HAROLD BRODKEY
371
among successful people: he is in love with everyone he likes or
wants, he loves with varying degrees of sincerity; and then he talks. I
was being chased at that time by nearly everyone but idly, almost as
a tic: it came about because I was attached to Ora: everyone wanted
to measure themselves against a beautiful and fairly brainy girl- I
mean they sort of said so.
Now he looks as if the occasion is on trial, as if he were in bitter
pain, as if I might bore him. He is bringing to bear a kind of pres–
sure : his suffering- my philistinism.
Socially, I'm relaxed outwardly. One problem in New York is
that I'm largish; and most of the people in my field are smaller, are
Napoleonic. My
size
suggests that I'm an outsider, a football player
who writes - a sexual icon . Inwardly I'm
working,
trying to improvise
a thing between Johnno and me, a talk, let's call it
A Talk :
I want to
make my waking up tomorrow unscalding.
I am also vaguely hallucinatory. I see ghosts, of other occa–
sions, of stories from life, of stories from books .
And I see signs in people's faces, early death, that kind of thing.
Pain, ambition, exhibitionism. Raw-nerved, drunk, personal power,
crazedness-not joke forms-not sexually impressive in Johnno . I
mean, not stuff I want to embrace -
sexualry
. . .
'johnno, I want to ask a question: don't you ever want to be
careful
about - your feelings?"
"No . You have the terrible habit of good-looking people who
like to refuse to flirt when they know they should. Because their
hearts are on fire."
"People still use that word,
flirt?
You're better looking than I
am, Johnno . .
.
n
Defeat. Defeated trickery.
"I am very beautiful; and it's time you said so."
I took a sad breath while he eyed me from a face, tilted,
spilled - pain spilled from it - yet, it seemed unspilled in any real
way .
"I doubt that ambition can be
realry
sexual," I said.
"You
know
about love and death-" I held his glance and said, "Don't you?" He
didn't answer.
"If
you're ambitious, you build up a debt to death, to
strong feeling-"
"Oh I hate all that
Death in Venice
crap. It's not true. See that
pretty blond boy over there?"
"The pudgy one with the dumb mouth?"
"That's not a
dumb
mouth, that's a great mouth of the fifties,
that mouth makes love like a wet fur teacup." Johnno still had some
