Chapter VII: Part THREE: Andante (2)

"No. I lost sight of what I'd felt--when I was a dizzy, drunk Hollywood writer. But when Archie taught me Freud and Jung--I got back the insight--in contemporary terms and scientific formulations. That's all. And it isn't very much."

"Are you ever frightened?"

"I'm protoplasm, for God's sake!"

He chuckled. "That's a relief! I've wondered what are you scared of. Sometimes--you seem haunted. Most of the time, I could swear you were afraid of nothing."

"The shadow of the ego--the black streak behind it that it never looks around to see."

"And what does that mean?"

"What I'm scared of. Inhumanity. Cruelty. To man--to me, also, I guess.''

"People get more humane."

"Like hell!"

"If you lived a thousand years ago--or ten thousand you'd believe it. The trouble is, you're supersensitive."

I took a long breath.

"What do you read?" I asked. "What do you want to hear? A list of German concentration camps? An account of the cremation of some six million innocent people by Germany? A survey of conditions in Russian slave labor camps? A discussion of physical torture as it is used by modern police in America? Or by military men? Or as a political instrument in Europe? Or as a diplomatic measure, by, let us say, the English, in their colonies? Do you want to hear a discourse on the behavior of Jap troops in war? On our own troops? Would you like to have me run over the treatment of people in American lunatic asylums? Shall I touch on lynching details--and other minor unpleasant experiences of the American Negro? Would you like me to talk about how we Americans disposed of the Indian problem? Would you be interested in some studies of corporeal punishment as it is administered in American slum homes and on American farms? Shall I recite the prison methods and jail practices common amongst our agents of law enforcement? Or would a review of the various effects of intense radiation on the human body, as well as its genes, coupled with the fact that about every other American is sitting around these days asking why in hell we don't atom-bomb Russia, tend to persuade you that we are not, essentially, humane people? Shall I discuss brutality in sports? Are you interested in considering our annual million smashed in automobiles as evidence of a certain basic scarcity of the humanitarian impulse? There are various business practices I could go into, in documenting the matter. Not the ruination of widows and orphans. Not the adulteration and poisoning of products. Just the little results of the basic premise of business which is that making money is the whole object, without reference to kindness or love. Or would you like to review the various sorts of crimes committed by the people in our fair land? Would you like to contemplate the interesting and vicious psychology of many of the _victims_ of these crimes? Shall we look at the degree of obliviousness, smugness, or rejection which Americans held toward the atrocities before the recent war--or hold now toward massacre and famine in India--famine in China--ruthless dictatorship in a dozen nations--Spain, for instance--Argentina--a lot more? Or shall we, on the other hand, investigate a whole field of cruelty as large as the one just hinted at: the _psychological_ cruelties of modern men? It would double the scope of the survey. The teachers--devising torments to sweat off their frustrations on their pupils. The common office techniques of the average man-of-affairs. The torments of the soul written into the class structures of society. The awful havoc wreaked on man whenever a minister preaches hell-fire and damnation. No fooling! We are not humane. We are--per capita--the cruelest people who ever lived, because, unlike the poor thieves on the two other crosses--we do know what we do!"

Tom took off his fogged spectacles and wiped them. I pushed the advantage. "Cruelty among doctors. An interesting little sidetrack. I recall, for example--"

"Skip it." He looked sorrowfully at me. "You win that one."

"All I want," I said, "is for people to _be_ truly humane. _Truly_ loving. But, to gain that, we'd be obliged to give up a great deal we now cherish dearly."

We had lemon ice.

Later, we walked into the Park and sat down....

The people on the newspapers on the grass, the silo smell of trees at night in heat waves, lamplight and music--as I have said....

"Cruelty in doctors," Tom repeated musingly, after we found a bench on the Mall, where we could feel the breeze if one came.

"Last night," I responded, when he didn't go on, "I was reading a book that suggested the whole philosophy of medicine was cruel. Saving babies--increasing the life span--only so people will go hungry by millions."

"Vogt? Osborne? I read them. What's true humanity? I don't know--except sometimes, in individual cases. What about old people, for instance?"

"What about them?"

He looked back over his shoulder as if he could see through the night, the trees of Central Park, and the blocks of buildings, to the East River. "Out on the Island--I take care of a ward filled with them. Chronics. Sixty years old. Seventy. Eighty. Ninety. Some been in bed for twenty years. No cure. No hope. No chance--in a high percentage--of doing a thing, ever. An organ's shot--ruined beyond repair. Half of them touched with senile dementia; a quarter, sunk in it. Mess their beds. You feed 'em with spoons. And yet they go on--year after year after year."

"I've seen the ward."

"America has millions of such people. Only a fraction of 'em in hospitals. Moms and pops, grandmas and grandpas, hanging on to the last, sick gristle of existence. Spoiling the lives of other millions of people. Taking their time and their energy. Absorbing funds that young kids desperately need. All for nothing. Wheedling and whining and complaining if everything isn't soft and easy for them. Reminding sons and daughters and grandchildren of their 'duty.' The duty to be enslaved by meaningless, useless senility. The food and the clothes, the beds and the service, the tax money, the energy, the topsoil, if you go for Vogt--and the metal--pours down their gullets and is worn out by their worn-out bodies--and not one single, solitary useful thing is accomplished."

"You're stealing my act," I said.

Tom laughed ruefully. "It's an easy act for a doctor to crib! Tell me, why in hell do people look forward so much to old age? Nine times out of ten, it's a mess. Even proud, independent people, when they get old, usually lose their pride and their independence--and go down begging for handouts."

"The best reason I can think of," I said, "is that they're disappointed in life as they've lived it up to middle age."

"The whole country grows older," Tom went on, after nodding to himself. "The American landscape will soon be cluttered with human antiques. Pension-seeking, vengeful, dogmatic, persecuting, bloc-voting, parasitic millions. An ocean of wasteful protoplasm--Old Men of the Sea--and old Women--riding on the backs of everybody. Is a thing like that humane?"

"It is richly sentimental."

"In the labs, thousands of my colleagues are sweating to bring it about. Studying the degenerative diseases. Trying to lick cancer and heart trouble and hypertension. Trying to lick aging itself--to keep the old, old indefinitely! Geriatrics--a whole science for the maintenance of second childhood! Sometimes, Phil, I actually think the world is as crazy as you say it is. Sometimes--when I run into a bright kid whose parents can't afford to have its legs straightened--and then when I visit my ward--I'd like to sweep the place clean with a Thompson gun and move in the kids who need it."

"There is the Townsend Plan," I offered. "Two hundred dollars a month for everybody who's old, if they spend it right away--and millions are too stupid to see the catch. In fifty years--Pensioned Old Age may be the great goal that progress and prosperity are today. Of course, there isn't enough stuff to go around, and there will never be, so two hundred bucks, if you gave it to the gaffers to spend, soon wouldn't buy a good-sized roast. But they may try for it."

Tom laughed somberly. "They are trying. You should see the pension literature in my ward. The letters they write. The voting they do. Should I shoot them? What the hell do you really believe about it?"

"There is the death wish," I said.

"They don't want to die! Not one in a dozen! Even if they're blind, vomiting on the hour, spoon-fed, and in pain--they want to go on living--and are proud of it."

"It's Jung," I answered, "who keeps talking about the law of opposites. The death wish is subjective. But we translate it into its opposite form--in this case, the objective. We want other people to die--to suffer--to bear our load--to take our responsibility. We hate. What did you say about your old folks? Vengeful and persecuting and parasitic? That's the death wish turned wrong-side-out. Or--take this pair of opposites. We have applied reason to extending life. So we have automatically obliged ourselves to apply reason to death. That is a psychological consequence of administering life--stretching it, maintaining it--of baby-saving and so on. Only--being egoists--blind to the basic laws of instinct--we won't kill anybody. Millions of Russians, maybe, but not one American. It's even against the law for a person to kill himself, for whatever merciful and laudable a reason. So what? We insist on our right to save and maintain every life. We also insist on dodging the resultant duty at the other end of the natural spectrum: death. The living have no recourse left but to extravert their death wish. To hate others because of the hatefulness of the trap they're in."

"How do you work it out?"

"In the better world," I said, "a person who had enjoyed the long conscious control of his life would feel somewhat responsible for controlling his death. When he got useless, he would give up. He would regard it as rational--and as part of that 'greater love' that almost no man, these days, hath a sign of."

"Voluntary euthanasia?"

"Why not? And if you came a header and couldn't do it for yourself--the state would do it."

"Do you think," Tom said with asperity, "that the people would permit anything like that? Or think of it as _idealism_? Why--it's a sin--!"

"Sure. Sin. It's one of the sins that keep the churches full and the heads and hearts of the folks empty. Vested interest."

"How many people would do it?"

I shrugged. "Couldn't say. You've seen cases. You'll likely witness another--my own--before long--"

"Good God! I'm sorry--Phil--!"

I laughed and he relaxed--visibly.

"The mass of humanity," he went on after a time, "hasn't that kind of insight, education, nerve--"

"No. Maybe not. Hasn't--as I'd put it--even that much access to its own instincts. Doesn't know even that clearly the relationship of ideals to acts. Of material gains to inner responsibilities. That's the trouble with the mass of humanity. It decides to use atom bombs--the work of a few geniuses who, left to themselves, might not."

"Appalling," Tom said.

"Sure. But the moldboard plow is just as deadly as the bomb in the hands of the common mass. And the implications of plows are much easier for the common jerk to understand than the implications of nucleonics. But he doesn't. So why worry about atomic bombs? Merely another aspect of the same, deep, and ubiquitous nonsense."

We sat awhile.

"What," Tom finally said, "will the better world be like?"

"Woodsy," I answered.

I could hear his grin in his voice. "To restore and shore up the topsoil?"

"Yep. To maintain the ecology that maintains man. And besides, woods are pleasant."

"The rivers would be clear. The factories would dump their wastes in the desert. And the sewage would go through processing plants and then be put back on the land."

"Not many factories, anyhow," I said.

"No? Why?"

"Not nearly so many people, for one thing. People would--people did--cherish each other more when they were scarcer. That's a psychological aspect of overpopulation thus far hardly observed. There are so many of us getting in each other's way and making life tough by merely being that we tend to hate each other just from congestion. Then--the people in the better world wouldn't be so crazed over junk. A tenth of the factories we've got now would probably furnish all the junk they'd want."

"Cities, do you think?"

"Maybe a few small ones--where people put in a few years before going back to the open country."

"Villages? Small towns?"

"Sure. Lots of schools and colleges. Everybody would be pretty bright--and pretty anxious to learn. Everybody would be artistic. Everybody would want to do a certain amount of work with his hands."

"Why?"

"That's the instinct of the critter, isn't it?"

"How come they'd all be bright?"

"Because the biggest fun we're going to have--when we get that wise, if we ever do--is breeding bright people. Living for the sake of future generations--and having some happiness doing it. Happiness with sex, amongst other things, when it ceases to scare us to pieces."

"Maybe," Tom's tone objected, "you might finally convince the folks that knocking themselves off when they got useless was evidence of a great love--an assimilated employment of the death wish. I can even see certain remedial effects in the idea--if that were the common philosophy: people would want to make a bigger effort while they did live, for example. But you can't get dumb babies to knock themselves off."

"You could start--though--at the other end. Clamping down on the people who overproduce and are least qualified to do so."

"Birth control for the morons? The Jukes and Kallikaks?"

"Yeah."

"Too difficult. They fornicate when drunk."

"Then set your lab wizards to find an easy, lasting system. They ought to work toward stopping the output of predefeated babies--of society-defeating hordes of nitwits--as a compensatory duty for working on longevity and the diseases of old age. Fill the drugstores with something you take a sip of that'll sterilize you for five years straight. Chocolate flavor. And back it with national advertising."

"Try to sell that idea! Every church would say it would mean the suicide of the race."

"Suicide of church members, maybe! Kidding aside, the more intelligent specimens of mankind, who do use birth control, still do have offspring--on purpose. It's just that they're outnumbered--and the net result is genetic decline."

"What else--in the better world?"

"No mummery about sex. No mysteries. The young allowed to develop according to their impulses--without shame or restraint so long as they aren't hurtful. The sex manners and aesthetics of the mature built upon that background of unashamed, free experience."

"And what would those manners be?"

"Don't ask me! I'm a shame-produced human gimmick, myself."

"You're welching!"

"Not exactly. I suspect--in the better world--sex would be such a different set of ideas and acts and experiences and feelings that we can't even imagine them."

"Nobody would dare bring up kids that way."

"People already have dared. A school in England does it. A school for difficult kids--not the socially elite specimens. And they turn out fine. Normal; and nice people. Which is something you definitely cannot say of the kids turned out by our own reform schools."

"It's hard to believe," Tom said.

"Isn't it! That's the trouble with truth--these days."

We went on talking for a long while about the better world.

As we designed it, that hot night, I kept thinking how much of our envisioned heaven-on-earth was constituted of what are now considered to be mortal sins.

By and by, Tom said, "Half the doctors in the Utopia would be psychiatrists--right?"

"No."

"Doesn't it follow--in your idea of the state of things? Half the people who go to doctors, you say, have psychological causes for their physical symptoms. And I'd just about agree. Half the hospital beds are occupied by nuts."

"The better world, though, is designed to keep people from getting neuroses and psychoses--individually. And to stop the massive neuroses and psychoses of nations and races."

"So it is!" He chuckled. "That's your everlasting premise, isn't it? If all the people understood themselves, they'd live according to their understanding, and be well, wise and happy, if not particularly wealthy."

"Doctors, like factories, would be scarcer in the better world."

"But what in hell would people _do_?"

"Oh--they'd do unto others as they'd be done by. And they'd add a step even to the Golden Rule. They'd do unto the unborn generations as they would wish their ancestors had done unto them. The existing Golden Rule--which nobody practices anyhow--is objective. Its subjective counterpart refers to the people to come, not the people around at the moment. That's the Golden Rule of instinct--what instinct is all about. Evolution. The increase of consciousness down the aeons. Obvious, isn't it--that the history of evolution steadily spells increasing consciousness? Logical, therefore, that such is the inevitable bent of the future of life--as life is conveyed in man, or as it might someday be conveyed in another form, if man doesn't catch on, consciously, to the scheme behind his consciousness."

"Biological immortality," Tom said.

"Psychobiological immortality. Only--modern man, being so pompous about what goes on in his cortex and repressing so much of what goes on in the rest of his brain, has construed the 'immortal' aspect of instinct as a property of his ego. The natural urge to live through his species, through kids--to love, that is--to be man's father--is drained off into the asinine notion that his personal ego will live in a slap-happy eternity."

"Man," said Tom, "has a pretty damned powerful feeling about that personal immortality. Hard to shake."

"Why not? It's fashioned out of his most powerful instinct. The one that supports life itself, reproduction, and that at least accompanies evolution. Man takes that billion-year-old galaxy of instincts, filters it through his cortex, and comes up with the idea of Heaven. It's a childish mistake. But even a child, when it's mistaken about the actual nature of an instinct, still has as powerful a compulsion in his error as he would have if he were correct. Say he's frightened by something that isn't really frightful: he's still just as much afraid. And we--most of us--are in that state about pretty much all of our inner selves."

"And have been, you think, for a long while?"

"Sure. Since thousands of years before Christ. You guys in medicine ought to quit studying tissue per se--and study its functioning some more. Contemporary man--as a rule--never gets even a glimmering of how his personality is split and how the conscious part can bamboozle the unconscious part--and believe it has got away with it. You know the fact--you ignore the implications. For instance, Tom, we actually see upside-down, right?"

"Sure."

"In our first few weeks--as babies, we react according to the fact of our vision. We want to grab the top of something--but we reach for the bottom--because human vision is inverted."

"It is."

"We learn--by experience--that we see upside-down. As we age--month by month--we develop a 'mind' that makes the correction for us. By the time we're some months old, everything 'looks' rightside-up. And only once in a while, under peculiar conditions, does anybody's mind ever glimpse the world the way his eyes see it--inverted."

"So what?"

"So--that is an example of useful autohypnosis. An immensely potent example. It shows how the 'mind' can establish a set of facts directly opposite to those observed by the eyes. A mind that can go through life looking at an inverted world but 'seeing' it the way it is--manifestly is capable of accepting almost any degree of suggestion from its other parts, and its various senses--of accepting true suggestion or false suggestion. Manifestly, it isn't necessarily 'right' or 'wrong' about anything not proven."

"An argument for empiricism."

"Sure. But for psychological empiricism. That is--an argument for refusing to take for granted any human descriptions of the nature of mind, personality, spirit, psyche, soul--call it what you will--until the descriptions have been pragmatically checked. Take my proposition that all ideas of personal survival after death are misconstructions of an instinct designed to apply to the psychological and biological future of men on earth. Then look over some people who, as a group, reject the idea of Heaven. The communists, I mean.

"I've pointed out--and brighter men have pointed out before me--that when the materialist dialectic was applied on a mass of people, it became a religion. Reason and logic departed. Dogma, orthodoxy, emotion, creed, saints, apostles, holy orders, a Bible with gospels--the whole, compulsive paraphernalia of religion burst into being. What was intended as an abstract, atheistic, scientific, materialistic pattern for living turned into the most fanatical evangelism, the most bigoted crusade, the least logical movement the earth has seen for ages. Lately, where the facts of the science of genetics have proven contrary to communist dogma, the Soviet has abolished science. The Roman Catholic Church never did anything more religious, in the worst sense of that word--more superstitious--more compulsive--or more absurd."

"What are you driving at?"

"Just this. What happened, psychologically, in Russia is one more great proof of instinct. Until and unless you find out pragmatically what instinct is, and what its laws are, no theory of government or system for living will be anything but a set of compulsive simulations of instinct. A religion. Communism was dialectical materialism so long as men just talked about it; when they tried to put it in effect, it became another faith, with the complete trappings of a faith. Dialectical materialism not merely denies that men are instinctual--it ignores the very possibility; as a result, its application drives instinct entirely into the unconscious mind. You can see the proof of that by reading in the daily papers what's happening in Russia or by noting the Russian technique of debate. Pure theology. Pure nonsense."

"I wish you'd written more along those lines," Tom said.

"I'd planned to. I'd even started the first chapters. The calm, collected, documented description of what instinct is and how it works. It was going to be a scientific contribution. Jung explained to the Freudians. Wylie explained to the Jungians."

Tom sat stiff for a minute or so. "Essays?"

"Peaceful ones. Scholarly. No brass and no balloons."

"Golly."

"Why 'golly'?"

"We need that tome."

"Not really. Too soon. Jung wrote me, once, that he thought it would take about five hundred years before people began to understand generally the ideas he elicited."

"More books might help shorten the interval."

I nodded my head affirmatively. "Might. Time doesn't matter, though. Not so much. When I first began to see what caused the immense and self-evident discrepancy between what some men would like to be and what most men actually are I burned up with the idea of noising the news around. I learned the hard way that the idea was one for just a few people--too few to be more than leaven in the coming centuries. I finally realized that my burn was, mostly, the desire to be the missionary myself. To get a by-line. Ego in a low form. And I also slowly realized that the truth would be there, always--and since it was there, steps could be taken by anybody, anytime, toward finding it again."

"You just write off your whole civilization--like that."

"It's what we're here for. To write ourselves off."

"Usefully."

"Well--our civilization has learned enough useful technical tricks to last for millenniums. We served a purpose."

Tom looked at his watch--and sighed. "Gotta go."

"I thought we were to have a long evening together."

"So did I. But I have to go back to Medical Center. They called before supper. There's a peculiar pneumonia up there--and something that isn't leukemia but acts like it."

We stood up and went across the grass, blinking in the gloom and stepping around prone figures.

"You seem all right," he said.

"I'm all right."

"I still think we could use that book--and I hope that we'll get it."

"Thanks."

"Need anything?"

He meant medicine. I said I didn't.

We both waved and a cab stopped.

He thanked me rather formally for dinner.

"So long, boy," he said, then. "And don't give up hope."

"I've got plenty of hope--it just isn't immediate, like the fiscal prospects of department stores."

"I mean for yourself."

"Hope isn't for yourself," I said.

"Night!"

His voice was gentle, affectionate. The door thwacked.

The cab went away into the torrid murk, its two little top lights blinking out when the driver threw the flag.

I stood on the corner, on cobblestones, shaded from nothing by the suffocating trees above me and thinking, I guess, about the book I wasn't going to write. All of a sudden my eyes filled with tears. I felt so lost, so lonely, so ashamed of my body and so scared that I wanted to have someone put comforting arms around me.

A couple necking on a flat bench beside the Park wall diddled a battery radio and it began to sing through its nose.

"Alllll--thuh worrrrld--is waiting for the sunnnnrise--alll--"

All that was coming up was the stone moon.

Diagonally down Fifth Avenue, I noticed the spot where the canoe-hat had poked the girl who looked like my daughter.

I went over there. On the cement sidewalk--a broad, pale path that sparkled in the street light--I saw the stains of that bastard's blood.

I wanted to spit in them.

I had an impulse to look around for a tooth--something to have mounted for a watch charm.

I supposed he'd put them in his pocket to give to his dentist.

I didn't feel so lonely after that.

10

It was about half past nine when I came back to my apartment.

I stripped off my clothes and put in two hours of work.

Then the phone rang.

I was sure it would be Ricky.

Some men's wives, calling that late, would be checking up.

Ricky would just be missing me.

I jumped over to the phone.

It wasn't that clear Hello Darling, like a star in clouds, a landfall in unknown, tedious seas.

"Hello. Phil Wylie?" A pleasant voice. Yvonne, perhaps.

"Yeah-me." I wasn't very civil since it wasn't Ricky.

"This is Gwen. Can you talk?"

"Gwen?"

"We met last night. If you've forgotten so soon, it's not my fault."

The redheaded girl at Hattie's--the one who looked studious and unaffected--the one who had made me think of the handsome wife of some fortunate professor. An interesting one.

"Oh," I said. "Sure."

"I'm not--interrupting--anything? Hattie said you were being a bachelor--and you sat up late. I just asked her."

"I was working."

"And I was hoping you were lonesome."

"Well, I am, as a matter of fact."

"Goody! I'll take a cab."

I was going to tell her to do no such thing. I sat down on the sofa to explain my intention of working until the words ran together and all I could manage was a dozen steps to bed sometime, probably, before dawn. But I leaned back and, in doing that, I looked into the other room. I saw myself sitting there, trying to read myself to sleep, eating some of Tom's barbiturate to help--and solitude eating me.

I said, "All right."

"You sound terribly nonchalant."

"It's the telephone," I said. "You can't see over it."

She chuckled and drew in her breath just enough so I heard it and said, "Twenty minutes."

I fixed up the manuscript and set the bridge table aside. Then I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. "Why?" I said to myself.

This inquiry may seem to have a connotation of guilt. Such is not the case. It represented introspection, which I continued as I removed, in the now-tepid water that emerged from the tap marked "cold," all track and trickle of the night's labors.

My friend Dave Berne--whom I'd come upon with Marcia in _dolce far niente_--once quoted Forbisher-Laroche to the effect that there are fifteen hundred and six discrete reasons for associating with prostitutes and only nine even potentially commensurate objections. Dave and I, with an hour or so to spare at the time, were able to list three hundred and twenty of the fifteen hundred and six and felt, upon discontinuing the game, that we had every good prospect of recapitulating the lot from our own joint knowledge.

A degree of doubt was cast upon the Forbisher-Laroche figures in my subsequent association with Dave, owing to the fact that he quoted the same authority on so many other matters--the breeding rate of hamsters, for example, the relative climbing efficiencies of various kite designs, and the esoteric causes of giddiness. It occurred to me that "Forbisher-Laroche" might serve my lawyer friend in lieu of the name of an authority or researcher which he could not call to mind--or even in lieu of better authority than his own. This, however, was remarkably good; so the table, even if specious, may be regarded as sound from the order-of-magnitude standpoint.

Among the nine objections to association with prostitutes were at least two (Dave said) which could be regarded as obsolete: the dangers of disease and of pregnancy. Of the remaining seven, only two more (he claimed) could be regarded as rational by the man of ethical detachment--one aesthetic; the other, the practical matter of costs. The rest were mere excursions into "morals"--a contradiction in itself since, were we to apply any genuine morality to sex and sexual conduct, we should have to begin by contemplating the field with simple honesty--a process in which the "Moralistical" objections would dissolve instanter, so he stated.

Of the two objections worth considering, then, one was the expense--a matter to be pondered in all deals and negotiations. The other was that old chestnut which appears in the endless series of candid books of advice to boys, books advertised as providing "complete sex enlightenment," books which, in sum, horribly frighten their readers and leave them, as a rule, incapable of any real enlightenment for the rest of their lives. "Would you," such books fiercely inquire, "walk into a cheap hotel, find that the stranger before you had left the tub filled with his dirty bath water, and immerse yourself in it?" This, in short, is the _aesthetic_ objection.

It contains certain fallacies. One is the implied idea that sex relations are equivalent to ablution--that they are designed to transfer from each individual to the other such foreign matter as may have accumulated on his or her person. There is the further implication that such individuals are thereafter unable to cleanse themselves of the alleged spotting and staining supposedly got in such a fashion. Carried to its logical conclusion, this thought would force hotels, as just one example, to discard a bathtub with the checking out of each guest. Industry could not keep up with such tub-scrapping.

In other words, the question is unfairly put. If cleaning one's self is to be admitted as a pertinent analogue for love-making, the question should read, "Would you use the _bathtub_ in a cheap hotel?" And why necessarily cheap?

"Would you," the interrogator should ask in all equity, "dawdle voluptuously in the shining, sunken, marble tub of the most gaudy hostelry on Park Avenue?"

Again, modern chemistry being what it is, and business being ingenious, it is a safe inference that the tub in the palatial hotel and the tub in its humble competitor would be made ready by the identical advertised product--one having the same statistical effect upon the muck and microbes of the rich as upon the grime and germs of the impecunious. And, even if such were not the case, the Park Avenue situation per se cannot be ruled out.

But I fear the bathtub analogue is hardly intended to be examined for what it is. There is no integrity of thought behind it. Its author does not pause to consider that millions already do plunge daily into common tubs--swimming pools, which are, presumably, well chlorinated. Nor does he go on to inquire as to whether his reader uses the dishes in restaurants and drugstores and whether, before using them, he inspects the dishwashing facilities and practices. There is a lack of fairness in the man. He himself--for reasons he would never dare to inspect--regards prostitutes as he regards the standing pool of some rank stranger's bath; and he deems it as his mission in life to promulgate this obscene and entirely unrealistic simile in the hope (and the good expectation) that all his young readers will, for the rest of their lives, upon encountering the flossiest of doxies, think instanter of stale tub water.

The fact of the matter is that the bright and capable girl who engages in prostitution will be found, on any count, cleaner and shinier, better soaped, scrubbed, polished and perfumed than the average for all wives in the land. Statistically, she may be slightly more venereal than her married sisters, but only slightly--and, since we have given her brightness and capability, it is equally certain (statistically) that she will be more likely to be under treatment and so incapable of communicating afflictions which, as noted above, have themselves somewhat lost their menacing aspect. In short, were a woman to be chosen by lot from (_a_) the general married group or (_b_) the group of alert tarts, and were the criterion to be bodily aesthetic desirability, there would be no doubt as to which group one should draw from. Tubs are tubs.

It is at best a trifling matter.

The positive first item on the Forbisher-Laroche list (if you're interested) and the first which Dave and I set down on our own impromptu schedule, was "fun." The idea that sexual congress, erotic play, coition--call it what you will--is _fun_ has very nearly vanished from Western society. To all persons who approach prostitution with the standing-tub-water philosophy, even the most faithful and the most sanctified relations between man and wife will hardly be even appetizing--since, by their acknowledged images, such people will find themselves condemned to a single tub of water in which they will be obliged to bathe all their lives. This, of course, is the inevitable penalty paid by every denigrator of sex activities: his own, under his best auspices, will still forever seem vile. Also this is the outlook of churches. It explains why the churchly so rarely have any fun and why, if they do, they make sure someone pays for it later--preferably a heretic, and, if possible, in blood.

But (to go to the opposite pole for reference--a course which is implicit in all considerations of the well-educated man) even amongst the heretics--amongst sophisticated, intellectual, emancipated citizens--the concept of fun in relation to sexual activity is absent, or nearly so. These people--husbands, wives, bachelors, spinsters, teen-agers and precocious children--readers of popular slick magazines and the newsprint digests, subscribers to book clubs, members of frank discussion groups--rely for their sex facts upon certain nationally advertised texts which are dispatched through the mails in plain wrappers. All such volumes are offered as authoritative manuals of the art of love--no holds barred; rather the contrary.

I have read perhaps a dozen of these treatises with close attention and I am prepared to agree that their claims are not exaggerated. They do present, in considerable detail and with never a minced word, what might be termed the classic figures of love-making. And yet their readers--persons who are presumed to be doing skull-practice for an imminent marital event--will not find in any of these works a suggestion that the subject in hand involves what I have called fun.

The verbal diagrams suggest, instead, that an extremely intricate and arduous business is being considered--one to be approached in precisely the same fashion as an inquiry into the manly art of self-defense made by a nervous weakling who is about to be exposed, more or less against his will, to an environment swarming with tough, aggressive stevedores and millhands.

In all these treatises, emphasis is put upon the likelihood of early failure--the mere hope of subsequent success--and the stratagems which, if meticulously pursued, may ultimately bring about success. The directions read like those for boxing, savate, or judo. An encounter of the most dire solemnity is envisaged. Painful knockdowns and other traumatizing incidents are constantly described. Yet it is pointed out repeatedly that a genuine knock_out_ will result inevitably in Unhappiness, Infidelity, Divorce, Frigidity, Impotence, Neurosis, Neurasthenia, Psychosis, Premature Senility, Suicide, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Thus the "sophisticated" individual comes to the practice of the art of love without room in his mind for the thought that it might be fun, pleasure, joy, glee, and a source of high laughter. He (or she) is, instead, nerved up for a clash, the outcome of which is most uncertain and potentially of extreme hazard, and the technique for which involves a repertoire like that of a concert organist, along with the timing, muscular co-ordination, and steady nerve of a trapeze performer.

It is scarcely necessary to remind the reader at this point that the manuals in question here are the works of accredited physicians, which is to say, of scientists. Their observations are astute, accurate and complete, from the objective standpoint--and, of course, highly _reasonable_. All they have omitted is the subjective, or instinctual, aspect of the matter--and here is as good an example of that phenomenal but widespread oversight as any.

Some of them even refer to the subject as the "science"--not the art--of love. Technique is a still commoner term. One can reflect sympathetically upon the plight of their mates. And, of course, one can also reflect that, at least in a few instances, these amatory scientists should be given the benefit of a solid doubt: were they to describe love-making as fun, and address themselves to the means of eliciting pleasure therefrom, rather than to the training-table and Olympiad aspects of the procedure, they would be denied the use of the mails even in plain wrappers and even if they had fifty university degrees. The United States Post Office is willing (in a gingerly way) to disseminate anatomical discourse on sex for the married or near-married; but it draws an absolute line at any suggestion that sexual relations are, or could be, consonant with a good time.

Thus we see that the churches, on the one hand, and the cognoscenti, on the other, rule fun out of sex and are supported in the matter by the government.

The first good reason for associating with a prostitute is, however, unmistakably--pleasure.

The pleasure is reciprocal--self-evident for the gentleman, and frequently for the lady also. In cases where the gentleman is something less than that, the lady still has the pleasure of pecuniary profit. This is not a matter to be taken lightly in an era in which the United States is regarded as the last stronghold of capitalism--and the "money-incentive" is recognized as one of our chief Ideals.

There are, it is true, certain nigglers who claim that, since the prostitute lends her person to an act from which she may receive no particular direct pleasure (owing to surfeit or to disinterest) the profession itself is immoral--a violation of that American Ideal which regards sexual relations as permissible only for the Consummation of Romantic Love. Let all such note, then, that fully half the wives in the land report that they seldom or never enjoy consummation, and rarely even intense pleasure, in their relations with their husbands. Must we say all these wives are therefore prostituting themselves?

A similar question may be asked of those who are finicky about the straight cash aspect of professional cohabitation. Our magazine fiction, radio, motion pictures, and other media are engaged in a uniform campaign to indoctrinate Miss America with the theory that her best possible operation in life is to marry a man with millions, or with wealth in his background, with a good income, or--minimally--good prospects. Hardly one heroine of these legends in a thousand marries an oaf manifestly doomed to poverty. Money is an American Ideal--and the plain inference to be drawn from our legends is that sexual desirability occurs for the acquisition of money.

The nation is elaborately stratified according to the amount of money obtained by each young woman upon marriage, or by other means. Of the girl who gets a rich husband we say (even though he has the manners of a gopher and the countenance of a quince), "Oh, well, she can own a convertible and sleep on percale." Advertising, of course, is wholly directed to this association of ideas: one never sees a homely girl displaying a fur coat or a roadster or even pop. With such massive duress visited upon her from every direction--with women marrying and divorcing wealthy men one after the other and remaining the while on elective lists of America's Leading Ladies--a girl cannot conceivably be criticized, on grounds logical or grounds emotional--for slightly short-cutting the standard technique and employing her fresh, gay, sex appeal to obtain the money directly, by a somewhat greater volume of relations at a lower net charge per unit. This is, after all, no more than the translation of another American Ideal--mass production--to a different field.

One associates with these young ladies, then, for one's money's worth of fun, as I have said. But, lest the reader doubt Forbisher-Laroche (as I do in a sense, myself) I set below, at random, a few of the putative 1,505 other reasons:

_Company._ A man often finds himself alone--as I did that evening.

_Need._ It has been pointed out that the so-called sexual drive of young men, at least, is on the order of five times as great as that of young ladies of equal age. This is a circumstance which, for some generations, our imbecile sires have endeavored to deny or conceal. Obviously, their absurd activities in that direction lie at the very heart of the insane condition of the modern mind. Since men have five times the passion of women in their youth, our sex mores must be revised, and soon, five hundred per centum, or we shall all go wacky. It may have happened to us already, in fact.

It has been pointed out that, with the increase of age, this enormous sex discrepancy tends to diminish. The woman of thirty-five will have undergone an augmentation of desire--her mate a decrease. In an unpublished work, I tentatively suggested that--this being the biological fact--a new sex convention might be devised whereby relations between all women of more than, say, thirty-five--whether married or single--and all unmarried males of less than, say, twenty-one, would be publicly regarded as rising out of "innocent necessity" and not counted as in any way unchaste, or unfaithful, or otherwise compromising. The notion seemed inspirational to me. It would at once provide a remedy for a truly desperate situation now existing unrecognized among both sexes at certain diverse ages--and it would give useful and socially beneficial occupation to a slew of wives and single women in America who at present have nothing to do at all. It would provide boys and young men with experienced tutors--women who knew what was in the books but were able to enjoy themselves, to boot--and it might, indeed, revive the now-drooping flower of love in the whole land. My friends, however, after reading my feuilleton, advised me not to publish it, on the fantastic grounds that it would be regarded as frivolous!

But to go on with the random reasons:

_Variety._ It is a point upon which I feel no comment whatever should be needed.

_Obedience._ This term has its limitations for the intended meaning. The word "command" might serve, but it also has connotations not here intended.

In a marriage ceremony, it is true, the wife agrees, as a rule, to "obey" her husband--and he, her. However, in perhaps half of American marriages, obedience drops out of the relationship the moment the preacher closes his prayer book. In perhaps a quarter, the husband becomes the serf of the wife--who has customs galore and the weight of American advertising to back her in her commands of what he must do, earn, obtain, provide, and so on.

Yet the sexual deed itself is one which, if there be command or obedience, requires that the command come from the male, the obedience from the female. (Male aggression, female passivity, the scientists insanely term it.) This circumstance, however loathsome to feminists, is--again--a simple fact of nature: a man is physiologically incapable of being commanded to make love. He cannot simulate. In acts so fundamental to his heart, mind, spirit, and soul as those related to sex, it is therefore not only psychologically evident, but physically plain, that a certain degree of obedience, or receptivity to command, or, if you prefer, co-operation, is necessary on the part of the woman. Without it, love-making, when possible at all, is at best a mere reflex.

Such is the condition of millions of women today, however--and not surprising, either, in view of the times and the customs--that they are inclined to refuse male address, and to whine, scold, heckle, disobey, begrudge, demean, belittle, routinize, particularize, censor, evade, scorn, shame, humiliate, et cetera, before or during or after sexual relations. This leaves the male relentlessly insatiate. Geared by Nature for cohabitation with a willing--nay, an enthusiastic--partner, he finds himself bedded with a cold and prissy marmot of a woman. It drenches his self-esteem, decays his manliness, and either reduces him to the shy, stammering estate of millions of our Milquetoasts or else sets him in a permanent rage against life so that he is ready to turn communist, or Ku-Kluxer, to take to drink, or to beat his children.

Prostitutes provide the only dependable respite from this dilemma, which man currently even somewhat allows himself. Inasmuch as they are sexually in the employ of the man, they will, if worthy of their hire, not critically submit to, but genially participate in his caprices. By this method, millions of otherwise lost men keep alive somewhere within themselves at least a flicker of honest, male self-respect. Now and then--if only a night a year--and only for a price--they are obeyed by a woman.

_Whim._ This is related to the above. As I pointed out to Yvonne, the norm for the human approach to sex relations is the mammalian. Yet all forms save one specific approach are today prohibited. State dungeons await even husbands reported by their children as abed off the parallel and with angular deviations of more than a very few degrees. This is called "bestiality"--a term devised by no animal lover.

Being animals, we hunger to be harmlessly animals. Being forbidden by parents, schools, church and state, millions are confined in the domestic arts of love to that one simple stratagem which propels locomotives. But amongst ladies of easier, nobler virtue, the parched mammal may discover some surcease.

_Beauty._ This, too, is self-explanatory.

_Relaxation._ Ditto.

_Peace._ Also.

_Health._ Also.

_Kindliness._ Many lack it at home.

_Warmth._ Another occasionally marked domestic deficit.

_Mirth._ See above.

_Femininity._ Look over the wives and look over the trollops.

_Youth._ Who does not age?

_Favor._ Some say all women are masochistic and many wives surely are; for these, a slight indiscretion may be a pleasanter thing to suffer than the painless boredom of impeccable fidelity. Whoring as a favor to the frau may be a rare form--but it must not be overlooked.

_Information._ Whole books could be written on this topic alone.

_Practice._ Here, again.

_Courtesy._ Helping worthy girls through college, and the like.

_Testing._ The litmus of another woman.

_Tradition._ No comment.

_Courage._ In these days, it takes a lot.

_Conversation._ A degree of candor is found among filles de joie that is elsewhere rare.

And so the list goes--to the alleged length of fifteen hundred and six excellent reasons for associating with hired damsels. They hardly furnish a good brief for the sexual slum and erotic underground of harlotry today; but they surely show the sores and shortcomings of the pure, the purulent, in heart.

Hence, when, at the beginning of this dissertation, I asked myself "Why?" I was speculating upon which of the multitude of possible motives governed my assent to Gwen's proposition.

Beauty, to be sure; she was a handsome wench; Loneliness and Fun; Relaxation; Information and Conversation, perhaps; and perhaps, also (a reason Forbisher-Laroche himself had never thought of) the Imminence of Death. It is said that the imminence of death on any large scale historically produced mass orgy--that, for instance, the Roman streets were littered with connected couples whenever the plague closed in upon the city during medieval times. This urge--sired doubtless by Nature's command to beget in every eleventh hour--may have had its dark and archetypal image within me somewhere.

11

These ratiocinations occupied me while I dressed, picked up the premises, and ordered from the Knight's Bar a supply of ice in a thermos jug, some whisky, Coca-Cola, glasses, and carbonated water. The waiter had brought them--a waiter wet and odoriferous from a day's running through the high temperatures, but cheerful withal--and held the card for my signature, and departed, before she called from the lobby.

I gave her the number and went out to the elevator.

She had piled up the sleek filaments of her red-brown hair to keep cool a graceful neck. She wore a suit of thin cotton--green--and interesting shoes of a darker green. She came to my quarters laughing amiably. "I'm very pleased with myself!"

"You should be."

She undid the catch of her jacket and took it off. The green blouse beneath was little more than a broad brassière--a sensible and summery thing that left bare a midsection of smooth, sunburned abdomen and rib. "It was my idea to call you up," she said.

"Which pleases me with you."

She sat down near the window, hopeful a breeze might come through it. Her eyes rested on mine with gay attentiveness. "It's terribly slow at Hat's," she said. "It has been--all month."

"Everybody," I said, "is out of town."

"Leaving nobody home to go out of the world with. Desolating!"

"I've got some Scotch--soda--"

"Weak," she said, "and lots of ice."

I mixed the drink. While I was doing it, she saw the manuscript in work and went over to the bridge table. She read a few lines. "It sounds amusing," she said.

"It did to me--the first time through. And the second time--when I corrected it. Right now, I'm cutting it, and my own jokes are a little less than fresh." I handed her the tall glass. "Too bad we don't have airconditioning here at the Astolat."

"I like heat waves. Besides--I spent the afternoon in an air-conditioned apartment. I'm all cooled off for the weekend."

"If you change your mind--we'll find a chilled spot later."

"Then I'll change it--" she looked across the glass-rim--"later. I was over at the apartment of a girl named Charmaine. Used to work for Hattie--and then became the friend of a lad who died and left her millions."

"Nice gal?"

Gwen said, with a quick, small indrawn breath, "Darling!" Then she glanced at me again--and flushed.

"Hattie told me all about Charmaine," I said.

"It--it--only makes me want a man--!" She was afraid I'd be indignant, or perhaps disgusted. "That's true! In fact--that's what Charmaine tries--to do. She likes to make people all hot and bothered. She--!"

The girl was embarrassed--and yet _remembering_, at the same time. The glass tilted a little in her hand. I went over to her and touched her. "Didn't they tell you about me?"

She laughed, then, and sat down. "I was fussed, I guess. Some men--"

I said it for her. "Some men are so narrow-minded you can't put a dime between what they don't know and what they'll never learn."

The feeling that she might have made a faux pas--might have prejudiced me hopelessly against her--had gone from her eyes. She walked over to the windowsill where the radio was. She switched it on and turned the dial back to the minimal volume. While the tubes warmed, she leaned forward on the sill and looked out--across the brick terrace and the parapet, some half dozen feet away. My floor is on a slight setback. When she found she couldn't see straight down, she pulled her head inside again, found a station playing dance music, tuned it in sharply, turned it very low, and smiled at me.

"Sex isn't logical," she said.

"Not from the standpoint we call logic."

"Take me."

"An idea."