They had a rumba band there that would give sloe-eyed fantasies to a
Norseman.
And it wasn't crowded.
I haven't said--was it necessary?--that I intended to make Mrs.
Prentiss eat one or two of those gardenias. That is, I proposed in my
mind to bring her to the point of withdrawing the order that I was to
behave toward her in all chaste chivalry. As to what I would do beyond
that, I had no idea. It could not possibly be important if I followed
up a moral (or immoral) victory with what would then be an ethical (or
unethical) act.
Mrs. Prentiss was a remarkably handsome young woman. She was somewhat
educated and she had a fair degree of intellectual sensitivity. In
telling me she had not understood what I was saying she had implied
a considerable degree of comprehension and a reluctance to deal with
whatever it was that she had gathered from my words. She was "mostly"
frigid (an intriguing expression) in many different ways.
In any sexual encounter she would undoubtedly barricade herself from
biological design with common artifact--and half the Pharmacopoeia,
besides. She was avid and did not know it. I could see--as the reader
has seen with me, no doubt--that her domestic debacle was the result of
a projection of her own guilt-sense. She was a nubile dancer. But she
used her dancing rather meanly--as a sly and enjoyable confession to
herself which, she thought, was the most that society would permit of
dancing. She was somewhat spoiled and very selfish--extremely prissy
in the real, felt sense of the word: a bitch. Nobody, that is to say,
existed for her excepting in that they existed for her desires.
She had moved to a room beside me. She had tried to lead me--at
first--on the dance floor. She had thrust the eyes and lips of her
psyche into the brunette cashier's hair without caring in the least for
the brunette or for any woman or for what happened to others. She had
attributed the libidinous gesture to my imagination, when I had brought
it to light. She had failed to add anything but frustration to the life
of a man about whom I had heard, so far, what I regarded as almost
nothing but good.
She had bought her world and was willing to pay in cash to keep it the
way she wanted it--but not willing to pay in a dime's worth of herself.
She needed a lesson. For there were nice things about her.
The expression on her face when she talked about Rol was descriptive,
to me, of many good qualities--of loyalty to emotions she did
not understand, of untapped vehemences, of tenderness--of human
characteristics she was unable to embody. She had been taught not to
embody them--she had been taught such attributes were weaknesses--or
she had been taught nothing concerning them at all. Her greedy mother.
The cocksure extravert--her father--a man who, even from her brief
account, plainly believed he knew all there was worth knowing on all
topics, one who had reached final conclusions about Everything. Reached
them--or was able to jump to them by a process requiring neither
thought nor the machinery for evaluation. Reached them or jumped to
them because his opinions were peeled like decalcomania from Precedents
set up by businessmen who have graduated from good universities.
I knew the type. Sometimes I feel there is hardly any other.
Yvonne's dad--successful real estate man--Ivy League--New
Yorker--daughter-adored. He had no reason to doubt his excellence. He
was rich, which proved it. He had graduated from a superior university,
which guaranteed his intelligence, knowledge and culture. And his
success had been achieved in a tough game in the biggest city on the
earth. Moreover, he was, apparently, a churchman. Hence not only the
tradition of America, as a whole, and the judgment of upper-class
America, but God Himself, attested to his superiority. On top of all
that, he was, no doubt, a good guy. A good guy who had loved his elder
daughter a little more (how?) than Yvonne.
It was not remarkable that Yvonne exhibited the characteristics and
the reactions she'd sketched for me--or those I'd witnessed. She had
been packaged in the best fashion of the richest and most powerful
culture of the twentieth century by people who knew and felt less of
the significance of life than any other group which has arisen in
the species during its past ten or twenty parasitical millenniums.
In representing the highest peak of what is called civilization she
presented the least sensitive arrangement of what is human.
A nice bitch, then, with a father complex.
When we began dancing, I was still fiddling in my mind with fragments
of the dinner monologue. A couple of things should be said about it.
As the reader has perceived, it represented in its way a conscious
effort at self-assessment. It was a partial statement of philosophy--my
own--urged upon me at that time because, under my circumstances, some
review of philosophy was inevitable. When the Ghoul appears, one thinks
about one's thoughts.
For a while, we scarcely talked at all.
American women, as a rule, will rarely listen to a monologue by a man;
when they do, it is usually because they want something from the man.
Men have, generally, the better faculty for speech; in America they
are not trained to use it. And they are, moreover, so accustomed to
female authority in their formative years that they submit, all their
lives, to the clamor of it. An aggregation of American people is thus
conventionally dominated by the tongues of women and sounds like the
continuous breaking of dishes.
Yvonne had listened through part of a lunch and all of a dinner and now
we set our communication in a more definite language--one that followed
the tempo of maracas and made use of the whole body.
"Rol," she said once, during an Afro-Cuban number, "needs lessons."
"Who doesn't?"
"Did you take a lot?"
"Hundreds."