The World Is the Home of Love and Death. Harold Brodkey

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ enviously wants).

      The skittery approach to her lips elicits anger sexually because it is not phrased seriously, physically. It is an assault—blind-beggar stuff—childish fiddling. Ma hates being touched if it is not expert—and, furthermore, if it is not an ultimate matter: life and death.

      Or if it were innocent and reliable Ma could bear it. But she suspects—in a fundamental way, in her belly—that Ida wants to rip up and demean the actual; the evidence is the compression, the schooled conclusions in Ida, who clearly feels that a kiss is a kiss, when physically, of course, that is not true. Ma is grateful but irritated—and Ida seems absolutely evil to Ma, an evil child, blind, and contemptible—the mean one of the brood.

      Ma has no frivolous abandonment in her. Her blasphemy and recklessness are not frivolous; they are costly and serious constructions. Lifelong.… She is tempted socially by Ida and her kisses, and she is repelled by the temporariness and by the sense of the world Ida shows in this kind of kiss at this moment.

      Ida is full of temper. Her nakedness of affection has the temper of assault: sweet raping. But rape. Her nerves, her money, her wit back her in this.

      Momma writhes and shifts with inner shouts—the seeds of temper, her own—and thinks of turning her mouth over to Ida. But then she can’t do it. She says, “Oh, you are chic. You are someone who travels. I have to catch my breath—”

      Ida pants slightly—comically.

      Momma, in her small-town privacies inside her, is horrified but resigned. She has never known anyone sexually who was not an astonishment—and in some ways a depressing oddity—animal-like, childish, nurseryish—and she sees in the panting that kind of overt animal mockery of the moment of intimacy. That is to say, she sees how Ida ends her stories: dissatisfaction and the decapitation of the favorite.

      Ida wants to steal Ma—abduct her—win her from rivals, own her attention—but not only Ma—I mean Ida has a general theory of doing this—so the moment has a publicly romantic odor to Ma.

      Ma looks pleadingly, sweetly, virginally, at Ida, beside her on the glider. Ma can claim sisterliness if she wants: “In some ways, we’re almost twins.”

      “Oh, yes,” says Ida, as if delighted. “Twins, certainly.” She grasps Lila’s hand. Such will, such fine-boned will is in Ida that Momma smiles—inside her other moods she feels she is in a schoolyard again, a girl.

      Ida’s sense of romance progresses by delicacies of parody—i.e., it is always two steps from the real—toward the heartier implications: commands, exploitations, secrets, alliances, bondages, rages: a display of self, an outbreak of darkness; she wants to bloom as a flower, a woman, a girl, a boy, a man. (Momma wants to bloom like that, too.) Ida names herself parodistically: “I kiss like John Gilbert, don’t I? Don’t you think so?”

      Ma ought to say, Oh, yes, and lean back, and so on.

      But Momma is not tamed, she is masochistic and flexible, and ashamed of that in relation to men, and crazy and vengeful as a result. Momma is crazy and vengeful freshly at every occasion of wrong. She is doing a thing: she is blooming as someone who cannot be tamed by sweat-mustached Ida.

      She can fake being ladylike and distant from things and she can fake being commanding—she can imitate Ida. Her denial, her fakery are comic in her style. She sits facing forward, and she refuses to alter her posture.

      A passionate woman being unmoved is funny.

      Ida titters.

      Momma dislikes comedy because of her sensibility—disgust and inner temper: a heat: distrust—these don’t turn into bearable jokes for her without contempt—for herself, for everyone—and she has too much physical merit still, although less surely, to hold herself, or romance, or the possibilities of a courtship moment, in contempt.

      Momma’s outrageous and inwardly wretched comedy taunts Ida, who, childlike, then tugs at Ma’s shoulder.

      But the tug is elegant—and startling. How startling Ida tends to be. Self-loving rather than making a gesture that actually included Momma: Ida needs to be loved as the good child whose every move embodies innocence and prettiness rather than as the active doer she is.

      Momma resists all force applied to herself. “No,” Momma says. “Absolutely no.” She is not breathing at all. Then she is breathing lightly. Then heavily. She says, gently scathing, “Eeeny, meeny, miney, mo, I caught a Lila by the toe—oh, Ida …” Then, leaning, straight-backed, at a slant away from Ida, a summing-up: “No one can count on you.”

      Ida, in her momentum, makes flirtatious offers of obedience: “Everyone can count on me. I am your slave—Lilly—you know that.” Then, owlishly: “You know you can count on me lifelong.” Then: “Ly—fff(i)ff—longgg—” The length she drew the word to was roughly the span of attention before one blinks mentally and registers what is said—it was the equivalent of five or six syllables. Her voice is not torn by love and desire—i.e., by folly. Nothing is implied of any state of feeling other than a sophisticated one—i.e., one in which it is known that attachments come and go. Her promise is a parody of promises, it has no human ordinariness. It has intelligence and cruelty, though, and longing.

      Momma straightens her head and does this and that, and then it emerges, as in a charade, that she is listening in an ordinary human way: she listens to the promise—now a memory in the air. She is smiling dimly, unreadably, beautifully.

      In the haze of illusions and realisms, female lawlessness and its codes, and female parodies, and female truths give way apparently, and Momma turns her head and smilingly, tacitly listens with the calm maternal-innocent set of her face, which then alters into a lover’s wicked stare—accusing and reckless. This hint at the humiliation of the mother by the lying boarding-school seducer, Ida, is a parody, too; but her being a lover and challenging Ida, that part, is not parody, so it’s all different now: it’s physical and remorseless, like some affairs that kids have in high school.

      That makes her vulgar—i.e., blunt and obvious—and sexual. This is rebellion on a giant scale, to be so local with Ida. Ma is claiming to be a more serious person than Ida by bringing in this real stuff in this championship way.

      Ida is jocular about rebellion. Ida treats all claims to leadership as childish, even her own. Ida puts a small kiss—shyly—on Momma’s jaw.

      A gust of feeling whirls Ma around. But she is not a mother, not a child—those are not sexual beings. In this assignation, Momma’s sense of what is to be done is real; Ida’s taste, and sense of things, prefers the symbolic: the summing-up.

      Ma feels that if she is honest with herself, she is, as a person (a sexual body and a quick mind), very little better off, if at all, with Ida’s understanding than she is with S.L.’s.

      Ma tugs at the tail of her bandanna. “S.L. may be in the house,” she says, with almost rabid sorrow: she holds up that hoop for Ida to go through.

      Ida grimaces—it’s a snarl: that was stylish back then, for a stylish woman to mimic a gangster or something. See, Ma is punishing Ida by invoking “a law” that makes Ida behave. Ida grabs Lila by the elbows and says, “You Garbo!” Elusive woman. Garbo isn’t married. It is Garbo-minus, so to speak, that Momma is. This is in Ida’s face as she moves back to her chair, thwarted, probably enraged.

      Lila feels СКАЧАТЬ