The World Is the Home of Love and Death

by Brodkey, Harold

  When one of us failed in a moment, the other was often mysteriously symmetrical in failure but not always. I mean the symmetry wasn’t an exact incestuous echo but a weirdity. You don’t know where to put your feet—your prick, your sexual anima, or soul—and you hide it, you pretend to assurance. The moment opens up: and you see and feel your ignorance like blindness as everyone says, and you peer outwardly; your gaze flashes around the universe and comes back and is inward in some queer reciprocal fleshy elbow-and-knee and crotch-and-cunt geometry which is higher and less easily measurable than symbols on paper are. But you see that each freedom to act is a kind of prison demanding you act, that each iota of overlordship or privilege is a whipgoad of do this, do that. You see each reciprocity as a failure—and goad—until orgasm frees you, and you see each refusal of reciprocity as an invitation and a reciprocal thing somehow but in the oh my God mode.

  The very violence, or edge of violence, stuff is instinct with queer, binding and blinding tenderness: blind girl, blind Samson, blind Delilah. What we pull down—Ora is Samson, too—is concern for other parts of our life. It is only us, drunkenness softening sexual vision by deepening it like the moonlit-bright night sky with the thorns of light on the lawn among the leaves and in the flower beds. Anyway, in the depths of a moment, we’re laughing and kissing, and I am kind of active, and Ora is not; what is mostly there is ignorance, just like when you’re exploring philosophy, and the more ignorance you admit to, the more sophisticated you are, provided the ignorance you admit to is the right sort. Dumbness is everything.

  I mean if Ora at this moment, drunkenly, refuses to admit her ignorance but goes on being Sophisticated Samsonetta, she becomes something like a tour guide. She fails to ascend the moment; she avoids the fall into hellishness (not really)—the cunt obviously being a gateway of sin for everybody. So the whole thing’s a mess, but it’s juicy and tender. You know this by a kind of sensation or sense of defeat, as if hitting her would solve everything, or at least ease the defeat. I am looming over her, holding both her breasts. The demonic and sour glee, the biting and choking stuff she likes, sort of I am strong, I am potent, I don’t need anyone—I don’t do it much; I think she is deluded. There is excitement in playacting it or in really dominating and scaring someone. Holding back becomes a complicated issue.

  Ora knew it—or part of it. She said, “You are the daring young man on the flying trapeze.”

  I said stupidly, “You are really incre-goddamned-fucking-dibly beautifully fucking be-uuuuu-tiful … God, Ora …” She liked that loosening of class lines stuff.

  Pressing and rubbing, I knew, somehow, just how loud to gasp to thrill her with shock, but not so loud it shocked her out of all her feelings—it’s called being attuned: a kind of knowing guesswork.…

  I whispered, “We didn’t make it from our car to the cottage that evening.…” The sloping lawn at a silent two A.M. I said, “We fucked on the lawn in the moonlight.…” I wasn’t actually in her yet … God, we were young …

  To propose reality as a story rather than a story as reality might at least remind you what a prior thing experience is. And how we hide it in stories. Ora hadn’t in a long time done her condemnation thing, her invocation of Goddamn, Goddamn this, Goddamn you that she’d done once or twice sexually. I was scared of the lifetime’s rage in each of us. She was as strong physically as a small man but she had all those complexities of overlay and training and much more delicate calibrations—it is an odd fate to be a woman. She was casually and wildly cruel (but not toward me) and yet calibratedly so toward the world; she was much more politically savvy than I was. Almost everything in my physical vocabulary became in relation to her even as the thinnest hint of itself, a shade, a shadow of brutality because the attraction was strong and we had stayed together long enough to know we would stay together longer. It irritated me profoundly, this eerie strength and weakness of attachment and corresponding freedoms and degrees of rule and permission, degrees, really, of finality.

  Anyway, I liked to praise her. I like not doing the other thing, the thing of persecution by sexual praise delivered as condemnation and shrill invective. In a moment of withdrawal, of catching my breath (the thing of at-the-crossroads-we-pause in the moonlight), I saw around me hedges and trees, patient leaves in their kingdoms of air; and I felt in her, her impatience with me as a man, the anguish of love wasted on art … on ambition.

  The grass ended and Ora’s arm was flung across the grayish-dark salvia and ghostly artemisia and white lilies. The stink of dirt and of marigolds. There was her smell, Ora’s breasts in the moonlight, in the clingingly half-warm air. I howled softly.

  “This is a pagan fuck,” Ora said. She tended to review things—nearly everything. She said, “Oh, Wiley, you don’t hate women!”

  She raised her arms and put them around my neck again. I have a tendency to be fatuous, out of touch: “You already did this,” I said stupidly, peeling her arms off me. I helped her lie down again. I couldn’t help thinking, stupidly, that Quick Fucks were superior because you hardly had time to notice your own fatuousness, or hers.

  She said, “Let’s have a baby.…”

  “What? Here? Outdoors?” I said it into her ear. I didn’t really have to say it: we were body to body. You know that feeling? You breathe breast to breast. She often claimed to be a nihilist … She said once, Nihilists can have a good time, Wiley—they just don’t think it means anything …

  I entered her; she helped. I thought things and didn’t say them but merely breathed them, pictures, words, pleasures, fuck memories, drunken maunderings, drunken superiorities, all the guest stuff of a fuck, all the stuff that the prick feels, the lower body, the pushily contracting and stiffened and loosening butt. And all the smells in your nose. And the rhythms—kind of, I don’t know, energetic tenderness, the Candide-naïve, the I-am-lost thing. She has stolen me, kidnaped me.

  I don’t think Ora ever told the truth, even a partial truth. Sometimes she claimed not to have a memory. But she loved lying, lying and romance—she couldn’t sing; she couldn’t hear music. And I, well, I am a writer and intrinsically naive although not about people: the truth-telling I did used to horrify Ora, sicken her, really. And all the Edenic slynesses, the serpents in the eyes and in the crotch, the nests of snakes in us everywhere—in naughty fingers, and in scratchy toes and insteps where it’s all feely now, and in the knowing and blinking and inwardly twisting eyes, and in the sensation of my hair tangling with her hair and my mouth on hers, and sweat prickling in tickled, partly sour, excited pubic hair in the dark. The audience consists of a separate room in each of us opening from a shifting set of other fields and sensations—of the grass on her back, of the odors, of the weight of sexual congress—it has nothing to do with acrobatics and only a little to do with the outdoors drama: it is mostly only that somehow we are suitable.

  Ora says it is love, and when she does I either deny it and tease her or burst out laughing: are we that lucky? What is clear, what is tangible is an angrily ambitious drunkenness, insanely flirtatious toward feeling (but somewhat resistant) so that it is hellish and celestial, and virginal and moonlit; and if other people let us alone this would not have to be judged. Well, it would be judged by us as audience, as our lives. The all-rightness, the fakery, the various meanings slide by, twistingly appear, slither away in darkness, as I pump and she, truly or not, grows astonished and far-off, celestial-secular and not unhappy. Each motion, each breath leaves a trail of light. Then I become a shoving elephant-kangaroo-snail, now moving slowly and a bit greasily (and saying, “Ah … Ah … Ah …”). My chest and head and crotch, enormous-seeming, become a shell over sensation and a luminous crawl in sexual space.

  A slight disapproval or edge of male violence comforts her, but it cannot be real, since, as if in its absence, she eases off and drops the thing of the nearness of her mind and soul to the clutching, slightly off-putting readiness in her, in her thighs, in the cunt. She has loosened. She is something like
an inward lawn. She floats out, in some female, fantasy-is-real way among the stars, a barge-borne Cleopatraangel, half a whore, a serious young girl.

  A sense of sexual consciousness in her and then my own, her sense of the irrevocability of sexual reality, which I don’t have, her grasp is finer than mine, as is the dexterity of her fingers except sexually, rhythmically. The more aware I am of her the more, in alternate moments, I am aware of my own hands, my own pleasure. I am curious and as if entendriled in my own shoving and off-putting readiness to forget her and to plow ahead, chest and mouth and cock—cock-a-loro … My visitor’s innocence compared to a woman’s darkness of genetic spirit, compared to Ora’s placative trafficking with hellishness, makes her want me to be guilty here—it is a rage here, in her, us as judges and responding or drying up—but we do respond. What is being allowed is some absence of loneliness, the exchange of meanings, perhaps of selves. In the mouth-stuff, in the mouth explorations we do of stuff, in the nuzzlings and licks and kisses, you can rushingly, briefly hear the electric runnings of the mind. A truth. A chance at some kind of grass-stained, fairly real happiness is here, not in a silly sense, but conceivably except that we know we will be blackmailed and owned by it if we admit to it. To any of it.

  It is a peculiar bodiedness that the moment has, the attentiveness, the drunken distances blown liftingly or sinkingly—love: a farce? a tragic thing? Love of a kind.… what is it worth?

  Not rhetorically. But really. I know better than to trust her sexually in the end stages of a fuck—she is anti-prick, silent, hidden, watchful, an enveloping presence of a fucked woman—it is sort of mathematical, her feeling, not mine, which is ashen and transcendent. Seeds of light break into rays and move otherwise as well, and ghosts of various sorts, a mirror flash of personal meaning and a constant sense of flesh, crystalline, statistical. Un-geometrically, almost know-ably, one moves in the web of bribes.

  Ora moves according to programs really, recipes of attention: Do this; then this; add this; then stir; then wait in the physically fiercer guesswork and ambition of curiosity about the next sensation, to see what it does.… Now, add this, stir, and wait, stir and blink … Oh fuck! … This fleshly wakefulness, Wiley’s moment, large, slow, semi-recumbent … oh fuck … We are indecent creatures, brooding a lexical and emotional geometry as sophisticated as the white subtleties of the shape of an egg. So complex. “Go ahead: you come,” she says—one feels a certain slickness of sensation, of one’s own eminence, of light and meaning representing beauty: it does and doesn’t represent beauty.… This is a gift Ora makes. Perhaps I steal it.

  The real air is here, and the trance is half-dissolved. I can see why people prefer characters to have the abstract bodies of conventional reference, to be bronze in that sense, and not to be merely real and, forgive me, at sea on a lawn in the moonlight.

  A GUEST IN THE UNIVERSE

  What an odd game of subtractions and additions a life is. A thought passes through my mind like a cat walking on my shoulders behind my neck. The sensation of the cat’s narrow ribs and finely tipped fur in motion ruffling my hair, lightly pressing against my skull is like the progression of a thought which then disperses. After the thought, it is as if the cat perches on my left shoulder, its small skull pressed to my temple, its body arched in taut balance.

  At a party in New York City in 1956, twelve years after my father died, in a large room, I felt the self-conscious grandeur of the place as without an echo, as a psychological environment of extreme self-consciousness: Jewish figures in the arts. And the room’s boastfulness was like a whisper without an echo, insolent and a matter of those-who-are-whispering-are-insiders: we are sophisticated and expensive: Upper Bohemian: arrivistes.

  “Nouveaux riches but we’re not riche, so it’s just nouveau,” mad Moira said to me. The downy couch we were on was so deep Moira Kellow was practically horizontal. “We wanted a room you didn’t have to sit up straight in,” she said. “These couches molest you—isn’t that nice? I like it. Have you ever played molesting-a-child when you fucked with someone? Ha-ha … You’re so young, you’re easy to shock.… You’re just a baby …” Part of her style was to be warmly venomous.

  Six oversize down couches, slightly grandiose, not the real thing (not the most expensive versions but very expensive Italian copies of the French thing) and covered in floral linens which I had been instructed by the woman I lived with, Ora, were the real thing. These couches were set among tables of all sizes and degrees of merit and value. A few of the tables were wood. “Wood is too English,” Moira said. “I’m not English. I like Englishmen, though … ha-ha, ha-ha …”

  The room had an amazing spirit of chic welcome, vases with charming fat or thin flowers, and books in small stacks on the floor; and small modern rugs and bare floor and large floral Aubussons (the room was big) and some glowing Persian carpets. But, all-in-all, by New York notions, the room had resigned itself to a kind of millionaires’ American second-rateness in regard to real taste and to an inferiority to real money: a favored term in those years, like the word grace. Such terms and notions were common in books and magazines and even in some movies, and were paramount in Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Eliot, ex-Catholics and Protestant alike, the reigning male divas of English and the source of ideas back then. Anyway, piety and post-piety and romance and masculinity were for these divas of sexual terror aristocratic. Racial. Sometimes national. Masters of radically scintillant language when they were young, figures of greatness grown stale, they were determinative figures, images of instructive terror which the room’s modesty—or the hostess’s—acknowledged and against which the room offered itself as a harbor.

  Three of the downy couches and three lacquered pale-orange tables (like memories of sunset) formed a group. The walls hold a number of poor versions of pictures from famous series: a damaged blue-green Picasso of a satyr-rape, five obscure Soutines, a large gouache of a screaming Pope by Francis Bacon. Food is laid out in the hall of mirrors, a Parisian elegant vulgarity of the time. The Kellows had a good chef of the second rank (twenty thousand dollars a year) who refused to work on Sundays: it is Sunday. On Sundays a Norwegian woman, an ex—registered nurse, who had been Moira’s nurse during a bout of “terrible illness of the mind” (Moira and Brr often referred to Moira as the new Zelda), prepared more food to go with what the chef had left behind. This was mixed with what Brr called “Jewish smorgasbord.” Moira has said to me, “I want to do what I want to do … I want to be decadent; REAL money gets to do what it wants to do, and I only get to do the best that I can.”

  We are lit by ordinary sunlight coming through a wall torn from a neoclassic intention by a series of enlarged windows that are unsettlingly modern. The wound of this is 1950s wit.… The old system, to judge from rooms in this apartment not so extensively rebuilt, was to have widely separated windows producing piers of light that fell wideningly in the strangely unrooted, semi-floating spaces of the altitudinous apartment at great intervals—fortresslike, shutting out the outside. The architecture had been an American imitation of an English variant of an Adriatic style, New York apartment house English Georgian but in yellow brick; the basic Georgian was derived from Diocletian’s palace at Split and from the domestic architecture of Ragusa in what is now Croatia.

  The idea in power at the time was that such historically bastardized and compromised architecture should be simplified, redone, should be purified. This was no longer identified as a fascist ideal. Anyway, now a wall of indirect light, of softened glare: the windows face east and it is afternoon; the direct sun is on the other side of the apartment: a wall of light partly broken by narrow brick piers and metal mullions and handsome, very expensive curtains; much of the room is glazed in almost a Greek wave of light.

  We look out from the seventeenth floor; and to the right is the gargantuan stone-and-steel reality of the engineers’ load-bearing webs (above mostly invisible-from-here gigantic masonry piers) of a bridge known for its ugliness: a stupendous framewo
rk of massive aerial beams and patterned light. When you go near the window or when you sit in certain couches and look out, it bursts on you and overshadows the pretensions and accomplishments of the room. It is witty that it is there, it is wittily horrendous, and the final pretension of the room is this alliance with nightmare: we are “children of the age, rich garbage,” one of the wits here has said; when you are in the torn room, you see in the flying enormousness of the structure of the bridge a mocking or hectoring ratio and proportion to what goes on here and to the people who are here.

  It is a post-war socialist ratio, rude and smothering, that says the considerable style and brio of the room are, ultimately, shitty eat-drink-and-be-merry, as well as rich and cleverly thought out and in some ways genuinely pretty and aspiring. The quality of fashion is as if kicked by a very intelligent, gloomy, hysterical seriousness, more satiric and hysterical than reasoned, into a high gear, a monstrousness. The room offers a too-obvious lecture on the monstrousness of soul in people and monstrousness of fate and the monstrousness of forces of society and the monstrousness of genetic inheritance and of psychological destiny—this is deep and yet fashionable and is a claim of art—and it does have force in the immediate moment on the gathered artists and figures: the tragedy of things in general in the significant form of monstrousness.

  “People are always laughing about fashion, but what else is there? You can’t live in a textbook,” Moira says. “I read all the time but I have to come up for air. But what do I know: I’m nuts. If I could be anybody I wanted, I would be Kafka.” She has an oval face, a very finished air of style and mind, unexciting eyes, too-large teeth, and a truly extraordinary physical presence that comes from the degree of style and of madness—she is suicidal, enraged, self-aware. I know it makes no sense, but it was as if she had a brain tumor that caused her to be chic instead of inducing trembles or other forms of vertigo.