“Well, of course,” Morty said.
“Naturally,” Gordon Rail said. He looked at the rest of us and we all agreed.
“It goes back to the day when I finished my internship. There was this guy I had gone through med school with, another gynecologist. A stiff bastard — he never saw the humor in what we were doing. Nothing ever bothered him. He was made out of stone, I think.”
“The Party Whip is like that,” the senator said.
“Really?” Gordon Rail said.
“Oh yes,” the senator said. “Thinks he’s a regular goddamn Thomas Jefferson. I never saw anyone like him for passing laws. No sense of humor at all.”
“When we finished our internship we both set up practices in the same city. Any of you boys ever see a gynecologist’s office?” Dr. Green asked.
“I have,” Morty said. “I’ve seen everything.”
“Then you know there are a lot of screens around, and sheets and special tables. We have to make it as impersonal as we can. We deal only with the specific thing, you see. Like a bank teller who only gets to know a depositor’s hand as he pushes the passbook under the cage.
“So anyway, this time I’m talking about I had a date to have dinner with my friend and I went over to pick him up at his office. He told me he’d be all through, but there was still one woman waiting to see him when I got there. Well, she must have been very nervous because when my friend came out and indicated that he was ready for her, and said to me, ‘Hello there, Green, I have one more appointment,’ and went back into his office, this woman just got up and went out the door. I looked at her, but she was tongue-tied with embarrassment — this happens sometimes — and just got the hell out of there as fast as she could. So I went on in to pick up my friend and tell him he’d just lost his patient, but his back was to me and he was stooped over examining some records. Before I could even open my mouth he said, ‘Go behind the screen and get undressed, Mrs. Davis.’ Well, when I saw all this equipment and everything, I figured here was a good chance to shake this bastard up for once, so I went back there and took off all my clothes. All the time he kept talking to me and reassuring me. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘when you’re ready, what I want to establish in this preliminary examination is your general condition. Just get on the table, please, and cover everything but your legs with the sheet.’ So I did. I got on the table and pulled the sheet over my head, and this guy asked me if I was ready, and I grunted, and he started around behind the screen. ‘I just want to see what your trouble is, Mrs. Davis,’ he says. ‘Oh my God,’ he says, ‘Mrs. Davis!’”
“Say, that’s very amusing,” Gordon Rail said.
“A little irresponsible, I think,” the Black Pope said.
“Well, isn’t that exactly what’s so amusing about it?” I asked.
“Gordon Rail’s right,” the senator said. “We’re all corrupt.”
“Of course it wouldn’t do for them to find out,” Gordon Rail said. He pointed to the crowds still gathering outside the window.
“We’re behind closed doors,” Dr. Green said.
“Maybe you’d better pull the drapes as well, Boswell,” the Black Pope said.
“Yes,” I said, “I’ve been thinking about that.” It was a good chance to get away. I hadn’t forgotten that there were others to visit. I stood up and began again my counter-clockwise promenade about the room. It was Market Day, the opening of the Fair, the Easter Parade.
I still felt uneasy about not being everywhere and everyone at once. It was no longer, I think, that I feared to miss them doing their turns, seeing them at their most expansive and best. Almost without my being aware of it a new weight of maturity had settled upon me like dust, the old-shoe ease of compromise. I felt older, and I knew that I would have been content to share their boredom or know their bleakness — to have been, so to speak, a crumpled handkerchief in the torn pocket of their gray bathrobes. As I reflected on this I realized that I knew nothing of human beings really, nothing of their characters, nothing even of their experience. The desire to know what people thought was a torment, like gazing at heights in the night sky and wondering if there could be life on other planets and what it would be like if there were, always knowing that you would never know, that some day others might, but you, never. The weight of one’s solitary existence was overwhelming; one was pinned by it, caged by it like an animal. (Surely, I thought, love is only the effort weak men put forth to compromise their solitariness.) One could not be sure of others; one could not be sure they didn’t lie when they said they were solitary too. I was Moses brought so far and no further, my single knowledge the knowledge of the margin that separated me from all I had ever hoped for, that margin another desert, another complicated wilderness. To be teased with sight and hearing and speech and to have seen and heard only oneself, held conversation with only oneself — this was the sad extravagance of life. Sure, I was less badly off than many men — I was not a little blind boy, I was no one who was starving, I was not someone with a wife in the hospital or a man with no legs — but trouble was trouble.
I nodded to Robert Frost. “Provide, provide,” I said.
I saluted the Cabinet. “Who’s minding the store?” I said.
I spotted Harold Flesh by himself in a corner. “Stick ’em up, Harold,” I said.
“Mr. Boswell,” someone called. “Mr. Boswell.” It was W.H. Lome, Jr. He stuck out his hand.
“How are you?” I asked.
“I just thought of something,” he said. “If a man owned a tavern his friends would have to buy their liquor when they came to see him.” It was his way of greeting anyone who had known his father.
“The rich get richer,” I said, and nodded to a tall old man standing by the sweets table.
“Ah, Boswell,” he said.
“M’lord,” I said.
Nate was at the table d’afrique. “It’s marvelous,” he said. “It’s costing me a fortune but it’s marvelous.”
“Two hundred is too unwieldy a number,” I said. “They don’t even know each other.”
“No, it’s marvelous. I want to thank you for doing this for me.”
“Dope,” I said. Something occurred to me. “Here,” I said, taking off the mantle of Host the Queen had hung around my neck and handing it to him. “It’s restricting my progress.”
“No, I couldn’t,” Nate said.
“You will.”
“No, I really couldn’t.”
“Damn it, I said you will.” I grabbed him and held him with one arm while I slipped the mantle over his head.
“No, it’s yours,” he said shyly. “Really, Boswell.”
I twisted the mantle tightly and holding both reins pulled up on them sharply. Nate fell against me as I choked him. “We’ll hear no more about it,” I said. “You’re the Host.”
“Well, then,” he said, “thank you. I want to show Perry. Where’s Perry? He’ll have to see this.”
I felt a little better after strangling Nate. It was still necessary, however, to organize the two hundred — at least necessary to start with them if I ever hoped to do anything about the others outside, and the others elsewhere, all the people behind the Iron Curtain and the people in the Andes and Tierra del Fuego and the Australian outback and the handful in the Antarctic and people on tiny islands in the Pacific and the populations of Europe and Asia and Africa. A general call would have to go out in a language they all could understand. Of course there would be problems, but first things first.
I clapped my hands. With the shock of my palms coming together my vision darkened. The reds went deeper. It was as if I were looking now through blood, but I also felt a kind of boozy randiness. I clapped my hands again; four or five people looked around and grinned.