Front matter (continued 5)

(z) to establish a true freedom

(y) to abolish racialism

(x) to end wars

(w) to limit birth to numbers the planet's resources could maintain indefinitely

(v) by the use of genetics and eugenics to raise constantly all levels of health and intelligence

(u) and thus to bring about the halcyon world which had been within the very grasp of the stupid species when they had all but destroyed themselves.

So propitious was this program that a banquet to celebrate its inauguration was called for that night. The entire community, dressed in its best, assembled in a mood of new hope to dine from trestle tables in an airplane hangar.

It was during this festival, while postprandial brandies were being served, that Xerxes Cohn stepped outdoors to take a breath of the thin, poignant night air of New Mexico and, perhaps, to turn a covertly exultant face upon the raw landscape; after all, through persons like himself, man would triumph despite man's folly and its cost. He stepped into the gloom, then, and because he was an astrophysicist as well as a nuclear expert, he turned his eyes to the familiar constellations. His stocky body grew stiff. There, in the region of Ursa Minor, glowed a hitherto unknown star—a nova of approximately the third magnitude. At once he called into the laughter-filled area behind him, "Oh, Tead! Schilch! Boden! Come on out! We've got a sign, too—a nova."

People—including those summoned—began to join the great man and murmur with a sort of primitive awe. As they looked, the light from yet another new star—reaching the planet earth after years of journeying at its absolute speed—burst before their gaze. The sign was doubled in the heavens—and, soon enough, trebled. It was Jetefti—the Italian-Czech—whose keen imagination caused him first to whisper, "I say, Xerx, it couldn't be—?"

Silence fell everywhere. More novae flashed into being. And there could no longer remain a doubt amongst even the most skeptical of this enlightened residue of the race. The stars had set forth an unimaginably vast initial of their own, an

13

The phone split my sleep. I was unready for the sound, or any sound, ripping open my peaceful bivouac—bayoneting dreams and my poor respite.

I grabbed in the dark. "Yeahhhh?"

"Can I come up?"

"For God's sakes, Paul, what time is it?"

"She's gone!"

"Okay, okay. Where—?"

"Downstairs!"

I found the light. Four-fifteen. Went to the door and propped it open with a chair. Turned on the shower and stepped into it—letting the multiple streams rattle against my sleepy skull and sweep away the salty acids on my body.

The door slammed. Paul stuck his head around the curtain. "I can't find her!"

"For God's sakes, it's not that hot! She won't melt! Go get yourself some whisky. Or would you rather have coffee?"

"Christ. What do I care?" His brow was fissured. Sweat had soaked his unshaved face—which he had wiped with hands increasingly grimed by junketing about the city all night. He looked like a hung-over mechanic.

"You need a bath, yourself," I said, stepping out.

"You don't understand! I've got to find her! Before she does anything desperate."

"Look, Paul. If she's going to pull one, on the spur—it's pulled. If it's not done now—she won't hurry about it." I daubed myself with a towel; perspiration came immediately where the water had just been. It was muggier than Miami before a hurricane. "Don't get the idea that because it's your first, it's her primary emotional crisis, either! Marcia's been through a lot!" I opened the hot-water tap, let it run, and filled a tumbler. I went into the living room, took a jar of powdered coffee from the desk pigeonhole where I kept it, dumped in a couple of spoonfuls, went back, and stirred with my toothbrush handle. Then I took a couple of lumps of sugar from a horde I'd been accumulating at the Astolat's expense, plunked them in, and stirred more. I drank about half of the hot coffee and lit a cigarette.

Paul had followed every step of this gambit. I felt a little less like a roused-up mummy with the coffee inside me, so I said, "I'm sorry as all hell, cooky. Tell me about it."

"You did it!" His eyes despised me for a moment. Then tears came. "I guess I should have known enough not to bring her around to see you."

"What did I do?"

"Made her self-conscious. Made her think it wasn't ever going to work out for us. She said that when you looked at her it made her feel like a tart."

It had gone the other way around: when she'd looked at me, she'd felt—not like a tart, necessarily—but not like a faithful wife, either. And I was being blamed for that. I skipped the point. "You two kids retired in good order."

"That's what I thought. We got about a block away before she blew up."

"I'm sorry."

He tossed himself into a chair. He slipped down his tie and stared at me. "What in hell did you do?"

"Nothing."

"It wasn't—a pleasant—lunch. If all those idiotic things hadn't got us laughing—then paralyzed—"

"Go on. She blew up?"

"Sure. She said about a thousand crazy things—things like never being able to go around with me where people knew—because she realized she'd always see them knowing—and thinking. I had to get back to the lab. We've got the pile set at—we've got stuff cooking. I managed to calm her down enough so she promised to go home and get dinner. But when I got there—" He held out a note:

Paul, dear—For people like us, it should always be quick, clean, permanent, and no hard feelings. I love you—that's why. M.

"Sounds like—going away. Nothing more drastic."

"Drastic enough! And she can't get away with that! I won't let her! We'd have made it."

"What did you do? Bloodhound around the city?"

"Went to her old apartment, first. Then—to the people who'd been her friends. Routing them out. Bribing doormen to let me knock and wake them up. Finally—when I ran out of ideas—I went to Hattie Blaine's. Good God—what a hideous place!"

I skipped that one, too. It was no time to argue that Hat's, while it had a few dim facets of one sort or another, was in my opinion (or had been, anyhow)—rather enchanting. A kindlier spot than many a hearth or any city street.

"What did Hat say?"

"Ye gods! She talked. She talked the grimmest bunch of obscene sophistries I ever heard in my life! She tried to get me drunk! She even tried to get one of the girls to—entertain me!"

"It never passed through your cold, reasoning, scientific cranium that perhaps she was trying to be decent to you?"

"Decent!"

"Did she know where Marcia was?"

"If she did—she wasn't saying. She said she had no idea on earth. Hadn't heard from her for months. Or seen her—naturally. I begged her—beseeched her—to give me any useful address. Any name. Any scrap of a suggestion—"

I picked up the phone. After ringing me, the Astolat switchboard operator had fallen back to sleep and I listened to the buzz for a long while before she plugged in—irritably. The number I gave wasn't in the book. But Hattie wouldn't be asleep—yet. Not unless she'd changed.

Viola answered and Hattie came on in a moment. "Hello, Phil. What's cooking? You and Gwen quarrel?"

Since waking, I hadn't thought about Gwen—or Yvonne. The question startled me. "Nope," I said. "Gwen, incidentally, has—has gone out for a bit with a friend of mine. Nice gal, Gwen. It's about my nephew, Paul."

"Oh. Is he there?"

"Yeah."

"Phil, that lad's in very bad shape."

"Yeah."

"I'm serious. I know men. He's apt to do—anything!"

"Yeah. Maybe so. Look. You don't have any ideas about Marcia—that you'd give me, but not him?"

"Too many!"

"I don't understand."

"I couldn't very well give Paul the names and addresses of all the boys who have liked her, could I? In the shape he's in—he'd rout out God Almighty, or run a one-man posse through hell."

"Yeah."

"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 afterthought. 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 that. 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.

It was on the Boulevard, with the rich night traffic, the skimmed scarlet scum of the studios and the magnates from Pasadena with their cold, oiled working-model blondes.

The bells rang. The iron hands came down. Stop civilization. Go civilization. Red lights green lights cracking my drunken brain. The acrid flavor of tomorrow in my mouth. Alarm. Headsplitting daylight. How about this? She sees him get out of the ice wagon. She throws a snowball at him. Go sell it to the Eskimos, she says. I've got it!

She throws the snowball. That's good. So okay—her mitten sticks to it and soaks him square in the puss and instead of spitting out the mitten—which he gets in his teeth—he makes like it's a mustache!

Hell! He's a football player, isn't he—not just an ice-man? Going to be a big-shot brain specialist someday, isn't he? Quick thinker. So okay. So he leaps and spears the mitten and the snowball like it's a long forward and he runs at her and tackles her and spills her—not real hard—but hard—and there's how they meet, the both of them lying down in the snow with her on her back and the guy on top. Is that good—or is it terrific?

And there, so help me Christ, after eleven days, and twenty-three thousand dollars, is how they do meet.

Wrong coast for Aglaia, I say? I'm sure I did.

That morning's taste.

The rest of them. The contract. The months.

The arms and the lights and the bells became lost in the prospect and I stepped from the curb and brakes trilled.

"Want a lift? You need one, pal."

That was Dave.

At my apartment, I made some coffee and later we went back together to the address in Beverly Hills—because he didn't know it, and he was a lonely guy, too.

In fact he still is.

The most brokenhearted guy in the world.

You see

nobody told him about the six-pointed star on the box he was shipped in—he had to find out for himself.

And he wants to be sure, when he checks out, that he kept it bright while he had the use of it.

Dave came in.

"By God," he said, "Wylie! The old, articulate cryptogram in person, nude as a saint's stool!" It might have been a bracing autumn forenoon: "I'm glad to see you! I was saying to a friend only the other night—a jerk named Staunton—Staunton, the town's not the same—Wylie's not here. The old termite has moved to the country—turned himself out to pasture! And Florida in the winter! The son-of-a-bitch is chasing the analema! Where's the patient?"

I pointed.

Dave took a look and came back.

"Shall we wake him up? I can take him to the office and get some of my minions looking for his wench. Private dicks, too. They won't find her. They couldn't find a luminous memorandum in a two-drawer filing cabinet. But it might wear him down a little."

"Let him sleep, for now."

Dave sat down. "This is swell! Send for a barrel of iced tea, will you—with a clear gin on the side? I had a hard night last night. A bunch of the super-big-shots came in on the Super-Chief and the Super-Century last night. Things in Hollywood are so bad that two of them stayed sober the whole damned evening."

I phoned Room Service. "There's a depraved guest of mine up here who wants some neat gin and a lot of iced tea—"

Dave had picked up one of my ashtrays and was looking at it intently. When I hung up he said, "Depraved? Depraved, you say? Me? Don't I detect not just one, but two colors of lipstick here?"

"Callers from the other rooms," I answered. "Came in to consult the oracle."

"Depraved," he repeated. "That's the trouble with you Gentiles. Two rules for everything. 'If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out.' But—'Let not thy left hand know what thy right doeth.' Something of that sort. So you reconcile the pair by going around plucking out other people's right eyes; and not letting your open hand know the other is gouging. Consulting the oracle! What a phrasemaker!"

I told him about Gwen and Yvonne.

He pretended to be still more deeply outraged. "There you are! A perfect Wylie situation. God, what an imposter! Not one lovely girl—but two—are sent on silver salvers. You entertain them. You get all the social opprobrium and none of the benefits. What confidence can youth have in you, after a trick like that? Here you are—the last hope for phallic worship in a dying world. The man with the one message that makes sense. Either the boys get their breeches back—and do things to make the dames respect 'em—or Nature will throw us out of the party. You proclaim it with your foghorn and you play it on your xylophone. But when it gets right down to the bedrocking—what do you do? You personally, Mr. Prophet? Welsh! Walk out on the act!"

"Times are changing," I told him. "Phallic worship? Can you build good rituals around our businessmen? A healthy restoration of phallic worship would ruin the profitable activities of every vested institution in the land, from its banks to its churches. People wouldn't even care if the trains ran on time, any more. Think of that!"

Dave was leering at me pensively. "By God. It might be the thing to revive Hollywood."

"Yeah," I said. "You open with a prologue that shows modern psychology has found the roots of love in our love lives. Then you fade to the American Home, where a Husband is trying to figure out how to arouse or enchant or even slightly interest one Beautiful Blonde Mother. She is rushing about the house swatting her children for bringing home a magazine full of art studies. Her husband tries to slip his arm around her—but she knows he is suffering from neurotic hay fever, makes his living by manufacturing second-rate household appliances which he sells owing to better advertising, is afraid of his stockholders, never had the earning capacity of Joe Benson or Harvey Tekker or Don Oaker, and is scared of her, besides. Great subject for phallic worship! We fade to a contented pagan maiden in the South Sea Isles—ukeleles and moonlight—"

"And the MPPA comes in and tosses out the film! It's a conspiracy!" he said in a Durantean tone.

"You guys have worked out the vein—that's all. There can't be any more very interesting movies till there's a new public attitude about life. You've got to where there's no permissible area that you haven't canvassed a hundred times. The new pictures are all remakes. People get sick of such things. Jam yesterday, today and tomorrow is as bad as none today. All the movies are self-plagiarisms. I even went to one with Ricky this summer."

"We're grateful."

"Remember the Three Little Pigs—and the song about the 'Big Bad Wolf' that people sang to kid themselves in the Depression?"

"I remember."

"So all right. We went to see this movie—and we also saw a remake of the Little Pigs. Same story. Same art. Same theme song. At the finale, the new inspiration is this: the wolf pops down the chimney of the little pig in the brick house—hind end first. And the pig fills a caldron with turpentine. The wolf lands in same—and the picture irises down on the wolf roaring away, his hind legs held high, his turpentined anus dragging, his forelegs pulling—like any dog. Now—I was brought up to believe that you can't tell the same joke twice. And I was also taught that putting turps on animals' rears was sadistic. I still think it is. And I think it's too vulgar a way to try for a laugh—cruelty to animals aside. That, my boy, is truly obscene—the dying effort of a perishing industry. Fortunately—television is coming in—and it will be far more vulgar. Television will really speed up the fertile necessity of a great change in this disgraceful Western world. Right?"

"Right," said Dave. "I saw that short. I psychologically snapped my petits fours." He looked at me for a while. "Phil—why'd you call me over here, this morning?"

Karl came with the gin and tea. I signed. He went.

Dave's question startled me. I suddenly saw it from his angle. I'd allowed him to skip—or postpone—an important conference because (I'd said) my nephew was on an emotional binge and I needed aid. Dave would know that, all else being equal and normal, I could handle my nephew. He'd know that, barring some editorial crisis, the cutting of a serial wasn't so important I couldn't set it aside for a day or so to row a relative through the waters of a soul-struggle. He'd know, by my cursory attention to Paul—and by the way my talk had slatted around—that I had more on my mind than Paul's problem. So he had realized—and I had not—that I'd decided to call in a friend—for myself.

"I need a good lawyer," I said.

"Oh—oh!"

I looked at him cross-eyed. "What an evil mind you have! I keep my accounts and the tax people are not particularly interested in me. No brunette has letters of mine and is asking for a thousand bucks. Nobody is suing me for plagiarism. I just noticed a little nuisance in the back of my throat the other day and went over to see Tom and had a biopsy—and I want my affairs in order."

I shouldn't have done it that way. He turned sheet-white.

"There isn't any report on the biopsy yet," I said. "Won't be till Monday. Makes quite a long weekend. But I have a hunch—"

"You God-damned dour Scotchmen! Maybe it's nothing."

"Tom thinks it's something."

He looked out the window for a long time—with his shoulders folded forward and the sun beating on his face, reflecting into it from the cement top of the parapet and bouncing at it from the tile terrace between. That ugly, fond mug.

"I suppose," he finally said, "when they have taken everything else and everybody else they come around for you in person."

"I never really expected to get even this old. When I was a kid, I was sure I'd never see thirty. As I recall, I didn't want to. Seemed a stale age."

Dave grinned feebly. "Ricky?"

I shook my head.

"She well now?"

"We think so."

"Get her down here, man!"

I shook it again. "Give her the two more days. And it just might—might—and then—"

"You didn't take a drink?"

Again.

"By God! What a reform!"

"I'm trying to get that serial done—"

"—strictly on Presbyterianism."

I thought that over. "Maybe. They'll need the dough. And it's a favorite old anodyne of mine—rolling up the sleeves."

Dave poured out a second glass of iced tea and gulped it. He nodded his head toward my bedroom. "When he wakes up, tell him to come down to my office. Tell him we're working for him. We'll do what we can think of. I'll keep him stooging around—and sober, if possible—and see you later."

"Going?"

He came across the room and put an arm around my shoulder. "You said you wanted to work. I'll be back."

"Okay."

2

I remember, one day on the way to California, when the Chief stopped at Needles. It was summertime and the thermometer on the station wall in the shade said 125 degrees. I was standing around, dizzy, when I saw a guy pacing up and down the platform as if he enjoyed it. I ventured out in the sunshine to see if he'd lost his mind and he turned around—a dark-skinned character. Royalty, it proved later, from Hyderabad. He liked it.

My apartment, that morning, was something like the Needles station on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. No baking sand, red-hot rocks, or mountains pitching on the miraged distance, of course. Needles was dry, too, and Manhattan was close to saturate.

I worked along—not minding much.

But after all, even Negroes sunburn—even Papuans get lazy.

Around one o'clock I began to feel—not hungry but empty—and I went in to check on Paul. He was still snoring and sweating.

Four and a half grains of sodium amytal, by itself, wouldn't have knocked him that flat that long. He'd have wakened in six or seven hours, I thought—feeling fuzzy and feeble and maybe a little sick. He still seemed good for more time, to me. It showed just how much sleep he'd left out in the past weeks, past months—worrying about that girl and worrying about making weapons with his beloved mathematics. It was possible, of course, that he'd explode awake any moment—look at his watch—throw an outside loop—and get going like a jet plane.

I wrote him a note saying I was downstairs in the Knight's Bar and that I had a new search in progress. That would bring him.

I got dressed. The gabardine was like wet newsprint.

This time, air conditioning was a relief. I sucked in a lungful and Jay came up.

"Want to sit with Mrs. Prentiss?"

"Sure."

Exactly two days before, she had leaned over the same table, an immaculate grooming operation—hurt, snooty, aloof, reading her disguised book. A Cinderella. Avid and anxious—haughty and pretty hateful—beautiful and not much good. I could say what was different about her now but it would be difficult to convey the true impression of that. Her hair, for one thing. It was just neatly combed—just casual, gold-blonde hair whose owner hadn't taken pains for once, with every single filament. Her dress. Another plain, costly print—but the body inside it was relaxed and not subconsciously trying to avoid creases. It didn't seem to fit quite as perfectly, and yet it suited her better: it made—would make—anybody, any man, look at the girl inside and the clothes after—not the other way around. The Musak was giving out with "Dardanella" and her foot was keeping time under the table.

"Hello, Yvonne."

She glanced up—from the morning paper.

"'Lo, Phil."

"Want company?"

"Love it." She moved over a little. I came around the table and sat down.

"You look right sweet this morning. Noon. Whatever it is."

She folded up the paper.

I ordered some cold salmon and potato salad and iced coffee.

She studied me—gravely for the most part. Once, she showed a dimple. But her voice was placid. "You could be annoyed at me."

"What for?"

"Don't be obvious!"

"Last night? Annoyed? I was tired. In a talky mood. It was my guest's own idea to come down. I said sure—and after she'd been there awhile—I changed my mind."

"That's what Gwen thought." She ate a little of her fruit salad. Maybe her hand shook. Certainly not much. She drew a straight, easy breath. "I imagined I could learn something from her."

"Did you?"

She looked at me with frank, gray eyes. She smiled into herself. "You know I did."

"What?"

"Isn't it strange how much we attach to trifles—love and sex trifles? Set up a whole lifetime for happiness—but fix it so that one little act for a handful of minutes will ruin the whole thing."

"That."

She flicked her head to put back her hair. "It's mad! To imagine such things are so important! To imagine whole lives and people and families can be ruined by anything—so little!"

I gave her the red schoolhouse riposte. "Knocking a person on the head is a little thing that hardly takes even one minute. But it's murder. Slipping a hundred G's out of the cash cage takes only a sec—but it's robbery—"

"And kissing you in a cab the other night," she answered, "took only a couple of blocks and I don't love you in the least. We touched. A moment or two. It was fun. We'll never do it again. Or, say—we do. Is that like murder and robbery? Should it ruin lives?"

"Not to my way of thinking. I don't feel wrecked."

"Neither do I," she said softly. "Neither do I! On the contrary! You have to find out that how you feel is terribly important—terribly. But what you do—unless you make it important—that's such a tiny thing!" She smiled. "When you think that just forty-eight hours ago—I was sitting here shuddering over Rol—"

"It occurred to me."

"It seems—" she sought for the proper words—"sort of—caddish. Unchivalrous. And hideously unsympathetic."

"Aren't you pushing yourself?"

"What do you mean?"

"You could have a reaction."

"I'm having one."

My lunch came.

"I mean," I said, "a reaction to this reaction."

She considered that and her curls moved. "I doubt it. I'm—cured."

"Cured one way. Maybe you're going to suffer in another."

She seemed frightened for a bare moment. "I don't know," she finally said. "How can I tell?"

"Wait and see."

"If I suffer, I suffer," she finally said. And her eyes weren't alarmed.

"Good for you!"

"May I ask a question?"

"Shoot."

I waited while she ate a little and formulated.

"Phil, what would you think of me now if I were your wife?"

It was quite a one. It was the second really tough one she'd put to me. "What would you ask God if He came in?" was the other.

"I hope," I said, "that I'd cherish you more than ever."

"But you might not?"

"I leave room for the possibility. I don't know, after all."

"Why would you cherish me?"

"For at last being honest with yourself about yourself."

"Easy answer. Why might you not?"

"I dunno. You might have found yourself—by that honesty—to be somebody who wouldn't like me. Ergo—how could I go on insisting—?"

"Only that?"

"Only that. It's a lot."

"You sure, Phil? Certain?"

"My-God-yes! A great, great many of the people I know, and am fond of, and admire, would look at your sin as just a sort of timid, dainty experiment. I suppose you're fishing around for rebuke. You'll never get much. Most women learn by doing—some men, by just thinking. What are you doing tonight, for instance?"

"I—I don't know yet." She flushed peach-pink. "I haven't—decided."

"Unh!"

"You sound like Rol. Like Rol—after— Before I left. Dainty—he talked like that."

"They bring us up—in a desert," I said. "Because that's where they grew up." I thought of Needles and the metallic sunlight and the Moslem prince. "Still—there are other things in life besides sex."

"Not if sex isn't right, there aren't. Not any other things worth living for."

"Back to Freud and the Western neurosis. Yvonne—I have to scram in a moment. Work. And a nephew. Maybe you'd care to meet him?"

"You'll forget to call me."

"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 autohypnosis, 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 hot!"

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 qualities 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."

"And you think God is what might be called the cause in instinct?"

"The cause, the pattern, the existence of it in animals and man, the physical laws and forms of the universe, and the instincts of living things that match those laws and forms. What's the difference between the laws of instinct—the great drives of life taken with the opposed drives that balance them and the harmony possible in a person who understands these—and other laws? The attraction and repulsion of electrical energy, for instance? We do not regard them as 'mutually exclusive.' What are you going to say about a question like Schrodinger's? He shows that one fragment of one atom hitting another atom in a gene will change the nature of the resulting being. I'd add that the instincts may change, too. Schrodinger shows you that what we know of energy lies at the heart of what we know of form. You can also see that form lies at the heart of what we know of behavior and of consciousness. When they understand the laws of the energy in atoms—they'll probably have a brand-new parallel, like that of other natural laws, for instinctual laws. They may even have a potential new insight into instinct. For how can anybody who notices the perfect instinctual pattern that corresponds with every living form, and who sees these forms evolving in awareness down the aeons, doubt that the universe has purpose or wonder what its purpose is? Unfortunately, in this putrid day and age, new discoveries in many fields are military secrets—so we, the people, won't be told them."

"You sound extremely bitter about that."

"Bitter? Yes, I'm bitter, in a way. All my life I've devoted myself to following the inquiry into the nature of Nature. This pursuit has led me—by way of psychology—into finding out a great deal about what is popularly called the nature of God. But now, knowledge at the source is restricted, classified, forbidden, secret—to protect the damned atom bomb. My government, as a security measure, has cut off my inquiry into God, my power to extend my own religion, my equivalent of your faith, my access to truth. Perhaps I'd never even manage to persuade anybody that the time has come to connect instinct and energy by theory. But the right that I hold most valuable has been taken from me. And from you. And from everybody—if they stopped to think. Freedom—that precious necessity—is actually freedom for the mind. There is no other pure liberty. All other freedoms stem from intellectual freedom—but all others are qualified by the material, social, political, and spiritual desires of people. What we call liberty in America is the right to know and to change: to extend or limit this liberty for the sake of that advantage or because of that prejudice—and then to learn better and shift the position once again—and so on forever. That is all there is to liberty insofar as it concerns behavior. But when the behavior of the mind is circumscribed, liberty is dead in its one absolute sense. It is dead today. We live in a midnight imposed by fear—a time like all dark ages. Truth and learning have gone underground. I am forbidden to know any more. What I think might be centuries in advance of what common people are thinking. It is still—at least potentially—obsolete, or inadequate, in relation to what other men may know—that I am not allowed by my government to find out. Wouldn't you be bitter—or sad—if your church were shut up by the Congress, if you were forbidden to learn more about your God, and if you were obliged to confine even your thinking to bootlegged guesses?"

"It's a pretty remote argument," he said.

"Is it? Remote to destroy the source of freedom?"

"Would you have us tell the Soviets how to make a bomb?"

"Is that the question? They know how! You have been told and told and told that they know how and have known since the Smythe Report appeared. And even that's not the point. When it became evident that the people of the United States faced the alternatives of maintaining the freedom of knowledge—at the risk of atomic conflict—or of destroying liberty at the source to gain the dubious advantage of a few years' time—the people chose the phony safety of secrecy for a mere unknowable dozens of months. They were too dumb to see they had sold their birthright."

"What would you have done?"

I shrugged. "The hell with it! If we had understood science and if we had believed in freedom we would have been willing, the minute the problem appeared, to fight for both—because they're one. We would not have permitted any bleak tyranny to interfere with the world-wide course of knowledge and the existence of our freedom."

"You're asking a good deal."

"I ask nothing. I merely point out that the fear of holocaust has been made permanent by our fearful failure to act. Freedom throttled will be difficult to revive. The habit of intellectual tyranny is already seeping into the pores of a world destined to be more panicky each year until either freedom of knowledge is restored or the far more likely chaos ensues. After chaos will come the regimentation, by opportunists, of a world that will have lost its grip on liberty. We bought a little time at the cost of all the values our ancestors piled up for us in the ages. It is a cheapskate civilization."

The Reverend Socker Melton suddenly chuckled. He had, in the midst of at least mild anxiety, hit on some straw, some philosophical prop. "Don't take it so hard! You sound as if you felt responsible for all the woes of man!"

"Don't you?"

"Good Lord! Certainly not!"

"You are a man, though."

"Just one man."

"Just one. But if you had access to instinct, you might realize that each one, to the degree he is aware, is all men."

"A cold, distant, impersonal idea, I must say!"

"The hell it is! The idea I'm putting forward involves being and acting what instinct orders in us—and the constant sense of that process. It relates me to every man—to every king and statesman and politician and movie queen and carpenter and garbage man—to every creature that walks and flies and swims and crawls—and to the sea, the setting sun, the stars. I see them all and I find in them the response that rises from being related to them. I consider them in my cortex—but my God consists also in feeling them. I do not stumble about in schisms and dichotomies. An infinite number of aspects of life which seem antithetical to most people seem merely two manifestations of one awareness to me. You're the kind of fellow, reverend, I bet, who goes around saying, like Will Rogers, that you never met a man you didn't like. I can buy that—and still know, besides, I never met a man I did like altogether, including me. I can say, there was never a moment when I altogether liked myself, or disliked. Warm sentiments pervade my coldest thoughts. Heaven and hell are here in this one room.

"There—you see—we get back to the original sin, again: the static standards that must be maintained if the ego is to be kept intact. This is evil—that is good; he is saved—she is damned; my opinion is right—yours is wrong; my faith makes me perfect and whole—yours, meaning all the other faiths on earth, is imperfect and fragmentary at best. For why? Simply because my faith is mine. Me, me, me. I, I, I. That is what happens—that is the tragifarce—of taking instinct away from the brain and being entire, and investing the gigantic force of it in the little front lobes. From then on—'I have faith—and I, alone, am right. I, alone, am God.'

"Well, in my book, I am God, padre, and so are you, and so are all the people on the street down there, and so is the heat wave, and so are scorpions and rattlesnakes and botuli bacilli, and so are the intergalactic clouds. One thing. It is not necessary for me to elevate myself above these—to commit original sin by defining that unity in terms of my fatuous self-admiration. I do not have to give my days, my doings and my dreams to the establishment of the general illusion that I am no animal—whether by fasts or feasts, by fish on Friday or by Easter celebrations, by shutting the door when I tend my body, and especially, dominie, I do not have to pretend the procreative urge in me is superior to that same urge in cosmos—by delimiting it, stylizing it, codifying it, and hiding it wherever and whenever it must have expression. Chastity, celibacy, virginity, purity—these are the lowest terms of original sin. These condemn the animal to a vile psychological and social beastliness by forcing him to pretend he is not the unashamed pure animal that he is."

"You want free love—promiscuity—no moral ethic—"

"Nonsense! I want to build our sex behavior around what is learned to be true nature of man—to establish an aesthetic from instinct—not from the instinct-perverting demands of ego and superego.'

"And what would it be?"

"Loving, for a start."

He moved impatiently. "Spiritual love—"

"I mean the same. What spiritual love has man today? What friendliness toward other men? What regard for Nature? Man fears. Man hates. And as to Nature—he is the hostile parasite on the whole of it, and calls himself its conqueror. Let him conquer his ego—and then—if he should prove to be—in some almost unimaginable era of clean passion—capable of as wide a variety of ways of loving as he is capable of simulating and extending the other faculties of other species—he will have to build his aesthetics around that. Love takes two people. If neither is injured, made less, turned hateful, rendered afraid—if the purposes of instinct, become aware and consciously directed, are not finally frustrated—no specific behavior will offend this dim-seen Nature. Shameless awareness lies far nearer to a way for mankind to grow loving than any so-called love of a Jesus which requires a man to think he is impure, vile, inevitably born a sinner, inferior physically to all other living things in Eden's Garden—and this, so he may publicly proclaim himself and secretly imagine himself to be their 'spiritual' superior. Isn't that clear?"

"Sometimes I follow you—sometimes not."

"Look at it this way. You say you've chucked out heaven and hell—or hell, anyhow—you modern religionists. I say, you cannot do so. I say—if your God is a god of what you consider pure goodness—you have to have a devil to balance Him. I say that all the saints and holy men and all the simple, human people who have managed, by one religion or another, to get some sense of the integration of their instincts, have done it because the religions did give them a semantic for instinct—a heaven-hell formulation of their nonverbal impulses—a yang-and-yin for Christianity, so to speak—or a Jehovah-Satan for Taoism. Take that away—and you take away all opportunity for the religious—the instinctual—experience. You produce a bunch of gassy bounders who—since hellishness is everywhere but since they've discarded hell—confuse the goodness of the species with goods, good health, prosperity, long life—things that may be possible devils for the species. They lose sight of the inwardness of the nongood and see evil as a material fact, entirely. Modern devil-seekers—men like Sheen, like Niebuhr—are closer to the mechanics of human nature than these idiot modern congregations that throw out Satan and his kingdom and as a result are condemned to evil behavior because they have made themselves blind to evil's source. Closer—but still not very damn close."

"What, then, is your criterion of good and evil?"

"I could give you dozens. I give you a sample. When you consider what you are doing, or what any man does, or any group of men—ask yourself whether that particular deed will benefit or injure the chances of future generations to evolve toward increased consciousness."

"Great heavens, man—most preachers wouldn't be able to decide a question like that! Let alone plain folks!"

"Sure. Did I say that preachers—let alone plain folks—or any handful of contemporary men—knew what they were doing? Or why? Or what anybody else was doing? They don't know. So they go on by instinct—the statistical sweep of impulses that lop off nations as readily as the wind lops trees. I said we could know. I said we weren't trying. Instinct is the immortal property—the urge in behalf of the future. Ants are doing what they can for ants, bees for bees, fish for fish—without much individual hesitation. But not men for men. Men today are trying either to get themselves into heaven, or to make a mint, or just to get by, as individuals. The future, to most men, means their own here—or their reward in heaven. To instinct, the future means the future of awareness, and men are but its most conspicuous exponents here and now. If we began to plan life for our progeny—what a world!"

I was getting sick of the guy. Sick, rather, of myself—my endless efforts to put a simple idea in some form that would perfuse skulls hardened against it—sometimes even by what they imagined to be open-mindedness. "Look. You believe, don't you, that you could sit down and write out a mode of behavior satisfactory for man to the end of time?"

"I could take a crack at it," he said.

"Well—I don't. I believe that future men should be left free to make up their minds without consulting any bulls and fiats from me. I get some sense of orientation, a raison d'être, from giving thought to the rights of the species now and to come. Not saving adult souls for present bliss—or spiritual cradle-snatching, either—but forwarding the whole, rolling business of biology on this sin-drenched planet, is the fun—for me."

"You are totally pessimistic about the present scene, apparently."

I looked out the window. It was getting on toward sunset. "Excepting for a few physical technologies—are we so different from our human predecessors? Crueler, it may be. And weaker physically, perhaps. Otherwise—not any different. And has there ever been a time in our past history when optimism for even one era or one society was warranted? History says not—the record. It is hardly an encouraging fact."

"No hope, then? No fringe of lining on the cloud—?"

"I didn't say that. The record has at least—continued. I hardly expect mankind to be blotted out. I just don't have a very high opinion of man's present works in relation to what he really is, desperately needs, and someday could be. There are compensations. I give you one. We won't be missed."

He began putting on his dickey. It plastered itself against his sodden undershirt. He ran his thick fingers around his collar.

"You're a hard person, Phil."

"I am a very gentle guy, Socker. The men of the earth are hard. They have confused another instinct here—and think to be hard is estimable."

"Somehow, I believe you're all wrong."

"Of course. So much of what I think is the opposite of what you do. And then—I believe a lot that Jesus said. While you don't believe any of it at all."

He flushed. "I'm not sure I'd want you to talk to my young people."

"You relieve me. And you've been very decent to listen—yourself."

"Oh," he said, fairly jovially, now that he was about to be gone, "I listen to them all. Crackpots, nuts, psychiatrists, anybody—"

"Listen to yourself, once."

Suddenly he was sore. "Who in hell do you think you are?"

"Somebody," I answered, "whose religion doesn't insist it knows all about all truth for all people for all time. Somebody who isn't a stuck-up, luxury-struck, fatuous, patronizing jerk in a black vest who carries around God's credit card in his hip pocket and keeps in the collection-plate business by holding smut sessions in the church gymnasium. Now, for God's sake, get out of here and let me work."

He stood at the door. He smiled again. "I'm sorry for you, Phil. Truly sorry. You're a brave man—in a way—and so arrogantly blind."

"Sure. We all are."

"Do me one favor?"

"Do me one. Cross the hall—poke the bell—"

"Pray."

"You pray. Wear holes in the sky. Tell God you're coming, soon. And tell Him I am, too, while you're at it. See you there!"

When he was gone, I felt washed out.

Why had I bothered to try something that couldn't come off? Didn't I know the work I'd done—the hells I'd gone through to get my Inkling—would never tempt that fat bastard past the first six steps of a million rugged miles?

Houses on sand paper roofs putty pillars no brains

What is conscience but fealty to truth?

What man can have good conscience if his beliefs conceal the smallest truth—or especially if they conceal himself from himself?

With honesty toward science—and toward the inner sciences—man and ethic are one.

Ethos is, indeed, what man has, and is.

Come off it, Wylie! The serial!

4

But I couldn't work, any longer.

I filled my tub, instead, with the coolest water in the tap.

You pray.

He would, too.

A lugubrious joke uttered itself within me.

Father, bring insight to this sincerely mistaken man—

(Taking the words out of my mouth: you right—me wrong)

Or,

Spare us the ineffable harm of the intellectual, the Antichrist—

(All who oppose us oppose Jesus—but didn't He say, In my house are many mansions?)

Prince of Peace! (Peace, in a pig's eye.) A mighty fortress. Onward, Christian soldiers. The Son of God Goes Forth to War. He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword— All the clayfaces, upturned to the ceramic excellence of the dominie Let us pray: Father, forgive them— The hypocrites!

Perhaps some—the widow kneeling in the stained-glass effulgence—clutching her mite—debating love against appetite—a possibly hungrier widow against bread and her own belly—she might see God there—

Our organ cost thirty-six thousand dollars and has five keyboards

God,

we migrants, traveling with galaxy, sun, slogging sphere, geological budge of continent, movement of races, American transportation, feet,

we on our journey-forever in time-space are sure as hell, unmistakably, definitely—as the saying goes— en route. Hence, I deem the status quo of ego unimaginative. Is this a sin? A sin to hunger for more Light? Or is it goodness

to reject the surrounding brilliance—call it The Dark—in order to make personal hay with the pewee flashlight of Episcopalianism.

Judge not that ye be not judged, Wylie, He said. Then shall I sit like a Buchmanite on the john waiting for guidance? And there shall be laughter in heaven They omit that chapter. Anger is their meat: Gabriel's pinfeathers, torn out by handfuls. Pluck yourself a quill, pal. Make yourself a pen from a seraphim. Remind them they should enjoy it. Nature, that's all, simply telling us to fall In love. And that's why Chinks do it— Japs do it—

I got out of the tub, scattering water, and turned the radio loud.

Let me communicate again in the idiom of man— my conceit has suddenly tired me out. I lay forlornly in the water, the water browned off by rust in the Astolat's pipes, the waters of life, but not much left. Sadness encompassed me. The sadness of little children dying by merely growing up of mature men turning childish again of American trees of the disinherited the stood-up the disappointed the deserted the uncomprehended of the walking wounded I hate to see that evening sun go down The love songs of the world are sad.

The old English ballads quaintly drone—murder and rue.

Gypsy violins have wet the eyes of European centuries.

Italians shake their opera houses with love's grief.

Don Juan dies young—and Romeo grows old.

The Hindu on his fetid riverbank throbs to the guillotine moon.

The damsel in Xanadu may be different—it doesn't go on to say.

But—

Frankie shot Johnny.

We Americans have had to borrow rue from our slaves; they have enough, and to spare

We call it blues—and the origin's appropriate to us.

The child in his cradle listens to locomotives talking themselves up the long grades, bidding the counties farewell in the night.

Ours is a civilization of pistons, motors turning, electrons peppering filaments into light. We are

a racy people. We got rhythm.

The tempo of our love and the momentum of our woe are one.

Our exultation soars with edifices that scrape the sky—then falters underground where we have iron rivers to carry the people home—and there is no home when they get there but only the percussant streets again, the shooting tabernacles, the radiance, the tumult in time.

We sleep. Morning comes.

In the mammoth sunshine of our cities we remember our blues the way the slaves remember.

No heart, no intellect, but we got rhythm! Look at the towers! Look at the sky—that's blue, too, baby!

The streets are straight, the blocks are square, the intersections regular. The shadows are geometry—they dive one hundred stories. It is a gameboard, ruled and sharp by transit here and plummet there, concrete and rectilinear.

This we call traffic. It is the way we move on the board.

Trucks and taxis playing fast chess to the beat of the Christmas-colored signals. We are a great, free, democratic people whose trains run approximately on time. In this civilization, eight-o'clock children make skip-ropes of rainbows and slide down the balustrades of sunbeams. One contraction of our chamber of commerce ventricle will thrust ten thousand tons of ore from Duluth to Pittsburgh.

We rate fireflies in kilowatts.

But we hate to see the evening sun go down.

Paul Bunyan's ox was blue. So—our hills, the evening in our thoroughfares, our dying lips.

Hence, when we talk about rue in these United States, brother, we do it in brass! We put

pistons and kilowatts in our lament, grief, sorrow, lostness!

We take a breath of our American air and we-the-people burst.

That's blues!

The mood would have led to God knows what charade in the auditorium of my senses—the multitude of watching, listening "mes" reacting in all their various ways at once; it might have become a ululation you could have heard on Mars—or frozen as if the head of Medusa had come on stage—or, by that third unanimity, blazed into laughter, revolted ecstasy at ecstasy itself.

The singing woman stopped. There was a knock.

I yelled, "Come in!" relieved—thinking it might be Paul.

For more than an hour, now, worry over him had cankered me.

(Do you imagine I tell you all that happens, here? I nearly would if I could—it is not that. But the compendium of the eighteen simultaneous trains of consciousness (the intrications and alternations and separate chains that run in a man's mind and that you could see in your own if you tried) would, in a weekend fill up all the books a man might read in his life. I give you hardly the essence, my friend—but only a sample of the aggregate—a biopsy of its own sort.)

A knock, then.

I realized it was the door in the bedroom.

"May I come in?" Yvonne asked.

"Certainly."

"Your radio's positively shaking the building!"

"Turn it down. I hope you won't mind I'm in here—slightly naked."

"Oh!" I couldn't see her, or she, me. The rooms waited because she had stopped. "Slightly!"

"Barely, if you prefer. Barely nude. Covered in a meager depth with rusty water. Concealed in soapy murk, besides. And, in addition, protected by scum. It's hard water, you know—Croton."

Presently the radio went down and out—a moron throttled in midspiel. "I'll sit in here," she said.

"Any place you like."

"I'll bet! I'll bet if you heard me coming—you'd grab the shower curtain—"

"Flowers for tonight?"

"You certainly have a long, mean memory, Philip Wylie! So that's just what I do bet!" She was approaching. She exclaimed, "What do you mean—soapsuds?"

"An invention for the Puritan mind. A burlesque. After all—!"

"After all—what?"

"In a better world—but skip it."

She did. "You certainly know how to upset people," she said.

"Now what?"

"After lunch—I phoned Gwen—to come over this evening."

"So?"

"And after that—I began to feel jittery."

"And now?"

"I came over here."

"To ask me how to feel? Ye Gods! I recommended having your own feelings—and I thought you were catching on."

She was wearing a faintly rose-pink frock of some shiny, translucent material. You could see the garments beneath—you were supposed to see. There were two—and the lace hem of the lower one showed below the blush of her dress—as it was supposed to show. She looked like a kid.

"I've got too many feelings at once." She walked toward the window, where I could now see her only by leaning a little. "I almost called Rol this afternoon."

I said nothing.

"Did you hear me?"

"Yeah. Why didn't you?"

"Because I wanted to see Gwen again. Once more, anyway."

"Suppose she couldn't have come?"

"That's unkind of you!"

"Would a friend have done as well?"

She didn't answer for so long that I leaned out again. She was swinging the cord of the window blind. The last debilitated glow in the sky made her look like a flower at twilight—like a single tinted object in a black-and-white photograph of a room. She caught sight of me.

"Maybe even better," she said falteringly. "What sort of person am I!"

"The sort that a person is, when a person begins finding out what sort."

"But not the final discovery?" The turn and set of her head was eager. I couldn't see her eyes.

"Who is?"

"You mean—you think everybody—?"

"Yes," I said, swirling the water around. "Everybody. Most—when they're young. Most grow out of it. Some—hardly notice it. Some have a minor case of it all their lives. To others—it's an intermittent hint—a leftover that crops up as a suggestion, not a fact. Lots—are carried off stage for good by it. The great majority insist they have no such feelings—never could and never did and never will. The result of that—"

"Is what?"

"Look out the window and see the crummy mess yourself, honey! If you'll toss me my dressing gown—from the closet—"

"I'm scared," she said, when I came into the sitting room.

I kissed her once.

She said, "Again."

So I really kissed her.

She stepped away, afterwhile. "I'm not so scared now."

"It's good for you to be."

"Why is it?"

"Because you so seldom knew you were. You spent your time trying to frighten other people—instead of knowing."

"Not frighten. Impress, maybe—"

"Another word for the same dirty deed: convince them of your inherent and cultivated superiority. Whenever people achieve that—they also convince others of their relative inferiority. And when that conviction comes from a false estimate of the situation—believe me, it's upsetting. Frightening is the realer word."

"Which implies that I'm not superior to anybody in any way."

"Check."

She stood there, looking at me through the murk. "Not even—prettier?"

"What's prettiness? The power to attract. If you were a genuine, all-around, Grade-A woman—you'd have the power to attract, without trying to impress a soul. As a pretty girl—you're not superior to a hundred thousand others—and inferior to tens of thousands."

"At least," she murmured, "I'm trying."

"Are you?"

"Am I not?"

"Who can really tell but you? For all I know, Yvonne, you may just be indulging in some new paroxysm of the spoiled rich matron."

"I did want to call Rol, though."

"Sure. When you had the jitters. Flight, maybe."

"Then do you think I ought to wallow in myself?"

"It's your word—wallow."

She was silent for quite a while. Finally she drew a breath and stretched voluptuously. "Did you ever feel as if you'd like to seduce everybody you saw?"

"Just the good-looking women."

"Are you trying to impress me—now?"

I laughed. "Guess so."

"Couldn't I begin with you?"

I shook my head. "You don't know yourself well enough to suit me, at the moment. And—anyway—I'm booked."

"A date!"

"A wife."

She considered that at length, too. "Gwen said last night she knew from the minute she saw you that you wanted company, but not particularly a pretty girl. Just a person. She said she told you all those things about herself, hoping—"

"They had their little effect," I reminded Yvonne.

"Your Ricky," she answered, "must be some gal."

"She's my gal—which makes her some gal to me."

The door knocked again—the front door, this time.

It was a box of flowers—yellow roses, again.

For a minute I thought the manager had slipped up.

There wasn't any card.

Then I knew.

That, I thought, was what it meant: a perception of the nature of other people.

Flowers are for the living, and I'm fond of yellow roses.

They'd be no use to me, dead. So I had these now. To remind me that the idea of flowers for the living, though seldom put in practice, describes the immortal essence.

Except for taking Paul off my back awhile, there wasn't anything else that Dave could do or say. But this, he did and said.

I stood there, rooted with the comprehension.

Yvonne fumbled womanishly through the stems.

"Who sent them?"

"A guy I know."

She gasped. "Guy!"

"It's the grown-up manifestation."

"Manifestation of what?"

"Put them in water while I get dressed," I said. "Of something you might learn—someday."

5

We had dinner together in the Knight's Bar.

She with one white orchid.

Jay received us with just the right look of appreciation for her—just the right glimmer for me. He was sorry such things happened, but he admired my taste.

The hotel staff, I knew, was by now vigorously discussing the matter. The girls who ran the elevators, the telephone girls, the room-service checkers, the cashiers, the waiters, the bellboys. Pros and cons:

He's an artist—and they're different. She's just another of those rich wives on the make. I bet you wish you were one, yourself, you hypocrite! Poor Mrs. Wylie! She's a nice, quiet girl and I'll bet he swept her off her feet—because that's what newspapermen and writers all are: chasers. Those quiet ones knock over more husbands than all the flashy jobs in town! We all do, if we get a chance. I don't blame either of them. I think both of them are stinkers. Whose business is it?

Up with the dishes, down with the cars, in with the stapler, out with the phone plugs—and on and on while typewriters paused and adding machines stood briefly still. Romance or scandal—take your choice. And never a sign to me but Jay's gleam—never a future syllable to Ricky: a conspiracy of employed custom, reinforced by a small world of reciprocal liking.

I wondered what they'd think if they knew the truth.