You could still see a few stars in the haze. The night was as close as
a pressure cooker.
My nausea left slowly; my shakes subsided.
In states of this sort I usually try, if possible, to make a list of
Things to Do.
Things to Do on Sunday Night in the Big City, after the witching hour.
One can walk the streets.
Go to the Park.
Read.
Eat.
(But not sleep.)
One can take a sightseeing bus to Chinatown.
The taxi dance halls are open.
The all-night movies.
Any of numerous friends--
or my brother--
would sit up and talk till morning.
I could
by simply lifting the telephone and dialing a number
fill my apartment with assorted pretty girls.
Or just Gwen.
Why not?
The image appeared
the woman-lines, the dry-martini taste of a woman's
libido
Gwen's cuprous hair;
and it was not Gwen at all
but an image in myself.
Who she was, I had no idea.
But I knew
I'd had enough of the Gwens in this world
to last until
my next reincarnation
or, possibly,
the second coming of Christ
in Anno Double-Domini.
(Tomorrow, I thought, begins
another reincarnation)
It was enough of a list.
I had now collected sufficient Things to Do so as to go on sitting
in my chair, which was all I desired to do: I had somewhat collected
myself.
The sky belched light.
I leaned forward, looked, and half of the hazy stars were erased, gone,
done for, hidden behind an invisible tumble of nimbus.
My nerves let themselves down another degree.
I went around the room, emptying an ashtray the night maid had
overlooked, fixing myself a glass of hot, powdered coffee.
And back to my chair.
Now, across the parapet, across the well-learned silhouette of
buildings opposite, the undersides of clouds were heated up. Their
contours showed in brief, stammering flashes of lavender, as if they
were gigantic lamps which some celestial electrician was trying to
connect with a frayed cord.
At my side, the exhausted curtain came to momentary life--then perished
again in the swelter of the room.
Gwen was an image. Whoever she was, I saw what I saw, looking from
within to what lay within. Another item for Forbisher-Laroche: Why
visit the fille de joie? Because she is more I than She.
Yvonne, then?
I gave the matter my consideration--and half an eye to the approaching
weather.
"Blow, blow, thou bitter wind
Thou art not so unkind
In this man's latitude."
Hark ye, Sir Bughouse:
You don't know anything.
All you know about Yvonne is what you read in the newspaper
advertisements.
She is a collection of costly, streamlined surfaces.
An accumulation from high-class department store counters.
And a statistic from a book that has not yet been published owing,
doubtless, to pressures from the Neo-Christian-Centrist-Totalitarian
Renaissance.
Did you think she was a woman?
She was a dream.
An arrangement of electrons, a mess of mesons, in your cranium, Sir
Spatterwit.
There must be blah-diddie-blah-blah (statistics, pal) happy homosexual
hours for housewives and houris
ergo
we, Wylie, have witnessed Onesuch.
What a premise! What a casual conclusion.
O Lydian ease!
O languorous Lesbos!
(O legislators!
You left out the ladies!