The World Is the Home of Love and Death

by Brodkey, Harold

  He meant What are you doing to me?

  I was already laughing—with mad hysteria, antagonism, contempt. And I laughed some more—at him—and groaned—and sent him rays of huge reproach—huger than his since he could not at that moment really look at me. He could read my feelings, too: Daddy, stop being so stupid. It’s hurting me. He could read that in me.

  “You damned brat!” He said it with a kind of agony. Sometimes I think foolishness might be the greatest human value. I think it’s really asinine to write Poor Wiley, poor S.L.—still, I write it here.

  I said, “Daddy,” while I laughed, while I pulled back, away from him.

  He slapped me.

  Not hard.

  Hard enough.

  I blacked out. It’s one of the things I can’t live with—a gesture like that. You always were a prima donna about people’s feelings, you were finicky, everything had to be just so with you—you never cared if you broke anyone’s heart or not.

  Momma’s voice caught us: “S.L., DON’T BE SUCH A FOOL! HE WAS STANDING HERE THE WHOLE TIME. YOU SAW HIM. HE DIDN’T TOUCH THE DOOR. WHY DOES NONIE MAKE YOU ACT SO CRAZY?”

  She was a fool, too—she was jealous of Nonie. She said later, to me, You broke his heart from the very beginning. I said to her, So what.

  She made it worse that day. She said, “YOU DON’T LOVE HER AND YOU LOVE HIM, IS THAT IT?”

  God. Oh my God.

  He is in pain—he is maddened—he is desperate. The pain and horror in him scalds me. Having consoled me with his strength and folly, Daddy now wants me to share his pain and folly, and the blame, too. Ma “knows”—she wants his attention for herself—she does know, she is laughing now in a bitter way—“Oh my God,” she says, “oh my God, I have to catch my breath, if anyone could see us, what would they say? We would look so dumb I don’t how we are to live.”

  She means all the wrong choices and all the mistakes, I think.

  Nonie says, “HE DID IT, DADDY!”

  Momma says, “Uhhhh, ohhhh.” Then, “Ahhhhh.”

  That means we look so stupid to her that she’s giving up.

  Daddy wheels, he makes almost a full circle, then he finishes the circle and stares at me, he says, “Oh my Gawdd—” It’s anguish. He says, he shakes me and says, “You’re really selfish, you really have a cold heart.…”

  I feel the madness in him still.

  Momma said, “You hit the child, and he still has his bandages on.”

  Now she’s ahead of him in the shame and redemption stakes.

  How pretty and strange we all look in the shade and bits of sunlight alongside our house.

  S.L. pushed his hat back. I saw myself in his glasses as he looked down at me. “You’re bad,” he said, “but oh my God, I don’t want you to be sad anymore,” and he knelt in front of me. His hands held my arms. He kissed me with his humid lips all over my face, especially where he’d hit me, he kissed my wounded chin—then my lips.

  The hot air around us vibrates.

  He said, “Forget I hit you. It was a mistake. Listen, my fine feathered friend, you’re my sunshine, don’t you ever forget that, don’t you ever ever worry about that ’cause it’s as sure as God made little green apples.”

  Momma’s standing over there and Nonie’s on the grass eyeing the fallen door, and Daddy and I are here at the middle of the whirling scene.

  I don’t know.

  He pressed his stubbled cheek harshly against my face: “Tell me you love me. Tell me it’s O.K.”

  “You’re not nice to me, Daddy.”

  “Leave him alone for five minutes, S.L. Stop torturing him every few minutes. He’ll come around.”

  I pushed him away.

  He held me anyway, rubbed my face with the raw junkyard of his, the rattling sounds coming from it of breath and eyelids clicking.

  “Say you love me a little.”

  I nodded.

  I did love him a little.

  He looked at me and moved his hat back still farther on his head.

  Then it fell. He turned and picked it up—then he stood up, and he walked toward the car door. “No pins in the hinges,” he says now, unashamed. “I’m not surprised: no one remembers anything, no one gives a man any credit; well, we’re all fools and clowns, it’s all ingratitude, we have to make the best of a bad business, I guess.”

  They betrayed him at the car place, he means. Betrayed us.

  He will protect us.

  He is vaguely suicidal, undone—he is sailing down the chute of his despair—it’s not like Momma’s being in the land of lament; the weight and thunder of him carries him more swiftly down and down and down in mood and not maneuverably—he has to be a saint to bear it. To pass it off as not too important, his despair just now.

  He turned to his daughter and said, “Nonie, give me a hand.”

  Lila can’t lift things; she’s fragile.

  Nonie started to complain, but he said, “Come on and I’ll buy you an ice cream cone tonight, Miss Ice Cream Lover.”

  “O.K., Daddy,” she said in a kind of businesslike and yet arch way.

  Grunting and clumsy, Nonie and Daddy got the door onto the backseat of the car.

  Momma and I—and the blue jay—watched.

  Daddy climbed into the wounded Buick. Embarrassed sunlight flowed unevenly around him.

  He said, ladling out blame and with a fixed and angry—and embarrassed—face, even when his tone changed in the middle of his speech, “They don’t know their business at that goddamned car place, I’ll go light a fire under them, I’ll find out what this is all about; they’re good joes, they won’t steer me wrong, they’ll treat me right.”

  I held Momma’s hand.

  The noise of the car motor running overcame and then faded behind the noises of sunlight and leaves and Momma’s breath as Daddy, looking businesslike and resolute, backed the quarter-undoored Buick down the gravel driveway and out into the street in the white light we used to have on the top of that bluff.

  LILA AND S.L.

  Lila stands in the doorway of the upstairs sleeping porch.

  “S.L., are you looking at my legs, I have good legs, do you like my legs? I think they’re still good, S.L.” Then: “We’re alone in the house. We’re alone here. On the sleeping porch. In the rain.”

  His wicker chair creaks. She’s sweetly sourly ignominious, fretful with considerable delicacy, in her manner of invitation and sensual grace.

  S.L.’s face takes on an incautious look, the effect is almost of love, but he closes his eyes and thins his lips and looks blank.

  “Tell me, S.L—I wonder what you think you know about me—” She addresses him, his blank look, his having-rejected-her face. Then: “Let’s be human,” she says. “I like a little romance on Sundays.” She has a fragile odor of risk and good humor and of imminent self-abandonment.

  She shows she knows that if she can inspire a recklessness in S.L., she’ll feel herself to be still in luck, that is, a major force as far as matters of personal powers of attraction and fucking. And she shows some disguises and arrogance toward S.L., and recklessness—she uses the charity stuff and denies it—shrewdly and as if she had no choice, and also she can turn around and show she doesn’t care, she can manage.

  S.L.’s face takes on an incautious look, and the effect is almost of love. He says, “This rain—does it put you in the mood—honey?” The honey is interestingly curled, a little sarcastic, tentative in regard to affection—this is a tone he uses at times. He’s often afraid of Lila—he considers his fear to be a reproach to her. “Lila, you’re too much,” he says—it might be that he’s angry and sarcastic and not drawn by her anymore. And his voice, his posture are insulting—to a surprising but not final extent. He doesn’t use the hard, don’t-touch-me sarcasm that is one of his forms of anger.

  Lila sits loosely and moves her knees back and forth a little—S.L.’s got a disturbed face—he’s susceptible to her; he’s got maybe three-quarters of an erection.


  “You ought to try to understand me, S.L.—it wouldn’t hurt you.… No one would think you were a sissy if we had a little romance.”

  Some of her systems are primitive. She’s eyeing him—as if unfrightened; the imminence of a fuck can’t make her shy—she’s a grownup: that’s rough in a way, that’s roughhousing in a ladyish way—silken and loose.

  She has a slight grin of blinded sophistication. She staringly waits for the outcome of what she’s doing.

  S.L. grabs at and then drops and eludes memories of her and him at the flopping and shoving of a fuck, of fucks at the center of what they’ve done at times with each other in bed.

  Daddy says, “Well, what the shit?” He breathed, in and out, in and out. “Honey, why not? Hey isn’t that the hell of it? A good time? Why not?”

  Lila doesn’t like men who are like locomotives. She likes to leash and control. Or she has to. She said, as if he had said something else, as if he had asked her, as if he had initiated this stuff, “I wouldn’t mind a small part.” She’s boldly crooked. She spreads her legs a little wider in case he’s pissed at her. Her body has an amusedly sexual stance.

  S.L.’s disturbed by the hint of a subtlety in her; he doesn’t want to have to react to or be obtuse or be nagged by its actions: “I’m just a truck driver at heart, honey,” he said. “I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout parties ‘round here.”

  A good many people’s daydreams, including her own and his, have entered into what Lila’s like now, except for the threats in her manner: those are real, not daydreamy. She’s absorbed many sexual details and methods in her time—she’s a fairly large piece of the world, all in all.

  S.L. tries to figure out Lila’s motives: Lila’s competing with other women for him—that interests her. And he’s a convenience; they’ve been together thirteen years. He feels shocked by sexual desire, vulnerable, achy.

  Lila would like to have S.L.’s sexual moods explained to her. His neck is rigid; he shifts his legs; his hands are on his thigh, near his crotch. The heat he feels draws his belly up, as if into his chest and throat, and he is crowded with it, the barnyard heat, which holds his outer and middling and inner attention. He feels a slight tenderness toward the sensory—he’s shocked by each of his heartbeats—for several moments. A moist, heated emptiness lunges upward in him and waits for sensation, is hungry for it; and a “contrary” leadenness moves down in him until it joins in the general area of his thighs with a sullen impetus of self-erasure, a vaguely genital impulse, perhaps toward pain. It is a large part of his mind; then it becomes background; then it returns and is imperative and central.

  He laughs, his face and eyes are swollen at once when he does, a personal oddity of appearance, to go with the particular sounds of that laugh, which expresses concupiscence and contains an announcement of sexual style and a recklessness about women and some toughness and considerable ignorance.

  “You feel like being nice to me—” Lila asks. Again she spreads her legs; she offers a whorey smile.

  He says, “Keep talking to me, keep talking. You ever hear of talking too much, honey …” His eyes are heavier yet, they glare romantically and then lighten: “I’m not a talker, I’m a fucker, and you know it.” But he looks a little pouting, childish, cupidlike—it’s a passionate physical joke that he looks that way. People who know S.L. and Lila talk about which one is the suitor of the other: which one is the most loved is what it comes to.

  “Oh I know it, I’m aggressive—I’m the Veteran of Foreign Wars.”

  S.L. says, tasting his feelings, “You’re something to write home about—”

  His attention rests on her like a bright light, as if she were in a prison cell and was being kept awake. Lila has a sort of air of drama like that, as if her mood matches that one note of his excitement. She sits almost somberly and then finds it in herself to produce one of her “good” smiles, but it is not aimed but is as if she were alone in a cell with an invisible watcher; and she moves her head invitingly but not so openly, placating him as an invisible watcher, as if she admits that placating him is something she does habitually or is due him from her, or that she really is in a prison of sexual (or social) dependence on him.

  S.L. carries himself pretty much as someone whose body and face are young still. His face is cagey, however. His “youthfulness” is worth something: I mean he makes use of it: he’s a businessman. He looks sad, sadly honest—as if to say he’s not on the make. But he is on the make in being a young man: this is part of his real-world esthetic and is a complex thing: he says to her, “I’m just a real-life hero from first-to-last.”

  She says, “You’re a real man—I’ll say that for you.”

  Although his face and posture have not moved a lot, his mood has: he’s now this handsome man who’s amiable, who’s sensitive, who’s justifiably moody and knows his own value and who’s angry the world is what it is—he’s someone who wants to be comforted sexually for this.

  His displays of mood are a species of temperament, so that when he’s sufficiently self-regarding to be a hero like Achilles or someone in a movie, he would like to shout and whimper and discuss his worries—show himself nakedly, like showing his prick. If he and Lila were drunk and Lila encouraged him, he would crazily (in a nonsense form) or seriously do just that. But it would be taking a chance to try that here because Lila might start a fight or twist the moment—she is pretty largely untamed.

  Lila brightens her face to rule his sadness and moods and dramas and to show that they are out of bounds sexually. Or some of them are. Or all of them except at her say-so. Or unless he explodes …

  “It’s all hunky-dory,” he says and shakes himself. He has a cloudy look of forgetfulness and a look of a willingness to be male—although he looks sad and although she is difficult. He’s got a good face, romantic eyes and mouth—he does look young—he’s really pretty, and at the moment somber.

  Lila has a funny sort of almost youthful self-congratulation, a late adolescent conceit on her face, but calculation like a meanness of spirit or sign of age appears and flickers and is almost sly—she grants herself some honesty of expression. There is a loss of style involved. She grants herself some well-marked desire, and she intends to protect herself and to be treated well no matter what she seems to risk: “I’m an honest woman who feels a little crazy, S.L.”

  She looks at him hopefully, then twenty-year-oldishly—which is a sweet joke—then sort of as her own age: perhaps she is wild—it is really hard to say. S.L. has his head bent forward; his eyes travel upward and he looks at Lila while he holds himself with one hand. He sighs. He stands. He will go to her. She has a sly look. S.L.’s fuck-stuff with her is not very codified. When he stands, his hand holding the bulge of his pants, his face takes on a crude, startled look: he wants to fuck, he wants to fuck Lila (maybe). He says with complicity, “Are there any more at home like you?”

  Lila’s sad, knowing little smile is very pretty; she “knows” he is meeting her halfway to the best of his understanding. But she’s sad. “I’m home for you,” she says; it is a dirty remark. “You’re a handsome Sam—” Sam is his name. “You’re a handsome Sammy-sam …”

  “Sammy-sam-sam,” he says.

  She can’t think of which nursery rhyme he means to refer to—or what song from an operetta or from vaudeville. His eyes indicate he’s referring to something sweet. He feels a need for simplicity: an unheedingness surrounds his attentiveness and makes it blind—and sexual. It is always a little sexual.

  His nursery rhyme: “Blow the house down,” he says.

  It’s raining; the summer rain makes the porch private. He’s day-dreamy about a fuck and a blow job; he has a let’s-be-ladies-and-gentlemen-air that he gets when he’s after something that doesn’t blackmail her so much that she despairs or blows up. She has gotten smart over the years. He has a thick poetry of posture, a gross and virile eloquence of posture, which she likes; it signals his own fuck-momentum; she might give in; he lets his breathi
ng drift into a fuck rhythm—he’s considered a good lay. The half-recollection, half-prediction of sensations violates, then empties his eyes.

  Lila bats her eyelashes and burlesquely eyes his pants caught on his stiffened prick, and she strokes him there, a nice-wife-forward-woman-playful-naughty-sly-whore—a compromise. The troubled actuality of this contains a taunting heavy sweetness: a sense of the uncertainty of things, and premonitions and foretastes are clustered in her in an incomplete sentimentality about fucking, I think. Her bold ongoingness is a form of self-love: she owes it to herself.

  He feels enough confidence in his physical reality—he is large-wristed, big-shouldered—that it becomes a conviction of his spiritual stature as a man. He’s not a whiner or a pleader or a rapist (except to a point): he’s S.L., king of the house, monarch of the truth, soul keeper (women and children don’t have souls).

  His assurance is in part about the weight and size of his perturbed genitals as it is about his imminent performance—but he is not so confident with Lila. He is aware she does not think him a bastard or liar or creep: when she dislikes him, it is because she finds him stupid. She has always refused to live anywhere except near her own family; S.L. cannot bully her. He calls her creepy and poisonous and things like that, and with the limitations of her life as a woman with (some) money, she takes his word that he knows what he says he knows. She doesn’t disbelieve him enough. Or she believes him still: this gives a perceptible and eccentric loveliness hastily, and harshly, to his face.