PART TWO

_Tarantella_

1

The desk clerk told me that Mrs. Prentiss had Room 1603--the apartment, not only next to mine but accessible from mine by a set of doors--now partly locked: I'd turned the key in the door on my side and tried the other, when I'd arrived.

"I thought," I said, "that she was a few floors down--"

"She moved this afternoon, Mr. Wylie. To get out of the heat, where there was more air."

Or more something.

I hung up and looked at the doors.

The promise not to make a pass at her naturally crossed my mind. It was, evidently, a one-sided commitment. At this season there weren't many guests in the hotel so she'd had no difficulty in moving near me. I wondered whether she would admit it or pretend it was a coincidence; and bet the latter way. _Honi soit qui mal n'y pense pas._

I checked myself in the mirror. Then I knocked on her door. The proper hall one.

She wore the gardenias in her hair--a white dress with a gold border stenciled around the hem--and her shoes and pocketbook were gold, too. The big diamond had evidently been sent down to the safe-deposit boxes, or left on her bureau--depending on which sort of person she was. Her hair was done up--with the curls among the flowers. She looked as attractive as she intended. Cool, too.

"Am I stunning?"

I nodded. "But not ravishing. If the Hindus had untouchables at the top of the caste system--white priestesses, say--you'd qualify."

"You obviously don't know much about priestesses."

I rang for the elevator.

"That," I pointed, "is my demesne, abode, diggings--"

"I know. I asked. And moved."

"Why, exactly?"

I suppose she wanted her eyes to be interesting. They were just--disturbed. "To tease you."

"Tease _whom_?"

She blushed the peach tinge I'd noticed before. "Me." Then she shook her head at herself. "Because I'm lonely, maybe. Because I have a kind of phobia about hotels. I don't know."

I took her to the Crépuscule--the steps down and the moonlit air conditioning--the blue leather benches--the violin, cello, and piano accordion--the little dance floor in the corner with mirrors on two sides--and the French cuisine. The trio there has rhythm and the cellist plays maracas when he feels like it, so you can rumba.

She had a dry Martini and I had tomato juice. Then I asked her and we danced a couple of fox trots. She was a little bit nervous for a minute or so and presently she wasn't. I asked the trio for a bolero; the two other couples quit; and we danced alone. Afterward we danced to a piece called "Cu-Gu-Tu-Ru" which is also known as "Jack-Jack." She understood, technically, about dancing the rumba and she gave some indication of feelings for the part that is more instinctive than planned. Once or twice she tried to lead me--without being aware of it.

If you know a good deal about dancing, you can tell a good deal about girls that you'd be a long time in learning by any other means. People are animals--and dancing among animals is several hundred million years older than the species that calls itself Homo sapiens. There was rhythm on the planet long before there were ballrooms. So you can expect vestiges, at least, in woman-the-animal, of impulses which belong to the skeleton, muscles, and nerves and not to society--vestiges specifically interpreted, disciplined or repressed by the individual in your arms. The woman's dancing says, This is what the world has done to me--or hasn't. And it is the same for men--which is why women, who live closer to their instincts, like to dance.

This circumstance, alas, has for so long been repudiated by our forebears that the dancing of most American males is rude and boorish and clumsy, at once self-assertive and self-conscious, unimaginative, disrhythmic, unsubtle--paranoid. It is what the world has done to them.

You can talk to a woman all night and persuade her of nothing.

You can hold her hand and a chemical change will take place in her.

You can kiss her in certain ways and the Old Memories will do what rhetoric cannot.

And you can dance with her.

If you can dance.

You can dance by fox trot, the American way, the integration of surfaces. We know the same steps, the same skills, the same beat. We look well together. We make a matched pair. The thresholds of our sentiments mesh, dovetail, tongue-and-groove. We are, indeed, in the groove.

You can use the dance of conquest and gradual assent, the tango.

Or the rumba.

Which is African. Studied teleology, stylized candor, libido embedded in the music, suspended in cadences, arrested, sustained--beyond intellect, this side of ecstasy. It is a sophistication that northern countries never knew of--a primitive deliberation, a hot-blooded coolness. For not knowing, they are punished by going without--and in other, obscure fashions. Very few northern women and fewer men, excepting among the young, are able to discover the essence.

They rumba--they say.

They wave their tails like pennants, the oscillating flesh corrupt in Christian purity.

Yvonne was one of the few.

She came honestly by the name, I thought.

"Huguenots," she said when we sat down. "On mother's side."

How can the Americans ever cleanse themselves?

I ordered our dinner.

Again, she tried to lead--to change her mind--to demur--to say she wasn't hungry--then to consider the cold roast beef.

"You'll like it," I said. If she had insisted, I'd have let her order for herself. But she didn't want anything in particular to eat. She wanted to see what happened to her slight, vain whims. So I ignored them.

"You can have another Martini."

"I guess I must?"

"Sure. Must. Dinner will take a few minutes and we won't dance again till after."

"You're terribly positive."

"Nonsense," I said. "You're used to men who have been beaten to death by women before you got hold of them."

Her eyes fixed on me, dilated, and she laughed. "Rol."

"Among all the others. Maleness has just about disappeared in your native land, sister. The boys are all brought up by women, and taught by women in school, and then they go to work to support women by manufacturing and distributing the things women think they want. It's called civilization--and actually it's only the highest form barbarism has yet reached. Trinket-and-gadget society. Domestic convenience society. A society that holds a handkerchief to one end and sets the other on a flush toilet--a society that aims to make the linen germicidal and the toilet silent, colored, and perfumed."

"And men? What do they do? Use fingers and squat?"

"You're learning too fast. Live outdoors, avoid neurosis, and so escape the common cold. I think they could stand for the flush toilet--but they would be more concerned in getting the nitrogen back to the topsoil than they would in the orchid rims. First things first and a conscious sense of responsibility for the future--that's us boys."

"Phooie!"

"Who do you like--to go on from lunch? Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, George Raft, Rudolph Valentino, Gregory Peck, or some of the new boy friends of the bobby-soxers I'm too old to remember the names of?"

"None of them. And I never saw Valentino in a picture."

"Meaning him."

"At least--he acted as if he had manners."

"On the contrary. He did, in a mannerly way, several things banned by the book of etiquette."

"Isn't that the same?"

"From the woman's viewpoint."

"Don't you ever get tired finding imaginary inferiorities in women?"

"Did I say it was inferior? It isn't. More realistic, in fact. Don't you, on the other hand, prefer to be appreciated for differences--rather than to worry over the need of proving identities?"

"_Modern Woman--the Lost Sex._ You got it out of the book."

"It's a pretty good book."

Yvonne watched the waiter exchange a filled glass for the empty one. She seemed to want to defer talking while she caught up with something in her mind. She sipped, and stared at the people eating dinner in the azure haze the place calls light, and sipped again. She had a good-sized mouth with a pretty shape: the lipstick went where the lips were, and nowhere else.

"I wanted to talk to you. I was ready to pester you. That's why I moved next door. I was going to let you find it out when we came back this evening. I was going to ask you in. I'm not afraid of you."

"Smallest achievement in the history of courage."

"I want to figure out what to do about Rol. You see--I'm still crazy about him."

"Send him to a good psychiatrist."

She exhaled with gentle violence. "Try it!"

"You said he was very upset--promised you anything. That was your chance to make him promise psychiatry. You seem to have read books about it--"

She shook her head. "Not many, really. You don't understand. Rol wasn't in the least bit upset because of what _he'd_ done. He was upset about my attitude over it. He said it was a 'trivial incident'--and told me he loved me--and said I was frigid and what did I expect. He said he didn't consider he'd been unfaithful to me--and talked on and on about being 'human.' Imagine!"

"Are you?"

The blush came again. She spoke in a low voice, "Mostly."

"People," I said, "don't want to know about people, nowadays."

"Did they ever?"

"Here and there--by fits and starts. They had a short spell of wanting to find out about themselves through reason--a couple of centuries ago. Innumerable spells of trying to figure themselves out through religions."

"But not now?" She was sarcastic. "Nobody knows anything now?"

"The average college graduate doesn't even know where he is in relation to other objects. Couldn't point to the ecliptic. Or explain the changing seasons. Couldn't point toward the sun, at night. Friends of mine, well-known writers, belong to a society that believes the earth is flat. There's another buddyship of boobs who think the earth is hollow and we live inside. Till the government began financing research for war, America spent twice as much on astrology as on scientific investigation. The folks would rather, by twice, be fooled than find out the truth."

"We've made a lot of progress."

"Individuals have learned a lot. The people ignore it. They are interested in the applications of science--appalled by the implications. Our civilization is just one more swarm of low cheats. It won't last because cheats can't. Only inertia sustains the current shape of it, and that momentum is encountering more friction every day. A republic of crooked dumbbells can't safely use the instruments of clever men. People not only don't know how to behave, they don't even know they are ignorant. Yet in the main, people are thoroughly satisfied with themselves. In view of sure catastrophes that loom on every margin toward which they hurry--the very self-satisfaction of people is the statistical guarantor of their doom. Hence that crack about pride going before a fall."

"I think people behave rather well, on the whole."

"Sure. They'll even be decent about doomsday. Blame somebody else as they perish, like flies, but perish heroically. A pity."

"You can't depress me!"

I laughed. "Bear in mind that you brought up that word 'depress.' I'm not depressed. I've had to learn how to get along in the certainty that all I was taught to live for is either rubbish or a dream of a future that lies ages beyond the public expectation. People don't know--won't know--can't know, in their present frame of mind. Take your little problem, for example."

Her face changed. Interest replaced antagonism. "So all right. Take my problem. Kick that around awhile!"

"You believe in evolution?"

"A person can still believe in evolution--and in God!"

"Certainly. Something exists in men which they've given the name of all their gods. That's fact. And evolution is a fact, too--a simple reality. A minority of the educated people in our land have accepted the fact that man's body evolved from the bodies of other animals. A still smaller per cent realize that man's mind--personality--spirit--also must have evolved from animals and the animal equivalent: instinct. The question is, How? Most of such people believe that it is the supreme function of the conscious human mind to repress instinct. That's their answer."

"But not yours!"

"I believe it's the function of consciousness to rediscover instinct, understand it, and pursue it--in the ways that it has to go. That it does go--people by the billions to the contrary notwithstanding. So far, people have made only blind efforts in that direction. Unconscious efforts. Their religions--according to the soundest hypothesis I've encountered--are the results of such attempts: expressions of animal instinct, as it appears in men--and in men wholly unaware of what they are expressing."

"Is that Freud?"

"It's Jung. Freud never got that far. He merely demonstrated that instinct exists in man. The id--he called it. The raw cravings of the infant. To Freud--the id was pretty much what sin is to a preacher. A disgraceful bunch of bestial lusts and impulses. Society--through the parents, mostly--disciplined the id by disciplining the infant and the child; this produced the superego--or conscience, according to Freud. As far as Freud could see, man would always live amidst conflicts set up between his id and whatever superego, or culture, had been hammered around it--plus his own common sense, if any. Dismal view."

"And Jung?"

"Well--Freud showed that instinct exists as a basic motivation of mankind. Not that anybody but a few psychiatrists have ever paid attention to the discovery. But there it was--the beginning of a science of psychological evolution of people. Jung asked what instinct was and how it worked. Jung found out several things Freud only began to realize. For instance, Jung looked at animals and perceived that their instincts unfold in them, individually, as they mature."

"You mean, new-born beavers don't start building dams immediately?"

"Exactly. So the id of infancy is only part of instinct. More instinct appears as the person ages--which is in line with the nature of instinct in all other living beings. Next, Jung noticed that instinct in animals, and in primitive people who hardly ever use reason and logic abstractedly, takes care of the whole life cycle of every species. So it cannot be viewed as mere lawless, infantile lust. If it were only that, animals, and primitive men, would tear up each other and themselves; all life would commit suicide. From the animal viewpoint--instinct includes whatever animals do that men would call 'good,' 'virtuous,' 'unselfish,' 'self-sacrificing,' and so on. Do you follow?"

"I think so."

"There are--so to speak--checks and balances--compensations--counterinstincts. That's the idea embodied in Chinese philosophy. In Taoism, for example. That's the concept symbolized by the yin and the yang. It's the idea embodied in Toynbee's theory of history, too--right up till the present, when his own ego confuses its own description of instinct with history. At that point, Toynbee decided that the Church of England--his personal patternization of instinct--might salvage civilization. Which, of course, is pathetic. But let's drag this bundle a little bit further before we drop it and go back to you. If all animals have a proper pattern of instinct--man has. But man is to some extent conscious--and therefore to some degree able to separate out a personal identity of himself--an ego--from the older, more powerful compulsions and countercompulsions of his instinct. And he has used his consciousness--largely--not to maintain and enhance the liaison between his ego and the forces that drive him statistically forever--but to swell up his ego and to conceal from it those fundamental forces."

"I don't understand that."

"Well--man tries to deny he's an animal. Or to hide the fact. To call everything that is animal subhuman. To call every success he makes his own achievement. To call every disaster no fault of his own. Because he is conscious--he has slowly learned to extend the physical capacities of every kind of animal--for his own, immediate benefits. He has telescope-microscope-X-ray eyes. He has atomic energy muscles. Brighter light at night than the fireflies. He can fly faster than any bird--speed through the water faster than any fish--store food for decades when a ruminant or a pelican can store it only for days. He has even developed quite a few techniques that have no good animal correlative, though most of man's inventions were made ages before even apes appeared on the planet. Man has merely learned. But he tells himself he discovered and invented. It gives him a preposterous arrogance. And that's largely what he has used consciousness to swell up."

"We just skip his ideals--and philosophies--?"

"No. But we note that, to extend his physical capacities, he has used logic and reason. He has sometimes tried to employ them on his consciousness; but never--except intuitively, till recently--has it dawned on him that he is usually unconscious of his own real motives. That his cultures represent guesses--or trial and error. You take a creature that is governed by instinct--and doesn't realize it--one who confuses instinct with deity and identifies deity with himself--a creature who has made logic work in every dimension of the objective world and is extremely smug about himself in view of the results--and you have an animal cut off from its own nature and hence from Nature itself. Modern men can't tell whether anything they think or say or do is suitable to them, or merely the result of a tradition--as the semanticists claim--or whether, perhaps, their motives rise in a desire to hide instinct, to deny the animal, to inflate ego, or what not."

"I'm confused again."

"Put anybody through psychoanalysis--all the way, not just far enough to scare the wits out of him, and so make him hide his fear from himself by turning upon and ridiculing psychoanalysis--and that person will discover there is more instinct in him that he didn't know about than there is ego that he knew. Awful shock. Then put the same person through an analysis by a Jungian, and he will get numberless clues about the images and dreams and the feelings we have which are intended, by Nature, to make us conscious of the whole of human instinct _as a pattern_."

Yvonne shook her head. "Let's talk about me."

I wanted--I always want--to continue that line of explanation. It seems logical to me that man would have in his head the means to recover a consciousness of instinct--and to find, in that recovered awareness, not just the psychological history of the past, as man finds history in his body, but intimations of the future, which also exist in his body, as countless extrapolating anthropologists have shown. There must be some way, I have always thought, to shove aside the immature id and also the disguising images, taboos, compulsions, and descriptions of the modern superego, and to see what lies beyond them both--looking backward and looking forward. Having at long last followed Jung's inquiry into this process, having grasped his techniques and repeated, through idioms of my own personality, the same empirical experiences which Jung has demonstrated in hundreds of other human beings as well as in societies seen as wholes--I have been afflicted with an urge to bring the steps to wider attention and understanding.

And I suppose I shall try to do so, sporadically, all my life. But I realize now the futility of the effort as a "cause."

I am the man who wanted, from childhood's earliest dreams, to know what men would think in the future. And now that I believe I know I find that--save for individuals--present men cannot even reach toward such ideas and concepts. Could they, the better world would be at hand, and not a mere ignorant wish. It is a simple irony--an operation of the very law I learned--the law that I imagine all men will finally discover. And, while it supplies me with hope for my species, it condemns me to general incomprehensibility.

If you wished for the future--and were given it--you couldn't use it today. Because it is the future.

Physicists feel this way--and rightly--concerning their urgent, brilliant, all-but-fruitless efforts to explain ideas in comparatively familiar and acceptable fields--ideas such as Relativity or the Quantum Theory. How much more, then, will psychologists feel it! The wide world of their awareness has as yet not even a basic glossary among people; they do not yet even use the arithmetic of that science in their daily lives.

Indeed, the psychiatrist, the practitioner of certain known principles of human psychology, the physician, is still prone to dodge the central fact of his science. "Psychology," he says, dogmatically identifying his opinion with the science, "does not conflict or interfere with religion. There are areas in which the minister or priest is better equipped to deal than the psychologist. Psychiatry does not attempt to change a man's beliefs. And it is not 'all sex'--as is so often claimed. It is not concerned with sex morals, or any moral law."

So, in his time, the churches made old Galileo lie, too. Made him lie to live at all.

And so the same churches in our day cause comparably enlightened men to lie concerning their knowledge--in order that any people may benefit by it at all. In order, truly, to go on living. It is one more expedient dishonor of scientists.

For psychology--though a thousand Presbyterian and Roman Catholic practitioners of its minor branches may not admit it--and though ten thousand better psychologists lie their faces black--has already put a period to orthodox religion. The old astronomers did away with the old cosmology for all the churches. The new investigators of awareness have done away with the ancient theologies and "moral" systems as completely--whether it takes the people a generation or a thousand years to find it out. Psychology is the scientific investigation of what man calls awareness and of what prompts him that he is unaware of. As such, it inevitably must analyze and resolve all man's beliefs, religions, faiths and the mechanisms of them, as well as his politics, his economics, the motives of his arts, his morals, ethics and sex manners. Why should anybody be surprised that science, turned finally upon man's inner self, should disclose different shapes from those held real by Stone Age man, barbarians, and a few later millenniums of men who decree that they are Christian but act more viciously than any beast?

The disavowing psychiatrists, opportunist weaselers or men who do not see that their science has set philosophy aside, will be historically remembered. Their acts will prove the shocking superstitiousness of the twentieth century and--in some cases--represent the public persecutions, the subjective witchburnings, which show this era to be a continuum of the Dark Ages.

As I said earlier, a smug people cannot even find the motive for asking if a science of psychology exists, let alone what it has learned. And we Americans are probably the most self-satisfied people who ever appeared. The whole world starves, brawls, perishes around us. Our own philosophy of progress is leading us to swift, continental exhaustion--to the resourcelessness of our own progeny. Yet we believe we are doing right and thinking rightly--a great, good, wonderful, near-perfect nation.

It will take generations of disaster to crack the hull of such preposterous self-satisfaction. Only through despair and amidst ruins, in all likelihood, will men discover that humility which may lead to the honest assessment of man's vanities, his insane traditions, pompous faiths, patriotisms, and excesses. But there is not much use talking about it or trying to explain. Knowledge cannot fend where the people refuse to know.

"Did you ever raise dogs?" I asked Yvonne.

She had been quietly eating lobster bisque--glancing at me from time to time while I reflected and while I ate, too. She nodded. "Several."

"Then you've noticed that pups behave in every single way that would, in people, be called sinful, immoral, and perverse."

"That's the nastiest thing I ever heard in my life! How could animals be perverted!"

"Did I say they were? I merely said--or tried to--that dogs exhibit all the same curious activities your Professor Kinsey found abundant in human behavior."

"They do not!"

I grinned. "Perhaps yours didn't. Perhaps--whenever you saw in your pups a symptom of any sort of sex activity--you yelled at them. Pulled them apart. Swatted them with a switch--"

"I never used a thing but rolled newspapers!"

I laughed until she saw why. She flushed. I went on. "You imposed, by force, your sex manners--Episcopalian?--I thought so--on your dogs. If you left them alone--as I do mine--you'd see that pups are every bit as 'perverted' as people. Grown dogs, too, sometimes. So are wild animals. Put a bunch of male monkeys together--without females--"

"I detest monkeys!"

"They won't mind. Anyhow--segregate the males and they'll turn homosexual. My caustic acquaintance, Dr. Hooton, the anthropologist, has reported it. He says it is 'disgusting'--a curiously unscientific term. The monkeys weren't disgusted, after all. Just having fun, getting relief, being excited."

"What are you trying to prove now?"

I shrugged. "That mammalian sexual behavior has a pattern and men belong in it."

"What nonsense! Men know what they are doing! Animals don't!"

"Then why was Kinsey able to show that men do just exactly what the dogs and monkeys and all the other mammals do--in spite of church, law, state, parents, culture, schools, society, and every other restraint they can dream up, consciously?"

"Some men--maybe."

"All I have been trying to point out, Yvonne, is that people who don't know where they are in space--people as ignorant of simple, cultural fact as the average American college graduate--obviously cannot know anything much about their real sex natures, since these have been honestly examined only recently and only by a few men, and since sexual enlightenment is the great taboo in this era. To that I merely add that men do behave sexually like mammals, which has been shown, and mammals do not behave in any fashion resembling the sex mores of this age."

Her gray eyes were bitter. "You think, then, that it would be perfectly acceptable, if you felt like it, to attack me right here and right now?"

"Yvonne. Even if I didn't have vestiges of your Episcopalian superego, or its equivalent, and ideas of my own besides--all the other people here do have your attitude. And I'm not a lunatic."

"You think, though"--her eyes went burningly around the room in search of effective illustration--"it would be perfectly all right for me to get a yen for the cashier, and show it, and let the cashier see it, too! Nobody should mind that--?"

She spoke with such emotion that I leaned forward to see why she'd selected the cashier. The cashier was a dark-haired girl, a pretty girl, leaning into the rays of a desk lamp to add up a dinner check.

I said, "Charming."

"You're an evil person."

"Did I pick out the cashier--or did you?"

She considered anger--and settled for laughter. "At least, you have one virtue. A person around you doesn't have to censor what he says."

"And the devil is shocked by virtue, too--is that right? How perfectly the closed mind bats them back! It must be marvelous never to be able to wonder what goes on outside your own head. The enviable situation of nearly everybody! And the everlasting chute-the-chutes to hell-on-earth. Here comes our next course, Miss Morals."

"Can I have pêches flambeau?" she asked, somewhat later.

"I'll join you."

"I thought you didn't drink?"

"I don't. A brandied bonbon? Peaches with the alcohol mostly burned away? Sherry in the soup? I'm not absolutist, Yvonne--not stuck with it, quite. I don't accidentally swallow the port in my fruit cocktail and then go out and get roaring drunk--excusing myself with the accident of the port. Maybe the sniff of alcohol will fold up the resolution of some reformed drunkards. My own problem--in that case--was different."

"What was it, then?"

"It's a long and sordid story that I am not going to tell you now."

"Do you really understand all these things you're talking about?"

I thought that one over. "Mostly," I said, "my mental activity relates to errors in the concepts of other people. Let's say--I've come to understand a good deal--by searching for blunder, by hunting for the sense of what brighter guys have learned. By relating them all."

"If God came in here now, what would you ask Him?"

It was quite a question and I looked at her with surprise. Her face saddened. "Rol said that to me, once. But what?"

What would I ask?

I realized, with a strange feeling, that I wouldn't ask anything. No questions. No further privileges. No favors. No additional enlightenment. That last impulse had stayed in my mind for a moment and I had then thought, if you want more enlightenment, the data is there, son. Enlighten yourself. Don't ask, when there's a chance of finding out on your own.

Superego?

Had my father told me that?

Or was that how I felt about life and the world?

I felt that way.

My father had his faith.

So it was not superego.

I would say hello to God.

What I did not know, what I knew that I did not express, others would learn, others would say.

There was a little instant of silence and remoteness around me as I underwent the experience that goes with such realization.

A calm.

The Crépuscule was a long way off--the sound and sight and smell of a dim restaurant.

The trio was playing "Ja-da," I finally realized.

Yvonne snapped her fingers in my face and laughed. "If you must daydream, put me in the act."

"What part do you want?"

"I'm a woman," she said. "And, according to you, I can play only one part. I'll be the sins of your mind. Do your evil for you. Kiss the cashiers and encourage little children to undress each other. Throw stones at cathedral windows--"

"It's your life. And your sin-list. Go ahead."

"_Your_ list."

"You're sticking to _acts_. And mighty compulsive ones, too. All I've done is to give such matters subjective consideration."

"The thought is father to the deed."

"Then for God's sake be more attentive to what you think!"

"Jesuit!"

"I'm the nemesis of that whole philosophy."

"At least--you're sincere. I didn't believe so, when I read your books. I thought you were just fond of shocking people."

"I could never shock them a millionth part of the amount they've shocked me."

"But you did your best?"

I laughed at that. "Sometimes." A sad confession.

"Don't you love burning brandy?"

We watched the peaches flame.

2

I took her over to the Amigo.

They had a rumba band there that would give sloe-eyed fantasies to a Norseman.

And it wasn't crowded.

I haven't said--was it necessary?--that I intended to make Mrs. Prentiss eat one or two of those gardenias. That is, I proposed in my mind to bring her to the point of withdrawing the order that I was to behave toward her in all chaste chivalry. As to what I would do beyond that, I had no idea. It could not possibly be important if I followed up a moral (or immoral) victory with what would then be an ethical (or unethical) act.

Mrs. Prentiss was a remarkably handsome young woman. She was somewhat educated and she had a fair degree of intellectual sensitivity. In telling me she had not understood what I was saying she had implied a considerable degree of comprehension and a reluctance to deal with whatever it was that she had gathered from my words. She was "mostly" frigid (an intriguing expression) in many different ways.

In any sexual encounter she would undoubtedly barricade herself from biological design with common artifact--and half the Pharmacopoeia, besides. She was avid and did not know it. I could see--as the reader has seen with me, no doubt--that her domestic debacle was the result of a projection of her own guilt-sense. She was a nubile dancer. But she used her dancing rather meanly--as a sly and enjoyable confession to herself which, she thought, was the most that society would permit of dancing. She was somewhat spoiled and very selfish--extremely prissy in the real, felt sense of the word: a bitch. Nobody, that is to say, existed for her excepting in that they existed for her desires.

She had moved to a room beside me. She had tried to lead me--at first--on the dance floor. She had thrust the eyes and lips of her psyche into the brunette cashier's hair without caring in the least for the brunette or for any woman or for what happened to others. She had attributed the libidinous gesture to my imagination, when I had brought it to light. She had failed to add anything but frustration to the life of a man about whom I had heard, so far, what I regarded as almost nothing but good.

She had bought her world and was willing to pay in cash to keep it the way she wanted it--but not willing to pay in a dime's worth of herself. She needed a lesson. For there were nice things about her.

The expression on her face when she talked about Rol was descriptive, to me, of many good qualities--of loyalty to emotions she did not understand, of untapped vehemences, of tenderness--of human characteristics she was unable to embody. She had been taught not to embody them--she had been taught such attributes were weaknesses--or she had been taught nothing concerning them at all. Her greedy mother. The cocksure extravert--her father--a man who, even from her brief account, plainly believed he knew all there was worth knowing on all topics, one who had reached final conclusions about Everything. Reached them--or was able to jump to them by a process requiring neither thought nor the machinery for evaluation. Reached them or jumped to them because his opinions were peeled like decalcomania from Precedents set up by businessmen who have graduated from good universities.

I knew the type. Sometimes I feel there is hardly any other. Yvonne's dad--successful real estate man--Ivy League--New Yorker--daughter-adored. He had no reason to doubt his excellence. He was rich, which proved it. He had graduated from a superior university, which guaranteed his intelligence, knowledge and culture. And his success had been achieved in a tough game in the biggest city on the earth. Moreover, he was, apparently, a churchman. Hence not only the tradition of America, as a whole, and the judgment of upper-class America, but God Himself, attested to his superiority. On top of all that, he was, no doubt, a good guy. A good guy who had loved his elder daughter a little more (how?) than Yvonne.

It was not remarkable that Yvonne exhibited the characteristics and the reactions she'd sketched for me--or those I'd witnessed. She had been packaged in the best fashion of the richest and most powerful culture of the twentieth century by people who knew and felt less of the significance of life than any other group which has arisen in the species during its past ten or twenty parasitical millenniums. In representing the highest peak of what is called civilization she presented the least sensitive arrangement of what is human.

A nice bitch, then, with a father complex.

When we began dancing, I was still fiddling in my mind with fragments of the dinner monologue. A couple of things should be said about it.

As the reader has perceived, it represented in its way a conscious effort at self-assessment. It was a partial statement of philosophy--my own--urged upon me at that time because, under my circumstances, some review of philosophy was inevitable. When the Ghoul appears, one thinks about one's thoughts.

For a while, we scarcely talked at all.

American women, as a rule, will rarely listen to a monologue by a man; when they do, it is usually because they want something from the man. Men have, generally, the better faculty for speech; in America they are not trained to use it. And they are, moreover, so accustomed to female authority in their formative years that they submit, all their lives, to the clamor of it. An aggregation of American people is thus conventionally dominated by the tongues of women and sounds like the continuous breaking of dishes.

Yvonne had listened through part of a lunch and all of a dinner and now we set our communication in a more definite language--one that followed the tempo of maracas and made use of the whole body.

"Rol," she said once, during an Afro-Cuban number, "needs lessons."

"Who doesn't?"

"Did you take a lot?"

"Hundreds."

She danced quietly for a while. "Did they teach you--?"

I held her a little closer. The gardenias smelled like nights in Florida. "It's not in the book, Yvonne. But there's nothing in the book, either, that says you shouldn't go to Havana and find out what the steps mean--when you've learned how to do them."

She said, "I think I better sit down."

We went to our table and she ordered another Planter's Punch. Her face was a damp, darker color now than peach; perspiration had curled small ends of her hair so that they were like the tendrils on vines. She was panting--and trying to disguise it--but I could hear the breath in her throat and see the dilation of her nostrils. We had been dancing hard. We both needed the long, slow drink of air--though the air here was warm, full of smoke, and had garish light in it that made too plain the grimed plaster on the walls. Too plain, that is, for the music and its mood.

"You do things to me," she said.

"You do them to yourself. In sex, men respond to the subject, women to the object. I'm your object--but you're the response."

"I could be annoyed with that."

"More of what you'd call antifeminist propaganda?"

She shook her head. "Annoyed on the grounds that you apparently never let yourself go."

"On the contrary. I always let myself go. But I always let my brain go along, too."

She thought about that. "Annoyed--then--on the grounds that there's nothing reciprocal about the dance we had."

"But you'd be wrong. After all--I asked you to dinner."

"Because you were curious." She spoke petulantly. "Because you like to find out what makes people tick. Because you're full of half-baked missionary impulses."

"Because you're a damned good-looking dame."

"You think so?"

"Don't fish."

"I'm not! Plenty of people think that I'm a spoiled brat with merely superficial good looks."

"Girls that troll in my waters catch whatever is swimming by that's hungry. Of course you're a spoiled brat--and all good looks are superficial. So I was in a mood. I came down to lunch. I saw a blonde with a book--odd enough, in itself, to be interesting. A hell of a good-looking blonde. And I sat down beside her and she told me the story of her life."

She saw that she was not going to be appeased beyond that deliberately meager degree. She sighed and picked up the tall glass as soon as the waiter deposited it and drank perhaps a third of it, thirstily. Afterward, she tittered. "I'm going to get tight, if I do that again."

"And if you get tight, I'll take you home."

"And if you take me home, I'll pound on your door."

"And if you pound on the door, I'll put you under a cold shower."

"And I'll call the manager."

"You won't need to. He'll be helping me with the shower."

"I thought you were maybe hoping I'd get a little tight."

"Why?"

"Don't men?"

"Not me."

"It's supposed," she said with a flirtatious glance, "to make it easier."

"Make what easier?"

"Oh--being with girls."

"I never found it difficult--_except_ when they were tight. Then my impulse is to run."

"There we go again! Women mustn't drink. But you--being a man--don't care if the boys get blind."

"Did I say so? Having been a drunk--and quit--I detest drunks. A common example of the law of opposites in operation. I force myself to associate with them, sometimes, because I owe drunkenness a good deal of quid pro quo--"

"Like an Alcoholic Anonymous?"

"Like that--without the self-canonization. An American man--with a few drinks in his blood stream--is able to become a shade more human. To shed the posture of men demanded by his era and its women. To show he has feelings, to be introverted--unless he gets out of hand--and even to think a little bit. To cherish and fear, to appreciate and revile, to show some evidence of the democracy and human brotherhood he is always talking about--and always doing his best to defeat by getting to the top in nefarious ways. I don't mind guys being slightly tight. Excepting for the danger that they'll go beyond that stage--which they so generally do."

"But women! Dear, dear!"

"The average American female with three or four cocktails in her becomes a living exhibit of the frustrations inherent in the feminist myth of these days. Together with the compulsions."

"Yes, Mr. Wylie?"

I grinned at her. "She sets out to _prove_ the myth she has not been able to live up to, sober--that women are superior to men and also the exact equals of men. She does this by turning into a bad imitation of a man. She argues. She imagines her arguments are brilliant and crushing--when they are non sequiturs and ad hominems. She directs. She orders. She demands. She judges--she is a little tin magistrate hurling charges to unseen juries and handing out sentences on her enemies or auditors. She is both the defending and the prosecuting attorney. She is everything but a lady and everybody but the prisoner. Which shows, of course, that she feels imprisoned when sober, and also envious of males when she goes around in her sober mind trying to convince herself and everybody she is their equal and also their superior."

Her voice suddenly became flat and cold. "I am beginning to get very tired of you, Mr. Wylie."

I looked at her.

You have only to apologize, to crawl about for a moment, to resume flattery or a suggestion thereof, to dance again, to put your hand gently on her--in such a way that she would remove it firmly. Then everything will be stardust again. She will be a beautiful young woman enjoying, with world sanction, the company of a suitable guy. Toying, perhaps, with the thought of an affaire. Toying would be her word and toy, her inept function.

And what had I been doing?

I looked for the waiter. If he had been visible in the smoke-spun, light-pulsing, low altitude of the big room, I would have asked for the check and taken her straight to her door and to hell with her. This was my night to howl, maybe. It was turning into my night to die. I had the right--or intended to make the right--to howl and die as I pleased and with whom I chose.

But while I was looking, she sensed my intention. "I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to be rude! You hurt my feelings."

So I dissembled. "I was hunting for our waiter. Let's go someplace else."

We walked down the staircase of a Latin spot off Eighth Avenue called the Cuban Paradise. A spot with a still lower ceiling, and no air conditioning or ventilation. Two small rumba bands alternate, so the music is constant, and nine-tenths of the customers are Cubans or Puerto Ricans or South Americans. The orchestras are not pretentious, but such as may be heard on a hundred side streets in Havana.

We took a little table at the wall. New Yorkers spend a good deal of their lives with their backs to walls, looking at things, eating things, drinking. We ordered coffee and the waiter dutifully told us there was a small minimum. It was Cuban coffee--thick and sweet--and we listened to rhythms musically naïve but emotionally more sophisticated than those of the big, smooth, uptown bands. Music is like accent in speech, and very few foreigners learn the language of another nation so well as to lose all traces of their own tongue--to talk like natives. At the Cuban Paradise, the Latins danced as they were supposed to and wanted to. Working people having fun. Immigrants remembering tropical nights--and sounds never heard in Manhattan--trees never seen on its streets--flowers never sold in its markets.

There were pairs of girls dancing together--hopefully--and when I saw them, executing the slow, insidious steps of a bolero--I glanced at Yvonne. She was watching them, too--watching them so intently that my glance became a stare. She noticed and swept from her face its look of participation.

Again, I felt terribly sorry for her. Sorry as one feels sorry for a bird that has failed to migrate and sits on its branch in the dreary rain of autumn, knowing the world is wrong, feebly sensing a lost, warmer climate, but unable to resolve the quandary of the dream and the pain of its present. A bird can be a sharp thing with a reptile's appetite--a bright bundle of vanity and vengeance. She smiled, though.

"Those two girls--the redhead and the one with blue-black hair--are very good, aren't they?"

"The dark one's beautiful--like an Indian."

"Probably is part Indian--and also probably a Dodger fan who chews bubble gum and works in Macy's stockroom."

"I wish I could lead--the way she does!"

"That's the boy's department." I laughed. "Sorry! Maybe you're right. Maybe I am prejudiced. Though I regard it as merely the extreme and necessary product of my constant effort to keep track of prerogatives which are defiled and trampled every few seconds in this fair land!" I then added, "If you really want to learn dancing, you have to learn both parts. Yours--the girl's."

She was easily mollified. And she was--not tight--but less cautious about herself. "I never thought of that! It would be interesting!" She looked at me thoughtfully. "Did you ever dance with a man?"

"Of course."

Her gray eyes kept looking. "Was it exciting?"

"Sailors," I said, "dance together on battleships and have fun. That's why sailors are good dancers. I was never a sailor, however. The dancing I've done with guys was when my teacher despaired of being able to show me a step--and called in one of the boys to demonstrate--and to lead it."

"Oh."

She was disappointed. She had fled in revulsion from her husband's act; she had no similar scruples about me.

On the contrary.

I thought that if she possessed even a little insight into that single pair of facts she might be a happier girl. And I also thought that any attempt to supply the insight by pointing out the two inconsistent attitudes would only tighten the hold of her small, personal dilemma. She would deny the very suggestion; she would use all her energy to authenticate the denial--immediately--and in the weeks, months, years to come--use it to kid herself. Not to investigate herself.

So I said, "It's a good way to learn. Lots of gals get women teachers in dancing school. Men embarrass them."

"Really?"

"Sure."

"You mean--if I went and enrolled and asked for a girl teacher--nobody would think I was--queer?"

"Thousands do."

"I never knew it." She said that almost to herself--and hurried on, as if to expunge it. "We had a man teacher that came to the house--and I was always afraid to go to a school--for fear I'd get some slimy gigolo--"

"More likely a GI working his way through college."

"Don't you want to dance with me again?"

It was after one o'clock when we climbed back up on the humid street and the doorman flagged a cab. She said the night was young--and I said, but I was old. I said I had to get up early and work. I told the driver to go by way of Central Park and Seventy-second Street and while we hummed between the lamplit green leaf walls she moved over to be kissed, so I kissed her, but not much. And after that I spoiled my breast-pocket handkerchief wiping off the lipstick, which is another convention. We went through the empty lobby. The night clerk was a tall, handsome gent and his eyes glimmered at me when I rang the elevator bell. Harry brought a car down, let out a policeman (who had been on God alone could imagine what errand) and hoisted us to Sixteen.

She took her key from the golden handbag and unlocked 1603. She turned up her face slightly. "It's been a lovely evening."

I tossed the key of 1601 and caught it. "Me, too."

"It's a pity a girl can't ask you in for a nightcap. But you'd only be able to have Coca-Cola."

"Gotta sleep. I'll give you a buzz in the morning, Yvonne."

"Will you?"

"Bet."

She gave me a musical good night and opened her door slowly. I walked down the red carpet--and her door closed with a bang.

3

There was nothing for me in my own apartment.

The books--even Vogt's _Road to Survival_, which I had almost finished--looked nervous. The many magazines--through all of which I had coursed while bathing, eating, sitting on the toilet, riding in the plane, idling--were like partly-consumed meals: there were bits here and there I still wanted to taste, to digest--but not now. I was, of course, neither sleepy nor intending to go to bed. I can get along for days, for weeks, on four or five hours of sleep, even without throat cancer. Often, when I am writing a long story, I begin with the sunrise, go to sleep at two or three the next morning, get up with dawn again--and so continue until the job is done.

My body ad-libs its life. When its brain is electrified, when the aurora of thought and imagination and sensation ascends there as a means to work, to dream, to worry, to engage in reasoning or wild speculation, the thing that calls itself "I" follows after, like a boy after a rainbow--and I have found as many pots of gold as a bank president. And when my body has nothing to say or do or think about, I sleep. I lie on the ground. I hoe potatoes and corn, dig garbage pits, make tables and bookshelves, fix gadgets. I sit on a beach and stare at the accumulation of hydrogen cunningly mixed with oxygen. When my body is sick, the I runs to doctors, takes pills, eases itself--and pushes at pain only if it must, like a man wheeling a heavy barrow up a hill. I do not have the illusion of fortitude that makes sadists of, say, Englishmen. I suffer. And when my I is grayed with its own weather, or the bad chemistry of the body that owns it, I suffer, too--jittering and jizzling, mourning and dreading, a repelled, repellent object--a man with blues.

The construction of society does not permit such practices by most. They have the 8:02 to catch, the Monday wash, and their two weeks in July. The church bell rings not when the preacher feels he is close to God, but at eleven, on the Seventh Day. He who is weak with the length of winter cannot escape it; who faints in the summer must faint again upon recovering consciousness--or else employ his I to whip his body so that it will face summer without further protest.

No other animal would do itself such violences.

This is an age of schedules. The people of it have long since foundered in time. Time is a sea that presses them to its bottom--a sea that waterlogs their tissues--a sea that prevents them from the experience of its own medium as other than a weight and an absolute dimension.

Living is drowning with the first lesson at the clock and being drowned forever after that.

My body and my I had endeavored, with some success, to ignore the obsessional meridians. Others may travel them like a baby that has learned to walk and become so enamored of the skill as to proceed, steadily, for the rest of its days, in one straight line on time's sea bottom. We have stopped--separately and together--somewhat explored time's other dimensions--gone to the surface and seen the sun, for example--bought time, stolen it, ignored it, zigzagged, looked back through it, and seen the straight line of the compulsive infant for the circle it really is.

As Dr. E. has shown, time's a human invention--a convenient illusion. As the body knows, it has no more significance, alone, than width, by itself. But the I has taken time, in most cases, for a universal measurement, notched it in hours and minutes, and set the whole world to counting time. Its mere recognition is subjective. Yet, how few subjects realize that if the subject be a baseball player, and if his subjectivity and objectivity live fifty years--then the subjectivity of Wordsworth, or Emerson, may have lasted for several hundred thousand?

So, in this frame of reference--this truer attitude--even I, compared with some of my timeserving fellow men, may be older than Methuselah.

The body is potentially immortal: it can reproduce itself. And so the I would be immortal in its self-sensation if it were oriented, like the lives of animals, toward that which it could reproduce--all men toward all men yet to be--rather than toward its wretched self-awareness, its greedy, permanent stoppage of time for narcissistic attitudinizing. The I is a mirror. It can see itself forever and any now as this now--if only it looks at the reflection to observe all those behind and all beyond, of which it is an integral. But if it ignores those behind--rules out even the next-lowest author of its instincts--and if it eschews the requirements of those to come which are the integral function of itself--if, that is, the I concentrates upon its one embodied reflection, rejecting the panoply of life and repudiating past and present for its little now--then, truly that I is mortal. It is a suicide for that it is an assassin.

Such are all persons but a very few, these days.

So are they taught.

So inspired: unpunctuality and unproductivity are un-American.

So do they urgently maintain themselves--egoists without the sense of individuation.

And that is why the earth is perishing for man.

In the hatred people have for people.

And the absolute hatred of posterity that rises from the absolute rejection of our real ancestry.

There are moments when the circumstance is unutterably clear to me--and in these, I _know_--without respect to the immediate employment of my body or the thing called I.

There are moments when the time-easements I have bought grow clouded.

And then the knowledge escapes arms, legs, cranium, and I.

What man, reared as I was, domiciled in this earth's insanity, has even the intimations, let alone the occasional assurance? And who, attached to his clocks, trains, bells, and the earth's turned shadow, keeps a continual hold upon the vital principle? Very few.

Say it was late.

Say I did not want to sleep.

Say, if you will, I did not want to face my circumstances. It is not so. The space during which I sat on the green sofa smoking my cigarette was what you call ten minutes--an infinity that could not be shortened, made painful, or even touched at any point by measurement.

I picked up the telephone.

The colored girl had a soft voice. "Hello?"

"This is Phil Wylie--is Hattie there?"

"What's the name again, please, sir?"

I spelled it. She was gone for a long time. I felt a little amused. If Hattie didn't remember--I thought she would--they'd be obliged to consult books or files or whatever records they kept, that went back to the wild, drunk, bewildering years when my first marriage had worn patience thin, shattered it, and turned loose on the town a younger man. A decade and more ago.

Hattie's voice--deep, harsh--worried, I thought. "Phil, for God's sake! Where have you been keeping yourself? I heard you were a reformed character."

"My wife told me to call you up."

Hattie was unruffled. "Sometimes they do. How are you?"

"Swell."

"I'm glad to hear it! What can we do for you?"

"It's a long, fascinating story that I'd like to run up and tell you."

"Be a pleasure. I'm losing at bridge. Looking for an out." She chuckled. "Stingers? Side cars? What shall I get ready?"

"Coffee."

"Better still! Viola keeps a percolator on--but I'll have her make it fresh. Usually--it's like French pot-au-feu--goes on forever."

"You've doubtless--moved--?"

"Moved! We're Manhattan's most displaced persons!" She gave me a high number on the West Side.

There was never a rush hour at Hattie's. But two a.m. was what might be called the peak. It embarrassed no one: she had plenty of sitting rooms. In any case, most of the customers knew one another--and knew one another as clients.

A white marble lobby. An elevator with much gilded fretwork. It was operated by a Negro with an exceedingly noncommittal face. Only one door in the hall on the top floor. A good-sized apartment building, I thought, as I pushed the bell and heard the chimes; hence a good-sized bordello. The colored girl who had answered the phone answered the door, keeping the chain attached. I told her my name.

The foyer was dim and modernistic. Two halls branched from it. I could see doors along both--and hear music.

"Jes' follow me, please."

She said it all night.

The perfumes mingled, the way they do. It is a woman's medley--expensive or cheap--with no other detectable difference. One door was open. Two girls sat there--pale, straight hair that fell to a sharp, sculptured point over a book and a pair of shimmering, nylon legs.

Viola went on.

She opened another door. Hattie was standing at the window in a green dress--her once-sleek orange hair dyed black, now, and fluffed out--her ankles no longer slim--and when she turned I hid, as all of us do, my inner response to the etching of the interval--that very Time which I so recently had seen to be without importance. She was now about fifty-five.

"Phil," she said, "this is nice! You don't seem a day older--just wiser. But look at me!"

"Brunette."

"A harridan. The warmest heart in the world--and what happens? The opposite of Dorian Grey. I blame it on the high morals and low conduct of the cops. Hard years. I loved Fiorello--and he despised every bone in my body. I was even over in Jersey for a while. It was the lowest period in my life. Sit down over there in the red chair. Viola, bring us coffee. You know--I've often thought about you--when I read your books--or when one of the girls did--or when I read something of yours in a magazine. You aren't around here much, any more, though, are you?"

I shook my head. "Miami Beach. And now--we're building a house in Miami."

"Florida. I went down last winter. Had a cold I simply couldn't shake. Stayed at the Steinberg-Riviera. Hell of a place, Miami Beach! Wonderful weather, period. Everybody on the make. Shake a palm and out drops a chippy. A madam with ethics would starve there--and the news about good taste hasn't got south of the Mason and Dixon Line."

"I always think of it as the end of the American dream."

"It's the end, anyhow. Phil. Do you really want to see me? Because if you're being polite for old time's sake--maybe you'd rather put off the sentimental chitchat till later."

Hattie is a thoughtful dame.

I was about to laugh at her when an abrupt inquiry held me for a second or two. I was surprised--a little. But the question postponed itself. "I came up--solely and utterly to call on you, Hattie."

She shrugged one shoulder. She yawned. "Maybe we can return your calls. We used to. But--really--I'm delighted. Except when you were--overburdened--you were always fun to have around. It's a dull life--just being chaperon to a lot of whores. And it seems to me the boys aren't interested in philosophy any more. They used to spend more time chinning than cheating, around here. Back in the old days of humanism and liberalism and Coué and the market boom, when the world was full of fun. Why--I had to scout local campuses for girls who could keep in the debates! Now--the boys just come in tight and preoccupied--ask for a girl by hair color, like picking out paint for a kitchen--pay--and scram. I can't recall how long it's been since we held one of those impromptu breakfasts--for the celebrities and plain people who happened to be around! It's depressing!"

I knew what she meant. Everybody knows.

Viola brought the coffee.

"Pretty," I said.

Hattie looked at the door where Viola had gone. "Nice girl. Married and has two kids. The wages are no damned good--but the tips!--I think she does as well as I do, after taxes. More passes made at Vi than nearly anybody actually working. She's a strict Baptist."

"I wasn't--" I thought of reminiscing a little. Then I thought it might be sad. Hattie seemed to have read my mind.

"Remember Elysse? The French girl with the brown bangs?"

I did.

"She's married. Lives in Troy. Comes to see me once in a while. Lovely girl. And--Charmaine? The president of an oil company moved her onto Park Avenue--died--and left her his heap. Millions. She's a good customer of mine. You know, Kinsey should interview me before he writes more books."

Kinsey again.

"Why don't you drop him a note? Volunteer?"

Hattie's face wrinkled with amusement. "I wouldn't want to shock the poor man."

I laughed.

Her brows came together. They were ordinarily straight and level, red once, black now--like a crayon mark made with a ruler. She still had good-looking amber eyes, fiery but steady, and her forehead was very high. She was beginning to look like some sort of sachem--a tribal wiseman, or a poet. Quite an impressive dame.

"It's funny," she said. "I've even heard men right in these rooms argue that Kinsey was a liar and crazy and incompetent and a menace to society. Otherwise bright men. Heard them say that Kinsey only talked to screwballs and neurotics and people who were inventing stuff to show off. You'd hardly believe such self-kidding was possible!"

"They said it about psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, too," I agreed. "Said that their conclusions were obviously nutty because they never saw anybody but nutty patients. Never stopped to reflect that a neurotic is not a nut, that every patient did his best to tell the precise, detailed truth about his private life, and that every single one of those stories involved the sex behavior of many, many other people who are called normal. I mean--the psychologists learned a whole hell of a lot about what normal people did from every neurotic patient. So when they talked about sex--they had the dope. Most people never thought of that angle."

"Most people," Hattie said, "never think. And when it comes to sex, they think about ten times less than never."

"Which brings me," I nodded, "to the matter in hand. I got a nephew. A brainy apple and a good kid. And you had a girl here--or on your call list--till about six months ago, named Marcia something--who's gone to live with Paul--he being the nephew."

Hattie said, "Yes," and waited.

I realized that a dozen years is a long time in which not to see anybody--a time long enough for a change, especially if one has quit drinking, married again, and so on and so on and so on. Hattie was afraid I was up to some sort of Presbyterian nasty-work--and she was ready to be disappointed. Ready not to help me call the cops on Marcia, so to speak, and ready to write off one more guy as a galvanized hypocrite.

I said, "In my frank opinion, Paul is not the sort who will be happy with an ex-houri. And I don't say that because he's my nephew and because I'm broad-minded about everybody but who-touches-me. Let me tell you what Paul's like--and how he came to confide in me on the situation--how he got into it--and how he's acting about it as of this afternoon."

"Tell me."

The longer she listened, the more she relaxed. When finally I stopped talking she walked over to the window, where she had stood when I came in. Her broadening buttocks and shoulders blotted out most of the river-gleam and the Jersey-glow, which you could see from there--but not the boat-hoots which came up around her, wallowing through the city, buzzing the middle ears of the millions. She stood there a while. The frame of faraway light blinked around her and the ferry boats and the freighters hollered pensively at each other. When she turned around, there were tears not only in her eyes but on her cheeks.

"If people only knew what I know!" She said it in a quiet voice with nothing of the brash timber of her usual speech.

"I'll buy that. I'll even add a big apothegm, Hat. People have found out so much, they are now obliged to learn the rest. The whole God-damned, agonizing, exalted rest of it."

She smiled in a woebegone way and got a Kleenex from a drawer. "It'll take thousands of years," she said. "They've been making the same mistakes, that long."

"Yeah. Meanwhile, we've got Paul and Marcia. I'm supposed to have lunch with them tomorrow. You can see--from what I've told you--why I think the thing will fold--painfully. There is, however, a chance it won't. A chance that depends on what sort of girl Marcia is, mostly. Which is why I came up here."

She was shaking her head. "Not on the kind of girl she is--necessarily. On how much she loves him."

"Okay. That."

"Providing--she can love. Providing--she hasn't kidded herself into a sweet little daydream that she got from reading too many women's magazines. Or all those books. She sure was a reading girl. And smart. And attractive, too. How tough are you, Phil?"

"It's something you do, isn't it? Not fill out in a questionnaire?"

Hattie smiled. "I don't want to offend those fine sensibilities of yours. Or make you think I'm something special in the she-Judas line. But you want to know whether the girl means it. Why not send your Paul back to his laboratory after lunch--he'd like that--like you to get acquainted with her--and why not--?"

"I'm not tough that way. That's businessman tough."

She dropped a hand. "Still--there's hardly one of them in a thousand who wouldn't--work out some breezy little arrangement--for a G, say. And she'd have to be such a one."

"She might just see through it. You said she was smart."

Hattie shrugged. "If she was smart enough to resist the G, maybe she'd be smart enough. However."

"In other words, you don't know about her."

"Not Marcia. If it was ninety-nine in a hundred, I could tell you right off. Some of them make damned good wives--better sometimes for being here. With the kind of men who really understand what life is--and with the kind who don't mind because they don't understand anything at all. I like to see those girls get married. Lots more make swell mistresses for men who married hunks of flint. I could go calling at so many swank addresses that your head would swim. And sometimes I do. There are worse places to look for a wife than good bagnios. Any high-society party, for instance. Women's colleges, too, I suspect. Most country clubs. The dud percentage--the lack of warmth--runs higher there--"

"Not to mention know-how."

She sighed--and then chuckled. "Isn't it crazy? Something that should be given more loving practice than music--something that needs extra experience and skill for civilized people. They think you can learn on one bridal night! Or from a book! A girl it would take a genius of sex to seduce satisfactorily marries a bright young college boy in the chopsticks class--and what have you got? The American home. Did you ever--" the question--indeed, the entire subject--seemed to have roused her--"ever once have an affair with a plain American wife who was any good? Somebody else's, I mean?"

"Once."

"Once! And how many--?"

"Look, Hattie. I came to cross-question you--"

She thought awhile, when she saw I wouldn't reply--looking out at the city and detesting it. "I've had lots of men bring their wives right here--to look and learn."

"How many?" I grinned.

"God knows! I'm an old madam, Phil. But many a snooty female has lost her inhibitions in my parlors--and gained a little knowledge that went into making a happy home for some guy. The more people say physical sex is unimportant--the more it is likely to become the only thing that is important for them. And they don't realize."

"I know."

"You know. And a lot of my clients know. And a lot of women. But they can't change anything."

"Yeah."

"What do I really do here, then? Ask yourself. I'm in the business of supplying erotic fun to people who are made for it, born to it, urged from the cradle to the grave to take part in it, who depend upon it for mental health, for a decent feeling of good will toward others--and aren't allowed to engage in it even with their own wedded wives, by the statutes of New York State and forty-seven other little penitentiaries! That's my trade. And because I'm in it--I am regarded as the greatest blight in civilized society, by millions. Holy, jumped-up St. Peter's be-hee!"

Through a recollected haze of alcohol I heard this same tirade from old and distant days. And Hattie was right, in her way. The theory of accession to culture and intelligence, to morality and Godliness, through the restraint of desire by the demeaning of it, had run its course in the Western world and unstrung nearly all of us. And where that thesis did not exist, there were others, still more absurd, to bring other peoples to their repetitive, obnoxious dooms.

Quite suddenly, I felt like weeping.

She left the window and sat down. "Relax."

The feeling passed like a bird's shadow.

"What were you doing all evening?" she asked. "How come you're up so late? Work?"

I thought of telling her--telling her the truth. Thought of it hard and seriously. "Out with a dame," I said, which was not what I meant by the truth. "A wife. A pretty package of all the quality advertising, from Pasadena, who had caught her hubby in flagrante with a gent--and fled. Protesting too much, if you understand."

"Half the girls in the country--if they had the nerve--!"

"A latent thing. In maturity, according to the psychologists, it becomes the psychological stuff by which we understand and appreciate our own sex."

"And it does, too."

"If you say so, it must be right, Hat."

"There--you are damned tooting!" She looked at me. "So you took her out--?"

"Rumbaing. I've got good at it--since I knew you."

"Really good?"

"Good enough to please the Cuban girls. So we danced. And I brought her back to the hotel--and turned her loose."

"Nice guy!"

"I wanted her to exercise her mind. After all--I only met her at lunch--and she's already moved up on my floor, next door."

"You should change hotels, then."

"Too lazy. Too busy. And I can deal with her. Spoiled--and too bad--because the guy she left sounds okay. I wish I could help her out. Taking--what they call--advantage of her, probably wouldn't. And you can't re-do a person's attitude and background in a few days--especially with a serial to correct. Usually requires years, and a good analyst--"

"Another wife--to be hated."

"By you?"

Hattie nodded. "I hate thousands of them. Some, I adore."

We didn't seem to find anything to say for a minute. I could have given her one more name for the short side of the ledger but I didn't want to. Finally I said, "If you get any ideas about Marcia--?"

"Call me up--when you've met her. Better still--come by again."

"I will." I had no idea whether I would or not.

She got up. "Look. Do me a favor and autograph a couple of your books for me, will you? And have another cup of coffee while I go downstairs and get them?"

"All right."

She went. Pretty soon a tall, redheaded girl came in without knocking, just as I'd expected one would. Brown-red hair--long, curled at the ends, and a pair of legs to look at. A girl like a mannequin--but no pose; no hauteur. She had enough sex appeal for the end of anybody's chorus line. She smiled open a wide mouth on even teeth and fixed her hazel eyes on me. Hattie remembered: I had never approved of whores who looked like whores. This one looked like a bright assistant on a magazine--or maybe the wife of a lucky prof.

"My name," she said, "is Gwen Taylor. Hattie got stuck for a few minutes--and told me to come in. I've heard a lot about you--here and there."

I stood and shook her hand.

She briefly grabbed her lower lip with her upper teeth. "Or is that--indelicate?"

"No. I'm pleased. And not fooled for a minute. You see--I know Hattie."

"After all," said the girl, "it's her profession. She said we were having coffee."

Viola came again with a tray. Gwen poured. "There are half a dozen of us around. Would you like to meet them?"

"One's enough."

Her eyes flickered and she smiled. "Thanks." She handed me the cup, served the sugar with tongs, poured cream, and fixed her own. "Warm night."

We talked about that.

By and by she nodded toward the radio-phonograph. "Hattie said you like to rumba. So do I."

I shook my head. "Sometime--"

She looked at me and smiled. "I hope!"

Hattie came with the books, by and by. She made an apology. I wrote in both volumes and signed my name and Hattie accompanied me down one of the two long halls with the many shut doors.

"Like Gwen?"

"Very much."

"I thought you would. She's--something! It's been marvelous to see you, Phil. Call me up!"

The exceedingly noncommittal elevator man took me back to the street. It was gravy-thick with the smell of the river.

I got a cab.

It slatted downtown.

Once, I leaned forward to tell the driver to turn around.

But I didn't speak.

4

There is a metal clip on every door in the Astolat; mail and written messages are put in it--so the guests won't have to stoop. I had a letter. A tidy backhand with little circles for periods and dots over the _i_'s. It looked like a billet-doux from Yvonne--and it was:

You meanie!

Everything you said got me so tremendously stimulated I couldn't sleep. I decided, after a struggle, if you were going to stir girls up that way, you were responsible for their condition. So I phoned you--and no answer! Don't you know hell hath no fury like a woman scorned? If you feel like a little chitchat when you do come in, phone me. I don't have to work tomorrow so you needn't be scrupulous about the hour. And even if you don't, thanks ever so much for a very disturbing, unsatisfying, lovely evening.

Yours, Y

It was four o'clock and my body was tired, though my mind was running round and round like a toy electric train.

I didn't want to see any more of Yvonne at the moment.

I turned out the lights in the sitting room, undressed, took a short, warm shower, and lay down on the double bed, naked. Usually, about two minutes after the lights go out, I fall asleep. But I knew it would take longer that night.

So I piled up the pillows and opened Vogt's _Road to Survival_ at the page where the jacket was enclosed.

Mr. Vogt's thesis is simple and damning; I had somewhat reflected upon it earlier that evening.

It is the philosophy of modern man to produce. To industrialize himself. To learn the techniques and technologies of science and of applied science. This is progress. Chinese, Soviets, Americans--everybody strives to speed up production, distribution, consumption. It is also the object of all nations to increase their populations.

The earth cannot support either of these two goals.

The topsoil of the planet will not feed the existing numbers of us, even now--and our method of using it is diminishing it at a gruesome rate. Faster and faster, we starve; and as we multiply, more of us will starve. Medicine, which increases the percentage of persons who survive infancy and extends the life span of all these, is but rapidly adding to sure victims of starvation.

We are busy breeding mouths to eat our future out of house and home.

Ideas of this sort have been around since Malthus's time.

These days, the facts accumulate.

I often reflect that man's contemporary sexual taboos lead (as they must, by the law of opposites) to sexual excesses: these are seen in man's witless overbreeding. His "moral" Catholic couch, his unregulated Baptist bed, sustains orgy and is the senseless agent of biological catastrophe. This is the riposte of Nature to man's refusal to use reason concerning his own nature.

Vogt wants planet-wide birth control, before the teeming hordes locust up the hope of a human hereafter.

Try and get it!

There are other truths about ourselves of this same order:

_The minerals._ We are digging them up with the reckless violence of pigs after truffles. Truffles can grow again--but not minerals. We are converting the earth's elements into forms all but irrecoverable even by the most immense expenditures of human energy and time.

_Our genes_--and the holy habit we've got into, of inhibiting birth among our most likely specimens--of proliferating boobs and nuts--of maintaining the feeble and the dim, abetting their rabbity bedding together--and of sending the cream of each generation to war's slaughter. This, alone, will drive us back toward apehood faster even than our growing physical destitution. Some European nations are doubtless already floundering in the poverty of residual blood-lines--bereft of brains and leadership by their religious devotion and their glorious wars.

Also, of course, there is our _failure to perceive our instinctual nature_. My own elected department in the category of dooms. Instinctively, as we must, all of us feel the weight of such colossal crimes against the meaning of instinct as those above--our cosmic disavowals (by our acts) of any responsibility toward men to come. That is why, at bottom, no one is happy in modern society--happy in his spirit, content, full of a sense of purpose and significance. It is why we shall have to remake civilization consciously--or to suffer its self-destruction.

Mr. Vogt, I thought, would feel the power of instinct, as it now blindly controls us, when he saw how religious men reacted to his simple indication of the necessity for using reason in our sex relations. And he would see the inertia of our traditions when he saw how utterly his warning was disbelieved, ignored, ridiculed, and forgotten. Others, with the same wild cry of despair, have had such reception, for the same reason.

It is not that man cannot do for himself.

But that he will not.

And he will not because he is self-flattered into the incredible illusion that Mr. and Mrs. America are doing very well already, thank you kindly.

After a long while, grinning over the tremendous sins of those who take it upon themselves to reject knowledge and yet to say what sin is, I closed the book.

Hell has one funny aspect.

It is where everybody lives.

I sent a thought to Messrs. Sheen, Niebuhr, and their ilk: The up-to-date devil, which you so earnestly seek, gentlemen, may readily be found--wearing the costume of your own minds: unconsciousness.

I slept like a log.