OPUS 21 (23 page)

Practice.
Here, again.

Courtesy.
Helping worthy girls through college, and the like.

Testing.
The litmus of another woman.

Tradition.
No comment.

Courage.
In these days, it takes a lot.

Conversation.
A degree of candor is found among filles de joie that is elsewhere rare.

And so the list goes--to the alleged length of fifteen hundred and six excellent reasons for associating with hired damsels. They hardly furnish a good brief for the sexual slum and erotic underground of harlotry today; but they surely show the sores and shortcomings of the pure, the purulent, in heart.

Hence, when, at the beginning of this dissertation, I asked myself "Why?" I was speculating upon which of the multitude of possible motives governed my assent to Gwen's proposition.

Beauty, to be sure; she was a handsome wench; Loneliness and Fun; Relaxation; Information and Conversation, perhaps; and perhaps, also (a reason Forbisher-Laroche himself had never thought of) the Imminence of Death. It is said that the imminence of death on any large scale historically produced mass orgy--that, for instance, the Roman streets were littered with connected couples whenever the plague closed in upon the city during medieval times. This urge--sired doubtless by Nature's command to beget in every eleventh hour--may have had its dark and archetypal image within me somewhere.

11

These ratiocinations occupied me while I dressed, picked up the premises, and ordered from the Knight's Bar a supply of ice in a thermos jug, some whisky, Coca-Cola, glasses, and carbonated water. The waiter had brought them--a waiter wet and odoriferous from a day's running through the high temperatures, but cheerful withal--and held the card for my signature, and departed, before she called from the lobby.

I gave her the number and went out to the elevator.

She had piled up the sleek filaments of her red-brown hair to keep cool a graceful neck. She wore a suit of thin cotton--green--and interesting shoes of a darker green. She came to my quarters laughing amiably. ''I'm very pleased with myself!"

"You should be."

She undid the catch of her jacket and took it off. The green blouse beneath was little more than a broad brassière--a sensible and summery thing that left bare a midsection of smooth, sunburned abdomen and rib. "It was my idea to call you up," she said.

"Which pleases me with you."

She sat down near the window, hopeful a breeze might come through it. Her eyes rested on mine with gay attentiveness. "It's terribly slow at Hat's," she said. "It has been--

all month."

"Everybody," I said, "is out of town."

"Leaving nobody home to go out of the world with. Desolating!"

"I've got some Scotch--soda--"

"Weak," she said, "and lots of ice." I mixed the drink. While I was doing it, she saw the manuscript in work and went over to the bridge table. She read a few lines. "It sounds amusing," she said.

"It did to me--the first time through. And the second time--when I corrected it.

Right now, I'm cutting it, and my own jokes are a little less than fresh." I handed her the tall glass. "Too bad we don't have air-conditioning here at the Astolat."

"I like heat waves. Besides--I spent the afternoon in an air-conditioned apartment.

I'm all cooled off for the weekend."

"If you change your mind--we'll find a chilled spot later."

"Then I'll change it--" she looked across the glass-rim--"later. I was over at the apartment of a girl named Charmaine. Used to work for Hattie--and then became the friend of a lad who died and left her millions."

"Nice gal?"

Gwen said, with a quick, small indrawn breath, "Darling!" Then she glanced at me again-and flushed.

"Hattie told me all about Charmaine," I said.

"It--it--only makes me want a man--!" She was afraid I'd be indignant, or perhaps disgusted. "That's true! In fact--that's what Charmaine tries--to do. She likes to make people all hot and bothered. She--!"

The girl was embarrassed--and yet
remembering,
at the same time. The glass tilted a little in her hand. I went over to her and touched her. "Didn't they tell you about me?"

She laughed, then, and sat down. "I was fussed, I guess. Some men--"

I said it for her. "Some men are so narrow-minded you can't put a dime between what they don't know and what they'll never learn."

The feeling that she might have made a faux pas--might have prejudiced me hopelessly against her--had gone from her eyes. She walked over to the windowsill where the radio was. She switched it on and turned the dial back to the minimal volume. While the tubes warmed, she leaned forward on the sill and looked out--across the brick terrace and the parapet, some half dozen feet away. My floor is on a slight setback. When she found she couldn't see straight down, she pulled her head inside again, found a station playing dance music, tuned it in sharply, turned it very low, and smiled at me.

"Sex isn't logical," she said.

"Not from the standpoint we call logic."

"Take me."

"An idea."

She nodded her head affirmatively and went on smiling.

"What attracts me--sexually--to people--isn't their sex. Not whether they're men or women--or even little kids, for that matter. It's something about them that I never know what it may be. The way they move--or the way they talk--or their expressions--or their looks. It can be any little thing. Sometimes I think it isn't
them
at all--but how
I
feel at the time. And even then my feelings aren't ever the same. According to what it is that attracts me, I'm different. Sometimes I see a man I'd like to have make love to me. Sometimes I see some college boy I'd just like to neck. Sometimes I see a woman I wish would have a crush on me and rush me--like college girls--and get herself terribly upset about wanting me around so much--and not knowing what to do. And sometimes I feel the way Charmaine seems to, about everybody she likes. I just try to see how excited I can make them be--and then let them be. Like that. Let them go away. Does it bore you?"

"No."

"There are some feelings I can't react to. Homosexuality in men. I don't mean it revolts me, or anything. I just can't see why they bother--even with all I
can
see. And the most peculiar part is noticing that the men who hate pansies the most are nearest to it.

You find that out, in my kind of life. They'll visit you and act strictly like Marine sergeants--and get very tight--and finally, perhaps, ask--probably pretending to kid--if there are only girls around the place. When anything like that happens--I feel perfectly blank. Yet that doesn't seem--normal--under the circumstances."

Gwen's theory of normal libido required the possibility of erotic reaction to just about any object, it appeared. I wondered how close that was to the actual nature of us all.

The Freudians would have shrugged it off as adolescent.

A carrying--into--maturity of the unsorted, unspecialized yearnings of the infant and the child. I felt that--if a person could choose--he, or she, would be far better off with Gwen's libido than the tormented fragment that the majority cherished. Cherished as the platform for all that they called love and integrity.

She was telling the truth. But presently I wondered if she had not told it a great many times, to men like myself, and to women--some women. Told it as a psychological tapestry against which to pose herself; as an advertisement, an inducement. It wouldn't be the first time I'd heard a prostitute do that. Tell the truth readily enough--too readily.

Personal history--anecdotes--subclinical material. Intellectual people would fall for it.

They would be seduced by it. For they have been deprived not just of the erotic play their childhood naturally yearned for but, in most cases, of the opportunity for mere discussion of the subject, which they'd have enjoyed.

Suppose eating, not sex, were the taboo of our century? Suppose it was illegal for more than two people to eat together and suppose even they had to get a license for it and eat in secret, while children were fed alone in dark closets? Suppose our billboards and newspaper ads, movies and books and art, devoted themselves to pictures of food--but never to one glimpse of anybody eating? (That's what we'd done about sex--or tried our best to do.) Wouldn't it result in secret, general passions to try esoteric foods? And wouldn't people like to get together, law or none, and talk about the tabooed object?

I thought about Bali, where people actually were a little ashamed of eating meals in public. An animal indecency to be ritualistically concealed.

I felt the familiar stab of indignation. How long would it take my fellow men to realize what they had done to themselves, and
why
they had done it?

To hide the real creature. To dress up the pretense that we are not instinctual.

Would we ever see? Learn? Break down the conceited barricade we'd lifted up since beyond the Stone Age--the wall between the old brain and the new cortex? Or would we, too, decay? Enter our Toynbean time of troubles, turn military, tyrannical, lucubricious and guilty--instead of loving and free, and so in the end fall prey to the outlying barbarian horde--the rest of the world, that outnumbered us sixteen to one? Was a Presbyterian, a Catholic, a collegiate agnostic, a Unitarian, a socialist nearer to insight than an old Roman?

I juggled the breathless doubt in my mind.

"The misery and aggression of the world, the hate and warlike sentiment," a great psychiatrist had said the other day, "are due to two causes: physical hunger in the Orient; in the Occident, the fantastic sex repressions derived from Christianity, so called, and obtaining still in the materialist societies. "

There it was--in the words of a psychological scientist.

Not a single statesman that I knew of had picked up the thought. "A penny,"

Gwen said. I apologized. "It's too intricate. It's a summing up of various truths rejected or denied. We're out of the habit of seeing them. So it might take me a couple of years to explain."

Gwen laughed. "Swell! I'll come by, an hour a day--and lie on your couch--and you can explain."

"Maybe," I said, "if they'd listened to you just now--and compared what you said with what they honestly feel--but they won't!"

"They will if you get them in the mood--and alone."

"Many?"

"Darned near all--that I ever see. You'd be astonished."

"Still--that doesn't matter. Because when they act they act as a mob. And as a mob--they never admit what they really think and feel and dream and wish and long for.

They just fight."

An expression came into her eyes that was part speculative and part cautious.

"Some like that, too. Like to be hurt."

"Sure. The guilt again. The old quid pro quo."

She watched me. "They get a kick out of it."

"Pain's their license for any fun. Not in Nature--just in people. And what--

incidentally--is your feeling about that?"

"Being hurt? I'd hate it."

"Me, too. Hurting, then?"

Her wary eyes decided. She raised a shoulder and let it fall. "What would you do if a guy who loved it asked you to beat him? If you knew it was the only kick he could get out of life? If he brought you a switch--"

"--just like the kind his mother used--"

"--and begged you?"

I said, "Scram."

"Suppose
a girl
did?" She looked at me intently.

It was an idea that had never crossed my mind. I thought it over. "Scram," I repeated. "There's pain enough in life--even in loving--without asking for more."

Gwen's eyebrows went up. "It's another thing I can't feel, either." She gestured with her hand, pushing the idea away from herself.

She'd finished her highball long since. She made another, now--a stronger one. I didn't want any more Coca-Cola at the moment--any more anything. Any more her, even.

And that shocked me.

What had the sensation come from?

From her most recent confession?

No. It was familiar--undistressing in that connotation--a known, acknowledged, assimilated phenomenon, like any other biological datum of birds, bees, flowers, our earth. Nothing surprising at all.

It went back to the question "Why?": To Loneliness, Beauty and Fun and all that.

The truth was, I had been unwilling, once again, to face the night unsleepy and alone. I didn't want a girl; this one, or anyone, except Ricky.

But the not-wanting of solitude was the greater negative.

She'd turned to another radio station and found a slow rumba. She drank deeply--

standing--and moving her hips in tempo.

"Come on," she said.

Unwillingly, and unwilling to protest the heat of the night, I began to dance with her. She was, as Hattie had promised, very good.

I thought that presently I would stop this and send her home. It would be awkward.

And then, as the music quickened and we made a spot turn in the center of the room, I saw through the doors to the doors beyond--the doors that led to Yvonne's room.

Mine was no longer flatly parallel with the wall.

I raised my voice. "Come on in, Yvonne!"

I had never relocked the door on my side.

She came in.

Gwen looked at her, at me, at Yvonne again--not troubling to hide the fact that she was astonished. But not irritated. I would have expected Yvonne to be embarrassed--

who would not?

She wasn't. Her gray eyes met mine steadily.

"I hoped you'd call me today," she said. "When you didn't--I had dinner with dad.

I got back after the theater--and I heard your radio go on. I finally decided to knock on your door. But when I unlocked the one on my side--I found yours open. I was just about to say boo! and ask for a drink. I'll be good and go quietly afterward."

She said it steadily, rapidly, so that I knew, and Gwen knew, she had prepared it.

"Mrs. Prentiss," I said, "Yvonne Prentiss--Miss Gwen Talyor."

Yvonne turned and held out her hand.