OPUS 21 (2 page)

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 tranquility, 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 t he 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--