OPUS 21 (34 page)

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.

But, then, I always wonder that.

I'm the silly jackass who does.

Look--waiters, busboys, and you over there in the cage with the pointed auburn haircut and the long eyelashes and the tight dress--here we have a handsome young woman who has set about, by means not nearly so rare or unorthodox as you pretend among yourselves--to find one or two universals, or fundamentals, which are not in the book.

What book?

Not in any?

Oh--yes--those banned novels. And those mournful, characters who thought only of their pale, poetical brows plunging into the Pit, the lonely well. Or sordid sun-tan oil on Jackson's vulgar beach.

When will the poets get the censors off
their
backs, too--and write like men, for a change? God's no fairy, or Satan, either.

What foul compulsion is this--that every page of the Tragedy must itself be mournful stuff, sinister, or sick?

Farce, instead!

Does the tragic deer, the beautiful, the doomed, imbue his every pools ide hour with dolorous contemplation? Must all the activities of the woodchuck be regarded as dismal? To write the stark terms of our essence on every breath and sentence of the moment is to be the own advocate of death, the white bones himself, and to overlook the splendor with such eyeless concentration that the poem becomes a joke on the poet.

I flirted with Yvonne--told her stories of Paris and Hollywood and Miami Beach--

held her hand--all, in chivalrous camouflage.

Paul came at last.

I hardly needed to see the stoop--the broken reach to push open the doors that enclosed our cold air cube--to know that, between us, we had not lifted his oppression.

For, when it is succubus that's lost, incubus perforce remains.

He looked disapprovingly at Yvonne. "Mrs. Prentiss, this is my nephew," I said.

"Paul Wilson."

"Hello, Mrs. Prentiss." He turned from her. ''I'll barge along, Phil. I thought you'd be alone."

"Oh, hell, sit."

"Really--it's not possible!" His ardent features were emphasized by pallor--and shooting about on his face, besides.

"Sit," I said, "and eat--or otherwise you'll force me to leave the lady and go with you. She has a date after dinner, anyhow."

He groaned and sat down--nipping the menu from the waiter's hands roughly. "No news."

"Tough." I turned to Yvonne. "His--fiancée--is lost."

"How awful! What happened?"

Paul glared at me for a moment. "Your friend Dave," he finally said, in a tone more polite than his facial expression, "did all he could. Got an agency looking. Sent a fellow over to stay in my-our-place. We hunted up some more friends of hers--that Dave got track of-and they told us of others. We've been seeing them. It isn't much fun."

"Why not quit, then? Wait for her?"

"If all she did was walk out," Yvonne agreed, "that's absolutely the only thing to do. Sit tight. Have a good time. Suppose she finds out you're apparently raising heaven and earth to locate her? She'll just hide in a safe spot and enjoy things that much more."

Paul turned to her. "Are you serious?"

Yvonne was working on him--signaling interest with her gray eyes (they had come considerably alive)--tossing the organized gold shower of her hair--moving herself about in such a way as to emphasize her sex. "It's a darned good generalization. But what happened?"

I wondered how he'd put it.

"Marcia--" he began, and described her. We were made to see a woman somewhere between Elaine-the-Fair and Florence Nightingale. "I was just about licked when we met! I'm a physicist--work on atomic energy. She made me live--filled me with new feelings--taught me what love could mean to a man like me. Then--we scrapped.

Over nearly nothing!" His eyes moved reproachfully to me--then back, confidingly, to the girl. She was listening, nodding with understanding, frowning with sympathy, and keeping her red lips parted the whole time. "We scrapped. She decided we weren't suited to each other. So she left me. That was--yesterday. I'd give everything I own to get her back! Everything I own--and am!"

"What exactly did you fight about?" Yvonne asked.

Paul's expression became vague. "Never mind. It wasn't important."

"Are you sure?"

He gave both of us a dark, defiant stare. "Yes."

"Then," Yvonne said, ''I'm right. You mustn't continue this search operation. You should wait. And entertain yourself. Let her do the coming back--since she ran away."

It was the first hope he had felt. "I wish I could believe it would work."

"Take my word for it. I'm a woman."

"And how," he asked scornfully, "do I start this gay, forgetful act?"

"With me," Yvonne said. ''I'll break my date. You can escort me to the most conspicuous place in town."

"You?" Paul took his first careful look at her. She undoubtedly satisfied him. But he was not altogether persuaded of the plan. It represented merely a new idea--and, as such, offered a small unexpected degree of optimism.

' I'd like it," Yvonne went on. "For a lot of reasons. I wasn't sure I wanted to keep my date. I think you're nice--even if terribly foolish. And Phil bailed me out of a tizzy the other night--so I could hardly do less for a nephew of his."

"What if I did it--acted blasé as hell--and Marcia was just relieved when she found out?"

"Then, Paul," she said, "nothing would have helped, anyhow."

You could see him grinding his jaw down on that one. He wanted Marcia. He was determined to get her back. Into what he regarded as his love had gone a good deal of unrecognized pride. Furthermore, he had undertaken to recover her by what he thought of as logical steps--ignoring his own hysterical condition--and unaware that his brand of logic did not, would not, could not apply in such a situation.

Yvonne knew that to interest men you talked about them. She started, indirectly.

"Is he a good scientist?" she asked
me.

"Terrific!"

I told her of his achievements in school; of his appointment.
"He
didn't quite make Saipan for the first bomb drop. But he was at Bikini. And he commutes to Eniwetok."

"I guess they're born," she said.

Paul took that up. "Born, hell! Made. You have the urge to study something. You happen to get going on math. In the end, you're a physicist."

I argued that. I thought an argument would change the subject from Marcia-on whom he'd concentrated ever since he'd brought up her name on Thursday. "Aptitude's hereditary. You can't take ten kids--even with high IQs--and turn out ten mathematicians."

"I say you can!"

"So does the Soviet. Marx, Lenin, Stalin. Communism depends on the theory that, given the right environment, people will turn out the way you want--since they start with equal possibilities. If that isn't so--communism doesn't make sense."

"It's silly on the face of it," Yvonne said.

"The geneticists think the communist idea is silly," I agreed. "In fact, they know so."

Paul said, "Nuts."

"Do you," I asked, "know anything about genetics? Are you
au courant
in this particular affair?"

"No. But--"

"Then stay out of it. Good God! Isn't that like a damned scientist?" I turned to Yvonne. "He'd laugh at me if I tried to argue with him about mesons. He's been briefed to the eyeballs on that. But he'll argue with anybody about genes and chromosomes and heredity--because he hasn't bothered to learn the known facts!"

Paul didn't rise. "Okay!" he said. "Okay. So communism is based on that fallacy.

Others, too. We have a few fallacies to contend with, in this country."

"Sure," I agreed. "I pointed one out to the Reverend Socker Melton, who called on me today. Old friend of pop's. Pointed out that, if we understood the importance of our celebrated liberty--we'd have been ready and willing to go to war the instant we realized that the Soviet holdout was going to force a restriction of knowledge. So what? Do our faults entitle other people to faults? Or vice versa? That's merely the maudlin attitude of Joe Doaks!"

Paul looked at the girl with a mock sneer. "Phil hates the common man."

"Hate, hell. I'm about the last friend he has left. Nearly the only one who refuses to boost common man exclusively, so as to exploit him--consciously or unconsciously.

I'm one of the few who still care enough about poor old common man to criticize him.

Everybody else is a planner or a mere booster--presidential candidates--Stalin--Hitler--

just rah-rah-for-humanity boys. I'm still trying to save common man from himself."

"You chill me," Paul said sarcastically.

"Chill you?" I would have picked up any lead to keep this bicker alight. It wasn't about Marcia.

He spoke to Yvonne. "Phil is the champion lost-cause defender of them all.

"Whatever he's for is sure to fail. He has the mildew-touch. My childhood is pockmarked with embarrassments that came from having people read his stuff--or having them barge over to see us and tell my dad that his brother-in-law was off the beam again."

"I can imagine," Yvonne said.

"Phil was out there hollering for rearmament in the thick of the old pacifist days.

He was an air-power promoter when the brass was folding 'em in like eggs in puddings.

He predicted we'd have to fight the Soviet a dozen years ago--and our boys immediately chummed up with Stalin. He went roaring out for intervention in the last war--bucking isolationists and practically cracking his insides when England and France went in without us. The minute the bomb was shot off--he started battling military control and telling the folks the mess we'd be in--and are in--right now. Once--down in Miami--

where he lives--he started a big health crusade. It's a prize pesthole. But that collapsed in his face, too. What he says is usually right--but what happens always makes him look like a louse. If he's championing common man now--well--draw your own conclusion." He winked at me.

' I'm championing the Better Man, these days," I said. "Breeding the Better Common Man. Another noble prospect doomed to fail in our time."

Paul snorted. ''I'm for training them better. Education."

"And I'm not against education--either. But you can't publish a brick. You can't make--"

"Watch it! The chemists can make anything out of anything."

"Take me," I said. "All my life, I've hired somebody to give me lessons in something."

Paul grinned a little. "You
are
a hard case. We admit that."

Yvonne laughed. "If he means dancing lessons--he's done all right."

"People," I plugged along on the new topic, "ought to summarize their professional, postschool lessons and see what they've learned. Consider me. In New York, I once took boxing lessons. Can't box for a damn. In Hollywood, I hired a strong man to live with me and teach me to lift weights. I got all beefed up--and then got sick in Poland--and the beef evaporated. I took lessons on the piano accordion for a year, once.

I've also taken piano lessons, saxophone lessons, and mandolin lessons. Ukelele, too, in 1919. Can't play a note. Took golf lessons for years. The last few times I played, I pushed 110. Took tennis lessons. Haven't hit a ball over the net in twenty years. Got a whiz to teach me ping-pong--for five bucks a throw. Can't return the serves of children. Studied a couple of foreign languages, besides the ones in school and college. Can't even say,

'Good morning' and 'Thanks' in 'em, any more. And horses! Great God! Hired cowboys to murder me every day, all day, for six months. Went to a dude ranch in the Carolinas and got briefed in eastern saddles. Hundreds of saddle-hours. And what? Hate to ride. Never do, if I can avoid it. Is that all? I haven't begun! Hired some Olympic champs to give me fancy diving lessons. Got going good--and found out in a couple of years I was slowing up--couldn't snap around any more. Had to quit that. Spent a lot of time in the North Woods. Had an Indian for a guide. Learned to stalk game. Learned to shoot--taught by experts. Can't hit a barn. Don't enjoy hunting. Spent a fortune deep--sea fishing. Don't even rate as an 'Expert' at my club. Bridge lessons--God Almighty, the time I've fussed with that! And what? Some days I'm fair--and some days I can't remember through jacks-