OPUS 21

by Philip Wylie

  metal domes.

  The boy staggered--and the wild gesticulation of his free arm was caught by my peripheral vision. So I saw the tray slant--saw its burden slide and crash onto the heads of a pair of buttressed dowagers, a few tables away. The noise seemed to continue for a long time and a scream permeated it as the boy lost hold entirely on his tray, fell against a chair-back, and dish after soiled dish cascaded onto flower hats, bright blouses, fat shoulders, and freckled necks.

  A rush of waiters masked the scene. Guests stood to see better.

  A bull-voiced beldame roared, "Send the manager!"

  Her less hefty companion burst through the waiters, daubing at the stained area of her bosom and throwing bits of lettuce with every swipe. She made a beeline for the ladies' room--followed by her smeared, stentorian colleague, whose hat was full of dill and parsley.

  This commotion had hardly died down--Jay had no more than managed to clear the carpet, dispatch the wreckage on the table, send out the chairs for purging, and bite back the last traces of his mirth--when another oddity got under way.

  "I want," said a man seated beside Paul, "a baked apple."

  "But there are no baked apples." Fred, the waiter, said this.

  "Go and tell the chef I want a baked apple."

  "I did, sir. There are none."

  "Explain to him that I always have a baked apple, here."

  "There is applesauce--sir."

  Fred is Viennese. His sorrowful, wise eyes meandered over to meet mine. They were expressionless. But the fact that they had moved toward me was, in itself, communication.

  "I do not like applesauce. Slippery pudding! Go and tell the chef I want my usual baked apple."

  The churl who spoke was familiar to me by sight. An Englishman--a VIP during the war--who had often stayed at the Astolat. A medium-sized man of sixty with a red face and eyes like gray gas. A brittle British voice, snotty in every particular. An iron-gray Kaiser Wilhelm mustache and a way of smacking his lips underneath it, when he was in a temper, that shook its points.

  He was always accompanied by his wife. As a rule, they ate quietly--talking together now and then, and more often just swilling in food. She was a lank, vapid woman with a toadstool's complexion, a chin like a fist, and hair tormented into little knobs--as if she absent-mindedly had cooked it, rather than coiffed it--and burned it in the process. Lumpy, burned hair, a disgusting dish of it--and a voice like claws, to match her master's.

  She stared, now, at her empty plate, and said nothing. She did not seem to be ashamed, or embarrassed, or to be waiting for a storm to subside. She was a woman born without the knack for yielding or apology. She merely looked at her plate because she would be God-damned if she cared to look at anything or anybody else.

  Fred came back. He put on a sympathetic expression. "The chef says he is very sorry. He says that this is not the time of year for baked apples."

  "The stands are loaded with apples," the Englishman snorted. "Seen 'em myself!"

  "I know. But they're eating apples. Not baking apples. They come later in the fall."

  The Englishman doubled his fist and lightly thumped the table. "I said I wanted a baked apple! All I wanted was a baked apple."

  "I have explained."

  "With cream. A baked apple with cream."

  I have seen Englishmen by the dozen go through this sort of routine. With the exception of certain Germans, some of them are, I believe, the rudest people on the earth.

  Badly brought-up babies--these empire builders.

  This one was insulting the waiter and his wife, in the bargain--but I have rarely seen an Englishman who minded insulting his wife by making scenes. When crossed in matters like baked apples they seldom consider wives, children, strangers, decorum, or the reputation of Britannia. They merely behave like twirps.

  Fred had said nothing.

  "I suppose," the Englishman at last went on, shivering his mustache, "you mean to tell me I am not to have a baked apple--?"

  "Perhaps for dinner--one of the eating kind could be baked--"

  The Englishman suddenly hurled his napkin on his plate. He stood. "No baked apple," he said. "Well!"

  He intended to stalk from the room.

  However, Paul--who had at first been chortling over the slow-spilled tray and later watching the Englishman with intent, even exaggerated, care--now interposed, to my great surprise.

  He sat next to the Britisher--on the same banquette. Thus when the infuriated man surged upright he stood alongside Paul and between our two tables.

  Paul stretched out his foot, rested his shoe on the corner of the Englishman's table, and untied the lace.

  The man, barred by the long leg, said, "Good Gad!"

  Paul retied the lace. He looked dimly at the Englishman--who, I honestly believe, had not so much as noticed or recalled a single person in the room but himself all during the baked apple affair. It is a kind of concentration peculiar to the British.

  "Put down your foot, man!"

  "Quintod!" Paul said, as if using rare syllables of opprobrium: "Quidhetch!

  Vassenoy!" He moved his foot this way and that, eying it. Even the Englishwoman was staring at it now, in some shock. After all, it was on her table, twenty inches from her picklelike nose, and not a victual.

  Paul turned again to the standing man and hissed, "Kittenpitches!"

  "Waiter!"

  Fred was still standing there--still fairly impassive. He had the wit to say, "Yes, sir?"

  "This person is drunk!"

  Paul came to his feet then--and towered over the Englishman. He bent close.

  "Pomadiant nocrot," he said harshly. "Cantapunce. Cabulate geepross. Dreek!"

  The Englishman opened his mouth and emitted a thin, high, frightened squeak.

  Paul scowled. "Nikerpole," he said, sadly now. "Oose."

  Quite suddenly, Paul sat down. He spoke to Marcia in a perfectly matter-of-fact tone--but a tone loud enough to carry around the respectfully quieted room. "Never did understand why people came here without first learning the language. And the manners. I dare say my Japanese surprised him! Probably an admiral in civies, spying out the next war. Got a camera in his mustache, I presume, clever devils!"

  The Englishman then left the room, shaking from head to foot.

  His wife, however, remained staring at her plate. By and by Fred brought her a stewed fish with which she began to fill her baleful gizzard.

  I would have thought--I would have bet-that this was the end of such things. The tray, alone, would have done as the month's quota for this proper restaurant.

  I was wrong.

  Hardly had the Englishman departed--hardly had his wife commenced to make slushing sounds with the cream sauce on her fish--hardly had I dried my tears-when the corner of the eye opposite the one that had caught sight of the teetering tray drew my attention in its new direction.

  This was toward the bar.

  Here Mrs. Doffin was sitting at her regular table.

  She had been sitting there, lunch and dinner, when I had first entered the Knight's Bar in 1937. A tall, narrow woman with dyed red hair, who was given to wearing witches' hats--such hats as women wore in Merlin's day--round and pointed. A stovepipe of a woman with a face on which a bleached fuzz grew, and eyes that resembled spoon-backs.

  Year in, year out, the four seasons through, Mrs. Doffin had five Martinis for lunch, five for dinner, five in the evening after dinner, and refreshments in her room, between-times. Some ten million dollars lay to her account in various banks, I understood, but, since the death of her husband in 1932, she had devoted herself entirely to one form of enjoyment, if the pointed hats be excepted.

  Never soused, noisy, or shot--she was never remotely sober. Sometimes, late at night, if you came into the bar, you would see her lips move as she communed voicelessly with whatever shades or hallucinations accompanied the thirteenth or fourteenth Martini. Occasionally, in a moment of clarity, she would recognize this person or that--a
waiter, the manager, Ricky, myself. She would nod regally then, wish you good morning, afternoon, or evening--approximately according to the time--and flick her fingers flirtatiously.

  She never bothered anybody.

  She was not bothering anybody now.

  She was sitting at her regular table, wearing a bright, vacant smile, and stuffing matches into her nose. She had placed twenty or thirty when I spotted her. She picked up another and delicately inserted it, pressing it up until its pink tip came even with the rest.

  "Curious," I said.

  Marcia and Paul craned their necks. They watched awhile.

  "I wonder how many it will hold," Paul said.

  "Another half dozen, I should think. She has a bit more room on the right side."

  "Does she light them when she gets a snoot full? Make quite a firework."

  "It's new," I answered. "First variation in ages."

  "Somebody should stop her!" Marcia said urgently.

  Paul's head shook. "On what grounds?"

  "Good heavens, Paul--!"

  Mrs. Doffin reached the point where neither nostril would contain another match.

  She tamped them pensively and nodded to herself. They protruded, I would say, the best part of an inch--all neat and even.

  Mrs. Doffin then removed her hat. It was the first time I had seen the full billow of her hair. It looked like excelsior on which paprika had been sprinkled. She set the hat on the seat at her side and glanced with a bright smile and opaque eyes at the whole earth.

  I suppose the waiters had failed to notice her new gambit owing to the fact that she, and her soundless palaver, were fixtures in the place, like the intruding girders and the gaudy horsemen on the walls. All the waiters ever saw was her glass, when she emptied it. She could have breathed fire, or come in tattooed, and they would have observed no change.

  From her hat, Mrs. Doffin withdrew a hatpin, long and as black as any of her garments or their accessories.

  This, with the utmost aplomb, she thrust through both her cheeks, hesitating only momentarily at the midpoint, evidently in order to get her tongue beneath the line of direction. One does not--her pleased look seemed to say--absurdly and clumsily impale one's tongue, in these little maneuvers.

  "Fred," I called at this point. "Mrs. Doffin needs you."

  He looked. His eyes bulged and his brows shot high. He hurried toward her. She flirted her fingers at him. He signaled to Jay. Together they escorted Mrs. Doffin from the room. Nobody ever saw her again. There are homes for the rich to do such things in.

  5

  "The heat is getting people," Paul said, as he and Marcia bade me good-bye in the lobby. Marcia gave me one last look. She knew she hadn't passed.

  She ascribed the wrong cause to the fact.

  She thought that, since I'd seen her sensual impulse was not confined to one person, I'd written her off as a slut. Whose sensual impulses have ever been confined to one person? Were they so limited, human breeding would be the rarest of activities and marriage almost unheard of.

  I didn't mind Marcia's libido.

  All I objected to was its orientation.

  I rode up to my room and began dilatorily to strip once again.

  6

  I am told the female of ruff is reeve.

  I am told the energy of one of the early atomic bombs is about equal to the energy that falls on a mile and a half square of the earth in a single day.

  I am told that a bishop in Philadelphia ordered two motion-picture houses to close down their shows.

  I am told that common goldfish will survive under winter ice while the fancy sorts will not.

  I am told the kurbash is a whip.

  I am told that Soviet fighter planes are buzzing our airlift.

  I am told that Paris is unchanged this summer.

  I am told that a committee is being formed to censor as un-American all books which, in its opinion, are sacrilegious or immoral.

  I am told that no creature can travel faster than a hundred and twenty-five miles an hour, or thereabouts.

  I am told that Truman reads Keats.

  These are things I had not known before.

  I subtract myself from them and find life going on as usual--the land I love deteriorating, the world I adore growing ever more miserable.

  I throw the papers and magazines on my coffee table and go to work.

  7

  Once, I laughed.

  Not at the slapstick landslide of dirty dishes on the dowagers.

  Not at the weird vanishing of Mrs. Doffin.

  But at the matter of a baked apple.

  O England--culture uncultivated!

  Brave boors.

  8

  Toward half past five I got my nose bloodied.

  It happened this way:

  I went down to the newsstand for a typewriter ribbon; the energy of my sentiments had worn holes in the incumbent tape.

  While I was waiting for a red light on Madison Avenue I heard band music and saw people scurrying toward Fifth. I went over to see the parade.

  It was a listless marching--veterans on gummy asphalt all along the limp trees by the Park. The older men from the older war rode in mimic locomotives that bucked their front wheels, hooted sirens, clanked bells. Some current soldiers marched--carrying rifles with hot metal parts, and behind them came a show of mechanized equipment, with bands interspersed. I listened to the bands and thought of Shakespeare's reference to men who couldn't contain their urine when they heard the bagpipes play. Brass bands, as much as anything, had undone the loose hold of the Germans on sense. Songs about rolling caissons and lifting anchors were flaring the eyes and dropping the chins of the street-lining crowds here, too. I studied these people, remembering all philosophers and the scientists and their faith in reason. Man's monumental Thought--his pride--was silly in these surroundings. Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Kant, Leibnitz, Spinoza, Descartes, Hume, Berkeley, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, James, and a hundred more-compartments of order in a chaos of shining orbs and panting tongues. Pretty compositions, real in themselves, and true enough--but floating in a flood their owners did not obesrve or--if they saw it--

  ruled irrelevant, nor realized they rode it, too. What old classic premise could stand the test of a brass band? None.

  I watched the bright horns and the dull guns.

  I stood at attention when the flags went by--feeling, as I always do, the aspiration in those white stars and those red stripes.

  We would continue to aspire--some of us--while breath stayed in us.

  But this stirring--this patriotic thrill--did not debilitate my sphincters. Tightened them, rather, against the multimillion goons who would as soon sell all of liberty down any creek as their own two-bit integrity. What patriots remain these days must battle harder against their countrymen for truth, for dignity, for honesty and love than ever against an outside foe.

  It proved a misfortune to be moved to lofty sentience, at that time.

  The tiresome military iron clanked by as it has clanked through every city on the earth for thousands of years.

  More men of the newer war came, canoe-shaped hats worn cock-eyed, bellies lean still, faces blank in the scalding sunshine.

  I noticed, now, that many paraders were moving among the spectators--marchers who had been dismissed some distance up the Avenue. These men, from other states, ticketed like parcel post, badge-thick and boozy, shoved among the ordinary citizens, cawing and singing, carrying pails, and shooting water pistols. Occasional cops watched them with the fixed, tolerating smiles taught in the department--proper address toward large political groups. The men, in what they thought of as boisterous glee, peed out their pistol streams at any pretty girl, blotting blouses, stippling skirts with dark dribbles, and evoking, as often as not, coaxing screams.

  I wandered through a block or two of this nickering infantilism, this petty and symbolic repayment for a thousand lacks and ten thousand wretched frustrations. Men will be boys, I thought.
Boys, I knew, will hardly ever be men.

  I came to a lamppost where a dozen pistoleers were singing, "I want a girl just like the girl who married dear old dad." Their mouths yearned it and the sun sparkled on the gold fillings in their teeth. This song, so far as I recall, is the only legitimate outlet for the Oedipus complex permitted in twentieth-century U.S.A. So I watched gents from Oklahoma and Idaho and Nebraska sing their incest, get their backs in it, and I wondered how much effort it would take to elicit from even one of them an acknowledgment of that emotion which, hidden deep inside him, gave him his particular inflection and look while he sang that particular song. I have wondered before while viewing luncheon clubs as they yearned for a girl like mother. To a face, every here and there, the anthem does memorable things. I supposed they would all rather be dead than have to admit the possibility of the truth. I supposed that the recognition of the baby alive in us all would require the hurdling of yet more dead bodies--billions, at least--to bring them to a happy acceptance of such affairs.

  American babies are not allowed to be Freudian.

  Not till they grow up, anyhow.

  I pushed along.

  There was a clearing in the crowd ahead. Out of it came such blats of laughter, animal calls, and whistlings as mark the approach to a feeding zoo--the same sound that is emitted by the amused radio audience.

  I reached the edge.

  Here the canoe-hats had formed an open oblong between the curb and an apartment front. It was necessary for anyone who went by to cross this area. On its rim stood a man with a stick, and heavy batteries. He wore a sergeant's chevrons and his breast was a blaze of heroism. Men crossed the vacated cement untouched--and middle-aged women, also. But whenever a young girl made her way through the hem of the crowd and came unexpectedly into the hollow oblong, the sergeant sneaked forward with his stick, got behind her, lifted the rear of her skirt, poked, and applied the juice.

  The girls, shocked electrically, without warning, in this delicate and private part of their anatomies reacted frantically. Most of them screamed. All of them leaped--

  thrusting their hips forward convulsively. Some then ran--and dove into the crowd on the other side. One, a girl with long, dark hair, slipped after she leaped, fell, and tore a hole in her stocking. Another jumped, turned, and cursed. One tried to hit the sergeant with her pocketbook. Most endeavored to recover some shred of composure--to laugh--or to slip away without showing what they felt. Some wept instantly.