OPUS 21

by Philip Wylie

  And it was generally difficult for me, even before now."

  "What's happened that made you change?"

  "God has sent for me," I said sarcastically.

  "You mean--you've been converted?"

  "If I am ever converted--in the common sense--it will be the hard way: posthumously and in the Presence. No. The change in me, what little I have so far discovered, probably comes from atrophy. The peace and mellowness that men mistake for wisdom-that is in fact the result of calcium deposits, excess urea in the cells, and so on."

  "You're forty!"

  "And you're twenty--instead of twenty-six."

  "You don't look it."

  "You do. And as you well know, it's a damn good age for a woman to look."

  She thought awhile. "You meet a lot of woman."

  "I meet a few."

  "Famous ones, I mean. What's your wife like? Blonde? Brunette?"

  "You know a movie actress named Maureen O'Sullivan?" She nodded. "Ricky--

  my wife--gets mistaken for her. We go into night clubs and sometimes they give us a swell table and people begin asking each other who the hell I am--thinking they've identified Ricky."

  "She's sweet--Miss O'Sullivan."

  "Ricky is, too."

  "Who's the most beautiful one you ever met?"

  "The most beautiful one--I never met. Hedy Lamarr."

  "You could, though. Celebrities can meet each other."

  ' I'm only about a Class D celebrity."

  "Suppose--?" She eyed me speculatively. "Suppose some glamorous dame and you met. Suppose you got a yen for her? What would you do?"

  "God knows."

  ' I'm serious. After all, you've written enough articles and books and stories about it. Do you mean what you say? Or are you just trying to be sensational?"

  "Would I, in other words, after meeting the gorgeous Miss or Mrs. So-and-so, invite her to take a long drive in the country--or to picnic on a beach--to look at etchings?

  Would I, personally? I might. Sure."

  "What would Mrs. Wylie say?" The gray eyes were troubled-perhaps afraid.

  "Maybe nothing. She would never hear of it. Does marriage have to end privacy entirely-

  -every hour of it in a life? If she did hear--she might still say nothing. She might laugh at me. She might be hurt. She might be angry. It would depend on her mood at the moment."

  "Her mood just at the moment!"

  "Sure."

  "Isn't that--pretty"--she sought a term--"unstable?"

  "Extremely stable. It would show that she regarded what we have been led to call infidelity a matter of so superficial a nature as to be colored by a superficial mood. This, in turn, would indicate that her more profound attitude toward me--and my feelings for her-was unshaken. Stable, as you would say. If, on the other hand, I knew she would have only one, single conceivable reaction--whether noncommittal or aggrieved--I could be certain that her feelings for me, and her deepest sense of my feelings, had become absolutist, rigid, probably dominating and demanding, certainly doctrinaire. I could deduce that she was in a most unstable situation--since people resort to the projection of absolutes on other people only when they are torn by uncertainty of themselves. Notice this in religions. The absolutes are defined to a hair--with different sorts of steeples, doorways, fonts and crucifixes marking infinitesimal splits over dogma--but with no commensurate variation in the effect on human conduct whatever. Is a Baptist nobler than a Methodist? Kinder? Wiser? No. So the different absolutes of both, seen detachedly, represent nothing more than the uncertainty, instability, self-doubt, inconfidence, distrust, and lack of magnanimity of both. Their passion to lay down the law, taken with the minuscule variants that ensue, is proof that Christians have no stability whatever. Sex follows the same rule--and so does everything else."

  "I would have been furious, though."

  She referred, still, to my hypothetical infidelity. And her reference was interesting. 'Without thinking, she had used the past perfect subjunctive. If, that is to say, her husband--the apparent supplier of the opulent rings--had trifled with a strange brunette at some lodge convention, this young lady's reaction would have been fury. It apparently would not be, now. The assured presumption was, therefore, a rift between herself and her spouse. Coupled with her way of drinking cocktails while eating a sandwich, the brandy in her coffee, her reading matter, and, particularly, the blur of suffering I had seen in her eyes, this presumption led to further inference: the rift was recent and she was in flight from it, while yet attempting to understand its causes.

  She was, that is to say, no habitual Martini drinker; these do not mix their cocktails with their viands. She was reading Kinsey not from the starved cupidity of hundreds of thousands of other women (for if she had been even that uninhibited she would have read it sooner) but in the effort to discover something. She was drinking not to drown her sorrow but to take away its edge: she had mixed her latest drink with the antidote of coffee. And, inasmuch as I had never seen her with her husband at the Astolat, it was a good guess, at least, that she was here as part of an act of abandonment rather than as a result of being abandoned by him. Her accent was vaguely eastern-but eastern rubbed against, and somewhat eradicated by, the flatter tones of the West. Like numberless other such women, she had fled to New York for refuge--and from a considerable distance. Texas, perhaps, or Arizona. And probably she had lived in Manhattan before now: the Knight's Bar was unknown to tourists--with the exception of Europeans visiting America.

  "You would have been furious," I finally said. "Think that over. Here we are, engaged in a favorite national pastime--imagining flirtations with handsome persons in the public eye. I often reflect that picture stars--male and female--are lucky to have so little imagination, on the average. If you can kill a person by sticking pins into a statue of him--which you cannot, unless he believes it--think of the possible result on a star of the lurid, lewd fantasies poured upon his photographs, or hers, by millions and millions of people. Grant any validity in the pin-sticking process and you have, in the photo-doting parallel, a curious possible explanation of what the press knows as Hollywood high jinks.

  Psychogenic. The effect, on the poor individual, of mass assault, mob lechery. But skip all that. The point I want to make is this: some ladies we have hypothesized are married.

  You can see yourself as enraged, if any husband of yours had his head turned--to continue the euphemisms--by one such. But it does not seem to occur to you that any possible husbands of the ladies also might feel themselves involved in the matter--and even experience traces of pain?"

  "Men!" she said. "Why should anyone care what they feel?"

  "O-h-h-h, because they're so plentiful."

  She smiled a little--and poured plain coffee. "You haven't asked me my name."

  "Naturally."

  "Naturally?"

  "You've been wondering when I would. In such a case, the obvious thing to do is to let a girl go on wondering. Besides--my inquisitiveness is never casual. It might be a convenience to know your name. But very little else. A clue, maybe, to the good taste of your parents--or lack of it--and to the national strain of your husband's paternal line."

  "It's Yvonne Prentiss."

  "See what I mean? A handy--but otherwise irrelevant fact."

  She laughed. "Do you live here?"

  "I'm staying here--on the sixteenth floor. For a few days."

  "I am, too."

  "You got mad at Mr. Prentiss," I said then, "and fled from your sprawling mansion out in the golden West to the sidewalks of New York--familiar to you in your girlhood. Your problem was not 'other women'--so what was it? Neglect? Brutality?

  Obsession? Bestiality? Stamp collecting? What?"

  Her eyes filled with tears.

  Just then, Fred came by. He's a waiter I know pretty well. "Look, Fred," I said,

  "I've made her cry. Bring another brandy."

  She was struggling. "Shouldn't it be a beer?"

  "If
you go on crying."

  "I really don't want another drink--"

  "Then bring her some ice cream."

  "--but I'll have one more." Fred nodded and went. "How did you know all that?"

  I told her. "It's Pasadena," she said. She shivered a little.

  So I talked. "Pasadena. How well I know it! Caltech, where people think the troubles of the world began. The peeling eucalyptus trees and the long shadows on the long sidewalk. Way back in the dear, dead beryllium days--"

  "I haven't the faintest idea what you mean!"

  "Dr. Einstein," I said, "walking around under his hair. Thinking so hard he never noticed the earthquake. It was the spring of nineteen-thirty-three. Perhaps I should explain that, in those days, when they wanted to split an atom, they generally used beryllium. A common element--half as heavy as aluminum and twice as strong--but difficult to recover. Poor Dr. E! Like all the reasonable men, seemingly he cannot perceive that what he thinks of as irrational is the force I hat governs human destiny! He assumes it's just a matter of enlightening the politicians. The deification of reason--the worship of common logic--cuts off human personality from natural truth exactly as idolatry destroys the faculty of rational analysis. And for the same reason. The intellectual paragon is as blind as any pagan-in the opposite direction. But we were talking about Pasadena--"

  "Vaguely," she said.

  "I'll be more explicit, then. I was working for Paramount in that blessed era when nothing upset the world worse than a depression. A curable malady--that. Anyhow, I had a producer who lived in Pasadena. A big, reddish house on one of those irrigated buttocks that grow out of the lower mountains. Completely surrounded by thornbushes--except for the entrance gate. The first time I went there was Sunday--a nine A.M. conference--and my producer's butler served highballs right away to myself and the other writers. I shall never forget it--or ever recall a word that we said there that day. I was an animal-horror man, at the time--"

  "A what?"

  "Animal-horror man. That's what the studio boss called me. In fact, he said I was pretty young to be an animal-horror man, the first time we met."

  She drank some of her brandy and then did a disturbing thing.

  She took her pale, wavy hair in both hands and bent it back up over her head so that the curly ends fell everywhere around her face. When she did it, she looked at me in a certain way. We were both supposed to understand the gesture perfectly--and not to notice it at all. Wild horses weren't supposed to be able to drag out of us an admission of what it meant.

  "Those were not only the beryllium days, but the days of animal pictures and horror pictures. Frank Buck and Osa Johnson and Tarzan. Frankenstein. Paramount was trying to combine the grisliest features of all of them. They were making Wells's Island of Dr. Moreau--for instance. And I was doing some of the writing. Hence I was an animal-horror man--and young for it, too. Precociously animalistic and horrible.

  Remember? Cobras fought mongooses? Tigers fought pythons and other unnatural antagonists? Zebus fought gnus? My producer wanted to throw a half dozen lions into a school of big sharks--and get some red-hot close shots of the fights that would then ensue. That--I stopped. Even we ogres draw the line somewhere--and I know a good deal about sharks. The lions, if you once got the sharks hitting them, would not be fighting, as my producer imagined, but dying by mouthfuls."

  "How awful!"

  "Pasadena, it was," I reminded her. "Another conference at that big house amongst the thorns. I know the place like a book. I know the spirit of the place. You lived there?"

  She stared at the room, empty now of all but waiters and two or three pairs of murmuring people. Full, however, of Musak. Light operettas.

  "Somehow it's easier to talk to strangers," she said, "than to people you've known all your life."

  "Of course!" I replied in sober agreement--although I thought the idea was rubbish.

  "And besides," she went on, immediately contradicting herself, ''I've read your articles and books and I feel as if I knew you better than you knew yourself."

  Unlikely, I figured. But this was important to her, so I nodded. "Maybe you do--in some ways."

  She had shown a certain economy of speech--owing possibly to the fact that I had given her little opportunity to show anything else. But her biography was fairly terse:

  "I was born in Boston--and the family moved here when I was a baby. My dad graduated from Princeton in 1921. He's a very intelligent, strong-willed, wonderful guy.

  My mother's a chronic invalid--of her own making. I have one sister--older--and no brothers. I'm very fond of my sister--but I was always jealous of her when I was young.

  Dad tried to make her a substitute for a son--took her everywhere, taught her sports and games-and I wanted to be the one. She's married and lives in Chicago. I went to school in Westchester--Rosehall--and came out here. At a mass debut. Dad's in real estate. After I came out, I fiddled around awhile--Junior League, and Red Cross, and Bar Harbor in the summers--and then I met Rol."

  She took a breath that quavered like a musical saw. "He's handsome. He has manners--buckets and barrels of manners. And money." She looked angrily at her rings.

  "I tried to make something out of him. To put ambition in him. I got him to work for dad-

  -and he quit. He wanted to go to California because he likes flowers. My God, how he likes flowers! We had greenhouses full. He thought he could become a botanist--or hybridize something--and he dawdled away his time with paintbrushes and pollen. I persuaded him to go into real estate out there--and he made a lot more money--but he gave it up. He began collecting a library of old books on botany--and writing a history of botany--and I was bottled up in botany. It got so he would hardly even dress up. Or shave. Overalls all day. I'd want to go places and see people and do things--and we'd be home, instead, with some French professor, maybe, for dinner, complete with beard, accent, ribboned glasses, and knee-patting under the table. Half the time, these professors and Rol--for Roland--talked Latin. I flunked it, three straight semesters, myself. Well--I took to going out alone--and he didn't care. I even tried to make him jealous--and he positively seemed to approve. He told me I needed outside interests and that he was a dull fellow for me! I--" She bit her lip.

  "--love the guy."

  "Not now. I did. What finally happened was--"

  "Should I get that beer ready?"

  She shook her head. For a while she was silent. Then she touched the book. "I heard--I knew--I suppose I shouldn't even have been surprised--let alone driven out of my mind--but there's so much that's nice about him. Used to be, anyhow. Too nice--and that should have prepared me--"

  I got it, then. "Not--other women, Yvonne. Men, huh?"

  She shuddered. You don't see people shudder very often--in restaurants, anyway.

  She shuddered because that was how it made her feel. She couldn't help it. And when the spasm passed, her hands went on trembling--like glassware vibrating after a certain right note has been struck. "He hired an assistant--a young college graduate--that I liked, at first. Then--one day--I got so bored and lonely I went into the greenhouses, which I hated, looking for them. And I found them, all right."

  She began to cry again--and to talk through the tears. "It was only--two weeks ago. Rol was dreadfully upset. He promised--everything on earth he could think of. And I stayed a week more--but it was simply too awful. I finally bought tickets. I--I don't like living at home--mother's such a sobby mess all the time. I wanted to see dad--and of course he was about ready to go out and kill Rol. Somebody--somebody--" her voice sank--"told me that if I read the Kinsey Report I'd see that what happened to Rol happened to maybe a third of the men like Rol. I guess it does. What difference does that make?"

  Children, I thought. No. Not even children. Children is just what they weren't--

  just what they'd never been--or just what, if they'd ever been, they refused to let themselves remember. These angel--pusses, growing up everywhere in America, psychologically hamstr
ung or maybe wingstrung in their cribs. Turned into demons by their right-thinking, practical, realistic, common-sense, hard-headed fathers and mothers.

  Marrying, in no better condition for marriage than nuns and eunuchs. Phooie.

  I slid my wrist in my cuff. It was after three. "Yvonne," I said, "are you busy tonight?"

  "I was going to have dinner with dad--as usual. He bucks me up."

  "Maybe you could do with a substitute bucker-upper, for a change."

  "Dad told me I ought to go out--call up old friends--"

  "The hell with what dad told you. And I haven't asked you, yet. I'm fussy, myself.

  Can you dance?"

  She nodded.

  "Rumba?"

  "Rol was a swell dancer. And we used to have a teacher come to the house--in the days before he lost interest in--me."

  "Well, I'll pick you up, around eight. The valet keeps my dinner things here--so put on a long dress."

  "I don't need to be rescued, Mr. Wylie. It's sweet of you. But I'd detest to go out feeling as if I was the object of a missionary project."

  "Then think of yourself as a missionary to me. I have no date. And I am very uninterested in spending this particular evening alone."

  "Why?"

  "Because I'm a writer. I put my heart and brain and libido into the composition of gay, mad, happy stories. Then I have to pay for it--in compensatory funk. Nothing psychological is free. The illusion that it is amounts merely to a passing human fancy--

  about fifty thousand years old. Surely you're familiar with the fact that humorous authors are melancholy babies, in the flesh? Well, I just miss being a humorous author--so I just miss being a one hundred per cent sourball."

  "What are you going to do now?"

  "That's a very possessive question," I said, "in view of the shortness of our acquaintance. However, I am going to cut a serial from two hundred and eighteen pages to one hundred and seventy-eight pages."

  "Exactly?"

  "Well--within a few lines. And not just this afternoon. It takes days. My wife is up in the country. We were having the house repapered and repainted. Every time I found a quiet corner and started to cut bleeding syllables from my precious prose, some damned craftsman with a mustache like a character in Midsummer Night's Dream spilled paste on my back. So, finally, I scrammed down here. If my wife had known I would have to put in. more days on the serial--she'd have postponed the rural clowns. But, not knowing, and with artisans so touchy about their schedules--"