ME
First things first. I mean who else?
I am handsome beyond endurance. Body by Michelangelo, it scares me. No doubt all my emotions are versions of panic. So in a sense I’m just like you. A touch self-involved perhaps but with such a self who could resist? Looking around at the others I wonder, how can they exist? Smudges on the page of life, most of them. But I boast.
I like to sleep, which may account for my freshness of appearance. Sleep is joy; The Others are pain. This formula is perhaps adequate but I do not entirely despise The Others. The world is after all there, it sates the appetites and The Others are not unamusing. On occasion they almost endear themselves to one, though one is careful not to involve oneself too deeply in their little projects. Busy, busy, busy. I’d rather just lie here and scratch my scrotum.
Of course it’s not very socially useful. Moments follow moments in no apparent sequence. You are eating, you have food in your mouth. You are in rut. One is dragged through the element of time with nothing to preoccupy one but the care of one’s teeth.
What are my habits? I like to gorge myself on exquisite food, go out dancing and get falling-down drunk. I get so boiled I start to disintegrate but in the morning everything’s still there. The silhouette unaffected, I don’t know how I do it.
The morning. Let us speak rather of the coming to. The point of opening the eyes and inwardly acknowledging the world. Sometimes vocally. A cry of horror, after which I try to lie still.
I interpret this as punishment for having it so good.
I, I, I.
But what the hell.
And sex, of course. One likes to ejaculate. As long as one is lying down.
Which brings us to Marcie.
MARCIE
Let us start with her feet. I’m in the mood and they may anyway be of as much intellectual profit as the rest of her. Her feet are blonde. Hairless but blonde. She is of a translucence, almost a spirituality that glows even in her feet. I am dark. Darkish. Hazel-eyed. A devil in heaven. She is heaven.
Her arches, high. Her toes, long and succulent. I do not, as I try to swallow them, grovel before her so much as before my own sensuality. I place myself at the service of something larger, as it were, than myself.
Her calves have none of the dancer’s or the athlete’s angularity. They are all softness of line and white vulnerability, ready at any moment to give into an overripeness that will embarrass by its luxury.
Need we violate her privacy by speaking of age? Over thirty-five, I guess, we never discuss it. Ideal, really. Any younger and a woman is apt to implicate you in scenarios too dreary to contemplate, and raddle your sleep with mindless chatter.
Her secret smell, floral, juicy. Orange marmalade. I chew on it for hours. What is this passion of the mouth for the folded flower? She goes off at intervals.
Her breasts. Her breasts.
Afterwards she sleeps in my arms, her head on my chest. I forget who she is and am happy with her. It’s not every woman who can make you feel like that.
Why does she not recoil from me as from a monster? Why does she not see me for the narcissistic opportunist that I am? I think—now, we are in the area of theory here, but I think it’s that the mere fact of her joyful unsuspicion renders me tame. Marcie weeps when she hears Louis Armstrong sing Wonderful World. If she steps on a bug she says Oh! Don’t worry! It’ll be over in a minute! Then she looks for a magazine to hit it with.
She paralyzes me with sentiment. Seduces me with her sense of fun. I am immobile.
Which is how I like it.
Here, in bed with Marcie, I am enclosed in satisfaction. Reality, a groan in the sleep. One turns on one’s other side.
And of course she is rich. Not that that matters to either of us. Certainly not to her. She is as innocent of money as a goldfish of water. She is perfect.
“You are perfect,” I tell her.
“Yeah?” she says.
She doesn’t believe me. Being human she cannot firmly delude herself into an awareness of her perfectness.
“You don’t know how beautiful you are,” I tell her.
She ruminates, and is saddened. “No,” she admits.
“It’s part of your perfection.”
She is not comforted. Her nose wrinkles. “Gee!” she says. “Suppose I find out!”
Darlingissima! These felicities of illogic keep her from being a mere rubber woman.
I love her more than I know. When she hurts her hand she asks me to kiss it, at which my soul weeps. But I am unable to represent this to myself.
