The Subterraneans Page 8
The time we read Faulkner together, I read her Spotted Horses, out loud—when Mike Murphy came in she told him to sit and listen as I’d go on but then I was different and I couldn’t read the same and stopped—but next day in her gloomy solitude Mardou sat down and read the entire Faulkner portable.
The time we went to a French movie on Larkin, the Vogue, saw The Lower Depths, held hands, smoked, felt close—tho out on Market Street she would not have me hold her arm for fear people of the street there would think her a hustler, which it would look like but I felt mad but let it go and we walked along, I wanted to go into a bar for a wine, she was afraid of all the behatted men ranged at the bar, now I saw her Negro fear of American society she was always talking about but palpably in the streets which never gave me any concern—tried to console her, show her she could do anything with me, “In fact baby I’ll be a famous man and you’ll be the dignified wife of a famous man so don’t worry” but she said “You don’t understand” but her little girl-like fear so cute, so edible, I let it go, we went home, to tender love scenes together in our own and secret dark—
Fact, the time, one of those fine times when we, or that is, I didn’t drink and we spent the whole night together in bed, this time telling ghost stories, the tales of Poe I could remember, then we made some up, and finally we were making madhouse eyes at each other and trying to frighten with round stares, she showed me how one of her Market Street reveries had been that she was a catatonic (“Tho then I didn’t know what the word meant, but like, I walked stiffly hang arming arms hanging and man not a soul dared to speak to me and some were afraid to look, there I was walking along zombie-like and just thirteen.”) (Oh gleeful shnuff-fleeflue in fluffle in her little lips, I see the outthrust teeth, I say sternly, “Mardou you must get your teeth cleaned at once, at that hospital there, the therapist, get a dentist too—it’s all free so do it—” because I see beginnings of bad congestion at the corners of her pearlies which would lead to decay)—and she makes the madwoman face at me, the face rigid, the eyes shining shining shining like the stars of heaven and far from being frightened I am utterly amazed at the beauty of her and I say “And I also see the earth in your eyes that’s what I think of you, you have a certain kind of beauty, not that I’m hung-up on the earth and Indians and all that and wanta harp all the time about you and us, but I see in your eyes such warm—but when you make the madwoman I don’t see madness but glee glee—it’s like the ragamuffin dusts in the little kid’s corner and he’s asleep in his crib now and I love you, rain’ll fall on our eaves some day sweetheart”—and we have just candlelight so the mad acts are funnier and the ghost stories more chilling—the one about the—but a lack, a lark, I go larking in the good things and don’t and do forget my pain—
Extending the eye business, the time we closed our eyes (again not drinking because of broke, poverty would have saved this romance) and I sent her messages, “Are you ready,” and I see the first thing in my black eye world and ask her to describe it, amazing how we came to the same thing, it was some rapport, I saw crystal chandeliers and she saw white petals in a black bog just after some melding of images as amazing as the accurate images I’d exchange with Carmody in Mexico—Mardou and I both seeing the same thing, some madness shape, some fountain, now by me forgotten and really not important yet, come together in mutual descriptions of it and joy and glee in this telepathic triumph of ours, ending where our thoughts meet at the crystal white and petals, the mystery—I see the gleeful hunger of her face devouring the sight of mine, I could die, don’t break my heart radio with beautiful music, 0 world—-the candlelight again, flickering, I’d bought a slue of candles in the store, the corners of our room in darkness, her shadow naked brown as she hurries to the sink—our use of the sink—my fear of communicating WHITE images to her in our telepathies for fear she’ll be (in her fun) reminded of our racial difference, at that time making me feel guilty, now I realize it was one love’s gentility on my part—Lord.
The good ones—going up on the top of Nob Hill at night with a fifth of Royal Chalice Tokay, sweet, rich, potent, the lights of the city and of the bay beneath us, the sad mystery—sitting on a bench there, lovers, loners pass, we pass the bottle, talk—she tells all her little girlhood in Oakland.—It’s like Paris—it’s soft, the breeze blows, the city may swelter but the hillers do fly—and over the bay is Oakland (ah me Hart Crane Melville and all ye assorted brother poets of the American night that once I thought would be my sacrificial altar and now it is but who’s to care, know, and I lost love because of it—drunkard, dullard, poet)—returning via Van Ness to Aquatic Park beach, sitting in the sand, as I pass Mexicans I feel that great hepness I’d been having all summer on the street with Mardou my old dream of wanting to be vital, alive like a Negro or an Indian or a Denver Jap or a New York Puerto Rican come true, with her by my side so young, sexy; slender, strange, hip, myself in jeans and casual and both of us as if young (I say as if, to my 31)—the cops telling us to leave the beach, a lonely Negro passing us twice and staring—we walk along the waterslap, she laughs to see the crazy figures of reflected light of the moon dancing so bug-like in the ululating cool smooth water of the night—we smell harbors, we dance—
The time I walked her in broad sweet dry Mexico plateau-like or Arizona-like morning to her appointment with therapist at the hospital, along the Embarcadero, denying the bus, hand in hand—I proud, thinking, “In Mexico she’ll look just like this and not a soul’ll know I’m not an Indian by God and we’ll go along”—and I point out the purity and clarity of the clouds, “Just like Mexico honey, O you’ll love it” and we go up the busy street to the big grimbrick hospital and I’m supposed to be going home from there but she lingers, sad smile, love smile, when I give in and agree to wait for her 20-minute interview and her coming out she radiantly breaks out glad and rushes to the gate which we’ve already passed in her almost therapy-giving-up strolling-with-me meandering, men—love—not for sale—my prize—possession—nobody gets it but gets a Sicilian line down his middle—a German boot in the kisser, an axe Canuck—I’ll pin them wriggling poets to some London wall right here, explained.—And as I wait for her to come out, I sit on side of water, in Mexico-like gravel and grass and concrete blocks and take out sketchbooks and draw big word pictures of the skyline and of the bay, putting in a little mention of the great fact of the huge all-world with its infinite levels, from Standard Oil top down to waterslap at barges where old bargemen dream, the difference between men, the difference so vast between concerns of executives in skyscrapers and seadogs on harbor and psychoanalysts in stuffy offices in great grim buildings full of dead bodies in the morgue below and madwomen at windows, hoping thereby to instill in Mardou recognition of fact it’s a big world and psychoanalysis is a small way to explain it since it only scratches the surface, which is, analysis, cause and effect, why instead of what—when she comes out I read it to her, not impressing her too much but she loves me, holds my hand as we cut down along Embarcadero towards her place and when I leave her at Third and Townsend train in warm clear afternoon she says “O I hate to see you go, I really miss you now.”—“But I gotta be home in time to make the supper—and write—so honey I’ll be back, tomorrow remember promptly at ten.”—And tomorrow I arrive at midnight instead.
The time we had a shuddering come together and she said “I was lost suddenly” and she was lost with me tho not coming herself but frantic in my franticness (Reich’s beclouding of the senses) and how she loved it—all our teachings in bed, I explain me to her, she explains her to me, we work, we wail, we bop—we throw clothes off and jump at each other (after always her little trip to the diaphragm sink and I have to wait holding softer and making goofy remarks and she laughs and trickles water) then here she comes padding to me across the Garden of Eden, and I reach up and help her down to my side on the soft bed, I pull her little body to me and it is warm, her warm spot is hot, I kiss her brown breasts both of them, I kiss her loveshoulders—
she keeps with her lips going “ps ps ps” little kiss sounds where actually no contact is made with my face except when haphazardly while doing something else I do move it against her and her little ps ps kisses connect and are as sad and soft as when they don’t—it’s her little litany of night—and when she’s sick and we’re worried, then she takes me on her, on her arm, on mine—she services the mad unthinking beast—I spend long nights and many hours making her, finally I have her, I pray for it to come, I can hear her breathing harder, I hope against hope it’s time, a noise in the hall (or whoop of drunkards next door) takes her mind off and she can’t make it and laughs—but when she does make it I hear her crying, whimpering, the shuddering electrical female orgasm makes her sound like a little girl crying, moaning in the night, it lasts a good twenty seconds and when it’s over she moans, “O why can’t it last longer,” and, “O when will I when you do?”—“Soon now I bet,” I say, “you’re getting closer and closer”—sweating against her in the warm sad Frisco with its damn old scows mooing on the tide out there, voom, voooom, and stars flickering on the water even where it waves beneath the pierhead where you expect gangsters dropping encemented bodies, or rats, or The Shadow—my little Mardou whom I love, who’d never read my unpublished works but only the first novel, which has guts but has a dreary prose to it when all’s said and done and so now holding her and spent with sex I dream of the day she’ll read great works by me and admire me, remembering the time Adam had said in sudden strangeness in his kitchen, “Mardou, what do you really think of Leo and myself as writers, our positions in the world, the rack of time,” asking her that, knowing that her thinking is in accord in some ways more or less with the subterraneans whom he admires and fears, whose opinions he values with wonder—Mardou not really replying but evading the issue, but old man me plots greatbooks for her amaze—all those good things, good times we had, others I am now in the heat of my frenzy forgetting but I must tell all, but angels know all and record it in books—
But think of all the bad times—I have a list of bad times to make the good times, the times I was good to her and like I should be, to make it sick—when early in our love I was three hours late which is a lot of hours of lateness for younglovers, and so she wigged, got frightened, walked around the church hands-apockets brooding looking for me in the mist of dawn and I ran out (seeing her note saying “I am gone out to look for you”) (in all Frisco yet! that east and west, north and south of soulless loveless bleak she’d seen from the fence, all the countless men in hats going into buses and not caring about the naked girl on the fence, why)—when I saw her, I myself running out to find her, I opened my arms a halfmile away—
The worst almost worst time of all when a red flame crossed my brain, I was sitting with her and Larry O’Hara in his pad, we’d been drinking French Bordeaux and blasting, a subject was up, I had a hand on Larry’s knee shouting “But listen to me, but listen to me!” wanting to make my point so bad there was a big crazy plead in the tone and Larry deeply engrossed in what Mardou is saying simultaneously and feeding a few words to her dialog, in the emptiness after the red flame I suddenly leap up and rush to the door and tug at it, ugh, locked, the indoor chain lock, I slide and undo it and with another try I lunge out in the hall and down the stairs as fast as my thieves’ quick crepesoul shoes’ll take me, putt pitterpit, floor after floor reeling around me as I round the stairwell, leaving them agape up there—calling back in half hour, meeting her on the street three blocks away—there is no hope—
The time even when we’d agreed she needed money for food, that I’d go home and get it and just bring it back and stay a short while, but I’m at this time far from in love, but bugged, not only her pitiful demands for money but that doubt, that old Mardou-doubt, and so rush into her pad, Alice her friend is there, I use that as an excuse (because Alice dike-like silent unpleasant and strange and likes no one) to lay the two bills on Mardou’s dishes at sink, kiss a quick peck in the malt of her ear, say “I’ll be back tomorrow” and run right out again without even asking her opinion—as if the whore’d made me for two bucks and I was sore.
How clear the realization one is going mad—the mind has a silence, nothing happens in the physique, urine gathers in your loins, your ribs contract.
Bad time she asked me, “What does Adam really think of me, you never told me, I know he resents us together but—” and I told her substantially what Adam had told me, of which none should have been divulged to her for the sake of her peace of mind, “He said it was just a social question of his not now wanting to get hung-up with you lovewise because you’re Negro”—feeling again her telepathic little shock cross the room to me, it sunk deep, I question my motives for telling her this.
The time her cheerful little neighbor young writer John Golz came up (he dutifully eight hours a day types working on magazine stories, admirer of Hemingway, often feeds Mardou and is a nice Indiana boy and means no harm and certainly not a slinky snaky interesting subterranean but openfaced, jovial, plays with children in the court for God’s sake)—came up to see Mardou, I was there alone (for some reason, Mardou at a bar with our accord arrangement, the night she went out with a Negro boy she didn’t like too much but just for fun and told Adam she was doing it because she wanted to make it with a Negro boy again, which made me jealous, but Adam said “If I should if she should hear that you went out with a white girl to see if you could make it again she’d sure be flattered, Leo”)—that night, I was at her place waiting, reading, young John Golz came in to borrow cigarettes and seeing I was alone wanted to talk literature—“Well I believe that the most important thing is selectivity,” and I blew up and said “Ah don’t give me all that high school stuff I’ve heard it and heard it long before you were born almost for krissakes and really now, say something interesting and new about writing”—putting him down, sullen, for reasons mainly of irritation and because he seemed harmless and therefore could be counted on to be safe to yell at, which he was—putting him down, her friend, was not nice—no, the world’s no fit place for this kind of activity, and what we gonna do, and where? when? wha wha wha, the baby bawls in the midnight boom.
Nor could it have been charming and helpful to her fears and anxieties to have me start out, at the outset of our romance, “kissing her down between the stems”—starting and then suddenly quitting so later in an unguarded drinkingmoment she said, “You suddenly stopped as tho I was—” and the reason I stopped being in itself not as significant as the reason I did it at all, to secure her greater sexual interest, which once tied on with a bow knot, I could dally out of—the warm lovemouth of the woman, the womb, being the place for men who love, not … this immature drunkard and egomaniacal … this … knowing as I do from past experience and interior sense, you’ve got to fall down on your knees and beg the woman’s permission, beg the woman’s forgiveness for all your sins, protect her, support her, doing everything for her, die for her but for God’s sake love her and love her all the way in and every way you can—yes psychoanalysis, I hear (fearing secretly the few times I had come into contact with the rough stubble-like quality of the pubic, which was Negroid and therefore a little rougher, tho not enough to make any difference, and the insides itself I should say the best, the richest, most fecund moist warm and full of hidden soft slidy mountains, also the pull and force of the muscles being so powerful she unknowing often vice-like closes over and makes a dam-up and hurt, tho this I only realized the other night, too late—). And so the final lingering physiological doubt I have that this contraction and greatstrength of womb, responsible I think now in retrospect for the time when Adam in his first encounter with her experienced piercing unsupportable screamingsudden pain, so he had to go to the doctor and have himself bandaged and all (and even later when Carmody arrived and made a local orgone accumulator out of a big old watercan and burlap and vegetative materials placing the nozzle of himself into the nozzle of the can to heal), I now wonder and suspect if our little chick didn’t reall
y intend to bust us in half, if Adam isn’t thinking it’s his own fault and doesn’t know, but she contracted mightily there (the lesbian !) (always knew it) and busted him and fixed him and couldn’t do it to me but tried enough till she threw me over a dead hulk that now I am—psychoanalyst, I’m serious!
It’s too much. Beginning, as I say with the pushcart incident—the night we drank red wine at Dante’s and were in a drinking mood now both of us so disgusted—Yuri came with us, Ross Wal-lenstein was in there and maybe to show off to Mardou Yuri acted like a kid all night and kept hitting Wallenstein on the back of his head with little finger taps like goofing in a bar but Wallenstein (who’s always being beaten up by hoodlums because of this) turned around a stiff death’s-head gaze with big eyes glaring behind glasses, his Christlike blue unshaven cheeks, staring rigidly as tho the stare itself will floor Yuri, not speaking for a long time, finally saying, “Man, don’t bug me,” and turning back to his conversation with friends and Yuri does it again and Ross turns again the same pitiless awful subterranean sort of nonviolent Indian Mahatma Gandhi defense of some kind (which I’d suspected that first time he talked to me saying, “Are you a fag you talk like a fag” a remark coming from him so absurd because so inflammable and me 170 pounds to his 130 or 120 for God’s sake so I thought secretly “No you can’t fight this man he will only scream and yell and call cops and let you hit him again and haunt all your dreams, there is no way to put a subterranean down on the floor or for that matter put em down at all, they are the most unputdownable in this world and new culture”)—finally Wallenstein going to the head for a leak and Yuri says to me, Mardou being at the bar gathering three more wines, “Come on let’s go in the John and bust him up,” and I get up to go with Yuri but not to bust up Ross rather to stop anything might happen there—Yuri having been in his own in fact realer way than mine almost a hoodlum, imprisoned in Soledad for defending himself in some vicious fight in reform school—Mardou stopping us both as we head to the head, saying, “My God if I hadn’t stopped you” (laughing embarrassed little Mardou smile and shniffle) “you’d actually have gone in there”—a former love of Ross’s and now the bottomless toilet of Ross’s position in her affections I think probably equal to mine now, 0 damblast the thorny flaps of the pap time page—