We went to our table and she ordered another Planter's Punch. Her face
was a damp, darker color now than peach; perspiration had curled small
ends of her hair so that they were like the tendrils on vines. She was
panting--and trying to disguise it--but I could hear the breath in her
throat and see the dilation of her nostrils. We had been dancing hard.
We both needed the long, slow drink of air--though the air here was
warm, full of smoke, and had garish light in it that made too plain the
grimed plaster on the walls. Too plain, that is, for the music and its
mood.
"You do things to me," she said.
"You do them to yourself. In sex, men respond to the subject, women to
the object. I'm your object--but you're the response."
"I could be annoyed with that."
"More of what you'd call antifeminist propaganda?"
She shook her head. "Annoyed on the grounds that you apparently never
let yourself go."
"On the contrary. I always let myself go. But I always let my brain go
along, too."
She thought about that. "Annoyed--then--on the grounds that there's
nothing reciprocal about the dance we had."
"But you'd be wrong. After all--I asked you to dinner."
"Because you were curious." She spoke petulantly. "Because you like
to find out what makes people tick. Because you're full of half-baked
missionary impulses."
"Because you're a damned good-looking dame."
"You think so?"
"Don't fish."
"I'm not! Plenty of people think that I'm a spoiled brat with merely
superficial good looks."
"Girls that troll in my waters catch whatever is swimming by that's
hungry. Of course you're a spoiled brat--and all good looks are
superficial. So I was in a mood. I came down to lunch. I saw a blonde
with a book--odd enough, in itself, to be interesting. A hell of a
good-looking blonde. And I sat down beside her and she told me the
story of her life."
She saw that she was not going to be appeased beyond that deliberately
meager degree. She sighed and picked up the tall glass as soon as
the waiter deposited it and drank perhaps a third of it, thirstily.
Afterward, she tittered. "I'm going to get tight, if I do that again."
"And if you get tight, I'll take you home."
"And if you take me home, I'll pound on your door."
"And if you pound on the door, I'll put you under a cold shower."
"And I'll call the manager."
"You won't need to. He'll be helping me with the shower."
"I thought you were maybe hoping I'd get a little tight."
"Why?"
"Don't men?"
"Not me."
"It's supposed," she said with a flirtatious glance, "to make it
easier."
"Make what easier?"
"Oh--being with girls."
"I never found it difficult--_except_ when they were tight. Then my
impulse is to run."
"There we go again! Women mustn't drink. But you--being a man--don't
care if the boys get blind."
"Did I say so? Having been a drunk--and quit--I detest drunks. A
common example of the law of opposites in operation. I force myself to
associate with them, sometimes, because I owe drunkenness a good deal
of quid pro quo--"
"Like an Alcoholic Anonymous?"
"Like that--without the self-canonization. An American man--with a few
drinks in his blood stream--is able to become a shade more human. To
shed the posture of men demanded by his era and its women. To show he
has feelings, to be introverted--unless he gets out of hand--and even
to think a little bit. To cherish and fear, to appreciate and revile,
to show some evidence of the democracy and human brotherhood he is
always talking about--and always doing his best to defeat by getting
to the top in nefarious ways. I don't mind guys being slightly tight.
Excepting for the danger that they'll go beyond that stage--which they
so generally do."
"But women! Dear, dear!"
"The average American female with three or four cocktails in her
becomes a living exhibit of the frustrations inherent in the feminist
myth of these days. Together with the compulsions."
"Yes, Mr. Wylie?"
I grinned at her. "She sets out to _prove_ the myth she has not been
able to live up to, sober--that women are superior to men and also the
exact equals of men. She does this by turning into a bad imitation
of a man. She argues. She imagines her arguments are brilliant and
crushing--when they are non sequiturs and ad hominems. She directs. She
orders. She demands. She judges--she is a little tin magistrate hurling
charges to unseen juries and handing out sentences on her enemies or
auditors. She is both the defending and the prosecuting attorney. She
is everything but a lady and everybody but the prisoner. Which shows,
of course, that she feels imprisoned when sober, and also envious of
males when she goes around in her sober mind trying to convince herself
and everybody she is their equal and also their superior."
Her voice suddenly became flat and cold. "I am beginning to get very
tired of you, Mr. Wylie."