Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (68 page)

At moments, as we walk, as he breathes in and out, as his moods alter, I feel his strength blending in with the beat of my heart behind my ribs—it is a vast sensation; almost infinite is how it feels. I widened out and had new reaches of myself and larger bones, a larger voice. I had his large heartbeat as echo and shadow or prop of my own much smaller and neater one: cello and perhaps tin drum. The mystique of male company is in this area of sharing strength, this addition to the self which has armylike aspects to it, a sense of multiplication. S.L.’s hospitality was hopelessly arbitrary, and sexual, unrooted in real customs—his sexual actuality constrained him—he could not be other than a man of lechery, he could not be
friendly
without being an immediate intimate: all his social grace and formality consisted of his holding back, of his being ironic about what he felt and largely knew, rightly perhaps, to be the sexual nature of the world.

His real hospitality was in sexual matters.

S.L. was thirty-three years old. A large percentage of his fucks were mercy fucks (and another large percentage was with whores, a pro
playing a pro). It is very strange, the charity of a sensual man, the movements of the heart in someone profoundly sensual, and the qualifications and reality in it. Ultimately, such charity accuses you:
If you can’t fuck and be attractive, you’re a Poor Thing.
Part of any real sense of strength is the sense of charity it has, the way part of being womanly is built around showing a kind of illegal mercy. With people with money, like us—a lot of this is corrupted by dealing and tricks. Bribes matter. That charity is now devoted to the good-looking mute kid—but it has an odd proviso because of my real father’s brute strength and temper (and his ignorance:
He is scum,
I will overhear when I am older) and because of the child’s prettiness and charm of posture and of expression: S.L. did an inventory: “You carry yourself good, you got a charm there in what you do with your face, you have real nice coloring, Prettikins.”

He is a father: I am proposing an
unideal
father, one for whom fatherhood can’t be a closed topic. He is an unideal example but he may be typical anyway. I am an example of an unreal but ideal son to him but not ideal because damaged and mute—that’s how it works. He is merely who he is, I am a narrator, and not just a narrator but a son who will “appreciate me, give a little
nice history, for a change—”

I am also merely who I was, a kid. And so what? So far as I know, I am maybe also a timeless fragment of truth—but it is mounted at an odd angle to the ecliptic of the earth in this rainy light.

A white house rises in front of me above its own gray and black reflection in a puddle, a sheet of dark water. It makes me tremble, the phenomenon, the dreamlike screen, the flattened and foreshortened mimicry and then the true and shadowed, to me somewhat tilted, wood loomer. I tremble in my ignorance. Everything is eccentric in plane and everything is albino to some extent. A gold rectangle on S.L.’s belt is pale, is palely
white
-seeming, with only a faint cast of possibly being also yellow in the glary and wet and drifting and changeable light. I cannot tell you how much I loved the actual house and how much I feared and even loathed its reflection. I kicked at the puddle, or stepped on it, to break it, or squash it. The reflection in its ideal nature shows a house in which I cannot live—one I cannot enter. I can’t live in the reflection; and at moments it seems to have stolen the real house and the realities of entry and halls of the wood loomer. I see in its smoothness, in its slick, enshrined prettiness, a rebuke to my grossness of dimension, and the related fleshly flaws of my existence. This bursts, in a kind of emotional
budding, into my yearning to have things be different for me—such things as that.

Then my mood changes.

I doubt that I am as changeable as S.L.

I am as changeable as S.L.

I stamp on the puddle and disorder it in real (and childish) earnest. Rescued, set free, the real house sails unheedingly blunt-walled in the gray and brown air—it goes on looming tiltedly, dimensionally: I look up to check on it across its piece of wet lawn and in its brackets of wet white mist. It ignores me.

I move on hurriedly, I come to the next puddle. In it I see another reflection, leaves of a tree and me looking down—a pale, curly-haired, blond child, very pale—and I see the gables and the chimney of another house. It is easier to see the house and its windows and chimneys and part of a tree and its branches and its leaves in the puddle where they are flattened and stilled and close to one another than in the trembling air in which, when I look up, all the mysterious separations into distances and directions and densities and differences dismay my shy, and maybe fragile, mind. I squat and touch the screen with a finger: everything is oddly angled, with ladders of succession, and no space; but only a kind of flattened clarity of organized presentation that is interesting and seems useful although no use is given, except that one’s eyes feel placated and fed.

The house has wooden siding and twisted and partially gleaming windows in the dulled light of the puddle. Shadowy fans of wind ruffle the surface and raise gliding and blinding ridges, but in such fine ways that the house and its border of near leaves—near to me peering in the puddle—do not entirely disappear. Insofar as I can read what I see (much of the world is a disorderly scribble to me, green and brown and silver chaos), the windows are framed, silled, corniced—there are a lot of them, of windows. Here is the tilted head of the doubled and peering child. The reflection is a reflection but it seems to be leaves and me and part of a house. It is not habitable but it is true. It is legible. It seems to be good training in seeing. It has the breath of Spirit in it. I held my fingers above it and slowly did not touch it and then I did. Then I withdrew them.

I like the usefulness but I do not like the hint of the ideal, the presence of ideal meaning—seemingly. It has a threat to it, a weird quality—it has the menace later to be noticed by the child in ideas and principles
proposed to him for him to be ruled by. The reflection has no real odor. I begin to wonder where is the sound of a train, where are the fields. Then I do hear a train far away, but the house is not trembling at all. The house wall near me does not echo and boom. We are here—we are high in the air, it seems from the silence and from the quality of the air: it is true: this is high ground. The noise of the train so far away and of the drip of water, of the stilled rain, like the noises S.L. makes, that
Daddy
makes, this much transformed man, are not examples of anything, but I can make them examples of the truth of the other house being one of these houses, of there being only one house so long as I use the reflection as the feeling and name of house. I do this, and the element of error in me turns out to be truth—
in a way
—as in my childhood dreams (and still, I would suppose).

“Look at you,” Daddy says. “You’re a looker—ha-ha.”

Nowhere here, nowhere, is there a single one of the odors of the other house.

Daddy and I, each, quiver with the lines of our moods—our lives: this is an example of being father and son in a way.

I echo with the man’s presence—it almost but doesn’t drown out the lines of my moods. Does he echo with himself?

Transactions and illogicality and rending fatedness in a moment.

Who will suffer most—who will have the better time today—him or me?

Imagine a man who was chiefly intelligence, whose entire life was spent as thought even when he took a child for a walk or when he fucked—even when he was in midfuck, or perhaps he chooses to be quick, so that he is not ever in midfuck but goes zip, zip; or he likes only danger, doing it in public hallways, so that the decor of the occasion is what matters, and midfuck is a silence in the hall—and was not himself in his own flesh, in an act, in the treacherous realities, the expanses of real time but was always thought, was intelligence-in-general, an example, and perhaps not quite a real mind but it is a real mind and he is a person as much as he ought to be for the sake of his life, even then, I would think.

I look up from the puddle at S.L., and I see the nature of presence in his wind-rouged (or salmoned) blondness, his ticking eyelids and his glasses, his fluttering necktie—he’s an example of unideal presence—well, I mean, he’s there, and if he’s there, he’s not the ideal thing, just in the nature of things, in the nature of what the ideal is: it is only me
alone in my head but there with him in bodies and voice—I don’t speak—me alone in my head and the meanings I want. The true thing in the rush of feeling is that I get only
him,
not my idea of a father, but confusion, yet it’s a stability, a still place in the wind. Only him and not my idea of a father, you can’t
tell
how much the feeling means; this is why if you’re in the present, it’s like being inside folly, pure folly, pure simplicity, the poor simplicity of real immediacy, not pure, not simple at all.

I think there is a transference of consciousness from him to me along these lines. It has to do with a kind of male sense of what’s going on, which is unlike a female sense of it. Real safety for a woman, a locked door, is ideal in a way it isn’t for a man, at least so far in history, in which it is simply a kind of madness or breakdown in the man, a step or degree in a hopeless defense and part of a history of defeats and victories, with now one being ahead and now the other.

I mean, he shares with me the contingent or time-riddled or on-consignment nature of our being together and our emotions—and our varied beauties and our varied vanities—and nightmares and hopes. He doesn’t know what is going to happen. He doesn’t know what is in his mind. This is familiar and male. I recognize the way he feels (sort of). Will I listen to him always, every minute? Will I be true among dangers? A wind has started up—it runs like a naked child after a bath, whirling here and there, and then it subsides. And then it’s a crowd and tumble of such children in their transparent rush and acrobatics—this widens the area cleared of mist. My wind-teased eyes begin to squint—to limit and edit my field of vision, the fields of my confusions. My will in squinting means, in part, that paying no attention is now an act of logic.

I hold his hand and walk squintingly alongside him, past wet azaleas and a somewhat ratty privet hedge, and I walk into and out of puddles: I am alternately completely nonplussed by puddles and blasé about them, above worrying about them since he didn’t care if I walked in them or not. He has some picture of childhood heroism, happiness, freedom: his pictures of that sort are also Ideals.

The puddles splash on my high shoes and up the calf of my bare leg, and meanwhile the sheer number of elements outdoors (including Daddy) hurts me even though I’m squinting. I have no principles yet for ignoring things, for paying no attention, so that I am harassed and tugged at fiendishly, I am fiendishly teased (as if by desire), and so I sort of faint into mindlessness and just get tugged along by the tall blond steeple of a lecher beside me.

When he says, “Walk,” I rouse myself, but if I look—I am giving an example: I don’t mean to: I should have said, I take my eyes from Da’s pants leg and I look up and I see a many-leaved wet trembling thing, a great mass of gleam and shadow inexplicably without light and suspended over my head,
porch roofs and sunroom roofs and indoor and outdoor stairs steps broken and in an avalanche.
I clutch Daddy—S.L., I mean—which reminds S.L. that I am frail; and then Dad changes his mind about the stilled water of puddles: “Your fat girlfriend will have my head if you don’t stop splashing around, you funny duck, your precious nurse will fry my balls in butter, you’re walking in the great lakes, Biddy-Buddy. Hell, look at you, you’re sopping: don’t you know about water? Well, we’re not on parade, we don’t have to pretend—you and me, we’re just a pair of schmucks.” He mops me with a handkerchief. I peer at green and gray porticoes of lawn and trees, dripping and green-and-gray, wet colonnaded rooms, piazzas—a wet paradise.

He said so: “It’s quiet, it’s paradise, it’s real quiet, it’s paradise for real, Honeykins.” Then: “It costs enough.”

He has a grunting peaceableness, which indicates how it’s Eden here. He is onstage but he is not as guarded, as he is downtown, say. The foreignness and incomprehensibility of his maleness, the brutality of heat and rot and the loneliness in him, man’s stuff, pride, showiness, and restlessness of appetite and of temper, and phallic languor, are harnessed by the way he’s nursing me, up to a point within his changes of mood.

His presence is bridled: it is a kind of flattery of me that this is so. He is not himself but is another self for me.

His presence was charity to children and to women. People made this clear to him. It was good to be near an affluent and good-looking man, to have this chance at one’s reality being enlarged by the transfer of consciousness with him, by being twinned to him in a way.

He sells this, so to speak; he uses this, maybe with some discretion and some honor, and maybe not—maybe without discretion and without honor—how would I know about that?

Up and down the curving street I see the crazed variety of Towering Sentinels, treetops and roofs, gables and chimneys zigzagging and jagged in segments and wedges of nearer, glowering sky, darkened sky, suffused with dimmish light above the haphazard geometries of this fortress neighborhood.

The wind is stumbling and knocking around, and growing stronger. It is hurrying and silently banging everything. For a moment, branches and mist, clouds and house awnings—elements of the real world—seem
to fly in the wind, but it is in the stupendously untrained vision of the child. He says—he’s thinking partly of money, partly of friendship—“It’s always fair weather when good friends get together.”

I stare upward at the nauseating wiggles of the spaghetti-and-applesauce clouds, and drips of water, wet twigs, and shiny leaves and dark brown shadows on lawns, and bits of clear sky and the madness of drizzle and dripping leaves and the motions of the trees. “It’s kine d-uh ni-isce seein’ youuu le(ih)oook at thee/unngs,” Daddy said.