OPUS 21

by Philip Wylie

  Ricky threw into the tormented years her fortitude. She said she was fortunate.

  They knew the name of her ailment and they were doing all they could.

  Hospitals and clinics, X rays and tests, sulfas and antibiotics, vaccines and sterile sores--a little improvement, a red-hot localization and the hospital again. Coming fine!

  Another year or two and you should feel--pretty much your old self. Patience. Courage.

  Well. She had plenty.

  The doctors--the dozens, the scores, mauled and mangled and encouraged. We have great hope for this new immunizing serum.

  She took it.

  Stubborn case, Mrs. Wylie. You seem to be especially sensitive to brucella.

  Streptomycin holds out hope.

  We find it, in a chronic case like yours--ineffectual.

  Some new mold is what we are searching for.

  The years--two--three--five--continued with their hopes and horror.

  It may be, Mrs. Wylie, that brucella sterilizes women in the same way it causes cattle to abort. Not all the sufferers--but a percentage. Of course, we aren't sure. But I wouldn't set my heart on having children, now. You're not in condition now, anyway; and when you've recovered, you may find it is impossible.

  She is a game girl, Ricky.

  Two years ago, she began to get well.

  We have had our fingers crossed--

  crossed--and held tightly in the clamp of one more hope.

  I thought about her.

  These things--and how she was still that same calm girl.

  And how could I tell her, that perhaps it was my turn?

  Gradually I got myself into the tub again.

  I shaved, then.

  We are all afraid of Five o'clock Shadow. Such fears, indeed, have become paramount for most of us.

  Yuts.

  What was Paul's idiom?

  Cipher-faces--standing around waiting for somebody to put a minus one in front of them. Hitler, Stalin, or Huey Long. Zero-pusses, he called them. Zed-mugs. Neck-heads. Neonightmares. Two-legged negatives.

  I shaved, thinking I was positive, anyhow. Wait till they focused their bright peepers on that biopsy!

  I wished I had a little music to cheer up the joint. All I could hear was passing cargo on Madison Avenue, the elevator ruminating in its shaft, and some dame in the bathroom above me talking to a little kid with the motherly tones of a cement mixer. The sweet child was answering in words I could not distinguish, but it knew how to mix concrete, too.

  Ricky and I haven't owned a radio for years--except one that sneaked into the house in a record-player and we didn't even notice we had that, for eight months. A man in this world encounters more than he can bear of the sort of thing that radio purveys; it is Heaven's own mercy if he can avoid a part of it. The printed ads and the billboards get you willy-nilly; and second-class mail is always fooling you. You are eternally exposed to entertainment by chumps in the flesh.

  But when I want a cerebral clyster I want something that won't wash my brain out. And while I can eat with my mouth I propose to get along without the nutrient enema. Every orifice to its rightful function, I say.

  But now I wanted music.

  So I called Bill-the-bellman again. To think (as you are beginning to see) is to act, with me. Sometimes. And the Astolat doesn't have what is correctly called piped radio in its rooms. Bill brought up a machine with knobs like the eyes of dead fish and an illuminated grin for a dial--such a grin as may be seen on any alligator lamp.

  I spun through about eighteen of my fellow citizens who were uniformly engaged in lying to the public and finally hit a girl with too much rosin on her voice, which was what I wanted.

  "When a Broadway baby goes to bed

  It's early in the morning--"

  I did a feather and a few more Peabody steps and a couple of advance left turns.

  The dame put a mute on the bridge of her nose.

  Broadway dreamed off to her lullaby.

  She began, "Say it with music--"

  I thought of Palmer Gymnasium on the Princeton Campus in about 1922--the June, the quiet trees, the cigarettes like cherry-colored fireflies, the flappers, a cicada competing with strings and woodwinds, and me outside because I didn't have the spondulix and the tux. My throat thickened with something sharper than carcinoma.

  If only I had known then what I know now.

  And suddenly I remembered that I had known.

  In that musky dark, in the dark of a thousand other disappointed evenings, in the beam and blister of every day, I had been tightening the spring for the run. The anticipated journey--the slatting of my choo-choo train around its silver track.

  I knew then because I was doing it.

  And I knew now, but differently, because it was done.

  That poignancy was not this.

  Beneath the fragrant maples and beyond the envious desuetude had burned the gathering assurance.

  The response to challenge.

  Spondulix, tux, and young girls' tongues, and stingers, too.

  Incidents.

  Repressions, Mr. Wylie. Inferiority, Phil.

  What had kept me so steadfast despite my passions of despair? Despite all music--

  despite the Weltschmerz of underprivileged sophomores?

  I looked at my old friend, The Typewriter.

  "Somehow they'd rather be kissed

  To the strains of Chopin or Liszt--"

  The more we succeed the more we fail.

  When I am gone, who'll write on you and say the same things better?

  Plenty of them, Philip.

  You never put the bar up where even you could jump.

  Who ever did?

  It was damned near eight o'clock.

  I got dressed fast.

  PART TWO

  1

  THE DESK CLERK told me that Mrs. Prentiss had Room 1603--the apartment, not only next to mine but accessible from mine by a set of doors--now partly locked: I'd turned the key in the door on my side and tried the other, when I'd arrived.

  "I thought," I said, "that she was a few floors down--"

  "She moved this afternoon, Mr. Wylie. To get out of the heat, where there was more air." Or more something. I hung up and looked at the doors. The promise not to make a pass at her naturally crossed my mind. It was, evidently, a one-sided commitment.

  At this season there weren't many guests in the hotel so she'd had no difficulty in moving near me. I wondered whether she would admit it or pretend it was a coincidence; and bet the latter way. Honi soit qui mal n'y pense pas.

  I checked myself in the mirror. Then I knocked on her door. The proper hall one.

  She wore the gardenias in her hair--a white dress with a gold border stenciled around the hem--and her shoes and pocketbook were gold, too. The big diamond had evidently been sent down to the safe-deposit boxes, or left on her bureau--depending on which sort of person she was. Her hair was done up--with the curls among the flowers.

  She looked as attractive as she intended. Cool, too.

  "Am I stunning?"

  I nodded. "But not ravishing. If the Hindus had untouchables at the top of the caste system--white priestesses, say--you'd qualify."

  "You obviously don't know much about priestesses."

  I rang for the elevator.

  "That," I pointed, "is my demesne, abode, diggings--"

  "I know. I asked. And moved."

  "Why, exactly?"

  I suppose she wanted her eyes to be interesting. They were just--disturbed. "To tease you."

  "Tease whom?"

  She blushed the peach tinge I'd noticed before. "Me." Then she shook her head at herself. "Because I'm lonely, maybe. Because I have a kind of phobia about hotels. I don't know."

  I took her to the Crepuscule--the steps down and the moonlit air conditioning--the blue leather benches--the violin, cello, and piano accordion--the little dance floor in the corner with mirrors on two sides--and the French cuisine. The trio there has rhyt
hm and the cellist plays maracas when he feels like it, so you can rumba.

  She had a dry Martini and I had tomato juice. Then I asked her and we danced a couple of fox trots. She was a little bit nervous for a minute or so and presently she wasn't. I asked the trio for a bolero; the two other couples quit; and we danced alone.

  Afterward we danced to a piece called "Cu-Gu-Tu-Ru" which is also known as "Jack-Jack." She understood, technically, about dancing the rumba and she gave some indication of feelings for the part that is more instinctive than planned. Once or twice she tried to lead me--without being aware of it.

  If you know a good deal about dancing, you can tell a good deal about girls that you'd be a long time in learning by any other means. People are animals--and dancing among animals is several hundred million years older than the species that calls itself Homo sapiens. There was rhythm on the planet long before there were ballrooms. So you can expect vestiges, at least, in woman--the-animal, of impulses which belong to the skeleton, muscles, and nerves and not to society--vestiges specifically interpreted, disciplined or repressed by the individual in your arms. The woman's dancing says, This is what the world has done to me--or hasn't. And it is the same for men--which is why women, who live closer to their instincts, like to dance.

  This circumstance, alas, has for so long been repudiated by our forebears that the dancing of most American males is rude and boorish and clumsy, at once self-assertive and self-conscious, unimaginative, disrhythmic, unsubtle--paranoid. It is what the world has done to them.

  You can talk to a woman all night and persuade her of nothing. You can hold her hand and a chemical change will take place in her. You can kiss her in certain ways and the Old Memories will do what rhetoric cannot.

  And you can dance with her.

  If you can dance.

  You can dance by fox trot, the American way, the integration of surfaces. We know the same steps, the same skills, the same beat. We look well together. We make a matched pair. The thresholds of our sentiments mesh, dovetail, tongue-and-groove. We are, indeed, in the groove.

  You can use the dance of conquest and gradual assent, the tango.

  Or the rumba.

  Which is African. Studied teleology, stylized candor, libido embedded in the music, suspended in cadences, arrested, sustained--beyond intellect, this side of ecstasy.

  It is a sophistication that northern countries never knew of--a primitive deliberation, a hot-blooded coolness. For not knowing, they are punished by going without--and in other, obscure fashions. Very few northern women and fewer men, excepting among the young, are able to discover the essence.

  They rumba--they say.

  They wave their tails like pennants, the oscillating flesh corrupt in Christian purity.

  Yvonne was one of the few.

  She came honestly by the name, I thought.

  "Huguenots," she said when we sat down. "On mother's side."

  How can the Americans ever cleanse themselves?

  I ordered our dinner.

  Again, she tried to lead--to change her mind--to demur--to say she wasn't hungry-

  -then to consider the cold roast beef.

  "You'll like it," I said. If she had insisted, I'd have let her order for herself. But she didn't want anything in particular to eat. She wanted to see what happened to her slight, vain whims. So I ignored them.

  "You can have another Martini."

  "I guess I must?"

  "Sure. Must. Dinner will take a few minutes and we won't dance again till after."

  "You're terribly positive."

  "Nonsense," I said. "You're used to men who have been beaten to death by women before you got hold of them."

  Her eyes fixed on me, dilated, and she laughed. "Rol."

  "Among all the others. Maleness has just about disappeared in your native land, sister. The boys are all brought up by women, and taught by women in school, and then they go to work to support women by manufacturing and distributing the things women think they want. It's called civilization--and actually it's only the highest form barbarism has yet reached. Trinket-and-gadget society. Domestic convenience society. A society that holds a handkerchief to one end and sets the other on a flush toilet--a society that aims to make the linen germicidal and the toilet silent, colored, and perfumed."

  "And men? What do they do? Use fingers and squat?"

  "You're learning too fast. Live outdoors, avoid neurosis, and so escape the common cold. I think they could stand for the flush toilet--but they would be more concerned in getting the nitrogen back to the topsoil than they would in the orchid rims.

  First things first and a conscious sense of responsibility for the future--that's us boys."

  "Phooie!"

  "Who do you like--to go on from lunch? Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, George Raft, Rudolph Valentino, Gregory Peck, or some of the new boy friends of the bobby-soxers I'm too old to remember the names of?"

  "None of them. And I never saw Valentino in a picture."

  "Meaning him."

  "At least--he acted as if he had manners."

  "On the contrary. He did, in a mannerly way, several things banned by the book of etiquette."

  "Isn't that the same?"

  "From the woman's viewpoint."

  "Don't you ever get tired finding imaginary inferiorities in women?"

  "Did I say it was inferior? It isn't. More realistic, in fact. Don't you, on the other hand, prefer to be appreciated for differences--rather than to worry over the need of proving identities?"

  "Modern Woman--the Lost Sex. You got it out of the book."

  "It's a pretty good book."

  Yvonne watched the waiter exchange a filled glass for the empty one. She seemed to want to defer talking while she caught up with something in her mind. She sipped, and stared at the people eating dinner in the azure haze the place calls light, and sipped again.

  She had a good-sized mouth with a pretty shape: the lipstick went where the lips were, and nowhere else.

  "I wanted to talk to you. I was ready to pester you. That's why I moved next door.

  I was going to let you find it out when we came back this evening. I was going to ask you in. I'm not afraid of you."

  "Smallest achievement in the history of courage."

  "I want to figure out what to do about Rol. You see--I'm still crazy about him."

  "Send him to a good psychiatrist."

  She exhaled with gentle violence. "Try it!"

  "You said he was very upset--promised you anything.

  That was your chance to make him promise psychiatry. You seem to have read books about it--"

  She shook her head. "Not many, really. You don't understand. Rol wasn't in the least bit upset because of what he'd done. He was upset about my attitude over it. He said it was a 'trivial incident'--and told me he loved me--and said I was frigid and what did I expect. He said he didn't consider he'd been unfaithful to me--and talked on and on about being 'human.' Imagine!"

  "Are you?"

  The blush came again. She spoke in a low voice, "Mostly."

  "People," I said, "don't want to know about people, nowadays."

  "Did they ever?"

  "Here and there--by fits and starts. They had a short spell of wanting to find out about themselves through reason--a couple of centuries ago. Innumerable spells of trying to figure themselves out through religions."

  "But not now?" She was sarcastic. "Nobody knows anything now?"

  "The average college graduate doesn't even know where he is in relation to other objects. Couldn't point to the ecliptic. Or explain the changing seasons. Couldn't point toward the sun, at night. Friends of mine, well-known writers, belong to a society that believes the earth is flat. There's another buddyship of boobs who think the earth is hollow and we live inside. Till the government began financing research for war, America spent twice as much on astrology as on scientific investigation. The folks would rather, by twice, be fooled than find out the truth."

  "We've
made a lot of progress."

  "Individuals have learned a lot. The people ignore it. They are interested in the applications of science--appalled by the implications. Our civilization is just one more swarm of low cheats. It won't last because cheats can't. Only inertia sustains the current shape of it, and that momentum is encountering more friction every day. A republic of crooked dumbbells can't safely use the instruments of clever men. People not only don't know how to behave, they don't even know they are ignorant. Yet in the main, people are thoroughly satisfied with themselves. In view of sure catastrophes I that loom on every margin toward which they hurry--the very self-satisfaction of people is the statistical guarantor of their doom. Hence that crack about pride going before a fall."

  "I think people behave rather well, on the whole."

  "Sure. They'll even be decent about doomsday. Blame somebody else as they perish, like flies, but perish heroically. A pity."

  "You can't depress me!"

  I laughed. "Bear in mind that you brought up that word 'depress.' I'm not depressed. I've had to learn how to get along in the certainty that all I was taught to live for is either rubbish or a dream of a future that lies ages beyond the public expectation.

  People don't know--won't know--can't know, in their present frame of mind. Take your little problem, for example."

  Her face changed. Interest replaced antagonism. "So all right. Take my problem.

  Kick that around awhile!"

  "You believe in evolution?"

  "A person can still believe in evolution--and in God!"

  "Certainly. Something exists in men which they've given the name of all their gods. That's fact. And evolution is a fact, too--a simple reality. A minority of the educated people in our land have accepted the fact that man's body evolved from the bodies of other animals. A still smaller per cent realize that man's mind--personality--

  spirit--also must have evolved from animals and the animal equivalent: instinct. The question is, How? Most of such people believe that it is the supreme function of the conscious human mind to repress instinct. That's their answer."

  "But not yours!"