OPUS 21 (21 page)

"Sure."

"In our first few weeks--as babies, we react according to the fact of our vision.

We want to grab the top of something--but we reach for the bottom--because human vision is inverted."

"It is."

"We learn--by experience--that we see upside-down. As we age--month by month--we develop a 'mind' that makes the correction for us. By the time we're some months old, everything 'looks' rightside-up. And only once in a while, under peculiar conditions, does anybody's mind ever glimpse the world the way his eyes see it--

inverted."

"So what?"

"So--that is an example of useful autohypnosis. An immensely potent example. It shows how the 'mind' can establish a set of facts directly opposite to those observed by the eyes. A mind that can go through life looking at an inverted world but 'seeing' it the way it is--manifestly is capable of accepting almost any degree of suggestion from its other parts, and its various senses--of accepting true suggestion or false suggestion.

Manifestly, it isn't necessarily 'right' or 'wrong' about anything not proven."

"An argument for empiricism."

"Sure. But for psychological empiricism. That is--an argument for refusing to take for granted any human descriptions of the nature of mind, personality, spirit, psyche, soul--call it what you will--until the descriptions have been pragmatically checked. Take my proposition that all ideas of personal survival after death are misconstructions of an instinct designed to apply to the psychological and biological future of men on earth.

Then look over some people who, as a group, reject the idea of Heaven. The communists, I mean.

"I've pointed out--and brighter men have pointed out before me--that when the materialist dialectic was applied on a mass of people, it became a religion. Reason and logic departed. Dogma, orthodoxy, emotion, creed, saints, apostles, holy orders, a Bible with gospels--the whole, compulsive paraphernalia of religion burst into being. What was intended as an abstract, atheistic, scientific, materialistic pattern for living turned into the most fanatical evangelism, the most bigoted crusade, the least logical movement the earth has seen for ages. Lately, where the facts of the science of genetics have proven contrary to communist dogma, the Soviet has abolished science. The Roman Catholic Church never did anything more religious, in the worst sense of that word--more superstitious--

more compulsive--or more absurd."

"What are you driving at?"

"Just this. What happened, psychologically, in Russia is one more great proof of instinct. Until and unless you find out pragmatically what instinct is, and what its laws are, no theory of government or system for living will be anything but a set of compulsive simulations of instinct. A religion. Communism was dialectical materialism so long as men just talked about it; when they tried to put it in effect, it became another faith, with the complete trappings of a faith. Dialectical materialism not merely denies that men are instinctual--it ignores the very possibility; as a result, its application drives instinct entirely into the unconscious mind. You can see the proof of that by reading in the daily papers what's happening in Russia or by noting the Russian technique of debate.

Pure theology. Pure nonsense."

"I wish you'd written more along those lines," Tom said.

' I'd planned to. I'd even started the first chapters. The calm, collected, documented description of what instinct is and how it works. It was going to be a scientific contribution. Jung explained to the Freudians. Wylie explained to the Jungians."

Tom sat stiff for a minute or so. "Essays?"

"Peaceful ones. Scholarly. No brass and no balloons."

"Golly."

"Why 'golly'?"

"We need that tome."

"Not really. Too soon. Jung wrote me, once, that he thought it would take about five hundred years before people began to understand generally the ideas he elicited."

"More books might help shorten the interval."

I nodded my head affirmatively. "Might. Time doesn't matter, though. Not so much. When I first began to see what caused the immense and self-evident discrepancy between what some men would like to be and what most men actually are I burned up with the idea of noising the news around. I learned the hard way that the idea was one for just a few people--too few to be more than leaven in the coming centuries. I finally realized that my burn was, mostly, the desire to be the missionary myself. To get a byline.

Ego in a low form. And I also slowly realized that the truth would be there, always--and since it was there, steps could be taken by anybody, anytime, toward finding it again."

"You just write off your whole civilization--like that."

"It's what we're here for. To write ourselves off."

"Usefully."

"Well--our civilization has learned enough useful technical tricks to last for millenniums. We served a purpose."

Tom looked at his watch--and sighed. "Gotta go."

"I thought we were to have a long evening together."

"So did I. But I have to go back to Medical Center. They called before supper.

There's a peculiar pneumonia up there--and something that isn't leukemia but acts like it."

We stood up and went across the grass, blinking in the gloom and stepping around prone figures.

"You seem all right," he said.

' I'm all right."

"I still think we could use that book--and I hope that we'll get it."

"Thanks."

"Need anything?"

He meant medicine. I said I didn't.

We both waved and a cab stopped.

He thanked me rather formally for dinner.

"So long, boy," he said, then. "And don't give up hope."

"I've got plenty of hope--it just isn't immediate, like the fiscal prospects of department stores."

"I mean for yourself."

"Hope isn't for yourself," I said.

"Night!"

His voice was gentle, affectionate. The door thwacked.

The cab went away into the torrid murk, its two little top lights blinking out when the driver threw the flag.

I stood on the corner, on cobblestones, shaded from nothing by the suffocating trees above me and thinking, I guess, about the book I wasn't going to write. All of a sudden my eyes filled with tears. I felt so lost, so lonely, so ashamed of my body and so scared that I wanted to have someone put comforting arms around me.

A couple necking on a flat bench beside the Park wall diddled a battery radio and it began to sing through its nose.

"Alllll--thuh worrrrld--is waiting for the sunnnnrise--alll--"

All that was coming up was the stone moon.

Diagonally down Fifth Avenue, I noticed the spot where the canoe-hat had poked the girl who looked like my daughter.

I went over there. On the cement sidewalk--a broad, pale path that sparkled in the street light--I saw the stains of that bastard's blood.

I wanted to spit in them.

I had an impulse to look around for a tooth--something to have mounted for a watch charm. I supposed he'd put them in his pocket to give to his dentist. I didn't feel so lonely after that.

10

It was about half past nine when I came back to my apartment.

I stripped off my clothes and put in two hours of work.

Then the phone rang.

I was sure it would be Ricky.

Some men's wives, calling that late, would be checking up.

Ricky would just be missing me.

I jumped over to the phone.

It wasn't that clear Hello Darling, like a star in clouds, a landfall in unknown, tedious seas.

"Hello. Phil Wylie?" A pleasant voice. Yvonne, perhaps.

"Yeah--me." I wasn't very civil since it wasn't Ricky.

"This is Gwen. Can you talk?"

"Gwen?"

"We met last night. If you've forgotten so soon, it's not my fault."

The redheaded girl at Hattie's--the one who looked studious and unaffected--the one who had made me think of the handsome wife of some fortunate professor. An interesting one.

"Oh," I said. "Sure."

"I'm not--interrupting--anything? Hattie said you were being a bachelor--and you sat up late. I just asked her."

"I was working."

"And I was hoping you were lonesome."

"Well, I am, as a matter of fact."

"Goody! I'll take a cab."

I was going to tell her to do no such thing. I sat down on the sofa to explain my intention of working until the words ran together and all I could manage was a dozen steps to bed sometime, probably, before dawn. But I leaned back and, in doing that, I looked into the other room. I saw myself sitting there, trying to read myself to sleep, eating some of Tom's barbiturate to help--and solitude eating me.

I said, "All right."

"You sound terribly nonchalant."

"It's the telephone," I said. "You can't see over it."

She chuckled and drew in her breath just enough so I heard it and said, "Twenty minutes."

I fixed up the manuscript and set the bridge table aside. Then I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. "Why?" I said to myself.

This inquiry may seem to have a connotation of guilt. Such is not the case. It represented introspection, which I continued as I removed, in the now-tepid water that emerged from the tap marked "cold," all track and trickle of the night's labors.

My friend Dave Berne--whom I'd come upon with Marcia in
dolce far niente
--

once quoted Forbisher-Laroche to the effect that there are fifteen hundred and six discrete reasons for associating with prostitutes and only nine even potentially commensurate objections. Dave and I, with an hour or so to spare at the time, were able to list three hundred and twenty of the fifteen hundred and six and felt, upon discontinuing the game, that we had every good prospect of recapitulating the lot from our own joint knowledge.

A degree of doubt was cast upon the Forbisher-Laroche figures in my subsequent association with Dave, owing to the fact that he quoted the same authority on so many other matters--the breeding rate of hamsters, for example, the relative climbing efficiencies of various kite designs, and the esoteric causes of giddiness. It occurred to me that "Forbisher-Laroche" might serve my lawyer friend in lieu of the name of an authority or researcher which he could not call to mind--or even in lieu of better authority than his own. This, however, was remarkably good; so the table, even if specious, may be regarded as sound from the order-of-magnitude standpoint.

Among the nine objections to association with prostitutes were at least two (Dave said) which could be regarded as obsolete: the dangers of disease and of pregnancy. Of the remaining seven, only two more (he claimed) could be regarded as rational by the man of ethical detachment--one aesthetic; the other, the practical matter of costs. The rest were mere excursions into "morals"--a contradiction in itself since, were we to apply any genuine morality to sex and sexual conduct, we should have to begin by contemplating the field with simple honesty--a process in which the "Moralistical" objections would dissolve instanter, so he stated.

Of the two objections worth considering, then, one was the expense--a matter to be pondered in all deals and negotiations. The other was that old chestnut which appears in the endless series of candid books of advice to boys, books advertised as providing

"complete sex enlightenment," books which, in sum, horribly frighten their readers and leave them, as a rule, incapable of any real enlightenment for the rest of their lives.

"Would you," such books fiercely inquire, "walk into a cheap hotel, find that the stranger before you had left the tub filled with his dirty bath water, and immerse yourself in it?"

This, in short, is the
aesthetic
objection.

It contains certain fallacies. One is the implied idea that sex relations are equivalent to ablution--that they are designed to transfer from each individual to the other such foreign matter as may have accumulated on his or her person. There is the further implication that such individuals are thereafter unable to cleanse themselves of the alleged spotting and staining supposedly got in such a fashion. Carried to its logical conclusion, this thought would force hotels, as just one example, to discard a bathtub with the checking out of each guest. Industry could not keep up with such tub-scrapping.

In other words, the question is unfairly put. If cleaning one's self is to be admitted as a pertinent analogue for love-making, the question should read, "Would you use the
bathtub
in a cheap hotel?" And why necessarily cheap?

"Would you," the interrogator should ask in all equity, "dawdle voluptuously in the shining, sunken, marble tub of the most gaudy hostelry on Park Avenue?"

Again, modern chemistry being what it is, and business being ingenious, it is a safe inference that the tub in the palatial hotel and the tub in its humble competitor would be made ready by the identical advertised product--one having the same statistical effect upon the muck and microbes of the rich as upon the grime and germs of the impecunious.

And, even if such were not the case, the Park Avenue situation per se cannot be ruled out.

But I fear the bathtub analogue is hardly intended to be examined for what it is.

There is no integrity of thought behind it. Its author does not pause to consider that millions already do plunge daily into common tubs--swimming pools, which are, presumably, well chlorinated. Nor does he go on to inquire as to whether his reader uses the dishes in restaurants and drugstores and whether, before using them, he inspects the dishwashing facilities and practices. There is a lack of fairness in the man. He himself--

for reasons he would never dare to inspect--regards prostitutes as he regards the standing pool of some rank stranger's bath; and he deems it as his mission in life to promulgate this obscene and entirely unrealistic simile in the hope (and the good expectation) that all his young readers will, for the rest of their lives, upon encountering the flossiest of doxies, think instanter of stale tub water.

The fact of the matter is that the bright and capable girl who engages in prostitution will be found, on any count, cleaner and shinier, better soaped, scrubbed, polished and perfumed than the average for all wives in the land. Statistically, she may be slightly more venereal than her married sisters, but only slightly--and, since we have given her brightness and capability, it is equally certain (statistically) that she will be more likely to be under treatment and so incapable of communicating afflictions which, as noted above, have themselves somewhat lost their menacing aspect. In short, were a woman to be chosen by lot from
(a)
the general married group or
(b)
the group of alert tarts, and were the criterion to be bodily aesthetic desirability, there would be no doubt as to which group one should draw from. Tubs are tubs.