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8

One night while we were making love, Sheri screamed. She had never screamed before, and it took me by surprise. It was a loud scream, right in my face, which was close to hers. Her mouth opened very wide and I could see all the way to the back of her throat, to her uvula. I saw the fillings in her teeth, the far end of her tongue, the shiny red inside of her cheeks.

Her eyes were open, looking at me while she screamed. I thought I must have done something wrong. What’s the matter? I said. Are you all right? I knew that women sometimes screamed while making love, but she had never screamed before, and besides, it wasn’t like her. I thought I might have hurt her and I stopped what I was doing, even though it was nothing special or unusual. I could have hit a sensitive spot, or maybe she wasn’t feeling well.

Is something the matter? I asked, but of course she didn’t answer. She didn’t believe in questions. But what was I supposed to do? Did she want me to keep on, or stop? I didn’t want to stop—I was too far in to stop.

I began again, very gently, hardly moving—and she screamed again. It occurred to me that the neighbors could hear her. I would see those screams in their eyes when we met in the hallway or on the street. But why should she start screaming now? When would I come to the end of her originality? Also, there was something odd about her screams, something not quite right. They were not like the screams you hear in movies, cries torn from the throat. I remembered Fay Wray in King Kong—she was a lusty screamer.

Most screams are wide-open vowel sounds—ah, oh, or ee—that come up from the diaphragm. They’re raw and unmodulated, which is why they’re startling. But Sheri’s screams were not like that. She screamed up in her sinuses, like a factory whistle. It was a blue note, a diphthong.

Her voice sounded hoarse, and I thought of the hoarse cry of the peacock, a phrase from a book. I remembered a line from a Surrealist poem: “The hyena’s oblong cry.” That’s the way my mind was tending.

Sheri’s face when she screamed was not screwed up around the eyes or distorted. It was only her mouth that screamed. She wasn’t like the girl in the Munch painting whose scream occupies her whole face. Sheri looked as if she was gargling. She let the scream out like an alarm clock that goes off when you can’t remember why you set it.

Maybe her screams were meant as a riddle or conundrum. Perhaps she was punctuating unspoken sentences. Anything was possible.

It also seemed to me that they were a bit stale, her screams. I got the feeling that she was palming off on me some secondhand screams left over from her old life, her inscrutable past. This is what I was thinking as I lay there, half in, half out.

9

For most of the people in Meyer Schapiro’s class at the New School, art was the truth about life—and life itself, as they saw it, was more or less a lie. Art, modern art, was a great, intense, but at the same time vague promise or threat, depending on how you looked at it. If civilization could be thought of as having a sexuality, art was its sexuality.

With the dim stained-glass light of the slides and the hushed atmosphere, Schapiro’s classes were like church services. Culture in those days was still holy. If he had chosen his own church, it would have been Romanesque—yet there was something fundamentalist in him, too. He made you want to get up and testify, or beat a tambourine.

I went to him as students twenty years later would go to India. I wanted to believe in something, anything, to become a member of a cult. My family had been neither religious nor cultivated and, coming from New Orleans, we had always been outsiders in New York. At Brooklyn College, everyone had been a Communist but me.

Modern painting was one more exclusion, one more mystery from which I was shut out. I used to feel this way when people talked about politics, but I didn’t mind so much because I wasn’t interested in politics. And besides, I secretly thought I was right. I thought that being a Communist