He had become proper. Perhaps, he had been unable to bear his life until now—who knows what lives people have . . . Sins. Crimes.
But one can theorize, too, that there had been in Remsen’s life, in other neighborhoods, neighborhoods in the sexual world, older boys larger and tougher than he was; there he was—in all that physical fear—and the desire—and he is smart . . . But anyway, I suspect the presence of the streets and storefronts of his childhood. Protectors. Gangs. Danger. It is as if I seemed to him to be more valuable than he was, and at the same time he believed that he came first . . . I haven’t the power, or the will, to interrogate him.
You can tell, sort of, what’s going on, but not clearly . . . He might want to move up in the world, measure himself in this way, demean the suburbs. I do not know. This topic—he is supremely, almost sublimely orderly in a down-to-earth way during our time together, on this topic, he cannot make the effort to understand me—he wins my admiration, my adherence, but without addressing me, without me, so to speak, but with the factual stuff of the bribes—a certain number of compliments, a degree of niceness in his tone, a kind of obeisance or acceptance of my school rank—without bitterness—a certain display of humor—a certain kind of offer of sexual pleasures a little beyond my desserts, beyond my sexual merits . . . But this is done without reference to me. It has some reference to what my tastes must be according to the rules of psychoanalysis and of his ‘brilliant’ perceptions of the political realities of this world. That includes his social analysis as well. His neural sense—and his genital sense—of things. These qualities of friendship plus a kind of sexual intimacy—as boys, that is to say without kinkiness—all of it has everything to do with him, with what he is, what he knows, what he has learned. He opens a cabinet door, and there on the shelves is nothing physical but is everything learned and known, is the sort of proudly housekept household of the self. I cannot do that. I must tell him nothing—it gives him a headache; he must discuss what I say with his doctor. He spends a day or two in bed. He demands clarity: that is, what he already knows, delicately modified—if modified at all. In discussing a wrestling meet—or a mountain climb—he somehow mixes mountains with boys he has wrestled with: massive topographical difficulties he has wrestled with, plodded through, or upward, or sprinted upward. One of the problems with symbolic representation of things is that then things can be represented by images which are imagined equivalences, piles of money, degrees of triumph, one’s own responses. But the mountain exists beyond my own response to it and beyond my father’s response and my family’s sense of it as does Remsen whom, in spite of it all, I love. He asks me what I read and he reads the same books in a kind of powerful rivalry, to win them from me—him keeping his balance, him doing his schoolwork, him as an athlete: it is him winning out over forces of disorder outside him and inside him—he is a walking Trojan War of neural and intellectual forces, oddments really, all of them accepted by him as general, and yet no one is like him: I am more widely understood, in my oddities, than he is; and he invariably dismisses with abuse the books I care about, so that I do not tell him anymore what I like. I lie to him and joke, or half joke, rather than duel with scorn, innuendo, summonings of rank, quotations about literary excellence, and so on. Depending on the judge, on who referees us, I win most of such exchanges, but then I have the dying Gaul, the wounded Remsen—young man in despair. In his courtship, in his peculiar affection, as he marches toward me—so to speak—or walks alongside me, talking sidelong about preparations for a match and tactics—how to prepare the legs—and how a love of Marx and Lenin helps in this . . . how Jack London understands and so on—is both a command, a logical progression of lawgiving, and also a human request for sympathy—the two arms of the seduction, of the nutcracker (a feminization in a sense, but only in a sense) of which he is enormously proud—that he is so normal—as to be able to elicit and command and to ask for sympathy humanly—but none of this is mutual. We do not take turns. What is understood, or silent, is that I am more normal, more successful, stronger, or some such thing, or all those things at the moment, because the world is hideous and wrong.
The compliment, or obeisance, is tacit, is in a tone, is to be understood. Lila used to say of certain things—of such things as this—human bargains, people acting out their dreams—It makes me laugh . . . And then she would not laugh except in certain stage-y often ironically-scoffing ways just this side of an outbreak of wild behavior—telling her mother to leave her alone: that sort of thing.
Or Daddy would say it, not necessarily about me, but I never saw Daddy doing business for a whole day: I never saw the negotiations or knew the terms of his dealings. But certain swindles, certain counterfeit things, claims, pretensions, certain claims of legitimacy (of claims) and of equivalency (for a trade, in order to establish justice or merely parity) would lead him to say, It makes me laugh, and he would take on a truly tragic air and he would snort and whinny a bit: a tragic horse in a tale or a sad king in a famous play . . . It was something like that.
On the sidewalk Remsen says, “Let me show you the arm lock I used on Willy Boston.”
“Not on your life,” I say. “Don’t make me laugh . . .” And I twist away, or threaten to kick him in the nuts if he already has taken hold of my arm.
But much of the meaning lies even beyond that—beyond the voices—and, as with Nonie, who always says, Don’t make me laugh, within a negotiation or progression toward her own kingdom of triumphs and some defeats, it lies in the relation of the kingdoms and of their comparative value: it is a relative shortcut to measurement by means of a certain kind of force he is trained in and I am not trained in.
“Don’t be an asshole,” I say; and then it depends on the set of my shoulders, on the degree of anger in my eyes, on the posture of my lips whether I am calling him a creep, or a slum child, or a truly inadequate lover . . .
My powers—those of scorn and of school popularity of a sort (my opinions are well regarded, partly because I don’t lie or use the opinions merely politically) and the consequent spread, the contagious spread of the scorn—control him, bridle him somewhat, although he passes that off mostly as his affection, his knowing about friendship-in-the-real-world . . . the real give-and-take. He and Nonie do occupy similarly constructed worlds, or cities, of winning and losing, of rank, of position. They are similarly aware of sharing a household with other children, citizens dependent on parental dispensations, in uneasy and quarrelsome—and heartbreaking—sharing.
His mouth twists—scornfully: it is not powerful scorn, not powerfully abusing. The most relative thing he does, the thing that most includes me, or permits me to be there, is a kind of weakness that he parades—it is a real thing, however. I am perhaps mischievous, and I parade a counterfeit, polite, paper-thin similar weakness, or matching one. He grows still then, suspecting, half seeing a truth—as one might see a deer or a deer scut in the pinewoods on one’s ascent of a mountain. He suspects me of some sort of emotional sleight-of-hand—of some slight of his things—the elements of his reality—so much so, moment after moment, that I am driven to experiment: “You are an asshole . . .” He may be so hurt, so angry, so whatever that he will now march off. I am forced—FORCED—to smile and grab his shoulder if I am at all interested in the sort of sexual intimacy possible with him.
Then, because he has been so hurt, I follow along where he leads—he has shortcuts from here to his house, and for us to take them means going mostly in single file with me following him. He cannot follow me at any time. He has told me he has a proud soul.
I see in him the world Nonie inhabits—the one Lila speaks of—but I see it more clearly and with less shock of immediacy when it is freed from gender (and family matters) and is set in a boy . . . an older boy . . . powerfully built, as I said . . . and monied, and not pathetic. I see that he feels, feels and thinks, that time will not change us, that, in justice, we will not take turns since there is no justice yet, and that what changes occur in ou
r standing will come about from his efforts—his will, his cleverness—but even as I follow him through backyards and across the back part of a farm field where a farmer has not yet sold to developers, I believe that he is cluttered with timelessness and with stillnesses and that he is without the will to be any other way and that I can evade him endlessly because I move and exist in time . . . Ahead of me, his back: his buttocks in motion, the literal façades of his vanity, embodiments of the men, the elements of reality he plays with in the board game of his sense of things: is he safe from me? I am phallically larger than he is, cleverer in the few ways I am cleverer: I am often hurt, often resentful of my life compared to his, and of him and of what he is: I am often tired of being patient: I often long to commit a terrible and private and hidden crime and then to laugh about it: I am often tired of him, always tired of him in a way—he is not what I desire. Lately, I have thought I must learn to accept what is given me, but sometimes I want to overturn everything in my life: it is an immense disrespect, even a contempt in me—that is what Don’t make me laugh refers to when I say it, or think it, that next state, that quality of soul that one might enter on, through a door, willfully . . .
But that does not mean I do not care for him. I repeat, he is an older boy . . . two and a half years older than I am. We are the same height; he outweighs me by nearly twenty-five well-organized pounds. To be near him is to be near the humiliation imposed by the stone face of a cliff or the fear-inflicting chest and forelegs—and hooves—of a horse. Trampled and buried, overwhelmed, thrown to the ground, conquered: it is present here. Would I then try to kill him? Beat his skull in with a rock? Humiliate him so in school he would never forget it? Some days he haplessly imitates my postures and the motions of my face—that sickens me—bores me. To see him at a distance—the posture, the physical power, the clothes, the motions—to feel at a distance that he is imitating me—it sometimes gives me a frisson . . . Of power? Strings leading from me to him physically? Morally? Immorally? Things inside me have no labels. He and I have secrets from the school. What does it mean I accept his love such as it is, accept it sometimes, perhaps mostly to punish my family. And then I resist being like that. I try to like him for what he is in the middle of the starvation of him being courtly out of his own feelings and in line with his judgment and without reference to my reality. He is very truthful—in his way—very fine—but he has never seen me. I love, I think, the capacity of his chest, the actual muscular and spread-rib capaciousness of the chamber of breath and of the faintly audible heartbeat when I lie near him on the bed in his bedroom.
And the backs of his thighs, the outline of his buttocks, but not the actual things: they are too real, too real as organized masses of muscle, as sources of accomplishment: they are youthfully hairy and singularly his. They are him. I never, or very rarely, tell him any truth from my side of the bones and tissues and skin and skimpy muscle which is me. I dislike his face. I dislike the shapes his courage takes—perhaps I am jealous . . . I mimic him: I long for the ideal thing, as in a dream, when the world, the sky, the liner among the leaves of the treetops are within my head: the ideal means my nearness to God—or to ultimate truth: the suicidal murderer’s platform. Ultimates are near-death. I have never kissed him. Never touched him tenderly. Part of me never stops laughing at him—the streams of time, the committees of selves, which are me rush along in regard to him like a brook or a laughably rattling wagon. In his presence—me as a male nymph—I refer to truth only from doctrines or to no truth: it is a chamber to lies to be near him, a stage; it is as if we wear makeup in order to simulate the dream things of the theater, of his own mind, of his sense of the ideal. I rarely use words other than his own when I talk to him, but when I do, it shatters him—momentarily; and often, he shows temper, temper or grief. If I were a doctor of the mind, I would say that ideas underlie pain and that ideals generate actions and are useful in private as pellets of solace, but that they must never be used as premises and one must realize, ipso facto, they cannot be used for human measurements.
I have been longer settled in University City than he has. I know people here and am known. The aura of how I am known, the accumulation of forgetfulness and of memory, that plus what I am physically now and mentally, that has hooked him to me . . . Boyhood romances: Do you know how to hold someone’s interest? Be rich, my mother has said.
I do it differently, Mom . . .
I have lived in this suburb for nine years and I want to live here for the rest of my life in that pulsating and changeable aura—that nest . . . That brief-time thing, that small matter is the center of my being able to sleep, to bear my dreaming, to walk in the streets, to be seen. He, Remsen, my beloved, ha-ha-ha, don’t make me laugh, sees this as a matter of social rank in the U.S.
Remsen says, “You’re all right for a bourgeois . . . But history will chew you up in little bits and spit you out . . .”
“And what if you are wrong?”
“Wrong?”
“What if history approves of me more than it does of you?”
“You think you are smarter than Marx?”
We are walking side by side down an alley in the late-afternoon shadows . . . Here and there, the sun, from the west, is suddenly nakedly brilliant.
“You think you are smarter than Freud? Than Schopenhauer?”
“You’re sure you know what Freud was saying . . .”
“I am brilliant,” he says, which is charming. In front of me, in some internal exhibition of recent memory becoming less recent second by second and serving more and more different purposes, in front of me but inside my head his exceedingly powerful and shapely butt wiggles like a mockery of a face—or like a mockery of breasts. The two mounds suckle nothing, at least in terms of actual food: it is the other face of food: the hinder end, the hind end . . .
“Me too—I’m brilliant,” I say in the flooding western light, the extraordinarily huge, hugely bright flare of blinding illumination (if one can say that) in the alley.
It is immodest to say this, but it was all right for him to say it: the claim was of a certain sort. His heart was in it. I was joking—I was laughing at him—as per usual was a local idiom back then—my heart was not in it; and it was a horror . . . The school does consider me brilliant and him of a good but lesser rank in those areas.
I cannot see him in the glare but I feel him slapped by the horror and I feel my own solecism: whether or not I am right or half right or a quarter right about the ways he is walled in and is self-concerned and self-referential, his reality is still one of awareness. The warriors and the abruptly dead are there.
“That was a socially decadent remark,” I say. In the bright blindness I can make out his shoulders, not as a complete sight or even as a complete line, and his neck, and the line of his jaw. “Mine. You are everything and everything is you . . .”
I am so sickened at making peace that, without warning, I start to jog, but then I half turn and now I see him illuminated and obliterated both, and I say, “Come on, set the pace for me . . .”
He hesitates for a second—murderously?—and then he takes off: he runs past me and ahead. “Come on, asshole,” he says . . . We are without fixed rank, he and I—egalitarian, democratic. His egalitarian-democratic would-be socialist absolutist and universe-comprehending buttocks move ahead of me in a shadow in which, as I run, lopingly, I see him as a physical fineness, as, clearly, in shadow, fineness enough for me.
Now we are in his backyard, having talked dirty while we passed through his garage, panting from the run. It was odd talk, odd in its dirtiness . . . semi-medical.
“You know what a fistula is?”
“No. Do you?”
“No. I just like the sound of cunt fistula . . . Oh my God, it’s a form of Count Dracula!”
“You’re afraid of being vampirized . . . Your prick falls off . . .”
“Your prick does not fall off if you’re vampirized: Dracula was a great lover . . .”
�
�You like the smell-of sperm?”
“No! Ugh . . . Do you?”
“You’re supposed to like it—you’re supposed to accept all your natural oils and stuff . . .”
“Jesus, Remsen! I don’t know if I can do that . . . When you dream of fucking—well, first, you dream of it lately?”
A little suspiciously, since he hates Socratic dialogues: “Yeah?”
“Did you dream of motions on your part and not on hers? Was it a specific cunt?”
“I don’t know: why?”
“Because the last three times I got caught in one of those dreams, it started as me seeing someone else fucking someone, and I got jealous and then it was me, sort of wrestlingly, but it was just me: there was so little trace of the other, the plausibility was no good and I woke up and I was, you know, fucking the mattress . . .”
“You’re very sick . . . You ought to see a doctor.”
“Yeah? You want to play doctor? Is that what you’re going to say next?”
His father had a lot of free time, and in their backyard was a sundial that said Carpe Diem and spokes of garden beds filled with neatly tended rosebushes, all of them in shades of red. White ones lined the yard. And yellow ones in half-oval beds were along the sides of the house.
“You’re of no interest to me sexually, buddy,” Remsen said. “You’re a human Kleenex.”
“Right.”
“You have no sense of humor,” he told me. “You’re social-and-decadent . . . You are truly bourgeois . . .”
I stop walking. The anger—or the flirtatiousness in that tone—stops then: his face and his breathing change. “I got hold of a new dirty book . . .”
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