The World Is the Home of Love and Death (27 page)

Her notion of fucking, the prime requisite in sexual style, is courage, she believes, real or bluffed: this is so for men and women. One of S.L.’s good-sized hands is rayed over her breast. He’s busy and interested in various neural blossomings and heats, irregularities of himself when he acts with sexual intent. Active circuits of warm blindness become qualities of vision more important than the eyesight of not-fucking.

His horselike eyes say
this-is-real-life.
His lower body’s, uh,
hot.
Lila starts to stroke his hair with movements unsynchronized with the slidings of her haunches and the tics of her face. He’s becoming pretty much enraged by—passion. Another way to put it is that S.L. is somewhat pleased and partly released into fuck moodiness. Lila stands higher than in her own view since one kind of status for a woman is determined by how many times and how well she gets fucked. He notices that Lila’s responses are older and blatantly efficient at fuck negotiations between him and her, and not actually generous. He holds in both hands Lila’s right breast, her larger breast, which he has pulled free of her dress and has on his face a look of such seriousness of intent that Lila holds her head proudly.

“You’re like a queen,” S.L. says.

Her breasts are publicly discussed—they have been since she was young. Lila feels she’s somewhat like a historical queen who was also dutiful toward her realm; I mean the queen-image was very powerful back then in America. And Lila is modern American, tormented-low-down-willful.… These are the ways she feels.

Her face has a look of puckered queenliness—her body, her moods are a gift she makes. Her breath makes a dark sound, a whispery, vaguely ghostlike clarinet noise on the porch. S.L. as a speculation in excitement lifts Lila’s legs. He sits back and puts her legs in his lap. He is sweating in the humid air, and he smiles at Lila and he lets spittle glisten on his lips, an odd obscenity that pleases him. He strokes her tit. She chuffs, dark-mooded. His eyes have a softened presence. He and Lila are enclosed in the limits of their attention. He strokes his hair with one hand. His breath is noisier than hers. He considers, shrewdly, pleasures that aren’t here. Something uneasy hovers in the deplorably fine rainmist on the porch. The rain is iterant. Small rivers flush and gurgle on the wood and shingles of the house. S.L. stares at Lila’s tit pouched in his hands. A sexual blurriness is inside and outside both of them. His hand cups, pumps, presses on her big breast … he’s here with her.… “You’re a woman,” he says, idly commanding. She bends her head back. She is as if splayed on the couch. His intrusively able hands press and finger and make handfuls—he sweats with increasing heat, increasing cruelty. She bestirs herself and puts her own arms around her upper chest in an embrace. She is sweetly dramatically, sultrily stormily obedient—responsive, perhaps more to sex than to S.L. No word covers what she is. S.L. sees her sweet-sweaty flesh, white, he feels it, he feels her sweat like a sweet acid from dead leaves. Her distance, her unsubmissiveness, hidden but perhaps hinted at, is like snow mixed with a warm softness, rotted, corrupt: her age, her mind, her soul … It is so complex, the peasant queenliness, the aging boy and girl, the married pair. “I am of the earth earthy,” she murmurs: persuading herself? As a form of musical accompaniment? A hint of what she wants the sex to be? And she is quite stupendously still so that it is odd to speak of her passive stillness as an energy of self-expression, which ignites S.L. in such a way that he becomes dimmed rather than illuminated, flexibly languorous, fatly passive or automatic in his actions, pouty and lunatic. What a strange landscape to be in.

They each have a lauding look; she’s a peculiar self-idolater anyway, sweetly and temperamentally flattering. Lila often feels unsexual people don’t appreciate how hard it is to have a sexual life when you’re good-looking and have “position.” She’s never been certain how the laws of self-respect work in actual fucking. S.L., with a darkly pleased but mostly unclear look on his face, grips
himself,
his prick, through his pants. All at once he has a sore look—he’s consoling a restless but somewhat amused wound. His face, his look grows semi-engorged, heroically hurt, suffering but about to be—I don’t know—eased. He is also bland with distance, a form of sexual confidence mixed with ignorance mixed with local experience: caution and temper make his face and its expression fruit-on-a-bough-ish. He finds sex to be low and
gorgeous.
He stares at Lila’s ghostly and warped, interestingly sleek and panting throat. He feels sex as a frog-wetness and grunting, as frog-deformity, or worse, as bugs or barnyard animals. He and Lila are a good-looking couple; bizarre stuff is O.K., is a sign of privilege, for the frog-lovers. The insides of Lila’s breasts are tremor-ridden, musical. She wanders among her sensations as in an empty house—she is somewhat wanton in imagination. She snorts as if she were being passionate but she’s thoughtful and drifty. S.L. has a grown-up, staring-off-to-one-side look while he senses his appetites transgressing provisos and forbiddings—a great many coerced obediences are undone here, are undone for once and all. He starts to snort—in deeper tones than Lila’s, while he pats her stomach and somewhat blindly rubs and then, in a more awake style, pinches or tweaks her nipple. Now he takes on a carpenter’s air of carefulness; he runs his fingers around her breast and, bending over, leaves his tongue in her ear while he skates his fingers libidinously and with little slaps and pinches of ownership and of veto, a little amateurishly, up and down the rucked-up cloth of her clothes.

The shuffling sequence of tongue-and-hand improprieties switches now to a dapper style—as if with drumbeats, an intrusive rhythm. He moves his midsection irregularly and expressively and with some would-be sexual dapperness, diluting the truer effect of his outspread temperament, his male berserkerhood.

He says, “It’s always fair weather when true friends get together …”

And so on …

When I was ten, a year after my older sister had left us because of the family disasters, my mother sent me away, too. Daddy was ill, and we had no money. “It’s over,” he said. “Leave me alone.” Momma sent me to live with an uncle I barely knew, her oldest brother. He lived in Little Rock, Arkansas, far from his mother, my grandmother, whom he didn’t like and hadn’t spoken to in twenty years and would not speak to in the course of the rest of his life.

Momma had been having affairs ever since Daddy became ill, I think. Perhaps she had done that before but I’d only noticed since. I’d walked through the living room when she had company of that sort, visiting her or when she was setting things up on the phone. She and Dad really hated each other by then, as much as the Little Rock uncle hated his mother.

Mom said, “Nobody loves you when you’re old and gray …” She was forty-two, admitting to forty. “Forgive me,” she said. “People play for keeps. Little Piggy goes to market and knows it all.” I might add that someone—a childless widower—had courted her because of me. She’d known him all her life and he had a Cadillac and a married daughter. When he told her he thought it would be
nice
for him totake over my education, for him to send me to private school and then to college, it had irked her sexual pride.

She had been modest but she had become shameless. She walked around the house in a peignoir and made snide remarks about her men and sad remarks about growing older. I realized that sometimes my existence caused things to happen. She would come into a room and say, “Leave me alone.” And: “You and I are too close—not close enough … whichever.” She was maybe a little drunk. She said, “I’m classy, if you ask me—I’m
still in the game.
Do you know what that means? I still have chances.
Pisher
, you have to get out of my way. Forgive me. Be patient. You’ll get your turn.…” She sighed. “You don’t know about the last minute yet. I want what I want—we’ll see if it’s too late or not.… Leave me alone,” she said. “Let me live. Let me get on with things. Let me try to live for God’s sake—if you don’t mind … Get out of my way. I’m not giving up without one last fling on the flying trapeze. I’m the daring old woman on the flying trapeze,
pisher.…
Watch my smoke.… The truth comes from whoever has the last word,” she said. “I’m going to try.”

I did not mind leaving her. I wanted to leave. I tried to be polite about it.

“Don’t pull a long face,” she said ironically, gently bitterly. She took me to the train station. She was a lousy mother, really. Her peculiar poetries of address and seduction and destruction drove everyone away.

She said, “Say something to me,
pisher
, before you go.”

“Good-bye,” I said.

“Whatever you want,” she said dryly, lighting a cigarette. “Kiss me,” she said. I stretched up and kissed her. “That’s right,” she said. “Wish me luck.…” I was silent. “Oh you don’t like me anymore—is that it? Wait and see what happens when you get old. We’ll see what we will see. You’re a child: you’ll be all right. Well, I don’t care.…” Her face held a vast emptiness. She smelled of Mommahood, Momminess, still, her perfumed powder, her clothes, her skin. She also smelled of acrid, nervous, passionate intelligence-without-point-to-it, a kind of madness. I mean she smelled familiarly of being a woman and then there was this ugly, burnt quality of odor such that I trembled dimly halfway-to-being-emotionally-through-with-her-and-finding-her-repulsive. She said, “I don’t like how my life turned out but it wouldn’t hurt you to be patient with me. Wish me luck.”

Taking a deep breath, I said, “Good luck. And leave me alone from now on. Don’t come after me this time. No more changing your mind. Let me
go
. ”

In photographs that year, I was an ugly child twisted with tension and self-disdain. I was as shy as if I were covered with mud. I was pitiable, and that hurt me. I was squat, ill-proportioned, with long thighs and a neck so long that I had been called for a while
Giraffe.
Dismounting from the train in Little Rock is a troll of a child, squinting, twisted, with no freckles and nothing impish about him.

The actual moment slides in and out of focus. I remember how strange and unpromising my aunt and uncle looked, large aunt, buck-toothed, pompous-looking; small, grinning, monkeylike uncle: they looked like self-important, emotionally ignorant people with money and no sense. In childhood one sees this but can’t say it. One can only say
I don’t like them.
In childhood one is several steps away from the literacy of self-defense. Many boys rarely or never look in grown-up eyes.

I was relieved that these people could stand the sight of me. The sufferance I was on in general, I mean in life, not in a story as someone active in response and in play, a presence, the pity and concern, the doubts and jealousies I aroused weren’t really part of Happiness-and-Normalcy Land or Adjustmentville. Aunt Charlotte was marginally less unattractive than Uncle Simon, and when she held out her arms, I returned her embrace in a version of my most honorable, sincere-child way. I don’t know if regular children do that, lie and suck up to grownups for the sake of shelter or not, shelter and the rest of it.

You can tell a lot in a hug, the dry boringness, the degree of emotional ignorance. Aunt Charlotte was a childless woman, plain and with a difficult husband, a proud, bossy woman in ugly clothes. Itregisters. I sincerely sucked up to Aunt Charlotte who was self-righteous and hairy and had a large bust. Aunt Charlotte responds to the hug of the wild boy, the fierce but dry seductiveness, the request.

I was, when I was with other boys, the most foul-mouthed, a specialist in vile vocabulary. I did not actually know about sex but I suspected that it existed. There is an odd musty smell to Aunt Charlotte and a look of command in her eyes. Uncle Simon, ah, Uncle Simon was quick-talking, he had a high tenor voice; his talk was a quick jibber-jabber. He had a lot of wavy, grayed hair, and canceled, or collapsed cheeks, small jowls, an enlarged nose, and a thin but protruding mouth that wandered half the width of his face when he talked.

His aura was male-womanly, and he was entirely averted inwardly, turned away emotionally from me and the moment. His “Hello,” his “Let’s shake hands” were so devoid of emotional presence that one sensed that for him being liked was everything—not in a fool’s version, but in his own neurotic version. His manner was one of cold charity. He had a funny sharp smell that lonely conceited men, subduedly homosexual, retired military men and priests and aging gangsters had, that bitter worship of the male and the disdain for it. And the lifelong experience of not being able to interest the men one did admire, the settling for a bureaucratized version of admiration for the nearest bearable male.

In Uncle Simon’s case, it was one of the U.S. senators from Arkansas. Simon had taken into his house a series of boys related to the family. I was the third such boy. Ten-year-olds are not actually childish; they are semi-adult but sexless and savvy about childhood.
One of those
, as a caption in my mind, meant his hands were too forward and too stiff.
He smells bad
, I thought despairingly, governs the sense of the emotional emptiness of the man.

He said in his quick, treble jibber-jabber, “Train trip interesting? Did you meet interesting people? You’re not a snob: you’re someone who talks to people on the train, aren’t you? Or are you a Northerner, a Northerner through and through—ha-ha.” He was a quick-witted, political joker who had no humor.