He is not a symbol to other boys . . . Not a local idol. So far as I know, no one loves him but me. His parents fear his finality. They dote on him and are wounded and fragile in how they perchingly live. And I love him only at times, mostly when his solipsistic dramas and fatalities permit me room—to matter, too . . . That isn’t often. It rests on sex, on the transmission of ideas—on the importance of ideas, our skeletons for the bodies of what we know, the corpus of knowledge—and it rests on power and on cruelties, because sentimental measurements are not only incomplete, they are not measurements, they are lies; they exist as statements, as aspects of one’s politics; but they do not exist as realities.
And when my love for him exists it has the curious form in real moments of being primarily intellectual—intelligent, intelligently admiring, not a folly, except perhaps morally, of course—I love him for good reason: he has established the reasons, with his exercises and his reading and his courtesies—such as they are—but he permits my love for him to exist only erotically—in the prior state to his loving women in that fashion, the fashion I show him by loving him . . . as if he were girlish and struggling to become male . . . within some mad chrysalis of boys’ companionship . . . and whatever.
My guess is that he knows himself to be circumstantially so much better looking than I am and so much richer (in terms of cash and inheritance and of possessions now, of things he can pay for) that he is willing to court me dishonestly—honestly as an erotic object—and he is not homosexual—rather than for the real reasons he cares about me. He will never admit that I know of to his intellectual dependence on me or to his actual liking for me in my faintly opaque transparency and unhappiness and various oddities—he will never admit to his obsession-for-a-while or schoolboy crush or neediness-toward-me, or, if one is incautious, his obvious love, lifelong, tireless, cool and bitter, rivalrous, ill-informed, perhaps accursed, perhaps okay.
His parents show little feeling about him—he scares them too much. He is this way: I mean as someone who frightens feeling in others so that it remains in burrows; and he cannot see it run or feel its silken haunches near him or on him. He is unreachable largely. Is it intelligent of me to say this of him? To see this in him? Am I being intelligent now? Perhaps I should love him simply and more or less madly . . . Love him, you damn fool, love him . . . He picks on me for not being intelligent—for not having read and believed and used the books he has read and believed and used—he blames me for having conned the school to think I’m smart—he has blamed me for my being merely local . . . Not universal . . . Not great . . . At college in a few years a dean will tell me that I am “nationally smart” and I will literally go crazy then, in front of him, screaming inside my head because of Jass and Remsen and another boy named Jimbo, and for Leonie and Nonie, and for my parents. The screaming didn’t stop for six months. I hid this from people and went about my daily stuff and so no one put me away. In a bin. In a home. But I was desperate and unbelieving.
And every once in a while, I would break down further. I’d go to a tiny nearby park even if it was cold, merely to be away from the carpentered geometries of an indoors, and I’d rub my face with snow or with leaves or with oily buds later, and say to myself, Wake up Come out of it Snap out of it It’s no big deal They’re just guessing They’re probably wrong . . .
Or if I used my other, private—perhaps more honest—voice, I would think unwordedly but just this side of wordedness that it was in the nature of the world that whatever happened—the stuff that happened—was shocking. Or astounding. Astonishing, if you like. Cruel and ordinary. Before he died in his thirties, Remsen had a far more distinguished life than I had . . . No: that’s not true. He did distinguished work as a doctor. He was murdered by a patient who, it is my guess, was affronted by Remsen’s merits and his inner distances, his being out of reach.
The question arises for me with Remsen a lot—so often—I mean it is so frequent in its recurrence, it recurred over so many months and years that it had the duration of knowing and being impressed by him and of caring about him that it is almost its theme—that I liked him because it was so difficult. It was part of getting along with him for me, to admit that in getting along with him I was comparing myself to others who could not—and not just to him. It is a cat’s cradle of comparisons, this way and that. He irritates me—more than X does? Sometimes. But the difficult defines me: I am he-who-does-this . . . He is, in part, armored against that: he defines me—or he is suicidal—really. That strength in him—and it is a strength—is a recurring horror—male, flexible, dynamic, extensive—that he inflicts. And my patience with it—which is part of what he likes—or needs—or is familiar with—and addicted to—permits him to live more easily than he would otherwise.
This sounds noble, but in real life, walking along a street past lawns and shrubs and houses in a real place and not in a story where characters and a story are limited for a while—but here the question is why not walk with someone else, why not do something else—the above thing seems stupid, vaguely shameful, collusive, grown-up in a way and boyish (and amateur) in another way.
A woman should do it.
Imagine Nonie doing it for him . . .
To live with this stuff, to be me—to be a boy in my circumstances—it is faintly spiritual in tone, middle-classy, with a spine to it of my being strongly ambitious in a worldly sense as a matter of faith. I mean that as a matter of faith my life means something, I bet—it is a gamble. This stuff, familiar to me as a boy, allows a considerable looseness of attachment and demands no discipline of tones toward him day after day—I can explore and be forgetful and careless and even brutal—but not in every circumstance. No fixed crudity of response that you become furtively expert in is allowed short of more obsessive love than this.
Perhaps this is part of what holds him, and Ora later—the way in which I am not Nonie but was her rival in the house for attention and money. For love, say. And to be the one whose sadness and anger was feared most or second or third . . .
At any rate, this is not exactly a crudity: it is adolescent and not entirely amateurish, which is to say that in the sense I was prior for him, then, in my own terms, what happened here was a curable fate.
But what if I am wrong and he and I—or me alone, without him—are trapped in a crudity of incurable fate because of my past plus my knowing him plus my acting in this way until all the components are mixed for an incurable fate.
Remsen was a reciter . . . someone who claimed, and who had, no authority underived from someone else. He can’t have his own life as the grounds for his authority—as I can. So he is a natural thief of styles and of time and of attention—a crow-and-a-hawk.
Even so, he is stubbornly alive . . . It is obstinately real to me, him walking beside me along the street, his size, his voice—his view of things. I laugh at him and fail to be amused. Or truly mocking. He says—quotingly—“You jape at me . . .” I did not, truly love him—I did not cross any of the lines of loyalty or of private sacrament—or of obligation—that I, rightly or wrongly, regard as true love (those lines at which, when I cross them, Ora exclaims, Oh you love me—and Leonie exclaimed, You are a little devil, you’re going to be a devil with women . . .). I did not cross those lines with him; without remembering every moment I spent with him, I cannot be certain I did not even stand (so to speak) at such lines, or at one of them; but he saw me in the locker room waltzing naked with Jass in front of the naked other boys; he saw me with my father; he saw me staring at the sky—so he knew; or he could have known . . . No, I am certain he knew all along what I did not do. He is aware that I am not a hero with him—at least in that sense. I tell him, “I don’t accept your stupid views on things no matter how many times you tell me it’s from Freud or Marx or Schopenhauer—okay?” I know he gets a lot of his quotes wrong—a lot of this is on purpose: he claims the authority of the famous name and puts his own thought in to see if his own thought is as good. He says something and he says it i
s Marx, and I say, “Shit, Rem, that isn’t Marx, that’s you in University City being a shit-poor liar . . .”
He pretty much grovellingly comes after me so long as I don’t plan it and don’t want it. He is incredibly aware of such matters in me.
So, I give up on him. I have him by not wanting me. He comes after me and after me, day after day after day, to my astonished and irritated amusement . . . My mother says, That’s a scalp you have . . . And some teachers and Caulkins, the school superintendent, my particular protector, who watches over my education and is concerned about my future and is interested whether I am to be heterosexual or homosexual or more a public or a private person—he, I, and a good many kids kept track of Remsen’s pursuit of me—kids who kept track of such things as that . . . It would be nice (worth a lot, maybe everything) to be anonymous, no matter what Milton said about fame being the spur, anonymous in order to think as an unwatched nobody, as no one unabominably concerned with the course of one’s thoughts and concerned only with that . . .
Remsen sees to it that I do not greatly profit from his attachment. Or from his pursuit of me. That isn’t just haggling . . . it is something odd, it is haggling-cum-romance . . . Jass, the Protestant, insists that we risk death and maiming—everything with him (everything) is the exercise of courage. Ora demands that I “love” her enough not to care if the love harms her—or whatever it is: I can’t think about her now. I don’t humiliate him or try to set things up to show off his doglike thing toward me—and he is cautious and shrewd about it.
But when I walk home, he sometimes literally pops but from behind a tree along the route I take and where he was hiding so no one will see how much he wants to see me. He won’t lend me his car, he won’t lend me books, he doesn’t offer to lend me clothes. One winter when I knew him I had no coat. Lila thought the pathos would bring me a coat fast. And Remsen’s mother nervously—and prettily—offered me a coat; a lot of people did; I always refused in order to shame Lila and to stay out of debt. But Remsen didn’t offer. I had the sense he wanted me to become ill. I went through the winter being cold and wearing a lot of sweaters, often four or five at the same time, one over the other, which some kids, some of the poorer kids, then some of the very rich kids, turned into a school style that winter, for a number of months.
Remsen has said I am a freak, a phenomenon, but not a real mind. I have a better-judged memory than he does—that is, it presents things with more judgment in the presentation and in the caption or footnote aspects (this was yesterday) than his memory can manage—he just remembers things and hopes there is meaning in that memory, but my memory aligns itself with its purposes and then admits that it does that. He is a kind of blind but determined and fairly smart gambler on his own limitations—I am, too, but in a different style. It is hard to talk about such things as this. I have a far better sense of consequences and, therefore, am almost infinitely better at induction and deduction than he is; and he is sometimes humble and sometimes murderous toward me because of this. His mind is better-stocked, more conventional—he is a Marxist-Freudian Positivist—well, you can’t be that and be logical, but you can be it and be conventional, conventionally intellectual, and that is what he is. At moments, when he is a bit drunk, or when he has been sniffing glue, partly as a duty—to be “fast,” to be radical, to be young-and-intelligent, et cetera, he says it is magical (to sniff glue) and his weird background shows through, not directly then, but by opposition to what he pretends is his being logical and reasonable at other times. Some primitive mess of semi-inspired superstition that yet is accurately enough placed in regard to life is what he is rooted in. This comes roaring through as indicating a kind of intellect and one of a certain rank; and sometimes that frightens me and I retreat into being a single ship alone on a vast ocean and am as isolated as he is—if he is the world, or if he is closer to being it than I am. Mostly, he is a dying or at least strangled rationalist, incapable of reason in the traditional Western sense; but since he is so hardworking and can be rational by rote and watchfully and out of a gray and ambitious despair, and since he is incapable of life, except erotically (he is too absolutist to live: living is political, unmendably political or relativist, as I said), and is incapable of feeling life to any great extent except as his doctor and his books and his body force him to—and except, at the moment, through me—he is pretty much an okay mind by almost all standards but mine. And will be—if he lives . . . And he was, as long as he lived. But I always laughed at his mind—and was fond of him . . .
But his mind really is an expanse of curiously ashen deadness, a dullness: it is strange to see this in someone so clearly spectacular and so bright. Maybe it comes from a partly misguided idea of being young (and spectacular) and has only a crooked and suffocating connection to his reality.
So that he is a sort of unembraceable hero, marvelous flesh that is a field of skipping ashes that fly into my grasp if I touch him—he is a shadow among the shades in an epic of ambition, but willfully; it is self-willed, much of what he is. What he calls ‘neurotic’ or ‘unfavorable circumstances’ is his romantic anxiousness not to pay the price for what he is as he goes along but to pay only afterwards, in a subsequent hell. He is truly alive at moments in terms of his escaping from reality and logic as into the hallucinatory stuff of sex—not the reality part but the accompaniment, as if the hallucination were music and he was a musician. Much of what he calls logic is like fingers clinging to a ledge which he then blithely releases from their intent desperation, and they, and he, as-if-scutter lithely away inside the music. So that if I did, for a while, hold, or earn, his ‘love’ as a boy of a certain kind and in relation to him, it was, in part, or so I say, a storm of ashes and of hallucination in him and of humiliation among shades, shadows, mental constructs. The physical thing, or the strongly emotional thing, when it comes near him, the ash breaks into finer and finer fragments, pitiably, us, us as shadows and ashes at the end of the world. He grovels some—it is as if playful and on a dreary plain; it is sexually polite, vaguely working-class, odd. It is not contractual. It is not a swindle. It does not mean much—but nothing does when it is momentary if you do not believe the moments are real or that time is or that moments and time matter. He grovels toward destiny as well as toward whoever he wants to engage with him in shadowy acts—that does not mean much either, his attitude toward destiny. He is brave but the grovelling makes him vengeful—toward what his ambition gains him; he grovels with immense, immense pride, on his way to a higher position in the world (higher than he has now), but he keeps score and he has his resentment toward this.
We walk. He wears a pale blue polo shirt that shows his muscles—or the shadows of them in this light. He is close to being physically beautiful. His face is coldly focussed with the wish to have me join him in his study of sex—sex among the shades, not our real selves but our mental selves, autonomous in regard to most physical rules—or at least it feels that way to the mind: the tender membranes and flying sparks and chemical whizzlings feel they are armor-and-rock. People write about this, how powerful and bronzelike and long-lived a mind is, not ruled by physical law exactly but stained, so to speak, by it, or if the physical is pure, then stained by the will: the mind, the mind in the shape of a long-legged, almost brilliant, quite handsome, nearly beautiful boy—him . . . Remsen . . . I am not responsive and yet I am so deeply flattered, so profoundly moved I am crazy with it. The cold focus of his face is to hide the grovelling. Is to undo it. Is to see to it that it doesn’t occur as it did the last time. I try to hide in my behavior, in a ceramiclike surface of myself that he has not grovelled at all. He has gone to a school in the slums and he has lived in neighborhoods where boys fooled around—naturally (he has said this and does not need to say it again)—and he is being natural-natural and boyish at a different site, commanding, different-handed, gang-leaderish, gang-followerish—naturally but artificially . . .
A book review of this stuff—an analysis of it—is that I think he
has been an object of this stuff and relives it from various angles—but the other experiences are, some of them, too shadowy, and others are too clear. I don’t know what he is repeating or studying—or what his desires are. I know he cares about me some and that I do not care to know more about him. He has older sisters—three of them. He has a very pretty, youngish mother . . . All my friends and the girls I saw something of had pretty mothers . . . His father is handsome, polite, very oddly mannerly—not the manners of a sect or of a social class. His father is unusually good-looking but nervous (or fearful) and wet-lipped, shy—a gangster maybe—or so Lila theorized.
The Runaway Soul Page 101