A Single Man

by Christopher Isherwood

  ‘Say something,’ he commands Kenny.

  ‘Do I have to?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’ll I say?’

  ‘Anything. Anything that seems to be important, right now.’

  ‘That’s the trouble. I don’t know what is important and what isn’t. I feel like my head is stopped up with stuff that doesn’t matter – I mean, matter to me.’

  ‘Such as —’

  ‘Look, I don’t mean to be personal, Sir – but – well, the stuff our classes are about —’

  ‘That doesn’t matter to you?’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Sir – I said I wasn’t being personal! Yours are a whole lot better than most; we all think that. And you do try to make these books fit in with what’s going on, nowadays – only, it’s not your fault, but – we always seem to end up getting bogged down in the Past; like this morning, with Tithonus. Look, I don’t want to pan the Past; maybe it’ll mean a whole lot to me when I’m older. All I’m saying is, the Past doesn’t really matter to most kids my age. When we talk like it does, we’re just being polite. I guess that’s because we don’t have any pasts of our own – except stuff we want to forget, like things in high school, and times we acted like idiots —’

  ‘Well, fine! I can understand that. You don’t need the Past, yet. You’ve got the Present.’

  ‘Oh, but the Present’s a real drag! I just despise the Present – I mean, the way it is right now – I mean, tonight’s an exception, of course – What are you laughing at, Sir?’

  ‘Tonight sí! The Present – no!’ George is getting noisy. Some people at the bar turn their heads. ‘Drink to Tonight!’ He drinks, with a flourish.

  ‘Tonight – sí!’ Kenny laughs and drinks.

  ‘Okay,’ says George. ‘The Past – no help! The Present – no good! Granted! But there’s one thing you can’t deny: you’re stuck with the Future. You can’t just sneeze that off.’

  ‘I guess we are. What’s left of it. There may not be much, with all these rockets —’

  ‘Death.’

  ‘Death?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘Come again, Sir. I don’t get you.’

  ‘I said Death. I said, do you think about Death a lot?’

  ‘Why, no. Hardly at all. Why?’

  ‘The Future – that’s where Death is.’

  ‘Oh – yeah. Yeah – maybe you’ve got a point there.’ Kenny grins. ‘You know something? Maybe the other generations before us used to think about Death a lot more than we do. What I mean is, kids must have gotten mad, thinking how they’d be sent out to some corny war and killed, while their folks stayed home and acted patriotic. But it won’t be like that, any more. We’d all be in this thing together.’

  ‘You could still get mad at the older people. Because of all those extra years they’ll have had, before they get blown up.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right, I could, couldn’t I? Maybe I will. Maybe I’ll get mad at you, Sir.’

  ‘Kenneth —’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Just as a matter of the purest sociological interest, why do you persist in calling me Sir?’

  Kenny grins teasingly. ‘I’ll stop if you want me to.’

  ‘I didn’t ask you to stop. I asked you why.’

  ‘Why don’t you like it? None of you do, though, I guess.’

  ‘You mean, none of us old folks?’ George smiles a no-hard-Feelings smile. Nevertheless, he feels that the symbolic relationship is starting to get out of hand. ‘Well, the usual explanation is that we don’t like being reminded —’

  Kenny shakes his head decisively. ‘No.’

  ‘What do you mean, No?’

  ‘You’re not like that.’

  ‘Is that supposed to be a compliment?’

  ‘Maybe. . . . The point is, I like calling you Sir.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘What’s so phoney nowadays is all this familiarity. Pretending there isn’t any difference between people – well, like you were saying about minorities, this morning. If you and I are no different, what do we have to give each other? How can we ever be friends?’

  He does understand, George thinks, delighted. ‘But two young people can be friends, surely?’

  ‘That’s something else again. They can, yes, after a fashion. But there’s always this thing of competition, getting in the way. All young people are kind of competing with each other, do you know that?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose – unless they’re in love.’

  ‘Maybe they are, even then. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with —’ Kenny breaks off abruptly. George watches him, expecting to hear some confidence about Lois. But it doesn’t come. For Kenny is obviously following some quite different train of thought. He sits smiling in silence for a few moments and – yes, actually – he is blushing! ‘This sounds as corny as hell, but —’

  ‘Never mind. Go ahead.’

  ‘I sometimes wish – I mean, when you read those Victorian novels – I’d have hated living in those days, all except for one thing – Oh, hell – I can’t say it!’ He breaks off, blushing and laughing.

  ‘Don’t be silly!’

  ‘When I say it, it’s so corny, it’s the end! But – I’d have liked living when you could call your father Sir.’

  ‘Is your father alive?’

  ‘Oh, sure.’

  ‘Why don’t you call him Sir, then? Some sons do, even nowadays.’

  ‘Not my father. He isn’t the type. Besides, he isn’t around. He ran out on us, a couple of years ago. . . . Hell!’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘What made me tell you all that? Am I drunk or something?’

  ‘No more drunk than I am.’

  ‘I must be stoned.’

  ‘Look – if it bothers you – let’s forget you told me.’

  ‘I won’t forget.’

  ‘Oh yes, you will. You’ll forget if I tell you to forget.’

  ‘Will I?’

  ‘You bet you will!’

  ‘Well, if you say so – okay.’

  ‘Okay, Sir.’

  ‘Okay, Sir!’ Kenny suddenly beams. He is really pleased; so pleased that his own pleasure embarrasses him. ‘Say, you know – when I came over here – I mean, when I thought I might just happen to run into you this evening – there was something I wanted to ask you. I just remembered what it was —’ He downs the rest of his drink in one long swallow. ‘It’s about experience. They keep telling you, when you’re older, you’ll have experience – and that’s supposed to be so great. What would you say about that, Sir? Is it really any use, would you say?’

  ‘What kind of experience?’

  ‘Well – places you’ve been to, people you’ve met. Situations you’ve been through already, so you know how to handle them when they come up again. All that stuff that’s supposed to make you wise, in your later years.’

  ‘Let me tell you something, Kenny. For other people, I can’t speak – but, personally, I haven’t gotten wise on anything. Certainly, I’ve been through this and that; and when it happens again, I say to myself, here it is again. But that doesn’t seem to help me. In my opinion, I personally have gotten steadily sillier and sillier and sillier – and that’s a fact.’

  ‘No kidding, Sir? You can’t mean that! You mean, sillier than when you were young?’

  ‘Much, much sillier.’

  ‘I’ll be darned. . . . Then experience is no use at all? You’re saying it might just as well not have happened?’

  ‘No. I’m not saying that. I only mean, you can’t use it. But if you don’t try to – if you just realise it’s there and you’ve got it – then it can be kind of marvellous —’

  ‘Let’s go swimming,’ says Kenny abruptly, as if bored by the whole conversation.

  ‘All right.’

  Kenny throws his head right back and laughs wildly. ‘Oh – that’s terrific!’

  ‘What’s terrific?’

  ‘It was a test. I thought
you were bluffing, about being silly. So I said to myself, I’ll suggest doing something wild, and if he objects – if he even hesitates – then I’ll know it was all a bluff. . . . You don’t mind my telling you that, do you, Sir?’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Oh, that’s terrific!’

  ‘Well, I’m not bluffing – so what are we waiting for? You weren’t bluffing, were you?’

  ‘Hell, no!’

  They jump up, pay, run out of the bar and across the highway and Kenny vaults the railing and drops down, about eight feet, on to the beach. George, meanwhile, is clambering over the rail, a bit stiffly. Kenny looks up, his face still lit by the boardwalk lamps: ‘Put your feet on my shoulders, Sir.’ George does so, drunk-trustful, and Kenny, with the deftness of a ballet-dancer, supports him by ankles and calves, lowering him almost instantly to the sand. During the descent, their bodies rub against each other, briefly but roughly. The electric field of the dialogue is broken. Their relationship, whatever it now is, is no longer symbolic. They turn and begin to run toward the ocean.

  Already, the lights seem far, far behind. They are bright but they cast no beams; perhaps they are shining on a layer of high fog. The waves ahead are barely visible. Their blackness is immensely cold and wet. Kenny is tearing off his clothes with wild whooping cries. The last remaining minim of George’s caution is aware of the lights and the possibility of cruise-cars and cops, but he doesn’t hesitate, he is no longer able to; this dash from the bar can only end in the water. He strips himself clumsily, tripping over his pants. Kenny, stark naked now, has plunged and is wading straight in, like a fearless native warrior, to attack the waves. The undertow is very strong. George flounders for a while in a surge of stones. As he finally struggles through and feels sand under his feet, Kenny comes body-surfing out of the night and shoots past him without a glance; a water-creature absorbed in its element.

  As for George, these waves are much too big for him. They seem truly tremendous, towering up, blackness unrolling itself out of blackness, mysteriously and awfully sparkling, then curling over in a thundering slap of foam which is sparked with phosphorus. George has sparks of it all over his body, and he laughs with delight to find himself bejewelled. Laughing, gasping, choking, he is too drunk to be afraid; the salt water he swallows seems as intoxicating as whisky. From time to time, he catches tremendous glimpses of Kenny, arrowing down some toppling foam-precipice. Then, intent upon his own rites of purification, George staggers out once more, wide-open-armed, to receive the stunning baptism of the surf. Giving himself to it utterly, he washes away thought, speech, mood, desire, whole selves, entire lifetimes; again and again he returns, becoming always cleaner, freer, less. He is perfectly happy by himself; it’s enough to know that Kenny and he are the sole sharers of the element. The waves and the night and the noise exist only for their play. Meanwhile, no more than two hundred yards distant, the lights shine from the shore and the cars flick past up and down the highway, flashing their long beams. On the dark hillsides you can see lamps in the windows of dry homes, where the dry are going dryly to their dry beds. But George and Kenny are refugees from dryness; they have escaped across the border into the water-world, leaving their clothes behind them for a customs fee.

  And now, suddenly, here is a great, an apocalyptically great wave, and George is way out, almost out of his depth, standing naked and tiny before its presence, under the lip of its roaring upheaval and the towering menace of its fall. He tries to dive through it – even now he feels no real fear – but instead he is caught and picked up, turned over and over and over, flapping and kicking toward a surface which may be either up or down or sideways, he no longer knows.

  And now Kenny is dragging him out, groggy-legged. Kenny’s hands are under George’s armpits and he is laughing and saying like a Nanny, ‘That’s enough for now!’ And George, still water-drunk, gasps, ‘I’m all right,’ and wants to go straight back into the water. But Kenny says, ‘Well, I’m not – I’m cold,’ and Nanny-like he towels George, with his own shirt, not George’s, until George stops him because his back is sore. The Nanny-relationship is so convincing, at this moment, that George feels he could curl up and fall immediately asleep right here, shrunk to child-size within the safety of Kenny’s bigness. Kenny’s body seems to have grown gigantic since they left the water. Everything about him is larger than life; the white teeth of his grin, the wide dripping shoulders, the tall slim torso with its heavy-hung sex, and the long legs, now beginning to shiver.

  ‘Can we go back to your place, Sir?’ he asks.

  ‘Sure. Where else?’

  ‘Where else?’ Kenny repeats, seeming to find this very amusing. He picks up his clothes and turns, still naked, toward the highway and the lights.

  ‘Are you crazy?’ George shouts after him.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Kenny looks back, grinning.

  ‘You’re going to walk home like that? Are you crazy? They’d call the cops!’

  Kenny shrugs his shoulders good-humouredly. ‘Nobody would have seen us. We’re invisible – didn’t you know?’

  But he gets into his clothes, now, and George does likewise. As they start up the beach again, Kenny puts his arm around George’s shoulder. ‘You know something, Sir? They ought not to let you out on your own, ever. You’re liable to get into real trouble.’

  Their walk home sobers George quite a lot. By the time they reach the house, he no longer sees the two of them as wild water-creatures but as an elderly professor with wet hair bringing home an exceedingly wet student in the middle of the night. George becomes self-conscious and almost curt. ‘The bathroom’s upstairs. I’ll get you some towels —’

  Kenny reacts to the formality at once. ‘Aren’t you taking a shower too, Sir?’ he asks, in a deferential, slightly disappointed tone.

  ‘I can do that later. . . . I wish I had some clothes your size to lend you. You’ll have to wrap up in a blanket, while we dry your things on the heater. It’s rather a slow process, I’m afraid, but that’s the best we can do —’

  ‘Look, Sir – I don’t want to be a nuisance. Why don’t I go now?’

  ‘Don’t be an idiot. You’d get pneumonia.’

  ‘My clothes’ll dry on me. I’ll be all right.’

  ‘Nonsense! Come on up and I’ll show you where everything is.’

  George’s refusal to let him leave appears to have pleased Kenny. At any rate, he makes a terrific noise in the shower, not so much singing as a series of shouts. He is probably waking up the neighbours, George thinks, but who cares? George’s spirits are up again; he feels excited, amused, alive. In his bedroom, he undresses quickly, gets into his thick white terrycloth bathrobe, hurries downstairs again, puts on the kettle and fixes some tuna fish and tomato sandwiches on rye. They are all ready set out on a tray in the living-room when Kenny comes down, wearing the blanket awkwardly, saved-from-shipwreck style.

  Kenny doesn’t want coffee or tea; he would rather have beer, he says. So George gets him a can from the icebox, and unwisely pours himself a biggish Scotch. He returns to find Kenny looking around the room as though it fascinates him.

  ‘You live here all by yourself, Sir?’

  ‘Yes,’ says George; and adds with a shade of irony, ‘Does that surprise you?’

  ‘No. One of the kids said he thought you did.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I used to share this place with a friend.’

  But Kenny shows no curiosity about the friend. ‘You don’t even have a cat or a dog or anything?’

  ‘You think I should?’ George asks, a bit aggressive. The poor old guy doesn’t have anything to love, he thinks Kenny is thinking.

  ‘Hell, no! Didn’t Baudelaire say they’re liable to turn into demons and take over your life?’

  ‘Something like that. . . . This friend of mine had lots of animals, though, and they didn’t seem to take us over. . . . Of course, it’s different when there’s two of you. We often used to agree that neither one of us wou
ld want to keep on the animals if the other wasn’t there —’

  No. Kenny is absolutely not curious about any of this. Indeed, he is concentrating on taking a huge bite out of his sandwich. So George asks him, ‘Is it all right?’

  ‘I’ll say!’ He grins at George with his mouth full, then swallows and adds, ‘You know something, Sir? I believe you’ve discovered the secret of the perfect life!’

  ‘I have?’ George has just gulped nearly a quarter of his Scotch, to drown out a spasm which started when he talked about Jim and the animals. Now he feels the alcohol coming back on him with a rush. It is exhilarating, but it is coming much too fast.

  ‘You don’t realise how many kids my age just dream about the kind of set-up you’ve got here. I mean, what more can you want? I mean, you don’t have to take orders from anybody. You can do any crazy thing that comes into your head.’

  ‘And that’s your idea of the perfect life?’

  ‘Sure it is!’

  ‘Honestly?’

  ‘What’s the matter, Sir? Don’t you believe me?’

  ‘What I don’t quite understand is, if you’re so keen on living alone – how does Lois fit in?’

  ‘Lois? What’s she got to do with it?’

  ‘Now, look, Kenny – I don’t mean to be nosey – but, rightly or wrongly, I got the idea that you and she might be, well, considering —’

  ‘Getting married? No. That’s out.’

  ‘Oh —?’

  ‘She says she won’t marry a Caucasian. She says she can’t take people in this country seriously. She doesn’t feel anything we do here means anything. She wants to go back to Japan and teach.’

  ‘She’s an American citizen, isn’t she?’

  ‘Oh, sure. She’s a Nisei. But, just the same, she and her whole family got shipped up to one of those internment camps in the sierras, right after the War began. Her father had to sell his business for peanuts, give it away practically, to some sharks who were grabbing all the Japanese property, and talking big about avenging Pearl Harbour! Lois was only a small kid, then, but you can’t expect anyone to forget a thing like that. She says they were all treated as enemy aliens; no one even gave a damn which side they were on. She says the Negroes were the only ones who acted decently to them. And a few pacifists. Christ, she certainly has the right to hate our guts! Not that she does, actually. She always seems to be able to see the funny side of things —’