“It’s just not right,” Beatrice said, sitting up and running her hand through her stringy hair. One leg was folded underneath her, and a hard, reasonless and abstract gaze made her eyes seem cold and distant. “I guess I’m not in the right mood or something.”
“What do you mean it’s not right.” Rodney was running his hands anxiously through his own unsprung hair. He resembled a broker during a crash, his shirt rumpled and undone, his eyes slightly bloodshot. “What’s right like? How am I supposed to know the right time? How’m I supposed to know what the right mood’s like?”
Sometimes she petted and tried to console him, and sometimes they would even start kissing again, their thin lips bumping again and again at one another. Then their bodies would do that slow horizontal dance again, and I would watch just for that movement, that steady and directionless rhythm of their bodies on the sofa. Bits of foam rubber were spilling from underneath the tangled bedspread like sawdust from a lathe. My interest was merely clinical. I knew it was the vital dance. I knew it was something very serious and inexplicable for Rodney and that, with luck, it would someday be the same for me as well. But for now the irresolvable dialectic of that motion was what fascinated me. I wanted them to be like that forever, like a glittery mobile or a perpetual object of performance art. I wanted them moving there together on my sofa until I forgot about them, until I accepted that movement of theirs as calmly as I accepted the walls and ceiling of my house, as firmly as I accepted my mom’s secret and brooding presence in the silent back bedroom. Motion not as a way of living, or as a dance of bodies, but as a sort of universal presumption. Bodies moved, cars moved, planes moved in the sky. Rocks and trees and garbage cans and concrete cinder blocks moved. The earth moved and the stars moved. There was the spiral movement of entire galaxies, and the fundamental movement of atoms and quarks and merely theoretical matter. Everything was moving everywhere all the time, because nobody was anywhere they wanted to be in the first place. Time, when you considered the elemental, even archetypal fact of motion itself, was just a formality, a record, a graph. Movement was life, and when you moved your body into the body of a woman you initiated other movements, other lives. Cells moved, proteins and enzymes moved together, particles of minerals and plasma moved in the blood. I didn’t care whether Rodney consummated his obsession with Beatrice or not, because I had come to realize that motion was destiny enough. Consummation would only inaugurate a moment of dull, sleepy disavowal. You could pretend motion had stopped for a while. Then you could lie down and sleep until your dreams woke you.
“You know what America is, don’t you, guys?” Beatrice asked us one day, examining herself in her compact, plucking at one damp, tangled eyelash. “It’s a big black hole that sucks everything in. You know who founded America, don’t you? People who could pretend they were anybody they wanted to be, because that’s what America is. Anything you want it to be.”
“America’s the frontier that’s never conquered,” I said, reaching to turn the television volume down. I swiveled around on the rug to face her, feeling something slip in my stomach, my groin, a feeling as if I had swallowed something very cold and heavy. “America’s motion. America’s always somewhere else. If we can’t go other places, we can be those places instead. My mom always said that’s why we’re Californians–because we don’t need to be here. We can always be anywhere else in the universe besides California, and still be here too. America’s the dialectic. It’s what Hegel talks about in The Phenomenology of Mind. The dialectic.”
Somewhere deep in my house I could hear Mom silently nodding her head. She wasn’t approving, though. She was just nodding her head.
Rodney let out an exasperated sigh, and reached for his Dos Equis. “Jesus Christ. Just what I need.” He took a long pull from the beer and quickly lit a Tareyton. He looked dispassionately from me to Beatrice, from Beatrice to me. His face was puffy and creased with worried lines. “Fucking stereo,” he said.
I felt very good sitting there, watching Rodney and Beatrice on the couch. Rodney looked at his cigarette. Beatrice, out of the corner of her eye, looked at Rodney.
Life had grown very substantial and real for me while Mom lay quietly in her room. I had everything now. A family, a house, a lucrative job, good times and faithful friends. I had the sweet clutter of books in my room. I had cigarettes, good whiskey, excellent home-cooked meals, a reputable broker, new shoes, the privacy of my own mind, healthy sexual curiosity and, somewhere in the world, Dad, who would always take me back if things got too rough. I felt settled, but not conventional. I was learning how to live my own life and yet still love Mom too, the lesson I knew Mom had always meant me to learn. Mom was very real and immanent all the time. She was a vast incontrovertible force, extensive like gravity or sound. She was like God, she was like air. And she was always in perfect control, especially when she wasn’t in any control at all.
12
“IS YOUR MOM seeing anyone?” Dad asked me, over and over again. “You know you can tell me. You know you can tell me if she’s seeing someone.” His voice grew webbed and anxious. There was something sudden about Dad’s voice when he considered Mom’s possible infidelity. He reminded me of Rodney, exasperated by Beatrice’s muggy sex. He was always quick to change the subject. “Is she all right?” he asked. “Is she eating properly? Do you have enough school clothes and spending money? Should I wire you more? Should I stop calling? Should I let you go on pretending I don’t exist?” Dad’s voice strained against the force of our lives, divided from us by a thin, translucent bubble. The bubble’s skin transmitted Dad’s voice and texture, but not his body, not his acting presence. “Does she ever ask about me, or wonder how I am? Do you think some nights she misses me? Or says my name out loud?”
“She’s not seeing anyone right now, Dad,” I said. “She’s working hard and likes her job very much. She’s trying to work out a lot of things, and just needs to be left alone for a while. She asks about you all the time, and I tell her that you’ve been asking about her. She wants you to know she misses you, but that she needs this time to think about nobody but herself. She needs to live as if nobody else in the world exists except her. She needs to be left alone a little longer, Dad. She needs to know we love her enough to trust her to be by herself.”
Dad’s voice was growing more tinny and desperate as Mom’s voice, sunk in the silence of her room, grew more audible and self-assured. Sometimes static swirled and seethed on Dad’s telephone line like foam on a seashore, leaving behind broken bits of shell and rock and bone. “I think it’s time you both came home,” Dad said one night. “I’ve been patient long enough. It’s about time you both learned a little something about responsibility. I’m talking about things like right and moral duty. I don’t mean I believe in God, but I do believe in responsibility. And so will you someday, sport. Someday, so will you.”
“WHAT DOES YOUR dad do?” Beatrice asked one night after I hung up and returned to the living room. The distant, stellar noise of the telephone continued to wheel around me like lights in a planetarium. “Is your dad in business? I always imagined your dad a big, successful businessman, Phillip. It’s in your blood, I can tell. You’ll be a businessman too, I’m sure. When you grow up.”
Dad was still there in the house with us long after I hung up the phone. He was more idea than thing, more impression than voice. Dad wasn’t life. Dad was history.
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of–business. Business convenes secret and ghostly ceremonies in the world. Ceremonies which the world needs, or else the world wouldn’t have them.” Beatrice was gazing abstractedly at the living room wall, turning one long tangled coil of oily hair behind her ear. “It’s as real as rocks, as organic as trees.” It was almost eleven o’clock and Rodney had gone into my bedroom to sleep. Beatrice held a half-finished glass of Nestlé’s Quik in her lap, its rim whorled with milky deposits and fingerprints. “Business always works, even when nature doesn’t. When plants stop photosynthesizing
, business will manufacture its own atmosphere. When other moons and planets crash into our seas and wreck our world, business will mine and redistribute them. Business is the world’s real nature, Phillip. We are all fleeing nature and using what it has taught us about business to make our world vaster and more perfect.”
Beatrice had breasts–little breasts, granted, but breasts nonetheless. When I lifted up her mascara-smudged Lacoste T-shirt and reached underneath to touch one, it was as warm as I expected. I brushed it gently with the palm of my untrained hand and then, softly and with clinical care, palpated it the same way a doctor might examine for cysts. I could feel the clusters of glands like tiny grapes all joined up to the nipple’s tuberous root. The surface skin was soft. I could smell Beatrice’s slightly unwashed odor, like the smell Mom’s laundry used to make when soaking in some motel sink. Holding Beatrice’s breast in my hand made me experience a cool and intellectual sense of redemption. I don’t mean I wanted to be a baby again; I didn’t want to be nurtured by this breast. I wanted only to regain a sort of molecular integrity. I wanted to crawl back into the cellular warmth of my own body, not some woman’s womb. I wanted to grow so small I could see protons and electrons bristling in my tiny night sky like showers of meteors and cosmic dust. I did not want to procreate that first time I touched a girl’s breast, I wanted to uncreate. I wanted to penetrate life in search of the unliving. I wanted to exonerate the fundamental and fragmentary lifelessness of things. Without a second thought, I leaned forward on my tiptoes and kissed my Beatrice on the lips, which were still slightly smudged with Nestlé’s Quik. Her lips didn’t move a muscle. I don’t believe either of us felt a thing.
“You can’t hide your desire for me,” I said.
Beatrice snapped her gum.
“Our two bodies are meant to be one,” I said. “You know it’s true. You knew it was true from the moment we first met.”
I stepped back, removing my hand from her. I expected I would touch a girl’s breast again someday, and remembered the cocoon I once discovered on the branch of a rosebush. I had broken off the branch and placed the cocoon inside a glass jar, the lid of which I punctured with a sharp knife to allow air so the cocoon could breathe. I included branches of other trees and bushes, leaves, stones and dirt for both scenery and a sense of environmental continuity. The cocoon just hung there, day after day, motionless, cobwebby and dry as a bone. Then one day I decided it must be thirsty, and poured in a generous helping of Coca-Cola through the punctured aluminum lid. A few days later the cocoon withered and collapsed on the branch like overripe fruit. Then, one night, when I was asleep, a few green drops oozed out.
I took Beatrice’s hand. It was, as always, grimy and smudged. It left a soft glimmering residue wherever it touched.
“I think it’s time you met my mom,” I told her. Then I escorted her down the long dark hallway to Mom’s silent room.
“HELLO, MOM. IT’S me. It’s Phillip. You remember me. Your son.”
Darkness seethed behind the door. Dead planets moved there. Somehow comprehensible alien languages whispered and transformed themselves into things. Light wrapped textures around itself, like young children in their parents’ clothing.
“I know I said I’d leave you alone for a while, Mom. I’m not trying to hurt you, or break any promises. Dad called and I only told him what I knew you wanted him to hear. There’s a fresh salad in the Tupperware bowl on the bottom shelf of the fridge. There’s frozen lasagna you can heat in the microwave. Now, Beatrice and I will go back into the living room and leave you alone, and if you want to fix yourself something to eat, you can. I promise we won’t get in your way, I just wanted you to meet my friend Beatrice. I’m in love with Beatrice, Mom, but it’s a completely different type of love from the way I love you. I just wanted you to know.”
I could feel Beatrice’s body standing beside me in the dark hall. Tonight her body was the only warmth in the house.
“It’s love without passion, Mom. I don’t feel any passion for Beatrice, just love. She might as well be a rock, or a landmark, or a memory, or a curious bug as far as physical passion’s concerned. She might as well be chemistry or math. Anyway, Mom. This is Beatrice.”
I gave Beatrice’s wrist a little squeeze.
“Hello, Mrs. Davis,” Beatrice said after a while.
Beatrice’s calm voice resounded in our still house like a summons.
“Now, Mom, we’ll leave you alone.”
Both Beatrice and I thought we could hear Mom breathing in her bed as we returned back down the dark hall to the living room sofa again.
THAT NIGHT WHILE Beatrice and I slept huddled together on the living room couch I awoke and heard movements in the kitchen. The weak filmy light from the streets filtered through our dusty venetian blinds, thinning and thickening like pages being turned back and forth in a book. I heard a single glass fall and break. I heard rummaging in the icemaker. I wondered if Mom was feeling OK, and thought I should start leaving vitamins out for her. I heard the coffee grinder, and waxy cardboard being torn from the frozen lasagna. Dishes and silverware began to clatter, the refrigerator door opened twice. Then the initiating chime of the microwave, and I did not hear so much as feel that long slow charge of heatless energy building, a kind of cosmic affinity being conceded deep down there among our secondhand kitchen appliances. The coffee was percolating on the countertop, the aluminum lid rattling. The microwave chimed again and buzzed, and a firm quick hand clicked it off. I could smell the antiseptic prepackaged smell of it, the thawed meat and cheese. Beatrice, asleep against my pale chest, stirred; she muttered something. One of her bare legs slowly wrapped itself around mine and she began faintly snoring. I heard the footsteps in the kitchen going back and forth, and boiling coffee being poured into a ceramic mug.
“I think it’s time you came out again,” I whispered, watching the door to the kitchen that adjoined the living room. “I’m getting worried about you. I don’t know how much more neglect I can promise. I miss you. Dad misses you. We all miss you, even the vast world. I’m sure it will all get better. I’m sure if you come out and try to face things, things will get better again on their own.”
The noises stilled in the kitchen. There was a slow breathing hush filling up the flashing lacquered walls. There was thinking going on in there. A very strong and willful mind at work. Then, succinctly, a long sipping of coffee.
Beatrice, in her sleep, gently kissed my shoulder.
The footsteps swung through the kitchen again and then, in the doorway, I saw a tall shadow that only slowly, holding the coffee in one hand and the lasagna on a plate in the other, emerged into the dim mothy light of the living room windows.
“What you think you’re doing?” Rodney asked, wincing against the bitter coffee. He gestured with the cup at Beatrice. “That’s my woman you got there.” His face was puffy and his hair stuck out like Larry’s on “The Three Stooges.” He stood there for a few moments, not looking at Beatrice and me so much as through us. Then he sat down on the floor and began to eat his lasagna. His fork ticked dully again and again against the cheesy plate.
“Sometimes I don’t know,” Rodney said, wiping his brow with the back of his greasy hand. “Sometimes I don’t know if I was born mean, or if the world just made me that way.” He lay the dish and fork on the floor with a deliberate clatter. He looked at the musty, glowing venetian blinds. Outside the phototropic streetlamps were beginning to dim; the power lines and parked metal cars began to buzz slightly and deeply on the empty street, filling up with the sun’s early warmth.
“I think Dan Duryea said that,” Rodney said. His sleepy eyes remained trained upon the cracked venetian blinds. “I really get a kick out of that goddamn Dan Duryea.”
13
THE FOLLOWING EVENING we decided to take Mom’s car out for an exploratory little spin. The engine started rough, but it started, and I let it warm up in the strange and generally unglimpsed garage of Mom’s house where everything, even the
shadows, seemed inverted and unreal.
“We got wheels!” Rodney declared, jiggling in the front passenger seat and thrumming Beatrice’s thighs with a paradiddle, a flam-paradiddle, then a spotty double roll. “Phillip’s got us wheels, man! Let’s roll! Let’s do what they do on TV and let’s roll! It was the only time I ever saw Rodney excited about anything. Rodney even offered to give me five, but my mind was too intent on the various pedals and knobs and levers before me. They were all familiar, but they were all unfamiliar too. They articulated me with that world of adults which was accessible in every way except the mind’s. When I touched them, I was touching some ineffable something of adults that made adults different. It was not the things themselves, but some mysterious identity behind the things. Signals, ashtray, wipers, defrost, tone and volume, fan, air, seat belt, dash. I eased the accelerator down and up, the engine expanding in the damp garage with a choppy roar and diminishing again like passing private airplanes. I practiced engaging the clutch and killed the engine three or four times. Each time the car started with a throatier, smoother voice. It was the voice of mechanical discretion. It was the voice of the whirring conspiratorial notions of engaged mechanical parts.
The History of Luminous Motion Page 7
