A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories (11 page)

Thus it went on all night, at least six hours of the night in action, clinging and pressing and striving. I spent three times, which I may say, surprised me. Twice he consented to go to his own bed and let me take a nap; but back he came, apologetic, conceited, coldly sweet. He did not spend until dawn; then so suddenly and softly that I did not notice it. Our room there above the kitchen was large and low: the ceiling drawn down shadowy like a tent to a pair of little windows knee-high. And I was noticing the daylight venturing just then in under those tent-flaps and horizontally across the rumpled beds toward my pillow in the corner. How glad I was to see it! Hours of the next morning sightseeing, hours of the next afternoon in the streamlined bus on my way back to Sorrento; how restful they would seem, after this peculiar darkness! For another hour or two, only an hour or two, this terrible companion would keep winding upon and around me like a great lively root of a tree, hungry, thirsty; and I felt more and more like a clod, like a stone, but with certain drops of moisture within me still, surprisingly. I noticed only a softening of his shoulders and his thighs, a soft kick such as an infant might give in sudden slumber. Then he whispered to me what it was. It was his orgasm; and it seemed in the nature of a weakness, a lapse, a breakdown; as if at last fatigue made him faint …

Evidently it had always been his habit to wield that superhuman phallus against one bent over in his crotch, head downward; so that when finally his moment approaches and he does just as he likes, and it must be in its entire bulk and strength, then precisely one feels it least. I scarcely felt it at all. This was the final instance of the alternation and confusion of too fanciful state of mind and too gross flesh which had characterized this intercourse from the start. Which at that point not only disappointed me; it worried me, in the way of an odd equivalent of bad conscience, a peculiar suspicion of my own honesty and sanity through this experience. The phallus of a demigod, nightmarish bludgeon, vanishing at last, just as the day began to break … It was as if I had made it all up for myself, to please and cheat and defeat myself; and if I had done so in fact, indeed I might well have been ashamed or alarmed.

But what on earth is stranger than the benefit of sexual inter course to those who feel the need of it? I honestly believe that it is not only politic but moral to comprehend and to admit that strangeness. For a long time I have had to live in wretched deprivation. Therefore I thanked God—and I mean, I really mean my own peculiar, exciting, painful, but certainly trustworthy god or gods—even for an oddity, even for an indecent comedy, like this. Having spent, my Hawthorn at last let me alone. Having slept a while, I began to turn restlessly this way and that in my double bed, so as to get out of line with the early blond rays of the sunrise; I began to hear the ready voices of the maids in the kitchen beneath us brewing weak coffee and frying cheap bacon; I woke up; I got up—feeling like a wild fowl, light and brave.

When I am happy, then I most sincerely wish to comprehend, to detect, to dissect. What man is not worth studying? Surely this young monster of Maine was, especially with strange myself in this curious combination … When I am happy, I am also as humble as can be. Therefore I did not conclude that he was simply somewhat impotent, although that fantastic grandeur of his sex might mean almost anything, and not improbably just that. But almost anyone may be impotent with someone. I am not an Adonis; I am the opposite of a Priapus; Maine Priapus simply may not have found me exciting. None of those I have gone to bed with just lately has. Only half a dozen all my life have—and then not really until I had a chance to deploy other aspects of myself than my sketchy, faulty physique; to devote a great amount of time and energy and intellect to their general advantage. I admit this, not complaining of it, but in order to conclude my disgraceful story with due scruple. The disgrace was more than mere physical indifference to me personally this time; there were complications.

In the course of the next morning I questioned him a little about his way of life, his past; and as I interpreted certain of his embarrassed but not in the least unwilling answers, they cleared up much of the mystery. He said that he has not been accustomed to being the beloved, that is, the one desired and labored over; therefore probably my positive active enthusiasm did not suit him. The lovers he has generally enjoyed have been young state-of-Mainers of an exceedingly simple manliness, fisherman and such. It is to be supposed that as a rule such young men never think of intercourse, certainly not of homosexual intercourse, until they are desirous to the point of overflowing. Therefore their excitement may be consummated, overcome, liquidated, in a jiffy. Then no doubt Hawthorn has gone on clinging to them in practically unselfish tribute of enthusiasm, and thrilled by fundamental incompatibility—which in fact affects many homosexuals as oppositeness of sex does not—until at last he has happened to spend, no matter how, as it were a swoon or a sweat or a shedding of tears: a culmination equivalent to exhaustion. Perhaps, truly juvenile, these youngsters have enjoyed his energy and obstination as a kind of nocturnal horseplay or roughhouse. Or perhaps they have only allowed it, endured it. Poor ambitious boys, grateful for the fuss made over them, hopeful of advantage or advancement, often do serve their elders or supposed betters thus: with a kind of venality not quite cynical, not exactly economic. Or, if they have not even allowed it, then poor Hawthorn has had to fulfill the experience for himself at his leisure, in retrospect, in lonely fancy and worshipful dreams and memorial masturbations. And no doubt some new youth has come to his attention whenever retrospect has ceased to operate … In any case pleasure must have come to be associated in his mind with failure to have his own way. Desire must seem to him, not what the word ordinarily, exactly intends—the conception of, and strong instinctive urge toward—but an end in itself; felicity itself, whatever the outcome. Which is idealism in a way. And I, my bizarre mystic opinions notwithstanding, am a materialist.

This customary intercourse with facile, normal youngsters also explained that odd trick of tucking his terrible sex away down between his own thighs. A kind of involuntary coition; only impulsive hugging with an orgasm at the end by accident, not planned at all, not noticed much, an overflow, a pollution. At the age when the proletariat is prettiest, that suffices; and when it is a question of only a substitute for normal intercourse, more than that might give offense. Thus I put upon a vague set of unknown, otherwise innocent individuals a slight specific part of the onus of my disappointment … It is strange to think how, upon almost every first occasion of love, even every careless fornication, there is jealousy in a humble innocuous form, a token payment of that immense debt to nature—some such grudge against protagonists of the beloved’s past; some vague objection to whatever, up to that point, has influenced him, educated him. But one unlucky human being, such as I, may not seriously blame another, such as my Hawthorn, for the gradual effect of the kind of sexual intimacy he has had a chance to engage in. For perhaps one may control the playing of one’s own part in love and the like; but the casting of other actors with one is fate: one lives a good deal by accidental meetings.

However, I could not help thinking that in the way of important experience of love—such as my own, in the past, alas—my phenomenal young man’s prospects were especially poor. Even in the midst of my enjoyment, it seemed to me: How unlikely that anyone would really wish to keep him for a lover long! Desirable he might appear, indeed, in so far as desire is distinguishable from hope; and in the long run, it is the recollection of delight that constitutes desire. The effect of a hopeless excitement in the end is to weaken one in amorous action; of which in fact I suppose that the sloth of his astonishing flesh is itself an example. Or perhaps the usage of that great fraudulent phallic symbol might just desperately intensify one’s desire for someone else, someone less difficult. And I thought it would scarcely be worthwhile to be desired by him, labored over by him. Evidently his pleasures had not even been satisfactory enough, and probably never would be, to instruct him in the giving of pleasure. In any case it would take a long time for me to instruct him in that sense: night after night without a wink of sleep, month after month of exasperation. Thus my widowed, therefore loose imagination tried to peer into the winter months ahead, when he planned to be in New York.

The strangest thing, the worst complication, was that he evidently thought of himself—or at least wished me to think of him—as already seriously attached to me. Every now and then, all night in little truces of his stammering and self-censorship, he made the warmest protestation of his enjoyment of me, his admiration of me, and almost love. I could see almost-love as it were in the balance on his little strong thin lips: the shape of the words without sound. And the slight grimace with which he withheld it or withdrew it implied no uncertainty or insincerity; only a kind of etiquette, a strategical or political sense. Probably he had heard that one should never be the first to say it. No sign of common skepticism, common sense; in every way he seemed perfectly pleased and excited, that is, in every way except that which just then concerned me: the organic, the orgastic. And as I have already mentioned, he murmured optimistic and indeed presumptuous little plans of our continuing to make love regularly and as a matter of course all winter. But why, why, I wondered—since, especially in terms of his eroticism, it all seemed very nearly inefficacious.

Presently an answer occurred to me. It was that vague and no doubt lovely company of young fisherman which suggested it also. The mediocrity of his pleasure did not matter to him because he had an eye on a more important advantage. It was that same not exactly economic venality; that which must have inspired their beguilement of him, their indulgence of his interminable embraces. Indeed our inequality was more complex than that between them and him. In actual amorous effect, mine was the more youthful and potent and expeditious body. But I was the elder in fact; his social and economic superior. No restless boy in his teens was ever more intensely preoccupied with the future than he, more pathetically determined to get on in the world. And I personified the world: society and celebrity and luxury and, indeed, that worldly opinion which would be favorable or unfavorable to him as a painter.

Yes, I concluded his ardor in my arms, such as it was, had to do with all that, and with my poor physical person only associatively, and by courtesy, and on purpose. He desired me no more or less than a girl-crazy fisherman, a lovely whittler of thole-pins, a snobbish inquisitive parasitic adolescent, might desire him—rather less, probably: for of course he could easily give such a one the immediate satisfaction which I found it almost impossible to give him. Call this a sort of love if you like; surely it was the farthest thing in the world from lust. It was an intellectual effort, a moral embrace. There was indeed not the least indifference about it; but it was only admiration and ambition disguised as desire; in that sense it was fraudulent. It was wily Proteus impersonating Priapus … Happening to wear that ostentatious organ, that heavy heraldry of sex, that sacred-looking simulacrum, he more or less consciously would have it serve him as a means to an end, a pretext, an allurement; and as a substitute for what it symbolized, which was what he partially lacked. The entire night was booby-trap; and sex was the bait; and I was the booby. His worst anxiety was lest I perceived this. It evidently meant so much to him that, before I even tried to explain it to myself, instinctively I pretended not to perceive anything. Of course, for my own enjoyment, I needed to fool myself a little also; but only a little, and not all night, and certainly not next morning. During our last whispered conversation before daybreak, I ceased to pretend, in my naturally shameless fashion. His frigidity or difficulty must be my fault some-how, I said. All night long the contact with his body had kept mine in a state of extraordinary tension; therefore the failure or near-failure of our meeting must be due to a lack of physical magic on my part for him; and I said I was sorry. Whereupon he protested that it was not so, not so at all; there had been no frigidity, no difficulty, no failure. And he spoke with an accent of real despair and bad temper.

So I understood that I was not to be allowed to give him up as a bad job and regretfully retreat. He would follow with his peculiar ambitious infatuation, and no doubt self-pity and bitterness. It did not suit him to understand what I might mean by any politely insincere word of humility, apology. And at the last, when his orgasm so surprisingly occurred, it was my impression that he felt not only pleasant unusual sensation but a kind of sudden sadness, sorriness. For now, if we continued this intimacy next winter as he intended, there would be this precedent of his being able to have an orgasm at last; I might expect it of him; and I thought he was sorry about that. For he wished to bend and accustom me to the combination of exorbitance and inadequacy which characterized him physically. It did not suit him to have much of anything expected of him. He wished to compromise me, to engage me in a kind of collusion in the matter of his physical insensibility to me. He wished to feel free to disappoint me, if need be; and to be sincerely surprised by and resentful of my disappointment if I should so far forget myself as to voice any.

I concluded that in a more general sense also he might be a bad-tempered man; at least one of those who must make sure every instant, by hook or crook of their own opinion, of being entirely in the right. I was also reminded of a particular kind of ruthlessness and self-righteousness and spite that had nothing particularly to do with sex: that of many men brought up in hardship or in severe northern places when they arrive to seek their fortune amid those who appear to have been born undeservedly, effortlessly, in a sunny clime or in fortune’s lap: New Englanders in New York, Scots in London, Germans everywhere. No doubt I should have trouble with this New Englander if and when I should attempt to cease to be friends with him. But no doubt he would not succeed in having his way with me; for he seemed not nearly pathetic enough to exercise the only intimidation as to which I am weak. Once or twice he frankly referred to his dread of perhaps being disappointed in me in the future. Never for an instant did he show the least interest in, or humility with respect to, the possibility of my having been disappointed by him, then and there, in the present nocturnal circumstances. It may have been only ignorance, innocence; but it vexed me, it warned me. Oh, woe, I exclaimed to myself, woe to whoever happens to be truly fascinated by the sight and the pseudo-promise of that supernatural private part of his! As for me, the characteristic laboriousness of my thought, all one incessant exorcization—to say nothing of my labors upon paper … My right hand, with pen in it, enables me not only to learn but to unlearn terrible things, in the long run.