The World Is the Home of Love and Death

by Brodkey, Harold

  She was a whore at one time, and she went back to it when times were hard. She had a crazed husband, Ken, who lived on her but he wasn’t happy about it, he wasn’t happy about anything.

  “It’s like a griddle out there, and I’m the pancake, ha-ha,” says S.L.

  “Oh, honey, you’re something so spay-she-ull I cayen’t stand it—”

  She was focused with the will to make him understand it.

  S.L. has an exhibitionist’s stance, an exhibitionist’s kindness, he puts on a show, he smells openly of money and of “love”—high-falutin’ attachments to a crippled child, to “poor” Cherry, to manners, too, a code of politeness.

  ( Where she comes from, there was a lot of killing: women didn’t count for much, I’ll tell you her good point, she was appreciative. )

  Dad has a fleshy and engorged look. He aches with his secrets. His pulse ticks with his physical response to her. He pulsates with a kind of horror and amusement that Cherry has called out in him. This is what makes him a glorious lecher. He blooms and parades; then he is sacrificed—he calls this being a gentleman, a trooper, a white man even if it kills you. So, sexually long-suffering, phallically edgy, he sinks into the well, the circumstances, of arousal. Her amusement grows. She is interested in life when she can feel her sexual life as the axis of the actual, breathing moment.

  Her sense of his goodness, his worthiness rests on his responses to her—on his cheapness and his chivalry, his self-invented, unreliable grace: she liked him a lot; as men go, he wasn’t bad.

  Like some big-pricked men, he tends to be operatic about his own responsiveness, he is urged on to further arousal.

  He says to Cherry, “What am I supposed to do with this?” and he sticks out the astonishing topography of his erection in his pants, and his hot, flushed face, like his eyes, blinks and blinks with his breath.

  Twice in his life that he spoke of, he “performed” in whorehouses. He went with men he knew, they took him because of his reputation; he let himself be used; he submitted to being Living Pornography, instruction: he went to it, he worked away on a whore, naked, pink-pricked, both of them intent, with maybe four men sitting near the bed and drinking scotch and beer, and watching.

  He is anguishedly shy and bold now. His sense of the heat-noise outside makes him blink faster when Cheery Cherry moves herself against him—she’s all a-sweat at once; her eyes grin. She has an odd smile. Pulling away from her, settling and resettling his buttocks, this susceptible man excites himself—but it’s as if she is doing it, her will, her will-lessness, whichever.

  He has a landscape of choice. He dresses to impose law on all this, he tries to guide how he is admired and chosen by his clothes. He chooses what he will do—he does it with mixed pain and chagrin, pride and a snaking torrent of pleasure. He does it in front of an audience—the pleasure and pain and anger of others—this small-town exhibitionist.

  “I like to know what I’m doing, I don’t know what I’m doing, you gotta leave me a little space to breathe, hon,” he says.

  He is again in a state of sexual riot, great consciousness of muscle and of heavy genitalia. Casanova feels his nipples shine among blond hairs. He makes the choice to be excited but he suffers in that state—he prefers that pain, though, to other kinds of pain. He holds me against his chest and bites his lip and shakes his head at Cherry. “Peace—and plenty,” he says, “peace and plenty.” He runs his hand over a tabletop and feels the startling silk of its high finish and the shaved stubble of grit in it. His hands are as if alive. He feels abstention as a choking pain but he smiles, blinkingly—"I’m not made of wood.” He pushes himself against the table to rearrange his pants—his crotch—and Cherry grabs him—his thigh—and says, “Don’t do that, you’ll hurt it, I’ll do it.”

  “How do you know what I’m doing?”

  “You want to straighten the big fella, I know you,” she says in her twang.

  He has a heavy defiance, a deep, deep secrecy. He resettles his weight differently: “The little one here—he don’t feel good—” Daddy speaks in her kind of Ruralese. “It sure is getting me down, we got to go, we got to get a move on, I got to get him fixed up or I’ll have me a stroke—a stroke.” He strokes the underside of my skimpy thigh and he moves his abdomen, first into, then away from Cherry’s helpful grasp.

  He tastes the air he breathes. “I’ll talk to you this afternoon,” he says to Cherry.

  The lightless hall, the sundots and revolving and widening spears of light—the false twilight—Dad is a haze and field of sensational weightiness, longness, and a kind of strong fatness—and she is stroking him and he is moistening his lips. His eyes are plumped out in ribaldry and praise—he got her to be like this—he gave her money. He rests his sight on a kind of sight of her breasts: “The tidbits, they ain’t watermelons—” He bumps against her hips, her haunches—strong, ungainly, serious flesh: “You’ll be the death of me, you have the flesh of fate.”

  Cherry says, “I love it when you talk to me liyuk thayat.”

  His taste for sexual and romantic drama is greatly pleased here. Never fully abstemious, he is a blurred poet of Eden and the consequent despair of such frequent and inevitable exiles—romanticized death.

  Cherry’s body has an exaggerated willfulness, a flitter in it, a quality of presence: she is largely naked inside her thin, summery red dress. Cherry knows this is familiar ground for S.L., being chased by a woman—Lila never saw S.L. properly in this light; she knew women pursued him but she never understood what it was like for him.

  She wanted to be the only one who was pursued.

  Cherry has an urgency, a drunkenness, about him, about herself and him. She says, “You want to fuck, you want to talk about fucking?”

  (Lila said, I could never want to compete with a woman like that.)

  His heart booms like a big wooden sloop banging against a dock.

  But I feel him loving me better than her. The terrible idea of the inside slot of her, the soft grease—a man with a big prick tends to find cunt incurably desirable, amazing—it’s the woman who has it who’s hard to take: they got to get even with you for every little thing. You can’t always tell if they like you or not, because if they like you, they hate you so much. I got treated well at moments, I never got treated well as a general rule. Now I’ll tell you something, I was something they liked, and sometimes, just sometimes, they was nice to me; and a woman’s who’s nice to you doesn’t lose you, do you take my meaning, or do I have to draw you a diagram?

  “Later this afternoon,” he says. “Yes.”

  They distribute rampant breaths and odd foot movements in the hallway, and he moves slightly upreared in the chest, carrying me.

  Cherry has a shocked look, “Wayell shooor, hunn—”

  She grabs him around the neck, holds him—she says, emotionally, but slyly, “I love your big balls, they got that shiny skee-in like Christmas tree thangs.”

  That she wants him more than he wants her—this is what excites him, although sometimes it sickens him in people and in her, too. But it is essential to him: I don’t know why it is you have to play hard-to-get with S.L. and chase him at the same time; he wants you to be a whore but hard-to-get: you figure it out, I can’t.

  “Now let me go, hon; I’ll see you this afternoon—count on me,” but no one can count on his sense of time or him keeping an appointment.

  Dramatically, Dad turns and we go through a door leaving her behind, we clatter down some dark stairs, and through a doorway, opening and closing a thin wooden door that slams inside the nausea and blackened-and-glaring headache the child has. Daddy is much renewed, a little disheveled; he is kind of feeling good now. Also, lousy.

  The garage. The sting of the smell of gas. The thick, queasy—hellish—smell of oil.

  “How are you, Ken?” Daddy says in a very loud voice to a man with a reddish, sunken face. A tic of muscle beats fast in Dad’s throat.

  The reddish, sunken man says loudly, “Not t
oo bad, sir—yayuss suhrr”—a low, crazy-angry countryman’s voice—“En theyattttt-sssuhhhh thhuh tree-oooth—”

  And that’s the truth.

  He opens the car door for us—it’s a black Dodge. We drive out of the garage into the sunstruck world below its dome of heat, and the damp air in the car from the garage gives way and becomes an acrid bitter presence when we are in the light. We drive past houses sparking with hidden and then showy flares of white fire. Dad fearful, large, and handsome in Ken’s car, S.L.’s fear—the world seems uncertain—on the road into town—steep, narrow, open on one side to an abrupt fall through space. Ken, red-faced, gaunt, squealingly fishtails the car on the absurdly tight curves of the road.

  Daddy says, “The child, now Ken—be good to the child—”

  “Isn’t that the truth? Isn’t that the goddamn truth?”

  Ken says that.

  Daddy sets his face, turns it into concrete or plaster colored with patience: “Isn’t Ken a real good driver, honey?” Daddy asks me. His arm is around me.

  Ken bends over the wheel, hunched and sour. (He was a pimp for her and she was a whore—that’s the truth of it.)

  The car skids and rocks. The outside world jiggles and flows. The spreading hollow flows upward and things in it get larger in the leaping and sliding views from here. The glassy sparking and hot whirl.

  “Daddy, I don’t feel good.”

  “Hold on, we got to be nice, we’re getting a nice ride, noblesse oblige—even if it kills you.”

  “Daddy—”

  “Ken, we got a child here vomits easy—”

  “Ain’t it the truth, ain’t it always the truth.”

  “Stick your head out the car window, get a little air,” Daddy said to me and fairly gently pushed my head out into the dirty burning air. Around the last turn and onto the flats—the child is in the silenced, ringing, bell jar just before sickness. Then the child gags and convulses. “Woodsman, spare my suit,” Daddy says.

  The car stops.

  “You’re a master with the brakes, you’ve got the magic foot.”

  “Well, here we are,” Ken said, modestly—maybe angrily—ignoring what Dad said.

  “You shoulda been a racing car driver or a fireman, and we say thank you, thank you, kind sir.”

  Ken sat, both hands hung on the black steering wheel, his elbows were down, his shoulders forward; his face, angled like a bird’s, stared forward; he is uselessly shrewd, uselessly cautious, uselessly angry.

  “Thank you again, kind sir,” Dad said. “You’re O.K. in my book, Ken.”

  S.L. was afraid all the time.

  “It’s the little accidents of life, it’s the little kindnesses that get to you, they’re the honey in the cake, they’re what make life worth living, people just plain are nicer in small towns, that’s what it comes to, there’s a truth for you; children are the meaning of life; here’s the meaning of life, have to be nice to the meaning of life, don’t we, Ken? A smart man’s got no choice.”

  Dad means it and he’s ironic—he has a kind of grace of implication.

  Ken said, darkly, “Ain’t it the truth?” A low restless voice.

  I’m lifted out into the palely beautiful and obtrusive light.

  Reddish Ken is coquettish in a rural, fixed way.

  “Who knows what it’s all about, life is just a bowl of cherries is what I say. Well, get a move on now, Ken, and let me know about Sam.”

  Ken and Sam, a tenant farmer, work for Dad.

  My dad owns two asparagus farms and other things.

  Ken nodded with what was his business look—shame and glee. He turned on the car motor and worked it into a low, subtle, steady mutter, a kind of poetry: “Wayell—hev uh guhdd dahay—” he said. The motor noise and the heat and the car walls and windows twisted and cut the sounds his voice laid on the air—and the car drove off.

  “Good riddance to garbage,” Daddy says.

  Lila was sophisticated about S.L.’s playing around, she said she wanted him to leave me alone sometimes and I’ll pay what’s required, but she was jealous at times, she was immensely jealous as a person, and she did not ever seem to want him to leave her entirely; she wasn’t sure, she wasn’t sure what knowing him as a husband, knowing him carnally, what it cost her. Her life was what occupied her. She didn’t want to be jealous or humiliated; she didn’t want to feel strongly about S.L.; she told me this—to be forced to feel more than I can bear by S.L. Or not him, by her marriage, by the pressure of ideas, by aspects of herself: I’m the party, I’m everyone’s party, S.L.’s my prop—my setting.

  But he felt the same way.

  The deeper stuff between them was steadily lied about, was known and then not known, forgotten that’s called, but it was too elaborate and too real to be excavated; it wasn’t forgotten, it was felt every day. They lived and died together, in relation to each other. The lecher, the anthology of amorous surprise, the calculator, I hear his breath snuffling and roaring in my ear: Grow up and set me free from that bitch, your mother. He said that.

  But he represents the world to me, not meaning at a distance from the world as Lila does. He embodies endurance and style in the middle of the world—and ruse and cowardice—and having a good time—and being a realist up and down the scale among real events—but I didn’t think he was good at any of it.

  Momma was meaning and song and Dad was the world in which meaning was a male secret that women commented on.

  You can never have meaning and the world at the same time.

  She brought me back alive to this burg, he said to guests, it was part of his social routine to say that; he and Lila had started out in Fort Worth but my mother was too hard on everyone, so we loaded our furniture on a train and shipped it to New Orleans and then we had it put on a barge and we watched it sail up the Mississippi: I never had a lot of gumption, I didn’t want to go north, I was scared, I admit it, but I liked seeing our furniture on that barge, it was a funny sight, and people here weren’t so bad, they were trash, but I got used to them; we were in Memphis for a few days and heard some real good music and met some nice people, gangsters, but they knew how to party, we had a good time with each other in those days, your mother and I, it sure was funny going north on the Mississippi; the three c’s, cotton and cows and corn, I’m just a country boy.

  He sweats lightly, a nervous whore, he’s also armored, sure of himself, a smart-aleck.

  Whenever he’s away from her during the day or for longer than that, he moves at the edge of scandal, but when he’s with her he’s suddenly within the bounds of propriety: without me, he goes crazy, he’ll never admit it, but it’s true.

  Lila is his sanity.

  A man’s life is a scandal—nature and war, it’s all shit. His life was filled with scandal. Lila said, Men get into trouble but it depends on their wives what happens to them because of that.

  On their social rank—and on being a Jew. Maybe it depends on their being political about their lives as well as on their qualities of the phallic and of violence. Daddy rode a cock horse whether or not it was thought of as scandalous or O.K. or ordinary for a man like him to do that. S.L. said to me, I had a famous prick—now come on, let’s see yours, kiddo.

  He was held captive, captivated—she felt she’d outwitted him and gained control but he got even, he wasn’t good to me; he was good to me sometimes but he got even, let me tell you. I didn’t think he could be such a good fighter as that.

  She said to me once, He proposed to me the first time we met, it was at a dance: my mother was taking me to visit other towns to get me away from the man—Bert Sorenstein—who was the love of my life. But Bert had no job, he was a gambler, and I was at this dance in Dallas, I was a sensation, I say it who shouldn’t, it’s not smart to toot your own horn, but I will say it, and this blond man, I asked him if he was a Jew, and he said he was whatever I liked best, whatever would make me smile: you know I never had a really good smile: my best feature was my being serious. So I would
n’t smile and he got frantic, so I knew he liked me, I could tell he was mad about me. Not just the you-know-what (an erection). No one ever looked at me like that but Bert but Bert was cool, he was a gambler in everything. S. L. had a breathlessness that moved me; he really didn’t care about a thing but me; he told me right away it was the war had ruined him, he didn’t care about nothing; did I say he was in uniform? A summer uniform? He was so gorgeous you wouldn’t believe it, you couldn’t believe it. I shouldn’t have believed it and I didn’t but I didn’t want an ugly man, they spend all their time getting even. That first night was a night I can’t forget, I still think about it, everybody was staring, we were scandalous, they knew what was going to happen. Of course, I’m dark and he’s fair, so some of it was coloring. But he was so set on me, well, the first time we danced for about ten seconds, I was a very, very good dancer; and he danced for a while and then he said, “Will you marry me? ” That’s how it started. I made him let me dance with someone else but he came right back so fast it was funny, I can’t laugh now but I laughed then. I guess I have to laugh now, too, we were so dumb, but who else was there for us? He wasn’t a bad dancer; he knew a lot, and I could make him look good even when he was in that mood. Momma almost died because of his uniform: it was like her daughter was dancing with the Czar. I knew S.L. was no good but Momma wanted him, and if she wanted to throw my life away, I was willing: does that sound crazy? Well, she was crazy but she wanted me to have what she never had: my father wasn’t a good-looking man. I figured I’d have a good time, I’d make my bed and I’d lie in it.

  He said something very similar: I thought she was something, I knew she was trouble, but I thought I could teach her, and if I couldn’t, well, I’d make my bed and I’d lie in it.

  Lila said, Really the truth is, Momma chose him, he courted Momma and she liked him, but I had to live with him. She was quick to think he was rich. I thought she always kept her nerve and knew what was going on and I could relax and trust her, so I believed her. Every few minutes, from right off the bat, he would ask me to marry him. He didn’t put a price on anything, you don’t know what that’s like. It’s like a breath of fresh air; he was maybe the fiftieth proposal I had, but it was never fun at that stage before, we got along fine, and that was a surprise to me, he didn’t torture me, so we decided to get married. I’ll tell you the truth, he thought I was rich and I thought he was rich, and we liked each other’s looks; so, we both got fooled, but we stuck it out.