"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 wehummed 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'sRoad 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 threethe 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, Iknow—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 Ipushed 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. Whenfinally 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 anaffair 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 thesisdid 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 thei'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
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'sRoad to Survivalat 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 ourfailure to perceive our instinctual nature. My own elected department in the categoryof 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.
PART THREE
Andante
Andante
1
Reveille was the heatof burning gasoline, gears grating, rubber clattering on the sticky pavement and bits of shouts, floating around like confetti. I can remember when it used to be hoofbeats, quiet neighbor-talk, and sometimes, utter silence.
I lay glistening in a depression of the bed. At first, the big noise of the city, diminishing when the lights changed, and plunging up with new zeal a moment afterward, gave me only the pleasant sensation, the titillations and satisfactions, of being in New York. Then I remembered my circumstance. The frightened little animal that I am tore terribly around while I tried to catch it and to hold it and to remind it that the thin tissue on the front of its brain was capable of managing its panic. I spent some time at the job and sat up trickling.
All my life I have listened to a wearisome cell repeat an old saw: the coward dies a thousand times, the brave man once.
A person is afraid to be cowardly.
For many years, owing to this rather superficial sentence, I had to accept the inner humiliation of cowardice. A boy with my kind of imagination, my style of projecting,could not but help finding in his head the taste of the thousand deaths.
And I am often cowardly still. In those few morning minutes, I chased my coward a long distance.
But I do think the aphorism should be discarded. Certainly the coward dies a thousand times. So, too, however, does the man of imagination. It is the manner of the thousand deaths that is important. And bravery—our poor, human bravery—is not necessarily consonant with faulty imagination or none at all, as this dumbbell's apothegm implies.
I finally caught my animal—a real beast and not a dream.
I ordered coffee and stepped into the sitting room.
It was after nine.
The morning papers had been put at my door. There was mail.
A letter from Ricky.
I ripped it open and read it hungrily.
Dear:Would you please, if you get a chance, go to the Lingerie Department at Saks and ask for Miss Drewson? Tell her I'd like to have three more slips like the blue satin ones I got last July when we were in town. I could order them by mail, but I want to be sure to get the same kind and she will know. Size twelve, which I guess I needn't tell you. We miss you—everything is just the same, which is dandy—and have fun. I love you very much.Ricky
Dear:
Would you please, if you get a chance, go to the Lingerie Department at Saks and ask for Miss Drewson? Tell her I'd like to have three more slips like the blue satin ones I got last July when we were in town. I could order them by mail, but I want to be sure to get the same kind and she will know. Size twelve, which I guess I needn't tell you. We miss you—everything is just the same, which is dandy—and have fun. I love you very much.
Ricky
I had a second little beast to chase, then.
There was a bank statement.
There were four publicity releases from business concerns which keep sending me their bilge even though I took the pains, almost a year ago, to write them that I'd quitdoing a newspaper column and had no way of airing their propaganda even if I felt the urge.
There were three letters from people who liked my books.
There was a letter from the assistant to the dean of a small college in Illinois:
Dear Wylie:Just how does one go about getting so swellheaded and self-righteous that he thinks he can tell off everybody on earth? I would like to know, because it must be a wonderful sensation to balloon around so gassily. Look out for pins, though!Please reply.Sincerely,John F. Casselberry.
Dear Wylie:
Just how does one go about getting so swellheaded and self-righteous that he thinks he can tell off everybody on earth? I would like to know, because it must be a wonderful sensation to balloon around so gassily. Look out for pins, though!
Please reply.
Sincerely,John F. Casselberry.
I put the letter between my big toe and the next one, held it out at body length, and reflected.
There is nothing unusual about this letter; I get a version of it every few days, sometimes running into thousands of derogatory words. And, of course, it is true.
Of course, of course, of course.
Authorship is the supreme act of ego.
Whether it is good or evil, as an act, depends, I suppose not so much on what's written, as how the writing is.
Most authors conceal the egoistic aspect of the business under the nom de plumes of their characters.
But exactly as every man is all that he thinks and does—and dreams, too—so is an author all he writes.
A mystery writer is a murderer in his head and he sets down his gory lore for an audience of murderers.
What does that make you, Wylie? You first-person author!
Did I use it to take the blame and the guilt—to take the responsibility—and to tear down the artifice of the third person? And was it true (as I felt) that, since my purpose wasto turn the thoughts of better authors into a vernacular more popular than their own, my I was the mere agent—and not the excreted vanity which it so constantly deplored? Or was the whole affair a secret exercise in look-ma-I'm-dancing?
God knows, some part of it had to be.
I fancied myself as a teacher.
I was mostly a ham.
What I knew, what I had learned, sought, made sure of, found comfort and understanding in—all this—and the long years I'd spent endeavoring to give it a dignified texture—forever emerged as the overemphasis of a self-enamored tyro reciting Hamlet. The truths were somewhat there. But the voice was the voice of cheap aspirations in a cheap world.
Some people heard my mentors. Yes.
A few, reading my wretched books, saw beyond the antic actor, the attention-compeller, the infantile see-how-I-do, to Freud and Jung and the physicists, to the mathematicians, to the calling world and the crying night ahead, to the ingenuity and inconceivable courage of those whom I ballyhooed.
But others—oh, how rightly—saw me!
Yakkety-yak.
Wylie's next.
Shock you. Make you think. Inspire you. Scare the hell out of you. Set bristles standing on old Comstock's neck.
Christ Jesus!
I had thought a havoc in prose might be a substitute for havoc itself—sparing a man here and a woman there from the reality of acquainting them with the instinct.
O tin messiah.
Tawdry complex.
Bawling calfcake.
Jackass of your own worst describing.
Balloon.
It must be a wonderful sensation.
Not truth, so much as show-off.
Not love of you—infatuation with me.
Not—for what I did—but, like most of us, for what I might have done—and used instead to inflate the First Person Singular with the airs of my hot compartments.
The extravert posing as the introvert.
The hoofer philosopher.
Shame, shame, shame!
Shame ran off me.
And I shall die, in it and with it.
I went to my window to look at the city the messy cubes in the haze and somebody's radio performed an act of God.
Ja-daJa-daJa-da, ja-da, jing, jing, jing.Shimmy, I thought.Shimmy.Shimmy in your B.V.D.'s.You wear 'em in the winter and you wear 'em in the fallYou wear 'em in the summer if you wear 'em at all.Shimmy.Shimmy!Shimmy in your B.V.D.'s.This is a message to and of the American people.The Dream.The Cross.EverybodyLoves my bodyBut my bodyDon't love nobodyBut me.
Dear Dean Casselberry:I have read all the books in your library. I am a God-fearing, patriotic American. I believe in brother-love and liberty. In the folks, who made me what I am and from whom I cannot find myself different in any respect. Aside from that, you are right. I am sending you, under separate cover, my ear, which I have cut off for you. It is all I had to give and you may address it in the first person because it will then understand. Also, for the inflation of a balloon like mine, I send these directions: use equal parts of the outcries of the oppressed and laughter; for ballast—you will be there, and you should also carry a pail of tears.Phil Wylie
Dear Dean Casselberry:
I have read all the books in your library. I am a God-fearing, patriotic American. I believe in brother-love and liberty. In the folks, who made me what I am and from whom I cannot find myself different in any respect. Aside from that, you are right. I am sending you, under separate cover, my ear, which I have cut off for you. It is all I had to give and you may address it in the first person because it will then understand. Also, for the inflation of a balloon like mine, I send these directions: use equal parts of the outcries of the oppressed and laughter; for ballast—you will be there, and you should also carry a pail of tears.
Phil Wylie
Some give moneysome give workbut if you give the personbrother, you're a jerk.It didn't do me any good ... for ...If you try to tell the truththere's only you telling it.
2
It was a hell of a morning.
3
From nine-thirty until twelve-thirty I cut that serial.You wouldn't be interested.We'll go on, anyway.What the hell else can a man do?
4
Paul and Marcia, when they appeared for lunch, were expectably nervous.
The condition called strain is universal in this civilization, anyway. It begins in the cradle with the Freudian conditioning—the creation of each superego. Toilet training, the disciplines of the bawling id, meals according to schedule rather than appetite, the sting of parental palm on cheek, buttock, and wrist that follows erotic manipulation. All these, and countless other "punishments"—which change with changing social codes, change with changing fads amongst pediatricians, and differ from one home to another and one culture to another—set up such stresses that, by the age of two, there is hardly one civilized being in a thousand who is not loaded up with a lifetime of disparate indignities.
Add to this the regimentations of school—the musts and must nots of classroom and cloakroom. Impose upon it the innumerable stringencies of a religion. Require patriotism. Pepper the taut personality with familial prejudices and phobias. Jew-detestation, snake-dread. Now, in the passing years, fold in the Law—cop, truant officer, and prison bars—sidewalks not to be spit on, or park benches not to be initialed, or loud noises not to be made by individuals (but only corporations), and season with the regulations that rise around the older child, the adolescent, the adult.
Remove the person, then, from every natural source of his existence. Set him in a city where no useful plants grow and no animals graze—at the end of a steampipe that uses coal mined he knows not where, or oil sucked up ten thousand miles away. A city where no wood is chopped. Detach him, that is to say, from Nature—deprive him of its experiences and every direct sensation of the earth, upon which he depends. Bring even his water in far conduits, with chlorine added, so he will never know a spring's taste.
Set him to work at earning a living without acquaintance of how the whole of any living is made. On the contrary. Let his life's blood derive from some capillary of the flow. Let him take charge—not of house-building, or food-raising, or wood-gathering or fire-keeping, not of cookery or childbirthing or the weaving of fabrics—but of the twenty-eighth step in the manufacture of one size of ball bearings. Call this earning a living.
Give him a town to defend against all other towns and cities, a county to boast of, a state to regard as superior to forty-seven other states, and a nation which anyone can see is the greatest on earth. Teach him to hold such superiority as the supreme goal—to believe that no more can be asked of him or of his fellows than that they maintain the greatest nation—however low the rest may sink. Teach him never to inquire if his superlatives are adequate for the conditions of his age. Let him live to the full—by odious comparison. Let him say—I am better than you, wherefore you—not I—need all the improvement.
Now. Set a few wars in his time, with their alarms, rigors, restrictions, and dull regimentations. Load up his era with means for bacteriological attack and with atomic bombs. Invent great secrets, with attendant rumors. Frighten him all day long—and at night. Tell him he is nevertheless a free man and that, above all else, he must cherish and protect his liberty. Next, at every corner and edge of freedom, hack, harass, chip, clip, steal, stain, bribe, sabotage, and smudge each meaning and application of liberty, so that he no longer gathers its fundamental sense and comes to imagine liberty is consonant with security—which is all that remains for him to dwell upon, since he has been deprived of every secure thing and every secure experience in God's cosmos.
It makes you nervous, n'est-ce pas?
No one should be surprised that modern man shows signs of strain.
Nothing much in the world is sane.
Only the great instinct—the spaceless, timeless urge toward consciousness—continues its thrust of sanity. Because of it, even the maddest men are able to seize upon the illusion that they are sane by interpreting their own, spotty awareness as if it were the entirety of possible knowing.Because of instinct, however, all the mad men and all the mad societies will be brushed like bugs from the earth's crust and replaced by better, sensibler men or—if necessary—by silence. By silence while Evolution is retooled and instinct tries again with a new form—one which may not be so dazzled by its little consciousness or so greedy for the immediate fruits thereof as to attempt, with all the means and methods set down here, and ten million more, to deny instinct, repudiate Nature, and insist its petty Reason is the shape of truth entire.
So we three nervous wrecks sat down to lunch.
Marcia was a pretty girl, winsome, willowy, with eyes as blue as an upland lake and light-brown hair which, where the sun fell through undulant glass brick, turned opalescent, like duck feathers, and shone every color, as if it were composed of quintillions of submicroscopic prisms. She wore a light perfume—smelled like an April garden—and her voice was limpid.
Poor Paul.
Gloves on her hands—white little things, knit of string. She was nearly as tall as I am. A trembling came through the gloves. "So glad to meet you, Phil. Paul talks about you incessantly. It's practically a fixation."
Hot in the lobby, steamy; you could bake bread in the place. "Come in the Knight's Bar," I said, "and cool off."
She bewitched me with her lakelike eyes a moment longer—and deep in them I saw the shadow glide, the fear—the numb, dark carnivore that had to eat, that looked up at me with a guilty but imploring gaze.
You see, I knew her.
I held the door. She went first, walking confidently in the face of the strangers in the restaurant. Paul hesitated halfway through the cold doorway—hesitated, and eyed me with a sort of regret. Regret—and inquiry. I nodded my head to say she was lovely.
Jay saw her—gestured with a menu. We sat.
They ordered Manhattans and I a coke.
Music sprayed from its electrical hose—garbled a little, echoing slightly, like music from a lawn sprinkler. This wash of counterpoint in every public place is an attempt to assuage nerves that burn like beds of coals. We do everything we can dream of to relax—except relax. If we did that—we would lose the world that we own. And we are afraid to find our souls.
"It broke the record today," Paul said. Our best prop.
"Just over a hundred." Marcia moved her long hair across her right shoulder and kept gazing at me to see—not if I remembered her, for we had already acknowledged that—but what the effect was to be. "You ought to see Park Avenue! It's a parade—driving to the country!"
I tried to look like a man who had no memory—who regarded the earth as if it were a big flower. "Hot," I agreed. "But I'm one of those unbearable souls who likes it that way."
"Me, too," said Marcia. "Two winters ago, I went to Miami. I was crazy about it—"
It was a defiant thing to say. For that was where I'd seen her—with Dave Berne, one morning when I'd stopped at his hotel, early, to take him fishing.
"A young lady left over from last night," he said.
Miss Somebody-or-other, he had said. Marcia breakfasting in his bed. She exposed a nude shoulder to wave at me from the other room. Dave paid her and we went away.
He caught his first sailfish that day.
I supposed, now, that Marcia was offering me the opportunity to ask if I hadn't seen her in Miami; I supposed she had pointed out the hurt to let me, if I wished, open it up. Paul had crushed his napkin. He was sitting beside her and across from me—wondering, probably, how to turn the conversation away from the heat wave, the weather, to a less self-conscious, more profitable subject.
"Workin'?" he asked.
"Miami," I said to Marcia, "is quite a place." Then I said to Paul, "Yeah."
"He's cutting a serial," Paul told the girl. "When he gets through, they'll pay him about five years of my salary for it. A month's work, for him. A story about how some college football player married the Daisy Queen, I imagine. For that, he gets sixty bucks to my one. All I do, though, is make atom bombs. You can see the public would rather—"
"—have its ego blown up than its cities."
She laughed. "What is it really about?"
I gave them an outline of the story. "You see," I said, "it's just the way Shaw put it. If you're going to tell people the truth, you've got to make them laugh, or they'll kill you."
"Why will they?" Marcia asked.
"Because the truth doesn't seem amusing to them at all. However—they have a feeling life should be amusing. So—if you can make them laugh, and still occasionally set down a fact, they assume it's possible for somebody to know a few truths and still laugh. This permits them—in the long run—to ignore the truth you set down and go on laughing."
"Does the truth seem amusing to you, Phil?" she asked.
"Infinitely."
"It seems ghastly to me."
"Infinitely ghastly, too. You have to approach it in both moods at once—or else, and this is commoner—in first one and then the other."
"There is an unwritten law in this country," Paul reminded us dryly, "that everything is just dandy all the time—and anybody who says different is a communist!"
I nodded. "There is also a superstitious belief that the act of stating an unpalatable truth will increase its danger to the folks. What you don't know won't hurt you. Innocence is bliss. Boost, don't knock. If you haven't anything good to say, don't say it. This is the folklore of advertising. This is the theme song of radio. Everything has to be on theup-and-up. Criticism is regarded as un-American and un-Christian. The nation was founded by a rebellion of the early fathers against British tyranny. Christ was the most passionate critic man ever had. But it is considered the essence of patriotism and the chief tenet of the Master to be anticritic. So the whole meaning both of our nation and of its principal religion have been thrown overboard—and we are all riding on a roller-coaster where no track inspectors are allowed."
"Goodness!" Marcia said.
"Where," I went on, "nobody is even sure that the tracks were ever laid to the end: looking ahead realistically also is forbidden."
The drinks came.
Paul lifted his glass to the girl. She smiled at him warmly—with love, I suppose. What kind? It was a look of gratitude. A certain composition of her features. I compared that expression with the casual, collegiate, young-woman-of-the-world wave she had once given me from Dave Berne's double bed. A high-spirited, working-prostitute salute.
Some part of her conscience was grateful to Paul for taking her out of professional circulation. She was, I presumed, a girl with a good deal of courage—and one with taste. A sensitive girl who could—still—accommodate her mind to the objective risks of her trade. But the attitudes of many men toward her would not be acceptable. To face them, she would have to sell pieces of her inner person. Paul had rescued her from that and her eyes thanked him.
But, far more, Marcia's face expressed a maternal sentiment—warm and enveloping. He was, in a sense, her baby. Emotionally immature, romantic, and hence naïve, he had taken her for what she was not. She had played up to his assumption as an older woman to a child. In seducing him, she had seduced herself. She had adopted him as the symbol of the values she had discarded, the values that were now most precious to her because they were lost.
When I thought that over, I realized it was the point of extreme hazard in their relationship. Not social pressures, but the pressures of emotions—of instincts of which neither was conscious—would be the explosive condition of their two lives. The dangerous day would be the day when he matured sufficiently to dissociate the need to love from the need to be loved. In her case, the time would come then, too—when he demanded no more mothering in bowels or brain or heart. But it might come sooner—when she tired of that one function, or extended it, or spoiled its object, or devoured it, or cast it out for its own good.
For neither man nor woman can possess without being possessed, or consume without being consumed, and whether the process involves an object or another person, not to know the way of it and not to abide by the way is to be destroyed by it.
The lunch went along badly.
My habit of apostrophe and tirade, which usually fills such hollows as occur in talk—and forces its way, sometimes, beyond those decent opportunities—seemed inappropriate here. They had been depressed by what I had already said about the world. I guessed that, along with worries, they had hoped the visit would elicit an avuncular gaiety. They were young and in love, they thought, and should get from their elders the jocose disposition reserved for young love. I felt some of their expectancy, at any rate, and it only inhibited my rhetoric.
We talked of the news, of the airlift to Berlin which, by its very existence, constituted an immense Appeasement. We discussed the presidential candidates. We talked awhile of women's clothes, of the veterans' organization currently holding a convention in the city, and I described the house Ricky and I were building south of Miami, drawing a diagram on the tablecloth with a knife.
The effort to keep talk going—to find topics and to change them before attempt was disclosed—made me restive.Paul wasn't helping any. He'd eaten hungrily enough and then sat back—jerking and fidgeting about, making faces, pulling his nose, simpering, and smirking moonily.
She'd held up her end.
The trouble was, of course, that none of us was engaged in honest behavior.
Paul wanted to say: What do you think of her—and us?
Paul wanted me to say: She's lovely—and I'm sure you'll be happy.
I had become doubly certain—without yet entirely appreciating why—that it would never turn out. I had been generically sure, even before—just as Ricky had been sure: Paul wasn't constructed to marry a harlot and live happily ever after.
I wanted to say: For God's sake, cooky, send her back to her trade; she'll find some other guy, eventually; she's not for you.
Then I wanted to go up sixteen floors to my apartment with my troubles, my work, no women, no nephew.
What did the girl want to say?
I looked at her again—at her opalescent hair and her blue eyes.
And she looked back.
For a moment, the shadow stood still—stood still, and dissipated.
A wanton expression, brief and Lilith-like, reshaped the sharp, carmine edges of her mouth. She saw me not as the uncle of her now-beloved, but as the detached person—another man—and in this seeing me, she involuntarily recalled her long affair with lust. I have heard a woman say that, by merely quivering her underlip in a certain fashion, she had been able to change the tone, attention, and interest of nine men in ten with whom she'd ever talked—and there was nothing in her history to make me doubt the statement. And I have heard another woman say that all there was to Rudolph Valentino was the dilation of his nostrils. Watching Marcia's mouth, I could understand the sense of such matters.
So I was sure of still another thing.
Hattie Blaine had been dubious of her. Hattie had made the suggestion—the to me profoundly immoral suggestion—of tempting this girl.
Hattie had done it out of an unconscious notion that Marcia had some point in her nature which could not be lent to the kind of marriage Paul would need.
It wasn't money.
It was mood.
Marcia caught me making this observation. She blushed a little, glanced at the table, and then raised her eyes—but whether anxiously or in a repetition of the look, I could not tell.
Passionate women are seldom ashamed of their passion.
What she felt was not bold; it was not arch; it was not mercenary; it was—simply—an essence of her own responses. A belonging, like the curved shape of her eyebrows or the narrowness of her red nails—which she accepted as no more and no less than that, and revealed as naturally.
I wanted to go, even more.
One can pick patterns in one's life—rhythms, cadences, aggregates, cross sections, events that occur in pairs and threes—and the phenomenon is undoubtedly the result of chance. But one notices, one superimposes the pattern subjectively—and decides it is not chance but some obscure order, because one likes to feel that obscure orders occur in life. It is difficult to keep the ego perpetually lined up with statistical reality.
In twenty-four hours I'd looked at, talked to, explored, and somewhat learned three different, very handsome young women. Mrs. Yvonne Prentiss. Gwen Taylor—at Hattie's. And Marcia.
They come in threes, I thought. I thought it had been a long time since I'd met even one girl so pretty as all these.I reminded myself not to be an ass—to keep the view that grouping and variation in no way warp mathematical principle. The obsessive quality of all such ideas weighed on me. I hardly heard her account of their junket, on the preceding Saturday, to Jones' Beach.
I began to invent an excuse for present departure—to think ahead about apologizing—my work—the check, please—
Then the busboy dropped the tray.
He had tripped, it proved, on a napkin.
There were heavy stacks of plates and side dishes on the tray—glasses of water—metal domes.
The boy staggered—and the wild gesticulation of his free arm was caught by my peripheral vision. So I saw the tray slant—saw its burden slide and crash onto the heads of a pair of buttressed dowagers, a few tables away. The noise seemed to continue for a long time and a scream permeated it as the boy lost hold entirely on his tray, fell against a chair-back, and dish after soiled dish cascaded onto flower hats, bright blouses, fat shoulders, and freckled necks.
A rush of waiters masked the scene. Guests stood to see better.
A bull-voiced beldame roared, "Send the manager!"
Her less hefty companion burst through the waiters, daubing at the stained area of her bosom and throwing bits of lettuce with every swipe. She made a beeline for the ladies' room—followed by her smeared, stentorian colleague, whose hat was full of dill and parsley.
This commotion had hardly died down—Jay had no more than managed to clear the carpet, dispatch the wreckage on the table, send out the chairs for purging, and bite back the last traces of his mirth—when another oddity got under way.
"I want," said a man seated beside Paul, "a baked apple."
"But there are no baked apples." Fred, the waiter, said this.
"Go and tell the chef I want a baked apple."
"I did, sir. There are none."
"Explain to him that I always have a baked apple, here."
"There is applesauce—sir."
Fred is Viennese. His sorrowful, wise eyes meandered over to meet mine. They were expressionless. But the fact that they had moved toward me was, in itself, communication.
"I do not like applesauce. Slippery pudding! Go and tell the chef I want my usual baked apple."