by Gore Vidal
“There’s nothing wrong with being a dike, you know.” Letitia blew smoke rings thoughtfully. For an instant I wondered if perhaps I had not got her range. But she quickly assured me that my first impression of her had been the right one. “That bed,” she said, indicating the four-poster with a swagger stick, “has held just about every stud in town who wants to be an actor. Do I shock you, Myra?”
“How can you shock me when you are just like me? The new American woman who uses men the way they once used women.”
“Jesus, Myra, but you are quick! ‘What a team we’d make. Sure you don’t want another martini? It’s just water now in the shaker. Well, then I’ll have it.” She poured herself a full glass. “Listen, dear, if you find anything really interesting at that circus of no-talent Buck’s conducting, send him over for a chat with Letitia.”
“With pleasure.”
“And you come along, too.” Letitia flashed a brilliant smile which I answered with one equally brilliant. Two masterful women had met and there is no man alive capable of surviving our united onslaught. Like had been attracted to like from the first moment we met and though it was now plain that she expected me to supply her with studs, I was not in the least distressed at being so used. Women like ourselves owe it to one another to present a united front to the enemy. Meanwhile, as quid for my quo, she will try to find work for Mary-Ann. All in all, as satisfying an encounter as I have had since Dr. Montag first introduced himself to us at the Blue Owl Grill.
25
Is it possible to describe anything accurately? That is the problem set us by the French New Novelists. The answer is, like so many answers to important questions, neither yes nor no. The treachery of words is notorious. I write that I “care for” Mary-Ann. But what does that mean? Nothing at all because I do not care for her at all times or at any time in all ways. To be precise (the task set us in the age of science), as I sit here at the card table in my room, wearing an old dressing gown of Myron’s, I can say that I like her eyes and voice but not her mouth (too small) or hands (too blunt). I could fill many pages of yes-no and still not bring the reader to any deep knowledge of what it is I feel at 7:10 P.M., March 12. It is impossible to sort out all one’s feelings at any given moment on any given subject, and so perhaps it is wise never to take on any subject other than one’s own protean but still manageable self.
What does Mary-Ann think of me? I could not begin to do more than guess nor, I suppose, could she answer this question even to herself: liking, hostility, attraction, revulsion, self-aggrandizement, self-sacrifice, all mingled together with no clear motif save the desire of each to exert power over the other. That is the one constant, to which all else is tributary.
Dr. Montag still challenges my theory from time to time. Once he spoke of the maternal instinct as something not involving power. But of course it does, in the most obvious way: the teat (or bottle) is the source of life to the baby, to be given or withheld at the mother’s pleasure. If there is any more fulfilling way of achieving total power over another human being, I have yet to hear of it. Of course most people successfully disguise their power drives, particularly from themselves. Yet the will to prevail is constant and unrelenting. Take that charming, seemingly unaggressive man who makes apparently idle jokes that cause others to laugh. In a sly way, he is exerting power quite as much as Hitler did: after all, his listeners were not laughing until he made them laugh. Thus it goes, at every level. My own uniqueness is simply the result of self-knowledge. I know what I want and I know what I am, a creation of my own will, now preparing for a breakthrough into an area where, until Myron’s death, I could enter only in dreams. Having already destroyed subjectively the masculine principle, I must now shatter it objectively in the person of Rusty, who has reappeared.
But who am I? What do I feel? Do I exist at all? That is the unanswerable question. At the moment I feel like the amnesiac in Spellbound, aware that something strange is about to happen. I am apprehensive; obscurely excited.
26
The telephone just rang. It was Mary-Ann. I have never heard her so excited. “He’s back! Rusty’s back!” I allowed her to think that she was telling me something that I did not know. In actual fact, late this afternoon, Irving Amadeus told me, “That beautiful creature just showed up for Atavistic Rhythm, and here we’d all given him up for lost!” I went straight to Buck’s office and checked with the secretary, who was at first reluctant to give me details, but when I threatened to take the matter up with Buck himself, she told me that Rusty had been arrested with two other young men at the Mexican border and held on suspicion of smuggling marijuana into the States. Fortunately, there was no very compelling evidence against them, and they were let go. Nevertheless, Rusty’s period of probation has been extended, and the probation officer has asked Buck to keep an eye on him. But Rusty had told Mary-Ann none of this. “You see, he was with these wild boys in Mexico and their car broke down and they were too broke to pay even for a bus ticket and so the American consul finally bailed them out, after they were practically starving to death.” No doubt about it, Rusty is very much a man of his era: his fantasy life shields Mary-Ann as well as himself from the cruel disorders of reality. Though I cannot say that the pleasure of others has ever had any effect upon me except to produce a profound melancholy, I was almost pleased at Mary-Ann’s delight. “You must be very happy,” I whispered like Phyllis Thaxter in Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, with wonderful Van Johnson. “And we want to have dinner with you tonight, if that’s all right. I told him how simply wonderful you’ve been to me while he was gone.”
“I’m sure you’d rather have him all to yourself tonight. Besides, are you sure he wants to see me?” There was a slight hesitation, followed by much protestation to the effect that Rusty was really very admiring of me since I had been such a help to him in Posture class.
27
It is now midnight. In many ways, a most exciting evening. I met Mary-Ann and Rusty at the Cock and Bull on the Strip; as one might guess, it is Rusty’s favorite restaurant for the food is profoundly hearty. He was unusually exuberant and for once I did not seem to make him uneasy. He improvised freely about his adventures in Mexico, all the while eating scones smeared with raspberry jam. I toyed with a single slice of turkey. I am in danger of becoming fat like Gertrude, who resembled, in her last days, a spoiled pear.
“Then after we left Tijuana, we had to break up because, you see, three guys can’t hitchhike together. Nobody would pick up three guys looking like us, with beards and all dirty, though there was this one fruit . . .” Rusty frowned at the pseudo-memory or, more likely, at an actual recollection transposed to flesh out the current fantasy. “He was willing to give us a lift, this funny little Mexican with shiny gold teeth and so nervous those gold teeth was chattering but he wanted us real bad, but we said hell no, I mean who wants to go that route?”
“Many do,” I said casually, in such a way that I did not seem to be challenging him. Under the table I gave Mary-Ann’s hand a little squeeze which she gratefully returned.
“Rusty nodded wisely, mouth full. “Yeah, I know. Why there are some guys—some guys I know right at school—who’ll sell their ass to some fruit for twenty bucks, just because they’re too lazy to get a job.”
“But wouldn’t you do that, if you needed the money?”
“Hell, I’d starve first, and that’s the truth.” He pulled Mary-Ann close to him and gave her a kiss. I believed him.
“In a sense, Rusty is a throwback to the stars of the Forties, who themselves were simply shadows cast in the bright morning of the nation. Yet in the age of the television commercial he is sadly superfluous, an anachronism, acting out a masculine charade that has lost all meaning. That is why, to save him (and the world from his sort), I must change entirely his sense of himself.
“When Rusty had finally completed his story of having been down-and-out in Mexico (borrowing heavily from a recent television drama on the same theme), we spoke of Mary-Ann and
the good impression that she had made on Letitia Van Allen. Even the unworldly Rusty was impressed. “Do you really think she likes Mary-Ann?”
“Very much.”
“Oh, not that much.” Although a Kathryn Grayson singing star, Mary-Ann also belongs to the Joan Leslie tradition of self-effacing good-sex woman-wife. For her it is Rusty’s career that matters, not her own. “Anyway,” she said, “it’s all due to Miss Myra. She arranged the whole thing.”
“That was a swell thing to do.” Rusty’s voice was deep and warm and he gave me a level gaze reminiscent of James Craig in the fourth reel of Marriage Is a Private Affair. “A mighty swell thing, and we’re both as grateful as we can be,” he added, carefully putting the two of them together on one side, leaving me alone on the other.
“Who Miss Van Allen should really see is Rusty,” said Mary-Ann, predictably, to which I replied, as predictably, “Of course she’ll see him, but in June. Don’t worry, I’ve already told her about him.”
“That’s real nice of you . . .” He was overcome by sincerity like James Stewart in any movie. Then the large veined hands with the blunt fingers took yet another scone and covered it with jam, and I meditated on the dark journey of those veins inside the jacket as they proceeded up the marbled forearms, coiling about the thick biceps, vanishing finally in the deep armpits.
“What would Myron have thought of him? Probably not much. Myron preferred the sinister and vicious, the totally abandoned. Rusty is not only not abandoned, he would not have been available, even to Myron whose technique as a seducer was highly developed. Yet where Myron would have failed I shall succeed.
“The fact that Rusty has not an inkling of my plans makes every moment we spend together in Mary-Ann’s company exquisite. Also, the deliberate (on my part) manipulation of the conversation was curiously thrilling, affording me an opportunity to observe how something entirely alien behaves in its native habitat: the never-fulfilled desire of the dedicated anthropologist who realizes that the moment he arrives in a village to study its culture, that culture has already been subtly altered by the simple fact of his presence; just as the earthly microbes our astronauts are certain to let loose upon other worlds are sure to kill or change those extraterrestrial forms of life we would most like to preserve in order to understand. But then it is our peculiar fate to destroy or change all things we touch since (and let us never forget it) we are the constant and compulsive killers of life, the mad dogs of creation, and our triumphant viral progress can only end in a burst of cleansing solar fire, either simulated by us or thrust upon us by the self-protective mechanism of a creation that cannot for long endure too many violent antibodies within its harmonious system. Death and destruction, hate and rage, these are the most characteristic of human attributes, as Myra Breckinridge knows and personifies but soon means, in the most extraordinary way, entirely to transcend.
“Yet the presence of the anthropologist (me) at the wooden table in the Cock and Bull did, eventually, alter significantly the behavior of the two natives as they lost their self-consciousness to the degree that the conversation ceased to be particular and became general, something that almost never happens among the lower orders who are, to a man, walking autobiographers, reciting their dull memoirs at extraordinary length, oblivious to the extent they bore even others of their kind who, of course, wait impatiently to tell their stories.
Somehow the subject reverted to Rusty’s proud rejection of the Mexican’s advances, and Mary-Ann made it plain that for her part she could never consider making love to another woman. “It just . . . well, disgusts me,” she said. “I mean I just couldn’t. I think, well, a woman should act like a woman and a man should act like a man, and that’s that.”
“But how should a man act?” I was mild.
Rusty knew. “He should ball chicks, that’s how he should act.”
“But only if he really loves them.” Mary-Ann was droll; both laughed at what was obviously a private joke.
“And why should he ball chicks?” I continued my gentle catechism.
“Well, because that’s . . . well, Christ, it’s natural!”
“And that’s how you get babies,” said Mary-Ann sagely. “I mean that’s how nature intended it.”
“Do you think nature intended you to have a baby each time you make love?”
Mary-Ann looked like a lapsed Catholic, trying to recall what she had been taught. But Rusty was a good Catholic Pole and knew right from wrong. “That’s what you’re supposed to do, yes. That’s what we’re told in church.”
“But you do use contraceptives, don’t you?”
Both flushed, and Rusty said, “Well, sure. I guess most Catholics do now, but that doesn’t mean you don’t know it’s wrong.”
“Then you basically believe that it’s right for more and more babies to be born, even though half the people ever born in the world are now alive, and that each day twelve thousand people starve to death in India and South America?” Oh, the sly Myra Breckinridge! Nothing can escape the fine net of her dialectic!
Rusty frowned to show that he was thinking when actually, as one of the acting-students recently said of another’s performance, he was only thinking he was thinking. “Well, maybe those Indians and Chinese and so on should probably practice birth control since their religion doesn’t care, if they have one . . .”
“But they do have religions. And they do care. And they believe that for a man to be manly he must have as many children as possible . . .”
“Because so many babies die in childbirth.” Mary-Ann was unusually thoughtful.
“They used to die,” I said. “And that kept the population in a proper balance with the food supply. But now the children live. And starve. And all because their parents passionately believe that to be manly is to make babies and to be womanly is to bear them.”
“But we’re different.” Rusty was dogged. “We got enough food and we also have . . .”
“Family planning.” Mary-Ann looked happy. No doubt contemplating some planning of her own.
“Enough food,” however, was all the cue I needed. I was brilliant. I quoted the best of the world’s food authorities (famine for us all by 1974 and forget about plankton and seaweed: not enough of it). I demonstrated that essentially Maithus had been right, despite errors of calculation. I described what happens to rats when they are crowded in too small a place: their kidneys deteriorate, and they go mad. I told how whenever the food supply of the lemmings is endangered, a majority of the race drown themselves in order that those left behind may flourish.
Then I gave statistics for the current world death rate, showing how it has drastically declined in the last fifty years due to advanced medicine. The physically and mentally weak who ordinarily would have died at birth now grow up to become revolutionaries in Africa, Asia and Harlem. As a result of miracle drugs and incontinent breeding, the world’s food supply can no longer support the billions of people alive at present; there will of course be even less food for those thousands who are joining us every minute. What is to be done? How is the race to be saved (I did not go into the more profound question of whether or not it should be saved)? My answer was simple enough: famine and war are now man’s only hope. To survive, human population must be drastically reduced. Happily, our leaders are working instinctively toward that end, and there is no doubt in my mind that nature intends Lyndon Johnson and Mao Tse-tung to be the agents of our salvation. By destroying a majority of the human race, they will preserve the breed since the survivors are bound to be not only wiser than we but racially stronger as a result of cellular mutancies caused by atomic radiation. If I say so myself, I had my listeners’ eyes bugging out by the time I had sketched for them man’s marvelous if fiery fate.
“But what can we do to stop all this from happening?” Mary-Ann was plainly alarmed.
“Don’t have children. That is the best thing. A gesture of course, but better than nothing. And try to change your attitudes about what is normal.” T
hen, in quick succession, I delivered a number of anthropological hay_ makers. Proper womanly behavior for an Eskimo wife is to go to bed with anyone her husband brings back to the igloo. Proper manly behavior for the Spartan warrior was to make love to a boy while teaching him how to be a soldier. I gave a rapid review of what is considered proper sexual behavior in Polynesia and along the Amazon. Everything I said came as revelation to Rusty and Mary-Ann, and they were obviously horrified by the unnaturalness of what was considered natural in other parts of the world. I believe I planted a seed or two. Mary-Ann of course could never prostitute herself like an Eskimo wife nor could Rusty ever make love to an adolescent boy (“those teeny-boppers give me a pain”); yet each now regards his old certainties as being, at least, relative. That is progress.
As could be expected, it was Mary-Ann who mounted the counterattack. “Maybe you’re right when you say there’s nothing that’s really basically normal but when everybody tells you that they want you to behave in a certain way, like marrying one man and having only his children, isn’t that the right thing to do because doesn’t the society deep down know what it’s doing, and is trying to protect itself?”
Unexpectedly she had made a good point. Not once in all these weeks have I suspected her of possessing a true intelligence. Obviously I have been misled by her California manner which is resolutely cretinous as well as nasal. The possibility that she might one day be a woman I could actually talk to was a revelation, and by no means an unpleasant one. Naturally, she could not be allowed to win her point. Even so, it will, as we academics say, count against the final grade.
I challenged her with a simple question: does any society know how to preserve itself? I then listed a number of civilizations that had destroyed themselves through upholding customs that were self-destructive. For instance, the health of the Roman state depended upon a vigorous aristocracy but that aristocracy committed suicide by insisting that their cooking be done in expensive pots made of lead. The result was acute lead poisoning which led to impotence and the literal extinction of an entire class, killed by custom. Then, superb dialectician that I am, I discussed every society’s secret drive to destroy itself and whether or not this was a good thing, taken in the larger context of the human race’s evolution. They were both shocked at the idea, particularly when I brought it home to them by suggesting that Rusty’s desire to have sex only with girls and Mary-Ann’s desire to have at least four children the world did not need might be considered proof that our society is now preparing to kill itself by exhausting the food supply and making nuclear war inevitable. Should this be the case, the only alternative (and a most unlikely one) would be for all the Rustys to follow the Spartan custom of making love to boys while the Mary-Anns, as lovers of women, would at least help preserve the race by bringing no more children into the world. But of course I was playing devil’s advocate since I am secretly convinced that we shall soon be purged by a chiliastic fire, and so, in the long run, current behavior will best serve us by hastening our necessary end. Yet efforts must still be made to preserve life, to change the sexes, to re-create Man. There is an off chance that my mission may yet succeed.