Kafka Was the Rage_ A Greenwich Village Memoir - Anatole Broyard [51]
The docks reminded me of the one in Yokohama where I had scraped the shit away and there was a military suggestion about Virginia too. She wore a tweed suit whose jacket was cut in what was called an Eisenhower style, with a biswing back. In everything she did, she impressed me as obeying a mysterious discipline.
We drove south for about a mile, then turned north again. We did this twice and it was all perfectly solemn. We hardly spoke because of the wind in our ears and because the scene itself imposed a kind of silence. The third time around I noticed that the dog was tiring. His tongue was lolling and his stride had lost some of its grace.
I wondered how much farther Virginia meant to go. The vibration of the car was getting to my bladder and the dog was so done in that it seemed cruel to keep on. I was going to ask her to stop, but then I realized—I don’t know how, but I knew—that she had forgotten about the dog. She was deciding whether to go home with me or not. Perhaps the car would run out of gas.
In the end, it was the dog who decided. When I tapped Virginia on the arm and pointed to him, she stopped suddenly, the first break in the perfection of her driving. I thought I would have to lift the dog into the car, but with a last gallant effort he jumped to the canvas. Tired with running after this girl, almost panting myself, I knew how he felt.
Now, one way or the other, she would have to answer. I rested my case, because I didn’t think it would do any good to try to persuade her. She would follow her own peculiar imperatives.
The car idled very fast, as if it was nervous. Virginia set the hand brake and then she pulled off her driving gloves. At least, I thought, her hands are naked, it’s a beginning. Then she turned in the seat and stretched out one hand to the dog. She began to pet him, rubbing his ears, his head, his back. She went on rubbing, rubbing him for some time while I sat there gazing at the river shining between the wharves.
She was asking the dog what to do—what should she do? She was asking him to decide. And he said Yes, you need to run too. The night is made for running. She went home with me because the dog was so graceful, so brave. Perhaps we too would be graceful and brave. In her way Virginia was, though in the two or three months that I saw her she never said anything remotely resembling that remark about the water lapping against her boat.
The saddest part of sex in those days was the silence. Men and women hadn’t yet learned to talk to one another in a natural way. Girls were trained to listen. They were waiting for history to give them permission to speak. They led waiting lives—waiting for men to ask them out, for them to have an orgasm, to marry or leave them. Their silence was another form of virginity.
There were all kinds of silences: timid silences, dogged silences, discreet, sullen, watchful, despairing silences, hopeful silences, interrogative silences. In the beginning, in the early stages of knowing a girl, I didn’t mind, because desire was a kind of noise—but afterward, lying in bed, the silence was cold, as if we had no blanket to cover us. There were girls who insisted on kissing all through the act, and I thought of this kissing as a speechless babble.
I was so depressed by this silence, by the absence of real talk or genuine confiding, that I went around for a while with a deaf and dumb girl. Why not? I said to myself. Why not go all the way? I didn’t know, when I picked her up in the lobby of the New School, that she couldn’t hear. I assumed that her odd speech—the way of someone who has never heard speech—was the accent of a foreign student. It sounded like Arabic.
When I realized that she had been born this way it seemed like a judgment. I felt that I had reached a logical conclusion. This was the final silence between women and men—why go on pretending? Her hearing aid was in her bra—when she undressed, she was stone deaf. We could only