Saline Solution (6 page)

I got invited to the country place one weekend, and spent a dada evening with Lucinda, her mother, a gay psychiatrist, and his neurotic dog. The most interesting thing was that I didn't perceive that the doctor was a fag. He was the most perfectly disguised closet queen I had ever seen, and I admired his total camouflage. At one point we went into the woodshed for kindling, and as we stumbled around in the dark, we both began tingling. I felt it and knew he felt it. He reached out and put his hand on my arse. But he had been drinking a lot and it turned me off.

In front of the fire he told psychiatrist stories, and was very amusing. He had the wit of a man who has found a place, no matter how uncomfortable, to stand.

'She's been with me for ten years,' he said, talking of a patient.

'Isn't she cured yet?' Lucinda asked.

'No,' he said, and laughed. 'She's still under the delusion that I can help her.'

'Do you have any homosexual patients?' I asked.

And Lucinda's mother laced me with a glance of rankling hatred. But he held my gaze. 'I don't consider homosexuality a neurosis,' he said.

'Merely an inconvenience?'

The secret life is the substantial life: the things we do, the feelings coursing through us, which we share with no one. It is most clearly felt in the moments just after awakening in the morning, when we press our fingertips to our lips and hold ourself with figure-ground fragility. We know it best as loops of terror swing through our minds just before sleep. It is most agonising and glorious when we are among others, and we sit in perfect self-possession, sensing the weight of the body in the chair, aware of the many levels of perception and the echelons of being, watching the others in their unconscious sniffings and meanderings around one another's sleepwalking toes. The secret life is what the policeman would arrest us for, and the priest punish us for, and the lover pursue us for. We have become addicted to the outside and the hard; the inside and the soft have become rare and precious moods. And fetch a high price among the savage and jaded experience junkies of our age.

When I go into the Baths, I often enter the universe of the private. My centre of gravity descends to my belly, my walk becomes slow, my glance is minimally seductive. I would be stamped shallow by the public worlds, the world of politics, the world of society, the world of power, the world of identity.

The joy of fucking lies only secondarily in ejaculation orgasm. Rather it is in the beauty of the woman's face when it melts and becomes unfamiliar, when she ceases to have a feature, and becomes the embodiment of mystery, the edge of knowing. In that space, she shows her single purest gesture, the actual curve of her soul, and one can see her in the totality of her shining complex self, radiant in admission of all that she is.

Essential human intelligence lies for me in the gleam of awareness in the eyes of one who is at the point of surrendering to a flow of passion. It has nothing to do with the patriarchal insanity over achievement. It is the slightest of pressures, the most delicate of textures.

All day long a single peace pervaded the house. Francis and Bertha were resting on the sand; Donna was off on one of her baroque cruises, tracking down the most blatant oddities of the Island's social fare. Thoughts swept in and out of my mind like the waves whose voice never ceased, not even for a second. Released from the need to use thought for any technological activity, I saw the substance of thought as light and airy. Great shimmering castles of fantasy proliferated before my inner eye. I was, then, master of all thought forms. Architecture flowed freely. Entire universes of discourse were caught and understood and dispensed in microseconds of chronological time. The computer sang.

I stepped into the land of the ideal, without for a moment losing the reality of the physical world of which I knew myself to be but a brief manifestation, me and all my fancy thoughts. The elusive face of ultimate reality smiled at me from behind the veils of the last few words still sawing wood in my brain. And then, at a stroke, I was cut loose. Past all conceptual boundaries, past all modes and moods, and into the embrace of pure being.

Francis and Bertha walked in. 'Hey man, you look stoned,' he said.

'You know, whenever I think I've got it, that's when I don't.'

'It's a long way to Tipperary,' he said.

I went down to the beach. It occurred to me that the thing which made Francis so valuable a friend was that he knew that any given state
is
that state, and only a fool wonders which label to apply to it. Enlightened or stoned? You can tell by the degree to which the person is trying to figure it out.

As I stepped onto the sand, paranoia closed over me like a giant clam shell. The people on the shore were all alien. Something was wrong with them, unspeakably wrong. I could find no rationalisation. To my horror, someone smiled at me. I smiled back. And then I was giggling uncontrollably. The hilarity of it was overwhelming. 'They'll think I'm crazy,' I thought.

I went back to the house. Some people had arrived, and as I walked in the door they began speaking to me, making noises with their mouths, hitting me with their words. With a great tearing of gears I shifted levels and entered the world of question and answer. I found myself holding my mind in a knot, wishing over and over again that Lucinda would return early.

V

She came in on the eight o'clock ferry. We embraced and held on to one another for a long while. Our needs this time were in absolute synchrony.

The house was in pandemonium. All of the groupers had arrived for the weekend, and with guests, some thirteen people plus dogs were milling around the living room and kitchen. Everyone was smiling and polite, but the level of irritation was high. Donna was at the phone in the corner of the room, watching the crowd with calculating eyes.

'That bastard is having a party tonight,' she shouted at me as Lucinda and I walked in.

'Who?' I said, exaggerating the word with my lips so she could see what I was saying from across the noisy room.

'That millionaire bastard on the corner. And the fucker hasn't invited me.' She spoke into the phone and hung up. 'I was over there this afternoon,' she said, walking towards us. Her voice dropped to a whisper. 'In that scummy swimming pool of his. And I was coming up the ladder when he swam past and grabbed my arse. I turned around. "I sure would like to eat you," he said. So I told him to open his mouth, I had to take a shit anyway.'

⁴
Yeah, well, I wouldn't invite you to the party either.'

'The summer's not over yet,' she said. Til fix him.'

Donna was one of the few consciously realised paranoids I had ever met. Her entire approach towards other people was based on a meter which registered somewhere around her solar plexus. It had three indications on it: friend, neutral, and enemy. 'You have to trust your instinct,' she said at least five times a day. 'You know when you can't trust someone. You can tell it in the first flash. Always go by that. Get him before he gets you.'

'Do you want to eat?' Lucinda asked.

'Why don't you throw in with us?' This from Donna who had no trouble with any change of subject. 'It'll be in about an hour. We have shrimp.'

'Then let's go fuck first,' I said to Lucinda.

She smiled. Her eyes were clear and warm. The purple bruise on the spot where I had hit her had faded, and she looked like a cover for a Billie Holiday album.

'You have a good time with the kids?' I asked.

'It was all right. They said that if I had a boy friend they wouldn't want to talk to him.'

'Terrific,' I said.

'I went to visit an old friend, and talked to her about us. She's forty-five and very wise. She said that you'll have to kill me. That either I'll get out of your space or you'll kill me.'

'Go join Women's Lib,' I said. 'Not the bra corps agitating for higher pay. But the ones who are trying to find out what psychological dependence is all about. Get free.'

But, as almost always, my words were the prelude to a seduction. And soon we were on the bed, kissing and holding. Our clothes got shrugged and tugged off. And for a while we fucked very tenderly, remembering each other, being gentle with one another. Then it was as though some trigger were pulled. Her legs shot up and I plunged deep into her cunt, and we were grunting and groaning like drunken wrestlers. She wrapped her calves around my thighs and rode hard and fast until she came. Her orgasm had the abrupt quality of the way in which a man will flick a cigarette butt into the street. I waited until her vibrations fell off, and then continued my movement inside her until I reached a climax.

'We've never come together,' she said.

'Well, we're living in a fascist country. What can you expect?'

We lay quiet for a while, enjoying the silence which stretched for great distances around the room. 'I got arrested earlier tonight,' I said. 'For riding a bicycle in Ocean Beach. It cost me fifteen dollars to bail out the bike and I have to go for a hearing tomorrow. It was the old cop. The sergeant. He came scooting down the path on his three-wheel scooter and nabbed me just as I crossed the line into Seaview. It was ridiculous. You should have seen him, old enough to be a grandfather, dressed in that silly blue suit, chasing people on bicycles.'

'Where were you going?'

'I was coming back from buying some grass. So he escorted me all the way back to the station, and I waited right next to the fucking jail for an hour while some automaton got ready to make out a ticket, and all the while I've got two ounces in my pocket.'

I lit a cigarette. I was now feeling the anger I had laughed off earlier in the day. 'I really wanted to kick his teeth in.'

'But he had a gun,' Lucinda said.

'Right. He had a gun.' I let the scene come together in my mind. 'And when I came out of that cracker box they use for a station, a lady came up to me and started laying a rap on my head. "Isn't it a shame?" she kept saying. And another guy came up and before I knew it we had a political rally going, denouncing the police and the courts, fists waving in the air. A pack of frightened middle-class wage slaves and one crazy on Fire Island shouting against rule by authority. It was incredibly trivial and glorious all at once. And people think they'll recognise fascism when the cops start talking German. It's here. America is a reform school.'

'What are you going to do at the trial?' she asked.

'Make a speech questioning the foundation of American law and the premises of western civilisation.'

Lucinda yawned. 'Let's see if Donna has dinner ready,' she said.

She went towards the closet to get a dress. 'You'll see,' I said. 'One day you'll wake up and discover that you haven't had an original thought, or an unconditional emotion, or a spontaneous action for a long time. You will have become a robot, a walking typewritter ribbon for government and industry and the military to use in any fucking way they want. And they will smile as they dig our graves. And the worst part is that they won't be any more intelligent than the billions of people they control; merely more crucial.

'Do you think we're having such a hard time just because we're maladjusted individuals? The whole culture is sick at its core. So distorted that there is no way to even remember what a healthy human being is like. No wonder our fucking is so mechanical. The ultimate American sexual scene will come when jailors give acid to chicks in prisons and watch them go down in a final burst of masochistic self-degradation to suck their cocks, while they hold a pistol barrel to their temples and watch the tears of relief spring from their eyes.'

Lucinda turned and there were tears in her eyes. 'And what about the baby?' she said.

I rocked with the emotion that hurtled between us. I hung my head. 'That's the real question, isn't it? Not whether we get our rocks off together.'

It was to be a boy. We had both flashed on that simultaneously one night. And we were going to call him Dante G. He could fill in the middle initial with any number of names he wanted at different times in his life, a mobile nomenclature. I desired to see him born, yet would take no responsibility for his upbringing. He would need food and shelter and fondling; he would need a certain stability to keep from being swept away by the winds of thought and circumstance. But I could barely manage such essentials for myself, and Lucinda resented the impositions introduced by a helpless infant. She most certainly did not want to be burdened with its care if I were not going to be around to help. We did not have a means in our culture by which a child could grow up without being a drag much of the time, and so it might be better to spare everyone concerned the hassle of dealing with an odious situation.

Except that such reasoning shrivelled before the fact of the foetus who by then had both overall shape and fingernails.

There is the classic scene in which the fond parents are lying in bed reading. Suddenly, the wife turns to the husband and says, 'It's kicking, here feel it,' and she places her hand on her belly. But to have felt that child moving in Lucinda's stomach would have driven me mad.

I wondered whether I would ever break through the walls of ego involvement without losing my individuality? And why did I hold this individuality in such high esteem anyway? It became an academic question when I realised that I had no power to shape my life in any meaningful sense. I could only remain alert and attempt to stay out of the way of my natural unfolding. And if that happened to be in the direction of fey expectations, what was I to do? I found myself taking refuge in habit, or decadence. The sexual act itself was becoming a chore from which I could not free myself. I had begun to lose my passion, and was beginning to stoke the fires of hatred in myself in order to feel something strongly enough to have a sense of being alive. But hate leads to fear, which merges into self-pity. And to expiate, once again I would use my cock as a club to punish Lucinda's cunt for daring to introduce new life into the world, and she would allow herself to sink deep into guilt.