HAROLD BRODKEY
391
"You get your words from a
Victorian
dictionary."
His personality asserted that this kind of talk was 'human,' a
courtship thing as threat and insult - and as dismissal- and that it
was all right to be like this.
The willed half-imposture, half-reality of him made up the
American beauty of his work.
He was professional. I wasn't. He was professional and in a
greater way and to a greater extent and more sufferingly than some
of the people I knew uptown who were like him in being professional
but who were lesser at it. And everything he said and did, his spoken
stuff and his gestural language outward, or in soliloquy, was solitary
work made public and communal by craft and will, and subject to
lapses of craftsmanship and feeling but not to lapses of will. He was
seriously under a discipline that I avoided but could not avoid all my
life but hoped to escape for a while since it was an editorial discipline
and not subject to music and did not permit the kind of thing I had
with Ora, which, for all I know, was an untrue thing but I didn't
want to live without it or to live mocking it, just yet.
I denied him in every way I could: "There is something amateur
in you," I said dishonestly, being unwilling to face the reality of him
being a professional and me being what 1 was, whatever it is 1 was.
"There is something amateur in you," he retorted, "You and
your desire to have everything washed with soap - I'm going to get
someone who's not afraid of sex to fuck me," he said. He'd caught
sight, past my shoulder, of a thin, young guy, really young, in a
dark t-shirt - a dark t-shirt was still
secretly
stylish then. The guy had
a sensitive face, intelligent eyes - big hands - 1 mean he was a sex–
ually alive sort of presence but the aliveness was like a guttering can–
dle, a sort of abused flame-he wasn't a star.
That quality in him was truly interesting but genuinely fragile–
a fairly strong guy in some ways but not an artist and, so, hugely
vulnerable. I never went near people like that, even in friendship:
they got too hurt.
I was jealous. OfJ ohnno and his wickedness (1 thought it) and
his moods, his awfulness, and his attention. 1 would guess he envied
me more violently than that but I can't tell from my feelings, only
from the way he acts. I have to watch and interpret. 1 was a coward
towardJohnno, almost always, because of his pain. 1 felt admiration
and contempt. 1 loathed him coldly and could have kicked him and
tormented him easily except that I don't do those things.
Except maybe in my own way.
