Daniel.
“I’ve brought you some lunch,” I said. I
felt self-conscious, vaguely ashamed, his mother drunk in the room downstairs
and her secrets in my possession. How wonderful to look at the rapist must have
been. Crawled away, she had said. Maybe he too—
“Daniel,” I said. I removed the book
gently from his grasp, and put the plate there instead.
How much of what she said to me about my
own motives was actually the truth? There were just about a million things I
wouldn’t want to do for him, my aversion amounting to a phobia, to a state not
of wouldn’t but couldn’t. Nor could I cope with this endless silent
non-reaction. I’d try to make him react, I was trying to now. And maybe that
was wrong, unkind—
Maybe I disliked and feared men so much
I’d carried the theories of de Beauvoir and her like to an ultimate conclusion.
I could only love what was male if it was also powerless, impotent, virtually
inanimate. Not even love it. Be perversely aroused by it. The rape principle in
reverse.
He wasn’t eating, so I bent down, and
peered into his face, and for the first time, I think he saw me. His luminous
eyes moved, and fixed on mine. They didn’t seem completely focussed, even so.
But meeting them, I was conscious of a strange irony. Those eyes, which perhaps
had never looked at the sea, held the sea inside them. Were the sea.
I shook myself mentally, remembering the
whisky plummeting on the gin.
“Eat, Daniel,” I said softly.
He grasped the sandwich plate with great
serenity. He went on meeting my eyes, and mine, of course, filled abruptly and
painfully with tears. Psychological symbolism: salt water.
I sat on the edge of the bed and stroked
his hair. It felt like silk, as I’d known it would. His skin was so clear, the
pores so astringently closed, that it was like a sort of silk, too. It didn’t
appear as if he had ever, so far, had to be shaved. Thank God. I didn’t like
the thought of her round him with a razor blade. I could even picture her
producing her father’s old cutthroat from somewhere, and doing just that with
it, another accident, with Daniel’s neck.
You see my impulse, however. I didn’t
even attempt to deal with the hard practicality of supporting such a person as
Daniel really was. I should have persuaded or coerced him to eat. Instead I sat
and held him. He didn’t respond, but he was quite relaxed. Something was going
through my brain about supplying him with emotional food, affection, physical
security, something she’d consistently omitted from his diet. I was trying to
make life and human passion soak into him. To that height I aspired, and,
viewed another way, to that depth I’d sunk.
I don’t know when I’d have grown embarrassed,
or bored, or merely too tired and cramped to go on perching there, maintaining
my sentimental contact with him, I didn’t have to make the decision. She walked
in through the door and made it for me.
“Eat your sandwich, Daniel,” she said as
she entered. I hadn’t heard her approach on this occasion, and I jerked away.
Guilt, presumably. Some kind of guilt. But she ignored me and bore down on him
from the bed’s other side. She took his hand and put it down smack on the
bread. “Eat up,” she said. It was macabrely funny, somehow pure slapstick. But he
immediately lifted the sandwich to his mouth. Presumably he’d recognised it as
food by touch, but not sight.
She wasn’t tight anymore. It had gone
through her and away, like her dark tea through its strainer.
“I expect you want to get along,” she
said.
She was her old self, indeed. Graceless
courtesies, platitudes.
She might have told me nothing, accused
me of nothing. We had been rifling each other’s ids, but now it was done, and
might never have been. I didn’t have enough fight left in me to try to rip the
renewed facade away again. And besides, I doubt if I could have.
So I got along. What else?
Before
I went back to my room, I stood on the promenade
“I’ve brought you some lunch,” I said. I
felt self-conscious, vaguely ashamed, his mother drunk in the room downstairs
and her secrets in my possession. How wonderful to look at the rapist must have
been. Crawled away, she had said. Maybe he too—
“Daniel,” I said. I removed the book
gently from his grasp, and put the plate there instead.
How much of what she said to me about my
own motives was actually the truth? There were just about a million things I
wouldn’t want to do for him, my aversion amounting to a phobia, to a state not
of wouldn’t but couldn’t. Nor could I cope with this endless silent
non-reaction. I’d try to make him react, I was trying to now. And maybe that
was wrong, unkind—
Maybe I disliked and feared men so much
I’d carried the theories of de Beauvoir and her like to an ultimate conclusion.
I could only love what was male if it was also powerless, impotent, virtually
inanimate. Not even love it. Be perversely aroused by it. The rape principle in
reverse.
He wasn’t eating, so I bent down, and
peered into his face, and for the first time, I think he saw me. His luminous
eyes moved, and fixed on mine. They didn’t seem completely focussed, even so.
But meeting them, I was conscious of a strange irony. Those eyes, which perhaps
had never looked at the sea, held the sea inside them. Were the sea.
I shook myself mentally, remembering the
whisky plummeting on the gin.
“Eat, Daniel,” I said softly.
He grasped the sandwich plate with great
serenity. He went on meeting my eyes, and mine, of course, filled abruptly and
painfully with tears. Psychological symbolism: salt water.
I sat on the edge of the bed and stroked
his hair. It felt like silk, as I’d known it would. His skin was so clear, the
pores so astringently closed, that it was like a sort of silk, too. It didn’t
appear as if he had ever, so far, had to be shaved. Thank God. I didn’t like
the thought of her round him with a razor blade. I could even picture her
producing her father’s old cutthroat from somewhere, and doing just that with
it, another accident, with Daniel’s neck.
You see my impulse, however. I didn’t
even attempt to deal with the hard practicality of supporting such a person as
Daniel really was. I should have persuaded or coerced him to eat. Instead I sat
and held him. He didn’t respond, but he was quite relaxed. Something was going
through my brain about supplying him with emotional food, affection, physical
security, something she’d consistently omitted from his diet. I was trying to
make life and human passion soak into him. To that height I aspired, and,
viewed another way, to that depth I’d sunk.
I don’t know when I’d have grown embarrassed,
or bored, or merely too tired and cramped to go on perching there, maintaining
my sentimental contact with him, I didn’t have to make the decision. She walked
in through the door and made it for me.
“Eat your sandwich, Daniel,” she said as
she entered. I hadn’t heard her approach on this occasion, and I jerked away.
Guilt, presumably. Some kind of guilt. But she ignored me and bore down on him
from the bed’s other side. She took his hand and put it down smack on the
bread. “Eat up,” she said. It was macabrely funny, somehow pure slapstick. But he
immediately lifted the sandwich to his mouth. Presumably he’d recognised it as
food by touch, but not sight.
She wasn’t tight anymore. It had gone
through her and away, like her dark tea through its strainer.
“I expect you want to get along,” she
said.
She was her old self, indeed. Graceless
courtesies, platitudes.
She might have told me nothing, accused
me of nothing. We had been rifling each other’s ids, but now it was done, and
might never have been. I didn’t have enough fight left in me to try to rip the
renewed facade away again. And besides, I doubt if I could have.
So I got along. What else?
Before
I went back to my room, I stood on the promenade
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