380
PARTISAN REVIEW
be sad, acid, cutting, ready to be
seen
in a poem-he didn't want to
befriends:
I mean in the childhood or grownup sense.
He was scared of that - and as bored by it - as I was by the un–
symmetrically huge drama of his psychic damnation.
I said, "I used to blame myself for being young: now, I'm
ashamed because of it, which is an improvement."
"You don't seem young," he said, heavy and somber with vision
and violation, like a lead idol. He partly understood what I meant,
which was very exciting of him. It's dull to be misunderstood.
"That is very oracular, Johnno." He didn't recognize the long
word until I offered it again: "Oracular."
"You're immensely old," he said like an interviewer.
"I suppose I'm not young-how would I know?"
He said, "You are jealous of me, you hate me because I'm bet-
ter than you." His hand lifted from my arm, wavered, descended.
"It's possible."
"My feelings are precious."
"Widely publicized, anyway."
"What makes you so harsh?"
"I don't see the point of getting entangled in obvious pain of a
certain kind for the sake of being in a poem."
"Certain kind?"
"Chic pain-thoroughly escapable-I don't want it."
"I am not chic," he said, half-outraged, superior, justifiably so .
My saying
chic
was philistine and stupid and bullying.
But he, having seen yet again, the eighteenth man that day,
who was his heart's wish, but maybe differently in my case and
maybe not differently at all, or not of importance but of a categorical
kind, his ambition's consort, became wrongfully
tragic
now. He was
crazy and violent with unnecessary angry loneliness. He had a choice
after all: he was hardly helpless . The precedence he gave his hurt
ruined his life. My life consists of study . Consciously . Study is pro–
foundly sad, even deadly, but it does not have in it envy and anguish
necessarily.
And it is not lonely in the usual ways.
Johnno blew up at me: "You're crazy, you refuse to live, I know
what life is. You should fuck me."
I moved my arm away from him. His face was contorted: his
mouth dribbled. His pain was the issue, and my stupidity about the
adventuresomeness to be expected of me, some physical rubbing or
rubbing up against, some boastfulness about, oh, the history of the
skin, some real perception of what life was like, the quasi-incest in
