contempt Nonie felt for her looks as she got older led to her saying: People are fooled by me, ha-ha . . . She could not breathe. Nonie said she had no regrets of any sort ever—I’m a good person; I don’t have regrets . . . Whenever I said I was sad about the past, or things now, she said harshly, I don’t have those feelings; you’re a fool—you’re crazy—you’re a crazy person—everyone knows you’re crazy, ugly in the ways you act, ugly and crazy—people hope you die, they’d like it if you were dead . . . Reality has a kind of stink to it. How much harm does Nonie intend as an average, respectable, morally harmless thing?
In bathroom mirrors at home and at school, the face is older—with a faintly abraded mouth, worn-out, reddened eyes . . . A woundedness . . . Leonie is in one’s mind: the afterwards like a pitch, a tar stuck to one’s feet in summer, the impersistencies and the insistent recurrences of sexual memory: nothing consecutive—nothing exact. The extent of the loss and the extent of presence is maddening. One is nude in bed but is on the living-room couch but is suddenly the site of vanished sexual recollection: the stuff with Leonie . . . Then one is in class, in class after class, obscene boy with a familied look of clean clothes: his eyes are marked up and smeared: I am marked up and smeared, long-boned, achingly obscene . . . long-eyelashed Middle Western American boy’s obscene and tremendously fragmented recall. I misheard
her, surely: “Your veins are people—” Oh it’s purple—purple—purple—Royal? Bruised? Twilit—like the sea in Homer—the teacher was talking about Homer: I half heard her say some of it: four-bagger. I sharply tumble—or dive—into slanted flickings of heated recurrence of sensation—flicks of mental flukes, sexual memory: “I think YOU’RE French . . .” Or something like that. You know what? I’ll get into trouble if you don’t keep your sense of humor . . . God, what a complicated idea. Wiley—Wiley—Wiley-dear—Wiley—OOPS-EE-DOOPS . . . The music of sexuality as nonsense that wartime year of jive talk? In real life, I don’t know who loves me and who does not . . . who laughs at me and who doesn’t . . .
Maybe you’re a weak person . . .
Eyes, balls, head of the dong, stomach, and brain hurt—I have sad, dumb, dreary staring eyes—and a girl named Sally Brown who is pretty and pale and who has big breasts suddenly starts liking me that day and I am fatally jumpy and odd: she cries . . . Many-eyed, I consider the hurt Sally and Leonie’s minor necking-orgasms . . . pre-orgasms . . . my own dribbling some . . . Facts of life: plumbing the depths: suffocation: death: escape. And the return of excited terror. I presume. I presume. To a certain common order of infatuation and a leftover heat . . .
If I try to imagine myself Nonie, oh my God, how much more vivid but scattered is her sense of the war than mine was; how much more intelligently and vividly she looks at other women; how sharp and active and actual are the envy and contempt and warmth-and-coldness in my breast . . . in my breasts . . . how strong I am . . . I move solidly (and deep inside horrifiedly) among the thought of sweet girls, of sweet young women, shy, willful, pretty-haired, as a thing in me separate from their presence even when they are present—ah, how tragically warm I am—how close to care-torn. Deeply felt invective, hysteria: the contented bitches . . . Girls . . .
How free of observation I am if I am masked as Nonie is. The feeling of angry risk and nobility in me, no one had better thwart it—better not . . . A shadow but real, I have a kind of slick proud sense of my body—and its movements, a sense of privacy—like being inside a fur coat. The feet, the ankles, the girlish womanliness: the boyishness: the greed: the plotting sociability—the intense silvery-shadowy sweetness—of—my becunted physical reality . . . I think I remember this.
The Runaway Soul Page 98