HAROLD BRODKEY
381
the family of poets, the ache in the mind, the physical shame of the
loss of the outward self, and what was done in the way of momentary
cure, not feelingly so much as in the way oflist-making but hungrily.
I, for instance, talking like this - with someone bright and danger–
ous - tended to become almost a conscious gyroscope inside a rest–
lessly physical frame of a less intelligible state of mind than that of
talking to him. Ora and I could only rarely talk in this way and not
for long just as we could never dance together because of the physical
intimacy and glances or no-glances and the immediacy of the other
drama of whether and in what ways the other was there. The vast
gymnastic routines - somersaults, twists and turns, cartwheels and
leaps - of the person and his mind and body to live in an enlarged
world, money and numbers, and the democratic humors of com–
plicity and physical warmth of some kind - you might say the near
impossibility of personal virginity - and the absence of any longing
for it in most people - the agonized and usually drunken sophistica–
tion of this stuff was beyond my reach: you have to prepare your
mind and body - and spirit - you have to have the humility and
drive and physical complicity in life itself among people of one ap–
proach or the sado-masochistic snobbery and being beaten down
and grovelling and defiance and lying and cheating of another ap–
proach or a grandeur of saying no but of acknowledging it as a no.
It's not a matter of potency. The way the lies work and the relief
when someone climbs into bed with you when you've spent years in–
side your head and your body is a little musty, like an attic, even if
you've been fucking around, and someone embraces your crooked–
ness and your professional errors and all the events, only half-known
by your own mind, by your own soul, is such that an impotent but
agreeable man, like a frigid but brilliant-talking woman is considered
to be, and is, under the circumstances,
a great lover .
..
I never had
that title ...
"I'm no good in bed."
"That's a stupid thing to say."
I only had to let him touch me: he did not mean anything in the
range of response - contempt, despair, shame - anything.
Plus he inferred or
knew
from my few love affairs and a time at
the beginning when I had been, not quite willingly, inside the human
grouping I described above, and had wanted Johnno to know he
didn't disgust me.
"I'm no good in bed under these circumstances, Johnno."
"You got it up for me once," he said.
