OPUS 21 Read online

  "Phil. He shouldn't see her now--even if I knew where she was--and I haven't a single good idea about that. Just--lots of possibilities. I don't know what she'd do--I doubt if she'd do anything violent--but she has a right to be wherever she wants, hasn't she?"

  "Of course. I just thought--if you did have any hunches--he's sitting here chewing the rug--"

  Hattie sighed. "Old enough to do better! Maybe he's a great physicist--but, believe me, he's in kindergarten on women! I tried to tell him so--gently. But he just sat there looking wilder than a priest trapped in the ladies' can! If I hear anything tomorrow, Phil, I'll give you a ring. If I were you--I'd slip Paul a Mickey Finn, or something, to cool him down."

  I thanked her.

  She told me she was glad I liked Gwen and I said again that I thought Gwen was a good deal of damsel and I hung up.

  "Nothing?" Paul had been on his chair-edge.

  I shook my head. "Hattie's calm about it-and she really knows the girl."

  "Really knows Marcia? That bat-faced old strumpet? The hell she does!"

  "Okay," I said. "Okay."

  "Who's Gwen?"

  "One of her girls. She was down here earlier. She's gone."

  He jumped up and came over to the sofa where I sat with the phone. "Fine thing! I thought you said you were here working--not cheating!"

  "A slight relapse, say. What of it?"

  "Relapse!" His voice was thin and high. His fists were doubled. His face streamed as if' he were shoveling in a boiler room. "Sweet guy, you are! Oh--you've got a good brain! Even talent! But all you do is whore around with your brains and your god-damned talent! And yourself! You look at a woman--you just look at her--and you make her feel like a slut! You've got a wife that's too good for a good guy--and a thousand times too good for you! So what? A weekend off--and you louse the place up with a chippy--!

  Somebody tries to dig a decent, lovely girl out of a bad spot--and you come along and roll your dirty eyes on her--!"

  I said, "Look, Paul. If you're going to rage around at people for keeping tarts in their homes, start with your own, will you?"

  He swung but he didn't follow hard and I ducked it.

  So he began to sob, then-back in his chair.

  I went to the bathroom, broke out a clean tumbler, dumped in the contents of three of the sodium amytal capsules Tom had prescribed for me, added water, swished it around, slogged back to the sitting room, poured in three fingers of whisky, and handed it to him. He took a deep, lunging breath and drank the whole business.

  He sobbed a while longer.

  Then, in a low, self-pitying voice, he began a rhapsody, or maybe threnody, on Marcia. The drink hit him, and the pills; he grew detailed and intimate; finally he said he'd lie down for an hour before going on with the search.

  It was getting light by that time.

  PART FOUR: Rondo

  1

  PAUL'S "HOUR" of sleep would last, I felt certain, for the best part of the morning.

  I went into my bedroom and looked at him. He had taken off his shirt and his shoes. He lay on his back with his mouth open, his lips nursing the air, his brow creased with wrinkles set there by a life of concentration--and distorted now with sorrow and pain. He was sweating like the inside of a still: the drops welled and ran on his face and his hairy chest and his ribs. Even his feet were bright-sprinkled. As I looked at him he stirred; a murmurous sound of protest and despair came out of the poor guy--a sound tragic and pitiful and weird, for there was nothing human about it. Hurt animals make such noises. Ridiculous--but I remembered how a young man could feel about a girl.

  I would like to say that I dressed, girded my spirit, and took some step on Paul's behalf--or even that I sat down at my table with grim and relentless character and put the milk-cart morning to good account by knifing further excess from my serial.

  Such was not the case. I lay on my sitting room couch with the purpose of gathering my forces for both efforts--but I met with failure.

  My head ached. Vague pains beset my body--squirting about mysteriously from neck to gut to ankle and back again by way of knee and pelvis and teeth. My tongue burned--dry and yet sticky--inflamed and evil-tasting to itself--the tongue of us millions who sedulously obey the cigarette advertising. (And just possibly the throat of some of us, too, I thought wincingly.) Idiot infantilism, scalding oral eros, obsession, compulsion, tobacco! I smoked on defiantly, wretchedly. The jiffy coffee lay in my stomach like a solid and the heat of it ran from my pores.

  I stared at my body--the wens and scars and indurations and red blots--the warts and excrescences and moles--the minor tumors that are our common response to age and attrition-the crinkling paper of my skin-the sun-tan that reflected from a mirror like youth itself but that, at chin-length, lost its satin and was seen to be marched and counter-marched with freckles and a rash of prickly heat. I surveyed the expanded, slack viscera beneath an irreducible fat that slid when I turned, like a hot-water bottle under my flabby epidermis. I noticed the cord inside my bent elbow, standing out like an old man's now, and poorly covered with a crêpy mantle that lacked elasticity--the time-shrunk backs of my hands-my toes, warped out of alignment, marked and marred with the miles and with the leather boxes we wear--their nails, turned in, split, chitinous--small, magenta lace of erupted capillaries--shine and scale on my shins--myself: waxwork--worn battlefield--

  warrant of decay, incipient cadaver.

  I did not need to see my face.

  Fatigue dwelt in me always, now. Oh--(barring such incidents in a single one of these tired cells as neoplasm, of course)--I would have exhibited my inordinate energy, my vitality, my apparent arrestation of age for another ten years or twenty or thirty--I might have been an agile old man, supple and good at games (with suitable allowance for the years) whose eyes never clouded, whose hair never fell, diving off tall dolphins to amuse my grandchildren and dancing gracefully with Ricky to the applause of other septagenarians and the infinite boredom of teen-agers. But I was old already--scribbled with the nasty information of years, apprised of slinking hurts, debilities, transient toxicities and nauseas that would increase and increase and increase--or would have done so except for that one, rambunctious cell.

  Who wants to be old?

  What man, in his so-called prime, fails to note his coming scenery--the bandaged varicosities, the braces, the cut bunions, the scarification and bloodless horn, the smells and tastes of himself, the thickening spectacles, the hearing aids, the pills and petit prostheses, the gouty overpall, the migraine and vertigo, rheum, sour burp, dyspnoeia, heart-kick, cracking, and the myriad painful impediments of urination, defecation, respiration, transpiration, the organic wheeze, the gradual invasion of death?

  He wants to be old who accepts it.

  But we, the people of the United States of America, have rejected it in toto: there must be some way to keep grandpa a gamin and mom nubile; meantime, let us pretend there is a way.

  Millions for senescence and not one cent for sense.

  So, okay, I said, it is happening to me with the short and sweet just around the corner and a good thing too, perhaps.

  Or a bad thing.

  A thing, I realized, of no import.

  Now is a sufficient tomorrow for all my yesterdays--if I will see to the circumstance in person.

  This summary was a current that carried away the incubus of that early morning and left me sound asleep on the divan.

  When I woke up I saw by my watch--which slid on its gold band when I moved my thin, saturate wrist--that it had passed nine o'clock. I budged and yawned and swam up into the room. I felt better--the other side of age having somewhat returned during the nap.

  Paul still lay on his back, mouthing and snoring and sweating.

  Room service brought cold orange juice and good, hot coffee with a civilized cup to drink from.

  I needed assistance--which is to say, Paul needed it. A friend. An attorney. I could hardly spend the whole day with him unless there
was no alternative. Yet certainly he should not be alone with his callow impetuosity. And certainly his young colleagues would--be too inept for a proper handling of all the potential dilemmas. He needed a Danaos--he had always needed one, a wise older slave to manage his love affairs--a shrewd promoter. Lacking such a companion he had invested the meaningless savings of youth's passion in one whore. Profligate, comical, and a disaster.

  I considered Johann Brink.

  Women, he would say, do not exist in the laboratory.

  When you switch on the cyclotron, you switch off She.

  It was too damned bad they hadn't taken women along in there with the atoms--

  flame inspiratrice, man's soul. They might have discovered more concerning the nature of the velocity of light and the behavior of particles and even the essence of packing fractions than they'd learned by the castrate inspection of their micros and macros and milles.

  Which other set of barbarian priests was it who emasculated themselves before accepting Holy Orders?

  I couldn't remember.

  Brink the mental giant and pigmy person would be as much help here as a handful of ice cubes against a forest fire.

  I dialed Dave Berne.

  His man Veto answered.

  "This is Phil Wylie."

  "Just a minute."

  "Hello, you toothless cobra! What the hell are you doing in town? Waiting for the women to faint?"

  "Some of us," I said, "don't have to wait."

  He roared. "No kidding! What gives? God, isn't it hot?

  If I had a human head, I could shrink it right here on my terrace--and it's only nine-twenty, A.M.!"

  "Dave, I got trouble."

  I told him about Paul.

  "I have a ten-thirty conference with some movie moguls," he said when I finished,

  "so I'll be right over."

  He was there in less than a half hour.

  David Abraham Lincoln Berne is the most interesting man I know--a statement which covers quite a few interesting men.

  A lawyer.

  A lawyer, furthermore, whose principal employ is with the movie companies.

  He was not always a lawyer. . . .

  Dave was born over a delicatessen, in Madison, Wisconsin, of serious minded, musically gifted, orthodox Jewish parents in the winter of 1906, the fourth child of eight, and no culls in the lot. As soon--he says--as he could pound with his porringer, they gave him a violin. But--again, according to him--he swiftly saw that he was going to be only a semiprodigy, so he turned to other fields. He did well in school. One of his playmates, a Milwaukee realtor nowadays, who liked Dave in spite of his personal limitations, long ago told me about that--and succinctly: "Some of those bastard Jews are born with a high school education!"

  Dave finished at fifteen--and took an extra year to grow in, working nights at the delicatessen and reading, for entertainment, philosophy.

  He has a remarkable memory. He might not be able to recall his laundry mark when he was in Virginia. But no one who knows him well would bet even on that.

  A compact guy who--because he is loose-jointed--seems anything but solid.

  Indeed, his flexibility is such that he could probably learn a yogin's basic postures in one sitting.

  Everybody liked him in Madison.

  This was not true in Virginia.

  He majored in psychology and went out for football. He'd played on his high school team. The backfield coach was impressed equally by the length of his accurate passes and the fact that he mastered the signals in one night's concentrated study. Letter-perfect and reflex-fast. But a pair of racially pure Nordic behemoths from Minnesota, sent proudly to the team by scouting old grads, decided that, although they had nothing personal against the yid, no yid would call their signals. In Dave's first game they managed to break both his legs.

  Dave got the idea. He let his uniform hang there, the next year--when he'd got off crutches. He made the newspaper--but not the fraternity he'd set his heart on.

  He made summa cum laude.

  He went next to Pennsylvania--tutoring, tending furnaces, minding babies, mowing lawns, as usual--and took both an M.A. and a Ph.D. in psychology. He got a job teaching it to pre-med students in Iowa. His thesis on "Formulations of Subjective Sexuality in Man" almost landed him the thing he wanted--a psycho-sociological research position with a big foundation. They wrote him, however, that they felt certain group attitudes (outrageous, but there they are!) would prejudice his fact-gathering efforts.

  A Gentile took over the project.

  Several of America's brilliant young men in psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis are former students of Dave.

  A Dr. Wiswell was put over him in Iowa.

  That was when he began to read law.

  He took the New York Bar exams in 1935 and went to work for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer that year.

  During the war, he was commissioned a captain in the Medical Corps and sent (by a General Muller, a Regular Army doctor who thought Hitler a great man and psychiatry bunk) to Alaska, to study the effects upon mental stamina of cold, isolation, and monotony.

  For the first time in his life, and after twenty months of Alaska, Dave pulled strings in his own behalf.

  He was assisting the OSS--a major, then--in figuring out methods of hastening the deterioration of Nazi morale--when they came through the Bulge. Dave stayed at a forward subheadquarters to manage the tourniquet on his colonel's bomb-shattered leg.

  Hurrying German troops took the colonel prisoner and shot Dave four times, on sight.

  Some of Patton's men found him, still alive, in a cellar, three days later. Two of his toes had to be amputated because they'd frozen. He limps when he's weary--but he's still a handball champ.

  The Nazis didn't take care of his colonel's tourniquet and the colonel died. Dave has a Purple Heart, plain--but nothing else to bespeak what, in a Gentile, might possibly have been regarded as courage beyond the line of duty.

  He had, you will recall, reluctantly decided that there would always be a Dr.

  Wiswell over him, in the field of psychology. He had also come to the reluctant conclusion that a Jew without money in America was like an unarmed man in a city of quick-draw experts. So he had studied law.

  Problems to which he put the lever of his mind usually yielded. The problem of money was one such. He is a completely honest man; he no longer saw any objection to applying his honesty, and talents, in places where money was abundant. He is worth, I should imagine, a quarter of a million, and he has only started.

  Dave is the ugliest man I know--or, at least, know well.

  A huge but thin hooked nose divides his face vertically. Hitler's trained anti-Semites needed only a look at that to shoot. His large, round ears are set almost at right angles to his head. He has a conspicuous Adam's apple which--in talk, or merely from emotion--rides up and down with the acceleration and quick braking of a humming bird before a hollyhock. His forehead bulges; his mouse-brown eyebrows look as if they had been sprayed on as a random after-thought. He is almost bald. His mouth takes a generous cut into his pale, gaunt cheeks and his chin retreats. Only his eyes contrast with a face they cannot redeem: they are an immortal blue-living proof of compassion, of reflection, and of mirth.

  He is a bachelor.

  He was in love, once, with a stately girl from Boston--a quiet, brainy brown-eyed girl who wore sensible shoes and braids but sometimes had the look of wanting to lie in the grass with a man, or even of being ready to pull a man down. I had hoped that Dave would be granted this one exception by the unwilling gods. He wasn't. She married an opera singer--and divorced him two years later--and went to live in Milan.

  My Campfire Girl, Dave called her, after that.

  He meant the part about Camps.

  It was in Hollywood that I met Dave.

  I was weaving down Sunset Boulevard one night, drunk, desultory, and alone.

  Very much alone. My first wife had taken my kid back East--and no blame for th
at. She was sick of the way it was.

  I'd spent the afternoon at an address in Beverly Hills where you could do what you pleased. .

  I'd spent the evening at a gambling place up on the hillside, sprinkling my money around and my IOUs--with a bunch of other writers, directors, junior producers, and picture girls. You'd know their names if I told you and the hell with that.

  Up on the hill above the canyon at the Casa Crap.

  Up there among the carbolic mountains--the near knees--the far, white peaks with snow on their nasty heads. Down below, the spot where God sat on the seventh day, and--

  in the big, flat print of His behind--Los Angeles. Ninety square miles of costume jewelry, Technicolor starshine, neon and sodium and all other colored gases, signboards with fifty-foot women in ten-foot brassières and men smoking four-foot pipes, boulevards under the palms and cloverleaf intersections with the billion paired headlights streaming and swirling, bungalow courts and drugstores, pool halls and bingo parlors, buses and trolley cars, acacias and roses and pepper trees, open markets with fruit piled in metaphysical polyhedrons, and the fog rolling in on the thin, chilly, sting-sinus air of California.

  You can keep it.

  I'd spent all my money and cashed a few IOUs to impress the girls.

  The girls.

  I'd played Mr. Bones with the bright young writers who go out there for the girls--

  searching amongst the girls in skirts for the girl that's their soul--Medea, Medusa and Circe, Sappho and daughter Eve, Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia, Urania--and Aglaia and Euphrosyne, too--and Lilith--searching for her on the wrong coast--all evening, a badminton of wisecracks, battledore and shuttlecock with the soulless prizes going to the heads that stayed clear the longest, the pocketbooks that were the deepest, the tallest gold lettering on office doors, and never a Muse or a Grace in the joint.

  I hadn't been able to find my car in the sepulcher parking yard.

  Too lost, ingrown, ashamed to ask the attendant.

  Too penniless to hire a cab. .

  I walked down that Golconda Golgotha, stopping to puke, with my fists in my pockets holding to wet handkerchiefs.