OPUS 21

by Philip Wylie

  "Don't you love burning brandy?"

  We watched the peaches flame.

  2

  I took her over to the Amigo.

  They had a rumba band there that would give sloe-eyed fantasies to a Norseman.

  And it wasn't crowded.

  I haven't said--was it necessary?--that I intended to make Mrs. Prentiss eat one or two of those gardenias. That is, I proposed in my mind to bring her to the point of withdrawing the order that I was to behave toward her in all chaste chivalry. As to what I would do beyond that, I had no idea. It could not possibly be important if I followed up a moral (or immoral) victory with what would then be an ethical (or unethical) act.

  Mrs. Prentiss was a remarkably handsome young woman. She was somewhat educated and she had a fair degree of intellectual sensitivity. In telling me she had not understood what I was saying she had implied a considerable degree of comprehension and a reluctance to deal with whatever it was that she had gathered from my words. She was "mostly" frigid (an intriguing expression) in many different ways.

  In any sexual encounter she would undoubtedly barricade herself from biological design with common artifact--and half the Pharmacopoeia, besides. She was avid and did not know it. I could see--as the reader has seen with me, no doubt--that her domestic debacle was the result of a projection of her own guilt-sense. She was a nubile dancer.

  But she used her dancing rather meanly--as a sly and enjoyable confession to herself which, she thought, was the most that society would permit of dancing. She was somewhat spoiled and very selfish--extremely prissy in the real, felt sense of the word: a bitch. Nobody, that is to say, existed for her excepting in that they existed for her desires.

  She had moved to a room beside me. She had tried to lead me--at first--on the dance floor. She had thrust the eyes and lips of her psyche into the brunette cashier's hair without caring in the least for the brunette or for any woman or for what happened to others. She had attributed the libidinous gesture to my imagination, when I had brought it to light. She had failed to add anything but frustration to the life of a man about whom I had heard, so far, what I regarded as almost nothing but good.

  She had bought her world and was willing to pay in cash to keep it the way she wanted it--but not willing to pay in a dime's worth of herself. She needed a lesson. For there were nice things about her.

  The expression on her face when she talked about Rol was descriptive, to me, of many good qualities--of loyalty to emotions she did not understand, of untapped vehemences, of tenderness--of human characteristics she was unable to embody. She had been taught not to embody them--she had been taught such attributes were weaknesses--

  or she had been taught nothing concerning them at all. Her greedy mother. The cocksure extravert--her father--a man who, even from her brief account, plainly believed he knew all there was worth knowing on all topics, one who had reached final conclusions about Everything. Reached them--or was able to jump to them by a process requiring neither thought nor the machinery for evaluation. Reached them or jumped to them because his opinions were peeled like decalcomania from Precedents set up by businessmen who have graduated from good universities.

  I knew the type. Sometimes I feel there is hardly any other. Yvonne's dad--

  successful real estate man--Ivy League--New Yorker--daughter-adored. He had no reason to doubt his excellence. He was rich, which proved it. He had graduated from a superior university, which guaranteed his intelligence, knowledge and culture. And his success had been achieved in a tough game in the biggest city on the earth. Moreover, he was, apparently, a churchman. Hence not only the tradition of America, as a whole, and the judgment of upper-class America, but God Himself, attested to his superiority. On top of all that, he was, no doubt, a good guy. A good guy who had loved his elder daughter a little more (how?) than Yvonne.

  It was not remarkable that Yvonne exhibited the characteristics and the reactions she'd sketched for me--or those I'd witnessed. She had been packaged in the best fashion of the richest and most powerful culture of the twentieth century by people who knew and felt less of the significance of life than any other group which has arisen in the species during its past ten or twenty parasitical millenniums. In representing the highest peak of what is called civilization she presented the least sensitive arrangement of what is human.

  A nice bitch, then, with a father complex.

  When we began dancing, I was still fiddling in my mind with fragments of the dinner monologue. A couple of things should be said about it.

  As the reader has perceived, it represented in its way a conscious effort at self-assessment. It was a partial statement of philosophy--my own--urged upon me at that time because, under my circumstances, some review of philosophy was inevitable. When the Ghoul appears, one thinks about one's thoughts.

  For a while, we scarcely talked at all.

  American women, as a rule, will rarely listen to a monologue by a man; when they do, it is usually because they want something from the man. Men have, generally, the better faculty for speech; in America they are not trained to use it. And they are, moreover, so accustomed to female authority in their formative years that they submit, all their lives, to the clamor of it. An aggregation of American people is thus conventionally dominated by the tongues of women and sounds like the continuous breaking of dishes.

  Yvonne had listened through part of a lunch and all of a dinner and now we set our communication in a more definite language--one that followed the tempo of maracas and made use of the whole body.

  "Rol," she said once, during an Afro-Cuban number, "needs lessons."

  "Who doesn't?"

  "Did you take a lot?"

  "Hundreds."

  She danced quietly for a while. "Did they teach you--?"

  I held her a little closer. The gardenias smelled like nights in Florida. "It's not in the book, Yvonne. But there's nothing in the book, either, that says you shouldn't go to Havana and find out what the steps mean--when you've learned how to do them."

  She said, "I think I better sit down."

  We went to our table and she ordered another Planter's Punch. Her face was a damp, darker color, now than peach; perspiration had curled small ends of her hair so that they were like the tendrils on vines. She was panting--and trying to disguise it--but I could hear the breath in her throat and see the dilation of her nostrils. We had been dancing hard. We both needed the long, slow drink of air--though the air here was warm, full of smoke, and had garish light in it that made too plain the grimed plaster on the walls. Too plain, that is, for the music and its mood.

  "You do things to me," she said.

  "You do them to yourself. In sex, men respond to the subject, women to the object. I'm your object--but you're the response."

  "I could be annoyed with that."

  "More of what you'd call antifeminist propaganda?"

  She shook her head. "Annoyed on the grounds that you apparently never let yourself go."

  "On the contrary. I always let myself go. But I always let my brain go along, too."

  She thought about that. "Annoyed--then--on the grounds that there's nothing reciprocal about the dance we had."

  "But you'd be wrong. After all--I asked you to dinner."

  "Because you were curious." She spoke petulantly. "Because you like to find out what makes people tick. Because you're full of half-baked missionary impulses."

  "Because you're a damned good-looking dame."

  "You think so?"

  "Don't fish."

  ' I'm not! Plenty of people think that I'm a spoiled brat with merely superficial good looks."

  "Girls that troll in my waters catch whatever is swimming by that's hungry. Of course you're a spoiled brat--and all good looks are superficial. So I was in a mood. I came down to lunch. I saw a blonde with a book--odd enough, in itself, to be interesting.

  A hell of a good-looking blonde. And I sat down beside her and she told me the story of her life."

  S
he saw that she was not going to be appeased beyond that deliberately meager degree. She sighed and picked up the tall glass as soon as the waiter deposited it and drank perhaps a third of it, thirstily. Afterward, she tittered. ''I'm going to get tight, if I do that again."

  "And if you get tight, I'll take you home."

  "And if you take me home, I'll pound on your door."

  "And if you pound on the door, I'll put you under a cold shower."

  "And I'll call the manager."

  "You won't need to. He'll be helping me with the shower."

  "I thought you were maybe hoping I'd get a little tight."

  "Why?"

  "Don't men?"

  "Not me."

  "It's supposed," she said with a flirtatious glance, "to make it easier."

  "Make what easier?"

  "Oh--being with girls."

  "I never found it difficult-- except when they were tight. Then my impulse is to run."

  "There we go again! Women mustn't drink. But you--being a man--don't care if the boys get blind."

  "Did I say so? Having been a drunk--and quit--I detest drunks. A common example of the law of opposites in operation. I force myself to associate with them, sometimes, because I owe drunkenness a good deal of quid pro quo--"

  "Like an Alcoholic Anonymous?"

  "Like that--without the self-canonization. An American man--with a few drinks in his blood stream--is able to become a shade more human. To shed the posture of men demanded by his era and its women. To show he has feelings, to be introverted--unless he gets out of hand--and even to think a little bit. To cherish and fear, to appreciate and revile, to show some evidence of the democracy and human brotherhood he is always talking about--and always doing his best to defeat by getting to the top in nefarious ways.

  I don't mind guys being slightly tight. Excepting for the danger that they'll go beyond that stage--which they so generally do."

  "But women! Dear, dear!"

  "The average American female with three or four cocktails in her becomes a living exhibit of the frustrations inherent in the feminist myth of these days. Together with the compulsions."

  "Yes, Mr. Wylie?"

  I grinned at her. "She sets out to prove the myth she has not been able to live up to, sober--that women are superior to men and also the exact equals of men. She does this by turning into a bad imitation of a man. She argues. She imagines her arguments are brilliant and crushing--when they are non sequiturs and ad hominems. She directs. She orders. She demands. She judges--she is a little tin magistrate hurling charges to unseen juries and handing out sentences on her enemies or auditors. She is both the defending and the prosecuting attorney. She is everything but a lady and everybody but the prisoner.

  Which shows, of course, that she feels imprisoned when sober, and also envious of males when she goes around in her sober mind trying to convince herself and everybody she is their equal and also their superior."

  Her voice suddenly became flat and cold. "I am beginning to get very tired of you, Mr. Wylie."

  I looked at her.

  You have only to apologize, to crawl about for a moment, to resume flattery or a suggestion thereof, to dance again, to put your hand gently on her--in such a way that she would remove it firmly. Then everything will be stardust again. She will be a beautiful young woman enjoying, with world sanction, the company of a suitable guy. Toying, perhaps, with the thought of an affaire. Toying would be her word and toy, her inept function.

  And what had I been doing?

  I looked for the waiter. If he had been visible in the smoke-spun, light-pulsing, low altitude of the big room, I would have asked for the check and taken her straight to her door and to hell with her. This was my night to howl, maybe. It was turning into my night to die. I had the right--or intended to make the right--to howl and die as I pleased and with whom I chose.

  But while I was looking, she sensed my intention. ''I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to be rude! You hurt my feelings."

  So I dissembled. "I was hunting for our waiter. Let's go someplace else."

  We walked down the staircase of a Latin spot off Eighth Avenue called the Cuban Paradise. A spot with a still lower ceiling, and no air conditioning or ventilation. Two small rumba bands alternate, so the music is constant, and nine-tenths of the customers are Cubans or Puerto Ricans or South Americans. The orchestras are not pretentious, but such as may be heard on a hundred side streets in Havana.

  We took a little table at the wall. New Yorkers spend a good deal of their lives with their backs to walls, looking at things, eating things, drinking. We ordered coffee and the waiter dutifully told us there was a small minimum. It was Cuban coffee--thick and sweet--and we listened to rhythms musically naive but emotionally more sophisticated than those of the big, smooth, uptown bands. Music is like accent in speech, and very few foreigners learn the language of another nation so well as to lose all traces of their own tongue--to talk like natives. At the Cuban Paradise, the Latins danced as they were supposed to and wanted to. Working people having fun. Immigrants remembering tropical nights--and sounds never heard in Manhattan--trees never seen on its streets--

  flowers never sold in its markets.

  There were pairs of girls dancing together--hopefully--and when I saw them, executing the slow, insidious steps of a bolero--I glanced at Yvonne. She was watching them, too--watching them so intently that my glance became a stare. She noticed and swept from her face its look of participation.

  Again, I felt terribly sorry for her. Sorry as one feels sorry for a bird that has failed to migrate and sits on its branch in the dreary rain of autumn, knowing the world is wrong, feebly sensing a lost, warmer climate, but unable to resolve the quandary of the dream and the pain of its present. A bird can be a sharp thing with a reptile's appetite--a bright bundle of vanity and vengeance. She smiled, though.

  "Those two girls-the redhead and the one with blue-black hair--are very good, aren't they?"

  "Very."

  "The dark one's beautiful--like an Indian."

  "Probably is part Indian--and also probably a Dodger fan who chews bubble gum and works in Macy's stockroom."

  "I wish I could lead--the way she does!"

  "That's the boy's department." I laughed. "Sorry! Maybe you're right. Maybe I am prejudiced. Though I regard it as merely the extreme and necessary product of my constant effort to keep track of prerogatives which are defiled and trampled every few seconds in this fair land!" I then added, "If you really want to learn dancing, you have to learn both parts. Yours--the girl's."

  She was easily mollified. And she was--not tight--but less cautious about herself.

  "I never thought of that! It would be interesting!" She looked at me thoughtfully. "Did you ever dance with a man?"

  "Of course."

  Her gray eyes kept looking. "Was it exciting?"

  "Sailors," I said, "dance together on battleships and have fun. That's why sailors are good dancers. I was never a sailor, however. The dancing I've done with guys was when my teacher despaired of being able to show me a step--and called in one of the boys to demonstrate--and to lead it."

  "Oh."

  She was disappointed. She had fled in revulsion from her husband's act; she had no similar scruples about me. On the contrary. I thought that if she possessed even a little insight into that single pair of facts she might be a happier girl. And I also thought that any attempt to supply the insight by pointing out the two inconsistent attitudes would only tighten the hold of her small, personal dilemma. She would deny the very suggestion; she would use all her energy to authenticate the denial--immediately--and in the weeks, months, years to come--use it to kid herself. Not to investigate herself.

  So I said, "It's a good way to learn. Lots of gals get women teachers in dancing school. Men embarrass them."

  "Really?"

  "Sure."

  "You mean--if I went and enrolled and asked for a girl teacher--nobody would think I was--queer?"


  "Thousands do."

  "I never knew it." She said that almost to herself--and hurried on, as if to expunge it. "We had a man teacher that came to the house--and I was always afraid to go to a school--for fear I'd get some slimy gigolo--"

  "More likely a GI working his way through college."

  "Don't you want to dance with me again?"

  It was after one o'clock when we climbed back up on the humid street and the doorman flagged a cab. She said the night was young--and I said, but I was old. I said I had to get up early and work. I told the driver to go by way of Central Park and Seventy-second Street and while we hummed between the lamplit green leaf walls she moved over to be kissed, so I kissed her, but not much. And after that I spoiled my breast-pocket handkerchief wiping off the lipstick, which is another convention. We went through the empty lobby. The night clerk was a tall, handsome gent and his eyes glimmered at me when I rang the elevator bell. Harry brought a car down, let out a policeman (who had been on God alone could imagine what errand) and hoisted us to Sixteen.

  She took her key from the golden handbag and unlocked 1603. She turned up her face slightly. "It's been a lovely evening."

  I tossed the key of 1601 and caught it. "Me, too."

  "It's a pity a girl can't ask you in for a nightcap. But you'd only be able to have Coca-Cola."

  "Gotta sleep. I'll give you a buzz in the morning, Yvonne."

  "Will you?"

  "Bet."

  She gave me a musical good night and opened her door slowly. I walked down the red carpet--and her door closed with a bang.

  3

  There was nothing for me in my own apartment.

  The books--even Vogt's Road to Survival, which I had almost finished--looked nervous. The many magazines--through all of which I had coursed while bathing, eating, sitting on the toilet, riding in the plane, idling--were like partly-consumed meals: there were bits here and there I still wanted to taste, to digest--but not now. I was, of course, neither sleepy nor intending to go to bed. I can get along for days, for weeks, on four or five hours of sleep, even without throat cancer. Often, when I am writing a long story, I begin with the sunrise, go to sleep at two or three the next morning, get up with dawn again--and so continue until the job is done.