Dying Inside

  “Does she?”

  “With great love. Also with great guilt. It seems you and she were estranged for many years.”

  “That’s over now. We’re finally becoming friends.”

  “How wonderful for you both.” He gestures with a flick of his eyes. “That doctor. No good for her. Too old, too static. After fifty most men lose the capacity to grow. He’ll bore her to death in six months.”

  “Maybe boredom is what she needs,” I reply. “She’s had an exciting life. It hasn’t made her happy.”

  “No one ever needs boredom,” Guermantes says, and winks.

  “Karl and I would love to have you come for dinner next week, Duv. There’s so much we three need to talk about.”

  “I’ll see, Jude. I’m not sure about anything about next week yet. I’ll call you.”

  Lisa Holstein. John Leibnitz. I think I need another drink.

  * * *

  Sunday. Greatly overhung. Hash, rum, wine, pot, God knows what else. And somebody popping amyl nitrite under my nose about two in the morning. That filthy fucking party. I should never have gone. My head, my head, my head. Where’s the typewriter? I’ve got to get some work done. Let’s go, then:

  We see, thus, the difference in method of approach of these three tragedians to the same story. Aeschylus’ primary concern is theological implications of the crime and the inexorable workings of the gods: Orestes is torn between the command of Apollo to slay his mother and his own fear of matricide, and goes mad as a result. Euripides dwells on the characterization, and takes a less allegorical

  No damned good. Save it for later.

  Silence between my ears. The echoing black void. I have nothing going for me at all today, nothing. I think it may be completely gone. I can’t even pick up the clamor of the spics next door. November is the cruelest month, breeding onions out of the dead mind. I’m living an Eliot poem. I’m turning into words on a page. Shall I sit here feeling sorry for myself? No. No. No. No. I’ll fight back. Spiritual exercises designed to restore my power. On your knees, Selig. Bow the head. Concentrate. Transform yourself into a fine needle of thought, a slim telepathic laser-beam, stretching from this room to the vicinity of the lovely star Betelgeuse. Got it? Good. That sharp pure mental beam piercing the universe. Hold it. Hold it firm. No spreading at the edges allowed, man. Good. Now ascend. We are climbing Jacob’s ladder. This will be an out-of-the-body experience, Duvid. Up, up and away! Rise through the ceiling, through the roof, through the atmosphere, through the ionosphere, through the stratosphere, through the whatsisphere. Outward. Into the vacant interstellar spaces. O dark dark dark. Cold the sense and lost the motive of action. No, stop that stuff! Only positive thinking is allowed on this trip. Soar! Soar! Toward the little green men of Betelgeuse IX. Reach their minds, Selig. Make contact. Make…contact. Soar, you lazy yid-bastard! Why aren’t you soaring? Soar!

  Well?

  Nothing. Nada. Niente. Nowhere. Nulla. Nicht.

  Tumbling back to earth. Into the silent funeral. All right, give up, if that’s what you want. All right. Rest, for a little while. Rest and then pray, Selig. Pray.

  * * *

  Monday. The hangover gone. The brain once again receptive. In a glorious burst of creative frenzy I rewrite The “Electra” Theme in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides from gunwale to fetlock, completely recasting it, revoicing it, clarifying and strengthening the ideas while simultaneously catching what I think is just the perfect tone of offhand niggerish hipness. As I hammer out the final words the telephone rings. Nicely timed; I feel sociable now. Who calls? Judith? No. It is Lisa Holstein who calls. “You promised to take me home after the party,” she says mournfully, accusingly. “What the hell did you do, sneak away?”

  “How did you get my number?”

  “From Claude. Professor Guermantes.” That sleek devil. He knows everything. “Look, what are you doing right now?”

  “Thinking about having a shower. I’ve been working all morning and I stink like a goat.”

  “What kind of work do you do?”

  “I ghostwrite term papers for Columbia men.”

  She ponders that a moment. “You sure have a weird head, man. I mean really: what do you do?”

  “I just told you.”

  A long digestive silence. Then: “Okay. I can dig it. You ghostwrite term papers. Look, Dave, go take your shower. How long is it on the subway from 110th Street and Broadway to your place?”

  “Maybe forty minutes, if you get a train right away.”

  “Swell. See you in an hour, then.” Click.

  I shrug. A crazy broad. Dave, she calls me. Nobody calls me Dave. Stripping, I head for the shower, a long leisurely soaping. Afterward, sprawling out in a rare interlude of relaxation, Dave Selig rereads this morning’s labors and finds pleasure in what he has wrought. Let’s hope Lumumba does too. Then I pick up the Updike book. I get to page four and the phone rings again. Lisa: she’s on the train platform at 225th, wants to know how to get to my apartment. This is more than a joke, now. Why is she pursuing me so singlemindedly? But okay. I can play her game. I give her the instructions. Ten minutes later, a knock on the door. Lisa in thick black sweater, the same sweaty one as Saturday night, and tight blue jeans. A shy grin, strangely out of character for her. “Hi,” she says. Making herself comfortable. “When I first saw you, I had this intuitive flash on you: This guy’s got something special. Make it with him. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you’ve got to trust your intuition. I go with the flow, Dave, I go with the flow.” Her sweater is off by now. Her breasts are heavy and round, with tiny, almost imperceptible nipples. A Jewish star nestles in the deep valley between them. She wanders the room, examining my books, my records, my photographs. “So tell me,” she says. “Now that I’m here. Was I right? Is there anything special about you?”

  “There once was.”

  “What?”

  “That’s for me to know and you to find out,” I say, and gathering my strength, I ram my mind into hers. It’s a brutal frontal assault, a rape, a true mindfuck. Of course she doesn’t feel a thing. I say, “I used to have a really extraordinary gift. It’s mostly worn off by now, but some of the time I still have it, and as a matter of fact I’m using it on you right now.”

  “Far out,” she says, and drops her jeans. No underpants. She will be fat before she’s 30. Her thighs are thick, her belly protrudes. Her pubic hair is oddly dense and widespread, less a triangle than a sort of diamond, a black diamond reaching past her loins to her hips, almost. Her buttocks are deeply dimpled. While I inspect her flesh I savagely ransack her mind, sparing her no areas of privacy, enjoying my access while it lasts. I don’t need to be polite. I owe her nothing: she forced herself on me. I check, first, to see if she had been lying when she said she’d never heard of Kitty. The truth: Kitty is no kin to her. A meaningless coincidence of surnames, is all. “I’m sure you’re a poet, Dave,” she says as we entwine and drop onto the unmade bed. “That’s an intuition flash too. Even if you’re doing this term paper thing now, poetry is where you’re really at, right?” I run my hands over her breasts and belly. A sharp odor comes from her skin. She hasn’t washed in three or four days, I bet. No matter. Her nipples mysteriously emerge, tiny rigid pink nubs. She wriggles. I continue to loot her mind like a Goth plundering the Forum. She is fully open to me; I delight in this unexpected return of vigor. Her autobiography assembles itself for me. Born in Cambridge. Twenty years old. Father a professor. Mother a professor. One younger brother. Tomboy childhood. Measles, chicken pox, scarlet fever. Puberty at eleven, lost her virginity at twelve. Abortion at sixteen. Several Lesbian adventures. Passionate interest in French decadent poets. Acid, mescaline, psilocybin, cocaine, even a sniff of smack. Guermantes gave her that. Guermantes also took her to bed five or six times. Vivid memories of that. Her mind shows me more of Guermantes than I want to see. He’s hung very impressively. Lisa comes through with a tough, aggressive self-image, captain of her soul, ma
ster of her fate, etc. Underneath that it’s just the opposite, of course; she’s scared as hell. Not a bad kid. I feel a little guilty about the casual way I slammed into her head, no regard for her privacy at all. But I have my needs. I continue to prowl her, and meanwhile she goes down on me. I can hardly remember the last time anyone did that. I can hardly remember my last lay, it’s been so bad lately. She’s an expert fellatrice. I’d like to reciprocate but I can’t bring myself to do it; sometimes I’m fastidious and she’s not the douching type. Oh, well, leave that stuff for the Guermanteses of this world. I lie there picking her brain and accepting the gift of her mouth. I feel virile, bouncy, cocksure, and why not, getting my kicks from two inputs at once, head and crotch? Without withdrawing from her mind I withdraw, at last, from her lips, turn around, part her thighs, slide deep into her tight narrow-mouthed harbor. Selig the stallion. Selig the stud. “Oooh,” she says, flexing her knees. “Oooh.” And we begin to play the beast with two backs. Covertly I feed on feedback, tapping into her pleasure-responses and thereby doubling my own; each thrust brings me a factored and deliciously exponential delight. But then a funny thing happens. Although she is nowhere close to coming—an event that I know will disrupt our mental contact when it occurs—the broadcast from her mind is already becoming erratic and indistinct, more noise than signal. The images break up in a pounding of static. What comes through is garbled and distant; I scramble to maintain my hold on her consciousness, but no use, no use, she slips away, moment by moment receding from me, until there is no communion at all. And in that moment of severance my cock suddenly softens and slips out of her. She is jolted by that, caught by surprise. “What brought you down?” she asks. I find it impossible to tell her. I remember Judith asking me, some weeks back, whether I had ever regarded my loss of mental powers as a kind of metaphor of impotence. Sometimes yes, I told her. And now here, for the first time, metaphor blends with reality; the two failures are integrated. He is impotent here and he is impotent there. Poor David. “I guess I got distracted,” I tell her. Well, she has her skills; for half an hour she works me over, fingers, lips, tongue, hair, breasts, not getting a rise out of me with anything, in fact turning me off more than ever by her grim purposefulness. “I don’t understand it,” she says. “You were doing so well. Was there something about me that brought you down?” I reassure her. You were great, baby. Stuff like this sometimes just happens, no one knows why. I tell her, “Let’s just rest and maybe I’ll come back to life.” We rest. Side by side, stroking her skin in an abstract way, I run a few tentative probing efforts. Not a flicker on the telepathic level. Not a flicker. The silence of the tomb. Is this it, the end, right here and now? Is this where it finally burns out? And I am like all the rest of you now. I am condemned to make do with mere words. “I have an idea,” she says. “Let’s take a shower together. That sometimes peps a guy up.” To this I make no objection; it might just work, and in any case she’ll smell better afterward. We head for the bathroom. Torrents of brisk cool water.

  Success. The ministrations of her soapy hand revive me.

  We spring toward the bed. Still stiff, I top her and take her. Gasp gasp gasp, moan moan moan. I can get nothing on the mental band. Suddenly she goes into a funny little spasm, intense but quick, and my own spurt swiftly follows. So much for sex. We curl up together, cuddly in the after-glow. I try again to probe her. Zero. Zee-ro. Is it gone? I think it’s really gone. You have been present today at an historic event, young lady. The perishing of a remarkable extrasensory power. Leaving behind this merely mortal husk of mine. Alas.

  “I’d love to read some of your poetry, Dave,” she says.

  * * *

  Monday night, about seven-thirty. Lisa has left, finally. I go out for dinner, to a nearby pizzeria. I am quite calm. The impact of what has befallen me hasn’t really registered yet. How strange that I can be so accepting. At any moment, I know, it’s bound to come rushing in on me, crushing me, shattering me; I’ll weep, I’ll scream, I’ll bang my head against walls. But for now I’m surprisingly cool. An oddly posthumous feeling, as of having outlived myself. And a feeling of relief: the suspense is over, the process has completed itself, the dying is done, and I’ve survived it. Of course I don’t expect this mood to last. I’ve lost something central to my being, and now I await the anguish and the grief and the despair that must surely be due to erupt shortly.

  But it seems that my mourning must be postponed. What I thought was all over isn’t over yet. I walk into the pizzeria and the counterman gives me his flat cold New York smile of welcome, and I get this, unsolicited, from behind his greasy face: Hey, here’s the fag who always wants extra anchovies.

  Reading him clearly. So it’s not dead yet! Not quite dead! Only resting a while. Only hiding.

  * * *

  Tuesday. Bitter cold; one of those terrible late-autumn days when every drop of moisture has been squeezed from the air and the sunlight is like knives. I finish two more term papers for delivery tomorrow. I read Updike. Judith calls after lunch. The usual dinner invitation. My usual oblique reply.

  “What did you think of Karl?” she asks.

  “A very substantial man.”

  “He wants me to marry him.”

  “Well?”

  “It’s too soon. I don’t really know him, Duv. I like him, I admire him tremendously, but I don’t know whether I love him.”

  “Then don’t rush into anything with him,” I say. Her soap-opera hesitations bore me. I don’t understand why anybody old enough to know the score ever gets married, anyway. Why should love require a contract? Why put yourself into the clutches of the state and give it power over you? Why invite lawyers to fuck around with your assets? Marriage is for the immature and the insecure and the ignorant. We who see through such institutions should be content to live together without legal coercion, eh, Toni? Eh? I say, “Besides, if you marry him, he’d probably want you to give up Guermantes. I don’t think he could dig it.”

  “You know about me and Claude?”

  “Of course.”

  “You always know everything.”

  “This was pretty obvious, Jude.”

  “I thought your power was waning.”

  “It is, it is, it’s waning faster than ever. But this was still pretty obvious. To the naked eye.”

  “All right. What did you think of him?”

  “He’s death. He’s a killer.”

  “You misjudged him, Duv.”

  “I was in his head. I saw him, Jude. He isn’t human. People are toys to him.”

  “If you could hear the sound of your own voice now, Duv. The hostility, the outright jealousy—”

  “Jealousy? Am I that incestuous?”

  “You always were,” she says. “But let that pass. I really thought you’d enjoy meeting Claude.”

  “I did. He’s fascinating. I think cobras are fascinating too.”

  “Oh, fuck you, Duv.”

  “You want me to pretend I liked him?”

  “Don’t do me any favors.” The old icy Judith.

  “What’s Karl’s reaction to Guermantes?”

  She pauses. Finally: “Pretty negative. Karl’s very conventional, you know. Just as you are.”

  “Me?”

  “Oh, you’re so fucking straight, Duv! You’re such a puritan! You’ve been lecturing me on morality all my goddamned life. The very first time I got laid there you were, wagging your finger at me—”

  “Why doesn’t Karl like him?”

  “I don’t know. He thinks Claude’s sinister. Exploitive.” Her voice is suddenly flat and dull. “Maybe he’s just jealous. He knows I’m still sleeping with Claude. Oh, Jesus, Duv, why are we fighting again? Why can’t we just talk?”

  “I’m not the one who’s fighting. I’m not the one who raised his voice.”

  “You’re challenging me. That’s what you always do. You spy on me and then you challenge me and try to put me down.”

  “Old habits are hard to break, Ju
de. Really, though: I’m not angry with you.”

  “You sound so smug!”

  “I’m not angry. You are. You got angry when you saw that Karl and I agree about your friend Claude. People always get angry when they’re told something they don’t want to hear. Listen, Jude, do whatever you want. If Guermantes is your trip, go ahead.”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t know.” An unexpected concession: “Maybe there is something sick about my relationship with him.” Her flinty self-assurance vanishes abruptly. That’s the wonderful thing about her: you get a different Judith every two minutes. Now, softening, thawing, she sounds uncertain of herself. In a moment she’ll turn her concern outward, away from her own troubles, toward me. “Will you come to dinner next week? We very much do want to get together with you.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “I’m worried about you, Duv.” Yes, here it comes. “You looked so strung out on Saturday night.”

  “It’s been a pretty rough time for me. But I’ll manage.” I don’t feel like talking about myself. I don’t want her pity, because after I get hers, I’ll start giving myself mine. “Listen, I’ll call you soon, okay?”

  “Are you still in so much pain, Duv?”

  “I’m adapting. I’m accepting the whole thing. I mean, I’ll be okay. Keep in touch, Jude. My best to Karl.” And Claude, I add, as I put down the receiver.

  * * *

  Wednesday morning. Downtown to deliver my latest batch of masterpieces. It’s colder even than yesterday, the air clearer, the sun brighter, more remote. How dry the world seems. The humidity is minus sixteen percent, I think. The sort of weather in which I used to function with overwhelming clarity of perception. But I was picking up hardly anything at all on the subway ride down to Columbia, just muzzy little blurts and squeaks, nothing coherent. I can no longer be certain of having the power on any given day, apparently, and this is one of the days off. Unpredictable. That’s what you are, you who live in my head: unpredictable. Thrashing about randomly in your death-throes. I go to the usual place and await my clients. They come, they get from me what they have come for, they cross my palm with greenbacks. David Selig, benefactor of undergraduate mankind. I see Yahya Lumumba like a black sequoia making his way across from Butler Library. Why am I trembling? It’s the chill in the air, isn’t it, the hint of winter, the death of the year. As the basketball star approaches he waves, nods, grins; everyone knows him, everyone calls out to him. I feel a sense of participation in his glory. When the season starts maybe I’ll go watch him play.