I mean he lives up to it. The mutual role-playing here is meant to indulge each other and it is a sexual act as tangibly as self-display or dirty talk. Both S.L. and Lila shiver with taut nerves in regard to each other.
Then S.L. changes: his self-appraisal is realistic now since she agrees with it. He’s sarcastic and moved because of his male beauty and knowledgeability as a grownup. She does this for him, has this power, I mean.
Momma’s glancing up at him, at his face, now his eyes: she stares into his eyes boldly. I think his eyes seem to her to request and yet discredit what is about to occur. She doesn’t know why. She is oddly loyal. His eyes anger her but not in an overall way but inside the sexual moment—she doesn’t know how to purify him. She sits and is solemn and sexual for him—and is also a little angry.
Perhaps, too, he has fooled her and she has fooled herself in regard to him. She puts her hand back on his clothed crotch.
He says, “A little fucketty-fuck for the married people? All right?”
Lila smiles like a shopper who isn’t sure of the salesman; she’s too nervous and too angry to smile as a lecherous woman. She is brave and shows bravado toward his temper but she has a hard kernel of caution, perhaps a respect, for men: a vague, tormented mistiness enters her eyes. Nerves, stage fright, deep fright, fright beyond belief, but general, not specifically caused by the moment, hysteria—sort of pleasurably, dirtily vast.
She’s not drunk; she makes herself unmorbid, insensitive, as if she were drunk—this is a discipline, a test of a Real Woman, not a wallflower, not someone on the sidelines. As a local beauty and a college beauty, she distrusts nature where she’s concerned. And this event and S.L. make her a wife in courtship, but she is Lila-in-courtship: she feels blasphemous, daring, and crazed. She would be greatly hurt to discover she was naive finally. If her mood were otherwise, she would smile in a certain sly way and tug at his pants, but she’s not in that other mood.
He is not enough in love with her or with himself to be sexually romantic all the way through himself. He is sexually romantic as a form of politeness. Her uncertainties used to affect him, but nowadays he feels that these events wobble along and what he notices is unclear: he doesn’t pay attention to what he notices. He sometimes says, I am an old married man … He doesn’t say that now, but he thinks so what? meaning don’t pay attention …
She stirs herself to improve the occasion; she has a notion about life that it is something she is good at: on her face is an obscure gaiety; and she smiles at him in a way that denies her opinion that this moment and the world itself rest on machines of a terrible ordinariness and that it’s best not just to be amiable but to work at being romantic—her smile is romantic and particular and slinkily furtive—she’s smiled like that and influenced men before, often. She is not quite willful.
S.L. bends toward the smile, lowers his face to hers and kisses and mouths the smile in a rush of ready intimacy. One’s sense of him physically is his being packed tight, stuffed with fantasies and thoughts and warmths.
Lila—obligingly—kisses back with a grand lewdness and breadth of appetite. It is not clear what she feels. While the kiss continues, S.L. sits on the couch with a certain physical virtuosity, but the movement and his weight are also oxlike. Nicely his leg and hers press together. Kissing changes the scale of his sensations and rules them, as in sleep when an episode takes over and fills the head as if the episode were the world.
His style becomes S.L.-the-lewd. He holds Lila toughly and kisses her with amiable contempt and some seductive looseness. She likes this well enough, or she puts up with it; and she offers a flexible languor. She proceeds inwardly in a separate tonality from him.
S.L. kisses proudly and then in moderate suggestion of someone working class and then even with a jazz or black quality. His tongue’s at work, so’s hers, in a moderate uproar of sexual impetus.
Then her movements become bucking and exigent—and nervous—maybe false. S.L. writhes too: it is a bizarre tangle of implications and rhythms, baroque.
Patterns of rainy light move on them. S.L.’s intent and Lila appreciates that. Lila looks snotty; some anger flavors her sexual reality and makes it familiar and like childhood and suggests how curious and responsive, how rebellious and manipulative she was, and obstinate and blank and suggestible and restless: not steady and not interested in being steady.
S.L.’s attractiveness makes her want to see if he’s attached to her strongly. “Kiss me some more on my mouth,” she says, although he is kissing her on her mouth.
S.L. uses warm-hearted insults a lot for talk but also as sexual stuff. What he says aloud is, “You kiss like a wife—” He ends the kiss; he pulls away a bit and says into her mouth, “You fuck like a wife.” He isn’t insulting only because it’s sexy for him. He means it; and he wants to be the boss here, the expert … It isn’t simple.
Her legs stir. She responds physically to his ferocity but she hates him mentally; this frees her for the sexual voyage with its purpose, which is to snuff him between her thighs, frees her to enjoy the perils of a fuck voyage and to have her own thoughts; it works for her sexually. But it isn’t simple. She won’t nurse him—she’s a proud matron. She bites his lip.
He says, “LILA!” He kisses her wetly and slaps her breast and she mutters, “uh” or “ow.” Her mouth’s spread wide for him while he strokes her trembling leg. He and she touch tongues, lick each other’s lips and gums. A tense and as if victorious soul resides in Lila’s lip-writhings and focuses the kiss—but she’s not triumphant; I mean he’s on top. Maybe it’s a triumph of marital attachment. Her face has ripe eyelids, is warmly expressive, sensual-seeming—but it is cold and coldly calculating too, which is at odds with or is a flavoring as she leans back and is flooded with, who knows what, passivity? Attention of a peculiar sort? S.L. remembers sketchily the look of her lips while he presses on them, so hard he is aware of the small bones of her jaw and of her teeth. She says, as if contented, “You’re eating me up …” Maybe she’s proud that at her age and after so many years she can still get him going—a phrase of hers. She likes his carryings on but it isn’t simple liking.
S.L . feels her eyes staring at him and he feels her not staring but, as it were, listening to the kiss: the idea of her staring makes the closedness of the present state more real to him. In erotic jocularity—he intends his saying this to be agreeable to her—he says, “Ah, a funny honeymoon …” That’s a line from an Eddie Cantor song about making whoopee. He has his own quick tact and he switches to the faintly mocking but still somewhat more romantic, palping her breast, “Ah, a loaf of bread, honey, and thou under a tree, thou, oh thou …” He has a sincere look on his face along with the jocularity—he has a tendency to go in for thematic sprawl.
Lila’s hair is askew. “Well, I’m a woman, S.L.,” she says to him—that’s poor territory for the boast she intends to make to distract him from her age. She speaks pantingly, with her eyes cast aloft as if to signal she’s off-balance now, “I’m not a know-nothing.”
She wants a fuck that’s more final than usual, one that might change things: fuck me and change my life…. She’ll take more risks and different ones and do fuck-movements different from when she was younger, and she wants him to appreciate it although chiefly she just wants not to be reproached by a lapse of ardor in him. It is not clear if she wants him or wants a fuck at all so much as it seems she wants to make use of this territory.… She’s thirty-five years old; he’s thirty-two. That was older back then than it is now.
His hands are on the inside of her thighs on private curves—his memory has her sexual odor in it.… Sexual curiosity—fluffy, severe—widens her muscularly but focuses him. She’s about to laugh and sigh with her lower belly. Splayed on the couch, she bestirs herself blinkingly and puts her fine arms around S.L.’s shoulders, her face fattened and careless.… She’s trapped and abandoned in carelessness: some of which is response, some is signal. If she focuses it would be as if she wer
e fighting with him, fencing with him. Her knowledge of the world is hinted at in the puffy secrecy and patience and carelessness of her face. In a way it’s as if she’s been lured here; she will be—eaten. She’s partially eaten now: her legs are gone, for instance—it’s sort of like that and not like that in that she is actually alert.
Her notion of fucking, the prime requisite in sexual style, is courage, she believes, real or bluffed: this is so for men and women. One of S.L.’s good-sized hands is rayed over her breast. He’s busy and interested in various neural blossomings and heats, irregularities of himself when he acts with sexual intent. Active circuits of warm blindness become qualities of vision more important than the eyesight of not-fucking.
His horselike eyes say this-is-real-life. His lower body’s, uh, hot. Lila starts to stroke his hair with movements unsynchronized with the slidings of her haunches and the tics of her face. He’s becoming pretty much enraged by—passion. Another way to put it is that S.L. is somewhat pleased and partly released into fuck moodiness. Lila stands higher than in her own view since one kind of status for a woman is determined by how many times and how well she gets fucked. He notices that Lila’s responses are older and blatantly efficient at fuck negotiations between him and her, and not actually generous. He holds in both hands Lila’s right breast, her larger breast, which he has pulled free of her dress and has on his face a look of such seriousness of intent that Lila holds her head proudly.
“You’re like a queen,” S.L. says.
Her breasts are publicly discussed—they have been since she was young. Lila feels she’s somewhat like a historical queen who was also dutiful toward her realm; I mean the queen-image was very powerful back then in America. And Lila is modern American, tormented-low-down-willful.… These are the ways she feels.
Her face has a look of puckered queenliness—her body, her moods are a gift she makes. Her breath makes a dark sound, a whispery, vaguely ghostlike clarinet noise on the porch. S.L. as a speculation in excitement lifts Lila’s legs. He sits back and puts her legs in his lap. He is sweating in the humid air, and he smiles at Lila and he lets spittle glisten on his lips, an odd obscenity that pleases him. He strokes her tit. She chuffs, dark-mooded. His eyes have a softened presence. He and Lila are enclosed in the limits of their attention. He strokes his hair with one hand. His breath is noisier than hers. He considers, shrewdly, pleasures that aren’t here. Something uneasy hovers in the deplorably fine rainmist on the porch. The rain is iterant. Small rivers flush and gurgle on the wood and shingles of the house. S.L. stares at Lila’s tit pouched in his hands. A sexual blurriness is inside and outside both of them. His hand cups, pumps, presses on her big breast … he’s here with her.… “You’re a woman,” he says, idly commanding. She bends her head back. She is as if splayed on the couch. His intrusively able hands press and finger and make handfuls—he sweats with increasing heat, increasing cruelty. She bestirs herself and puts her own arms around her upper chest in an embrace. She is sweetly dramatically, sultrily stormily obedient—responsive, perhaps more to sex than to S.L. No word covers what she is. S.L. sees her sweet-sweaty flesh, white, he feels it, he feels her sweat like a sweet acid from dead leaves. Her distance, her unsubmissiveness, hidden but perhaps hinted at, is like snow mixed with a warm softness, rotted, corrupt: her age, her mind, her soul … It is so complex, the peasant queenliness, the aging boy and girl, the married pair. “I am of the earth earthy,” she murmurs: persuading herself? As a form of musical accompaniment? A hint of what she wants the sex to be? And she is quite stupendously still so that it is odd to speak of her passive stillness as an energy of self-expression, which ignites S.L. in such a way that he becomes dimmed rather than illuminated, flexibly languorous, fatly passive or automatic in his actions, pouty and lunatic. What a strange landscape to be in.
They each have a lauding look; she’s a peculiar self-idolater anyway, sweetly and temperamentally flattering. Lila often feels unsexual people don’t appreciate how hard it is to have a sexual life when you’re good-looking and have “position.” She’s never been certain how the laws of self-respect work in actual fucking. S.L., with a darkly pleased but mostly unclear look on his face, grips himself, his prick, through his pants. All at once he has a sore look—he’s consoling a restless but somewhat amused wound. His face, his look grows semi-engorged, heroically hurt, suffering but about to be—I don’t know—eased. He is also bland with distance, a form of sexual confidence mixed with ignorance mixed with local experience: caution and temper make his face and its expression fruit-on-a-bough-ish. He finds sex to be low and gorgeous. He stares at Lila’s ghostly and warped, interestingly sleek and panting throat. He feels sex as a frog-wetness and grunting, as frog-deformity, or worse, as bugs or barnyard animals. He and Lila are a good-looking couple; bizarre stuff is O.K., is a sign of privilege, for the frog-lovers. The insides of Lila’s breasts are tremor-ridden, musical. She wanders among her sensations as in an empty house—she is somewhat wanton in imagination. She snorts as if she were being passionate but she’s thoughtful and drifty. S.L. has a grown-up, staring-off-to-one-side look while he senses his appetites transgressing provisos and forbiddings—a great many coerced obediences are undone here, are undone for once and all. He starts to snort—in deeper tones than Lila’s, while he pats her stomach and somewhat blindly rubs and then, in a more awake style, pinches or tweaks her nipple. Now he takes on a carpenter’s air of carefulness; he runs his fingers around her breast and, bending over, leaves his tongue in her ear while he skates his fingers libidinously and with little slaps and pinches of ownership and of veto, a little amateurishly, up and down the rucked-up cloth of her clothes.
The shuffling sequence of tongue-and-hand improprieties switches now to a dapper style—as if with drumbeats, an intrusive rhythm. He moves his midsection irregularly and expressively and with some would-be sexual dapperness, diluting the truer effect of his outspread temperament, his male berserkerhood.
He says, “It’s always fair weather when true friends get together …”
And so on …
JIBBER-JABBER IN LITTLE ROCK
When I was ten, a year after my older sister had left us because of the family disasters, my mother sent me away, too. Daddy was ill, and we had no money. “It’s over,” he said. “Leave me alone.” Momma sent me to live with an uncle I barely knew, her oldest brother. He lived in Little Rock, Arkansas, far from his mother, my grandmother, whom he didn’t like and hadn’t spoken to in twenty years and would not speak to in the course of the rest of his life.
Momma had been having affairs ever since Daddy became ill, I think. Perhaps she had done that before but I’d only noticed since. I’d walked through the living room when she had company of that sort, visiting her or when she was setting things up on the phone. She and Dad really hated each other by then, as much as the Little Rock uncle hated his mother.
Mom said, “Nobody loves you when you’re old and gray …” She was forty-two, admitting to forty. “Forgive me,” she said. “People play for keeps. Little Piggy goes to market and knows it all.” I might add that someone—a childless widower—had courted her because of me. She’d known him all her life and he had a Cadillac and a married daughter. When he told her he thought it would be nice for him totake over my education, for him to send me to private school and then to college, it had irked her sexual pride.
She had been modest but she had become shameless. She walked around the house in a peignoir and made snide remarks about her men and sad remarks about growing older. I realized that sometimes my existence caused things to happen. She would come into a room and say, “Leave me alone.” And: “You and I are too close—not close enough … whichever.” She was maybe a little drunk. She said, “I’m classy, if you ask me—I’m still in the game. Do you know what that means? I still have chances. Pisher, you have to get out of my way. Forgive me. Be patient. You’ll get your turn.…” She sighed. “You don’t know about the last minute yet. I want what I want—
we’ll see if it’s too late or not.… Leave me alone,” she said. “Let me live. Let me get on with things. Let me try to live for God’s sake—if you don’t mind … Get out of my way. I’m not giving up without one last fling on the flying trapeze. I’m the daring old woman on the flying trapeze, pisher.… Watch my smoke.… The truth comes from whoever has the last word,” she said. “I’m going to try.”
I did not mind leaving her. I wanted to leave. I tried to be polite about it.
“Don’t pull a long face,” she said ironically, gently bitterly. She took me to the train station. She was a lousy mother, really. Her peculiar poetries of address and seduction and destruction drove everyone away.
She said, “Say something to me, pisher, before you go.”
“Good-bye,” I said.
“Whatever you want,” she said dryly, lighting a cigarette. “Kiss me,” she said. I stretched up and kissed her. “That’s right,” she said. “Wish me luck.…” I was silent. “Oh you don’t like me anymore—is that it? Wait and see what happens when you get old. We’ll see what we will see. You’re a child: you’ll be all right. Well, I don’t care.…” Her face held a vast emptiness. She smelled of Mommahood, Momminess, still, her perfumed powder, her clothes, her skin. She also smelled of acrid, nervous, passionate intelligence-without-point-to-it, a kind of madness. I mean she smelled familiarly of being a woman and then there was this ugly, burnt quality of odor such that I trembled dimly halfway-to-being-emotionally-through-with-her-and-finding-her-repulsive. She said, “I don’t like how my life turned out but it wouldn’t hurt you to be patient with me. Wish me luck.”
The World Is the Home of Love and Death Page 19
