OPUS 21 (36 page)

I looked, listened, sniffed attentively.

Last chance.

And I remembered.

Not far away, probably torn down, probably only a greasy ghost sharing the fourth dimension of some new structure with a marquee and a doorman, was a hall bedroom within spitting distance of the curved rails of an extinct elevated railroad where I'd made my abode for a year. Not far away, the loft in which I'd earned my eighteen simoleons a week with the other sweated youths. The counters of that department store where, with the stupendous poor, I'd cut yard goods. Far away, though, the farms I'd labored on and farther still the crewmen of the freighter. In time, however, Rushford was near-the American rustic who will not call himself a peasant because he drives a Ford.

Cruel, unwashed, suspicious, insanitary louts and ugly lasses--poor.

Salt of the earth. Savor of dung.

Backbone of the nation. Spineless.

In a properly informed electorate, the majority will make intelligent decisions.

Agreed.

Then, gentlemen,

shall we not inform the electorate that this is the age of knowledge? Shall we not rectify the schizoid discrepancies between these people on the fire escapes, bumpkins, and the inhabitants of penthouses? Give the good-natured fornications of the poor back to the taut middle classes? Inform the poor of the ways of children? Release the entombed libido of them all? Having done that, so they may vote sanely-having revealed the democracy of desire-how shall we set about to teach them advanced algebra, genetics, relativity, and bacteriology--so that their acts will be in some small measure relevant to the exigencies of our times?

Freedom of the mind is immured in the vaults of the Navy and the War Department and the Air Forces.

Freedom of speech is chained in the cellars of the churches.

Freedom of action is spread-eagled on the wheel of business.

There is no information in the electorate.

Instinct only.

It is a fact we had better face unless we are prepared to lose our own selves in the stunted years of an American feudalism.

Liberty, or death, gentlemen.

We who would not fight for liberty because we did not see the involvement of it are staring into the hot barrels of death. The time for sacrifice is at hand. What have we?

Production, instead! And compulsory reproduction.

I went up to Hattie's bagnio because I am a middle-class American male in the higher brackets, of Princeton extraction, who was denied the poor man's access to females during adolescence and early maturity and who (owing probably to that abnormal deprivation) belongs to a distinguished group that makes blah per cent of its sex contacts with prostitutes, blah per cent by unorthodox means, and blah per cent with males. That is evidently why I knew the address. I went, owing to the fact that a member of the generation behind me--a prodigy, similarly conditioned--of superior stature, superior health, superior life expectancy, superior stability
(sic)
,
and a superior happiness quotient--far above the average by the tables!--had come a psychological cropper in a tart's arms owing to the fact that the Age of Kinsey is also the Atomic Age and he, briefed in the latter, was emotionally distrait over the conundrum: how to tell the people on the fire escape all about the effect of neutrons on chromosomes--a datum to be regarded as utterly essential for political judgment. And other troubles.

Personally, I was of the opinion the poor could not be told at this late date and would have to learn by doing. Also the rich. And this judgment, while it in no way impaired my faith in democracy, and while it gave me a good assurance of the long future, singularly blighted my assessment of so-called democratic practices in the land during the past century and filled me with a ribald contumely for the poor-doting, poor-blind, wisdom-spurning, technologically blank intellectuals, together with nearly everybody else.

I wanted to get my nephew out of a jam before he got into one.

This is a sentiment I bear toward all humanity.

My successes in its prosecution are, sometimes, trivial.

Besides which

a man who thinks he is soon to die

enjoys kiting around in a city he has cherished all his life, among the people he loves, at night, in a cab.

I rode up through the marble lobby and past the floor-ledges of the building in the gold elevator cage with the colored boy whose face showed no trace of his fascinating, perennial opportunity to look upon (before and after) the persons and countenances of hundreds of the great, the prominent, and the rich, who were not quite satisfied with the legal sex mores of their environment and the permissions of their acquaintances.

I inhaled the many-doored hallway.

"Hattie," said Viola, "is out at a party."

"Is my nephew Paul here?"

She shook her elegant head. "He hasn't been in."

Well, I could have phoned. Why didn't I?

"Miss Taylor's here." The jungle-bright eyes sloped darkly toward me and away.

"Is she? I thought--"

' I'll call her." She led me to the same room--Hattie's parlor.

I sat down. I could stick around a while. Paul might not come here, in his humiliating chase. He probably would. He'd had--no doubt--other leads to check first.

Gwen appeared. She was wearing her hair down, tonight, and a silk dress the color of a new penny. A matching dress. "'Lo, Phil." She walked gracefully to the phonograph, clicked records, turned dials, and filled the room with soft bongoses, maracas, the background thud of a conga drum.

"I thought you were going downtown?"

"Soon. Did you mind--about last night?"

"Tonight--I never mind about last night. Rule of my life. Look, Gwen. How did you know--so quickly--exactly what that gal was like?"

"I told you," she said. "I get feelings."

"I don't. Just surprises."

"You try to think," she said. "Figure. Then you go by the results of that. It's no good. You just--relax--and see what your sensations are."

"We were never allowed to relax about it. From the cradle to the crematory--we have to be either tensely on guard or else proficiently on the job."

"It's a wonder people like you ever have babies."

"We don't have many."

Gwen smiled. "On guard?"

"And proficient."

"Nature's way," she said, "of reducing the number of real dopes! Tell me something."

"Sure."

"If Yvonne hadn't busted in last night--?"

"The answer is no."

"That's what I thought."

"It wasn't you."

She stirred her red-brown hair. "I know that. If it had been me--if I'd thought so--

I'd have repressed my own feelings about your blonde roommate."

"What's going to happen to her?"

Gwen curved one shoulder toward me and straightened it--a shrug that dismissed responsibility. "How do you think a girl like me feels-about one like her? She has everything. She's always had it. And thrown herself away."

"Save the tough act for somebody you can fool!"

Gwen came over and put her fingers in my hair and turned my head up and kissed me where it wouldn't show. "She wants to know--that's all. Why shouldn't she? She's been dying all her life from not knowing."

"A hundred and fifty million people--"

"Save out a few million, Phil. Not everybody has the sordid past or no past at allor none to speak of. Some just grow up naturally."

' I'd like to meet 'em."

"Oh--" she sat down near me--"you'd never know, anyhow. Because if you found out--or anybody found out--they couldn't go on being natural any longer. It's against the law to be a person in this world. Naturalness--that relaxation I spoke of--has to stay in the bootleg department, to stay at all."

"Pity."

"You're telling me!" She thought awhile. "I'll give you some news. I don't know whether Hattie would, or not. Marcia's here."

I waited till a small shock was absorbed. "Yeah?"

"Came in this afternoon."

"What doing?"

"Working."

"Why?"

"Want to talk to her?"

"Yeah."

She kissed me again. "If the unfaithful mood ever comes over you--"

"Don't count on it."

She chuckled. "You're one of the lucky ones. Only--you don't know it. That's the way they are, mostly."

"Some compliment."

She nodded. Her metallic hair swung before my eyes. She got up from the arm of my chair. "So long! Don't worry about--you know who."

Marcia came to the door in a few minutes. She was wearing a black dress--a thin black dress and--nothing else. Her blue eyes were defiant.

"Hi!"

"Paul is apt to barge in here any minute."

"I know. I thought he might." She shut the door.

I went over to the window and squinted through the dark heat at the Jersey rivage.

"He might. And you were going to have him sent in. You were going to go through a prepared routine. You were going to disillusion him--but quick-break his heart right now-

-and get it over with. You were going to tell him about the cute salesman who dropped in around four. The newspaper publisher who stopped by at five. The nice banker who hung around till he was late for dinner. And the college kid who'd just left."

"You read minds," she said.

"Don't."

"Why not?" She walked over to me. "What else? All you had to do the other day was to take one quick look at me and see I was a tramp. Oh--I could feel you paw me. I could see you putting your damned twenty bucks on my bureau. You knew--so you knew how to look. And--sooner or later--everybody would know. And know how to look. And look that way. And where would a good kid's wife be, then?"

"You might have thought of that sooner," I said, ignoring the false charges for the moment.

"I suppose I make the world go around! What
did
I think about? What would anybody think about? They'd think--this is how a sweet guy treats a nice girl. This is how he talks. This is how he holds your hand. Holds your hand, for God's sake! You'd get a real kick out of that--the realest one you'd had in years. You'd think--
maybe. Maybe
the life could end. Maybe I could have an apartment someplace and kids and a guy people respected. Maybe I could get into the bridge games and the theater parties and the midnight snacks next door and the church suppers, even, and drive a sedan around a suburb, buying groceries at the chain stores and not forgetting to pick up Junior's shoes."

"Forsaking all others?"

"Yes," she said, "I thought about that, too! I'm human. Feelings come over me.

I'm maybe even like a kleptomaniac that can't resist a box of tacks in a hardware store or a pair of cheap earrings on a counter. Maybe I could learn to choke it down. Control it. I did--for months."

"And now?"

"Now it doesn't matter."

"Months isn't years."

Her eyes fixed on mine. They were not defiant now--but speculative. "Sure. So I'm human. So Paul knew that. I told him he couldn't expect a letter-perfect show, forever."

"Did you?"

"Certainly, I did. And what did he say? He said I couldn't expect one from him, either."

"He's being pretty--devoted--right now."

"That's what has to stop. That's why I hope he does come in here. That's why I asked Hattie to let me stay here--instead of just putting me on the phone exchange, the way it used to be. I wanted to go back with a bang. After the way you looked me over the other noon--that's exactly what I wanted to do."

"Funny."

"I see nothing funny."

"I thought--you were looking me over."

She sat down suddenly--folded in the middle and dropped into a chair. "You did?"

"Yes, I did."

"Well--here I am." She spoke in a low tone-not with resignation, not with spite.

"All you have to do is say so."

I skipped that. "Marcia, I never needed to consider what sort of person you were.

All I needed to think about was what sort of guy Paul is. And I could see--I thought I could--the whole thing coming apart--slowly, painfully, rottenly--"

"Go on. Play God with us poor mortals."

"My opinion--that's all--sure. I know Paul pretty well, though."

"Better than I do?" She grinned sarcastically.

"Better. I know better what he comes from. Then I saw you. I had the impression, Marcia, that your maternal instincts were involved. You were pulling the child to your warm breast and nourishing his starved little body. Feelings like that. No-good feelings, for wives." She had sucked her lips into a point; she glanced at me almost with fear; so I went on. "Maybe you thought about running errands for his kids. But actually you did more thinking about fondling his emotions--taking care of him--working for him. And you even did work. You sat there in the Knight's Bar looking at Paul like a proud female parent--like a doting mother sharing in her son's discussions of his conquests. You were the conquered--but you were the string-pulling mamma, too. Take it or leave it--that's how I felt you felt about him! And then I caught you looking at me--looking at me the way a girl with warm insides looks at a man. So if I didn't give you the impression I was struck silly with the possibilities of the match--that's also why. I'm sorry--but there's the whole answer."

She was breathing evenly--but more deeply than anybody needed to breathe, just sitting. Down the hall, doors opened and shut. Raucous, faintly nervous male laughter echoed. "Some of the boys from the convention," she said, almost reluctantly--as if she found it necessary to explain so I wouldn't stop, and as if she was afraid the explanation would stop me.

I looked at her--at a breathing, beautiful girl--and I thought for a moment about the canoe-hats. Then I shook it off. "If a good gal--a sweethearted dame who had no stomach for the life--had started living with Paul, I'd have objected. In your case--I didn't believe you were even that--"

Feet marched on happy excursions down the hall. Somebody tried the door--

opened it, to his surprise--and apologized gruffly without daring to carry the impulse through and look in.

Marcia was staring at me. "So all right," she said. "Paul's just a little kid. He's not even a good boyfriend. Too jittery. I thought I could teach him. He doesn't really want to learn. He thinks a dame is made of soap bubbles and lives on a pedestal a mile high. He thinks sex is something for pack trips in the mountains and spruce boughs. I got sick to death of his pack-trip monologue! Who wouldn't? Lying with a guy on a good inner-spring mattress and listening to him yak about pine needles! Drenching myself in cologne--and hearing him rave about stable smells! I was ready to spring myself, when we had that lunch. And you gave me the excuse. I'd saved up mad enough for six girls--