Andrea Dworkin - Ice And Fire

Arendt, Singer, Freud, Darwin, Milton. I am profoundly loved.

I am trembling. Donne. Utterly female. Bought and saved.

*

I am afraid to eat, wet, in the restaurant, out of the rain,

trembling and wet: too carnal, too vulgar, too much the

mountain of thigh, I want the ether.

*

lt is, of course, not entirely this way. Somehow, Conrad reminds him of a high school teacher who had a boat in his sophomore year of high school; and Dostoyevsky reminds him

of someone he fucked three weeks ago in Denver— it was cold

there; and Milton reminds him of how misunderstood he was

when he was eighteen; and Zola’s J ’Accuse reminds him of

how he stood up to his parents and finally told them whatever;

and Mann reminds him of a lover who told him how hard it

was being German and of course he remembers the room they

were in and the sex acts that went before and after the desperately painful discussion of how hard it is; and Virginia Woolf reminds him of how depressed he is when he has to attend

sales conferences; and Singer reminds him of how his Jewish

mother reacted when he told her whatever; and Mozart reminds him of all the piano lessons he took and how brilliant he was before he decided to be brilliant now as an editor of

literature and also how he was unappreciated especially when

he taught English to a bunch of assholes in the sixties who had

no critical standards; and Freud reminds him of what it was

like to be such a sensitive child in school when all the boys

were masturbating and telling whatever jokes; and Jean Rhys

reminds him that he has been stalled on his own novel for

quite a while because of the demands of his job, which can be

quite pedestrian; and Djuna Barnes reminds him of a party he

went to in the Village dressed not in a dress like the other

whatevers but in a suit and didn’t that show whomever; and

Dickens reminds him of how much he abhors sentimentality

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and the many occasions on which he has encountered it and

since he is in his late thirties there have been many occasions

and he remembers them all. And the Brontes remind him of his

last trip to England, which Maggie is really fucking up, which,

he tells me sternly, is going to hurt feminism.

And I wonder how I am going to survive being loved so

profoundly, like this. My palms do not sweat; they weep.

*

We went from the coffeehouse to the restaurant in the rain,

wet. I tried to slide along the broken New York sidewalks,

drift gracefully over the cracks, dance over the lopsided cement,

not hit the bilious pieces of steel that jut up from nowhere for

no reason here and there, not fall over the terrible people

walking with angry umbrellas into me. I tried to glide and

talk, an endless stream of pleasant yesses with an occasional

impassioned but do you really think. We stopped, we breathed

in the rain, breathless, in a crack I saw a broken needle, syringe,

I want it a lot these days, the relief from time and pain, I keep

going, always, away from it, he followed and we walked far,

across town, all the way from east to west, in the rain, wet,

cold, and I tried not to be breathless, wet, and the hair on his

lip glistened with lubrication and he strutted, his shoulders

sometimes hanging down, sometimes jutted back. They hung

down for the Japanese. They jutted back for Celine.

The cement disappeared behind us, a trail of rice at a

wedding, and stretched out in front of us, the future, our life,

our bed, our home, our earth, wet.

We went into the restaurant, wet.

*

A small cramped table, an omelette, a dozen cups of coffee, a

million cigarettes, one brutal piss after waiting all night, no

dessert, his credit card: dinner: I was tired enough to die. Hours

more of the canon, my heart. Except that we had reached the

end hours before, but still he went on.

We walked out, I wanted to go, off on my own, back to

myself, alone, apart, noiseless, no drone of text and interpretation, no more writers to love together as only (by now it was established) we could: just the dread silence of me alone,

with my own heart. On cement, in rain, wet.

I left him on a corner. Asked him which way he was going.

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Would have gone the opposite. Extended my hand, kind but

formal, serious and sober, ladylike and gentlemanly, quiet but

taut, firm and final. He took it and he pulled me into his lips

so hard that I would have had to make both of us fall to get

away: and I didn’t scream: and he said he loved me and would

publish my book. Oh, I said, wet.

*

We left the restaurant and walked down a wide street full of

shops, cards, clothes, coffeehouses, restaurants, some trees

even, brick buildings, light from the moon on the rain. We

talked nervous clips, half sentences, fatigue and coffee, wet.

We crossed a small street. We stood in front of a blooming

garden, all colored and leafy, where a prison used to be, I had

been in it, a tall brick building, twelve floors of women, locked

up, a building where they took you and spread your legs and

tried to hurt you by tearing you apart inside. A building where

they put you in cells and locked that door and then locked a

thicker door and then locked a thicker door, and you could

look out the window and see us standing on that corner below,

looking like a man and a woman kissing under the moon in

the rain, wet. You could see the lights and the hookers on the

street corners and the literati fucking around too. You could

see a Howard Johnson’s when it was still there and gaggles of

pimps right across a huge intersection and you could hear a

buzz, a hum, that sounded like music from up there, up on one

of those floors inside that brick. You could see the people

underneath, down below, and you could wonder who they

were, especially the boys and the girls kissing, you could see

everything and everyone but you couldn’t get at them, even if

you screamed, and inside they spread you on a table and they

tore you up and they left you bleeding. And they tore me up.

And now it was a garden, very pretty really, and my honey the

publisher who I had just met was right there, in the moonlight,

wet: and the blood was flowing: he grabbed me and pulled me

and kissed me hard and held me so I couldn’t move and it was

all fast and hard and he said he loved me.

*

I am bleeding again on this corner; where there was a prison;

where a man has kissed me against my will; and will publish

my book, oh my love; and it is wet; and the cement glistens;

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