OPUS 21 (12 page)

The disavowing psychiatrists, opportunist weaselers or men who do not see that their science has set philosophy aside, will be historically remembered. Their acts will prove the shocking superstitiousness of the twentieth century and--in some cases--

represent the public persecutions, the subjective witchburnings, which show this era to be a continuum of the Dark Ages.

As I said earlier, a smug people cannot even find the motive for asking if a science of psychology exists, let alone what it has learned. And we Americans are probably the most self-satisfied people who ever appeared. The whole world starves, brawls, perishes around us. Our own philosophy of progress is leading us to swift, continental exhaustion--to the resourcelessness of our own progeny. Yet we believe we are doing right and thinking rightly--a great, good, wonderful, near-perfect nation.

It will take generations of disaster to crack the hull of such preposterous self-satisfaction. Only through despair and amidst ruins, in all likelihood, will men discover that humility which may lead to the honest assessment of man's vanities, his insane traditions, pompous faiths, patriotisms, and excesses. But there is not much use talking about it or trying to explain. Knowledge cannot fend where the people refuse to know.

"Did you ever raise dogs?" I asked Yvonne.

She had been quietly eating lobster bisque--glancing at me from time to time while I reflected and while I ate, too. She nodded. "Several."

"Then you've noticed that pups behave in every single way that would, in people, be called sinful, immoral, and perverse."

"That's the nastiest thing I ever heard in my life! How could animals be perverted!"

"Did I say they were? I merely said--or tried to--that dogs exhibit all the same curious activities your Professor Kinsey found abundant in human behavior."

"They do not!"

I grinned. "Perhaps yours didn't. Perhaps--whenever you saw in your pups a symptom of any sort of sex activity--you yelled at them. Pulled them apart. Swatted them with a switch--"

"I never used a thing but rolled newspapers!"

I laughed until she saw why. She flushed. I went on. "You imposed, by force, your sex manners--Episcopalian?--I thought so--on your dogs. If you left them alone--as I do mine--you'd see that pups are every bit as 'perverted' as people. Grown dogs, too, sometimes. So are wild animals. Put a bunch of male monkeys together--without females-

-"

"I detest monkeys!"

"They won't mind. Anyhow--segregate the males and they'll turn homosexual. My caustic acquaintance, Dr. Hooton, the anthropologist, has reported it. He says it is

'disgusting'--a curiously unscientific term. The monkeys weren't disgusted, after all. Just having fun, getting relief, being excited."

"What are you trying to prove now?"

I shrugged. "That mammalian sexual behavior has a pattern and men belong in it."

"What nonsense! Men know what they are doing! Animals don't!"

"Then why was Kinsey able to show that men do just exactly what the dogs and monkeys and all the other mammals do--in spite of church, law, state, parents, culture, schools, society, and every other restraint they can dream up, consciously?"

"Some men--maybe."

"All I have been trying to point out, Yvonne, is that people who don't know where they are in space-people as ignorant of simple, cultural fact as the average American college graduate--obviously cannot know anything much about their real sex natures, since these have been honestly examined only recently and only by a few men, and since sexual enlightenment is the great taboo in this era. To that I merely add that men do behave sexually like mammals, which has been shown, and mammals do not behave in any fashion resembling the sex mores of this age."

Her gray eyes were bitter. "You think, then, that it would be perfectly acceptable, if you felt like it, to attack me right here and right now?"

"Yvonne. Even if I didn't have vestiges of your Episcopalian superego, or its equivalent, and ideas of my own besides--all the other people here do have your attitude.

And I'm not a lunatic."

"You think, though"--her eyes went burningly around the room in search of effective illustration--"it would be perfectly all right for me to get a yen for the cashier, and show it, and let the cashier see it, too! Nobody should mind that--?"

She spoke with such emotion that I leaned forward to see why she'd selected the cashier. The cashier was a dark-haired girl, a pretty girl, leaning into the rays of a desk lamp to add up a dinner check.

I said, "Charming."

"You're an evil person."

"Did I pick out the cashier--or did you?"

She considered anger--and settled for laughter. "At least, you have one virtue. A person around you doesn't have to censor what he says."

"And the devil is shocked by virtue, too--is that right? How perfectly the closed mind bats them back! It must be marvelous never to be able to wonder what goes on outside your own head. The enviable situation of nearly everybody! And the everlasting chute-the-chutes to hell-an-earth. Here comes our next course, Miss Morals."

"Can I have pêches flambeau?" she asked, somewhat later.

' I'll join you."

"I thought you didn't drink?"

"I don't. A brandied bonbon? Peaches with the alcohol mostly burned away?

Sherry in the soup? I'm not absolutist. Yvonne--not stuck with it, quite. I don't accidentally swallow the port in my fruit cocktail and then go out and get roaring drunk--

excusing myself with the accident of the port. Maybe the sniff of alcohol will fold up the resolution of some reformed drunkards. My own problem--in that case--was different."

"What was it, then?"

"It's a long and sordid story that I am not going to tell you now."

"Do you really understand all these things you're talking about?"

I thought that one over. "Mostly," I said, "my mental activity relates to errors in the concepts of other people. Let's say--I've come to understand a good deal--by searching for blunder, by hunting for the sense of what brighter guys have learned. By relating them all."

"If God came in here now, what would you ask Him?"

It was quite a question and I looked at her with surprise. Her face saddened. "Rol said that to me, once. But what?"

What would I ask?

I realized, with a strange feeling, that I wouldn't ask anything. No questions. No further privileges. No favors. No additional enlightenment. That last impulse had stayed in my mind for a moment and I had then thought, if you want more enlightenment, the data is there, son. Enlighten yourself. Don't ask, when there's a chance of finding out on your own.

Superego?

Had my father told me that?

Or was that how I felt about life and the world?

I felt that way.

My father had his faith.

So it was not superego.

I would say hello to God.

What I did not know, what I knew that I did not express, others would learn, others would say.

There was a little instant of silence and remoteness around me as I underwent the experience that goes with such realization.

A calm.

The Crepuscule was a long way off-the sound and sight and smell of a dim restaurant.

The trio was playing "Ja-da," I finally realized.

Yvonne snapped her fingers in my face and laughed.

"If you must daydream, put me in the act."

"What part do you want?"

''I'm a woman," she said. "And, according to you, I can play only one part. I'll be the sins of your mind. Do your evil for you. Kiss the cashiers and encourage little children to undress each other. Throw stones at cathedral windows--"

"It's your life. And your sin-list. Go ahead."

"Your
list."

"You're sticking to
acts.
And mighty compulsive ones, too. All I've done is to give such matters subjective consideration."

"The thought is father to the deed."

"Then for God's sake be more attentive to what you think!"

"Jesuit!"

' I'm the nemesis of that whole philosophy."

"At least--you're sincere. I didn't believe so, when I read your books. I thought you were just fond of shocking people."

"I could never shock them a millionth part of the amount they've shocked me."

"But you did your best?"

I laughed at that. "Sometimes." A sad confession.

"Don't you love burning brandy?"

We watched the peaches flame.

2

I took her over to the Amigo.

They had a rumba band there that would give sloe-eyed fantasies to a Norseman.

And it wasn't crowded.

I haven't said--was it necessary?--that I intended to make Mrs. Prentiss eat one or two of those gardenias. That is, I proposed in my mind to bring her to the point of withdrawing the order that I was to behave toward her in all chaste chivalry. As to what I would do beyond that, I had no idea. It could not possibly be important if I followed up a moral (or immoral) victory with what would then be an ethical (or unethical) act.

Mrs. Prentiss was a remarkably handsome young woman. She was somewhat educated and she had a fair degree of intellectual sensitivity. In telling me she had not understood what I was saying she had implied a considerable degree of comprehension and a reluctance to deal with whatever it was that she had gathered from my words. She was "mostly" frigid (an intriguing expression) in many different ways.

In any sexual encounter she would undoubtedly barricade herself from biological design with common artifact--and half the Pharmacopoeia, besides. She was avid and did not know it. I could see--as the reader has seen with me, no doubt--that her domestic debacle was the result of a projection of her own guilt-sense. She was a nubile dancer.

But she used her dancing rather meanly--as a sly and enjoyable confession to herself which, she thought, was the most that society would permit of dancing. She was somewhat spoiled and very selfish--extremely prissy in the real, felt sense of the word: a bitch. Nobody, that is to say, existed for her excepting in that they existed for her desires.

She had moved to a room beside me. She had tried to lead me--at first--on the dance floor. She had thrust the eyes and lips of her psyche into the brunette cashier's hair without caring in the least for the brunette or for any woman or for what happened to others. She had attributed the libidinous gesture to my imagination, when I had brought it to light. She had failed to add anything but frustration to the life of a man about whom I had heard, so far, what I regarded as almost nothing but good.

She had bought her world and was willing to pay in cash to keep it the way she wanted it--but not willing to pay in a dime's worth of herself. She needed a lesson. For there were nice things about her.

The expression on her face when she talked about Rol was descriptive, to me, of many good qualities--of loyalty to emotions she did not understand, of untapped vehemences, of tenderness--of human characteristics she was unable to embody. She had been taught not to embody them--she had been taught such attributes were weaknesses--

or she had been taught nothing concerning them at all. Her greedy mother. The cocksure extravert--her father--a man who, even from her brief account, plainly believed he knew all there was worth knowing on all topics, one who had reached final conclusions about Everything. Reached them--or was able to jump to them by a process requiring neither thought nor the machinery for evaluation. Reached them or jumped to them because his opinions were peeled like decalcomania from Precedents set up by businessmen who have graduated from good universities.

I knew the type. Sometimes I feel there is hardly any other. Yvonne's dad--

successful real estate man--Ivy League--New Yorker--daughter-adored. He had no reason to doubt his excellence. He was rich, which proved it. He had graduated from a superior university, which guaranteed his intelligence, knowledge and culture. And his success had been achieved in a tough game in the biggest city on the earth. Moreover, he was, apparently, a churchman. Hence not only the tradition of America, as a whole, and the judgment of upper-class America, but God Himself, attested to his superiority. On top of all that, he was, no doubt, a good guy. A good guy who had loved his elder daughter a little more (how?) than Yvonne.

It was not remarkable that Yvonne exhibited the characteristics and the reactions she'd sketched for me--or those I'd witnessed. She had been packaged in the best fashion of the richest and most powerful culture of the twentieth century by people who knew and felt less of the significance of life than any other group which has arisen in the species during its past ten or twenty parasitical millenniums. In representing the highest peak of what is called civilization she presented the least sensitive arrangement of what is human.

A nice bitch, then, with a father complex.

When we began dancing, I was still fiddling in my mind with fragments of the dinner monologue. A couple of things should be said about it.

As the reader has perceived, it represented in its way a conscious effort at self-assessment. It was a partial statement of philosophy--my own--urged upon me at that time because, under my circumstances, some review of philosophy was inevitable. When the Ghoul appears, one thinks about one's thoughts.

For a while, we scarcely talked at all.

American women, as a rule, will rarely listen to a monologue by a man; when they do, it is usually because they want something from the man. Men have, generally, the better faculty for speech; in America they are not trained to use it. And they are, moreover, so accustomed to female authority in their formative years that they submit, all their lives, to the clamor of it. An aggregation of American people is thus conventionally dominated by the tongues of women and sounds like the continuous breaking of dishes.

Yvonne had listened through part of a lunch and all of a dinner and now we set our communication in a more definite language--one that followed the tempo of maracas and made use of the whole body.

"Rol," she said once, during an Afro-Cuban number, "needs lessons."