Ice And Fire

by Andrea Dworkin

  need, tired of the repetition, you learn by rote, slowly, like in

  the third grade, not tone deaf but no genius of your own: the

  notes, one by one, so you can get hard. You get hard. Now

  85

  you’re not pretending. I don’t know how it will end. I am

  waiting for it to end. I know what I want: to get to the end:

  you will tell me when the game is finished: is it over? are you

  hard?

  *

  He is normal now, not impotent and suicidal, but in a rage:

  my normal, human husband who gets hard: he is in a rage,

  like a mad dog. This isn’t what I meant. I love life so fiercely,

  so desperately: I thought only good could come of it: sex is so

  easy: there is an abundance of it, without limits: I teach him

  what I know: he needed a little more confidence, so reader, I

  married him. I didn’t know. I didn’t know. Believe me, not

  them: the normal, human husband with normal, human rage:

  little girl saints of sex with your philosophy, little darlings,

  when what’s inside comes out, be somewhere hidden, chaste,

  out of reach: it spilled over: it was rage: it was hate: it was sex:

  he got hard: he beat me until I couldn’t even crawl: it costs me

  nothing, and there is an endless abundance of it, with no limits:

  I try to get away: how it will end, I don’t know. Until now I

  devoured, devoured, I loved life so fiercely: now I think nothing

  good can come of it: why didn’t someone say— oh, girl, it isn’t

  so easy as it seems, be gone when what’s inside comes out:

  impotence and suicide aren’t the worst things. His face isn’t

  sad now: he is flowering outside, to others, they have never

  seen him fatter, cockier, no grief, no little boy: the human

  husband, all hard fuck and fists: and I cower: reader, I married

  him: I saved him: how it will end, I don’t know.

  *

  You can see what he needed, you can see what I did. It’s no

  secret now, not me alone. I got inside it when it was still a

  secret. It is everywhere now. Watch the men at the films. Sneak

  in. Watch them. See how they learn to tie the knots from the

  pictures in the magazines. Impotent and suicidal. I taught him

  not to be afraid to hurt: me. What’s inside comes out. I love

  life so fiercely, so desperately, and I devour, devour, and how

  it will end, I don’t know. Sex is so easy, and it costs me nothing,

  and there is an endless abundance of it, with no limits: and I

  devour, devour. I saved him. How it will end, I don’t know.

  There will be a film called Snuff.

  86

  I love life so fiercely, so desperately, that

  nothing good can come of it: I mean the

  physical facts of life, the sun, the grass,

  youth. It’s a much more terrible vice than

  cocaine, it costs me nothing, and there is an

  endless abundance of it, with no limits: and

  I devour, devour. How it will end, I don’t know.

  Pasolini

  *

  Sad, gentle face, comic. Unconsummated. My virgin. My little

  boy. My innocent. Suicidal and impotent. I want you to know

  what I know, being ground under: hard thighs: hard sweat:

  hard cock: kisses to the marrow of the bone. I love life so

  fiercely, so desperately. It costs me nothing, and there is an

  endless abundance of it, with no limits, and I devour, devour. I

  teach you. You get hard. You pulverize human bones. Finally I

  know how it will end. Oh, I run, I run, little boy.

  87

  Coitus as punishment for the happiness of

  being together.

  Kafka

  *

  I lived another year in that Northern city of Old Europe. Terror

  wipes you clean if you don’t die. I took everyone I liked: with

  good cheer, a simple equanimity. There were houseboats,

  saunas, old cobbled streets, huge mattresses on floors with

  incense burning: long-haired boys and short-haired girls: I

  knew their names: something about them: there was nothing

  rough: I felt something in the thighs: I always felt something

  coming from me or I did nothing: it was different: I had many

  of them, whoever I wanted. I read books and took drugs. I

  was happy.

  I started to write, sentences, paragraphs, nothing whole. But

  I started to write.

  Slowly I saw: coitus is the punishment for being a writer

  afraid of the cold passion of the task. There is no being together, just the slow learning of solitude. It is the discipline, the art. I began to learn it.

  *

  I lived in the present, slowly, except for tremors of terror,

  physical memories of the beatings, the blood. I took drugs. I

  took who I wanted, male or female. I was alert. I read books. I

  listened to music. I was near the water. I had no money. I

  watched everyone. I kept going. I would be alone and feel

  happy. It frightened me. Coitus is the punishment for the happiness of being alone. One can’t face being happy. It is too extreme.

  *

  I had to be with others, compulsion. I was afraid to be alone.

  Coitus is the punishment for the fear of being alone. I took

  who I liked, whatever moved me, I felt it in my gut. It was

  fine. But only solitude matters. Coitus is the punishment for cowardice: afraid of being alone, in a room, in a bed, on this earth: coitus is the punishment for being a woman: afraid to be alone.

  *

  88

  I couldn’t be alone. I took whoever made me feel something, -a

  funny longing in the gut or crotch. I liked it. I took hashish,

  acid. Not all the time, on special days, or on long afternoons. I

  took long saunas. I was happy. I read books. I started to write.

  I began to need solitude. It started like a funny longing in the

  gut or crotch. Coitus was the punishment for not being able to

  stand wanting solitude so much.

  *

  I gave up other lovers. I wanted solitude. It took a few years to

  get faithful. Coitus was the punishment for a breach of faith.

  *

  I came back to New York City, the Lower East Side. I lived

  alone, poor, writing. I was raped once. It punished me for the

  happiness of being myself.

  *

  I am alone, in solitude. I can almost run my fingers through it.

  It takes on the rhythmic brilliance of any passion. It is like

  holy music, a Te Deum. Coitus is the punishment for not

  daring to be happy.

  *

  I learn the texture of minutes, how hours weave themselves

  through the tangled mind: I am silent. Coitus is the punishment

  for running from time: hating quiet: fearing life.

  *

  I betray solitude. I get drunk, pick up a cab driver. Coitus is

  the punishment.

  *

  I write day in and day out, night after night, alone, in the quiet

  of this exquisite concentration, this exquisite aloneness, this

  extreme new disordering of the senses: solitude, my beloved.

  Coitus is the punishment for not daring to be extreme enough,

  for compromising, for conforming, for giving in. Coitus is the

  punishment for not daring to disorder the senses enough: by

  knowing them wi
thout mediation. Coitus is the punishment

  for not daring to be original, unique, discrete.

  *

  I am not distracted, I am alone, I love solitude, this is passion

  too. I am intensely happy. When I see people, I am no less

  alone: and I am not lonely. I concentrate when I write: pure

  concentration, like life at the moment of dying. I dream the

  89

  answers to my own questions when I sleep. I am not tranquil,

  it is not my nature, but I am intensely happy. Coitus is the

  punishment for adulterating solitude.

  *

  I forget the lovers of Europe. They don’t matter. The terror

  still comes, it envelops me, solitude fights it tooth and nail,

  solitude wins. I forget what I have done on these streets here.

  It doesn’t matter. I concentrate. I am alone. The solitude is

  disruption, extremity, extreme sensation in dense isolation.

  This is a private passion, not for exhibit. Coitus is the

  punishment for exhibiting oneself: for being afraid to be happy

  in private, alone. Coitus is the punishment for needing a human

  witness. I write. Solitude is my witness.

  *

  Coitus is the punishment for the happiness of being. Solitude is

  the end of punishment.

  I write. I publish.

  *

  Coitus is punishment. I write down everything I know, over

  some years. I publish. I have become a feminist, not the fun

  kind. Coitus is punishment, I say. It is hard to publish. I am a

  feminist, not the fun kind. Life gets hard. Coitus is not the

  only punishment. I write. I love solitude: or slowly, I would

  die. I do not die.

  Coitus is punishment. I am a feminist, not the fun kind.

  90

  Ne cherchez plus mon coeur; les betes

  l'ont mange.

  (Don’t look for my heart anymore; the beasts*

  have eaten it. )

  Baudelaire

  *

  He was a subtle piece of slime, big open pores, hair hanging

  over his thick lip onto his teeth, faintly green. He smiled. I

  sat. Oh yes, and I smiled. Tentatively. Quietly. Eyes slanted

  down, then up quickly, then away, then down, nothing elaborate. Just a series of sorrowful gestures that scream female.

  Gray was in the air, a thick paste. It was a filter over

  everything or just under my eyelids. The small table was too

  dirty, rings of wet stuck to it, and the floor had wet mud on it

  that all the people had dragged in before they sat down to

  chatter. I picked this place because I had thought it was clean.

  I went there almost every day, escaping the cold of my desolate

  apartment. Now the tabletop was sordid and I could smell

  decay, a faint acrid cadaver smell.

  The rain outside was subtle and strange, not pouring down

  in sheets but just hanging, solid, in thin static veils of wet

  suspended in the air, soaking through without the distracting

  noise of falling hard. The air seemed empty, and then another

  sliver of wet that went from the cement on the sidewalk right

  up into the sky would hit your whole body, at once, and one

  walked or died.

  I had nothing to keep the rain off me, just regular cotton

  clothes, the gnarled old denim of my time and age, with holes,

  frayed not for effect but because they were old and tired, and

  what he saw when he saw me registered in those ugly eyes

  hanging over those open pores. Her, It, She, in color, 3-D,

  fearsome feminista, ballbuster, woman who talks mean, queer

  arrogant piece. But also: something from Fellini, precisely a

  mountain of thigh, precisely. I could see the mountain of thigh

  hanging in the dead center of his eyes, and the slight drip of

  saliva. Of course, he was very nice.

  * the stupids

  91

  Coffee came, and cigarettes piled up, ashtray after ashtray,

  two waitresses with huge red lips and short skirts running back

  and forth emptying them, and the smell of the smoke got into

  my fingers and into my hair and on my clothes and the rain

  outside even began to carry it off when it was too much for

  the room we were in. The empty packs were crumpled, and I

  began pulling apart the filters, strand by strand, and rolling

  the matchbooks into tight little wads and then opening them

  up all softened and tearing them into little pieces, and then I

  began to tear the fetid butts into pieces by tearing off the paper

  and rolling the burnt tobacco between my palms which were

  tight and wretched with strain and perspiration and I was

  making little piles of torn papers and torn matchbooks and

  torn cigarette packs but not touching the cellophane (he was

  talking), and making the little piles as high as I could and

  watching them intently, staring, as if their construction were a

  matter of symmetry and perfection and indisputable necessity

  and it required concentration and this was my job. During this

  we talked, of course mostly he talked, because I was there to

  be talked to, and have certain things explained, and to be

  corrected, especially to be set right, because I had gone all

  wrong, gotten all Dostoyevsky-like in the land of such writing

  as “ Ten New Ways to Put on Lipstick” and “ The Truth About

  How to be Intimate with Strangers. ” Coitus was what?

  In the rain we walked to another restaurant, to dinner. Oh,

  he had liked me. I had done all right.

  *

  When I walked into the coffeehouse, he knew me right away.

  The mountain of thigh, not any other kind of fame. The place

  was wet, smelly, crowded, and I had picked it, it resembled me,

  not modest, dank, a certain smell of decay. The other women

  huddled themselves in, bent shoulders, suddenly, treacherously lowered heads that threatened to fall off their necks, tight little legs wrapped together like Christmas packages,

  slumping down, twisting in, even the big ones didn’t dare

  spread out but instead held their breath, pulled in their

  tummies, scrunched their mouths, used their shoulders to cover

  their chests, crossed their ankles, crossed their feet, crossed

  their legs, kept their hands lying quietly under the tabletops,

  didn’t show teeth, moved noiselessly, melted in with the gray

  9Z

  and the mud and the wet, except for some flaming lips: and no

  monumental laughs, no sonorous discourse, no loud epis-

  temology, no boom boom boom: the truth. I wanted to

  whimper and contract, fold up, shrivel to some version of

  pleasing nothing, sound the call: it’s all finished, she gives up, no

  one’s here, out to lunch, empty, smelly, noiseless, folded up.

  But I would have had to prepare, study, start earlier in the

  day, come from a warmer apartment into a cleaner coffeehouse, be dry, not wear the ancient denim articles of an old faith, witnesses, remembrances, proofs, evidences of times without such silly rules. He stood, nodded, smiled, pointed to the seat, I sat, he gave me a cigarette, I smoked, I drank coffee, he

  talked, I listened, he talked, I built castles out of paper on

  tabletops, he talked, oh, I was so quiet, so soft, all brazen

  thigh to the naked eye, to his dead and ugly eye, but i
nside I

  wanted him to see inside I was all aquiver, all tremble and

  dainty, all worried and afraid, nervy and a pale invalid, all

  pathetic need contaminated by intellect that was like wild

  weeds, wild weeds massively killing the gentle little flower

  garden inside, those pruned and fragile little flowers. This I

  conveyed by being quiet and tender and oh so quiet, and I

  could see my insides all running with blood, all running with

  knife cuts and big fuck bruises, and he saw it too. So he took

  me to dinner in the rain.

  *

  The bathroom was in the back, painted a pink that looked

  brown and fungoid, and I got to it by heaving myself over the

  wet boots strewn like dead bodies in my way, sliding along the

  wet puddles, touching strange shoulders delicately like God

  just for a hint of balance. The smoke heralded me, shrouded

  me, trailed behind me: in front, around, behind, a column of

  fire hiding me. The walls in the little room were mud and the

  floor was mud and the seat of the toilet had some bright red

  dots and green splotches and the mirror had a face looking

  out, destitute. I was bleeding. The rain and bleeding. The

  muscles in my back caved in toward each other furiously and

  then shot out, repelled. A small island under my stomach beat,

  a drum, a pulse, spurting blood. Oh, mother. I took thick paper

  towels meant for drying big wet hands and covered the toilet

  seat and pushed my old denim down to the slobbering floor. I

  93

  waited for life to pass, for the man to go away, for the blood

  to stop, to grow old and die. Four beige-stained walls, enough

  naked flesh hitting the cold edge of the cold air to keep me

  awake and alive, and time passing. Then I went out because I

  had to, because I wasn’t going to die there, past the kitchen, a

  hole in the wall, burning oil hurled in the air by a cook who

  bounced from pot to pot, singing, sauteing, stirring, draining,

  humming. I walked through all the same tables, this time my

  hands straight down by my side like other people, and I sat

  down again. The piles of matchbook paper covered the table-

  top, and he was slumped and disbelieving.