HAROLD BRODKEY
379
New York: he said, "You will know how wrong you are when I die."
I started to grin stonily, agonizedly - nervously - at the mothery–
ness of that , at the reminder of death, at the reminder of how much
he wanted to hurt me to make me come to life his way and love him
his way; he said, "You're the pervert:
they
will say of you, Isn't it too
bad his love was
never
blind ."
He meant I
loved,
was infatuated, had affairs in ways that
weren't concerned with the tormenting puzzles of loving someone
like
J
ohnno and his sense of things, his sense of the era - and of
truth ...
''J
ohnno, I think you're terrific -"
His was a complex ambition which in some senses included me:
"Everyone intelligent is interested in you - or in love," he said, mak–
ing an accusation like that of being like
The Times
or like being a
policeman. As someone else might say,
You're obvious.
It
was true in a limited sense: I was in style in that way among
certa in people, so that it was part of daily reality, people competing
for me as well as with me and trying to get my attention - and the
rest of me - but not caring very much about having me except as
subject matter, the subject being my disappointing them then,
too - I'm just guessing about that . The area of sincerity toward me
within the Zeus-cloud of his ambition was private, was individual
towards me in a way; but that part of him seemed all pain and
general and to be not concerned with me but with pain and very
limited self-sacrifice in terms of only at certain fixed hours of the day
but limitless in the sense of choosing his notions over the old
sacraments. He had a kind of sea gull quality of an implication of
immanent outcries at being abandoned .
"They can all be in love with you - but you are in love with
me- " He leaped blindly into his own silent speech, the phrases of
possible poems; I saw it in his face, the velocity and foreshortening
that that mental distancing imposed on things he did. He expressed
a sort of truth - he thought this was intense life - the realest life–
and intensity, the one that famous poets had.
And his touch, so childlike, felt like the curled points of dead
leaves - the dryness of the ambition.
I laughed: I always do when I am admired - I'm sort of fatuous .
It
didn't matter how he said it. He laughed because I did , with shock
and closeness, closeness to a story about me - or closeness to a story
about love and him and maybe me; and then he sort of went, "Ha,
ha," he laughed differently as a device to be distant. His laugh got to
