The World Is the Home of Love and Death

by Brodkey, Harold

  “What do you think movies really are?” Brr asked, setting a topic. A few people in our group sighed at the classroom essay aspect, the thing of being used.

  Moira told the jazz-movie director to pull over a table and sit on it: “It’s less like a speech, it’s easier if you’re sitting.” He was short and pudgy, very energetic and commanding in his cowboy boots, and kind of sycophantic in an offhand way—cute that was called back then.

  He did pull up a table but he said, “You only fed me bagels and caviar: I listen to jokes for that, I don’t answer questions—”

  That remark of his had the quality of being applauded or nodded at good-humoredly. Brr Kellow as a laughingstock, him and Moira as jerks, as pushy users and jerks, oddly that was part of their having so much style. I don’t know how people do that no-mercy and yet sycophantic thing.

  In the long-drawn-out afternoon of Apocalypse, the ex – movie star women preen on a couch facing ours. Supposedly innocent professionalism is coercive, unstable, a plenum of rights claimed and enforced. It stains everyone that this is the decade of perfect breasts, wild brassieres that bestow weird, jutting bomblike breast shapes. Such lies make it difficult to be sane: sanity is social, somewhat Freudian. The idea of a fanciful reality and of people’s secrets is built in to the local notion of sanity, of normalcy.… This is a group high in nervous breakdowns and charity. The men (but not me) have a frightening and fashionable idea of a universal but ideal and tireless and undemanding fucker, and they wear very expensive, impressive clothes.

  The brute structure of being cute (in the youthful sense) and possessing a maybe bullshit veracity, and the semi-Baudelairean corrupt reality—behind these styles are the beliefs and terms of people who live in personal hells, me too, but mine is diluted in the middle of the supposed Eden of the U.S., a suburb of Hell. The eerie thrum of holiness in a given moment may have a homosexual tinge—that too is an issue.

  Deuteronomy said, “Movies are what you have to see so you can stop hearing your mother’s voice in your head say, Don’t handle yourself, Harvey …”

  “Simple stories for simple people,” said one of the woman movie stars, someone I’d found attractive when I was thirteen: she was still attractive. It was strange how known to me she was, her voice, her mannerisms, some of the shapes of her body. An element of dream was attached to the memory of her.

  Moira said in mad, sotto voce mockery, “Simple stories for simple people.” She was often rude to women (a party as arena for unnamed championships).

  The show business corporation head said, “Movies are how I know I’m unhappy because my life is not like a movie, but they make me feel good anyway because I know I am not as dumb as a movie. Ha-ha.”

  “Wiley,” Brr said. He is calling on me to speak. The bastard.

  I said, “I never knew a simple person. I don’t think such a thing exists. So movies are simple forms for complex people, but then people want to be simple too, like ads and movies. They get competitive. Or they run out of ideas. Or it looks good—it’s a victim-thing. I think movies are truly terrible simplifications, smothering. But they get their power from two things: what movies define is popularity for now. Movies themselves are operatic hallucinations with motions substituted for the music in opera—but simple: simple, dirty music. Like dirty talk it tends to have a limited vocabulary. Their force is derived from the way hallucinations become active delusions during masturbation. And in dreams—what makes you out to be handsome or powerful and kingly. They’re in the genre of masturbation-accompaniment.”

  “Go on,” Brr said.

  “No,” I said. But I did go on: “I mean it’s interesting that movies are so fake, and we make them real. You are alone in your head in public, and you roar along with the crowd for God and community—I dislike the way movies bully and dominate the audience. What we know about sex—and people—never gets shown in movies.… Isn’t that strange? Movies do dance numbers and scenes of women getting dressed really well. Maybe everyone wants to see faked, tamed stories of self-willed sexuality. I think movies are hard to do: it’s hard to get the victim-thing, even only parts of it, right: and to palpate the audience and kowtow and to take the punishment the audience hands out and being made use of and also being adored. It’s very tricky: it’s all S and M sexual terror and faking it all—”

  The jazz-movie director said, “We’re all downtrodden in Hollywood—”

  Deut, who was tall, and who had a much greater public popularity at the moment than anyone else in the room, said, “Oh that: that’s socialism—” A joke. “But, also, you’re very short.” Nearly everyone laughed. Brr was short and mostly liked only short people except for Deut and me.

  I was tense from talking the way I did, kamikaze and without direct calculation: a role.

  “It’s getting too deep for me,” said one of the women ex – movie stars making a play for importance in the room.

  Deuteronomy said with great as-if-onstage charm, “It’s the sibling rivalry tango …”

  The short movie director had been Deuteronomy’s (and my) predecessor as Brr’s closest friend. Brr’s dominance was because of his knowledge of style as much as because he controlled so much publicity. Also, he wanted it, and people granted it—it was Sunday.

  Moira said, “Aren’t we heavy?” Heavy was a term in use in New York then. “It’s a relief sometimes to be heavy.”

  “Touché,” Brr said.

  I looked at Ora who was some feet away, across the room, and silent; she was having one of her Wiley-is-showing-off, l-can’t-match-that moments. I wanted her to be proud of me. Ora was the best-looking person in the room if you liked her style.

  “Do you rehearse what you say?” Moira asked.

  “I went to Harvard,” I said.

  “What else can you do?” she asked.

  “Yes,” said the short movie director; it was a job offer and a challenge. An offer of New Yorkish friendship.

  “Yes. What else can you do ?” said Moira again, more intensely.

  I kind of went haywire. I said, “I can type and I can fuck, but mostly I’m a mess—I make a mess of things.” I got enraged and looney from nerves.

  The director moved in closer, but Brr said to me, “You want another bagel?” which I thought meant shut up, that he didn’t want me to talk to the director and make friends. He and Moira kidnaped me. We left the big room, Moira and Brr and I without Ora. Or Deut. Moira’s hip bumped the wall; she had a pretty body and a drunken-drugged pretty walk, kind of a trained walk, but she was ill and strange with the pills she took. She and Brr liked leaving their parties and then returning. Or had to, to breathe, or because of their states of mind. But they liked to tease as now. In the dining room, Moira sat me in the corner; and she and Brr went and filled dishes of food and Brr got a glass of champagne from the kitchen for me, and they came back with a napkin and silverware. They sat on either side of me: they interrogated me about my movie theories which I hadn’t worked out, and they asked me about myself.

  Brr said, “Now is what you’re saying that movies are mostly sadomasochistic—S and M?”

  “Well, the audience is masochistic and vengeful. The virtual destruction, physical and moral, of the star and of the character in the movie and of the producer and director and everyone else is necessary. In most movies and in movie careers sooner or later—”

  “Alice in Wonderland,” Brr said. The aftereffect of his making use of you is a passionate and troubled love and hate and punishment.

  Moira wanted to know where the knowledge of sadomasochism came from in my life. She is at this moment insolent and domestically somewhat sly and socially alert and articulate and given over to big-time psychic violence—it is unsettling. “Were you a brute as an adolescent?” she asks. I nodded; I don’t know why I lied; I thought it was sexy. Moira went on, “Your mother encouraged you?”

  Brr was watching: it really always was a case of him watching.

  “My mother was meant to be the mothe
r of sissies—No, I swaggered in spite of her.”

  She wanted more: “Were you her victim too?”

  “Sure—”

  “But your mother loved you a lot, I can tell—”

  “Mostly she liked to come first—she kind of fell in love with me now and then—”

  “You have such a romantic way of looking at things,” Moira said sarcastically.

  “It was partly sunlit and it was partly that the sun turned black.” I was misquoting Racine.

  “I don’t really understand you when you talk,” Moira said, forgivingly.

  “O.K. I was quoting Greek stuff.” Then, courageously, I grinned at her: I didn’t need her, and I wasn’t really afraid of her.

  Brr said, “What do you mean by S and M? Whippings? Or psychological meanness—”

  “Oh floggings—sure …” I meant the imaginative thing in movies, old shipboard routines and British schoolboys and pirates.

  He said, “No. I mean, hanky-spanky.” The real thing in a bedroom.

  I said, “It seems to be good for the complexion.”

  He said, “What kind of analyst do you have?”

  “I haven’t been analyzed: I don’t have enough money.”

  “Well, if you’re suffering, they help you and let you owe them,” Moira said.

  I said, “Well, yes, if your suffering is what they’re writing about at the time. Otherwise not. I asked two analysts in Boston, when I was in college, for help but I had no money, and both had been sympathetic, but when I said I was broke, they said I was normal.”

  Moira said, “Oh. Do they ever say that ? Oh, the innocent—” Meaning me. “I’m a paranoid schizophrenic—”

  “That’s a secret” Brr said.

  “I’m only it off and on,” Moira said with a giggle: “It’s the worst thing to be if it’s full-time—You are so pure, honey,” Moira said to me in a mad way now that the idea of her madness was in her; then she said to Brr, in a serious and exaggeratedly sane tone, a whole other accent, said of me elegiacally. “He’s pure …”

  Brr said, “Do you think of S and M as mostly physical ?” The phrase psychic violence wasn’t in use yet. But it was clear Brr suspected himself of it.

  I sighed. “No. The worst is to be destroyed mentally.” I made a face. I figured he’d take it as a challenge.

  Moira didn’t help: “Like me by Brr,” she said among the lies and poses. And she giggled.

  I hesitated and said nothing.

  “Oh my God,” Moira said. “You’re such a baby. It makes you sad about me. Hurting people excites men: their whole self becomes an erection—I’m a femme fatale for some people—”

  “Alden Whitto,” Brr said to her.

  I said, “Yeah, he’s one of those beautiful, romantic shits.”

  “A shit?”

  “Remember when you were little, the kid who put pebbles in his shoes or burned himself with matches and wanted to burn you?” Brr accepted Whitto as a prophet-of-sorts.

  “No.”

  “They were really sophisticated about punishments. About handing out shit. They’re like dark mermaids. They learn about this stuff; they can do it intimately. They always want to get even: they liked revenge—they’re juicy, like caterpillars. I’m talking about kids, the kids’ version—”

  Brr said, “No.” Then: “Were they freaks?”

  “They were bright, not class-officer material, they were too mean. And they were of an absolutist cast, and the rest of us weren’t—they had the one-God thing, the one class leader, the one smart boy, the one pretty girl. If you’re one of these guys or girls you get to tyrannize in all sorts of ways in everything you do—”

  “Where did you read this?” Brr asked.

  “I observed it,” I said, and shrugged.

  “He read it somewhere,” Moira said. “Everything’s in books. Nothing new is possible. Are you a sadist, Wiley? It doesn’t matter what he says,” she said to Brr; “he’s a sadist.”

  “Are you a sadist?” Brr asked me.

  I shrugged. “Now and then …”

  Unwillingly, with a true unwillingness, he laughed, “Ha-ha.” I see myself as a comedian but he rarely saw me as one.

  “The master of the erection is the master of the hounds,” I said, taking refuge in nonsense, to discourage the talk. But, also, I turn foolish without warning.

  He and Moira winced.

  I sighed and explained, “You look into each other’s eyes—you maybe let what’s there make itself visible. Then you have it like a stone to carry: you’re responsible for it.… It’s not easy to bear the attention—it’s like being naked in a torture chamber—I think you suffer differently if you’re a sadist.”

  Brr said to me, “Is that sexy?”

  “It doesn’t explain itself—sometimes it’s sexy: it depends on which direction the whip is aimed. It’s better as an aspect of nature than as theatrical carryings-on—”

  “I hate intellectuals,” Moira said.

  I stood up. “I’m in over my head.”

  Brr, standing up beside me, came to my shoulder. Fear or tension or whatever it was made me say in a shadowy voice, “Erections are like bananas in the marketplace, they’re part of monkey business.” I often say stupid things because I am often stupid. I hoped that would eliminate the short-man-tall-man thing between me and Brr. It is part of some sort of give-and-take to speak without sense.

  I followed Moira and Brr back into the other room.

  Deuteronomy, on the same couch, fills us in: “The talk here has gone from movies to books—are movies ever as good as books? And now the talk is about books: are they as good as sex?”

  All the talk at all the Sunday brunches was like this.

  “Ha-ha, ha-ha.”

  “ HAHAHAH.”

  “HA-HA …”

  Bray, rasp, snort, snurtle-chortle, wry smiles, the latest model for wisecracks.

  Moira said with cold sexual precision, “We talked about sadism.”

  “Well, you had the best of it,” Chonberg said.

  Faces turned ; it was shocking: the faces move in separate tempos and with separate intelligences and agendas—we didn’t use that word. Each face is clearly a kind of vagina dentata.

  Well, don’t think about it, don’t notice, don’t think about people’s bodies, don’t unzip anyone in your mind, don’t unbutton any 1950s perfect-booby brassieres, promise nothing. The real subject is success. And meaning.

  “Well, tell us,” Deut said.

  “I don’t want to,” I said, a bit haughtily—sadistically. (I was joking.)

  “Please,” Deuteronomy said with his wide-faced akimbo onstage charm that so disconcerted me offstage.

  “I have to think about it more.”

  The Jewish Noël Coward, Noël Schwearzen, said, “I’ve passed up fucks for books—” His wisecrack was in the style of the hot poop.

  Moira spoke in a tone of cross sexuality to Schwearzen, “Oh you, you’re an artist …” I have no idea if she was mocking him or not.

  Brr and Deuteronomy flicked their faces and their eyes, almost like headlights, at me: then Deut said to Schwearzen, “Oh you, you’re a real artist—” His timing and vocal dexterity were much greater and swifter than Schwearzen’s. He went on with a stagy naïve smile: “I’ve passed up books for fucks.”

  Brr, still looking for magazine topics, said, “Why does a man’s being an artist matter to women?”

  “Hunh?” Schwearzen said. Hunhs were a form of wisecrack but Deut was the ace at them.

  “Ha-ha,” Deut said in his making-friends way but with a faint edge of ignoring Schwearzen as well.

  Brr also said in a way that ignored Schwearzen: “But we know art matters …”

  “Sometimes,” Deuteronomy said. He was rosy-cheeked, had floppy hair: light makeup and a wig, self-made, invented. He was running things, and he didn’t surrender command to Brr now, which was interesting.

  I had power in an eerie way that I didn’t have with most
people except in New York: power of this sort was also a form of weakness.

  I said as if it were a quote, “And this was commonly, but not universally, said, in praise of men who were called artists, that it would mean something to a woman or to women that these men made things out of their own heads and bodies which then become a large part of the furniture of the mind.”

  Deuteronomy asked, “Where’s that from?”

  “Where do you think?” I said, feeling him throb a little. “Thomas Aquinas,” I said, making it up.

  “Oh he does nothing but quote,” Moira said crossly, of me, I suppose. She was on a down slope from her drug-and-drinking high.

  The texture of the silence then was wretched, at least for me. My face grew hot: “Brr introduces me to people and doesn’t warn them about how I talk.” Then I said: “I have to talk the way I do—I don’t know why. I just do. Sorry.” I often have the sense socially of being blindfolded with a gauze blindfold that I can almost see through: I am in a translucent haze and can almost see what I am doing but not quite.

  Deuteronomy said, protectively, “The wisecrack meets the footnote.”

  All at once it was secrets time, a maze thing, the egos and attitudes—the thing that makes parties work sometimes. The people there were not scholars or artists, but they understood the market in seeing. Or something. The moment is penetrable by the force of physical logic, the grammar of motion, but we’re not accustomed to doing that.

  Mad Moira said, “Oh hell: why think? I can’t think.”

  Deut said, “Fuck thinking? It gives people pimples.”

  Moira said with modesty, “I am crazy: I think you’re funny.”

  The party was a whiff of battle—think how human everyone is, and who they sleep with, and then how surprised they are by death or by grief.

  Moira said to me, “Do you have a tiger in you?”

  Imagine the reality of a tiger inside you, the clawing restlessness and stretching and the stench, the carnival-colored predator.