Pieces of Soap

by Stanley Elkin

  In the case of extramarital affairs the ULM had to play catch up. Among Kinsey’s lower groups the extramarital experience was, at least in the first years of marriage, much higher than for the upper group. Forty-five percent of LLMs married before the age of twenty had affairs; by the time they were forty the percentage declines to 27 percent, by fifty to 19 percent. ULMs follow a different pattern, the lowest incidences being found in the youngest groups—between 15 and 20 percent. This figure increases steadily till, by the time they were fifty, 27 percent reported having affairs outside marriage. Clearly, I think, lower level males did not go out of town much.

  Perhaps because 75 percent of the sample in Sexual Behavior in the Human Female had gone to college—the national average was only 13 percent at the time—the second book had much less the notion of the Upstairs/Downstairs dichotomies about it and seemed to offer a story of progressive sexual liberation, not leaps and bounds but a sense of the steady-state evolutionary. Since many of the histories were taken from women born in the last decade of the nineteenth century—the oldest of these women would not even have qualified for Social Security when the book was published in 1953—the statistics reinforce this. Less than half as many women born in the late-nineteenth century had premarital intercourse as those born in the early twentieth; more than four times as many women born in the last century were not naked when having sex as those born in the twentieth. Tellingly, kiss and tellingly, of the 2,480 married women represented in the book, about a quarter of them had had extramarital affairs by the time they were forty, but the figure begins at 6 percent before the 1920s, rises to 9 percent in the 1920s, and jumps to 26 percent by the early 1940s. One-third of the women who’d had premarital sex had had it with from two to five partners. (In a recent Playboy survey the mean number of partners for women was 16.1, the median 7.8.) Do you know where your children are?

  This concern with classification, while scrupulous, lends to the books, and even to their abstracts, an almost infuriating quality of chart, distracting as the proper conjugation of verbs, the correct alignments between articles and endings. One wants, that is, to speak the language, suddenly, all at once, simply to discover one’s human place. And if Kinsey did not make that possible, then at least he created the conditions; he cleared the throat, say, and permitted the first halting conversations to begin. It wasn’t enough, of course. It could never have been enough. We shall not ever, locked in flesh, discover the wavelengths and frequencies or learn the sexual forks or know what is expected of us. One wants the answer to one question—how’m I doin’? One wants, that is, to measure dick. Because nothing alien is alien to any of us and sex is only the interesting fluids of the ego, the strange and lovely magnetism of the skin. It is that compulsive pushing of the centrifugals along the tumbling, degraded orbits of our lives.

  MY SHIRT TALE

  I remember what it cost me if not exactly what it looked like—twelve ancient 1953 dollars, or doubloons, or whatever it was money was called back in those days. Twenty percent of our monthly rent, six movies for myself and my wife, something between a half and a full percent of a T.A.’s salary for teaching freshman rhetoric at the University of Illinois. So twelve bucks’ worth of fiscal 1953 wampum expended in one fell swoop of shirt outlay.

  Because a shirt is probably the only thing in which I look halfway decent. Wrapping myself in them as though they were flags, this purely personal patriotism, my indulgent streamers of self, my pretty banners of being. And of all the shirts from that decade, this is the one, though I don’t remember it exactly, that I remember at all. It was yellow, not the bright, rich, improbable yellow of an egg yolk, but yellow enough, the yellow of a butter pat, yellow as cholesterol. And of a material and texture vaguely basted, and vaguely quilted, too, I think, as if the material had been directly sewn onto its tissue pattern—a crinkly shirt, a seersucker shirt. It had shiny opaque buttons big as nickels and the color, I recall, of a blood blister on your finger. And a slim, purplish grid, precisely the color of the buttons, at its cuffs and up its front, fenced its wide yellow butter-pat fields and crops like aerial photography, a golden, glorious acreage.

  And this next is tough to figure because I’m not, I think, the type. Though maybe I am. I eat the hard parts first, I mean. Observe the deferred appetites, keeping them like a kind of kosher, working my way from the radicchio and endives, the kales and cabbages, all food’s sour foliage, past its blunt, pale vegetable instrumentality, its parsnips and turnips and eggplants, all the way through to my fried fats and favorites. But not the type anyway, so where did it come from? How did it get there? How, in me, arise, procedural as the first this/then/that sequences in a mass, this lagging, red-tape heart? What, could I be the type? Not in my heart, of course. In my heart a big spender. Or where did those dozen dollars come from with which I bought it?

  Putting it away once I had it, the shirt I mean, for a special occasion, on a sort of layaway, hope and expectation’s dower.

  Then, in June 1953, T. S. Eliot came to Champaign-Urbana to read his poetry, and I took the shirt out of my closet and wore it for the first time. Perhaps I thought he’d see it on me and make me a star. Though I’m not that type either, really, and don’t do investments. If I make them at all it’s in special occasions. (As dessert is a special occasion, as red meat is after supper’s pale flora.)

  You have to understand something. This was 1953, but only five years earlier I’d still been in high school. In certain psychic ways I still was. Now I must tell you something about the nature of courtship and show business in those days.

  It was the Golden Age of Lip-Synch. And we can imagine how it must have begun.

  Since the invention of the phonograph, all wars, for reasons of troop morale, have had a tradition not only of parodic cross-dressing, servicemen bereft of female companionship doing sexual burlesque for each other—think of “There Is Nothin’ Like a Dame” in South Pacific—but of cross-singing, too, an elaborate choreographics of gesture and mouth movement. I don’t know why this was considered entertaining or even mildly amusing, but it was. During the war, and deep into the postwar years, it was a mainstay, a staple on variety shows and on all the amateur hours. On Dick Clark’s American Bandstand recording stars lip-synched the words to their own records. There were offshoots and, no longer parody, the curious practice was raised to the level of a “talent” in pageants such as Miss Teenage America. One sees such things still, of course, but it’s not like it was. Now it’s only archaeology. There were giants in the earth back when I’m talking.

  I’ve said I never understood the appeal of lip synch. In even its more dramatic avatars I didn’t, where, like some one-man band, one person got to play all the parts, the percussion, the reeds, the strings, the brass, some Old MacDonald of an act, here a solo, there a chorus, ee-yi, ee-yi o! But, in ways I didn’t understand at the time, I may actually have been inspired by such routines or, if not inspired, at least shaped, influenced at least, maybe even married.

  For—it shames me to say it—back in high school, then, later, back in the earlier fifties, I used to sing to all my dates. I don’t mean I lip-synched to the other guy’s hits, or stood, proud as any Spaniard or Mexican, out in the elements beneath their windows or in their courtyards administering open, public Serenade to the girls. I sang to them, there on the dance floor, into their actual ears on the very first date. Nor did I merely move my lips. I impersonated Sinatra, impersonated Crosby, I did Dick Haymes to them and committed Perry Como. All the greatest crooners’ greatest hits. It was, I thought, the way the sexes spoke to each other, pure mating ritual, purposeful as, oh, dipping a wing in dust and hopping about counterclockwise in the nest on your left foot, or swimming backwards, say, and rearing up on your dorsal to the fishy, liquid vertical before dumping your milt, by evolution sanctioned, by all the purring sacreds of biology.

  Then I was a graduate student and T. S. Eliot came to town.

  Yes, that T. S. Eliot. The one who changed my mat
ing call. (Because isn’t that what literature is, finally, poetry only the upscale of all that lyrical moonery-junery in all those lyrics in all those dance tunes?) That T. S. Eliot, the special occasion on which my twelve-dollar shirt-cum-gonfalon had been waiting all along, without knowing it perhaps, but willing to bet you, dollars to 1953 doughnuts, that, like love, it would know it when it saw it and be, as they say, ready to wear. The red-letter day that was all it was waiting on until it could come out of the closet and shine, I thought, yellow for yellow and bright for bright against the sun itself.

  And I say changed my mating calls because that’s exactly what happened. I was a college boy now, a graduate student nuch, even a T.A., and changed my lyrics if not my tune, no longer so ready, as once I was, to drop “You sigh and then a song begins/You speak and I hear violins/ It’s magic” into my girlfriends’ ears like so many coins in so many parking meters. (Well not so many, never so many. Damn few, really, when you come right down.) But changing my style and changing my ways.

  “We,” I’d tell them out there on the dance floors, “are the hollow men.”

  We are the stuffed men

  Leaning together

  Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

  And, when I had their attention,

  This is the way the world ends

  —I’d inform,

  This is the way the world ends

  Not with a bang but a whimper

  —I’d whimper. Or suggesting, suggestively,

  Let us go then, you and I,

  When the evening is spread out against the sky

  Like a patient etherised upon a table;

  Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

  The muttering retreats

  Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels . . .

  Urging them, pleading with them,

  Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’

  Let us go and make our visit

  Only hoping it served Eliot better than it served me. Then, recovering, telling them,

  Because I do not hope to turn again

  Because I do not hope

  Because I do not hope to turn,

  courting them on a borrowed cynicism, on the other fellow’s wearies and blues, as I’d—what?—lip-synched those fox-trots, more than, and more than now, too, actual mind-synching, actual soul-synching, getting down on what, Catholic convert or no Catholic convert, I never even realized was the other WASP’s dime, doing a young man’s inverted ventriloquism and following willy-nilly any old au courant fascism of style.

  So there I was, into my hoarded, red-letter, special-occasion, secret rainy-day shirt reserves. And there was T. S. Eliot, into his. Into his, really. Looking, I mean, just exactly what you expected he’d look like, what he was supposed to look like, as certain monuments precisely look what you precisely think they’re going to look like when you finally get to see them, their unmistakable, sui generis selves so identical to the head’s forewarned, forearmed impressions of them you’re disarmed and actually experience a shock of recognition, a kind of primal, exponential déjà vu. Tall, but no taller than you thought he’d be, slender, but not so slender that it surprised you, in a dark wool suit no darker and no less dark than you’d anticipated. Wearing the familiar spectacles you’d assumed he’d wear, that made his famous, intelligent face look kindly as the picture of it you held in your head. T. S. Eliot doing T. S. Eliot, avuncular as a friend of the family in films. Me, on the other hand, hey, I could have been anybody. How had I ever supposed he might recognize me and make me a star?

  An archivist at the University of Illinois reports that no one introduced Mr. Eliot, and while that seems difficult to believe, I have no memory of anyone introducing him, not even himself. That he made no commentary on the poems he read, other than to give us their titles, is certainly true, going from one to the next like a musician at a recital.

  He read for fifty minutes. His voice neutral, serious, reasonable, understated, nothing at all like my own angry, spurious soul-synch. But the only poem I absolutely remember him reading that night was “Journey of the Magi.”

  ‘A cold coming we had of it,

  Just the worst time of the year

  For a journey, and such a long journey:

  The ways deep and the weather sharp,

  The very dead of winter.’

  And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,

  Lying down in the melting snow.

  There were times we regretted

  The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,

  And the silken girls bringing sherbet.

  Then the camel men cursing and grumbling

  And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,

  And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,

  And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly

  And the villages dirty and charging high prices:

  A hard time we had of it.

  At the end we preferred to travel all night,

  Sleeping in snatches,

  With the voices singing in our ears, saying

  That this was all folly.

  Nothing dramatic, nothing end-of-the-world here, just arranging the prosaic goods, unflamboyant as stock boys straightening clothing. He had knocked me down, the Lip- and Soul-Synched Kid, with a feather. I could have put myself under citizen’s arrest, hauled myself up on charges, not for my callowness so much as for passing bad bills. But what good is crying over spilled youth? Most youth, unless you’re very smart or very lucky, is spilled. You try to be better. Simply, you make an attempt to come into your own.

  Mr. Eliot was signing books and people were clambering up on the stage with anthologies, their turquoise Harcourt, Brace Complete Poems and Plays extended, or with sheets torn from loose-leaf notebooks, from their homework. (I have an impression that he moved toward the apron and leaned into the footlights, stooping down, meeting his fans halfway, better than.) I asked Joan to get one of those autographs for me. Human stuff embarrasses her less.

  It was, all in all, a grand evening, a splendid evening, just as special a special occasion as any nifty shirt—this was, and would always be, my T. S. Eliot shirt—could hope for. It was June. Almost certainly I would have worn it again, each time I put it on getting some extra, associative Proustian kick out of it, feathering myself in the true layered look, the one that goes back, I mean, the one that comes with nostalgia sewed on like buttons. (You have to come into your own, I said. I know, I know. But Rome wasn’t built in a day. Why should your character have an easier time?) So I must have worn it again. I just don’t remember.

  Except for the last time. Another special occasion. A lollapalooza. The day I was inducted into the army in Chicago. Wearing it to Fort Leonard Wood on the train and, then, once I’d been given my uniforms, my fatigues and my khakis, bringing it with me all the way to Fort Carson, Colorado, where I did my basic training and where I was told to send home my civilian clothes because I wouldn’t be needing them, and where, because I didn’t know how to wrap a package, I finally removed it from my footlocker, where my C.O. had gotten tired of looking at it during inspections, and, Rome and my character still unbuilt, I threw it away.

  SUMMER: A TRUE CONFESSION

  I’m recollecting summer here, invoking the wraiths of light and easy temperature, calling on soda pop, on ice cream, the 31 flavors like some Periodic Table of the Sweet, paging its avatars, the avatars of ice cream, the tasty geometry of the cones and cylinders, entreating its Fudgsicle felicities, its Creamsicle kicks—conjuring all possibility’s erogenous zones, the regatta and sandlot, the campfire and day game, sweat and fireflies and feeling up girls, faces in the watermelon and all the heightened decibels of heat—the cicadas’ sing-along and all the whistle, gruff, and flourish of traffic with the top down. The claims of machinery in open air.

  I’m recalling the bright banging burst of fireworks exploding like bouquets of semiprecious stones, amethyst, sapphire, topaz, ga
rnet—the gem boutonnieres. Commanding the spicy savories of hot solstice—bratwurst, hot dog, coleslaw, beer. Remembering wicker, recalling bamboo, recollecting summer’s swaying, loose, and ropy hammock style, the interlocking lanyard of the deck chair and chaise like furniture woven by sailors. The pinched stink of chlorine in the madeleine. All summer’s ripish rounds like the treats of custody, of visitation—a season like a Saturday, like a date with a dad. Its trips, I mean, to zoos and drive-ins, the littered life outdoors, stepping on candy wrappers, condoms, the sports pages like dry flora, everywhere setting off the sounds of localized fires like a kindled shmutz.

  I’m singing, that is, of our astonishing, let-hung-out forms, of immodesty and surrender, of all our oils and fats and greasy glitter like a stored fuel. Of summertime’s dangerously dropped guard.

  Here’s what happened:

  The Virginia State Fair came to Richmond. This was 1956 and I was in the army and probably they were letting servicemen in free that night or discounting the admission, because I was wearing my uniform and so was Sherm, who, either of us, wouldn’t have otherwise, and somehow I’d gotten separated from Joan and Sherm and Sherm’s wife, Linda, and was in a far corner of the midway, some underpopulated, low-rent district of the fun fields, beyond even the last glancing illumination of the garish, kindled neon of the rides like odd, improbable lamps in questionable taste, the last blazing calliopedic centripetals and centrifugals of light. Beyond all altered gravity’s—the Whip’s, the Loop-the-Loop’s—dizzying spheres of influence, and hard by the game booths, the pyramids of wooden milk, the ringtoss like a pegboard of missing keys, the circumferentials of all pitch-penny chance, the booths in the dark bright as stages.