MICHAEL BRODSKY
211
But to ransom verdicts from the reserve my fear perfected over a long
period of time, that was something else. Wasn 't she going to reward me
for breaking through that reserve, rending the postnatal amnion that
goes by the name of solipsism, into a light, of sorts. But that dying
light was overwhelmed by the raw light of the bulb overhead. Or
rather, that dying light faded in the flush of her flaws, prey to the raw
light of the bulb.
You do not understand, I repeated. The sentence had no meaning,
it was the vehicle of an emotion still undefined, an alloy of sentiments.
And it was less emotion than a need to call some emotion into being
through the words, in her or in me, in me if in her. I went from the less
useful, utterance, to the useless: I examined a birthmark on her thigh.
Oh that, she murmured, anticipating my question. But I had no
question. All future encounters would simply pivot around the birth–
mark, as in Hawthorne. But without dread and reproach. On the
contrary, the birthmark was a kind of foothold on the steeps of
irresolution. In the night I had to grope for it with a flashlight, in
recovering the birthmark I recovered my equilibrium. The birthmark
oriented me and when in her moods she had no fixed boundaries, when
she seemed to dissolve into the landscape, dissolve the landscape, all
paste and fuming lava, then it was to the birthmark I retreated. The
birthmark oriented me with respect to the room's contents. So much for
night that bore us on its back without complaint, along with other
flotsam. Often in our lovemaking I feared the loss of the birthmark and
the coordinate system of which it was the origin. Things were plotted
in relation to the birthmark, once plotted they crouched vigi lantly. I no
longer had to look around. The lattice netted all stimuli, relevant or
irrelevant. And
to
the vigilant, no stimulus is irrelevant. I even
sustained my erections better. How to have and keep an erection.
Though strictly speaking, they less facilitated the expression of my
passion than numbed me to it. Shades of the polymorphous perverse,
and at this late date. At the moment of orgasm, when all is blood and
foam, I thought of a book, a manual, to aid others not so fortunate as I
in finding peace through geometry, analytic,
to
be exact. But what if
she fled. Farewell, coordinate system, farewell collapsible axes. Then I
wou ld have to translate the origin
to,
let us say, a mole on my chest, an
ecchymosis on my left testicle, perennial low man on the scrotum pole.
But in doing that I might topple the whole edifice. I was lulled by the
thought. Eventually, as we grew older and wiser and feebly raucous in
our wisdom, removed from love and lust, I would abandon the notion
completely, but not the contemplation of the birthmark that system-
