“Well," said Dr. Victor Jonas, emerging from the hall into the living room, "they're in bed, at last. Now we can have a little time to ourselves."
Paul Radford, who had been sitting on the sofa beside Peggy Jonas watching the opening scenes of an old movie on television, quickly pushed himself to his feet. "You've got two attractive boys there," he said to Dr. Jonas. "How old Are they?"
"Thomas will be twelve in September," said Dr. Jonas, "and Matthew was just nine."
Peggy Jonas' eye left the movie a moment. "Perhaps Mr. Radford would like some coffee or tea," she said to her husband. She was a small, friendly young woman, with a frank and freckled Irish face.
"Nonsense," said Dr. Jonas. He turned to Paul. "I've something better for you out in back."
Peggy Jonas settled into the corner of the sofa. "I'll be right here, then. If you need me, make whimpering sounds."
Dr. Jonas had Paul by the arm. "Let's go," he said. "It's through the kitchen."
Paul followed his host across the dining room and kitchen. Dr. Jonas held the rear screen door open, and Paul went through it.
"Careful," said Dr. Jonas. "There are two steps."
They tramped across the wet grass toward the far side of the yard. Despite the slight drifts of fog, the moon was visible. For a moment, they walked in silence.
Paul had arrived at Dr. Jonas' modest early-American house in Cheviot Hills at ten minutes after eight. Whatever apprehension he had suffered in his drive from The Briars was swiftly dissipated by Dr. Jonas' cordial welcome. The Devil's Advocate, as Dr. Chapman had bitterly characterized him, would have been completely miscast in the role of Inquisitor. He was perhaps five feet nine or ten. His rust hair, parted on the side, hung down his forehead in the Darrow manner. His gray eyes were lively and blinking, and his nose was a great hooked beak that seemed to obscure a cheerful mouth. He wore an open sport shirt, and corduroys, and he moved like a man who still had five more things to do. His pipe—which he had been smoking when he greeted Paul at the door—was an aged corncob. On anyone else, it would have been an affectation.
Dr. Jonas had been reading to his boys when Paul arrived. At once, after introducing them to Paul, he had shouted out for Peggy. Paul had insisted that he finish whatever he was reading, and immediately, without apology or self-consciousness, he had waved Paul to the large wing chair and returned to the sofa where the boys were waiting and had resumed. Paul liked that. Peggy appeared just after the story had been finished, and Paul rose to acknowledge the introduction. Then, they all sat for ten or fifteen minutes, Peggy and Dr. Jonas conversing with Paul on the science fiction just read, on comic books, the press in Los Angeles, the fog in Cheviot Hills, the beauty of The Briars, life in California versus life anywhere else, the public schools, and the Dodgers. It had all been so easy and natural that Paul felt he had been part of this family and this house for years.
Now, walking beside Dr. Jonas in the shrouded moonlight, he realized that they had arrived at a miniature bungalow located at the farthest extremity of the yard.
"My workshop," said Dr. Jonas. "I think this is why we bought the house."
He opened the door, turned up the lights, and they were inside a large single room. Paul surveyed it quickly. It was dominated by a worn oak desk piled high with loose papers and manuscripts. The armless swivel chair faced an old typewriter. A door, partially ajar, revealed a narrow lavatory. Against a wall were four file cabinets. A brick fireplace dominated another wall, and near it was a cot and then an entire wall of books.
As Dr. Jonas went to open a window, Paul, as was his habit whenever he entered a new study, strolled along the shelves and noted the book titles. He saw Dr. Chapman's book at once, and then a second copy of it. There were volumes by Freud, Adler, Jung, Alexander, Fenichel, Bergler, Dickinson, Terman, Stone, Stopes, Gorer, Hamilton, Krafft-Ebing, Lynd, Reik, Weissenberg, Mead, Ellis, Guyon, Trilling, Kierkegaard, Riesman, Russell.
"Chartreuse, dry sherry, or cognac?" asked Dr. Jonas. He was standing beside a low table of bottles that Paul had not seen when he came in.
"Whatever you say," said Paul.
"I recommend the chartreuse highly," said Dr. Jonas.
"Perfect."
Dr. Jonas filled two liqueur glasses, set one on his desk and brought the other to the lamp table next to the plastic upholstered chair across from the desk. Paul settled in the plastic chair while Dr. Jonas filled his corncob from the walnut humidor on the desk.
"I suppose you know all about me, Mr. Radford," Dr. Jonas said suddenly.
Paul was taken aback. "Why, a little, of course—I always try to . . . to read up on someone . . . before meeting them.”
“So do I." He smiled. "I even read your book."
"Oh, that—"
"You showed real promise. It's a pity you haven't written more. I presume you don't, now. One writer in the family's enough."
Paul refused to meet the allusion to Dr. Chapman head-on. "We—all of us work together on Dr. Chapman's books. I'm afraid that's enough to keep me occupied."
Dr. Jonas had the corncob smoldering. He lowered himself into the squeaking swivel chair. "You told your boss that he was also invited tonight?"
"Of course, but he couldn't make it. We start the last sampling tomorrow morning. He'll be up until midnight preparing."
"So you have to do the dirty work alone?"
Paul scowled. He was about to retort that there was no dirty work, but he knew that once he made the proposal this would make him look foolish. "I don't know what you mean," he said.
"I mean simply I can't believe you came all the way out here—to a stranger—out of mere intellectual curiosity—to pass the time of evening. I may be wrong. If so, forgive me. But that's what I mean." Observing that Paul had taken his briar from his pocket, Dr. Jonas pushed the humidor toward him. "Try my mixture."
Paul worked his way to the edge of the chair, lifted the lid of the humidor, and dipped his pipe into it.
"As a matter of fact," said Dr. Jonas, "I'm glad Dr. Chapman didn't come. I don't think I'd like him. And I rather think I like you."
Paul wanted to be loyal, yet was pleased with the offer of friendship. "You might be surprised. He's intelligent, decent—"
"I'm sure. But there's something else about him—I—no, forget it. What I want to say, better say, right off, is that many people who don't know me find me abrupt and disagreeable. I'm not. Understand that. I'm only frank. I may not always be right, but I am frank. When I'm in this room—the hard-think room—with my intellectual equal, I have no patience for the amenities, the social word game. That's deplorable waste. I like to get to essentials, get on with it, get the best from my opposite, and give my best, and learn and improve. That's fun. If you will tolerate that, then we will get along. This could be a valuable evening for both of us."
"Fair enough," said Paul, sinking back in the chair. "Need a match?"
"I have one."
"Now, you know how I feel about Dr. Chapman's highly publicized surveys. I don't like them, for the most I don't. You, I assume, believe in them fervently."
"I certainly do."
"Good. The lines are drawn."
Paul recalled the emotions he had felt at Reardon, upon first reading Dr. Jonas' reviews of the bachelor survey. He had thought them short-sighted and unfair. Had Dr. Chapman's personal annoyance influenced him at the time? Dr. Chapman had loftily implied that Dr. Jonas was a gnat bothering an elephant. Of course, in all justice, Dr. Jonas' dissents were handicapped by lack of publication space. Now, however, the old emotions filtered back. Our work is so simply right, Paul thought. Why can't an intelligent man like that see it? Was he, as Dr. Chapman contended, crafty and ambitious?
"You know how I felt about the bachelor book," continued Dr. Jonas, almost uncannily, as if he were reading Paul's mind. "A few of my feelings were published. Well, I want you to know I feel even more set against the married female sampling —and the use Dr. Chapman will make of it."
"But it's still in preparation," said Paul. "How can you be critical of something you haven't read?"
Dr. Jonas' corncob had gone out, and he busied himself lighting it again. When he had it smoking, he looked up at Paul. "There's where you are wrong. I have read the female findings—most of them—enough of them. As you probably know, I've been retained by a certain group connected with the Zollman Foundation in Philadelphia to analyze the female survey—both surveys, in fact. Well, your Dr. Chapman is trying to win those people over; he's been regularly sending them copies of your findings."
"It's hard to believe. The work is still in progress."
"Nevertheless, the Zollman directors are abreast of it, and so am I. They've supplied me with photostats of what you've done." He pointed off. "I have a couple hundred pages of your newest survey in the top drawer of that second cabinet. Everything, in crude form, up until two months ago. So I believe I am qualified to discuss with you your latest findings."
Paul had been totally unprepared for this, had even unconsciously counted on Dr. Jonas' lack of knowledge of their latest effort to support him, and now he was vaguely disturbed. Why had Dr. Chapman been so quick to rush their undigested efforts to critical outsiders? And why had Dr. Chapman kept this secret from him, leaving him now so vulnerable? Most probably, he supposed, Dr.. Chapman had believed that Paul already knew that this must be done, that every calculated risk must be taken to sweep the day. Still, it was disquieting. Nevertheless, meeting Dr. Jonas' direct gaze now, he was determined that the unusual man behind the desk, piercing eyes, monstrous nose, foul corncob, be made to understand the basic worth of their crusade.
"Yes, I suppose you are qualified," said Paul. "What beats me, Dr. Jonas—"
"Excuse me, but would it offend you to get on a first name basis? Otherwise, it's as if the referee said, Mister Dempsey, this is Mister Tunney, who's going to try to knock your head off."
Paul laughed. "All right."
"Not that I anticipate any real Donnybrook. This is my study, and the word here is gemütlichkeit. If we're going to belabor each other, let's make it a friendly pummeling. I'm sorry I interrupted you, Paul. You were saying?"
"Okay, Victor." Paul had been prepared to make a high-level defense, but now it seemed pompous, and he tried hastily to revise and slant what he had to say to the informality of the occasion. "I read a good deal of your writings on our bachelor report. I agreed with you, still do, about a lot of minor shortcomings. But it always seemed to me you missed the forest for the trees. Since the Mayflower, people in this country have been living in a dreary house behind a puritanical curtain. They've grown up in this cold, stark house built by John Calvin of Geneva, and the sign on the door, sternly printed by Jonathan Edwards, read, 'No frolicking.' The best parts of their lives have been lived in this dark, unlighted house, and it is unhealthy and unwholesome, and we've merely been trying to get rid of that curtain and let some light in."
"How have you done that?"
"How? By gathering data—information on a little-known subject—and we've done this on a scale never before attempted. As Dr. Chapman says, we're the fact-gatherers."
"Not enough," said Dr. Jonas placidly. "You add up your digits, and you spew them out, and you say that does good. I wonder. As someone said of another such report—I think it was Simpson in The Humanist—just looking up and counting stars never achieved the science of astronomy, and just collating what married women say on their sexual behavior won't give us real insight into this behavior."
"Well, I disagree with you," said Paul warmly: "We're making a giant first step. The very idea of removing sex from scrawlings on lavatory walls to frank, sensible, open discussion will do infinite good. I remember Dr. Robert Dickinson saying that the enemies of sex freedom were conception, infection, detection. True. But we've controlled most of these. Still, we are left to fight one more enemy rarely challenged—ignorance —and ignorance thrives on silence."
Dr. Jonas banged his corncob on the cork center of his circular metal ash tray. When the bowl was empty, he dipped it into the humidor again. "You are persuasive," he said. "I grant you that the final enemy is ignorance. But I believe Dr. Chapman is fighting that enemy the wrong way. He has done much good, of course, but he has done a greater amount of mischief." He ran a flaming match over the rim of the pipe and then blew the match out and dropped it into the tray. "Of course, you are dealing with married people in our society, and that makes research even more difficult. I suppose man was really meant to be polygamous, but then monogamy was imposed upon him—as were a hundred other unnatural customs and credos like turn-the-other-cheek, love-thy-neighbor, fair play, sportsmanship, and so forth. He is burdened with all sorts of pressures inconsistent with his real nature. But, by accepting this, he receives certain benefits, and so the pressures are the price for being civilized and advanced. Man sets his own rules, then tries to make them work, unnatural though they may often be. Sex is one form of behavior that suffers gravely."
"I don't deny that."
"Making sex work, under these repressive circumstances, is a delicate assignment. You think it can be done by simply counting noses?"
"I don't think so and neither does Dr. Chapman. No. I'd say we're going so far, as far as we can, and others will go further."
"Yes, Paul, yes," said Dr. Jonas. "But the problem, as I see it, is this—you know you are going so far and no further. You understand this, but your public doesn't. The vast public has been propagandized to believe that whatever science says is so. They believe science is some mystical society, with a direct line to God, that cannot be quite understood but must be be-lieved. Naturally, they accept Dr. Chapman's reports as the Final Word on sexual behavior. They do not know that the data are raw and uncooked. They think the findings are ready for consumption, and Dr. Chapman does not tell them other-wise. So the readers read the reports and act accordingly. Misinformation is added to ignorance, and the result is harmful."
"What makes you so positive we are disseminating misinformation?"
"Your methods. Do you want me to go into them?”
“Please do."
Paul saw that the tobacco in his own pipe had been burned to white ash. He laid the pipe aside and sipped his chartreuse. He regretted his mission. He would like to have known Dr. Jonas under other circumstances. The conversation, not unfamiliar, might have been stimulating, but now, because of what he had been asked to do, it was little more than a waiting, a prelude to a bribe. Still, he told himself, the work was not only Dr. Chapman's work but his own, his own more than Horace's or Cass's, and it must be protected.
". . . is not strictly controlled, not clinically controlled, and I think that it is wrong," Dr. Jonas was saying.
Paul gathered his wits tightly, trying to deduce what he had missed. Obviously, Dr. Jonas was discussing the interview technique.
"This business of groups volunteering does not give you truly representative subjects," Dr. Jonas continued. "The women who volunteer want to talk—"
"Is there a better technique?" Paul interrupted. "Would you prefer ringing doorbells or putting advertisements in the paper? Selecting individuals by going through the telephone directory or stopping them on street corners? Or mailing questionnaires that many will not understand or too many easily ignore? The Federal Research Committee approved of our methodological and statistical formula."
Dr. Jonas nodded. "You have had approval. And those other methods are not so accurate as the one you employ. But there are better means of finding truth than the one you use. I am certain of that. I don't want to digress into that now. I prefer to discuss your technique."
"Go ahead."
"Dr. Chapman puts so much dependence upon the representative nature of women's groups and organizations. I think that is suspect. I have a suspicion that the most representative American women do not belong to any formal groups or clubs at all. They are not joiners, and this makes them quite different from the women you interview, and you are not covering any of them. You are not even getting all the members of the organizations."
"Enough. At The Briars, there are 220 married women. Most have volunteered-201, to be exact."
"According to my information, Paul, that is exceptionally high. I believe only nine percent—nine out of every 100 groups you sample—have volunteered one hundred percent of their membership."
"Well, yes—"
"I contend that the women in those clubs who don't volunteer are the ones with sexual prejudices and prudery. You get the exhibitionists—I use this in the broadest sense—and the psychologically disturbed women who are eager to talk."
"We make allowances for the type."
"Not enough, Paul, not enough. I'm sure you're acquainted with the work of Abraham H. Maslow at Brandeis. He, too, made a sex study employing female volunteers. But he learned something extremely significant. Nine out of ten of the volunteers were tested and found to be high in self-esteem. They were found to be a special type of woman, aggressive and sure of themselves, and generally these were the ones who were not virgins, who were unconventional in their sex behavior, and who were masturbators. The one out of ten who scored very low in self-esteem, representative of the non-volunteering type, was unsure and inhibited, and she was usually a virgin, conservative, and she did not masturbate. I feel Dr. Chapman is getting too much of the women who esteem themselves highly, and not enough of the other. Then, there's the question of memory error in the interview itself—"
Since Paul had always been troubled by the Maslow study, he decided to ignore it and seized upon the last. "I think I can speak with some personal knowledge about this. Undoubtedly, many women appear determined to withhold the truth, to omit or revise or exaggerate, but when they realize how objective we are, how eager for facts, they usually level with us."
"How can you be sure? Because of your Double Poll?"
Paul did not attempt to hide his astonishment. The Double Poll was an informal, private name given the invaluable papers Dr. Chapman had inherited from the late Dr. Julian Gleed, of Massachusetts. Dr. Gleed had been a nineteen-year-old student at Clark University in September 1909 when the controversial Dr. Sigmund Freud had appeared on his only visit to America. So taken was young Gleed by Freud's Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, especially by the fourth lecture on sexuality, that he forthwith resolved to become an analyst. Once he began his practice, Dr. Gleed found that he was most fascinated by how differently husbands and wives viewed the same events in their marriages. Soon, Dr. Gleed was making a specialty of accepting only those cases where he could treat both husband and wife, separately, on his couch. In meticulous hand, he kept voluminous records of these couples—two hundred and three married couples in all—and established a percentage of discrepancy, especially in their free association about their sexual behavior.
When Dr. Gleed published a brief summary of his findings in a psychiatric journal, one of his most avid readers was Dr. Chapman, then about to begin his bachelor survey. Dr. Chapman promptly initiated a lengthy correspondence with Dr. Gleed and soon had the old analyst's statistics and the means by which to allow for error in his own future interviews. After Dr. Gleed's death, his papers were willed to Dr. Chapman, who culled from them what more he needed. The Double Poll, as Gleed's papers were privately called, was known only to Dr. Chapman and his associates. It had never been published or publicized. It was kept as a secret measuring stick. Yet, Paul told himself incredulously, here Dr. Jonas seemed to know all about it. Paul speculated on how this was possible. At last, he concluded that Dr. Chapman had disclosed all his procedure to the Zollman Foundation, and it had been leaked to Dr. Jonas.
"Yes, the Double Poll, among other checks," Paul heard himself say.
"I'll concede that you can allow for a certain amount of conscious lying. As a matter of fact, it's quite clever of Dr. Chapman. But how can you detect unconscious lying and allow for it?"
"Well—can you be specific?"
"A married woman comes in to see you tomorrow. You ask your set questions. She replies. She means to be honest, and she answers honestly. Or so she believes, and you believe. But memory of events in childhood or adolescence is clouded, faulty, inaccurate. Reported sexual behavior is not always true sexual behavior. Freud made that clear. You are wrestling with a woman's unconscious. She cannot deliver what is hidden from herself, what is repressed and latent. She may relate fantasies as facts, and by now believe them to be true. She may be passing along what analysts call screen memories, recent memories overlaid on old ones, so that the old ones are distorted."
"Our check questions, each differently worded, usually catch this," said Paul.
"I doubt it. She may repeat the same partially false answer a dozen times, to a dozen different questions, because she believes it to be true. Also, she may be blocking out certain events and really be convinced that they never took place. I'm simply saying that the overt, obvious, conscious reply is not enough. It doesn't say enough, and it's often not accurate."
"It's accurate often enough," said Paul doggedly. "What would you suggest? You can't put each volunteer into full analysis."
"I'd trust each one more if she was under amytal narcosis."
Paul shook his head. "My God, Victor, it's tough enough getting three thousand married women to talk sexual behavior without also demanding that they take truth serum. You'd wind up with a handful."
"Perhaps a handful would be better than three thousand," said Dr. Jonas mildly, "if you could count on what they were saying." He rose, sauntered to the window, and closed it. "You know, I've heard out hundreds of married women in my time. I used to be one of the five marriage counselors of the Conciliation Court in Los Angeles. It's a legal thing. If one of the two parties in a divorce wants a hearing, the other must, under subpoena if necessary, show up and talk it out with a counselor. One year, we undertook a thousand cases—kept half of them married. I'm still in marriage counseling on a private basis."
"Do you use amytal narcosis?"
"When I have to. But infrequently. That's not the point. My colleagues and myself aren't digit-hunting like Dr. Chapman. When we take a woman's sex history, we aren't interested only in frequency of intercourse and orgasm. We're concerned with inner emotional degree and gradation more than outer physical sum and amount. That's the crux of it. That's where we most violently differ with Dr. Chapman."
Paul finished his chartreuse and watched as Dr. Jonas circled the room. He reached the desk and half sat on it. He stared down at Paul. "I was just wondering how to go on without annoying you."
"You're not annoying me a bit. I'm sold on what I'm doing. I think Dr. Chapman is a human being, but an important one, and I feel privileged to be associated with him. If I sound a little sophomoric, I'm not. I'm thirty-five, and mature in a half-assed sort of way. If I didn't believe in this, I'd clear out in two minutes. I'd go back to teaching literature or writing books—or something more useful like marriage counseling—if I considered that vocation more valuable. No, you're not annoying me at all. I've heard almost everything you're saying before, but not said as well."
"More chartreuse?"
"No, thanks. The talk is heady enough. As to your remark that we're after physical sum rather than emotional degree, I think you're way off base. That's not the point at all."
"Isn't it? I wonder." Dr. Jonas returned to his chair.
"We're in the business of statistics—not lonely heart advice."
Dr. Jonas frowned. "By publishing for the layman, you're in both." He held a silver letter opener before his nose, regarded it fixedly, then placed it on the desk blotter. "Your Dr. Chapman is primarily a biologist. As such, he brings his special point of view to the survey. What he is interested in is numbers. I'm not. I'm a psychologist. I want to know about feelings and relationships." He found a magazine on the desk. He opened it, and Paul saw that it was Encounter. "I was reading an article by Geoffrey Gorer, the English anthropologist. Witty and profound. He speaks of these sex surveys, one in particular. By the standards of the interviewers he says—" Dr. Jonas sought the quotation, and then, finger on the page, read aloud—" 'Sex becomes a quite meaningless activity, save as a device for physical relaxation—something like a good sneeze, but involving the lower rather than the higher portions of the body. If tensions build up, one either takes a pinch of snuff or a mistress; it doesn't matter which.' " He lowered the magazine. "You can correct me if I'm wrong, but I am not aware that Dr. Chapman has ever used the word love in print or speech."
Paul said nothing.
"I'm not badgering you," said Dr. Jonas. "I miss that word. All your diagrams, graphs, tables, are devoted to the physical act—quantity, frequency, how much, how often—yet this doesn't tell these married women a damn thing about love or happiness. This is separating sex from affection, warmth, tenderness, devotion, and I don't think it should. Dr. Chapman, like so many in his field, implies that regular sexual outlet, orgasm, means happiness and health. It doesn't, believe me. So-called normal physical sex can represent love, but it can also express anxiety, fear, vanity, compulsion. I'm saying that using the physical act of sex as a unit of judgment on normality or happiness or health can be all wrong. Physical sex is one part of the whole man or whole woman. It doesn't determine character. Rather, a human being's character determines his or her sexual behavior. Terman put it best. Sexual adjustment in marriage is mostly an expression of the very same factors which enable a man or woman to adjust successfully in any human relationship. Your sex life is the slave of your over-all personality. If you are a sufficiently integrated personality, so that you get along happily in career, socially, and so forth, the odds are you'll get along sexually. If your life is an emotional mess, it may not show up in Dr. Chapman's impressive charts. A woman may have three magnificent orgasms in a week. This is fine, normal, what all must strive for, Dr. Chapman will say. But this woman may still be miserable, wanting in tender love and joy of life."
Paul had been slumping in the plastic-covered chair, long legs outstretched. Now he pulled himself upright. "I won't deny our limitations," he said. "How do you measure love? It's impossible—"
"Then why pretend that measurement of coitus and orgasm is a measurement of love?"
"Dr. Chapman doesn't say that—"
"But since he says no more, people believe it. If a large number of people show up in his digits as performing intercourse three times a week, then he labels it biologically normal. But suppose my wife and I are not physically and psychologically endowed to perform three times a week. Once a week is fine for us. We read these charts and think we are abnormal, and this implies wrong and guilt and invites suffering. I just don't believe that because something is shown to be widespread that it is automatically the right thing and the healthy thing."
"You're reading only one side of the coin," said Paul. "There's another. Turn it over. Obversely, it reads--well, just the opposite of what you've been arguing—that telling everyone certain sex practices are widespread removes the shame and abnormality from them. And I say that this is helpful. It liberates millions from needless repressions and guilts."
"I'm not sure I like that kind of gamble."
"Sometimes it's necessary," said Paul. "You lock yourself up in this pretty bungalow and theorize, but we're out listening to three thousand real women with real sex histories. That's reality. That's the way the world is living. The peddlers of ignorance, of medieval morality, smear us for this. They say we are collectors and purveyors of erotic filth. You have no idea of the resistance we meet. They put Dr. Chapman with D. H. Lawrence, and Rabelais, and De Sade, and Henry Miller. But that's not the worst of it. While we're locked in battle with these roundheads, we have at our rear the special eggheads, the lint pickers and pinhead tabulators, the intellectual critics." He held up his hand. "I'm not saying you are among them, though to all intents you might as well be. But despite this, while our arms and strategy and banners may not be perfect, we go on fighting, because we know the cause, and we know we are needed. Perhaps our means to the end is wrong. Perhaps the end does not justify the means. Well—perhaps. But we are fighting, because we know someone must win a more tolerant morality and a new climate for sex—and since someone isn't doing it, now, right now, then we must."
Paul halted, breathless. Momentarily embarrassed by his outburst, he sought his pipe. Dr. Jonas smiled. "You're all right," he said.
"As I told you, I believe in this."
"Maybe I've been a little rough on you. I don't mean it personally—"
"Christ, you don't have to apologize to me."
"... but, you see, I don't believe in this. When we spoke on the phone, you said we had the same goal, so let's talk. Well, yes, that I believe. The same goal. You know, Paul, prattling on about tolerance and wisdom and better life used to be the province of radical or liberal boys, the very young. Now, I think it's time for the men to take over, do the boys' work. I'm sick of idealism being related to puberty. I think the business of idealism belongs to tough, sophisticated, mature grown men. I want to confine Puritanism behind a small iron fence, as you do, make it a curiosity and symbol of the dead past, like Plymouth Rock. I want men and women finally free and unafraid. They must be led out of bondage to that better place. Yes, we are in full accord about that. The question is: Which road will take us swiftly and surely to that place? I have an idea, and I don't think it is Dr. Chapman's road."
Paul was suddenly conscious of his assignment. "But we're going in the same direction. That's the important thing. I'm sure Dr. Chapman would appreciate your criticisms--"
"I doubt it."
"The survey is his entire life. He's always trying to improve it. He's a pure scientist." Paul hesitated, aware of the skepticism in Dr. Jonas' face. "You don't believe me?"
"Well—"
"You seem unreasonably hostile to him."
"Because, in my opinion, he is not a pure scientist. He is as much, if not more, a publicist and politician. Those strains degrade the breed, the purity."
Fleetingly, Paul remembered the conversation on the train, when Dr. Chapman had defended the Scientist as Politician. He considered paraphrasing Dr. Chapman's explanation of the necessity, but then he thought better of it.
"I think," Dr. Jonas was saying, "you make the mistake, Paul, of mixing your own identity with Dr. Chapman's. You are devoted to truth. And, you can see how I might be useful. But Dr. Chapman, I am sure, is not you, far from you."
"We're not that unlike."
"You may not want to be, but I have a hunch you are. However, that's neither here nor there."
"But it is. I'd very much like to get you together with Dr. Chapman. Let you see for yourself."
Dr. Jonas eyed Paul curiously. "Is that why you are here?”
“Not exactly," Paul said too quickly.
Dr. Jonas studied the blotter on his desk a moment. His fingers fiddled with a small clay ash tray in the shape of a sombrero. When he looked up, his voice was gentle. "Well, before we find out exactly why you are here, you might want to hear me out a few more minutes. I have a little more to say about your survey. My sense of completeness would be frustrated if I did not finish. I would keep thinking at night what I should have told you."
"By all means," said Paul, relieved.
"From the outset of your investigation, I noticed, Dr. Chapman, like several others before him, seemed to choose the orgasm as his unit of measurement. At first, I saw nothing wrong with that. It was something to start with. And, as you have remarked, how can one measure love? All right, Men—the orgasm—but what alarmed me, what I now deplore, is the ill usage of his findings in the bachelor survey, and the dangers inherent in publishing the married female survey. Of course, Dr. Chapman is a biologist, so I can understand his affection for sub-human animals. I was not surprised when he quoted Edward Elkan, writing in that Bombay sexology journal, as stating that no female animals, except some bony fish and the swan, ever have orgasms. Nor was I surprised when Dr. Chapman reported that the average male primate indulges in sex as a reflex action, that he has his orgasm seventeen seconds after intromission, just long enough for the species to survive. But when he related this latter information to the revelation that the average single male interviewed reaches orgasm in one hundred and nineteen seconds—less than two minutes—I was disturbed."
"Why should you be? It's a fact."
"Your fact. Others have different facts. Dickinson found the average to be closer to five minutes; Kinsey found the average to be between two and three minutes. But let's say it is a fact. I don't object to that. What I object to is that by implication Dr. Chapman condones the fact—says brief duration of intercourse is right and good, because it is widespread and therefore normal. I'm not sure it is right and good—I speak of marital relations—and neither are most psychiatrists sure it is right and good. What is natural and easiest for the male as an animal may not be suitable to the condition of marriage that he has invented. I wouldn't be surprised if many men took this as license to abandon control."
"I can't believe that, Victor, not while women—and this I have heard from them—relate potency and virility to prolonged intercourse. And don't forget Hamilton's findings. He asked his women, 'Do you believe that your husband's orgasms occur too quickly for your own pleasure?' and forty-eight percent answered yes, in one form or another. Most men sense this or understand it."
"Well, maybe. Mind you, I'm not saying rapid ejaculation is always wrong. An excited, erotic response can be good, if it does not stem from hostility. And often, of course, a female may he pathologically retarded in her response, and then there is no need for the male to indulge in unnatural masochism. But generally, this is not the case. And I think Dr. Chapman's use of his figures on male orgasm have been harmful. Furthermore, I don't like the way he separates orgasm from emotion. In your tables, each orgasm represents a single numeral, no more, no less, no different from any other. But don't tell me an orgasm with a streetwalker is the very same as orgasm with a pretty virgin you have married. Or that orgasm attained in harried seconds on a public stairway is the same as one attained during a leisurely vacation in a mountain hide-out. Even worse, to Dr. Chapman, that numeral on orgasm is the end of the sexual relationship."
"Isn't it?"
"For the male, technically, yes. But you've just been talking to some thousands of females. For many of them, it may not be an end but a beginning. What about procreation—pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood?"
"You're right, of course," said Paul. "I'm sure Dr. Chapman understands that. It'll be clear when the new work is written."
"I see no evidence of it in what I've read to date. You may think, Paul, I've drifted far afield. But I don't believe so. You throw a lot of cold figures out to men and women who are deeply concerned. They read them, or misread them, or are misled by what they read, and they're no higher from hell than when they started. I was going over Dr. Chapman's female pie graphs last night, and I was appalled at some of the master's sketchy and dogmatic comments to the Zollman people. In graph after graph, he seemed to be saying that women who enjoy orgasms frequently are certain to have happy marriages, as if that was all there was to love. I'm more inclined to plump with Dr. Edmund Bergler and Dr. William S. Kroger. Remember what they wrote? 'If a woman typically experiences orgasm in a series of clandestine relationships, but is cold in marriage, her orgasm is not proof of health but of neurosis.' There are a hundred authorities who believe orgasms are not so closely related to marital success as Dr. Chapman would suppose. I really worry that Dr. Chapman's undigested nonsense can do infinite damage."
"I think it's a pity you saw this new material before Dr. Chapman could study and edit it."
Dr. Jonas pinched the point of his hooked nose. "I only read it because Dr. Chapman saw fit to submit it to the Zollman Foundation. And that's one more point I wish to make. Do you mind?"
"Please—"
"Your boss is too impatient, too much the man in a hurry. Fretfulness, haste, may be estimable qualities in a promoter, but they work to the detriment of a scientist. Don't think me pompous or stuffy about this. I'm really concerned. If you must excuse or qualify what you have written, then don't submit it to be read. I'm referring not only to the latest findings he gave the Zollman directors but the books he has and will submit to his profession and the lay public. And even his pronouncements in the press—I read that big interview he gave when he arrived here—all about men and women having different attitudes toward the sexual act. It's taken him a long time to learn what Lord Byron knew by instinct in 1819—'Man's love is of man's life a thing apart/'Tis woman's whole existence.'"
"Which Madame de Stael discovered a quarter of a century before Byron," Paul could not resist saying. "'Love is the whole history of a woman's life; it is only an episode in man's.' Perfectly true. But few people ever believed what Byron or Madame de Stael wrote. Now, Dr. Chapman is proving it statistically. Why shouldn't he tell the press about it? It'll certainly give more mutual understanding of love to married couples."
"Will it? The mere statistics of it—that men and women are different? I think not. Because it doesn't tell the whole truth. And either Dr. Chapman knows this and won't face it, or he simply doesn't know it—and in either case, he shouldn't go to the public with it yet. This very fact that men and women are different proves a serious error in the survey itself. Dr. Chapman's graphs show how many times a woman has sexually complied to her mate's demands, but the graphs don't show how she felt about complying. Which is a truer fact about a woman's love—that she agreed to copulate with her husband last night? Or that she felt a certain way about doing it before, during, and after? Remember this, Paul, a man must have desire to become one of Dr. Chapman's statistics, but a woman may become a statistic without any desire at all. More often than not, I believe, a woman will want her husband because he has been sweet and thoughtful and devoted to her the entire day, and the night's physical act of love becomes a culmination of all the other facets of love throughout the day. I think it is this, rather than an aching and demanding sexual organ, that puts a female happily into bed. With a man, it is quite the opposite. He is in bed largely because of his organ. I'm only saying Dr. Chapman's splashy interview did not explain this important difference."
"He pointed Out plainly that woman's needs differ from man's," Paul interrupted doggedly.
"Not enough. He's only saying that men and women face each other on two different levels. That's disheartening to know, when you leave it that way. But if your statistics also included women's feelings and requirements—and he then told them to the press—it might do a lot of good. But here again, he's not interested in the essential, only in numbers that can be translated into headlines. If he were not so rushed to win publicity and money—"
"He doesn't keep a red cent of his earnings."
"I know that," Dr. Jonas said brusquely. "I mean money for his damn project—and I'm not sure this is all so selfless—anyway, if he weren't so rushed, he could get into his investigations with more depth. The whole atmosphere of superficiality is distressing."
"One has to set boundaries."
"Yes, Paul, but as long as you've opened the can of peas partially, open it completely, so that someone may profit by its contents. I'm not trying to harass you with generalities. I know exactly what I mean. Take this married female survey you're winding up. I want more information. And what I want is pertinent. The woman you interview—is she sterile or not? How many children does she have? If she had premarital intercourse, was she ever pregnant? If so, how did this affect her eventual marriage? This woman—was she an only child? If not, did she have an older brother or sister? What are her feelings toward the size of the male genital? What are her feelings toward intimacy during the period of menstruation? Does she prefer twin beds to a double bed? Do contraceptives restrain her response? Is she thinking of a divorce? Has she been in analysis? If she had premarital intercourse, and married her partner, did she do so because coitus was satisfactory, or in spite of the fact that it wasn't or didn't matter?" Abruptly, he stopped. "I could go on for an hour. I won't. The point is, a few of these questions should have been considered."
"How do you know they weren't?"
"I don't. I assume—based on what I perceive of Dr. Chapman's character, ambitions, aims, and previous charts." He stared at Paul a moment. "You still think Dr. Chapman would like to talk to me?"
"I know that he would."
"Why?" Before Paul could speak, Dr. Jonas spread his hands as a baseball umpire does in calling a safe play. "No prepared platitudes, Paul—and no double-talk about how the great white father always wants to improve. Just tell me the real reason he would want to see me—and why he sent you here?"
Paul felt his cheeks tighten and their color change. He sat unmoving, trying to determine his reply. Should he play Dr. Chapman's game of pretense? Surely, Dr. Jonas would find it obvious. Or should he cast aside pretense and frankly state the truth? Possibly, Dr. Jonas would be antagonized. In either instance, Paul realized, Dr. Jonas' reaction would be negative.
Through the evening, he was now aware, he had been carefully watching to detect that one crack in his host's armor. In every man, there was this crack, sometimes hardly visible, but there nonetheless. Once detected, it could often be opened wider and breached, no matter what the initial resistance, by a concerted attack on insecurity or aspiration. But Paul had been unable to find the crack in his host's integrity. Perhaps there was none. This possibility was disquieting. For all the man's bull-headed, wrong-headed opposition, Paul wanted his respect. Usually, he did not care. But this time it mattered. To repeat the contrived story would involve a calculated risk. It might reveal the crack, and Dr. Chapman would win, and he, Paul, would gain. More likely, it would reveal nothing and serve only to earn Dr. Jonas' contempt. Paul wanted neither the victory nor the defeat.
Dr. Jonas, arms crossed on his chest, corncob smoking, balanced on his swivel chair, waiting.
Paul stirred. "I'll tell you what he wanted me to talk to you about. He wants you on his team as a consultant, under contract, at half more than you're earning today."
Dr. Jonas' voice was hardly audible. "The Zollman Foundation?"
"Yes."
"He wants to buy me out?"
Paul hesitated. "Yes."
"Why are you telling me this?"
Paul shrugged. "Because if you can be bought out, you will be. And if you can't be, I've retained your friendship."
Dr. Jonas continued to teeter on the swivel chair. The only sound in the room was the squeak of its unoiled spring. That, and for Paul, his own heart. He watched and waited. The crack. Would it show?
There was a knock on the door.
Dr. Jonas looked off. "Yes?"
The door opened slightly, and Peggy's freckled face poked into the room. She glanced from one to the other. "No cuts or bruises? No knockdowns?"
"No," said Dr. Jonas.
"Well, now, you've both had enough. I've got a snack on the table. Victor, you bring your guest in before he faints from undernourishment."
"All right, dear."
Peggy's head disappeared. Dr. Jonas rose to his feet, and Paul stood up. They went through the bungalow door into the yard. The fog was thicker now. Great flaxen curls of vapor obscured the moon. The wet yard was dark except for the light from the kitchen door. Both men entered the corridor of yellow light on the grass.
Dr. Jonas took Paul's arm. Paul turned his head, and he saw that Dr. Jonas was smiling. "Let's put it this way, Paul," he said. "Let's say, you've retained my friendship."
Efficiently, Peggy Jonas cleared the dining-room table of the plates and the large platter that still held a third of the warm pizza pie. Paul and Dr. Jonas ate their Danish rolls and drank their coffee.
Not once during the time at the table had Paul or Dr. Jonas returned to their discussion of the survey. The conversation had been inconsequential and pleasant. Peggy, with a wonderful gift for mimicry, had synopsized the old motion picture that she had seen on television. Dr. Jonas spoke of the bull fights the entire family had recently witnessed in Tijuana, and each of them had a theory about the cult that had adopted the sport in the United States, agreeing only that there was a certain snobbery involved, like proudly parading the first name of some slob of a bartender. Paul spoke of a vacation that he had once enjoyed, during the period when he had taught at the private girls' school in Berne, with the remarkable Basques in and about San Sebastian.
When the coffee was served, Dr. Jonas asked Paul if he ever intended to write again—the only allusion to any part of their talk in the rear bungalow—and Paul told him of the Sir Richard Burton literary biography begun some years before and abandoned for the collaboration on A Sex Study of the American Bachelor.
Now, as Peggy went into the kitchen, Dr. Jonas said, "I wonder if you've heard any rumors about the new clinic a group of us are opening in Santa Monica?"
"No, I haven't."
"Quite interesting," said Dr. Jonas. "What I'm telling you is confidential, until the project is announced shortly. The building is under construction right now, a beautiful spot overlooking the ocean. It's going to be used to mend sickly and broken marriages, just as the Menninger Clinic treats mental health."
Paul was intrigued. "What will you do there?"
"Well, I'm going to head it up. We'll have a large staff of psychiatrically oriented marriage counselors. We'll circularize the entire country, eventually. Minimum fees for help, treatment, care. It's nonprofit. We have endowments. Then, besides the actual face-to-face work, we will undertake a broad program of education." He smiled. "This is the road I'm taking—to the goal we talked about."
"It sounds too good to be true—for what it is. When do you kick off?"
"In about four months. When the building is ready. We have our staff almost organized. There are still a few key openings." He glanced keenly at Paul. "You made me an offer. Now I'd like to return the favor. Only this isn't to buy you out. It's to reform you. More important, we can use you."
"I'm damn flattered—really."
"Are you interested?" Dr. Jonas waited, then added, "And you'd still find time for travel—and Sir Richard Burton."
Paul entertained the vision briefly: solid and useful man's work on the island of Southern California, and with time to go off and write. Yet, much as he liked the vision and the person who was creating it, the stigma of treason and traitor was stamped across the fancy. This was the rival camp. He was treating with his leader's enemy, a benevolent and enlightened enemy, but an enemy. Moreover, Dr. Chapman had conjured up a vision also: the shining academy in the East, devoted to sexual behavior, international in scope, bathed in wealth and fame, and himself the second in command. Dr. Chapman had not failed him yet, and he would not fail Dr. Chapman now.
"As I said, Victor, I'm flattered," he heard himself saying.
"But I just couldn't. Dr. Chapman has been a good friend, and generous. I'm devoted to him. More important, I believe in him."
Dr. Jonas nodded. "Okay. My loss. Let's not worry it."
Paul consulted his watch. "I didn't know it was this late. Five more minutes and you'll be charging me rent." He pushed away from the table. "I've got to be on deck at nine tomorrow morning."
"How long will this last sample run?"
"About two weeks."
Dr. Jonas pursed his lips. "I sometimes think about those interviews of yours—"
"In what way?"
"Publication of the report is the ultimate harm—I mean, the permissive effect your data has, the sudden undermining of long-taught ideas about right and wrong, making wrong things right, because they prevail. That's the ultimate harm. But those interviews tomorrow—" He shook his head slowly.
"It's all extremely clinical, like an X-ray technician busily at work."
"Not quite. Those women come in to see you. Sick or well, most have everything in order, properly in place, properly repressed, properly forgotten, and they function. And then you start hammering those questions. Each is a shaft, hurtled into a dark place, churning, overturning, impaling a fear. All order disappears. Like atoms triggered and bumping in wild chaos. You've started an uncontrolled chain of unwholesome and noxious forces. And you don't follow through, stay with the subjects, help them put everything in place again, in an orderly - if different -fashion. You set off the chain reaction and then let the women go, and I sometimes wonder, Go where, to what? What are they like afterward, what becomes of them?"
Paul was on his feet. "I'm sure it's not so bad as all that."
"I hope not," said Dr. Jonas without conviction.
And what bothered Paul most, that one moment, was that he was without conviction either.