The World Is the Home of Love and Death (26 page)

She says, “You’re a real man—I’ll say that for you.”

Although his face and posture have not moved a lot, his mood has: he’s now this handsome man who’s amiable, who’s sensitive, who’s
justifiably
moody and knows his own value and who’s angry the world is what it is—he’s someone who wants to be comforted sexually for this.

His displays of mood are a species of temperament, so that when he’s sufficiently self-regarding to be
a hero
like Achilles or someone in a movie, he would like to shout and whimper and discuss his worries—show himself nakedly, like showing his prick. If he and Lila were drunk and Lila encouraged him, he would crazily (in a nonsense form) or seriously do just that. But it would be taking a chance to try that here because Lila might start a fight or twist the moment—she is pretty largely untamed.

Lila brightens her face to rule his sadness and moods and dramas and to show that they are out of bounds sexually. Or some of them are. Or all of them except at her say-so. Or unless he explodes …

“It’s all hunky-dory,” he says and shakes himself. He has a cloudy look of forgetfulness and a look of a willingness to be male—although he looks sad and although she is
difficult.
He’s got a good face,
romantic
eyes and mouth—he does look young—he’s
really pretty,
and at the moment somber.

Lila has a funny sort of almost youthful self-congratulation, a late adolescent conceit on her face, but calculation like a meanness of spirit or sign of age appears and flickers and is almost sly—she grants herself some
honesty
of expression. There is a loss of style involved. She grants herself some well-marked desire, and she intends to protect herself and to be treated well no matter what she seems to risk: “I’m an honest woman who feels a little crazy, S.L.”

She looks at him hopefully, then twenty-year-oldishly—which is a sweet joke—then sort of as her own age: perhaps she is wild—it is really hard to say. S.L. has his head bent forward; his eyes travel upward and he looks at Lila while he holds himself with one hand. He sighs. He stands. He will go to her. She has a sly look. S.L.’s fuck-stuff with her is not very codified. When he stands, his hand holding the bulge of his pants, his face takes on a crude, startled look: he wants to fuck, he wants to fuck Lila (maybe). He says with complicity, “Are there any more at home like you?”

Lila’s sad, knowing little smile is very pretty; she “knows” he is meeting her halfway to the best of his understanding. But she’s sad. “I’m home for you,” she says; it is a dirty remark. “You’re a handsome Sam—” Sam is his name. “You’re a handsome Sammy-sam …”

“Sammy-sam-sam,” he says.

She can’t think of which nursery rhyme he means to refer to—or what song from an operetta or from vaudeville. His eyes indicate he’s referring to something sweet. He feels a need for simplicity: an unheedingness surrounds his attentiveness and makes it blind—and sexual. It is always a little sexual.

His nursery rhyme: “Blow the house down,” he says.

It’s raining; the summer rain makes the porch private. He’s day-dreamy about a fuck and a blow job; he has a
let’s-be-ladies-and-gentlemen-air
that he gets when he’s after something that doesn’t blackmail her so much that she despairs or blows up. She has gotten smart over the years. He has a thick poetry of posture, a gross and virile eloquence of posture, which she likes; it signals his own fuck-momentum; she might give in; he lets his breathing drift into a fuck rhythm—he’s considered a good lay. The half-recollection, half-prediction of sensations violates, then empties his eyes.

Lila bats her eyelashes and burlesquely eyes his pants caught on his stiffened prick, and she strokes him there, a nice-wife-forward-woman-playful-naughty-sly-whore—a compromise. The troubled actuality of this contains a taunting heavy sweetness: a sense of the uncertainty of things, and premonitions and foretastes are clustered in her in an incomplete sentimentality about fucking, I think. Her bold ongoingness is a form of self-love: she owes it to herself.

He feels enough confidence in his physical reality—he is large-wristed, big-shouldered—that it becomes a conviction of his spiritual stature
as a man.
He’s not a whiner or a pleader or a rapist (except to a point): he’s S.L., king of the house, monarch of the truth, soul keeper (women and children don’t have souls).

His assurance is in part about the weight and size of his perturbed genitals as it is about his imminent performance—but he is not so confident with Lila. He is aware she does not think him a bastard or liar or creep: when she dislikes him, it is because she finds him stupid. She has always refused to live anywhere except near her own family; S.L. cannot bully her. He calls her creepy and poisonous and things like that, and with the limitations of her life as a woman with (some) money, she takes his word that he knows what he says he knows. She doesn’t disbelieve him enough. Or she believes him still: this gives a perceptible and eccentric
loveliness
hastily, and harshly, to his face.

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 were 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.