VIII
April 30, 1962. New York City.
I dreamt of The Club.
I had a new symptom: I could see only in lurid shades of red. It was not unpleasant, and I strolled about the room almost merrily, making sure that everyone was happy and had what he wanted. I had never been so content. I had the comfortable sense that all time was before us, that it had been frozen forever at Saturday night.
I was the Host. “Oh, Boswell can be the Host,” people called when I walked in, and the Queen ran up and slipped the mantle of Host around my neck. “The amiable man,” she said.
“I am not genuinely fond of people,” I replied modestly and they all applauded. “As you were,” I said, and they returned to their conversations.
I continued my tour of the room, the merry old uncle of Scrooge’s early Christmases, long hose over my plump, pinkish, hairless calves, fat as jolly roasts. They had dressed me in silks, and I walked among them wide- behinded, hearty as a father of the bride, moving people under the mistletoe, proposing toasts, drinking all men’s healths, shoving money into the fiddler’s hands. People smiled at me and begged me to stay, but I remembered my obligations and shook my head. Frequently I wrote out checks and folded them into their parting handshakes.
Nate’s was as lush as a tropic. Now that I was an intimate of the place, it struck me as it never had when I was an outsider. My dancing slippers glided silkenly over the soft fur carpets. The linen, thick as blankets on the tables, looked like the cloths that set off precious stones in jeweler’s trays; indeed, I could just perceive the repressed gleam of gold and silver beneath the rosy haze of the cutlery. The knives and forks and goblets and dishes seemed expensive precision tools, like the studded, complicated brass of band instruments.
As I walked about the room, nodding happily to the lovely women, the handsome men, sound as athletes in their evening dress, I had a vision. Through the windows of Nate’s Place, past the crowds outside, I could see the Times Building, and moving across the dream-restored electric-bulbed banner in letters of fire: SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST. Of course, I thought. It was good to know. I remembered films I had seen where the end of the world was portrayed. The Bomb had fallen and the survivors were always a cross section, a tiny representative handful of men, cozy as people in an elevator together — a laborer, a businessman, a young officer, an old lady, a Negro, an ingénue, a bum. But it wouldn’t be like that at all — it would be like this. The last men and women on earth would be in evening clothes, as we were. We were vulnerable, perhaps, but we were less vulnerable. I began to congratulate the people around me as I greeted them, to love them for their safety. We were like finalists in some cosmic beauty contest — mutually gorgeous.
I felt a new elation, a new freedom, and I moved now with that special, just controlled wildness of the exceptionally happy. I became more interested in what people were saying, realizing just in time that it would be important. I didn’t want to miss any of it, but I saw that I couldn’t be everywhere at once. Had it not seemed ungracious I would have demanded the silence of all groups until I could join them. Things were being said, I knew, that I was missing — intimate shop talk of the Great, as sweet to me as the songs and voices of the Sirens. Two hundred was too unwieldy a number, I realized, and I had a sense of imperfection like the awareness of a stain on my trousers. It was no longer enough simply to live forever. It was no longer enough to be just one single man. I wanted to be everyone in this room and all the people in the crowds outside and all people everywhere who had ever lived. What did it mean to be just Boswell, to have only Boswell’s experience?
I walked faster. Soon I was running around the room from group to group, but I saw that this was no better and I resumed my normal pace, a long, impatient stalk like an angry cat’s.
At one table where Morty Perlmutter and Dr. Green, the noted gynecologist, were among the group, I made up my mind to stop. “Gentlemen,” I said, nodding to both. I sat down and a famous senator handed me a drink. I did not know the senator personally and Dr. Green introduced him to me as his son. Gordon Rail, the communications tycoon, whispered in my ear. “Our next President,” he said. “The man to watch. He has the support of all seven hundred and forty-three of my morning newspapers and of five of my TV and radio networks. Three hundred and twelve of my evening papers will say they’re against him, but that’s only to make it look good, you understand.”
“Fixing beyond fixing,” I said.
“What did you expect?” he asked.
“Dr. Green was just telling us something very interesting when you stopped by, Boswell,” Morty Perlmutter said. I glanced at Dr. Green, who seemed a little uneasy.
“Go on, Doctor,” I said.
“Well, it’s not really very much.”
“No, no, please go on,” I said. “I shall feel I’m intruding otherwise.”
“It’s just something about the Profession,” he said.
“Yes?” I said, waiting.
“Well, it’s rather personal, when you come right down to it.”
“Yes?”
“Well,” he said at last, “you know how we gynecologists are supposed to be able to look on the female anatomy just as if it were some kind of machine?”
“Yes.”
“Well, it’s just that I never could.”
“I see.”
“I get nervous,” he explained. “It’s damned hard to have to examine some of these girls. It drives me crazy.”
“I should have thought you’d be used to it by this time, Green,” Gordon Rail said.
“Not at all,” Morty said. “It’s our culture. It’s only where the weaving trade flourishes that you have prurience. Paris and Rome and New York are world centers of the garment industry. That’s why there’s so much emphasis on sex in those cities.”
“I never realized that,” the senator said.
“Well, of course,” Morty said. “Why do you think my tribes are so underpopulated? Where you have nakedness you don’t have much of your copulation.”
“That would suggest an interesting new interpretation of the Fall,” the Black Pope said.
“To this day I can enjoy making love to my wife only if she has a sheet over her head,” Dr. Green said glumly. His son the senator looked down shyly. “Once she almost smothered,” Dr. Green said.
“On the Isle of Pica the unmarried virgins all go around nude except for this bandage on their left knee,” Morty Perlmutter said. “It used to madden me to think about what was under that bandage. I mean, for God’s sake, I had the example of the right knee, but it didn’t make any difference.”
“It embarrasses me even to look at the equipment,” Dr. Green said. ‘“I’m a fetishist about gynecological supplies. I talk this way only because we’re behind closed doors.” He lowered his voice. “It’s good to be able to get it off my chest, but I don’t really deserve to be among you men at all.”
The other men demurred politely. “We’re all of of us corrupt, Green,” Gordon Rail said with kindness.
“Have any of you boys ever had a tube of vaginal jelly in your hands?” Dr. Green asked ardently.
“What do you think about the dissemination of birth- control information, Green?” Gordon Rail asked. “As a newspaperman I’d like to know.”
“Well, it’s good for business, of course,” Dr. Green said. “Excuse me, Your Reverence,” he said to the Black Pope. “Say,” he said to the rest of us, “how would you fellows like to hear an amusing story? Of course it’s off the record.”