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Authors: John Hawkes
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melodies.
I am a man of feeling. And in our more than eighteen years of dreams and actuality, Fiona and I knew hours of miserable silence, knew the shock of intimacy momentarily spurned, attended funerals, held hands in the whiteness of other weddings, tasted departure and the last liquid kiss, tried to console each other for each pair of friends who, weaker or less fortunate than ourselves, went down in flames. Once in anger Fiona snatched from my hand the brief silken panties she had only moments before slipped down and removed. Once I was graceless enough to lead Fiona nude from our dimly lit living room under the quieteyes of a naked man whose extended fingers were pressed together as if in prayer.
And more. The gradual discovery that most people detest a lover, no matter how modest. My unavoidable fist fight with an older wind-sucking man over the question of virginity in young girls. Fiona weeping through the wood with the sun running wild over her lovely buttocks. Hugh’s neck in his noose. All this and more we knew, all this we suffered.
Much of it must be described as pain, or at least as degrees of pain. But when I saw Fiona’s long fingers reaching inside somebody else’s heavily starched white shirt, or when I heard her voice receding, or when I listened with interest to one of her analytical and yet excited accounts of a night of love away from me, or smelled cigar smoke on her belly, or (to shift perspective) on all those occasions when I found myself alone for the last time with a weeping woman, when I tore myself away from the small sheep’s golden curls and gave back keys, turned off certain bedroom lights forever, understood that this small voice or that would never again lie coiled in my golden ear and that never again would I know this girl’s saliva, that woman’s passionate secretions, when an unhappy negative magic was actually transforming a real mistress into a mental mistress —was all this at least my true pain, my real agony?
Not at all. The nausea, the red eyes, the lips white in blind grief and silent hate, these may have been the externals of a pain that belonged to Hugh but never once to me. Hugh’s pain perhaps. Not mine. It is simply not in my character, my receptive spirit, to suffer sexual possessiveness, the shock of aesthetic greed, the bile that greases mostmatrimonial bonds, the rage and fear that shrivels your ordinary man at the first hint of the obvious multiplicity of love. Once Hugh told me that some small question of sex or the mere beginnings of jealousy often produced in him the sensation that he was drawing fire into his large intestine through a straw. But this pain, at least, is a pain I have never known. Not for me the red threads around the neck, the pillow in the open mouth, the ruptured days, the nights of shouting, the nights of trembling on the toilet. Jealousy, for me, does not exist, while anything that lies in the palm of love is good.
Of course in his own way Hugh was also a sex-singer of sorts. But Hugh was tormented, tempestuous, unreasonable. He was capable of greed and shame and jealousy. When at last he allowed the true artistic nature of our design to seep into consciousness, for instance, he persecuted himself and begrudged me Catherine, tried to deny me Catherine at a time when I knew full well that, thanks to my unseen helping hand, he himself was finally about to lurch down his own peculiar road with Fiona. And yet Hugh was also a sex-singer of sorts. But in Hugh’s dry mouth our lovely song became a shriek.
“T HERE SHE IS!”
Hugh clutched my arm with that hand that served as two, whispering and pointing his flipper into a nearby field: “There she is. See her? Perfect, perfect!”
His whisper was as dark and sparkling as the light in the black center of his narrow eyes. Hearing his curiously eager words and the three small black cameras knocking together on the ends of their straps, and seeing the white sun and sandy hills and the
I am a man of feeling. And in our more than eighteen years of dreams and actuality, Fiona and I knew hours of miserable silence, knew the shock of intimacy momentarily spurned, attended funerals, held hands in the whiteness of other weddings, tasted departure and the last liquid kiss, tried to console each other for each pair of friends who, weaker or less fortunate than ourselves, went down in flames. Once in anger Fiona snatched from my hand the brief silken panties she had only moments before slipped down and removed. Once I was graceless enough to lead Fiona nude from our dimly lit living room under the quieteyes of a naked man whose extended fingers were pressed together as if in prayer.
And more. The gradual discovery that most people detest a lover, no matter how modest. My unavoidable fist fight with an older wind-sucking man over the question of virginity in young girls. Fiona weeping through the wood with the sun running wild over her lovely buttocks. Hugh’s neck in his noose. All this and more we knew, all this we suffered.
Much of it must be described as pain, or at least as degrees of pain. But when I saw Fiona’s long fingers reaching inside somebody else’s heavily starched white shirt, or when I heard her voice receding, or when I listened with interest to one of her analytical and yet excited accounts of a night of love away from me, or smelled cigar smoke on her belly, or (to shift perspective) on all those occasions when I found myself alone for the last time with a weeping woman, when I tore myself away from the small sheep’s golden curls and gave back keys, turned off certain bedroom lights forever, understood that this small voice or that would never again lie coiled in my golden ear and that never again would I know this girl’s saliva, that woman’s passionate secretions, when an unhappy negative magic was actually transforming a real mistress into a mental mistress —was all this at least my true pain, my real agony?
Not at all. The nausea, the red eyes, the lips white in blind grief and silent hate, these may have been the externals of a pain that belonged to Hugh but never once to me. Hugh’s pain perhaps. Not mine. It is simply not in my character, my receptive spirit, to suffer sexual possessiveness, the shock of aesthetic greed, the bile that greases mostmatrimonial bonds, the rage and fear that shrivels your ordinary man at the first hint of the obvious multiplicity of love. Once Hugh told me that some small question of sex or the mere beginnings of jealousy often produced in him the sensation that he was drawing fire into his large intestine through a straw. But this pain, at least, is a pain I have never known. Not for me the red threads around the neck, the pillow in the open mouth, the ruptured days, the nights of shouting, the nights of trembling on the toilet. Jealousy, for me, does not exist, while anything that lies in the palm of love is good.
Of course in his own way Hugh was also a sex-singer of sorts. But Hugh was tormented, tempestuous, unreasonable. He was capable of greed and shame and jealousy. When at last he allowed the true artistic nature of our design to seep into consciousness, for instance, he persecuted himself and begrudged me Catherine, tried to deny me Catherine at a time when I knew full well that, thanks to my unseen helping hand, he himself was finally about to lurch down his own peculiar road with Fiona. And yet Hugh was also a sex-singer of sorts. But in Hugh’s dry mouth our lovely song became a shriek.
“T HERE SHE IS!”
Hugh clutched my arm with that hand that served as two, whispering and pointing his flipper into a nearby field: “There she is. See her? Perfect, perfect!”
His whisper was as dark and sparkling as the light in the black center of his narrow eyes. Hearing his curiously eager words and the three small black cameras knocking together on the ends of their straps, and seeing the white sun and sandy hills and the
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