Beautiful Losers

by Leonard Cohen

  12

  The Plague! The Plague! It invades my pages of research. My desk is suddenly contagious. My erection topples like a futuristic Walt Disney film of the leaning Tower of Pisa, to the music of timpani and creaking doors. I speed down my zipper and out falls dust and rubble. Hard cock alone leads to Thee, this I know because I’ve lost everything in this dust. Plague among the Mohawks! In 1660 it broke out, raging along the Mohawk River, assaulting the Indian villages, Gandaouagué, Gandagoron, Tionnontoguen, like a forest fire powered by the wind, and it came to Ossernenon, where lived Catherine Tekakwitha, four years old. Down goes her warrior father and her Christian mother, croaking out her final confession, down goes her little brother, his little prick useless as an appendix forever. Of this doomed, intermarried family, only Catherine Tekakwitha survived, the price of admission gouged in her face. Catherine Tekakwitha is not pretty! Now I want to run from my books and dreams. I don’t want to fuck a pig. Can I yearn after pimples and pock marks? I want to go outside and walk in the park and look at the long legs of American children. What keeps me here while lilacs grow outside for everybody? Can F. teach me something? He said that at the age of sixteen he stopped fucking faces. Edith was lovely when I first met her in the hotel, where she sold manicures. Her hair was black, long and smooth, the softness of cotton rather than silk. Her eyes were black, a solid depthless black that gave nothing away (except once or twice), like those sunglasses made of mirrors. In fact, she often wore that kind of sunglasses. Her lips were not full but very soft. Her kisses were loose, somehow unspecific, as if her mouth couldn’t choose where to stay. It slipped over my body like a novice on roller skates. I always hoped it would fasten somewhere perfect and find its home in my ecstasy, but off it slipped after too brief a perch, in search of nothing but balance, driven not by passion but by a banana peel. God knows what F. has to say about all this, damn him. I couldn’t bear to discover that she lingered for him. Stay, stay, I wanted to shout at her in the thick air of the sub-basement, come back, come back, don’t you see where all my skin is pointing? But off she skidded, up the piggy steps of my toes, a leap into my ear while my manhood ached like a frantic radio tower, come back, come back, a plunge into my eye where she sucked too hard (remembering her taste for brains), not there, not there, now grazing the hair of my chest like a seagull over spray, come back to Capistrano sang the knob, up to my kneecap, a desert of sensation., exploring the kneecap so very carefully as if it hid a locket clasp her tongue could spring, infuriating waste of tongue, now descending like laundry down the washboard of my ribs, her mouth wants me to turn over so that it can roller-coast down my spine or some foolish thing, no I won’t turn over and bury my hope, down, down, come back, come back, no I won’t fold it against my stomach like a hideaway bed, Edith, Edith, let some things happen in heaven, don’t make me tell you!… I didn’t think this would force itself into my preparations. It is very hard to court you, Catherine Tekakwitha, with your pock-marked face and your insatiable curiosity. One lick, now and then, brief warm coronations promising glory, an occasional collar of ermine teeth, then a swift disgrace, as if the archbishop suddenly learned he’d crowned the wrong son, her saliva cold as an icicle as it dried down the length of her exit, and this member of mine rigid as a goal post, hopeless as a pillar of salt in the destruction, ready at last to settle for a lonely night with my own hands, Edith! I broke my problem to F.

  – I listen in envy, F. said. Don’t you know you’re being loved?

  – I want her to love me in my way.

  – You’ve got to learn –

  – No lessons, I’m not going to settle for lessons this time. This is my bed and my wife, I have some rights.

  – Then ask her.

  – What do you mean “ask her”?

  – Please make me come with your mouth, Edith.

  – You’re disgusting, F. How dare you use that language in connection with Edith? I didn’t tell you this so that you could soil our intimacy.

  – I’m sorry.

  – Of course, I could ask her, that’s obvious. But then she’d be under duress, or worse, it would become a matter of duty. I don’t want to hold a strap over her.

  – Yes you do.

  – I warn you, F., I’m not going to take your cowardly guru shit.

  – You are being loved, you are being invited into a great love, and I envy you.

  – And stay away from Edith. I don’t like the way she sits between us at the movies. That is just courtesy on our part.

  – I’m grateful to you both. I assure you, she could love no other man as she loves you.

  – Do you think that’s true, F.?

  – I know it’s true. Great love is not a partnership, for a partnership can be dissolved by law or parting, and you’re stuck with a great love, as a matter of fact, you are stuck with two great loves, Edith’s and mine. Great love needs a servant, but you don’t know how to use your servants.

  – How should I ask her?

  – With whips, with imperial commands, with a leap into her mouth and a lesson in choking.

  I see F. standing there, the window behind him, his paper-thin ears almost transparent. I remember the expensively appointed slum room, the view of the factory he was trying to buy, his collection of soap arranged like a model town on the green felt of an elaborately carved billiard table. The light came through his ears as if they were made of a bar of Pears Soap. I hear his phony voice, the slight Eskimo accent which he affected after a student summer in the Arctic. You are stuck with two great loves, F. said. What a poor custodian I have been of those two loves, an ignorant custodian who walked his days in a dream museum of self-pity. F. and Edith loved me! But I didn’t hear his declaration that morning or didn’t believe it. You don’t know how to use your servants, F. said, his ears beaming like Jap lanterns. I was loved in 1950! But I didn’t speak to Edith, I couldn’t. Night after night I lay in the dark listening to the sounds of the elevator, my silent commands buried in my brain, like those urgent proud inscriptions on Egyptian monuments dumb under tons of sand. So her mouth sailed crazily over my body like a flock of Bikini birds, their migratory instincts destroyed by radiation.

  – But I warn you, F. continued, a time will come when you’ll want nothing in the world but those aimless kisses.

  Talking about transparent skin, Edith’s throat was like that, the thinnest, softest cover. You thought a heavy shell necklace would draw blood. To kiss her there was to intrude into something private and skeletal, like a turtle’s shoulder. Her shoulders were bony but not meager. She wasn’t thin but no matter how full the flesh her bones were always in command. From the age of thirteen she had the kind of skin which was called ripe, and the men who pursued her then (she was finally raped in a stone quarry) said that she was the kind of girl who would age quickly, which is the way that men on corners comfort themselves about an unattainable child. She grew up in a small town on the north shore of the St. Lawrence, where she infuriated a number of men who thought that they should be able to rub her small breasts and round bum simply because she was an Indian, an A—— at that! At sixteen, when I married her, I myself believed that her skin couldn’t last. It had that fragile juicy quality we associate with growing things just about to decline. At twenty-four, the year of her death, nothing had altered but her buttocks. At sixteen they had been two half spheres suspended in midair, later they came to rest on two deep curved creases, and this was the extent of her body’s decay until she was squashed all at once. Let me think about her. She liked me to rub her skin with olive oil. I complied even though I really didn’t like playing around with food. Sometimes she filled her belly-button hole with oil and using her little finger she drew the spokes of Asoka’s wheel, then she smeared it, skin darkening. Her breasts were small, somewhat muscular, fruit with fiber. Her freakish nipples make me want to tear up my desk when I remember them, which I do at this very instant, miserable paper memory while my cock soars hopelessly into her mangled coffin, and my
arms wave my duties away, even you, Catherine Tekakwitha, whom I court with this confession. Her wondrous nipples were dark as mud and very long when stiffened by desire, over an inch high, wrinkled with wisdom and sucking. I stuffed them into my nostrils (one at a time). I stuffed them in my ears. I believed continually that if anatomy permitted and I could have stuffed a nipple into each of my ears at the same time – shock treatment! What is the use of reviving this fantasy, impossible then as now? But I want those leathery electrodes in my head! I want to hear the mystery explained, I want to hear the conversations between those stiff wrinkled sages. There were such messages going between them that even Edith could not hear, signals, warnings, conceits. Revelations! Mathematics! I told F. about this the night of her death.

  – You could have had everything you wanted.

  – Why do you torment me, F.?

  – You lost yourself in particulars. All parts of the body are erotogenic, or at least have the possibility of so becoming. If she had stuck her index fingers in your ears you would have got the same results.

  – Are you sure?

  – Yes.

  – Have you tried it?

  – Yes.

  – I have to ask you this. With Edith?

  – Yes.

  – F.!

  – Listen, my friend, the elevators, the buzzers, the fan: the world is waking up in the heads of a few million.

  – Stop. Did you do that with her? Did you go that far? Did you do that together? You’re going to sit right there and tell me every detail. I hate you, F.

  – Well, she stuck her index fingers –

  – Was she wearing nail polish?

  – No.

  – She was, damn you, she was! Stop trying to protect me.

  – All right, she was. She stuck her red nails in my ears –

  – You enjoy this, don’t you?

  – She stuck her fingers in my ears and I stuck my fingers in her ears and we kissed.

  – You did it to each other? With your bare fingers? You touched ears and fingers?

  – You begin to learn.

  – Shut up. What did her ears feel like?

  – Tight.

  – Tight!

  – Edith had very tight ears, nearly virgin, I’d say.

  – Get out, F.! Get off our bed! Take your hands off me!

  – Listen, or I’ll break your neck, chicken voyeur. We were fully dressed except for our fingers. Yes! We sucked each other’s fingers, and then we stuck them in each other’s ears –

  – The ring, did she take the ring off?

  – I don’t think so. I was worried about my eardrums because of her long red nails, she was digging so hard. We shut our eyes and we kissed like friends, without opening our mouths. Suddenly the sounds of the lobby were gone and I was listening to Edith.

  – To her body! Where did this happen? When did you do this to me?

  – So those are your questions. It happened in a telephone booth in the lobby of a movie theater downtown.

  – What theater?

  – The System Theatre.

  – You’re lying! There is no telephone booth in the System. There’s only one or two telephones on the wall separated by glass partitions, I think. You did it out in the open! I know that dirty basement lobby! There’s always some fairy hanging around there, drawing cocks and telephone numbers on the green wall. Out in the open! Was anyone watching? How could you do this to me?

  – You were in the men’s room. We were waiting for you beside the telephones, eating chocolate-covered ice-cream bars. I don’t know what was keeping you so long. We finished our ice cream. Edith spotted a flake of chocolate sticking to my little finger. In a very charming fashion she leaned over and flicked it into her mouth with her tongue, like an anteater. She had overlooked a flake of chocolate on her own wrist. I swooped in and got that, clumsily, I confess. Then it turned into a game. Games are nature’s most beautiful creation. All animals play games, and the truly Messianic vision of the brotherhood of creatures must be based on the idea of the game, indeed –

  – So Edith began it! And who touched whose ear first? I have to know everything now. You saw her tongue stretched out, you probably stared. Who started it with the ears?

  – I don’t remember. Maybe we were under the influence of the telephones. If you remember, one of the fluorescent lights was flickering, and the corner where we were standing jumped in and out of shadows as though great wings were passing over us or the huge blades of an immense electric fan. The telephones kept their steady black, the only stable shape in the shifting gloom. They hung there like carved masks, black, gleaming, smooth as the toes of kissed stone R.C. saints. We were sucking each other’s fingers, slightly frightened now, like children pulling at lollipops during the car chase. And then one of the telephones rang! It rang just once. I am always startled when a pay phone rings. It is so imperial and forlorn, like the best poem of a minor poet, like King Michael saying good-by to Communist Romania, like a message in a floating bottle which begins: If anyone finds this, know that –

  – Damn you, F.! You’re torturing me. Please.

  – You asked me for the whole picture. I forgot to mention that the lights were buzzing, unevenly, like the snores of a sinus victim. I was sucking her narrow finger, careful of the sharp nail, thinking of the wolves who bleed to death from licking the blood-baited knife. When the light was healthy our skin was yellow, the merest pimple exaggerated, and when it failed we fell into a purple pallor, our skin like old wet mushrooms. And when it rang we were so startled that we actually bit each other! Children in a scary cave. Yes, there was someone watching us, not that we cared. He was watching us in the mirror of the fortune-telling scale which he was climbing off and on, dropping in nickel after nickel, dialing various questions, or the same one for all I know. And where the hell were you? The basement of the System is a horrible place if you do not stick with the people you came with. It smells like a desperate clearing in a siege of rats –

  – You lie. Edith’s skin was perfect. And it smells of piss, nothing else, just piss. And never mind what I was doing.

  – I know what you were doing, but never mind. When the telephone rang this fellow wheeled around and stepped off the scale, quite gracefully, I must say, and in that moment the whole eerie place seemed like his personal office. We were standing between him and his telephone, and I feared (it sounds ridiculous) that he would do some violence, pull a knife or expose himself, for his whole weary life among the water pipes and urinals seemed to hang on this telephone message –

  – I remember him! He was wearing one of those Western string neckties.

  – Right. I remember thinking in that instant of terror that he had conjured up the ring himself with his incessant dialing, that he had been performing a ritual, like rain-making. He was looking right through us as he stepped forward. He stopped, waiting, I suppose, for the second ring, which never came. He snapped his fingers, turned, climbed back on the scale, and returned to his combinations. We felt delivered, Edith and I! The telephone, hitherto so foreboding and powerful, was our friend! It was the agent of some benign electronic deity, and we wanted to praise it. I suppose that certain primitive bird and snake dances began the same way, a need to imitate the fearful and the beautiful, yes, an imitative procedure to acquire some of the qualities of the adored awesome beast.

  – What are you trying to tell me, F.?

  – We invented the Telephone Dance. Spontaneously. I don’t know who made the first move. Suddenly our index fingers were in each other’s ears. We became telephones!

  – I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  – Why are you crying?

  – I think you have ruined my life, F. For years I’ve been telling secrets to an enemy.

  – You’re wrong, my friend. I have loved you, we’ve both loved you, and you’re very close to understanding this.

  – No, F., no. Maybe it’s true, but it’s been too hard, too much crazy education, and G
od knows for what. Every second day I’ve had to learn something, some lesson, some lousy parable, and what am I this morning, a Doctor of Shit.

  – That’s it. That’s love!

  – Please go away.

  – Don’t you want to hear what happened when I was a telephone?

  – I do, but I don’t want to beg. I have to beg you for every scrap of information about the world.

  – But that’s the only way you value it. When it falls on you from out of the trees you think it’s rotten fruit.

  – Tell me about Edith when you were telephones.

  – No.

  – Arrwk! Sob! Ahahah! Sob!

  – Contain yourself. Discipline!

  – You’re killing me, you’re killing me, you’re killing me!

  – Now you’re ready. We dug our index fingers in each other’s ears. I won’t deny the sexual implications. You are ready to face them now. All parts of the body are erotogenic. Assholes can be trained with whips and kisses, that’s elementary. Pricks and cunts have become monstrous! Down with genital imperialism! All flesh can come! Don’t you see what we have lost? Why have we abdicated so much pleasure to that which lives in our underwear? Orgasms in the shoulder! Knees going off like firecrackers! Hair in motion! And not only caresses leading us into the nourishing anonymity of the climax, not only sucking and wet tubes, but wind and conversation and a beautiful pair of gloves, fingers blushing! Lost! Lost!