And they went at it for ten minutes more and he and the bear came together.
“
ouhw ouhw nnng,” said the bear.
“
” groaned Ashenden, and fell out of the bear and lay on his back and looked at the stars.
And he lay like that for half an hour, catching his breath, feeling his nerves coalesce, consolidating once more as a man, his hard-on declining, his flesh turning back into flesh, the pleasure lifting slow as fever. And thinking. So. I’m a sodomite. But not just any ordinary sodomite with a taste for sheep or a thing for cows, some carnivore’s harmless extension of appetite that drives him to sleep with what he eats. No. I’m kinky for bears.
And then, when he was ready, when at last he could once more feel his injured hand, he pushed himself up on his elbows and looked around. The bear was gone, though he thought he saw its shape reclined beside a tree. He stood up and looked down and examined himself. When he put his clothes back on, they hung on him like flayed skin and he was conscious of vague withdrawal symptoms in his nuts. He moved into the moonlight. His penis looked as if it had been dipped in blood. Had it still been erect the blood might perhaps have gone unnoticed, a faint flush; no longer distended, it seemed horrid, wet, thick as paint. He cupped his hand beneath himself and caught one drop in his palm. He shook his head. “My God,” he said, “I haven’t just screwed a bear, I’ve fucked a virgin!”
Now his old honor came back to chide him. He thought of Jane dying in the castle, of the wolf mask binding her eyes like a dark handkerchief on the vision of a condemned prisoner, of it binding his own and of the tan beard across his face like a robber’s bandanna. Ashenden shuddered. But perhaps it was not contagious unless from love and honor’s self-inflicted homeopathy. Surely he would not have to die with her. All he had to do was tell her that he had failed the test, that he had not met her conditions. Then he knew that he would never tell her this, that he would tell her nothing, that he would not even see her, that tomorrow — today, in an hour or so when the sun was up — he would have Plympton’s man take him to the station, that he would board a train, go to London, rest there for a day or two, take in a show, perhaps go to the zoo, book passage to someplace far, someplace wild, further and wilder than he had ever been, look it over, get its feel, with an idea of maybe settling down one day. He’d better get started. He had to change.
He remembered that he was still exposed and thought to cover himself lest someone see him, but first he’d better wipe the blood off his penis. There was a fresh handkerchief in his pocket, and he took it out, unfolded it and strolled over to the pond. He dipped the handkerchief in the water and rubbed himself briskly, his organ suddenly tingling with a new surge of pleasure, but a pleasure mitigated by twinges of pain. There was soreness, a bruise. He placed the handkerchief back in his pocket and handled himself lightly, as one goes over a tire to find a puncture. There was a small cut on the underside of his penis that he must have acquired from the bear. Then the blood could have been mine, he thought. Maybe I was the virgin. Maybe I was. It was good news. Though he was a little sad. Post-coitum tristesse, he thought. It’ll pass.
He started back through art to the house, but first he looked over his shoulder for a last glimpse of the sleeping bear. And he thought again of how grand it had been, and wondered if it was possible that something might come of it. And seeing ahead, speculating about the generations that would follow his own, he thought, Air. Water, he thought. Fire, Earth, he thought…And honey.
The Condominium
“NO DREAM,” he would write, “not a vision, not even a reverie. No fancy nor aspiration either. No crummy goal nor lousy aim. Something harder, acknowledged. More real than any of these. Something two-in-the-bush realer than any bird. Right up there with death and taxes.
“A place to live, to be. Out of what vortical history came spinning this notion of a second skin? From what incipit, fundamental gene of nakedness came, laboring like a lung, insistent as the logical sequences of a heartbeat, the body’s syllogisms, this demand for rind and integument and pelt? (Small wonder our daddies were tailors, needlers and threaders, or that our mothers threw up an archaeology on the dining room table, first the wood, varnished and glossed and waxed, then thick baize pads, next a linoleum, then a plain cloth and then a crocheted, a sheet of plastic over all with a bowl of fruit, a dish of candy, a vase of flowers, and none of this for protection and even less for ornament, but just out of dedication to weight as a principle, a tropism in the bones for mass and hide.) Out of what frightful trauma of exclusion arose this need, what base expulsion from what cave during which incredible spell of rotten weather?
“And never land, never real estate, the land grant unheard of, unimagined and unnecessary (what could you do with land?), even the notion of a ‘promised land’ merely religion, poetry. No. No great Mosaic East India Company tracts in the background, no primogenitive tradition of estates, properties, patents and dominions. Not land, not dirt, only what land and dirt threw up, its lumbers and sands and clays and ores and stones — its ingredients, like a recipe for cement.”
“His father,” he would write, “met his mother at ‘camp.’ There were tents but this may have been before tents. Somewhere there was a photograph of young men in bedrolls, his father and his shrouded pals like disaster victims laid out in a line in the sun. And the girls — Floradora, Gibson, Bloomer, whatever the Twenties term for their type may have been — with already about them a sepia hunt of nostalgia puffing their knickers, thickening their socks, bagging their sweaters, complicating their curls. Weekend fraternities—‘The River Rats,’ ‘The Crusoe Club,’ ‘The Peninsula Club’—and sororities—‘The Blueschasers,’ ‘The Flappers,’ ‘The Go-to-Hell-God-Damnits’—of the white-collar working class down to New Jersey on the train from New York, the city. He had spent more than half his summers there, but had no fixed memory of the place because it was always changing. When he was a boy it was like living on a sound stage, some studio town going up before his eyes. He watched the carpenters, the Phil-Gas, the diggers of septic tanks, all the electricians, all the Dugan’s and Breyer’s Ice Cream and Borden’s Milk and Nehi Soda people opening up routes, signing up customers, civilizing this wilderness as ever any missionaries or conquistadors civilized theirs. He saw electricity come in, city water, mail (the rural delivery boxes like the tunnels for toy trains, PATERSON MORNING CALL or BERGEN MESSENGER stenciled on the tin tunnels like names for the trains).
“So the tents came down (never having actually seen the tents, he nevertheless sensed them, or rather their absence, knowing that he walked not through fields and cleared woods but along lots and parcels, and that antecedent to these there would have to have been sites) and the bungalows went up, each summer some new section of the colony developed, the new bungalows put up in pairs or fours or half-dozens, as though speculators and contractors were incapable of dealing in anything but even numbers, their insistence on the careful geometric arrangements like architecture’s on some principle of equilibrium, a vaguely military hedging against the failure of their enterprise. Only his and a few of the other bungalows owned, or anyway mortgaged, not rented, by his parents and a handful of collateral old-timers, ‘pioneers’—some of them relatives, all of them friends — as they styled themselves, had been put up independently. (And didn’t he feel proud, aristocratic even, with the distinction imposed by ownership?)