394
PARTISAN REVIEW
Then he said: "You are A Pretty Policeman who doesn't
acknowledge
suffering."
He sneered it. I had a funny reaction, sort of
an oblique one. I was startled anyone drunken could say something
so ornate.
Maybe his mind was entirely superior to mine .
It scared me, the social and erotic reality, the lies, the kind of
free-floating force that a kind of free-floating
brilliance
has - the free–
floating brilliance in everyone, and Johnno's particular brilliance.
Do lies guarantee, do they promise a shoddy embrace? I mean,
the self is everywhere in one's flesh. And you go to bed with every act
and every word the other has ever done or uttered.
A liar's sexuality is unutterably demeaning. To fuck for ambi–
tion-or style-is cleaner but that is unutterably a trespass, too.
The person in the dark t-shirt smiled at me and said, "I dig
you."
'Dig' was new to me then as that sort of word, so it was outside–
of-school, what he said, it was freed language, it was a remark apart
from what so far various anguished male exiles had said to me.
Anyway, naturally, I felt desire, but it had no shape, that desire, it
didn't indicate what it wanted: to hurt everyone and then to die? To
violate myself and then to accept death with relief? To kill him in
some way? To tie him to an anxious and burdensome sense of me, to
drown him in me, in the reaches of the self I could never keep track
of? And for me to have his body as my toy, my dream - and his ab–
surd and ridiculous and silly pride - his boy's pride - teach me pride
and a new language? I would have liked to have set sail from con–
sciousness as it was and be a new Odysseus, a killer in a new myth,
in ruthless adventure, to find out what I could do in the sexual world
in which grownups lived.
No one at the party whom I looked at was openly phallic: it was
all sidelong, all studious in a way. No one had that command that
guarantees the
sexual
performance will have some
sexual
meaning, no
one there had that level of sexual melodrama in public. Ora had it.
But maybe my saying that means only I have certain tastes .
But people there - at the party - did look romantically in–
teresting, emotionally valid: they had
that
intensity : they had
qualities: they were being interesting, worriedly so: they looked, all
of them, as if they had adroit minds thorny with consciousness and
calculations.
The death of sin? You can't have the death of something that never was. I
NEVER think of SIN.
But the birth of
love?
No.
It
was the death of
