Kafka Was the Rage (15 page)

With a girl, there was always the definition of terms: what getting into bed meant to her and what it could mean to me. Why are we doing this? she would ask, and I would have to make up a lie because I didn’t know the answer. As we pressed up against the idea of love, as we felt its heat and blinked in its light, the personal and the philosophical met in a blur.

I would be seized with an incredible sincerity, and while I knew that this sincerity was temporary, there was a sense in which it was eternal too. The girl and I were like two bows bent all the way back, with only one arrow between us. Seduction was a touching and beautiful genre, the most heartfelt literature of the self. At such times, I saw myself as I might be, as lovable. And I think the girl saw herself at her best too, as inspiring.

There was a wonderful embarrassment about it all, a moral nakedness. A contemporary writer, a psychotherapist, defined embarrassment as radiance that doesn’t know what to do with itself—and that’s what we had. We had radiance. When people are embarrassed, it’s as if they’ve fallen out of their compulsive rhythms and are framed for a moment in an absolute, undefended stillness.

Undressing was a drama in itself. A girl standing with her arms behind her back, at the clasp of her bra, had some of the beauty of a crucifixion. She also looked
as if she was hiding something behind her, a gift. Pausing, gazing past me into the middle distance, her arms still back, handcuffed by hesitation and desire, she was trying to see the future or the end of love. And when at last her breasts sprang loose, she looked down at them with as much amazement as I did.

When a girl took off her underpants in 1947, she was more naked than any woman before her had ever been. It was as if time or history itself had been evolving toward her nakedness, yearning for it. The men of my generation had thought obsessively about her body, had been elaborately prepared for it, led up to it by the great curve of civilization. Her body was on the tip of our minds, a pinup on the brink of our progress, our freedom. We’d carried it, like a gun, all through the war. The nakedness of women was such an anticipated object that it was out in front of American culture, like the radiator ornament on the hood of a car. We were at that point in our social evolution where we had taken in as much awareness of women’s bodies as we could stand without going mad. We were a nation of voyeurs.

Perhaps, when she had undressed, a girl would apologize for her body, say that it was too thin or fat, that her breasts were too small. It was always she who had to measure up, who had to justify men’s furious imaginings. If she had dared to refer to it, she might have apologized for her sex—its wetness, its pungency, its hairiness, its peculiar, almost furtive location. She might end her undressing with a little shrug, as if to say, This is all I have.

I loved the awkwardness of these girls. There were times when it broke my heart. Afraid to take any sort of initiative, they hovered and fumbled, loitered and digressed. This awkwardness was, for me, a kind of
sublime, an unconscious statement of their innocence. I remember a girl whose awkwardness took the form of stepping in dog shit in the street when we were on the way to my apartment. It happened three or four times and I asked her, Don’t you see where you’re going? But that was precisely what she didn’t want to do. She didn’t want to see. Stepping in dog shit was like retreating all the way back to the pregenital. It was a proof of her inadvertence, her sublimity.

One girl in particular sums up that time for me. She was a perfect example of what I mean when I say that sex used to be more individual, more personally marked, than it is now. She stands out beyond the others not because she was more original than they were, but because a combination of circumstances allowed her to spin out her idiosyncracy, to find what it needed.

Her name was Virginia and she was a rich girl who had come to New York to study art—not to paint or sculpt, but study, to
be with
art, to live near it. When she arrived in the Village, she made a great hit because she had high cheekbones. In 1947, high cheekbones were the best thing a girl could have, better than big breasts or great legs. Cubism had reached the human face and people in the Village liked to talk about bone structure.

What impressed me almost as much as her cheekbones was a remark Virginia made the first time we talked. She had told me that she was from a coastal town in New England and, trying to imagine the circumstances of her life, I asked her how close her house was to the water.

Quite close, she said. Close enough so that when I
lay in bed at night with the windows open I can distinguish the sound of the water lapping against the hull of my boat from that of the other boats. I thought this quite a fine distinction, like a piece of aquatic literary criticism. She had a low voice and a clipped, toothy way of talking.

On the strength of her cheekbones and that remark, I took her out. But her conversation was so polite, so relentlessly general, that I couldn’t get up the necessary momentum, couldn’t set in motion the kind of rhetoric that would have made it possible to ask her to come home with me. It was not until the fourth time we went out that I asked her. I gave up any idea of leading up to it and just asked. I hadn’t even touched her, but I said, I want you to stay with me tonight.

Without appearing to hear what I said she told me that she had to exercise her dog. She had a saluki, a very fast and elegant breed that had to be run every day. I thought this meant taking the dog to Washington Square and throwing a stick, but Virginia had more style than that. We got into her MG, one of the early, rakish models, and the dog leapt gracefully onto the folded canvas top.

We drove to West Street, along the Hudson under the West Side Drive. In those days West Street was deserted at night. When Virginia stopped the car, the dog jumped out and sat on the cobblestones, waiting for a signal. Then, as we headed south, he loped easily alongside. The car was so low that his head was on a level with mine. He grinned as he ran and I noticed that he had high cheekbones, too.

I remember that there was a hugh garbage compactor on the dock at the foot of Twelfth Street and its smell mingled with the milder reek of the river, which
we could glimpse between the rotting wharves. The MG was stiffly sprung and made a lot of noise drumming over the cobblestones. Virginia held her hands at three and nine o’clock on the polished wooden steering wheel.

West Street at night was the kind of place that makes you pensive. The ruined docks seemed to say that there would be no more steamer trunks and champagne in first-class cabins, or friends coming down to the dock to see you off to Europe. To take Virginia home with me would be like sailing from one of these docks. I looked at her and tried to estimate my chances, but she was wrapped up in her dog and her driving.

The docks reminded me of the one in Yokohama where I had scraped the shit away and there was a military suggestion about Virginia too. She wore a tweed suit whose jacket was cut in what was called an Eisenhower style, with a biswing back. In everything she did, she impressed me as obeying a mysterious discipline.

We drove south for about a mile, then turned north again. We did this twice and it was all perfectly solemn. We hardly spoke because of the wind in our ears and because the scene itself imposed a kind of silence. The third time around I noticed that the dog was tiring. His tongue was lolling and his stride had lost some of its grace.

I wondered how much farther Virginia meant to go. The vibration of the car was getting to my bladder and the dog was so done in that it seemed cruel to keep on. I was going to ask her to stop, but then I realized—I don’t know how, but I knew—that she had forgotten about the dog. She was deciding whether to go home with me or not. Perhaps the car would run out of gas.

In the end, it was the dog who decided. When I
tapped Virginia on the arm and pointed to him, she stopped suddenly, the first break in the perfection of her driving. I thought I would have to lift the dog into the car, but with a last gallant effort he jumped to the canvas. Tired with running after this girl, almost panting myself, I knew how he felt.

Now, one way or the other, she would have to answer. I rested my case, because I didn’t think it would do any good to try to persuade her. She would follow her own peculiar imperatives.

The car idled very fast, as if it was nervous. Virginia set the hand brake and then she pulled off her driving gloves. At least, I thought, her hands are naked, it’s a beginning. Then she turned in the seat and stretched out one hand to the dog. She began to pet him, rubbing his ears, his head, his back. She went on rubbing, rubbing him for some time while I sat there gazing at the river shining between the wharves.

She was asking the dog what to do—what should she do? She was asking him to decide. And he said Yes, you need to run too. The night is made for running. She went home with me because the dog was so graceful, so brave. Perhaps we too would be graceful and brave. In her way Virginia was, though in the two or three months that I saw her she never said anything remotely resembling that remark about the water lapping against her boat.

The saddest part of sex in those days was the silence. Men and women hadn’t yet learned to talk to one another in a natural way. Girls were trained to listen. They were waiting for history to give them permission to
speak. They led waiting lives—waiting for men to ask them out, for them to have an orgasm, to marry or leave them. Their silence was another form of virginity.

There were all kinds of silences: timid silences, dogged silences, discreet, sullen, watchful, despairing silences, hopeful silences, interrogative silences. In the beginning, in the early stages of knowing a girl, I didn’t mind, because desire was a kind of noise—but afterward, lying in bed, the silence was cold, as if we had no blanket to cover us. There were girls who insisted on kissing all through the act, and I thought of this kissing as a speechless babble.

I was so depressed by this silence, by the absence of real talk or genuine confiding, that I went around for a while with a deaf and dumb girl. Why not? I said to myself. Why not go all the way? I didn’t know, when I picked her up in the lobby of the New School, that she couldn’t hear. I assumed that her odd speech—the way of someone who has never heard speech—was the accent of a foreign student. It sounded like Arabic.

When I realized that she had been born this way it seemed like a judgment. I felt that I had reached a logical conclusion. This was the final silence between women and men—why go on pretending? Her hearing aid was in her bra—when she undressed, she was stone deaf. We could only tap each other on the arm. She told me that she heard my voice as a vibration in my chest.

There was another kind of silence: the silence of the body, not only in sex but in its other functions. I’ve known girls who never, even if they stayed a week at my apartment, had a bowel movement. If orgasm was difficult, excretion was impossible. And so these poor girls would be twice constipated, would have a double
bellyache. In my small apartment, the toilet was too near, like the nearness of shame.

I could see the evidence of this withholding in their clouded eyes, their fading complexions, even their speech patterns. Their faces would get puffy, their bellies would be distended, their bodies knotted. Their sentences would clot as they longed to get away, to let go of it all.

If I had known how to reassure these girls, or if I had remained with any of them long enough, they might have relaxed and become natural with me, and I with them. But I was driven with restlessness. I was still looking for transfiguration, as I had said to Dr. Schachtel—it was transfiguration or nothing. But transfiguration had to start somewhere, and I never gave it a chance. There was another obstacle, too: I was just learning how to write, I turned everything into literature, and this was something no affair could survive.

Although their bodies were often beautiful to me and their personalities as appealing as our inhibitions allowed them to be, it was ultimately with girls’ souls that I grappled. No matter what we said or did, I couldn’t get away from their souls. Their souls lay beside us in the bed, watching, sorrowing. Perhaps I needed their souls—there is no other explanation for their inconvenient presence—but I didn’t know what to do with them, any more than I knew what to do with my own.

I was looking for so much in each girl and she was looking for so much in me, we confused and depressed each other. I think too that I may have muddled sex and literature. The tension and the excitement were so similar that sometimes the two things were as difficult to distinguish as the tolling of distant church bells.

I remember once I was walking in the street with my friend Milton Klonsky and we were talking seriously, deeply, about books when we passed a wonderful-looking girl. She must have seen the admiration in my face, because she smiled, a little conspiratorial smile. I broke off in the middle of a sentence and ran after her, which enraged Milton. I could never make him understand that, at the moment when she smiled, I saw her as the incarnation of meaning.