Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  Fennie said on the plane to New York, “It’s sort of womanlike the way the Parthenon crouches. It’s full of magic.” He shielded his eyes with his hand. “It’s sort of threatening. It’s not calm at all. It seems very mysterious. I wonder why people say it’s classical.” He said, “It’s one of the wonders of the world.”

  VI

  THEY WERE HOME. Ann was too tired and too disorganized to sleep. She tried to set her thoughts in order. She wasn’t so impressed by her daughters, she decided. Character skips a generation. She and Fennie had character.

  On and on her thoughts meandered: Life and sex were to be regarded wryly—that’s why the young seemed so stupid. Character, she thought, character counted. Feelings were too unreliable.

  Ann started up suddenly, as if she had been dozing. She cried out, “Oh God, we keep getting shot over and over—in the same place!”

  Fennie said, “What! What!” and came awake. “Ann, what is it?”

  “It was a dream,” she said. “I was a target at an amusement park, in a shooting range. You had blond hair, you were a workingman, and you said it was all right for me to cry.…” The rising moon appeared in the window, large and full and reddish, lunatic. “It hurt so. It was a silly dream.” She said, “I like good sense. I haven’t any respect for human nature. I like things to last.” She said, “Fennie, I’m turning middle-class.” She said, “Everyone who gets what they want turns middle-class.” She moved her head and looked at him then. “Why is that, Fennie?” she asked him. “Tell me why that is.”

  INNOCENCE

  I Orra at Harvard

  ORRA PERKINS was a senior. Her looks were like a force that struck you. Truly, people on first meeting her often involuntarily lifted their arms as if about to fend off the brightness of the apparition. She was a somewhat scrawny, tuliplike girl of middling height. To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die. I’m not the only one who said that. It was because seeing someone in actuality who had such a high immediate worth meant you had to decide whether such personal distinction had a right to exist or if she belonged to the state and ought to be shadowed in, reduced in scale, made lesser, laughed at.

  Also, it was the case that you had to be rich and famous to set your hands on her; she could not fail to be a trophy, and the question was whether the trophy had to be awarded on economic and political grounds or whether chance could enter in.

  I was a senior, too, and ironic. I had no money. I was without lineage. It seemed to me Orra was proof that life was a terrifying phenomenon of surface immediacy. She made any idea I had of psychological normalcy or of justice absurd since normalcy was not as admirable or as desirable as Orra; or rather she was normalcy and everything else was a falling off, a falling below; and justice was inconceivable if she, or someone equivalent to her if there was an equivalent once you had seen her, would not sleep with you. I used to create general hilarity in my room by shouting her name at my friends and then breaking up into laughter, gasping out, “God, we’re so small-time.” It was grim that she existed and I had not had her. One could still prefer a more ordinary girl but not for simple reasons.

  A great many people avoided her, ran away from her. She was, in part, more knowing than the rest of us because the experiences offered her had been so extreme, and she had been so extreme in response—scenes in Harvard Square with an English marquess, slapping a son of a billionaire so hard he fell over backwards at a party in Lowell House, her saying then and subsequently, “I never sleep with anyone who has a fat ass.” Extreme in the humiliations endured and meted out, in the crassness of the publicity, of her life defined as those adventures, extreme in the dangers survived or not entirely survived, the cheapness undergone so that she was on a kind of frightening eminence, an eminence of her experiences and of her being different from everyone else. She’d dealt in intrigues, major and minor, in the dramas of political families, in passions, deceptions, folly on a large, expensive scale, promises, violence, the genuine pain of defeat when defeat is to some extent the result of your qualities and not of your defects, and she knew the rottenness of victories that hadn’t been final. She was crass and impaired by beauty. She was like a giant bird, she was as odd as an ostrich walking around the Yard, in her absurd gorgeousness, she was so different from us in kind, so capable of a different sort of progress through the yielding medium of the air, through the strange rooms of our minutes on this earth, through the gloomy circumstances of our lives in those years.

  People said it was worth it to do this or that just in order to see her—seeing her offered some kind of encouragement, was some kind of testimony that life was interesting. But not many people cared as much about knowing her. Most people preferred to keep their distance. I don’t know what her having made herself into what she was had done for her. She could have been ordinary if she’d wished.

  She had unnoticeable hair, a far from arresting forehead, and extraordinary eyes, deep-set, longing, hopeful, angrily bored behind smooth, heavy lids that fluttered when she was interested and when she was not interested at all. She had a great desire not to trouble or be troubled by supernumeraries and strangers. She has a proud, too large nose that gives her a noble, stubborn dog’s look. Her mouth has a disconcertingly lovely set to it—it is more immediately expressive than her eyes and it shows her implacability: it is the implacability of her knowledge of life in her. People always stared at her. Some giggled nervously. Do you like me, Orra? Do you like me at all? They stared at the great hands of the Aztec priest opening them to feelings and to awe, exposing their hearts, the dread cautiousness of their lives. They stared at the incredible symmetries of her sometimes anguishedly passionate face, the erratic pain for her in being beautiful that showed on it, the occasional plunging gaiety she felt because she was beautiful. I like beautiful people. The symmetries of her face were often thwarted by her attempts at expressiveness—beauty was a stone she struggled free of. A ludicrous beauty. A cruel clown of a girl. Sometimes her face was absolutely impassive as if masked in dullness and she was trying to move among us incognito. I was aware that each of her downfalls made her more possible for me. I never doubted that she was privately a pedestrian shitting-peeing person. Whenever I had a chance to observe her for any length of time, in a classroom for instance, I would think, I understand her. Whenever I approached her, she responded up to a point and then even as I stood talking to her I would fade as a personage, as a sexual presence, as someone present and important to her, into greater and greater invisibility. That was when she was a freshman, a sophomore, and a junior. When we were seniors, by then I’d learned how to avoid being invisible even to Orra. Orra was, I realized, hardly more than a terrific college girl, much vaunted, no more than that yet. But my God, my God, in one’s eyes, in one’s thoughts, she strode like a Nike, she entered like a blast of light, the thought of her was as vast as a desert. Sometimes in an early winter twilight in the Yard, I would see her in her coat, unbuttoned even in cold weather as if she burned slightly always, see her move clumsily along a walk looking like a scrawny field-hockey player, a great athlete of a girl half-stumbling, uncoordinated off the playing field, yet with reserves of strength, do you know? and her face, as she walked along, might twitch like a dog’s when the dog is asleep, twitching with whatever dialogue or adventure or daydream she was having in her head. Or she might in the early darkness stride along, cold-faced, haughty, angry, all the worst refusals one would ever receive bound up in one ridiculously beautiful girl. One always said, “I wonder what will become of her.” Her ignoring me marked me as a sexual nonentity. She was proof of a level of sexual adventure I had not yet with my best efforts reached: that level existed because Orra existed.

  What is it worth to be in love in this way?

  II Orra with Me

  I DISTRUST summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but who is obviously calm, someone who claims to write w
ith emotion recollected in tranquillity, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to reenter and be riven. An acrobat after spinning through the air in a mockery of flight stands erect on his perch and mockingly takes his bow as if what he is being applauded for was easy for him and cost him nothing, although meanwhile he is covered with sweat and his smile is edged with a relief chilling to think about; he is indulging in a show-business style; he is pretending to be superhuman. I am bored with that and with where it has brought us. I admire the authority of being on one’s knees in front of the event.

  In the last spring of our being undergraduates, I finally got her. We had agreed to meet in my room, to get a little drunk cheaply before going out to dinner. I left the door unlatched; and I lay naked on my bed under a sheet. When she knocked on the door, I said, “Come in,” and she did. She began to chatter right away, to complain that I was still in bed; she seemed to think I’d been taking a nap and had forgotten to wake up in time to get ready for her arrival. I said, “I’m naked, Orra, under this sheet. I’ve been waiting for you. I haven’t been asleep.”

  Her face went empty. She said, “Damn you—why couldn’t you wait?” But even while she was saying that, she was taking off her blouse.

  I was amazed that she was so docile; and then I saw that it was maybe partly that she didn’t want to risk saying no to me—she didn’t want me to be hurt and difficult, she didn’t want me to explode; she had a kind of hope of making me happy so that I’d then appreciate her and be happy with her and let her know me: I’m putting it badly. But her not being able to say no protected me from having so great a fear of sexual failure that I would not have been able to be worried about her pleasure, or to be concerned about her in bed. She was very amateurish and uninformed in bed, which touched me. It was really sort of poor sex; she didn’t come or even feel much that I could see. Afterward, lying beside her, I thought of her eight or ten or fifteen lovers being afraid of her, afraid to tell her anything about sex in case they might be wrong. I had an image of them protecting their own egos, holding their arms around their egos and not letting her near them. It seemed a kindness embedded in the event that she was, in quite an obvious way, with a little critical interpretation, a virgin. And impaired, or crippled by having been beautiful, just as I’d thought. I said to myself that it was a matter of course that I might be deluding myself. But what I did for the rest of that night—we stayed up all night; we talked, we quarreled for a while, we confessed various things, we argued about sex, we fucked again (the second one was a little better)—I treated her with the justice with which I’d treat a boy my age, a young man, and with a rather exact or measured patience and tolerance, as if she were a paraplegic and had spent her life in a wheelchair and was tired of sentiment. I showed her no sentiment at all. I figured she’d been asphyxiated by the sentiments and sentimentality of people impressed by her looks. She was beautiful and frightened and empty and shy and alone and wounded and invulnerable (like a cripple: what more can you do to a cripple?). She was Caesar and ruler of the known world and not Caesar and no one as well.

  It was a fairly complicated, partly witty thing to do. It meant I could not respond to her beauty but had to ignore it. She was a curious sort of girl; she had a great deal of isolation in her, isolation as a woman. It meant that when she said something on the order of “You’re very defensive,” I had to be a debater, her equal, take her seriously, and say, “How do you mean that?” and then talk about it, and alternately deliver a blow (“You can’t judge defensiveness, you have the silly irresponsibility of women, the silly disconnectedness: I have to be defensive”) and defer to her: “You have a point: you think very clearly. All right, I’ll adopt that as a premise.” Of course, much of what we said was incoherent and nonsensical on examination, but we worked out in conversation what we meant or thought we meant. I didn’t react to her in an emotional way. She wasn’t really a girl, not really quite human: how could she be? She was a position, a specific glory, a trophy, our local upper-middle-class pseudo-Cleopatra. Or not pseudo. I couldn’t revel in my luck or be unselfconsciously vain. I could not strut horizontally or loll as if on clouds, a demigod with a goddess, although it was clear we were deeply fortunate, in spite of everything: the poor sex, the differences in attitude which were all we seemed to share, the tensions and the blundering. If I enjoyed her more than she enjoyed me, if I lost consciousness of her even for a moment, she would be closed into her isolation again. I couldn’t love her and have her, too. I could love her and have her if I didn’t show love or the symptoms of having had her. It was like lying in a very lordly way, opening her to the possibility of feeling by making her comfortable inside the calm lies of my behavior, my inscribing the minutes with false messages. It was like meeting a requirement in Greek myth, like not looking back at Eurydice. The night crept on, swept on, late minutes, powdered with darkness, in the middle of a sleeping city, spring crawling like a plague of green snakes, bits of warmth in the air, at 4 a.m. smells of leaves when the stink of automobiles died down. Dawn came, so pink, so pastel, so silly: We were talking about the possibility of innate grammatical structures; I said it was an unlikely notion, that Jews really were God-haunted (the idea had been broached by a Jew), and the great difficulty was to invent a just God, that if God appeared at a moment of time or relied on prophets, there had to be degrees in the possibility of knowing Him so that He was by definition unjust; the only just God would be one who consisted of what had always been known by everyone; and that you could always identify a basically Messianic, a hugely religious, fraudulent thinker by how much he tried to anchor his doctrine to having always been true, to being innate even in savage man, whereas an honest thinker, a nonliar, was caught in the grip of the truth of process and change and the profound absence of justice except as an invention, an attempt by the will to live with someone, or with many others without consuming them. At that moment Orra said, “I think we’re falling in love.”

  I figured I had kept her from being too depressed after fucking—it’s hard for a girl with any force in her and any brains to accept the whole thing of fucking, of being fucked without trying to turn it on its end, so that she does some fucking, or some fucking up; I mean, the mere power of arousing the man so he wants to fuck isn’t enough: she wants him to be willing to die in order to fuck. There’s a kind of strain or intensity women are bred for, as beasts, for childbearing when child-bearing might kill them, and child rearing when the child might die at any moment: it’s in women to live under that danger, with that risk, that close to tragedy, with that constant taut or casual courage. They need death and nobility near. To be fucked when there’s no drama inherent in it, when you’re not going to rise to a level of nobility and courage forever denied the male, is to be cut off from what is inherently female, bestially speaking. I wanted to be halfway decent company for her. I don’t know that it was natural to me. I am psychologically, profoundly, a transient. A form of trash. I am incapable of any continuing loyalty and silence; I am an informer. But I did all right with her. It was dawn, as I said. We stood naked by the window, silently watching the light change. Finally, she said, “Are you hungry? Do you want breakfast?” “Sure. Let’s get dressed and go—”

  She cut me off; she said with a funny kind of firmness, “No! Let me go and get us something to eat.”

  “Orra, don’t wait on me. Why are you doing this? Don’t be like this.”

  But she was in a terrible hurry to be in love. After those few hours, after that short a time.

  She said, “I’m not as smart as you, Wiley. Let me wait on you. Then things will be even.”

  “Things are even, Orra.”

  “No. I’m boring and stale. You just think I’m not because you’re in love with me. Let me go.”

  I blinked. After a while, I said, “All right.”

  She dressed and went out and came back. While we ate, she was silent; I said things, but she had no comment to make; she ate very little; she f
olded her hands and smiled mildly like some nineteenth-century portrait of a handsome young mother. Every time I looked at her, when she saw I was looking at her, she changed the expression on her face to one of absolute and undeviating welcome to me and to anything I might say.

  So, it had begun.

  III Orra

  SHE HADN’T COME. She said she had never come with anyone at any time. She said it didn’t matter.

  After our first time, she complained, “You went twitch, twitch, twitch—just like a grasshopper.” So she had wanted to have more pleasure than she’d had. But after the second fuck and after the dawn, she never complained again—unless I tried to make her come, and then she complained of that. She showed during sex no dislike for any of my sexual mannerisms or for the rhythms and postures I fell into when I fucked. But I was not pleased or satisfied; it bothered me that she didn’t come. I was not pleased or satisfied on my own account, either. I thought the reason for that was she attracted me more than she could satisfy me, maybe more than fucking could ever satisfy me, that the more you cared, the more undertow there was, so that the sexual thing drowned—I mean, the sharpest sensations, and yet the dullest, are when you masturbate—but when you’re vilely attached to somebody, there are noises, distractions that drown out the sensations of fucking. For a long time, her wanting to fuck, her getting undressed, and the soft horizontal bobble of her breasts as she lay there, and the soft wavering, the kind of sinewlessness of her legs and lower body, with which she more or less showed me she was ready—that was more moving, was more immensely important to me than any mere ejaculation later, any putt-putt-putt in her darkness, any hurling of future generations into the clenched universe, the strict mitten inside her: I clung to her and grunted and anchored myself to the most temporary imaginable relief of the desire I felt for her; I would be hungry again and anxious to fuck again in another twenty minutes; it was pitiable, this sexual disarray. It seemed to me that in the vast spaces of the excitement of being welcomed by each other, we could only sightlessly and at best half organize our bodies. But so what? We would probably die in these underground caverns; a part of our lives would die; a certain innocence and hope would never survive this: we were too open, too clumsy, and we were the wrong people: so what did a fuck matter? I didn’t mind if the sex was always a little rasping, something of a failure, if it was just preparation for more sex in half an hour, if coming was just more foreplay. If this was all that was in store for us, fine. But I thought she was getting gypped in that she felt so much about me, she was dependent, and she was generous, and she didn’t come when we fucked.