The World Is the Home of Love and Death (38 page)

“Big-mouth—big-mouthed evil girl kisses Jew on the grass.”

I never liked the way she kissed unless I directed her. On her own she kissed too
thickly
for my taste.

Drunkenly, I saw the usefulness of disliking her kiss, its usefulness as a plot device; it goaded me to roll on top of her, a little more down the slope, on the tickling, faintly harsh grass; I want to control the sloppiness of her kiss, turn it into sensual coherence. In disdain, to withdraw from the kiss, to rise to a half-sitting position, commandingly, as if punishingly—
ah, ah,
the extraordinary uninnocence of the event despite my being innocent and stupid, or stupid and—I don’t know: somehow it was all of a piece.

Her hands, their touch, was often clumsy, detached from sexual meaning, from insinuation or rhythm or from submission but seemed left over from daylight stuff. I feel her hunger for—for what? For me and for Romance, for something knowable within the lingua franca of contemporary notions. I am so aware of her that I
feel
her hunger to know, to live what she has read, and I am aware of her distance from me and of her permission, and I am aware of her fake or counterfeit of self-loss. And I can close off that awareness and simply proceed or I can stay with it which is more sadistic in a sense.

I stroke her, in an aware way. I say, “Let’s ruin your dress—” her skirt really, which I tried clumsily to place under her while mock-entering her.

“Here on the grass?” she says. She often complains that I am too blunt.

“Here on the grass—”

“The moon will see us,” she said in the style of plays and movies she admired.

“Sssh,” I said.

In our cottage, as in the apartment in the city, she went around pulling shades although we were not visible. She was afraid of envy—and she required privacy: she liked secret sexual perspectives or was imprisoned in them: the perspectives of a player and of an audience arousing the envy of the air, the spite of the night spirits. She objected even to the moon.

The omissively omniscient encyclopedia which is Ora is partly an encylopedia of American Desires. This fine-eyed, astoundingly good-looking, strongly made woman loves her clichés. “I have a big brain—” she says. Then she abandons or loses the thought. She apologizes or masks herself: “I’m drunk—I like this.…” She said the last in a kind of college way: we met and first fucked at college.

Her thoughts are hidden from me behind the bones of her forehead, of her skull, of her great prettiness: walls of bone policed by will: her eyes in moonlight do not convey bodily acceptance but radiate attention from a different group of her congress of selves, her repertoire of attentions, of questions—her risks, her philosophies, her sense of fatedness in herself.… Her interest, her curiosity is in what other women have, and men: that envy and cleverness—that realism—it is a way of knowing real things. The boniness of her relents and what spills out from her in a kind of stink of promptness is sexual invitation to the burrows: that courage of hers, that thing of sexual readiness, that inert tension of whether to be active or still, but inviting anyway, I love that—I love it deeply. On the steep slope of the semi-mountain lawn, the trees, and me, drunkenly, reelingly risen over her, and the nursery dirtiness of our drunkenness: she says, “This will be a dirty fuck.…”

Perhaps she means
Let this be great sex
 …

“Shut up,” I said, from within the same fictional world—I mean it was me but I was playing my role. The moist ground and the moonlight: I was cautious and did not name myself: I was a structure of hiddenness—as she was but differently. Here, the circus trick, the trapeze thing is to be
logical
in a drunken moment on a sloping lawn with a specific woman at a specific moment in her life—in mine, too, and in a specific year: a specific fuck.

Ora says, with praise that is a little gritty with insult in regard to her
ambitions,
her fantasies—her fictional world: “You are a king—this is a king’s garden—” she says pornographically, having a say: “It is a king’s prick.”

I whisper tyrannically,
regally
—I used to love my large white prick—"Hey, Ora, no propaganda, just fuck, O.K.?” She always hated my saying that.

To be logical is to recognize the free symmetries, where one act is free-willed, sort of, and the other in response is not as free to be unsymmetrical, directly or in undermeanings or overtones. The curious movements of the selves are
ambitious
—male free-will ignores her. Female free-will drifts off into fantasy or other absence: love and flight, the Eurydice thing, not blinking, not looking back, not holding back. To whatever extent I don’t fantasize or withdraw into myself or respond to her direction, I hold her astonished physical gaze, but this depends on my finding her phallically exciting—a dialogue exists. She doesn’t bounce or drift into feeling and then return: she is willfully present in a way that is unloving, but it is love as she does it. For each of us; she writes the dialogue, and I
astonish
her out of that daydream.

There are conditions and circumstances of touch and posture—the role you play in the kiss, in the licking—and elements of courage, of sexual courage, of wit and of sophistication of a kind in her that don’t necessarily match my moods, my nerve endings. I like a kind of storytelling structure and a confession of who you are. When I touched or nuzzled Ora, she often couldn’t do the dance of response, but she grew warm and welcoming. She seemed to be reacting to the drama, to what I did, but really to something inside herself. She was safe from me at the bottom of flight after flight of steps so to speak. Who she was—I mean the person and then the overlay of how she had been taught and how she had rebelled—was interesting to me, but not a lot since it seemed like a cage she was in. She never really confessed; she negotiated and did what she considered her part. I didn’t like her notions of wildness or of routine stuff; her versions didn’t permit much feeling or made feeling a curious thing surrounded by critical recognitions, little oh’s and
ah, that was good, that was the goods.
She liked that kind of thing. I don’t know how much that was her and how much was social class and a Gentile thing.

Sophistication? Well, each fuck is the edge of the end of the affair, of not caring, or being angry and set on cheating, or being mysteriously or unmysteriously set free—it’s weird-—and then that doesn’t happen quite: you’re not set free.

Well, drunkenness sets you free somewhat. At least to a flow of connections, undulations into modulations of mood: she was too movielike and not funny, so I said, meaning when we were on the slope, “Not here—there—” Rolling her over on the grass and rolling with her: “Roll you over in the clover …” It made her slightly dizzy, and she gasped and grinned, suddenly amused.

The odd, childlike submissions she would do were not like the stubborn things of her unresponse or the awed moments of frightened cooperation when her fright made her more sexual. She was more frightened of feeling than of me—of the loss of her powers of negotiation. But I didn’t want to lose my male powers: we had these masks. Some of her fright was of losing me but it wasn’t so great that fucking her was like dancing or a pas de deux: I mean she liked my presence, liked it steamily, but not as much as I would have liked from her and which I had had versions of with other people.

In a way, a life’s story would be A Book of Fucks—wouldn’t it? She wants me to let go of myself and do what I like: she says so. She means the two-character fuck—she is being generous and in her terms
loving.
I slap her butt sharply. On my knees I roll and tumble her smartly, and at first she laughs, but then she grows recalcitrant: she kind of grunts, rises from the waist, hugs me. She is strong-armed, wet-mouthed, wild-haired, something of a fake in the pouring moonlight; her strength and mind, her strength of mind, her head—she wants me to pose as the commander, to dance in the moonlight, be lightly brutal and grunt and plunge drunkenly; she wants me to show her my sexual secrets—my nursery secrets—my locker-room secrets.

We elude each other—but not completely. You can’t assume a primary asymmetry of the selves: something in us fits with each other, the vibration of similar pain, similar selves in part, somehow similar. My mind doesn’t lose its sexual attentiveness toward her but does to myself, which slows down the accumulation of that hot, luminous throbbing which indicates the nearness of orgasm. She stiffens faintly: it is a matter of seconds, she knows that quickly; it happens two or three times, a stroking, a manipulation of the breast; this affects her and registers in my body, in body heat and the smell of the sweat and in the drunken touch: we are now in the realm of secondary theatricalization—it seems like a moment of virginity because she is new to this.

I start to laugh in the night air. Women mostly know how virginal or unvirginal they are, but Ora is like a man in this, this other sense of consciousness, of being untouched, unpenetrated.

The moments of tumbling her and the moment of the slap on her large-ish, moonlight-whitened and moonlight-shadow-folded butt (and the sight of her marvelously beautiful back) were when I moved past her sexual experience and became the unvirginal, or dirty one, the priapic demon, the bad male. And she became the wronged, slightly angry—slightly huffy—well-educated virgin.

She laughed out loud, too—gasped maybe. Then I was alone—moonlight and the dark and the starlight. And in this moment she fled too, fled inwardly, either frightened or betrayed, a watching nymph—but a dirty-minded one, not a virgin—and everything got more theatrical and, as it were, mathematical, the two of us, minds and bodies, spirits and drunkenness.

Then it became a requirement, kind of in the sense of being the only good
-humored
possibility, to be violent and distant toward her, violent in a kind of dirty and knowing good humor, which is what she had tacitly asked for. She didn’t always choreograph what I did, but if I was drunk or tired or tired of her, she did.

She couldn’t recognize my experience if it was not like a book or like men she had known, if it was not in a category. She faltered in comprehension because I was like a younger brother or a cupid in some ways—I was actually a year and a half younger than she was. We were brother and sister in sin—sort of—sort of as in a story. But incest would be perfunctory and boring except for its being a sin because you knew the same things. Incest might not be such a deep experience but it would be easy.

I mean there was a kind of social class thing in Ora, a sexual social class thing, sort of
the inferiority of other people showed in the inferiority of their consolations
—she wasn’t entirely sure of this but she was fairly certain. She had experimented—she knew the automaton reality and men who smelled of fear and eagerness and self-consciousness, and she had experienced some sense of inner darkness and of wrong invitation in the other: what I always felt as
a dirty landscape,
the dirty landscape of sex with its queer coils of space in one place, its queerness as journey and as instruction and as darkness and light.

When one of us failed in a moment, the other was often mysteriously symmetrical in failure but not always. I mean the symmetry wasn’t an exact incestuous echo but a weirdity. You don’t know where to put your feet—your prick, your sexual
anima,
or soul—and you hide it, you pretend to assurance. The moment opens up: and you see and feel your ignorance like blindness as everyone says, and you peer outwardly; your gaze flashes around the universe and comes back and is inward in some queer reciprocal fleshy elbow-and-knee and crotch-and-cunt geometry which is higher and less easily measurable than symbols on paper are. But you
see
that each freedom to act is a kind of prison demanding you act, that each iota of overlordship or privilege is a whipgoad of
do this, do that.
You see each reciprocity as a failure—and goad—until orgasm frees you, and you see each refusal of reciprocity as an invitation and a reciprocal thing somehow but in the
oh my God
mode.

The very violence, or edge of violence, stuff is instinct with queer, binding and blinding tenderness: blind girl, blind Samson, blind Delilah. What we pull down—Ora is Samson, too—is concern for other parts of our life. It is only us, drunkenness softening sexual vision by deepening it like the moonlit-bright night sky with the thorns of light on the lawn among the leaves and in the flower beds. Anyway, in the depths of a moment, we’re laughing and kissing, and I am kind of active, and Ora is not; what is mostly there is ignorance, just like when you’re exploring philosophy, and the more ignorance you admit to, the more sophisticated you are, provided the ignorance you admit to is the right sort. Dumbness is everything.

I mean if Ora at this moment, drunkenly, refuses to admit her ignorance but goes on being Sophisticated Samsonetta, she becomes something like a tour guide. She fails to ascend the moment; she avoids the fall into hellishness (not really)—the cunt obviously being a gateway of sin for everybody. So the whole thing’s a mess, but it’s juicy and tender. You know this by a kind of sensation or sense of defeat, as if hitting her would solve everything, or at least ease the defeat. I am looming over her, holding both her breasts. The demonic and sour glee, the biting and choking stuff she likes, sort of
I am strong, I am potent, I don’t need anyone
—I don’t do it much; I think she is deluded. There is excitement in playacting it or in really dominating and scaring someone. Holding back becomes a complicated issue.