OPUS 21

by Philip Wylie

  Or is it

  goodness

  to reject the surrounding brilliance--call it The Dark--in order to make personal hay with the pewee flashlight of Episcopalianism.

  Judge not that ye be not judged, Wylie, He said.

  Then shall I sit

  like a Buchmanite on the john

  waiting for guidance?

  And there shall be laughter in heaven

  They omit that chapter.

  Anger is their meat:

  Gabriel's pinfeathers, torn out by handfuls.

  Pluck yourself a quill, pal.

  Make yourself a pen from a seraphim.

  Remind them they should enjoy it.

  Nature, that's all, simply telling us to fall

  In love.

  And that's why Chinks do it--

  Japs do it--

  I got out of the tub, scattering water, and turned the radio loud.

  Let me communicate again in the idiom of man--

  my conceit has suddenly tired me out.

  I lay

  forlornly in the water, the water browned off by rust in the Astolat's pipes, the waters of life, but not much left.

  Sadness encompassed me.

  The sadness of little children dying by merely growing up of mature men turning childish again

  of American trees

  of the disinherited

  the stood-up

  the disappointed

  the deserted

  the uncomprehended

  of the walking wounded

  I hate to see

  that evening sun go down

  The love songs of the world are sad.

  The old English ballads quaintly drone--murder and rue.

  Gypsy violins have wet the eyes of European centuries.

  Italians shake their opera houses with love's grief.

  Don Juan dies young--and Romeo grows old.

  The Hindu on his fetid riverbank throbs to the guillotine moon.

  The damsel in Xanidu may be different--it doesn't go on to say.

  But-

  Frankie shot Johnny.

  We Americans have had to borrow rue from our slaves; they have enough, and to spare

  We call it blues--and the origin's appropriate to us.

  The child in his cradle listens to locomotives talking themselves up the long grades, bidding the counties farewell in the night.

  Ours is a civilization of pistons, motors turning, electrons peppering filaments into light. We are

  a racy people.

  We got rhythm.

  The tempo of our love and the momentum of our woe are one.

  Our exultation soars with edifices that scrape the sky--then falters underground where we have iron rivers to carry the people home--and there is no home when they get there but only the percussant streets again, the shooting tabernacles, the radiance, the tumult in time.

  We sleep.

  Morning comes.

  In the mammoth sunshine of our cities we remember our blues the way the slaves remember.

  No heart, no intellect, but we got rhythm!

  Look at the towers!

  Look at the sky--that's blue, too, baby!

  The streets are straight, the blocks are square, the intersections regular. The shadows are geometry--they dive one hundred stories. It is a gameboard, ruled and sharp by transit here and plummet there, concrete and rectilinear.

  This

  we call traffic.

  It is the way we move on the board.

  Trucks and taxis playing fast chess to the beat of the Christmas-colored signals.

  We are a great, free, democratic people whose trains run approximately on time. In this civilization, eight-o'clock children make skip-ropes of rainbows and slide down the balustrades of sunbeams. One contraction of our chamber of commerce ventricle will thrust ten thousand tons of ore from Duluth to Pittsburgh.

  We rate fireflies in kilowatts.

  But we hate to see the evening sun go down.

  Paul Bunyan's ox was blue. So-our hills, the evening in our thoroughfares, our dying lips.

  Hence, when we talk about rue in these United States, brother, we do it in brass!

  We put pistons and kilowatts in our lament, grief, sorrow, lostness!

  We take a breath of our American air and we-the-people burst.

  That's blues!

  The mood would have led to God knows what charade in the auditorium of my senses--the multitude of watching, listening "mes" reacting in all their various ways at once; it might have become a ululation you could have heard on Mars--or frozen as if the head of Medusa had come on stage--or, by that third unanimity, blazed into laughter, revolted ecstasy at ecstasy itself.

  The singing woman stopped.

  There was a knock.

  I yelled, "Come in!" relieved--thinking it might be Paul.

  For more than an hour, now, worry over him had cankered me.

  (Do you imagine I tell you all that happens, here? I nearly would if I could--it is not that. But the compendium of the eighteen simultaneous trains of consciousness (the intrications and alternations and separate chains that run in a man's mind and that you could see in your own if you tried) would, in a weekend fill up all the books a man might read in his life. I give you hardly the essence, my friend--but only a sample of the aggregate--a biopsy of its own sort.)

  A knock, then.

  I realized it was the door in the bedroom.

  "May I come in?" Yvonne asked.

  "Certainly."

  "Your radio's positively shaking the building!"

  "Turn it down. I hope you won't mind I'm in here--slightly naked."

  "Oh!" I couldn't see her, or she, me. The rooms waited because she had stopped.

  "Slightly!"

  "Barely, if you prefer. Barely nude. Covered in a meager depth with rusty water.

  Concealed in soapy murk, besides. And, in addition, protected by scum. It's hard water, you know--Croton."

  Presently the radio went down and out-a moron throttled in midspiel. ''I'll sit in here," she said.

  "Any place you like."

  "I'll bet! I'll bet if you heard me coming--you'd grab the shower curtain--"

  "Flowers for tonight?"

  "You certainly have a long, mean memory, Philip Wylie! So that's just what I do bet!" She was approaching. She exclaimed, "What do you mean--soapsuds?"

  "An invention for the Puritan mind. A burlesque. After all--!"

  "After all--what?"

  "In a better world--but skip it."

  She did. "You certainly know how to upset people," she said.

  "Now what?"

  "After lunch--I phoned Gwen--to come over this evening."

  "So?"

  "And after that--I began to feel jittery."

  "And now?"

  "I came over here."

  "To ask me how to feel? Ye Gods! I recommended having your own feelings--and I thought you were catching on."

  She was wearing a faintly rose-pink frock of some shiny, translucent material.

  You could see the garments beneath--you were supposed to see. There were two--and the lace hem of the lower one showed below the blush of her dress--as it was supposed to show. She looked like a kid.

  "I've got too many feelings at once." She walked toward the window, where I could now see her only by leaning a little. "I almost called Rol this afternoon."

  I said nothing.

  "Did you hear me?"

  "Yeah. Why didn't you?"

  "Because I wanted to see Gwen again. Once more, anyway."

  "Suppose she couldn't have come?"

  "That's unkind of you!"

  "Would a friend have done as well?"

  She didn't answer for so long that I leaned out again. She was swinging the cord of the window blind. The last debilitated glow in the sky made her look like a flower at twilight-like a single tinted object in a black-and-white photograph of a room. She caught sight of me.

  "Maybe even better," she
said falteringly. "What sort of person am I!"

  "The sort that a person is, when a person begins finding out what sort."

  "But not the final discovery?" The turn and set of her head was eager. I couldn't see her eyes.

  "Who is?"

  "You mean--you think everybody--?"

  "Yes," I said, swirling the water around. "Everybody. Most--when they're young.

  Most grow out of it. Some--hardly notice it. Some have a minor case of it all their lives.

  To others--it's an intermittent hint--a leftover that crops up as a suggestion, not a fact.

  Lots--are carried off stage for good by it. The great majority insist they have no such feelings--never could and never did and never will. The result of that--"

  "Is what?"

  "Look out the window and see the crummy mess yourself, honey! If you'll toss me my dressing gown--from the closet--"

  "I'm scared," she said, when I came into the sitting room.

  I kissed her once.

  She said, "Again."

  So I really kissed her.

  She stepped away, afterwhile. ''I'm not so scared now."

  "It's good for you to be."

  "Why is it?"

  "Because you so seldom knew you were. You spent your time trying to frighten other people--instead of knowing."

  "Not frighten. Impress, maybe--"

  "Another word for the same dirty deed: convince them of your inherent and cultivated superiority. Whenever people achieve that--they also convince others of their relative inferiority. And when that conviction comes from a false estimate of the situation--believe me, it's upsetting. Frightening is the realer word."

  "Which implies that I'm not superior to anybody in any way."

  "Check."

  She stood there, looking at me through the murk. "Not even--prettier?"

  "What's prettiness? The power to attract. If you were a genuine, all-around, Grade-A woman--you'd have the power to attract, without trying to impress a soul. As a pretty girl--you're not superior to a hundred thousand others--and inferior to tens of thousands."

  "At least," she murmured, ''I'm trying."

  "Are you?"

  "Am I not?"

  "Who can really tell but you? For all I know, Yvonne, you may just be indulging in some new paroxysm of the spoiled rich matron."

  "I did want to call Rol, though."

  "Sure. When you had the jitters. Flight, maybe."

  "Then do you think I ought to wallow in myself?"

  "It's your word--wallow." She was silent for quite a while. Finally she drew a breath and stretched voluptuously. "Did you ever feel as if you'd like to seduce everybody you saw?"

  "Just the good-looking women."

  "Are you trying to impress me--now?"

  I laughed. "Guess so."

  "Couldn't I begin with you?"

  I shook my head. "You don't know yourself well enough to suit me, at the moment. And--anyway--I'm booked."

  "A date!"

  "A wife."

  She considered that at length, too. "Gwen said last night she knew from the minute she saw you that you wanted company, but not particularly a pretty girl. Just a person. She said she told you all those things about herself, hoping--"

  "They had their little effect," I reminded Yvonne.

  "Your Ricky," she answered, "must be some gal."

  "She's my gal--which makes her some gal to me."

  The door knocked again--the front door, this time.

  It was a box of flowers--yellow roses, again.

  For a minute I thought the manager had slipped up.

  There wasn't any card.

  Then I knew.

  That, I thought, was what it meant: a perception of the nature of other people.

  Flowers are for the living, and I'm fond of yellow roses.

  They'd be no use to me, dead. So I had these now. To remind me that the idea of flowers for the living, though seldom put in practice, describes the immortal essence.

  Except for taking Paul off my back awhile, there wasn't anything else that Dave could do or say. But this, he did and said.

  I stood there, rooted with the comprehension.

  Yvonne fumbled womanishly through the stems.

  "Who sent them?"

  "A guy I know."

  She gasped. "Guy!"

  "It's the grown--up manifestation."

  "Manifestation of what?"

  "Put them in water while I get dressed," I said. "Of something you might learn--

  someday."

  5

  We had dinner together in the Knight's Bar.

  She with one white orchid.

  Jay received us with just the right look of appreciation for her--just the right glimmer for me. He was sorry such things happened, but he admired my taste.

  The hotel staff, I knew, was by now vigorously discussing the matter. The girls who ran the elevators, the telephone girls, the room-service checkers, the cashiers, the waiters, the bellboys. Pros and cons:

  He's an artist--and they're different. She's just another of those rich wives on the make. I bet you wish you were one, yourself, you hypocrite! Poor Mrs. Wylie! She's a nice, quiet girl and I'll bet he swept her off her feet--because that's what newspapermen and writers all are: chasers. Those quiet ones knock over more husbands than all the flashy jobs in town! We all do, if we get a chance. I don't blame either of them. I think both of them are stinkers. 'Whose business is it?

  Up with the dishes, down with the cars, in with the stapler, out with the phone plugs--and on and on while typewriters paused and adding machines stood briefly still.

  Romance or scandal--take your choice. And never a sign to me but Jay's gleam--never a future syllable to Ricky: a conspiracy of employed custom, reinforced by a small world of reciprocal liking.

  I wondered what they'd think if they knew the truth.

  But, then, I always wonder that.

  I'm the silly jackass who does.

  Look--waiters, busboys, and you over there in the cage with the pointed auburn haircut and the long eyelashes and the tight dress--here we have a handsome young woman who has set about, by means not nearly so rare or unorthodox as you pretend among yourselves--to find one or two universals, or fundamentals, which are not in the book.

  What book?

  Not in any?

  Oh--yes--those banned novels. And those mournful, characters who thought only of their pale, poetical brows plunging into the Pit, the lonely well. Or sordid sun-tan oil on Jackson's vulgar beach.

  When will the poets get the censors off their backs, too--and write like men, for a change? God's no fairy, or Satan, either.

  What foul compulsion is this--that every page of the Tragedy must itself be mournful stuff, sinister, or sick?

  Farce, instead!

  Does the tragic deer, the beautiful, the doomed, imbue his every pools ide hour with dolorous contemplation? Must all the activities of the woodchuck be regarded as dismal? To write the stark terms of our essence on every breath and sentence of the moment is to be the own advocate of death, the white bones himself, and to overlook the splendor with such eyeless concentration that the poem becomes a joke on the poet.

  I flirted with Yvonne--told her stories of Paris and Hollywood and Miami Beach--

  held her hand--all, in chivalrous camouflage.

  Paul came at last.

  I hardly needed to see the stoop--the broken reach to push open the doors that enclosed our cold air cube--to know that, between us, we had not lifted his oppression.

  For, when it is succubus that's lost, incubus perforce remains.

  He looked disapprovingly at Yvonne. "Mrs. Prentiss, this is my nephew," I said.

  "Paul Wilson."

  "Hello, Mrs. Prentiss." He turned from her. ''I'll barge along, Phil. I thought you'd be alone."

  "Oh, hell, sit."

  "Really--it's not possible!" His ardent features were emphasized by pallor--and shooting about on his face, besides.

&nbs
p; "Sit," I said, "and eat--or otherwise you'll force me to leave the lady and go with you. She has a date after dinner, anyhow."

  He groaned and sat down--nipping the menu from the waiter's hands roughly. "No news."

  "Tough." I turned to Yvonne. "His--fiancée--is lost."

  "How awful! What happened?"

  Paul glared at me for a moment. "Your friend Dave," he finally said, in a tone more polite than his facial expression, "did all he could. Got an agency looking. Sent a fellow over to stay in my-our-place. We hunted up some more friends of hers--that Dave got track of-and they told us of others. We've been seeing them. It isn't much fun."

  "Why not quit, then? Wait for her?"

  "If all she did was walk out," Yvonne agreed, "that's absolutely the only thing to do. Sit tight. Have a good time. Suppose she finds out you're apparently raising heaven and earth to locate her? She'll just hide in a safe spot and enjoy things that much more."

  Paul turned to her. "Are you serious?"

  Yvonne was working on him--signaling interest with her gray eyes (they had come considerably alive)--tossing the organized gold shower of her hair--moving herself about in such a way as to emphasize her sex. "It's a darned good generalization. But what happened?"

  I wondered how he'd put it.

  "Marcia--" he began, and described her. We were made to see a woman somewhere between Elaine-the-Fair and Florence Nightingale. "I was just about licked when we met! I'm a physicist--work on atomic energy. She made me live--filled me with new feelings--taught me what love could mean to a man like me. Then--we scrapped.

  Over nearly nothing!" His eyes moved reproachfully to me--then back, confidingly, to the girl. She was listening, nodding with understanding, frowning with sympathy, and keeping her red lips parted the whole time. "We scrapped. She decided we weren't suited to each other. So she left me. That was--yesterday. I'd give everything I own to get her back! Everything I own--and am!"

  "What exactly did you fight about?" Yvonne asked.

  Paul's expression became vague. "Never mind. It wasn't important."

  "Are you sure?"

  He gave both of us a dark, defiant stare. "Yes."

  "Then," Yvonne said, ''I'm right. You mustn't continue this search operation. You should wait. And entertain yourself. Let her do the coming back--since she ran away."

  It was the first hope he had felt. "I wish I could believe it would work."

  "Take my word for it. I'm a woman."

  "And how," he asked scornfully, "do I start this gay, forgetful act?"