Her brows came together. They were ordinarily straight and level, red
once, black now--like a crayon mark made with a ruler. She still had
good-looking amber eyes, fiery but steady, and her forehead was very
high. She was beginning to look like some sort of sachem--a tribal
wiseman, or a poet. Quite an impressive dame.
"It's funny," she said. "I've even heard men right in these rooms
argue that Kinsey was a liar and crazy and incompetent and a menace to
society. Otherwise bright men. Heard them say that Kinsey only talked
to screwballs and neurotics and people who were inventing stuff to show
off. You'd hardly believe such self-kidding was possible!"
"They said it about psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, too," I agreed.
"Said that their conclusions were obviously nutty because they never
saw anybody but nutty patients. Never stopped to reflect that a
neurotic is not a nut, that every patient did his best to tell the
precise, detailed truth about his private life, and that every single
one of those stories involved the sex behavior of many, many other
people who are called normal. I mean--the psychologists learned a whole
hell of a lot about what normal people did from every neurotic patient.
So when they talked about sex--they had the dope. Most people never
thought of that angle."
"Most people," Hattie said, "never think. And when it comes to sex,
they think about ten times less than never."
"Which brings me," I nodded, "to the matter in hand. I got a nephew. A
brainy apple and a good kid. And you had a girl here--or on your call
list--till about six months ago, named Marcia something--who's gone to
live with Paul--he being the nephew."
Hattie said, "Yes," and waited.
I realized that a dozen years is a long time in which not to see
anybody--a time long enough for a change, especially if one has quit
drinking, married again, and so on and so on and so on. Hattie was
afraid I was up to some sort of Presbyterian nasty-work--and she was
ready to be disappointed. Ready not to help me call the cops on Marcia,
so to speak, and ready to write off one more guy as a galvanized
hypocrite.
I said, "In my frank opinion, Paul is not the sort who will be happy
with an ex-houri. And I don't say that because he's my nephew and
because I'm broad-minded about everybody but who-touches-me. Let me
tell you what Paul's like--and how he came to confide in me on the
situation--how he got into it--and how he's acting about it as of this
afternoon."
"Tell me."
The longer she listened, the more she relaxed. When finally I stopped
talking she walked over to the window, where she had stood when I came
in. Her broadening buttocks and shoulders blotted out most of the
river-gleam and the Jersey-glow, which you could see from there--but
not the boat-hoots which came up around her, wallowing through the
city, buzzing the middle ears of the millions. She stood there a while.
The frame of faraway light blinked around her and the ferry boats
and the freighters hollered pensively at each other. When she turned
around, there were tears not only in her eyes but on her cheeks.
"If people only knew what I know!" She said it in a quiet voice with
nothing of the brash timber of her usual speech.
"I'll buy that. I'll even add a big apothegm, Hat. People have found
out so much, they are now obliged to learn the rest. The whole
God-damned, agonizing, exalted rest of it."
She smiled in a woebegone way and got a Kleenex from a drawer. "It'll
take thousands of years," she said. "They've been making the same
mistakes, that long."
"Yeah. Meanwhile, we've got Paul and Marcia. I'm supposed to have lunch
with them tomorrow. You can see--from what I've told you--why I think
the thing will fold--painfully. There is, however, a chance it won't.
A chance that depends on what sort of girl Marcia is, mostly. Which is
why I came up here."
She was shaking her head. "Not on the kind of girl she is--necessarily.
On how much she loves him."
"Okay. That."
"Providing--she can love. Providing--she hasn't kidded herself into
a sweet little daydream that she got from reading too many women's
magazines. Or all those books. She sure was a reading girl. And smart.
And attractive, too. How tough are you, Phil?"
"It's something you do, isn't it? Not fill out in a questionnaire?"
Hattie smiled. "I don't want to offend those fine sensibilities of
yours. Or make you think I'm something special in the she-Judas line.
But you want to know whether the girl means it. Why not send your Paul
back to his laboratory after lunch--he'd like that--like you to get
acquainted with her--and why not--?"
"I'm not tough that way. That's businessman tough."
She dropped a hand. "Still--there's hardly one of them in a thousand
who wouldn't--work out some breezy little arrangement--for a G, say.
And she'd have to be such a one."
"She might just see through it. You said she was smart."
Hattie shrugged. "If she was smart enough to resist the G, maybe she'd
be smart enough. However."
"In other words, you don't know about her."
"Not Marcia. If it was ninety-nine in a hundred, I could tell you right
off. Some of them make damned good wives--better sometimes for being
here. With the kind of men who really understand what life is--and with
the kind who don't mind because they don't understand anything at all.
I like to see those girls get married. Lots more make swell mistresses
for men who married hunks of flint. I could go calling at so many swank
addresses that your head would swim. And sometimes I do. There are
worse places to look for a wife than good bagnios. Any high-society
party, for instance. Women's colleges, too, I suspect. Most country
clubs. The dud percentage--the lack of warmth--runs higher there--"
"Not to mention know-how."
She sighed--and then chuckled. "Isn't it crazy? Something that should
be given more loving practice than music--something that needs extra
experience and skill for civilized people. They think you can learn
on one bridal night! Or from a book! A girl it would take a genius of
sex to seduce satisfactorily marries a bright young college boy in the
chopsticks class--and what have you got? The American home. Did you
ever--" the question--indeed, the entire subject--seemed to have roused
her--"ever once have an affair with a plain American wife who was any
good? Somebody else's, I mean?"
"Once."
"Once! And how many--?"
"Look, Hattie. I came to cross-question you--"
She thought awhile, when she saw I wouldn't reply--looking out at the
city and detesting it. "I've had lots of men bring their wives right
here--to look and learn."
"How many?" I grinned.
"God knows! I'm an old madam, Phil. But many a snooty female has lost
her inhibitions in my parlors--and gained a little knowledge that went
into making a happy home for some guy. The more people say physical sex
is unimportant--the more it is likely to become the only thing that is
important for them. And they don't realize."
"I know."
"You know. And a lot of my clients know. And a lot of women. But they
can't change anything."
"Yeah."
"What do I really do here, then? Ask yourself. I'm in the business of
supplying erotic fun to people who are made for it, born to it, urged
from the cradle to the grave to take part in it, who depend upon it for
mental health, for a decent feeling of good will toward others--and
aren't allowed to engage in it even with their own wedded wives, by the
statutes of New York State and forty-seven other little penitentiaries!
That's my trade. And because I'm in it--I am regarded as the greatest
blight in civilized society, by millions. Holy, jumped-up St. Peter's
be-hee!"
Through a recollected haze of alcohol I heard this same tirade from
old and distant days. And Hattie was right, in her way. The theory
of accession to culture and intelligence, to morality and Godliness,
through the restraint of desire by the demeaning of it, had run its
course in the Western world and unstrung nearly all of us. And where
that thesis did not exist, there were others, still more absurd, to
bring other peoples to their repetitive, obnoxious dooms.
Quite suddenly, I felt like weeping.