“I know. But this isn’t France. And if it was I’m not sure Cornelia wouldn’t be chaperoned till she was safely married. Is she married?”
“Certain African tribes—”
“There’s no time for certain African tribes. A woman named Mrs. Mash, who lives in Haversham, is coming to see me any day and ask for a clean bill of health about you. So answer yes or no—are you keeping your nose clean?”
“Of course I am. I’m walking the chalk line these days. It shows how much I’m willing to give up to have a child.”
“What about Cornelia Spry?”
“Cornelia Bly. I’m not sleeping with her, if that’s what you mean.”
I looked at him and then looked away. What good was the question? How could I tell whether he was lying or not? He even owed it to me to lie, to clear my conscience and get me off the hook. But it didn’t get me off the hook. Our talk only lashed me into a state of curiosity bordering on prurience itself. I was now that censor whom if you scratch you will find a satyr. In the half-wretched relish with which I now threw myself into the role of snoop, it was all I could do to keep from picking Augie’s brains every time I saw him. Then a totally unforeseen incident occurred which uncorked my friend without any prompting, as well as shed some light on him from a fresh quarter.
It happened at a party, a typical Avalon evening studded with intellectuals who listened only to jazz and read principally the avant-garde funnies. In addition, there was the beautiful and jumpy Monica Stern, the dress designer; old Thaddeus Hall, the connoisseur of doorknobs; and Sid Walters, the clear poet. Mills, my director, was on hand. Whether or not he came with the beret I don’t know because I came late and left early. He was there with his wife, a large, pleasant chandelier of a woman, covered with costume jewelry. It kept falling off her like decorations from a Christmas tree, and once I saw her angling for something in her Tom Collins, though that may have been a cherry. At one point Monica Stern sat next to me, rapidly draining me of interest in the servant problem. I had slipped away to Moot Point and was deep in didoes with her there, altering her to suit the tenant, when I became aware of a peculiar thunderhead building up out of the conversation around us. It went like this.
There was a bachelor named Morley who ate ice. He had brought up something he called mannerism tests, in a discussion about the sexes. When pressed for details by interested guests, he rang Mills into the discussion.
“Oh, you have a subject do three or four things.” Mills explained. “There’s a typically masculine and typically feminine way of doing each. You give the person a score accordingly.”
“Let’s try it,” a woman proposed. “Who’ll be It? Morley?”
“I know the tests, or at least one of them—how you drink from a glass,” Morley answered, grinding up the cubes out of his fourth or fifth highball. “The rest’ll come back to me the minute I hear them. What we want is a fresh subject.”
“How can there be two ways of drinking?”
‘There’s two ways of doing everything. And you can’t cheat. Come on, who’ll volunteer?”
Everybody was cagey. But at that moment who should turn from a tête-à-tête he’d been deep in with a woman a little apart from the group but Augie. He extended an empty glass to the hostess. “Could I have another?” he said. Everybody laughed.
Morley rose and spread his arms like a traffic cop. “Make way for the gent,” he said, and taking Augie’s glass went to the cellaret himself. “What are you drinking?”
“Scotch and soda. What’s the matter with all you people?” Augie asked, grinning. Here a small knot gave off twitting Sid Walters about the clarity of his verse, and we became one. Morley shouldered his way back with a hastily conjured highball. The company watched in silence as Augie took it, glanced into it, and drank.
“Female,” Morley said with a consulting look at Mills. “Women look into a glass before they drink, men not. Right, Putsi?”
“Not female—feminine,” Mills corrected him. “It’s not sexual as such—just strains in the make-up, characteristics. Like—well, masculine and feminine endings in poetry.”
“Augie does move the needle to the thread, not the thread to the needle,” Isolde said with a laugh. “Remember that business in Huckleberry Finn where the woman sees through Huck’s disguise?”
But Morley was not to be put off. “I just remembered another one—the way you look at your nails. That right, Puts?”
“Well, yes,” Mills said, sauntering toward the cellaret with his own glass.
“What the hell is this?” Augie asked, his smile a little frayed.
“Just look at your nails,” Morley said. “Don’t be bashful. Go on—they’re yours.”
“Let somebody else. I don’t want to hog the show.”
“What good is the test if you let everybody do a part of it? Go on, look at your nails. Don’t be a spoilsport.”
“All right if it’ll make you happy.” Augie obligingly spread the fingers of one hand in a fan and examined the tips.
“I think I’d like a drink too,” my wife said, rising and making her way over to the bar. “And, Julia, do you still have the shuffleboard downstairs?” she asked the hostess. “I’d like to play.”
Morley screwed round in his seat to find Mills, who was trying to bail out of the lark. “Puts, he looked at his nails like this. Isn’t the idea that that’s the way a woman would examine a polishing job? As distinguished from closing your hand up in a sort of fist?”
The latter was what Augie was now doing with both hands, having set his drink down. “For God’s sake,” he said, giving his belt a hitch. As we sat wondering how we were going to dismount this tiger we’d gotten aboard, Augie shook a cigarette from a pack and twisted a match from a book, remarking that Morley had probably had too much to drink—a fact which had also penetrated the rest of us.
“What’s the next test?” my wife called over. “Let me be the guinea pig for the next one.”
“He just took it,” Mills put in, nodding at Augie. “It’s the way you strike a match. Most women strike the match away from them, men toward them—the way Augie just did.”
“So what score does that give me?” Augie inquired.
“Sixty-six and two thirds,” Morley said. “It’s all in fun of course,” he added with a nervous laugh.
“Don’t laugh in that tone of voice,” Augie said. “It ain’t ladylike.”
“Now look here, pal.”
“If you’re so interested in masculine behavior, I’ve got a suggestion. Step outside and repeat that score.”
“We are outside,” someone said in a hopeless whisper. It was the case; we were out on the terrace, where we hung suspended largely on canvas in attitudes of stylish prostration, behind screens which moths had begun to batter in the late-summerevening half-light. “There’s boxing gloves in the basement,” the hostess said facetiously.
“You people run this stuff into the ground,” Augie said. That’s what the rest of us thought too, suffering there in the gloom, and he should have let it drop. “All this bushwa.”
“It’s not bushwa, exactly,” Mills said, strolling around behind a stout chaise longue from where he now proceeded to try to make peace by pouring oil on the flames. “The point is this: everyone is, and should be, a mixture of the two. Now wait a minute! A perfectly masculine man would be a monstrosity, just as a perfectly feminine woman would. Van Appledorn has worked all this out in exhaustive studies. The ideal is a balance of ingredients, is what Van Appledorn says.”
“I don’t give a damn what Van Appledorn says. Just watch your own lip. I fished a miller out of my last drink, so why shouldn’t I look in the glass first?”
“You were quite right. Oh. Women usually hold a cigarette between their fingertips is another. I notice you’ve got yours well down against your hand, like a truck driver,” Mills added graciously. “Of course these tests aren’t Van Appledorn’s. Schmidlapp’s working on that.”
“You can have
Schmidlapp too.”
Someone whispered in the ruined twilight: “Abraham Lincoln wore a shawl.”
“I still think—” Augie went on, ignoring the emollient and kindling his expired fag from a table lighter someone had the presence of mind to extend—“I still think a man is a person who likes women and a woman is a person who likes men.” He thanked the guest who had given him the light and glanced down at the unattached Morley, who now sat in a dejected slump, as though a jag had worn off. “That’s perfectly true to a point,” Mills said. “It doesn’t hold for your Don Juan. He’s trying to prove something. . . .”
The discussion, to still call it that, was going on when several of us went downstairs by way of falling in with Audrey’s shuffleboard suggestion. We had been playing for some time when there was a muffled hubbub overhead, and a woman’s face appeared at the top of the stairway. “They’re at it!” she called, and was gone again.
We clomped upstairs and out to the yard where we found a circle of spectators standing on the grass, watching something in the center that wasn’t instantly discernible. By an accident of confusion I thought first that Augie was fighting Mrs. Mills. Then I saw that in the cleared space were Augie and Morley, supporting one another in a comradely embrace.
“They’re pooped,” our stairway narrator explained. “Should we break them up? Most people think not.”
“It started all over again when Morley accused Augie of symbolic virilization,” someone else said.
“And then Augie called Morley a battle-ax.”
“My daphne,” the hostess moaned, glancing worriedly at a flower bed.
“Look, could you come over more this way, fellows?” her husband said, drawing the pair toward the house. The two staggered over together, interlocked.
“Isolde, put a stop to it.”
“Why? It’s what they want,” she had sense enough to answer.
“I’ll put a stop to it—the second he’s sober,” Augie said with great honor.
“I’m sober,” Morley retorted. “What are you going to do about it?”
“Let go of that and I’ll show you,” Augie said, trying to wrench free his necktie to which Morley clung like a swaying subway rider. “More toward the house, away from those flowers,” the host insisted testily. The combatants swerved obligingly down a slope in the lawn, with elaborate menace but around opposite sides of an intervening sour gum, as though they were stalking a common foe rather than spoiling for one another. Suddenly Morley took a cut at Augie that caught him straight on the nose. Augie cocked back a lean arm and planted one in Morley’s middle, dumping him over backward into a clump of bushes. Augie stood over him and inquired after his health. Morley rose and grasped him around the waist with such determination that what they were doing changed to wrestling. Dancing erratically, they carried on an insulting banter full of epithets like “bigot bastard,” and during which they stumbled about more or less buttressing one another. The host and I tried to pull them apart, but they were inseparable. By now a subtle bond had developed between them which seemed to consist of their being linked against their discouragers. At length, however, they stumbled against the sour gum with such impact that they were not only shaken free of one another but knocked, breathless, to the ground.
“It’s a draw!” Isolde declared. We rushed forward and hustled the antagonists inside into separate bathrooms, from which they emerged cleaned up, and ready to shake hands, which they did with foolish grins. Everybody felt better all around. Everybody, that is, except Mills. He sat with a preoccupied look, which I later learned arose from his not being sure there hadn’t been an error made in the drinking-glass test. It turned out that it’s men who do tend to glance into a glass first—women by and large not.
But the incident did not lose its importance as a cause. At our weekly luncheon, the following Wednesday, Augie was not long in getting around to the triviality of the entire occurrence. “Mean, of course, there are these differences between the sexes. It’s just that I don’t like the idea of guys that lay their palm on their chest when they laugh being umpires,” he said. “Or look at the toe of their shoe and waggle it, like women.”
“Have you ever noticed that women pick a flake of tobacco off their tongue while a man sort of spits it out?” I said, sprinkling salt into my soup.
“Women have a different walk from a man,” Augie said, looking away. “A woman throws her leg forward from the hip. A man from the knee.”
“Yes, I remember that from physiology class.”
I bit off a crust of roll and chewed it thoughtfully.
“Women and men get into bed differently,” I said. “You’ve probably noticed the way a woman does that.”
“Mmm,” he said with a nod. He twisted round in his chair. “Where’s that damned waiter with my beer?”
“A woman sits down on the bed first, then sort of swivels her legs around under the covers. Unlike a man who thrusts himself in foot first.”
I have said that Augie was not prompted to the revelation he now made, but I guess I did irk him again with my insight into women and knowledge of their ways and all. However, I knew he had come stoked up and ready to tell me how many women he had slept with even without my cueing him by remarking: “I was thinking about your point regarding just plain taste for women being the real male gauge. What would be your guess is the number of women the average man sleeps with? The average American let’s make it. In his lifetime?”
“That’s hard to say,” Augie answered. He took a pull on his beer, which had been served him, and looked away. “I’ve slept with forty-three.”
“Forty-three!” I exclaimed, lowering a laden soup spoon.
“Isn’t that many?” he asked with a negligence that I thought was really too much.
“Do you keep count, for God’s sake?”
“I won’t swear to the figure. Mean I happened to be thinking about it the other night, wondering where the women I’d known were that very minute, the way you do, and I started to count them.”
“How many of these are since you’ve been married?” I asked. “If I’m not being too personal.”
“Not at all. Ten.”
Ten. So he had gobbled more sex on the side than I had partaken of in my entire thirty-five years, wild oats included. “What’s the largest number of affairs you’ve had going at once?” I asked, biting down on an aching tooth.
“Three.”
“Three. And do you think,” I demanded indignantly, setting my soup spoon down altogether, “do you think I should be asked to give you a reference in the light of this information? Do you sit there with your bare face hanging out and ask me to recommend you to Rock-a-Bye and the Crib and Itsy Bitsy and God knows what else yet, as they flunk you out one after the other, do you ask me to say of a man who has laid over forty women, This is my idea of family timber.’? Do you think this is the sort of thing we want in our community? Do you now? What will people think when they find out I turned a goddam ram loose in the P.T.A.! Forty-two women!”
“Forty-three. Shh! People are looking. Now then. Don’t you think these very facts speak in my favor? Because they show what I’m willing to give up to be a family man.”
“You’re not giving up Cornelia Bly. Because I phoned your hotel that night you stayed in, and they said you had left a message not to be disturbed,” I put up to him. I hadn’t phoned that night—it was just a trick. In my wretchedness and my wrath I wanted all the facts, however they might discommode my conscience. “I never asked to be a reference,” I said. “But the only way out of this is straight through it.”
“That’s the way I look at it too,” Augie answered. “So O.K. I’ll tell you about Cornelia Bly.” He studied his shrimp cocktail with that kind of frown that precedes the birth of an intricacy. “I can only put it this way. It’s Cornelia Bly who’s put me back on the straight and narrow.”
Sensing a fresher nuance than those with which I was normally visited by articulate friends, even Augie, I
spread my elbows on the table and listened keenly.
“You see, even if my wife might stand for a certain amount of nonsense I have a mistress who won’t. Cornelia Bly is—how shall I put it?—a Puritan of the intellect. She doesn’t care that much for conventions, but imposes her own rules on human relations outside of them, like your true radical. No promiscuity for her! So while my wife wouldn’t mind my sleeping with Cornelia, Cornelia wouldn’t stand for a minute for my sleeping with someone else.”
“You mean you feel morally accountable to the woman who’s led you astray?” I asked.
“Exactly,” he said, gratified by my grasp. He shifted forward in his chair and went on eagerly, “You see, I wouldn’t dare two-time her.”
“Is she a battle-ax?”
Augie laughed, but gently, as if the walls had ears. “There’s this, that most men do want a certain amount of domination. It’s what I’ve always missed in my home life. I never got it from Isolde. Can you understand all this?”
“I may in time. I could understand it better now if it was the other way around—that you were married to your mistress and sleeping with your wife.”
“That’s exactly the way it feels! That Cornelia is my wife and Isolde’s the Other Woman.” Augie smiled. “We have a little domestic joke, Cornelia and I. I call her C.B. Like a vice-president?”
“What about your guilt feeling?” I asked. “What ever became of that?”
“That’s been transferred to my marriage.”
“You mean it’s when you’re with your wife you feel pangs of conscience?”
“That I’m cheating on Cornelia,” he said, nodding.
“But won’t this undermine your marriage?”
“Undermine it?” he said, with a tolerant smile for my opacity. “Just the contrary. Don’t you see, it gives my home life the quality of an affair, and what takes longer to wither than that? Isolde’s even suited to the role physically—sitting around the house in those velvet slacks and subversive necklines, greeting me with cocktails and roses in her hair. It’s for her I buy the jewels and the expensive perfumes, believe you me!”
The Tunnel of Love Page 9
