The way you’re loved really does shape your consciousness—do you know? The way it lays down paths or highways. I was unrehearsed, unprofessional, unskillful—a kid. I had a whole history of being his kid. In his arms, the moment is smelly and poignant and so familiar that it is sensually realer than language can easily say: it is as real and clutching as a dream insisting it is real, insisting on its own plausibility.
Comedy comes swiftly, the accustomed and unaccustomed torture; his hair tickles—I don’t love him physically or as a father quite, or as myself in this time-gargantuan form, or in this other boy grown old and cagey form; but the torturedness in me is also sweaty and seriously hilarious, a familiarity of domestic flirting, unlaughing, the almost continuous, half-shocked hilarity of feeling—the evasiveness, half-scoffing, stupidly contemptuous—as the one who is being loved, as the son-lover, or whatever, just as in my blond childhood.
I am practiced at living on, at lasting for a while. I have lasted this long.
Finally I count aloud, “One, two three,” and then I push him off me.
“You’re a whole floor show, you are,” Dad said.
His reality upsets me, and my reality upsets him—I mean the feelings and sharing the same address and then the eyes, the look in the eyes …
S.L. says, “Let your blond hair do your talking for you.… It’s all a rat race. But keeping your mouth shut and being young, you hold aces.…”
You can lose your nerve about being loved. You can be bored to the point of rage. I was precocious: I made few, if any, confessions to anyone, ever. I am correctness itself among my errors except when I lose my nerve in the lit-up areas of this affection and the obstinacy of its blind unsuitability: love, David the Psalmist. Love between men is a strangely silent thing, really—
I want to talk to you—
I make a face in the ache of unsettled androgyny, in the degree of misplaced femininity he has imposed. I suppose he is repeating his adolescence, redrawing it in me, not him. The weight—and music—of what he does is recondite, nostalgic—forbidden. He is a dying man. The merit and sanctity of his life are greater if his definitions are the best ones, the absolute ones, the absolutely true ones. If both our lives are sanctified, what then?
If I am one of the electrifying boys and he is one of the grown rajahs and hidden-faced seducers, who are we then? His feelings. Well, was I regular-featured? Recessive? Pallid? Juicy? I don’t reallyknow. I suppose I had an exposed and plagiaristically awake look in the style of the time—imitating nothings and nobodies, he said once, despising how I wanted to be part of the time. Did my face have a heartbreaker’s truth? Was it maybe a heartbreaking compromise as faces go? My role was that of the one whose heart is thrown away. S.L.’s was to have the desperate odor of a lover.
S.L. says, “You think you know it all.”
What possibilities of story, the Know-all and the dying man. The Pretty Boy and the dying man’s happiness—what is a dying man’s happiness worth?
“Don’t make a parade of yourself,” S.L. says paternally.
“I don’t make a parade of myself …” I say.
Dad’s nervous odor, his saltiness are part of my mental sensations of youth. His responses to me aren’t physically logical. Dad’s moments with a boy, held breath and heroic tactics of eyelids: he is posing. Underwater. In the refractions, a man’s eyes staring through a wet stain of feeling, I feel the oddly slick darkness of his interest. Male beauty is a heroic matter, the too-great commotion of that. “If you notice too much, you won’t last long,” he says.
Poems of Rejection
S.L. says, “You have no sense. You want to drive people away? Is that what you like to do? You have the wrong attitude. Me, I’m as smart as they come—You don’t know a damn thing. Be careful,” S.L. says with a lot of silence in his voice: “You want me to have the last laugh?” He says, “At least, I don’t sound like a book. Try not to sound like a book. Don’t lead me on … I’m not a Betty Coed—I’m a sick man … PERIOD. Well, I don’t know who’s going to teach you good sense. I don’t claim to know every little thing: I’m not a Be-all and a Know-all like you. You ever put your head to the grindstone? Things are too easy for you. You’re lucky you got a real lump in your pants. Try to be reasonable. That’s in your favor: sweet reason. Some people are scum—don’t be like them. I’m afraid you’re no Tom Sawyer.” Was that his real desire? “The rest of us have to live too. I wasn’t someone who was there for the long count … I know my limitations. Don’t try to understand everything—just be nice. Everybody’s a thief—you know that? Don’t look at me like I should explain everything—I’m not a teacher. Listen: I’m telling you secrets. I hope you appreciate it. Do me a favor, Wiley, and don’t be a fool who thinks he’s smart, don’t be someone who thinks he’s smart and doesn’t know what’s what half the time, don’t be someone who doesn’t have a Chinaman’s chance in hell. Be nice to me. I’ve got no time to pity a fool. A young fool …”
And so on.
The ins and outs of Daddy’s speeches, his underlying sense of its being hopeless that he will be understood, his lostness, his logics, his sense of power and the strain of his illogical sense of truth, his self-indulgent love of speech, his voice threading through his sense of things, his voices really, the idle exercise of subordinate or of superior speech—At least, your dad talks to you, Wiley.… Yeah but it is a difficult thing, this talk, strange and obscene, his life, his vision of things. It was strange and obscene to comprehend his loneliness, the unhilarious despair, the part that was not a joke. I felt what it was like for him when he touched me. Or when I listened. I comprehended with my restlessness, my butt—he said that once with the deadened smile of the supremacy of his experiences, the powerful rank of the domestic presence of death, the role of the male, the tiredness in him at that false citizenship in a harsh world, his jealousy and interest in the public histories of men. We are inside a protected silence, he and I.… The war was everywhere, nearly everywhere, but not here. I did somehow comprehend that men dreamed of usurping or matching the weird power of being beautiful and causing history the way some women did. It was like a myth to be in the room with him. And it was real: a lot of this showed on my face.
“Hard facts are hard,” Dad said, wound up and ill, going on as if with mechanical delight—and slavery—to his life as a good-looking man. Nervous wit and loneliness. “I’m a lover. I do things whether I want to or not. I’ll tell you a secret: everyone thinks he’s God and wants to have a good time and his own way. That’s the engine and the caboose.”
“Am I a fool all the time?” I asked him.
“All,” he said with a triumphant, amused, huffy, weary delight.
Welcome to our morphine-laced deadpan comedy. “They say people with my condition live longer if they have a good time. I’ll tell you frankly, I’m not up to snuff. I’m a quitter. I don’t care who knows it either. It’s too much for me—I’ll shout it from the window: I’m done in; it is all too much for me. I’m fair as they come.… At least I don’t giggle when a man talks to me—”
“I’m not giggling.”
He said: “It’s baby gas. That’s a riddle. Well, one lesson you learn is don’t talk fancy if there’s no money in it.… There’s a word to the wise.” He put his hand on my knee.
“I don’t want to be a whore, Daddy …” I pushed his hand off.
“You have some funny ideas, a lot of very very funny ideas. You have too much imagination, more than you need. I’ll tell you a secret about you—you don’t know if you’re coming or going.”
S.L. is not, and never was, a nice person—“Gorgeous, yes,” Lila said, “but he was a very, very bad person. Well, I say long live the rest of us.” She stroked my arm which burned along the course of that movement of her now small-in-my-sight hand. Her touch in the fluctuations of my history is part of what I know of the fluctuations of history. We are a family of whores. In a sexual universe.
She said, “Do I give you c
onniptions? You’re the hardest person to deal with I ever saw. S.L. ’s not a smart man where women are concerned.…”
“Momma, I don’t want to be a whore.”
Lila said, “You’re someone who looks at everything and gets everything wrong. You can get away with that in school but you can’t get away with that in life.” I said (about school and my life and my value-in-the-world): “I mostly don’t have to talk about it but I have to keep it in mind because the science teacher and Mr. Caulkins”—the school superintendant and my realest ally—“say I can help win the war with what I might discover in science: that’s why they’re interested in what I’ll do next: they’re being patient with me.” A somewhat muted ha-ha was in my breath: I don’t belong to you. “It’s not easy; they expect too much from me.”
Daddy said, “Don’t aggravate me with your shenanigans, Wiley.… DON’T EVER AGAIN LET ME HEAR YOU TELLING ME OR ANYBODY ELSE HOW SMART YOU ARE DO YOU HEAR ME THERE ARE SOME THINGS I CAN’T STAND AND I DON’T HAVE TO STAND THEM DO YOU HEAR ME AND THAT’S ONE OF THEM …” Guilt and jealousy in the shadow of death.
“I was talking factually, Daddy. I get tired of pretending to be Tom Sawyer, that’s all …”
“People hide what they’re supposed to hide. They don’t hide what’s pretty. Brains aren’t pretty.” He had been a pretty man but not known for his brains. He and I are talking in the shadow of his death. Truthfully up to a point. Lying differently, at least. He got pretty crazed at times with happenstance calculations—pain, torture, death. I was supposed to be afraid of him and for him—I mean he wanted that. The oddity, Jesus, of all that he wanted. It was eerie …
I didn’t intend to accept his moody definitions or his helter-skelter advice: and, yet, in my heart, I did. Anyway, he loved me at the end—I could see it.… But it was his love.
He said, “There are some things only good-looking people know—you’re not really good-looking but you’re young: it’s all the same thing …”
Near death, if you talk, you have to take carelessness as O.K. I didn’t trust him anymore ever. His mind reluctantly, abrasively defined me, welcomed me. Wanted me dead.
He said, “You wish I was rich? It’s all money. Everyone’s a whore …” He complained about the doctor: “Well, he’s more interested in you than in me, and I’m the one with the disease. These fellas wait their chance to win out over you—it’s hard enough to die without having to watch everyone crow over me. I can live without that.” Then he heard my earlier speech or figured out the tactic: “AND I’M TELLING YOU TO SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP,” my father said. “I’M A DYING MAN,” he said, taking pride in that position, that fate, that reality of my inheritance from him.
DUMBNESS IS EVERYTHING
One time Ora and I were very drunk after a party in Bronxville—a large, milling, snotty-but-shy, defensive and prying and young and rich suburban Gentile crowd, with the usual party sexuality like a heated cloud. We were living down the road from Betty-and-Irving’s, in what had been a farmer-caretaker’s cottage. Betty was Ora’s aunt, her mother’s sister. Betty’s mother and father had lived on this Westchester hilltop, the top of this steep ridge: and over the years they had bought up two or three more places to enlarge their own.
Betty’s father was from Ohio and was a respectable sort, a front man for gangsters in the hotel and hotel-laundry business. Betty’s mother had been a pretty woman, bright, afraid of boredom. This part of the neighborhood had not been fashionable. A Ziegfeld star had lived here, one who bathed in asses’ milk. Two farms were still in operation. Most of the five remaining large houses belonged to Jews or to Ora’s Mafia-allied grandparents.
Our cottage had no garage. We used the one at the main house, a wooden building painted very white and set at the end of a very short, steep, tightly curved driveway, overshadowed by oaks. We’d had the top down on the car. I’d put it up when we got near home, for privacy where we were known, as in the lighted gas station and by the local police who kept watch on the place when no one was there. I was too drunk to drive into the garage and I laughed at this and sat there in the car on the tarred apron—built up on one side to be level—in front of it. I’d taken off my jacket when we left the party and had unbuttoned my shirt a little so that cool air would help keep me control my drunkenness while I drove.
I’d driven soberly as an act of will—you can do that. You can stand outside your drunkenness just as you can stand outside the sentences and ideas of the decade. When the car stopped, when the motor vibration and noise stopped, and the wheels were still, the drunkenness shufflingly bulged and was dizzying, more than before—it pulsed in my head, stung my eyes and rang and banged—I felt encased in invisible water, drowning. I willed the drunkenness to be quiet. “We made it,” I said. Ora and I had been stiff and as if counting the moments and miles, not certain this wasn’t the night of disaster, of a wrecked car, perhaps of death or our being crippled.
Coming home, we had spoken a little about the party, about who made passes at whom. As it got later while we drove north, we began to speak to each other with the stiffest intellectuality we could manage, of the sort we had been taught in the style of the late 1940s at Harvard: we discussed Epictetus, Hegel, Santayana. We tried to make our drunkenness traditional, or something. We were living up to college standards. We spoke a bit of anti-Semitism and intellectuality-—and we were alternately very grand, and we giggled often although not about being serious but about being drunk or about the mindless architecture of the highway, of how the Taconic Parkway was placed.
She was drunker than I was but when she was drunk she behaved with a rigid sobriety that was drunken only in a kind of underlying obscenity; she was a good-sized young woman and inveighed against things—some of it came from social class, as if she carried a horsewhip or a rifle. She was not ever at peace with that part of herself but had a refuge or retreat into an obscenely sturdy wildness of spirit, almost a rich girl’s pretension, and her pet dichotomy—that was a word she loved—between life as boredom and life as wickedness. She had to piss often when she was drunk; but she was very good-looking; and the attempts on her were usually made in the back halls near the bathroom.
In the car she had been careful not to move much because that would agitate the saucepan and make it slop over. Still, we had stopped three times and then had settled into the endurance contest of getting home. Perhaps our realer home was the apartment in the city: I don’t know.
The immensity of the view was behind us and to one side—we had an immensity of silence, an immensity of warmish wind, a breeze really but not stopping-and-starting, not made of individual hooks and curls, but, because of the great width of the night air, riverine, hugely animal and ghostly, a whispering dragon of a wind. Ora had taken her shoes off and she got one back on, a single high-heeled shoe. She turned her face toward me and said, “Kiss me. Do you feel sexy?”
No one was there, in the main house, or in the three smaller ones on the property. The trees were there, an immense copper beech snuffling in the breeze, and some larches and maples, firs and spruces. The slope opened to a view, sky and stars, distant hills and implicit valleys, farms back then, and comfortable small towns, soon to be suburb. The cleverest estates controlled their views; fools had chosen this high ridge. We had a scattering of lights above and below, stars and houses; the ones below indicated lives with less money to spend than there was up here.
“I have to pee,” she said. “And I don’t know if I can walk.”
I put my arms under hers and kind of pulled-shifted her until her thighs were spread, until her legs were mostly in a sexual posture. She was usually verbally forward, the aggressor in speech, but physically she was passive and full of waiting—perhaps that was a style back then. Her heavy head, her marvelous skin, her hair pressed against my cheek. I lifted her skirt and got her panties off—over the one high heel. The night air, the bright albino watchface moon with its blurred random wholeness, the stiffly assaulting breeze, and my
head ringing with drunkenness, of course—it is all a lost world now, those farms so near New York City and my youth and drunkenness.
The relief at not being dead and the social immensities of the time, the nearness-and-distance in the view of that vast, restless rural, semi-rural district and its local yeomanry, and the strangeness of the hour and of being in love.… Farming was merely part of what locals did; they worked, had businesses. Our escape, our elevation on this high ridge which was not fashionable—which was for outsiders (but it was beautiful, this land set so high) everything was fictional and touched with brevity and with a greatly skewed, faintly Gatsbyoid romance.
The warm wind, the moonlight, the strength of her body, the diminished dark as my eyes adjusted—in those days her face was never boring. Even she was not bored by her face. I helped her hobble across the driveway. No one could see us from the road; I mean the road was angled, and headlights would not illuminate us.
She clung to me and said, “This is too open.” I held her up and we went behind the corner of the garage. A kind of warmth came off the wood of the garage and a damp coolness rose from the grass. “Are there any animals?” she asked. At the back of the garage was a stone wall, partly overgrown, and beyond it a field now young timber that had been farmed through part of the war, eight years ago, ten. You could hear the emptiness, you could hear and see and feel that no one was there, that few animals had survived. The moon illuminated part of the garage and then it was very dark. I held her and checked the grass with my feet. “Go over there,” she said. She said, “Don’t look.”
The World Is the Home of Love and Death Page 26
