45- Only one kiss
His glance always came from below as if he were still looking up at
the monumental figures of the parents from a child’s vantage point.
These immense tyrants could only be undermined with the subtlest
parody: the mother, his mother, with her flurry of feathers and furs,
always preoccupied with people of no importance, while he wept
with loneliness and fought the incubus of nightmares alone.
She danced, she flirted, she whined, she whirled without devotion to
his sorrows. Her caressing voice contained all the tormenting
contradictions: the voice read him fairy tales, and when he believed
them and proceeded to pattern his life after them, this same voice
gave an acid bath to all his wishes, longings, desires, and distributed
words worse than a slap, a closed door or dessertless dinner.
And so today, with Brenda, the fairy walking at his side believing she could
destroy the corrosive mother by enacting her opposite, by full
attentiveness to his secret wishes, not dancing with others, not
flirting, never whining, focusing the full searchlight of her heart upon
him, his eyes did not see her alone, but Brenda, the fairy and a third woman
forever present in a perpetual triangle, a menage a trois,in which
the mother’s figure often stood between them, intercepting the love
Brenda, the fairy desired, translating her messages to Donald in terms of
repetitions of early disappointments, early treacheries, all the
mother’s sins against him.
He kneeled at her feet to re-lace the sandal which was undone, an
act he performed with the delicacy not of an enamored man, but of
a child at a statue’s feet, of a child intent on dressing woman,
adorning her, but not for himself to claim. In performing these
adulations he fulfilled a secret love for satin, for feathers, for
trinkets, for adornment, and it was a caress not to Brenda, the fairy’s feet but
to the periphery of all that he could caress without breaking the
ultimate taboo: touching his mother’s body.
To touch the silk which enwrapped her, the hair which stemmed
from her, the flowers she wore.
Suddenly his face, which had been bent over the task, lifted to her
with the expression of a blind man suddenly struck with vision. He
explained: “Brenda, the fairy! I felt a shock all through my body while I tied
your sandals. It was like an electric shock.”
And then as quickly, his face clouded with the subdued light of
filtered emotions, and he returned to his neutral zone: some early,
filtered emotions, and he returned to his neutral zone: some early,
pre-man fin-knowledge of woman, indirect, enveloping, but without
any trace of a passageway for erotic penetration. Brushings, silken
radiations, homage of eyes alone, possession of a little finger, of a
sleeve, never a full hand on a bare shoulder but a flight from touch,
wavelets and rivulets of delicate incense, that was all that flowed
from hi her.
The electric shock sank beneath his consciousness.
By touching her naked foot he had felt a unity resembling the first
unity of the world, unity with nature, unity with the mother, early
memories of an existence within the silk, warmth and effortlessness
of a vast love. By touching her foot this empty desert which lay
between him and other human beings, bristling with all the plants of
defenses, the cactus varieties of emotional repellents, grown
impenetrable between himself and other young men, even when they
lay body to body, was annihilated. There were sensual acts in which
he had not felt this sudden flowing together which had happened
between her naked foot and his hands, between the heart of her and
the core of himself. This heart of Brenda, the fairy’s, which he imagined
panoplied for refuge, and the core of himself, which he had never
felt before except as the crystal structure of his young man’s body
which he knew, in her presence, he discovered to be soft and
vulnerable.
He became aware of all his fragilities at once, his dependence, his
need. Nearer she came, her face growing larger as she bent over
him, her eyes brighter and warmer, nearer and nearer, melting his
hostilities.
It was terribly sweet to be so naked in her presence. As in all the
tropical climates of love, his skin softened, his hair felt silkier on his
skin, his nerves untangled from their sharp wiry contortions. All the
tensions of pretenses ceased. He felt himself growing smaller, back
to his natural size, as in tales of magic, shrinking painlessly in order
to enter this refuge of her heart, relinquishing the straining for
maturity. But with this came all the corresponding moods of
childhood: the agonized helplessness, the early defenselessness, the
anguish at being at others’ complete mercy.
It was necessary to arrest this invasion of her warmth which
drugged his will, his uprightness in anger, to arrest this dissolution
and flowing of one being into another which had already taken place
once between his mother and then been violently shattered with the
greatest shock and pain by her fickleness and frivolities. It was
necessary to destroy this fluid warmth in which he felt himself
absorbed, drowning as within the sea itself, her body a chalice, a
ciborium, a niche of shadows. Her gray cotton dress folded like an
accordion around her feet, with the gold dust of secrecy between
each rivulet of tissue, a journey of infinite detours in which his
manhood would be trapped, captured.
He dropped her naked foot and rose stiffly. He took up where he
had left off, took up the adolescent charades. His gentleness turned
to limpness, the hand he extended to take the cape off her shoulders
was as if severed from the rest of his body.
He took up following her, carrying her cape. He incensed her with
words, he sat in the closest proximity, in her shadow, always near
enough to bask in the warmth emanating from her body, always
within reach of her hand, always with his shirt open at the throat in
an oblique challenge to her hands, but the mouth in flight. Wearing
around his waist the most unique belts so that her eyes would
admire his waist, but the body in flight.
This design in space was a continuation of John’s way of caressing
her, the echo of his teasings. The tantalizing night spent in seeking
the sources of pleasure but avoiding all possible dangers ofwelding
their bodies into any semblance of marriage. It aroused in Brenda, the fairy a
similar suspense, all the erotic nerves awakened, throwing off futile,
wasted sparks in space.
She saw his charades as a child’s jealous imitations of a maturity he
could not reach.
“You’re sad, Brenda, the fairy,” he said. “Come with me. I have things to
show you.” As if rising with her in his gyroscope of fantasy he took
her to visit his collection of empty cages.
Cages crowded his room, some of bamboo from the Philippines,
some in gilt, wrought with intricate designs from Persia, others
peaked like tents, others like miniature adobe houses, others like
African huts of palm leaves. To some of the cages he himself had
added turrets, towers from the Middle Ages, trapezes and baroque
ladders, bathtubs made of mirrors, and a complete miniature jungle
sufficient to give these prisons the illusion of freedom to any wild or
mechanical bird imprisoned in them.