“Yes there is,” he said, shaking his head sadly. “It could only survive as fiction. One must lie, you see, to tell a certain kind of truth. But the novel will never be written.”
“Well, then!” I said in a burst of enthusiasm, “let me be your scribe. I will write the story, the fiction-that-is-more-than-fact. All you will have to do is relate to me, as you are now, all of your experiences, and I will order them and put them in print.”
An expression of ineffable sadness crossed that dear, crushed face. “No,” he said, “that could not possibly work. I have not the patience to relate to you all my experiences nor you the temper to absorb them; then too there is more to writing than simple chronology as you would find out if you applied yourself. Everything becomes turned inside-out, convoluted and involuted like life itself; old wrenches, old dreams, doomed perceptions, flashes of possibility, coming together in such a way as to negate the possibility of a present. I tell you, I have thought all this over and it is true.”
“No, no!” I cried, clutching his wrist, not to disagree with him in emphasis so much as to comfort him, try to bring him back from that mood of tragic withdrawal which characterized so many of our conversations, so much of our relationship as it passed into the darkness. “Life is real and earnest and proceeds carefully in its honest, plodding way toward a just and total destiny. To know what happened before and after is to apprehend the fullest sense of it. I really can’t bear to see you in such a mood.”
D’Arcy shakily passed a hand across his forehead and then cupped his eyes with it; the eyes disappearing one by one as if two soft, distant lights had winked out and then, fishlike, they emerged one by one and stared at me again. “You are a good friend,” he said, “although, alas, a blockhead. But that is possibly for the best; I could not, at this difficult and final stage of my ascension, stand to deal with anyone who was not imperceptive. Shall I continue my narrative?”
“Of course,” I said, pouring us two more glasses of wine and passing one on to him. “I want to hear everything you have to say. I think that what you are saying is truly important.”
“Do you really? Do you really, my friend? I feel so old, so tired, so wretched and useless. Is anything I say important?”
“Very much so,” I said, “more than you could possibly grasp, being as sensitive as you are. I don’t know how the world could pass on without knowing more and that is why I want to hear.”
“I began by discussing my first sexual contact with a girl, did I not?” D’Arcy asked, balancing the wine glass prettily on his knee (a characteristic trick, accomplished with much subtlety but without that excessive grace which would have created embarrassment), “and then, somehow, I wandered off into this question of masturbation. I wonder how it could have happened.”
I passed on, then (he said after a moment’s pause during which he rapidly finished his wine) into a period of my life which was so circumscribed by masturbation as, perhaps, to preclude questions of logic. Having settled for the first time on that historic afternoon my ability to induce the sensations and culminations within myself, I think that I must have arrived at a qualified definition of manhood: that is, my goals were within the realization of my methods. Little concerned me but the act itself and all of life—non-masturbatory life, I mean to say—that stretched out dismally both fore and aft was merely a means of passing time, meaningless events to be worked through before it could all begin again. It was biologically impossible for me to induce orgasm more than three to four times a day and, in addition, there were any number of routine tasks which had to be performed to keep up the appearances of life during which masturbation would have obviously been impossible or highly embarrassing.
There was schoolwork to attend to and relationships to build upon; there were parental admonitions (they called it “being close”) to satisfy and there were the needs of my own self, those of replenishment. Nevertheless, I was able to work things down to a schedule and it was a schedule, I must admit, which I adhered to for better part of two years. It involved spending as much time as possible in my own bed or in locked cubicles in public places. It circumscribed everything.
I masturbated in sheets, in toilet paper, in the rolled-up wads of magazines; I did it with my own trembling fingers. I scurried from one useless, meaningless task to the next, counting out the pulses of my body and urging restocking. I found small sophistries, both physical and mental, which could affect the sensations qualitatively although never quantitatively; that is, I could relate in different ways to the moment of ecstasy, being either under or over it, as I chose. I became, in short, a sophisticate. A few examples will, I trust, suffice: there is no way in which I can sufficiently overstate the apocalyptic dreariness of this period of time nor, in certain fashion, its total irrelevance: I will thus be forgiven, I trust, for a certain compression of the narrative; as I have already said, I severely dispute chronology in relation to life, and although there is a need, perhaps, to adhere to its detail, there is no reason to be overwhelmed by it. The only true chronology is the inner clock which twitches back and forth, all directions in one, guiding us toward the true and naked perceptions of our destiny. I do not mean to wander.
Some examples:
1) I was able, in the public toilet at a large railroad terminal, to wedge my briefcase solidly against the otherwise resistant door and, by careful attention to the luck of process, bring upon myself within 30 seconds a peculiarly intense climax redolent of ancient odors and connections, vaulting me into some cell of gloom, some hitherto undiscovered part of myself which, torn free by the exercise of joints, sobbed and bucked its juices away as I sat in silent wonder and let the odor: foul, fecal, faintly perfumed, smoke and loss, drain over and through me, secure in the after-knowledge that I had found the most important because the least known part of myself. Until the porter opened the door to find me still confronting my prick and balls in that frieze of woe, eyes turned loosely, slackly up, the hint of stain still dribbling from the center. He looked at me for a very long time while I reached futilely for my briefcase, trying to drag it atop my lap, but found in the afterglow that my strength was gone so that I could do nothing, nothing at all but try feebly to close the door which he pushed against my hand with his strong knuckles. He was carrying a heavy mop.
“Hey,” he said, “what in the hell are you doing? This is a public place, man.”
“I’m doing some reading,” I said, I was at a thorough loss.
“Doesn’t look to me like you’re reading, son. It looks to me like there’s been some very active joint-work in these premises.”
“No,” I said in confusion, not even sure what the term he had used meant other than that it was more than faintly obscene. “Nothing like that at all. I promise.”
“Personally,” he said—he was a squat, broad man with an aimless smile and small darting eyes, the very picture of accusation and discovery which I had conjured up so very long ago—“I don’t care what you’re doing here. This is a civil service post. But it makes very bad for the other customers. You’d better pull your pants up. What magazine is that you’ve been using?”
“It’s a textbook,” I said wildly, “my physics textbook. I was just studying it and you have no right to come in on me like this. I could get you in trouble.”
His smile gleamed most purple against the dark bulbs on the ceiling. “A physics textbook,” he said with high amusement, “well, I’ve seen ’em do this and I’ve seen ’em do that but a physics textbook—That’s a mighty queer kick you got there, it could damage you in your later life.” And he began to laugh without concealment then, the sound of his high squeals bringing aimless rustles up and down the row of cubicles, a feeling of weary observation emerging toward me from all angles of the room.
I was frantic, of course. You must understand that this was not only—preposterous luck!—my first adventure in discovery but that it was also my first excursion into terminology; I had had no idea until then what the outside world actually thought of what I was doing to myself. I had seen it as a rite, a private, mystic ritual of purification, utterly self-absorbed if not self-discovered, and now it was coming upon me, most rapidly, that in the eyes of that world all of it was sheer scatology and laughable to boot; not at all spiritual but a belch from the devil. How could this be? How could anything which did this to me be at the level of laughter? But so it appeared to be. I pulled my pants around me in an explosion of energy.
Meanwhile, the attendant was already closing the door. “That’s all right,” he whispered amidst his giggles, “you go right ahead and do whatever you want to do; ain’t gonna be nobody here to bother you. I’m just sorry you ain’t got a home to do it in; the least that a man should have is a private place.” I heard a dull banging, a clanging of the mop’s metal against the surface. Then he had gone away.
I was shattered. But in the midst of all this there was that high, tight, refined series of perceptions which always seems to have assaulted me at periods of crisis; which has been my salvation again and again. It was a feeling of disconnection, of utter severance of causes and outcome, much like the sensations of orgasm themselves, but different because there was no passion in it. As I felt this feeling come over me I knew exactly what I had to do: I adjusted my clothing neatly and removed the contents of the bowl by flushing; I picked up the scattered tissues from the floor and restored my text to briefcase; only then, and with a glance in the mirror to make sure my tie was adjusted and my fingernails clean, did I move slowly, even grandly, from that wretched terminal, stopping by the door to drop in the palm of the attendant’s hand all the change which was in my possession. It came out to be thirty-three cents in silver and copper and the sound of his wheezing, groaning inhalation as he seized them from me, the utter obverse and cancellation of his laughter, was enough to fill me with a wild exaltation as I moved from him, through the swinging doors, and into the larger spaces of the terminal itself, my briefcase banging wildly against my calves, my breath harsh in my throat as I fled from what, in retrospect, was my first connection with the possibility of options.
2) An old family friend, Bernice, had a daughter approximately my age and during Bernice’s occasional visits—she drove through three states to visit my family; there was apparently some kind of relationship underlying this persistence which was not to be divulged to a person as junior as myself—it was left to me to entertain this daughter, a dull, round girl named Rona who liked nothing at all that I was doing. The visits lasted all afternoon and far into the evening, encompassing drinks at both ends and a minuscule dinner in between, and since my family and Bernice would only concede to me that they were discussing “old times,” Rona and I were in a state of exile during all of this; funds were provided me early in the day to take her “to the movies” or the like. All of these difficulties, of course, might have been avoided if Rona had had a male parent, someone sturdy and dependable whose idea of “old times” was not a fundamental excision of all who, perhaps, represented “new times,” but there was something sinister about Rona’s parentage; my parents would only tell me that her father had “left a long time ago” and when pressed further had said that it was possible he had never come in the first place. What I am trying to say is that Bernice was unmarried fore and aft and Rona very possibly a bastard; this would have been a difficult intuition, arrived at only in retrospect through the most careful and insidious kind of reflection, were it not for the fact that this dear girl made absolutely no secret of her ancestry, invited speculation, as a matter of fact, by saying that to the best of her knowledge her father had been a wandering gigolo whom her enlarged mother had enticed into her desserts through careful planning and the offering of a premium rate. This fact, announced almost at the time of our first meeting at the beginning of our mutual adolescence—Bernice and daughter had lived on the “coast” for the decade before that so the renewal of acquaintanceship was thus delayed—was reiterated three times yearly at our reunions and more richly embroidered every time; Rona’s bastardy was, perhaps, the key to her identity.
One would have hoped so ... assuming, of course, that the possession of identity is the most crucial need of the mid-century adolescent ... for outside this, Rona was of little interest; she was overweight, overbearing and afflicted by that sullenness which, perhaps, can only be found in adolescent girls who are a good deal less attractive than they feel they should be and who know the reason why. We never got along particularly well together, but our self- and reciprocal loathing was of such proportions that we did not find it necessary to “go to the movies” together during these visits, finding enough interest in trading our points of view and experiences which always seemed to be antithetical. I hasten to note that there was at no time even the intimation of sexual attraction between us: in the first place, I was then and for some time to come in a literally pre-sexual stage, and in the second place, the only men Rona said she would “let touch” her were certain movie and political personalities who were at least as alien to me as my magazines would have been to her. It was my mention of the magazines, as a matter of fact, which precipitated all of the trouble between us.
We were, at that time, sitting on the convertible couch in my bedroom which nightly and in the early mornings still remained the battlefield of horror; sitting at a median distance from one another while from below came the exhausted drone of voices which, although already at the lowest levels, would not fully run down for several more hours. We had passed through the most minute stages of boredom: had plumbed each other’s feeble mutual recollections and experiences, had engaged in mild antagonisms for the sake of repudiation and were now at the point where, literally, we had nothing to say or even to mumble to one another. Yet the evening dragged on: we were forbidden to enter the living room while the “visit” was in progress and although the movies were a possibility, the sheer terror, for me, of walking through the streets with Rona held me back from even that proposal. I had the idea that everybody who passed would think she was my “date,” and although I had little knowledge of precisely what “dates” were for, I knew that I did not want it thought that I was seeking it, whatever it was, from Rona. So we sat, in a numbness so deep as to be beneath the reaches of the spirit itself and looked at the walls; the worst visit yet, the worst in history, and finally, out of desperation—for my hatred of this girl was so palpable that I could imagine myself doing something violent to her—I wondered if she might be interested in looking over some of my literature. Just so that she could see the kind of things they were publishing these days; I had no idea if girls were ever interested in this kind of thing but felt they should be because, after all, they were half, if the less interesting part, of the human race. All right, it was an insane impulse. I do not deny this. The normal adolescent hides his materials, snuggles them to the core of his person, would equate discovery with obliteration. But I was not a normal adolescent, you see. These materials had only the most peripheral relation to my activities; I considered them a fillip; a freak, fortuitous addition which related to the actual sensations induced only through idiosyncrasy. It was inconceivable that, for many, the magazines could be the prime means when for me they were only a kind of satellite.
Her dull eyes twitched somewhat, at any rate. “Magazines?” she said. “What kind of magazines?” “Oh, you find them on newsstands all over the place if you only look for them,” I said. “It all depends; like I said, if you didn’t look for them you wouldn’t even know they exist.” I reached into the space between mattress and frame bed and, with some difficulty, brought out two of them, stiff and luminescent. “Like these,” I said, and passed them over to her.
She took them and placed them carefully on the portion of rumpled skirt which composed her lap, began to go through them slowly, wetting her finger as she turned each page, pausing at certain pictures which had, indeed, won my own approval. These were not The Magazine but some of its inferior competitors and the poorer quality of photographic and page stock made it difficult, from my angle of vision, to see exactly at what she was looking, but most of them absorbed her for quite a time. Her face flushed dimly, her shoulders twitched and finally she turned the last page over and looked up at me. She regarded me as if she had never seen me before; I could see the recognition staggering at the corners of her eyes and finally moving into the center. She put the magazines to one side.
“Do you have any more?” she said.
Yes, I had more. I took out another sampling—it was necessary for me to urge both of us off the bed in order to get the next batch from that interior—and gave them to her diffidently, observing, without interest, that the magazines seemed to have brought out more response from her than I had seen in some half a decade of desultory visits. Of course this was of no interest to me whatsoever—the idea of response of any sort being too dreadful for even the aberrant adolescent mind to contemplate in relation to a girl like this—but I did feel the dim satisfaction of knowing that, for Rona at least, this would not be the least memorable of her visits. And it passed the time.
“Must you stay here?” she said in a high whine, raising her head and staring at me. “Couldn’t you go to the bathroom or go out for a walk or something?”
“I can’t go out for a walk. We’re supposed to be together, you remember? I’m supposed to entertain you.”
“So go to the bathroom, then. You’re entertaining me enough.”
“I don’t want to go to the bathroom.”
She took one of the magazines she had finished and handed it to me with a thrusting gesture, rolled it into my open palm. “Here,” she said. “That should make the difference. Now do you want to go to the bathroom?”
“No,” I said in mystification, “I don’t.”
“You mean you’re all cleaned out already?”
“What?” I asked. “What’s that? I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
She stood with a vaulting, almost prideful gesture and placed two of the magazines in the coil of her armpit. “Well, if you don’t understand,” she said, “I guess that I’ll just have to go to the bathroom myself. I haven’t been there for a long time and I’ll not be out for a while.”
