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FICTION
posted 6/26/1997
Just once, or so it seems, I did experience the full flowering of depression. We were living in Vence, at that time a smallish town in southern France about twenty miles from Nice where I was expected to write fiction (and where I would begin to write such novels as Travesty and The Blood Oranges). Our French friends feasted us on Provençal rabbit; the surrounding landscape was yellow with genêt, the heady blossom that Henry Plantagenet always wore on his hat. But I was in the grip of a dark paralysis, for no reason that I knew of, and saw the clear light of the Côte d'Azur as dulled through the waves of my own misery. I could not eat the rabbit, took no walks, could not bear to listen to the soft sounds coming from the dovecote.
Every evening, after a dismal dinner, I fell asleep while Sophie began helping our youngest son with his schoolwork. Every morning I sat benumbed and mindless at a small table of polished cherry wood. Every morning Sophie left a fresh rose on my table, but even these talismans of love and encouragement did no good. All was hopeless, writing was out of the question.
Then there came an invitation for lunch in town and Sophie insisted that we accept it. Our hostess, a vivacious Frenchwoman, tried to cheer me up with a lively bit of gossip about a middle-aged man who went to pick up his young daughter at a school in Nice, only to discover accidentally from one of the young girl's classmates that his daughter was an energetic prostitute who had already gone, that day, from the playground to a sexual assignation. As I listened to that story, my interest quickened; I drank a glass of wine, and I saw myself walking jauntily toward a lone girl near some empty swings. At that moment I was distracted but no longer depressed. When we finished our meal (a specialty of cod and boiled potatoes served with aïoli, a lovely rich garlic sauce) and parted outside the restaurant, I kissed our French friend as happily as did Sophie, yet I was sorely impatient to get to our car.
In the hours and days to come the fresh roses sparkled on my table and I took for granted that I was close to beginning my novel for that year. Obviously Colette (not the writer but rather our friend) was if anything sympathetic to the father in her anecdote, whom she considered morally injured by his wayward daughter. From the beginning I was convinced that the father was in fact an odious man, while I was curiously pleased that his daughter was able to enjoy her after-school hours in a way generally considered a most serious transgression. (Here I should say that I too disapprove of child prostitution or pornography. But in fiction I have always been an immoralist of sorts, and was already thinking of Colette's story as fiction. I should say too that I have always been committed to eroticism in fiction, and convinced that there is nothing less erotic than the usual slang terms we often hear, even in the work of today's fiction writers, who somehow think they are being liberated because they write "cunt," a truly ugly word when compared to the erotics of "vulva," a word that resonates with the depths of the female sexual organ, or "cunny," the seventeenth-century term (which I believe is related to "bunny," suggesting a lighter view of the matter).
At any rate my distaste for the father grew. And within a week, two essential memories came to mind, one of a critic and one of a story my father once told me about a riot in a women's prison. The critic was a Marxist, who at a conference in a small college for women caused me considerable embarrassment, while making clear, I thought, his own contempt for the imagination. As soon as that memory returned, I knew that this figure, in his black suit and humorless face, was my protagonist (the novel would eventually be called The Passion Artist, ironically, of course). My father's story was this: At a young age, and as a member of the National Guard, he had helped to quell a riot in a nearby women's prison. My father and the other guardsmen had beaten the women with barrel staves. As good a man as he was, my father was apparently unaware of the horror of what they had done. The Passion Artist, then, centers around a women's prison, a riot in which the women defeat the male intruders, and a doctor in the prison -- Dr. Slovotkin -- who performed tests on the imprisoned women in order to develop his theory of gender. It's an oddly compelling theory -- namely "that men and women are both the same and the opposite." (No doubt the reader might dismiss this contradiction entirely, or disagree with both halves of it individually, but it does become meaningful when elaborated on.)
By the end of The Passion Artist, we learn that Mirabelle, Konrad Vost's daughter, is living happily with her boyfriend, that both Vost and Dr. Slovotkin have died, and that, after the successful liberation of the women's prison, it has become a home for transient Eastern European women. The Passion Artist is a study of severe sexual repression (mostly affecting the men in the novel) and of the power of women. Paradoxically, it is a novel filled with highly erotic -- even sexual -- scenes, reflecting, in part, a collection of books I found hidden in one of the massive bookcases in that old house we were renting in Vence.
One of the most erotic of those scenes comes early in the novel, when Konrad Vost both betrays his daughter and yet succumbs to a prolonged afternoon of oral sex with the nameless girl who met him in the school yard.
"But She Was Not Mirabelle," which follows, is an example of the extent to which a mere anecdote may be transformed into fiction. Also, I must add that this same piece appeared under the same title in 1978 in Penthouse; it is the only prose of mine ever to appear in such a popular magazine. I keep my only copy of that issue, as I have kept it for nearly twenty years, in a calfskin binder made for me by my daughter. -JH
***
In retrospect he was not able to discover the source of the well-being he felt that day or of the realization, upon him once more, that again the day had arrived when, as many times in the past, he would devote his entire afternoon to Mirabelle. But there it was: the good feeling, the benevolence, the exhilaration of seeing the day through a sheet of ice, and the determination that he would refuse the ordinary demands of his daily life in the pharmacy and undertake the long familiar walk in order to greet Mirabelle at the end of her day at school. The satisfaction attendant on this decision was immense: the students would emerge from the several gray buildings behind the wall on the top of which were strung the long strands of protective wire. The students would fill the sandy compound with the life of their bodies; the moving students would remind him of Gagnon's birds. He would see Mirabelle; he would stand still and wave; Mirabelle would return his greeting, surprised, happily understanding that once again her father was taking the trouble to walk home with her from school. Arm in arm they would set off together as they had done less and less frequently in these five surprisingly bearable years since the death of Claire.
He was breathing exactly the same clear cold air as would soon fill the lungs of the dispersing students. He was alone and walking eastward into the shadows of exactly the same street he would be traversing westward into the pale fading light with Mirabelle. It was the route of the small infrequent trolley cars, those doorless vehicles of gray riveted metal, and the sight of the narrow rails embedded in a field partly of cobblestones, partly of concrete, and the sagging overhead cable and the tin-roofed shelters where waited no passengers, no parents with children in hand: the sight of this thoroughfare on which he alone was proceeding could only evoke, as he strode along, the sound of Mirabelle's voice at his side and the vision of the entire schoolful of students swarming toward him suddenly with arms in the air and shoes and boots clattering on the empty stones.
He reached the landmark of the fountain, an amateurish replica in concrete of a dolphin from the mouth of which trickled not a drop of water. He turned the familiar corner where now, as always, he was both vindicated and offended by the smell of sewage pumping upward through an iron grate in the stones; he approached within sight and hearing distance of the low darkening school. But he heard nothing. He saw no one. He quickened his pace. With misgivings, with the utmost of disappointment, he entered the sandy square intended for recreation and calisthenics. But it was empty, except for a single girl who was walking listlessly in his direction and who was not Mirabelle. The impossible had happened. He was too late. He who was always correct, precise, punctual, was now, too late. Nevertheless, he decided to speak to the girl, who evidently meant to speak a few words to him.
"I am looking for Mirabelle," he said, "the daughter of Konrad Vost. Is she here?"
He inclined himself slightly from the waist, he relaxed his face, he assumed a pleasant quizzical expression, all in order to put at ease this girl who, except for her clothes, was strikingly similar to the girl he was seeing. The same rather large size, the same dark hair cut to shoulder length in imitation of an adult style, the same unformed quality of the face that still belonged to a child. Of course, instead of wearing skirt, blouse, shoes tied with the laces, this girl was dressed in pants of faded blue denim and, clinging to her torso, a thin white collarless and sleeveless shirt that was like a sweater. Across the front of the shirt and conforming the shape of this child's womanly bosom was printed in black letters the message WE AIM TO PLEASE. He noted the boldness of the letters but did not understand the pathos of the double meaning, since the message on the shirt was couched in that language he had never learned to read. He noted too the wooden sandals, on the bare feet, the goose flesh on the arms and upper chest. Mirabelle would not approve of such a costume. And she was perhaps too shy to stand this close to a stranger in the lengthening shadows of an empty schoolyard. But the incongruity of the lone girl was appealing as was the directness with which she was looking up at his face, so that he found himself bending again from the waist and attempting to disregard the tightness of the pant, the shirt.
"Well," he repeated, knowing the uselessness of the question, "and Mirabelle? Is she here?" "No, she's already gone," said the girl, inclining her shoulder vaguely and drawing still closer. "If you want Mirabelle you must come earlier. But I'm available. And I can give you more than she could. And for less."
He waited. She said nothing more. He listened intently. And was someone else, someone very much like himself though with briefcase, topcoat, cane, face in the shadows, now approaching this same empty place to pause at the gate, to draw back, to stand quietly watching a tall middle-aged man already conversing with the obscured figure of the very person he, the imaginary stranger, had come to find? Had he visited this same schoolyard weeks in the past? Had this same girl been waiting? For a moment longer, he, the actual man, the living father, he who had come on his innocent mission, stood darkly within the institutional enclosure creating a dream, clinging as best he could to incomprehension. But then his entire world fell on him, like a facing of ice from an immense cliff, so that he was left with only defeat instead of disbelief, with the intolerable pain of sight after blindness, with the feeling of young fingers on the sleeve of his coat. So the school was in fact visited by men who were not at all the fathers of the concerned students; so she who was now waiting beside him meant what she had said and did not know or care who he was; so in an instant he had discovered the true uselessness of inquiry about Mirabelle who was already the genie who knew how to escape from the bottle. He was cold. He felt annulled. He was able to think of nothing but an armful of corsets. He was inflamed. He was annulled.
"Now," said the girl at his side, recalling him to the young fingers and the voice he would never forget. "Now, are you coming?"
He nodded. She requested his billfold. He complied. After she had transacted her business, alone, impervious to the fading light, oddly considerate of the man who possessed a steel tooth and who had made her friend her competitor, she stepped around his rigid figure and led the way out of the sandy enclosure and through the cold streets toward the building that concealed the shuttered room in which he knew she would again confront him with what he had hardly thought of since Claire's voice faded and the deathbed contained only her still form.
Between the schoolyard and the shuttered room there were only the determined clattering sounds of the wooden sandals and the cold blanketing knowledge of himself as a single anonymous older man in pursuit of the illicit services of a girl who was still in fact a child. Within the caverns that were now himself, even this knowledge was a form of oblivion. The girl made no attempt to conceal their passage together. He found that he was neither alarmed nor dismayed at the loudness of the sandals that protected the bare feet from the stones. But it was precisely the sandals that she removed first in that small room with its single shuttered window and its empty walls of whitewashed concrete. One narrow door opened into the cubicle that was the toilet, which the girl now used, while the other opened into the cubicle containing the stove, the iron bottle of gas, the meager tins of food, the outmoded refrigerator on the top of which rested the radio of blackened Bakelite. In one corner of the room stood a table and two upright chairs; along one wall was the sparsely padded couch that obviously folded out into a bed for both mother and daughter; from the corner opposite the table and the chairs, and positioned so that it bisected the corner exactly, there protruded the shockingly incongruous sight of a gaunt narrow chaise longue which, with its gilded lion's feet, its gilded frame, its upholstering material stitched with the enormous brown heads of flowers in the bloom, might have been dragged from an abandoned chateau that existed only in the pages of a moldy volume bound in green leather. Clearly this shabby, overly rich piece of furniture, situated in concrete and emptiness, represented the unattainable taste and vision of the mother; here she rested whenever she returned from working in the bakery, dry goods shop, laundry, rested in poor splendor while the girl, no doubt, played the radio in the cubicle that was filling with the smell of meat boiling in a steel pot on the stove.
No sooner had the toilet flushed than the girl reappeared, zipping her trousers, disregarding him where he stood fully clothed between the chaise longue, the bare table, the couch. Through the slats in the shutters the light entered the room as if through the skeletal ribs of an animal long dead. He had not moved since entering this place of nakedness, and when the girl returned from the cubicle in the kitchen bearing a small glass filled to the brim with a clear liquor, he found it difficult to raise his arm, extend his hand, seize the glass. But he did so, while the girl stood watching him, and at the precise moment he coughed on the last of the liquor, the girl, in an easy gesture, and with both hands, pulled the white shirt over her head and free from her body. He coughed, he felt the burning in his nose and throat, the wetness in his eyes, and in the midst of this condition induced deliberately by the girl as preparation for the sight of her nakedness, he attempted not to think of Claire but instead gave himself the full benefit of what in his lifetime he had never seen: the thick and womanly breasts of a young girl.
She took the glass from him and replaced it not in the kitchen but on the bare table, so as to keep him in sight. The room smelled faintly of garlic and bottled gas; in the puckering of the naked waist he saw a scar that might have been inflicted in the fury of some childhood beating. Through the open door he could see the black and white toilet stark and waiting like an instrument of execution, and still wet and noisy from the girl's use. Around her neck was a thin chain bearing a small golden heart for a pendant.
Then, taking his hand in hers, she directed him, as if he were a walking invalid, not to the couch as he had expected but instead to the anomaly of the chaise longue that extended into the room like an ornate tongue, like the narrow prow of an entombed boat, like the reclining place of a courtesan with feathers and painted skin. He could hardly bear to stretch himself out on it. But he did so, as she directed, allowing her to straighten his legs and, with her hand in his brow, to push his head gently backward into the cushion. She did not remove his shoes or spectacles; against his forehead her hand was as dry and naked as the bare feet, the bare breasts.
She remained at the head of his half-seated, half-prostate form, retaining the single childish hand on his brow, until patient, unhurried, staring down at him, she extended her other hand and touched him behind the ear, on the back of the neck, and then inserted two fingers between the collar of the turtleneck shirt and the skin of his neck and slowly, in gestures that were now circular, now probing, worked the fingers downward as far as she could comfortably reach. He felt that those fingers were exalting his bones and flesh and buried spine. Fully clothed, hands at his sides, he felt himself imperceptibly reaching upward with the top part of his body toward the upright heaviness of the girl at his side. Her breathing deepened: the fingers probed, he allowed his head to incline gently to the right so that through half-closed eyes he could see the armpit, the surprising hair, the shape of the ribs like curves of light beneath the skin, the rounded bottom of one large breast. Hearing the girl's breath and his own, he allowed himself to raise and maneuver his right arm and hand so that his forearm was extended between her legs and the hand was clutching to himself the tightly denimed weight of the girl's leg and thigh. The zipper was half open, the thigh in its skin of cloth was hot.
He felt the fingers withdrawing from the neck of his shirt, he felt the bareness of the girl as she leaned over him and, with the fingers that only moments before were on the pulse of his neck, began to massage his chest and abdomen through the black shirt. He was not moving, and yet in his entire upper body, from his hips to his head, he felt himself straining to arch his back. Without looking he was aware that the girl's trinket, the small golden heart, was sliding in little fits and starts down the black expanse of his shirt, and knew that the girl's spread fingers were working insistently into the secret of his hard chest.
Slowly she dislodged his hand and arm and momentarily disappeared from the darkness in which he lay. He waited; on the chaise longue he felt like a man fallen to the narrow ledge; never had he known what he now recognized as the beginning of the state of ecstasy. Then with relief, with anxiety, he realized that the girl was kneeling at the foot of the chaise longue and was gripping his ankles in her two hands and pulling apart his legs so that he had no recourse but to comply, to bend his spread legs at the knees and to allow both feet to drop to the floor on either side of the flat narrow bedlike portion of the chaise longue. The position, that of lying backward with legs wide apart and feet on the floor, like a survivor upside down on his back and awkwardly straddling in reverse some enormous wet black beam of a ship, exposed him suddenly, unmistakably, to the total mercy of the nameless young half-naked girl who was herself now straddling the flat narrow portion of the chaise longue where his outstretched legs had lain.
For a moment he looked down the partial length of himself and into the eyes of the girl. He confronted the steady eyes, the hanging hair, the naked breasts, the tight fat triangular area where the strain on the girl's spread thighs was causing the zipper to creep increasingly open of its own accord. Then, as she moved closer and leaned forward and reached for him with her two hands, the small golden heart swinging free of her naked chest like a plumb line, then his entire person underwent a moment of brief spasmodic revulsion which, in the next instant, collapsed and gave way to a wave of trust and desire. Even before he closed his eyes he felt the girl's fingers flicking loose the tongue of his leather belt and unzipping and pulling wide the mouth of his trousers.
His eyes were shut, he gripped the edges of the chaise longue; his breath was short and helpless in his mouth. The girl's fingers were inside the now invaded clothing of his loins which were flat, rigid, tumultuous in both concealment and accessibility. In his darkness he could feel the belt no longer buckled, the shirt pulled free from the trousers, the sensation of unexpected air. He could not have felt more naked if she had removed altogether the black trousers and the severe and modest underpants. But he was clothed and unclothed at the same time, and the girl's fingers -- seemed to be multiplying inside his clothing and next to his skin. Somehow he was aware of the fingers all together and individually, detecting now the careful circumvention of the tight seam, now a smooth endless tickling or caressing sensation in the most vulnerable portion of his anatomy, now a rushing of all her fingers together inside the private tangle of his groin. In the midst of this pleasure, suddenly he became aware of the girl pushing one of her fingers into his rectum, and he gasped in a silent cry of joy and humiliation. How could he have been so ignorant of this experience? How could the girl have the knowledge and daring to do what she's doing?
But then, as he knew by the sudden pressure and profusion of hair, then the girl's face was buried in his disheveled groin. It was as if her head had become suddenly the head of a young lioness nuzzling at the wound it had made in the side of a tawny and still-warm fallen animal. Her face, her head, her mouth, her tongue, and suddenly he was confronted with his own unmistakable flesh -- flaccid, engorged, he could not tell -- aroused and moving in the depths of his clothes, in the mouth of his trousers, in the mouth of the girl. Bright blood, golden hair, and now the girl's head swerved once in a large circle of violence, tenderness, and then abruptly stopped, became fixed and rigid so that all her determination was now concentrated in the now fierce sucking activity of the hot mouth. The rectal pressure was increasing, the sound of breathing ceased, in the midst of his shock and pleasure he was now refusing what he knew was inevitable inside himself, fighting the greedy mouth as the child fights his bladder in the night. But then it began, in darkness and in the midst of what sounded like distant shouting, that long uncoiling of the thick white thread from the bloody pump, that immense and fading constriction of white light inside the flesh. Whom could he thank? How could he admit what had happened? He wanted to breathe, his head had fallen to one side, for a moment he did not even know whether he, like the poor child, had soaked his clothes in the futility and brightness of that emission that was now, finally, at an end.
He could not move. His eyes were closed. But then -- after how long? and how soon before the mother would turn the corner and approach the silent building that housed this room? -- then he felt the girl stirring and lifting her head from his lap. But she continued to move, not climbing indifferently to her feet, as he expected, but moving forward, keeping her body close to his own, until suddenly he felt her two hands pressed gently to the sides of his head, turning it, straightening it, and felt her mouth pressed against his own in a kind of protracted youthful kiss he could not have expected and had never known. Then as she continued kissing him with lips, tongue, jaw, slowly into his exhaustion, his joy, his mortification, there came the realization that now the girl was returning him the gift, the taste, of his own seminal secretions, his own psychic slime.
When he finally reached the doorway, adjusting his clothes, attempting to stand at ease, he could think of nothing except that the discoloration between the girl's buttocks had reminded him shockingly of a blown rose, and that the girl had in fact removed his spectacles and hidden them safely in the right-hand pocket of his black coat, where now he found them.
In the doorway and clothed again in pants and shirt, the girl spoke to him at last:
"I've done it before with an older man," she said, as his age and station came thundering down upon him once again. "But this is just the beginning. I promise you, just the beginning."
In the dark street there was no sign of the returning woman, the deceived mother, as rapidly and with set face he turned his back on the scene of his awakening, his degrading, at the hand of a dissolute child, and walked away into the night. The streets were empty yet everywhere he heard the sound of clattering sandals.
Portions of the introduction also appeared in Humors of Blood & Skin: A John Hawkes Reader.
emerge from the several gray buildings behind the wall on the top of which were strung the long strands of protective wire. The students would fill the sandy compound with the life of their bodies; the moving students would remind him of Gagnon's birds. He would see Mirabelle; he would stand still and wave; Mirabelle would return his greeting, surprised, happily understanding that once again her father was taking the trouble to walk home with her from school. Arm in arm they would set off together as they had done less and less frequently in these five surprisingly bearable years since the death of Claire.
the obscured figure of the very person he, the imaginary stranger, had come to find? Had he visited this same schoolyard weeks in the past? Had this same girl been waiting? For a moment longer, he, the actual man, the living father, he who had come on his innocent mission, stood darkly within the institutional enclosure creating a dream, clinging as best he could to incomprehension. But then his entire world fell on him, like a facing of ice from an immense cliff, so that he was left with only defeat instead of disbelief, with the intolerable pain of sight after blindness, with the feeling of young fingers on the sleeve of his coat. So the school was in fact visited by men who were not at all the fathers of the concerned students; so she who was now waiting beside him meant what she had said and did not know or care who he was; so in an instant he had discovered the true uselessness of inquiry about Mirabelle who was already the genie who knew how to escape from the bottle. He was cold. He felt annulled. He was able to think of nothing but an armful of corsets. He was inflamed. He was annulled.
two upright chairs; along one wall was the sparsely padded couch that obviously folded out into a bed for both mother and daughter; from the corner opposite the table and the chairs, and positioned so that it bisected the corner exactly, there protruded the shockingly incongruous sight of a gaunt narrow chaise longue which, with its gilded lion's feet, its gilded frame, its upholstering material stitched with the enormous brown heads of flowers in the bloom, might have been dragged from an abandoned chateau that existed only in the pages of a moldy volume bound in green leather. Clearly this shabby, overly rich piece of furniture, situated in concrete and emptiness, represented the unattainable taste and vision of the mother; here she rested whenever she returned from working in the bakery, dry goods shop, laundry, rested in poor splendor while the girl, no doubt, played the radio in the cubicle that was filling with the smell of meat boiling in a steel pot on the stove.
like an ornate tongue, like the narrow prow of an entombed boat, like the reclining place of a courtesan with feathers and painted skin. He could hardly bear to stretch himself out on it. But he did so, as she directed, allowing her to straighten his legs and, with her hand in his brow, to push his head gently backward into the cushion. She did not remove his shoes or spectacles; against his forehead her hand was as dry and naked as the bare feet, the bare breasts.
gripping his ankles in her two hands and pulling apart his legs so that he had no recourse but to comply, to bend his spread legs at the knees and to allow both feet to drop to the floor on either side of the flat narrow bedlike portion of the chaise longue. The position, that of lying backward with legs wide apart and feet on the floor, like a survivor upside down on his back and awkwardly straddling in reverse some enormous wet black beam of a ship, exposed him suddenly, unmistakably, to the total mercy of the nameless young half-naked girl who was herself now straddling the flat narrow portion of the chaise longue where his outstretched legs had lain.
knew was inevitable inside himself, fighting the greedy mouth as the child fights his bladder in the night. But then it began, in darkness and in the midst of what sounded like distant shouting, that long uncoiling of the thick white thread from the bloody pump, that immense and fading constriction of white light inside the flesh. Whom could he thank? How could he admit what had happened? He wanted to breathe, his head had fallen to one side, for a moment he did not even know whether he, like the poor child, had soaked his clothes in the futility and brightness of that emission that was now, finally, at an end.
