Loving Women (36 page)

You’re right.

So come over here.

I went where there were always new things to learn. Maybe the only things that mattered. We lay side by side in the cool evening, and she kissed my neck and then sucked on it and pinched my skin and then pressed gently on my head, moving me to her breasts. She pushed them against my cheeks and then I had the wet tip of my tongue against the dry tip of a nipple, the aureole pebbling as I flicked it. But she pressed again, moving me away, and I was at her navel, kissing it, pushing my tongue into it, and her whole body writhed, her breath changing, the inhaling high pitched, the exhaling deeper, the sound beyond her control, and
then my head was between her legs. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I thought if I was her what would
I
want me to do, and I kissed the inside of one thigh and came up to the great black hairiness, breathing on it, afraid, unsure, and then kissed the inside of the other thigh, nibbling at her skin with my teeth, my hands sliding under her bottom and squeezing. I was afraid of doing the wrong thing, of moving to the wrong place out of stupidity, and then she put both hands on my head and guided me to the crevice, and I inhaled the damp female smell, the earth smell, the tidal salt, and I placed my tongue in the center of it, and moved gently and uncertainly along the closed lips, down into the wetness and then lightly dragged my tongue gently upward until everything else opened like a dark flower. She made a deep moaning sound, a sound almost detached from her and yet most deeply from her, a pleasured sound but sad too, as if life itself were leaving for just that moment and I did it again, and felt for the first time in my life that hard hidden slippery little nipple under my tongue and she said
there
and I flicked it and she said
Right there
and I flicked it again and then again, and her voice dropped deeper than I’d ever heard it before, it came from some deep underwater canyon, and she said
Oh Gawwwwwddddddddd there
. Her hands leaving my body now, and gripping the side of the narrow bed, while I eased the flat of my tongue along the tiny tit, very lightly, then suddenly darting it into her as deeply as I could. My tongue become a cock: I glanced up once and saw her kneading her breasts, pulling them up to a point, and then I pressed my mouth on her and sucked the little tit as if it were a tiny cock, sucked her cock the way she’d sucked mine, doing it over and over, until at last a high-pitched plea came from her, all full of fear and resistance, saying
do it, stop
, saying
don’t stop
, followed by a trembling lost wordless sound, and I kept doing it in rhythm to her breathing and mine, to her sounds, to her deep flooding need, until she just came apart. Her legs shot out the length of the bed and locked and she grabbed my head with both hands and then pressed her muscled thighs together and started to scream, up and high and down and low, like a flamenco singer, all in one long uncontrolled sound, and she arched up from the bed and then slammed back down hard at the shoulders, doing it again and then more weakly and then one final quivering time. She rolled to one side, then the
other, and then took my head and moved me up and kissed my face that was wet from her. Licking me. And crying. Just bawling. She cried as she guided my cock into her soaked center and cried some more as I pounded fiercely into her and cried when I came and cried until she fell asleep with my arms around her.

Chapter

39

From
The Blue Notebook

BB
gave me
a book to read, by a guy named Richard Wright. The man is a Negro. There were things in the book that I’d never thought about before. For example:

“Among the subjects that white men would not discuss with Negroes were the following: American white women; the Ku Klux Klan; France, and how Negro soldiers fared while there; French women: Jack Johnson; the entire northern part of the United States; the civil war, Abraham Lincoln; U.S. Grant; General Sherman; Catholics; the Pope; Jews; the Republican Party; Slavery; Social Equality; Communism; Socialism; the 12th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution; or any topic calling for positive knowledge or manly self-assertion on the part of the Negro.”

It made me think that I should discuss all this with the Negroes but I don’t know much about any of it. It’s like a lot of other stuff: I feel ignorant
most of the time,
not just when I hang out with the Negroes. It’s with everybody. The dumbest thing I ever did was dropping out of high school. I thought nobody from Brooklyn could ever get to college and now I meet guys like Dunbar and they tell me college isn’t that hard, that I could go when I get out. But I can’t wait that long to learn about everything. I keep thinking I should just read the whole damned encyclopedia from A to Z. In a way, that’s what they really mean by “hip”—knowing
everything.

• • •

The Boulder. Do I really feel it? Or am I imagining it? And if I only imagine it, is it real? I know the
feeling
is real but it makes me feel ashamed, like I can’t control myself. I hate the way feelings just take over. But if I didn’t feel
anything,
what would I be? A rock. A plant. There’s gotta be some way to have both
.

Vagina. The passage leading from the uterus to the vulva in certain female mammals. A sheathlike part or organ
.

Vulva
. The external female genitalia
.

Uterus
. The portion of the oviduct in which the fertilized ovum implants itself and develops or rests during prenatal development. The womb of certain mammals
.

Clitoris
. The erectile organ of the vulva, homologous to the penis of the male
.

(Where did all the street names come from? Cunt, pussy, snatch, box, furburger, muff, crack, quim, crevice, twat. The glory hole. The bearded clam. And cunt. Always cunt. Cunt and cunt and cunt.)

“But above all, the best thing is to draw men and women from the nude and thus fix in the memory by constant exercise the muscles of the torso, back, legs, arms, and knees, with the bones underneath. Then one may be sure that through much study attitudes in any position can be drawn by help of the imagination without one’s having the living forms in view.”
—
Vasari on technique. (In the base library.)

Why are so many goddamned countries run by old men? Eisenhower’s already old and he just started the job, and there’s Churchill in England and Adenauer in Germany and Chiang in Formosa and this prick Syngman Rhee in Korea. The papers say the war could be over by now, that we have a deal for this peace treaty, but Rhee won’t sign. Our guys keep getting killed and Rhee doesn’t give a rat’s ass. He wants it his way. So he will keep the war going as long as there’s enough Americans to do the fighting. We ought to shoot the old bastard. How
do
they do it? How do they get people to
obey
them? They couldn’t beat up
anyone
in a street fight. How do they make young people go places to
die?

• • •

I find myself reading more and more of the
front
of the newspaper. Now there’s a new thing, the French in Indochina, and it seems like it’s getting worse. Dulles says it’s all tied up with Korea, but from the papers you see right away that the French shouldn’t be there. The place is a
colony,
and the Indochinese want the French the fuck out. The French won’t go, so the Indochinese are trying to shoot them out. When does this shit
end?
They also say there is a Communist govt in Guatemala. At least that’s closer to home, though I’m not even sure where Guatemala is. Gotta check the atlas
.

(I also find myself forgetting about the comics sometimes, and I worry about it. I still read
Sawyer
and
Canyon,
and I glance at
Li’l Abner
and
Joe Palooka.
But I used to read
everything
on the comics page. I told people who laughed at me
, Hey,
this is just like a lawyer reading
law books.
Since I was eleven I wanted to write and draw a comic strip. But suppose I’m losing the urge? I mean, suppose I don’t
care
about comics anymore?
Then
what happens to me? What can I
become
?)

I checked the atlas. Guatemala is just south of Mexico
.

From
The Art Spirit
by Robert Henri (great book lent to me by MR):

“Find out what you really like if you can. Find out what is really important to you. Then sing your song. You will have something to sing about and your whole heart will be in the singing.”

That’s so true. Henri is talking about music in order to make a point about art. But it’s also true about singing. I listen to the blues guys singing and the power comes from the fact they are singing about what’s important to them, even if it is
pain.
Henri also says:

“…  Most people go through their lives without ever doing one whole thing they really want to do.”

(My father: it’s true of him. It was probably true of my mother. True of most of the people I know back in the neighborhood, even most of the people in the Navy.)

And Henri says:

“The self-educator judges his own course, judges advices, judges the evidence about him. He realizes that he is no longer an infant. He is already a man: has his own development in process. No one can lead him. Many can give advices, but the greatest artist in the world cannot point his course for he is a new man. Just what he should know, just how he should proceed can only be guessed at.”

Jesus Christ
.

When I say the word “I” what do I mean?

Chapter

40

O
ne evening we went to the empty beach facing Perdido Bay. I loved the name of the great wide bay because of the loud honking record of “Perdido” by Illinois Jacquet and Flip Phillips. They’d taken a simple tune by Duke Ellington and made something insane of it, a sound without control. The bay didn’t look at all the way the record sounded, but I felt some kinship to it because I’d at least heard the foreign word. Eden told me “
perdido
” meant “lost” in Spanish.

“What does
Santana
mean?” I said.

“Big holy one,” she said, and laughed sarcastically.

“You don’t think you’re holy?”

“No.”

We walked along the beach and talked about the history of the whole area, the fleets of French and Spanish sailors who washed up on its shores, to die of strange new diseases or to stay too long and die of an aching loneliness. The histories at the base library were vague and sketchy, written for high school students. Which one of those men first called this bay “lost” and why? Eden squeezed my hand. I asked her when her family had come to the Gulf and how and why. She gazed out past the bay and said, “Centuries ago.” Explaining nothing about the how and the why.

And then we stopped. Two men were walking barefoot on the beach far ahead of us, their trousers rolled to their knees. One was short, the other much taller. But even at this distance, I recognized them. The tall one was Miles Rayfield. The other was Freddie Harada.

“Let’s walk back,” I said.

She looked at me, puzzled. “How come?”

“I know those guys up ahead. I don’t really want to have to talk to them.”

“Okay,” she said, “we’ll go to the shrimp place.”

Chapter

41