OPUS 21 (33 page)

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 Xanidu 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.