“Why? Why?”
But I had had enough; I was no longer confined. I commenced a gazelle’s trot down the corridor, gathered into myself. Behind me I could hear his shout, why? why? increased in momentum as my own speeding along to intercept me, but I was faster and evaded it. Why? why? he shrieked, and there seemed to be other questions as well: questions like Who is D’Arcy? and Why are you doing this? and Where did D’Arcy go? and Don’t you understand that your childhood—?, but I was gone now; I was gone way out of sight; I was beyond the catching, speeding around corridors as fast as night, squealing through the hush of the hallways like the coming dawn, into the space of my own vacant room where I closed the lockless door and leaned against it for some time listening to my laughter ripple down the scale past sobs to silence and then at last I was ready to remove all my garments, put them in the wardrobe and resume once again my biography of D’Arcy. With luck my roommates, both reporting in on me, would be gone for several hours. I would have thought far more about the nature of the interview and certain intricate elements of luck but as always the seizure of recollection came over me and left me quite committed, quite drained; unable then to pursue all but the most rational thoughts for the next several hours.
EIGHT
“I am in an increasingly foul mood these days,” D’Arcy said the following evening, once again holding the inevitable chilled tumbler of wine. We had passed most of the day in slumber, awakening only in the late afternoon to go in search of a modest meal and replenishments for D’Arcy’s wine bottles and now, the last exhausted output of the sun streaming in through his windows, we had both succumbed to a late-afternoon spell of contemplation. His mood still seemed as sullen, however, as mine was generous, leading to some trepidation as I replied to him.
“I hope it has nothing to do with me,” I said.
“Well, in part it does. You are, if I may speak frankly, a rather repulsive person; parasitic, demanding and utterly without insight. But since most people follow this pattern in one way or the other, I cannot say that this is the prime source of discontent; I have fucked many a woman stupider than you and whose cunt was no clear compensation. No, I think it must be your wretched biography that is doing this to me. That would be the explanation.”
“My biography? But it was your inspiration.”
“No,” he said with vague unease. “It was yours. I was perfectly happy to allow my history to be its own biography; accept judgment in preliterate terms. But you wanted to structure and systematize it all through the written word.”
“I have had your utmost cooperation,” I pointed out to him. “Not at any point have you refused to continue.”
“That would explain the foulness of my mood. No man’s life should be exacted out of him the way we have done in the last few days. The putrefaction, the corruption, the small swinishness and greed! I had never before realized the essential triviality from which my greatness springs.”
“But it is your greatness,” I said, “and is thus inextricably bound to origins. You can hardly separate the one from the other.”
“No one can justify this,” D’Arcy growled. “Hardly on spiritual grounds.”
“All right,” I said, judiciously enough, pouring myself some rich burgundy from an available decanter and resisting a mad urge to upset the remainder of the contents on the carpet; it would have served him right. The obduracy, the self-indulgence of genius! Often one wonders how anything ever gets done. “Do you want to call a halt to the project? Is that what you indicate to me?”
“It would be impossible,” D’Arcy said unhappily, standing to look at himself in the mirror, the reflection casting back dim fire into the room from the one bulb centered over the wooden frame. “It would be a coitus interruptus of the soul, as they say. We had better continue.”
“Then consider me as ready.”
“But nothing compels me to think of this as a happy project, nor to cease my resentment.”
“Most great works are unhappy,” I said.
“And great workmen.” He sat. “I believe I had finished my discussion of that afternoon with Marie-Jean which I foreshadowed at the beginning, the very beginning of these reminiscences. I left us lying in the field, my still shuddering frame suspended only several inches from the tingling fence itself.”
“That would be right,” I said.
He paused to contemplate for a while and then went headlong into his narrative. Before he did so, however, he made a rather astonishing remark, one which to this moment I simply cannot interpret:
“I haven’t been fucked in so long,” D’Arcy said, “that I’m beginning to doubt that I was ever fucked at all. There’s such an accretion built up back from my testes that I may be mistaking simple semen for recollection. But when you do it, it all comes out the same way.”
I would like to say (D’Arcy continued in the face of my stupefaction, and gradually I became caught up with his narrative, the wine decanter between us now being used at a fearful pace) that my first fuck utterly changed my life; vitiated me of sentimental ignorance, made clear my position in relation to the abstract carnality I had so shockingly (and with such fulfillment) faced, but this would only be an idealization of the matter. The incident was obviously crucial; in fact absolutely central to the astonishing events which followed and eventually culminated my journey ... but the transition far from being abrupt was so agonizingly slow that the untutored observer would not even have been aware that a transition had occurred.
I sat awkwardly, uneasily beside Marie-Jean on the return home. From time to time, I would try to say something; offer a remark which would both normalize our relationship and yet intimate that I knew the import of the events that had occurred, but everything I said seemed more disastrous than the last, and all remarks I made being met with a pout or a sneer I soon subsided into a sulk of my own, watching the insects mash the windowpane with a rustling sound; seeing the endless shoreland of the country plunge toward and then recede from us; all unchanged in the action. “I guess that was good for you,” was what I had said, and also, “You never really know what it’s like until you do it, isn’t that the truth?” and “I guess things were pretty silly when I backed into the wire but it really wasn’t my fault you know, the damned thing was too near,” all of this said with a disaffected post-adolescent’s giggle while I looked at her unyielding profile locked in frieze above the steering post, her stunned eyes, from that aspect, seeming to take me in as merely another bit of countryside flora as she drove, the grey roads whickering, the sun receding behind us, my drained loins panting out their own measure of discontent. My state of mind, to be sure, could not be seen as an entirely stable one. Nevertheless, there was potential, at that time, for exiting from the situation without disgrace: I had functioned in a not entirely inappropriate manner and my secret—for Secret was what I now suspected it to be—was sheathed within the cove of that efficacy. But matters were not left at that point. I never left matters at a proper point. I felt constrained to tell Marie-Jean that my first experience with sex had been so pleasant that all I could hope, at this time, was that there would be another such engagement shortly.
“Why?” she said, bypassing a truck dangerously with one elbow dangling at a careless angle over the wheel, the other making flickering motions as she went for a cigarette from some obscure feminine place. “Why would that be? Why do you want it again?”
“Well, it was very nice. Pleasant I mean. I thought—”
“It will never be again,” she said, finding her cigarette, and jamming it between her lips with awkwardness but a good deal of certainty. From one angle she was able to eject flame, at the same time curving the car to narrowly avoid two solemn cattle who had come to peer at the road from an incautious point. I felt the jolt as a series of small shocks radiating through my thighs and up through my limbs, a slow poisoned dripping, a series of intimations against a discovered doom. “It will never be again,” she said.
“Why not? Do you want me to hold your cigarette for you while you drive? Look out, they have wagons and stones all over these roads.”
“Because a purpose served is a purpose earned,” she said obscurely, narrowly missing an abutment and wrenching the car back to the highway with what seemed like renewed determination. A truck scrambled past, a dim face floating in a windowpane seemed to be addressing us. “And a purpose earned is a purpose finished,” and that is all I could get out of my Marie-Jean, my darling, my familiar, my first ally of commitment, all the way home. We rumbled through American roads, American interpasses, American cloverleafs in that sullen and perfect silence which I was always afterwards to identify with the postcoital shock, and back to the resort with the smashed bodies of dead flies clustered on the windowpane arranged in a pattern of tribute that seemed almost floral. We pulled in front of what had been jocularly entitled by the host the “Homing Area” and got out of the car silently, Marie-Jean kicking a few of the fenders seemingly to verify that the car was still connected and then brushing off the flies with a series of absent gestures which dumped the majority of them into the grill. I felt it necessary to accompany her into her home; it was, after all, a “date” and even a “first date” had certain responsibilities. The light bones of her elbow rested lightly, cohesively in my hands, as we flung open the doors with a series of booming sounds and entered into the indescribably musty area of the “happy room” itself, a room dotted with numerous grey couches which the host had specified for the comfort of guests during “social hours.” It was in such circumstances and in such a position that we discovered my mother in the violent embrace of the social director himself, the two of them locked to the rear cushions of the largest couch of all, their bodies fluttering and trembling much as our windshield flies had been doing on the moment of contact. They were entirely naked and I noted with a kind of wicked precision the beating of limbs upon one another, a series of motions which alternately hid and exposed all that my mother had to offer anyone. Marie-Jean gave a dull sound which emerged in the quick attention of the room as more of a thump than squeal and pelted toward the stairs. I was left to bear the confrontation. Under the circumstances I think I did very well. And my mother’s behavior, given the complexities and difficulties of the situation was wholly admirable, so well-timed and relevant as to be almost purely metaphoric. I might note that for a woman in her middle 40’s (or perhaps it was late 30’s; she always shyly disassembled in this area and would never show me my birth certificate) my mother was interestingly constructed although, by no means, on a level with the girls in The Magazine or, for that matter, in the magazines.
“I thought you and the little slut were getting laid,” is what she said. “What are you coming back this early for?”
In the fine surreal tension of the moment—a surrealism exacerbated by my realization that it was true, the implications I had felt to lie under the surface of human behavior were all entirely true: everybody was doing it, no one was not doing it; there was nowhere you could go and no one with whom you could deal who was not consumed by the treasure of the idiot’s gift—I said, “We did. But we finished early. I touched a high-tension wire.”
My mother giggled thinly and at that moment, the social director himself appeared, his body sliding slowly, like a panel of wood, from under the breadth of my mother’s embrace and he peered cautiously past me, into the surfaces of the room as if they would tell him all that he needed to know about the ramifications of human behavior. A bridge table, near the corner of the room murmured sympathetically and then collapsed gracelessly to one side of its legs, apparently affected by the penetration of his gaze and wanting to make some comment, no matter how lenient, upon the situation.
“This is impossible,” he said. “This is clearly impossible. How can I be in such a situation?” My mother stood up uneasily, crossing her legs and began to forage under the couch, perhaps in search of her clothes. Her exposed rump seemed to me, then, to solidify all the horrors through which I had passed under the wires; I turned my eyes lest an insolent gleam destroy us entirely. “Perhaps you should ask yourself that question,” she said. “The boy isn’t able to answer you.”
“You had my daughter,” the social director said. “You possessed my daughter. My Marie-Jean. My only child. You parted her and went inside. You drifted into her. You sullied her. And now you come back to confront me. My daughter. My single child, my only substance.”
“I didn’t mean to,” I said. “It just happened.”
“Leave the boy alone,” my mother said, extracting various items and articles and beginning to get into them piecemeal; she looked like a woman in a clear state of transition, perhaps being forced to a new level of feeling as she drew on concentricities, layers of silk, poise. “I told you she was a little slut, didn’t I? Didn’t I?”
“Why I could kill you, you dishonoring thief,” he said, but made no move to leave the couch and do so; his eyes seemed blank, rather, suspended in a kind of confusion, a fine, flickering greyness catching the dull light of the room off-angle. “That is, if I wanted to.”
“It doesn’t mean a thing to me,” I said pointlessly. “All of it. I mean, I see it everywhere now and it all comes down to the same kind of thing. What does it matter? What’s the difference?”
“I bet you liked it too.”
“Oh come on, now,” my mother said, brushing him tentatively with a finger while at the same time she began to arrange her dress on several levels, patting it in accommodation to her body. As I equated her developing appearance with what I now knew to lie beneath it, I felt a shock of collision, a fine, vaulting insight, one which I would not be able to correlate for several years but whose apprehension, at that time, I must have fully possessed. It was all the same, underneath. “He’s incapable of liking anything and he’s really too confused now to put his feelings in order. A disaster is a disaster, why can’t you face facts? I’d finish you but the whole thing would be ruined.”
“My only daughter.”
