Read Kafka Was the Rage for Free Online Page B

feeling empty, or, rather,
filled
with emptiness, replete with it. But I roused myself and tried to think—not about what she said but what was
behind
it, what she was driving at. I’ve always been rather literal-minded and it’s one of the things I’m ashamed of, as some men are ashamed of the size of their penis.
    Why do you think it’s bad? I said. Do you feel you’re getting softhearted?
    I must be careful about climbing stairs, she said. The doctor thinks stairs are dangerous.
    Doctor? I said. What doctor? What are we talking about?
    I’m telling you, she said, that I have a bad heart. It’s defective, wanting, imperfect. The doctor advises me to avoid undue exertion.
    My first thought was that I represented undue exertion—we had, in fact, just been exerting ourselves—and that we must put an end to it. But then I heard what she had been saying. You mean you’re sick? There’s something wrong—actually wrong—with you?
    That is what I have been trying to tell you.
    But why didn’t you tell me before? How long have you known this? I got all excited. I wanted her to get a second opinion, to see a heart specialist, but she said she had already done all that. What it came down to, she said, was that her heart was simply different from other people’s hearts.
    And so I entered upon still another adjustment. I made Sheri my burden. From then on, whenever we went anywhere, whenever we came back to the apartment, I carried her up the stairs. I delivered her, conveyed her. I became her porter as well as her lover. I was even ready to carry her down the stairs, but she said it wasn’t necessary.
    At first, before I was used to it, she was surprisingly heavy, in spite of her slenderness. You might say that she was metaphysically heavy. I think too that she made herself go limp, a deadweight. She threw her head back, like the women you see being abducted in romantic paintings.
    The hardest part was when we went to see people. Many of her friends were painters who lived on top floors in order to get the light. When we arrived, after four or five flights, I would be red-faced and breathless, unable to speak. Because we hadn’t told people abouther heart, they wondered about me. They thought we had been doing something in the hallway. I began to get a reputation.
    After the first shock of her announcement, it seemed almost natural to me that she should have a bad heart. Her rib cage was so narrow. I put my ear to it and listened. While I imagined ordinary hearts to have a beat like bad rock music, Sheri’s heartbeat was more like a Chopin étude, a desultory or absentminded strumming.
    I had never thought of her as physically strong. Even though her legs and thighs were solid and full, her body seemed to lead a hazardous life, to have a determined fragility. She did not walk—she floated, and none of her movements made any concession to gravity. When I thought about it, it seemed to me that the human heart was a very primitive instrument, a poor piece of plumbing, for such a complicated, arrhythmical creature. It was such a garish, representational thing to have inside her abstract chest—it was as ugly as the velvet bleeding-heart medals I had admired so much when I was a Catholic child in New Orleans.
    I enjoyed carrying her. For a few moments she was in my power. And I liked the idea that she was portable. I began to think of love as weight. When I had her in my arms she seemed more tangible, more palpable. If I wanted to, I could throw her down the stairs, or over the rail.
    Our lovemaking changed. The need to be gentle introduced an insidious erotic complication. I inserted myself stealthily, like a burglar. I became a sleep-crawler. In one of his lectures at the New School, Gregory Bateson had told us about a South Pacific tribe that practiced what they called sleepcrawling. The sleep-crawler,or
moetotolo
, visited his lover in her own hut in the middle of the night. This was a tribe that slept in straw