Love Among the Cannibals

by Wright Morris

  “She’s not too bad,” Mac said, as I walked up, “but you’re great!”

  They made room for me and I asked these chicks if they knew how to get to the UCLA campus. They did. It was not far from where they lived. I said they would have to excuse me, a little later, since I had an important appointment, but I would be back to pick Mac up about five. That suited Miss Harcum to a T, but not her girl friend. The less interest I showed—and I doubt if it was possible to show less interest—the more this girl seemed to feel I was just her type. “While you were gone,” Miss Harcum said, “you know what Nina said?” I didn’t. “She said why didn’t I tell her you were the Leslie Howard type.”

  “We’re in about the same age bracket,” I replied.

  “As if that’s what I meeeeeeaaaannnnnn!” said this chick.

  Ordinarily I’m a great one for this kind of banter, but I felt almost too weak to talk. Don’t ask me why. That is merely a statement of how I felt. I was forty-one years of age and had just made an appointment to see for less than an hour a girl who was more than likely just half that age. What for? I wanted to see if she was real. Not that that was entirely why—but I really did. I felt completely unreal myself. The thought that I might die, or faint away, before three o’clock came along led me to open a thermos and drink some black coffee. I couldn’t just sit there, so I asked this chick if she felt like a walk. She did. I suppose she thought that this was her break. I led her down to where the sand was firm, then walked her more than a mile, all the way to Venice, then back again, without saying a word. It impressed her to beat hell. But favorably. Even on Mallorca she hadn’t run into anything like that. When we got within a yell of our umbrella she suddenly broke away, like a kid, and ran that knock-kneed girlish run across the sand.

  “You won’t be-leevut,” she said, “but we went all the way without a word! I’ve never done anything so thrilling in all my life.”

  They all watched me walk up, look at my wrist watch, then say that it was time for me to run along. That impressed her too. But not so favorably.

  Some instinct I’ve learned to trust led me to drive back to our mansion, force down a banana, then brush my teeth with chlorophyll paste. I was still about half an hour early when I located the Westwood corner, so I parked a block to the east and just sat in the car. All she had to do was not show up. I sat there, listening to the radio, watching these good-looking sun-tanned kids, some of them in their forties, come and go until ten past three o’clock. I’d made up my mind to call it quits at three fifteen. Right at that point a roadster, with four in the front seat, pulled over sharp just ahead of me, and two of the boys rolled aside to let this girl out. Eva. She stood there a moment adjusting her skirt. Those boys blocked the traffic, ogling and talking, till the honking behind them made them move, and when the light changed to green she walked across the street. Just watching her walk I could hardly stand it. My hands shook. Two or three cars of college boys whistled and waved at her before I got my car started, and I was nearly sick with the thought that one of them would pick her up. But she was still there when I got there. When I stopped she got in. I turned off to the right at the next block just to get out of the stream of traffic, and heard her say:

  “It looks like thirty minutes is all I’ve got.”

  I said, “You feel like a drink?”

  “I really don’t like to drink,” she said.

  “I tell you—” I said, bright as a kid, “why don’t we just drive up to our place and park. It’s quiet.”

  When I said that, she made her first move. Toward the door. She pulled over to it and hung one brown arm out. I was so ashamed I could have cried, but I couldn’t tell a girl who looked like a bombshell that all I wanted to do was just go somewhere and look at her.

  “Which way?” I said, as we were back on Sunset. What I meant at the time was which way to get her home.

  “A gauche,” she said, wagging her hand at the wrist, which was the first little tag end of sophistication. At the next turn she said, “A droite,” and I pulled into a coffee shop parking lot. I started to open my door, when she said:

  “Is this one of those tops that come up?”

  I didn’t know. We had been given the car with the top down, and that was how I had left it. She leaned over and examined the dashboard, flicked a switch, and up came the top. Out of the back, like a phantom, it rose up behind us like a hood, then dropped. The front seat was suddenly dark and quiet as a cave.

  “Why don’t we just sit?” she said, and took a cigarette from her purse. I watched her light it, draw on it, and when she settled back into the corner, blue as a fish bowl through the cloud of smoke, I saw her eyes. They held my gaze. She did not ask me why I was staring at her. She did not ask me what was on my mind. Her eyes held my gaze until the lids, as if the effort suddenly fatigued them, slowly closed, lowering my own gaze to her lips. They were parted. A fleck of cigarette paper held my eye. One of her front teeth had come in with a twist and smoking had given it a yellow cast. The ivory color, I remember thinking, of an old piano key. She did not speak, but feeling my gaze she sucked the lower lip into her mouth, and made a sound in her throat like a cat awakened with a stroke of the hand. Without opening her eyes she rocked toward me, the cigarette fell on the seat between us, and I crushed it with my knee as I rocked toward her. I did not kiss her. I fastened on her lips. Whatever impulse the vampire has to fasten on flesh and draw life from it, I shared with him, and she seemed to share with me. A car pulled in on our left, one backed out on our right, a drive-in waitress took and delivered orders, leaving her tray to rock on the fender of our car. I was the first to draw away, and she said:

  “It’s time, isn’t it?”

  I saw that it was. I started the car, and driving back to Westwood she arranged her face in the rearview mirror, combed her hair, and put back the lipstick I had wiped off. With the tip of her Kleenex she removed some of it from my face. I let her out of the car a block east of the movie where she had left the kids at the matinee. She turned and said:

  “You want to call me at eight?”

  “I’ll call,” I said.

  I watched her go down the street past a parking lot where two young men hailed her, one of them eating ice cream, and he came forward with his sandwich and gave her a bite. Together, they walked on down to the corner, where the doors of the movie were opening, and they stood there chatting till the kids she had to take home came along.

  I didn’t drive right back to the beach. I drove up the canyon to our place, where I walked into the bathroom and looked at the mirror, not seeing for a moment the red stain around my mouth. Otherwise the tan concealed how I really looked. The house was cool, but a film of perspiration beaded my lips. I took several of the barbital tablets that Mac keeps on hand for a TV performance, then I set the alarm for six o’clock and lay down on the couch. I wondered if a woman agreeably raped felt as I felt. I just wondered. The idea did cross my mind. Little else, neither pleasure nor pain, except for the delight of the flavor, slightly perfumed, that her lips had left in my mouth. I had not closed my eyes before the alarm went off. I took a shower, ate three spoonfuls of the cottage cheese we keep in the icebox, brushed my teeth, changed my shirt, and drove down to the beach. Mac and his chick were there, very cozy, but the girl friend had gone. She had a course in speech projection at seven o’clock.

  The day before, I would have done what I could to protect Mac from himself, but now I suggested that we all go to some quiet place and eat. I couldn’t bear the thought of eating, but if I got them fed and settled down for the evening, I’d be free at eight o’clock.

  We drove along the shore to a place in Malibu, where we had a drink at the bar, then sat at a table where Miss Harcum could admire the sea. I usually gaze into a woman’s eyes, being a successful song-and-dance man, but I’d picked up this habit in the last few hours of looking at the mouth. The more I looked at Miss Harcum’s mouth—when it was closed and I could look at it—the more it seemed
like a horn player’s solo in a tight little string ensemble. It didn’t go. It just didn’t belong with the face. The moment my eyes settled on her lips I had the unpleasant sensation that I was seeing something she didn’t know was exposed. Her mouth is what you’d call full, in the attractive sense, but the upper lip had a tuck in it, a little row of pleats, as if she was tasting a lemon peel. She had it painted to match her nails, and do something interesting with her tan, but the one impression I got was that it was raw.

  My condition being what it was, undernourished on the one hand, and overstimulated on the other, I didn’t take these observations too seriously. But it did lead me to turn and look at the mouths around the candlelight beside us, just the big red mouths, and it gave me quite a start. I mean it gave me the weemies. So many sets of sharp teeth in a purse of flesh. I had a period as a kid when all I saw in a woman’s face was her nose, and I don’t recommend you have a try at something like that. All you see, after a little practice, are the holes in the face. Now all I saw was lips, the hardness of the lips the moment the mouth closed, like a flytrap, then sprang open like an evil toy to show you the teeth. Something you fed. Something you had to keep fed, that is. You pressed the little button, the jaws spread wide, then you dropped something in to keep it mollified. You either did, bygod, or the mouth looked out for itself. It prowled, like a sleepwalker, around the house at night. It was not just a part of the face, as we think, but the major entrance to the body—the rest of the face was there merely to make sure that the mouth got fed. The eyes were there, you might say, to see the prey, then lure it within reach. I’m not just elaborating on a gruesome notion but trying to tell you how I felt, sitting there in this fishhouse, watching this group of lovely female mouths. I’m not excluding males. It just so happens that the females interest me. My own mouth, frankly, often scares the hell out of me. It also naturally crossed my mind that I had just come, almost within the hour, from feeding on lips that must resemble these. I am forty-one. I do not easily kid myself. If something had come over me during the day that I could not explain in terms of normal behavior, it did not deprive me of drawing certain conclusions about mouths. A pretty little painted, tainted, scented pocket cannibal.

  The moment we had taken a seat in this place Miss Harcum referred to me as Uhl, honey; to Mac, as Macky, honey; and to the kid who cleaned the table as just plain honey, but with sugar on it. She kept up this flow of southern sunshine, asking the busboy wheah he was from, the waitress wheah she got that wonnaful hairdo, and so forth. I suppose it reflected how much out of water she felt. Here she had this famous song writer, Irwin Macgregor, on her clean little hands. Did she want him? I could see that she did if he would just keep his own little hands where they belonged.

  Anyhow, that was how I sized up Miss Harcum, a great one to gaze at you through a cloud of smoke, but tight as a button if your knees happened to rub. The clothespin school, as Mac calls them, with reference to their thighs, but if they happen to be clothespins he found in a dime store, why then it’s all right. No, it’s more than all right. Man, it’s great.

  When Mac is in love—when he is in, that is, the condition I have just described—my battle-scarred slob of a song writer is a boy at heart. He blushes at the word “honey,” and wriggles like a seal at a glance from her eyes. I’ve learned to marvel at and professionally respect this sort of thing. A first-class second-rate song hit-of-the-month will come out of it. Third-class pop songs are all written by the boys who know better than to believe their own nonsense, but the good stuff is still turned out by the boob who believes in it. When the right sort of chick comes along, Mac can believe.

  “It’s got to have heart, man!” he says. “You know what I mean?” And I do.

  In between short runs at his bouillabaisse he managed to coin a handful of words that I could paste together into a sentence for his light o’ love. He wanted to take her home and give her a try on the tape. If she sounded as good on the tape as she had the night before, in the rumpus room, if she sounded even half that good, he would give her a chance. We would, that is. I would put the words of love into her mouth. We would darken her up and give her a cute little Mexican part. Some chic little Camino Real sort of thing. None of that exactly depressed her, and while she dabbed around in her lobster—the hardware they gave her was something new—I drank the tomato juice cocktail that Mac hadn’t touched. Tempus fidgets, as you know, and at seven forty-five I stepped back to the phone.

  I got one of those damn kids again, one just learning about the phone, and more interested in saying something clever than listening. The word “Eva” didn’t seem to click with him. The little bastard kept repeating, “This tha Mattson resituns.” Then she must have heard him; I heard a scuffle, and she said:

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Greek,” I said.

  If your condition is right, you can use the telephone like a stethoscope. Mine was. I could hear the intake of her breath when I said Greek. I hadn’t been aware of it at the time, but now I could see, right where I could touch it, the pulse beat in the flesh at her throat.

  “Say something,” I said.

  “Can you come at nine?”

  “Come where?”

  “Here.”

  “Where is here?”

  “Oh—” she said, then she told me to go down Sunset to Kentwood, make a right turn, then a left, then follow that road up the canyon till it stopped. I can’t explain it, but the way she did it I knew I wasn’t the first one to have asked that question. Just to keep her on the phone I repeated the directions.

  “I’ve got to go now,” she said, and hung up.

  When Kafka struck on the telephone as the symbol of modern man’s frustration, I would be willing to bet it had something to do with a chick. One minute you have her, then you don’t. It suddenly crossed my mind that I still didn’t know her name.

  I bought a pack of cigarettes, then went back to the table and said that it was now eight o’clock, so I had to get back and dress for an appointment I had at nine. That suited Mac fine, but I could see Miss Harcum make a quick run through everything her mother had told her. But when life comes at you in a fishhouse, you either take it or duck. She decided to take it.

  “Uhl, honey, you be shoh yoh get me home uhly now?”

  I said that I would.

  In this fire engine I’ve already described, we drove along the coast highway to Sunset, arousing the envy and concern of the Thunderbird couples that went by. It gave the bad-taste monster I was driving a certain class. Only Trader Horn, some oil mogul, or the kingpin in the new white-slave traffic would ride around in a squad car with the siren turned off. Billie Harcum loved it. Her pretty little pony tail whipped in the wind. Driving very slow gets you the notice today that driving very fast once did, and we had all the attention we could use going back. Miss Harcum was naturally impressed with our layout, but not so impressed as she might have been, since she was too young to have learned about culture from Citizen Kane. It was pure dog, but she missed the finer touch. Pure dog is nothing without the mothball scent of nostalgia.

  I made them some drinks before changing my clothes, and put a stack of our songs on the record player. I felt a little sorry for Miss Harcum—but not too much. All of Mac’s ideas of a soirée intime come from the French novels he has never read but thought he heard somebody or other tell him about. The wolf wears a kimono and sprays himself with eau de cologne. Mac varies the classical routine by slipping on a crucifix with garnets, and smoking Turkish cigarettes in a holder imported from France. He excused himself to get into his outfit, and I got into mine.

  What outfit? Did she want me to take her to a place like Ciro’s or something with class? If she liked to dance, we would go somewhere and dance. I picked out a modified summer formal, of the type I had seen around Las Vegas, and the effect was pretty handsome with my tan. For the third or fourth time in the last five hours I brushed my teeth. Mac was still in the shower when I had finished, so I told Miss
Harcum to make herself at home. To give the place a cool professional air I set up the sound tape near the piano, and gave her a few pointers as to how to pitch her voice to the mike. It wasn’t lost on me, in this discussion, that she thought her voice would be better if I was around to listen to it, instead of Mac. Not that I was flattered. It just so happens that Mac scares the hell out of them—and I don’t. This judgment, as I say, is not flattering. I said I was sure her voice would be lovely and could hardly wait to get back to hear it, which would probably be around eleven o’clock. I knew I wouldn’t, but that was what I said.

  I found Kentwood where the Greek said it would be, made the turns she told me to take, then wound up the grade for about a mile to this place at the top. The road wheeled around a flower bed at the turn, then passed through a big gate into a courtyard. Nothing pretentious, just a big, plain comfortable-looking place: out in back a garden of the odorless flowers they grow in profusion out here, glowing with the artificial brightness of candle wax. Two or three of the kids I had seen at the movie were kicking a ball around the yard, but when I came up the drive they turned and hollered at the house. The Greek came out of a door at the side. She was wearing something simple—she knew about that—and she carried this child saddled on her hip, held very casually in the crook of her arm. She came toward me, smiling, this child on her haunch, and if I had been standing my knees would have buckled. Every cliché in the world once had its moment of truth. At some point, if you traced it back, it expressed the inexpressible, and I was face to face with the original Madonna and Child. Not even her own, just any child would do, and being a precocious, gifted child one of his grubby little hands was fondling her breast. She came to the door of the car and said:

  “I’ve got to hold him till he burps,” and with the first finger of her free hand she cleaned the food from his gums, sniffed it on her finger, then wiped the finger clean on the diaper he wore. That gesture, that kind of knowledge, cut through the self-awareness of the pose, and I knew what it was that paralyzed me about this girl. Life without its clichés. Vegetable, animal, and mineral.