Chapter V: Part TWO: Tarantella (2)

The body is potentially immortal: it can reproduce itself. And so the I would be immortal in its self-sensation if it were oriented, like the lives of animals, toward that which it could reproduce--all men toward all men yet to be--rather than toward its wretched self-awareness, its greedy, permanent stoppage of time for narcissistic attitudinizing. The I is a mirror. It can see itself forever and any now as this now--if only it looks at the reflection to observe all those behind and all beyond, of which it is an integral. But if it ignores those behind--rules out even the next-lowest author of its instincts--and if it eschews the requirements of those to come which are the integral function of itself--if, that is, the I concentrates upon its one embodied reflection, rejecting the panoply of life and repudiating past and present for its little now--then, truly that I is mortal. It is a suicide for that it is an assassin.

Such are all persons but a very few, these days.

So are they taught.

So inspired: unpunctuality and unproductivity are un-American.

So do they urgently maintain themselves--egoists without the sense of individuation.

And that is why the earth is perishing for man.

In the hatred people have for people.

And the absolute hatred of posterity that rises from the absolute rejection of our real ancestry.

There are moments when the circumstance is unutterably clear to me--and in these, I _know_--without respect to the immediate employment of my body or the thing called I.

There are moments when the time-easements I have bought grow clouded.

And then the knowledge escapes arms, legs, cranium, and I.

What man, reared as I was, domiciled in this earth's insanity, has even the intimations, let alone the occasional assurance? And who, attached to his clocks, trains, bells, and the earth's turned shadow, keeps a continual hold upon the vital principle? Very few.

Say it was late.

Say I did not want to sleep.

Say, if you will, I did not want to face my circumstances. It is not so. The space during which I sat on the green sofa smoking my cigarette was what you call ten minutes--an infinity that could not be shortened, made painful, or even touched at any point by measurement.

I picked up the telephone.

The colored girl had a soft voice. "Hello?"

"This is Phil Wylie--is Hattie there?"

"What's the name again, please, sir?"

I spelled it. She was gone for a long time. I felt a little amused. If Hattie didn't remember--I thought she would--they'd be obliged to consult books or files or whatever records they kept, that went back to the wild, drunk, bewildering years when my first marriage had worn patience thin, shattered it, and turned loose on the town a younger man. A decade and more ago.

Hattie's voice--deep, harsh--worried, I thought. "Phil, for God's sake! Where have you been keeping yourself? I heard you were a reformed character."

"My wife told me to call you up."

Hattie was unruffled. "Sometimes they do. How are you?"

"Swell."

"I'm glad to hear it! What can we do for you?"

"It's a long, fascinating story that I'd like to run up and tell you."

"Be a pleasure. I'm losing at bridge. Looking for an out." She chuckled. "Stingers? Side cars? What shall I get ready?"

"Coffee."

"Better still! Viola keeps a percolator on--but I'll have her make it fresh. Usually--it's like French pot-au-feu--goes on forever."

"You've doubtless--moved--?"

"Moved! We're Manhattan's most displaced persons!" She gave me a high number on the West Side.

There was never a rush hour at Hattie's. But two a.m. was what might be called the peak. It embarrassed no one: she had plenty of sitting rooms. In any case, most of the customers knew one another--and knew one another as clients.

A white marble lobby. An elevator with much gilded fretwork. It was operated by a Negro with an exceedingly noncommittal face. Only one door in the hall on the top floor. A good-sized apartment building, I thought, as I pushed the bell and heard the chimes; hence a good-sized bordello. The colored girl who had answered the phone answered the door, keeping the chain attached. I told her my name.

The foyer was dim and modernistic. Two halls branched from it. I could see doors along both--and hear music.

"Jes' follow me, please."

She said it all night.

The perfumes mingled, the way they do. It is a woman's medley--expensive or cheap--with no other detectable difference. One door was open. Two girls sat there--pale, straight hair that fell to a sharp, sculptured point over a book and a pair of shimmering, nylon legs.

Viola went on.

She opened another door. Hattie was standing at the window in a green dress--her once-sleek orange hair dyed black, now, and fluffed out--her ankles no longer slim--and when she turned I hid, as all of us do, my inner response to the etching of the interval--that very Time which I so recently had seen to be without importance. She was now about fifty-five.

"Phil," she said, "this is nice! You don't seem a day older--just wiser. But look at me!"

"Brunette."

"A harridan. The warmest heart in the world--and what happens? The opposite of Dorian Grey. I blame it on the high morals and low conduct of the cops. Hard years. I loved Fiorello--and he despised every bone in my body. I was even over in Jersey for a while. It was the lowest period in my life. Sit down over there in the red chair. Viola, bring us coffee. You know--I've often thought about you--when I read your books--or when one of the girls did--or when I read something of yours in a magazine. You aren't around here much, any more, though, are you?"

I shook my head. "Miami Beach. And now--we're building a house in Miami."

"Florida. I went down last winter. Had a cold I simply couldn't shake. Stayed at the Steinberg-Riviera. Hell of a place, Miami Beach! Wonderful weather, period. Everybody on the make. Shake a palm and out drops a chippy. A madam with ethics would starve there--and the news about good taste hasn't got south of the Mason and Dixon Line."

"I always think of it as the end of the American dream."

"It's the end, anyhow. Phil. Do you really want to see me? Because if you're being polite for old time's sake--maybe you'd rather put off the sentimental chitchat till later."

Hattie is a thoughtful dame.

I was about to laugh at her when an abrupt inquiry held me for a second or two. I was surprised--a little. But the question postponed itself. "I came up--solely and utterly to call on you, Hattie."

She shrugged one shoulder. She yawned. "Maybe we can return your calls. We used to. But--really--I'm delighted. Except when you were--overburdened--you were always fun to have around. It's a dull life--just being chaperon to a lot of whores. And it seems to me the boys aren't interested in philosophy any more. They used to spend more time chinning than cheating, around here. Back in the old days of humanism and liberalism and Coué and the market boom, when the world was full of fun. Why--I had to scout local campuses for girls who could keep in the debates! Now--the boys just come in tight and preoccupied--ask for a girl by hair color, like picking out paint for a kitchen--pay--and scram. I can't recall how long it's been since we held one of those impromptu breakfasts--for the celebrities and plain people who happened to be around! It's depressing!"

I knew what she meant. Everybody knows.

Viola brought the coffee.

"Pretty," I said.

Hattie looked at the door where Viola had gone. "Nice girl. Married and has two kids. The wages are no damned good--but the tips!--I think she does as well as I do, after taxes. More passes made at Vi than nearly anybody actually working. She's a strict Baptist."

"I wasn't--" I thought of reminiscing a little. Then I thought it might be sad. Hattie seemed to have read my mind.

"Remember Elysse? The French girl with the brown bangs?"

I did.

"She's married. Lives in Troy. Comes to see me once in a while. Lovely girl. And--Charmaine? The president of an oil company moved her onto Park Avenue--died--and left her his heap. Millions. She's a good customer of mine. You know, Kinsey should interview me before he writes more books."

Kinsey again.

"Why don't you drop him a note? Volunteer?"

Hattie's face wrinkled with amusement. "I wouldn't want to shock the poor man."

I laughed.

Her brows came together. They were ordinarily straight and level, red once, black now--like a crayon mark made with a ruler. She still had good-looking amber eyes, fiery but steady, and her forehead was very high. She was beginning to look like some sort of sachem--a tribal wiseman, or a poet. Quite an impressive dame.

"It's funny," she said. "I've even heard men right in these rooms argue that Kinsey was a liar and crazy and incompetent and a menace to society. Otherwise bright men. Heard them say that Kinsey only talked to screwballs and neurotics and people who were inventing stuff to show off. You'd hardly believe such self-kidding was possible!"

"They said it about psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, too," I agreed. "Said that their conclusions were obviously nutty because they never saw anybody but nutty patients. Never stopped to reflect that a neurotic is not a nut, that every patient did his best to tell the precise, detailed truth about his private life, and that every single one of those stories involved the sex behavior of many, many other people who are called normal. I mean--the psychologists learned a whole hell of a lot about what normal people did from every neurotic patient. So when they talked about sex--they had the dope. Most people never thought of that angle."

"Most people," Hattie said, "never think. And when it comes to sex, they think about ten times less than never."

"Which brings me," I nodded, "to the matter in hand. I got a nephew. A brainy apple and a good kid. And you had a girl here--or on your call list--till about six months ago, named Marcia something--who's gone to live with Paul--he being the nephew."

Hattie said, "Yes," and waited.

I realized that a dozen years is a long time in which not to see anybody--a time long enough for a change, especially if one has quit drinking, married again, and so on and so on and so on. Hattie was afraid I was up to some sort of Presbyterian nasty-work--and she was ready to be disappointed. Ready not to help me call the cops on Marcia, so to speak, and ready to write off one more guy as a galvanized hypocrite.

I said, "In my frank opinion, Paul is not the sort who will be happy with an ex-houri. And I don't say that because he's my nephew and because I'm broad-minded about everybody but who-touches-me. Let me tell you what Paul's like--and how he came to confide in me on the situation--how he got into it--and how he's acting about it as of this afternoon."

"Tell me."

The longer she listened, the more she relaxed. When finally I stopped talking she walked over to the window, where she had stood when I came in. Her broadening buttocks and shoulders blotted out most of the river-gleam and the Jersey-glow, which you could see from there--but not the boat-hoots which came up around her, wallowing through the city, buzzing the middle ears of the millions. She stood there a while. The frame of faraway light blinked around her and the ferry boats and the freighters hollered pensively at each other. When she turned around, there were tears not only in her eyes but on her cheeks.

"If people only knew what I know!" She said it in a quiet voice with nothing of the brash timber of her usual speech.

"I'll buy that. I'll even add a big apothegm, Hat. People have found out so much, they are now obliged to learn the rest. The whole God-damned, agonizing, exalted rest of it."

She smiled in a woebegone way and got a Kleenex from a drawer. "It'll take thousands of years," she said. "They've been making the same mistakes, that long."

"Yeah. Meanwhile, we've got Paul and Marcia. I'm supposed to have lunch with them tomorrow. You can see--from what I've told you--why I think the thing will fold--painfully. There is, however, a chance it won't. A chance that depends on what sort of girl Marcia is, mostly. Which is why I came up here."

She was shaking her head. "Not on the kind of girl she is--necessarily. On how much she loves him."

"Okay. That."

"Providing--she can love. Providing--she hasn't kidded herself into a sweet little daydream that she got from reading too many women's magazines. Or all those books. She sure was a reading girl. And smart. And attractive, too. How tough are you, Phil?"

"It's something you do, isn't it? Not fill out in a questionnaire?"

Hattie smiled. "I don't want to offend those fine sensibilities of yours. Or make you think I'm something special in the she-Judas line. But you want to know whether the girl means it. Why not send your Paul back to his laboratory after lunch--he'd like that--like you to get acquainted with her--and why not--?"

"I'm not tough that way. That's businessman tough."

She dropped a hand. "Still--there's hardly one of them in a thousand who wouldn't--work out some breezy little arrangement--for a G, say. And she'd have to be such a one."

"She might just see through it. You said she was smart."

Hattie shrugged. "If she was smart enough to resist the G, maybe she'd be smart enough. However."

"In other words, you don't know about her."

"Not Marcia. If it was ninety-nine in a hundred, I could tell you right off. Some of them make damned good wives--better sometimes for being here. With the kind of men who really understand what life is--and with the kind who don't mind because they don't understand anything at all. I like to see those girls get married. Lots more make swell mistresses for men who married hunks of flint. I could go calling at so many swank addresses that your head would swim. And sometimes I do. There are worse places to look for a wife than good bagnios. Any high-society party, for instance. Women's colleges, too, I suspect. Most country clubs. The dud percentage--the lack of warmth--runs higher there--"

"Not to mention know-how."

She sighed--and then chuckled. "Isn't it crazy? Something that should be given more loving practice than music--something that needs extra experience and skill for civilized people. They think you can learn on one bridal night! Or from a book! A girl it would take a genius of sex to seduce satisfactorily marries a bright young college boy in the chopsticks class--and what have you got? The American home. Did you ever--" the question--indeed, the entire subject--seemed to have roused her--"ever once have an affair with a plain American wife who was any good? Somebody else's, I mean?"

"Once."

"Once! And how many--?"

"Look, Hattie. I came to cross-question you--"

She thought awhile, when she saw I wouldn't reply--looking out at the city and detesting it. "I've had lots of men bring their wives right here--to look and learn."

"How many?" I grinned.

"God knows! I'm an old madam, Phil. But many a snooty female has lost her inhibitions in my parlors--and gained a little knowledge that went into making a happy home for some guy. The more people say physical sex is unimportant--the more it is likely to become the only thing that is important for them. And they don't realize."

"I know."

"You know. And a lot of my clients know. And a lot of women. But they can't change anything."

"Yeah."

"What do I really do here, then? Ask yourself. I'm in the business of supplying erotic fun to people who are made for it, born to it, urged from the cradle to the grave to take part in it, who depend upon it for mental health, for a decent feeling of good will toward others--and aren't allowed to engage in it even with their own wedded wives, by the statutes of New York State and forty-seven other little penitentiaries! That's my trade. And because I'm in it--I am regarded as the greatest blight in civilized society, by millions. Holy, jumped-up St. Peter's be-hee!"

Through a recollected haze of alcohol I heard this same tirade from old and distant days. And Hattie was right, in her way. The theory of accession to culture and intelligence, to morality and Godliness, through the restraint of desire by the demeaning of it, had run its course in the Western world and unstrung nearly all of us. And where that thesis did not exist, there were others, still more absurd, to bring other peoples to their repetitive, obnoxious dooms.

Quite suddenly, I felt like weeping.

She left the window and sat down. "Relax."

The feeling passed like a bird's shadow.

"What were you doing all evening?" she asked. "How come you're up so late? Work?"

I thought of telling her--telling her the truth. Thought of it hard and seriously. "Out with a dame," I said, which was not what I meant by the truth. "A wife. A pretty package of all the quality advertising, from Pasadena, who had caught her hubby in flagrante with a gent--and fled. Protesting too much, if you understand."

"Half the girls in the country--if they had the nerve--!"

"A latent thing. In maturity, according to the psychologists, it becomes the psychological stuff by which we understand and appreciate our own sex."

"And it does, too."

"If you say so, it must be right, Hat."

"There--you are damned tooting!" She looked at me. "So you took her out--?"

"Rumbaing. I've got good at it--since I knew you."

"Really good?"

"Good enough to please the Cuban girls. So we danced. And I brought her back to the hotel--and turned her loose."

"Nice guy!"

"I wanted her to exercise her mind. After all--I only met her at lunch--and she's already moved up on my floor, next door."

"You should change hotels, then."

"Too lazy. Too busy. And I can deal with her. Spoiled--and too bad--because the guy she left sounds okay. I wish I could help her out. Taking--what they call--advantage of her, probably wouldn't. And you can't re-do a person's attitude and background in a few days--especially with a serial to correct. Usually requires years, and a good analyst--"

"Another wife--to be hated."

"By you?"

Hattie nodded. "I hate thousands of them. Some, I adore."

We didn't seem to find anything to say for a minute. I could have given her one more name for the short side of the ledger but I didn't want to. Finally I said, "If you get any ideas about Marcia--?"

"Call me up--when you've met her. Better still--come by again."

"I will." I had no idea whether I would or not.

She got up. "Look. Do me a favor and autograph a couple of your books for me, will you? And have another cup of coffee while I go downstairs and get them?"

"All right."

She went. Pretty soon a tall, redheaded girl came in without knocking, just as I'd expected one would. Brown-red hair--long, curled at the ends, and a pair of legs to look at. A girl like a mannequin--but no pose; no hauteur. She had enough sex appeal for the end of anybody's chorus line. She smiled open a wide mouth on even teeth and fixed her hazel eyes on me. Hattie remembered: I had never approved of whores who looked like whores. This one looked like a bright assistant on a magazine--or maybe the wife of a lucky prof.

"My name," she said, "is Gwen Taylor. Hattie got stuck for a few minutes--and told me to come in. I've heard a lot about you--here and there."

I stood and shook her hand.

She briefly grabbed her lower lip with her upper teeth. "Or is that--indelicate?"

"No. I'm pleased. And not fooled for a minute. You see--I know Hattie."

"After all," said the girl, "it's her profession. She said we were having coffee."

Viola came again with a tray. Gwen poured. "There are half a dozen of us around. Would you like to meet them?"

"One's enough."

Her eyes flickered and she smiled. "Thanks." She handed me the cup, served the sugar with tongs, poured cream, and fixed her own. "Warm night."

We talked about that.

By and by she nodded toward the radio-phonograph. "Hattie said you like to rumba. So do I."

I shook my head. "Sometime--"

She looked at me and smiled. "I hope!"

Hattie came with the books, by and by. She made an apology. I wrote in both volumes and signed my name and Hattie accompanied me down one of the two long halls with the many shut doors.

"Like Gwen?"

"Very much."

"I thought you would. She's--something! It's been marvelous to see you, Phil. Call me up!"

The exceedingly noncommittal elevator man took me back to the street. It was gravy-thick with the smell of the river.

I got a cab.

It slatted downtown.

Once, I leaned forward to tell the driver to turn around.

But I didn't speak.

4

There is a metal clip on every door in the Astolat; mail and written messages are put in it--so the guests won't have to stoop. I had a letter. A tidy backhand with little circles for periods and dots over the _i_'s. It looked like a billet-doux from Yvonne--and it was:

You meanie!

Everything you said got me so tremendously stimulated I couldn't
sleep. I decided, after a struggle, if you were going to stir girls
up that way, you were responsible for their condition. So I phoned
you--and no answer! Don't you know hell hath no fury like a woman
scorned? If you feel like a little chitchat when you do come in,
phone me. I don't have to work tomorrow so you needn't be scrupulous
about the hour. And even if you don't, thanks ever so much for a very
disturbing, unsatisfying, lovely evening.

Yours, Y

It was four o'clock and my body was tired, though my mind was running round and round like a toy electric train.

I didn't want to see any more of Yvonne at the moment.

I turned out the lights in the sitting room, undressed, took a short, warm shower, and lay down on the double bed, naked. Usually, about two minutes after the lights go out, I fall asleep. But I knew it would take longer that night.

So I piled up the pillows and opened Vogt's _Road to Survival_ at the page where the jacket was enclosed.

Mr. Vogt's thesis is simple and damning; I had somewhat reflected upon it earlier that evening.

It is the philosophy of modern man to produce. To industrialize himself. To learn the techniques and technologies of science and of applied science. This is progress. Chinese, Soviets, Americans--everybody strives to speed up production, distribution, consumption. It is also the object of all nations to increase their populations.

The earth cannot support either of these two goals.

The topsoil of the planet will not feed the existing numbers of us, even now--and our method of using it is diminishing it at a gruesome rate. Faster and faster, we starve; and as we multiply, more of us will starve. Medicine, which increases the percentage of persons who survive infancy and extends the life span of all these, is but rapidly adding to sure victims of starvation.

We are busy breeding mouths to eat our future out of house and home.

Ideas of this sort have been around since Malthus's time.

These days, the facts accumulate.

I often reflect that man's contemporary sexual taboos lead (as they must, by the law of opposites) to sexual excesses: these are seen in man's witless overbreeding. His "moral" Catholic couch, his unregulated Baptist bed, sustains orgy and is the senseless agent of biological catastrophe. This is the riposte of Nature to man's refusal to use reason concerning his own nature.

Vogt wants planet-wide birth control, before the teeming hordes locust up the hope of a human hereafter.

Try and get it!

There are other truths about ourselves of this same order:

_The minerals._ We are digging them up with the reckless violence of pigs after truffles. Truffles can grow again--but not minerals. We are converting the earth's elements into forms all but irrecoverable even by the most immense expenditures of human energy and time.

_Our genes_--and the holy habit we've got into, of inhibiting birth among our most likely specimens--of proliferating boobs and nuts--of maintaining the feeble and the dim, abetting their rabbity bedding together--and of sending the cream of each generation to war's slaughter. This, alone, will drive us back toward apehood faster even than our growing physical destitution. Some European nations are doubtless already floundering in the poverty of residual blood-lines--bereft of brains and leadership by their religious devotion and their glorious wars.

Also, of course, there is our _failure to perceive our instinctual nature_. My own elected department in the category of dooms. Instinctively, as we must, all of us feel the weight of such colossal crimes against the meaning of instinct as those above--our cosmic disavowals (by our acts) of any responsibility toward men to come. That is why, at bottom, no one is happy in modern society--happy in his spirit, content, full of a sense of purpose and significance. It is why we shall have to remake civilization consciously--or to suffer its self-destruction.

Mr. Vogt, I thought, would feel the power of instinct, as it now blindly controls us, when he saw how religious men reacted to his simple indication of the necessity for using reason in our sex relations. And he would see the inertia of our traditions when he saw how utterly his warning was disbelieved, ignored, ridiculed, and forgotten. Others, with the same wild cry of despair, have had such reception, for the same reason.

It is not that man cannot do for himself.

But that he will not.

And he will not because he is self-flattered into the incredible illusion that Mr. and Mrs. America are doing very well already, thank you kindly.

After a long while, grinning over the tremendous sins of those who take it upon themselves to reject knowledge and yet to say what sin is, I closed the book.

Hell has one funny aspect.

It is where everybody lives.

I sent a thought to Messrs. Sheen, Niebuhr, and their ilk: The up-to-date devil, which you so earnestly seek, gentlemen, may readily be found--wearing the costume of your own minds: unconsciousness.

I slept like a log.