David Wallace: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Q.

‘It’s not a good word, I know. It’s not just quote sadness the way one feels sad at a funeral or film. More a plummeting quality. A timelessness to it. The way the light gets in winter just before dusk. Or that — all right — how, say, at the height of lovemaking, the very height, when she’s starting to come, when she’s truly responding to you now and you can see in her face that she’s starting to come, her eyes widening in that way that is both surprise and recognition, which not a woman alive can fake or feign if you really look intently at her eyes and really see her, you know what I’m talking about, that apical moment of maximum human sexual connection when you feel closest to her, with her, so much closer and realer and more ecstatic than your own coming, which always feels more like losing your grip on the person who’s grabbed you to keep you from falling, a mere neural sneeze that’s not even in the same ballpark’s area code as her coming, and — and I know what you will make of this but I’ll tell you anyhow — but how even this moment of maximum connection and joint triumph and joy at making them start to come has this void of piercing sadness to it, of the loss of them in their eyes as their eyes widen to their very widest point and then as they begin to come begin to shut, close, the eyes do, and you feel that familiar little needle of sadness inside your exultation as they arch and their eyes close and you can feel that they’ve closed their eyes to shut you out, you’ve become an intruder, their union is now with the feeling itself, the climax, that behind those drawn lids the eyes are now rolled all the way around and staring intently inward, into some void where you who sent them cannot follow. That’s shit. I’m not putting it right. I can’t make you feel what I felt. You’ll turn this into Narcissistic Male Wants Woman’s Gaze On Him At Climax, I know. Well I don’t mind telling you I’d begun to cry, at the anecdote’s climax. Not loudly, but I did. Neither of us were smoking by now. We were both up against the headboard, facing the same way, though addorsed is how I remember it for the story’s last part, when I wept. Memory is strange. I do remember listening for some acknowledgment from her that I was crying. I felt embarrassed — not for crying, but for wanting so badly to know how she took it, whether it made me seem sympathetic or selfish. She stayed where he left her all day, supine in the gravel, weeping, she said, and giving thanks to her particular religious principles and forces. When of course as I’m sure you could have predicted I was weeping for myself. He left the knife and drove off in the unmuffled Cutlass, leaving her there. He may have told her not to move or do anything for some specified interval. If he did, I know she obeyed. She said she could still feel him inside her soul, the mulatto — it was hard to break the focus. I felt certain that the psychotic had driven off somewhere to kill himself. It seemed clear from the anecdote’s outset that someone was going to have to die. The story’s emotional impact on me was profound and unprecedented and I will not even try to explain it to you. She said she wept because she had realized that as she stood hitchhiking her religion’s spiritual forces had guided the psychotic to her, that he had served as an instrument of growth in her faith and capacity to focus and alter energy fields by the action of her compassion. She wept out of gratitude, she says. He left the knife up to the handle in the ground next to her where he had thrust it, apparently stabbing the ground dozens of times with desperate savagery. She said not one word about my weeping or what it signified to her. I displayed far more emotion than she did. She learned more about love that day with the sex offender than at any other stage in her spiritual journey, she said. Let’s both have one last one and then that will be it. That her whole life had indeed led inexorably to that moment when the car stopped and she got in, that it was indeed a kind of death, but not at all in the way she had feared as they entered the secluded area. That was the only real commentary she indulged in, just at the anecdote’s end. I did not care whether it was quote true. It would depend what you meant by true. I simply didn’t care. I was moved, changed — believe what you will. My mind seemed to be moving at the quote speed of light. I was so sad. And that whether or not what she believed happened happened — it seemed true even if it wasn’t. That even if the whole focusedsoul-connection theology, that even if it was just catachrestic New Age goo, her belief in it had saved her life, so whether or not it’s goo becomes irrelevant, no? Can you see why this, realizing this, would make you feel conflicted in — of realizing your entire sexuality and sexual history had less genuine connection or feeling than I felt simply lying there listening to her talk about lying there realizing how lucky she’d been that some angel had visited her in psychotic guise and shown her what she’d spent her whole life praying was true? You believe I’m contradicting myself. But can you imagine how any of it felt? Seeing her sandals across the room on the floor and remembering what I’d thought of them only hours before? I kept saying her name and she would ask What? and I’d say her name again. I’m not afraid of how this sounds to you. I’m not embarrassed now. But if you could understand, had I — can you see why there’s no way I could let her just go away after this? Why I felt this apical sadness and fear at the thought of her getting her bag and sandals and New Age blanket and leaving and laughing when I clutched her hem and begged her not to leave and said I loved her and closing the door gently and going off barefoot down the hall and never seeing her again? Why it didn’t matter if she was fluffy or not terribly bright? Nothing else mattered. She had all my attention. I’d fallen in love with her. I believed she could save me. I know how this sounds, trust me. I know your type and I know what you’re bound to ask. Ask it now. This is your chance. I felt she could save me I said. Ask me now. Say it. I stand here naked before you. Judge me, you chilly cunt. You dyke, you bitch, cooze, cunt, slut, gash. Happy now? All borne out? Be happy. I don’t care. I knew she could. I knew I loved. End of story.’

Between a cold kitchen window gone opaque with the stove’s wet heat and the breath of us, an open drawer, and the gilt ferrotype of identical boys flanking a blind vested father which hung in a square recession above the wireless’s stand, my Mum stood and cut off my long hair in the uneven heat. There was breath and the mugginess of bodies and the force of the hot stove on the back of my emergent neck; there was the lunatic crackle of the wireless’s movement among city stations, Da scanning for better reception. I could not move: about and around me the towels trapped hair at my shoulders’ skin and Mum circled the chair, cutting against the bowl’s rim with blunt shears. At one edge of my vision’s strain a utensil drawer hung open, at the other the beginning of Da, head cocked past the finger at the glowing dial. And straight ahead, before me and centered direct across the shine of the table’s oilcloth, like a tongue between the teeth of the pantry’s opening doors, hung my brother’s face. I could not move my head: the weight of the bowl and towels, Mum’s shears and steadying hand — she, eyes lowered, intent on her crude task, could not see the face of my brother emerge against the pantry’s black. I had to sit still and straight as a tin grenadier and watch as his face assumed, instantly and with the earnestness reserved for pure cruelty, whichever expression my own emerging face betrayed.