The Merry Month of May (7 page)

“Well, I didn’t try to tell her that it just was different with men. That it’s a kind of adventure. What was the point? You couldn’t talk to her. So I made her a solemn promise instead. That night. And, that night, as you may have guessed by now, was the night McKenna was conceived. She wasn’t anticipated or planned for. But I know that happens with lots of people. It’s happened with lots of my friends. I call them Reconciliation Babies. Some deep emotional spark down deep inside them somewhere makes contact and catches hold and sticks.

“And I haven’t laid a glove on another broad since.” He moved in the chair.

“But wasn’t that miraculous? That she should come to me like that? I mean, she didn’t have to. She could just have taken Hill and left, and left me a letter. Or not even left me any note at all! And where would I have been then? No, I think that part was marvelous.”

“Yes,” I said from deep within the open mouth of my glass. “That part was certainly marvelous. But then, she’s a marvelous woman, Louisa.”

“She sure is, and I don’t mind telling you that I’ve had several pretty long hard dry spells because of that solemn promise, since then,” Harry said. “That’s why I’m not so very hot on going down to Madrid for this job without her.”

Such self-centeredness as that demands a certain respect. He reached for the bottle. I quickly held out my glass. It had been a brand-new bottle when he got it from the bar. But I felt I needed a drink. I felt dishonest. But I did not quite see how I could tell him now, six years after, about my share in his reconciliation with his wife—and by extension, in the conception of his daughter. It was too personal. It was too—intimate. The very idea embarrassed me. And yet some devilish part of me was enjoying having my secret with Louisa, even if she wouldn’t acknowledge it. At that moment, I hated the whole evening.

Harry poured himself more than half a tumblerful of straight Scotch, and poured almost as much for me, before I stopped him. He took very little Perrier. I took more. I never was able to drink and keep up with Harry drink-for-drink, though I’m a serious drinker. The studio kitchen had its own refrigerator and ice, and Harry knocked some loose. Then when he sat back down in the big black leather chair and put his feet back up on the desk corner, I realized he wasn’t finished.

I was pretty well worn-out emotionally, and I didn’t want to hear any more. The thing I was most terrified of hearing—his revelations about his sexual life with Louisa—had come and gone rather placidly, without causing any earthquakes or seismographic oscillations, and I thought that was enough. Of course, he had not been very graphic. But I still thought it was enough. But I apparently did not have any way of communicating this to Harry; or if I did, it was not getting through to him. For whatever reasons of his own, Harry had gone beyond receiving any signals from me.

I’m convinced that the emotional tensions of the evening with the two producers were the initial cause of it. Add to that all the brandy and then all that Scotch, and those ungodly strong cigars. Top it off with the morbid speculations about having to go to Madrid for a long period without Louisa which the conversation had called forth, and you had a Harry Gallagher in a nervous fit of irresponsible soul-searching, with me as the captive audience.

Other people’s intimate sexual disclosures have always made me nervous. Several times in my life I have been trapped and made the victim for such soul-searching declarations by men I knew, and every time it has resulted in the loss of a friendship. The next time they see you the eyebrows go up and the eyes get flat and funny, and an impenetrable wall of plastic descends. Harry remains the sole exception to this rule, but I didn’t know that then. And I was made more unhappy by having been forced to be dishonest with him.

“Of course, there’s more to the whole story than that, naturally,” was the way he began. O, foreboding sentence of a miserable night in store! How many times have I heard you? And how many times have you portended spiritual bad digestion to come?

He always was a very highly sexed individual, Harry proceeded to tell me. Even back in his earliest young youth, and as far back as he could remember. He didn’t know why exactly. It was just there. He had an abiding love for the female body, both in toto and altogether in its form (he said) and in all its details, down to its tiniest parts. And it didn’t matter much who inhabited it. He liked female bodies. He liked to look at them and touch them and smell them, and study them inside and out, in the same way that other people like to find out what is between the covers of a book. He collected women—in the same way other people collect books. And he had to admit to me he saw absolutely nothing wrong with this in any way. That was why he honestly, truly could not see what had upset Louisa so.

Of course, now he understood that it was some tremendous, baby-girllike insecurity of her own (she had, incidentally, always been a great adorer of her father: for example). And, of course, now all that was over for him now.

But it was a phenomenon he had noted (over the years; talking) in a great many American men. They were all of them—or a great, great many; a very high percentage—absolutely cunt-struck. They were almost all, like himself, completely cunt-oriented.

I sat nursing my drink and nodding, without looking up too often, and watched the level of my glass descend too fast, despite the Perrier I kept adding to it. I was sure that my ears were burning fiery red.

Harry was always quite a swearer, using all the four-letter words with great freedom, even in mixed company, and right now he was not worrying about niceties. And, I was well aware that in the past few years it had become chic to use them liberally in conversation, particularly in front of women. I was publishing them in great quantities in my Review. But my primitive upbringing never allowed me to feel comfortable around them, even when females were not present. I never used them myself. I was aware this was a fault, but there was nothing I could do about it. Besides, there was no more point in interrupting Harry than there would have been in trying to interrupt that bursting dam in Fréjus several years ago.

I have always been a low-keyed man sexually; female bodies interest me less than female minds, so to speak. Sex, while undeniably pleasant, and not something to be avoided, always seemed to me something that the pursuit of cost one a great deal more energy than the final results achieved were worth. So I don’t think I ever did really understand that part of Harry well. It was almost as if there were some actual basic biologic difference between us.

Cunt-struck, Harry was continuing, incognizant of my red ears, cunt-oriented: those were the key words to remember. When the true history of his generation came to be written, it might well go down to posterity as the Cunt-struck Generation. By extension they could then be called Cuntniks, as Kerouac, Ginsberg and company, a few years younger, were Beatniks. Harry laughed suddenly, ha-ha-ha, in a kind of crazy way. But the very first memory of his life was of sex. It was of lying in bed on a sunny summer morning jacking off. He couldn’t have been more than five: too young even to know what coming was, in any normal way; but lying there jacking his cock just the same. And what was in his mind? What were his thoughts, his fantasy, at the time? Cunt! The little girl next door! The little girl next door, when he was too young even to know what a cunt was, or looked like.

He had been a dedicated pussy-eater since the very first time he had indulged the pastime. Had been one before, even; since first learning such a technique existed via the pornography shown him by older boys. His own young porno collection had swung more and more toward pictures, stories, drawings, any material having to do with cunt-lapping. But the girls of his generation, at least while young, were backward in this respect. His first real opportunity did not come till he was 17, when he took out in his father’s big Studebaker a younger girl noted for going out with all the boys, and had gone down on her before he fucked her. She had not been at all surprised. All the boys liked to eat her pussy that way she said, and she herself loved it. She was his first blow job, and his first real fuck. He would never forget her. Wherever she was, he wished her well. But she was quite a contrast to the rest of them, who all seemed to feel that licking their cunts was dirty and immoral, a perversion; which of course only excited him all the more. Perhaps it frightened them because its intensity was so great, and made them find they were sexual creatures after all. Whatever, it gave him some anxious moments about his “perversion”. And as it was with sucking, so it was with fucking.
There are other things in life besides sex, Harry,
spoken in a high, protesting highschool—or college—soprano, was a sentence that would remain in his head the rest of his life. Later, of course, as he moved on from Boston to New York, and then to Hollywood, and then into the Service, and back to Hollywood, he realized that what he had found and taken unto himself; what he could, indeed, almost be said to have totally and alone
created
for himself, i.e., this preoccupation with and adoration of female cunt—was after all not really all that much of a singular experience at all.

His entire generation, or at least (here he nodded at me, allowing me existence, too, alongside himself), at least one element of his generation, had it, and suffered from it and enjoyed it.

He had analyzed it and analyzed it and, if you took away all the commercialization of it (cunt; and the adoration of cunt) in the advertising world; all the promulgation of it in films and magazines and radio and TV; if you took all that away—
it
was still there; still there, and existing in and of itself, by itself, antedating all the rest of it, all the media saturation. He thought maybe it had to do with some brand-new element of male masochism, introduced by whatever matriarchal environmental factor he had never been able to isolate. Masochism in the distorted male pleasure principle: the pleasure of giving pleasure to the woman. That, of course, was unnatural. Imagine a male dog or cat or lion concerning himself with giving pleasure to the female! Ridiculous! But men did it. And it had to be masochistic. There was something perversely pleasurable in
making
a woman enjoy sex. For example: You take a woman and, by whatever means, bring her on toward coming—toward her orgasm—and before long, you reached a point where you ceased to exist as you for her. You ceased to be Harry Gallagher for her and became just a man, any man, who is giving her excitation and stimulation. Carry it a while further and you ceased to be even a man, and became just some object, some thing which is causing her to have pleasure. Carry it on all the way to where she comes and you ceased even to be an object. Because in the midst of her come nothing exists except herself and what she’s feeling. So that, through her, what you’ve done is “stimulate” yourself right out of existence. What you’ve really been doing is to be present at and assist in your own cuckolding. In reality— . . . you have been cuckolding yourself! . . . Man, we’re masochists, man! he cried at me, his eyes jewelly in the light. All us cunt-lovers!

I think he was a little drunk by then. Anyway, it was certainly a new idea to me, and the logic seemed impeccable. I mainly kept my eyes down and nodded, pretending to peer reflectively into my by-now empty glass, in order to avoid being further embarrassed by exposing the embarrassment I already felt. At one point once, I thought fleetingly of asking to have my glass refilled. But before I could even do it, Harry had leaned forward with the bottle in his hand and poured whisky in the glass, his jaw continuing to wag and rotate at me, without even slowing.

I got very drunk. Things began to come and go in what film people call fast dissolves, and then would suddenly arrest themselves in those sudden stop-shots in which everything freezes and the man with the pointing finger remains fixed, frozen, in front of you for what seems an inordinate length of time. I began to see things in splintered images as if the mirror glass had broken; and I would find myself present at the beginning of something only to disappear and find myself, next, far into the middle part of something else without having been present at the ending of the first or the beginning of the second. So I am somewhat vague about the rest of what transpired.

I remember Harry talking about his pornography collection, which is famous in the American colony in Paris, and saying he would get some of it out to prove some point. Next I was sitting forward in my chair with my knees together, poring through a whole flock of precisely focused, glossy finish photographs in series of fives in my lap, all of which Harry apparently had said he’d bought in London, I remembered vaguely. Beside me on the low Louis Treize table was an even greater flock of them which I apparently had already been through; and beside these was a stack of Olympia Press and Ophelia Press books I must have looked at too. All of this is crystal clear. The photos were of varied subjects, but most of them were of two women making love in various ways. Some of them were of white girls committing fellatio upon young Negro males. The girls changed from series to series.

“That’s the trend it’s taking,” Harry was saying beside me from over my shoulder. “More and more. Lesbianism. Or not even true lesbianism. Just two women, two normal women, making love together. I don’t know why it turns me on so, but it does.”

Then I disappeared again. When I returned, Harry was locking up the pornography collection in its glass-doored shelves. I was aware dimly that he had been talking about “his Fantasy”. He himself had capitalized the word with his voice, and it had something to do with making love with two women at the same time, instead of the normal, usual one.

“You wouldn’t believe it,” he growled over his shoulder, as he turned the key on the last great batch of the pornography. “But it’s the God’s truth.” Apparently he had just been talking about something else, too. “If I didn’t lock them up, they’d disappear in a minute. That’s why I had the doors put on. Why, I’ve had producers and directors staying up here working on a script with me, big important men I mean, and making plenty of their own money. Well, by God, after they’d leave, I’d find one or two of my choicest items missing. Stolen.” He put the keys in his jacket pocket protectively. They were on a different ring from his other keys. All of this was crystal clear, too. “I don’t know why it is. But pornography just is considered fair game. By everybody. An honest man that you could leave all sorts of money lying around in front of, and just let him loose around your pornography!” Harry said.