OPUS 21

by Philip Wylie

Dear Dean Casselberry:

  I have read all the books in your library. I am a God-fearing, patriotic American. I believe in brother-love and liberty. In the folks, who made me what I am and from whom I cannot find myself different in any respect. Aside from that, you are right. I am sending you, under separate cover, my ear, which I have cut off for you. It is all I had to give and you may address it in the first person because it will then understand. Also, for the inflation of a balloon like mine, I send these directions: use equal parts of the outcries of the oppressed and laughter; for ballast-you will be there, and you should also carry a pail of tears.

  Phil Wylie

  Some give money

  some give work

  but if you give the person

  brother, you're a jerk.

  It didn't do me any good . . . for . . .

  If you try to tell the truth there's only you telling it.

  2

  It was a hell of a morning.

  3

  From nine-thirty until twelve-thirty I cut that serial.

  You wouldn't be interested. We'll go on, anyway. What the hell else can a man do?

  4

  Paul and Marcia, when they appeared for lunch, were expectably nervous.

  The condition called strain is universal in this civilization, anyway. It begins in the cradle with the Freudian conditioning--the creation of each superego. Toilet training, the disciplines of the bawling id, meals according to schedule rather than appetite, the sting of parental palm on cheek, buttock, and wrist that follows erotic manipulation. All these, and countless other "punishments"--which change with changing social codes, change with changing fads amongst pediatricians, and differ from one home to another and one culture to another--set up such stresses that, by the age of two, there is hardly one civilized being in a thousand who is not loaded up with a lifetime of disparate indignities.

  Add to this the regimentations of school--the musts and must nots of classroom and cloakroom. Impose upon it the innumerable stringencies of a religion. Require patriotism. Pepper the taut personality with familial prejudices and phobias. Jew-detestation, snake-dread. Now, in the passing years, fold in the Law--cop, truant officer, and prison bars--sidewalks not to be spit on, or park benches not to be initialed, or loud noises not to be made by individuals (but only corporations), and season with the regulations that rise around the older child, the adolescent, the adult.

  Remove the person, then, from every natural source of his existence. Set him in a city where no useful plants grow and no animals graze--at the end of a steampipe that uses coal mined he knows not where, or oil sucked up ten thousand miles away. A city where no wood is chopped. Detach him, that is to say, from Nature--deprive him of its experiences and every direct sensation of the earth, upon which he depends. Bring even his water in far conduits, with chlorine added, so he will never know a spring's taste.

  Set him to work at earning a living without acquaintance of how the whole of any living is made. On the contrary. Let his life's blood derive from some capillary of the flow. Let him take charge--not of house-building, or food-raising, or wood-gathering or fire-keeping, not of cookery or child-birthing or the weaving of fabrics--but of the twenty-eighth step in the manufacture of one size of ball bearings. Call this earning a living.

  Give him a town to defend against all other towns and cities, a county to boast of, a state to regard as superior to forty-seven other states, and a nation which anyone can see is the greatest on earth. Teach him to hold such superiority as the supreme goal--to believe that no more can be asked of him or of his fellows than that they maintain the greatest nation-however low the rest may sink. Teach him never to inquire if his superlatives are adequate for the conditions of his age. Let him live to the full--by odious comparison. Let him say--I am better than you, wherefore you--not I--need all the improvement.

  Now. Set a few wars in his time, with their alarms, rigors, restrictions, and dull regimentations. Load up his era with means for bacteriological attack and with atomic bombs. Invent great secrets, with attendant rumors. Frighten him all day long--and at night. Tell him he is nevertheless a free man and that, above all else, he must cherish and protect his liberty. Next, at every corner and edge of freedom, hack, harass, chip, clip, steal, stain, bribe, sabotage, and smudge each meaning and application of liberty, so that he no longer gathers its fundamental sense and comes to imagine liberty is consonant with security--which is all that remains for him to dwell upon, since he has been deprived of every secure thing and every secure experience in God's cosmos.

  It makes you nervous, n'est-ce pas?

  No one should be surprised that modern man shows signs of strain.

  Nothing much in the world is sane.

  Only the great instinct--the spaceless, timeless urge toward consciousness--

  continues its thrust of sanity. Because of it, even the maddest men are able to seize upon the illusion that they are sane by interpreting their own, spotty awareness as if it were the entirety of possible knowing. Because of instinct, however, all the mad men and all the mad societies will be brushed like bugs from the earth's crust and replaced by better, sensibler men or--if necessary--by silence. By silence while Evolution is retooled and instinct tries again with a new form--one which may not be so dazzled by its little consciousness or so greedy for the immediate fruits thereof as to attempt, with all the means and methods set down here, and ten million more, to deny instinct, repudiate Nature, and insist its petty Reason is the shape of truth entire.

  So we three nervous wrecks sat down to lunch.

  Marcia was a pretty girl, winsome, willowy, with eyes as blue as an upland lake and light-brown hair which, where the sun fell through undulant glass brick, turned opalescent, like duck feathers, and shone every color, as if it were composed of quintillions of submicroscopic prisms. She wore a light perfume--smelled like an April garden--and her voice was limpid.

  Poor Paul.

  Gloves on her hands--white little things, knit of string. She was nearly as tall as I am. A trembling came through the gloves. "So glad to meet you, Phil. Paul talks about you incessantly. It's practically a fixation."

  Hot in the lobby, steamy; you could bake bread in the place. "Come in the Knight's Bar," I said, "and cool off."

  She bewitched me with her lakelike eyes a moment longer--and deep in them I saw the shadow glide, the fear--the numb, dark carnivore that had to eat, that looked up at me with a guilty but imploring gaze.

  You see, I knew her.

  I held the door. She went first, walking confidently in the face of the strangers in the restaurant. Paul hesitated halfway through the cold doorway--hesitated, and eyed me with a sort of regret. Regret--and inquiry. I nodded my head to say she was lovely.

  Jay saw her--gestured with a menu. We sat.

  They ordered Manhattans and I a coke.

  Music sprayed from its electrical hose-garbled a little, echoing slightly, like music from a lawn sprinkler. This wash of counterpoint in every public place is an attempt to assuage nerves that burn like beds of coals. We do everything we can dream of to relax--

  except relax. If we did that--we would lose the world that we own. And we are afraid to find our souls.

  "It broke the record today," Paul said. Our best prop.

  "Just over a hundred." Marcia moved her long hair across her right shoulder and kept gazing at me to see--not if I remembered her, for we had already acknowledged that

  --but what the effect was to be. "You ought to see Park Avenue! It's a parade--driving to the country!"

  I tried to look like a man who had no memory--who regarded the earth as if it were a big flower. "Hot," I agreed. "But I'm one of those unbearable souls who likes it that way."

  "Me, too," said Marcia. "Two winters ago, I went to Miami. I was crazy about it--

  "

  It was a defiant thing to say. For that was where I'd seen her--with Dave Berne, one morning when I'd stopped at his hotel, early, to take him fishing.

/>   "A young lady left over from last night," he said.

  Miss Somebody-or-other, he had said. Marcia breakfasting in his bed. She exposed a nude shoulder to wave at me from the other room. Dave paid her and we went away.

  He caught his first sailfish that day.

  I supposed, now, that Marcia was offering me the opportunity to ask if I hadn't seen her in Miami; I supposed she had pointed out the hurt to let me, if I wished, open it up. Paul had crushed his napkin. He was sitting beside her and across from me--

  wondering, probably, how to turn the conversation away from the heat wave, the weather, to a less self-conscious, more profitable subject.

  "Workin'?" he asked.

  "Miami," I said to Marcia, "is quite a place." Then I said to Paul, "Yeah."

  "He's cutting a serial," Paul told the girl. "When he gets through, they'll pay him about five years of my salary for it. A month's work, for him. A story about how some college football player married the Daisy Queen, I imagine. For that, he gets sixty bucks to my one. All I do, though, is make atom bombs. You can see the public would rather--"

  "--have its ego blown up than its cities."

  She laughed. "What is it really about?"

  I gave them an outline of the story. "You see," I said, "it's just the way Shaw put it. If you're going to tell people the truth, you've got to make them laugh, or they'll kill you."

  "Why will they?" Marcia asked.

  "Because the truth doesn't seem amusing to them at all. However--they have a feeling life should be amusing. So--if you can make them laugh, and still occasionally set down a fact, they assume it's possible for somebody to know a few truths and still laugh.

  This permits them--in the long run--to ignore the truth you set down and go on laughing."

  "Does the truth seem amusing to you, Phil?" she asked.

  "Infinitely."

  "It seems ghastly to me."

  "Infinitely ghastly, too. You have to approach it in both moods at once--or else, and this is commoner--in first one and then the other."

  "There is an unwritten law in this country," Paul reminded us dryly, "that everything is just dandy all the time--and anybody who says different is a communist!"

  I nodded. "There is also a superstitious belief that the act of stating an unpalatable truth will increase its danger to the folks. What you don't know won't hurt you. Innocence is bliss. Boost, don't knock. If you haven't anything good to say, don't say it. This is the folklore of advertising. This is the theme song of radio. Everything has to be on the up-and-up. Criticism is regarded as un-American and un-Christian. The nation was founded by a rebellion of the early fathers against British tyranny. Christ was the most passionate critic man ever had. But it is considered the essence of patriotism and the chief tenet of the Master to be anticritic. So the whole meaning both of our nation and of its principal religion have been thrown overboard--and we are all riding on a roller-coaster where no track inspectors are allowed."

  "Goodness!" Marcia said.

  "Where," I went on, "nobody is even sure that the tracks were ever laid to the end: looking ahead realistically also is forbidden."

  The drinks came.

  Paul lifted his glass to the girl. She smiled at him warmly--with love, I suppose.

  What kind? It was a look of gratitude. A certain composition of her features. I compared that expression with the casual, collegiate, young-woman-of-the-world wave she had once given me from Dave Berne's double bed. A high-spirited, working-prostitute salute.

  Some part of her conscience was grateful to Paul for taking her out of professional circulation. She was, I presumed, a girl with a good deal of courage--and one with taste.

  A sensitive girl who could--still--accommodate her mind to the objective risks of her trade. But the attitudes of many men toward her would not be acceptable. To face them, she would have to sell pieces of her inner person. Paul had rescued her from that and her eyes thanked him.

  But, far more, Marcia's face expressed a maternal sentiment--warm and enveloping. He was, in a sense, her baby. Emotionally immature, romantic, and hence naive, he had taken her for what she was not. She had played up to his assumption as an older woman to a child. In seducing him, she had seduced herself. She had adopted him as the symbol of the values she had discarded, the values that were now most precious to her because they were lost.

  When I thought that over, I realized it was the point of extreme hazard in their relationship. Not social pressures, but the pressures of emotions--of instincts of which neither was conscious--would be the explosive condition of their two lives. The dangerous day would be the day when he matured sufficiently to dissociate the need to love from the need to be loved. In her case, the time would come then, too--when he demanded no more mothering in bowels or brain or heart. But it might come sooner-when she tired of that one function, or extended it, or spoiled its object, or devoured it, or cast it out for its own good.

  For neither man nor woman can possess without being possessed, or consume without being consumed, and whether the process involves an object or another person, not to know the way of it and not to abide by the way is to be destroyed by it.

  The lunch went along badly.

  My habit of apostrophe and tirade, which usually fills such hollows as occur in talk--and forces its way, sometimes, beyond those decent opportunities--seemed inappropriate here. They had been depressed by what I had already said about the world.

  I guessed that, along with worries, they had hoped the visit would elicit an avuncular gaiety. They were young and in love, they thought, and should get from their elders the jocose disposition reserved for young love. I felt some of their expectancy, at any rate, and it only inhibited my rhetoric.

  We talked of the news, of the airlift to Berlin which, by its very existence, constituted an immense Appeasement. We discussed the presidential candidates. We talked awhile of women's clothes, of the veterans' organization currently holding a convention in the city, and I described the house Ricky and I were building south of Miami, drawing a diagram on the tablecloth with a knife.

  The effort to keep talk going--to find topics and to change them before attempt was disclosed--made me restive. Paul wasn't helping any. He'd eaten hungrily enough and then sat back--jerking and fidgeting about, making faces, pulling his nose, simpering, and smirking moonily.

  She'd held up her end.

  The trouble was, of course, that none of us was engaged in honest behavior.

  Paul wanted to say: What do you think of her--and us?

  Paul wanted me to say: She's lovely--and I'm sure you'll be happy.

  I had become doubly certain--without yet entirely appreciating why--that it would never turn out. I had been generically sure, even before--just as Ricky had been sure: Paul wasn't constructed to marry a harlot and live happily ever after.

  I wanted to say: For God's sake, cooky, send her back to her trade; she'll find some other guy, eventually; she's not for you.

  Then I wanted to go up sixteen floors to my apartment with my troubles, my work, no women, no nephew.

  What did the girl want to say?

  I looked at her again--at her opalescent hair and her blue eyes. And she looked back. For a moment, the shadow stood still--stood still, and dissipated.

  A wanton expression, brief and Lilith-like, reshaped the sharp, carmine edges of her mouth. She saw me not as the uncle of her now-beloved, but as the detached person--

  another man--and in this seeing me, she involuntarily recalled her long affair with lust. I have heard a woman say that, by merely quivering her underlip in a certain fashion, she had been able to change the tone, attention, and interest of nine men in ten with whom she'd ever talked--and there was nothing in her history to make me doubt the statement.

  And I have heard another woman say that all there was to Rudolph Valentino was the dilation of his nostrils. Watching Marcia's mouth, I could understand the sense of such matters.

  So I was sure of still another th
ing.

  Hattie Blaine had been dubious of her. Hattie had made the suggestion--the to me profoundly immoral suggestion--of tempting this girl.

  Hattie had done it out of an unconscious notion that Marcia had some point in her nature which could not be lent to the kind of marriage Paul would need.

  It wasn't money.

  It was mood.

  Marcia caught me making this observation. She blushed a little, glanced at the table, and then raised her eyes--but whether anxiously or in a repetition of the look, I could not tell.

  Passionate women are seldom ashamed of their passion.

  What she felt was not bold; it was not arch; it was not mercenary; it was--simply--

  an essence of her own responses. A belonging, like the curved shape of her eyebrows or the narrowness of her red nails--which she accepted as no more and no less than that, and revealed as naturally.

  I wanted to go, even more.

  One can pick patterns in one's life-rhythms, cadences, aggregates, cross sections, events that occur in pairs and threes--and the phenomenon is undoubtedly the result of chance. But one notices, one superimposes the pattern subjectively--and decides it is not chance but some obscure order, because one likes to feel that obscure orders occur in life.

  It is difficult to keep the ego perpetually lined up with statistical reality.

  In twenty-four hours I'd looked at, talked to, explored, and somewhat learned three different, very handsome young women. Mrs. Yvonne Prentiss. Gwen Taylor--at Hattie's.

  And Marcia.

  They come in threes, I thought. I thought it had been a long time since I'd met even one girl so pretty as all these. I reminded myself not to be an ass--to keep the view that grouping and variation in no way warp mathematical principle. The obsessive quality of all such ideas weighed on me. I hardly heard her account of their junket, on the preceding Saturday, to Jones' Beach.

  I began to invent an excuse for present departure--to think ahead about apologizing--my work--the check, please--

  Then the busboy dropped the tray.

  He had tripped, it proved, on a napkin.

  There were heavy stacks of plates and side dishes on the tray--glasses of water--