OPUS 21 Read online

  into Yvonne's eyes.

  When they stopped, Yvonne said softly, "That was wonderful!"

  "Like it?"

  "I never felt I was doing a rumba before. Even"--she laughed lightly toward me--

  "with the eminent professor Wylie."

  "He's good," Gwen said. "But you have to be experienced."

  "I used to think I was."

  "You will be, lamb," Gwen said.

  An announcer lengthily discussed various food products. Gwen turned him down to an indecipherable mutter. When strains of music returned thinly, Yvonne asked, "Can you tango?"

  Gwen nodded.

  So they danced again and, by and by, as they passed me, Yvonne said, "Mind if I borrow your girl friend for a brief chitchat?"

  I shook my head.

  Yvonne danced Gwen through the other room and through the doors. They closed quietly. Moments before, I had been embarrassed by Gwen's presence--by the realization that I had wanted companionship rather than passion. Now my feelings changed, showing how incomplete my awareness of them had been. I was alone and I did not want to be.

  Yvonne had deprived me of my casual date. I was not precisely jealous of one woman over another, but I was distressed. And this sentiment was not relieved by the plain fact that I was responsible, through a series of negative acts, for my situation.

  I could have sent Yvonne packing. I could, by not nodding my head, have kept Gwen with me. On the evening before, I could have accepted Yvonne's invitation for a nightcap, or accepted the later invitation in her note to me. I'd been somewhat Olympian on both occasions--a little more detached than there was detachment in the sum of the parts of my nervous system.

  But what should one do?

  What would others do?

  This is a question which I sometimes test by projecting myself into others, not to examine their circumstances, but to imagine what they would do in mine.

  I switched off my radio.

  I stretched out on my divan, lighted a cigarette and cogitated.

  A great many of the men I know would refuse to believe or weigh the facts as they existed. Their knowledge of homo sapiens is so superficial, so repressed, or so compartmented, that they could not even assume an Yvonne would want to take a Gwen into her boudoir, let alone that one had done so.

  And the majority of my male friends would label any narrative of my past two days as a boast. They would doubt that I'd encountered two such extremely attractive girls in so short a space of time. Two? Three, by the reckoning of these men--for they would include the scalding stare of Marcia as asexual coup. They would assume I'd somewhat mistaken my own libido for any description I gave of the three girls, in the bargain.

  They would forget how disturbed Yvonne was; hence they would fail to see that the interest she had shown in me was motivated not by myself, or any possible charm of mine, but by her wish for escape, or for anodyne, or for revenge--and perhaps, also, for mere experiment with her insatieties. These men would also overlook the fact that Gwen was a prostitute. Such liking as she felt for me was merely a fortunate vicissitude of business. She would have called me up even if she had disliked me: trade was slow and I had the price. Such men--and I knew many--would even overlook Marcia's attachment to Paul, on the opposite grounds that she was, after all, a prostitute. They would imagine every woman's hot-eyed glance as evidence of their irresistibility. In my place, they would conclude that three women, young and handsome, had given them a tumble because of what they were.

  Three handsome young women had certainly invited me; but not one for myself.

  There is also, among some of my friends, an inverted form of chivalry which causes them to feel they are obliged to respond to every feminine beckon with assent. But they take no responsibility for the results--the tangible and psychological results--of whatever behavior follows such assent. These imagine themselves great lovers and great understanders of women; they actually hold toward women about the same attitude they hold toward roast beef.

  To all these last men, the fact that I had failed to wait upon Yvonne the night before, and dispatched Gwen with a nod, and responded to Marcia's luncheon leer with nothing more than analysis, would seem a great waste of opportunity, a failure to meet obligation, and even a kind of hypocrisy. For they would be men who knew that I held no brief for absolute fidelity in marriage. Knowing that, they would conclude any refusal of mine to commit adultery was Pharisaic. Such men are black-white viewers; they go through life blind to the color spectrum.

  I knew still other men--a few, at least--who would regard my association with prostitutes and loose women (which is what they would call Yvonne) as proof that I was a bum. To these, all that I did, thought and expressed would be discredited by the antics of some of my companions. "Wylie," they would say, "hangs out with scum." Ergo Wylie's discernment, his art, his intellectual ability is manifestly nil.

  This is the common attitude of "Christians"--though how they explain their own Christ's various companions is beyond my guessing.

  Two or three more of my friends would take what might be called the anthropological view of my situation. They would argue that, being away from my wife and needing sexual refreshment, having the opportunity, but not taking it, I was acting weakly. These would overlook not merely the motives of the ladies, and my feelings about my wife, but also the fact that my share of everyman's borrowed time was apparently running out--a circumstance which in itself alters the libido.

  To some of my friends, then, I would have to excuse myself for what I had already done; to others, I would have to make excuses for what I had failed to do. To myself, I had nothing much to say.

  In a minute, an hour, or on the morrow, my reasons, moods and motives would change once more and my behavior might be different. Hence this empathetic review had merely shown again how men behave according to sets of compulsions--patterns of conscious virtue, conscious sin, or conscious animalism--which stem in every case from arbitrary mores. And neither amongst the overtly virtuous nor the subtly sinful is the pattern valuable; it makes hypocrites of the former and deprives the latter of joy. The animalists, too, have no solution: they fornicate as through a wall, knowing a person exists on the other side but not what a person is.

  So any instinct, when unseen, compels men to abide by some formulation of itself. They accept a Faith and are then obliged to play they are the God who rules that Faith. So, too, a man like myself, who quests beyond these compulsive faiths (and is therefore called faithless by Believers of every stamp) foolishly plays God whenever he does not quite know himself.

  I sat there, sneering at the pompous fashion in which I had behaved and wondering how to make peace with my solitude, my recovered mortality. Even I had wanted more than I had found for myself. Not redheads and ash blondes abed in the night of that heat-glazed city, but their company, their tempting presence. It would be a matter worth thinking about in the future--if my future was to be long enough for that kind of thought.

  I came close, again, to calling Ricky, at that point.

  Telling her. Summoning her.

  And I thought that most of the men I knew would do precisely that. They like to ride downhill alone; but when the burden grows heavy and the grade steep, their wives become wheels on the wagon of their difficulties. So American marriage is too often both trouble-sharing and a private sport. "If you love her," they would say, "and if she loves you, it is your duty to let her know and she would be hurt if you did not." These, I think, are little boys married to their mothers. If I had known the truth of my condition, Ricky would have been the next to know. But I was not certain--quite. Let her sleep the night through, then. Live two more contented days. She is my wife. She nurtures me and I her and if I told her when I did not need to tell her, that would be a true weakness in my lexicon.

  Even while thinking that, I looked at the phone again and touched it. But I am not quite such a schoolboy.

  I may be the only male in America who feels as I do but my feeling is
definite: from the age of about six, I did not want a girl who was necessarily just like the girl that married dear old dad.

  It may be that there are no real men left in America. America may be as barren of actual masculinity as Sodom of holy folk.

  Some of us, however, still take an occasional crack at keeping alive the memory of what men once were--or fanning the hope of what they may be.

  Once, for instance, men behaved with compassion toward women; they were even interested in how women feel; what women did was actually important to men--once. It may again be so.

  But the likelihood is that nobody ever escaped Sodom alive. Lot's wife looked back for a last squint at the new streamlined dish washers--and turned to a pillar of salt.

  Lot, a moment later, tried to save a charred copy of the financial page--and turned into a pillar of bicarbonate of soda.

  I got to about that point in my estimates when the doors opened again. Yvonne appeared--flushed and tousled--a drink in one hand and some books in the other.

  "Lonesome?" she asked.

  "Far from it," I said. "I was working with the Lord."

  She laughed. "Join us?"

  I shook my head. "I thought not. Here! Amusez-vous!" She threw the books on my bed and shut the door again.

  I looked at the books. Three mystery stories in the conventional getup of gaud and grue and one volume without a jacket: Huxley's Ape and Essence, which Yvonne had de-nuded to camouflage another treatise. I passed up the mysteries--the immunizing doses of mayhem, the habit-forming homicide--with which so many of the better people try to allay their critical sensations in this civilization. I took the Huxley back to my living room and read in it here and there.

  It was unfortunate, I thought, that the bright Aldous had seen fit to show the world that he, too, could write a screenplay. Did he need a studio job, I wondered?

  But it was only funny that the public and the critics had misjudged the tale. For Huxley's portrait of post-atomic California was not, as most persons assumed, the flight of a delirious brain. It was, by every relevant index, the most likely prediction that an intelligent man could make, these days. It was just what good actuaries and capable business forecasters should anticipate. Six hundred years ago, I reflected, the Great Plague had reduced Western Europe to a similar condition: religion had become corrupt, rogues had seized the government, the expiring feudal system had been finally shattered, and the people had roamed amidst half-empty towns and cities, living by robbery, raping, burning witches, and indulging every horrid superstition, while knowledge vanished and science stood still. This condition had lasted for more than a century.

  The intervening twenty generations had not been enough to change man a particle. He was the same specious brainist and therefore the same potential dupe of his unaltered instincts. His opposite possibilities were perhaps even stronger--since he had exploited vanity for six more centuries. Atomic bombs, likely, would be worse than Plague and have long-lasting, ancillary effects of the very sort described by Huxley. And there would be new plagues--military diseases.

  Yet it had not occurred seriously to anybody, so far as I knew, that the mordant scenery of Ape and Essence was a logical extension of current events. Wild fantasy, the critics thought--having insufficient imagination to evaluate past or present and no education in the sciences whatever, as a rule.

  Well, I thought, when and if we reach the state of cannibalism, I shall try to eat a critic. There should be good crackling around fat heads.

  And next I thought that even Huxley made too little of the fact that, after our earth was literally Hell for a hundred years, man produced the Renaissance.

  I also thought how no one apparently had realized that the Californian cult of Belial was an inversion of the Roman Catholic parades, liturgies, chants and other idolatrous measures. And I thought how the Huxleyan method disclosed, with considerable vim and penetration, that Christian worship--Catholic or Protestant--is all but completely a paean for Satan today. The Godly serve the Devil through hatred, hypocrisy, materialism, conceit and big death wishes. They need only a change of names and symbols to align what they actually do with their pretension. Belial already reigns over the Church--not God.

  Someday, after the atomic wars--I thought--a practitioner of the corrupted religion of his time, a science-hater (for what he deemed science had done to man), a legless character with three arms and two navels (owing to the general damage done the genes of all living things), a cannibal (but one who could still read a little), might discover this volume in the silence of a wrecked library and hail Huxley as a great prophet--a man with valuable new ideas for worship and fresh notions about sex relations in public places.

  Thus Huxley might contribute (contrary to his intent but in the same fashion as many other prophets) to the majestic rites of human degradation.

  No critic, however, could possibly contemplate such a matter as anything but a joke.

  I wondered how the great-grandchildren of critics would view it.

  Thus wondering, I went to bed.

  It was late, of course.

  I put out my light and listened to the seismic nocturne of the city.

  From the next room came a bold, cajoling giggle.

  Then quiet.

  The building quivered.

  The planet turned.

  Exhaustion lowered me into sleep on a jerky rope that did not loosen me for a long time.

  12

  Contrary to expectation, the end of civilization came about through a series of events connected in no way with war or atomic bombardment. Of these events the earliest, so far as careful inquiry could determine at the time, was initially observed by Malcolm Calk of 2531 North Munley Street, Urbana, Illinois. Mr. Calk had just become engaged to Dorothea Lurp of the same address--the boarding establishment of Sarah L.

  Rev, or Reev--and they were celebrating the happy occasion by spending a weekend at the Chicago home of Miss Lurp's parents. The day being warm--it was the 9th of August, in the hot summer of 1953--the young couple determined to repair to the beach.

  They were contentedly ensconced at the lakeside when Mr. Calk's eyes wandered from the person of his fiancée, who was in wading, to the clouds overhead. These were of a cumulus nature, for the most part widely spaced, and drifting southward on a wind reported later by the Weather Bureau as of twelve miles per hour at mean cloud altitude.

  Calk's mind was, as may readily be imagined, turned toward those fancies which are commonly described as "building castles in the air." He reports, indeed, that the phrase passed through his thoughts as he looked at the vaporous structures overhead.

  Within them he observed a certain slight turbulence or agitation to which he at first paid scant heed. Clouds revolve and turn themselves inside out in a manner that bespeaks air currents and their own diaphanous consistency--a manner that sometimes suggests they have a life of their own in a weird fourth dimension of the blue up yonder.

  But the young Calk gave the phenomenon only a cursory, occasional glance; his head was already "in the clouds"--another phrase upon which he recalls musing at the time. He was apparently a person of whimsey--a patternmaker employed by the Racine Forge and Tool Company of Urbana.

  Presently, however, his focus was drawn with insistence toward the slow-tumbling clouds and, as people will, he gave free play to his imagination, seeing in the changing shapes now a dragon, now a cat's face, and now the chuck of a turret lathe.

  These gossamer figures wove themselves, vanished, and eddied into yet different forms until, ultimately he found himself viewing a large letter N. About this he saw nothing remarkable--at first. A letter of the alphabet is probably shaped by the clouds as often as any boar's head or serpent.

  The "N," however, took on contour and texture until it seemed a deliberate thing--

  resembling, as Calk put it later, "Sky-writing done backwards in a newsreel so that the frayed-out smoke pulled together again to make a real clean-cut N."

  At the momen
t, however (so uncritical was his brain and so unrelated was the celestial phenomenon to his thoughts), he came to a different conclusion. When the N

  established itself as a clear and sharply defined capital letter, some two miles in length and many thousands of feet above Lake Michigan, Calk informed himself that it was, actually, the work of a sky-writer. This is a kind of rationalization which any psychologist will recognize. Because what he saw did not quite conform to his past experience, Calk discounted his sensory impression and interpreted an external fact in terms of orderly recollections rather than of observable reality. Donner, Bates, Breesteen, Cavanaugh, Cohen and Wilstein, among other authorities, have noted the similiarity of this process to that by which prejudices are often established.

  "Look, honey," Mr. Calk called to his fiancée. "Skywriter."

  Miss Lurp looked and nodded in agreement. "Yeah. Bet it's cold up there! Lucky fellow--the pilot."

  No one else in the vicinity appeared to be aware of the process overhead. Miss Lurp continued to wade--Mr. Calk to watch her and to cast an occasional glance at the sky. A letter U was slowly formed alongside the perfect N.

  Miss Lurp at this point stepped on a clamshell, or possibly a broken bottle, which hurt her foot although it did not break the skin. Exaggerating the injury, she hopped ashore to solicit comfort, which Mr. Calk readily supplied. Thereafter, sitting side by side, they gazed up at the NU, near which yet other clouds were shifting and shaping themselves.

  "Why," said Miss Lurp, "that's not sky-writing at all! It's just the clouds coming together accidental-like." To another couple, sitting on the sand nearby, she called,

  "Look, people! The clouds are having a spelling bee!"

  One upturned countenance, or even two, may not serve to divert a throng from its preoccupations, whether sordid or sublime. But four faces intently elevated will permeate any mass of people and constrain nearly all of the individuals in it to join. This contagion of curiosity now spread over the beach. Soon, persons everywhere--on the sand and the walk behind and in the water--bathers, loafers, nurses with perambulators on the Drive, and policemen who were supposed to patrol it but who were more attentive to the nurses-