OPUS 21

by Philip Wylie

  It was on the Boulevard, with the rich night traffic, the skimmed scarlet scum of the studios and the magnates from Pasadena with their cold, oiled working-model blondes.

  The bells rang.

  The iron hands came down.

  Stop civilization. Go civilization.

  Red lights green lights cracking my drunken brain.

  The acrid flavor of tomorrow in my mouth.

  Alarm.

  Headsplitting daylight.

  How about this?

  She sees him get out of the ice wagon.

  She throws a snowball at him.

  Go sell it to the Eskimos, she says.

  I've got it!

  She throws the snowball. That's good. So okay--her mitten sticks to it and soaks him square in the puss and instead of spitting out the mitten--which he gets in his teeth--

  he makes like it's a mustache!

  Hell! He's a football player, isn't he--not just an iceman? Going to be a big-shot brain specialist someday, isn't he? Quick thinker. So okay. So he leaps and spears the mitten and the snowball like it's a long forward and he runs at her and tackles her and spills her--not real hard--but hard--and there's how they meet, the both of them lying down in the snow with her on her back and the guy on top. Is that good--or is it terrific?

  And there, so help me Christ, after eleven days, and twenty-three thousand dollars, is how they do meet.

  Wrong coast for Aglaia, I say? I'm sure I did.

  That morning's taste.

  The rest of them. The contract. The months.

  The arms and the lights and the bells became lost in the prospect and I stepped from the curb and brakes trilled.

  "Want a lift? You need one, pal."

  That was Dave.

  At my apartment, I made some coffee and later we went back together to the address in Beverly Hills--because he didn't know it, and he was a lonely guy, too.

  In fact he still is.

  The most brokenhearted guy in the world.

  You see nobody told him about the six-pointed star on the box he was shipped in-

  -he had to find out for himself. And he wants to be sure, when he checks out, that he kept it bright while he had the use of it.

  Dave came in.

  "By God," he said, "Wylie! The old, articulate cryptogram in person, nude as a saint's stool!" It might have been a bracing autumn forenoon: "I'm glad to see you! I was saying to a friend only the other night--a jerk named Staunton--Staunton, the town's not the same--Wylie's not here. The old termite has moved to the country--turned himself out to pasture! And Florida in the winter! The son-of-a-bitch is chasing the analema! Where's the patient?"

  I pointed.

  Dave took a look and came back.

  "Shall we wake him up? I can take him to the office and get some of my minions looking for his wench. Private dicks, too. They won't find her. They couldn't find a luminous memorandum in a two-drawer filing cabinet. But it might wear him down a little."

  "Let him sleep, for now."

  Dave sat down. "This is swell! Send for a barrel of iced tea, will you--with a clear gin on the side? I had a hard night last night. A bunch of the super-big-shots came in on the Super-Chief and the Super-Century last night. Things in Hollywood are so bad that two of them stayed sober the whole damned evening."

  I phoned Room Service. "There's a depraved guest of mine up here who wants some neat gin and a lot of iced tea--"

  Dave had picked up one of my ashtrays and was looking at it intently. When I hung up he said, "Depraved? Depraved, you say? Me? Don't I detect not just one, but two colors of lipstick here?"

  "Callers from the other rooms," I answered. "Came in to consult the oracle."

  "Depraved," he repeated. "That's the trouble with you Gentiles. Two rules for everything. 'If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out.' But--'Let not thy left hand know what thy right doeth.' Something of that sort. So you reconcile the pair by going around plucking out other people's right eyes; and not letting your open hand know the other is gouging. Consulting the oracle! What a phrasemaker!"

  I told him about Gwen and Yvonne.

  He pretended to be still more deeply outraged. "There you are! A perfect Wylie situation. God, what an imposter! Not one lovely girl--but two--are sent on silver salvers.

  You entertain them. You get all the social opprobrium and none of the benefits. What confidence can youth have in you, after a trick like that? Here you are--the last hope for phallic worship in a dying world. The man with the one message that makes sense. Either the boys get their breeches back--and do things to make the dames respect 'em--or Nature will throw us out of the party. You proclaim it with your foghorn and you play it on your xylophone. But when it gets right down to the bedrocking--what do you do? You personally, Mr. Prophet? Welsh! Walk out on the act!"

  "Times are changing," I told him. "Phallic worship? Can you build good rituals around our businessmen? A healthy restoration of phallic worship would ruin the profitable activities of every vested institution in the land, from its banks to its churches.

  People wouldn't even care if the trains ran on time, any more. Think of that!"

  Dave was leering at me pensively. "By God. It might be the thing to revive Hollywood."

  "Yeah," I said. "You open with a prologue that shows modern psychology has found the roots of love in our love lives. Then you fade to the American Home, where a Husband is trying to figure out how to arouse or enchant or even slightly interest one Beautiful Blonde Mother. She is rushing about the house swatting her children for bringing home a magazine full of art studies. Her husband tries to slip his arm around her--but she knows he is suffering from neurotic hay fever, makes his living by manufacturing second-rate household appliances which he sells owing to better advertising, is afraid of his stockholders, never had the earning capacity of Joe Benson or Harvey Tekker or Don Oaker, and is scared of her, besides. Great subject for phallic worship! We fade to a contented pagan maiden in the South Sea Isles--ukeleles and moonlight--"

  "And the MPPA comes in and tosses out the film! It's a conspiracy!" he said in a Durantean tone.

  "You guys have worked out the vein--that's all. There can't be any more very interesting movies till there's a new public attitude about life. You've got to where there's no permissible area that you haven't canvassed a hundred times. The new pictures are all remakes. People get sick of such things. Jam yesterday, today and tomorrow is as bad as none today. All the movies are self-plagiarisms. I even went to one with Ricky this summer."

  "We're grateful."

  "Remember the Three Little Pigs--and the song about the 'Big Bad Wolf' that people sang to kid themselves in the Depression?"

  "I remember."

  "So all right. We went to see this movie--and we also saw a remake of the Little Pigs. Same story. Same art. Same theme song. At the finale, the new inspiration is this: the wolf pops down the chimney of the little pig in the brick house--hind end first. And the pig fills a caldron with turpentine. The wolf lands in same--and the picture irises down on the wolf roaring away, his hind legs held high, his turpentined anus dragging, his forelegs pulling--like any dog. Now--I was brought up to believe that you can't tell the same joke twice. And I was also taught that putting turps on animals' rears was sadistic. I still think it is. And I think it's too vulgar a way to try for a laugh--cruelty to animals aside. That, my boy, is truly obscene--the dying effort of a perishing industry.

  Fortunately--television is coming in--and it will be far more vulgar. Television will really speed up the fertile necessity of a great change in this disgraceful Western world. Right?"

  "Right," said Dave. "I saw that short. I psychologically snapped my petits fours."

  He looked at me for a while. "Phil--why'd you call me over here, this morning?"

  Karl came with the gin and tea. I signed. He went.

  Dave's question startled me. I suddenly saw it from his angle. I'd allowed him to skip--or postpone--an important conference because (I'd s
aid) my nephew was on an emotional binge and I needed aid. Dave would know that, all else being equal and normal, I could handle my nephew. He'd know that, barring some editorial crisis, the cutting of a serial wasn't so important I couldn't set it aside for a day or so to row a relative through the waters of a soul-struggle. He'd know, by my cursory attention to Paul--and by the way my talk had slatted around--that I had more on my mind than Paul's problem. So he had realized--and I had not--that I'd decided to call in a friend--for myself.

  "I need a good lawyer," I said.

  "Oh-oh!"

  I looked at him cross-eyed. "What an evil mind you have! I keep my accounts and the tax people are not particularly interested in me. No brunette has letters of mine and is asking for a thousand bucks. Nobody is suing me for plagiarism. I just noticed a little nuisance in the back of my throat the other day and went over to see Tom and had a biopsy--and I want my affairs in order."

  I shouldn't have done it that way. He turned sheet-white.

  "There isn't any report on the biopsy yet," I said. "Won't be till Monday. Makes quite a long weekend. But I have a hunch--"

  "You God-damned dour Scotchmen! Maybe it's nothing."

  "Tom thinks it's something."

  He looked out the window for a long time-with his shoulders folded forward and the sun beating on his face, reflecting into it from the cement top of the parapet and bouncing at it from the tile terrace between. That ugly, fond mug.

  "I suppose," he finally said, "when they have taken everything else and everybody else they come around for you in person."

  "I never really expected to get even this old. When I was a kid, I was sure I'd never see thirty. As I recall, I didn't want to. Seemed a stale age."

  Dave grinned feebly. "Ricky?"

  I shook my head.

  "She well now?"

  "We think so."

  "Get her down here, man!"

  I shook it again. "Give her the two more days. And it just might--might-and then--

  "

  "You didn't take a drink?"

  Again.

  "By God! What a reform!"

  ' I'm trying to get that serial done--"

  "--strictly on Presbyterianism." I thought that over. "Maybe. They'll need the dough. And it's a favorite old anodyne of mine--rolling up the sleeves."

  Dave poured out a second glass of iced tea and gulped it. He nodded his head toward my bedroom. "When he wakes up, tell him to come down to my office. Tell him we're working for him. We'll do what we can think of. I'll keep him stooging around--and sober, if possible--and see you later."

  "Going?"

  He came across the room and put an arm around my shoulder. "You said you wanted to work. I'll be back."

  "Okay."

  2

  I remember, one day on the way to California, when the Chief stopped at Needles.

  It was summertime and the thermometer on the station wall in the shade said 125 degrees.

  I was standing around, dizzy, when I saw a guy pacing up and down the platform as if he enjoyed it. I ventured out in the sunshine to see if he'd lost his mind and he turned around-a dark-skinned character. Royalty, it proved later, from Hyderabad. He liked it.

  My apartment, that morning, was something like the Needles station on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. No baking sand, red-hot rocks, or mountains pitching on the miraged distance, of course. Needles was dry, too, and Manhattan was close to saturate.

  I worked along--not minding much. But after all, even Negroes sunburn--even Papuans get lazy.

  Around one o'clock I began to feel--not hungry but empty--and I went in to check on Paul. He was still snoring and sweating.

  Four and a half grains of sodium amytal, by itself, wouldn't have knocked him that fiat that long. He'd have wakened in six or seven hours, I thought--feeling fuzzy and feeble and maybe a little sick. He still seemed good for more time, to me. It showed just how much sleep he'd left out in the past weeks, past months--worrying about that girl and worrying about making weapons with his beloved mathematics. It was possible, of course, that he'd explode awake any moment--look at his watch--throw an outside loop--

  and get going like a jet plane.

  I wrote him a note saying I was downstairs in the Knight's Bar and that I had a new search in progress. That would bring him.

  I got dressed. The gabardine was like wet newsprint.

  This time, air conditioning was a relief. I sucked in a lungful and Jay came up.

  "Want to sit with Mrs. Prentiss?"

  "Sure."

  Exactly two days before, she had leaned over the same table, an immaculate grooming operation--hurt, snooty, aloof, reading her disguised book. A Cinderella. Avid and anxious--haughty and pretty hateful--beautiful and not much good. I could say what was different about her now but it would be difficult to convey the true impression of that. Her hair, for one thing. It was just neatly combed--just casual, gold-blonde hair whose owner hadn't taken pains for once, with every single filament. Her dress. Another plain, costly print--but the body inside it was relaxed and not subconsciously trying to avoid creases. It didn't seem to fit quite as perfectly, and yet it suited her better: it made--

  would make--anybody, any man, look at the girl inside and the clothes after--not the other way around. The Musak was giving out with "Dardanella" and her foot was keeping time under the table.

  "Hello, Yvonne."

  She glanced up--from the morning paper.

  "'Lo, Phil."

  "Want company?"

  "Love it." She moved over a little. I came around the table and sat down.

  "You look right sweet this morning. Noon. Whatever it is."

  She folded up the paper.

  I ordered some cold salmon and potato salad and iced coffee.

  She studied me--gravely for the most part. Once, she showed a dimple. But her voice was placid. "You could be annoyed at me."

  "What for?"

  "Don't be obvious!"

  "Last night? Annoyed? I was tired. In a talky mood. It was my guest's own idea to come down. I said sure--and after she'd been there awhile--I changed my mind."

  "That's what Gwen thought." She ate a little of her fruit salad. Maybe her hand shook. Certainly not much. She drew a straight, easy breath. "I imagined I could learn something from her."

  "Did you?"

  She looked at me with frank, gray eyes. She smiled into herself. "You know I did."

  "What?"

  "Isn't it strange how much we attach to trifles--love and sex trifles? Set up a whole lifetime for happiness--but fix it so that one little act for a handful of minutes will ruin the whole thing."

  "That."

  She flicked her head to put back her hair. "It's mad! To imagine such things are so important! To imagine whole lives and people and families can be ruined by anything--so little!"

  I gave her the red schoolhouse riposte. "Knocking a person on the head is a little thing that hardly takes even one minute. But it's murder. Slipping a hundred G's out of the cash cage takes only a sec--but it's robbery--"

  "And kissing you in a cab the other night," she answered, "took only a couple of blocks and I don't love you in the least. We touched. A moment or two. It was fun. We'll never do it again. Or, say--we do. Is that like murder and robbery? Should it ruin lives?"

  "Not to my way of thinking. I don't feel wrecked."

  "Neither do I," she said softly. "Neither do I! On the contrary! You have to find out that how you feel is terribly important--terribly. But what you do--unless you make it important--that's such a tiny thing!" She smiled. "When you think that just forty-eight hours ago--I was sitting here shuddering over Rol--"

  "It occurred to me."

  "It seems--" she sought for the proper words--"sort of --caddish. Unchivalrous.

  And hideously unsympathetic."

  "Aren't you pushing yourself?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "You could have a reaction."

  ' I'm having one."

/>   My lunch came.

  "I mean," I said, "a reaction to this reaction."

  She considered that and her curls moved. "I doubt it. I'm--cured."

  "Cured one way. Maybe you're going to suffer in another."

  She seemed frightened for a bare moment. "I don't know," she finally said. "How can I tell?"

  "Wait and see."

  "If I suffer, I suffer," she finally said. And her eyes weren't alarmed. "Good for you!"

  "May I ask a question?"

  "Shoot."

  I waited while she ate a little and formulated.

  "Phil, what would you think of me now if I were your wife?"

  It was quite a one. It was the second really tough one she'd put to me. "What would you ask God if He came in?" was the other.

  "I hope," I said, "that I'd cherish you more than ever."

  "But you might not?"

  "I leave room for the possibility. I don't know, after all."

  "Why would you cherish me?"

  "For at last being honest with yourself about yourself."

  "Easy answer. Why might you not?"

  "I dunno. You might have found yourself--by that honesty--to be somebody who wouldn't like me. Ergo--how could I go on insisting--?"

  "Only that?"

  "Only that. It's a lot."

  "You sure, Phil? Certain?"

  "My--God--yes! A great, great many of the people I know, and am fond of, and admire, would look at your sin as just a sort of timid, dainty experiment. I suppose you're fishing around for rebuke. You'll never get much. Most women learn by doing--some men, by just thinking. What are you doing tonight, for instance?"

  "I--I don't know yet." She flushed peach-pink. "I haven't--decided."

  "Unh!"

  "You sound like Rol. Like Rol--after-- Before I left. Dainty--he talked like that."

  "They bring us up--in a desert," I said. "Because that's where they grew up." I thought of Needles and the metallic sunlight and the Moslem prince. "Still--there are other things in life besides sex."

  "Not if sex isn't right, there aren't. Not any other things worth living for."

  "Back to Freud and the Western neurosis. Yvonne--I have to scram in a moment.

  Work. And a nephew. Maybe you'd care to meet him?"

  "You'll forget to call me."