OPUS 21 (3 page)

older men--stare back at the bereavement of their youth, hating themselves for that which barbaric fear (translated as noble character) had prevented them from doing, knowing, sensing, or enjoying. Often, these had turned their irreversible disappointment into a mockery of Kinsey, thus exposing the near-vacuum in which they had endured their decades--without being aware of the exposure. Americans are not mature enough, intelligent enough, discerning or well enough educated to learn from psychology; but it is evident they are, in many cases, of an adequate spiritual development to learn from a Rockefeller-endorsed zoologist.

It didn't matter to me where the facts came from--so long as people began to perceive they were facts--facts that made a far truer picture of man and sex than all the utterances of priests, preachers, legislators, and other sick-minded slobs put together.

We behave sexually like other mammals--apes, horses, dogs. Centuries of suppression alter us not a jot. It is a sterling proof that instinct, not vanity-calling-itself-reason, is our guide. It is the hardest blow yet struck against the bishops. In our time, they and their sickly minions will prevail. But after us, and them, some decent men may rise in the debris and put to a proper use what we all know and nearly all deny. . . .

She was reading the Kinsey Report.

"What for?" I asked.

The question startled her, although the introduction itself did not. She was obliged to feign a social surprise. Her inward gray eyes met mine and moved away. She drew part of an annoyed breath. She shut the book. She made up her mind to say, "I beg your pardon. Were you speaking to me?"

She had a musical voice, pitched low but not husky.

"I wondered why you were reading the Kinsey Report so avidly--and my curiosity started talking. I usually do ask people things, when I want to know. It's discourteous. But sometimes they tell me."

That made her smile a little. "You might be asking quite a question."

"Any question is quite a question. If I merely asked you how to get to Fifth Avenue, you would be telling me, in answering, where to take my life. I might be run over, doing it. I might get into a street fight. Or meet a blonde. If I asked you why you've been crying so much--that would be quite a question, too. If I were a woman, I might ask, simply--what you wore under what, and where you bought it. The answer to that one would describe dozens of your attitudes toward dozens of important matters."

She didn't say anything. If she nodded, it was the smallest of her nods. She twirled her cocktail glass, sipped the last of the amber drink, and returned to her reading.

She wanted me to know that she didn't flirt. I expressed my apperception by ordering lemon pie, which I didn't want, and coffee, which I did--and further, by leaving my table and the restaurant while my place was being cleared and my dessert brought. I went across the hot street to the newsstand and bought
Time
magazine--which I used to read for information and read now to keep abreast of the Biases--and the
Telegram.
When I carne back to the bar I found the girl had also ordered coffee--and brandy. That settled it.

"My name," I said immediately, "is Philip Wylie. I'm a writer. The waiters will vouch for me. I live here." The strain left her eyes and they widened slightly. "I've read lots of things you've written! For
heaven's sake!"

Most Americans who get around have read lots of the things I've written. This is a great instant advantage--though often a present handicap--in picking up strangers. They are at first agreeably surprised; but they generally expect writers to "be like" the characters in their books--from God alone knows what an abysmal lack of imagination-and are therefore eventually disappointed.

Since I said nothing, she went on, "You're the author who hates women!" There was shine in her eyes, then--challenge--amusement. Spite, too.

"Only moms," I answered. "And not 'hate'--deplore."

"And Cinderellas, too!"

"Oh, yes. I'd forgotten the Cinderellas. I deplore them also."

"Maybe I'm one."

"A superior specimen--if true." I am semi-gallant.

"What made you hate women so violently? Did your mother beat you? And why do you blame everything that goes wrong on women?" Two hard lines showed the muscles around her teeth. "Don't you realize that for everything you've written against women--you could say the same--and a hundred times as much--against men?"

"Lookie," I said. "Many years ago, when I was younger and foolish, I wrote a book about a few of the more conspicuous and lethal flaws in our fair nation. The book was some three hundred and seventy pages long. I devoted all but about twenty pages to the calamitous follies of males. Men, as you call them. But I did, for some twenty pages of light blast, violate the ironclad altar of femininity and point out mom's big mouth and little brain, her puffed crop and shaky pins. A few things. I hardly thought I had loaded the dice-inasmuch as half the people are female and I gave females only about a fifteenth of my slightly caustic attention. But ever since that book came out, almost every woman I've met has accused me of outrageously laying the blame for a manifestly hell-bound society on females. In the first place, this is not true. In the second place, such statements-

-the hundreds I've collected--tend to show that American women positively refuse to take any blame for anything whatever. They have no conscience and no sense of responsibility. They believe themselves to be as spotless as United States senators say they are, in campaign orations. They lack the capacity for admitting guilt. They are nearly all--I have thus found--psychologically far, far, far more destitute than I claimed only certain kinds of them to be."

She laughed. "You're
still
mad! Someday you'll break down and write a wonderful novel about the woman who really poisoned you against them all."

' I'll break down," I agreed. "But I'll never write the novel! One reason is-there's no such novel. Women have always been good to me--with a few exceptions I can tolerate.

Women have made love to me and they have been generous with me, and taught me, and they have been sensitive toward me. My daughter--who is sixteen--adores me.

My first wife tried every combination she could think of to make me happy--and put up with me for ten years, when I was a drunkard. My second wife has gone even further.

Past ten years--for one thing. And I quit drinking altogether, after we'd been married for a while. I--to repeat the most readily understandable expression--adore her. And I adore my daughter. I adore women, as a matter of fact. Such vexation as I--have shown represented an aspect of that reverence: a good many women are fundamentally disappointing to anybody who cares much for women. And I resent the general damage such women do.

A man"--I looked at her as loftily as I could--"has a curious faculty for resenting human sabotage even when he is not, himself, directly involved in the matter. A woman, as a rule, sees harm in the ruinous excursion of a nitwit only if she sees it as a real or potential menace to herself, loved ones, and assigns. It is a comfortingly personal outlook toward which I am hotly antipathetic."

"You talk like your books," she said.

"Why not? I wrote the damned things!"

She poured her brandy into her coffee and drank a little.

"Men," I went on, "in this century, are deeply imbued with just that personal, feminine attitude. They refuse to meddle with evils that do not immediately threaten them. They have sold out their duty toward the whole species, for local, temporal advantages. They no longer live lives but merely cadge existences. If a guy is successful and well fixed, the ordinary American does not and cannot see that he has the reason or the right--let alone the need!--to take a dim view of anything on earth." I picked up my copy of
Time
magazine and waved it at her. "Whenever one of my morally indignant volumes appears, this self-righteous periodical, for instance, usually begins its reviews by saying that lawn a palatial residence in Florida, earn big money writing commendable hack stories for the magazines, fish all the time, and yet--blackguard!--I have the gall to gripe! The inference is that I am a lunatic. Indeed, it has become more than an inference.

This carburetor of the news called my latest effort a whiff into midnight: Who is nearer the witching hour--the well-heeled gent who still sees imperfections in the planet and says so or the editor who unconsciously imagines that prosperity and criticism are incongruent? That is the Ivy League philosophy--suitable to cover the ruins it soon will bring about."

"You're mad at Clare Luce," the girl said.

"There you go! Personal again! See here, ma'am. A man can get as intense feelings from statistical tables as a woman can from Sinatra's brow wave. Vital statistics give them to me. I had such sensations when, after the publication of the Smythe Report, I pensively ran over the Periodic Table. Many other charts and graphs deeply affect me. I hardly know Clare Luce. I had cocktails with her once-though. Very attractive. Very-not bright-ardent. That's the important thing in women, too. We disagreed about everything we discussed. But a woman who enters the field of ideas is obliged, naturally, to follow some man or men. Women have never left any ideas around for men or women to follow.

Clare said she follows Monseigneur Fulton Sheen--another glitteringly ardent soul. I'm not mad at Clare Luce. In my situation I find it impossible to be mad at anybody on earth.

And it was generally difficult for me, even before now."

"What's happened that made you change?"

"God has sent for me," I said sarcastically.

"You mean--you've been converted?"

"If I am ever converted--in the common sense--it will be the hard way: posthumously and in the Presence. No. The change in me, what little I have so far discovered, probably comes from atrophy. The peace and mellowness that men mistake for wisdom-that is in fact the result of calcium deposits, excess urea in the cells, and so on."

"You're forty!"

"And you're twenty--instead of twenty-six."

"You don't look it."

"You do. And as you well know, it's a damn good age for a woman to look."

She thought awhile. "You meet a lot of woman."

"I meet a few."

"Famous ones, I mean. What's your wife like? Blonde? Brunette?"

"You know a movie actress named Maureen O'Sullivan?" She nodded. "Ricky--

my wife--gets mistaken for her. We go into night clubs and sometimes they give us a swell table and people begin asking each other who the hell I am--thinking they've identified Ricky."

"She's sweet--Miss O'Sullivan."

"Ricky is, too."

"Who's the most beautiful one you ever met?"

"The most beautiful one--I never met. Hedy Lamarr."

"You could, though. Celebrities can meet each other."

' I'm only about a Class D celebrity."

"Suppose--?" She eyed me speculatively. "Suppose some glamorous dame and you met. Suppose you got a yen for her? What would you do?"

"God knows."

' I'm serious. After all, you've written enough articles and books and stories about it. Do you mean what you say? Or are you just trying to be sensational?"

"Would I, in other words, after meeting the gorgeous Miss or Mrs. So-and-so, invite her to take a long drive in the country--or to picnic on a beach--to look at etchings?

Would I, personally? I might. Sure."

"What would Mrs. Wylie say?" The gray eyes were troubled-perhaps afraid.

"Maybe nothing. She would never hear of it. Does marriage have to end privacy entirely-

-every hour of it in a life? If she did hear--she might still say nothing. She might laugh at me. She might be hurt. She might be angry. It would depend on her mood at the moment."

"Her mood just at the moment!"

"Sure."

"Isn't that--pretty"--she sought a term--"unstable?"

"Extremely stable. It would show that she regarded what we have been led to call infidelity a matter of so superficial a nature as to be colored by a superficial mood. This, in turn, would indicate that her more profound attitude toward me--and my feelings for her-was unshaken. Stable, as you would say. If, on the other hand, I knew she would have only one, single conceivable reaction--whether noncommittal or aggrieved--I could be certain that her feelings for me, and her deepest sense of my feelings, had become absolutist, rigid, probably dominating and demanding, certainly doctrinaire. I could deduce that she was in a most unstable situation--since people resort to the projection of absolutes on other people only when they are torn by uncertainty of themselves. Notice this in religions. The absolutes are defined to a hair--with different sorts of steeples, doorways, fonts and crucifixes marking infinitesimal splits over dogma--but with no commensurate variation in the effect on human conduct whatever. Is a Baptist nobler than a Methodist? Kinder? Wiser? No. So the different absolutes of both, seen detachedly, represent nothing more than the uncertainty, instability, self-doubt, inconfidence, distrust, and lack of magnanimity of both. Their passion to lay down the law, taken with the minuscule variants that ensue, is proof that Christians have no stability whatever. Sex follows the same rule--and so does everything else."

"I would have been furious, though."

She referred, still, to my hypothetical infidelity. And her reference was interesting. 'Without thinking, she had used the past perfect subjunctive. If, that is to say, her husband--the apparent supplier of the opulent rings--had trifled with a strange brunette at some lodge convention, this young lady's reaction
would have been
fury. It apparently would not be, now. The assured presumption was, therefore, a rift between herself and her spouse. Coupled with her way of drinking cocktails while eating a sandwich, the brandy in her coffee, her reading matter, and, particularly, the blur of suffering I had seen in her eyes, this presumption led to further inference: the rift was recent and she was in flight from it, while yet attempting to understand its causes.

She was, that is to say, no habitual Martini drinker; these do not mix their cocktails with their viands. She was reading Kinsey not from the starved cupidity of hundreds of thousands of other women (for if she had been even that uninhibited she would have read it sooner) but in the effort to discover something. She was drinking not to drown her sorrow but to take away its edge: she had mixed her latest drink with the antidote of coffee. And, inasmuch as I had never seen her with her husband at the Astolat, it was a good guess, at least, that she was here as part of an act of abandonment rather than as a result of being abandoned by him. Her accent was vaguely eastern-but eastern rubbed against, and somewhat eradicated by, the flatter tones of the West. Like numberless other such women, she had fled to New York for refuge--and from a considerable distance. Texas, perhaps, or Arizona. And probably she had lived in Manhattan before now: the Knight's Bar was unknown to tourists--with the exception of Europeans visiting America.