THAT HE WAS UNDER a cloud was, by this time, well borne in on Mopworth, who now made his fatal mistake. He tried to clear himself.
He forgot that vigorous or prolonged refutation or denial of a charge cloaks the inner recognition of its truth. He followed the girls back to Wycliffe College after the holidays. True, the print of McGland’s cloven hoof led there; but after learning all there was to learn of the shambles McGland had made of a certain faculty reception following a reading, Mopworth had no reportorial reason whatever to stay in town, but stayed on anyway to date the girls. Geneva first. He took her to the most expensive restaurant in town and ordered a bottle of vintage claret to go with their roast beef.
“Are you sure you can afford this, Alvin?”
“Why do you keep asking me that wherever I take you? If we must be crass about it, the English publisher has kicked in with some more advance and I’ve now got an American one. The McGland bandwagon gets jollier by the day. But I do want to do justice to Gowan. Did he really make those passes at the President’s wife? What’s apocryphal and what isn’t? Every time I spot a new suspect she takes a powder.”
“You were very fond of him, weren’t you?”
“Weren’t you?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Oh, God, must we have this game? Everyone knows that research on Gowan consists in little more than picking up his amorous spoor. Oh, don’t cry.”
“You’re cruel.”
“I am no such thing. I’m simply trying to get some facts. Surely you can tell me once and for all whether there was anything between you. Obviously I shan’t use real names.”
“There was nothing between us.”
“That was what you went to his room to tell him the night I was there?”
“Alvin. Don’t you see this voyeur role you’re playing? Vicariously reliving his—”
“Piezoelectricity,” Mopworth said. He had gone insane, kicking his feet about in all directions under the table like a skater having them go beneath him, to the peril of all. When Geneva looked at him in surprise and said “What?” he did not repeat the word. It was simply one that came back to him from physics lab in schooldays, a term for electricity produced by pressure, as in a crystal subjected to compression along a certain axis. He had only used it as a sort of expletive anyway. “Your mother,” he said quietly, rearranging the silver around his untouched plate. “When did it start between them?”
“You can leave my mother out of it too, I should imagine. She’s suffered enough.”
“Of all the women I’ve talked to, she seems to be the one most of all to be feeling no pain,” Mopworth retorted. “I’ve decided her story’s been made up of whole cloth to throw them off your scent. How am I doing?”
“Well, there are plenty of other women you can ‘interview,’ as I suppose you must call it. I noticed you had a good time chasing Lucille Haxby on New Year’s Eve.”
“I had to chase her. She took a powder every time she saw me coming.”
“That’s the second time you’ve used that expression tonight. What does it mean?”
“It’s underworld slang for vamoose, scram. Geneva, you seem to have an amazing lack of familiarity with your own argot. The other night you didn’t know what a patsy was. It’s part of your sweetness. Innocence,” he said, smiling richly at her across the table.
Geneva remained unwon by this. She frowned into her own plate and said, “What about Bobsy Springer? Are you making any headway with her?”
“Let’s keep this up. There’s nothing better than cold roast beef. Not that we’re likely to get to that, either.”
“I’m sorry, but don’t you see, Alvin?” Geneva leaned an elbow on the table to regard him, and Mopworth wailed inwardly at the recognition of the tableau that was coming. Chief among her attitudes was this one apparently derived from magazine advertisements for port wine. They showed a girl sitting at a table with an elbow thus cocked, her chin in her hand, in which a cigarette smokes, her head inclined to one side while she converses with her companion, usually an older man. “Writing this book is a way of vicariously reliving Gowan’s sex life, and in so doing identifying yourself with him. He’s your—your—”
“Surrogate,” said Mopworth, trying to satirize the opposition by supplying their words for them, as he sometimes now did. “Through him I play the rake, re-enacting the adventures of Don Juan with none of the risks.”
“And in so doing express your inverted affection for him.”
Mopworth grasped the edge of the table firmly in both hands, as though he were going to overturn its contents into her lap. Before executing this extreme measure, however, he got hold of himself, remembering just in time the significance of self-defense. Or was it in time? He was in a war you could not win, in the hands of a regime that shot all its prisoners after a fair trial. And he was in America, where all this had been brought to perfection.
Well, instead of protesting he would play it cool. He would not even ignore them. He would amble through the whole damn thing like Henry Fonda, and afterwards take her out for a ride in the country, in a densely wooded section as they said in the tabloids, and there stuff her damned breasts into his mouth, first the one, then the other. That would be later. Now, with a rather pleasant, two-can-play-at-this-game little smile, his brown eyes twinkling mischievously, he said, “Could your reaction to my simple inquiries indicate there was more between you than you admit?”
“No, because I’m not the only one who says all this. Nectar says it too.”
Blabbermouth, he thought. He made a date with her.
“But I’m not criticizing you when I say it. Don’t you see that, Alvin? Can’t you get that through your head?” Nectar Schmidt said patiently. “You’re the one who thinks there’s any onus attached to being that way.”
Mopworth toyed with the picture always evoked by the term “onus attached.” It was vaguely sickroom in feeling, and was some thingamajig with a loathsome little aperture in it, encircled by a sleazy suggestion of fuzz, dangling by a string from a shapeless object held in someone’s hand.
“So you have been saying things about me. I’ve sensed it. I’ve felt it.”
“You mean you have a keen intuition?”
Mopworth again grasped the edge of the table and this time came even closer to overturning it into his companion’s lap. Jolly good show that would be, to clinch the case against him, wouldn’t it? He reminded himself again that this was Mental Health country, and one should expect to be driven crazy by a certain amount of this type of thing. This was their line of goods. Again, he must roll with the punches. He must not care. He must be amused, and very little of that. He knew what he would do when this evening was over, when this whole business was concluded and wrapped up. He would go away somewhere where he was not known and for a solid week do nothing but howl like a dog.
He said, “No, Nectar, I don’t. I’m rather a poor judge of character, actually. Not like you lot. Geneva told me you’ve been saying these things.”
“That’s rather a catty thing to do,” Nectar said, spearing a forkful of salad.
“I suppose. You mean Geneva’s talking about you behind your back.”
“No. You talking about her behind hers.”
“Piezoelectricity!” Mopworth’s voice, cracked though it was, brought the waiter at a trot to ask if anything were wrong. He said there wasn’t and waved him away. Nectar glanced up at him with her head still bent over her salad. He said, “Where were we?”
“Talking behind people’s backs. Do you do it about all the women you go out with? Will you say things about me later? You see, Alvin,” Nectar went instructively on, looking earnestly at him now and executing the little twitch of her nose that made her glasses jump (why did she wear dark glasses in here where there was scarcely enough light to eat with the naked eye?), “you do have these hostilities toward us. Instead of denying it you should admit it—clear the air. Face up to it squarely and see what there is to be done about it. You see the way you’re twisting your napkin? Whose neck are you wringing?”
“Yours.”
“All right. Fine. That’s better.” Nectar paused, her point made, to let it sink in. While she did so she took a sip of her wine. “The thing is that I don’t judge you when I say those things. We all have a dash of the opposite in us, women of the masculine, men of the feminine. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.” He stuffed her into a culvert, after sending a whiff of piezoelectricity through her, wedging her well in out of sight among the dirt and leaves so no one would discover the body, as she went on in what was suddenly a more intimate, or at least personal, tone. “Ackshy, it’s pry that counterstrain in myself that makes me cotton to you.”
“Is that what you’re doing?’ Mopworth said, shooting a glance at the door.
“Yes. Masculine women tend toward feminine men, and vice versa.”
“Yes, I see. I know,” said Mopworth, falling to his food.
He now had to admit that he Harbored Resentment Toward Women. There was no use denying it. It was growing by leaps and bounds—every time he talked to one of them it seemed. God but this was a tough course! If you’d told Mopworth that before the summer was over he would physically attack a woman he would have laughed in your face. Yet he knew how deep-seated his hostility was becoming, and how urgent the need to do something about it. To bloody well tidy himself up.
He spent all that spring interviewing people, driving from city to city as the job required. By mid-June, when the commencements were over and the graduates had returned to their homes, he had worked himself back down to Woodsmoke, and so he rang Geneva up. They had a skein of spaghetti and a bottle of Chianti at Indelicato’s.
He had decided absolutely on a mood of light jollity, and so he took her hands across the table and said, “My God, they’re like ice. What school did you go to? No, let me guess. You can always tell women’s colleges by the temperature of their hands. Hot moist palms, Sarah Lawrence. The erratic creative daemon. Medium cool for Radcliffe, and room temperature for the all-around Smith type.” She smiled wanly, in no mood for jokes. The great eyes dropped hostilely, the full red mouth compressed itself. “Come on, buck up, how about a spot of the old American camaraderie? Drink up and we’ll go on a bun.”
“What’s a bun?”
“You don’t know what it means to take a powder. You don’t know what a patsy is. And now you don’t know what bun means. I tell you you’re overeducated.”
She smiled rather tautly again, picking at the straw around the wine bottle. “And now what to do with myself.”
“Ah, yes, that.” Mopworth leaned back, wary and sympathetic both. They had stumbled onto the national crisis: what American women were to do with their liberated minds and opened vistas occupied half the magazines and a growing swarm of social anthropologists. “We must have a good talk about that later. But a bun is a bender, a toot. Come on, drink up. I think the secret of Indelicato’s Chiantis is that he hangs them down there among the provolone cheeses. Then knock’d back, knock’d back! We cannot bag Truth sober, but with clubbed feet and muddled wits mayhap we’ll stumble on’t.”
“Why are you always trying to get me tight?”
“The better to loosen you up, my dear. Mmbah-hah-ha. Mmbwah-hah-ha. Happy, darling? This wine is supposed to loosen your tongue. Is it doing that?”
“Yes, and a few of my teeth, too.”
“That’s the ticket, laugh at our troubles! We’ll have another bottle. Boohwah-hah-hah.”
In spirit, Mopworth slipped his hand down her blue-and-white checked gingham dress, till under his palms he could feel her breasts put forth their buds. They would flutter like caught doves in his grasp, they would strut like pouters . . .
After dinner he drove to the beach. They looked out across the darkening water in the silence that followed when he shut the engine off. He dropped an arm along the back of the seat, and drew her head toward him till he could smell the fragrance of her hair, newly washed and bound with a yellow ribbon. He turned her by the chin and kissed her.
“Why so sad, prithee why so sad?” he said.
“Why must you always break into poetry at serious moments? Are you afraid of feeling?” He was so baffled by this that all he could say was, “I see what you mean.”
“Now that I’m graduated what shall I do with myself? What’s it all for?”
Mopworth hunched his shoulders and sighed toward the everlasting sea. “I’m afraid I can’t help you there. I’m not Margaret Mead.” This announcement seemed so to depress her that he found himself saying quietly, suddenly quite like a horse tout slipping somebody a good tip out of the side of his mouth, “Come along with me through New York, New Jersey and parts of Pennsylvania.” He had a good bit of interviewing to do there.
“Will you be seeing Nectar? She lives in Gettysburg.”
“I may. But how about it? I’m very fond of you, Geneva.”
She lit a cigarette from a match he had ready for her before she had shaken it from its pack. He watched her lean forward and kiss the cork tip, leaving no doubt a red stain on it in the dark. “Alvin, how old are you?”
“On for thirty. ‘Time, you old gypsy man, will you not stay, put up your caravan just for one day—?’”
“Why is it you’ve never married?”
Turning his head slightly away in the gloom, Mopworth bit an imaginary fly out of the air. It was a gesture he had learned from her grandfather, old Spofford, whom he had once seen do this when exasperated or at his wits’ end, like a harried old dog. He then engaged in another bit of pantomime freely and openly, having decided to take the offensive. Cranking an imaginary phonograph, or perhaps sausage machine, to suggest the mechanical nature of the platitudes in which romance here seemed to have become enmeshed, he said, “Because I don’t want to face the responsibility of loving one woman, I fear the involvements and the problems this would pose . . .”
Geneva, who was gazing out her window and had not noticed the action, or detected the irony in his voice, nodded thoughtfully and continued, “It’s too much of a challenge. God knows you’re not alone in hesitating to take the final mature step. There are lots like you. Lots. Of both sexes.”
Mopworth now made the decision of his life. Since he could obviously not lick ‘em, he decided to join ’em. That was it in a nutshell. He swiveled about a bit on the seat, as though he were impaled on a spindle there and trying to make the best of it. Then, gripping the steering wheel in both hands, as though they were taking a turn at breakneck speed rather than sitting quietly in the dusk by the seaside, he said: “Mightn’t it be that your constant unmasking of me masks a deep-seated fear of being unmasked yourself?”
It was so simple, as religious conversions are said in the end to be by those who surrender their souls up to God after a hopeless struggle. He got the hang of it instantly, with no trouble whatsoever. He was suddenly talking the language of the natives, with a fluency that made him feel a naturalized citizen overnight, and not a foreigner any longer at all.
“So you’re the one with the hostility,” he went on. “A hostility toward men based on a . . . on a . . .” Here he momentarily faltered, but Geneva readily supplied the words for which he was groping. “A fear of them. Yes, that’s right, Alvin. A fear, or at least hesitancy, based in turn on a doubt of my adequacy in a love situation.”
Mopworth’s first surprise derived from the belief that she was engaging in self-criticism. Nothing of the kind. In America such self-inventories were not admissions of faults at all but claims to complexity. Basic insecurities and feelings of insufficiency and the like were all degrees of intricacy on which the natives preened themselves; bandying the terms was part of courtship. This was all far less developed in England than here, where women were cherished not for their beauty and virtue, as was once the case, so much as for the resonance of their problems and the subtlety of their needs. Mopworth had inklings of this now. Geneva Spofford had given herself to only one man, a man in dire straits. She had rushed in to save him (at least so she thought) at a crucial moment, and her surrender was the only means at her disposal by which to lure him back to life. Mopworth had no knowledge of the scene, but he was given its gist, or its moral, in what Geneva now told him as she summed herself up for him in the crowded darkness of the Volkswagen: “I suppose what I need is a man who needs me. I have got to have that.” The confession was like having been given a glimpse of her thigh, or the touch of her breast—if not the sight of her naked.
Like a knight-errant pondering the promises and perils of the country through which he wanders, Mopworth pushed on down to New York and then into New Jersey and Pennsylvania, reflecting on everything Geneva had told him and wondering what lay in store for him in Gettysburg. For he had decided to drive the forty miles he had to go out of his way to visit Nectar Schmidt. Sex life in America was beginning to fascinate him.