Chapter X: Part FOUR: Rondo (1)

1

Paul's "hour" of sleep would last, I felt certain, for the best part of the morning.

I went into my bedroom and looked at him. He had taken off his shirt and his shoes. He lay on his back with his mouth open, his lips nursing the air, his brow creased with wrinkles set there by a life of concentration--and distorted now with sorrow and pain. He was sweating like the inside of a still: the drops welled and ran on his face and his hairy chest and his ribs. Even his feet were bright-sprinkled. As I looked at him he stirred; a murmurous sound of protest and despair came out of the poor guy--a sound tragic and pitiful and weird, for there was nothing human about it. Hurt animals make such noises. Ridiculous--but I remembered how a young man could feel about a girl.

I would like to say that I dressed, girded my spirit, and took some step on Paul's behalf--or even that I sat down at my table with grim and relentless character and put the milk-cart morning to good account by knifing further excess from my serial.

Such was not the case.

I lay on my sitting room couch with the purpose of gathering my forces for both efforts--but I met with failure.

My head ached. Vague pains beset my body--squirting about mysteriously from neck to gut to ankle and back again by way of knee and pelvis and teeth. My tongue burned--dry and yet sticky--inflamed and evil-tasting to itself--the tongue of us millions who sedulously obey the cigarette advertising. (And just possibly the throat of some of us, too, I thought wincingly.) Idiot infantilism, scalding oral eros, obsession, compulsion, tobacco! I smoked on defiantly, wretchedly. The jiffy coffee lay in my stomach like a solid and the heat of it ran from my pores.

I stared at my body--the wens and scars and indurations and red blots--the warts and excrescences and moles--the minor tumors that are our common response to age and attrition--the crinkling paper of my skin--the sun-tan that reflected from a mirror like youth itself but that, at chin-length, lost its satin and was seen to be marched and counter-marched with freckles and a rash of prickly heat. I surveyed the expanded, slack viscera beneath an irreducible fat that slid when I turned, like a hot-water bottle under my flabby epidermis. I noticed the cord inside my bent elbow, standing out like an old man's now, and poorly covered with a crêpy mantle that lacked elasticity--the time-shrunk backs of my hands--my toes, warped out of alignment, marked and marred with the miles and with the leather boxes we wear--their nails, turned in, split, chitinous--small, magenta lace of erupted capillaries--shine and scale on my shins--myself: waxwork--worn battlefield--warrant of decay, incipient cadaver.

I did not need to see my face.

Fatigue dwelt in me always, now. Oh--(barring such incidents in a single one of these tired cells as neoplasm, of course)--I would have exhibited my inordinate energy, my vitality, my apparent arrestation of age for another ten years or twenty or thirty--I might have been an agile old man, supple and good at games (with suitable allowance for the years) whose eyes never clouded, whose hair never fell, diving off tall dolphins to amuse my grandchildren and dancing gracefully with Ricky to the applause of other septagenarians and the infinite boredom of teen-agers. But I was old already--scribbled with the nasty information of years, apprised of slinking hurts, debilities, transient toxicities and nauseas that would increase and increase and increase--or would have done so except for that one, rambunctious cell.

Who wants to be old?

What man, in his so-called prime, fails to note his coming scenery--the bandaged varicosities, the braces, the cut bunions, the scarification and bloodless horn, the smells and tastes of himself, the thickening spectacles, the hearing aids, the pills and petit prostheses, the gouty overpall, the migraine and vertigo, rheum, sour burp, dyspnoeia, heart-kick, cracking, and the myriad painful impediments of urination, defecation, respiration, transpiration, the organic wheeze, the gradual invasion of death?

He wants to be old who accepts it.

But we, the people of the United States of America, have rejected it in toto: there must be some way to keep grandpa a gamin and mom nubile; meantime, let us pretend there is a way.

Millions for senescence and not one cent for sense.

So, okay, I said, it is happening to me with the short and sweet just around the corner and a good thing too, perhaps.

Or a bad thing.

A thing, I realized, of no import.

_Now_ is a sufficient tomorrow for all my yesterdays--if I will see to the circumstance in person.

This summary was a current that carried away the incubus of that early morning and left me sound asleep on the divan.

When I woke up I saw by my watch--which slid on its gold band when I moved my thin, saturate wrist--that it had passed nine o'clock. I budged and yawned and swam up into the room. I felt better--the other side of age having somewhat returned during the nap.

Paul still lay on his back, mouthing and snoring and sweating.

Room service brought cold orange juice and good, hot coffee with a civilized cup to drink from.

I needed assistance--which is to say, Paul needed it. A friend. An attorney. I could hardly spend the whole day with him unless there was no alternative. Yet certainly he should not be alone with his callow impetuosity. And certainly his young colleagues would be too inept for a proper handling of all the potential dilemmas. He needed a Danaos--he had always needed one, a wise older slave to manage his love affairs--a shrewd promoter. Lacking such a companion he had invested the meaningless savings of youth's passion in one whore. Profligate, comical, and a disaster.

I considered Johann Brink.

Women, he would say, do not exist in the laboratory.

When you switch on the cyclotron, you switch off She.

It was too damned bad they _hadn't_ taken women along in there with the atoms--_flame inspiratrice_, man's soul. They might have discovered more concerning the nature of the velocity of light and the behavior of particles and even the essence of packing fractions than they'd learned by the castrate inspection of their micros and macros and milles.

Which other set of barbarian priests was it who emasculated themselves before accepting Holy Orders?

I couldn't remember.

Brink the mental giant and pigmy person would be as much help here as a handful of ice cubes against a forest fire.

I dialed Dave Berne.

His man Veto answered.

"This is Phil Wylie."

"Just a minute."

"Hello, you toothless cobra! What the hell are you doing in town? Waiting for the women to faint?"

"Some of us," I said, "don't have to wait."

He roared. "No kidding! What gives? God, isn't it hot? If I had a human head, I could shrink it right here on my terrace--and it's only nine-twenty, A.M.!"

"Dave, I got trouble."

I told him about Paul.

"I have a ten-thirty conference with some movie moguls," he said when I finished, "so I'll be right over."

He was there in less than a half hour.

David Abraham Lincoln Berne is the most interesting man I know--a statement which covers quite a few interesting men.

A lawyer.

A lawyer, furthermore, whose principal employ is with the movie companies.

He was not always a lawyer....

Dave was born over a delicatessen, in Madison, Wisconsin, of serious minded, musically gifted, orthodox Jewish parents in the winter of 1906, the fourth child of eight, and no culls in the lot. As soon--he says--as he could pound with his porringer, they gave him a violin. But--again, according to him--he swiftly saw that he was going to be only a semiprodigy, so he turned to other fields. He did well in school. One of his playmates, a Milwaukee realtor nowadays, who liked Dave in spite of his personal limitations, long ago told me about that--and succinctly: "Some of those bastard Jews are born with a high school education!"

Dave finished at fifteen--and took an extra year to grow in, working nights at the delicatessen and reading, for entertainment, philosophy.

He has a remarkable memory. He might not be able to recall his laundry mark when he was in Virginia. But no one who knows him well would bet even on that.

A compact guy who--because he is loose-jointed--seems anything but solid. Indeed, his flexibility is such that he could probably learn a yogin's basic postures in one sitting.

Everybody liked him in Madison.

This was not true in Virginia.

He majored in psychology and went out for football. He'd played on his high school team. The backfield coach was impressed equally by the length of his accurate passes and the fact that he mastered the signals in one night's concentrated study. Letter-perfect and reflex-fast. But a pair of racially pure Nordic behemoths from Minnesota, sent proudly to the team by scouting old grads, decided that, although they had nothing personal against the yid, no yid would call their signals. In Dave's first game they managed to break both his legs.

Dave got the idea. He let his uniform hang there, the next year--when he'd got off crutches.

He made the newspaper--but not the fraternity he'd set his heart on.

He made _summa cum laude_.

He went next to Pennsylvania--tutoring, tending furnaces, minding babies, mowing lawns, as usual--and took both an M.A. and a Ph.D. in psychology. He got a job teaching it to pre-med students in Iowa. His thesis on "Formulations of Subjective Sexuality in Man" almost landed him the thing he wanted--a psycho-sociological research position with a big foundation. They wrote him, however, that they felt certain group attitudes (outrageous, but there they are!) would prejudice his fact-gathering efforts.

A Gentile took over the project.

Several of America's brilliant young men in psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis are former students of Dave.

A Dr. Wiswell was put over him in Iowa.

That was when he began to read law.

He took the New York Bar exams in 1935 and went to work for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer that year.

During the war, he was commissioned a captain in the Medical Corps and sent (by a General Muller, a Regular Army doctor who thought Hitler a great man and psychiatry bunk) to Alaska, to study the effects upon mental stamina of cold, isolation, and monotony.

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 afterthought. 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 ice-man? 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."

I shouldn't have done it that way. He turned sheet-white.

"There isn't any report on the biopsy yet," I said. "Won't be till Monday. Makes quite a long weekend. But I have a hunch--"

"You God-damned dour Scotchmen! Maybe it's nothing."

"Tom thinks it's something."

He looked out the window for a long time--with his shoulders folded forward and the sun beating on his face, reflecting into it from the cement top of the parapet and bouncing at it from the tile terrace between. That ugly, fond mug.

"I suppose," he finally said, "when they have taken everything else and everybody else they come around for you in person."

"I never really expected to get even this old. When I was a kid, I was sure I'd never see thirty. As I recall, I didn't want to. Seemed a stale age."

Dave grinned feebly. "Ricky?"

I shook my head.

"She well now?"

"We think so."

"Get her down here, man!"

I shook it again. "Give her the two more days. And it just might--might--and then--"

"You didn't take a drink?"

Again.

"By God! What a reform!"

"I'm trying to get that serial done--"

"--strictly on Presbyterianism."

I thought that over. "Maybe. They'll need the dough. And it's a favorite old anodyne of mine--rolling up the sleeves."

Dave poured out a second glass of iced tea and gulped it. He nodded his head toward my bedroom. "When he wakes up, tell him to come down to my office. Tell him we're working for him. We'll do what we can think of. I'll keep him stooging around--and sober, if possible--and see you later."

"Going?"

He came across the room and put an arm around my shoulder. "You said you wanted to work. I'll be back."

"Okay."

2

I remember, one day on the way to California, when the Chief stopped at Needles. It was summertime and the thermometer on the station wall in the shade said 125 degrees. I was standing around, dizzy, when I saw a guy pacing up and down the platform as if he enjoyed it. I ventured out in the sunshine to see if he'd lost his mind and he turned around--a dark-skinned character. Royalty, it proved later, from Hyderabad. He liked it.

My apartment, that morning, was something like the Needles station on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. No baking sand, red-hot rocks, or mountains pitching on the miraged distance, of course. Needles was dry, too, and Manhattan was close to saturate.

I worked along--not minding much.

But after all, even Negroes sunburn--even Papuans get lazy.

Around one o'clock I began to feel--not hungry but empty--and I went in to check on Paul. He was still snoring and sweating.

Four and a half grains of sodium amytal, by itself, wouldn't have knocked him that flat that long. He'd have wakened in six or seven hours, I thought--feeling fuzzy and feeble and maybe a little sick. He still seemed good for more time, to me. It showed just how much sleep he'd left out in the past weeks, past months--worrying about that girl and worrying about making weapons with his beloved mathematics. It was possible, of course, that he'd explode awake any moment--look at his watch--throw an outside loop--and get going like a jet plane.

I wrote him a note saying I was downstairs in the Knight's Bar and that I had a new search in progress. That would bring him.

I got dressed. The gabardine was like wet newsprint.

This time, air conditioning was a relief. I sucked in a lungful and Jay came up.

"Want to sit with Mrs. Prentiss?"

"Sure."

Exactly two days before, she had leaned over the same table, an immaculate grooming operation--hurt, snooty, aloof, reading her disguised book. A Cinderella. Avid and anxious--haughty and pretty hateful--beautiful and not much good. I could say what was different about her now but it would be difficult to convey the true impression of that. Her hair, for one thing. It was just neatly combed--just casual, gold-blonde hair whose owner hadn't taken pains for once, with every single filament. Her dress. Another plain, costly print--but the body inside it was relaxed and not subconsciously trying to avoid creases. It didn't seem to fit quite as perfectly, and yet it suited her better: it made--would make--anybody, any man, look at the girl inside and the clothes after--not the other way around. The Musak was giving out with "Dardanella" and her foot was keeping time under the table.

"Hello, Yvonne."

She glanced up--from the morning paper.

"'Lo, Phil."

"Want company?"

"Love it." She moved over a little. I came around the table and sat down.

"You look right sweet this morning. Noon. Whatever it is."

She folded up the paper.

I ordered some cold salmon and potato salad and iced coffee.

She studied me--gravely for the most part. Once, she showed a dimple. But her voice was placid. "You could be annoyed at me."

"What for?"

"Don't be obvious!"

"Last night? Annoyed? I was tired. In a talky mood. It was my guest's own idea to come down. I said sure--and after she'd been there awhile--I changed my mind."

"That's what Gwen thought." She ate a little of her fruit salad. Maybe her hand shook. Certainly not much. She drew a straight, easy breath. "I imagined I could learn something from her."

"Did you?"

She looked at me with frank, gray eyes. She smiled into herself. "You know I did."

"What?"

"Isn't it strange how much we attach to trifles--love and sex trifles? Set up a whole lifetime for happiness--but fix it so that one little act for a handful of minutes will ruin the whole thing."

"That."

She flicked her head to put back her hair. "It's mad! To imagine such things are so important! To imagine whole lives and people and families can be ruined by anything--so little!"

I gave her the red schoolhouse riposte. "Knocking a person on the head is a little thing that hardly takes even one minute. But it's murder. Slipping a hundred G's out of the cash cage takes only a sec--but it's robbery--"

"And kissing you in a cab the other night," she answered, "took only a couple of blocks and I don't love you in the least. We touched. A moment or two. It was fun. We'll never do it again. Or, say--we do. Is that like murder and robbery? Should it ruin lives?"

"Not to my way of thinking. I don't feel wrecked."

"Neither do I," she said softly. "Neither do I! On the contrary! You have to find out that how you feel is terribly important--terribly. But what you do--unless you make it important--that's such a tiny thing!" She smiled. "When you think that just forty-eight hours ago--I was sitting here shuddering over Rol--"

"It occurred to me."

"It seems--" she sought for the proper words--"sort of--caddish. Unchivalrous. And hideously unsympathetic."

"Aren't you pushing yourself?"

"What do you mean?"

"You could have a reaction."

"I'm having one."

My lunch came.

"I mean," I said, "a reaction to this reaction."

She considered that and her curls moved. "I doubt it. I'm--cured."

"Cured one way. Maybe you're going to suffer in another."

She seemed frightened for a bare moment. "I don't know," she finally said. "How can I tell?"

"Wait and see."

"If I suffer, I suffer," she finally said. And her eyes weren't alarmed.

"Good for you!"

"May I ask a question?"

"Shoot."

I waited while she ate a little and formulated.

"Phil, what would you think of me now if I were your wife?"

It was quite a one. It was the second really tough one she'd put to me. "What would you ask God if He came in?" was the other.

"I hope," I said, "that I'd cherish you more than ever."

"But you might not?"

"I leave room for the possibility. I don't know, after all."

"Why would you cherish me?"

"For at last being honest with yourself about yourself."

"Easy answer. Why might you not?"

"I dunno. You might have found yourself--by that honesty--to be somebody who wouldn't like me. Ergo--how could I go on insisting--?"

"Only that?"

"Only that. It's a lot."

"You sure, Phil? Certain?"

"My-God-yes! A great, great many of the people I know, and am fond of, and admire, would look at your sin as just a sort of timid, dainty experiment. I suppose you're fishing around for rebuke. You'll never get much. Most women learn by doing--some men, by just thinking. What are you doing tonight, for instance?"

"I--I don't know yet." She flushed peach-pink. "I haven't--decided."

"Unh!"

"You sound like Rol. Like Rol--after-- Before I left. Dainty--he talked like that."

"They bring us up--in a desert," I said. "Because that's where they grew up." I thought of Needles and the metallic sunlight and the Moslem prince. "Still--there are other things in life besides sex."

"Not if sex isn't right, there aren't. Not any other things worth living for."

"Back to Freud and the Western neurosis. Yvonne--I have to scram in a moment. Work. And a nephew. Maybe you'd care to meet him?"

"You'll forget to call me."

"Then you call me--later on."

"Probably I will."

I scraped up the last of the salmon and tipped the ice cubes in my coffee glass against my upper lip.

Yvonne reached over and took my left hand. She ran the backs of her fingers slowly through it and shivered with a small ecstasy. "Phil! I'm all new!"

"You certainly let your hair down."

She leaned toward me. "I let down--!" She smiled and shook her head. "Am I so wicked?"

"Nope. If you tried, you might make it. Right now--"

I left her in that subdued, shiny-eyed jizzle.

3

The door slipped out of my somewhat moist palm when I opened it and was slammed not by the day's breeze, for there was no breeze, but by a draft that sucked through the Astolat Hotel--a current of air bearing the odors of food, carpets, paint, luggage, and the scents of rich women--a damp, thermal issue that would have incubated eggs.

Paul sat bolt upright in my bed.

He saw me, first. He stared at the room. He swung his feet to the floor.

"Gotta get going. Any news of her?"

"Take it easy, bo."

"What time is it?"

I told him.

"You've let me waste half the day?" His voice broke.

"Not waste it. Thought the rest would do you good. Bring you back to your senses a little. Seems not."

"God damn you--you should have waked me up. I feel horrible."

"Snap out of it! Try to remember what the poet says about rags, bones, hanks of hair--and a good cigar is a smoke." His eyes were so wild that I took pity on him. "Jump in the shower. I've got Dave Berne--an old pal of mine--working on your Marcia. He probably has detectives on the hunt this minute."

Paul heavily rubbed the stubble on his face. "I _thought_ you'd take charge."

While he used my shower and my razor I had his clothes pressed and ordered some breakfast for him.

But he ate the food only because he had to wait for the valet. I couldn't remember having seen anybody in such a tizzy about a girl since the days of my youth--since my own tizzies. And tizzy wasn't the right word for Paul's condition. It was pretty nearly psychopathic.

He ate and ran from my rooms, after I'd made him promise to report back later in the day.

I got into the serial again and the sun moved across the blue-hot sky, driving from Manhattan everybody with the fare.

Ambulances were collecting prostration cases.

Cops were going around shutting off the fire hydrants which wilted citizens were opening with wrenches. Cops trying to save the water supply against fall drought, against fires, against winter snow that could be flushed into the sewers, and in behalf of the thirst, cookery, and cleanliness of the millions.

The heat wave had become big headlines in the papers.

Sometimes I looked out the window at the glaring roofs of the metropolis and tried archmeasures of cortical autohypnosis, imagining the sky gray, snow falling in hushed and steady spirals, shop windows green and red for Christmas, and Salvation Army Santa Clauses ringing handbells beside their tripods and kettles on the main intersections. It wasn't any good. My personal limits of trained tolerance had been exceeded by a great, tormented gob of atomic fire ninety-three million miles away and right here on my windowsill.

Still--I made fair progress.

The light was losing its intensity, though the air was no less fevered, when I got a call.

"Is this Phil Wylie?" It was a man's voice--bland, on the booster side.

"Yo." I was not very enthusiastic about being Phil Wylie.

"This is Socker Melton. Friend of your father. He told me to look you up, here--and I've tried a time or two before now. Glad to catch you in. May I come up?"

What do you do? I told him I was working hard--on a rush operation--but to come up anyhow.

Then I raged around the sitting room for a bit.

Christ badger every old friend of the family!

The oaf's knock was pompous. Bonk and pause, bonk and pause, bonk.

Like the pass-signal to a kid's shanty.

I opened the door, being careful to cling to the knob.

My dimmest view was justified.

Socker Melton was a big chum--sixty-two or -three and about two-hundred and twenty-five. He had a face that would have been square if he'd sacrificed his extra chin--large, blue, eager-beaver eyes--a babyish snub nose--and a rather thick mouth, not very clearly defined; but there was nothing repulsive in the ensemble--he looked like a star Buick salesman. He wore--maybe I should say sported, since he probably thought of it that way--a white flannel suit of a light weight and he carried a panama hat, the sweatband of which was earning its keep. A poor day for those big boys and I felt sorry for him. His clerical collar was doing its best to stand up for Jesus--but there were folds in it and his black dickey was mussed.

I propped the door open.

He inventoried the place after a passing gander at me. You could see that he liked nice things--and the Astolat is well heeled. His eye rested especially on some mirror-backed hanging shelves.

"I hate to intrude like this--"

"Any friend of pop's--" I said.

He gave the panama a scale--to show me he was an informal guy like me--and dropped into one of my chairs. The thing squeaked hard and braced itself. I figured to be charming for about ten minutes.

I'm a sucker for people who get to see me, anyway. I like most people--as individuals, to begin with; and although I do what I can--and the family does what it can--to keep the more extraverted oddities from jimmying doors and peering through bedroom windows, I spend a God-awful amount of time chitchatting with visiting strangers of all sorts.

The chair he'd taken was in reach of my MS, so he reached for it. It is possible that he was trying to adjust to the fact that I was wearing only a pair of shorts.

"Sounds amusing," he said, after reading a few lines.

That was what Gwen had said the night before. I was glad to see the Cloth in agreement with the professionally unclad. Competent magazine fiction should appeal to all tastes.

"Pleased that you think so."

I told myself that I had no right to be irritated at the preacher's patronizing tone, or at his unasking and uninvited reading of my manuscript. After all, when artists paint in public places, people feel free to look over their shoulders.

"I'm the rector of St. Shadows, over on Park," he said. "But don't hold that against me."

I'd heard of the guy. The "Socker" came from intercollegiate boxing--at which he had been champ of his class many long years ago. My old man thought he was a "great personality, a liberal, a true intellectual of the church, and a profound modern philosopher."

"I won't hold it against you if you say not."

He laughed--about four watts too heartily. "Mind if I take this coat off?"

I did mind--because that meant he'd stick around longer. But I'd asked him up. What the hell! I usually give myself a break around four or five, anyhow--for coffee.

I told him that. "I was about to knock off--" and so on. "Would you like something to drink?"

He said he'd have a sloe gin fizz. This was to get across his modernity and liberality.

"Don't drink, myself." I took some trivial pleasure in his visible surprise.

"I thought all authors--?"

"Used to be a lush. Quit." I told Room Service about this new guest and his taste for wild plum juice.

He had said, "Oh," anent my confession. I hung up and he grinned at me. He'd taken off his collar and dickey by that time and was sitting there in a wet undershirt. "In town for long?"

"Nope."

"You're here a good deal, though, your father tells me."

"Sometimes. At the moment--we're building in Florida--and my kid attends school there--so Florida is where we spend most of our time."

"Hot, in the fall and spring, isn't it?"

"Not this hot!"

He thought that was amusing, too. "Hurricanes," he said.

"Yep. Hurricanes."

"You've been in them?"

"Repeatedly." I passed up a grade-A chance to dramatize Wylie, since it would give him equal privileges, when his turn came.

"I'll tell you, frankly, why I'm here," Socker said. "I want you to do me a favor." He gave me that ministerial look--the beaming meekness of a man who is never denied a favor.

"Like what?"

It dashed him a trifle. "Well, Phil--" (old friend of dad, I reminded myself) "I don't suppose you've been in a church for a long time."

"Not to my knowledge."

That got him again. "And I don't suppose you've ever been in a church like mine. Don't get the idea I'm about to ask you over to hear me preach. A preacher like yourself--you see, I've read your books--wouldn't be much interested in the rhetorical efforts of a chap like me." He was a little nervous, now, and actually a shade humble. "What I'm driving at is this. We've got a young people's society that has thrown doctrine out the window--not caring how much stained glass broke--and is trying to get some meaning out of religion by putting some new meaning in it."

"Sounds trenchant."

"I want you to come over, Phil, and talk to my young people. They're readers of yours. We've discussed your books at meetings--gone through them chapter by chapter--had some real battles! It's our feeling that, at bottom, you're as earnest a Believer as any of the rest of us. I've sprung some surprises on my young folks--Phil--but springing you would really rock them."

The Buick salesman touch.

I told him--as nicely as I could--about never making speeches, and why. It's always embarrassing.

He covered up his very annoyed disappointment and decided all I needed was a working-over. He began this by ignoring the invitation--after a little more pressure got him nowhere. He talked about his church and the young people and their outlook:

"You'd be interested in learning what's going on among religious liberals, Phil. In fact, you owe it to yourself to find out! And your writing shows you don't know! Dogma has simply gone overboard--and I mean overboard. We're studying psychology as hard as you are. We take up a book like the late Liebman's _Peace of Mind_--and learn to understand it. Hell-fire and damnation--original sin--that sort of rubbish--is out. We'll listen to a communist over there as attentively as to a priest. We believe Christ would have made the fair distribution of goods His business--if He were alive now. We sit around and air sex problems as frankly as the professors. Use their lingo. We don't believe religion ought to be a lifelong way of pain and hardship and self-torment and sorrow--"

I'd been thinking about the Law of Opposites. What he was saying, I'd said, myself, in some instances. But not all. Some of it made me a little sick. I tried to interrupt but he barged ahead:

"To us, religion is a practical attitude and a source of _joie de vivre_--or it's mistaken. We've got a gymnasium in my church and we hold weekly dances and weekly bingo games there. When we talk about the Master--we talk about a Man who is our Friend--not an Oriental mystic who left His disciples puzzled by contradictory advice. If you can't see your way clear to visiting with us--at this time--you certainly ought to be able to see the value of catching up with the status of modern Christianity--"

"There are a couple of points that worry me," I said.

"Come and thresh them out with us!"

"I don't imagine Jesus would have been interested in communism, for example."

"Because it's antagonistic to orthodox religion? Wasn't He an antagonist of orthodoxy, Himself?"

"The logic escapes me, there. If I'm not mistaken, Jesus was exclusively concerned with the inner world. He was completely antimaterialist. Social systems were superficial to Him. He was agin the obsessive materialism of Near East capitalists two thousand years ago--and I strongly suspect He would see dialectical materialism as a mere spread of that unilateral pall over the conscious minds of the masses."

"Superb! Come over and tell us that!"

"You're supposed to know it, already," I answered. "And to be teaching it. Besides, I am a firm believer in Original Sin."

"_What!_"

The sloe gin and my iced coffee arrived.

He offered to pay--a unique point--clumsy, but pleasant.

George looked him over twice. George had never seen a clergyman in my haunts, except my father, whom he knew.

"I believe in Original Sin," I said, when George went and when the parson had taken a cool, deep pull, "since I believe every religion is the attempt, the compulsive and unconscious attempt, to make a schemata of instincts that will be palpable to the sense perceptions of human personality--and since I also believe that religions have generally failed in that function--causing the sin."

"Failed how?"

"Failed by being turned to the support of the ego."

"But we'd agree with you, there!"

"So I must conclude there is some basic error in the entire religious phenomenon. Believing that religions express a genuine psychological compulsion--a need to discover the inner pattern of behavior, the inner design of consciousness--but observing that the orthodox patterns offered so far have led only to a succession of material advances that ended in social collapse--I must conclude that there is some _human_ error which repeats itself down the millenniums. Some terribly deep perversion of Nature that at first lets man advance a little--then throws him back nearly the whole distance--gets him going once more with a newer, 'truer' religion--and so on, ad infinitum. This perversion is what I call Original Sin."

"Pretty abstract," he said.

"Not at all. Here's the Sin. Religions have been used not so much as formulations for guidance as to convince their various Believers that man is, himself, godlike, wherefore God. Not an animal with a fresh neurological awareness. Not a beast of the field, who knows it and who therefore knows that what goes on inside beasts is nothing to sneer at. But God Almighty, personified according to His self-personifications of Zeus, Amon-Ra, the Prophets, Jehovah, or Who-not. God Almighty--destined to live forever with all the numerous Gods-Almighties--in the Elysian Fields, Nirvana, or Wherever. You follow me?"

"I think so."

"You don't. Let's try it again. Imagine a band of apes that developed self-awareness. Apes that suddenly saw themselves _as selves_. Imagine those apes interpreting the new cortical phenomenon not as a fresh and fascinating development amongst animals--but as evidence of their metamorphosis from the flesh to something Higher. They don't know what, exactly. They work out What in a series of mythologies and religions. 'What' turns out, in our era, to be Sons of God, Brothers in Christ, Redeemed Eternally by Grace. That's where they are today. Not humble animals, carrying on the business of Evolution for species yet unguessed. They feel sure (in Christ) that they are the perfect biology right now. They sit at the end of an age-old endeavor to acquire that seeming. An endeavor which has shucked off or hidden every aspect of animal reality it can."

He was shaking his head. "I feel puzzled--"

"The use of religions, in effect, has been to conceal and deny the animal nature of man. That is perverse. Man eats--a simple, animal activity. How many religious rituals--turned into social functions in how many cases--could you list, all of which were designed to give a nonanimal cast to eating? Hundreds?"

"I suppose you mean feasts and fasts and such?"

"Food taboos, food rituals, food symbols--like your bread and wine--religious dietary laws. Sure. Man--like the beasts--must eat. But he has tried ten thousand tricks to make it seem nonanimal, or 'godlike.' Now. Consider sex--another human function which is exactly like its animal counterpart. Here there is less exigency than in eating--more time-lag for ritual and style. Man went passionately into the business of developing systems which would conceal the animal and instinctual nature of sexuality and lend to it the superior qualities of his various gods, religions, his self-glorifying self-images."

"I think I begin to see--"

"Exactly. By now--we dwell amid a species that is twenty or thirty or forty thousand years away from the contemplation of its instincts as germane to animal instincts. The distance in time is matched by countless steps in illusion. It is hardly possible for a man to think of himself as an animal in the true sense, any more. It is all but impossible for him to feel, to experience, his animal fact. And--since I believe instinct seen locally in time and space is as 'good' as it is 'evil'--and that, in sum, it is _all good_--I find this long attempt to translate natural instincts into ridiculous and unnatural dogmas and god-images--is a very sad mistake. A very great sin--the 'original' sin of assuming a superiority toward terrestrial, psychological, and cosmic Nature.

"Each new religion may be--usually is--an 'improvement' in some way upon its discarded or waning predecessor. But each is, always, founded on the premise that man is 'above' that which works within him and occurs around him. So, in the end, even though intelligent religious premises may benefit humanity in many ways--for instance, the search for truth inspired by Jesus, led haltingly to the birth of the scientific method--the fundamental premise is _always false_ and the benefits are finally fouled by the basic blunder. Instinct frustrated by the delusions of Believers of all sorts _has_ to go into autonomous operation on the multitudes, simply because they deny and repress instinct until this society or that--and all of them--fails to meet their instinctual needs. And instinct, acting in violent fashion, upon such blind, willful repudiators of necessary process--always brings calamity. It _has_ to wipe out or at least reduce each new aggregate of the self-deceived. So another civilization topples. Then another creed arises and we begin again. Until we get straightened out about _what instinct is_--get, so to speak, a real picture of our inner selves, of what it is in us that we have made into all gods and theology--a picture congruent with such truths as we _can_ see and _can_ admit--we're bound to operate in this roller-coaster fashion."

"In other words, your Original Sin is the church itself!" He sounded disturbed.

"It's--any ism. Any person or group with sure-fire dogmas that you have to accept on faith--as offering ends justifying physical means and psychological means that are illogical, unethical, unreasonable, that fail to take into account the innate facts of our animal instinct, that exclude valid opposites to their tenets, and so on."

"And you think God is what might be called the _cause_ in instinct?"