The World Is the Home of Love and Death (18 page)

Dad has a fleshy and engorged look. He aches with his secrets. His pulse ticks with his physical response to her. He pulsates with a kind of horror and amusement that Cherry has called out in him. This is what makes him a glorious lecher. He blooms and parades; then he is sacrificed—he calls this being
a gentleman, a trooper, a white man even if it kills you.
So, sexually long-suffering, phallically edgy, he sinks into the well, the circumstances, of arousal. Her
amusement
grows. She is interested in life when she can feel her sexual life as the axis of the actual, breathing moment.

Her sense of his
goodness,
his worthiness rests on his responses to her—on his cheapness and his chivalry, his self-invented, unreliable grace:
she liked him a lot; as men go, he wasn’t bad.

Like some big-pricked men, he tends to be operatic about his own responsiveness, he is urged on to further arousal.

He says to Cherry, “What am I supposed to do with this?” and he sticks out the astonishing topography of his erection in his pants, and his hot, flushed face, like his eyes, blinks and blinks with his breath.

Twice in his life that he spoke of, he “performed” in whorehouses. He went with men he knew, they took him because of his reputation; he let himself be used; he submitted to being Living Pornography, instruction: he went to it, he worked away on a whore, naked, pink-pricked, both of them intent, with maybe four men sitting near the bed and drinking scotch and beer, and watching.

He is anguishedly shy and bold now. His sense of the heat-noise outside makes him blink faster when Cheery Cherry moves herself against him—she’s all a-sweat at once; her eyes grin. She has an odd smile. Pulling away from her, settling and resettling his buttocks, this susceptible man excites himself—but it’s as if she is doing it, her will, her will-lessness, whichever.

He has a landscape of choice. He dresses to impose law on all this, he tries to guide how he is admired and chosen by his clothes. He chooses what he will do—he does it with mixed pain and chagrin, pride and a snaking torrent of pleasure. He does it in front of an audience—the pleasure and pain and anger of others—this small-town exhibitionist.

“I like to know what I’m doing, I don’t know what I’m doing, you gotta leave me a little space to breathe, hon,” he says.

He is again in a state of sexual riot, great consciousness of muscle and of heavy genitalia. Casanova feels his nipples shine among blond hairs. He makes the choice to be excited but he suffers in that state—he prefers that pain, though, to other kinds of pain. He holds me against his chest and bites his lip and shakes his head at Cherry. “Peace—and plenty,” he says, “peace and plenty.” He runs his hand over a tabletop and feels the startling silk of its high finish and the shaved stubble of grit in it. His hands are as if alive. He feels abstention as a choking pain but he smiles, blinkingly—"I’m not made of wood.” He pushes himself against the table to rearrange his pants—his crotch—and Cherry grabs him—his thigh—and says, “Don’t do that, you’ll hurt it, I’ll do it.”

“How do you know what I’m doing?”

“You want to straighten the big fella, I know you,” she says in her twang.

He has a heavy defiance, a deep, deep secrecy. He resettles his weight differently: “The little one here—he don’t feel good—” Daddy speaks in her kind of Ruralese. “It sure is getting me down, we got to go, we got to get a move on, I got to get him fixed up or I’ll have me a stroke—a stroke.” He strokes the underside of my skimpy thigh and he moves his abdomen, first into, then away from Cherry’s helpful grasp.

He tastes the air he breathes. “I’ll talk to you this afternoon,” he says to Cherry.

The lightless hall, the sundots and revolving and widening spears of light—the false twilight—Dad is a haze and field of sensational
weightiness, longness
, and a kind of strong fatness—and she is
stroking
him and he is moistening his lips. His eyes are plumped out in ribaldry and praise—he got her to be like this—
he gave her money.
He rests his sight on a kind of sight of her breasts: “The tidbits, they ain’t watermelons—” He bumps against her hips, her haunches—strong, ungainly, serious flesh: “You’ll be the death of me, you have the flesh of fate.”

Cherry says, “I love it when you talk to me liyuk thayat.”

His taste for sexual and romantic drama is greatly pleased here. Never fully abstemious, he is a blurred poet of Eden and the consequent despair of such frequent and inevitable exiles—romanticized death.

Cherry’s body has an exaggerated willfulness, a flitter in it, a quality of presence: she is largely naked inside her thin, summery red dress. Cherry knows this is familiar ground for S.L., being chased by a woman—Lila never saw S.L. properly in this light; she knew women pursued him but she never understood what it was like for him.

She wanted to be the only one who was pursued.

Cherry has an urgency, a drunkenness, about him, about herself and him. She says, “You want to fuck, you want to talk about fucking?”

(Lila said,
I could never want to compete with a woman like that.)

His heart booms like a big wooden sloop banging against a dock.

But I feel him loving me better than her.
The terrible idea of the inside slot of her, the soft grease
—a man with a big prick tends to find cunt incurably desirable, amazing—
it’s the woman who has it who’s hard to take: they got to get even with you for every little thing. You can’t always tell if they like you or not, because if they like you, they hate you so much. I got treated well at moments, I never got treated well as a general rule. Now I’ll tell you something, I was something they liked, and sometimes, just sometimes, they was nice to me; and a woman’s who’s nice to you doesn’t lose you, do you take my meaning, or do I have to draw you a diagram?

“Later this afternoon,” he says. “Yes.”

They distribute rampant breaths and odd foot movements in the hallway, and he moves slightly upreared in the chest, carrying me.

Cherry has a shocked look, “Wayell shooor, hunn—”

She grabs him around the neck, holds him—she says, emotionally, but slyly, “I love your big balls, they got that shiny skee-in like Christmas tree thangs.”

That she wants him more than he wants her—this is what excites him, although sometimes it sickens him in people and in her, too. But it is essential to him:
I don’t know why it is you have to play hard-to-get with S.L. and chase him at the same time; he wants you to be a whore but hard-to-get: you figure it out, I can’t.

“Now let me go, hon; I’ll see you this afternoon—count on me,” but no one can count on his sense of time or him keeping an appointment.

Dramatically, Dad turns and we go through a door leaving her behind, we clatter down some dark stairs, and through a doorway, opening and closing a thin wooden door that slams inside the nausea and blackened-and-glaring headache the child has. Daddy is much renewed, a little disheveled; he is kind of feeling good now. Also, lousy.

The garage. The sting of the smell of gas. The thick, queasy—hellish—smell of oil.

“How are you, Ken?” Daddy says in a very loud voice to a man with a reddish, sunken face. A tic of muscle beats fast in Dad’s throat.

The reddish, sunken man says loudly, “Not too bad, sir—yayuss suhrr”—a low, crazy-angry countryman’s voice—“En theyattttt-sssuhhhh thhuh tree-oooth—”

And that’s the truth.

He opens the car door for us—it’s a black Dodge. We drive out of the garage into the sunstruck world below its dome of heat, and the damp air in the car from the garage gives way and becomes an acrid bitter presence when we are in the light. We drive past houses sparking with hidden and then showy flares of white fire. Dad fearful, large, and handsome in Ken’s car, S.L.’s fear—the world seems uncertain—on the road into town—steep, narrow, open on one side to an abrupt fall through space. Ken, red-faced, gaunt, squealingly fishtails the car on the absurdly tight curves of the road.

Daddy says, “The child, now Ken—be good to
the child
—”

“Isn’t that the truth? Isn’t that the goddamn truth?”

Ken says that.

Daddy sets his face, turns it into concrete or plaster colored with patience: “Isn’t Ken a real good driver, honey?” Daddy asks me. His arm is around me.

Ken bends over the wheel, hunched and sour.
(He was a pimp for her and she was a whore—that’s the truth of it.)

The car skids and rocks. The outside world jiggles and flows. The spreading hollow flows upward and things in it get larger in the leaping and sliding views from here. The glassy sparking and hot whirl.

“Daddy, I don’t feel good.”

“Hold on, we got to be nice, we’re getting a nice ride,
noblesse oblige
—even if it kills you.”

“Daddy—”

“Ken, we got a child here vomits easy—”

“Ain’t it the truth, ain’t it always the truth.”

“Stick your head out the car window, get a little air,” Daddy said to me and fairly gently pushed my head out into the dirty burning air. Around the last turn and onto the flats—the child is in the silenced, ringing, bell jar just before sickness. Then the child gags and convulses. “Woodsman, spare my suit,” Daddy says.

The car stops.

“You’re a master with the brakes, you’ve got the magic foot.”

“Well, here we are,” Ken said, modestly—maybe angrily—ignoring what Dad said.

“You shoulda been a racing car driver or a fireman, and we say thank you, thank you, kind sir.”

Ken sat, both hands hung on the black steering wheel, his elbows were down, his shoulders forward; his face, angled like a bird’s, stared forward; he is uselessly shrewd, uselessly cautious, uselessly angry.

“Thank you
again,
kind sir,” Dad said. “You’re O.K. in my book, Ken.”

S.L. was afraid all the time.

“It’s the little accidents of life, it’s the little kindnesses that get to you, they’re the honey in the cake, they’re what make life worth living, people just plain are
nicer
in small towns, that’s what it comes to, there’s a truth for you; children are the meaning of life; here’s the meaning of life, have to be nice to the meaning of life, don’t we, Ken? A smart man’s got no choice.”

Dad means it and he’s ironic—he has a kind of grace of implication.

Ken said, darkly, “Ain’t it the truth?” A low restless voice.

I’m lifted out into the palely beautiful and obtrusive light.

Reddish Ken is coquettish in a rural, fixed way.

“Who knows what it’s all about, life is just a bowl of cherries is what I say. Well, get a move on now, Ken, and let me know about Sam.”

Ken and Sam, a tenant farmer, work for Dad.

My dad owns two asparagus farms and other things.

Ken nodded with what was his business look—shame and glee. He turned on the car motor and worked it into a low, subtle, steady mutter, a kind of poetry: “Wayell—hev uh guhdd dahay—” he said. The motor noise and the heat and the car walls and windows twisted and cut the sounds his voice laid on the air—and the car drove off.

“Good riddance to garbage,” Daddy says.

Lila was sophisticated about
S.L.’s playing around,
she said she wanted him to
leave me alone sometimes and I’ll pay what’s required,
but she was jealous at times, she was immensely jealous as a person, and she did not ever seem to want him to leave her entirely; she wasn’t sure, she wasn’t sure what knowing him as a husband, knowing him carnally, what it cost her.
Her
life was what occupied her. She didn’t want to be
jealous
or
humiliated;
she didn’t want to feel strongly about S.L.; she told me this—to be forced to feel
more than I can bear
by S.L. Or not him, by her
marriage,
by the pressure of ideas, by aspects of herself:
I’m the party, I’m everyone’s party, S.L.’s my prop—my setting.

But he felt the same way.

The deeper stuff between them was steadily lied about, was known and then not known,
forgotten
that’s called, but it was too elaborate and too real to be excavated; it wasn’t forgotten, it was felt every day. They lived and died together, in relation to each other. The lecher, the anthology of amorous surprise, the calculator, I hear his breath snuffling and roaring in my ear:
Grow up and set me free from that bitch, your mother.
He said that.

But he represents the world to me, not meaning at a distance from the world as Lila does. He embodies endurance and style in the middle of the world—and ruse and cowardice—and having a good time—and being a realist up and down the scale among real events—but I didn’t think he was good at any of it.