I gave them an outline of the story. "You see," I said, "it's just the
way Shaw put it. If you're going to tell people the truth, you've got
to make them laugh, or they'll kill you."
"Why will they?" Marcia asked.
"Because the truth doesn't seem amusing to them at all. However--they
have a feeling life should be amusing. So--if you can make them laugh,
and still occasionally set down a fact, they assume it's possible for
somebody to know a few truths and still laugh. This permits them--in
the long run--to ignore the truth you set down and go on laughing."
"Does the truth seem amusing to you, Phil?" she asked.
"Infinitely."
"It seems ghastly to me."
"Infinitely ghastly, too. You have to approach it in both moods at
once--or else, and this is commoner--in first one and then the other."
"There is an unwritten law in this country," Paul reminded us dryly,
"that everything is just dandy all the time--and anybody who says
different is a communist!"
I nodded. "There is also a superstitious belief that the act of stating
an unpalatable truth will increase its danger to the folks. What you
don't know won't hurt you. Innocence is bliss. Boost, don't knock. If
you haven't anything good to say, don't say it. This is the folklore of
advertising. This is the theme song of radio. Everything has to be on
the up-and-up. Criticism is regarded as un-American and un-Christian.
The nation was founded by a rebellion of the early fathers against
British tyranny. Christ was the most passionate critic man ever had.
But it is considered the essence of patriotism and the chief tenet of
the Master to be anticritic. So the whole meaning both of our nation
and of its principal religion have been thrown overboard--and we are
all riding on a roller-coaster where no track inspectors are allowed."
"Goodness!" Marcia said.
"Where," I went on, "nobody is even sure that the tracks were ever laid
to the end: looking ahead realistically also is forbidden."
The drinks came.
Paul lifted his glass to the girl. She smiled at him warmly--with love,
I suppose. What kind? It was a look of gratitude. A certain composition
of her features. I compared that expression with the casual,
collegiate, young-woman-of-the-world wave she had once given me from
Dave Berne's double bed. A high-spirited, working-prostitute salute.
Some part of her conscience was grateful to Paul for taking her
out of professional circulation. She was, I presumed, a girl with
a good deal of courage--and one with taste. A sensitive girl who
could--still--accommodate her mind to the objective risks of her trade.
But the attitudes of many men toward her would not be acceptable. To
face them, she would have to sell pieces of her inner person. Paul had
rescued her from that and her eyes thanked him.
But, far more, Marcia's face expressed a maternal sentiment--warm
and enveloping. He was, in a sense, her baby. Emotionally immature,
romantic, and hence naïve, he had taken her for what she was not.
She had played up to his assumption as an older woman to a child. In
seducing him, she had seduced herself. She had adopted him as the
symbol of the values she had discarded, the values that were now most
precious to her because they were lost.
When I thought that over, I realized it was the point of extreme hazard
in their relationship. Not social pressures, but the pressures of
emotions--of instincts of which neither was conscious--would be the
explosive condition of their two lives. The dangerous day would be the
day when he matured sufficiently to dissociate the need to love from
the need to be loved. In her case, the time would come then, too--when
he demanded no more mothering in bowels or brain or heart. But it might
come sooner--when she tired of that one function, or extended it, or
spoiled its object, or devoured it, or cast it out for its own good.
For neither man nor woman can possess without being possessed, or
consume without being consumed, and whether the process involves an
object or another person, not to know the way of it and not to abide by
the way is to be destroyed by it.
The lunch went along badly.
My habit of apostrophe and tirade, which usually fills such hollows
as occur in talk--and forces its way, sometimes, beyond those decent
opportunities--seemed inappropriate here. They had been depressed by
what I had already said about the world. I guessed that, along with
worries, they had hoped the visit would elicit an avuncular gaiety.
They were young and in love, they thought, and should get from their
elders the jocose disposition reserved for young love. I felt some of
their expectancy, at any rate, and it only inhibited my rhetoric.
We talked of the news, of the airlift to Berlin which, by its very
existence, constituted an immense Appeasement. We discussed the
presidential candidates. We talked awhile of women's clothes, of the
veterans' organization currently holding a convention in the city, and
I described the house Ricky and I were building south of Miami, drawing
a diagram on the tablecloth with a knife.
The effort to keep talk going--to find topics and to change them before
attempt was disclosed--made me restive. Paul wasn't helping any. He'd
eaten hungrily enough and then sat back--jerking and fidgeting about,
making faces, pulling his nose, simpering, and smirking moonily.
She'd held up her end.
The trouble was, of course, that none of us was engaged in honest
behavior.
Paul wanted to say: What do you think of her--and us?
Paul wanted me to say: She's lovely--and I'm sure you'll be happy.
I had become doubly certain--without yet entirely appreciating
why--that it would never turn out. I had been generically sure, even
before--just as Ricky had been sure: Paul wasn't constructed to marry a
harlot and live happily ever after.
I wanted to say: For God's sake, cooky, send her back to her trade;
she'll find some other guy, eventually; she's not for you.
Then I wanted to go up sixteen floors to my apartment with my troubles,
my work, no women, no nephew.
What did the girl want to say?