The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  “You refuse to believe in my real family, which is working-class . . .”

  “I bet they have money . . .”

  “They are crude and violent, Remsen . . .”

  “But you live with people with country-club connections . . .”

  “Jesus, am I ever highly ranked . . . Me, the bourgeois desirable one . . . It must really drive you crazy . . . “He was so much better built . . . If I refer to that, he, almost gently, blossoms. “I am a more acceptable local form . . . You’re too much a body. You’re too educated—and sensual . . .” It’s odd about lies in real life, when you’re talking, how they slant and curve and shine like some kinds of metal, and they reflect something glancingly, something real and unexplained. I hesitated and then I said that to him; I heard the words glancingly, or the meanings, shades of meaning: the sentence moved like a dog, almost, or an otter—or like an armada of flaming otters shatteringly, meltingly . . .

  At times, the language I use, the way it curves—like a stocking on a girl’s leg, Remsen said once—stirs him physically—the way he is a mind-become-a-boy . . .

  “Tell me again about your real family?” he says askingly, with his chest and arms so thrust into the glare-surrounded shadow where we stand among the spokes of rosebushes that it is a familiar signal, a variant of when he is sexually needy or curious or whatever it is in him toward me . . .

  “I am working-class by blood—unless you count my real uncles—and of a far, far lower-ranked class than any you can be from. My real father lives on a street where there are only a few houses and it’s not in a neighborhood and mostly prison guards live in those houses. Do you see what I mean?”

  He doesn’t answer. He is in motion—like a thought—among the bushes, past the many-lipped silence of the rose into the glare where the shadow of the garage stops near the back door of his house. My rearranged face, my disarranged face, my hair flip-flopping as I settle creakingly on the bed—in his bedroom—me: I am clothed, buttoned, I am in a long-sleeved shirt—jeune homme fatal, although you would hardly believe it at first sight. If I am honest, I should say that some people do believe it: some days, when I go to the grocery store for my mother and sister, I count the number of people who react to me. It gets intense . . .

  As I settle on Remsen’s bed—gangling, conceited-humble—reasonably glad to be here compared to being at home—I am, on this occasion, so glad to be not ignored that my posture is of my unrefused friendship for him—with some quite noticeable distances in it—in the end I am not really here except as a mind-cum-an-excitable-substance neural-physical but mostly neural, since he bores me with his determination-to-be-a-fixed-quantity-as-a-man-who-will-win-out-in-the-universe. I say out loud, “Losing now and then is not such a bad-idea . . .” And he is not honest about absolutist and relativist matters, although he has read two of Einstein’s papers in German (he has completely misunderstood them, I think). I have no real political franchise here: merely power: it is a very fragile love, not as an emotion inside me, but as a color and a territory in which I move and act. It is inward, messy, approximate . . . unideal . . . But it is love.

  He asks—well, he has fondled himself but not elaborately and he has put his hand over the muscle of his chest; that the context is sexuality interests my blood, so to speak, and my nerves, which become shadowy in their pulsing sense of meanings—he asks as part of an ongoing conversation about dominance and a Utopian escape from any sexual cruelty: this is supposed to get me excited and to represent a modern attitude, a modern attitude as absolution—“Well, would you hit a woman to stop her from making a scene with you?”

  “I WOULDn’t hit her . . .”

  “Would you THINK about hitting her?”

  I have an erection and so does he . . . I have a part of an erection, a specific erection, a cast of excitement.

  “No,” I say.

  “Are you saying this to make me feel lower-class again?”

  “Christ, I don’t know . . .” He has asked me not to mention to him anything about analysis and not to ask him about his analysis or about the psychoanalyst he sees: this is part of what it is forbidden me to say. I am grist-for-a-mill, the ground on which he will find his balance in order to proceed, heroically, from there to another and, of course, deeper affair. An attitude: We are failures here together: as part of a seduction, of a seduction of a kind, a move toward collusion which he rules absolutely, in a way, but not quite. Perhaps competing with that or rather measuring myself against it is one of the things that amuses me, although perhaps not enough.

  Judging from his actions in high school, I believe that he knows very little about social rank and social rankings in this country (and in other societies) but that he bends all his worries, all his pain until he feels it can be explained because of his social rank and the corruptions in it.

  It is symbolic representation based on ignorance and a personally skewed perspective—an aesthetic matter posing as an ultimate secular truth, which is okay—except there is a sense in which, in a corrupt tradition, if one wants to be loyal to it, or if one has to be loyal to it, psychologically, in order to breathe, then ignorance of certain things becomes the mark of that loyalty, ignorance, unawareness, a kind of doom.

  Which then relegates you to a fierce and lower and doomed rank. It is not what being of family or part of a valuable tradition is about. Remsen simply has not even the beginnings of a sense of the merits, denials, willfulnesses, braveries, offers of amusement and of human absolution that go with class things. Although he counts on such absolution sexually . . . Or he is aware of it, I should say, and he does not count on it for himself.

  “Are you saying this to make me feel lower-class again?”

  “Christ, I don’t know . . .” is what we have just said. “No,” I say. Then, in deadpan naughtiness, maybe in boredom: “Yes—”

  He is too remarkable-looking and too powerful and too well read not to be irritating when he gets onto the social-class thing so stupidly-slyly. He wants to save himself only a little.

  With that savoir faire as someone older and huger than I am, he says, “So, uh, tell . . . uh . . . me the uh ah huh the uh troooooooithhhhh . . .” He believes that he speaks normative English. His accent and his manner are not pleasing. But they’re not repulsive—a term in local use back then. They’re not so bad, but he makes no real effort to please, either. When I don’t speak, he—after eyeing my pants, my crotch as I recline on the bed catty-cornered and at a distance from him but within the intimacy of being on the same bed—he, after irritating me out of the sexual mood I was in, comes to the point, at the wrong time, and says, “Will you uh uhwahtchu(h) meeeee—uh mahhssss-tuhr-bayyyyyte(h) . . . ?” When I don’t answer—I am hesitating—he adds, “Layturrrr . . . ?”

  I raise my eyebrows without focussing my eyes, so that it is as if the hairs in those crescent shapes look at him . . .

  At any rate, another kind of sightedness is suggested. I don’t have to be honest with myself around him. Lies, within a certain range of untruth, on a certain plane of reference, are okay here—they are all that is possible here. He breathes in a way that is not a sigh: he will make an effort to see that I am aroused . . . My erections, which, after all, do have a factual nature, like my turn running the 440 and my grade average (101+ to show I do unexpectedly good schoolwork), are realer to him than I am. “You said you had a dirty book . . .”

  “It’s not obscene: it’s dirty . . .” He hands it to me from a drawer in a bedside table in which are dirty books, dirty photographs loosely spread.

  “They been like that all day?”

  “My mother never cleans in here—only Sarah cleans. And she thinks I’m going to hell, but she won’t tell on me . . .”

  “Does Sarah like it that you’re going to hell?”

  “She doesn’t read the books,” he said. “I leave stuff in them so that I can tell.”

  He makes mistakes about what affects me, but he often understands how to have an effect and
how these things operate with and touch me. As a matter of fact, he knows that better than I know myself. I learn each time, learn a little bit, about myself. Within the ambit of a casual and skipping dirtiness, he won’t discuss his social class or matters of social class endlessly, which leaves room for me to exist—a little room—and he won’t irritate me in the next few moments—if he can help it—which also leaves room: it is a form of obscene truce.

  His looks, the pale eyes, dark, firm, profuse lashes, strong eyelids, the in-a-way glare of his reality—the burning eastern-and-morning shine, almost blinding, of fresh health, an effulgence in his skin—it is more than acceptable if I don’t think about the life inside the haylike heat and summer smelliness of his looks: the sheaf of optical and tactile details of human surfaces—of this one person—in the fragments and torn sheets and showers and rags of the light, the brilliantly outflung afternoon light and its shadows (as of the window sash) in the room and some solitary rays revolving like solitary glances from the sky and the glare around the house and under our cloudless part of the sky are warming and enticing: one plays around—sins—inside the light as one looks at a dirty picture and reads in the silly book which proposes truly perfect, blinding, blindingly obliterating pleasures.

  For a moment, one resents his somewhat too juicy presence. But what if he is the soul of mankind—or something? Or Nonie is? What if I am, in the end, a mistake, or am as momentary, and as bodiless, and as hurried in the end, as the light in the room is? What if he is a true reflection of some ultimately absolute thing in the universe? And I am to be punished in the end—on the way to Lethe?

  I say—carefully not sighing, hedging my bets—“You want to do this in socialist brotherhood?” Then: “Or not?”

  He considers for a moment whether to let me tease him—whether my rights extend that far—or my power . . . Or my powers . . . He doesn’t know my mood, my state, with any precision.

  “Yes,” he says, “let me see your prick . . .” He says it with different inflections and with just a touch of a tone of cleverness to show he’s on top of the situation . . . heroically. He claims too much: that he can read everything I feel, that he’s not the fool here. It’s a disaster, socially (or sexually)—to be beyond someone’s comprehension; so that people who claim to comprehend you are forcing you into a bind. You have to agree or else insult them.

  Also, if you’re spending a couple of hours with some kid who believes in clichés, you have to be clichéd or the whole thing turns into a nightmare of overt struggle—often really violent, as if you were a demon, a goblin, a hobgoblin, as if your being unlike him, or her, meant you were part of an army of unseen powers. And that it is not all linguistic . . . I mean linguistic snobbery, like genital snobbery, seems to be demonic . . . bile and brimstone. But it irritates me to pretend he understands me . . . Of course, in a way he does. His stuff, based on that pretension, partly works. I feel I am all bent over, bent together, as if we were locked in a toy chest, he and I, or something, but his stuff partly works. It is not like being with a helpless girl. It works and some of it doesn’t work and I am not really the demon here. In my irritation with his claims of absolute truth—and of absolute understanding—I speak in a way familiar to him—I mean it is a way he feels that people speak except for some girls: “Socialism is bullshit,” I say. “What control is there of the governors? Power corrupts. Real power really corrupts . . . Absolute power corrupts absolutely . . . The claim of absolute thought corrupts. You have to have electoral socialism—and, probably, you can’t. That’s what’s wrong with your Stalin . . .”

  “You [are] bullshit[ting],” he says. I am, too, but I also mean that what I say is pretty much correct—in part. Remsen goes on: “He [Stalin] has to guard a great new idea from killers . . . from the dead men of the old regimes.”

  Very few people accuse you of what is not true of them and which scares them in themselves.

  “Oh, what bullshit . . . Anyone who does that with power, well, power is power, my friend . . .”

  “That’s not a famous epigram,” he said almost humbly in his triumph (at this reply). I look at him, though, and his eyes are glaring masterfully. He has one hand stroking his crotch. Disgusting . . .

  I smile patiently.

  Affection in me toward him humbles him . . . sort of.

  “Don’t handle yourself . . . Your mother thinks we’re talking intellectually . . .”

  “This is intellectual,” he said masterfully-slyly-argumentatively (meaning that sex of this sort was intellectual). I hear his zipper; I am not looking at him. I know from experience he gets sleepy-eyed and weird when he shows himself to the air—I think that is like some boy or boys he knew earlier, but maybe it is natural to him—it is foreign and creepy, to me.

  Then, usually, after a long few seconds of that, he wakes to himself and then to me . . . which moves me if I look . . . I wasn’t looking. I meant not to look today or be moved by him, but I did and was moved; and, then, grinning in a shadowy way with raised eyebrows, I looked away—calmly—into the middle of the reality here as he has defined it over and over, which is to say, I look into the middle of the lightlessness of We are not in love . . . He had a firmer—and more sensible—sense of lying than I did, a more excitable and doom-laden sense of untruth—by that I don’t mean lies; I mean the failure of an absolute . . . of the absolute . . . A truth he believes is invariably a total and unchanging truth. His face darkened and lightened whatever he did with a kind of dense illumination of his forms of logic by the action he was doing as he went along—by a pragmatic relativism somewhat beyond me physically. I was jealous of him, of the ways he was, in a lot of ways. “I like to imagine things,” he says. Then he says, “I like to lie . . .” A kind of innocence as he toys with himself . . .

  “My mother says that . . .” I can’t, at the moment, remember the term free will . . . “No one likes to be coerced by truth . . .”

  He reaches over to stroke my skinny chest between the buttons of my shirt—he does it with one long, knuckly, gently hairy finger. Like my mother, he is a cold lover of mine—if he is a lover of mine—cold except for the excitement of the ups and downs of who’s-the-boss, who-loves-who-more-at-the-moment: a weird historicism of this stuff, they both like that—in different ways.

  “I am using my left hand,” he says. It is kind of a cold moment. “I’m ambidextrous sexually now: I’ve trained myself . . . God, the woman who gets me will be lucky . . .”

  He touches flesh—my flesh—to get himself going. Perhaps he touches me in the hope of his being able to get me going. It is a cold business—hot in some ways, hot as a byproduct, a leftover and amateur heat.

  “Bad sex is an earnest of normalcy . . .”

  “What does earnest mean?” he asks.

  “A sign, a promise . . . a token . . .”

  “You and the dictionary,” he says. He says, “You want to read out loud from the Marquis de Sade?”

  “I’m all right,” I say. That means Leave me alone . . .

  My assurance, my half-assurance—the half-bumptious thing of perception, often semi-worded close to its origination as perception in a boy—and the way that that shows that I am allied to suburban words and some secret words and to words for secret things—that is a lot of what about me excites him . . . the real world and emotions and moments known in words and inflections, in hints and the like, and then that knowledge is seen, somewhat foolishly, as a sign of social caste.

  The longer he knows me the more like me he becomes in some mannerisms—and some skills—and often he shows his feelings of superiority at having learned what I learned, at his having mastered it.

  “No one is all right,” he corrects me. “People are immature or they are mature.” He comes to the correction of others almost like a porpoise bringing its blowhole to the surface of the sea—it is a necessity of breath, death-and-life really, something like that.

  I move away slightly, only slightly, from his finger—actually by th
en two absentminded knuckly fingers. I turn partly onto my side, out of his reach. I sigh and start in on a sort of dryly strained pantomimic jousting, a jostling with him but made of silence and distancing—a resistance to the somewhat sexy maneuverings, fluctuations, pulsings of the bed (those go with the movements of his right hand on himself), and to the thoughts, the meanings. In this oceanic set of seconds I am inert despite the movements of his left hand—and of his mood—inert toward the eroticism in me which reflects or answers to or echoes his. Or is rivalrous with it. Pride. And a different sense of what is sexual? Or virtue? A moral cowardice? A bravery? The circling, semi-startled nature of my mood, the comparative ease of sexuality at that age, a sense of the difficulty of continuing in my life—and then sexuality itself, cumulatively—accumulatingly—and, looking ahead, crescendoingly, unprotectedly, unshieldingly interesting.

  My style is to be inert . . . an indolent insolence. Remsen named it (on other occasions) an insolent indolence—a phrase from some book, or perhaps his own, with the help of a thesaurus. The phrases don’t mean the same thing. He wants to have a vocabulary like mine but he is careless about usage and connotation—or uncaring or thoughtless—and he believes meaning has been established: he sees universal and absolute meanings everywhere. I am erotically inert, indolent—whatever—and that indolent inertia—or suburban virtue—is part of how I talk to people: it is an unsettling discarding of erotic ambition—hence (hence is a show-off word) an odd claim to victory-and-defeat both, a sense of superiority in terms of foresight and in regard to not being tricky, an offer of a truce, an implication of some rank in regard to a bleak acceptance of the moment.

  This sex—between boys—at the edge of a blossoming into some sort of social existence has in it an acceptance of failure as a principal thing: it is a field of effort without further purpose here: it is directed elsewhere in its purposes. Procreation is not its goal; and pride is only oddly involved, as in the grunting sweatiness of wrestling.