The World Is the Home of Love and Death

by Brodkey, Harold

  Leave me alone.… His prying. He’d said this stuff before: nearly everything said between us has a history. Intimacy …

  I turn the water up louder.

  Dad was an exhibitionist. He winks at me (in memory). He still has a small-town style, a kind of out-of-date vanity as an old-fashioned man, a gentleman—nostalgia is a form of romance among men in the Midwest. Maybe it’s always a style—sort of a you know who I am … I am not a surprise.… A form of seductiveness. He was in style still with rural people; this showed when he went into the VA hospital. Sometimes his sickness got worse when he was in a rage. He mostly slept in my room after I was ten years old, lived alongside me in actual days, actual nights. He lived with me, not Momma. He slept alongside my dreams at night.

  Now he says, “You’re like a weed. You grow like a weed.” He doesn’t know what tone to use. “We’re a pair of Tarzans.”

  No, we’re not.

  We’re in a third-floor apartment; treetops alongside the sidewalk stir outside. We’re on Kingsland Avenue …

  I had noticed the change in all my smells. He could bear to be near that—I was surprised and thought he was nuts. My ambitions as achild changed every few months when I started to grow, when I became a growing boy. My inner feelings were as if written on a sheaf of papers that were crumpled into a single black-and-white wad, flowers and no-flowers of odd heat, faintly cold and half-understood. Businesslike daily toughness, tough-nerved realism but the realism changed day to day as I did physically, a kind of flowering, partly dirty. Even in the cold water of the kinds of shower I took, I have hottish breath as if there were now a fire in my consciousness or a lot of fires: things burning without clear, or formal, outward reason; and the recurrent smoke of this stuff choked me even in the water. The odd, gulping atop the inner heat, atop the feverish heat at moments, the queer, private smoke that makes me comical, a fool.… Why would my ill father want to be near this smelly, incomplete, smoke-ridden, fever-brained person, this skinny, early man?

  Dad on the other side of the curtain says, “Are you tired of being a saint? I guess your balls dropped—or didn’t they?”

  “I don’t know …” I said from inside the water. I remembered my balls hung high and being little beans and now there they are … The delay or lags of the mind toward transformations … my balls had been throbbing for months.

  “You got a lot to learn,” Dad says on the other side of the curtain. I’m playing a bit with my whang-ee. He says: “I’m putting ideas in your head. You got too many there already—take some advice from me: don’t be too important. Just be human. Don’t let nothing get in the way of being human. Believe me, I know … I learned the hard way. Love and affection come first—you know about the bluebird of happiness? Well, that’s the truth—the bluebird of happiness is right in your own backyard. So be human …”

  The changing light of meaning inside a speech, the direct lying and hopeful swindling, and the hot air, and then in other phrases hopeful almost-sincerity, a hidden proposition and sincerity—Be a fool and listen to me, let’s be fools, love me, I love you, it’s all a mug’s game, stay close to me … Did he sound like this all along but I was too little to get it? I used to hear differently. Jealousy and temper, I experience them, but I mostly refuse to know about them.… Am I girlish? Am I a saint? He has said to me, You save my life every night—you surely do.… He experiences less terror if I am there. I was protected by the big ha-ha of art which defends such phrases as fathers-and-sons; but I have been aware for years that most of the fathers and sons I know are in a mess. My rank as a boy is high because my father’s interest in me is so great. I am a star—like Sabu, in the movies.

  “Elephant boy, howdah-do, isn’t it a fine howdah-do. Wiley, the elephant boy? Is this a ‘Sikh’ joke?”

  The water is in my face. The independence of others’ wills is part of the loss of Eden; one understands Justice in the Universe differently. I am sometimes interested in the thing of his being interested in me and sometimes bored by it.

  “Are you a rooster?” he says. “Are you crowing? Cock-a-doodle-ooo, not a cockadoodl e-dooodooo—I bet the hens are laying eggs for you.” His talk casts a sexual shadow. He has no money, he can’t back up his bribes now; he can’t bully anyone: he can’t buy anyone. I don’t know what he expects: S.L. was always a Big Expecter. I start to do what boys do, some boys anyway, jack off just out of range of the strange world. An act of espionage, of cleverness, of rebellion—behind the shower curtain. I am very quiet about it. An awful sweetness, an awfulness in general, a vertiginous pre-satisfaction sets in. Sensations are in as if winged motion in a gulf of simultaneous forgetfulness and omniscience. I am as if at an altitude above the multiplicity of wills in the prison house.

  He is saying, “You’re a growing boy—welcome to hell—well, I don’t want to give you pause; I want to applaud you.” He means everything, everything he says, one way or another. He says, “Be young and sweet: use your head. Remember I always said, use your head. You’re a Jim Dandy, I’ll tell the world.” The surprised electricities of the self, dancing and mocking, raked by water noise, magnetically attract further naked electrical storms, response, in grasp and half-grasp in the speed of life. I feel Dad’s voice as an electric touch, cruelly civilized in a burning way, this thing of the air-raids on you of an actual voice, thatnervous actuality.… The delicate cliff of nests and its gates and the sore and smooth-electrical thorniness, that stuff and the soul dilating—hurtfully—the momentary collapse of loneliness and the onset of a rash availability, over and over, the rabbit heat and finch tones of sexual sensation enter me as a sort of rape. These windless transfers, mind to mind, man to man, the madly different inner labyrinths and dangers, it is like a dream although it is directly real.

  Everything has significance as in a poem. Or as when you’re in love. I’m sorry I lived in the ways I did live, but the different motions of parts of me went whirring and whirring among various electric reeds and in a biological light, meanings half-given to me, half-earned, half-stolen, the mathematics of mental things: the great stammerer speaks, ab, ah, what astounding feeling.

  “Are you taking a cold shower? Are you getting rid of your feelings?”

  Cleaning up I am coldly without feeling, and then suddenly wrenched by sensation and feeling. Who is he on the other side of the curtain? The soft-edged, masked-face manifestations of his importance to me shriek among the flusters of guessed-at meanings—the mind is listening: all of it is real. … A wild and stinking horde of ghosts hoots along my nerves and disorders my schoolboy calm. Freakishly compounded complexities of feeling in an interval-breathed self … in a moist pit of feeling, the agonies of pleasure and the dimensionalities of duration and recurrence. Specific memories in their changeable meaning, nanosecond by nanosecond, carom along lines of association, witnessy and radiant.… Unrepeatable singularity, the real geography of the moment, the vocal silence in the bathroom, calculation, sweet silence.… The mind is a sort of angel’s egg of the universe and hatches stuff.

  Daddy, back in our room, the two of us, Daddy sits himself in the too-small chair by the window. He is ill and listening to himself, sullen and distant. He loved you. He always loved YOU. “Maybe you should take a shower,” I say, drying my hair. Some days he is afraid of bathing and of showers.

  He says, “Spare me your opinions. I don’t like smart-alecks.… Well, I guess we are in the land of broken hearts.” What does he know? “Knowing you is like sitting in an electric chair,” he says. Then he says, “Little Bird, you are my sunshine.” Sometimes an electric chair, my mind adds.

  The smart-aleck boy says aloud, “Sometimes an electric chair.”

  We go two-by-two in the flood. In my voice you hear my father’s voice, Daddy’s voice—What did you expect, that you could know anyone with impunity?

  “Doncha kno-ohhh? Juh know j’uhh {k}no{w}, know, know better than to talk like a fool …” he says with a degree of grandeur.

  Each flicker
of mind is like a barn swallow circling, hunting, perching. I don’t want to be graceless. The odd, true, jammed warehouse of a world and of an intimacy, the actual leaves in the slight wind at the window, agonized, temporary, interrupted tumbling, the skittery advance into the next moment, the thuds and rumbles and stolen strength of the heart, among the secrecies. A lost ecstatic real is part of the hortatory stillness: dry your hair and dry between your toes and keep breathing.… The real billows out in insistent kinship—the real does this in me, assigns me to itself. My parents came to me without footnotes.

  My Dad says to me, “Pisher—” Then: “Little Pisser—” Then: “Macher Peepee—” Mockery. Then: “Don Juan … you’re dripping on the floor.”

  I thought I knew what he thought life was like for a man.

  Some of S.L.’s Jokes

  “I have to laugh sometimes: people who look like turkeys think they look like angels—maybe they have their wings in their wallets. I had the face of an angel when I was young, and over prison walls I could fly. The daring young man on the flying trapeze. I would give you the shirt off my back, and a lot of good it did me. You didn’t have to kowtow tome like I was God. I will say this: there is no appreciation in the world. Ah, ah, everything wears me out. Well, I always voted for a short life but a happy one. I wouldn’t say it’s been a happy one. I don’t care. I’m the I-don’t-care boy. How do you like them bananas? Well, you can all go to hell—not you if you’re nice. I’ll tell you the truth: life isn’t good for you. Did you know I was a philosopher? I am but no one pays attention. It’s not my fault I was always a sweetheart. I didn’t make the world—there’s a lot I didn’t do. You are the light of my life—how is that for a joke on me? I guess I’m not too lucky, but I’m a good sport. I give three cheers because I have you in my life: you cheer me up: hoorah, hoorah, hoorah. I wouldn’t believe everything I say if I was you—I wouldn’t listen to me like I was William Shakespeare, … Listen to me like I was S. L. Silenowicz—that’s enough for me. Give us a kiss …” He says, “I don’t want to be listened to like I was a woman—but I sure as hell’m not the man in the family. I’m down and out; I’m cannon fodder. I lost everything and I’m stuck. I’m stuck with you.…”

  My sense of accident and darkness comes from him, from what he said in the weakened boom of his voice and how he looked at me, the expressiveness of his face, in the domestic light of his illness, of the time we spent together—bridal, two men in a room, a kind of early adolescent ceremony of education: I mean that being with him was to enter the world of men … “Learn to talk to me, and you can talk to anyone.… Believe me, I understand everything—everything. I’m the center of the universe. When I look up, there’s sky all around, so I know I am the center.” Him and his son more or less—Ah, God, you gave me a decomposing, local emperor, and the relentlessness of moments, death, actuality. “If you don’t pay attention, I don’t exist—do you hear me? If you don’t understand me, I might as well be dead now—you’re talking to a sick man, but I am a man …”

  I was impressed by the efficient effect, the sense of truth (of a kind) that he conveyed to me in his talk, in his jokes, in his actuality. I listen and from time to time I actually hear him.

  He says, with a sigh, “You have a way of sucking me in, little pitcher with “big ears—the big pitcher—well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. I always hated old Jews: they smell bad and they think they know it all: they don’t listen to anyone. You want to cheer me up? You want to make a career of this? Half the world is waiting for your sunrise. It’s hard to love a man—ask me and I’ll tell you the truth: I’m such a genius, I can do that. It’s just my luck that you can’t love anyone. Anyone asks you, you tell ’em, S.L. said I couldn’t love anyone … S.L. always defended me: people said I wasn’t fit to sleep with hogs, and he said I was …”

  I remember the often ugly but thrilling melodies his voice had, the male implication, shameless-shameful, men-in-a-garage, his variety of talk. It stirs me in the bowels of my being—it reminds me of who I am.

  “I don’t want everyone spoiling you—anyone,” he said. He often changed his mind midsentence. Pronouns and emotions flew around as did his sense of propriety, about what it was fit for me to know. “You’re just a kid. Everything is hard enough without you making it worse.”

  His throat chuffs with obedient and disobedient breath in illness and intimacy.

  “What I have to say is turn over a new leaf—actions speak louder than words. Give us a kiss. Who knows what a kiss means? Captains and lootenants—what would it take to get you to be nice to me, a real human being, day in and day out?”

  (I said dully and in a pure voice, in some daring and self-protective and in some hurting-him and saying no and some scoffing way, “It isn’t for sale, what I do.”)

  “What does that mean?” he said, outscoffing me. And adding a male more-than-a-schoolteacher knowledge of language. Also a social class thing, small-town, ruler-of-the-world thing. He said, “I know more than a schoolteacher does: what you say doesn’t make sense. I know what sense is; ask me, I’ll tell you.”

  I muttered, “Leave me alone.” My eyes were not averted. My politeness; my refusal to be tough with him encouraged him.

  “What? What is it now? You talk gibberish, Esperanto … pidgin … pidgin English … pidgin shit …”

  Looking at him and feeling the express reality of my youth and comparative freshness (it is in the eyes and eyelashes; it is in the youthful skimpiness, spindliness, newness of nerve endings), I scowl, knowing that it affects him.

  He winces. “Being nice gives people a reason to like you,” he said encouragingly.

  I was aware that if you were nice to him for a reason, that then he wouldn’t consider it nice—he had a thing about love, about the paradisaical—always more and more complete and pure, more and more ideal, or nearer to it. I knew better than to say anything to him about him and upset him; he sometimes had spasms of heart fibrillation if I crossed him. It’s interesting if you’re thinking, if you have a thought or whatever, and you don’t want it to show on your face, how the thought itself becomes nasty and more pointed because it is hidden: He’s being stupid.

  Anyway, my silences, my glancing away are part of our language which has problems because of the differences in our ages and in our minds—you know? You have to do it by feel and by eye—and you know misapprehension is built in—if I use an ideal measure, then he is not bookish. If he uses an ideal measure, I am not sonlike in the way sons act in movies or in daydreams—I am too fancy, too modern. To understand requires a physical sympathy, vaguely sexual, and an emotional sense of calculation. But when I manage it, it is like being dressed up and clean.

  Then if Dad hugs me too intimately, it gets all fucked up.

  As long as the gestures were sparse, then the signals, words, and breathing had precise musics or urgencies. When the sympathy grows more heated and touchy, then everything becomes gross. My side of the dialogue, already limited, is wiped out in his imposing this passion—or whatever it is—imposing it on us. I don’t feel that stuff. It seems ruinous to me, ruinous of me. I mean, in the room, in the smell of dust, in the smell of sunlight, in the smell of the hour of sunlight in that room, in the nearby sense (and sight and odor) of my father’s arms and chest, I was wiped out. Ugh. This made me skeptical toward his feelings. But if you’re not going to be destructive, you have to be skeptical only in the right way.

  I felt my existence had no merit in his eyes beyond that of to-be-devoured. I don’t think there were many possibilities for him. The notion of infinite and different realities of meaning exhilarated and frightened me and seemed very secret, a closed book. But people felt I was an open book, which means young.

  S.L., suffocating me, said, “You’re a tough nut.”

  It is scary: the infinite time-bony extent to which someone touching you is an antagonist, casually ruthless, part of a delusion where love (and laziness) and surrender are entwined.

  H
e said, “You’re not so much fun as you think—you hog the floor. A real person has to make sense out of you. Your problem is you doubt people. You’re no better than anyone else.…”

  “You don’t treat me as if I were the same as you.”

  That triggered his temper: “Shut up! SHUT UP! Hush! I want to hear my own voice for a change. I am smart by popular demand. I am good-looking in my way.” Old routines he used to do at parties he and Mom gave. I kept wanting to understand clearly as when I read books. I knew his was love talk in a way.

  But what was important to me—to my soul, if I might be permitted to say that—was that you couldn’t film us. Or quote us as some kind of high, noble, sentimental example. The unordinariness and then the aura Dad has of his right as a full-grown man to have passions, the way he has so many ways of getting his way, the way he mostly runs things—you can’t film that. He has a tactic of being in control impatiently; he has a fluster of wicked principledness. Male realism. Glamorously intent.

  And that is always just about out of control in a good guy way, alive and human, and stinking and dark-willed in an invertedly and endlessly different-languaged world—his world. A stink of acrid nerves is in him as if he has been traveling day and night to this hug—traveling, ill in the moments … (His reactions to me were the basic medium in which I learned to swim.) Compared to the world—and in the light in the room—I was, at my young age, preeminently a change of subject for him, a change from illness and death, and from his own being, his own personality—that was the term back then.

  Love for a son was part of an obscure rigmarole of a change of meaning which he, and only he, judged. I mean I had no say, or very little, and no social whatever constrained or guided him and certainly not Momma: no one had any say-so in what the meaning was. “I am a man. I am an American,” he said. Momma said he was a bossy Jew and didn’t know it. I rejected his definitions of things—he hadn’t managed his life well—and I denied the reality of his principles and his ideas and ideals. But I was aware of how he breathed and the way he became sightless in the hug and was sighted inwardly with a sense of sensual-emotional emergency. I mean he affected me. The sensibility of the flesh, the hands, the backs of the hands and the palms like queer irisless eyes and his neck pulsing was a kind of sense—or judgment—so that he is what I know, his acts, these moments—his obdurate, anxious heat, an in-the-depths heat, a thing of being in deep water that took his mind off his dying.