HAROLD BRODKEY
387
charming-
he did it to placate me. I don't want to exaggerate but I
felt suddenly what it must be like to be a beautiful woman and young
and to have men do as you want without your having to be
ugly
to
command this .
I ascribed him doing this - and he eyed me and smoked and
drank and overtly didn't eye me as he got calm - to my
beauty:
the
sexual thing because of Ora and my being a good writer.
But I didn't want to get hooked on that stuff, that childish or
beautiful-woman's power, because it was the stuff of unreal worlds,
stifling love affairs, phone calls, the treehouse disciplines of an in–
fatuation partly based on feeling the rest of the world is savage and
short-tempered and dull, and so you have to keep talking and
generating the absent-from-the-world pair of voices thing in order to
hold brutality at bay.
I mean, there were guys and women in New York who had
maybe four or five such affairs going on at once, sometimes sophisti–
catedly supplying for two of the affairs, news of the other three: a
woman I knew from college used to fall in love with pretty wives and
she would love them and court them but have an affair with the hus–
band and then she had an outside social climbing kind of affair or
two, one with a man, one with a woman, but she liked women bet–
ter, and she always claimed she loved me, that she lived as she did
because she couldn't have me . In a city like New York-a friend of
Johnno's, a boring poet, called it Nude Yock Zitty: zitty meant pim–
ple: Yock meant a loud laugh - adjacent lives spill over in really odd
patterns of attachment. I had a distant cousin who had come to New
York to live: he was amazingly ugly and amazingly vain; he had
some money and he was a good talker, really good; and he had these
webs of affairs, some based on speech but especially based on pimp–
ing for kinds of vicarious excitement or voyeurism more analogous
to an erotic espionage and a kind of power-broking than to sexuality
or to emotion - I mean nothing was distilled, concentrated;
everything was splattered, everything was splashed and spilled as
soon as it was brewed. An ironic vanity - the sort that such a man as
I had, and I knew three other men who did that stuff-is akin to
madness and falls over into it - then these guys claim that madness
is art, their art. I assumed, rightly or wrongly, that they weren't
competent artists to start with - their lives and work did not seem
like art - but since art is learnable, the issue was what sort of stuff
did their lives produce, and it seemed to me their lives produced
fraudulence , ego, the claim of insight (based on the success
bf
their
