Remsen said, calmly ignoring my mood of resistance while categorizing it—you know that tone in someone your age when you’re young—“You’re bloodless. Doesn’t your blood ever boil?”
The loneliness of being unspoken to even though someone is speaking, it’s like being a cavern—and being turned into a monster—the terms of your monsterhood, deformity or scales or that you breathe fire and are a devourer; the terms, I say, are unclear . . .
“You’re the cold one,” I say from my odd posture, but then I lean back; I roll onto my back again. I say it with inflection but not with a recognizable music. “You’re the one who always says you have the heart of a lizard . . .”
He ignores that. Too. He speaks aloud from within the breathing whelk shell of his hallucinatory moment: “She is spreading her legs,” he intones. “The soft fur of her muff is—”
“—braided to spell For Remsen . . .”
“Why-are-you-a-cold-fish?” he asks as he works.
He is mostly really talking to himself—perhaps he is talking about himself. So it is a bid for attention. I want to insert myself in his daydreams; I say, “Miss Gangtinney says I am a cold poached fish . . . a carp. I am provincial and sarcastic . . .”
Confession as a sort of solicitous rape of attention: he says orderingly: “Unbutton your shirt . . .”
I think giving sexual orders was his favorite sexual daydream. Remsen was scared of Miss Gangtinney. He was scholastically ambitious, and she was social, wellborn (by St. Louis standards, not at the top but okay), and very bright and had a lot of say with good colleges. And she was on record as disliking boys in general and bright Jews with pretty sisters in particular, bright Jewish girls who were, in general, much brighter than their brothers, Miss Gangtinney said; the brothers she derided as pushy and Christless—i.e., without mercy or a true sense of values—without a sense of the value of the nothingness of the worldly mind: they (the brothers of the girls she preferred) were too entranced at the profits (she was egregiously anti-Semitic but not Nazi) to be made in the newly discovered world . . . The profit the mind can find in the world. And they, the brothers, were unaware of the very real beauty of drunkenness and defeat . . . And of the power of women, the private primacy of breasts . . . And so on . . .
She is a loon—brilliant and vital—but a loon—an important woman, a person: a necessary person if you want to learn anything at our school. She does like (and deride) me. But she breaks a lot of her rules for me—and, bitchily and troublemakingly, says so in class, even in classes that I am not in.
“I hate that sor-did bih-bee-bi(h)itch,” Remsen says.
I unbutton only one button. “She hates you, too.” I sigh and am inert. She can’t stand anything about him—except his eyes. She has said, “His eyes make me nervous.”
“She doesn’t pick on you,” Remsen says in an eerily new, sexually tinted, far-off voice.
“She picks on me with an ax . . . She’s a battle-ax.” When I am in trouble in my life, he comes close and is there, not quite as a help, but mostly, maybe, only to look at the wounded beloved, the hatefully beloved—whatever . . . I feel in his breathing that he is returning and is nearer.
He says, “Are you in trouble with her?”
“She makes room for me,” I said finally, too stirred—too agitated—by the sex he was having to manage much more in the way of speech. Propping my head up with my hand, I turn onto my other side so that he is visible to me. We are visible to each other. Then, perversely, I close my eyes and begin. I remember how well built he is—I am flattered. My elbow digs into the mattress. Do some boys escape this? Are they let alone? Is it a matter of plainness? Of disguise? I open my eyes and I look across him so that his physical reality lies under the whizzing and yet stilled glacier of my pointless staring . . . The meaning here is blurry—as if it were physically hesitant; I am uninstructed and instruction does not shape itself genetically here.
But in this reluctance—the time lag of it, so to speak—one has a stronger sense of the progress of sensation, of the opening of the sexual whatever, of the initial hallucination and of how it warms up and then loses its, power to affect me. The loneliness here, like the peculiar lurchingness of the physical reality, seems to be of immense value and yet to be valueless. He says, “Hunh? What’s that me[an]?” Gangtinney making room for me. I have to ponder and work back in the seconds to find in my memory what I said. He says again, “Let’s see your prick . . .” He said it in a kind of nasal voice that made language seem to be a backyard part of his spirit—and of his body . . . He is always looking for a way to feel he’s smarter than I am in the actual moment . . .
I say, “I don’t feel like it . . .” But I turn myself, I angle my back slightly. My blood tingles at this exercise of genital fact. We are in touch with each other oddly, Remsen and I, in this odd way. Abruptly I say, “I haven’t seen it in hours . . .” And I look down at it and angle myself further and for a moment it is real as heft and length and as sensation, too, but the sensation itself is different and the mind is infinitely more present in this kind of display with a different sort of comparison or struggle hinted at or dealt with.
I tended when I was in his company to drop vowels and hit n’s—navint n’eeN (N)it nowers . . . Masculine talk. Locker-room jazz. A senseless pretense to yet another style . . .
He knows different things. He feels different things. He breaks off his motion and yet he continues in a sexual arc—I could not do that—he has some information, or some myth, about genitalia that I know little about and can’t feel (sensually) except when I am with him. “Jesus,” he says. Then, in a mounting arc of feeling that I cannot share but am partly pleased to see: “Let’s arm wrestle . . .” That is part of his sensual daydream, his fantasy, of being Hercules—or Samson . . . Unfearful . . . Huge . . . Betrayed, blinded . . . But able to destroy everything nearby—not everything in sight . . . It is an oddly physical semi-hallucination, a symbolic whatever: he likes that a lot.
I say, “Anything to touch flesh in a fighting way . . .” Combative. “No . . .” I said it and heard myself, heard that my breath was quilled with some possibility that included him. Perhaps only as a semi-demi-dominated watcher . . . A minor moment. A major one would be if booze and drugs or some other sort of finality entered in, the drugs of those days being benzedrine, ether, opium, morphine, chloral hydrate, aspirin with brandy, I forget the other ones—I tried the above ones; so did Remsen. Major is when you can be destroyed . . . I can harm him . . . He can harm me . . . This bothers me a lot. I stop. I am exposed but I lie on my back and put my arm over my eyes.
The bed shudders slightly with his movements. “Would your mind doctor think I was crazy?” His doctor has forbidden him to talk seriously with people his own age, he has said. Then I say: “Hit a woman? Twist her wrist? Spank her? Under what circumstances? In what tone? If you do that stuff, who gets the most mileage out of it—you know? It has to be part of a whole shebang—I mean the episode doesn’t just stop there: it goes on . . .”
“Smash her—smash her to smithereens,” he said, sort of roiling semi-demi-mightily on the bed: he is speaking of a difficult woman or of his sisters or of some sort of male heroism perhaps. He jerks off so much that this stuff in the afternoons which doesn’t happen all the time partly ends, when it does happen, sometimes, in a dry come.
And the difficulty for him in getting past that point where coming is not certain is not emotionally moving. He curls around on the bed so that his extended arm can touch and start to stroke my leg, not lecherously toward me—he is partly a gentleman—he is in pursuit of a flesh-fiery idea of sexuality. It is a gesture for himself, part of an imagined (or actual) sexual ruthlessness, his sexual actuality.
“I don’t want to be sad,” I said. Postcoital.
Or guilty.
I found what he did on the whole to be repellent but to be acceptable because it was fake—it did not really involve me even in conspiracy. I thought it did not involve any rea
l responsibility for me . . . I thought it was like a tutorial.
“My sisters are shrews,” he said. “They’re all shrewd enough. I’d like to run over and over them with the car . . . Ah . . .” He is trying for an exciting idea. I may have misheard him. An idea verging on shocked hallucination. Removing my arm from my eyes, looking at him, I see that he is not bold and clear in mood but is blurry and lost, half there sexually—faintly shocked by himself, tired, unorgasmic, unsatisfied and already knowing it. You can’t talk to someone about what he hasn’t done—you cannot teach him to feel sexually. He must protect his sense of the centrality of his life.
“I am rich,” he says. “I am rich and I am handsome . . . A stiff prick is like a pylon . . . POWER on . . . ZZZZZ . . . BZZZZ . . . IZZZ . . .” He was erect in a way that seemed boring and minor to me . . . “Get yours hard—I want to see it,” he said.
Guys did that in the locker room for each other sometimes. It wasn’t something I liked but I thought it was normal, that I ought to do it now. Sometimes when I am fatuous, it makes some people like me with an admixture of contempt . . . Remsen liked to lean his head on my bared shoulder if I would bare it and then my stomach would be visible, would be right in front of his eyes, while he jerked off preferably but not necessarily with me seriously erect and kind of jerking off, too, but only half seriously. If I was serious, he stopped what he was doing and he stared. I was bigger than he was and I was more sincere when I did it . . . when I did anything. And he lost track of himself in curiosity sometimes . . . That was in the past. But right after I came—or he would ask me to wait for him and to come when he did—he would come then, dryly, or not dry but dryly in tone, sort of all mind and relief and study: a playfulness, serious and overweening . . . And I would be struck with grief postcoitally . . . At any rate, we don’t do that anymore. Originally I dodged it, prevented it, refused to do it; the original refusal is what I am talking about. But now it has become his taste: I have outgrown my girlish phase; I am now repellent to him, he sometimes says. I know better than to say aloud, “You won’t leave me alone if I get an erection.” One time he called it Napoleonic artillery, pure Clausewitz, bim, bam, boom, but he would not explain any part of what he meant and he would not hint; and the way he acted showed nothing. He says now: “Unbutton your shirt . . . please . . . I’ll just look and think of Jean . . .” Look and remember being younger and think of a girl he sees now? One pursues a certain tact in these matters . . . One doesn’t say no. One is merely unmoving . . . unloving . . . inert . . . It is a confusing subject . . . a peculiar suburban moment . . .
Who is more unkind here—he or I; he for asking, me for refusing? Is fate or destiny unkind? Genital fate? Sexual destiny—with every man, every woman with an individual sexual character, a singular sexual life? One ought to be stricken with fear and trembling, with a sickness of the soul, of the nerves—of one’s soul? This is part of the world. Nonie—and Remsen’s sisters—live in the world of men hinted at here in a small corner of the afternoon of two boys . . .
The Last for Now About Nonie
Back when I was a little kid, when we were all sincere that day—in the lightning storm—Nonie was suffering and it was pleasure and no pleasure at all to see her like that.
Daddy’s not insincere exactly, but what fantasy-and-reality of his is he instructing her in as a truth when he says, “Nonie, Nonie darling, you have to stop”? Have to means what? The or else is what? (He’s not simple—he was always too much for me, Lila said.)
“Nonie, it’s killing me—you’re killing me. Oh, Hon, what can I do to help?” he says.
It used to be that before there were painkillers people went mad from toothache sometimes. He means she will destroy him and who will take care of her then? Isn’t that the threat?
She can kill him this way and he won’t fight back, but he won’t die to help her first. She tries to figure it out without words: you can see it on her face, that she’s trying to figure it out, the cathedral child, our cathedral virgin, she wants to comprehend the stained-glass devotion of the man while she is in a state of unsubdued terror, but I don’t think she can do it; it makes her suffer more; it makes her crazier to try . . . These are some of the politics of actual love, actual terror.
Her safety, her well-being, is a mark of our excellence and refinement. In Nonie, in her eyes, in her ideals, in her touch, is a bleakness, a bleak area—a distance, a landscape, a wordlessness that still is human . . . Nonie is well within the species’ limits. I guess she reads Daddy’s attitude as indifference. Indifference to her invites her violence, the girl in the rainstorm—her prettiness, her bitten fingernails.
She knocks a doll off a longish wooden rack on a bookcase; but then she’s afraid right away and she says, “I DIDN’T DO THAT. IT JUST BROKE. IT JUST BROKE!”
It was rubberoid and it tore; she says it broke.
She looks sly, then woodenly innocent. Nonie defeated me often over the years. Even now her shadow threatens me in a number of ways. I kind of sincerely mean it when I say, God damn her to hell.
The silver-gray-white lightning pushes a dark tree trunk racingly onto, into the window, into the room. It flies into my eyes, my mind, where it shivers, vibrates, is stilled.
Nonie stands in the passionate thin albino reality of the light. Leapingly it recedes—across her glaring eye sockets as well. Across Daddy’s white-shirted chest, too.
“GO TALK TO IT, YOU SON OF A BITCH. MAKE IT STOP. IT’S A BAD LIGHT, DADDY.” Then to Anne Marie: “GO STAND BY THE WINDOW. YOU’RE FAT; WE PAY YOU MONEY—LET IT GET YOU!”
Nonie knows herself to be the cheated one—she’s not an able lawyer, not proficient at contention in words and principles, at least in today’s tribunal. Whosoever’s lightning it is, why doesn’t Daddy help her? Shadows like those that mar the face of the moon are in her mouth: “MAKE IT GO KILL MOMMA! MOMMA TELLS LIES. MAKE IT GO KILL MOMMA, BURN HER UP. IT CAN TURN HER BLACK.”
Sins are those acts that guarantee defeat. Nonie was sinless for all practical purposes until the damned lightning started.
“For God’s sake, Hon—”
The child—me—laughs at Nonie’s stricken and illumined and knotted face.
“I DON’T LIKE IT!” Nonie shouts.
She’s given up inside herself, given up to some extent . . . momentarily.
She faces blinkingly the maybe Holy Beast . . . outside . . . that is in the room suddenly . . . the Angelic Flutter of This Injustice, the paw of the Beast of Interrogation . . . the loss of her citizenship now.
Then she grabs the doll she knocked off the rack; she stoops, grabs—swiftly—and throws it—a gesture of unmaternal shamelessness.
The seriousness of The Onslaught: she wants to supply a recent minor, childish crime in this cruelly unfavoring context, a mock sacrifice, a display of ritual temper by a flat-chested girl who is the soul of quick logic and respectability and who has just done something not-so-bad . . . It’s a kind of weird combination of things passionate and harshly shrewd but childlike in her, and pure . . .
Spittle is on her chin, and Daddy is crying.
Forgiveness is easy if the moment is not particularly real . . .
Short of her death, and not even then, in a way, she doesn’t have to feel inferior. As a fighter, she was, on occasion, happy. She could feel triumphant, pure, well loved, well taken care of, whether in much of a true way she was or not, whenever it seemed necessary or advisable to her.
The pain for me after the session with Leonie, the pain of not being liked enough, of Nonie’s knowing the world better than I did, was so horrific—so biting and long-lasting—that I vowed never to do that to anyone, the thing that Leonie and Nonie did, or that Nonie did, and never to be agreeable in the way I had been, to that stuff, never to struggle sexually or in any other way with women at all . . .
But a dozen years before that night, when I was little, I watched Nonie suffer. And, here, inside that night, Nonie in her terror looks innocent again,
innocent in a way: it’s Nonie still in the little openings when her terror lets up. She is riddled by thoughts, her kind of thoughts; she has her kind of thoughtful terror. Is there such a thing as a lesser soul? What if she really is as good as me?
Jesus!
Don’t hurt me, God, for judging her.
The doll she threw is one she never liked; that useful (or placatory) sin was witty . . . She is panting and outraged—and full of waiting . . . A ghost appears at the window, through a glass veil; the veil is running with water; howling gutturally, it ignores the offering, it runs toward Nonie . . . And she screams. She makes a movement of terror. Bent over, she clutches her own thigh. The intruding light swells and ebbs. Nonie spits and dribbles—she cowers, rouses herself she perseveres and is brave—that is to say, she is impenitent. Impenitence is remarkable in her here.
I want Nonie broken and penitent and saved. The ammoniac smell of her pee and the frenzy of her resistance afflict me. Can someone make her penitent, short of violence and horror stronger than her own?
I don’t want things to be like this.
Is it wrong to see her in this way, when she is like this?
Nonie’s open mouth and soldiering eyes and the walls of the room and Anne Marie’s face and breast are covered with wrecked light. The fleeting shadow-films of the rain—the rain’s shadows—are a sort of terrible ruin . . . Come on, gang, let’s all pitch in and SAVE our Nonie now. My NONIE. The rain noises are like a horse snuffling, a lynx breathing in my ear—in a dream. Nonie is looking at Daddy: “YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT ME. YOU DON’T TAKE MY SIDE EVER. YOU HATE ME. YOU WANT ME DEAD. I KNOW YOU. GOD DAMN YOU. I WON’T LOVE YOU ANYMORE—GET OUT ON THE LAWN. LET THE LIGHTNING GET YOU. I’M NOT BAD. LET IT GET YOU, DADDY.” Christ, it’s almost funny—it’s funny if you have no heart. Let’s save her . . . “YOU’RE BAD. YOU HATE ME.” She kicks at Anne Marie: “YOU FAT BITCH, GOD DOESN’T LIKE YOU AT ALL. YOU PLAY WITH YOURSELF AND YOU LIE. YOU GET OVER, YOU GET OVER BY THE WINDOW: LET IT BURN YOU . . .” Nonie means, surely, doesn’t she, that only evil meets evil head-on?
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