FIVE
I had a conversation with the taller of my two roommates today while the other was in one of the recreational areas and he, on a mild dispensation due to a virus, was being permitted to stay in his bed all day. My dispensation was of a clearer order; the injection I had received the previous night was of stunning and pervasive force and left me quite limp, entirely unable to confront the possibility of any activity at all, let alone the particularly horrid and “cheery” tasks of the recreational staff of this institution. I began by telling him of what had happened to me the previous evening.
He jerked his head as a full lever of dismissal and turned it to the wall, indicating, perhaps, that he did not seek conversation with me. I persisted, however, describing the reaction of the attendant, his gestures with the needle and the eventual stultifying outcome and at last it became apparent to him that I really meant to talk, that there was no way out of it. He turned wearily to face me, his face now cast open by the illness seeming surprisingly more youthful, and it occurred to me to wonder for the first time what he was doing in a place like this. I am a much older man, of course.
“That is impossible,” he said. “Attendants are not licensed to dispense drugs. Only the doctors are. And there are no doctors patrolling this place after working hours, you can count on that. Impossible!” he repeated, this time with a French accent, apparently about to lapse into his execrable, arcane phraseology again.
“But I tell you, he did it. He gave me an injection right here.” I showed him the spot on my arm. “And then I became unconscious.”
“Nonsense. You stabbed yourself with a pin or crushed it with a fingernail. I am really not interested in your imagined slights and brutalities. I am ill—I mean, that is mal—and I wish to go to sleep.”
“But they are committing atrocities here! Isn’t anybody aware of the fact that people are being maltreated?”
“You do not seem maltreated to me. You seem to be in entirely good spirits, offensive and boorish as usual, full of quips and slights.” He groaned faintly. “I must get some rest now. Further interruptions will force me to call one of the attendants.”
“How about your companion?” I said archly. “Why don’t you call him? He will take care of you.”
Instantly he was out of bed—not that mal after all, it seemed—and standing huge before me, his face palpitating oddly. “I wish to know exactly what you mean by that remark.”
“I mean to get your attention. They are filling us full of injections here. They are making us stuporous and undoubtedly picking our brains. They are all out to get us. Don’t you think you could transcend your silly virus enough to be sensible and listen to me? I’m telling you that there are enormous things going on here. For all you know your own virus may have been caused by their drugs. Think about it.”
“The next slur you make upon my roommate will meet with instant retaliation. La Guerre. I will strike you violently.”
“Oh, go to hell,” I said, quite disgusted, quite hopeless and, for the moment, sharing my roommate’s disinterest in all aspects of the institution. “Get back to bed and cover yourself up.”
He did so, heavily, making snorting noises with his back turned toward me, apparently intimating gross and terrible vengeance, and went unhappily between the bedsheets. I sat up shakily and fumbled for my bedroom slippers, found them at last and moved around the room slowly, testing my limbs, examining them for defects. When my roommate’s breathing had subsided to the even tempo of sleep I stole upon him and carefully looked at his left wrist, the wrist which he had thrown casually around the pillow, embracing it as if it were an impossibly distended breast.
It was just as I had suspected, of course. The institutional stamp was on the wrist, over the pulse itself and as his blood throbbed evenly in his healthy veins, it dilated and expanded slowly, regularly. I looked at the mark for some time and then at the face of my roommate, expected to see that face rise to greet me with a cackle but the eyes were shuttered in sleep, the face a cold mask and it was quite obvious that he was not feigning, that he was actually unconscious, that he had dared to go to sleep in the same room as one confined in the institution … an institution which was his employer.
That confirmed everything I needed to know.
Truly, truly, all of them are out to get me. This intimation, first known many years ago, but stated in its final, most succinct form, only to D’Arcy himself, and then at the conclusion of our relationship, has pursued me all of my life, has shaped so many of my responses; has, in a sense, conditioned and structured the very quality of my inner life and yet there is nothing, nothing after all, that I can do. It explains everything: the abominable French, the sneers and sly winks exchanged behind my back, the high, cold arrogance which these two roommates have always sustained toward me, the strange solicitousness of the outer “staff,” the actions of the attendant himself.
But, in addition, it is completely irrelevant. I have my work, after all; I have my work to do and as long as I can function I intend to do it. It has fallen to me to write the last, the true, the encapsulatory memoirs of the wonderful career of D’Arcy and while capacity yet remains with me I will do this because this task is vital, because his voyage was vital, because I was his only true confidant. So I will continue then, weary as I am I will continue; there is no one who can stop me, there is no one who has the ability to stop me; I will persist. Before it breaks apart I will have told it all.
There are other factors at work too. I could kill either of my roommates in a twinkling if I desired. There is no way they could anticipate this or head me off. I have the weapons, you see; the means. I have the final insight. They are as grass before me.
The needle that glints in the palm that strikes in the frame that buckles has a different voyage. Aha, aha, aha!
I was trying to talk of D’Arcy before I was so crudely interrupted by these irrelevancies.
SIX
“The province,” I said to my dear friend, once again lifting the glass to my lips; it was a stein this time since we had switched to foaming, Alpine beer in order to “beat the weather,” as D’Arcy put it, and to regularize our discussions which had begun, in their later nightly stages, to take on more the aspects of the drunken preamble than the sensitive, polished, transmuted retrospective. “You were going to tell me about the province.”
He shook his head and took an uncapped bottle from the table, drank beer that way and finally replaced it with a grimace. “I will get to that in due time,” he said. “I was still talking, as I believe, about the inaccessibility of conventional sexual objects.”
“But the last thing you said to me was that you were just about ready to tell me of the province, of the dishevelled tree, of what happened to you on that afternoon so long ago.”
“And who are you to say that?” he asked rather belligerently, brandishing the bottle at me and then taking another swallow. “You’re only the biographer. What right do you have to tell me what to tell next? I’m the subject; it’s my story from beginning to end. I can make it up if I want to and I can tell you anything I want.”
“I never said you couldn’t,” I said placatingly, my voice a rich, pleasant, mellow hum in the throbbing room. I have often been told that I have a singularly melodious and pleasing larynx; something which could have led me to an excellent career in public speechmaking and politics, had I not forsaken all of this for art. “I was only trying to help you get things in order,” I said calmly.
“I’ll get things in order my own way,” D’Arcy said. “I don’t need your help and I don’t need being ordered what to do. Is this your biography or mine we’re working on?” His voice held a thin edge of petulance and I decided that it was best to soothe him.
“Yours, of course,” I said. “You are the dedicatee, I merely the witness, and I would not presume to tell you what to say or when to say it or in what manner. You lead the way, I will only follow.”
“Better, then,” said D’Arcy, uncapping a fresh bottle and pouring some of it tinkling into his glass. “I didn’t want to think that there was a reversal of roles here. The confusion this kind of thing leads to, the hatred, the loss! No, one must enact his single destiny from childhood to senescence, never stirred by alternative. I know that you can agree to this.”
I drained my own glass and poked it out for a modest refill, then sat it carefully on the arm of the chair. “Of course,” I said. “Everything you say is absolutely correct.”
“I was just getting on. I haven’t forgotten a single thing I said I would tell you. I’m getting to it.”
I took my pad from an inner coat pocket and opened it carefully to a fresh page, still feeling the thin ripples of hostility in the room but now receding, receding. “Yes,” I said, “I’m waiting.”
As I was saying (D’Arcy said), the gaps in my sexual education were immense and could seemingly only be filled by the girls in the magazines themselves; girls who, costumed by bare flesh and the invidiousness of their spirit would possess that utter knowledge of function and reciprocity which I so desperately needed, but girls whose means and whereabouts and interiors I had no more knowledge of than I did of the intricate, poisonous physiology of self. It was perfectly apparent that there were women about in the world—did I not see them all the time, these swaddled, irretrievable objects? And that many of these women had breasts and nipples, steaming vaginas and heavy thighs but all of it was so carefully sequestered, so remote, so distant that it could as well have not existed for all the good it did for me.
I risk misapprehension here. Let me explain. I was not interested in copulation nor interrelationship in a sexual way with women who—stubbornly—I still perceived as adjuncts or objects rather than subjects. I was only in search of the revelation of a mystery, a revelation that could only be accomplished were a woman to talk freely and frankly with me. What did they do? What did they get out of it? How did they masturbate? How mutual was the masturbation of intercourse? What was intercourse, precisely? Did one play with the breasts before, during, or after emission? These were the questions which concerned me. I suppose that these are the questions which plague the career-rapist, and that in subtle ways I had a good background toward a deviate’s professionalism ... but my opportunities being as restricted as they were and my outlets so plentiful—for I had not ceased masturbating, not for a moment; if anything the tempo and pulsing of my hands and joints had increased through all this time—the idea of conjoinment violent or otherwise never occurred to me. In certain circumstances, no doubt, I could have proceeded in this fashion indefinitely, gone through all the years suspended between curiosity and fulfillment, at a kind of wasteland of the psyche until (if all things had gone this way) you would have seen me now in my 38th year, mild D’Arcy, gentle D’Arcy, confused D’Arcy sitting somewhere on a sofa wiping his glasses with a shirttail and still perpetually trying to assemble what all of it was about. We have seen plenty of men like this; their slack mouths questing, their dull eyes brightening—but never enough—as they enter into the presence of women; these men who roam in small, chattering packs outside the hotels in which public dances are being held, these men who are still trying to find an identity at some post-puerperal stage and thus are in no position to affect the identity of others. You are one of these types yourself, my friend, if I may be frank. You have sublimated most of this into the so-called “creative” or “journalistic” drives which, along with a heavy, frowning beard permit you to seemingly negate the reality of your interior, but believe me, I know what is really with you—as a refugee from that estate myself I have that kind of attuned sensitivity known only to homosexuals or convicts among one another—and I fail to derogate you; it is perfectly all right with me, in short. I know your suffering, your limitation, the thoughts which pass through your representation of a mind when you pass or witness an attractive female; the ordeal of dread and loss which occupies you when you try to imagine the contact of warm flesh, sliding breast, gentle pressure. It is not pleasant to live in a state of perpetual hysteria to be touched off by the first wandering thigh or shoulder in sight. Spite alone could blow your fragile balance to shreds. But, as I say, this is perfectly all right with me; I regard you without amusement and with much solemnity.
The province. We were getting to the matter of the province. I was seventeen then, seventeen finally, when I accompanied my parents to a dismal seaside resort several hundred miles from the city in which we dwelt. It was the first vacation for all of us in some time; my father’s harassments in the “accounting business” and my mother’s ambitions to “cut expenses” had kept all of us safely swaddled at home during the summers until, this preceding spring, my father incurred what he said was a “heart attack,” which the attending doctors called instead a “warning of an impending heart attack,” and with the first flash of mortality spiked deep into his chest my father decided that he, that all of us, were “entitled to get away.” Our “entitlement” consisted of being removed to a development consisting of several bleak bungalows and a central dining area, half of it facing a rather polluted lake, the other half some blasted farmland, and my father joined us here on weekends, otherwise living and working in the accounting business in the city. I was not pleased with what I took to be a kind of exile but my mother had activities to occupy her most of the time—she was a restless card-player and also found that she and the “social director” had gone to the same school a long time ago, although at different times—and this left me with most of my own time unpressed; long swims in the dreary lake and walks through the farmland, a drive-in movie theater some miles away which had a bus line of its own, and all the time I needed and could possibly want to masturbate. I was greedy, desperate of my masturbatory prerogatives, and I had never had so many as I did at the beginning of that summer. All in all, not precisely discontent, I worked out an enclosed existence and, taking it for my destiny, passed into a period of self-absorption.
This period ended abruptly only a fortnight after our arrival, however. The social director—a widower—had a daughter, Marie-Jean; and Marie-Jean, a lush but equivocal seventeen, had nowhere to turn for companionship other than to the guests and the children of the guests. It happened that I was the only person in the entire camp between the ages of 15 and 20 with the exception of herself. Fate took us.
I see you poising nearer, my friend; I see your pencil raised to take a particularly vigorous series of notes, the high twitch of your eyelids intimates a kind of involvement I have never seen from you before. Rest assured that you are correct; I am about, at last, to talk to you of D’Arcy’s inaugural into the universe of copulation. But in time, in time. It took time that summer. Marie-Jean, it appeared, did not like me very well at all. And unversed—oblivious is the word—as I was in the intricacies or even simplicities of summer-seduction, I was unable to deal with that dislike other than with a reciprocal hostility of my own. The first time she went into the lake where I was already paddling my feet and looking skyward, I asked her how she could bear to dwell in a place like this and why her bathing suit was so tight and yet ill-shaped. It was not a propitious meeting.
As it turned out, she did not live here year-round; she had little more connection with this “resort” than I did. As it developed through our conversations, her father was a teacher of mathematics in a suburban high school who ran the resort summers to “make a buck,” and whose loathing for the scenery easily approximated my own. A bizarre promotional genius, however, accompanied by the services of a professional photographer, had resulted in a brochure whose misrepresentation of the property was as profitable as it was marginally legal ... and this explained his presence there as well as that of Marie-Jean, to say nothing of my own. Marie-Jean and I did not get along well together from the start.
There was no way in which we could have. As I realized later, she had seen, practically from our first meeting, that she was going to have to have a relationship with me because I was the only vaguely accessible male within several square miles of the area that summer, but the imminence of this relationship did not please her. It was a question of needing it more than she repudiated me. What I am trying to say is that Marie-Jean, short, well-developed, insular and suspicious little Marie-Jean, was a thoroughgoing slut. Her sexual history, in its way, was at least as rich as my own.
