Real Life(68)

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THEY ARE FEELING a little waterlogged by the time it’s all over, and also feeling kind of ashamed of themselves, self-indulgent. There is something very American about this, Brigit says—that anything that feels good must come with shame.

“It’s because we’re all Protestants,” she continues.

“Didn’t you go to Catholic school all your life?” he asks, and she laughs at him.

“Yes, but my point stands.”

They go inside to get ice cream. Wallace requests a waffle bowl with vanilla, for which Brigit mocks him. Brigit herself requests chocolate on a cone, which Wallace doesn’t think is any more adventurous than vanilla. The hall is decorated with a mural of some kind, depicting the charitable actions of some white man from a long time ago; he’s giving out candy to small, strangely demonic-looking children, and the whole scene is both bucolic and horrifying. There are many people loitering, eating ice cream, talking, eating brats. The music from the outside is louder here; the band has moved on to some very earnest rock covers.

Off to the side, a man is eating something from a cardboard bowl. He has the sort of lean face in which the muscles of his jaws are visible as they work. Wallace watches the muscles slide and shift beneath the man’s skin, which is olive colored. There is also the thickening of muscle in his neck as he swallows, the food passing down and down through his throat and into the darkness of his body. This is an ordinary act, so commonplace as to seem invisible, but when any such act is considered, there is a wild strangeness to it. Consider how the eyelid slides down over the eyeball and back, the world cast into an instant of darkness with every blink. Consider the act of breathing, which comes regularly and without effort—and yet the great surge of air that must enter and exit our body is an almost violent event, tissues pushed and compressed and slid apart and opened and closed, so much blood all over the whole business of it. Ordinary acts take on strange shadows when viewed up close.

Wallace wants him too, but the act of wanting is distinct from sexual imagination. He can comprehend this simultaneously at two levels, what it is to want—though he only ever engages the first, the most superficial, the glance, the gaze, the ascertainment of object, fetish, token. Below this, of course, is the act itself, articulated through innumerable possibilities. Fucking and sucking and chewing and pinching and grinding and sliding and hitching and thrusting and rolling and tasting and licking and biting; there’s being held, there’s being whispered to, being pushed down, being thrown up against the wall and kept there. So much of it geographical, physiological, so much specificity to it. There is sex in the mind, which follows from the identification of objects of sexual potential. Indeed, the sexual potential is but the shadow of sexual possibility projected forward; we know we want someone when we encounter them because of what could come if we just reach out and say it: Hey, look at me.

But when Wallace looks at such people, people he wants, he always feels so much worse afterward. Being so aware of their bodies makes him aware of his own body, and he becomes aware of the way his body is both a thing on the earth and a vehicle for his entire life’s history. His body is both a tangible self and his depression, his anxiety, his wellness, his illness, his disordered eating, the fear of blood pouring out of him. It is both itself and not itself, image and afterimage. He feels unhappy when he looks at someone beautiful or desirable because he feels the gulf between himself and the other, their body and his body. An accounting of his body’s failures slides down the back of his eyes, and he sees how far from grace he’s been made and planted.

It’s not even that he wants to be them—though queer desire has this feature baked in, so better to say it’s not just that he wants to be them. He wants to be not himself. He wants to be not depressed. He wants to be not anxious. He wants to be well. He wants to be good.

There are ways to wrangle a body’s dimensions, but these dimensions correspond solely to the physical space it occupies. How to wrangle the body that is unreal? How to wrangle the histories of our bodies, which are inseparable from the bodies themselves and are always growing? How to change or shape that part of us? Wallace is unwell. Parts of him are falling off. It’s maudlin, he knows, but it’s also true. When he sees a good body going around in the world, he finds he’s unable to look away from both it and himself. The truly awful thing about beauty is that it reminds us of our limits. Beauty is a kind of unrelenting cruelty. It takes the truth, hones it to a terrifying keenness, and uses it to slice us to the bone.

A good body is a monstrous thing; it stalks and hunts us in the smallest parts of ourselves. It extracts from us painful truths. When Wallace sees a good body, what he feels is thirst, or else an ache, which is the sensation of beauty forcing its way inside.

The thing about Miller’s body is that it isn’t a beautiful body, not like this man’s, and so Wallace is able to interface with it as a sexual object. It isn’t beyond him. There is something definitively human about Miller’s body, its weight, its length, its odd angles, its pockets of fat and flesh. The places where it goes suddenly soft or hard, where it is unexpectedly supple or strong or taut. Miller’s body is accessible, understandable in all the ways that it is flawed. It is legible to Wallace. The man eating dumps out the rest of his food and leaves. Their ice cream is ready, and Brigit passes him his bowl and they go out into the evening air.