Ralph said later, “I love her like a two-reel silent, but has anybody heard any Haile Selassie records lately?”
(Of course the uproar when Madame Milanov walked down the aisle must have unnerved the debutante: you could’ve heard it at Carnegie—where of course the young Miss Price, Madame’s obvious successor in Nilotic melodrama has sung Cleopatra.)
However, concerning the woman, she is a primitive woman, for all that she is a musical genius and for all that she has fallen in love with the Audrey Hepburn look and means to achieve it. A poorly educated, self-doubting (and therefore in respect of the genius perhaps all the more touching), primitive woman who has been terribly punished, whose overriding idea of punishing retribution makes her finally less compelling than a woman like you (well, there are no other women like you, so you) who having gone through hell is able to find a kind of restoration through kindness.
I could say more—all the nasty speculation about the weight loss from devotees of warblers at least four axe handles across the pistol pockets. Let suffice that everything you’ve held about the Meneghini all these years is still true, and the only thing to be done about it (at least until the Pope opens The Letter from Fatima in 1960) is to put the two of you back together and charge a hundred dollars a ticket to raise cash to elect the first American president who likes to go to thuh opra. Herodiade alternating the mother and the daughter? Or are you currently so steeped in mother/daughter cross-referential melodrama that all you yearn to do is—but you declined Dialogues, didn’t you? (It’s going to be a succès fou, but I never did see you in it.)
Aftermaths and post-mortems: this morning, on the line (reported on the telephone by Ralph and Alice):
“Did you love it, dear, love it live?”
“I loved it.”
“Were you moved?”
“I wuz, deah . . . so moved they had to move me back.”
And so skip town—but first, the last First Friday of 1956. They’ll just have to do without their December: those who have not already made nine in a row must begin again. I do hate leaving town, just in case Winchell does decide to blow his brains out on television: it would give me as much joy to behold as did the public humiliation and death of the senator from Wisconsin. I know, hatred is a wound, and I pray to have it lifted . . . one day. In the meantime I am so delighted with the sponsors of his vile show for canceling him that I may take up smoking Old Gold and give myself a Toni (“which twin?”). Also, I’d love to crash the parties the debutante has lined up: the noise is she’s going in Harry Winston’s rented rocks like a showgirl. Glad I was at Herbert W’s: she came looking like Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face.
I could go on in this vein, but I’d best abrupt myself if I’m to regroup my forces for the day and face life (I wonder will it ever get to the stage again when I sit down and look at that thing the way we did last winter?). Best of luck with Pilgrim Soul and the ways of Eire-wohn mo bhron. Remember that Maev means intoxication. And don’t worry about playing your own mother; Gloria de Haven did it with no after effect (that one can detect).
Do write c/o General Delivery, Newport, or telephone the general store. (Massachusetts is a far cry from New York, but not so far as that from Dublin.) After last summer, they’d send out Indian runners in the winter storm to fetch the eremite off his lonely hill, down from his own Tor Ballyhoo where on the widow’s walk in the howling nor’easter Calliope is right at home amid the travails and flails of any number of wailing Whaling widows, see above.
Si da mi stesso diviso
e fatto singular di l’altra gente to talk to you.
Your ever-loving pal,
S. D. J. (The O’Maurigan)
His Seal
Bisexual Pussy Boy
Robert Glück
My middle years were going by so fast—I seemed to be swept into a Max Sennett frenzy of manic gesture and locomotion toward the cliff and over. I was fifty-four years old: how durable the urges to fuck and to write about it. I responded to an ad on Craig’s List during one of the periods that Rich left me, October 2001. “We have problems,” I thought, as though to confirm our success as a couple. Rich was just a floral motif. Something pretty to give away. He turned away. The replication of that moment—a civilization founded on a gesture.
I longed for the days of general condition, average situation, but the complex was also compelling, to be impossibly sundered, hands thrown wide apart, the gesture of grievance and loss. I’d stood at the sink, saying, Oh no I won’t!—but what did that mean? Get away! That’s what you think! Now, where is this?
I had not been attracted to the photo on Craig’s List: his smock is gathered at the chest like a housedress; he wears round glasses and his limp, sexless hair is tightly gathered, but he stands next to an energetic painting—a huge grasshopper—and after a few e-mail exchanges he wrote, “My experiences with men so far have been pretty anonymous but very thrilling, and it seems like the next step is to find someone who I can trust who is educated, interesting and experienced enough to boss me around and make me a masterful cocksucker. Can you do that? I’ve read a little about you online and it seems pretty clear that you possess a sophisticated creativity and gratitude for your life which is unusual. This makes me optimistic.”
His response made me optimistic. I felt honored to be initiating Bill into the homo mysteries, although setting out on the drive to Oakland was making me even angrier at Rich. For some reason, it took me decades to learn that nothing is better than sex with someone you love. I learned that with Rich. As for Rich, anyone would probably have been a better mate, any guy walking on the sidewalk of the degraded street that leads me to the freeway. I thought I would be with Rich forever, so now forever seems to be in the past. All my future was chased away by the monster arbitrary. I hate the psychic drudgery of crossing the bridge and I resented the waste of time promiscuity takes.
I brought some champagne. I learned that from Kathy. Late one night, she asked me to stop at a corner store. She emerged with a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. Her boyfriend was coming over later, she explained. Thrillingly late. I’d felt so strong a pang of love for Kathy and her ways that it knocked the wind out of me. I was happy for her night of romance, relief from romantic desolation, and I looked forward to her report the next day. I needed to take care of someone, and here was a national treasure for me to nurture. We took baths together. She talked about her breasts, that they hung so thoroughly she called them worms, that they were murderers, that they would kill her. We were both confident in our nakedness, our sexual organs, little Napoleons. My own worm floating wanly. The jumble of limbs. But I was driving across the bridge in the middle of a random afternoon on the way to some stranger’s body. I envied those writers for whom meaning is evident. At that moment, they were putting the finishing touches on poems and novels with favorite pens and drinking cappuccinos in favorite cafés or they were symbiotic with their laptops at home, basking in the bright screen of their own mentation. They were gripping the world with ideas and power. Blasts of wind buffeted the car. Now Kathy was on my mind, and her mountains of pills. Twenty years earlier, I started crying in Safeway. I could not go on, and sat down on the floor next to the chips and bottled bean dip. I felt intense relief when I learned it was a disease and not a breakdown. I retreated to blankets and sheets, pajamas and soup. Kathy needed a place to stay for November and December till she left the city, so we had the absurd idea that she would take care of me. Kathy needed to be taken care of, always, but that did not amount to a debt in her mind, any more than it would to a child. I felt a pervasive nausea, partly because I undoubtedly got the disease from rimming some guy—my favorite activity in those days. What was I living on?—how did I run my classes?
The flat oily odor of Kathy’s vitamins and obscure supplements filled the house as I drifted for weeks in a nausea that sharpened my senses. My disease did not interest her. I could not convince her that I was really sick. She came home from the party at eleven o’clock instead of
nine with a paper plate of leftover Thanksgiving dinner, just scraps that she seemed to want herself. I felt like a pig trying to get them down quickly. “I have friends who died of hepatitis,” she said. Liver disease reduces testosterone, and I floated through the year with no desire at all, prepubescent. A roaring, clanging noise had been silenced. No more wheel of fire. Instead of killing me, hepatitis saved my life, since HIV was spreading through the bathhouses at that time. As Kathy was leaving—for London?—she thrust a cheap gray windup rabbit in my hands and turned away without a word, a gesture I could not interpret. She had a menagerie of stuffed animals, so perhaps she wanted to comfort me? I found the rabbit in a closet five or six years later and realized at once that she was letting me know that I was acting like a baby. Like someone who needed to be taken care of.
Best girlfriend.
Bill and I sat on a broken-down mohair sofa next to a space heater in his chilly studio in the industrial section of Oakland. He was trembling and it was an honor to take his fear and excitement into my arms. He was the perfect WASP. No more smock, good-bye pony tail. I exalted as though with the first swing my pick had struck a fantastic vein. I felt the skin of his back under his shirt; his skin was luxury. The parts of a mobile started turning on their own inside my chest. I had been invited as a teacher, the limit of my role and function. That made sense of the disparities. Bill was twenty-eight; he had a preppy face, bred for centuries to retreat from the arousal it generated. His variation on that theme: he was comfortable alone, he desired to be alone. He took off for weeks in his four-wheeler, camping in the desert, feeling connected to the earth. Also, he swam in the bay. Was this like an adolescent taking too many hot showers to cleanse his raddled spirit?
Bill explained that he had a girlfriend who encouraged our meeting. “Without her this would have been impossible, because I need a certain balance.” His emotional life belonged to her. He wanted to forestall emotion in me so urgently that it amounted to an emotional request. Despite his appreciation, he did not want me. That is, he wanted my age, my attention, and a hard fuck. It was intolerable that I should feel anything beyond excitement. It was a mistake to build on my hope that we might speak the same language. He wanted me to shut up. It was a mistake to think that I could protect him and guide him. He wanted me to fuck him carelessly. I told him what would make me feel good, but my words carried no force and we both knew they were beside the point.
Bill led me to a mat in the middle of the dark space, protesting a little because I dragged the space heater with me. He did not want to give our sex an association—not with the sofa, not with the tidy bed against the far wall, which I looked at with longing. He did not even care if I got undressed—it was just Age watching Youth, that’s what it took to transform his straight ass into a sexual organ.
I thought this was something to tell Ed about, but he had been dead for x years. This was something to tell Kathy about, though she had been dead for x years, and estranged from me for years before that. She would call the operator to break into my conversations if she wanted to talk to me. That was later—in 1987, say. I was running the Poetry Center then. Her food was utterly erratic, now she was eating only potatoes.
Two figures—Ed and Kathy—they are complete in themselves and have no relation to each other—just to their own narrative and inner drama, like Bellini saints. I gave my life away freely to Ed, Kathy, and Reese, then I suppose I needed some payment. Loneliness creates an excess of self. I could not give any more life away without getting some back. A group of her friends went looking on Twenty-fourth Street for a container for her ashes. I thought the floral Mexican box from the craft store would do, but the others fell in love with a nineteenth-century bronze dripping with flowers and cherubs. Kathy’s ashes would inhabit the urn for what—only four or five weeks?—before we scattered them at the beach. This was a sin against thrift. Reasoning with the others in the overpriced antique store, contorting inside, I realized two things in the same moment: the urn was exactly the sort of excess Kathy loved, and I will end up in the stupid Mexican box. The pure jealousy I felt for Kathy’s urn reconnected me to her more than anything had since her death. Like any extreme emotion it replaced what was in front of me. I had the sensation of falling. I inhabited a resentment that had always been too expensive, slightly out of reach.
I was supposed to be writing about Ed, but Kathy intruded, the real unfinished business at that point, if that’s what you call a ghost.
Bill had a beautiful stomach, taut and small. He liked to show it off, this prize, this flesh. His pubic tuft, a bit of loose fur. His penis was a detail, even to him. I use the word penis because it was so cold in his studio. I put the hard curlicue in my mouth but that did not seem to give him pleasure. The studio had been some vast industrial warehouse. He blew me, lightly keening. That turned the day upside down. The footlights dimmed, and a silver shaft fell on us through a crack in heaven’s floor. Bill’s face was held up to it by the activity of our two bodies finding their way together, slow and deliberate. That is, Bill defied the future, then put his trust in it. In that blow job, his reality was realized. His faith scared me because I feared the depth of his loneliness and my own, in this barn, in the heaven of his flesh. Its strict beauty was like a happy sermon, like the peaceable kingdom. How extremely strange to find heaven and hell so mixed up. There on the wall gloated the devil with washboard abs and a forked flame for a prick. And there was the giant grasshopper—God had stretched out his hand.
After the blow job, my cock was returned to me. I poked it, the skin slick and cold, like fell on a lamb. Bill showed me his asshole and what he liked to do with it, and why not? He achieved what few can claim outside porn fantasy, the complete transformation of an asshole into a sexual organ. It didn’t really have a name any longer. Pussy. It was bubble gum pink, clean as a whistle, and without the suggestion of scent, as though it existed in the imagination or as a photo. His rickety daddy long legs cantilevered outward at odd angles so his weightless torso seemed to bounce on them.
I am telling this to Ed and Kathy. Long ago at the baths I saw an old man gazing slack jawed into the vortex of a churning butt of a man who was fucking a man beneath him. The old man’s head was tipped at an odd angle, as though a strong wind blew out of the butt, and now I understood that he was using the bottom correction of his bifocals to keep the ass in focus. My head was tipped back as well in order to read the fine print on Bill’s little butt. His fingers were inside it, displaying it, running rings around it. He said, “It’s repulsive, right?—what we do.”
“Sure,” I said. I felt shocked, but I hate to disagree. Bill probably needed our sex to be repulsive, and repulsive sex was not automatically undesirable. My first thought was that my age disgusted him. “Can I have some water?” I asked. And, “How about some music?” But Bill didn’t want to be sidetracked, or to ruin some favorite CD by associating it with our sex. I didn’t think our sex was disgusting—his desire not to communicate was frustrating, but not disgusting. It produced a question. Why do young men want old men if not to learn from them, since experience is what we have to offer? Possible answer: young men want power over old men. Communication upsets that dynamic and every dynamic of power. I was that much more an old fool, he was that much more a young slut. Anyway, I began to feel pleasure, and pleasure made our sex normal. Does arousal make things strange for some people? It is my native home.
At some point, when Bill realizes that his inner life is so disjunct, won’t that equal terror? It seemed very 2002, the sense of bodies coming apart, sexuality parsed out, yet intensely lived. States of being can’t be averaged out—is living in a disjunct condition a kind of heroism? The front of my body whirled, feeling a greed satisfied, I had forgotten it existed—waking from the sleep of marriage. He pulled his asshole open an inch with his forefingers for my eyes. It was time to come, but every few minutes I was distracted by this strange vaudeville show, the finger drawing the membrane outward as if throwing a tiny
pot.
Then I fucked him as carelessly as he wanted me to do. I entered him from behind, my strokes were so hard I was spanking him with my thighs. His intricate lower back and the jiggling flesh of his ass made me feel surges of tender lust. Inside he was hot, I was in a well-heated room at last. Bill had only enough flesh to jiggle a little. I felt the complexity of generating excitement in a body that interests me, an alphabet of sites. I plunged and probed like a prospector losing his cool, made frantic by the growing richness of his vein of gold. Then I fell into—what?—a spatial fallacy, looking at our aroused bodies where there was so much interaction, if only along a few inches of skin. But from the point of view of the vast empty space, our little bodies expressed a contradictory stillness or timelessness, our two fragments, our two little hard-ons like levers that start the toy engine’s senseless rotation: the organic reality of our bodies did not survive the cold darkness. I felt the grief of separation, as though time islands were drifting apart, me with a foot on each. And weirdly I also felt merry, like Slippage the Clown. Nature made a mistake. Nature speculated when it gave every one of us a temporary meeting place of bone and muscle. Why shouldn’t life be as forever as a Martian landscape? Why should the inorganic remain and the living change and perish? That is, emptiness saw through my senses. A new model: desire, the creator of ghosts. His barn of a studio, his huge works, his space heater. I had the thought that one day Bill would understand his disjunction as grief and kill himself—say, vanish in the desert. Until then he would never make a unit, never come to rest—
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