OPUS 21 (15 page)

She sure was a reading girl. And smart. And attractive, too. How tough are you, Phil?"

"It's something you do, isn't it? Not fill out in a questionnaire? "

Hattie smiled. "I don't want to offend those fine sensibilities of yours. Or make you think I'm something special in the she-Judas line. But you want to know whether the girl means it. Why not send your Paul back to his laboratory after lunch--he'd like that--

like you to get acquainted with her--and why not--?"

' I'm not tough that way. That's businessman tough."

She dropped a hand. "Still--there's hardly one of them in a thousand who wouldn't--work out some breezy little arrangement--for a G, say. And she'd have to be such a one."

"She might just see through it. You said she was smart."

Hattie shrugged. "If she was smart enough to resist the G, maybe she'd be smart enough. However."

"In other words, you don't know about her."

"Not Marcia. If it was ninety-nine in a hundred, I could tell you right off. Some of them make damned good wives--better sometimes for being here. With the kind of men who really understand what life is--and with the kind who don't mind because they don't understand anything at all. I like to see those girls get married. Lots more make swell mistresses for men who married hunks of flint. I could go calling at so many swank addresses that your head would swim. And sometimes I do. There are worse places to look for a wife than good bagnios. Any high-society party, for instance. Women's colleges, too, I suspect. Most country clubs. The dud percentage--the lack of warmth--

runs higher there--"

"Not to mention know-how."

She sighed--and then chuckled. "Isn't it crazy? Something that should be given more loving practice than music--something that needs extra experience and skill for civilized people. They think you can learn on one bridal night! Or from a book! A girl it would take a genius of sex to seduce satisfactorily marries a bright young college boy in the chopsticks class--and what have you got? The American home. Did you ever--" the question--indeed, the entire subject--seemed to have roused her--"ever once have an affair with a plain American wife who was any good? Somebody else's, I mean?"

"Once."

"Once! And how many--?"

"Look, Hattie. I came to cross--question you--"

She thought awhile, when she saw I wouldn't reply--looking out at the city and detesting it. ''I've had lots of men bring their wives right here--to look and learn."

"How many?" I grinned.

"God knows! I'm an old madam, Phil. But many a snooty female has lost her inhibitions in my parlors-and gained a little knowledge that went into making a happy home for some guy. The more people say physical sex is unimportant--the more it is likely to become the only thing that is important for them. And they don't realize."

"I know."

"You know. And a lot of my clients know. And a lot of women. But they can't change anything."

"Yeah."

"What do I really do here, then? Ask yourself. I'm in the business of supplying erotic fun to people who are made for it, born to it, urged from the cradle to the grave to take part in it, who depend upon it for mental health, for a decent feeling of good will toward others--and aren't allowed to engage in it even with their own wedded wives, by the statutes of New York State and forty-seven other little penitentiaries! That's my trade.

And because I'm in it--I am regarded as the greatest blight in civilized society, by millions. Holy, jumped-up St. Peter's be-hee!"

Through a recollected haze of alcohol I heard this same tirade from old and distant days. And Hattie was right, in her way. The theory of accession to culture and intelligence, to morality and Godliness, through the restraint of desire by the demeaning of it, had run its course in the Western world and unstrung nearly all of us. And where that thesis did not exist, there were others, still more absurd, to bring other peoples to their repetitive, obnoxious dooms.

Quite suddenly, I felt like weeping.

She left the window and sat down. "Relax."

The feeling passed like a bird's shadow.

"What were you doing all evening?" she asked. "How come you're up so late?

Work?"

I thought of telling her--telling her the truth. Thought of it hard and seriously.

"Out with a dame," I said, which was not what I meant by the truth. "A wife. A pretty package of all the quality advertising, from Pasadena, who had caught her hubby in flagrante with a gent--and fled. Protesting too much, if you understand."

"Half the girls in the country--if they had the nerve--!"

"A latent thing. In maturity, according to the psychologists, it becomes the psychological stuff by which we understand and appreciate our own sex."

"And it does, too."

"If you say so, it must be right, Hat."

"There--you are damned tooting!" She looked at me. "So you took her out--?"

"Rumbaing. I've got good at it--since I knew you."

"Really good?"

"Good enough to please the Cuban girls. So we danced. And I brought her back to the hotel--and turned her loose."

"Nice guy!"

"I wanted her to exercise her mind. After all--I only met her at lunch--and she's already moved up on my floor, next door."

"You should change hotels, then."

"Too lazy. Too busy. And I can deal with her. Spoiled--and too bad--because the guy she left sounds okay. I wish I could help her out. Taking--what they call--advantage of her, probably wouldn't. And you can't re-do a person's attitude and background in a few days--especially with a serial to correct. Usually requires years, and a good analyst--"

"Another wife--to be hated."

"By you?"

Hattie nodded. "I hate thousands of them. Some, I adore."

We didn't seem to find anything to say for a minute. I could have given her one more name for the short side of the ledger but I didn't want to. Finally I said, "If you get any ideas about Marcia--?"

"Call me up--when you've met her. Better still-come by again."

"I will." I had no idea whether I would or not.

She got up. "Look. Do me a favor and autograph a couple of your books for me, will you? And have another cup of coffee while I go downstairs and get them?"

"All right."

She went. Pretty soon a tall, redheaded girl came in without knocking, just as I'd expected one would. Brown-red hair--long, curled at the ends, and a pair of legs to look at. A girl like a mannequin--but no pose; no hauteur. She had enough sex appeal for the end of anybody's chorus line. She smiled open a wide mouth on even teeth and fixed her hazel eyes on me. Hattie remembered: I had never approved of whores who looked like whores. This one looked like a bright assistant on a magazine--or maybe the wife of a lucky prof.

"My name," she said, "is Gwen Taylor. Hattie got stuck for a few minutes--and told me to come in. I've heard a lot about you--here and there."

I stood and shook her hand.

She briefly grabbed her lower lip with her upper teeth. "Or is that--indelicate?"

"No. I'm pleased. And not fooled for a minute. You see--I know Hattie."

"After all," said the girl, "it's her profession. She said we were having coffee."

Viola came again with a tray. Gwen poured. "There are half a dozen of us around.

Would you like to meet them?"

"One's enough."

Her eyes flickered and she smiled. "Thanks." She handed me the cup, served the sugar with tongs, poured cream, and fixed her own. "Warm night."

We talked about that.

By and by she nodded toward the radio-phonograph. "Hattie said you like to rumba. So do I."

I shook my head. "Sometime--"

She looked at me and smiled. "I hope!"

Hattie came with the books, by and by. She made an apology. I wrote in both volumes and signed my name and Hattie accompanied me down one of the two long halls with the many shut doors.

"Like Gwen?"

"Very much."

"I thought you would. She's--something! It's been marvelous to see you, Phil. Call me up!"

The exceedingly noncommittal elevator man took me back to the street. It was gravy--thick with the smell of the river.

I got a cab.

It slatted downtown.

Once, I leaned forward to tell the driver to tum around.

But I didn't speak.

4

There is a metal clip on every door in the Astolat; mail and written messages are put in it--so the guests won't have to stoop. I had a letter. A tidy backhand with little circles for periods and dots over the
i's
. It looked like a billet-doux from Yvonne--and it was:

You meanie!

Everything you said got me so tremendously stimulated I couldn't sleep. I decided, after a struggle, if you were going to stir girls up that way, you were responsible for their condition. So I phoned you--and no answer! Don't you know hell hath no fury like a woman scorned? If you feel like a little chitchat when you do come in, phone me. I don't have to work tomorrow so you needn't be scrupulous about the hour. And even if you don't, thanks ever so much for a very disturbing, unsatisfying, lovely evening.

Yours,

Y

It was four o'clock and my body was tired, though my mind was running round and round like a toy electric train.

I didn't want to see any more of Yvonne at the moment.

I turned out the lights in the sitting room, undressed, took a short, warm shower, and lay down on the double bed, naked. Usually, about two minutes after the lights go out, I fall asleep. But I knew it would take longer that night.

So I piled up the pillows and opened Vogt's
Road to Survival
at the page where the jacket was enclosed. Mr. Vogt's thesis is simple and damning; I had somewhat reflected upon it earlier that evening.

It is the philosophy of modern man to produce. To industrialize himself. To learn the techniques and technologies of science and of applied science. This is progress.

Chinese, Soviets, Americans---everybody strives to speed up production, distribution, consumption. It is also the object of all nations to increase their populations.

The earth cannot support either of these two goals.

The topsoil of the planet will not feed the existing numbers of us, even now--and our method of using it is diminishing it at a gruesome rate. Faster and faster, we starve; and as we multiply, more of us will starve. Medicine, which increases the percentage of persons who survive infancy and extends the life span of all these, is but rapidly adding to sure victims of starvation.

We are busy breeding mouths to eat our future out of house and home.

Ideas of this sort have been around since Malthus's time.

These days, the facts accumulate.

I often reflect that man's contemporary sexual taboos lead (as they must, by the law of opposites) to sexual excesses: these are seen in man's witless overbreeding. His

"moral" Catholic couch, his unregulated Baptist bed, sustains orgy and is the senseless agent of biological catastrophe. This is the riposte of Nature to man's refusal to use reason concerning his own nature.

Vogt wants planet-wide birth control, before the teeming hordes locust up the hope of a human hereafter.

Try and get it!

There are other truths about ourselves of this same order:

The minerals.
We are digging them up with the reckless violence of pigs after truffles. Truffles can grow again--but not minerals. We are converting the earth's elements into forms all but irrecoverable even by the most immense expenditures of human energy and time.

Our genes
--and the holy habit we've got into, of inhibiting birth among our most likely specimens--of proliferating boobs and nuts--of maintaining the feeble and the dim, abetting their rabbity bedding together--and of sending the cream of each generation to war's slaughter.

This, alone, will drive us back toward apehood faster even than our growing physical destitution. Some European nations are doubtless already floundering in the poverty of residual blood-lines--bereft of brains and leadership by their religious devotion and their glorious wars.

Also, of course, there is our
failure to perceive our instinctual nature.
My own elected department in the category of dooms. Instinctively, as we must, all of us feel the weight of such colossal crimes against the meaning of instinct as those above--our cosmic disavowals (by our acts) of any responsibility toward men to come. That is why, at bottom, no one is happy in modern society--happy in his spirit, content, full of a sense of purpose and significance. It is why we shall have to remake civilization consciously--or to suffer its self-destruction.

Mr. Vogt, I thought, would feel the power of instinct, as it now blindly controls us, when he saw how religious men reacted to his simple indication of the necessity for using reason in our sex relations. And he would see the inertia of our traditions when he saw how utterly his warning was disbelieved, ignored, ridiculed, and forgotten. Others, with the same wild cry of despair, have had such reception, for the same reason.

It is not that man cannot do for himself.

But that he will not.

And he will not because he is self-flattered into the incredible illusion that Mr.

and Mrs. America are doing very well already, thank you kindly.

After a long while, grinning over the tremendous sins of those who take it upon themselves to reject knowledge and yet to say what sin is, I closed the book.

Hell has one funny aspect.

It is where everybody lives.

I sent a thought to Messrs. Sheen, Niebuhr, and their ilk: The up-to-date devil, which you so earnestly seek, gentlemen, may readily be found--wearing the costume of your own minds: unconsciousness.

I slept like a log.

1

REVEILLE WAS THE HEAT of burning gasoline, gears grating, rubber clattering on the sticky pavement and bits of shouts, floating around like confetti. I can remember when it used to be hoofbeats, quiet neighbor-talk, and sometimes, utter silence.

I lay glistening in a depression of the bed. At first, the big noise of the city, diminishing when the lights changed, and plunging up with new zeal a moment afterward, gave me only the pleasant sensation, the titillations and satisfactions, of being in New York. Then I remembered my circumstance. The frightened little animal that I am tore terribly around while I tried to catch it and to hold it and to remind it that the thin tissue on the front of its brain was capable of managing its panic. I spent some time at the job and sat up trickling.