William Vollmann - The Royal Family

He knew not, this veteran captain, what plan to urge upon himself except the old plans (no fault of his, that old plans were derailed); he’d fall back into the encarnadine trench, taken by persuasion’s assaults! His octopus-minded ex-wife had paid him back for yesterday; he’d pay her back with tomorrow: that is how wars go. Limping down between rocky uncertainties as a cat limps, he wandered through a graduation at Berkley which he’d come to just to see the girls; his resolution had not at all affected the routine of the Economics Department whose young faces were meaty and confident beneath the mortarboards, parents brushing the dust and soot from the shoulders of their dark gowns, Japanese dads focusing their zooms while every mom looked on with full-judged concern. Ignoring sons, he scanned the daughters with salvo upon salvo of loving glances… no use — he’d grown too old! The sun shone with impersonal malice on the cement, none of the young graduates suspecting the dark wretchedness of adult events that would mutilate and eventually destroy them. The profile-line of mortarboard, cheek and gown was very pleasant, but now the graduates doffed their ceremonial vestments and lost their splendor, becoming just like everyone else. — Well, now he’d do what seemed best to him. No luck with young things, incarnadine prizes unripe? Well, he’d light the battle in another way, with the flame-white hair of elder dames! Surely they wouldn’t keep their treasures to themselves… Fishing deathlessly, he soon had something on his hook… That very night he was besieging the middle-aged lady with kisses, undermining her vigilant lips, his tongue the battering ram that assaulted the gates of her modestly clenched teeth which held firm until, sending a clever shot behind her lines, he exploded and dissolved her earlobe in a single lick of slobbery lust; now the gates opened, and ferociously the tongue surged in, pillaging her mouth’s stronghold of all its well-wrought treasures of moans and sighs; dragging her down on top of him to complete the work, he launched grazing passes between her still-clothed thighs. — I really think you’d better… she began; and he kissed down her murmurs until they were both outbreathed… — Stop, she said. — Just one more kiss, he said (expertly conducting his propaganda war). He rolled her on her side, clasping her beyond possibility of escape, and began to suck the spit out of her. His hand rubbing and rubbing until the juice worked out through her pants, he said: You really want me to go? — This is mad, she said. Yes, yes… — Yes what? — Yes I want you to go. — I will, he grinned, any time now. — His other hand had twisted down the front of her blouse to loot her intermediate prizes. The hand between her legs was rasping harder now; he felt the first small spasm of her defeat; and she began clinging to him harder and he said: Should I go or not? and she said: Is this some kind of game? and he lowered his face very earnestly down upon her face and said: Mm hm as he directed more whizzing salvoes across her body to breach her other swirls and brattices, making her breath come thick and hot and fast as she straddled him writhing like a soldier whose belly’s been blown open by a lucky shot, and he said: So, should I go? and she giggled and said: You devil… — The next morning he was with a charming Mexican woman, pressing a Hershey’s chocolate kiss into her hand, saying: Don’t say I never kissed you. — You never kissed me, she said, pouncing on him, and he was kissing her swimmingly and they went out for coffee and eggs and bacon and ham and sausage and biscuits and gravy, cramming it in until at last she leaned back sighing happily and said: I like you because you are so intelligent and analytical! and he put his hand on her sweet arm. — But as soon as he left her to match himself against the lovely young girl champions whom he once could have run down like a hunting dog, he shrank and said: I’m not what I was. — That evening he wandered past the trio playing Smetana in the old Jesuit chapel at Loyola University, the stained glass windows gleaming, everyone sweating, and someone told him (he knew not whether it was true) that the Jesuits hated for the piano to be played. But the trio played until it was dusk, and the yellow windows glowed. The sky was awash with cerulean blue; the evening smelled like grass. He wandered past girls as lovely as the disconnected squares of snowquilt blueness seen between a field of bushy cloud, but he cringed from them; he was afraid now. — My ex-wife’s ruined me! he thought. — He wandered down the dark and dirty streets owned by princesses of darkness. A whore, a whore, and looking at her he knew right away that he’d forget her face even though it was beautiful; she blocked his way on the sidewalk and said hi and he said hi and she wanted to know what she wanted to know, so he must break the bad news; but she took his hand and squeezed it and he squeezed it back for a minute before he walked on, not looking at her, and he’d already forgotten her face, but strangely enough he remembered her hand; it’s a cliché to say that black people are chocolate-skinned, but that hand of hers was the lovely reddish-brown of fresh cocoa shavings—

During the divorce settlement he came across an unsent letter from his ex-wife to his mother which ran: Sometimes I think that we hide from ourselves how deeply we feel about people. For instance, my husband. I always thought him a little dull and condescending, but at the same time he did me favors and so I thought I liked him until last night when I dreamed that he was chasing me around the house, stalking me with a gun, meaning to kill me, and waking up I realized that I had always feared and hated him.

So while his powers shrank he fought on, long cut off from his own lines because the others had been defeated long ago, riven into marriage beds by the octopus-eyed girls, or (no better and no worse) they’d won the encarnadine prizes they’d striven for and retired from the lists, licking them over and over in their life’s last caves like dragons greeding over their hoard, licking them out of dull habit, with nothing left to taste but their own stale breath. Oh, no doubt there were a few still left, fighting on ragtag and wild, but in the wars of merciless love, as I’ve just said, to lose is to lose, to win is to lose, and (sad but true) to keep the war hot proves no less to lose, for love-strife is a death where love-life passes us by. In the old days he never would have spied; he liked to think his ex-wife had degraded him down to that, but she was no more than a horrible fire he’d passed through, scorching and scarring him, to be sure; after all, heat was what he’d asked for. Too late? Too late for what? Whatever he might have done or not done, it was getting too late. His penis, speckled and frolicksome like an otter, would soon play no more. He’d perfume it only with sacrilege.

There was a lady his own age whom he thought stalked him as he stalked her, but when he closed on her, bellied up to her slit, she said: I–I’m embarrassed to say this…

Go ahead.

I–I’d love to let you kiss me, but I can’t be like other women…

… and he saw that another game was ended; she wouldn’t have had him in her sleep.

He sat at home reading the Neutron Trilogy but he couldn’t concentrate.

He thought of a long and lovely face sipping at a straw. Her eyes were so big they filled up half her face. Her pupils were ripe dark fruits.

The golden retriever bitch lifted her head and panted innocently, open-mouthed, her pink tongue as thin as a slice of fancy ham, and then she lay back down under his chair to let her honeyhaired sides quake while she basked and gnawed on the last stand of ivy which ran along the bottom of the house and which she had previously neglected to destroy. This task done, she looked at him again, perhaps content, perhaps hoping and waiting for something, so he stroked the length of her skull forward and backward with two fingers, until she raised her nose and licked him. She lay down again, and he heard a rustling as she worried lovingly at the dismembered vines of his dream house.