Moise and the World of Reason by Tennessee Williams Page A

habitation by myself and two lovers.
    I smiled wryly and said, “God has forbidden them to”
    Then I sat down and said, “It’s a monument to the living nigger on ice.”
    Then, like the cock crowing thrice, I said to myself the last line of a lyric which I’d read once.
    â€œBoys are fox-teeth in the heart.”
    I recalled that the poem also dealt with girls and with men but couldn’t remember what it had to say of them except that it was more flattering and less feeling.
    But the feeling was pain and the pain was excruciating and for the third time in my life I seriously considered doing away with myself and by what means I could do it.
    (Other two times? When committed to that island in the East River and the first time that Lance infected me with that yellow drip of a pickup on a faraway street.)
    Doing away with myself.
    On the island in the River East I had thought of slashing my wrists but there was nothing that I could slash them with since they had confiscated my reading glasses, my wristwatch, anything that had glass or a cutting edge to it, except my longing for Lance which was strong enough to draw blood but was not a material thing.
    The time of the drip I had considered water, probably because it suggested that old Baptist hymn called “Washed in the Blood of the Lamb.”
    (Mother used to sing it so passionately in church that people would turn to look at her with startled eyes.)
    This brought to mind another short lyric poem on the subject of boys, again just a single line of it.
    They offer you their eyes like startled flowers.
    (Referring to boys on street corners.)
    And I remember saying to the poet, “I think they offer their eyes like broken crutches.”
    And he replied, “That is because you are negative by nature.”
    Was that true about me? I honestly don’t think so. Not even now as I stare at the next page of the Blue Jay with its pale blue parallel lines still undefiled by the pencil. I don’t think it’s pessimistic to look upon ugliness as well as beauty bare, although, like Millay and Euclid, I prefer to opt for the second.
    And now that next page of the Blue Jay has been fucked by the pencil and is no longer bare beauty. . . .

    I am not the only writer in the direct line of the maternal side of my family. My grandmother Ursula Phillips was the widow of a very handsome and dandified young gentleman who was struck by the sudden subway at the age of twenty-seven. By contemporary standards of this Eastern metropolis I don’t suppose his accomplishments in the field of literature were particularly striking except in a ludicrous way. His career could be called meteoric. He flashed into it at the age of twenty-two and dropped dead five years later, a burnt-out wreck of a handsome young man who had physical attributes, according to Grandmother Ursula, which would rival Apollo’s: a strong but slender physique, flawless skin, large eyes between green and blue which were heavily lashed. “Some people accused him of wearing cosmetics,” she told me, “but you know, dear, all that he ever put on was a light cologne called
Lilac Vegetal.”
    When Grandmother Ursula said that to me, I laughed and said, “Grand, do you mean he went out naked except for the light cologne?”
    She boxed my ears and said, “Boy, your grandfather was out of blue-grass Kentucky land with blood as blue as the grass. You just remember that and don’t make sarcastic remarks which you mistake for humor.”
    â€œOh, now, Grand, don’t we all, and nobody means much by it.”
    â€œYour grandfather would have spit on Alabama if he’d been the kind that spits.”
    She creaked up out of her rocker with the intense concentration of those possessed by an idol and brought forth two of her long-lost idol’s literary creations. One was a very thin published book, a novella it could be called, which was