Beautiful Losers. Leonard Cohen

stay away from Edith. I don’t like the way she sits between us at the movies. That is just courtesy on our part.

      -I’m grateful to you both. I assure you, she could love no other man as she loves you.

      -Do you think that’s true, F.?

      -I know it’s true. Great love is not a partnership, for a partnership can be dissolved by law or parting, and you’re stuck with a great love, as a matter of fact, you are stuck with two great loves, Edith’s and mine. Great love needs a servant, but you don’t know how to use your servants.

      -How should I ask her?

      -With whips, with imperial commands, with a leap into her mouth and a lesson in choking.

      I see F. standing there, the window behind him, his paper-thin ears almost transparent. I remember the expensively appointed slum room, the view of the factory he was trying to buy, his collection of soap arranged like a model town on the green felt of an elaborately carved billiard table. The light came through his ears as if they were made of a bar of Pears Soap. I hear his phony voice, the slight Eskimo accent which he affected after a student summer in the Arctic. You are stuck with two great loves, F. said. What a poor custodian I have been of those two loves, an ignorant custodian who walked his days in a dream museum of self-pity. F. and Edith loved me! But I didn’t hear his declaration that morning or didn’t believe it. You don’t know how to use your servants, F. said, his ears beaming like Jap lanterns. I was loved in 1950! But I didn’t speak to Edith, I couldn’t. Night after night I lay in the dark listening to the sounds of the elevator, my silent commands buried in my brain, like those urgent proud inscriptions on Egyptian monuments dumb under tons of sand. So her mouth sailed crazily over my body like a flock of Bikini birds, their migratory instincts destroyed by radiation.

      -But I warn you, F. continued, a time will come when you’ll want nothing in the world but those aimless kisses.

      Talking about transparent skin, Edith’s throat was like that, the thinnest, softest cover. You thought a heavy shell necklace would draw blood. To kiss her there was to intrude into something private and skeletal, like a turtle’s shoulder. Her shoulders were bony but not meager. She wasn’t thin but no matter how full the flesh her bones were always in command. From the age of thirteen she had the kind of skin which was called ripe, and the men who pursued her then (she was finally raped in a stone quarry) said that she was the kind of girl who would age quickly, which is the way that men on corners comfort themselves about an unattainable child. She grew up in a small town on the north shore of the St. Lawrence, where she infuriated a number of men who thought that they should be able to rub her small breasts and round bum simply because she was an Indian, an A——at that! At sixteen, when I married her, I myself believed that her skin couldn’t last. It had that fragile juicy quality we associate with growing things just about to decline. At twenty-four, the year of her death, nothing had altered but her buttocks. At sixteen they had been two half spheres suspended in midair, later they came to rest on two deep curved creases, and this was the extent of her body’s decay until she was squashed all at once. Let me think about her. She liked me to rub her skin with olive oil. I complied even though I really didn’t like playing around with food. Sometimes she filled her belly-button hole with oil and using her little finger she drew the spokes of Asoka’s wheel, then she smeared it, skin darkening. Her breasts were small, somewhat muscular, fruit with fiber. Her freakish nipples make me want to tear up my desk when I remember them, which I do at this very instant, miserable paper memory while my cock soars hopelessly into her mangled coffin, and my arms wave my duties away, even you, Catherine Tekakwitha, whom I court with this confession. Her wondrous nipples were dark as mud and very long when stiffened by desire, over an inch high, wrinkled with wisdom and sucking. I stuffed them into my nostrils (one at a time). I stuffed them in my ears. I believed continually that if anatomy permitted and I could have stuffed a nipple into each of my ears at the same time-shock treatment! What is the use of reviving this fantasy, impossible then as now? But I want those leathery electrodes in my head! I want to hear the mystery explained, I want to hear the conversations between those stiff wrinkled sages. There were such messages going between them that even Edith could not hear, signals, warnings, conceits. Revelations! Mathematics! I told F. about this the night of her death.

      -You could have had everything you wanted.

      -Why do you torment me, F.?

      -You lost yourself in particulars. All parts of the body are erotogenic, or at least have the possibility of so becoming. If she had stuck her index fingers in your ears you would have got the same results.

      -Are you sure?

      -Yes.

      -Have you tried it?

      -Yes.

      -I have to ask you this. With Edith?

      -Yes.

      -F.!

      -Listen, my friend, the elevators, the buzzers, the fan: the world is waking up in the heads of a few million.

      -Stop. Did you do that with her? Did you go that far? Did you do that together? You’re going to sit right there and tell me every detail. I hate you, F.

      -Well, she stuck her index fingers-

      -Was she wearing nail polish?

      -No.

      -She was, damn you, she was! Stop trying to protect me.

      -All right, she was. She stuck her red nails in my ears-

      -You enjoy this, don’t you?

      -She stuck her fingers in my ears and I stuck my fingers in her ears and we kissed.

      -You did it to each other? With your bare fingers? You touched ears and fingers?

      -You begin to learn.

      -Shut up. What did her ears feel like?

      -Tight.

      -Tight!

      -Edith had very tight ears, nearly virgin, I’d say.

      -Get out, F.! Get off our bed! Take your hands off me!

      -Listen, or I’ll break your neck, chicken voyeur. We were fully dressed except for our fingers. Yes! We sucked each other’s fingers, and then we stuck them in each other’s ears-

      -The ring, did she take the ring off?

      -I don’t think so. I was worried about my eardrums because of her long red nails, she was digging so hard. We shut our eyes and we kissed like friends, without opening our mouths. Suddenly the sounds of the lobby were gone and I was listening to Edith.

      -To her body! Where did this happen? When did you do this to me?

      -So those are your questions. It happened in a telephone booth in the lobby of a movie theater downtown.

      -What theater?

      -The System Theatre.

      -You’re lying! There is no telephone booth in the System. There’s only one or two telephones on the wall separated by glass partitions, I think. You did it out in the open! I know that dirty basement lobby! There’s always some fairy hanging around there, drawing cocks and telephone numbers on the green wall. Out in the open! Was anyone watching? How could you do this to me?

      -You were in the men’s room. We were waiting for you beside the telephones, eating chocolate-covered ice-cream bars. I don’t know what was keeping you so long. We finished our ice cream. Edith spotted a flake of chocolate sticking to my little finger. In a very charming fashion she leaned over and flicked it into her mouth with her tongue, like an anteater. She had overlooked a flake of chocolate on her own wrist. I swooped in and got that, clumsily, I confess. Then it turned into a game. Games are nature’s most beautiful creation. All animals play games, and the truly Messianic vision of the brotherhood of creatures must be based on the idea of the game, indeed-

      -So Edith began it! And who touched whose ear first? I have to know everything now. You saw her tongue stretched out, you probably stared. Who started it with the ears?