The World Is the Home of Love and Death (37 page)

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.”

I leaned against the garage. The feel of the paint and of the temperature of the wood came through my shirt and I loved myself both as a kind of machine of registry of such things and for being a little rich and for being young and on this hilltop—or side of a ridge—and I loved her more or was amorous or attached because of a thing of our minds being set at such angles that I let her describe me to myself: she expected me to love myself, to be angrily poetic, faintly savage. She taught me, kind of.

I took off my shirt so she could wipe herself with it but she didn’t want to use it, so I handed her a sassafras leaf from a nearby sapling.

First, though, were the sensations of the wood on my thin-skinned, bare back, and the shirt dangling from my hand, and the sounds of Ora pissing on the grass, the wet whistling whisper of that. And the air. And then the heroism—sexual, too—of trying to live. Lechery stirred in a winged fashion; each element of the self is a fashioner of the air and of moments: the arms bathed in air, the queer onrush of sexual self-dramatization, you know, of how the two of you do it. The roles, the longing, perhaps the wish to use one’s party self, the young woman and the boy-turned-young-man: “As long as you’re squatting there …” She looked up. I partly undid my pants.

She always had a queer reaction to my doing things, a reaction of excitement to my initiating things: she was imprisoned and then not entirely freed. It was as if she slid deeper in a kind of burrow—that was, if she accepted the invitation: sometimes she hesitated. Still, some element of negotiation remained, and there was power present in her, too.

Is it power that stirs my now clearly animate flesh? Or is it a shuffling cowardice, fucking when we’re drunk—moving within her daydreams, her ideas of sexuality? Is it a distraction of the will? Again I offer the shirt, the sassafras leaf. Ora uses her finger and some grass and stands—my bare arm supports her, touches her: she can stand and balance.

The weight of Ora leaning on me is sultry and real. I put my hand inside the loose-fitting, wide-shouldered blouse she wore. She is a powerful sexual presence.

The party had been partly for me, for signing a contract to write a movie for the youngish guy whose house it was. And Ora had dressed herself for playing second fiddle—a guy at the party, very drunk, said she was
the devil’s Venus.
She had on a white cardigan, unbuttoned. The night slid and shuffled. Now her blouse was below her breasts. Her bra was absurd. The drunkenness made me alive all over my body as when I was a boy. Leaning on each other, pausing now and then to kiss, we crossed the back lawn in the silent and unlaboring moonlight. The path wound in the enclosed setting of lawns and flower beds past the main house and two giant beeches with their vaguely silver, shattered, moonlit faces and under some maples and past flower beds and hedges and a stone patio-terrace. Ora, weighty and real, solid-bodied, gleaming vaguely, leaned on me, permissively, negotiatingly as we moved drunkenly in the dark. Where the lawn is open behind the large house, she gripped my dong to balance out my soft, night-air palping and stroking of her bare breasts. Bare-breasted, sugary-breathed (from the alcohol), faintly wet-skinned, we share a snuffling drunken kiss under a murmuring, chattering beech.

The night spreads away below us.

“How far does sound carry?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t want an audience.”

I slipped my feet out of my shoes, got her shoe off with my bare foot … pants, her skirt … her cardigan … Now we’re naked but in the moonlight—

“Can we be seen? Can anyone hear us?”

“Naw. It’s just us and the spirits—” The booze and the black cupids of modern desire. I whispered, “I’m scared of the dark—” Under the tree. A joke.

It is quite clear—as in a test—that we are not in any major way opposed to each other, physically or spiritually. It is strange, this tentative and yet, at least momentarily final alliance.

Ora’s body is a landscape, a climate—or a kind of boat—for my feelings. She doesn’t dance comfortably or wriggle or seduce with her body. There is some huge gulf between it as visible and affecting you and its inward or private reality for her as heat and that divergence is what you touch.

You touch the weird vivacities of the burrows of her body and their games of entry or hers; her body itself was the caryatid-columned porch of these moments. Perhaps I elected her body in something like the heavy way she elected me brute-of-the-moment, long-legged sexual demi-demon and commander. Not that I was or wasn’t those things, but that was her sexual projection for me—a game, maybe. It was like being plunged into a dictionary of her life with secret moments in it written out, although not in language I could understand. The overweening handsomeness of her first guy in high school was part of what she conferred, maybe dreamily, on me. We are each in a category of desire relating to pride, which is not unusual but perhaps which condemns us, two spoiled creatures on the high, sloping, moonlit lawn among flower beds, some with wooden or stone statues in them, and the hedges like walls. Much of the event is lost inside a moment hidden from language:
We didn’t make it from the car to the cottage—we fucked on the lawn.
Ora kept a diary in which she also wrote,
Perhaps this will be a famous diary.…

What we have here is a shuffling set of drunken fields of attention, the phallus in night air—the white, faintly dry branch or self, unpriapic and then priapic
as hell,
a kind of silent violence of implication, the odor of grass and of lilies—
rich, rich,
the night murmured; the boy is inside the man:
On our country property as in a dream: but it is life.…

“I owe you a good love poem, Ora.…”
I-uhahh—ohhhhhhhh-yoooooooooooo-uh-uh-guh/id luh-uhvw poh-immmm, Oh-rah.…
Laughing silently in the tenacity of my drunkenness, I stumbled and, boyishly, released her, rather than take her with me to the grass. And whirling and falling from my height and on the slope so that my head plunged seven feet, whirringly, me and my branchlike prick and me landing on my side and then turning on my back: ah, there are stars, leaves, night-yews, moon: the stink of grass: the grip of half-silent laughter, then loud, foolish laughter—"Hush—don’t …” Ora bends over: oh the breasts, oh the breasts, oh the
oddity
of breasts, oh the weight of recurring innocence, of virginity returned: the weight again of present-tense ignorance and darkness, a kind of confusion: her breath, her shoulders, her head-—a
timor felicitatis
—a fear of happiness and of its loss, a fear of her reality having power, a fear of moonlight and of my own desire. How I grip, with what ferocity, the thick, motionful sheaves of her long, handsome hair: how I own and control the dark, horselike moment, and am ridden myself by duty and pride, by her as audience, by her and me as audience—ah, ah, ah …

And the jolt of falling, traveling through my bones, did hurt my balls and my drunkenness-disdaining prick …

“Oh my God, I cannot
stand
being alive …” I said to her.

“Well,” she said, slightly mush-mouthed, hand on my prick, other hand on my arm, then on my chest—exciting herself, owning me, feeling me, owning me inversely perhaps—“that is the way you are, Wiley …”