  Opus 21 BOOKS BY Philip Wylie HEAVY LADEN · BABES AND SUCKLINGS · GLADIATOR By Philip Wylie and William W. Muir title OPUS 21 Descriptive Music FOR THE LOWER KINSEY EPOCH a Concerto for a One-Man Band SIX ARIAS FOR SOAP OPERAS Fugues, Anthems, & Barrelhouse BY PHILIP WYLIE RINEHART & COMPANY, INC. New York and Toronto First Printing, April 1949 COPYRIGHT, 1949, BY PHILIP WYLIE PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ALL RIGHTS RESERVED TO MY WIFE WARNING Most of the characters in this book are unreal—and that is particularly true of the author.... Few of the events recorded here ever took place—exactly.... Even the time is somewhat out of joint, so purists are advised not to bother to compare the meteorology with the obituaries.... I never had (for instance) an elder sister named Georgianna, that I know of.... The difference between what is Real (or Truth) and what is Illusion (or Fiction) is left to such judgment as the reader may own—just as it is in all the other experiences of life. P.W. PART ONE: Scherzo, 3 Opus 21 Scherzo Scherzo 1 It happens to millions. They sit in doctors' offices trying to hide nervousness in the pages of magazines. Wondering what germs their predecessors have deposited in Life and Harper's Bazaar or Action Comics. The nurse calls: Mr. So-and-so. Mrs. So-and-so. Miss So-and-so. They go in. "Doctor," they say, "just lately I've begun to notice...." They have begun to notice Death. And now the doctor notices, too. Millions of us, in this century, find out before angina curls us like insects in flame. Before the stone is lodged in its screaming cavity. Before the final, involuntary issue of bowel or bladder or foamy lungs. It is one of the marvels of science. "Tom," I said, for the doctor is an old friend, "lately I've noticed a feeling of fullness in my nasal passages. And this morning, before I flew down from the country, I looked at the back of my throat. Up behind the uvula. Something is—growing there." "Let's take a squint." Tom was calm. He hadn't spent his forenoon staring from an airplane window at the landscapes of New York and New Jersey, but seeing only a reflection in a bathroom mirror. A reflection of his face, yawning unpleasantly in the lavender fluorescence, the vertical tubes of light, and there, on his throat's arch, a foreign tissue like a clot of paint scraped from a bright palette. He had merely shaved, as the rest of us had shaved on thousands of mornings, thinking of this and that. Now he switched on a light, tilted the circular reflector above his forehead and removed his gold spectacles. I yawned. He said, "Hunh." So I knew. We'd been friends, after all, for thirty-four years; by the inflection of a syllable, we could make lucid assertions. He thought—what I thought. "Phil," he said, "we better get a biopsy right away." "It's in a bad spot." His instruments gagged me for a minute or two, brought tears in my eyes, probed at revolted mucosae. "Yes, Phil. And there's a lot of it. You didn't notice—anything—?" "Earlier? Nope. This morning. I was flying down anyhow. I have a serial to correct." "Of course," Tom said, "I'm not sure. It could be one of those rank lymphoid things. Radium blots them out. X-ray. Radioactive cobalt, these days, perhaps. But—" But. We looked at each other for a while. He said a kind thing: "We're both—forty-six." He meant that we shared the hazards of time together. He also intended to start me thinking of all I had been and done, seen and known, felt and expressed, in four and a half decades of life. His clock ticked. His phone rang. The receiver brought to my age-dulled ears the emery of a woman's voice. And Tom, with the cultivated patience that masks a physician's irritation, told her to take the "pink medicine" every two hours instead of every four. The elixir alurate, I thought. That brickbat on the safety valve of America: barbital. I would soon be on morphine myself.... "How long?" I asked, when Tom hung up. His pale eyes peered affectionately from behind his spectacles. I felt sorry for him. "Let's get that biopsy, first." "No fooling, Tom. You're nine-tenths convinced. The learned goons in your profession have told me my number was up, several times, before this. Sooner or later, one of you is bound to be right. And I don't feel lucky today. How long?" He picked up a letter he had dictated, read it, and put it in a tray. He straightened his prescription pad so it was square with the tooled leather corner of his desk blotter. He glanced at the photograph of Aileen, his wife, Joy and Lee, his daughters. "If it's malignant—it's where you can't operate." "How long will I be—able to write?" "Month. Two. Three. Maybe more. No way to tell." "Radiation—won't slow it down?" "Can't use strong doses that near your brain, Phil." He grasped his telephone again. He told his nurse to arrange the biopsy. Immediately. He wrote an address. "I'm busy tonight," he told me. "Can't get out of it. What about tomorrow—for dinner?" I said, "Swell. When will I have the report?" "Monday." "Be quite a long weekend." He commenced writing a prescription. I had told him how well he seemed, when the nurse had ushered me in. He didn't seem well any more. The vestige of his White Mountain tan was saffron. In fifteen minutes, circles had come under his eyes. He handed me two little rectangles of paper. "No—pain?" "Not yet." It was a cruelty. He flinched minutely. "That's for pb. Quarters. If you spook yourself up. And sodium amytal. Grain and a half. Sleep. You can take the whole bottle, if you want to. Then the biopsy will surely be negative and you'll have thrown away your other six lives." He put his arm around my shoulder. "See you tomorrow—at your hotel—around seven." I walked through the patients—through people who had nothing more serious than hypertension, or gastric ulcer, or diabetes. Or perhaps they did have fatal afflictions, though. Cancer, for example. You couldn't say what they had—sitting there, tremulously thumbing the magazines. They looked at me. They looked at the fat girl who rose because her turn was next. I lit a cigarette when I got outdoors. Coal tar, I thought. Too late not to light a cigarette. I stepped down in the gutter—in gum wrappers, glittering bits of cellophane, the blanched drift of horse manure, a swatch of blue cloth, a letter that had been rained on, fresh Pekinese sign, and a little dry mud. All around me midday, midtown Manhattan soaked up August in its brick pores, its limestone pores—flashed back August from glass, from polished granite, and from all its million metal fixtures. The sky was bluely vague. An air-liner shoved up through it from La Guardia—a grinding abnormality. I hailed a cab. For the ordeal of biopsy, whatever it might be, I summoned my meager contempt. A long experience of surgery is a poor indoctrination for each new need of it. Ringed about with sadists in white suits, with sterile techniques, with inquisitional steel, I have been too often the Exposed Nerve. I do not hope much, any more—and only defy so long as I am able. This artificial pose, garnished with calm and with smiling, is what some men call courage, and others dignity, but no man in his right mind evokes without cost: we are the hateful survivors of our sciences. It was a little thing. A needle's prick in an alabastrine clinic. A numb diddling above the tonsil. Some blood to spit out. The one sharp experience was the slight widening of the surgeon's eyes when first he saw my throat. Go on, I thought. Tell me that the cure of cancer depends upon its early recognition! Ask me if I haven't read the advertisements of the Society! And ask yourself, you smooth-faced blue-eyed son-of-a-bitch, if you have checked the area behind your own uvula lately! What I said was, "Just noticed it today." I came, I meant, as soon as I could. I wasn't a dumbbell. I didn't let that gob grow inside my neck, week after week, in secret fear. I did what you told me to do. He said, "Well, well," and injected me and clipped off a hunk and told me to come back on Monday at twelve o'clock. I went onto the street again. It wasn't bothering me any. Nobody could catch it from me. Another cab slid to a stop on another pile of metropolitan offal. I got in. The radio was talking about Babe Ruth, who had recently died of throat cancer. And metastases. I thought of telling the driver to turn off the lush woe. Life's ironies amuse cynical people—who are, after all, sentimentalists, for only sentimental people would bother themselves to beget so foolish a self-defense as cynicism. "Terrible loss," the driver said, waiting for the Madison Avenue light. I chose this better opportunity. "Loss, hell! A baseball player. A tough guy. Somebody with trick reflexes who could bat a ball farther than anybody else, oftener. And the whole damned United States gets choked up and goes into mourning. Double-page spreads in the newspapers. When a really great man dies, he's lucky to get one snapshot and a column." I looked quickly at his framed license. Saul Kaufman. "Will the American people go on a morbid spree when Einstein dies?" I asked. It got him. He glanced back appreciatively. "You said it!" If his name had been Angelo Utrillo, I would have suggested Fermi. He wouldn't have known who Fermi was, but my explanation would have filled him with pride. And if it had been Michael Riority, I would have tried De Valera. "Babe Ruth," I repeated when I paid my fare. "Did the Mirror and the News give Freud a double-page spread? The greatest mind in the twentieth century. Greatest Jew since Jesus. We should be proud to live in the same age. But what are we proud of? Babe Ruth. Baseball's okay—but the way people act about it certainly shows what's wrong with people." "You're right, Mac." I tipped him a quarter. Money wasn't going to be useful to me much longer. Then I felt sick. The money I possessed—the insurance—the money that might come from my books and perhaps from the posthumous sale of a few stories to the movies—would be all there was for my wife daughter my wife's mother and some others. I had two rooms—a bedroom and parlor. Sleep and reading in bed were thus kept separate from work, from the two hundred and eighteen pages of my serial which had to be cut sheet by sheet, line by line, to fit the precise requirements of a weekly magazine. This small suite was on the sixteenth floor. Here, the street sounds became boogie-woogie—set to rhythm by bouncing back and forth between the walls of Madison Avenue. Here the smell of the city was less toxic. And here the eye ranged over rooftops. My draperies, flowered and lined with sateen, moved now against the dark-green embrasures of the window—not in a breeze but in the upward eddy of diurnal heat. The yellow roses with which the management had greeted me dangled in their vase. I wondered whether to cut their stems or throw them out. If Ricky, my wife, had accompanied me, there would have been two dozen roses—and she would have known about the stems. I propped open the door to the hall with a book. Air sucked through the crack. In a big mirror, over the mantel, over the chunks of topaz glass that represented coals in the artificial fireplace, I could see myself. Strained and pallid, sweat showing at the armpits of my dark-blue gabardine jacket. I took it off. My shirt was wet. I took that off. The man in the mirror was naked from the waist up. A man with a little fold of belly showing over his belt. A man whose back, when he turned, was well muscled at the shoulders and ridged with parallel sinews that made a valley of the spine. A man whose strength had come through effort and application, rather late. A man who stepped closer to the mirror and opened his mouth to study, inside it, a small, fresh wound. He sat down on the divan, presently, and took a cigarette from the coffee table. Lighted it. Reached for the telephone. And identified with himself again. I wanted to call Ricky—in the country. To call her from the vegetable garden, where she might be weeding, or from the rock garden, when she might be replanting the daffodil bulbs, to call her from a book, or from washing the cocker pups, or from painting shelves, or from anything that she was doing. I wanted, with overwhelming urgency to tell her to come down to New York and share this weekend. Carry it with me and for me. She would. She has the grit and the amenability to Nature. Besides, she knows me. But I sat there, my fingers growing slippery on the phone. If it proved to be harmless—then the consummate hours, the pain, the anxiety, and the quiet planning would be a mere excess. If it proved malignant—what purpose would be served by destroying her tranquillity, by adding her dread to my own, until the hour when the fact was established? She would willingly, wantingly, accept the burden—to ease my share of it. But why should she? Monday would be soon enough—win, lose, or get some cursed clinical draw. Radiation. Surgery. Artificial larynx. Gueules cassÉes, I thought. I'd seen friends. Getting their throats cut inchmeal. Burping to make speech. Shedding their chins. The hell with it! I called the bookstore, instead, and ordered a tome on carcinoma of the throat. I put the phone back on the table. Clean shirt. The jacket of a ribbed, cotton suit, blue and white. I hadn't sweated through my trousers—yet. They'd do as slacks. I rang for the elevator. 2 One of the two restaurants in the Astolat Hotel, where we stay whenever we are in New York, is called the Knight's Bar. It has been extended and refurbished recently. King Arthur's retinue, armed, armored, gaudily caparisoned, and mounted on some of the most unlikely steeds in mural art, charge, joust and canter on the walls. The place has indirect lighting, banquettes and chairs upholstered in red leather, and air conditioning. The food is excellent. A pre-chilled atmosphere enveloped me when I came in and I felt it without gratitude. I like hot weather. Jay, the headwaiter, saw me, glanced about at the tables—which were by now less than a third occupied—and beckoned me toward a place near the bar with a definitiveness unwarranted by the wide choice. I wondered why as I came forward—obediently, and hardly aware of the trifling inquiry in my mind. Then I saw, around to the right, a pretty girl, sitting alone, reading a book. On each side of her were empty tables. Did Jay, out of subconscious loyalty to my wife, intend to rush me past this pitfall? Or had the girl asked for solitude? She wasn't one of the Knight's Bar regulars—or one of the hotel residents. I knew all of them, at least by sight. Ordinarily, I would have meekly followed Jay to the table he had selected. But now I thought—why should I? Rather, I thought, there is very little time left for me on this earth. Why shouldn't I use it as I please? So I nodded at a table beside the girl. She would be something to look at besides my thoughts. Jay is an American. But what he did now was European. He smiled slightly in understanding; he raised his eyebrows minutely in coappreciation of the young lady's good looks; and he shrugged one shoulder—in patient recognition of the fact that a male is a male and the firmest marriage vows are warrants of mere intent. I grinned back—and sat on the bench beside the young lady as soon as Jay pulled out the table. She looked at me—turning her head slowly—and afterward went on reading her book. Her eyes were gray, stained with some unguessable, dark residue of emotion. Her hair was pale blonde, not quite ashen—parted in the middle and clipped at the back like a schoolgirl's—with a wide gold barrette. She had small, smooth hands. She wore a square engagement ring and a wedding ring set with many diamonds. From time to time, too, she sipped a Martini. Her dress was a gray and white print—not fancy but fitted by somebody who knew the tricks. Bonwit's, maybe, or Bergdorf's. Her shoulders were fairly broad, for a girl's. But she had large, firm breasts—or the synthetic equivalent thereof. I noticed, too, that the perfume she used was not right for her appearance—though perhaps it suited the self-estimate of her soul. It was one of the musky varieties—animal, nocturnal, full of erotic business. In a restaurant where you have enjoyed a thousand meals, you look desultorily at the menu because, as a rule, you know what you are going to order. I took the fried sole, a boiled, parsley potato, and apple sauce. Then, for a while, I forgot the girl. I must plan, I thought. First, the money. Fifty thousand dollars' worth of insurance. Several thousand dollars in war bonds. I had about ten thousand in the bank. Ricky had a few thousand. We owed a steep mortgage on the house we were building in Florida—in the country south of Miami, among live oaks and cabbage palms. It would be too big a home for Ricky and her mother and Karen, by themselves. Too big—and too expensive to keep up, without my income. They could sell it as soon as it was finished, and undoubtedly make a small profit. Or they could rent it each year for a much larger sum than the interest, amortization and upkeep—thus bringing to my estate an income of one or two annual thousands. I would be paid twenty-four thousand dollars for the serial upstairs, when I had cut it. Unfortunately, half of that would be turned over to the government, as income tax. Most of the balance was ear-marked for furniture which Ricky now might or might not buy. I thought about the tax.... Business is the lone God of our Congress. Let a man open a pie factory or begin to mold cement blocks and he becomes Privileged. His property is taxed as a sacred, eternal entity. His costs are deductible. Only the profit he pockets is thought of by our Congress as income; his every barrel of flour or bag of cement is capital. But let a man create books or serials in his head and Congress sees him as a social inferior, a mere wage earner. The accumulation of intellectual property for a book may require three-quarters of a life. Its sale, for a year or two, may be considerable. After that one book—or after two or three—an author may return to pittances. What he has written may become the mental and emotional capital of his countrymen, or of the world, for generations. Yet Congress does not deem it equal to pies or bricks and sometimes skims away in a year the whole capital of an author—as if it were but annual income. America bounteously provides for the makers of bricks and pies; it short-changes book-makers and the winners of Nobel Prizes. Indeed, such is the unconscious hostility of the mob toward the fruits of intelligence that, not long ago, a group of representatives, commercial he-whores and contumelious morons, endeavored to do away with copyright altogether on the grounds that what a man thought and wrote down, or what he felt and painted, belonged free of charge to the whole people: noneconomic, since it was Art. To such men as these, only junk fabricators, gadgeteers, tram operators, pop bottlers and the like are entitled to the best profit for their contribution to life. History will note the fact when history writes how American avarice held in open contempt all culture and all thought, decerebrated itself and so died headless. As a man about to perish I could not but think bitterly of this. Had my labors, my work, my business, my investment of skill and thought and sweat been deemed equivalent, by my government, to the activities of a manufacturer of flea powder, I could have left the people I loved far better off. A relative complaint, under the circumstances and in my case. But when I thought of the "successful" writers I knew who had been taxed into poverty for their genius, and when I thought of the potbellied yuts I'd met who turned up fortunes in sewer pipes, cemetery lots and toilet paper, my sentiments toward the people and their politicians were rude.... They would get along—Karen and Ricky and Ricky's mother and those who would now depend on them. My death might even accelerate the sale of my books for a while. There might be movie sales. Plays. Posthumous editions. Anthologies. If I had led Ricky to be careless and extravagant, she would nonetheless be capable, under necessity, of good management. The hundred-year-old house in the country would continue to fend off the winters and to doze through the summers in its great lawns. Karen would attend Swarthmore. If Ricky wished, she could work again; she was well enough now. Marry again. The thought jarred and I considered that sensation. Marry? Of course she would. She should. What is wickeder than inhibiting sentiment, than memory turned prison? I am not a jealous man and even my envies are of an obscure sort. The momentary shock came from the fact that, never before, had I thought of Ricky as married to another man. Romantic about another man—perhaps. (Hadn't I said, in fun and also meaning it, that if, in our seventies, she were to swear she had been faithful, I would regard it as sad? No man desires a wanton for a wife. But a great many men love their wives in such a fashion as to consider them people—human, curious, imaginative, subject to sensations of staleness, capable of discretion, and not intended to be—through every hour of all that is a life—belled, balled and chained, hobbled and kept like cattle. An academic point—now. We might never see those seventies—note the envisaged smiles—or hear the candlelit confidence.) She would marry again. Karen would marry. The bonds I'd bought, the real estate, the insurance I'd purchased down the years—flush or borrowing—would provide a measure of security. Come war? Come vast inflation? Costly sickness? There is no security on our planet. There is no way, by money, wills, investments, legal instruments, or other means, to carry even the smallest wish or the most minimal responsibility beyond crematory and urn. Such is the aching truth—the irony we try to avoid. No one understands it better than I—but I had done what I could to avoid it, too. Done it—in spite of a national tax philosophy that evaluates authorship as a meaner trade than pawnbroking. In all America are only five thousand of us who make our whole livelihood by writing, anyway. To Congress—a scattered, inconsequential number—vote-voiceless and therefore impotent. It is a figure—five thousand in one hundred and fifty millions—which the aspiring writer should bear in mind. And some are communists, or leftists, besides—which, in the miserable eyes of Congress these days, no doubt makes our whole profession suspect. Freedom is sick. Freedom is dying. Why not? Everything is sick and doomed. Including me—now, I thought jeeringly. My plate came—the toast-brown fish, the green-speckled potato, a salad I hadn't ordered, tartar sauce in a dish, and the applesauce in another. I pushed Congress out of my mind. More accurately, the girl did. She cleared her throat. A little sound, with faint annoyance clinging to it. I had been sitting there, smoking two cigarettes, oblivious to her for ten minutes. She must have assumed that I had chosen to sit beside her because she was attractive—which was true. But now, owing to the absence of sidewise glances, of self-conscious bread-buttering, of any aura of awareness, she had irritatedly cleared her throat. If I had spoken to her forthwith she would, perhaps, have made a short, polite, but discouraging reply. Since, however, I had broken off even the peripheral touching of consciousness, she coughed vexedly, exploringly. So I glanced at her book. I had already noticed the jacket. It was Ape and Essence by Aldous Huxley. She had been reading with a slight frown. But now I saw that the jacket did not fit the book, which was thicker than Mr. Huxley's post-atomic predictions. The jacket, then, was camouflage—for a larger book with maroon binding. What sort of reading, I wondered, would a glamorous young woman hide behind Aldous Huxley? And, abruptly, I knew: the Kinsey Report. I leaned back and verified it. This amused me. The people of Miami Beach, where I had lived in the winter, and the people of New York, whom I had encountered in the spring, had been busy for both seasons with Dr. Kinsey's refreshing work. It was, at least, refreshing to me.... I am interested in psychology. For a quarter of a century I have known, by way of Freud, Krafft-Ebing, Stekel, Ellis, and many others, the same facts, in comparable orders of magnitude as those which Dr. Kinsey elicited by his scientific cross-questioning of cross sections. My own experience of life, taken with the confidences of my associates, has merely confirmed what others have noted. I have published such data in my books, years before Kinsey. And all that time I have reflected with a hooting pique upon the unconquerable illusions of Americans. What I have long known to be true, and often written down, they have refused to consider as real. Until the first of the Kinsey Reports, all erotic activity except that mechanical minimum permitted by state legislatures has been regarded, even by most enlightened citizens, either as an accident carefully hidden in their own lives, or else as the perverted behavior of persons who, eventually, would land on the couches of psychiatrists—if not in prison. It is the most depraved truth about us. Kinsey—with the august reputation of Rockefeller money to give his findings the one sort of credibility acceptable to Americans—had accomplished what hundreds of psychologists and scores of writers like myself had been unable to do: he had convinced multitudes that the sexual behavior of people is mammalian in every respect. He had shown, where we had failed, that erotic activity of some sort is universal, that the earlier and more vigorously such activities are commenced, the more potent and sexually capable its practitioners become—that use, not restraint (as the "pure" have decreed), develops the nerves, capillaries and muscles of the sexual organs precisely as it does those of other organs and that what we call sins and perversions are as ubiquitous as what we call normal sex acts. He had made an ass of the law and a fool of the church and held up an odious society in such a light that its heathen taboos and wholehearted hypocrisies were at long last more visible than the foul rags covering them. I had seen, that winter, numbers of men relieved (and not always bothering to hide the fact) by the realization that some homosexual experience in their past was not a blot upon their lives without precedent or parallel. And I had seen other numbers of men—older men—stare back at the bereavement of their youth, hating themselves for that which barbaric fear (translated as noble character) had prevented them from doing, knowing, sensing, or enjoying. Often, these had turned their irreversible disappointment into a mockery of Kinsey, thus exposing the near-vacuum in which they had endured their decades—without being aware of the exposure. Americans are not mature enough, intelligent enough, discerning or well enough educated to learn from psychology; but it is evident they are, in many cases, of an adequate spiritual development to learn from a Rockefeller-endorsed zoologist. It didn't matter to me where the facts came from—so long as people began to perceive they were facts—facts that made a far truer picture of man and sex than all the utterances of priests, preachers, legislators, and other sick-minded slobs put together. We behave sexually like other mammals—apes, horses, dogs. Centuries of suppression alter us not a jot. It is a sterling proof that instinct, not vanity-calling-itself-reason, is our guide. It is the hardest blow yet struck against the bishops. In our time, they and their sickly minions will prevail. But after us, and them, some decent men may rise in the debris and put to a proper use what we all know and nearly all deny.... She was reading the Kinsey Report. "What for?" I asked. The question startled her, although the introduction itself did not. She was obliged to feign a social surprise. Her inward gray eyes met mine and moved away. She drew part of an annoyed breath. She shut the book. She made up her mind to say, "I beg your pardon. Were you speaking to me?" She had a musical voice, pitched low but not husky. "I wondered why you were reading the Kinsey Report so avidly—and my curiosity started talking. I usually do ask people things, when I want to know. It's discourteous. But sometimes they tell me." That made her smile a little. "You might be asking quite a question." "Any question is quite a question. If I merely asked you how to get to Fifth Avenue, you would be telling me, in answering, where to take my life. I might be run over, doing it. I might get into a street fight. Or meet a blonde. If I asked you why you've been crying so much—that would be quite a question, too. If I were a woman, I might ask, simply—what you wore under what, and where you bought it. The answer to that one would describe dozens of your attitudes toward dozens of important matters." She didn't say anything. If she nodded, it was the smallest of her nods. She twirled her cocktail glass, sipped the last of the amber drink, and returned to her reading. She wanted me to know that she didn't flirt. I expressed my apperception by ordering lemon pie, which I didn't want, and coffee, which I did—and further, by leaving my table and the restaurant while my place was being cleared and my dessert brought. I went across the hot street to the newsstand and bought Time magazine—which I used to read for information and read now to keep abreast of the Biases—and the Telegram. When I came back to the bar I found the girl had also ordered coffee—and brandy. That settled it. "My name," I said immediately, "is Philip Wylie. I'm a writer. The waiters will vouch for me. I live here." The strain left her eyes and they widened slightly. "I've read lots of things you've written! For heaven's sake!" Most Americans who get around have read lots of the things I've written. This is a great instant advantage—though often a present handicap—in picking up strangers. They are at first agreeably surprised; but they generally expect writers to "be like" the characters in their books—from God alone knows what an abysmal lack of imagination—and are therefore eventually disappointed. Since I said nothing, she went on, "You're the author who hates women!" There was shine in her eyes, then—challenge—amusement. Spite, too. "Only moms," I answered. "And not 'hate'—deplore." "And Cinderellas, too!" "Oh, yes. I'd forgotten the Cinderellas. I deplore them, also." "Maybe I'm one." "A superior specimen—if true." I am semigallant. "What made you hate women so violently? Did your mother beat you? And why do you blame everything that goes wrong on women?" Two hard lines showed the muscles around her teeth. "Don't you realize that for everything you've written against women—you could say the same—and a hundred times as much—against men?" "Lookie," I said. "Many years ago, when I was younger and foolish, I wrote a book about a few of the more conspicuous and lethal flaws in our fair nation. The book was some three hundred and seventy pages long. I devoted all but about twenty pages to the calamitous follies of males. Men, as you call them. But I did, for some twenty pages of light blast, violate the ironclad altar of femininity and point out mom's big mouth and little brain, her puffed crop and shaky pins. A few things. I hardly thought I had loaded the dice—inasmuch as half the people are female and I gave females only about a fifteenth of my slightly caustic attention. But ever since that book came out, almost every woman I've met has accused me of outrageously laying the blame for a manifestly hell-bound society on females. In the first place, this is not true. In the second place, such statements—the hundreds I've collected—tend to show that American women positively refuse to take any blame for anything whatever. They have no conscience and no sense of responsibility. They believe themselves to be as spotless as United States senators say they are, in campaign orations. They lack the capacity for admitting guilt. They are nearly all—I have thus found—psychologically far, far, far more destitute than I claimed only certain kinds of them to be." She laughed. "You're still mad! Someday you'll break down and write a wonderful novel about the woman who really poisoned you against them all." "I'll break down," I agreed. "But I'll never write the novel! One reason is—there's no such novel. Women have always been good to me—with a few exceptions I can tolerate. Women have made love to me and they have been generous with me, and taught me, and they have been sensitive toward me. My daughter—who is sixteen—adores me. My first wife tried every combination she could think of to make me happy—and put up with me for ten years, when I was a drunkard. My second wife has gone even further. Past ten years—for one thing. And I quit drinking altogether, after we'd been married for a while. I—to repeat the most readily understandable expression—adore her. And I adore my daughter. I adore women, as a matter of fact. Such vexation as I have shown represented an aspect of that reverence: a good many women are fundamentally disappointing to anybody who cares much for women. And I resent the general damage such women do. A man"—I looked at her as loftily as I could—"has a curious faculty for resenting human sabotage even when he is not, himself, directly involved in the matter. A woman, as a rule, sees harm in the ruinous excursion of a nitwit only if she sees it as a real or potential menace to herself, loved ones, and assigns. It is a comfortingly personal outlook toward which I am hotly antipathetic." "You talk like your books," she said. "Why not? I wrote the damned things!" She poured her brandy into her coffee and drank a little. "Men," I went on, "in this century, are deeply imbued with just that personal, feminine attitude. They refuse to meddle with evils that do not immediately threaten them. They have sold out their duty toward the whole species, for local, temporal advantages. They no longer live lives but merely cadge existences. If a guy is successful and well fixed, the ordinary American does not and cannot see that he has the reason or the right—let alone the need!—to take a dim view of anything on earth." I picked up my copy of Time magazine and waved it at her. "Whenever one of my morally indignant volumes appears, this self-righteous periodical, for instance, usually begins its reviews by saying that I own a palatial residence in Florida, earn big money writing commendable hack stories for the magazines, fish all the time, and yet—blackguard!—I have the gall to gripe! The inference is that I am a lunatic. Indeed, it has become more than an inference. This carburetor of the news called my latest effort a 'whiff into midnight.' Who is nearer the witching hour—the well-heeled gent who still sees imperfections in the planet and says so or the editor who unconsciously imagines that prosperity and criticism are incongruent? That is the Ivy League philosophy—suitable to cover the ruins it soon will bring about." "You're mad at Clare Luce," the girl said. "There you go! Personal again! See here, ma'am. A man can get as intense feelings from statistical tables as a woman can from Sinatra's brow wave. Vital statistics give them to me. I had such sensations when, after the publication of the Smythe Report, I pensively ran over the Periodic Table. Many other charts and graphs deeply affect me. I hardly know Clare Luce. I had cocktails with her once—though. Very attractive. Very—not bright—ardent. That's the important thing in women, too. We disagreed about everything we discussed. But a woman who enters the field of ideas is obliged, naturally, to follow some man or men. Women have never left any ideas around for men or women to follow. Clare said she follows Monseigneur Fulton Sheen—another glitteringly ardent soul. I'm not mad at Clare Luce. In my situation I find it impossible to be mad at anybody on earth. And it was generally difficult for me, even before now." "What's happened that made you change?" "God has sent for me," I said sarcastically. "You mean—you've been converted?" "If I am ever converted—in the common sense—it will be the hard way: posthumously and in the Presence. No. The change in me, what little I have so far discovered, probably comes from atrophy. The peace and mellowness that men mistake for wisdom—that is in fact the result of calcium deposits, excess urea in the cells, and so on." "You're forty!" "And you're twenty—instead of twenty-six." "You don't look it." "You do. And as you well know, it's a damn good age for a woman to look." She thought awhile. "You meet a lot of woman." "I meet a few." "Famous ones, I mean. What's your wife like? Blonde? Brunette?" "You know a movie actress named Maureen O'Sullivan?" She nodded. "Ricky—my wife—gets mistaken for her. We go into night clubs and sometimes they give us a swell table and people begin asking each other who the hell I am—thinking they've identified Ricky." "She's sweet—Miss O'Sullivan." "Ricky is, too." "Who's the most beautiful one you ever met?" "The most beautiful one—I never met. Hedy Lamarr." "You could, though. Celebrities can meet each other." "I'm only about a Class D celebrity." "Suppose—?" She eyed me speculatively. "Suppose some glamorous dame and you met. Suppose you got a yen for her? What would you do?" "God knows." "I'm serious. After all, you've written enough articles and books and stories about it. Do you mean what you say? Or are you just trying to be sensational?" "Would I, in other words, after meeting the gorgeous Miss or Mrs. So-and-so, invite her to take a long drive in the country—or to picnic on a beach—to look at etchings? Would I, personally? I might. Sure." "What would Mrs. Wylie say?" The gray eyes were troubled—perhaps afraid. "Maybe nothing. She would never hear of it. Does marriage have to end privacy entirely—every hour of it in a life? If she did hear—she might still say nothing. She might laugh at me. She might be hurt. She might be angry. It would depend on her mood at the moment." "Her mood just at the moment!" "Sure." "Isn't that—pretty"—she sought a term—"unstable?" "Extremely stable. It would show that she regarded what we have been led to call infidelity a matter of so superficial a nature as to be colored by a superficial mood. This, in turn, would indicate that her more profound attitude toward me—and my feelings for her—was unshaken. Stable, as you would say. If, on the other hand, I knew she would have only one, single conceivable reaction—whether noncommittal or aggrieved—I could be certain that her feelings for me, and her deepest sense of my feelings, had become absolutist, rigid, probably dominating and demanding, certainly doctrinaire. I could deduce that she was in a most unstable situation—since people resort to the projection of absolutes on other people only when they are torn by uncertainty of themselves. Notice this in religions. The absolutes are defined to a hair—with different sorts of steeples, doorways, fonts and crucifixes marking infinitesimal splits over dogma—but with no commensurate variation in the effect on human conduct whatever. Is a Baptist nobler than a Methodist? Kinder? Wiser? No. So the different absolutes of both, seen detachedly, represent nothing more than the uncertainty, instability, self-doubt, inconfidence, distrust, and lack of magnanimity of both. Their passion to lay down the law, taken with the minuscule variants that ensue, is proof that Christians have no stability whatever. Sex follows the same rule—and so does everything else." "I would have been furious, though." She referred, still, to my hypothetical infidelity. And her reference was interesting. Without thinking, she had used the past perfect subjunctive. If, that is to say, her husband—the apparent supplier of the opulent rings—had trifled with a strange brunette at some lodge convention, this young lady's reaction would have been fury. It apparently would not be, now. The assured presumption was, therefore, a rift between herself and her spouse. Coupled with her way of drinking cocktails while eating a sandwich, the brandy in her coffee, her reading matter, and, particularly, the blur of suffering I had seen in her eyes, this presumption led to further inference: the rift was recent and she was in flight from it, while yet attempting to understand its causes. She was, that is to say, no habitual Martini drinker; these do not mix their cocktails with their viands. She was reading Kinsey not from the starved cupidity of hundreds of thousands of other women (for if she had been even that uninhibited she would have read it sooner) but in the effort to discover something. She was drinking not to drown her sorrow but to take away its edge: she had mixed her latest drink with the antidote of coffee. And, inasmuch as I had never seen her with her husband at the Astolat, it was a good guess, at least, that she was here as part of an act of abandonment rather than as a result of being abandoned by him. Her accent was vaguely eastern—but eastern rubbed against, and somewhat eradicated by, the flatter tones of the West. Like numberless other such women, she had fled to New York for refuge—and from a considerable distance. Texas, perhaps, or Arizona. And probably she had lived in Manhattan before now: the Knight's Bar was unknown to tourists—with the exception of Europeans visiting America. "You would have been furious," I finally said. "Think that over. Here we are, engaged in a favorite national pastime—imagining flirtations with handsome persons in the public eye. I often reflect that picture stars—male and female—are lucky to have so little imagination, on the average. If you can kill a person by sticking pins into a statue of him—which you cannot, unless he believes it—think of the possible result on a star of the lurid, lewd fantasies poured upon his photographs, or hers, by millions and millions of people. Grant any validity in the pin-sticking process and you have, in the photo-doting parallel, a curious possible explanation of what the press knows as Hollywood high jinks. Psychogenic. The effect, on the poor individual, of mass assault, mob lechery. But skip all that. The point I want to make is this: some ladies we have hypothesized are married. You can see yourself as enraged, if any husband of yours had his head turned—to continue the euphemisms—by one such. But it does not seem to occur to you that any possible husbands of the ladies also might feel themselves involved in the matter—and even experience traces of pain?" "Men!" she said. "Why should anyone care what they feel?" "O-h-h-h, because they're so plentiful." She smiled a little—and poured plain coffee. "You haven't asked me my name." "Naturally." "Naturally?" "You've been wondering when I would. In such a case, the obvious thing to do is to let a girl go on wondering. Besides—my inquisitiveness is never casual. It might be a convenience to know your name. But very little else. A clue, maybe, to the good taste of your parents—or lack of it—and to the national strain of your husband's paternal line." "It's Yvonne Prentiss." "See what I mean? A handy—but otherwise irrelevant fact." She laughed. "Do you live here?" "I'm staying here—on the sixteenth floor. For a few days." "I am, too." "You got mad at Mr. Prentiss," I said then, "and fled from your sprawling mansion out in the golden West to the sidewalks of New York—familiar to you in your girlhood. Your problem was not 'other women'—so what was it? Neglect? Brutality? Obsession? Bestiality? Stamp collecting? What?" Her eyes filled with tears. Just then, Fred came by. He's a waiter I know pretty well. "Look, Fred," I said, "I've made her cry. Bring another brandy." She was struggling. "Shouldn't it be a beer?" "If you go on crying." "I really don't want another drink—" "Then bring her some ice cream." "—but I'll have one more." Fred nodded and went. "How did you know all that?" I told her. "It's Pasadena," she said. She shivered a little. So I talked. "Pasadena. How well I know it! Caltech, where people think the troubles of the world began. The peeling eucalyptus trees and the long shadows on the long sidewalk. Way back in the dear, dead beryllium days—" "I haven't the faintest idea what you mean!" "Dr. Einstein," I said, "walking around under his hair. Thinking so hard he never noticed the earthquake. It was the spring of nineteen-thirty-three. Perhaps I should explain that, in those days, when they wanted to split an atom, they generally used beryllium. A common element—half as heavy as aluminum and twice as strong—but difficult to recover. Poor Dr. E! Like all the reasonable men, seemingly he cannot perceive that what he thinks of as irrational is the force that governs human destiny! He assumes it's just a matter of enlightening the politicians. The deification of reason—the worship of common logic—cuts off human personality from natural truth exactly as idolatry destroys the faculty of rational analysis. And for the same reason. The intellectual paragon is as blind as any pagan—in the opposite direction. But we were talking about Pasadena—" "Vaguely," she said. "I'll be more explicit, then. I was working for Paramount in that blessed era when nothing upset the world worse than a depression. A curable malady—that. Anyhow, I had a producer who lived in Pasadena. A big, reddish house on one of those irrigated buttocks that grow out of the lower mountains. Completely surrounded by thornbushes—except for the entrance gate. The first time I went there was Sunday—a nine A.M. conference—and my producer's butler served highballs right away to myself and the other writers. I shall never forget it—or ever recall a word that we said there that day. I was an animal-horror man, at the time—" "A what?" "Animal-horror man. That's what the studio boss called me. In fact, he said I was pretty young to be an animal-horror man, the first time we met." She drank some of her brandy and then did a disturbing thing. She took her pale, wavy hair in both hands and bent it back up over her head so that the curly ends fell everywhere around her face. When she did it, she looked at me in a certain way. We were both supposed to understand the gesture perfectly—and not to notice it at all. Wild horses weren't supposed to be able to drag out of us an admission of what it meant. "Those were not only the beryllium days, but the days of animal pictures and horror pictures. Frank Buck and Osa Johnson and Tarzan. Frankenstein. Paramount was trying to combine the grisliest features of all of them. They were making Wells's Island of Dr. Moreau—for instance. And I was doing some of the writing. Hence I was an animal-horror man—and young for it, too. Precociously animalistic and horrible. Remember? Cobras fought mongooses? Tigers fought pythons and other unnatural antagonists? Zebus fought gnus? My producer wanted to throw a half dozen lions into a school of big sharks—and get some red-hot close shots of the fights that would then ensue. That—I stopped. Even we ogres draw the line somewhere—and I know a good deal about sharks. The lions, if you once got the sharks hitting them, would not be fighting, as my producer imagined, but dying by mouthfuls." "How awful!" "Pasadena, it was," I reminded her. "Another conference at that big house amongst the thorns. I know the place like a book. I know the spirit of the place. You lived there?" She stared at the room, empty now of all but waiters and two or three pairs of murmuring people. Full, however, of Musak. Light operettas. "Somehow it's easier to talk to strangers," she said, "than to people you've known all your life." "Of course!" I replied in sober agreement—although I thought the idea was rubbish. "And besides," she went on, immediately contradicting herself, "I've read your articles and books and I feel as if I knew you better than you knew yourself." Unlikely, I figured. But this was important to her, so I nodded. "Maybe you do—in some ways." She had shown a certain economy of speech—owing possibly to the fact that I had given her little opportunity to show anything else. But her biography was fairly terse: "I was born in Boston—and the family moved here when I was a baby. My dad graduated from Princeton in 1921. He's a very intelligent, strong-willed, wonderful guy. My mother's a chronic invalid—of her own making. I have one sister—older—and no brothers. I'm very fond of my sister—but I was always jealous of her when I was young. Dad tried to make her a substitute for a son—took her everywhere, taught her sports and games—and I wanted to be the one. She's married and lives in Chicago. I went to school in Westchester—Rosehall—and came out here. At a mass dÉbut. Dad's in real estate. After I came out, I fiddled around awhile—Junior League, and Red Cross, and Bar Harbor in the summers—and then I met Rol." She took a breath that quavered like a musical saw. "He's handsome. He has manners—buckets and barrels of manners. And money." She looked angrily at her rings. "I tried to make something out of him. To put ambition in him. I got him to work for dad—and he quit. He wanted to go to California because he likes flowers. My God, how he likes flowers! We had greenhouses full. He thought he could become a botanist—or hybridize something—and he dawdled away his time with paintbrushes and pollen. I persuaded him to go into real estate out there—and he made a lot more money—but he gave it up. He began collecting a library of old books on botany—and writing a history of botany—and I was bottled up in botany. It got so he would hardly even dress up. Or shave. Overalls all day. I'd want to go places and see people and do things—and we'd be home, instead, with some French professor, maybe, for dinner, complete with beard, accent, ribboned glasses, and knee-patting under the table. Half the time, these professors and Rol—for Roland—talked Latin. I flunked it, three straight semesters, myself. Well—I took to going out alone—and he didn't care. I even tried to make him jealous—and he positively seemed to approve. He told me I needed outside interests and that he was a dull fellow for me! I—" She bit her lip. "—love the guy." "Not now. I did. What finally happened was—" "Should I get that beer ready?" She shook her head. For a while she was silent. Then she touched the book. "I heard—I knew—I suppose I shouldn't even have been surprised—let alone driven out of my mind—but there's so much that's nice about him. Used to be, anyhow. Too nice—and that should have prepared me—" I got it, then. "Not—other women, Yvonne. Men, huh?" She shuddered. You don't see people shudder very often—in restaurants, anyway. She shuddered because that was how it made her feel. She couldn't help it. And when the spasm passed, her hands went on trembling—like glassware vibrating after a certain right note has been struck. "He hired an assistant—a young college graduate—that I liked, at first. Then—one day—I got so bored and lonely I went into the greenhouses, which I hated, looking for them. And I found them, all right." She began to cry again—and to talk through the tears. "It was only—two weeks ago. Rol was dreadfully upset. He promised—everything on earth he could think of. And I stayed a week more—but it was simply too awful. I finally bought tickets. I—I don't like living at home—mother's such a sobby mess all the time. I wanted to see dad—and of course he was about ready to go out and kill Rol. Somebody—somebody—" her voice sank—"told me that if I read the Kinsey Report I'd see that what happened to Rol happened to maybe a third of the men like Rol. I guess it does. What difference does that make?" Children, I thought. No. Not even children. Children is just what they weren't—just what they'd never been—or just what, if they'd ever been, they refused to let themselves remember. These angel-pusses, growing up everywhere in America, psychologically hamstrung or maybe wingstrung in their cribs. Turned into demons by their right-thinking, practical, realistic, common-sense, hard-headed fathers and mothers. Marrying, in no better condition for marriage than nuns and eunuchs. Phooie. I slid my wrist in my cuff. It was after three. "Yvonne," I said, "are you busy tonight?" "I was going to have dinner with dad—as usual. He bucks me up." "Maybe you could do with a substitute bucker-upper, for a change." "Dad told me I ought to go out—call up old friends—" "The hell with what dad told you. And I haven't asked you, yet. I'm fussy, myself. Can you dance?" She nodded. "Rumba?" "Rol was a swell dancer. And we used to have a teacher come to the house—in the days before he lost interest in—me." "Well, I'll pick you up, around eight. The valet keeps my dinner things here—so put on a long dress." "I don't need to be rescued, Mr. Wylie. It's sweet of you. But I'd detest to go out feeling as if I was the object of a missionary project." "Then think of yourself as a missionary to me. I have no date. And I am very uninterested in spending this particular evening alone." "Why?" "Because I'm a writer. I put my heart and brain and libido into the composition of gay, mad, happy stories. Then I have to pay for it—in compensatory funk. Nothing psychological is free. The illusion that it is amounts merely to a passing human fancy—about fifty thousand years old. Surely you're familiar with the fact that humorous authors are melancholy babies, in the flesh? Well, I just miss being a humorous author—so I just miss being a one hundred per cent sourball." "What are you going to do now?" "That's a very possessive question," I said, "in view of the shortness of our acquaintance. However, I am going to cut a serial from two hundred and eighteen pages to one hundred and seventy-eight pages." "Exactly?" "Well—within a few lines. And not just this afternoon. It takes days. My wife is up in the country. We were having the house repapered and repainted. Every time I found a quiet corner and started to cut bleeding syllables from my precious prose, some damned craftsman with a mustache like a character in Midsummer Night's Dream spilled paste on my back. So, finally, I scrammed down here. If my wife had known I would have to put in more days on the serial—she'd have postponed the rural clowns. But, not knowing, and with artisans so touchy about their schedules—" "Don't tell me!" she exclaimed. "We just had the house in Pasadena done over!" Her eyes faded. "For what?" She murked about inside herself briefly. "I'd like very much to go out with you—if you really want me to. On one condition." "I know." She turned quickly, unbelievingly. "You do not!" "Bet?" "Bet you flowers for me tonight." "Generous wager, I must say. Indecently feminine! Okay. Promise to admit it—if I have the right answer? No hedging?" "Promise." "You'll go out—on condition I won't make a pass at you." She flushed a faint peach color. "I thought you were going to guess I wanted to go Dutch." "I know you did." "How?" "I know how women think, as they term it." "You're right, though." I picked up her check and signed it and signed my own and signed the two sets of bar checks and gave Fred—who was loitering about in the background with overt patience—a sound tip. "Buy yourself," I said to her, "some dandy flowers. I like gardenias. I hate orchid-colored orchids. On second thought, if flowers remind you of Roland—" "He never grew them to wear—or for bouquets. Just to breed." "See you. And thanks for the indiscreet lunch." 3 It was, as they say, sweltering in my suite. Sweltering, like every term, is comparative and relative and also tentative. I like to swelter, as a rule. To work stripped and sweating, with a vasomotor system engaged in cooling me, rather than the opposite, which others prefer—a pumping system busy stoking the body against cold air. This—like most events and experiences—is more a matter of mental climate than physical. Such attitudes are self-taught, people-taught, or environment-taught. One's frontal lobes are liable—unless trained in every particular at autocriticism—to hypnotize the rest of the brain into compliance with the ego's demand. Suggestion rises at some spot in the throbbing cerebral tissues, or from without, and is snatched up by the cortex to be delivered back as ultimate gospel to the whole human establishment: great balance of the brain and all the instincts in it, spinal cord, nerves, organs and muscles. These, then, like a converted Christian, are compelled by one fallible new layer of the organism to adjust to the command. When the whole man cannot, the cortex founders in neurosis or psychosis. Usually, however, the adjustment, farfetched or absurd though it may be, is sufficient so that the mechanism goes on with at least a semblance of effectiveness. Its nutty operator is allowed to live; people aren't very critical—or even observant. Only in human aggregates is the effectiveness shown to be mere semblance. Men seen locally in time and space appear purposeful enough, reasonable, even charitable. Seen whole, they are clearly insane. And only one in a thousand sees that this collective madness is but the sum of little acts of hypnosis performed by his own cortex on his whole man. Thus, in trifling example, where you might have been sweltering, I was sweating without psychic trauma. You may have taught yourself, been taught, or may have decided from observation that ninety degrees is an insufferable temperature. I have concluded it is pleasant. My constitution is no different from yours. The concept of thin blood is mythical—mine, indeed, is probably "thicker" than yours, for it contains a very high number of red cells. But the opinion my cortex holds of hot weather permits the rest of me to function in a hot room without the added burden of psychic pain. Your synthetic dread of hot weather may send you rushing to the seaside, where you then spend the day in a sun temperature of a hundred and twenty-five. You burn your skin. Or you exhaust yourself getting to the top of a mountain—where the unfamiliar and unseasonable coolness sets you sneezing with a cold. I have observed that millions of people who are obliged to live in temperatures of ninety seem to do so with tranquillity and this is the message my cortex has delivered, not as gospel—not as the authority for a trance—but as submitted opinion. I have sent my brains the opposite message, in North Dakota, in the winter, with similarly good result. The latitudes of tolerance are immense. The uses people make of them are meager. They pant too much on hot days, shiver too much on cold. About God and science, sex and business, they have hypnotized themselves to the great benefit, they think, of that bright, running dot of conscious vanity called "I." Even asleep, they finally hear little but the repetition of their own opinion. It becomes the one voice on earth—God's, of course. The point here is—I liked the warm day. But liking is another poor, irrelevant expression. What did it matter, now, whether I liked, disliked, or snored with apathy? |
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