OPUS 21 Read online

  "Then you call me--later on."

  "Probably I will."

  I scraped up the last of the salmon and tipped the ice cubes in my coffee glass against my upper lip. Yvonne reached over and took my left hand. She ran the backs of her fingers slowly through it and shivered with a small ecstasy. "Phil! I'm all new!"

  "You certainly let your hair down."

  She leaned toward me. "I let down--!" She smiled and shook her head. "Am I so wicked?"

  "Nope. If you tried, you might make it. Right now--"

  I left her in that subdued, shiny-eyed jizzle.

  3

  The door slipped out of my somewhat moist palm when I opened it and was slammed not by the day's breeze, for there was no breeze, but by a draft that sucked through the Astolat Hotel--a current of air bearing the odors of food, carpets, paint, luggage, and the scents of rich women--a damp, thermal issue that would have incubated eggs.

  Paul sat bolt upright in my bed.

  He saw me, first. He stared at the room. He swung his feet to the floor.

  "Gotta get going. Any news of her?"

  "Take it easy, bo."

  "What time is it?"

  I told him.

  "You've let me waste half the day?" His voice broke.

  "Not waste it. Thought the rest would do you good. Bring you back to your senses a little. Seems not."

  "God damn you--you should have waked me up. I feel horrible."

  "Snap out of it! Try to remember what the poet says about rags, bones, hanks of hair--and a good cigar is a smoke." His eyes were so wild that I took pity on him. "Jump in the shower. I've got Dave Berne--an old pal of mine--working on your Marcia. He probably has detectives on the hunt this minute."

  Paul heavily rubbed the stubble on his face. "I thought you'd take charge."

  While he used my shower and my razor I had his clothes pressed and ordered some breakfast for him.

  But he ate the food only because he had to wait for the valet. I couldn't remember having seen anybody in such a tizzy about a girl since the days of my youth--since my own tizzies. And tizzy wasn't the right word for Paul's condition. It was pretty nearly psychopathic.

  He ate and ran from my rooms, after I'd made him promise to report back later in the day.

  I got into the serial again and the sun moved across the blue-hot sky, driving from Manhattan everybody with the fare.

  Ambulances were collecting prostration cases.

  Cops were going around shutting off the fire hydrants which wilted citizens were opening with wrenches. Cops trying to save the water supply against fall drought, against fires, against winter snow that could be flushed into the sewers, and in behalf of the thirst, cookery, and cleanliness of the millions.

  The heat wave had become big headlines in the papers.

  Sometimes I looked out the window at the glaring roofs of the metropolis and tried archmeasures of cortical auto-hypnosis, imagining the sky gray, snow falling in hushed and steady spirals, shop windows green and red for Christmas, and Salvation Army Santa Clauses ringing handbells beside their tripods and kettles on the main intersections. It wasn't any good. My personal limits of trained tolerance had been exceeded by a great, tormented gob of atomic fire ninety-three million miles away and right here on my windowsill.

  Still--I made fair progress.

  The light was losing its intensity, though the air was no less fevered, when I got a call.

  "Is this Phil Wylie?" It was a man's voice-bland, on the booster side.

  "Yo." I was not very enthusiastic about being Phil Wylie.

  "This is Socker Melton. Friend of your father. He told me to look you up, here--

  and I've tried a time or two before now. Glad to catch you in. May I come up?"

  What do you do? I told him I was working hard--on a rush operation-but to come up anyhow.

  Then I raged around the sitting room for a bit.

  Christ badger every old friend of the family!

  The oaf's knock was pompous. Bonk and pause, bonk and pause, bonk.

  Like the pass-signal to a kid's shanty.

  I opened the door, being careful to cling to the knob.

  My dimmest view was justified.

  Socker Melton was a big chum--sixty-two or -three and about two-hundred and twenty-five. He had a face that would have been square if he'd sacrificed his extra chin--

  large, blue, eager-beaver eyes--a babyish snub nose--and a rather thick mouth, not very clearly defined; but there was nothing repulsive in the ensemble--he looked like a star Buick salesman. He wore--maybe I should say sported, since he probably thought of it that way-a white flannel suit of a light weight and he carried a panama hat, the sweatband of which was earning its keep. A poor day for those big boys and I felt sorry for him. His clerical collar was doing its best to stand up for Jesus--but there were folds in it and his black dickey was mussed.

  I propped the door open.

  He inventoried the place after a passing gander at me. You could see that he liked nice things--and the Astolat is well heeled. His eye rested especially on some mirror-backed hanging shelves.

  "I hate to intrude like this--"

  "Any friend of pop's--" I said.

  He gave the panama a scale--to show me he was an informal guy like me--and dropped into one of my chairs. The thing squeaked hard and braced itself. I figured to be charming for about ten minutes.

  I'm a sucker for people who get to see me, anyway. I like most people--as individuals, to begin with; and although I do what I can--and the family does what it can-

  -to keep the more extraverted oddities from jimmying doors and peering through bedroom windows, I spend a God-awful amount of time chitchatting with visiting strangers of all sorts.

  The chair he'd taken was in reach of my MS, so he reached for it. It is possible that he was trying to adjust to the fact that I was wearing only a pair of shorts.

  "Sounds amusing," he said, after reading a few lines.

  That was what Gwen had said the night before. I was glad to see the Cloth in agreement with the professionally unclad. Competent magazine fiction should appeal to all tastes.

  "Pleased that you think so."

  I told myself that I had no right to be irritated at the preacher's patronizing tone, or at his unasking and uninvited reading of my manuscript. After all, when artists paint in public places, people feel free to look over their shoulders.

  ' I'm the rector of St. Shadows, over on Park," he said. "But don't hold that against me."

  I'd heard of the guy. The "Socker" came from intercollegiate boxing--at which he had been champ of his class many long years ago. My old man thought he was a "great personality, a liberal, a true intellectual of the church, and a profound modern philosopher."

  "I won't hold it against you if you say not."

  He laughed--about four watts too heartily. "Mind if I take this coat off?"

  I did mind--because that meant he'd stick around longer. But I'd asked him up.

  What the hell! I usually give myself a break around four or five, anyhow--for coffee.

  I told him that. "I was about to knock off--" and so on. "Would you like something to drink?"

  He said he'd have a sloe gin fizz. This was to get across his modernity and liberality.

  "Don't drink, myself." I took some trivial pleasure in his visible surprise.

  "I thought all authors--?"

  "Used to be a lush. Quit." I told Room Service about this new guest and his taste for wild plum juice.

  He had said, "Oh," anent my confession. I hung up and he grinned at me. He'd taken off his collar and dickey by that time and was sitting there in a wet undershirt. "In town for long?"

  "Nope."

  "You're here a good deal, though, your father tells me."

  "Sometimes. At the moment--we're building in Florida--and my kid attends school there--so Florida is where we spend most of our time."

  "Hot, in the fall and spring, isn't it?"

  "Not this h
ot!"

  He thought that was amusing, too. "Hurricanes," he said.

  "Yep. Hurricanes."

  "You've been in them?"

  "Repeatedly." I passed up a grade-A chance to dramatize Wylie, since it would give him equal privileges, when his turn came.

  ' I'll tell you, frankly, why I'm here," Socker said. "I want you to do me a favor."

  He gave me that ministerial look--the beaming meekness of a man who is never denied a favor.

  "Like what?"

  It dashed him a trifle. "Well, Phil--" (old friend of dad, I reminded myself) "I don't suppose you've been in a church for a long time."

  "Not to my knowledge."

  That got him again. "And I don't suppose you've ever been in a church like mine.

  Don't get the idea I'm about to ask you over to hear me preach. A preacher like yourself--

  you see, I've read your books--wouldn't be much interested in the rhetorical efforts of a chap like me." He was a little nervous, now, and actually a shade humble. "What I'm driving at is this. We've got a young people's society that has thrown doctrine out the window--not caring how much stained glass broke--and is trying to get some meaning out of religion by putting some new meaning in it."

  "Sounds trenchant."

  "I want you to come over, Phil, and talk to my young people. They're readers of yours. We've' discussed your books at meetings--gone through them chapter by chapter--

  had some real battles! It's our feeling that, at bottom, you're as earnest a Believer as any of the rest of us. I've sprung some surprises on my young folks--Phil--but springing you would really rock them."

  The Buick salesman touch.

  I told him--as nicely as I could--about never making speeches, and why. It's always embarrassing.

  He covered up his very annoyed disappointment and decided all I needed was a working-over. He began this by ignoring the invitation--after a little more pressure got him nowhere. He talked about his church and the young people and their outlook:

  "You'd be interested in learning what's going on among religious liberals, Phil. In fact, you owe it to yourself to find out! And your writing shows you don't know! Dogma has simply gone overboard--and I mean overboard. We're studying psychology as hard as you are. We take up a book like the late Liebman's Peace of Mind--and learn to understand it. Hell-fire and damnation--original sin--that sort of rubbish--is out. We'll listen to a communist over there as attentively as to a priest. We believe Christ would have made the fair distribution of goods His business--if He were alive now. We sit around and air sex problems as frankly as the professors. Use their lingo. We don't believe religion ought to be a lifelong way of pain and hardship and self-torment and sorrow--"

  I'd been thinking about the Law of Opposites. What he was saying, I'd said, myself, in some instances. But not all. Some of it made me a little sick. I tried to interrupt but he barged ahead:

  "To us, religion is a practical attitude and a source of joie de vivre--or it's mistaken. We've got a gymnasium in my church and we hold weekly dances and weekly bingo games there. When we talk about the Master--we talk about a Man who is our Friend--not an Oriental mystic who left His disciples puzzled by contradictory advice. If you can't see your way clear to visiting with us--at this time--you certainly ought to be able to see the value of catching up with the status of modern Christianity--"

  "There are a couple of points that worry me," I said.

  "Come and thresh them out with us!"

  "I don't imagine Jesus would have been interested in communism, for example."

  "Because it's antagonistic to orthodox religion? Wasn't He an antagonist of orthodoxy, Himself?"

  "The logic escapes me, there. If I'm not mistaken, Jesus was exclusively concerned with the inner world. He was completely antimaterialist. Social systems were superficial to Him. He was agin the obsessive materialism of Near East capitalists two thousand years ago--and I strongly suspect He would see dialectical materialism as a mere spread of that unilateral pall over the conscious minds of the masses."

  "Superb! Come over and tell us that!"

  "You're supposed to know it, already," I answered.

  "And to be teaching it. Besides, I am a firm believer in Original Sin."

  "What!"

  The sloe gin and my iced coffee arrived. He offered to pay--a unique point--

  clumsy, but pleasant.

  George looked him over twice. George had never seen a clergyman in my haunts, except my father, whom he knew.

  "I believe in Original Sin," I said, when George went and when the parson had taken a cool, deep pull, "since I believe every religion is the attempt, the compulsive and unconscious attempt, to make a schemata of instincts that will be palpable to the sense perceptions of human personality--and since I also believe that religions have generally failed in that function--causing the sin."

  "Failed how?"

  "Failed by being turned to the support of the ego."

  "But we'd agree with you, there!"

  "So I must conclude there is some basic error in the entire religious phenomenon.

  Believing that religions express a genuine psychological compulsion--a need to discover the inner pattern of behavior, the inner design of consciousness--but observing that the orthodox patterns offered so far have led only to a succession of material advances that ended in social collapse--I must conclude that there is some human error which repeats itself down the millenniums. Some terribly deep perversion of Nature that at first lets man advance a little--then throws him back nearly the whole distance--gets him going once more with a newer, 'truer' religion--and so on, ad infinitum. This perversion is what I call Original Sin."

  "Pretty abstract," he said.

  "Not at all. Here's the Sin. Religions have been used not so much as formulations for guidance as to convince their various Believers that man is, himself, godlike, wherefore God. Not an animal with a fresh neurological awareness. Not a beast of the field, who knows it and who therefore knows that what goes on inside beasts is nothing to sneer at. But God Almighty, personified according to His self-personifications of Zeus, Amon-Ra, the Prophets, Jehovah, or Who-not. God Almighty--destined to live forever with all the numerous Gods-Almighties-in the Elysian Fields, Nirvana, or Wherever. You follow me?"

  "I think so."

  "You don't. Let's try it again. Imagine a band of apes that developed self-awareness. Apes that suddenly saw themselves as selves. Imagine those apes interpreting the new cortical phenomenon not as a fresh and fascinating development amongst animals--but as evidence of their metamorphosis from the flesh to something Higher.

  They don't know what, exactly. They work out What in a series of mythologies and religions. 'What' turns out, in our era, to be Sons of God, Brothers in Christ, Redeemed Eternally by Grace. That's where they are today. Not humble animals, carrying on the business of Evolution for species yet unguessed. They feel sure (in Christ) that they are the perfect biology right now. They sit at the end of an age-old endeavor to acquire that seeming. An endeavor which has shucked off or hidden every aspect of animal reality it can."

  He was shaking his head. "I feel puzzled--"

  "The use of religions, in effect, has been to conceal and deny the animal nature of man. That is perverse. Man eats--a simple, animal activity. How many religious rituals-turned into social functions in how many cases--could you list, all of which were designed to give a nonanimal cast to eating? Hundreds?"

  "I suppose you mean feasts and fasts and such?"

  "Food taboos, food rituals, food symbols--like your bread and wine--religious dietary laws. Sure. Man--like the beasts--must eat. But he has tried ten thousand tricks to make it seem nonanimal, or 'godlike: Now. Consider sex--another human function which is exactly like its animal counterpart. Here there is less exigency than in eating--more time-lag for ritual and style. Man went passionately into the business of developing systems which would conceal the animal and instinctual nature of sexuality and lend to it the superior q
ualities of his various gods, religions, his self-glorifying self-images."

  "I think I begin to see--"

  "Exactly. By now--we dwell amid a species that is twenty or thirty or forty thousand years away from the contemplation of its instincts as germane to animal instincts. The distance in time is matched by countless steps in illusion. It is hardly possible for a man to think of himself as an animal in the true sense, any more. It is all but impossible for him to feel, to experience, his animal fact. And--since I believe instinct seen locally in time and space is as 'good' as it is 'evil'--and that, in sum, it is all good--I

  find this long attempt to translate natural instincts into ridiculous and unnatural dogmas and god-images--is a very sad mistake. A very great sin--the 'original' sin of assuming a superiority toward terrestrial, psychological, and cosmic Nature. "Each new religion may be-usually is--an 'improvement' in some way upon its discarded or waning predecessor.

  But each is, always, founded on the premise that man is 'above' that which works within him and occurs around him. So, in the end, even though intelligent religious premises may benefit humanity in many ways--for instance, the search for truth inspired by Jesus, led haltingly to the birth of the scientific method--the fundamental premise is always false and the benefits are finally fouled by the basic blunder. Instinct frustrated by the delusions of Believers of all sorts has to go into autonomous operation on the multitudes, simply because they deny and repress instinct until this society or that--and all of them--

  fails to meet their instinctual needs. And instinct, acting in violent fashion, upon such blind, willful repudiators of necessary process--always brings calamity. It has to wipe out or at least reduce each new aggregate of the self-deceived. So another civilization topples. Then another creed arises and we begin again. Until we get straightened out about what instinct is--get, so to speak, a real picture of our inner selves, of what it is in us that we have made into all gods and theology--a picture congruent with such truths as we can see and can admit--we're bound to operate in this roller-coaster fashion."

  "In other words, your Original Sin is the church itself!" He sounded disturbed.

  "It's--any ism. Any person or group with sure-fire dogmas that you have to accept on faith--as offering ends justifying physical means and psychological means that are illogical, unethical, unreasonable, that fail to take into account the innate facts of our animal instinct, that exclude valid opposites to their tenets, and so on."