The Name of the World - Denis Johnson [37]
Why she wanted to spend this time with me I could only guess, because I was afraid to ask. I sat beside her looking at the daylit moon, wanting to kiss her, but afraid to. Also I had a powerful urge to leave, to get away from her, or from myself in this situation, but that idea scared me, too, because I saw myself five minutes down the road, braking and considering, accelerating and stopping, maybe even turning the car around in the big fields, the only person in the only car from horizon to horizon, and then turning the car around yet once again and heading home, wanting to go back to her, but afraid to.
Now I’m going to interrupt myself, and I don’t know how to signal that except by saying it.
Looking over the pages of this reminiscence, I see I’ve misled. I’ve created the impression that what I’ve been aiming at is the account of a one-night stand, and that the item pending most crucially between Flower and me was my loss of a kind of late-life virginity. I’ve implied I’d had nothing to do with women since I’d lost my wife. That’s not true.
The worst of my disequilibrium had passed in a couple of years. I wouldn’t bore even a highly paid psychiatrist with the details of my love life, my sex life, during this period, except to say that it was quite a lot less than nothing—that is, I couldn’t bear to have so much as a single sexual thought, let a single desire so much as flicker in my mind, during the two years after I was widowed. Not only because my grief made me loyal to my wife, but also because I was grieving for someone who was dead, and death is such a physical thing. I didn’t want physical things. I didn’t even like facts about things, and in a secret way I came to hate the truth itself.
This extra dimension of loneliness, this revulsion for the world and even, at first, for the stuff of which it was composed, seemed unique at the time. But I think I see now that it was completely typical, and that what revolted me above all was the understanding that everything passes away.
So this sad insight didn’t first visit me while I waited with Flower for something to happen between us. And she wasn’t the woman who broke me out of the ice. A month or so after the second anniversary of my widowhood, I went to a prostitute. Or rather, she came to me, came to my hotel room in Washington where I was staying at the expense of the Senate Committee on Ethics, who were conducting hearings. (I was called to Washington, but never called to testify.) A tall woman in her thirties, the only prostitute I’ve ever met as such. I explained my situation to her, and she was very understanding, and she even refused payment, and we made love. At first she refused payment, that is, but afterward she suddenly wondered if I hadn’t been conning her with a sad story, and she wanted her money on general principles. Ultimately she decided I couldn’t have been so false about a part of life so real, and wouldn’t take the money. But I insisted. So she took it. And that is how that went.
I didn’t feel villainous, or soiled, either. I felt like I’d been with a woman, we’d meant something to each other, maybe not very much, and she’d passed along.
So this isn’t about that at all.
Am I making sense in this account? Am I intelligible? Or am I muttering? I think it stands a chance of being useful. That’s the point of writing it all down. It’s not just an aid to private introspection. But am I being too meditative? Too introspective?
The joint of Flower’s collarbones showed in the neck of her smock, and just below it the moles and imperfections in the flesh on her breastbone. To let my wife and child be dead. I didn’t think I was cruel enough for that. Because that is what the imperfections in Flower’s skin invited me to do. There was a sense in which Anne and Elsie had to be killed, and killing them was up to me.
I had to break the tension, the mixed desire and shame, I had to say anything at all. “I’d like to read the phrases inside your envelopes. Let me see what other people wrote.”
“I can’t let you do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because