I said it for her. "Some men are so narrow-minded you can't put a dime
between what they don't know and what they'll never learn."
The feeling that she might have made a faux pas--might have prejudiced
me hopelessly against her--had gone from her eyes. She walked over to
the windowsill where the radio was. She switched it on and turned the
dial back to the minimal volume. While the tubes warmed, she leaned
forward on the sill and looked out--across the brick terrace and the
parapet, some half dozen feet away. My floor is on a slight setback.
When she found she couldn't see straight down, she pulled her head
inside again, found a station playing dance music, tuned it in sharply,
turned it very low, and smiled at me.
"Sex isn't logical," she said.
"Not from the standpoint we call logic."
"Take me."
"An idea."
She nodded her head affirmatively and went on smiling. "What attracts
me--sexually--to people--isn't their sex. Not whether they're men or
women--or even little kids, for that matter. It's something about them
that I never know what it may be. The way they move--or the way they
talk--or their expressions--or their looks. It can be any little thing.
Sometimes I think it isn't _them_ at all--but how _I_ feel at the time.
And even then my feelings aren't ever the same. According to what it
is that attracts me, I'm different. Sometimes I see a man I'd like to
have make love to me. Sometimes I see some college boy I'd just like to
neck. Sometimes I see a woman I wish would have a crush on me and rush
me--like college girls--and get herself terribly upset about wanting me
around so much--and not knowing what to do. And sometimes I feel the
way Charmaine seems to, about everybody she likes. I just try to see
how excited I can make them be--and then let them be. Like that. Let
them go away. Does it bore you?"
"No."
"There are some feelings I can't react to. Homosexuality in men. I
don't mean it revolts me, or anything. I just can't see why they
bother--even with all I _can_ see. And the most peculiar part is
noticing that the men who hate pansies the most are nearest to it. You
find that out, in my kind of life. They'll visit you and act strictly
like Marine sergeants--and get very tight--and finally, perhaps,
ask--probably pretending to kid--if there are only girls around the
place. When anything like that happens--I feel perfectly blank. Yet
that doesn't seem--normal--under the circumstances."
Gwen's theory of normal libido required the possibility of erotic
reaction to just about any object, it appeared.
I wondered how close that was to the actual nature of us all.
The Freudians would have shrugged it off as adolescent. A
carrying-into-maturity of the unsorted, unspecialized yearnings of
the infant and the child. I felt that--if a person could choose--he,
or she, would be far better off with Gwen's libido than the tormented
fragment that the majority cherished. Cherished as the platform for all
that they called love and integrity.
She was telling the truth. But presently I wondered if she had not told
it a great many times, to men like myself, and to women--some women.
Told it as a psychological tapestry against which to pose herself; as
an advertisement, an inducement. It wouldn't be the first time I'd
heard a prostitute do that. Tell the truth readily enough--too readily.
Personal history--anecdotes--subclinical material. Intellectual people
would fall for it. They would be seduced by it. For they have been
deprived not just of the erotic play their childhood naturally yearned
for but, in most cases, of the opportunity for mere discussion of the
subject, which they'd have enjoyed.
Suppose eating, not sex, were the taboo of our century? Suppose it was
illegal for more than two people to eat together and suppose even they
had to get a license for it and eat in secret, while children were fed
alone in dark closets? Suppose our billboards and newspaper ads, movies
and books and art, devoted themselves to pictures of food--but never
to one glimpse of anybody eating? (That's what we'd done about sex--or
tried our best to do.) Wouldn't it result in secret, general passions
to try esoteric foods? And wouldn't people like to get together, law or
none, and talk about the tabooed object?
I thought about Bali, where people actually were a little ashamed of
eating meals in public. An animal indecency to be ritualistically
concealed.
I felt the familiar stab of indignation. How long would it take my
fellow men to realize what they had done to themselves, and _why_ they
had done it?
To hide the real creature. To dress up the pretense that we are not
instinctual.
Would we ever see? Learn? Break down the conceited barricade we'd
lifted up since beyond the Stone Age--the wall between the old brain
and the new cortex? Or would we, too, decay? Enter our Toynbean time of
troubles, turn military, tyrannical, lucubricious and guilty--instead
of loving and free, and so in the end fall prey to the outlying
barbarian horde--the rest of the world, that outnumbered us sixteen
to one? Was a Presbyterian, a Catholic, a collegiate agnostic, a
Unitarian, a socialist nearer to insight than an old Roman?