The History of Luminous Motion (7 page)

11

“I’VE
NEVER CONSIDERED myself beautiful,” Beatrice said, listlessly running her hands
through her tangled blond hair. Beatrice was twelve years old and attended Rodney’s
sixth-grade class at Junípero Serra Grammar School. “But I don’t think beauty’s
the only thing men are looking for, if you know what I mean.” Her look let us
know she didn’t expect there was any chance we would ever know what she meant. She
tugged at her slightly soiled dress and crossed her legs. After a second of
demure hesitation, she accepted Rodney’s cigarette. Then Beatrice lit it with a
Ronco from her purse, which she snapped shut with a practiced flourish. “Beauty’s
just what a woman seems. Plenty of women can be made beautiful. Look at
Vogue
, for instance. Look at
Cosmo
. That’s not all men are looking
for, you know. I
know
that’s what
they
say
men are supposed to be
looking for, but that’s just a male myth. That’s just capitalism. That’s just
the psychological domination manifest in all competitive class struggle. Basically,
you see, I think men are a lot more capable and intelligent than that. I think
men want a woman they’re attracted to, sure–I’m no spiritual idealist or
anything. I don’t subscribe to bogus Christian dualism–all that
repressive male ideology we’ve inherited from the Greeks. But there’s a natural
woman men are looking for underneath all the Clairol and Maybelline. There’s a
raw–oh, I don’t know, call it sexuality, or passion, or molecular
urgency–that marks a real woman out from the pack. It’s in her eyes, in
her smell, in the way she combs her hair.” Delicately, Beatrice jiggled in her
seat, tugging her skirt straight underneath her.

We
were sitting at a Formica booth in Winchell’s, feeling that warm arousal of
steam from our fresh coffees. I held my Styrofoam cup between my hands. I was
trying to keep my eyes expressionlessly focused on Beatrice. I was certain any
expression on my part would be a sort of self-betrayal. Better to give her
nothing about me she could analyze or remember, nothing she could keep for
years and years, like nail clippings or stray buttons with which she could cast
intricate social spells. I just wanted to watch Beatrice, her lips so hastily
smudged with the chocolate rainbow donut, her pink skin and knotty, unwashed
hair. Beatrice lived in a trailer park with her father. The trailer park,
located in Encino, was called Trailer Town, and Beatrice’s one-bedroom trailer
was a 1959 Spartan Luxuryliner with polished wood interior and fully operable
stove and central heating.

“I
think that’s what I’ll always have to offer my men,” Beatrice said, and took
the first brave sip of our scalding coffee. Rodney and I had ordered it black
because Beatrice had. She put it down with a little emphasis.

“It’s
like television, movies, books, even record albums.
This
is what beauty is.
This
is how you’re supposed to look.
This
is a girl’s
normal
height, how much
makeup to wear, how big your tits should be”–I felt Rodney give a little
jump beside me–“and all that long morose unforgiving catalog of what
women are
supposed
to be, how women
are
supposed
to feel. Beauty is the
culture industry’s attempt to make each of us a commodity. The culture
industry, guys, is vast and incredibly articulate. It knows exactly what it
wants to say all the time. It wants to make each of us the same on the outside,
while letting us pretend we’re somehow marvelously special on the inside. The
culture industry hasn’t invented ‘beauty’ in order to control how we look, but
how we
are
, and that’s the scary
part. How we think. How we
be
. I
guess you guys should know right away I’m a Marxist. I support the Sandinistas,
and the leftist guerrilla forces in Chad. I’m not a vulgar Marxist or
anything–I mean, I don’t pick my nose in public (that’s supposed to be a
little joke)–no, I guess you’d have to call me a post-structural Marxist.
I give credit to Althusser, but I’m not an acolyte of
anybody’s
. Anyway”–with another little flourish of her black
purse–” if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to find a ladies’ room.” Beatrice
glanced over her shoulder, then pointed. One tiny cuticle of her index finger
was perceptibly tagged with chocolate. “That’s it there, I think.”

When
she was gone, Rodney and I took long, contemplative sips of our hot, black
coffee. Around us the scrubbed linoleum still smelled strongly of ammonia and
disinfectant, and every once in a while the matronly woman behind the counter,
wearing a black hairnet and plastic gloves, gave us a dirty look, as if she
expected us at any moment to run off with something. Coolness drifted through
me. I was very high in the air, drifting among birds and planes. It was incredibly
quiet in the high air. There were no words in sight, not even fragments of
words. Eventually, without looking up, I leaned towards Rodney.

“What’s
she talking about?” I asked.

Rodney
didn’t say anything right away. I heard the flash of a match that he dropped
into the black ashtray. “I don’t know,” he said after a while, watching the
bright match extinguish with a tiny puff. “But I think it may be a load of
crap.”

WE
WOULD TAKE Beatrice to my house in the afternoons when we weren’t scavenging
other houses, but she never put out. She always said she was going to put out
but she never did. Though my interest in the outcome was philosophical rather
than immediate, I would watch the slow struggles Rodney waged with Beatrice on
the poor, makeshift couch in my living room with perfect equanimity. They would
kiss for hours, penetrating into the roots of one another’s mouths, breathing
deep into one another’s lungs and hearts, shifting and turning very slowly,
Rodney’s leg between Beatrice’s, his arm around her waist. Sometimes I would
watch them for a while, but then I would watch the television instead. “The
Rockford Files,” perhaps, which I adored, or “Barnaby Jones,” which I could at
least endure. “Mmmm,” Rodney might say, though Beatrice remained chastely, even
demurely, silent. “Mmm, baby.” It didn’t sound quite right to me, but perhaps,
I thought, Rodney was still practicing. Perhaps love wasn’t something you felt,
but rather something you learned. Then, abruptly, Rodney’s hand would stray too
far and, before either of us knew it, “it” would be abruptly over.

“It’s
just not right,” Beatrice said, sitting up and running her hand through her
stringy hair. One leg was folded underneath her, and a hard, reasonless and
abstract gaze made her eyes seem cold and distant. “I guess I’m not in the
right mood or something.”

“What
do you mean it’s not
right
.” Rodney
was running his hands anxiously through his own unsprung hair. He resembled a
broker during a crash, his shirt rumpled and undone, his eyes slightly
bloodshot. “What’s
right
like? How am
I supposed to know the
right
time? How’m
I supposed to know what the
right
mood’s like?”

Sometimes
she petted and tried to console him, and sometimes they would even start
kissing again, their thin lips bumping again and again at one another. Then
their bodies would do that slow horizontal dance again, and I would watch just
for that movement, that steady and directionless rhythm of their bodies on the
sofa. Bits of foam rubber were spilling from underneath the tangled bedspread
like sawdust from a lathe. My interest was merely clinical. I knew it was the
vital dance. I knew it was something very serious and inexplicable for Rodney
and that, with luck, it would someday be the same for me as well. But for now
the irresolvable dialectic of that motion was what fascinated me. I wanted them
to be like that forever, like a glittery mobile or a perpetual object of
performance art. I wanted them moving there together on my sofa until I forgot
about them, until I accepted that movement of theirs as calmly as I accepted
the walls and ceiling of my house, as firmly as I accepted my mom’s secret and
brooding presence in the silent back bedroom. Motion not as a way of living, or
as a dance of bodies, but as a sort of universal presumption. Bodies moved,
cars moved, planes moved in the sky. Rocks and trees and garbage cans and concrete
cinder blocks moved. The earth moved and the stars moved. There was the spiral
movement of entire galaxies, and the fundamental movement of atoms and quarks
and merely theoretical matter. Everything was moving everywhere all the time,
because nobody was anywhere they wanted to be in the first place. Time, when
you considered the elemental, even archetypal fact of motion itself, was just a
formality, a record, a graph. Movement was life, and when you moved your body
into the body of a woman you initiated other movements, other lives. Cells
moved, proteins and enzymes moved together, particles of minerals and plasma
moved in the blood. I didn’t care whether Rodney consummated his obsession with
Beatrice or not, because I had come to realize that motion was destiny enough. Consummation
would only inaugurate a moment of dull, sleepy disavowal. You could pretend motion
had stopped for a while. Then you could lie down and sleep until your dreams
woke you.

“You
know what America is, don’t you, guys?” Beatrice asked us one day, examining
herself in her compact, plucking at one damp, tangled eyelash. “It’s a big
black hole that sucks everything in. You know who founded America, don’t you? People
who could pretend they were anybody they wanted to be, because that’s what
America is. Anything you want it to be.”

“America’s
the frontier that’s never conquered,” I said, reaching to turn the television
volume down. I swiveled around on the rug to face her, feeling something slip
in my stomach, my groin, a feeling as if I had swallowed something very cold
and heavy. “America’s motion. America’s always somewhere else. If we can’t go
other places, we can be those places instead. My mom always said that’s why
we’re Californians–because we don’t need to be here. We can always be
anywhere else in the universe besides California, and still be here too.
America’s the dialectic. It’s what Hegel talks about in
The Phenomenology of Mind
. The dialectic.”

Somewhere
deep in my house I could hear Mom silently nodding her head. She wasn’t approving,
though. She was just nodding her head.

Rodney
let out an exasperated sigh, and reached for his Dos Equis. “Jesus Christ.
 
Just what I need.” He took a long pull
from the beer and quickly lit a Tareyton. He looked dispassionately from me to
Beatrice, from Beatrice to me. His face was puffy and creased with worried
lines. “Fucking stereo,” he said.

I
felt very good sitting there, watching Rodney and Beatrice on the couch. Rodney
looked at his cigarette. Beatrice, out of the corner of her eye, looked at
Rodney.

Life
had grown very substantial and real for me while Mom lay quietly in her room. I
had everything now. A family, a house, a lucrative job, good times and faithful
friends. I had the sweet clutter of books in my room. I had cigarettes, good whiskey,
excellent home-cooked meals, a reputable broker, new shoes, the privacy of my
own mind, healthy sexual curiosity and, somewhere in the world, Dad, who would
always take me back if things got too rough. I felt settled, but not
conventional. I was learning how to live my own life and yet still love Mom
too, the lesson I knew Mom had always meant me to learn. Mom was very real and
immanent all the time. She was a vast incontrovertible force, extensive like
gravity or sound. She was like God, she was like air. And she was always in
perfect control, especially when she wasn’t in any control at all.

12

“IS
YOUR MOM seeing anyone?” Dad asked me, over and over again. “You know you can
tell me. You know you can tell me if she’s seeing someone.” His voice grew
webbed and anxious. There was something sudden about Dad’s voice when he
considered Mom’s possible infidelity. He reminded me of Rodney, exasperated by
Beatrice’s muggy sex. He was always quick to change the subject. “Is she all
right?” he asked. “Is she eating properly? Do you have enough school clothes
and spending money? Should I wire you more? Should I stop calling? Should I let
you go on pretending I don’t exist?” Dad’s voice strained against the force of
our lives, divided from us by a thin, translucent bubble. The bubble’s skin
transmitted Dad’s voice and texture, but not his body, not his acting presence.
“Does she ever ask about me, or wonder how I am? Do you think some nights she
misses me? Or says my name out loud?”

“She’s
not seeing anyone right now, Dad,” I said. “She’s working hard and likes her
job very much. She’s trying to work out a lot of things, and just needs to be
left alone for a while. She asks about you all the time, and I tell her that
you’ve been asking about her. She wants you to know she misses you, but that
she needs this time to think about nobody but herself. She needs to live as if
nobody else in the world exists except her. She needs to be left alone a little
longer, Dad. She needs to know we love her enough to trust her to be by
herself.”

Dad’s
voice was growing more tinny and desperate as Mom’s voice, sunk in the silence
of her room, grew more audible and self-assured. Sometimes static swirled and
seethed on Dad’s telephone line like foam on a seashore, leaving behind broken
bits of shell and rock and bone. “I think it’s time you both came home,” Dad
said one night. “I’ve been patient long enough. It’s about time you both
learned a little something about responsibility. I’m talking about things like
right and moral duty. I don’t mean I believe in God, but I do believe in
responsibility. And so will you someday, sport. Someday, so will you.”

“WHAT
DOES YOUR dad do?” Beatrice asked one night after I hung up and returned to the
living room. The distant, stellar noise of the telephone continued to wheel
around me like lights in a planetarium. “Is your dad in business? I always
imagined your dad a big, successful businessman, Phillip. It’s in your blood, I
can tell. You’ll be a businessman too, I’m sure. When you grow up.”

Dad
was still there in the house with us long after I hung up the phone. He was
more idea than thing, more impression than voice. Dad wasn’t life. Dad was
history.

“It’s
nothing to be ashamed of–business. Business convenes secret and ghostly
ceremonies in the world. Ceremonies which the world needs, or else the world
wouldn’t have them.” Beatrice was gazing abstractedly at the living room wall,
turning one long tangled coil of oily hair behind her ear. “It’s as real as rocks,
as organic as trees.” It was almost eleven o’clock and Rodney had gone into my
bedroom to sleep. Beatrice held a half-finished glass of Nestlé’s Quik in her
lap, its rim whorled with milky deposits and fingerprints. “Business always
works, even when nature doesn’t. When plants stop photosynthesizing, business
will manufacture its own atmosphere. When other moons and planets crash into
our seas and wreck our world, business will mine and redistribute them. Business
is the world’s real nature, Phillip. We are all fleeing nature and using what it
has taught us about business to make our world vaster and more perfect.”

Beatrice
had breasts–little breasts, granted, but breasts nonetheless. When I
lifted up her mascara-smudged Lacoste T-shirt and reached underneath to touch
one, it was as warm as I expected. I brushed it gently with the palm of my
untrained hand and then, softly and with clinical care, palpated it the same
way a doctor might examine for cysts. I could feel the clusters of glands like
tiny grapes all joined up to the nipple’s tuberous root. The surface skin was
soft. I could smell Beatrice’s slightly unwashed odor, like the smell Mom’s
laundry used to make when soaking in some motel sink. Holding Beatrice’s breast
in my hand made me experience a cool and intellectual sense of redemption. I
don’t mean I wanted to be a baby again; I didn’t want to be nurtured by this
breast. I wanted only to regain a sort of molecular integrity. I wanted to
crawl back into the cellular warmth of my own body, not some woman’s womb. I
wanted to grow so small I could see protons and electrons bristling in my tiny
night sky like showers of meteors and cosmic dust. I did not want to procreate
that first time I touched a girl’s breast, I wanted to uncreate. I wanted to
penetrate life in search of the unliving. I wanted to exonerate the fundamental
and fragmentary lifelessness of things. Without a second thought, I leaned
forward on my tiptoes and kissed my Beatrice on the lips, which were still
slightly smudged with Nestlé’s Quik. Her lips didn’t move a muscle. I don’t
believe either of us felt a thing.

“You
can’t hide your desire for me,” I said.

Beatrice
snapped her gum.

“Our
two bodies are meant to be one,” I said. “You know it’s true. You knew it was
true from the moment we first met.”

I
stepped back, removing my hand from her. I expected I would touch a girl’s
breast again someday, and remembered the cocoon I once discovered on the branch
of a rosebush. I had broken off the branch and placed the cocoon inside a glass
jar, the lid of which I punctured with a sharp knife to allow air so the cocoon
could breathe. I included branches of other trees and bushes, leaves, stones
and dirt for both scenery and a sense of environmental continuity. The cocoon
just hung there, day after day, motionless, cobwebby and dry as a bone. Then
one day I decided it must be thirsty, and poured in a generous helping of
Coca-Cola through the punctured aluminum lid. A few days later the cocoon
withered and collapsed on the branch like overripe fruit. Then, one night, when
I was asleep, a few green drops oozed out.

I
took Beatrice’s hand. It was, as always, grimy and smudged. It left a soft
glimmering residue wherever it touched.

“I
think it’s time you met my mom,” I told her. Then I escorted her down the long
dark hallway to Mom’s silent room.

“HELLO,
MOM. IT’S me. It’s Phillip. You remember me. Your son.”

Darkness
seethed behind the door. Dead planets moved there. Somehow comprehensible alien
languages whispered and transformed themselves into things. Light wrapped
textures around itself, like young children in their parents’ clothing.

“I
know I said I’d leave you alone for a while, Mom. I’m not trying to hurt you,
or break any promises. Dad called and I only told him what I knew you wanted
him to hear. There’s a fresh salad in the Tupperware bowl on the bottom shelf
of the fridge. There’s frozen lasagna you can heat in the microwave. Now,
Beatrice and I will go back into the living room and leave you alone, and if
you want to fix yourself something to eat, you can. I promise we won’t get in
your way, I just wanted you to meet my friend Beatrice. I’m in love with
Beatrice, Mom, but it’s a completely different type of love from the way I love
you. I just wanted you to know.”

I
could feel Beatrice’s body standing beside me in the dark hall. Tonight her
body was the only warmth in the house.

“It’s
love without passion, Mom. I don’t feel any passion for Beatrice, just love. She
might as well be a rock, or a landmark, or a memory, or a curious bug as far as
physical passion’s concerned. She might as well be chemistry or math. Anyway,
Mom. This is Beatrice.”

I
gave Beatrice’s wrist a little squeeze.

“Hello,
Mrs. Davis,” Beatrice said after a while.

Beatrice’s
calm voice resounded in our still house like a summons.

“Now,
Mom, we’ll leave you alone.”

Both
Beatrice and I thought we could hear Mom breathing in her bed as we returned
back down the dark hall to the living room sofa again.

THAT
NIGHT WHILE Beatrice and I slept huddled together on the living room couch I
awoke and heard movements in the kitchen. The weak filmy light from the streets
filtered through our dusty venetian blinds, thinning and thickening like pages
being turned back and forth in a book. I heard a single glass fall and break. I
heard rummaging in the icemaker. I wondered if Mom was feeling OK, and thought
I should start leaving vitamins out for her. I heard the coffee grinder, and
waxy cardboard being torn from the frozen lasagna. Dishes and silverware began
to clatter, the refrigerator door opened twice. Then the initiating chime of
the microwave, and I did not hear so much as feel that long slow charge of
heatless energy building, a kind of cosmic affinity being conceded deep down
there among our secondhand kitchen appliances. The coffee was percolating on
the countertop, the aluminum lid rattling. The microwave chimed again and
buzzed, and a firm quick hand clicked it off. I could smell the antiseptic
prepackaged smell of it, the thawed meat and cheese. Beatrice, asleep against
my pale chest, stirred; she muttered something. One of her bare legs slowly
wrapped itself around mine and she began faintly snoring. I heard the footsteps
in the kitchen going back and forth, and boiling coffee being poured into a
ceramic mug.

“I
think it’s time you came out again,” I whispered, watching the door to the
kitchen that adjoined the living room. “I’m getting worried about you. I don’t
know how much more neglect I can promise. I miss you. Dad misses you. We all
miss you, even the vast world. I’m sure it will all get better. I’m sure if you
come out and try to face things, things will get better again on their own.”

The
noises stilled in the kitchen. There was a slow breathing hush filling up the
flashing lacquered walls. There was thinking going on in there. A very strong
and willful mind at work. Then, succinctly, a long sipping of coffee.

Beatrice,
in her sleep, gently kissed my shoulder.

The
footsteps swung through the kitchen again and then, in the doorway, I saw a
tall shadow that only slowly, holding the coffee in one hand and the lasagna on
a plate in the other, emerged into the dim mothy light of the living room
windows.

“What
you think you’re doing?” Rodney asked, wincing against the bitter coffee. He
gestured with the cup at Beatrice. “That’s my woman you got there.” His face
was puffy and his hair stuck out like Larry’s on “The Three Stooges.” He stood
there for a few moments, not looking at Beatrice and me so much as through us. Then
he sat down on the floor and began to eat his lasagna. His fork ticked dully
again and again against the cheesy plate.

“Sometimes
I don’t know,” Rodney said, wiping his brow with the back of his greasy hand. “Sometimes
I don’t know if I was born mean, or if the world just made me that way.” He lay
the dish and fork on the floor with a deliberate clatter. He looked at the musty,
glowing venetian blinds. Outside the phototropic streetlamps were beginning to
dim; the power lines and parked metal cars began to buzz slightly and deeply on
the empty street, filling up with the sun’s early warmth.

“I
think Dan Duryea said that,” Rodney said. His sleepy eyes remained trained upon
the cracked venetian blinds. “I really get a kick out of that goddamn Dan
Duryea.”