Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  No matter what I mumbled, “Hush,” and “Don’t be silly,” and in a whisper, “Orra, I love you,” she kept on saying those things, until I slapped her lightly and said, “Shut up, Orra.”

  Then she was silent again.

  The thing was, apparently, that she was arrhythmic: at least that’s what I thought; and that meant there weren’t going to be regular contractions; any rhythm for me to follow; and any rhythm I set up as I fucked, she broke with her movements: so that it was that when she moved, she made her excitement go away. It would be best if she moved very smally: but I was afraid to tell her that, or even to try to hold her hips firmly, and guide them, to instruct her in that way for fear she’d get self-conscious and lose what momentum she’d won. And also I was ashamed that I’d stopped going down on her. I experimented—doggedly, sweatily, to make up for what I’d done—with fucking in different ways, and I fantasized about us being in Mexico, someplace warm and lushly colored where we made love easily and filthily and graphically. The fantasy kept me going. That is, it kept me hard. I kept acting out an atmosphere of sexual pleasure—I mean of my sexual pleasure—for her to rest on, so she could count on that. I discovered that a not very slow sort of one-one-one stroke, or fuck-fuck-fuck-Orra now-now-now, really got to her; her feelings would grow heated; and she could shift up from that with me into a one-two, one-two, one-two, her excitement rising; but if she or I then tried to shift up farther to one-two-three, one-two-three, she’d lose it all. That was too complicated for her: my own true love, my white American. But her feelings when they were present were very strong, they came in gusts, huge squalls of heat as if from a furnace with a carelessly banging door, and they excited and allured both of us. That excitement and the dit-dit-ditting got to her; she began to be generally, continuingly sexual. It’s almost standard to compare sexual excitement to holiness; well, after a while, holiness seized her; she spoke in tongues, she testified. She was shaking all over; she was saved temporarily and sporadically: that is, she kept lapsing out of that excitement, too. But it would recur. Her hands would flutter; her face would be pale and then red, then very, very red; her eyes would stare at nothing; she’d call my name. I’d plug on one-one-one, then one-two, one-two, then I’d go back to one-one-one: I could see as before—in the deep pleasure I felt even in the midst of the labor—why a woman was proud of what she felt, why a man might kill her in order to stimulate in her (although he might not know this was why he did it) these signs of pleasure. The familiar Orra had vanished; she said, “GodohGodohGod” it was sin and redemption and holiness and visions time. Her throbs were very direct, easily comprehensible, but without any pattern; they weren’t in any regular sequence; still, they were exciting to me, maybe all the more exciting because of the piteous-ness of her not being able to regulate them, of their being like blows delivered inside her by an enemy whom she couldn’t even half domesticate or make friendly to herself or speak to. She was the most out-of-control girl I ever screwed. She would at times start to thrust like a woman who had her sexuality readied and well understood at last, and I’d start to distend with anticipation and a pride and relief as large as a house; but after two thrusts—or four, or six—she’d have gotten too excited, she’d be shaking, she’d thrust crookedly and out of tempo, the movement would collapse; or she’d suddenly jerk in midmovement without warning and crash around with so great and so meaningless a violence that she’d lose her thing; and she’d start to cry. She’d whisper wetly, “I lost it” so I’d say, “No, you didn’t,” and I’d go on or start over, one-one-one; and of course, the excitement would come back; sometimes it came back at once; but she was increasingly afraid of herself, afraid to move her lower body; she would try to hold still and just receive the excitement; she would let it pool up in her; but then, too, she’d begin to shake more and more; she’d leak over into spasmodic and oddly sad, too large movements; and she’d whimper, knowing, I suppose, that those movements were breaking the tempo in herself; again and again, tears streamed down her cheeks; she said in a not quite hoarse, in a sweet, almost hoarse whisper, “I don’t want to come, Wiley, you go ahead and come.”

  My mind had pretty much shut off; it had become exhausted; and I didn’t see how we were going to make this work; she said, “Wiley, it’s all right—please, it’s all right—I don’t want to come.”

  I wondered if I should say something and try to trigger some fantasy in her; but I didn’t want to risk saying something she’d find unpleasant or think was a reproach or a hint for her to be sexier. I thought if I just kept on dit-dit-ditting, sooner or later she’d find it in herself, the trick of riding on her feelings, and getting them to rear up, crest, and topple. I held her tightly, in sympathy and pity, and maybe fear, and admiration: she was so unhysterical; she hadn’t yelled at me or broken anything; she hadn’t ordered me around: she was simply alone and shaking in the middle of a neural storm in her that she seemed to have no gift for handling. I said, “Orra, it’s O.K.: I really prefer long fucks,” and I went on, dit-dit-dit-dit, then I’d shift up to dit-dot, dit-dot, dit-dot, dit-dot.… My back hurt, my legs were going; if sweat was sperm, we would have looked like liquefied snowfields.

  Orra made noises, more and more quickly, and louder and louder; then the noises she made slackened off. Then, step by step, with shorter and shorter strokes, then out of control and clumsy, simply reestablishing myself inside the new approach, I settled down, fucked slowly. The prick was embedded far in her; I barely stirred; the drama of sexual movement died away, the curtains were stilled; there was only sensation on the stage.

  I bumped against the stone blocks and hidden hooks that nipped and bruised me into the soft rottenness, the strange, glowing, breakable hardness of coming, of the sensations at the approaches to coming.

  I panted and half rolled and pushed and edged it in, and slid it back, sweatily—I was semiexpert, aimed, intent. Sex can be like a wilderness that imprisons you: the daimons of the locality claim you. I was achingly nagged by sensations; my prick had been somewhat softened before, and now it swelled with a sore-headed but fine distension; Orra shuddered and held me cooperatively; I began to forget her.

  I thought she was making herself come on the slow fucking, on the prick which, when it was seated in her like this, when I hardly moved it, seemed to belong to her as much as to me; the prick seemed to enter me, too: we both seemed to be sliding on it; the sensation was like that; but there was the moment when I became suddenly aware of her again, of the flesh and blood and bone in my arms, beneath me. I had a feeling of grating on her, and of her grating on me. I didn’t recognize the unpleasantness at first. I don’t know how long it went on before I felt it as a withdrawal in her, a withdrawal that she had made, a patient and restrained horror in her, and impatience in me: our arrival at sexual shambles.

  My heart filled suddenly—filled; and then all feeling ran out of it—it emptied itself.

  I continued to move in her slowly, numbly, in a shabby hubbub of faceless shudderings and shufflings of the midsection and half-thrusts, half-twitches; we went on holding each other, in silence, without slackening the intensity with which we held each other; our movements, that flopping in place, that grinding against each other, went on; neither of us protested in any way. Bad sex can be sometimes stronger and more moving than good sex. She made sobbing noises—and held on to me. After a while sex seemed very ordinary and familiar and unromantic. I started going dit-dit-dit again.

  Her hips jerked up half a dozen times before it occurred to me again that she liked to thrust like a boy, that she wanted to thrust; and then it occurred to me that she wanted me to thrust.

  I maneuvered my ass slightly and tentatively delivered a shove, or rather, delivered an authoritative shove, but not one of great length, one that was exploratory; Orra sighed, with relief it seemed to me; and jerked, encouragingly, too late, as I was pulling back. When I delivered a second thrust, a somewhat more obvious one, more amused, almost boyish, I was like a boy whipping
a fairly fast ball, in a game, at a first baseman—she jerked almost wolfishly, gobbling up the extravagant power of the gesture, of the thrust; with an odd shudder of pleasure, of irresponsibility, of boyishness, I suddenly realized how physically strong Orra was, how well knit, how well put together her body was, how great the power in it, the power of endurance in it; and a phrase—absurd and demeaning but exciting just then—came into my head: to throw a fuck; and I settled myself atop her, braced my toes and knees and elbows and hands on the bed and half-scramblingly worked it—it was clearly mine; but I was Orra’s—worked it into a passionate shove, a curving stroke about a third as long as a full stroke; but amateur and gentle: that is, tentative still; and Orra screamed then; how she screamed: she made known her readiness; then the next time, she grunted: “Uhnn-nnahhhhhh …” a sound thick at the beginning but that trailed into refinement, into sweetness, a lingering sweetness.

  It seemed to me I really wanted to fuck like this, that I had been waiting for this all my life. But it wasn’t really my taste, that kind of fuck: I liked to throw a fuck with less force and more gradations and implications of force rather than with the actual thing; and with more immediate contact between the two sets of pleasures and with more admissions of defeat and triumph; my pleasure was a thing of me reflecting her, her spirit entering me; or perhaps it was merely a mistake, my thinking that; but it seemed shameful and automatic, naive and animal, to throw the prick into her like that.

  She took the thrust: she convulsed a little; she fluttered all over; her skin fluttered; things twitched in her, in the disorder surrounding the phallic blow in her. After two thrusts, she collapsed, went flaccid, then toughened and readied herself again, rose a bit from the bed, aimed the flattened, mysteriously funnel-like container of her lower end at me, too high, so that I had to pull her down with my hands on her butt or on her hips; and her face, when I glanced at her beneath my lids, was fantastically pleasing, set, concentrated, busy, harassed; her body was strong, was stone, smooth stone and wet-satin paper bags and snaky webs, thin and alive, made of woven snakes that lived, thrown over the stone; she held the great, writhing-skinned stone construction toward me, the bony marvel, the half-dish of bone with its secretive, gluey-smooth entrance, the place where I was—it was undefined, except for that: the place where I was; she took and met each thrust—and shuddered and collapsed and rose again: she seemed to rise to the act of taking it; I thought she was partly mistaken, childish, to think that the center of sex was to meet and take the prick thrown into her as hard as it could be thrown, now that she was excited; but there was a weird wildness, a wild freedom, like children cavorting, uncontrolled, set free, but not hysterical, merely without restraint; the odd, thickened, knobbed pole springing back and forth as if mounted on a web of wide rubber bands: it was a naive and a complete release. I whomped it in and she went, “UHNNN!” and a half-iota of a second later, I was seated all the way in her, I jerked a minim of an inch deeper in her, and went, “UHNNN!” too. Her whole body shook. She would go, “UHN!” And I would go, “UHN!”

  Then when it seemed from her strengthening noises and her more rapid and jerkier movements that she was near the edge of coming, I’d start to place the whomps, in neater and firmer arrangements, more obviously in a rhythm, more businesslike, more teasing, with pauses at each end of a thrust; and that would excite her up to a point; but then her excitement would level off, and not go over the brink. So I would speed up: I’d thrust harder, then harder yet, then harder and faster; she made her noises and half-thrust back. She bit her lower lip; she set her teeth in her lower lip; blood appeared. I fucked still faster, but on a shorter stroke, almost thrumming on her, and angling my abdomen hopefully to drum on her clitoris; sometimes her body would go limp; but her cries would speed up, bird after bird flew out of her mouth while she lay limp as if I were a boxer and had destroyed her ability to move; then when the cries did not go past a certain point, when she didn’t come, I’d slow and start again. I wished I’d been a great athlete, a master of movement, a woman, a lesbian, a man with a gigantic prick that would explode her into coming. I moved my hands to the corners of the mattress; and spread my legs; I braced myself with my hands and feet; and braced like that, free-handed in a way, drove into her; and the new posture, the feeling she must have had of being covered, and perhaps the difference in the thrust got to her; but Orra’s body began to set up a babble, a babble of response, then—I think the posture played on her mind.

  But she did not come.

  I moved my hands and held the dish of her hips so that she couldn’t wiggle or deflect the thrust or pull away: she began to “Uhn” again but interspersed with small screams: we were like kids playing catch (her poor brutalized clitoris), playing hard hand: this was what she thought sex was; it was sexual, as throwing a ball hard is sexual; in a way, too, we were like acrobats hurling ourselves at each other, to meet in midair and fall entangled to the net. It was like that.

  Her mouth came open, her eyes had rolled to one side and stayed there—it felt like twilight to me—I knew where she was sexually, or thought I did. She pushed, she egged us on. She wasn’t breakable this way. Orra. I wondered if she knew, it made me like her, how naive this was, this American fuck, this kids-playing-at-twilight-on-the-neighbor-hood-street fuck. After I seated it and wriggled a bit in her and moozed on her clitoris with my abdomen, I would draw it out not in a straight line but at some curve so that it would press against the walls of her cunt and she could keep track of where it was; and I would pause fractionally just before starting to thrust, so she could brace herself and expect it; I whomped it in and understood her with an absurd and probably unfounded sense of my sexual virtuosity; and she became silent suddenly, then she began to breathe loudly, then something in her toppled; or broke, then all at once she shuddered in a different way. It really was as if she lay on a bed of wings, as if she had a half-dozen wings folded under her, six huge wings, large, veined, throbbing, alive wings, real ones, with fleshy edges from which glittering feathers sprang backward; and they all stirred under her.

  She half-rose; and I’d hold her so she didn’t fling herself around and lose her footing, or her airborneness, on the uneasy glass mountain she’d begun to ascend, the frail transparency beneath her, that was forming and growing beneath her, that seemed to me to foam with light and darkness, as if we were rising above a landscape of hedges and moonlight and shadows: a mountain, a sea that formed and grew; it grew and grew; and she said “OH!” and “OHHHH!” almost with vertigo, as if she were airborne but unsteady on the vans of her wings, and as if I were there without wings but by some magic dispensation and by some grace of familiarity; I thunked on and on, and she looked down and was frightened; the tension in her body grew vast; and suddenly a great, a really massive violence ran through her, but now it was as if, in fear at her height, or out of some automatism, the first of her three pairs of wings began to beat, great fans winnowingly, great wings of flesh out of which feathers grew, catching at the air, stabilizing and yet lifting her: she whistled and rustled so; she was at once so still and so violent; the great wings engendered, their movement engendered in her, patterns of flexed and crossed muscles: her arms and legs and breasts echoed or carried out the strain, or strained to move the weight of those winnowing, moving wings. Her breaths were wild but not loud and slanted every which way, irregular and new to this particular dream, and very much as if she looked down on great spaces of air; she grabbed at me, at my shoulders, but she had forgotten how to work her hands; her hands just made the gestures of grabbing, the gestures of a well-meaning, dark but beginning to be luminous, mad, amnesiac angel. She called out, “Wiley, Wiley!” but she called it out in a whisper, the whisper of someone floating across a night sky, of someone crazily ascending, someone who was going crazy, who was taking on the mad purity and temper of angels, someone who was tormented unendurably by this, who was unendurably frightened, whose pleasure was enormous, half human, mad. Then she screamed in rebuke, �
��Wiley!” She screamed my name: “Wiley!”—she did it hoarsely and insanely, asking for help, but blaming me, and merely as exclamation; it was a gutter sound in part, and ugly; the ugliness destroyed nothing, or maybe it had an impetus of its own, but it whisked away another covering, a membrane of ordinariness—I don’t know—and her second pair of wings began to beat; her whole body was aflutter on the bed. I was as wet as—as some fish, thonking away, sweatily. Grinding away. I said, “It’s O.K., Orra. It’s O.K.” And poked on. In midair. She shouted, “What is this!” She shouted it in the way a tremendously large person who can defend herself might shout at someone who was unwisely beating her up. She shouted—angrily, as an announcement of anger, it seemed—“Oh my God!” Like: Who broke this cup? I plugged on. She raised her torso, her head, she looked me clearly in the eye, her eyes were enormous, were bulging, and she said, “Wiley, it’s happening!” Then she lay down again and screamed for a couple of seconds. I said a little dully, grinding on, “It’s O.K., Orra. It’s O.K.” I didn’t want to say Let go or to say anything lucid because I didn’t know a damn thing about female orgasm after all, and I didn’t want to give her any advice and wreck things; and also I didn’t want to commit myself in case this turned out to be a false alarm; and we had to go on. I pushed in, lingered, pulled back, went in, only half on beat, one-thonk-one-thonk, then one-one-one, saying, “This is sexy, this is good for me, Orra, this is very good for me,” and then, “Good Orra,” and she trembled in a new way at that, “Good Orra,” I said, “Good … Orra,” and then all at once, it happened. Something pulled her over; and something gave in; and all three pairs of wings began to beat: she was the center and the source and the victim of a storm of wing beats; we were at the top of the world; the huge bird of God’s body in us hovered; the great miracle pounded on her back, pounded around us; she was straining and agonized and distraught, estranged within this corporeal-incorporeal thing, this angelic other avatar, this other substance of herself: the wings were outspread; they thundered and gaspily galloped with her; they half-broke her; and she screamed, “Wiley!” and “Mygodmygod” and “IT’S NOT STOPPING, WILEY, IT’S NOT STOPPING!” She was pale and red; her hair was everywhere; her body was wet, and thrashing. It was as if something unbelievably strange and fierce—like the holy temper—lifted her to where she could not breathe or walk: she choked in the ether, a scrambling seraph, tumbling and aflame and alien, powerful beyond belief, hideous and frightening and beautiful beyond the reach of the human. A screaming child, an angel howling in the Godly sphere: she churned without delicacy, as wild as an angel bearing threats; her body lifted from the sheets, fell back, lifted again; her hands beat on the bed; she made very loud hoarse tearing noises—I was frightened for her: this was her first time after six years of playing around with her body. It hurt her; her face looked like something made of stone, a monstrous carving; only her body was alive; her arms and legs were outspread and tensed and they beat or they were weak and fluttering. She was an angel as brilliant as a beautiful insect infinitely enlarged and irrevocably foreign: she was unlike me: she was a girl making rattling, astonished, uncontrolled, unhappy noises, a girl looking shocked and intent and harassed by the variety and vicious-ness of the sensations, including relief, that attacked her. I sat up on my knees and moved a little in her and stroked her breasts, with smooth sideways winglike strokes. And she screamed, “Wiley, I’m coming!” and with a certain idiocy entered on her second orgasm or perhaps her third since she’d started to come a few minutes before; and we would have gone on for hours but she said, “It hurts, Wiley, I hurt, make it stop.…” So I didn’t move; I just held her thighs with my hands; and her things began to trail off, to trickle down, into little shiverings; the stoniness left her face; she calmed into moderated shudders, and then she said, she started to speak with wonder but then it became an exclamation and ended on a kind of a hollow note, the prelude to a small scream: she said, “I came.…” Or “I ca-a-a-ammmmmmmme.…” What happened was that she had another orgasm at the thought that she’d had her first.