“The joke went flat?”
I’m lying there and looking up at him—the tar feels lousy.
“What joke?”
I can’t explain, since I mean and don’t mean joke, so I say, “Unnhaw-wahh”—an expressive noise, maybe exhorta tory as well as evasive—I mean, it’s unclear, but expressive.
Long pause. Then he says, “I don’t think you have a good sense of humor, Wiley.” (“Wu-high-ly.”)
I turned my face to the side, cheek to the pavement. “I get told that a lot,” I said, from my mouth and eyes down there alongside the pavement.
I felt lousy and coerced by the near-kiss of the tar and the meaning of me doing one thing and Jimmy not following, so that if I persisted in it, it would have some other meaning that I wasn’t too sure I wanted: if meaning is a place, it was a place I didn’t want to go to, a weird planet with a bad reputation. So I heaved myself up again quickly and said, “See, I get sick and tired, and fed up, too. I’m through with half-assed gestures, O.K.? Now, will you please pick the goddam crap off my back, and don’t pinch, and don’t take forever—”
I offered him my back. It’s like a half-assed order: you try to get away with this thing; or you’re asking—with some embarrassment, I guess—for some of the tenderness crap. Jesus, I figured it was clear I was getting even for his saying that about my not having any humor.
My voice stayed deep, which is a good sign that I’m getting somewhere in my life in general: I’m learning to pitch my voice like a grownup.
Then his tenderness, which was flickering like leaves, became knowing and sad, and he shoved my shoulder—because I was moody—with a hard shove of his hand. It is not quite credible in some ways, considering my lousy life, but I am spoiled and very handsome (sort of)—and he shoved me to show his freedom, but it was truncated as a gesture of ownership or courtship or whatnot. The style, the tone of it. Things showed in it. One thing that showed was that he was afraid of me.
He was a sad boy, but we weren’t at a sad age. I said, “You probably have more free will than I do, because you get along with your mother.” I also said, “I always seem too planned out to myself; I have a lot of very pseudo carelessness about free will.”
He was knocking some crud off the knobby part of my back—i.e., the spine—and part of the upper muscular cape, too. Up close and speaking either turned away or close to him, I felt the syllables to be like hollow tubes or near-kisses; their shapes are all weird and segmented. When I said pseudo, I turned toward him to help make sure he’d get it, that he’d recognize the word. I look at his eyes, but I can’t see that he does hear. So I turn away, so that when I say carelessness, it goes shooting off like a stalk into the air away from him.
I usually felt he wanted me to explain myself to him, and when I did, he didn’t always listen—that is part of my dislike for him. Usually, he wasn’t listening. If he didn’t listen, he didn’t have to judge and change mentally if I was true or interesting. If he wasn’t going to change mentally, then not enough was at stake for things to be exciting and real for us. For me. I mean, change in step with each other rather than alone and somberly: it was exciting to be in step, and so on. I hate to change all by myself: you know it’s going to be lonely, it’s going to be bad. You just rattle around then, you have no coordinates to measure sanity by; it seems inhuman. He had that stubborn virgin’s thing of undercutting the moments by making them into things that didn’t matter, since nothing really happens ever. The virgin’s lie.
If you notice everything, you won’t like anyone—I’d been told that a lot.
Notice everything: that’s rich. I ignore most of what I notice, like everyone else.
The extraordinary truth, so anguishing to me, of the reality of life as fires of passion, within the moments, and only barely referred to in the fluster of acts involved in our flirting with such big questions as whether to be really loyal to one another—all that stuff is ungraspable for me, but I feel comprehension always near, so help me: I swear this is how we lived. To live almost with virtue instead of with a grinding shrewdness, it’s just beyond thought, and then, as I said, the comprehension hangs around and seems very close—in tenderness stuff mostly, when it’s mixed with a little or a lot of some kinds of violence of meaning, when you’re not cold and selfish but seem to be careless with yourself. Extravagant, wonderful. A fool. The comprehension always seems as if it will get clearer, that history will explain it or bring it, that I’ll find out about this stuff when I get older. I sometimes want to rush things.
I don’t want the fixed kind of comprehension, which is so satisfying, but the other kind, which is a sort of response and loss of everything but the response in the flicker, in the exploding novas of the moments, of the new turns one’s history is taking in (pardon me) love for one another.
The comprehension that comes is about living out the stuff involved in belonging to someone. Anyway, when you’re in the middle of loving, then that incomprehensible comprehension which is so dangerous and fine and never entirely apt is ballooning in your breath and eyes and chest just about all the time for a while, but erratically. Even without that, I feel, and have since infancy, that we are pregnant with each other’s lives every minute anyway, with how someone feels and does in the world, and this tends to fill me with love foolishly sometimes and makes me obnoxiously gay and sort of all right, no matter what. I deal in unnecessary amounts of everyone’s happiness—happiness-in-the-concentration-camp is how my ill parents and I lived for years at times, between not getting along and being horrible, of course. So when I’m talking to anyone I don’t feel merely sorry for or put off by badly—and even then, too, if I’m honest—I have his or her happiness in me, his or her life, and he or she has mine in him or her, and they blast you or do you some good.
The necessity I feel and have for the impossible return, the approximate recurrence, of certain smoky moments, images that arise only in this person’s or that person’s company, what does that mean? I take that to be what I mean by love. Here we are, this is us with each other now, and we have this queer amalgam of trust, treachery, tyranny, chemistry, and truce, and the seductions of language; and we have here, also, the paltry allegiances of our friendship short of love, short of admitting slavishly that there is necessity in our experiencing images and reality together, him and me, side by side, in each other’s company. I live like that, but I don’t really like it—maybe it’s sort of an irrevocable kind of agonized and ecstatic flirtation with happiness. I cannot bear this. An ease in our being together is almost a reward of a successful sidestepping of affection—I saw it like that, too. I felt it. I came to experience a kind of death, I was so overloaded with the moment’s reality. I choked on it, the stoniness and wilderness and the ocean and fields of possibility of the reality of emotion. I felt a kind of earnest despair at being without such emotion except in spurts when it is begotten by our courage in being—oh—attractive to each other: our courage cohabits with impossibility. “Impossibility” is a funny term. We are a disobedient and surprisingly successful species. I don’t know. Maybe that’s just American romanticism, you know?
In the landscape of neat houses, of love and beauty as locally understood, among the cruelties and famines of that stuff, a lilac hedge is visible in a yard nearby. The moment is fleeting (as hell). I am not able to grasp or bear anything. I am as capricious and as tense as if I were a beautiful horse or a beautiful boy, which in a way, for a while, I am. My middle-class stupidities and gracelessness goad me. I say, “Leave that filth on my back; I like it; it’s a badge; you take too goddam long; you have the fingers of a butcher.”
He stopped—his fingers abandoned my skin. My theory is he was relieved. He felt love as a tragic burden or as suffocation—felt it means he didn’t have to say it in words: he could “know it” and let it go at that. Anyway, it’s only a theory.
I hold back from Jimmy not because I’m clever and shrewd about people or anything but because he fits over my senses
and my mind in a way I don’t want. I don’t want to be more like him or more him than I already am.
See, I’ve gotten away from the act of loving him by a set of pretty simple steps.
He said, “You’re careless.” Meaning reckless. He said, “You didn’t prove anything.” I.e., what good is the glamour of your acting up and having my attention like this?
He is weak in a number of ways.
I am choking as in surf when you swallow salt water. I love and don’t love in a kind of rucking up of attention and voice—I mean, it’s a sudden wrinkling up and gathering together—unless I am being soft and seductive and reasonable, as I am with women, going along a predetermined path so that a woman inside her physical and other differences can know where I am and not be blinded and doesn’t have to be overpoweringly shrewd and deductive—i.e., conventional, knowing about things outside herself in a handy way, inspired smally: I’d like to say it like that—but can figure me out and choose me if she wants.
I don’t think anything else works with women, they’re so stubborn.
I said, “You hope. You wouldn’t know what I proved even if it kicked you in the head.”
He’s hurt, numbly: “Wuh-huh-i-lee—” The protest is unbelievably vague in detail, but it’s clear as a threat: Obey these vague laws, avoid these vaguely worded, maybe immense punishments that lie in my unhappiness, OR ELSE.…
I say coldly, in careful syllables, “You have no noticeable brain yet.” It isn’t true, but he isn’t sure, and he suffers as if it were true. His eyes get weird.
Before that starts to make me sad and maybe really guilty, I say, “You’re merely very, very good-looking.” That’s like a joke; that’s to cheer him up. But at first he suffers from the denial of his mind that seems to be, and then the praise settles in, and his eyes loosen up. Some.
As for me, what settles into me is a sense of me being a puppet, moved around by semiautomatic earlier decisions, such as to be polite, or politic, or whatever. Whatever it is, I’m not free with people, free to risk things, free toward their vulnerabilities, their rights. I’m less freed or free than a stubborn girl is. Me having a bad temper and not too many friends is a sign of my being trapped like that and getting free from people even if it is lonely.… It’s also a sign of this that often people like me more than I like them. Well, tough shit.… So in order to be free, I say, in a very independent, unmaneuvered, unquick, unquick-ened, nice voice—I do this morally; I am free to be ethical if I want—“It’s not true that you have no noticeable brain yet. Your brain is very noticeable.…”
Now he says to me, “Oh, man, you really are a Jekyll and a Hyde.”
He doesn’t mean really two characters in one skin; he means more than that: one part of what he means is that I am a quick-change artist who is also someone cruel who subsides from time to time into kindness—into flattery.
“You know I like you, you know I think you have a mind. You know I think it’s good to be around you when you’re talkative. You can be a hell of a civilized guy.”
I think he is basically, humanly hurt inside, no matter what happens.
Friendship is what we’re here for: I said, “It’s good to be around you. You’re civilized.” I wanted to make sure he got a good quote.
“I’m very careful about my manners; I think I know how to act.” He said this pleasedly—also like a scientist reporting on it.
“Is that why you take such long pauses between speeches? Are you figuring out what to do?”
“Cut it out,” he said, in pain—maybe threateningly, too.
He has no real wish for honesty, which also surprises me and makes me bored, some. His mother and his brother and his father probably picked on him for being slow in conversation. Calculating is what it amounted to, unalive: he didn’t have a whole hell of a lot of spontaneity or honesty or improvisation in him.
We really didn’t understand each other’s really personal diction.
Well, I was tired of what was happening, I was antsy, nerved up from the exchange, and I wanted another venue of reality, one less of speech, less of things being tricky—I mean, there’s more than one way to be laconic—and so I started to remount my bike.
“I proved a lot of things,” I said, as I did it, remounted my bike. “I mean, by the way, you’d see I proved some things if you would choose to use your civilized mind.”
“Oh, uh, Wuh-hi-i-lee, were you setting a trap?”
That is, did I flatter him (I thought he was saying this, something like this) and then watch to see if he was egocentric? And not a good guy?
I hadn’t pedaled, only kicked the pavement, and now, wobblingly, I slowed and stopped again.
I stood and faced him. Stood? I’m mostly on the bike and wobbling back and forth, forward and back. “No, I wasn’t. I make up stuff as I go along. I’m just saying to you I proved a lot of things. Lying in the road proved a lot of—oh, Christ.”
He’d gotten me to start to try to explain; explanations are demeaning: you’re in service to the other’s understanding you then; you’re not allowed to live but have to stand in a clear light and just explain. He’d set a trap: it was his system: he’d got me off guard by accusing me of what he was about to do and then I went into being naive to prove him wrong. Now he’s deadpan, but it’s as if he’s grinning.
I have one leg over the bar of the bike: “Are you grinning?”
He’s all covered with glare and shakes his head, or I imagine it, because he is deadpan insofar as one approximately makes this stuff out in real life, in real light.
He’s listening carefully; he’s looking at me. I snoot him. I scratch my back, contortedly, more and more furiously.
“You goddam mind-hater,” I say mildly from within my contortion, absently; but I mind the way he is, I hate and loathe him, pretty much, but, of course, I don’t know for sure that he set a trap unless he tells me so.
“Wiley.” The inflection means cut it out; but that wasn’t enough: he said, in a further convulsion of hurt or whatever, which is really anger in him, “Cut it out.” His anger isn’t like mine: he says things that have to do with anger; anger silences me. He threatens to hate me actively for a while; that’s what cut it out means if you haven’t got real authority. He knows I hate him now, finally, but he wants to finesse me out of it: I mean, he wants to browbeat me out of it and not change and listen to me or be sympathetic.
He has no gift of prophecy about emotional things, and his anger doesn’t suggest to him a lifetime of guilt and grief or give him any hint that he is attempting to imprison me in praising him to balance whatever admiration or desire he feels toward me—or toward my methods, or my abilities—or his desire to experience the way people treat me.… He wants to have my life be his, sort of. That’s love.
Competition—and curiosity—are always in it. Less if it’s incest—or with a twin.
Or if it’s for money.
Anger for him, since he’s slow and as if not conscious when he feels it, is merely release as justice: it’s a happy ending but a little way back before it’s proved, if you follow me.…
I stopped scratching my back and started pedaling and was surprised and hurt after a few seconds that we were on a hill still. I would shortly be out of breath: “This goddam hill—is endless—” And I used his name in its most formal version: “James.”
He’d caught up to me on his bike and he was being oversized, self-consciously even huge—and athletic—just on my right, shading me, overshadowing me: this is a form of blackmail—and also of physical threat, and that, plus more, makes it comforting to him, or useful, or whatever. He is a marvel of power and reason and being athletic and of winning-out-in-his-way.
I said, “You remember one thing: hurt me and you’d better kill me, because if I survive I’ll smash you to bits someday, if it’s the last thing I do. Get me? Think about it or you’ll get very, very hurt”
Now he’s pulling ahead of me. “Don’t threaten me. We’ve got a whole day of
this crap ahead of us.”
Then, more nicely, sort of more nicely, I said, “Why is—does friendship—” I had changed the form: I often did: verbs are sick things anyway—they’re so general; think of all the ways people walk and how differently different people, and in what different ways, according to their states and moods, all of that, walk; and then think of the word walk but then think of it as you usually think of it, as just meaning not run or whatever or something even more vague and general: it’s sick.… “Why is—does friendship always have this quarreling crap in it? Do you think maybe we’re vulgar? Is it different for Christians, you think?”
He wasn’t listening.
He’s maybe ten yards ahead and pulling away.
Actually he hears, but in a way that’s complex. Not only are we on bikes and moving, so that the air draws out and dilutes syllables, and makes thickets in which they get lost, but he’s a wretched and solitary victim now and he doesn’t have to listen—except to plots against his throne. Nothing else is as interesting to him just now.
So I feel the way he’s listening is not real, which means it’s not acceptable to me.
But it’s O.K. We’re young. We have a lot of energy.
So I’m ready, I can go on, I know Jimmy has gotten set to fight—vaguely but violently—both inside and outside of his usual tactics, family tactics (his family’s), and also inside and outside of loving me, or whatever the emotion should be called—he doesn’t like loving people, or me, the one he chose, although I helped and didn’t exactly drive him away all that much, as I do some people.
He said—he is more or less not seated on his bike but is pedaling from a half-erect posture, powerfully—he more or less shouted, “You be reasonable.”
Leave his maybe ridiculous superiority alone, he means.
Stories in an Almost Classical Mode Page 64