The Female Man

"I don't know you," I said at last. The truth was we had been friends for a long time, good friends. I don't know why I had forgotten that so completely. Vitti was the anchor in my life at school, the chum, the pal; we had gossiped together, eaten together. I knew nothing about her thoughts now and can't report them, except for my own fatuous remarks. Oh, the dead silence! I groped for her hand but couldn't find it in the dark; I cursed myself and tried to stay together in that ghastly moonlight, shivers of unbeing running through me like a net and over all the pleasure of pain, the dreadful longing.

"Vitti, I love you."

Go away! Was she wringing her hands?

"Love me!"

No! and she threw one arm up to cover her face. I got down on my knees but she winced away with a kind of hissing screech, very like the sound an enraged gander makes to warn you and be fair. We were both shaking from head to foot. It seemed natural that she should be ready to destroy me. I've dreamed of looking into a mirror and seeing my alter ego which, on its own initiative, begins to tell me unbearable truths and, to prevent such, threw my arms around Vittoria's knees while she dug her fingers into my hair; thus connected we slid down to the forest floor. I expected her to beat my head against it. We got more equally together and kissed each other, I expecting my soul to flee out of my body, which it did not do. She is untouchable. What can I do with my dearest X, Y, or Z, after all? This is Vitti, whom I know, whom I like; and the warmth of that real affection inspired me with more love, the love with more passion, more despair, enough disappointment for a whole lifetime. I groaned miserably. I might as well have fallen in love with a tree or a rock. No one can make love in such a state. Vitti's fingernails were making little hard crescents of pain on my arms; she had that mulish look I knew so well in her; I knew something was coming off. It seemed to me that we were victims of the same catastrophe and that we ought to get together somewhere, in a hollow tree or under a bush, to talk it over. The old women tell you to wrestle, not fight, or you may end up with a black eye; Vitti, who had my fingers in her hands, pressing them feverishly, bent the smallest one back against the joint. Now that's a good idea. We scuffled like babies, hurting my hand, and she bit me on it; we pushed and pulled at each other, and I shook her until she rolled over on top of me and very earnestly hit me across the face with her fist. The only relief is tears.

We lay sobbing together. What we did after that I think you know, and we sniffled and commiserated with each other. It even struck us funny, once. The seat of romantic love is the solar plexus while the seat of love is elsewhere, and that makes it very hard to make love when you are on the point of dissolution, your arms and legs penetrated by moonlight, your head cut off and swimming freely on its own like some kind of mutated monster. Love is a radiation disease. Whileawayans do not like the self-consequence that comes with romantic passion and we are very mean and mocking about it; so Vittoria and I walked back separately, each frightened to death of the weeks and weeks yet to go before we'd be over it. We kept it to ourselves. I felt it leave me two and a half months later, at one particular point in time: I was putting a handful of cracked corn to my mouth and licking the sludge off my fingers. I felt the parasite go. I swallowed philosophically and that was that. I didn't even have to tell her.

Vitti and I have stayed together in a more commonplace way ever since. In fact, we got married. It comes and goes, that abyss opening on nothing. I run away, usually.

Vittoria is whoring all over North Continent by now, I should think. We don't mean by that what you do, by the way. I mean: good for her.

Sometimes I try to puzzle out the different kinds of love, the friendly kind and the operatic kind, but what the hell.

Let's go to sleep.

XVII