and out his throat. Long afterward in another city he’d share a reefer
with a woman and only then feel again this wondrous hilarity. He did
it, he’d done it, he was made now of a different and better stuff and
ever after would be, he hadn’t known that would be so and now he did.
Ever after.
In the altogether transformed night, its odors sweet in the liquid air,
silence of the city, he leaned against the lamppost to wait. He said to
himself I will always remember this night and this moment, and he
would, though not always with the rich First Communion solemnity he
felt then, felt until the laughter rose again.
The cab was tiger yellow in the dawn, the rear door wide and the
backseat generous, excellent. The scraggy elder driving it asked Where
to, and Prosper caught him grinning in the rearview. Grinning at him.
“Takin’ French lessons, huh, kid?”
“What?” Prosper at first thought the driver had mistaken him
maybe for someone he knew. French lessons?
“I said taking French lessons?” the old fellow said more distinctly.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Prosper said, leaning forward.
“I mean, you been eatin’ pussy?” the driver practically shouted. “Be
surprised if you hadn’t! Ha! Whew! Better wash up before you get
home to Mom! My advice!”
Prosper got it then, and almost lifted his hands to his face to smell
the smell still on them and on his face and mustache, but didn’t, retired
to the back of the seat in silence as the driver laughed.
French lessons. Because why, something about the French? He’d
heard it called French kissing, that kiss with tongues entwined, imagine
what his mother with her fear of germs would have thought of that.
How had he even thought of doing it, eating or virtually eating it,
where had he got the idea, apparently not his alone anyway, so usual
that even this guy could know it and joke about it. Did it just happen to
everyone, he guessed it must, that you discovered that certain body
parts you’d known and used in one way had a set of other functions
and uses you hadn’t been told about, unexpected but just as important
and constant—mouths and tongues for more than tasting and eating,
hands for using and manipulating, the hidden excreting parts able and
even meant to go together with the other workaday parts, you might
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 175
not think so but it turned out to be so and you somehow knew to use
them so even if you hadn’t thought of it before—couldn’t have thought
of it, it was so unlikely. Like those paperback novels where you read
one story going one way and then turn the book over and upside down
to read another going the other way: as you read you might finger open
the pages that you’d discover later and see them upside down and back-
ward but they wouldn’t be when you went to read them. You’d just dive
in. And he had, and she had known why he would want to and why she
would want him to, even if at first she refused him.
And the sounds they’d made too, that she’ d made, sounds borrowed
from the other side, where they meant a different thing—Bea’s coos as
she handled a length of silk velvet, May’s high whimper at the sight of
a dead cat in the street, Mert’s grunts of satisfaction at stool, or Fred’s
as he lifted a full shot of rye to his mouth, the same.
So he knew, and he would go on knowing that this was possible,
knowing also that everybody else or almost everybody else (Bea and
May, surely not, but how could you be sure?) knew it for a thing to do,
a thing that could be done and was done. A thing you could practice
even, as the grunting discus flinger or fungo slugger practices, driven
to enact it over and over. As he would seek to do thereafter whenever
and wherever he was welcome. He’d follow that Little Man in his boat
up dark rivers into the interior, that limbless eyeless ongoing Little
Man, parting the dense vegetation and hearing cries as of great birds,
nearly forgetting over time how weird a thing it was, really.
Don’t stop they’d say, an urgent whisper, or a cold command; a
warning or plea, bashful or imperious.
Don’t stop Vi said to him in Henryville, and amid her yearning
thrashing struggle toward what she wanted to reach. Prosper had to
work not to be thrown off and uncoupled, like a caboose at the end of
a train making too much steam on a twisty roadbed, whipsnaked and
banging the track. All that kept him connected and at work was her
hands in his hair and his on her flexing haunches. Until up ahead some
kind of derailment began, unstoppable: first the crying plunging engine
escaped, gone wild and askew, and then one by one the cars, piling
happily into one another, then all into stillness, silence, seethe.
Oh they said after a time softly, oh: and Um and Haw. Ho, he said, huho.
7
War and the sex urge go together,” Pancho Notzing said.
“Is that so,” Prosper inquired.
He and Pancho and Vi, with Sal Mass on Al’s lap in the
back, had taken the car down to the Wentz Pool on the west
side of town, a famous amenity built by another of Ponca City’s brief
flaring of oil millionaires. It had just opened for the season. Pancho
took a stately dip in an ancient bathing costume that drew almost as
much attention as Al and Sal in theirs. Now Prosper watched Vi Har-
bison stretch out on a chaise, face up into the sun.
“It is certainly so,” Pancho said. He had draped a towel around his
throat and was performing a series of physical-culture exercises that
didn’t seem to inhibit his speaking one bit. “I know it from the last
war. The Girl Problem.”
“Soldiers and girls.” Prosper knew that Pancho had three nieces, a
great trial to him, restless and wild, entranced with men in uniform,
khaki-wacky as the term was. At least they’d not be rounded up and
treated as criminals and sinners like the poor girls of the last war, for
which Pancho was grateful. Still he worried.
“It’s the men themselves who are the problem,” he said. “If there is
a problem.”
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 177
“Well sure,” Prosper said. “If you think maybe you won’t be alive
next month or next spring. Sure.”
“Not only that, not only that,” Pancho said. He ceased his Macfad-
den program. “A lot of the women in the plant, in that town, they’ve
nothing to fear—they aren’t facing death on the battlefield. But I guar-
antee there’s no end of intrigue going on there. Married or not.”
“You think so?”
“I’m sure so.”
Prosper didn’t tell him that this week Anna Bandanna was issuing a
subtle warning about VD—“Keep clean for that man who’s far away.”
Not that he thought Pancho was being censorious. Intrigue, by which
he meant something like hanky-panky, was a Passion that needed to be
met, like any other. In the Harmonious City there would be young
women in every job, doing every task their passional nature suited
them to. Old and young, working alongside men, many different men
in the course of a day. Intrigue. Women who were Butterflies, in Pan-
cho’s terminology, and never settled on a partner; others with more
than one man for whom they cared deeply; others with but one lover