OPUS 21 (29 page)

For the first time in his life, and after twenty months of Alaska, Dave pulled strings in his own behalf.

He was assisting the OSS--a major, then--in figuring out methods of hastening the deterioration of Nazi morale--when they came through the Bulge. Dave stayed at a forward subheadquarters to manage the tourniquet on his colonel's bomb-shattered leg.

Hurrying German troops took the colonel prisoner and shot Dave four times, on sight.

Some of Patton's men found him, still alive, in a cellar, three days later. Two of his toes had to be amputated because they'd frozen. He limps when he's weary--but he's still a handball champ.

The Nazis didn't take care of his colonel's tourniquet and the colonel died. Dave has a Purple Heart, plain--but nothing else to bespeak what, in a Gentile, might possibly have been regarded as courage beyond the line of duty.

He had, you will recall, reluctantly decided that there would always be a Dr.

Wiswell over him, in the field of psychology. He had also come to the reluctant conclusion that a Jew without money in America was like an unarmed man in a city of quick-draw experts. So he had studied law.

Problems to which he put the lever of his mind usually yielded. The problem of money was one such. He is a completely honest man; he no longer saw any objection to applying his honesty, and talents, in places where money was abundant. He is worth, I should imagine, a quarter of a million, and he has only started.

Dave is the ugliest man I know--or, at least, know well.

A huge but thin hooked nose divides his face vertically. Hitler's trained anti-Semites needed only a look at that to shoot. His large, round ears are set almost at right angles to his head. He has a conspicuous Adam's apple which--in talk, or merely from emotion--rides up and down with the acceleration and quick braking of a humming bird before a hollyhock. His forehead bulges; his mouse-brown eyebrows look as if they had been sprayed on as a random after-thought. He is almost bald. His mouth takes a generous cut into his pale, gaunt cheeks and his chin retreats. Only his eyes contrast with a face they cannot redeem: they are an immortal blue-living proof of compassion, of reflection, and of mirth.

He is a bachelor.

He was in love, once, with a stately girl from Boston--a quiet, brainy brown-eyed girl who wore sensible shoes and braids but sometimes had the look of wanting to lie in the grass with a man, or even of being ready to pull a man down. I had hoped that Dave would be granted this one exception by the unwilling gods. He wasn't. She married an opera singer--and divorced him two years later--and went to live in Milan.

My Campfire Girl, Dave called her, after that.

He meant the part about Camps.

It was in Hollywood that I met Dave.

I was weaving down Sunset Boulevard one night, drunk, desultory, and alone.

Very much alone. My first wife had taken my kid back East--and no blame for that. She was sick of the way it was.

I'd spent the afternoon at an address in Beverly Hills where you could do what you pleased. .

I'd spent the evening at a gambling place up on the hillside, sprinkling my money around and my IOUs--with a bunch of other writers, directors, junior producers, and picture girls. You'd know their names if I told you and the hell with that.

Up on the hill above the canyon at the Casa Crap.

Up there among the carbolic mountains--the near knees--the far, white peaks with snow on their nasty heads. Down below, the spot where God sat on the seventh day, and--

in the big, flat print of His behind--Los Angeles. Ninety square miles of costume jewelry, Technicolor starshine, neon and sodium and all other colored gases, signboards with fifty-foot women in ten-foot brassières and men smoking four-foot pipes, boulevards under the palms and cloverleaf intersections with the billion paired headlights streaming and swirling, bungalow courts and drugstores, pool halls and bingo parlors, buses and trolley cars, acacias and roses and pepper trees, open markets with fruit piled in metaphysical polyhedrons, and the fog rolling in on the thin, chilly, sting-sinus air of California.

You can keep it.

I'd spent all my money and cashed a few IOUs to impress the girls.

The girls.

I'd played Mr. Bones with the bright young writers who go out there for the girls--

searching amongst the girls in skirts for the girl that's their soul--Medea, Medusa and Circe, Sappho and daughter Eve, Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia, Urania--and Aglaia and Euphrosyne, too--and Lilith--searching for her on the wrong coast--all evening, a badminton of wisecracks, battledore and shuttlecock with the soulless prizes going to the heads that stayed clear the longest, the pocketbooks that were the deepest, the tallest gold lettering on office doors, and never a Muse or a Grace in the joint.

I hadn't been able to find my car in the sepulcher parking yard.

Too lost, ingrown, ashamed to ask the attendant.

Too penniless to hire a cab. .

I walked down that Golconda Golgotha, stopping to puke, with my fists in my pockets holding to wet handkerchiefs.

It was on the Boulevard, with the rich night traffic, the skimmed scarlet scum of the studios and the magnates from Pasadena with their cold, oiled working-model blondes.

The bells rang.

The iron hands came down.

Stop civilization. Go civilization.

Red lights green lights cracking my drunken brain.

The acrid flavor of tomorrow in my mouth.

Alarm.

Headsplitting daylight.

How about this?

She sees him get out of the ice wagon.

She throws a snowball at him.

Go sell it to the Eskimos, she says.

I've got it!

She throws the snowball. That's good. So okay--her mitten sticks to it and soaks him square in the puss and instead of spitting out the mitten--which he gets in his teeth--

he makes like it's a mustache!

Hell! He's a football player, isn't he--not just an iceman? Going to be a big-shot brain specialist someday, isn't he? Quick thinker. So okay. So he leaps and spears the mitten and the snowball like it's a long forward and he runs at her and tackles her and spills her--not real hard--but hard--and there's how they meet, the both of them lying down in the snow with her on her back and the guy on top. Is that good--or is it terrific?

And there, so help me Christ, after eleven days, and twenty-three thousand dollars, is how they do meet.

Wrong coast for Aglaia, I say? I'm sure I did.

That morning's taste.

The rest of them. The contract. The months.

The arms and the lights and the bells became lost in the prospect and I stepped from the curb and brakes trilled.

"Want a lift? You need one, pal."

That was Dave.

At my apartment, I made some coffee and later we went back together to the address in Beverly Hills--because he didn't know it, and he was a lonely guy, too.

In fact he still is.

The most brokenhearted guy in the world.

You see nobody told him about the six-pointed star on the box he was shipped in-

-he had to find out for himself. And he wants to be sure, when he checks out, that he kept it bright while he had the use of it.

Dave came in.

"By God," he said, "Wylie! The old, articulate cryptogram in person, nude as a saint's stool!" It might have been a bracing autumn forenoon: "I'm glad to see you! I was saying to a friend only the other night--a jerk named Staunton--Staunton, the town's not the same--Wylie's not here. The old termite has moved to the country--turned himself out to pasture! And Florida in the winter! The son-of-a-bitch is chasing the analema! Where's the patient?"

I pointed.

Dave took a look and came back.

"Shall we wake him up? I can take him to the office and get some of my minions looking for his wench. Private dicks, too. They won't find her. They couldn't find a luminous memorandum in a two-drawer filing cabinet. But it might wear him down a little."

"Let him sleep, for now."

Dave sat down. "This is swell! Send for a barrel of iced tea, will you--with a clear gin on the side? I had a hard night last night. A bunch of the super-big-shots came in on the Super-Chief and the Super-Century last night. Things in Hollywood are so bad that two of them stayed sober the whole damned evening."

I phoned Room Service. "There's a depraved guest of mine up here who wants some neat gin and a lot of iced tea--"

Dave had picked up one of my ashtrays and was looking at it intently. When I hung up he said, "Depraved? Depraved, you say? Me? Don't I detect not just one, but two colors of lipstick here?"

"Callers from the other rooms," I answered. "Came in to consult the oracle."

"Depraved," he repeated. "That's the trouble with you Gentiles. Two rules for everything. 'If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out.' But--'Let not thy left hand know what thy right doeth.' Something of that sort. So you reconcile the pair by going around plucking out other people's right eyes; and not letting your open hand know the other is gouging. Consulting the oracle! What a phrasemaker!"

I told him about Gwen and Yvonne.

He pretended to be still more deeply outraged. "There you are! A perfect Wylie situation. God, what an imposter! Not one lovely girl--but two--are sent on silver salvers.

You entertain them. You get all the social opprobrium and none of the benefits. What confidence can youth have in you, after a trick like that? Here you are--the last hope for phallic worship in a dying world. The man with the one message that makes sense. Either the boys get their breeches back--and do things to make the dames respect 'em--or Nature will throw us out of the party. You proclaim it with your foghorn and you play it on your xylophone. But when it gets right down to the bedrocking--what do you do? You personally, Mr. Prophet? Welsh! Walk out on the act!"

"Times are changing," I told him. "Phallic worship? Can you build good rituals around our businessmen? A healthy restoration of phallic worship would ruin the profitable activities of every vested institution in the land, from its banks to its churches.

People wouldn't even care if the trains ran on time, any more. Think of that!"

Dave was leering at me pensively. "By God. It might be the thing to revive Hollywood."

"Yeah," I said. "You open with a prologue that shows modern psychology has found the roots of love in our love lives. Then you fade to the American Home, where a Husband is trying to figure out how to arouse or enchant or even slightly interest one Beautiful Blonde Mother. She is rushing about the house swatting her children for bringing home a magazine full of art studies. Her husband tries to slip his arm around her--but she knows he is suffering from neurotic hay fever, makes his living by manufacturing second-rate household appliances which he sells owing to better advertising, is afraid of his stockholders, never had the earning capacity of Joe Benson or Harvey Tekker or Don Oaker, and is scared of her, besides. Great subject for phallic worship! We fade to a contented pagan maiden in the South Sea Isles--ukeleles and moonlight--"

"And the MPPA comes in and tosses out the film! It's a conspiracy!" he said in a Durantean tone.

"You guys have worked out the vein--that's all. There can't be any more very interesting movies till there's a new public attitude about life. You've got to where there's no permissible area that you haven't canvassed a hundred times. The new pictures are all remakes. People get sick of such things. Jam yesterday, today and tomorrow is as bad as none today. All the movies are self-plagiarisms. I even went to one with Ricky this summer."

"We're grateful."

"Remember the
Three Little Pigs
--and the song about the 'Big Bad Wolf' that people sang to kid themselves in the Depression?"

"I remember."

"So all right. We went to see this movie--and we also saw a remake of the Little Pigs. Same story. Same art. Same theme song. At the finale, the new inspiration is this: the wolf pops down the chimney of the little pig in the brick house--hind end first. And the pig fills a caldron with turpentine. The wolf lands in same--and the picture irises down on the wolf roaring away, his hind legs held high, his turpentined anus dragging, his forelegs pulling--like any dog. Now--I was brought up to believe that you can't tell the same joke twice. And I was also taught that putting turps on animals' rears was sadistic. I still think it is. And I think it's too vulgar a way to try for a laugh--cruelty to animals aside. That, my boy, is truly obscene--the dying effort of a perishing industry.

Fortunately--television is coming in--and it will be far more vulgar. Television will really speed up the fertile necessity of a great change in this disgraceful Western world. Right?"

"Right," said Dave. "I saw that short. I psychologically snapped my
petits fours."

He looked at me for a while. "Phil--why'd you call me over here, this morning?"

Karl came with the gin and tea. I signed. He went.

Dave's question startled me. I suddenly saw it from his angle. I'd allowed him to skip--or postpone--an important conference because (I'd said) my nephew was on an emotional binge and I needed aid. Dave would know that, all else being equal and normal, I could handle my nephew. He'd know that, barring some editorial crisis, the cutting of a serial wasn't so important I couldn't set it aside for a day or so to row a relative through the waters of a soul-struggle. He'd know, by my cursory attention to Paul--and by the way my talk had slatted around--that I had more on my mind than Paul's problem. So he had realized--and I had not--that I'd decided to call in a friend--for myself.

"I need a good lawyer," I said.

"Oh-oh!"

I looked at him cross-eyed. "What an evil mind you have! I keep my accounts and the tax people are not particularly interested in me. No brunette has letters of mine and is asking for a thousand bucks. Nobody is suing me for plagiarism. I just noticed a little nuisance in the back of my throat the other day and went over to see Tom and had a biopsy--and I want my affairs in order."