232
PARTISAN REVIEW
Ling was no Hollywood high school girl , propped on a drugstore
stool, waiting to be Lana Turner. Yet like every Californian she
dreamed of being able to lie there, head back, and make you dance
out of your pants even though you both had just made love previous–
ly . For me this couldn't be. I had recently been to Africa and seen
the bodies that would make a Matisse tremble, all shimmering length
and softness and colored eyes. Not that Ling wasn ' t reasonably good
looking; otherwise her high school graduation picture wouldn ' t have
been so constantly on the front page, nor would all those campus
clubs have formed . But the Italian in her had created breasts that
at twenty-five were beginning to sag. Her face was a sallow pitted
moon domed with black glorious hair set over a fine nose and a
mouth that wavered between orangutang and Polynesian sunset.
Meeting her, hair frizzled, all wonderfully, variously shawled and
coated , you 'd think it was the goddess , Mad Mari;uana herself.
But the illusion moved with the drug fire until it was only this I saw:
the deep gutter of her smile with its way of saying, " Feasts, " and
pointing way inside her skin , its caverns and ellipses; her husky croak–
shadow voice, path to her eyes' cold granite ; her eskimo teeth bring–
ing these corkscrews with which I opened the bottles of the dead and
stuffed in my microscopic ferns and lice; the curved hatchet strokes
of her hands , soft as blown thistles, giving onto " owl-taloned"
fingers . Beauty maybe , but of an ambiguous variety .
We naturally indulged. There would be the pies of heaping grass
and thus buoyed, we would lie down, hands seeking her breasts , the
round moans they gave off as I reached and, walls away, her voice
answered: a lost shoe in a well, a hand nestling an egg to its silence .
The images come darkling, but I can't see them, knee deep as I am
taking out the jelly and putting a giant cantankerous fish in there ,
and if she likes acquariums , that 's good, because otherwise I might
have to withdraw and become a worm, see , overcome by the self-pity
that comes when sex gets distracted from love, or true desire . Nor
does it seem odd that I might feel scared before this way she had of
unclouding her bush so that the WHOLE THING IGNITED; where–
upon Ling would laugh and say , "That's what the Indians do with
their chapparal ," and I'd be real scared before this sudden flushing
in her eyes , pink, sea-pink, like a freighter going to sunset Japan , or
like the roses at the bottom of the African mud . ...
