Kafka Was the Rage_ A Greenwich Village Memoir - Anatole Broyard [4]
He came hurrying into the stationery store just as we were going out. Sheri was in front of me and he ran right into her. As he wrote somewhere, fantasy makes us clumsy. He also said that the art of living in New York City lies in crossing the street against the lights.
Sheri, who floated instead of walking, was easy to knock over, and Auden had all the velocity of his poetry and his nervousness. She fell backward, and as she did, she grabbed Auden around the neck and they went down together, with him on top. I was so concerned about her skirt flying up that I didn’t even stop to think about whether she might have been hurt. She was lying on the floor beneath one of the most famous poets of our time, but I couldn’t see the poetry or the humor of it.
She clung to Auden, who was sprawled in her arms. He tried desperately to rise, scrabbling with his hands and his espadrilles on the floor. He was babbling incoherently, apologizing and expostulating at the same time, while she smiled at me over his shoulder, like a woman dancing.
Until this time, most of the sex in my life had had an improvised character. It was done on the run, in borrowed, often inconvenient spaces, sandwiched between extraneous events, like the arrival or departure of parents or roommates, or the approach of daylight. Now I could have, could enjoy, sex whenever I chose. It had evolved from an obsessive idea into a surprising fact, an independent thing, like a monument. It was perpetually there when I had nothing else to do.
I had always believed, perhaps sentimentally, that lovemaking clarified things, that people came to understand each other through it. Yet it didn’t work that way with Sheri—in fact, she grew more mysterious to me all the time.
She made love the way she talked—by breaking down the grammar and the rhythms of sex. Young men tend to make love monotonously, but Sheri took my monotony and developed variations on it, as if she were composing a fugue. If I was a piston, she was Paul Klee’s Twittering Machine.
She was like one of those modern black jazz singers who works against the melody and ignores the natural line ends. Most people agree on some kind of rhythm in sex, but Sheri refused all my attempts at coordination. She never had orgasms—she said she didn’t want them. I did want them, but I had to get used to arriving at them in a new way. Instead of building or mounting to orgasm, I descended to it. It was like a collapsing of structures, like a building falling down. I remember thinking once that it was the opposite of premature ejaculation.
I had conceived of lovemaking as a sort of asking and answering of questions, but with us it only led to further questions, until we seemed to be locked in a philosophical debate. Instead of the proverbial sadness after sex, I felt something like a semantic despair.
Our sexual progress reminded me of a simultaneous translation. But then, every once in a while, we would speak the same language; she would allow us to chime, to strike the same note at the same time, and it was as if I were suddenly acoustical, resounding, loud in the silence.
When we stayed home in the evenings, I would sit with a book in my lap and watch her paint. But if she glanced around and saw me reading, she would put down her brush and come over and turn all her art on me. She distrusted books. I never saw her read one. I think she believed I might find something in them that would give me an advantage over her, or that I might use against her.
I felt the same way about her painting. She was an abstract painter and I couldn’t follow her there. She left me outside, like a dog that you tie to a parking meter when you go into a store. I had never been comfortable with abstract painting. I had no talent for abstraction, didn’t see the need for it, or the beauty of it. Like liberal politics, it eliminated so many things I liked.
Yet if I could understand her paintings, I thought, our sex would be better. We would exist in the same picture plane,