The Best of Fritz Leiber

by Fritz Leiber

  I was also told that American extremism, both of the right and left, which had seemed such a big thing in mid-century, had largely withered away or at least been muted by the great surge of the same forces which were making America ever more beautiful and prosperous. Cities were no longer warrens of discontent. Peace marches and Minutemen rallies alike, culminating in the late sixties, had thereafter steadily declined.

  While impressed, I did not fall into line, but tried to point out some black holes in this glowing picture. Indeed, feeling at home with the Grissims now and having learned that nothing I could say would shock them into anger and confusion, I was able to be myself fully and to reveal frankly my anti-American ideas, though of course more politely and, I hoped, more tellingly than yesterday—it seemed an age ago—driving from the rocketport.

  In particular, I argued that many or most Americans were motivated by a subtle, even sophisticated puritanism, which made them feel that the world was not safe unless they were its moral arbiters, and that this puritanism was ultimately based on the same swollen concern about property and money—industry, in its moral sense— that one found in the Swiss and Scottish Presbyterians and most of the early Protestants.

  “You’re puritans with a great deal of style and restraint and wide vision,” I said. “Yet you’re puritans just the same, even though your Puritanism is light years away from that of the Massachusetts theocrats and the harsh rule Calvin tried to impose on Geneva. In fact,” I added uncautiously, “your puritanism is not so much North European as Roman.”

  Smiles crinkled briefly at that and I kicked myself for having myself introduced into the conversation that hackneyed comparison.

  At this point Emily animatedly yet coolly took up the argument for America, pointing out the nation’s growing tolerance and aestheticism, historically distinguishing Puritanism from Calvinism, and also reminding me that the Chinese and Russians were far more puritanical than any other peoples on the globe—and not in a sophisticated or subtle way either.

  I fought back, as by citing the different impression I’d got of the Russians during my visits in the Soviet Union and by relaying the reports of close colleagues who had spent time in China. But on the whole Emily had the best of me. And this was only partly due to the fact that the longer I sparred with her verbally, the less concerned I became to win my argument, and the more to break her calm and elicit some sharp emotional reaction from her, to see that pale skin flush, to make those reefer-serene eyes blaze with anger. But I wasn’t successful there either.

  At one point Jack came to her aid, mildly demonstrating for American broad-mindedness by describing to us some of the pleasure cities of southern Asia he’d visited on R.&R.

  “Bangkok’s a dismal place now, of course,” he began by admitting, “with the Com-g’rillas raiding up to and even into it, and full of fenced-off bombed and booby-trapped areas. Very much like the old descriptions of Saigon la the sixties. As you walk down the pot-holed streets, you listen for the insect hum of a wandering antipersonnel missile seeking human heat, or the faint flap-flap of an infiltrator coming down on a whirligig parachute. You brace your thoughts against the psychedelic strike of a mind-bomb. Out of the black alley ahead there may charge a fifty-foot steel centipede, the remote-controlled sort we use for jungle fighting, captured by the enemy and jiggered to renegade.

  “But most of old Bangkok’s attractive features—and the entrepreneurs and girls and other entertainers that go with them—have been transferred en masse to Kandy and Trincomalee in Ceylon.” And he went on to describe the gaily orgiastic lounges and bars, the fresh pastel colors, the spicy foods and subtly potent drinks, the clean little laughing harlots supporting their families well during the ten years of their working life between fifteen and twenty-five, the gilded temples, the slim dancers with movements stylized as their black eyebrows, the priests robed in orange and yellow.

  I tried to fault him in my mind for being patronizing, but without much success.

  “Buddhism’s an attractive way of life,” he finished, “except that it doesn’t know how to wage war. But if you’re looking only for nirvana, I guess you don’t need to know that.” For an instant his tough face grew bleak, as if he could do with a spot of nirvana himself, and the shadows gathered around him and the others more thickly.

  During the following off-lecture evenings we kept up our fireplace talks and Emily and I returned more than once to our debate over puritanism, while the rest listened to us with faint, benevolent smiles, that at times seemed almost knowing. She regularly defeated me.

  Then on the sixth night she delivered her crowning argument, or celebrated her victory, or perhaps merely followed an impulse. I had just settled myself in bed when the indirect lightning of my “doorbell” flooded the room with brief flashes, coming at three-second intervals, of a rather ghastly white light. Blinking, I fumbled on the bedside table for the remote control of the room’s appliances, including tri-V and door, and thumbed the button for the latter.

  The door moved aside and there, silhouetted against the faint glow of the hall, was the dark figure of Emily, like a living shadow. She kept her finger, however, on the button long enough for two more silent flashes to illuminate her briefly. She was wearing a narrow kimono—Jack’s newest gift, she later told me—and her platinum hair, combed straight down like an unrippling waterfall, almost exactly matched the silvery, pale gray silk. Without quite overdoing it, she had made up her face somewhat like a temple dancer’s—pale powder, almost white; narrow slanting brows, almost black; green eye-shadow with a pinch of silvery glitter; and the not-quite-jarring sensual note of crimson lips.

  She did not come into my room, but after a pause during which I sat up jerkily and she became again a shadow, she beckoned to me.

  I snatched up my dressing gown and followed her as she moved noiselessly down the hall. My throat was dry and constricted, my heart was pounding a little, with apprehension as well as excitement. I realized that despite my near week with the Grissims, a part of my mind was still thinking of the professor and his wife as a strait-laced colonel and his lady from a century ago, when so many retired army officers lived in villas around San Antonio, as they do now too around the Dallas-Ft. Worth metropolitan area.

  Emily’s bedroom was not the austere silver cell or self-shrine I had sometimes imagined, especially when she was scoring a point against me, but an almost cluttered museum-workshop of present interests and personal memorabilia. She’d even kept her kindergarten study-machine, her first CO2 pistol, and a hockey stick, along with mementos from her college days and her Peace Corps tours.

  But those I noticed much later. Now pale golden light from a rising full moon, coming through the great view window, brimmed the room. I had just enough of my wits left to recall that the real moon was new, so that this must be a tape of some past night. I never even thought of the Communist and American forts up there, with their bombs earmarked for Earth. Then, standing straight and tall and looking me full in the eyes, like some Amazonian athlete, or Phryne before her judges, Emily let her kimono glide down from her shoulders.

  In the act of love she was energetic, but tender. No, the word is courteous, I think. I very happily shed a week of tensions and uncertainties and self-inflicted humiliations.

  “You still think I’m a puritan, don’t you?” she softly asked me afterward, smiling at me sideways with the smeared remains of her crimson mouth, her gray eyes enigmatic blurs of shadow.

  “Yes, I do,” I told her forthrightly. “The puritan playing the hetaera, but still the puritan.”

  She answered lazily, “I think you like to play the Hun raping the vestal virgin.”

  That made me talk dirty to her. She listened attentively—almost famishedly, I thought, for a bit—but her final comment was “You do that very well, dear,” just before using her lips to stop mine, which would otherwise have sulphurously cursed her insufferable poise.

  Next morning I started to write a poem about her
but got lost in analysis and speculation. Tried too soon, I thought.

  Although they were as gracious and friendly as ever, I got the impression that the other Grissims had quickly become aware of the change in Emily’s and my relationship. Perhaps it was that they showed a slight extra fondness toward me. I don’t know how they guessed—Emily was as cool as always in front of them, while I kept trying to play myself, as before. Perhaps it was that the argument about puritanism was never resumed.

  Two evenings afterward the talk came around to Jack’s and Emily’s elder brother Jeff, who had fallen during the Great Retreat from Jammu and Kashmir to Baluchistan. It was mentioned that during his last furlough they had been putting up an exchange instructor from Yugoslavia, a highly talented young sculptress. I gathered that she and Jeff had been quite close.

  “I’m glad Jeff knew her love,” Emily’s mother said calmly, a tear behind her voice, though not on her cheeks. “I’m very glad he had that.” The professor unobtrusively put his hand on hers.

  I fancied that this remark was directed at me and was her way of giving her blessing to Emily’s and my affair. I was touched and at the same time irritated—and also irritated at myself for feeling irritated. Her remark had brought back the shadows, which darkened further when Jack said a touch grimly and for once with a soldier’s callousness, though grinning at me to remove any possible offense, “Remember not to board any more lady artists or professors, mother, at least when I’m on leave. Bad luck.”

  By now I was distinctly bothered by my poetry block. The last lectures were going swimmingly and I ought to have been feeling creative, but I wasn’t. Or rather, I was feeling creative but I couldn’t create. I had also begun to notice the way I was fitting myself to the Grissim family—muting myself, despite all the easiness among us. I couldn’t help wondering if there weren’t a connection between the two things. I had received the instructorship offer, but was delaying my final answer.

  After we made love together that night—under a sinking crescent moon, the real night this time, repeated from above—I told Emily about my first trouble only. She pressed my hand. “Never stop writing poetry, dear,” she said. “America needs poetry. This family—”

  That broken sentence was as close as we ever got to talking about marriage. Emily immediately recovered herself with an uncharacteristically ribald “Cheer up. I don’t even charge a poem for admission.”

  Instead of responding to that cue, I worried my subject. “I should be able to write poetry here,” I said. “America is beautiful, the great golden apple of the Hesperides, hanging in the west like the setting sun. But there’s a worm in the core of that apple, a great scaly black dragon.”

  When Emily didn’t ask a question, I went on, “I remember an advertisement. ‘Join all your little debts into one big debt.’ Of course, they didn’t put it so baldly, they made it sound wonderful. But you Americans are like that. You’ve collected all your angers into one big anger. You’ve removed your angers from things at home—where you seem to have solved your problems very well, I must admit— and directed those angers at the Communist League. Or instead of angers, I could say fears. Same thing.”

  Emily still didn’t comment, so I continued, “Take the basic neurotic. He sets up a program of perfection for himself—a thousand obligations, a thousand ambitions. As long as he works his program, fulfilling those obligations and ambitions, he does very well. In fact, he’s apt to seem like a genius of achievement to those around him, as America does to me. But there’s one big problem he always keeps out of his program and buries deep in his unconscious—the question of who he really is and what he really wants—and in the end it always throws him.”

  Then at last Emily said, speaking softly at first, “There’s something I should tell you, dear. Although I talk a lot of it from the top of my mind, deep down I loathe discussing politics and international relations. As my old colonel used to tell me, ‘It doesn’t matter much which side you fight on, Emily, so long as you have the courage to stand up and be counted. You pledge your life, your fortune, and your sacred honor, and you live up to that pledge!’ And now, dear, I want to sleep.”

  Crouching on the edge of her bed before returning to my room, and listening to her breathing regularize itself, I thought, “Yes, you’re looking for nirvana too. Like Jack.” But I didn’t wake her to say it, or any of the other things that were boiling up in my brain.

  Yet the things I left unsaid must have stayed and worked in my mind, for at our next fireside talk—four pleasant Americans, one Englishman with only one more lecture to go—I found myself launched into a rather long account of the academic Russian family I stayed with while delivering the Pushkin Lectures in Leningrad, where the smog and the minorities problems have been licked too. I stressed the Rosanovs’ gentility, their friendliness, the tolerance and sophistication which had replaced the old rigid insistence on kulturny behavior, and also the faint melancholy underlying and somehow vitiating all they said. In short, I did everything I knew to underline their similarity to the Grissims. I ended by saying “Professor Grissim, the first night we talked, you said America’s achievement had been due almost entirely to the sweep of science, technology, and computerized civilization. The people of the Communist League believe that too—hi fact, they made their declaration of faith earlier than America.”

  “It’s very strange,” he mused, nodding. “So like, yet so unlike. Almost as if the chemical atoms of the East were subtly different from those of the West. The very electrons—”

  “Professor, you don’t actually think—”

  “Of course not. A metaphor only.”

  But whatever he thought, I don’t believe he felt it only as a metaphor.

  Emily said sharply to me, “You left out one more similarity, the most important That they hate the Enemy with all their hearts and will never trust or understand him.”

  I couldn’t find an honest and complete answer to that, though I tried.

  The next day I made one more attempt to turn my feelings into poetry, dark poetry, and I failed. I made my refusal of the instructor-ship final, confirmed my reservation on the Dallas-London rocket for day after tomorrow, and delivered the last of the Lanier Lectures.

  The Fourth of July was a quiet day. Emily took me on a repeat of our first scooter jaunt, but although I relished the wind on my face and our conversation was passably jolly and tender, the magic was gone. I could hardly see America’s beauty for the shadows my mind projected on it.

  Our fireside conversation that night was as brightly banal. Midway we all went outside to watch the fireworks. It was a starry night, very clear of course, and the fireworks seemed vastly remote—transitory extra starfields of pink and green and amber. Their faint cracks and booms sounded infinitely distant, and needless to say, there was not a ribbon or whiff of chemical smoke. I was reminded of my last night in Leningrad with the Rosanovs after the Pushkin Lectures. We’d all strolled down the Kirovskiy Prospekt to the Bolshaya Neva, and across its glimmering waters watched the Vladivostok mail rocket take off from the Field of Mars up its ringed electric catapult taller far than the Eiffel Tower. That had been on a May Day.

  Later that night I went for the first time by myself to Emily’s door and pressed its light-button. I was afraid she wouldn’t stop by for me and I needed her. She was in a taut and high-strung mood, unwilling to talk in much more than monosyllables, yet unable to keep still, pacing like a restless feline. She wanted to play in the view window the tape of a real battle in Bolivia with the original sounds too, muted down. I vetoed that and we settled for an authentic forest fire recorded in Alaska.

  Sex and catastrophe fit. With the wild red light pulsing and flaring in the bedroom, casting huge wild shadows, and with the fire’s muted roar and hurricane crackle and explosions filling our ears, we made love with a fierce and desperate urgency that seemed almost—I am eternally grateful for the memory—as if it would last forever. Sex and a psychedelic trip also have their mee
ting point.

  Afterward I slept like a sated tiger. Emily waited until dawn to wake me and shoo me back to my bedroom.

  Next day all the Grissims saw me off. As we strolled from the silver station wagon to the landing area, Emily and I dropped a little behind. She stopped, hooked her arms around me, and kissed me with a devouring ferocity. The others walked on, too well bred ever to look back. The next moment she was her cool self again, sipping a reefer.

  Now the rocketship is arching down. The stars are paling. There is a faint whistling as the air molecules of the stratosphere begin to carom off the titanium skin. We had only one flap, midway of freefall section of the trip, when we briefly accelerated and then decelerated to match, perhaps in order to miss a spy satellite or one of the atomic-headed watchdog rockets eternally circling the globe. The direction comes, “Secure seat harnesses.”

  I just don’t know. Maybe I should have gone to America drunk as Dylan Thomas, but purposefully, bellowing my beliefs like the word or the thunderbolts of God. Maybe then I could have fought the shadows. No…

  I hope Emily makes it to London. Perhaps there, against a very different background, with shadows of a different sort…