OPUS 21 (17 page)

"

It was a defiant thing to say. For that was where I'd seen her--with Dave Berne, one morning when I'd stopped at his hotel, early, to take him fishing.

"A young lady left over from last night," he said.

Miss Somebody-or-other, he had said. Marcia breakfasting in his bed. She exposed a nude shoulder to wave at me from the other room. Dave paid her and we went away.

He caught his first sailfish that day.

I supposed, now, that Marcia was offering me the opportunity to ask if I hadn't seen her in Miami; I supposed she had pointed out the hurt to let me, if I wished, open it up. Paul had crushed his napkin. He was sitting beside her and across from me--

wondering, probably, how to turn the conversation away from the heat wave, the weather, to a less self-conscious, more profitable subject.

"Workin'?" he asked.

"Miami," I said to Marcia, "is quite a place." Then I said to Paul, "Yeah."

"He's cutting a serial," Paul told the girl. "When he gets through, they'll pay him about five years of my salary for it. A month's work, for him. A story about how some college football player married the Daisy Queen, I imagine. For that, he gets sixty bucks to my one. All I do, though, is make atom bombs. You can see the public would rather--"

"--have its ego blown up than its cities."

She laughed. "What is it really about?"

I gave them an outline of the story. "You see," I said, "it's just the way Shaw put it. If you're going to tell people the truth, you've got to make them laugh, or they'll kill you."

"Why will they?" Marcia asked.

"Because the truth doesn't seem amusing to them at all. However--they have a feeling life should be amusing. So--if you can make them laugh, and still occasionally set down a fact, they assume it's possible for somebody to know a few truths and still laugh.

This permits them--in the long run--to ignore the truth you set down and go on laughing."

"Does the truth seem amusing to you, Phil?" she asked.

"Infinitely."

"It seems ghastly to me."

"Infinitely ghastly, too. You have to approach it in both moods at once--or else, and this is commoner--in first one and then the other."

"There is an unwritten law in this country," Paul reminded us dryly, "that everything is just dandy all the time--and anybody who says different is a communist!"

I nodded. "There is also a superstitious belief that the act of stating an unpalatable truth will increase its danger to the folks. What you don't know won't hurt you. Innocence is bliss. Boost, don't knock. If you haven't anything good to say, don't say it. This is the folklore of advertising. This is the theme song of radio. Everything has to be on the up-and-up. Criticism is regarded as un-American and un-Christian. The nation was founded by a rebellion of the early fathers against British tyranny. Christ was the most passionate critic man ever had. But it is considered the essence of patriotism and the chief tenet of the Master to be anticritic. So the whole meaning both of our nation and of its principal religion have been thrown overboard--and we are all riding on a roller-coaster where no track inspectors are allowed."

"Goodness!" Marcia said.

"Where," I went on, "nobody is even sure that the tracks were ever laid to the end: looking ahead realistically also is forbidden."

The drinks came.

Paul lifted his glass to the girl. She smiled at him warmly--with love, I suppose.

What kind? It was a look of gratitude. A certain composition of her features. I compared that expression with the casual, collegiate, young-woman-of-the-world wave she had once given me from Dave Berne's double bed. A high-spirited, working-prostitute salute.

Some part of her conscience was grateful to Paul for taking her out of professional circulation. She was, I presumed, a girl with a good deal of courage--and one with taste.

A sensitive girl who could--still--accommodate her mind to the objective risks of her trade. But the attitudes of many men toward her would not be acceptable. To face them, she would have to sell pieces of her inner person. Paul had rescued her from that and her eyes thanked him.

But, far more, Marcia's face expressed a maternal sentiment--warm and enveloping. He was, in a sense, her baby. Emotionally immature, romantic, and hence naive, he had taken her for what she was not. She had played up to his assumption as an older woman to a child. In seducing him, she had seduced herself. She had adopted him as the symbol of the values she had discarded, the values that were now most precious to her because they were lost.

When I thought that over, I realized it was the point of extreme hazard in their relationship. Not social pressures, but the pressures of emotions--of instincts of which neither was conscious--would be the explosive condition of their two lives. The dangerous day would be the day when he matured sufficiently to dissociate the need to love from the need to be loved. In her case, the time would come then, too--when he demanded no more mothering in bowels or brain or heart. But it might come sooner-when she tired of that one function, or extended it, or spoiled its object, or devoured it, or cast it out for its own good.

For neither man nor woman can possess without being possessed, or consume without being consumed, and whether the process involves an object or another person, not to know the way of it and not to abide by the way is to be destroyed by it.

The lunch went along badly.

My habit of apostrophe and tirade, which usually fills such hollows as occur in talk--and forces its way, sometimes, beyond those decent opportunities--seemed inappropriate here. They had been depressed by what I had already said about the world.

I guessed that, along with worries, they had hoped the visit would elicit an avuncular gaiety. They were young and in love, they thought, and should get from their elders the jocose disposition reserved for young love. I felt some of their expectancy, at any rate, and it only inhibited my rhetoric.

We talked of the news, of the airlift to Berlin which, by its very existence, constituted an immense Appeasement. We discussed the presidential candidates. We talked awhile of women's clothes, of the veterans' organization currently holding a convention in the city, and I described the house Ricky and I were building south of Miami, drawing a diagram on the tablecloth with a knife.

The effort to keep talk going--to find topics and to change them before attempt was disclosed--made me restive. Paul wasn't helping any. He'd eaten hungrily enough and then sat back--jerking and fidgeting about, making faces, pulling his nose, simpering, and smirking moonily.

She'd held up her end.

The trouble was, of course, that none of us was engaged in honest behavior.

Paul wanted to say: What do you think of her--and us?

Paul wanted me to say: She's lovely--and I'm sure you'll be happy.

I had become doubly certain--without yet entirely appreciating why--that it would never turn out. I had been generically sure, even before--just as Ricky had been sure: Paul wasn't constructed to marry a harlot and live happily ever after.

I wanted to say: For God's sake, cooky, send her back to her trade; she'll find some other guy, eventually; she's not for you.

Then I wanted to go up sixteen floors to my apartment with my troubles, my work, no women, no nephew.

What did the girl want to say?

I looked at her again--at her opalescent hair and her blue eyes. And she looked back. For a moment, the shadow stood still--stood still, and dissipated.

A wanton expression, brief and Lilith-like, reshaped the sharp, carmine edges of her mouth. She saw me not as the uncle of her now-beloved, but as the detached person--

another man--and in this seeing me, she involuntarily recalled her long affair with lust. I have heard a woman say that, by merely quivering her underlip in a certain fashion, she had been able to change the tone, attention, and interest of nine men in ten with whom she'd ever talked--and there was nothing in her history to make me doubt the statement.

And I have heard another woman say that all there was to Rudolph Valentino was the dilation of his nostrils. Watching Marcia's mouth, I could understand the sense of such matters.

So I was sure of still another thing.

Hattie Blaine had been dubious of her. Hattie had made the suggestion--the to me profoundly immoral suggestion--of tempting this girl.

Hattie had done it out of an unconscious notion that Marcia had some point in her nature which could not be lent to the kind of marriage Paul would need.

It wasn't money.

It was mood.

Marcia caught me making this observation. She blushed a little, glanced at the table, and then raised her eyes--but whether anxiously or in a repetition of the look, I could not tell.

Passionate women are seldom ashamed of their passion.

What she felt was not bold; it was not arch; it was not mercenary; it was--simply--

an essence of her own responses. A belonging, like the curved shape of her eyebrows or the narrowness of her red nails--which she accepted as no more and no less than that, and revealed as naturally.

I wanted to go, even more.

One can pick patterns in one's life-rhythms, cadences, aggregates, cross sections, events that occur in pairs and threes--and the phenomenon is undoubtedly the result of chance. But one notices, one superimposes the pattern subjectively--and decides it is not chance but some obscure order, because one likes to feel that obscure orders occur in life.

It is difficult to keep the ego perpetually lined up with statistical reality.

In twenty-four hours I'd looked at, talked to, explored, and somewhat learned three different, very handsome young women. Mrs. Yvonne Prentiss. Gwen Taylor--at Hattie's.

And Marcia.

They come in threes, I thought. I thought it had been a long time since I'd met even one girl so pretty as all these. I reminded myself not to be an ass--to keep the view that grouping and variation in no way warp mathematical principle. The obsessive quality of all such ideas weighed on me. I hardly heard her account of their junket, on the preceding Saturday, to Jones' Beach.

I began to invent an excuse for present departure--to think ahead about apologizing--my work--the check, please--

Then the busboy dropped the tray.

He had tripped, it proved, on a napkin.

There were heavy stacks of plates and side dishes on the tray--glasses of water--

metal domes.

The boy staggered--and the wild gesticulation of his free arm was caught by my peripheral vision. So I saw the tray slant--saw its burden slide and crash onto the heads of a pair of buttressed dowagers, a few tables away. The noise seemed to continue for a long time and a scream permeated it as the boy lost hold entirely on his tray, fell against a chair-back, and dish after soiled dish cascaded onto flower hats, bright blouses, fat shoulders, and freckled necks.

A rush of waiters masked the scene. Guests stood to see better.

A bull-voiced beldame roared, "Send the manager!"

Her less hefty companion burst through the waiters, daubing at the stained area of her bosom and throwing bits of lettuce with every swipe. She made a beeline for the ladies' room--followed by her smeared, stentorian colleague, whose hat was full of dill and parsley.

This commotion had hardly died down--Jay had no more than managed to clear the carpet, dispatch the wreckage on the table, send out the chairs for purging, and bite back the last traces of his mirth--when another oddity got under way.

"I want," said a man seated beside Paul, "a baked apple."

"But there are no baked apples." Fred, the waiter, said this.

"Go and tell the chef I want a baked apple."

"I did, sir. There are none."

"Explain to him that I always have a baked apple, here."

"There is applesauce--sir."

Fred is Viennese. His sorrowful, wise eyes meandered over to meet mine. They were expressionless. But the fact that they had moved toward me was, in itself, communication.

"I do not like applesauce. Slippery pudding! Go and tell the chef I want my usual baked apple."

The churl who spoke was familiar to me by sight. An Englishman--a VIP during the war--who had often stayed at the Astolat. A medium-sized man of sixty with a red face and eyes like gray gas. A brittle British voice, snotty in every particular. An iron-gray Kaiser Wilhelm mustache and a way of smacking his lips underneath it, when he was in a temper, that shook its points.

He was always accompanied by his wife. As a rule, they ate quietly--talking together now and then, and more often just swilling in food. She was a lank, vapid woman with a toadstool's complexion, a chin like a fist, and hair tormented into little knobs--as if she absent-mindedly had cooked it, rather than coiffed it--and burned it in the process. Lumpy, burned hair, a disgusting dish of it--and a voice like claws, to match her master's.

She stared, now, at her empty plate, and said nothing. She did not seem to be ashamed, or embarrassed, or to be waiting for a storm to subside. She was a woman born without the knack for yielding or apology. She merely looked at her plate because she would be God-damned if she cared to look at anything or anybody else.

Fred came back. He put on a sympathetic expression. "The chef says he is very sorry. He says that this is not the time of year for baked apples."

"The stands are loaded with apples," the Englishman snorted. "Seen 'em myself!"

"I know. But they're eating apples. Not baking apples. They come later in the fall."

The Englishman doubled his fist and lightly thumped the table. "I said I wanted a baked apple! All I wanted was a baked apple."

"I have explained."

"With cream. A baked apple with cream."

I have seen Englishmen by the dozen go through this sort of routine. With the exception of certain Germans, some of them are, I believe, the rudest people on the earth.

Badly brought-up babies--these empire builders.

This one was insulting the waiter and his wife, in the bargain--but I have rarely seen an Englishman who minded insulting his wife by making scenes. When crossed in matters like baked apples they seldom consider wives, children, strangers, decorum, or the reputation of Britannia. They merely behave like twirps.