• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 863 0

boy, but I couldn’t stop thinking of him, all thirty or forty pounds of him, ensconced in the trunk gazing through the darkness at the spare tire. Up in the bedroom, between us, Diana brought more fever to our lovemaking than she ever had before, but it was the wrong fever, as if she were trying to get rid of an internal pressure through physical means. She would ride me and close her eyes, and she would bend down to kiss my eyelids, and there wouldn’t be a sprig of affection in it, not a single solitary sign of love. It was just something she needed. She churned away and when she’d whip her head back and forth, the sweat from her forehead fell on my face. She slapped me several times as a sex thing, and as often as she came, it wasn’t enough, she wanted to come more often, and harder. She knocked the porcelain tabby cat off the bedside table, and the flowers too. They lay insensate on the floor in a puddle of water. She told me we were going to skip dinner. The mushroom didn’t make her sick, but I guess it gave her some sort of permission. It went further and profoundly into night, all this mushroom sex, and then on and on toward morning. I’d fall asleep and wake up to feel her working on me. She wouldn’t let me sleep. We had bruises. I never imagined this happening, but no matter how naive you sometimes think I am, I knew that whole night, by then, watching her, that she was in love with someone else, intensely, and had always been, and been tormented by it, and now she was taking it out on me, and making it obvious and those were her thoughts, the ones she couldn’t tell me, not for a penny, not for a pound.

We had some great times, Diana and me, but we couldn’t last, and we didn’t. We brought the statue of the boy home, and Diana put it into the garden close by where the petunias and pansies had been despite my protests.

FIFTEEN

THERE’S A STORY of Kierkegaard’s that I especially like. A philosopher builds an enormous palace, but to everyone’s surprise he himself does not live in the palace but establishes his residence in a dog kennel next to it. The philosopher is invariably offended when it is pointed out to him that he lives in this ludicrous manner. But how else could I have built the palace, the philosopher asks, if I had not also lived in the dog kennel?

It is like a Jewish joke. Kierkegaard made great efforts to live in the palace of thought he himself had built, but of course he could not manage it, given to polemical rages as he was, and to a peculiar kind of spiritual unhappiness driven by heart-spite. Besides, one eventually grows attached to one’s own doghouse and the daily bowl of scraps. Stubbornly we stay on in the dog kennel to prove that we were correct to have established ourselves in there in the first place.

The story about Kierkegaard I like is the one in which he falls drunkenly off a sofa at a party. Lying on the floor, he starts to refer to himself in the third person when the other guests try to help him up. “Oh, just leave it there,” he says, speaking of his body. “Let the maids sweep it up tomorrow morning.”

THE NEXT TIME Aaron called on the telephone — like the secret police, the terror experts, he always made the bell ring in the dead center of the night — he informed me that the money I had sent him was an “installment.” In consideration of emotional crimes against him, he said, he would regard his intentional death as postponed until after the next such payment.

I was braver this time. I told him he was talking nonsense.

Between us in the electronic ether, the thousands of miles, a silence brewed and thickened, was salted and seasoned, mixed with the sounds of his breathing.

Nonsense? he asked. Nonsense?

Just so, I said bravely, touching with tenderness the crease in my pajama leg. Esther likes to iron my pajamas, it relaxes her. Utter nonsense, I said with a fatherly rumble. And furthermore, I said, to nettle him, You sound like a schoolgirl, all these theatrics about killing yourself. Please. Get yourself some grit. If you want to kill yourself, Aaron, you are free