OPUS 21

by Philip Wylie

  My body ad-libs its life. When its brain is electrified, when the aurora of thought and imagination and sensation ascends there as a means to work, to dream, to worry, to engage in reasoning or wild speculation, the thing that calls itself "I" follows after, like a boy after a rainbow--and I have found as many pots of gold as a bank president. And when my body has nothing to say or do or think about, I sleep. I lie on the ground. I hoe potatoes and corn, dig garbage pits, make tables and bookshelves, fix gadgets. I sit on a beach and stare at the accumulation of hydrogen cunningly mixed with oxygen. When my body is sick, the I runs to doctors, takes pills, eases itself--and pushes at pain only if it must, like a man wheeling a heavy barrow up a hill. I do not have the illusion of fortitude that makes sadists of, say, Englishmen. I suffer. And when my I is grayed with its own weather, or the bad chemistry of the body that owns it, I suffer, too--jittering and jizzling, mourning and dreading, a repelled, repellant object--a man with blues.

  The construction of society does not permit such practices by most. They have the 8:02 to catch, the Monday wash, and their two weeks in July. The church bell rings not when the preacher feels he is close to God, but at eleven, on the Seventh Day. He who is weak with the length of winter cannot escape it; who faints in the summer must faint again upon recovering consciousness--or else employ his I to whip his body so that it will face summer without further protest.

  No other animal would do itself such violences.

  This is an age of schedules. The people of it have long since foundered in time.

  Time is a sea that presses them to its bottom--a sea that waterlogs their tissues--a sea that prevents them from the experience of its own medium as other than a weight and an absolute dimension.

  Living is drowning with the first lesson at the clock and being drowned forever after that.

  My body and my I had endeavored, with some success, to ignore the obsessional meridians. Others may travel them like a baby that has learned to walk and become so enamored of the skill as to proceed, steadily, for the rest of its days, in one straight line on time's sea bottom. We have stopped--separately and together--somewhat explored time's other dimensions--gone to the surface and seen the sun, for example--bought time, stolen it, ignored it, zigzagged, looked back through it, and seen the straight line of the compulsive infant for the circle it really is.

  As Dr. E. has shown, time's a human invention--a convenient illusion. As the body knows, it has no more significance, alone, than width, by itself. But the I has taken time, in most cases, for a universal measurement, notched it in hours and minutes, and set the whole world to counting time. Its mere recognition is subjective. Yet, how few subjects realize that if the subject be a baseball player, and if his subjectivity and objectivity live fifty years--then the subjectivity of Wordsworth, or Emerson, may have lasted for several hundred thousand?

  So, in this frame of reference--this truer attitude--even I, compared with some of my timeserving fellow men, may be older than Methuselah.

  The body is potentially immortal: it can reproduce itself. And so the I would be immortal in its self-sensation if it were oriented, like the lives of animals, toward that which it could reproduce--all men toward all men yet to be--rather than toward its wretched self-awareness, its greedy, permanent stoppage of time for narcissistic attitudinizing. The I is a mirror. It can see itself forever and any now as this now--if only it looks at the reflection to observe all those behind and all beyond, of which it is an integral. But if it ignores those behind--rules out even the next-lowest author of its instincts--and if it eschews the requirements of those to come which are the integral function of itself--if, that is, the I concentrates upon its one embodied reflection, rejecting the panoply of life and repudiating past and present for its little now--then, truly that I is mortal. It is a suicide for that it is an assassin.

  Such are all persons but a very few, these days.

  So are they taught.

  So inspired: unpunctuality and unproductivity are un-American. So do they urgently maintain themselves--egoists without the sense of individuation.

  And that is why the earth is perishing for man.

  In the hatred people have for people.

  And the absolute hatred of posterity that rises from the absolute rejection of our real ancestry.

  There are moments when the circumstance is unutterably clear to me--and in these, I know--without respect to the immediate employment of my body or the thing called I.

  There are moments when the time-easements I have bought grow clouded.

  And then the knowledge escapes arms, legs, cranium, and I.

  What man, reared as I was, domiciled in this earth's insanity, has even the intimations, let alone the occasional assurance? And who, attached to his clocks, trains, bells, and the earth's turned shadow, keeps a continual hold upon the vital principle? Very few.

  Say it was late.

  Say I did not want to sleep.

  Say, if you will, I did not want to face my circumstances. It is not so. The space during which I sat on the green sofa smoking my cigarette was what you call ten minutes-

  -an infinity that could not be shortened, made painful, or even touched at any point by measurement.

  I picked up the telephone.

  The colored girl had a soft voice. "Hello?"

  "This is Phil Wylie--is Hattie there?"

  "What's the name again, please, sir?"

  I spelled it. She was gone for a long time. I felt a little amused. If Hattie didn't remember--I thought she would--they'd be obliged to consult books or files or whatever records they kept, that went back to the wild, drunk, bewildering years when my first marriage had worn patience thin, shattered it, and turned loose on the town a younger man. A decade and more ago.

  Hattie's voice-deep, harsh-worried, I thought. "Phil, for God's sake! Where have you been keeping yourself? I heard you were a reformed character."

  "My wife told me to call you up."

  Hattie was unruffled. "Sometimes they do. How are you?"

  "Swell."

  ' I'm glad to hear it! What can we do for you?"

  "It's a long, fascinating story that I'd like to run up and tell you."

  "Be a pleasure. I'm losing at bridge. Looking for an out." She chuckled. "Stingers?

  Side cars? What shall I get ready?"

  "Coffee. "

  "Better still! Viola keeps a percolator on--but I'll have her make it fresh. Usually--

  it's like French pot-au-feugoes on forever."

  "You've doubtless--moved--?"

  "Moved! We're Manhattan's most displaced persons!" She gave me a high number on the West Side.

  There was never a rush hour at Hattie's. But two A.M. was what might be called the peak. It embarrassed no one: she had plenty of sitting rooms. In any case, most of the customers knew one another--and knew one another as clients.

  A white marble lobby. An elevator with much gilded fretwork. It was operated by a Negro with an exceedingly noncommittal face. Only one door in the hall on the top floor. A good-sized apartment building, I thought, as I pushed the bell and heard the chimes; hence a good-sized bordello. The colored girl who had answered the phone answered the door, keeping the chain attached. I told her my name.

  The foyer was dim and modernistic. Two halls branched from it. I could see doors along both--and hear music.

  "Jes' follow me, please."

  She said it all night.

  The perfumes mingled, the way they do. It is a woman's medley--expensive or cheap--with no other detectable difference. One door was open. Two girls sat there--pale, straight hair that fell to a sharp, sculptured point over a book and a pair of shimmering, nylon legs.

  Viola went on.

  She opened another door. Hattie was standing at the window in a green dress--her once-sleek orange hair dyed black, now, and fluffed out--her ankles no longer slim--and when she turned I hid, as all of us do, my inner response to the etching of the interval--

  that ver
y Time which I so recently had seen to be without importance. She was now about fifty-five.

  "Phil," she said, "this is nice! You don't seem a day older--just wiser. But look at me!"

  "Brunette."

  "A harridan. The warmest heart in the world--and what happens? The opposite of Dorian Grey. I blame it on the high morals and low conduct of the cops. Hard years. I loved Fiorello--and he despised every bone in my body. I was even over in Jersey for a while. It was the lowest period in my life. Sit down over there in the red chair. Viola, bring us coffee. You know--I've often thought about you--when I read your books--or when one of the girls did--or when I read something of yours in a magazine. You aren't around here much, any more, though, are you?"

  I shook my head. "Miami Beach. And now--we're building a house in Miami."

  "Florida. I went down last winter. Had a cold I simply couldn't shake. Stayed at the Steinberg-Riviera. Hell of a place, Miami Beach! Wonderful weather, period.

  Everybody on the make. Shake a palm and out drops a chippy. A madam with ethics would starve there--and the news about good taste hasn't got south of the Mason and Dixon Line."

  "I always think of it as the end of the American dream."

  "It's the end, anyhow. Phil. Do you really want to see me? Because if you're being polite for old time's sake--maybe you'd rather put off the sentimental chitchat till later."

  Hattie is a thoughtful dame.

  I was about to laugh at her when an abrupt inquiry held me for a second or two. I was surprised--a little. But the question postponed itself. "I came up--solely and utterly to call on you, Hattie."

  She shrugged one shoulder. She yawned. "Maybe we can return your calls. We used to. But--really--I'm delighted. Except when you were--overburdened--you were always fun to have around. It's a dull life-just being chaperon to a lot of whores. And it seems to me the boys aren't interested in philosophy any more. They used to spend more time chinning than cheating, around here. Back in the old days of humanism and liberalism and Coué and the market boom, when the world was full of fun. Why--I had to scout local campuses for girls who could keep in the debates! Now--the boys just come in tight and preoccupied--ask for a girl by hair color, like picking out paint for a kitchen--

  pay--and scram. I can't recall how long it's been since we held one of those impromptu breakfasts--for the celebrities and plain people who happened to be around! It's depressing!"

  I knew what she meant. Everybody knows.

  Viola brought the coffee.

  "Pretty," I said.

  Hattie looked at the door where Viola had gone. "Nice girl. Married and has two kids. The wages are no damned good--but the tips!--I think she does as well as I do, after taxes. More passes made at Vi than nearly anybody actually working. She's a strict Baptist."

  "I wasn't--" I thought of reminiscing a little. Then I thought it might be sad. Hattie seemed to have read my mind.

  "Remember Elysse? The French girl with the brown bangs?"

  I did.

  "She's married. Lives in Troy. Comes to see me once in a while. Lovely girl. And-Charmaine? The president of an oil company moved her onto Park Avenue--died--and left her his heap. Millions. She's a good customer of mine. You know, Kinsey should interview me before he writes more books."

  Kinsey again.

  "Why don't you drop him a note? Volunteer?"

  Hattie's face wrinkled with amusement. "I wouldn't want to shock the poor man."

  I laughed.

  Her brows came together. They were ordinarily straight and level, red once, black now--like a crayon mark made with a ruler. She still had good-looking amber eyes, fiery but steady, and her forehead was very high. She was beginning to look like some sort of sachem--a tribal wiseman, or a poet. Quite an impressive dame.

  "It's funny," she said. "I've even heard men right in these rooms argue that Kinsey was a liar and crazy and incompetent and a menace to society. Otherwise bright men.

  Heard them say that Kinsey only talked to screwballs and neurotics and people who were inventing stuff to show off. You'd hardly believe such self-kidding was possible!"

  "They said it about psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. too," I agreed. "Said that their conclusions were obviously nutty because they never saw anybody but nutty patients. Never stopped to reflect that a neurotic is not a nut, that every patient did his best to tell the precise, detailed truth about his private life, and that every single one of those stories involved the sex behavior of many, many other people who are called normal. I mean--the psychologists learned a whole hell of a lot about what normal people did from every neurotic patient. So when they talked about sex--they had the dope. Most people never thought of that angle."

  "Most people," Hattie said, "never think. And when it comes to sex, they think about ten times less than never."

  "Which brings me," I nodded, "to the matter in hand. I got a nephew. A brainy apple and a good kid. And you had a girl here--or on your call list--till about six months ago, named Marcia something--who's gone to live with Paul--he being the nephew."

  Hattie said, "Yes," and waited.

  I realized that a dozen years is a long time in which not to see anybody--a time long enough for a change, especially if one has quit drinking, married again, and so on and so on and so on. Hattie was afraid I was up to some sort of Presbyterian nasty-work--

  and she was ready to be disappointed. Ready not to help me call the cops on Marcia, so to speak, and ready to write off one more guy as a galvanized hypocrite.

  I said, "In my frank opinion, Paul is not the sort who will be happy with an ex-houri. And I don't say that because he's my nephew and because I'm broad-minded about everybody but who-touches-me. Let me tell you what Paul's like--and how he came to confide in me on the situation--how he got into it--and how he's acting about it as of this afternoon."

  "Tell me."

  The longer she listened, the more she relaxed. When finally I stopped talking she walked over to the window, where she had stood when I came in. Her broadening buttocks and shoulders blotted out most of the river-gleam and the Jersey-glow, which you could see from there--but not the boat-hoots which came up around her, wallowing through the city, buzzing the middle ears of the millions. She stood there a while. The frame of faraway light blinked around her and the ferry boats and the freighters hollered pensively at each other. When she turned around, there were tears not only in her eyes but on her cheeks.

  "If people only knew what I know!" She said it in a quiet voice with nothing of the brash timber of her usual speech.

  "I'll buy that. I'll even add a big apothegm, Hat. People have found out so much, they are now obliged to learn the rest. The whole God-damned, agonizing, exalted rest of it."

  She smiled in a woebegone way and got a Kleenex from a drawer. "It'll take thousands of years," she said. "They've been making the same mistakes, that long."

  "Yeah. Meanwhile, we've got Paul and Marcia. I'm supposed to have lunch with them tomorrow. You can see--from what I've told you--why I think the thing will fold--

  painfully. There is, however, a chance it won't. A chance that depends on what sort of girl Marcia is, mostly. Which is why I came up here."

  She was shaking her head. "Not on the kind of girl she is--necessarily. On how much she loves him."

  "Okay. That."

  "Providing--she can love. Providing--she hasn't kidded herself into a sweet little daydream that she got from reading too many women's magazines. Or all those books.

  She sure was a reading girl. And smart. And attractive, too. How tough are you, Phil?"

  "It's something you do, isn't it? Not fill out in a questionnaire? "

  Hattie smiled. "I don't want to offend those fine sensibilities of yours. Or make you think I'm something special in the she-Judas line. But you want to know whether the girl means it. Why not send your Paul back to his laboratory after lunch--he'd like that--

  like you to get acquainted with her--and why not--?"

  ' I'm not tou
gh that way. That's businessman tough."

  She dropped a hand. "Still--there's hardly one of them in a thousand who wouldn't--work out some breezy little arrangement--for a G, say. And she'd have to be such a one."

  "She might just see through it. You said she was smart."

  Hattie shrugged. "If she was smart enough to resist the G, maybe she'd be smart enough. However."

  "In other words, you don't know about her."

  "Not Marcia. If it was ninety-nine in a hundred, I could tell you right off. Some of them make damned good wives--better sometimes for being here. With the kind of men who really understand what life is--and with the kind who don't mind because they don't understand anything at all. I like to see those girls get married. Lots more make swell mistresses for men who married hunks of flint. I could go calling at so many swank addresses that your head would swim. And sometimes I do. There are worse places to look for a wife than good bagnios. Any high-society party, for instance. Women's colleges, too, I suspect. Most country clubs. The dud percentage--the lack of warmth--

  runs higher there--"

  "Not to mention know-how."

  She sighed--and then chuckled. "Isn't it crazy? Something that should be given more loving practice than music--something that needs extra experience and skill for civilized people. They think you can learn on one bridal night! Or from a book! A girl it would take a genius of sex to seduce satisfactorily marries a bright young college boy in the chopsticks class--and what have you got? The American home. Did you ever--" the question--indeed, the entire subject--seemed to have roused her--"ever once have an affair with a plain American wife who was any good? Somebody else's, I mean?"

  "Once."

  "Once! And how many--?"

  "Look, Hattie. I came to cross--question you--"

  She thought awhile, when she saw I wouldn't reply--looking out at the city and detesting it. ''I've had lots of men bring their wives right here--to look and learn."

  "How many?" I grinned.

  "God knows! I'm an old madam, Phil. But many a snooty female has lost her inhibitions in my parlors-and gained a little knowledge that went into making a happy home for some guy. The more people say physical sex is unimportant--the more it is likely to become the only thing that is important for them. And they don't realize."