OPUS 21

by Philip Wylie

  Paul answered the door, took the drink, and put his own dollar on Karl's tray. "It went that way for about two months. Then she told me." His ice clinked without his volition. "The whole story--straight out--beginning at dinner one evening in the Waldorf.

  The guy she married--a smug, sadistic twirp. Getting divorced. Coming to New York.

  Scrimping along on modeling jobs. Running into Hattie Blaine. Ever heard of her?"

  Who hadn't? Hattie was madam to Manhattan's upper set. I gave a nod.

  "Hattie sold her on the idea--after quite a campaign. Marcia went to work. That was about three years ago. I took her home that night--placidly enough--and went for the walk that lasts till they put out the sidewalks again. Then I phoned Johann I was sick--and got sick, drinking. For a month or so more, I tried the old Presbyterian anodyne: work.

  No use."

  "Not when you're young."

  "Later?"

  "It comes with time. Go ahead."

  "When I had all but burned out my main bearings, I phoned her. Maybe you won't believe it--but Marcia was going to phone me that evening. We talked it over. She moved to my flat and got a job."

  "So?"

  "We might get married."

  "She want to?"

  "She refuses--now. I'm not always certain I want to, myself." He stuck his forefinger into his shoe and tugged at the counter. "And I don't know why. Why I want to marry her. Why I'm uncertain."

  "How do your--?" I broke that off.

  But he got it. "My friends think she's swell. You gathered she was good-looking.

  She's a tall, slender gal with light-brown hair and blue eyes. Quiet. You'd never think--I But I went into that, didn't I? She attended college, in Iowa, for a year--and she likes to read. By that I mean--"

  "Nobody else--?"

  "Christ, no. They think she's a working gal--which she is, now: a nice friend of mine."

  "Someday--" I stopped there--again.

  "Yes." His face whitened. "A putty-chinned, overweight lodge brother from Keokuk, just tight enough to miss the stony stare and come up with the big hello. It's happened."

  "I see."

  "She went home and had hysterics."

  "Bring her over."

  Paul looked at me thoughtfully. "You are upset."

  "Sure. Now. You are. So bring her over. Not tonight--or tomorrow night. I'm busy."

  "What about lunch tomorrow? She's not working and I can slide out."

  "Lunch, then. Come around one."

  The family's very fond of Paul and a good many of us have tried to spoil him. He was one of those irresistible kids--the kind that wears glasses, has braces on his teeth, raises bizarre pets, looks up everything in the encyclopedia, and is always engaged in a project about five years ahead of his current age--so that he is always in deep water and needs help. Everybody helped Paul. When he grew up--through one of the most gangling and precocious adolescences in the history of youth--the aunts, sisters, and female cousins used to argue constantly about his looks. Was he genuinely handsome, did he merely have character in his face, or was he plain ugly but friendly-looking? The argument was never decided. But, at least, he looked better when his eyesight was corrected, the spectacles were abandoned, and the braces had come off his teeth.

  I walked Paul to the door and pulled out my bill-clip. There were a couple of fifties in it and I gave them to him. Not much else--so--when he'd gone, I wrote a check to cash and phoned for Bill the bellman. He came up and took my check and brought the money back in a few minutes. I gave him fifty cents--knowing it was too much--knowing I had always tipped too much--knowing that I had never cared because I'd been brought up amidst, nickel pinchers and because I like to please the people around me--and realizing all of a sudden that I would go right on being extravagant till the day I died which, luckily for my estate, probably wouldn't be far off.

  In this connection, one trifle should be mentioned which on looking over these minutes, I see I haven't got to. It crossed my mind at this point, as it had earlier in the day.

  I walked over and sat on the arm of a wing chair, staring out at the hot evening.

  New York often has a marine sky to which, being a seaport, it is entitled. That night the clouds were low and small--evenly spaced and of a size. When the sun hit them, it turned them several different colors--a dappled effect, like a peacock's tail in which orange, not iridescent blue-green, was the predominating tinge. It was getting on toward seven.

  I thought about my dollar-strewing habits and the fact that I probably wouldn't much reduce what funds I'd stored up myself and reluctantly but methodically amassed in the coffers of the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company.

  Tom-the-doctor had said the damned excrescence in my craw, if mortal, wouldn't be operable. That meant I wouldn't be lying around in some hospital, like so many of them, at umpteen bucks a day, while they slowly took out my neck. It meant, so far as I was concerned, that a day would come along when I would make up my mind the books no longer balanced. A day, that is, when pain or mechanical difficulties made it impossible to proceed with the prose. When I couldn't write any more.

  That day, I would have completed my best effort to get my affairs in order. I'd have seen the people I loved--and seen them before it was an ordeal for them to see me. I do not have a horror-but a kind of intellectual rage--over meaningless, agonizing, nonproductive, lingering existence. In my life, I've seen a great deal of it. I have seen people who were a stinking nursing problem twenty-four hours a day--who were afflicted with fantastic agony besides--and who implored their relatives, friends, and physicians to put them out of their misery--but who lived in that state for a couple of years.

  By taking a reasonable amount of thought, and through a certain amount of luck, I have avoided several of the pitfalls into which man persistently topples. Into others, I've all but pitched myself. But this was one I intended to skip. In the kit I carry for boat trips is a hypodermic syringe and a thin little bottle of morphine tablets. I've never had to use them on the broken leg, the gasoline burn, the leader-wire cut, for which they are always ready. But, when the day came which, in my judgment, would turn the balance of life, I knew precisely what I would do. I had always known, even before I had owned such gentle means.

  You dissolve all the tablets--five grains--and fill the barrel of the hypo. You jab yourself and push.

  Simple.

  The reader of these notes may therefore spare himself--as I spared myself--as all human beings should be spared--the anticipation of death dragged out excruciatingly by the miracles of science.

  That is one of the items on the gigantic ledger in which are gathered those details that prove modern man is mad.

  Too many people, for one thing,

  when they get to dying,

  want to top Jesus.

  Wanting that,

  inevitably,

  they want to kill as many others as possible

  by Christlike torture--

  forgetting that even He

  had his legs broken

  as a method of mercy killing.

  My apologies, then, for not entering this note sooner.

  I sat at the window and I could have pulled out my own hair, or wept, (or roared with laughter) on account of Paul.

  I knew Paul pretty well, and loved him.

  And I did not believe he was enough of a realist or a humorist to marry a harlot and prosper in his soul.

  Whoever she was, she would eat him away altogether, or eat away years of him.

  When he found himself out--that he could not accept himself with her--it might be too late. He was stubborn. The ordeal would continue--brave front and eroding guts. What should a man do?

  I am not my brother's keeper.

  How often that wretched phrase has been used as the alibi for vicious neglect!

  How rarely has it served in the intended sense. It is but a warning to Peeping Toms, to Meddlesome Matties and Interfering In-Laws, Overweening Do-gooders, Pa
ul Prys, the Rabble of the Self-righteous.

  Would God the Peepul understood the Words of Jesus had one meaning, always, and often the opposite of the convenient, accepted interpretation; that their Christ appreciated how nothing can be truly said of the Father that does not make a suitable apothegm for Beelzebub!

  Who asked them to interpret, anyway?

  He told them to act.

  I am not my brother’s keeper.

  The Holy Writ that John Sumner never comprehended, or Anthony Comstock, old Cotton Mather, and a dozen billion more.

  What man, seeing even a pig caught under a fence, does not pull it out, although it might be the Sabbath?

  Which is germane to the circumstance?

  What of the Good Samaritan?

  I left the sunset hanging over the gray composite of the roofs--the willow trees in penthouse gardens, the chimneypots that twirled with supper cooking, and the fly-eyed walls, the thousand-lenses, the bloodshot windows staring at New Jersey--staring from the square sides of skyscrapers that towered around me in stiff, unplanned attention, waiting for night, waiting with God knew what stony thoughts and brickish resignation--

  doubtless for Soviet rockets.

  I pushed down my shorts, kicked them onto a bed as Paul had kicked his jacket, and turned on the water in the tub.

  I lay down there, donning the warm garment gradually, the wet, the clean, the only other that fits as perfectly as the grave. I turned off the tap with my foot. I looked at my skin, which was still fairly smooth, for all the long time I'd worn it, weathered it, and given it unnatural chores of excretion.

  Good-bye to All That. Good-bye Mr. Chips. And Miss Chippies.

  Yak-yak.

  This is the cup.

  And

  take this cup from me.

  Nyanh-nyanh.

  I soaped the person.

  The phone rang.

  It does.

  You get out of the bathtub. You wrap a towel around your midriff and make footprints on your rug. You sit and drip.

  The operator says, "One moment, please. Rushford calling."

  If her boy friend had too many beers on the night before, she hurts your ear.

  This mug must have been rolling.

  "Hello, dear."

  Rickey's voice was as clear as heaven's door-chimes.

  I could feel my heart jumping around inside me, trying to straighten things up in a hurry.

  "Hello, Tud." It rhymes with "good" and doesn't mean anything to anybody but us.

  "How are you--you sound--worried?"

  My banging heart must have left a chair out of place somewhere. I took a good breath and pushed whatever it was back into the regular design. "Naw. Maybe tired. Been working. Paul was here. I'm worried about him--if that's what you mean."

  "I guess so. I called up because I thought maybe you were planning to call me this evening."

  "Was."

  "Mother and I are going up to Brookses to play bridge. So we'd have been out, if you'd have called. What about Paul?"

  “He’s living in sin with a dame he’s nuts about--and he found out after he went overboard that she's an old understudy from Hattie Blaine's finishing school for young ladies."

  "Oh, dear." Rickey can put all her compassion into two syllables--and it's compassion enough for a saint.

  "I was dawdling around here cogitating ways and means--"

  She giggled. "In the tub, I bet."

  "Think what Socrates accomplished in a tub. Not to mention Archimedes."

  "The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker," she replied amiably. "Then there was that show-girl who bathed in champagne. Her tub landed her in jail. Any number of people have opened their arteries in tubs. They put tubs under guillotines--north end. A tub cuts both ways, dear--"

  "What should I do, then? Maybe you take dust baths. Maybe that makes people brighter. The genius is a quaking mass of emotional mincemeat. Hasn't told a soul but me. Dumped it in my lap. Regarded it as an Act of God that I happened to be here when the confessional mood came over him. Typical physicist--solve any equation but the human."

  Rickey said, "Did you see her?"

  "Tomorrow. Lunch."

  "It just won't work--for him."

  "Yeah."

  "Is he--terribly--?"

  "The works. Head-over-heels."

  "Oh, dear! Has it been long?"

  "Six-seven months."

  "Then--it could take him six or seven years to--"

  "Some kind of female arithmetic. But probably solid."

  "You could call up Hattie and talk to her and find out--"

  "I've considered that. What do I ask Hattie? Is Marcia sincere--like sincere in a Freddie Wakeman character?"

  "Marcia?"

  "M'm'm'm."

  "If it was only Dolores! Or Fern or Pearl!"

  "More woman-palaver. And it's Marcia. And she was in college for a while. She reads books."

  "You could ask if she's sweet. You know what to ask, dope."

  "I will pull a low-brimmed hat over my eyes, slip a roscoe into my pocket, print up a few dozen private-eye calling cards, and fare forth--"

  "It would help to know something more about her than Paul's feelings. Then call me up. How's the work?"

  "Oh--a needle in every haystack."

  "You ought to have a little fun."

  ' I'm enjoying every paragraph."

  "Why don't you call up Murray's and take some more lessons? Maybe if you put in enough roadwork and a few more thousand dollars--you could finally learn to tango."

  "Damn your pretty eyes! Why don't you study how to follow?"

  Ricky laughed. "No fooling! You work too much. If you don't play some, you'll burn yourself out in another forty-six years. You've been getting stale around here."

  "Tell me about the birds and the flowers and Popcorn."

  Popcorn is one of the cocker pups--all white. Quite a dog. Popcorn had got into the garbage pit and trapped himself for two hours. There had been a squall. The wind had blown over the delphiniums. The 2-4-D I'd sprayed around was already wilting weeds that had defied generations of her forebears. She was going to dig up and separate the crocuses in the rock garden. She had decided I wouldn't finish building the water lily pool for another year and she was planning to use the excavation for composting. There were two young downy woodpeckers and an oriole at the bird feeding station that afternoon.

  "Don't work too hard," she repeated. "And have some fun."

  ' I'm weary and I'm bored and I'm lonely." God knew I was lonely, anyhow.

  "It's good for you."

  "I hope you starve emotionally."

  "It is a big bridge party and I am going to sit beside Mr. Teel." Mr. Teel is an aging squire who lives in the lush Genesee bottom land and can't keep his hands off. I was laughing. I was also biting back the desire to tell her to drive to Buffalo and grab the night plane.

  "The trouble," I said, "with ladies and Mr. Teel is that they fidget and flush, squirm and put up with it. Personally, I think they like it."

  "Should I scream?"

  "Lord, no. Worst possible technique. When you bid six spades and start playing it and you notice something on your knee of about the weight of a man's hand, there are three good possibilities. Relax and enjoy it. This is what I recommend. However, you can also idly lower the tip of your cigarette and apply it. The third, very good, move is to lean forward as if staring myopically at the dummy--reach under the table yourself--and grab back in a way Mr. Teel will never forget."

  "You know everything, don't you?"

  "Need you ask?"

  "Except that we're wasting a lot of money on Long Distance. Are you sure you're all right?"

  Women's ears! "Yeah."

  "Then good night."

  "Night, darling."

  What dripped now was not eau de Croton Reservoir. It came from Wylie's pores.

  Almost--I called her back about the plane.

  She had sounded fine--thank God!

&nb
sp; It was not always so.

  We had been married, Ricky and I, for two years (was it three?) and built a candy-box house on an island in Biscayne Bay (before the sixty sewers of Greater Miami belched the water sludge-thick) when she fell sick. Brucellosis, they called it, or undulant fever. In cattle, Bang's disease. The cows abort. They told us it was common everywhere in our fair land and caught from unpasteurized milk, or cheese, ice cream, or meat improperly inspected. The pasteurization laws in those days, they said, were altogether inadequate; inspection was bad; and cattle owners--they said further--were loath to lose their stricken animals. For a small bribe, we were told, they might be warned of impending inspection. Thereupon, they could drive the afflicted members of their herds into hiding while the government agent went by. They were in business (after all) and a buck is sacred; so are American sacred cattle sacred; let the public look after itself. Some of the cowmen don't believe the germ theory, anyhow; they think hygiene is one more racket like their own. And some, of course, like a certain proportion of the men in every business, would sell you leper's dung (neatly packaged--nationally advertised) if there were money in it.

  They sold the milk.

  We drank it.

  Some get brucellosis--some not. Some hundreds of thousands of free American citizens. It is one of the marvels of our Age.

  Some die.

  Some heal themselves, in due time.

  Others, like my Ricky, drag out the years in pain, debility, and sorrow. Fits of fever seize them. They take to their beds for days, for weeks, for months--racked and suffering and exhausted, sick at their stomachs, sick in their heads. The gram-negative bacterium is (they say) neurotoxic. It inflames the ganglia of the brain. The patient may expect not merely fever and pains, but constant anxiety, causeless fears, a collapse of the calmest temper, hysterias, heebie-jeebies, screaming meemies, spasms, and incomprehensible alarms.

  You must try to ignore it, Mrs. Wylie. Personality changes occur owing merely to the nature of your disease. Devote your (changed) self to a consideration of the change as physical phenomenology. You are lucky to get your trouble diagnosed. Hundreds of thousands of undulant fever sufferers spend their lives running from one doctor to another without avail. They're told they have tuberculosis, intestinal poisoning, brain tumor, neurasthenia, and bad dispositions. Medicine is--though the fact's not medicine's fault--very laggard about recognizing this common malady. Consider yourself lucky.