Chapter VI: Part THREE: Andante (1)

1

Reveille was the heat of burning gasoline, gears grating, rubber clattering on the sticky pavement and bits of shouts, floating around like confetti. I can remember when it used to be hoofbeats, quiet neighbor-talk, and sometimes, utter silence.

I lay glistening in a depression of the bed. At first, the big noise of the city, diminishing when the lights changed, and plunging up with new zeal a moment afterward, gave me only the pleasant sensation, the titillations and satisfactions, of being in New York. Then I remembered my circumstance. The frightened little animal that I am tore terribly around while I tried to catch it and to hold it and to remind it that the thin tissue on the front of its brain was capable of managing its panic. I spent some time at the job and sat up trickling.

All my life I have listened to a wearisome cell repeat an old saw: the coward dies a thousand times, the brave man once.

A person is afraid to be cowardly.

For many years, owing to this rather superficial sentence, I had to accept the inner humiliation of cowardice. A boy with my kind of imagination, my style of projecting, could not but help finding in his head the taste of the thousand deaths.

And I am often cowardly still. In those few morning minutes, I chased my coward a long distance.

But I do think the aphorism should be discarded. Certainly the coward dies a thousand times. So, too, however, does the man of imagination. It is the manner of the thousand deaths that is important. And bravery--our poor, human bravery--is not necessarily consonant with faulty imagination or none at all, as this dumbbell's apothegm implies.

I finally caught my animal--a real beast and not a dream.

I ordered coffee and stepped into the sitting room.

It was after nine.

The morning papers had been put at my door. There was mail.

A letter from Ricky.

I ripped it open and read it hungrily.

Dear:

Would you please, if you get a chance, go to the Lingerie Department
at Saks and ask for Miss Drewson? Tell her I'd like to have three
more slips like the blue satin ones I got last July when we were
in town. I could order them by mail, but I want to be sure to get
the same kind and she will know. Size twelve, which I guess I
needn't tell you. We miss you--everything is just the same, which is
dandy--and have fun. I love you very much.

Ricky

I had a second little beast to chase, then.

There was a bank statement.

There were four publicity releases from business concerns which keep sending me their bilge even though I took the pains, almost a year ago, to write them that I'd quit doing a newspaper column and had no way of airing their propaganda even if I felt the urge.

There were three letters from people who liked my books.

There was a letter from the assistant to the dean of a small college in Illinois:

Dear Wylie:

Just how does one go about getting so swellheaded and self-righteous
that he thinks he can tell off everybody on earth? I would like to
know, because it must be a wonderful sensation to balloon around so
gassily. Look out for pins, though!

Please reply.

Sincerely, John F. Casselberry.

I put the letter between my big toe and the next one, held it out at body length, and reflected.

There is nothing unusual about this letter; I get a version of it every few days, sometimes running into thousands of derogatory words. And, of course, it is true.

Of course, of course, of course.

Authorship is the supreme act of ego.

Whether it is good or evil, as an act, depends, I suppose not so much on what's written, as how the writing is.

Most authors conceal the egoistic aspect of the business under the nom de plumes of their characters.

But exactly as every man is all that he thinks and does--and dreams, too--so is an author all he writes.

A mystery writer is a murderer in his head and he sets down his gory lore for an audience of murderers.

What does that make you, Wylie? You first-person author!

Did I use it to take the blame and the guilt--to take the responsibility--and to tear down the artifice of the third person? And was it true (as I felt) that, since my purpose was to turn the thoughts of better authors into a vernacular more popular than their own, my I was the mere agent--and not the excreted vanity which it so constantly deplored? Or was the whole affair a secret exercise in look-ma-I'm-dancing?

God knows, some part of it had to be.

I fancied myself as a teacher.

I was mostly a ham.

What I knew, what I had learned, sought, made sure of, found comfort and understanding in--all this--and the long years I'd spent endeavoring to give it a dignified texture--forever emerged as the overemphasis of a self-enamored tyro reciting Hamlet. The truths were somewhat there. But the voice was the voice of cheap aspirations in a cheap world.

Some people heard my mentors. Yes.

A few, reading my wretched books, saw beyond the antic actor, the attention-compeller, the infantile see-how-I-do, to Freud and Jung and the physicists, to the mathematicians, to the calling world and the crying night ahead, to the ingenuity and inconceivable courage of those whom I ballyhooed.

But others--oh, how rightly--saw me!

Yakkety-yak.

Wylie's next.

Shock you. Make you think. Inspire you. Scare the hell out of you. Set bristles standing on old Comstock's neck.

_Christ Jesus!_

I had thought a havoc in prose might be a substitute for havoc itself--sparing a man here and a woman there from the reality of acquainting them with the instinct.

O tin messiah.

Tawdry complex.

Bawling calfcake.

Jackass of your own worst describing.

Balloon.

It must be a wonderful sensation.

Not truth, so much as show-off.

Not love of you--infatuation with me.

Not--for what I did--but, like most of us, for what I might have done--and used instead to inflate the First Person Singular with the airs of my hot compartments.

The extravert posing as the introvert.

The hoofer philosopher.

Shame, shame, shame!

Shame ran off me.

And I shall die, in it and with it.

I went to my window to look at the city the messy cubes in the haze and somebody's radio performed an act of God.

Ja-da
Ja-da
Ja-da, ja-da, jing, jing, jing.
Shimmy, I thought.
Shimmy.
Shimmy in your B.V.D.'s.
You wear 'em in the winter and you wear 'em in the fall
You wear 'em in the summer if you wear 'em at all.
Shimmy.
Shimmy!
Shimmy in your B.V.D.'s.
This is a message to and of the American people.
The Dream.
The Cross.
Everybody
Loves my body
But my body
Don't love nobody
But me.

Dear Dean Casselberry:

I have read all the books in your library. I am a God-fearing,
patriotic American. I believe in brother-love and liberty. In the
folks, who made me what I am and from whom I cannot find myself
different in any respect. Aside from that, you are right. I am
sending you, under separate cover, my ear, which I have cut off for
you. It is all I had to give and you may address it in the first
person because it will then understand. Also, for the inflation of a
balloon like mine, I send these directions: use equal parts of the
outcries of the oppressed and laughter; for ballast--you will be
there, and you should also carry a pail of tears.

Phil Wylie

Some give money some give work but if you give the person brother, you're a jerk. It didn't do me any good ... for ... If you try to tell the truth there's only you telling it.

2

It was a hell of a morning.

3

From nine-thirty until twelve-thirty I cut that serial. You wouldn't be interested. We'll go on, anyway. What the hell else can a man do?

4

Paul and Marcia, when they appeared for lunch, were expectably nervous.

The condition called strain is universal in this civilization, anyway. It begins in the cradle with the Freudian conditioning--the creation of each superego. Toilet training, the disciplines of the bawling id, meals according to schedule rather than appetite, the sting of parental palm on cheek, buttock, and wrist that follows erotic manipulation. All these, and countless other "punishments"--which change with changing social codes, change with changing fads amongst pediatricians, and differ from one home to another and one culture to another--set up such stresses that, by the age of two, there is hardly one civilized being in a thousand who is not loaded up with a lifetime of disparate indignities.

Add to this the regimentations of school--the musts and must nots of classroom and cloakroom. Impose upon it the innumerable stringencies of a religion. Require patriotism. Pepper the taut personality with familial prejudices and phobias. Jew-detestation, snake-dread. Now, in the passing years, fold in the Law--cop, truant officer, and prison bars--sidewalks not to be spit on, or park benches not to be initialed, or loud noises not to be made by individuals (but only corporations), and season with the regulations that rise around the older child, the adolescent, the adult.

Remove the person, then, from every natural source of his existence. Set him in a city where no useful plants grow and no animals graze--at the end of a steampipe that uses coal mined he knows not where, or oil sucked up ten thousand miles away. A city where no wood is chopped. Detach him, that is to say, from Nature--deprive him of its experiences and every direct sensation of the earth, upon which he depends. Bring even his water in far conduits, with chlorine added, so he will never know a spring's taste.

Set him to work at earning a living without acquaintance of how the whole of any living is made. On the contrary. Let his life's blood derive from some capillary of the flow. Let him take charge--not of house-building, or food-raising, or wood-gathering or fire-keeping, not of cookery or childbirthing or the weaving of fabrics--but of the twenty-eighth step in the manufacture of one size of ball bearings. Call this earning a living.

Give him a town to defend against all other towns and cities, a county to boast of, a state to regard as superior to forty-seven other states, and a nation which anyone can see is the greatest on earth. Teach him to hold such superiority as the supreme goal--to believe that no more can be asked of him or of his fellows than that they maintain the greatest nation--however low the rest may sink. Teach him never to inquire if his superlatives are adequate for the conditions of his age. Let him live to the full--by odious comparison. Let him say--I am better than you, wherefore you--not I--need all the improvement.

Now. Set a few wars in his time, with their alarms, rigors, restrictions, and dull regimentations. Load up his era with means for bacteriological attack and with atomic bombs. Invent great secrets, with attendant rumors. Frighten him all day long--and at night. Tell him he is nevertheless a free man and that, above all else, he must cherish and protect his liberty. Next, at every corner and edge of freedom, hack, harass, chip, clip, steal, stain, bribe, sabotage, and smudge each meaning and application of liberty, so that he no longer gathers its fundamental sense and comes to imagine liberty is consonant with security--which is all that remains for him to dwell upon, since he has been deprived of every secure thing and every secure experience in God's cosmos.

It makes you nervous, n'est-ce pas?

No one should be surprised that modern man shows signs of strain.

Nothing much in the world is sane.

Only the great instinct--the spaceless, timeless urge toward consciousness--continues its thrust of sanity. Because of it, even the maddest men are able to seize upon the illusion that they are sane by interpreting their own, spotty awareness as if it were the entirety of possible knowing. Because of instinct, however, all the mad men and all the mad societies will be brushed like bugs from the earth's crust and replaced by better, sensibler men or--if necessary--by silence. By silence while Evolution is retooled and instinct tries again with a new form--one which may not be so dazzled by its little consciousness or so greedy for the immediate fruits thereof as to attempt, with all the means and methods set down here, and ten million more, to deny instinct, repudiate Nature, and insist its petty Reason is the shape of truth entire.

So we three nervous wrecks sat down to lunch.

Marcia was a pretty girl, winsome, willowy, with eyes as blue as an upland lake and light-brown hair which, where the sun fell through undulant glass brick, turned opalescent, like duck feathers, and shone every color, as if it were composed of quintillions of submicroscopic prisms. She wore a light perfume--smelled like an April garden--and her voice was limpid.

Poor Paul.

Gloves on her hands--white little things, knit of string. She was nearly as tall as I am. A trembling came through the gloves. "So glad to meet you, Phil. Paul talks about you incessantly. It's practically a fixation."

Hot in the lobby, steamy; you could bake bread in the place. "Come in the Knight's Bar," I said, "and cool off."

She bewitched me with her lakelike eyes a moment longer--and deep in them I saw the shadow glide, the fear--the numb, dark carnivore that had to eat, that looked up at me with a guilty but imploring gaze.

You see, I knew her.

I held the door. She went first, walking confidently in the face of the strangers in the restaurant. Paul hesitated halfway through the cold doorway--hesitated, and eyed me with a sort of regret. Regret--and inquiry. I nodded my head to say she was lovely.

Jay saw her--gestured with a menu. We sat.

They ordered Manhattans and I a coke.

Music sprayed from its electrical hose--garbled a little, echoing slightly, like music from a lawn sprinkler. This wash of counterpoint in every public place is an attempt to assuage nerves that burn like beds of coals. We do everything we can dream of to relax--except relax. If we did that--we would lose the world that we own. And we are afraid to find our souls.

"It broke the record today," Paul said. Our best prop.

"Just over a hundred." Marcia moved her long hair across her right shoulder and kept gazing at me to see--not if I remembered her, for we had already acknowledged that--but what the effect was to be. "You ought to see Park Avenue! It's a parade--driving to the country!"

I tried to look like a man who had no memory--who regarded the earth as if it were a big flower. "Hot," I agreed. "But I'm one of those unbearable souls who likes it that way."

"Me, too," said Marcia. "Two winters ago, I went to Miami. I was crazy about it--"

It was a defiant thing to say. For that was where I'd seen her--with Dave Berne, one morning when I'd stopped at his hotel, early, to take him fishing.

"A young lady left over from last night," he said.

Miss Somebody-or-other, he had said. Marcia breakfasting in his bed. She exposed a nude shoulder to wave at me from the other room. Dave paid her and we went away.

He caught his first sailfish that day.

I supposed, now, that Marcia was offering me the opportunity to ask if I hadn't seen her in Miami; I supposed she had pointed out the hurt to let me, if I wished, open it up. Paul had crushed his napkin. He was sitting beside her and across from me--wondering, probably, how to turn the conversation away from the heat wave, the weather, to a less self-conscious, more profitable subject.

"Workin'?" he asked.

"Miami," I said to Marcia, "is quite a place." Then I said to Paul, "Yeah."

"He's cutting a serial," Paul told the girl. "When he gets through, they'll pay him about five years of my salary for it. A month's work, for him. A story about how some college football player married the Daisy Queen, I imagine. For that, he gets sixty bucks to my one. All I do, though, is make atom bombs. You can see the public would rather--"

"--have its ego blown up than its cities."

She laughed. "What is it really about?"

I gave them an outline of the story. "You see," I said, "it's just the way Shaw put it. If you're going to tell people the truth, you've got to make them laugh, or they'll kill you."

"Why will they?" Marcia asked.

"Because the truth doesn't seem amusing to them at all. However--they have a feeling life should be amusing. So--if you can make them laugh, and still occasionally set down a fact, they assume it's possible for somebody to know a few truths and still laugh. This permits them--in the long run--to ignore the truth you set down and go on laughing."

"Does the truth seem amusing to you, Phil?" she asked.

"Infinitely."

"It seems ghastly to me."

"Infinitely ghastly, too. You have to approach it in both moods at once--or else, and this is commoner--in first one and then the other."

"There is an unwritten law in this country," Paul reminded us dryly, "that everything is just dandy all the time--and anybody who says different is a communist!"

I nodded. "There is also a superstitious belief that the act of stating an unpalatable truth will increase its danger to the folks. What you don't know won't hurt you. Innocence is bliss. Boost, don't knock. If you haven't anything good to say, don't say it. This is the folklore of advertising. This is the theme song of radio. Everything has to be on the up-and-up. Criticism is regarded as un-American and un-Christian. The nation was founded by a rebellion of the early fathers against British tyranny. Christ was the most passionate critic man ever had. But it is considered the essence of patriotism and the chief tenet of the Master to be anticritic. So the whole meaning both of our nation and of its principal religion have been thrown overboard--and we are all riding on a roller-coaster where no track inspectors are allowed."

"Goodness!" Marcia said.

"Where," I went on, "nobody is even sure that the tracks were ever laid to the end: looking ahead realistically also is forbidden."

The drinks came.

Paul lifted his glass to the girl. She smiled at him warmly--with love, I suppose. What kind? It was a look of gratitude. A certain composition of her features. I compared that expression with the casual, collegiate, young-woman-of-the-world wave she had once given me from Dave Berne's double bed. A high-spirited, working-prostitute salute.

Some part of her conscience was grateful to Paul for taking her out of professional circulation. She was, I presumed, a girl with a good deal of courage--and one with taste. A sensitive girl who could--still--accommodate her mind to the objective risks of her trade. But the attitudes of many men toward her would not be acceptable. To face them, she would have to sell pieces of her inner person. Paul had rescued her from that and her eyes thanked him.

But, far more, Marcia's face expressed a maternal sentiment--warm and enveloping. He was, in a sense, her baby. Emotionally immature, romantic, and hence naïve, he had taken her for what she was not. She had played up to his assumption as an older woman to a child. In seducing him, she had seduced herself. She had adopted him as the symbol of the values she had discarded, the values that were now most precious to her because they were lost.

When I thought that over, I realized it was the point of extreme hazard in their relationship. Not social pressures, but the pressures of emotions--of instincts of which neither was conscious--would be the explosive condition of their two lives. The dangerous day would be the day when he matured sufficiently to dissociate the need to love from the need to be loved. In her case, the time would come then, too--when he demanded no more mothering in bowels or brain or heart. But it might come sooner--when she tired of that one function, or extended it, or spoiled its object, or devoured it, or cast it out for its own good.

For neither man nor woman can possess without being possessed, or consume without being consumed, and whether the process involves an object or another person, not to know the way of it and not to abide by the way is to be destroyed by it.

The lunch went along badly.

My habit of apostrophe and tirade, which usually fills such hollows as occur in talk--and forces its way, sometimes, beyond those decent opportunities--seemed inappropriate here. They had been depressed by what I had already said about the world. I guessed that, along with worries, they had hoped the visit would elicit an avuncular gaiety. They were young and in love, they thought, and should get from their elders the jocose disposition reserved for young love. I felt some of their expectancy, at any rate, and it only inhibited my rhetoric.

We talked of the news, of the airlift to Berlin which, by its very existence, constituted an immense Appeasement. We discussed the presidential candidates. We talked awhile of women's clothes, of the veterans' organization currently holding a convention in the city, and I described the house Ricky and I were building south of Miami, drawing a diagram on the tablecloth with a knife.

The effort to keep talk going--to find topics and to change them before attempt was disclosed--made me restive. Paul wasn't helping any. He'd eaten hungrily enough and then sat back--jerking and fidgeting about, making faces, pulling his nose, simpering, and smirking moonily.

She'd held up her end.

The trouble was, of course, that none of us was engaged in honest behavior.

Paul wanted to say: What do you think of her--and us?

Paul wanted me to say: She's lovely--and I'm sure you'll be happy.

I had become doubly certain--without yet entirely appreciating why--that it would never turn out. I had been generically sure, even before--just as Ricky had been sure: Paul wasn't constructed to marry a harlot and live happily ever after.

I wanted to say: For God's sake, cooky, send her back to her trade; she'll find some other guy, eventually; she's not for you.

Then I wanted to go up sixteen floors to my apartment with my troubles, my work, no women, no nephew.

What did the girl want to say?

I looked at her again--at her opalescent hair and her blue eyes.

And she looked back.

For a moment, the shadow stood still--stood still, and dissipated.

A wanton expression, brief and Lilith-like, reshaped the sharp, carmine edges of her mouth. She saw me not as the uncle of her now-beloved, but as the detached person--another man--and in this seeing me, she involuntarily recalled her long affair with lust. I have heard a woman say that, by merely quivering her underlip in a certain fashion, she had been able to change the tone, attention, and interest of nine men in ten with whom she'd ever talked--and there was nothing in her history to make me doubt the statement. And I have heard another woman say that all there was to Rudolph Valentino was the dilation of his nostrils. Watching Marcia's mouth, I could understand the sense of such matters.

So I was sure of still another thing.

Hattie Blaine had been dubious of her. Hattie had made the suggestion--the to me profoundly immoral suggestion--of tempting this girl.

Hattie had done it out of an unconscious notion that Marcia had some point in her nature which could not be lent to the kind of marriage Paul would need.

It wasn't money.

It was mood.

Marcia caught me making this observation. She blushed a little, glanced at the table, and then raised her eyes--but whether anxiously or in a repetition of the look, I could not tell.

Passionate women are seldom ashamed of their passion.

What she felt was not bold; it was not arch; it was not mercenary; it was--simply--an essence of her own responses. A belonging, like the curved shape of her eyebrows or the narrowness of her red nails--which she accepted as no more and no less than that, and revealed as naturally.

I wanted to go, even more.

One can pick patterns in one's life--rhythms, cadences, aggregates, cross sections, events that occur in pairs and threes--and the phenomenon is undoubtedly the result of chance. But one notices, one superimposes the pattern subjectively--and decides it is not chance but some obscure order, because one likes to feel that obscure orders occur in life. It is difficult to keep the ego perpetually lined up with statistical reality.

In twenty-four hours I'd looked at, talked to, explored, and somewhat learned three different, very handsome young women. Mrs. Yvonne Prentiss. Gwen Taylor--at Hattie's. And Marcia.

They come in threes, I thought. I thought it had been a long time since I'd met even one girl so pretty as all these. I reminded myself not to be an ass--to keep the view that grouping and variation in no way warp mathematical principle. The obsessive quality of all such ideas weighed on me. I hardly heard her account of their junket, on the preceding Saturday, to Jones' Beach.

I began to invent an excuse for present departure--to think ahead about apologizing--my work--the check, please--

Then the busboy dropped the tray.

He had tripped, it proved, on a napkin.

There were heavy stacks of plates and side dishes on the tray--glasses of water--metal domes.

The boy staggered--and the wild gesticulation of his free arm was caught by my peripheral vision. So I saw the tray slant--saw its burden slide and crash onto the heads of a pair of buttressed dowagers, a few tables away. The noise seemed to continue for a long time and a scream permeated it as the boy lost hold entirely on his tray, fell against a chair-back, and dish after soiled dish cascaded onto flower hats, bright blouses, fat shoulders, and freckled necks.

A rush of waiters masked the scene. Guests stood to see better.

A bull-voiced beldame roared, "Send the manager!"

Her less hefty companion burst through the waiters, daubing at the stained area of her bosom and throwing bits of lettuce with every swipe. She made a beeline for the ladies' room--followed by her smeared, stentorian colleague, whose hat was full of dill and parsley.

This commotion had hardly died down--Jay had no more than managed to clear the carpet, dispatch the wreckage on the table, send out the chairs for purging, and bite back the last traces of his mirth--when another oddity got under way.

"I want," said a man seated beside Paul, "a baked apple."

"But there are no baked apples." Fred, the waiter, said this.

"Go and tell the chef I want a baked apple."

"I did, sir. There are none."

"Explain to him that I always have a baked apple, here."

"There is applesauce--sir."

Fred is Viennese. His sorrowful, wise eyes meandered over to meet mine. They were expressionless. But the fact that they had moved toward me was, in itself, communication.

"I do not like applesauce. Slippery pudding! Go and tell the chef I want my usual baked apple."

The churl who spoke was familiar to me by sight. An Englishman--a VIP during the war--who had often stayed at the Astolat. A medium-sized man of sixty with a red face and eyes like gray gas. A brittle British voice, snotty in every particular. An iron-gray Kaiser Wilhelm mustache and a way of smacking his lips underneath it, when he was in a temper, that shook its points.

He was always accompanied by his wife. As a rule, they ate quietly--talking together now and then, and more often just swilling in food. She was a lank, vapid woman with a toadstool's complexion, a chin like a fist, and hair tormented into little knobs--as if she absent-mindedly had cooked it, rather than coiffed it--and burned it in the process. Lumpy, burned hair, a disgusting dish of it--and a voice like claws, to match her master's.

She stared, now, at her empty plate, and said nothing. She did not seem to be ashamed, or embarrassed, or to be waiting for a storm to subside. She was a woman born without the knack for yielding or apology. She merely looked at her plate because she would be God-damned if she cared to look at anything or anybody else.

Fred came back. He put on a sympathetic expression. "The chef says he is very sorry. He says that this is not the time of year for baked apples."

"The stands are loaded with apples," the Englishman snorted. "Seen 'em myself!"

"I know. But they're eating apples. Not baking apples. They come later in the fall."

The Englishman doubled his fist and lightly thumped the table. "I said I wanted a baked apple! All I wanted was a baked apple."

"I have explained."

"With cream. A baked apple with cream."

I have seen Englishmen by the dozen go through this sort of routine. With the exception of certain Germans, some of them are, I believe, the rudest people on the earth. Badly brought-up babies--these empire builders.

This one was insulting the waiter and his wife, in the bargain--but I have rarely seen an Englishman who minded insulting his wife by making scenes. When crossed in matters like baked apples they seldom consider wives, children, strangers, decorum, or the reputation of Britannia. They merely behave like twirps.

Fred had said nothing.

"I suppose," the Englishman at last went on, shivering his mustache, "you mean to tell me I am not to have a baked apple--?"

"Perhaps for dinner--one of the eating kind could be baked--"

The Englishman suddenly hurled his napkin on his plate. He stood. "No baked apple," he said. "Well!"

He intended to stalk from the room.

However, Paul--who had at first been chortling over the slow-spilled tray and later watching the Englishman with intent, even exaggerated, care--now interposed, to my great surprise.

He sat next to the Britisher--on the same banquette. Thus when the infuriated man surged upright he stood alongside Paul and between our two tables.

Paul stretched out his foot, rested his shoe on the corner of the Englishman's table, and untied the lace.

The man, barred by the long leg, said, "Good Gad!"

Paul retied the lace. He looked dimly at the Englishman--who, I honestly believe, had not so much as noticed or recalled a single person in the room but himself all during the baked apple affair. It is a kind of concentration peculiar to the British.

"Put down your foot, man!"

"Quintod!" Paul said, as if using rare syllables of opprobrium: "Quidhetch! Vassenoy!" He moved his foot this way and that, eying it. Even the Englishwoman was staring at it now, in some shock. After all, it was on her table, twenty inches from her picklelike nose, and not a victual.

Paul turned again to the standing man and hissed, "Kittenpitches!"

"Waiter!"

Fred was still standing there--still fairly impassive. He had the wit to say, "Yes, sir?"

"This person is drunk!"

Paul came to his feet then--and towered over the Englishman. He bent close. "Pomadiant nocrot," he said harshly. "Cantapunce. Cabulate geepross. Dreek!"

The Englishman opened his mouth and emitted a thin, high, frightened squeak.

Paul scowled. "Nikerpole," he said, sadly now. "Oose."

Quite suddenly, Paul sat down. He spoke to Marcia in a perfectly matter-of-fact tone--but a tone loud enough to carry around the respectfully quieted room. "Never did understand why people came here without first learning the language. _And_ the manners. I dare say my Japanese surprised him! Probably an admiral in civies, spying out the next war. Got a camera in his mustache, I presume, clever devils!"

The Englishman then left the room, shaking from head to foot.

His wife, however, remained staring at her plate. By and by Fred brought her a stewed fish with which she began to fill her baleful gizzard.

I would have thought--I would have bet--that this was the end of such things. The tray, alone, would have done as the month's quota for this proper restaurant.

I was wrong.

Hardly had the Englishman departed--hardly had his wife commenced to make slushing sounds with the cream sauce on her fish--hardly had I dried my tears--when the corner of the eye opposite the one that had caught sight of the teetering tray drew my attention in its new direction.

This was toward the bar.

Here Mrs. Doffin was sitting at her regular table.

She had been sitting there, lunch and dinner, when I had first entered the Knight's Bar in 1937. A tall, narrow woman with dyed red hair, who was given to wearing witches' hats--such hats as women wore in Merlin's day--round and pointed. A stovepipe of a woman with a face on which a bleached fuzz grew, and eyes that resembled spoon-backs.

Year in, year out, the four seasons through, Mrs. Doffin had five Martinis for lunch, five for dinner, five in the evening after dinner, and refreshments in her room, between-times. Some ten million dollars lay to her account in various banks, I understood, but, since the death of her husband in 1932, she had devoted herself entirely to one form of enjoyment, if the pointed hats be excepted.

Never soused, noisy, or shot--she was never remotely sober. Sometimes, late at night, if you came into the bar, you would see her lips move as she communed voicelessly with whatever shades or hallucinations accompanied the thirteenth or fourteenth Martini. Occasionally, in a moment of clarity, she would recognize this person or that--a waiter, the manager, Ricky, myself. She would nod regally then, wish you good morning, afternoon, or evening--approximately according to the time--and flick her fingers flirtatiously.

She never bothered anybody.

She was not bothering anybody now.

She was sitting at her regular table, wearing a bright, vacant smile, and stuffing matches into her nose.

She had placed twenty or thirty when I spotted her.

She picked up another and delicately inserted it, pressing it up until its pink tip came even with the rest.

"Curious," I said.

Marcia and Paul craned their necks. They watched awhile.

"I wonder how many it will hold," Paul said.

"Another half dozen, I should think. She has a bit more room on the right side."

"Does she light them when she gets a snoot full? Make quite a firework."

"It's new," I answered. "First variation in ages."

"Somebody should stop her!" Marcia said urgently.

Paul's head shook. "On what grounds?"

"Good heavens, Paul--!"

Mrs. Doffin reached the point where neither nostril would contain another match. She tamped them pensively and nodded to herself. They protruded, I would say, the best part of an inch--all neat and even.

Mrs. Doffin then removed her hat. It was the first time I had seen the full billow of her hair. It looked like excelsior on which paprika had been sprinkled. She set the hat on the seat at her side and glanced with a bright smile and opaque eyes at the whole earth. I suppose the waiters had failed to notice her new gambit owing to the fact that she, and her soundless palaver, were fixtures in the place, like the intruding girders and the gaudy horsemen on the walls. All the waiters ever saw was her glass, when she emptied it. She could have breathed fire, or come in tattooed, and they would have observed no change.

From her hat, Mrs. Doffin withdrew a hatpin, long and as black as any of her garments or their accessories.

This, with the utmost aplomb, she thrust through both her cheeks, hesitating only momentarily at the midpoint, evidently in order to get her tongue beneath the line of direction. One does not--her pleased look seemed to say--absurdly and clumsily impale one's tongue, in these little maneuvers.

"Fred," I called at this point. "Mrs. Doffin needs you."

He looked. His eyes bulged and his brows shot high. He hurried toward her.

She flirted her fingers at him.

He signalled to Jay.

Together they escorted Mrs. Doffin from the room.

Nobody ever saw her again.

There are homes for the rich to do such things in.

5

"The heat is getting people," Paul said, as he and Marcia bade me good-bye in the lobby.

Marcia gave me one last look. She knew she hadn't passed.

She ascribed the wrong cause to the fact.

She thought that, since I'd seen her sensual impulse was not confined to one person, I'd written her off as a slut.

Whose sensual impulses have ever been confined to one person?

Were they so limited, human breeding would be the rarest of activities and marriage almost unheard of.

I didn't mind Marcia's libido.

All I objected to was its orientation.

I rode up to my room and began dilatorily to strip once again.

6

I am told the female of ruff is reeve.

I am told the energy of one of the early atomic bombs is about equal to the energy that falls on a mile and a half square of the earth in a single day.

I am told that a bishop in Philadelphia ordered two motion-picture houses to close down their shows.

I am told that common goldfish will survive under winter ice while the fancy sorts will not.

I am told the kurbash is a whip.

I am told that Soviet fighter planes are buzzing our airlift.

I am told that Paris is unchanged this summer.

I am told that a committee is being formed to censor as un-American all books which, in its opinion, are sacrilegious or immoral.

I am told that no creature can travel faster than a hundred and twenty-five miles an hour, or thereabouts.

I am told that Truman reads Keats.

These are things I had not known before.

I subtract myself from them and find life going on as usual--the land I love deteriorating, the world I adore growing ever more miserable.

I throw the papers and magazines on my coffee table and go to work.

7

Once, I laughed.

Not at the slapstick landslide of dirty dishes on the dowagers.

Not at the weird vanishing of Mrs. Doffin.

But at the matter of a baked apple.

O England--culture uncultivated!

Brave boors.

8

Toward half past five I got my nose bloodied.

It happened this way:

I went down to the newsstand for a typewriter ribbon; the energy of my sentiments had worn holes in the incumbent tape.

While I was waiting for a red light on Madison Avenue I heard band music and saw people scurrying toward Fifth. I went over to see the parade.

It was a listless marching--veterans on gummy asphalt all along the limp trees by the Park. The older men from the older war rode in mimic locomotives that bucked their front wheels, hooted sirens, clanked bells. Some current soldiers marched--carrying rifles with hot metal parts, and behind them came a show of mechanized equipment, with bands interspersed. I listened to the bands and thought of Shakespeare's reference to men who couldn't contain their urine when they heard the bagpipes play. Brass bands, as much as anything, had undone the loose hold of the Germans on sense. Songs about rolling caissons and lifting anchors were flaring the eyes and dropping the chins of the street-lining crowds here, too. I studied these people, remembering all philosophers and the scientists and their faith in reason. Man's monumental Thought--his pride--was silly in these surroundings. Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Kant, Leibnitz, Spinoza, Descartes, Hume, Berkeley, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, James, and a hundred more--compartments of order in a chaos of shining orbs and panting tongues. Pretty compositions, real in themselves, and true enough--but floating in a flood their owners did not observe or--if they saw it--ruled irrelevant, nor realized they rode it, too. What old classic premise could stand the test of a brass band? None.

I watched the bright horns and the dull guns.

I stood at attention when the flags went by--feeling, as I always do, the aspiration in those white stars and those red stripes.

We would continue to aspire--some of us--while breath stayed in us.

But this stirring--this patriotic thrill--did not debilitate my sphincters. Tightened them, rather, against the multimillion goons who would as soon sell all of liberty down any creek as their own two-bit integrity. What patriots remain these days must battle harder against their countrymen for truth, for dignity, for honesty and love than ever against an outside foe.

It proved a misfortune to be moved to lofty sentience, at that time.

The tiresome military iron clanked by as it has clanked through every city on the earth for thousands of years.

More men of the newer war came, canoe-shaped hats worn cock-eyed, bellies lean still, faces blank in the scalding sunshine.

I noticed, now, that many paraders were moving among the spectators--marchers who had been dismissed some distance up the Avenue. These men, from other states, ticketed like parcel post, badge-thick and boozy, shoved among the ordinary citizens, cawing and singing, carrying pails, and shooting water pistols. Occasional cops watched them with the fixed, tolerating smiles taught in the department--proper address toward large political groups. The men, in what they thought of as boisterous glee, peed out their pistol streams at any pretty girl, blotting blouses, stippling skirts with dark dribbles, and evoking, as often as not, coaxing screams.

I wandered through a block or two of this nickering infantilism, this petty and symbolic repayment for a thousand lacks and ten thousand wretched frustrations. Men will be boys, I thought. Boys, I knew, will hardly ever be men.

I came to a lamppost where a dozen pistoleers were singing, "I want a girl just like the girl who married dear old dad." Their mouths yearned it and the sun sparkled on the gold fillings in their teeth. This song, so far as I recall, is the only legitimate outlet for the Oedipus complex permitted in twentieth-century U.S.A. So I watched gents from Oklahoma and Idaho and Nebraska sing their incest, get their backs in it, and I wondered how much effort it would take to elicit from even one of them an acknowledgment of that emotion which, hidden deep inside him, gave him his particular inflection and look while he sang that particular song. I have wondered before while viewing luncheon clubs as they yearned for a girl like mother. To a face, every here and there, the anthem does memorable things. I supposed they would all rather be dead than have to admit the possibility of the truth. I supposed that the recognition of the baby alive in us all would require the hurdling of yet more dead bodies--billions, at least--to bring them to a happy acceptance of such affairs.

American babies are not allowed to be Freudian.

Not till they grow up, anyhow.

I pushed along.

There was a clearing in the crowd ahead. Out of it came such blats of laughter, animal calls, and whistlings as mark the approach to a feeding zoo--the same sound that is emitted by the amused radio audience.

I reached the edge.

Here the canoe-hats had formed an open oblong between the curb and an apartment front. It was necessary for anyone who went by to cross this area. On its rim stood a man with a stick, and heavy batteries. He wore a sergeant's chevrons and his breast was a blaze of heroism. Men crossed the vacated cement untouched--and middle-aged women, also. But whenever a young girl made her way through the hem of the crowd and came unexpectedly into the hollow oblong, the sergeant sneaked forward with his stick, got behind her, lifted the rear of her skirt, poked, and applied the juice.

The girls, shocked electrically, without warning, in this delicate and private part of their anatomies reacted frantically. Most of them screamed. All of them leaped--thrusting their hips forward convulsively. Some then ran--and dove into the crowd on the other side. One, a girl with long, dark hair, slipped after she leaped, fell, and tore a hole in her stocking. Another jumped, turned, and cursed. One tried to hit the sergeant with her pocketbook. Most endeavored to recover some shred of composure--to laugh--or to slip away without showing what they felt. Some wept instantly.

But the response of the delighted--the ecstatic onlookers, was always the same: a jarring salvo of catcalls, guffaws, finger whistles, ribald yells, mirth's paroxysms.

I watched this business for quite a while--the bands going by behind me--the flags--the guns--and the sweating people standing all along the curb for miles of Fifth Avenue.

Finally, a fair-haired girl of about sixteen came innocently into the open place, looked about to find the reason for it, saw none, and began to cross. The sergeant slipped swiftly behind her. Quickly, with his stick, he lifted the little pink cotton of her skirt, bent as he walked, with ogling pool-room pantomine, took aim, and thrust. This girl did not leap but stood transfixed on the point of the electric stick. A great grin broke on the sergeant's face and he thrust, now--again and again. Her head turned in slow horror. Whatever fantasy had seized her brain was shattered by the sight of the lewd man jabbing at her. The crowd roared like all the pottery on earth falling over a precipice. A look of the most pitiful terror came over her. At last, she found the nerves and muscles for running and escaped into the yapping multitude.

The sergeant straightened up. When he straightened, I stepped out and hit him on the mouth as hard as I could.

The approving roar stopped as if a noose had tightened on its throat.

The sergeant stared at me with addled menace. Blood trickled from between his lips, where I had felt his teeth loosen.

Then one of his buddies hit me from the side.

My nose blazed with pain.

The hollow lost its shape. Different--yet not much different yells were raised.

Someone cracked the back of my head.

I saw a place between two fat men, lunged at it, looked back. The sergeant was slowly sitting down, fumbling for his handkerchief.

Blows fell on me. A man in a navy uniform grabbed my arm. I hit him and he let go. The crowd closed around me.

When, after long minutes of pushing and weaving, I emerged on a side street, my nose was bleeding.

I wiped it and went, somewhat shakily, to the hotel.

The nosebleed stopped in a few minutes.

I turned on my radio and found a cello solo amongst the predinner music.

Ave Maria, as a matter of fact.

9

Tom Alden--Tom-the-doctor--had been thinking about me, off and on, for more than thirty hours, now.

He is the kind of person whose thoughts give birth more to inquiry than opinion.

We went to a Longchamps for dinner--the gold and vermilion decorations made bearable by air conditioning. Traffic was light; only a few people were about--people going tiredly in the heat-choked night. After dinner, we rode back in a cab to the Astolat and strolled over to the Park where we sat together on the Mall, listening to the concert. Thousands of people had spread out newspapers in the lamplit dusk and lay upon them, asleep, talking, making love. The police had suspended the bans that one night. Tenements and penthouses were ovens; their refugees gasped on the grass. Kids played in the fountains and no one interfered. The city itself had an evacuated feeling; all who were able had fled the heat wave and the rest were in parks, in cool restaurants, or in the movie theaters. Stars shone hazily above the trees and the stagy skyscrapers. Music, coming down the Mall, was distorted by invisible eddies that still rose from the sun-baked cement; it soared and fell and wobbled through the furnace atmosphere.

Tom, as I said, is given to inquiry. This is not surprising in a man who practices several sciences. If we were old friends, we were also dedicated, in different ways, to the examination of all that surrounded ourselves and each other. Our sensibilities were tuned to the fact; they lacked the common diffidences of most such attachments.

"How's it going?" That was his first question, when he arrived at my hotel rooms.

"Okay."

He put down the black bag that lies within easy reach of his whole life.

"Jittery?"

"Not that I know of."

"Tell Ricky?"

"No."

"How is she?"

"All cured--we hope."

His pale eyes fixed on me. "Let me have another look at the throat."

He had another look--rearranging lights.

"I did a little reading on it, Phil. I can't say for sure what it is."

"I'm going on the assumption that it is--what-for."

"Yes. You would. Most people would take the opposite attitude--until the last possible fraction of the last possible second."

"Why?"

He shrugged and put his tools away. "Wishful thinking."

"More fun to know than wish--look than dream."

"Not many agree with that."

"They don't know enough--look far enough. If you're going to get yourself free--you've got a lot of illusion to hack through first."

"Do you feel really free?"

I shook my head. "Not free at all. But I do feel I know what freedom is--what it means--what it's for. Maybe that's as near as you can get--these days."

He went to the toilet and washed--in an absent-minded, habitual manner. "Hot night."

"Hot."

"You've been told your number was up before now. I've been considering that. You know what it's like."

"Sure."

"What's it like?" He asked it eagerly, and yet academically, as if there were a formula for the reply.

"Changes from minute to minute."

"I suppose so." He seemed disappointed.

That was when we started for Longchamps.

He took the bag along. He always does....

He ordered one Tom Collins. The tall glass was sweating even before the waiter could bring it from the bar.

"How are you--fixed?"

I told him that.

He peered at the room, the other diners, the gaudy colors. "Funny. I remember back in high school in Montclair when you were the class poet. Everybody thought you'd be a writer, sure. The last will and testament of our class left your pen to the juniors. Remember that?"

I remembered.

"But I don't suppose anybody--including yourself--ever thought you'd rip out magazine serials like logs going through a circular saw. Get to be a popular writer. And then set people on their ears by writing about psychology. We all thought you were destined for the garret--a lot of reputation, maybe--but not Florida houses and--fifty thousand dollars' worth of insurance--"

"No."

"Did you?"

"Yeah."

"You did!"

"No harm in daydreaming, was there? Back then?"

Tom meditated on those distant high school years. "You realized the daydream."

"A person like me has a good many daydreams. When one comes true--he automatically starts on the next."

"Do you consider yourself happy?"

"Enormously, Tom."

"So do I. _Why?_ How come? When you spend about ninety per cent of your time considering the unhappiness of the world?"

"Somebody has to collect the garbage or we'd all die of plague. And a born garbage collector loves his job."

"There's more to it than that."

"Yeah. It's not garbage. It's what we discard, ignore, repress. The green fertilizer of the next crop. The yin to the coming yang. My contemplation of what you call the unhappy aspects of life is really the substance of what I find to be hope."

"Jung changed you a lot, Phil."

"I dunno. I got thinking--some years back--of a poem I wrote when I was twenty-one. Threw it away--lost it--haven't any idea what happened to it. But in that poem was the fundamental Jungian idea--the idea that instinct directs human affairs--and that it's a force in action which always has equal and opposite reactions--"

"Still--Archie--"

I thought of Archie--the psychiatrist to whom Tom had sent me for analysis. "Archie taught me psychology--Freudian, Jungian, Adlerian--and let me work out my own problems, aloud. He was a great teacher."

"He died of cancer," Tom mused.

"'--too'?"

He looked at me and grinned gently. "Masochism takes funny forms in you."

"In us all." I went back a little way in the discussion. "When I was a young guy, I formed the habit of listening to, and looking at, everything that happened in my mind. Ruling out nothing. Trying to relate everything to everything else. That's a good habit. That's the natural mind. There are too God-damned many prohibitions and taboos in the life of a Presbyterian minister's son to keep track of. So I started--as a game--ignoring all of them, in my head. Plenty of people do. I arrived--in that poem--at a pretty complete formulation of instinct and the laws of instinct--as Jung sees it working. As Toynbee sees it working collectively, on civilizations. As Northrop glimpses it. As Jesus tried to define it. As Aristotle didn't even guess it."

"So you think you really never underwent a philosophical change?"