Yes, there were men and women, women and men, but they
were faded: they were background, not foreground, intrusions,
failures of faith, laziness of spirit: forays into the increasingly
foreign world of the social human being: they were brief
piercing moments of sensation, the sensation pale no matter
how acute, sentimental no matter how tough: namby-pamby
silliness of thighs that had to open: narrow pleasure with no
mystery, no subtlety, no subtext: pierce, come; suck, come;
foretold pleasures contained between the legs, while solitude
promised immersion, drenching, the body overcome by the
radical intensity of enduring. *
I met my beautiful boy, my lost brother, around, somewhere,
and invited him in. I saw him around, here and there, and
invited him in. Talking with him was different from anything
else: the way the wind whispers through the tops of trees just
brushed by sunset. It made me happy. I invited him in. My
privacy included him. My solitude was not betrayed. We were
like women together on that narrow piece of foam rubber, and
he, astonished by the sensuality of it, ongoing, the thick
sweetness of it, came so many times, like a woman: and me
122
too: over and over: like one massive, perpetually knotted and
moving creature, the same intense orgasms, no drifting separateness of the mind or fragmented fetishizing of the body: instead a magnificent cresting, the way a wave rises to a height pushing
forward and pulls back underneath itself toward drowning at
the same time: one wave lasting forever, rising, pulling,
drowning, dying, all in the same movement; or a wave in an
ocean of waves covering nearly all the earth, immense. My lost
brother and I became lovers forever, buried there, in that sea
so awesome in its density and splendor. I need never touch
him again. He became my lover forever. So he entered my
privacy, never offending it.
*
I had learned solitude, and now I learned this.
*
On his birthday I gave him a cat that had his face.
I had looked everywhere for it. I had looked in stores, I had
traced ads, read bulletin boards, made phone calls. I had gone
out, into the homes of strangers, looking for the cat I would
know the minute I saw it. Red. With his face: a certain look,
like a child before greed sets in, delicate, alert, listening. The
day came and I didn’t have it. I knew the cat was somewhere
waiting, but I was afraid I would not find it. The day of his
birthday I went out, looking, a last search, asking, following
every lead, hour after hour. The heat was rancid. Then a man
told me where to look: a woman had found a pregnant cat in a
garbage dump and had taken it home: the kittens were red. He
called her. I went there. The skies had darkened, gotten black.
