“If I did finish you, you’d hate me for it anyway,” my mother said calmly, drawing on the last rudiments of her apparel, “and then you’d start on me. Well,” she said with a splendid shrug, facing me, “I guess our vacation is over. Shall we go upstairs and pack?”
“I haven’t even said goodbye to her.”
“To who?”
“To Marie-Jean.”
“You’ve said goodbye in the most appropriate manner, sweetheart. Anything more would spoil the effect.”
“Oh, you bitches,” the social director said, stretching out full-length on his back and rubbing his eyes. “Oh, you bitches. Isn’t there any end to it? You try to start a business to make a few dollars and—”
“We can probably be home by this evening,” my mother said, taking my hand in a tentative grasp. “Maybe a little earlier, it all depends. Well,” she said, facing the social director, her profile now a jut of positiveness. “Well, we’ll need transportation to the station. Also, there’s the question of what we owe you? How much is the bill?”
“You just try to keep afloat and look what happens to you,” the social director said. “The little bitch. Of course, she was just as bad in the city, I must admit that. I thought that the country would be a healthy influence on her. But instead she only does it in fields. She probably does it in cow flop. That shows the country for you.”
“I said we’ll need some transportation and we’ll have a bill to settle,” my mother said again. “I must give you credit, though, baby; before this little scene just now I was having some real doubts about your manhood. All those problems and those things that happened upstairs. I was beginning to think that your genitals were underdeveloped or that you were a sex freak or something. I can’t tell you what a comfort this is. Of course it could have happened in better circumstances. Will you get dressed, damn it?”
“I am dressed,” I said.
“I didn’t mean you. You were probably dressed when you were doing it, if I know my son. Don’t I know my son?”
The social director heaved himself up. “I can’t understand it.”
“Three and a half weeks. You’ll give some sort of a reduction because we didn’t eat breakfast; you promised that. But you can bill us for the ride to the station. Come on, we’ll get packed,” she said, and without even checking in verification, she left the room. I stumbled gracelessly after her, paused at the door; found that the social director and I were meshed in a long, wandering look. He covered his genitals which I took to be a healthy sign—we were, at least, responding to each other in an area of acknowledgment, now, and no proposal—and shook his head several times apparently in quest of some sort of equilibrium. “Your mother is a strange woman,” he said. “A strange woman.” He began to nestle a hand under the couch, apparently in search of his own garments.
I couldn’t take it again. The spectacle of the social director, like my mother, drawing on an attitude along with his clothing and moving to some kind of firmness was too bewildering to anticipate. I left the room hurriedly, in search of the stairs, in search of some kind of flight. It was clear that unusual things had happened to me this afternoon, but I was not sure of their quality.
At the height of the landing I found Marie-Jean, her body poised in a full-scuttle between bedroom and bathroom, her hair askew, her breasts extruding from the undersized bathrobe she was wearing. She gave me one wild look and a crow of despair seemed to come from her but as I reached to touch her—to assure her of I know not what—the crow moderated to a scream and she retreated, her eyes sweeping me, into the cove of her bedroom and slammed the door emptily. Inside I could hear bursts of sound that could have accommodated any kind of human reaction.
My mother came into the hall tugging a large valise from which fragments of clothing protruded uneasily. “You,” she said. “You better give me a hand with this. Are you ready to go? And why don’t you say goodbye to the girl; she was nice to you. I wish people were as nice to me as that dear girl has been to you.”
At this point in the recitation, D’Arcy paused for a long time, shifting on the web of his seat, his fingers outstretched but not touching the curved wine glass which lay before him on the table. Hesitant because I did not wish to interrupt his narrative or the thoughts which preceded it, and because I had already been lectured roundly on imprudence, I said nothing, but after some while it became apparent that he had, for the moment, nothing more to say; that he was, as a matter of fact, waiting for me to say something to him. I balanced my notebook idly on my knee and looked at the open, pleading intensity which had flowered in his eyes, then out through a window, trying to draw some shred of propriety against what I had envisioned.
“Well, that must have been most shocking,” I said finally. “Most shocking. Of course it didn’t necessarily have to be. It all depends. I’m just trying to get it down in as finished a form as possible. I have no right to judge your reactions; you’re entirely right to have admonished me on that.”
D’Arcy’s eyes glowed feebly, then he took the glass and raised it midway to his lips. “You could understand—” he said, and then said nothing for some time, apparently trying to frame his reactions, “well, if you could understand, I’m sure you would.”
“Surely,” I said, and again, “surely. It must have been stunning and dislocating to have come back from this crucial engagement and to have found that during this time—”
“You fool,” he said, “you blockhead. You don’t understand, do you? That I would choose a petty, compulsive idiosyncratic to subsume by identity, to make clear my course to the world, oh that—”
“I’m only trying to make an inference—”
“You’ll never understand. I see now the pointlessness of this episode as I have never seen it before; it is enough to make me shriek, to tear me into little ravening pieces. But we will go on, won’t we? The commitment is too general, the history is too sweeping. So we will carry out the little farce to its conclusion.”
“I have no idea of what you are saying to me.”
“Oh, you fool!” cried D’Arcy and for the first time in our relationship I realized then that idol, object, prince as he was he was also human, all-too-human, possessed of suffering and blood, capable of a shriek. “You’ll miss the essential point unless I give it to you, then, unless I furnish some kind of psychological handout to permit you to stay in the receiving-station. The full horror of the instance is this, then: that all through this there were two parts of me; the transmitted recipient and the transmuted whole; the witness and the commentator and that as always they were never joined but riven, riven, and the transmutative part, the part which dwelt in the soul and controlled my odyssey, that transmuted part which has been the rock-foundation upon which all else has come, that transmuted part, I tell you, was observing all of this coldly, coldly, with utmost necessity and the need to re-evoke because now, you fool, you incompetent son of a bitch, now I had something entirely new to masturbate toward!”
Began, then (said D’Arcy after a further pause during which he observed the rolling of my eyeballs, the frantic flutterings of wrist-and-conjoined pen with which I took down this amazing revelation, the slight crouch of shoulders and knees with which I attempted desperately to literally entrap within myself this insight so that never again would I miss a point so crucial; the slow, burning density of shame which passed from my forehead downward like a shroud, while all through this he rubbed his hands slowly, confident, at last, that he had made a point too central for the world, our eventual locus, to miss) the most frenetic period of my career; one in which all the latent implications, education and history which had been fed incautiously into me through adolescence began to find a point of connection, of that utilization of background which is the hallmark of the middle-class as we know it; nothing wasted, everything gained. Shortly after my return with mother from the farmlands—my father had been warned by telegram that a small plague had infested the general area and that we were leaving immediately; he was not to come to join us on the weekend nor was he to have any comment whatsoever other than to await us and our explanation of the terrible illness—it was decided that my education at the “special” school had reached a kind of completion and that it was now time for me to leave my family and to voyage, for the first time, on my own. My mother was insistent that I leave the household; I had been “cooped up too long in this hothouse,” is how she put it and now it was time for me, for any young man, to “spread his wings and try life.” Catalogues were consulted by the thousands, our mailbox became insufficient to encompass its daily spray of leaflets, enticements and application forms, and the mailman came personally to drop off a small density of brown envelopes with a sullen expression heightened by a tint of knowledge which, as he explained to mother, was that they were trying to “send me away.” In less earnest circumstances—if mother had not felt that my education had been sorely lacking for almost two decades and now desperately needed to find its fruition—the “application procedure” might have been an unpleasant but provocative interlude lasting through the remaining months of the summer and into at least the middle of the next school year. But mother refused to send me to “that place” for even the space of a week; it was absolutely vital, she insisted, that I get out of town with the opening of the school year, so that I would have ample time to adjust to a life away from home. After all, she pointed out to my father, life was mortal, she was mortal, everyone was mortal; it would be catastrophic if anything happened to them before I had had the experience of foraging for myself, even if in a controlled environment. A school no less “special” than the one I had attended was selected procedurally, its major benefit, to my mother, being that it was some 600 miles from our home; huddled between two dismal mountain slopes—they were called “giant peaks” in the catalogue—this school accommodated some 300 of the most “special” children it could find and, to its further benefit, was co-educational. Mother said both within and without my father’s presence that I would find this a particular lure since a huddling with baffled and troubled members of my own sex for long years had made me “shy.” An enormous deposit was mailed, five large bags were sent up on the railway and at the beginning of the next month I was given a large sum for self-sustension for the full year, an airplane ticket, and was guided to the airport by mother’s careful directions. It was important, she said, that I “practice” being on my own as soon as possible. I was instructed not to come home for the holidays—large presents would be sent me air mail—and to keep my correspondence to a minimum, and then to be addressed only to my mother at home; it was important that I “branch out” as soon as possible. It is entirely likely that I came nowhere near my senses until the moment when I entered the private room in the large dormitory that was the main function of the school and realized that for the first time my opportunities outstripped my capacity. I was no longer a virgin and I was alone.
All during this period I had been masturbating, of course; masturbating with an intensity, a skill, even a sheer exuberance, which I had never before possessed. I had ample material with Marie-Jean for one thing and for another, the climactic interview in the parlor of her home was always sufficient for at least one major climax if all else failed. Throughout that tortured month preparing my exile I had spent the larger part of my waking time either in my bedroom or making frantic plans to get there, my turgid, plaintive organ centering my being as firmly as a bolt of electricity can short-circuit an appliance. Often, the connection between fingers and prick seemed so fragile that there was a kind of suspension in the act of connection, a feeling that my hand was fleshless, almost transparent with need and so that at this time I discovered pillows; they were both more and less resilient than skin and duplicated to a degree astonishing, the feeling of Marie-Jean’s slippery greeting as we had meshed. Also, there were sheets, towels, pillowcases (entirely different than other linens because the hole, when tightly bunched, could simulate very interestingly) and rough bits of paper which I now kept in my desk ostensibly out of a discovered ambition to write. The masturbation had become so intense, the climaxes themselves so highly distended, that I had little idea of what was going on outside of them. Marie-Jean might have told me but after one limpid, one-line letter in which she had asked me to kill myself, from her again did for a time.
I had smuggled my collection of magazines virtually intact into the dormitory; openly as well, simply by removing the covers, tying them all with string and sprinkling a little dust over the top and bottom copies, I passed them in my own mind and in the minds of all possible sightseers as “research materials.” Nevertheless I had been frightened during the plane trip that an air current or a malevolent stewardess might have dislodged them from their precarious balance on the rack above my head and sent papers containing dismembered breasts, open mouths and speckles of dried semen to a final and terrible destiny all over the continent. But no such thing happened and it was with a feeling of inequitable relief that I dislodged the string behind my barred door to find that they, like I, had survived their journey with the contents askew but essentially intact. For sheer happiness I took out a favorite copy of The Magazine and rolling it into a tube (for old time’s sake) inaugurated my narrow bed with the first of what I thought would be an imploding and protected series of joy, all cascades, all foam, white and purified as the first touch of loss. But I had mis-estimated the quality of my environment, to say nothing of my colleagues.
May I leap ahead rapidly in time, modestly discarding the expository necessities, leaving the bridgework to the biographer who, if possessed of intelligence as you are not, would be able to work out the transitions with a minimum of wordage and a maximum of insight; the transitions being the most painful because least necessary part of all biography. I am poised over the girl in the heat and cove of my room under the doom of a November rainfall—the girl is somewhat older than I am and tragically overdeveloped, her large breasts, fascinating in armor, in a kind of flat, aimless repose with clothing removed, stretched out aimless to her sides and under her arms, the nipples almost invisible under the distension, to say nothing of my clasping mouth. She is muttering faintly, probably about the weather, while with a kind of desperation I try to find her opening, at the same time making polite comments about the disorder of the room, my embarrassment at her seeing it in such shambles, until finally with a moist clamor I feel myself sliding into her, sliding into her, and her arms go reluctantly around me, severing the connection of mouth and breast—which had never been that interesting anyway; I had been doing it only out of a sense of propriety—and with a series of horselike bucking movements not to say whinnies, she begins to carry me, carry me over the sliding eaves of her need.
I feel myself growing inside her and at the same time moving away; all this time birdsongs moving within my head, proud eaglets struggling to churn away from the surfaces of the sea, and the rain comes down unevenly, unevenly, so that I feel myself surrounded by a kind of disorder on all levels as I lie submissive at last in her embrace, feeling the slow steaming and then, as one particularly violent heave of her round body sets my magazines on the shelf above my bed to a kind of scuttling underneath their rubber band, I feel myself turned to them, turned to that attunement, and in a kind of explosion of feeling, all legs, all memory, I am devoured into her and expire slowly, reaching at this time for her breasts to support and inspect them. The feeling at the moment of orgasm has been that of girl-as-giant-fist clasped around my genitalia but underneath that has been something else; a profound undercurrent of woe, perhaps, an unscholarly feeling of mystery destroying the personality. When I came from without her limbs again with that peculiar slurping which seems, I have since discovered, to be the comma of intercourse, I lay atop her having no idea of what to say until finally she dislodged me and sat up, her breasts assuming their normal (or abnormal) proportions again, falling hugely to the area of her navel where she inspected the nipples carefully, apparently for lustre or change of color.
“You really bite, don’t you?” she says—all post-coital conversations have now, for me, assumed the aspect of the present tense; this is one subgenre which, because of its hideous sameness, is always of the moment, “you could have hurt them if they weren’t so tough.”
“Well, it was nice of you to come to the room,” I say, because there is nothing else at the moment I can think of and at that moment, the magazines which have been precarious enough, shift on their perch and topple, in a slow, drooling wobble, one by one to the bed, between us. I shrug and reach toward them, hopeful that it will be seen as a kind of joke.
“Are those those girl magazines?” she says, chewing on a fingernail and reaching the free hand out to caress them. “Oh yes, they are. That’s what I thought they were. You see them all over. You keep them too?”
“Just for the articles.”
“Oh, a lot of the boys use them to jerk off. You’d be surprised how many use them that way. The shy ones, mostly. Do you ever use the magazines to jerk off in?”
“Not really,” I say, assembling them hurriedly and trying to get them back on the shelf without exposing my genitalia which have hardened in idiot need to the coincidence. “I don’t think of them that way.”
“Oh that’s perfectly all right. There’s nothing shameful about it. A lot of the fellows who can’t seem to get laid use them all the time. Can you imagine anyone not getting laid around this place?” She ventures a tentative laugh which becomes, eventually, a giggle. “It’s possible, of course. You’re not very good, you know. You need a lot of practice.”
“It’s not my fault. You rushed.”
“Who rushed who?” she says, inspecting the other breast carefully, putting a finger in the nipple as if to test it for responsiveness. “You asked me to come to your room and have a talk and the next minute I have my clothes off. All of my clothes off. Not that I mind, of course. What else is there to do when it rains?”
“Well,” I say, still in that slow stun which seems to be the inevitable consequence of the aftersex and feeling now too that familiar combination of dread and eagerness which means that the real implications of an event may lie entirely before me, “I guess you’d better get back upstairs.”
