Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

“You hear, Cosmo? A yak mugger.”

“Are you married, young man?” asked Cosmo, dreamily.

“No.”

“Good question,” she cried, “for we observe, as necessarily we must, that marriage encourages perversity — assuming the parties agree on specified indulgences, Cosmo, which is paradoxical.”

“Indeed, Tulip, the natural perversions themselves, one might well assume,” he said, whispering.

“Let me continue.”

“Please, please do.”

Something shadowy and mean in her voice wanted to spring, to rip off his head. I wanted to leave.

“Let me continue.”

“Please, please do.”

“Paradoxical, I repeat, for the prime value of sex, to an advanced view, lies precisely in its antagonism to society. What, then, dare one ask, must we make of marriage?”

“An antisocial perversion,” he said.

“Yes, clearly,” I added, “clearly.”

The words burst out of themselves with a wonderful feeling. I love logic. Its inevitability, its power of consummation.

“Cosmo,” she said, ignoring me, “you’re a horse’s ass.”

She looked at me. I nodded my head. “Clearly.”

“I say, fellow, is much going on in the living room?” Her black eyes, like periods, stopped mine.

“I just came the other way, actually. From the back of the apartment.”

I pointed.

“How fascinating. Do publish a travel book. In the meantime, look behind you.”

I turned and looked through the dining room over scattered struggling to the living room. It was piled and dense with sluggish, sliding spaghetti.

“It’s mainly in there now.” I pointed.

“Good. The orgy, Cosmo, our oldest mode of sexual community has moved closer. Let’s go watch now that we needn’t poke about the rooms like vulgar tourists. Oh, Cosmo, what better solvent have we for the diversity of human beings? And, needless to add, it’s such a chic way of breaking the ice.”

They left the kitchen, her smashing voice flinging in all directions, and hesitated at the edge of the toiling pile with spray in their eyes. Figures cast up like tidal garbage lay quivering at their feet.

“Cosmo, the view is breathtaking. Tell me your impressions.”

“Breathtaking, a view of the infinite mind. Indeed, the mind, that ocean where each kind …”

“Yes, yes … where every sort its own sort shortly finds.”

I pushed by them down the edge of the mind, squatting, peering at whatever caught light — blades, nails, paps, hips, tips — looking for her blond hair, her gray eyes, her legs.

I pushed beyond the mind, back into the clogged hall, and looked into a bedroom. Three mirrors showed me looking. I went on, looked into a study, and saw a wall of whips, barbells on the floor, framed diplomas, photos of movie stars and contemporary philosophers. I found a bathroom. I knocked, stepped in. A naked man sitting pertly in the tub said, “I’ll bet you’re Zeus. I’m Danaë.” I shook my head, backed out muttering, “I’m Phillip.” Again in the hall, rump to rump, hip to hip, between moaning, writhing walls; pardon me, so so sorry, until a knee plugged under my crotch and I pitched to a side and down, elbow deep in churning, hands smack on a hot face. Eyes gleamed through my fingers, teeth nibbled my palm, fingers clapped my thigh, squeezed to nerve, and my fist swung back like a hoof. Struck neck. “You want to hit?” There was a punch, a slap, a gibbering girl tumbling over me and nails raked my spine. I scrambled for space, slammed nose flat into shivering thighs, pinwheeled, flapped cha-cha-cha like a sheet in the wind, and fell out against bare wall, wheezing, whistling into virtual black. Tulip’s voice slashed it like tracers:

“I will say one thing, Cosmo, you meet people in an orgy. Not like conventional sex, sneaking in corners, undermining human society selfish, acquisitive, dirty. I mean every time one gets laid, as it were, it’s conservative politics, don’t you think? On the other hand, orgies are liberal, humane. The ambience of impulse, the deluge of sensation, why orgies are corporate form, the highest expression of our catholicity, our modern escape from constrictive, compulsive, unilinear simplifications of medieval sex. Don’t you think?”

“They give me a certain cultural feeling.”

People were sliding across my legs.

“Precisely.”

A pulsing hole went by.

“Precisely a feeling of mind, as it were.”

People were sliding across my legs like lizards. I was inching one buttock at a time toward the foyer. A squeal of recognition needled my ear. My hands flew up, slapped a breast, belly, weedy groove.

“You!”

She collapsed into my arms and we went sliding down the molding like snakes, sliding out of massy sucking foliage. But she quit, suddenly dead as a ton. I dragged. She babbled encouragement, “Gimme, gimme sincere.” I reached the door with her, opened it, and light swept her body. Bruised, vaporous, shining with oils, more limp than any deposition I’d ever seen, more tragic than Cordelia in the arms of Lear. But she wasn’t Cecily.

She was all right. Whoever she was, squalid enervation made easy lines like vines; lips, like avocado pulp, hung lovey in her face. Nose, belly, legs, all in good repair. I helped her stand, then turned her about to consider another prospect. I smiled. She smiled. Both of us a smidgeon self-conscious, confronting one another this way, a couple in the eyes of the world, standing apart, she and I, and it wasn’t easy to think, to ignore the great pull of the worm bucket and pretend to individuation. She gave way shyly under my glance, and leaned toward the wall. There was no wall. Her hands flailed like shot ducks, her eyes grabbed for mine, flashing fright and dismay, and I flung after her into the sticky dismal, thrashing, groping like Beowulf in the mere for a grip on Grendel. I seized a wrist. I dragged, dragged us up to light. She whimpered so at the injustice, the imbecilic ironies. For her sake I contained my own distress. It wasn’t exactly she. Like her, like her in many ways. Not a speck worse. But another girl. I released her, simpered an apology.

“You must love me very much,” she said. “My name is Nora.”

Such tender imperative. Another time, another place, who knows what might have been. If circumstances were slightly different, the light better, noise a little less, if, if, if I hadn’t shoved her back in, furious with myself, we might have had a moment, a life …

“To think, Cosmo, how we build on merest chance — marriage, society, great societies — as if there weren’t ever so much to choose from, so much that any choice at all must seem fanatical in its limitation. Isn’t it that which makes the satyr frightfully amusing, his perpetual hard-on?”

“Ho, ho. A singular notion. But awfully true, Tulip. Awfully true, indeed.”

I stumbled past them at the titillating margin. She was mushing his little rear in her fist.

“Cosmo, Cosmo, I think I see a perversion. You’ll have to tell me what it’s called. If only there were a bit more light. My, how it smells. Cosmo, what would you call that smell? The vocabulary of olfaction is so limited in English.”

“Communism?”

“I adore your political intelligence, Cosmo. Why is it on every other subject you’re such a horse’s ass?”

I shoved into a bathroom to wash and look for fungicide, slammed the door, flicked the light. Voilà! A girl. She was bent over the sink having spasms. I pressed beside her, ran the water, snapped a towel off the rack.

“May I?”

She presented her chin, flecked, runny as it was, and didn’t make an occasion of it. Her eyes were full of tears. Elegant gray eyes like hers; blond hair to the shoulders, in love with gravity. In less than a minute there was a bond, soft and strong as silk, holding us. I wiped her chin, we laughed at nothing, chatted, smoked a cigarette, and felt embarrassed by our luck in each other. I peed, and one of us said, “Let’s get out of this party,” and the other said, “Yes, right now.” Holding hands tightly we left the bathroom and worked down the hall and through the living room. More people were arriving, thickening the stew; dull raging continued all around. At the door stood a big man.