Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (81 page)

I said, moist-eyed, “I am a free man—boy—man.” Then I said, in a very well-educated way but mumbling and local, “It is one of my privileges not to have to be careful to make sense by your standards when I speak.”

I want him to remember that I’m a smart kid and can be—well,
trusted,
you know. So I had spoken in a really careful sentence. To show I could be trusted—this was out of loneliness, and folly, a cheating on myself, to explain myself as if in a footnote in school. I mean, I heard dialogue in my head—him saying,
Wiley, what are you doing? What are you saying? Why are you showing off? Are you being a jackass?
I saw this on his face—in his eyes, outlined and bowed and pointy, and in the set of his mouth, and I answered it in the long and careful sentence that he hardly heard. He thought about it and then dropped the effort of remembering and figuring out so many words.

“Wiley, what is it?” he said—as if I’d groaned and not spoken.

It was much more tender than I had expected.

I’d finessed him into it, I’d willed it, but part of the point was also what he decided on when he came near me.

Then he said, “Are you all right?”

“I am—a—free—man.”

“Did you have an asthma attack?”

He wasn’t being pleasant. I mean, who wants
medical
attention?

He wasn’t being derisive—just bored and standoffish and self-enraptured in his concern.

“Listen, jackass, I don’t believe in manliness,” I said.

Of course, he didn’t know the
context,
so that didn’t make too much sense.

Jimmy blinked. “Why are you attacking me
now?”

“Oh, cut the innocent-bystander crap.” Then I said,
“You
exist, you do things for people, jackass: my feelings about
human
freedom don’t make
me
a jackass, Setchell, whatever you want to think—for your own purposes.”

I add metaphysical overtones to his sense of his own day while he gets along in his canny goings-on.

When I talk, the stuff I’m saying grinds into me as failure and loneliness.

I am falling, in a state of off-again, on-again, blurred, low-key rage for freedom, or whatever it is; and his looking at me in whatever degree of affection or mix-up or incuriosity or desire, or whatever state and mixtures of things he’s in, doesn’t help—the light is behind him, the pale sky; and he’s like the dark nucleus at the center.

We are shirtless again, and bare-legged, bare-ankled: I’m in torn sneakers; he has bicycle shoes.

I can understand his not understanding me when I talk. I’m not a clear person.

He twitches; he isn’t calm; and so, when I see that, I get ashamed, in case I’ve been a show-off and have upset him; but really, you know, I don’t know why he twitches, and, in a way, I am too cowardly to ask, but his life is attached to mine today, for these hours: I’m immune to nothing.

I am not tough—merely mean at times. I stand up in quick stages,
segments.
I haul my bike upright.

Then he reached over, and I was careful not to stiffen, and he touched me with two fingers on the back of my neck where my hair started and he picked off a piece of tar. The tar was stuck to me, and then it whistled free; and behind it, on my skin, was a burning sensation, insecurely placed, but it did abut on an emotion.

His fingers moved in what I considered to be a Jimmy-like way, like the words in a first-grade reader, careful and clear, so that you don’t get startled by meanings.

But I get startled by them anyway. I am a glorious mirror for other people in some ways, unfortunately—for their heroisms of existing in
the real world. I often feel I don’t exist physically, in the inherited world of parents and the like. Sometimes it’s O.K. I stood still, and he went after some of the pebbles that were stuck to my back under the loose T-shirt; I have a skinny back. It’s odd not to be someone worthless. I grew stilled inwardly, pondlike,
girlish
—I mean with guilt and responsiveness. I really mean with greed and also with a kind of suspicion, and then with stiff gratitude, stiff with resistance because of the suspicion, and then not, but kind of wildly generous, like a kid, but one my size—me, I guess. His fingers are
small,
considering his size. I’m six one and he’s six two. His fingers taper down and are kidlike in the last joints. “You’re being so goddam tender I can’t stand it,” I said, and he gasped, or groaned, like my dad—as my dad used to, wanting me not to talk. I would guess the tenderness was real, but it’s his and I don’t know what it means in relation to who I am and what I do and what I have just done. I was overborne by the mysterious chemical fires he lit with his acting like this and his continuing to act—with tenderness—while currying me of dirt after my dumb gesture, or whatever I should call it. What I’m trying to get to is to say that this stuff with the fingers, the tender-fingers business, occurs along the lines of the irrevocable, too—the masculine irrevocable.

If he likes me this much, why didn’t he lie down beside me?

Why didn’t he say,
Jesus, God, Jesus, God?

How come he’s so stubbornly set on doing things his way, inside his own way, inside his own life?

Why didn’t he give up his own will and his own speech? Look, he’s being so—
nice.
Medically generous. In each touch, in each movement of his fingers are inspired little puffs of soul-deeps and absentminded-ness, like birds in dust or leaves, forgetting themselves and leaning or fluffing and being almost still: stilled birds in very early morning sunlight. Something like that.

How can I live up to his silly goddam fingers?

How do you live up to anything halfway decent?

How do you live with anything that’s really just about entirely decent?

People don’t stay decent. This is a trap, what he’s doing.

It’s so terrible to be irritated by people. How do you live with people?

The tenderness was already turning nasty. His fingers were getting sharp and quick and gougey. Of course, it wouldn’t stay like that, either, but now his touches were rough and rebuking.

Then he began doing it as if I were inanimate, and my back was his
teddy bear or his bike tire; that was O.K., but then it’s not O.K. Frankly, I am not usually in love with him—only a few moments here and there—but I had been for a few seconds: paralyzed, frozen, stilled, or whatever, for a moment there.

If he’d been knowingly
physical,
limitlessly sexual by a sort of nostalgic implication back toward childhood but with self-conscious purposes and within virginal limits and virginal and whorey knowledges, like a smart kid, it would have been easier. Different. Well, to tell the truth, he was like that, too, but slyly, and with more vanity than confidence. Second by second, he changed, or I saw or imagined a change. Some of what he did was derisory. Also, I hate being touched.

Finally, I pulled away from him, glanced at him. I suppose he thought it was all nuts, but I kept thinking I was being obvious and that he understood everything—
every single thing.
And he did, in his way. After all, I am obvious in what I do, and very, very
logical.

All over my back and my mind—my consciousness, my feelings—are his fingers, and the tones and senses of possibility and of other stuff, little raw, alive places, not necessarily sane stuff—maybe just kid stuff. I put my bike’s handlebar in his hand—a sort of comic act, a sort of
Here’s a toy for you. Isn’t life disgusting?
And I glanced at him knowingly, with rebuke. But he’s not likely to get it; he didn’t remember
he’d
been rebuking; he never did remember things like that. And then, because I didn’t want to do what I did next—that’s first; and second, because the comic thing drove me now, and all the wounded or whispery places, which are growing shabby and vague mostly, but are also burning brighter; and third, because I did love him,
maybe,
and didn’t love myself yet in my rather handsome adolescence but was learning to by using him, and his feelings about me; and fourth, because it excited me not to
understand
this stuff, I lay down in the road again.

Now he and I could observe the act of
a free man
—so to speak—a second time, and maybe it had gone null and wasn’t dangerous anymore, unless, of course, he did understand and would somehow prop me up in being me and doing this, and then it would blaze up, the act and us, masculinity and meaning, maybe men in love, who knows what.

So I did it.

So I am supine and I say, “See—I am a free man—
boy—man.”

The last part was just an automatic memory thing.

He said, “You want me to take the pebbles off—or not(tt)?” He was still in the earlier phase, his feelings were still back there; I guess I can
say that—and my being supine on the tar now, again, was more an interruption than the next step along the line of
irrevocability
—and whatnot. The multiple
t
when he ended
not
made his mouth into an ugly grimace: this means he is irked, bored, not watching me now, not going along with
it
—whatever
it
was.

“The joke went flat?”

I’m lying there and looking up at him—the tar feels lousy.

“What joke?”

I can’t explain, since I mean and don’t
mean joke,
so I say, “Unnhaw-wahh”—an expressive noise, maybe exhorta tory as well as evasive—I mean, it’s unclear, but expressive.

Long pause. Then he says, “I don’t think you have a good sense of humor, Wiley.” (“Wu-high-ly.”)

I turned my face to the side, cheek to the pavement. “I get told that a lot,” I said, from my mouth and eyes down there alongside the pavement.

I felt lousy and coerced by the near-kiss of the tar and the
meaning
of me doing one thing and Jimmy not following, so that if I persisted in it, it would have some other meaning that I wasn’t too sure I wanted: if meaning is a place, it was a place I didn’t want to go to, a weird planet with a bad reputation. So I heaved myself up again quickly and said, “See, I get sick and tired, and fed up,
too.
I’m through with half-assed gestures, O.K.? Now, will you please pick the goddam crap off my back, and don’t pinch, and don’t take forever—”

I offered him my back. It’s like a half-assed order: you try to get away with this thing; or you’re asking—with some embarrassment, I guess—for some of the tenderness crap. Jesus, I figured it was clear I was getting even for his saying that about my not having any humor.

My voice stayed deep, which is a good sign that I’m getting somewhere in my life in general: I’m learning to pitch my voice like a grownup.

Then his tenderness, which was flickering like leaves, became knowing and sad, and he shoved my shoulder—because I was
moody
—with a hard shove of his hand. It is not quite credible in some ways, considering my lousy life, but I am spoiled and very handsome (sort of)—and he shoved me to show h
is
freedom, but it was truncated as a gesture of ownership or courtship or whatnot. The style, the tone of it. Things showed in it. One thing that showed was that he was afraid of me.

He was a sad boy, but we weren’t at a sad age. I said, “You probably
have more free will than I do, because you get along with your mother.” I also said, “I always seem too planned out to myself; I have a lot of very pseudo carelessness about free will.”

He was
knocking
some crud off the knobby part of my back—i.e., the spine—and part of the upper muscular cape, too. Up close and speaking either turned away or close to him, I felt the syllables to be like hollow tubes or near-kisses; their shapes are all weird and
segmented.
When I said
pseudo,
I turned toward him to help make sure he’d get it, that he’d recognize the word. I look at his eyes, but I can’t see that he does hear. So I turn away, so that when I say
carelessness,
it goes shooting off like a stalk into the air away from him.

I usually felt he wanted me to explain myself to him, and when I did, he didn’t always listen—that is part of my dislike for him. Usually, he
wasn’t
listening. If he didn’t listen, he didn’t have to judge and change mentally if I was true or interesting. If he wasn’t going to change mentally, then not enough was at stake for things to be exciting and real for us. For me. I mean, change in step with each other rather than alone and somberly: it was exciting to be in step, and so on. I hate to change all by myself: you know it’s going to be lonely, it’s going to be bad. You just rattle around then, you have no coordinates to measure sanity by; it seems inhuman. He had that stubborn virgin’s thing of undercutting the moments by making them into things that didn’t matter, since nothing really happens ever. The virgin’s lie.

If you notice everything, you won’t like anyone
—I’d been told that a lot.

Notice everything: that’s rich. I ignore most of what I notice, like everyone else.

The extraordinary truth, so anguishing to me, of the reality of life as fires of passion, within the moments, and only barely referred to in the fluster of acts involved in our flirting with such big questions as whether to be really loyal to one another—all that stuff is ungraspable for me, but I feel comprehension always near, so help me: I swear this is how we lived. To live almost with virtue instead of with a grinding shrewdness, it’s just beyond thought, and then, as I said, the comprehension hangs around and seems very close—in tenderness stuff mostly, when it’s mixed with a little or a lot of some kinds of violence of meaning, when you’re not cold and selfish but seem to be careless with yourself. Extravagant, wonderful. A fool. The comprehension always seems as if it will get clearer, that history will explain it or bring it, that I’ll find out about this stuff when I get older. I sometimes want to rush things.

I don’t want the fixed kind of comprehension, which is so satisfying, but the other kind, which is a sort of response and loss of everything but the response in the flicker, in the exploding novas of the moments, of the new turns one’s history is taking in (pardon me) love for one another.