Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (30 page)

Then when it seemed from her strengthening noises and her more rapid and jerkier movements that she was near the edge of coming, I’d start to place the whomps, in neater and firmer arrangements, more obviously in a rhythm, more businesslike, more teasing, with pauses at each end of a thrust; and that would excite her up to a point; but then her excitement would level off, and not go over the brink. So I would speed up: I’d thrust harder, then harder yet, then harder and faster; she made her noises and half-thrust back. She bit her lower lip; she set her teeth in her lower lip; blood appeared. I fucked still faster, but on a shorter stroke, almost thrumming on her, and angling my abdomen hopefully to drum on her clitoris; sometimes her body would go limp; but her cries would speed up, bird after bird flew out of her mouth while she lay limp as if I were a boxer and had destroyed her ability to move; then when the cries did not go past a certain point, when she didn’t come, I’d slow and start again. I wished I’d been a great athlete, a master of movement, a woman, a lesbian, a man with a gigantic prick that would explode her into coming. I moved my hands to the corners of the mattress; and spread my legs; I braced myself with my hands and feet; and braced like that, free-handed in a way, drove into her; and the new posture, the feeling she must have had of being covered, and perhaps the difference in the thrust got to her; but Orra’s body began to set up a babble, a babble of response, then—I think the posture played on her mind.

But she did not come.

I moved my hands and held the dish of her hips so that she couldn’t wiggle or deflect the thrust or pull away: she began to “Uhn” again but interspersed with small screams: we were like kids playing catch (her poor brutalized clitoris), playing hard hand: this was what she thought sex was; it was sexual, as throwing a ball hard is sexual; in a way, too, we were like acrobats hurling ourselves at each other, to meet in midair and fall entangled to the net. It was like that.

Her mouth came open, her eyes had rolled to one side and stayed there—it felt like twilight to me—I knew where she was sexually, or thought I did. She pushed, she egged us on. She wasn’t breakable this way. Orra. I wondered if she knew, it made me like her, how naive this was, this American fuck, this kids-playing-at-twilight-on-the-neighbor-hood-street fuck. After I seated it and wriggled a bit in her and moozed
on her clitoris with my abdomen, I would draw it out not in a straight line but at some curve so that it would press against the walls of her cunt and she could keep track of where it was; and I would pause fractionally just before starting to thrust, so she could brace herself and expect it; I whomped it in and understood her with an absurd and probably unfounded sense of my sexual virtuosity; and she became silent suddenly, then she began to breathe loudly, then something in her toppled; or broke, then all at once she shuddered in a different way. It really was as if she lay on a bed of wings, as if she had a half-dozen wings folded under her, six huge wings, large, veined, throbbing, alive wings, real ones, with fleshy edges from which glittering feathers sprang backward; and they all stirred under her.

She half-rose; and I’d hold her so she didn’t fling herself around and lose her footing, or her airborneness, on the uneasy glass mountain she’d begun to ascend, the frail transparency beneath her, that was forming and growing beneath her, that seemed to me to foam with light and darkness, as if we were rising above a landscape of hedges and moonlight and shadows: a mountain, a sea that formed and grew; it grew and grew; and she said “
OH
!” and “
OHHHH
!” almost with vertigo, as if she were airborne but unsteady on the vans of her wings, and as if I were there without wings but by some magic dispensation and by some grace of familiarity; I thunked on and on, and she looked down and was frightened; the tension in her body grew vast; and suddenly a great, a really massive violence ran through her, but now it was as if, in fear at her height, or out of some automatism, the first of her three pairs of wings began to beat, great fans winnowingly, great wings of flesh out of which feathers grew, catching at the air, stabilizing and yet lifting her: she whistled and rustled so; she was at once so still and so violent; the great wings engendered, their movement engendered in her, patterns of flexed and crossed muscles: her arms and legs and breasts echoed or carried out the strain, or strained to move the weight of those winnowing, moving wings. Her breaths were wild but not loud and slanted every which way, irregular and new to this particular dream, and very much as if she looked down on great spaces of air; she grabbed at me, at my shoulders, but she had forgotten how to work her hands; her hands just made the gestures of grabbing, the gestures of a well-meaning, dark but beginning to be luminous, mad, amnesiac angel. She called out, “Wiley, Wiley!” but she called it out in a
whisper,
the whisper of someone floating across a
night sky, of someone crazily ascending, someone who was going crazy, who was taking on the mad purity and temper of angels, someone who was tormented unendurably by this, who was unendurably frightened, whose pleasure was enormous, half human, mad. Then she screamed in rebuke, “Wiley!” She screamed my name:
“Wiley!”
—she did it hoarsely and insanely, asking for help, but blaming me, and merely as exclamation; it was a gutter sound in part, and ugly; the ugliness destroyed nothing, or maybe it had an impetus of its own, but it whisked away another covering, a membrane of ordinariness—I don’t know—and her second pair of wings began to beat; her whole body was aflutter on the bed. I was as wet as—as some fish, thonking away, sweatily. Grinding away. I said, “It’s O.K., Orra. It’s O.K.” And poked on. In midair. She shouted,
“What is this!”
She shouted it in the way a tremendously large person who can defend herself might shout at someone who was unwisely beating her up. She shouted—angrily, as an announcement of anger, it seemed—
“Oh my God!”
Like:
Who broke this cup?
I plugged on. She raised her torso, her head, she looked me clearly in the eye, her eyes were enormous, were bulging, and she said,
“Wiley, it’s happening!”
Then she lay down again and screamed for a couple of seconds. I said a little dully, grinding on, “It’s O.K., Orra. It’s
O.K.
” I didn’t want to say
Let go
or to say anything lucid because I didn’t know a damn thing about female orgasm after all, and I didn’t want to give her any advice and wreck things; and also I didn’t want to commit myself in case this turned out to be a false alarm; and we had to go on. I pushed in, lingered, pulled back, went in, only half on beat, one-thonk-one-thonk, then one-one-one, saying, “This is sexy, this is good for me, Orra, this is very good for me,” and then, “Good Orra,” and she trembled in a new way at that,
“Good
Orra,” I said,
“Good … Orra,
” and then all at once, it happened. Something pulled her over; and something gave in; and all three pairs of wings began to beat: she was the center and the source and the victim of a storm of wing beats; we were at the top of the world; the huge bird of God’s body in us hovered; the great miracle pounded on her back, pounded around us; she was straining and agonized and distraught, estranged within this corporeal-incorporeal thing, this angelic other avatar, this other substance of herself: the wings were outspread; they thundered and gaspily galloped with her; they half-broke her; and she screamed,
“Wiley!”
and
“Mygodmygod”
and “
IT’S NOT STOPPING, WILEY, IT’S NOT STOPPING
!” She was
pale
and
red; her hair was everywhere; her body was wet, and thrashing. It was as if something unbelievably strange and fierce—like the holy temper—lifted her to where she could not breathe or walk: she choked in the ether, a scrambling seraph, tumbling and aflame and alien, powerful beyond belief, hideous and frightening and beautiful beyond the reach of the human. A screaming child, an angel howling in the Godly sphere: she churned without delicacy, as wild as an angel bearing threats; her body lifted from the sheets, fell back, lifted again; her hands beat on the bed; she made very loud hoarse tearing noises—I was frightened for her: this was her first time after six years of playing around with her body. It hurt her; her face looked like something made of stone, a monstrous carving; only her body was alive; her arms and legs were outspread and tensed and they beat or they were weak and fluttering. She was an angel as brilliant as a beautiful insect infinitely enlarged and irrevocably foreign: she was unlike me: she was a girl making rattling, astonished, uncontrolled, unhappy noises, a girl looking shocked and intent and harassed by the variety and vicious-ness of the sensations, including relief, that attacked her. I sat up on my knees and moved a little in her and stroked her breasts, with smooth sideways winglike strokes. And she screamed,
“Wiley, I’m coming!”
and with a certain idiocy entered on her second orgasm or perhaps her third since she’d started to come a few minutes before; and we would have gone on for hours but she said, “It hurts, Wiley, I hurt, make it stop.…” So I didn’t move; I just held her thighs with my hands; and her things began to trail off, to trickle down, into little shiverings; the stoniness left her face; she calmed into moderated shudders, and then she said, she started to speak with wonder but then it became an exclamation and ended on a kind of a hollow note, the prelude to a small scream: she said, “I
came
.…” Or “I ca-a-a-ammmmmmmme.…” What happened was that she had another orgasm at the thought that she’d had her first.

That one was more like three little ones, diminishing in strength. When she was quieter, she was gasping, she said, “Oh, you
love
me.…”

That, too, excited her. When that died down, she said—angrily—“I always knew they were doing it wrong, I always knew there was nothing wrong with me.…” And that triggered a little set of ripples. Sometime earlier, without knowing it, I’d begun to cry. My tears fell on her thighs, her belly, her breasts, as I moved up, along her body,
above her, to lie atop her. I wanted to hold her, my face next to hers; I wanted to hold her. I slid my arms in and under her, and she said, “Oh, Wiley,” and she tried to lift her arms, but she started to shake again; then, trembling anyway, she lifted her arms and hugged me with a shuddering sternness that was unmistakable; then she began to cry, too.

S
OMETIMES WHEN
I wake, I am eleven years old; and the underside of the bedsprings, the rows of coils that face me, sag, squeak, clatter against the wooden bed frame, flabbily press air—a slow sound—when I grip the curved enameled wires of the coils with my hands and bare feet, and move horizontally, hand over hand, foot over foot. No part of me touches the floor. I can climb sideways or toward the foot or head of the bed, my head in any direction. I am in my underpants and otherwise naked. And sweaty. That child’s bare feet are crudely large, intrusions from next year’s body. The weighty endowments to come shove and push unimaginably at a mind that refuses to name or predict them, shove and push at the childish bones and skin, too; his wrists have a grossness no other part of his arms yet has. Some time-ridden force hives and swarms in him, with no due proportion, swelling out here and there, enlarging his lips: his mouth is dull and harsh, the lips flattened planes, unchildish in his high-colored face; his eyes are cold, abstract, and hurt and vengeful eleven-year-old eyes; whatever hives in him secretes a honey and he has pale, summer skin, but also secretes a venom and he is sullen; his disposition is rough, unhoneyed, cynical, bloated with impatience. He is, with desperate weariness and unamusement, sly. He is not under the bed alone; he is with another child, one considerably smaller, seven years old, perhaps. The other child is in his underpants, and barefooted, and lies atop him as he climbs, suspended, on the underside of the bedsprings. The other
child clings with his arms around my neck, his legs slide from side to side within the guardrails of my skimpy thighs; I shift my abdomen often to change the plane on which he slides, to block or interrupt a slide, to contradict the loose bony slippage of his uncoordinated frame on me: he bounces and bumps and slips on my abdomen and chest. I scuttle within the confines of a game of Tarzan. If his mother or grandmother comes in, they may or may not object; I don’t care. The bed-springs are a matted tangle of jungle growth; sweatily, intensely, I disturb the dust of habitation in the half-grave beneath the bed.

Any memory of private play that year would be of play in barely lit garages or thin-windowed basements, in the most distant and the weediest parts of fields, in the corners or on the hidden side of roofs of half-built houses, or in the hidden tunnels in clumps of shrubbery, among the prickle-edge leaves and nagging spines of evergreens, or on tree branches leafed in, or in windowless shanty-clubhouses, by candlelight at noon, anywhere out of sight—perhaps I speak only of myself. I wanted to be unobserved. Boys and girls already adolescent mysteriously shamed me by their notice or even their mere presence, grownups wore me out and humiliated me—younger children spied and bore tales, were stings administered by another world: all faces held the threat or actuality of humiliation closing in; to be eleven was humiliating, the powerlessness, the lie of looking like a child still; we had been more lovable a few years before; now we got on everybody’s nerves. In our view, we were the only true humans, the only complete, rational beings, clearer-headed than angels—no adult understood this. They thought we stammered with unease; it was with contempt. We did not believe we were temporary; we were too rational for miracles, for puberty; there was no hair on me below that of my eyelashes except childish fuzz—we waited. I had almost the cold heart and the will and austere obsessiveness of a man. Not quite. The moment before puberty is perhaps the clearest-minded of any but it is full of errors: still, we were all brain, eyes, logic, will, and a working coldness. I did not believe in time and change, in anyone’s honesty or promises—my cynicism was absolute. What passionate, relentless scoffers we were. We were like actors in a movie who know they will be murdered shortly, and everything about them, arms, legs, soul, will be carted away, will vanish from the plot, and not our parents, not our friends, not even memory would find
us
again. We were as cold and sly and temporary, as full of basking and venom, and with a peculiar suitable treacherous cold irking beauty, as snakes.