AS HE NEARED GETTYSBURG, Mopworth became disturbed by certain thoughts he had been having relative to Nectar Schmidt. These were not just idle notions but minutely constructed malicious scenarios worked out in great detail, in which he imagined various misfortunes that might befall her, that she especially would not like. They had a single theme. They all involved failures of expectation, of which the common theme was that she be “brought down a peg or two.” (Americans made so much of status.) The futures he worked out for Nectar, often lying in bed in some motel or musing behind the wheel of the Volkswagen on long motors, were thus in essence reversals of the jolly forecasts of class prophecies.
Mopworth imagined, now, that she did not make a brilliant match at all, of the kind to which she no doubt confidently looked forward as her due, but married instead a sod who fizzled out completely. He made this sod, to whom he gave the name Herkimer Stoat, the head of a failing button factory which he inherited from his father but soon ran into the ground thanks to plain ineptitude and the inability to handle people. He said “From where I sit” and “Can do.” That Nectar was spoiled and extravagant went without saying, and that only hastened their inevitable decline. They went from city to city, the Stoats, carrying their dwindling belongings in scuffed suitcases secured with twine, finally trying their luck with a dry-goods store in like McKeesport which Nectar attended to while Stoat peddled some sort of rubbish from door to door. Mopworth put her in a house dress in a pocket of which she kept change—the few spools of thread and yard or two of scallop trim which they sold a day requiring no cash register—and had them living in two rooms behind the store. They were open Thursdays and Saturdays until nine.
Mopworth came to with a start, ashamed of the clarity of detail with which all this was worked out. How could a chap as nice as he be such a bastard? Was he devising these scenarios of his own free will, or was some nasty agency over which he had no control turning them out inside his head without his real consent or genuine participation? He was, at all events, in Gettysburg, and he stopped at a public phone booth to call Nectar, with whom he had been in touch along the route, and notify her of his arrival. She told him to come right out, giving him directions for getting to her house from where he was.
The house was modern in the now more or less hidebound sense of that term. A rectangle of redwood and glass perched on a rock ledge, it was approached by a dirt road that coiled like a length of intestine around a steep hill. It was owned by her brother, with whom Nectar had lived since the divorce and dispersal of her parents. Miles owned a record shop in town, run for him by a manager, as he himself shrank from human contact and was physically unable to wait on trade. It was Miles who brought matters to a head between Mopworth and Nectar, because he drove Mopworth absolutely and completely out of his mind in the course of a single evening.
Miles typified, at its final, untenable extreme, the malady of self-consciousness, with its attendant horror of the obvious. His inability to wait on customers was only one example of the exquisite pitch to which this quality had in him become developed. He could not say “What’s yours?” or “Can I do anything for you?” He could say “Hello” or “Goodbye” only with the greatest difficulty, usually with averted eyes and a flustered smile. “Merry Christmas” he could not utter. The thing was simply out of the question. He usually hid in the house till the holidays were over, in his room when that was invaded by well-wishers. If some circumstance absolutely required his emergence and exposed him in the street to a neighbor or acquaintance advancing with extended hand, his anguish usually infected the other and successfully aborted the ceremony. Wishing somebody a happy birthday was equally out of the question, and as for having to say “So nice to have met you,” or “I hope you slept well,” these ordeals simply palsied his tongue. It was for this reason that having a guest in the house, necessitating as it did any number of such direct attritions, left him shattered—and often the guest as well. If physically touched, Miles would recoil as though shot.
He was not in when Mopworth arrived, about four in the afternoon. The house was flooded with music which Mopworth had begun to hear halfway up the drive. It came from a phonograph Nectar made no move to turn off, or even down, so they sat exchanging their first gossip amid billows of dissonance of an extremely advanced order. Both the turntable on which they originated and the speakers from which they issued were concealed, at least from Mopworth, who cast vain glances into all corners of the long living room in search of these sources. No part of the room offered any refuge since there was a pair of stereophonic speakers at either end of it, in keeping with the ideal of high fidelity enthusiasts, to give the listener the illusion of being inside the sound. When Nectar went to the bar to fix them their second drink—a move that consisted in little more than turning her back on him for a second, as the house was an assemblage of “areas” rather than formally divided rooms—Mopworth went into the kitchen on the pretext of admiring the place. The music came through unseen louvers there too. He wandered back into the living room after noting that a stew was simmering on the stove.
The house was one of those of which the architect’s dream seems to be that of making the finished product resemble as closely as possible the blueprints for it. It was constructed of what are, often belligerently, called “honest materials.” The walls were of bare brick, relieved only by an occasional unframed specimen of those canvases that seem not so much to have been painted as puked; the chairs were the string-bottomed kind the very sight of which can raise hysterical welts on the rumps of some beholders; the fireplace tools stood in a milk can. The ottoman supplementing the chair to which Mopworth returned was a portion of tree-stump—oak he was told after inquiries which led Nectar to believe he was admiring it. The shape of the chair called for an occupancy so nearly supine that he had to raise his head every time he took a drink in order to keep from dribbling whiskey down his shirt front, like an invalid sipping tea in bed.
“Who wrote this?” Mopworth asked, pointing thumbs toward both ends of the room. Nectar’s reply was drowned out by an increase of the din about which he had inquired.
At five o’clock the front door burst open and a pale youth with colorless eyes and flying straw hair entered. He plunged into the house as the timid swimmer plunges into water, after hesitating on the bank for several minutes. He had, indeed, stood at the door for some time before plowing through it, having noticed the car in the drive. It is by such sudden musterings of their will that unsociable egos often give a first impression of great gregariousness. He came straight on in, to get it over with.
“Ah, here’s Miles,” Nectar said. “Miles, this is Alvin Mopworth.”
Mopworth tried to shake the other’s hand, but it was twitched free of his grasp in the nick of time, like a goldfish he had tried unsuccessfully to scoop from a tank. Stripping himself of his coat, which Nectar hung up somewhere, Miles made for the bar and poured himself a drink. He stood there taking gulps from his glass with obvious discomfiture. Pauses in the conversation were excruciating. He began to walk around the room, and once when he passed Mopworth’s chair he suddenly raised his arm, as though he were going to punch Mopworth in the nose for having come. Sensing that the burden of making the host feel at home here lay squarely at the door of the guest, Mopworth again jerked his thumbs two ways toward the ruthless loudspeakers and asked, “Who wrote this music?” Miles said a name, then seized a record envelope from a table and thrust it at Mopworth, pointing out some copy on the back of it that he might find instructive:
“In his Montevideo days the composer became tantalized by the possibility of expressing in tonal anarchy something of the challenge inherent in utter Chaos. If over the systematically mangled motifs of the adagio movement there broods the unmistakable Geist of decay—the phosphorescent shimmer of corruption painted by the flutes, the answering, nauseated bleat of the oboes—the subsequent andante undertakes the reassembly of resulting chromatic debris. A tentative, narcissistic whimper from the violins, suggesting a last invitation to Weltschmerz, is shouldered aside by a belch from the brasses, rude yet reaffirming . . .”
Mopworth prolonged his immersion in this statement, fearing that to raise his head would be to reveal his outrage. The composer’s name was Quichimi—a good name, too, for the state induced by his music. Provided it was accented on the second syllable. This racket was giving him the quichimies. Yes, he had the screaming quichimies. He was getting drunk, a sobering thought in itself . . .
With relief he saw Miles disappear into a study at the end of the living room where by now it had developed the turntable was. Nectar had made a trip or two there, to add a few LP’s to the automatic spindle. Mopworth hoped the purpose of this one was to shut the phonograph off. No such luck. He could see Miles, in a blessed interval of silence, shuffling through a stack of albums for replenishment. When Nectar excused herself for a look at the stew in the kitchen, Mopworth found himself momentarily alone. He flung himself on the couch with a moan of protest. He wanted to clamp a cushion to each ear, to pull down the dung-colored draperies and wind them around his head until he knew no more. He must pull himself together. He would show them all what decent music was. “The new concerto is coming along,” he would write to Clara von Hoffmanstahl in 1823, “but I can really no longer bear the strain of these constant public recitals, for which ill health equips me less and less. I warn all! I coughed up blood again last night, nearly a quart, my liebchen, my vogel. Again that pest Bruno plagues me for another ‘triumph’ in Vienna—for what? To line his pockets and send me to a pauper’s grave. How I long for the peace of your arms, and twilight over the Strudelstrasse. Yes, when this beast is put down, the verrücht third movement, I fly to your side, and then God willing . . .”
“Dinner’ll pry be an hour or more.”
Conversation became a matter of reading lips. How could a nervous wreck like Miles stand it anyway? That was the paradox. Perhaps the very noise formed a kind of protective wall around him. The final record did at last come to an end, and the silence that followed was bliss, though Miles himself continued to give Mopworth the quichimies. One method Miles had of sheathing himself from subjects of even a remotely emotional content was to lapse into dialect at the first threat of their approach. “I dinna dream ye were callin’ on ma sister serious, mon,” he remarked of Mopworth’s having driven this distance to see her. The guise of a Scotsman was dropped for that of a Southern plantation owner when, in response to something Nectar said of Mopworth’s present research labors, he said, “Ah had no idea yawl were a writin’ man, suh.” All this while he nervously gulped down whiskey on the rocks, as though the institution of the cocktail hour drove him to drink. Mopworth too continued to drink more than he should; regrettably, because the wine Miles served with the stew was superb and he was unable to do justice to it. It was a Burgundy called Musigny which Mopworth had not hitherto tasted.
All more or less pleasantly numbed by dinner, they settled down again in the living room. Nectar sat on the couch with some knitting. Glimpses of her legs, tucked up under her bright plaid skirt, made Mopworth wish Miles would go. But Miles couldn’t. The inability to say good night was of a piece with the inability to say hello—a painful extension of the trouble people universally have in simply getting up and out. Mopworth solved the problem by rising to turn in himself, hoping that when he came back out of his room, half an hour later, Miles would be gone. He was. Nectar was still curled up on the couch knitting. He stood watching her in pajamas and robe. It was a red silk dressing gown with a heraldic emblem on the breast pocket and broad lapels, which made him resemble a profligate emperor. He struck an attitude under one of the framed throwups.
“Running up a sock or two, are we?”
“Yes, for Miles.” She held up a tubular fragment of wool, in which some suggestion of geometric design was beginning to take shape. “He’s very fussy about fit.” She knitted a few stitches, peering at her work with that studious intentness so characteristic of her, and which was by no means restricted to people. The lamplight shone on her cropped black hair. Her nose gave a jump, this time without jogging any smoked glasses for she was not wearing them. “You don’t like him.”
“Nonsense. Why do you say that?”
“I feel it. You resist him, pry out of some sort of resentment.”
“Oh, no. Not at all. I may have trouble talking to him as freely as a bloke might wish to, but that’s because he’s so highstrung,” Mopworth said, deciding that the best answer was to tell the truth, if a partial, or modified, truth.
“Why do you say that?”
The comment seemed perfectly self-explanatory to Mopworth, as though he had said that her skirt was plaid and the sock she was knitting red. “Isn’t he?”
“I’ve never noticed it, speshy.”
“Pry because you’re used to it.” He had lapsed into a sudden involuntary imitation of her way of talking, which he hoped had passed unnoticed, or, if noticed, would not be taken as malicious. He must watch that. As an actor he had often kept himself sharp by impersonating other people’s diction, as a musician practices scales. He had on several occasions—in fact that day alone in the car—mimicked Nectar’s speech, whose peculiar slurrings and elisions fascinated him. She ran the constituent vowels in a sentence into bunched arrangements of her own, that were completely arbitrary like a child’s.
“Used to what?”
Mopworth’s fists clenched themselves in the pockets of his robe as he now imitated Spofford. He bit a fly out of the air. He knew the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose nature of any such argument with this woman. But there was nothing to do but plow ahead in the hope that maybe this time a chap wouldn’t hang himself. “The way he shrinks from human contact.”
Nectar knitted a few more stitches, and then, raising her dark eyes, she gave him an understanding smile. “Has it occurred to you that it may be you who shrink from human contact? That you’re simply projecting into him what you experience in yourself—a hyper-response to another man in the room?”
Mopworth had it that she and this Stoat character lost even the dry-goods store to which they had come, so that Nectar had to peddle homemade doughnuts door to door, eking out in this way a meager living which was supplemented by Christmas baskets from the church and a turkey at Thanksgiving from the local what did they call them here? Ward heelers.
He turned and faced Nectar squarely, albeit from the far end of the room to which he had now stalked, and said: “I wish now I had stayed in a motel.”
“Why?”
“So you could visit me,” he said, completely reversing his intended implication because saying as much as he had served somehow to ease his resentment and even induce a kind of remorse.
“You’re visiting me.”
“It’s not the same thing. I wish we were alone, Nectar.”
“We are. Miles has gone out for a drive. He won’t be back for hours.”
Indignation in some curious way stoked his desire, the two becoming progressively mixed, or mutually nourishing. Or was it so curious? After all, they were both classified as passions. And hadn’t Conrad said in Victory or somewhere that the sex bond is based on antagonism as much as love? Get that “based on.” Not interrupted by, or complicated with—based on.
“So we’re alone.”
“I see what you mean. Speaking of Miles,” he said, sitting down beside her on the couch, “could it be that we’re breeding too fine an organism?”
“I know what you mean. Yes, he’s a boy of almost ethereal sensitivity.”
“Man. Not boy. Could it be you continue to regard him as a boy the more easily to regard yourself as a girl? Rather than a woman?” Delighted again to find he was getting the hang of this Yankee business, and back in the swim with it, he added with zest, “And thus avoid sexual responsibility yourself?” He reached for her hand, which she drew back sharply. Realizing that he had gone too far, he went still farther so as to appear to be kidding. “Electra,” he said with a good-natured grin.
She set the knitting on a table.
“This is serious,” she said.
“Why?”
“You lash out at me as a way of diverting attention from yourself.”
“Why the hell shouldn’t I?” Mopworth said, anger now taking the lead in his mixed emotions again, like a horse breaking out of a bunched field for a bit. “I mean divert attention from myself. I have nothing to hide. So why the devil—I mean, besides I was joking.”
“What better way of cloaking a serious charge? You know you’re vulnerable, and the best defense is a good offense. And I find what you say offensive all right, Alvin.”
“Oh, rot! I’m not lashing out at anybody. It all started when I hinted at something that’s actually plain as day to any objective observer, and so I’ll say it outright now. That your brother gets on a bloke’s nerves. I can’t stand him. There, that lay the cards honestly and simply on the table, right side up and no dissimulation? I can’t stand him. I’m not criticizing him by saying that, and I’m sure he’ll say the same thing about me. We just get on one another’s nerves.”
“What you say figures.”
“Why?”
“Hate is the best way of repressing its opposite.”
Flesh and blood could stand just so much. Seizing her by the shoulders with both hands, he shook her till the couch springs shrieked beneath them. She bounced violently in his grasp, like a life-size rubber object. His clutch shifted from her shoulders to her throat, round which his fingers tightened. “Stop psychoanalyzing me!” he shouted. “Stop it, do you hear! Stop, stop, stop it! All of you!”
He paused, one knee on the couch, in the pose in which Othello is seen smothering Desdemona in illustrations of Shakespeare. Nectar wriggled free of his relaxing grasp and moved away from him. She did not run away, or even rise, but sat on the end of the couch, away from him, tidying herself. She watched him as, still standing with one knee on the couch, he stared at the floor, his arms hanging loose at his sides.
“Would you like me to give you the name of a good doctor?”
Mopworth turned away and nodded once, or seemed to. His eyes were glazed and he was breathing heavily.
“Because now I’m really worried about you, Alvin. You seem to be more hostile every time we meet.”
Mopworth now gave a shake of his head, like a dazed boxer coming to. “Hostile schmostile,” he said, trying to pull himself together and recover at least a measure of his dignity. “You wanted me to get violent. To attack you. Of course. It would prove your point. Well, I’ll not give you the satisfaction.” He managed a wry smile over his shoulder and said, “Except maybe to tear that pretty dress off your back.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
Before his astonished eyes, she rose, unzipped the dress and pulled it over her head. She laid it across the back of a chair. She removed her underthings and then her shoes and stockings. Then she lay down on the couch and said: “Take me.
“Where to?” Mopworth said, hedging.
“Make love to me. Go in and win. Here’s your chance to prove I’m wrong about you, if I am, and you’re right.”
He stood hesitantly over the couch, looking down at her. He pulled uncertainly at a jowl. “This isn’t the way.”
“Why not?”
“A man needs cooperation.”
“What do you call this?”
“It’s not the same thing. Not this type of attitude.”
“Take your clothes off. We’ll be alone for a long time. I know that. Come and master me.”
Mopworth shook his head again, this time in genuine concern for her.
“You always have to be the dominant one, Nectar. It’s not right in you. I say it for your own good. Ah, how you must hate men,” he said. Though undeniably acute, that still wasn’t a strong enough finish for his point. He needed something sharper, some last, spearing rejoinder. A phrase from a magazine feature on the Ordeal of the American Female which he had recently seen swam into his mind. “You’re an emasculating woman,” he said.
“And what kind of man are you?” she called as he turned away.
“I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “I just . . . don’t know any more . . . I’m all mixed up.”
“Then don’t criticize my brother.”
With that she rose, rather in the manner of one who has made her own point, and proceeded to dress again as though nothing had happened, which in a sense was the case. Mopworth circled the room in a dull rage, inspecting things in it he had not noticed before, or that he had not fully absorbed, his anger gorging itself on one or another of the framed upchucks. He paused and regarded with a kind of malevolent glee the milk can from the neck of which the fire tongs and other hearth implements protruded.
“Has anyone in your family ever owned a dairy farm, or worked in a creamery?” he asked.
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“This milk can. The whole house is done in such honest materials, as you call them, that I figured one of you must have worked in a cow barn, or had some such bit of background.”
“Alvin, perhaps you’d best go.”
“Perhaps I had.”
He was dressed, packed and out of the house inside of fifteen minutes, and in another five speeding down the highway. He did a hundred miles that night before turning in at a motel.
He was determined to get back to Woodsmoke before Geneva could get a letter from Nectar, or even a telephone call. She must hear his side of it first. She would hear his side of it first he vowed, gritting his teeth as he took a banked turn at seventy miles an hour on the deserted highway. He had done right in declining such a gambit, had he not? What man could possibly have given a proper account of himself under circumstances so aimed at discommoding him? That girl was crazy, and if he didn’t steer clear of her he would wind up in the bin himself. Had he already gone round the bend? His ears burned with chagrin, so he must still have possession of his faculties. That scene back at the house would in due course join the half-dozen episodes the memory of which made him draw his pillow across his face and moan into it. For the moment he tried to put it out of his mind with a roll call of the girls to whom he had made love, truly and happily, each as should be—she the fragile vessel possessed, he the possessor, the truly ravishing male, not effete but jolly well robust, primitive even, Pithecanthropus erectus you might say . . .
But as he lay sleepless in a motel bed at two A.M. his confidence seeped away, his doubt returned. The one ebbed as the other flowed. He had not suspected himself capable of such vehemence, driven to it though he had been. The beast that sleeps in all of us (dozing lightly in some) had certainly wanted out, back there in that awful house. Had very nearly gotten loose, too. There was no mistake about it: at that moment his fingers had wanted to close round that soft white throat. “I am a murderer,” he said aloud to himself in the darkness, hoping by exaggeration to make the whole thing something that could be laughed at. “I wanted to throttle the breath out of that woman, drag the body out into the yard and under cover of darkness bury it in a shallow grave. Now I am alone in a strange motel, with people fleeing past me at sixty miles an hour on a Godforsaken highway in the black American night.”
Since he did not fall into the proverbial “troubled sleep” till daylight, he stayed in bed until noon, and didn’t reach Connecticut until nightfall—too late to phone Geneva except to say where he was and ask her to dinner the following evening. Pinching the phone cord in two fingers, he held his breath and steeled his nerves for refusal, or some sort of hesitation, but she agreed quite readily. Nor was there anything odd in her manner when she said, “Fine, Alvin. Sevenish?” He said in a “natural” voice that he had seen Nectar Schmidt and so on.
They went to Indelicato’s, and again Geneva picked pensively at the wicker sheath around the Chianti bottle. At last, after two glasses of the wine, she said, looking into her plate of lasagna, “Nectar telephoned me last night right after you did. I gathered there was some sort of drama.” So she had got there first with her story after all.
He swallowed what he had in his mouth and with a nod remarked casually, “I could wring her neck.”
“So I gather.”
“Oh, come now. She’s letting that Grand Guignol imagination of hers run away with her. What else did she say?”
“She seems to think you need help.”
“What I don’t need is Nectar. I want very much never to see Nectar again as long as I live, and that seems to me the first step both on the road toward mental health and, if I may say so, on the road toward you too, what? Little more wine?” he said, with an odd laugh.
“Did everything sort of—go blank?”
“No. Everything suddenly went quite clear. She has got to go.”
Geneva became earnest, leaning farther toward him, so that the end of her scarf, loosely knotted like a Girl Scout’s around the collar of her middy blouse, dangled dangerously close to her lasagna. “Don’t you see, Alvin, that your attempted rape of Nectar was just another expression of your rage at being unable to feel any desire for her? It’s so simple. You can’t love a woman so you hate her. This hate, which includes hatred of yourself, explodes in an attack of physical violence that—”
Mopworth wasn’t listening. The most overwhelming sense of reassurance was flooding him. At the first mention of the word “rape” he had looked up hopefully from his own plate. He was a sex criminal—what a relief!—and not a murderer at all. All this in a latent, or potential, sense, of course, but that was not the point. One thing at a time and everything by stages. The point for the moment was that a perfectly normal impulse had gotten out of hand, not an abnormal one; carried out, it would have meant the forced physical possession of his victim, not her extinction. He felt, somehow, restored to the human community again.
“Do you suppose that’s what I was up to?” he asked wistfully. “You seem so much better at sorting these things out than I, Geneva, and I mean it would give a chap something to go along on, to take hold of, if he thought he were capable of rape—”
“Of course I wasn’t there, but that’s the way it seems to me, knowing you as I do, Alvin. There are of course normal emotions mixed up in all crimes of passion. Distortions of them, in a sense.”
Mopworth took further heart from the term “crime of passion,” for the kindred implication of the primitive at work in him, rather than the effete, which was of a piece with the feeling of being a respectable member of the human race again that had been inspired by the word “rape.” Perhaps a satisfactory balance of the two could somehow yet be brought about, and he be made whole again. But he knew that his problem, though put in a more encouraging light, was not therefore more simple. No, it was a knotty business, this getting straightened around, this having insight. What he could do was work his way out of the hole he found himself in by the one gleam of light he had been vouchsafed, the one rope thrown down to him in the pit in which he had lain: that he had behaved like a sex fiend. Nobody could take that away from him.
Impulsively, he reached out and took Geneva’s hand. He felt it warm in his, first acquiescent, then responsive, returning the pressure. She smiled, and though, typically, the great golden eyes dropped their deferential gaze to the table, he knew both the smile and the gaze were for him.
The emotions that thronged his breast were abruptly routed by an incident that illustrated fate’s knack for invading crucial moments with the most grotesque coincidences—indeed, perhaps, for directing them.
The table at which they were sitting was in the downstairs bar where McGland and Spofford had had their run-in with the local hooligans. Similarly, the smattering of types consequent on the commuters “discovering” this originally workmen’s hangout was again in evidence in the night’s trade. At the bar were a middle-aged woman in a soiled trench coat and a hussar’s hat, and her companion, a thickset man with a red neck which overflowed his shirt collar and that of the black leather jacket he wore above well-pressed tan slacks. In a pause in their own conversation, Mopworth and Geneva listened to that of the other couple, conducted in voices that would have been impossible not to overhear. The man was explaining the meaning of the term “laissez faire” to the woman. “David Niven has got it. George Sanders. Actors like that,” he said. “Means suave stuff. Man of the world.” There was an exchange of arch references to himself, after which he laughed and put his arm around her in a great bear hug. The woman nearly fell off the seat in his direction. They laughed and had more fun about that.
“Well,” Mopworth observed to Geneva, “there’s no doubt he’s heterosexual.”
His remark had the misfortune of falling into a sudden silence, and the man heard it. He turned from the bar, gave Mopworth a look, and came over. It was only a few steps to their table.
“Was you referrin’ to me, bud?”
“Why, yes,” Mopworth answered with a pleasant smile, rising. “I just said you were heterosexual.”
“That’s what I thought.” The man gave his trousers a hitch and his chest swelled up like a blowfish. “Care to back up them insinuations with a little action, and maybe see if there’s some truth in them?”
“Apparently you misunderstand the term.” Mopworth laughed good-naturedly at their little contretemps, at the same time evaluating the inch of forehead, or less, that separated the other’s tar-black hair from his caterpillar eyebrows. “It simply means that in your case things are exactly as they seem. A canoodle going with every confidence in self, nothing to prove, and with great laissez faire I might add—”
“Hell business is that of yours? Hell do you think you are anyway, coming around here giving people angles on theirself? I’m jist as normal as you any day, as I said I’m ready to step outside and prove. Or stay right here if you’d rather.” He gave his belt another truculent hitch.
“But of course! That’s precisely the gist of my—”
“Look, bud, I don’t care to hear any more about this particular wrinkle tonight, see. If you’re so sure you’re in the clear about all them fancy names your sort likes to go around calling people to show they’re educated, maybe you’re ready for that little demonstration. Or maybe if I flatten that pretty nose of yours you won’t have so much trouble keeping it out of other people’s business.”
Here Geneva began a gesture of protest at the same time that Indelicato, who had been momentarily attending to something in the main dining room overhead, bustled back down from the stairway behind the bar. He shouldered his way between the disputants. “Now, now, what’s all this about?” he said, holding them apart like a referee. “What’s it this time, Jake?”
“He said I was heterosexual.”
Indelicato turned to Mopworth. “That right?”
“Why, yes, as a matter of fact I did,” Mopworth said, “a term the meaning of which he evidently does not—Let me explain. It refers to the normal erotic makeup of either male or female—”
“Now I warn you, bud.” Jake moved a step closer with a force that made light of the obstruction between them, namely Indelicato.
“Now listen, Jake,” Indelicato said, trying to squeeze his way back between the two, “he don’t mean no harm by that. Nobody’s a hundred per cent normal or adjusted is what they figure these days, is all the fellow probably means to infer.” Indelicato had evidently been educating himself in these matters, either by reading or by diligent eavesdropping on the clientele newly dignifying his place. “We’ve all got a dash of that in us is all I’m sure he’s trying to get at.” Indelicato turned to Mopworth again. “That right? You mean Jake here is partly heterosexual, just like everybody else.”
Mopworth shook his head, laughing patiently still. “No. This chap is clearly all that. No ifs, ands or buts. But the thing I’m trying to get through his—” An involuntary glance at the other’s cranium only made matters worse.
“Why, you—”
With an angry growl he let fly with a swing that missed Indelicato as narrowly as it did Mopworth. Indelicato dug in for a last attempt to separate the two and, finding this beyond his means, said, perhaps out of a long-standing exasperation, “Oh, all right! If you guys want to mix it up go on outside! I’ve had enough of it in here. I’m sick and tired of all these brawls and misunderstandings I’m getting in here lately. I’ve had it. This place is getting a bad name, I don’t know why, I don’t think I got it coming to me. But go on outside if you want to mix it up. I give up.”
“That suits me,” said Jake. “Unless he’s afraid of getting them pearly whites knocked down his throat.”
Mopworth made a gesture of despair like Indelicato’s, then took the other by the arm and led him through the door, still trying to explain the meaning of the term that was causing all the confusion. His words were lost in the general hubbub, for as Geneva was trying to restrain Mopworth, the woman in the hussar’s hat was tugging, though less hysterically, at her own man’s sleeve, and in the wake of these trooped several interested diners. Mopworth, who was forcibly struck by his opponent’s resemblance to an ape as he hunched forward through the door, had his own reasons for what the majority took to be suicidal folly.
Among his habits had long been one of scrupulous daily exercise. When in New York, he always worked out with barbells and wall pulleys in the gymnasium of a health club to which he belonged, as he had in London. He occasionally went a round or two with the retired prizefighter the New York club kept around for members interested in learning something of “the manly art of self-defense.” He had concealed these habits as being far too wide open to interpretation as narcissistic desires to cut a figure—to cultivate a masculine ideal that he did not inwardly feel he measured up to.
In any case, he easily evaded not only the first wild swing into which the ape threw himself the instant they had squared off in the parking lot, after handing their jackets to their women, but most of those that followed too. Good footwork and the knack of finely timed ducking sufficed to elude the intended haymakers, which wore out no one but the ape himself. Once or twice the ape stumbled into the ring of spectators encircling them. After each such fiasco, he would put his guard up again and hunch menacingly in for a fresh try, snorting and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. His murderous expression made Mopworth laugh—though Mopworth prudently did not try to move in for any blows of his own. His first act on arising in the morning was always to limber up before an open bedroom window, where he would alternately squat on his heels and rise again, squat and rise, arms extended before him. Sometimes he would fold his arms and vary this with a Russian dance. Defending himself against the ape seemed at times little more than an adroit recapitulation of this calisthenic—squatting in time to insure the passage of the lullabyers over his head, bobbing erect to collect himself for the next.
Tiring after several minutes of these inconclusive maneuvers, his adversary presently tripped and fell down, provoking a gale of laughter from the crowd. This enraged him, and he suddenly shifted his tactics from boxing to those of simple rough-and-tumble. Lowering his head, he charged like a bull, butting Mopworth in the stomach with a sudden lunge that sent them both rolling in the dirt. They fetched up against the front tire of an automobile, their arms flailing and their legs kicking. It had degenerated into a complete dogfight, with the ape finally on top of Mopworth and pummeling him about the face and body. A shout of protest from the onlookers and cries of “Let him up! Fight fair!” was followed by the sight of Geneva suddenly breaking out of the ring of the spectators and beating the ape about the head with both of her fists. “Get up, you brute! You coward, get off of him and fight fair!” Stung, perhaps, more by her taunts than by her blows, he did. The two faced one another again with fists cocked, this time with a difference. Mopworth was genuinely enraged for the first time in the entire episode. He took the offensive now, and with a speed that gave him the advantage of complete surprise. First he feinted a left to the body that lowered the other’s guard, and then with lightning speed brought his right up from the ground in a terrific uppercut that sent the ape reeling back against the car, down whose chromium-plated slopes he slid to a sitting position. In the course of his descent, he struck the back of his head, either on the radiator grillwork or the Mercury-like figurine that crowned it. Whichever it was proved to be an unexpected ally to Mopworth, for the ape sat there with a dazed expression that drew a cry of alarm from his woman. She knelt down beside him and began to rub the back of his head. Concerned himself, Mopworth started forward to make solicitous inquiries, but felt himself jerked abruptly back by the arm.
It was Geneva. “Get into the car,” she said. “Here’s your coat. I’ll go in and pay the bill. I’ll be right out.”
“But—”
“Do as I say,” she ordered through her teeth. She wheeled him about and gave him a start toward where the car was.
He climbed in, tossing his coat into the back seat. He waited for Geneva behind the wheel. She was no more than two minutes. “Can you drive?” He nodded, coughing. “Then hurry. Let’s get out of here. No, let me drive. You’re in no shape to.” She got out, came round the other side and got in behind the wheel as he shoved over.
She headed for the beach. After shutting off the engine, she took one look at him and said, “Give me your handkerchief.” She climbed out and walked to the shore. In the darkness he could see her stooping to dip the handkerchief in the water. She brought it back dripping, and, in the illumination from the dome light, wiped the grime from his face and tenderly dabbed a cut on his lip which was still trickling blood. “You—” she began. She did not finish, leaving unclear whether an epithet or an endearment had been intended. She completed her ministrations by suddenly dropping the handkerchief and taking his rumpled head in both her hands. She was sobbing.
Sympathetically, Mopworth reached into her blouse and drew forth a white breast. He kissed it reverently, putting his lips to its hard bud with a moan of joy. “How beautiful, how beautiful,” he said, babbling the word over and over.
“You poor, bumbling, blundering sap. What will ever happen to you?”
“Nothing if—What I mean is, something has, right now, if this can possibly mean as much to you as it does to me. Geneva, I need you. I feel as though I’ve been kicked by a mule into paradise. Don’t kick me out again.”
These were well-chosen words. She stroked his hair with an urgent, unaccustomed possessiveness. Mopworth knew it was not as simple as all this. The sudden turn in his fortune made him realize well enough the pivot on which Geneva’s own emotions revolved. More than he needed her, he clearly divined, did she need his need of her. He for his part no doubt needed her need of his need of—God, where would it all end! Now, at least, it was begun.
“Geneva, could it be you and me?”
“Oh, my God,” she sobbed tentatively.
They became formally engaged to be married toward the end of that winter. Nectar Schmidt got her announcement in the spring.