1 1 4
him, hit him, cursed him, called him foul names, threw myself
on him and tore his throat open. All day long, every minute of
every day, but especially today, whichever day it is, I want to
kill, burn down, tear down, destroy, put an end to this,
somehow, anyhow. He does the dishes. I stalk him. I want to
talk with you, I want an answer, what are we going to do,
where are we going to go, I want to move to a hotel, I want to
move, I want to leave this city, I am going to kill somebody, I
want the landlord to die, I want to slice out his heart, I want
to pound him into the ground myself, these hands, I am going
to call him now and tell him what a foul fuck he is, what a
pig, I am going to threaten him, his wife, his children, I am
going to make them as afraid as I am cold, I know we don’t
have any money but I have to go to a hotel I can’t stay here I
am going to burn down the restaurant I know how to make
bombs I am going to bomb it I am going to pour sand down
their chimney I am going to throw rocks I am going to burst
the windows I am going to explode it and break all the glass I
am going to set a fire I am going to smash my fists through the
windows. I almost did that tonight, he says, shaking, I almost
couldn’t stop myself, I almost broke all the windows. I am
quiet. He is gentle, I am the time bomb. I look at him. He is all
turned inward with pain, on the edge of a great violence which
we are united in finding unspeakable when it comes from him:
we are believers in his tenderness: it is our common faith. He
has a surface, calm and clear as a windless, warless night:
underneath perhaps he too is cold, or perhaps I am simply
driving him mad. He wants to throw rocks, not egged on by
me but when alone, coming home. He cannot bear violence, in
himself, near him. I have absorbed it endlessly, I can withstand
anything. I am determined to keep calm, I see I am hurting
him with my bitter invective, I am determined to get through
another night, another day. He reads. Perhaps he is cold too?
We talk. We touch hands quietly. We fall asleep together in his
bed marooned. I wake up soon. He is asleep, curled up like a
lamb of peace. Perhaps you have never known a gentle man.
He is always a stranger, unarmed, at night wrapped in simple
sleep he curls up like a child in someone’s arms. It is after 1 1
pm, the restaurant has now been closed long enough for the
wind streaming through the apartment to have cleared out my
115
room so that I will not choke or get head pain or throw up or
have sharp pains in my gut. My lungs will ache from the cold.
My fingers will be stiff. My throat will hurt from the cold. I sit
down to work. I must write my book. I work until the dawn,
my salvation, day after day, when I see the beauty of earth
unfolding. I watch dawn come on the cement which is this
earth of mine. Then I sleep my kind of sleep, of cold and
burning, of murder and death, of paralysis and silent screams,
of a man with a knife who moves with impunity through a
consciousness tortured with itself, of the throats I have slit, of
the heat of that tropical place. In the dream there was no
blood but I wake up knowing that it must have been terrible,
smelly and heavy and sticking and rotting fast in the sun.
*
I watch him sleep because the tenderness I have for him is
what I have left of everything I started with.
My brother was like him, frail blond curls framing a guileless
face, he slept the same way, back where I started. A tenderness
remembered tangentially, revived when I see this pale, yellowhaired man asleep, at rest, defenseless, incomprehensibly trusting death not to come. We are innocence together, before
life set in.
Sometimes I feel the tenderness for this man now, the real
one asleep, not the memory of the baby brother— sometimes I
feel the tenderness so acutely— it balances on just a sliver of
memory— I feel it so acutely, it is so much closer to pain than
to pleasure or any other thing, for instance, in one second
when each knows what the other will say or without a thought
our fingers just barely touch, I remember then in a sharp sliver
of penetration my baby brother, pale, yellow-haired, curls
framing a sleeping face while I lay awake during the long
nights, one after the other, while mother lay dying. It is con-
sumingly physical, not to sleep, to be awake, watching a blond
boy sleeping and waiting for your mother to die. Or I remember my brother, so little, just in one second, all joy, a tickle-fight, we are squared off, each in a corner of the sofa
(am I wearing my cowgirl outfit with gun and holster?), father
is the referee, and we are torrents of laughter, rapturous
wrestling, and his curly yellow hair cascades. He was radiant
with delight, lit up from inside, laughing in torrents and me
11 6
too. My childhood was this golden thing, eradicable, intense
sensations of entirely physical love remembered like short,
sweet, delirious hallucinations, lucid in fog. Now I love no
one, except that tender man now in the next room dreaming
without memory, a blessed thing, or not dreaming at alclass="underline" that
curled-up blond muscled thing recalling every miracle of love
from long ago. I was happy then: don’t dare deny it.
I don’t love now, at all, except when I remember to love the
blond boy, the stranger not even related to me, not part of
anything from before, who sleeps in the next room: a tall blond
man: when I remember to love him certain minutes of certain
days. Don’t look for my heart. The beasts have eaten it. What
is his name?
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Our women writers write like women writers,
that is to say, intelligently and pleasantly,
but they are in a terrible hurry to tell what
is in their hearts. Can you explain why a
woman writer is never a serious artist?
Dostoyevsky
*
I came back from Europe. I lived alone in a pink apartment on
the Lower East Side across from the police precinct. I wanted
to be a writer. I want to write. Every day I write. I am alone
and astonishingly happy.
The police cars ram into the crushed sidewalk across the
street. The precinct is there. Men in blue with guns and