Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  His tone says that he belongs to me in a way but that I have to die into a role if I want his devotion (such as it is), with him in the lead, et cetera.…

  I get scared, because I can’t afford to hate the day or him: I’m in somewhat desperate circumstances about my life, about enjoying myself sometimes when I get the chance. My home life is poor. It’s a home death at home.

  Say something PLEASANT. Go to the bins in your head where words and phrases of a business order of things, which have to be comprehended in a much-trafficked way, fairly steadily, are kept, and use those in a businesslike way, to make the kind of talk that rests palely in the head in a business part of the world. My head is the norm, or whatever. Get some polite formulas. Use sensual stuff unsensually to cut down the consequences; this is social wit, this is sensible: you take meaning away from what is sensible to the senses—what you see and feel in local areas of the real—that muffles things and keeps them safe and sound.

  Sort of.

  Maybe.

  I say, “This hill is eight hundred thousand goddam meters long—straight up. Maybe that’s why flat, desert landscapes are more religious. They don’t wear you out with a lot of tiring, up-and-down crap. You project the end, and it makes sense then—Hey, cheer me up: we know this is not a Himalayan Alp, right?”

  Jimmy is bicycling well ahead of me, but now, as I say those things, shout them, really, and joke, he slows until his rear tire is beside my front one: the road is empty except for us on this part of the grade. “There’s a lot of religion in the Himalayas—I heard about it,” he says, turning his head back and forth to let the words flow back to me. He is giving me this; conversationally he is giving in and being nice.

  But he is also manipulating and being bossy: he is correcting my stuff and making everything from his point of view rather than listening to me; he is removing the point of what I said, and aiming the talk in another, more a travelogue, direction. He’s also being friendly.

  “But this isn’t limitless like that,” I say—I’m in his conversation now.

  I don’t want to talk to the power manipulator he is—he lives in a world of no settled formality; that’s what his nonmemory and the comparative stupidity are for: bossiness, tyranny, an absence from the duties in being with someone—but I don’t have a choice of anyone else for the day now, unless I want to give up on the day.

  So I say, “Well, yes, but the road does have this slant, this godforsaken slant—” But I have a private rule of not talking to myself and of not laughing at anybody, so I said to him, to be useful and to add a little rhetorical and pious class to the day, “God’s shepherding meaning is gone.” I say this in a mumble and he knows I am laughing at him, but I am defeated and will behave because of what I did earlier and I’m not a big winner anyway.… I don’t do the thing of showing my shoulder holster all the time or mentioning my armies and saying Watch it; I’m demonic and sweet, both; I let who I’m with have free will and undergo condemnation by various tribunals in them and in me. I can sort of get along and even be at home, queasily, in the eerie and tilted and nervous democracy of others’ claims.

  Hard politics, the politics of happy, happy charm.

  I have renounced my vow and will prove today I don’t fear God or hell.

  I stand and pedal. My left side happens to be in shade, cooler, partly colored black at the jogged peripheries of my rainbowy (salt-prismed) vision. Jimmy is risen in his bike saddle, too.

  God, we’re tall, immense shadow-throwers.

  He asked me to do this today—come riding. I am here for his purposes, after all—I mean, on the basis of invitation.

  (My mother said, For how long do you plan to be gone from here? She’s ill: she has cancer.)

  The moist, sweaty soil of shadows on my left side gives way at the suburban hilltop to sun on that side as the road turns west, and my face is faintly veiled in its own flowing shadows now for the first time in a while.

  The queer mumble of noises, noises from the valley, at this considerable height, none of the noises distinct, is like sounds in a mechanical underbrush. The noises are dimmed, partly smothered in the fat, polluted air.

  Meaninglessness is in devoting one’s attention to the noises after they were identified and judged as ugly.

  “Look hard at the day and judge God, look hard and lose sight of God—how about that?”

  “Yeah? I don’t know. What do you mean, Wiley?”

  I’m not sure we knew his superiority was gone. Maybe it was a truce.

  “I may be quoting. I don’t know. If you look hard, you get political—that’s all I meant. Detail means God is not there—that’s all. I prefer the details to God: that’s by the way, by the way.”

  “Yeah? I don’t know; I don’t know that I think you’re right on that.”

  He’s holding on to the crown with both hands.

  “I don’t have to be right. You do: you have to make more sense than I do. I have a reputation: I’ve proved I know what I’m talking about sometimes. I can afford to be unclear.…”

  “That’s true.” Then: “Wiley, why do you attack me all the time?”

  “You had the upper hand for a while.”

  “You never let anybody have the upper hand.”

  “Jesus, you’re so full of krap with a k it makes me vom-itttt—”

  “Cut it out, Wiley.”

  In boyish shame at the imperfections of my speeches and my affections, my mind opens onto the morning: I am looking down over my arms, my hands, the handlebars of the bike, past the racer’s wheel in motion, to the road spinning or pulling, or being pulled backward, under the wheel.

  After a second or two, the slope picks up steepness going down.

  I enter what is like a tunnel, windy and speedy, going downhill in an accelerating swoop and with half-circles of rush pulling at my hair. The increment of speed and the steadiness of balance formed transparent tents and invisible hallways and domes with echoes in them.

  And something like the hands, fingers, tongues, and feet and toes of the wind push and prod me in an airy but semibreathless tumble, a kiddie free-for-all, a seduction in the key of free fall, and weirdly roofed and walled, I guess, in the concentration or seduction of the senses or whatever it is, in staying alive and whizzing dangerously down and down and down.…

  I am startled by how pretty sometimes the musics of movement are.

  Jimmy idly—or as if idly—passes me.

  He can’t see me anymore: he is ahead of me.

  The animal sense of the moment tickles, it startles in a blood way. I glance up with a fox’s heat of dreadful attention, a predator’s study in the wanton speed, the early feverishness, the being out for the day with James Setchell (Jimmy), the irregular heat of the morning, aliveness, the downhill, the riding free-handed, the idle whooping under my breath, air on my bare chest, skinny ribs; and with my face upturned, I catch sight of a wide-winged hawk; it swings hangingly in the air not far past some trees, not far, not high, in an oval of open sky: it is uncandled but alight, whitened by glare. I glance down the road ahead of me and then back up, and I locate again the patient, blood-hungry, peculiar chandelier in the pallid air. On its stringed circuit, on its heaven-descended chain, it marks, in its circles, the inclination of the lurching earth. I look down again and locate potholes and I steer some on the descending road and its shadows, and then I look back up again and to the side and I locate the hawk but with more difficulty: it has shifted eastward. I try but I can’t make out its markings; it is mostly a white blur, plus a spikily black line swaying: the feathered edge of an airy paddle, mostly motionless on its own; but it moves anyway. The hawk. I hardly know how to look at it: man oh man oh man: the black, splayed-back pinions of the wings are like a fat boy’s fingers gripping a windowsill of air. His head is hidden in blur; I am moving and can’t see anyway—the pressure of wind is on my eyes. The road has its magical tunnel descent. When I look up again, the hawk is entirely gone, the sky is empty, the hawk’s s
wing and my movements have covered more territory than time permits to be inside a single moment. So it is another moment and a new territory. And there are more blocks to sight than I had thought to associate with the sky here, roofs, roadside clifflets, and trees taller on this slope than on the other one, on the ascent. So the sky is not wide here, it is not a great field in many dimensions but is a bunch of falling and rising glades or clearings of depthy, heighty air, leaf-trimmed and almost exploding and zooming screens, here and there above me, through the failures of the trees along here to be fat and wild.

  This slope of the ridge is more wooded and stylish than the ascent. The houses have more expensive yards among the trees; it is really mostly a woods here.

  Again and again, my sight, diving upward, is a quick ballooning rush into blue particles, into stuff that has no resemblances but only a dissolving beauty—the planelessness, and the illuminated blue aerial substance of the day. My eyes are then lowered and fixed again on the striped and confettied road, and I squint ably in the wind and the downward rush.

  And then a sexual rush buzzes along my ribs, and then a memory of white light, breathlessness: a flick, a flicker, which is a pinpoint of the vaster drowning, the convulsion of coming when I masturbate.

  It’s gone; I have an erection that hurts. I’m me, a bicyclist, and there is Jimmy: I have a maybe brutal sense of romance.

  “James—”

  “Hunh—”

  “God is The Great Pornographer.”

  He sort of says hunh again, noncommittally, not disapproving, maybe encouragingly. The wind pulls at the inflection.

  I cannot bear the moment. Sometimes I think I know how Lucifer felt on the first morning when he saw creation and was overcome with feeling and resistance—and he fell.

  “Does The Great Pornographer in the Sky, does He send you your sexual fantasies in color or in black-and-white?”

  Jimmy listens to the blasphemy with caution: “Hunh—” This hunh is a signal that he’s thinking. He slows down, marginally.

  I hate him.

  I catch up to him and blow and pursily push the syllables of a similar speech, a second reading.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “I never thought about it.”

  He’s afraid of the dark elevation of the mood, the subject—us being both in a kind of Secret and Happy Hell all of a sudden.

  “Well, think now—” I know that sounds like a command, but the way I said it, I was sad and not a tyrant at all, just a guy who needed cheering up, sort of—this was partly a joke, partly a technique we all used, a lot of us, when we wanted to talk about sex.

  The words, the subject spoonily stir him. Jimmy gives in somewhat.

  The wind blows his hair, my hair.

  Twisted on his bicycle seat, he says, “They have a little color—sometimes.” “But when?”

  He shrugged—shyly.

  I offered, “Mine have color when they start, then they turn black-and-white.” I spread out the idea, the sense of time in the idea, for him.

  “Yeah, me too,” he said, shyly; and my heart started to beat with nutty interest, intimacy almost: we are at a more lightless vestibule of affection.

  I am exaggerating the clarity with which we spoke, but things were clearer on this subject. We were more attentive even if we were also avertedish, and nervous, in a lot of ways.

  The words, simple monosyllables, were easy to hear, not much risk or effort in guessing at surface meanings anyway.

  I said, “When I remember something sexual—it has real color, like in real life, but I don’t notice colors all that much. I miss them if they’re not there, but I don’t keep track,” I say.

  “I think about colors a lot.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh.”

  We smile at each other in the quick slish-slosh of time, of movements, of slight wind, the morning’s air.

  “If I try to imagine myself bicycling—if I make a fantasy—I feel nuts if I notice things, because, for instance, the bike I use in a fantasy may not be this bike—it can be on your bike—I can be in midair until I think about what bike I am on. Then, when I get the bike fixed up—when I notice and correct the bike stuff—” Often, when I get a sentence halfway clear, I’ll suddenly play or romp into bigger words and more luscious grammar.” —then the memory starts to hurt—you know what I mean, like a dream ache?”

  I am showing off to him. He often lets me show off.

  Maybe even usually.

  The trees have vanished, and the road is open to full sunlight again.

  I had two veins running down my right forearm, and one ran along the side of the wrist and one crossed over the back of the wrist and then forked, and there is the back of my hand on the bicycle handlebars, the terrible white skin, the fairly big fingers, the chrome bar and its curvature. There is the wind on the new skin. Now I feel my back like a piece of plywood in a sheet, a big board, a piece you can barely get your arms around—hug me, you bastard. The bicycle seat rubs my ass and the hollows of my skinny thighs—my right leg in particular.

  “Like a dream ache—be-hee-, be-heep—do you hear me? This is sore-ass Silenowicz. Jesus Christ, I hope these are some halfway decent woods we’re going to—”

  Me to Jimmy, unable to bear the sexual stuff, and gasping some, pedaling alongside him on a wide, empty stretch of road. This is in front of the momentarily abandoned holes and girders of a shopping center being built. Hills of dirt, upright steel beams, enormous open stretches to be made into a blacktop inland sea, an ebony Mediterranean of a parking lot.

  I pursued the matter now of my complaint—I like complaint—the boyishly strained kind. I am experimenting with it. I should say, for one reason and another, I don’t talk much at home or at school; so I dump on Jimmy, I dump a lot of words and elaborate constructions—i.e., ideas. “This is a lot of work to go to just to march around in some crappy woods with a gun—” I was in part doing an imitation or a version of a valid kid, not a creep. Valid: rooted in nature, male, meaning being stronger than some other kids, being bossy and in the position of judging other kids.

  Wind interrupts my syllables, and muffles and lids, defensively, his eyes, which he might use in part for amateur lipreading in the wind. We pedal; he sniffs, he smiles: he smells my speech, he smiles at it as if licking it inwardly; I mean, it is a limp, vague, antenna-ish, plus devourer’s, smile. Is he friendly, the speaker? the antenna part of the smile asks waveringly. Are his motives favorable? it asks. If he feels uncomfortable smiling like that, it would mean I had been abominable and he had caught on fast. His smile tests my half-heard, barely heard, guessed-at speech, the secrets of its tones, of the future, of what I intend to do, of what I intend by it, my speech; my face in the moment, the pileup of phrases, the different tones, the abrasiveness that is in part a mock abrasiveness to hide whatever soprano and witless sweetness has survived in me.

  When his smile vanishes, that doesn’t mean he disapproves of how I spoke to him so much as that his hearing me is a serious matter at the moment, more serious than the other matters—i.e., he doesn’t want to run away from this topic so much, so he is attempting to hear in stages, depending on how much it’s bothersome to him to hear me now that we mentioned sex for the first time this morning.

  We move along on our slender machines among the conditions of travel: the potholes, the crookedly and swoopingly centrally humped road, macadam and pebbled; we bounce and sway in the air currents and rush of nerves when a brushing, racing, wind-loaded and wind-spilling, bristling and snuffling boar-machine, an automobile, goes by. Christ, the weird hissing and, neurally, the staggering hesitation of their passing; then their dusty and advantaged, motor-steadied, keeled diminishing into the glimmering and dusty glow of distance with their amazing speed: distance is golden this time of day, in this part of the country, this part of the world.…

  The sun, at moments when it is sunny, heats the air, which then rises like a ghost of a huge dairywo
man, gray and yellow, and of another century, and in the immense fluster of her clothes, sounds are lost.

  I am testing him, in part. If he makes a real attempt to hear now, it will mean he is in a state of affection, even infatuation. This test is and isn’t purposeful, on my part. I want to talk to him: I am used to being with him: I mean, since we started out; I am young and flexible in my habits; it’s something I’ve gotten into over the years, doing this, testing people but a little dishonestly, as an act of intimacy of a kind, as I’m doing with Jimmy: but I really want to see if he is A Good Person. He’s An All Right Person (in some ways), but he is not good. But I am so far out of control, so overfitted with energies and blustering restlessness at this hour—this vacationer’s day in my life—that I am almost as pleased by his not listening, by some blindness in his friendship, as by the other. I’m almost as pleased as if it were a sign of goodness, his being wicked or whatever. Anyway, the goodness probably is not there. And while I really can’t live (or love) without it, I can’t want it to happen now. I’m probably safe. He’s leaning back and just pedaling, which indicates his vanity and my unimportance. If he felt a lot of affection, he might listen and feel still more affection, and common sense might leave him, and he might come to me and cuddle and nurture me, here on these backward and decaying slopes of childhood, and I know damn well I would never be able to bear that.

  ANGEL

  TODAY The Angel of Silence and of Inspiration (toward Truth) appeared to a number of us passing by on the walk in front of Harvard Hall—this was a little after three o’clock—today is October twenty-fifth, nineteen-hundred-and-fifty-one.

  The shadow came first. In my case, I looked up to see if the sky had clouded over and saw instead with amazing shock the rudiments of a large face, not in any perspective, but a facelike thing that was also a figure, not with feet nearest me, then legs, and so on, and not frontal, but smoothly and yet crudely present in all the visual and mental ways figures and faces sometimes are for me in my dreams.