The World Is the Home of Love and Death

by Brodkey, Harold

  I leaned against the garage. The feel of the paint and of the temperature of the wood came through my shirt and I loved myself both as a kind of machine of registry of such things and for being a little rich and for being young and on this hilltop—or side of a ridge—and I loved her more or was amorous or attached because of a thing of our minds being set at such angles that I let her describe me to myself: she expected me to love myself, to be angrily poetic, faintly savage. She taught me, kind of.

  I took off my shirt so she could wipe herself with it but she didn’t want to use it, so I handed her a sassafras leaf from a nearby sapling.

  First, though, were the sensations of the wood on my thin-skinned, bare back, and the shirt dangling from my hand, and the sounds of Ora pissing on the grass, the wet whistling whisper of that. And the air. And then the heroism—sexual, too—of trying to live. Lechery stirred in a winged fashion; each element of the self is a fashioner of the air and of moments: the arms bathed in air, the queer onrush of sexual self-dramatization, you know, of how the two of you do it. The roles, the longing, perhaps the wish to use one’s party self, the young woman and the boy-turned-young-man: “As long as you’re squatting there …” She looked up. I partly undid my pants.

  She always had a queer reaction to my doing things, a reaction of excitement to my initiating things: she was imprisoned and then not entirely freed. It was as if she slid deeper in a kind of burrow—that was, if she accepted the invitation: sometimes she hesitated. Still, some element of negotiation remained, and there was power present in her, too.

  Is it power that stirs my now clearly animate flesh? Or is it a shuffling cowardice, fucking when we’re drunk—moving within her daydreams, her ideas of sexuality? Is it a distraction of the will? Again I offer the shirt, the sassafras leaf. Ora uses her finger and some grass and stands—my bare arm supports her, touches her: she can stand and balance.

  The weight of Ora leaning on me is sultry and real. I put my hand inside the loose-fitting, wide-shouldered blouse she wore. She is a powerful sexual presence.

  The party had been partly for me, for signing a contract to write a movie for the youngish guy whose house it was. And Ora had dressed herself for playing second fiddle—a guy at the party, very drunk, said she was the devil’s Venus. She had on a white cardigan, unbuttoned. The night slid and shuffled. Now her blouse was below her breasts. Her bra was absurd. The drunkenness made me alive all over my body as when I was a boy. Leaning on each other, pausing now and then to kiss, we crossed the back lawn in the silent and unlaboring moonlight. The path wound in the enclosed setting of lawns and flower beds past the main house and two giant beeches with their vaguely silver, shattered, moonlit faces and under some maples and past flower beds and hedges and a stone patio-terrace. Ora, weighty and real, solid-bodied, gleaming vaguely, leaned on me, permissively, negotiatingly as we moved drunkenly in the dark. Where the lawn is open behind the large house, she gripped my dong to balance out my soft, night-air palping and stroking of her bare breasts. Bare-breasted, sugary-breathed (from the alcohol), faintly wet-skinned, we share a snuffling drunken kiss under a murmuring, chattering beech.

  The night spreads away below us.

  “How far does sound carry?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t want an audience.”

  I slipped my feet out of my shoes, got her shoe off with my bare foot … pants, her skirt … her cardigan … Now we’re naked but in the moonlight—

  “Can we be seen? Can anyone hear us?”

  “Naw. It’s just us and the spirits—” The booze and the black cupids of modern desire. I whispered, “I’m scared of the dark—” Under the tree. A joke.

  It is quite clear—as in a test—that we are not in any major way opposed to each other, physically or spiritually. It is strange, this tentative and yet, at least momentarily final alliance.

  Ora’s body is a landscape, a climate—or a kind of boat—for my feelings. She doesn’t dance comfortably or wriggle or seduce with her body. There is some huge gulf between it as visible and affecting you and its inward or private reality for her as heat and that divergence is what you touch.

  You touch the weird vivacities of the burrows of her body and their games of entry or hers; her body itself was the caryatid-columned porch of these moments. Perhaps I elected her body in something like the heavy way she elected me brute-of-the-moment, long-legged sexual demi-demon and commander. Not that I was or wasn’t those things, but that was her sexual projection for me—a game, maybe. It was like being plunged into a dictionary of her life with secret moments in it written out, although not in language I could understand. The overweening handsomeness of her first guy in high school was part of what she conferred, maybe dreamily, on me. We are each in a category of desire relating to pride, which is not unusual but perhaps which condemns us, two spoiled creatures on the high, sloping, moonlit lawn among flower beds, some with wooden or stone statues in them, and the hedges like walls. Much of the event is lost inside a moment hidden from language: We didn’t make it from the car to the cottage—we fucked on the lawn. Ora kept a diary in which she also wrote, Perhaps this will be a famous diary.…

  What we have here is a shuffling set of drunken fields of attention, the phallus in night air—the white, faintly dry branch or self, unpriapic and then priapic as hell, a kind of silent violence of implication, the odor of grass and of lilies—rich, rich, the night murmured; the boy is inside the man: On our country property as in a dream: but it is life.…

  “I owe you a good love poem, Ora.…” I-uhahh—ohhhhhhhh-yoooooooooooo-uh-uh-guh/id luh-uhvw poh-immmm, Oh-rah.… Laughing silently in the tenacity of my drunkenness, I stumbled and, boyishly, released her, rather than take her with me to the grass. And whirling and falling from my height and on the slope so that my head plunged seven feet, whirringly, me and my branchlike prick and me landing on my side and then turning on my back: ah, there are stars, leaves, night-yews, moon: the stink of grass: the grip of half-silent laughter, then loud, foolish laughter—"Hush—don’t …” Ora bends over: oh the breasts, oh the breasts, oh the oddity of breasts, oh the weight of recurring innocence, of virginity returned: the weight again of present-tense ignorance and darkness, a kind of confusion: her breath, her shoulders, her head-—a timor felicitatis—a fear of happiness and of its loss, a fear of her reality having power, a fear of moonlight and of my own desire. How I grip, with what ferocity, the thick, motionful sheaves of her long, handsome hair: how I own and control the dark, horselike moment, and am ridden myself by duty and pride, by her as audience, by her and me as audience—ah, ah, ah …

  And the jolt of falling, traveling through my bones, did hurt my balls and my drunkenness-disdaining prick …

  “Oh my God, I cannot stand being alive …” I said to her.

  “Well,” she said, slightly mush-mouthed, hand on my prick, other hand on my arm, then on my chest—exciting herself, owning me, feeling me, owning me inversely perhaps—“that is the way you are, Wiley …”

  “Big-mouth—big-mouthed evil girl kisses Jew on the grass.”

  I never liked the way she kissed unless I directed her. On her own she kissed too thickly for my taste.

  Drunkenly, I saw the usefulness of disliking her kiss, its usefulness as a plot device; it goaded me to roll on top of her, a little more down the slope, on the tickling, faintly harsh grass; I want to control the sloppiness of her kiss, turn it into sensual coherence. In disdain, to withdraw from the kiss, to rise to a half-sitting position, commandingly, as if punishingly—ah, ah, the extraordinary uninnocence of the event despite my being innocent and stupid, or stupid and—I don’t know: somehow it was all of a piece.

  Her hands, their touch, was often clumsy, detached from sexual meaning, from insinuation or rhythm or from submission but seemed left over from daylight stuff. I feel her hunger for—for what? For me and for Romance, for something knowable within the lingua franca of contemporary notions. I am so aware of her
that I feel her hunger to know, to live what she has read, and I am aware of her distance from me and of her permission, and I am aware of her fake or counterfeit of self-loss. And I can close off that awareness and simply proceed or I can stay with it which is more sadistic in a sense.

  I stroke her, in an aware way. I say, “Let’s ruin your dress—” her skirt really, which I tried clumsily to place under her while mock-entering her.

  “Here on the grass?” she says. She often complains that I am too blunt.

  “Here on the grass—”

  “The moon will see us,” she said in the style of plays and movies she admired.

  “Sssh,” I said.

  In our cottage, as in the apartment in the city, she went around pulling shades although we were not visible. She was afraid of envy—and she required privacy: she liked secret sexual perspectives or was imprisoned in them: the perspectives of a player and of an audience arousing the envy of the air, the spite of the night spirits. She objected even to the moon.

  The omissively omniscient encyclopedia which is Ora is partly an encylopedia of American Desires. This fine-eyed, astoundingly good-looking, strongly made woman loves her clichés. “I have a big brain—” she says. Then she abandons or loses the thought. She apologizes or masks herself: “I’m drunk—I like this.…” She said the last in a kind of college way: we met and first fucked at college.

  Her thoughts are hidden from me behind the bones of her forehead, of her skull, of her great prettiness: walls of bone policed by will: her eyes in moonlight do not convey bodily acceptance but radiate attention from a different group of her congress of selves, her repertoire of attentions, of questions—her risks, her philosophies, her sense of fatedness in herself.… Her interest, her curiosity is in what other women have, and men: that envy and cleverness—that realism—it is a way of knowing real things. The boniness of her relents and what spills out from her in a kind of stink of promptness is sexual invitation to the burrows: that courage of hers, that thing of sexual readiness, that inert tension of whether to be active or still, but inviting anyway, I love that—I love it deeply. On the steep slope of the semi-mountain lawn, the trees, and me, drunkenly, reelingly risen over her, and the nursery dirtiness of our drunkenness: she says, “This will be a dirty fuck.…”

  Perhaps she means Let this be great sex …

  “Shut up,” I said, from within the same fictional world—I mean it was me but I was playing my role. The moist ground and the moonlight: I was cautious and did not name myself: I was a structure of hiddenness—as she was but differently. Here, the circus trick, the trapeze thing is to be logical in a drunken moment on a sloping lawn with a specific woman at a specific moment in her life—in mine, too, and in a specific year: a specific fuck.

  Ora says, with praise that is a little gritty with insult in regard to her ambitions, her fantasies—her fictional world: “You are a king—this is a king’s garden—” she says pornographically, having a say: “It is a king’s prick.”

  I whisper tyrannically, regally—I used to love my large white prick—"Hey, Ora, no propaganda, just fuck, O.K.?” She always hated my saying that.

  To be logical is to recognize the free symmetries, where one act is free-willed, sort of, and the other in response is not as free to be unsymmetrical, directly or in undermeanings or overtones. The curious movements of the selves are ambitious—male free-will ignores her. Female free-will drifts off into fantasy or other absence: love and flight, the Eurydice thing, not blinking, not looking back, not holding back. To whatever extent I don’t fantasize or withdraw into myself or respond to her direction, I hold her astonished physical gaze, but this depends on my finding her phallically exciting—a dialogue exists. She doesn’t bounce or drift into feeling and then return: she is willfully present in a way that is unloving, but it is love as she does it. For each of us; she writes the dialogue, and I astonish her out of that daydream.

  There are conditions and circumstances of touch and posture—the role you play in the kiss, in the licking—and elements of courage, of sexual courage, of wit and of sophistication of a kind in her that don’t necessarily match my moods, my nerve endings. I like a kind of storytelling structure and a confession of who you are. When I touched or nuzzled Ora, she often couldn’t do the dance of response, but she grew warm and welcoming. She seemed to be reacting to the drama, to what I did, but really to something inside herself. She was safe from me at the bottom of flight after flight of steps so to speak. Who she was—I mean the person and then the overlay of how she had been taught and how she had rebelled—was interesting to me, but not a lot since it seemed like a cage she was in. She never really confessed; she negotiated and did what she considered her part. I didn’t like her notions of wildness or of routine stuff; her versions didn’t permit much feeling or made feeling a curious thing surrounded by critical recognitions, little oh’s and ah, that was good, that was the goods. She liked that kind of thing. I don’t know how much that was her and how much was social class and a Gentile thing.

  Sophistication? Well, each fuck is the edge of the end of the affair, of not caring, or being angry and set on cheating, or being mysteriously or unmysteriously set free—it’s weird-—and then that doesn’t happen quite: you’re not set free.

  Well, drunkenness sets you free somewhat. At least to a flow of connections, undulations into modulations of mood: she was too movielike and not funny, so I said, meaning when we were on the slope, “Not here—there—” Rolling her over on the grass and rolling with her: “Roll you over in the clover …” It made her slightly dizzy, and she gasped and grinned, suddenly amused.

  The odd, childlike submissions she would do were not like the stubborn things of her unresponse or the awed moments of frightened cooperation when her fright made her more sexual. She was more frightened of feeling than of me—of the loss of her powers of negotiation. But I didn’t want to lose my male powers: we had these masks. Some of her fright was of losing me but it wasn’t so great that fucking her was like dancing or a pas de deux: I mean she liked my presence, liked it steamily, but not as much as I would have liked from her and which I had had versions of with other people.

  In a way, a life’s story would be A Book of Fucks—wouldn’t it? She wants me to let go of myself and do what I like: she says so. She means the two-character fuck—she is being generous and in her terms loving. I slap her butt sharply. On my knees I roll and tumble her smartly, and at first she laughs, but then she grows recalcitrant: she kind of grunts, rises from the waist, hugs me. She is strong-armed, wet-mouthed, wild-haired, something of a fake in the pouring moonlight; her strength and mind, her strength of mind, her head—she wants me to pose as the commander, to dance in the moonlight, be lightly brutal and grunt and plunge drunkenly; she wants me to show her my sexual secrets—my nursery secrets—my locker-room secrets.

  We elude each other—but not completely. You can’t assume a primary asymmetry of the selves: something in us fits with each other, the vibration of similar pain, similar selves in part, somehow similar. My mind doesn’t lose its sexual attentiveness toward her but does to myself, which slows down the accumulation of that hot, luminous throbbing which indicates the nearness of orgasm. She stiffens faintly: it is a matter of seconds, she knows that quickly; it happens two or three times, a stroking, a manipulation of the breast; this affects her and registers in my body, in body heat and the smell of the sweat and in the drunken touch: we are now in the realm of secondary theatricalization—it seems like a moment of virginity because she is new to this.

  I start to laugh in the night air. Women mostly know how virginal or unvirginal they are, but Ora is like a man in this, this other sense of consciousness, of being untouched, unpenetrated.

  The moments of tumbling her and the moment of the slap on her large-ish, moonlight-whitened and moonlight-shadow-folded butt (and the sight of her marvelously beautiful back) were when I moved past her sexual experience and became the unvirginal, or dirty one, the p
riapic demon, the bad male. And she became the wronged, slightly angry—slightly huffy—well-educated virgin.

  She laughed out loud, too—gasped maybe. Then I was alone—moonlight and the dark and the starlight. And in this moment she fled too, fled inwardly, either frightened or betrayed, a watching nymph—but a dirty-minded one, not a virgin—and everything got more theatrical and, as it were, mathematical, the two of us, minds and bodies, spirits and drunkenness.

  Then it became a requirement, kind of in the sense of being the only good -humored possibility, to be violent and distant toward her, violent in a kind of dirty and knowing good humor, which is what she had tacitly asked for. She didn’t always choreograph what I did, but if I was drunk or tired or tired of her, she did.

  She couldn’t recognize my experience if it was not like a book or like men she had known, if it was not in a category. She faltered in comprehension because I was like a younger brother or a cupid in some ways—I was actually a year and a half younger than she was. We were brother and sister in sin—sort of—sort of as in a story. But incest would be perfunctory and boring except for its being a sin because you knew the same things. Incest might not be such a deep experience but it would be easy.

  I mean there was a kind of social class thing in Ora, a sexual social class thing, sort of the inferiority of other people showed in the inferiority of their consolations—she wasn’t entirely sure of this but she was fairly certain. She had experimented—she knew the automaton reality and men who smelled of fear and eagerness and self-consciousness, and she had experienced some sense of inner darkness and of wrong invitation in the other: what I always felt as a dirty landscape, the dirty landscape of sex with its queer coils of space in one place, its queerness as journey and as instruction and as darkness and light.