Let’s enjoy ourselves, I say; let’s have fun. Lord, let us live in the sand by the surf of the sea and play till cows come home. We’ll have a house on the Vineyard and a brownstone in the Seventies and a pied-à-terre in a world capital when something big is about to break. (Put the Cardinal in the back bedroom where the sun gilds the bay at afternoon tea and give us the courage to stand up to secret police at the door, to top all threats with threats of our own, the nicknames of mayors and ministers, the fast comeback at the front stairs, authority on us like the funny squiggle the counterfeiters miss.) Re-Columbus us. Engage us with the overlooked, a knowledge of optics, say, or a gift for the tides. (My pal, the heir to most of the vegetables in inland Nebraska, has become a superb amateur oceanographer. The marine studies people invite him to Wood’s Hole each year. He has a wave named for him.) Make us good at things, the countertenor and the German language, and teach us to be as easy in our amateur standing as the best man at a roommate’s wedding. Give us hard tummies behind the cummerbund and long swimmer’s muscles under the hound’s tooth so that we may enjoy our long life. And may all our stocks rise to the occasion of our best possibilities, and our humanness be bullish too.
Speaking personally I am glad to be a heroic man.
I am pleased that I am attractive to women but grateful I’m no bounder. Though I’m touched when married women fall in love with me, as frequently they do, I am rarely to blame. I never encourage these fits and do my best to get them over their derangements so as not to lose the friendships of their husbands when they are known to me, or the neutral friendship of the ladies themselves. This happens less than you might think, however, for whenever I am a houseguest of a married friend I usually make it a point to bring along a girl. These girls are from all walks of life — models, show girls, starlets, actresses, tennis professionals, singers, heiresses and the daughters of the diplomats of most of the nations of the free world. All walks. They tend, however, to conform to a single physical type, and are almost always tall, tan, slender and blond, the girl from Ipanema as a wag friend of mine has it. They are always sensitive and intelligent and good at sailing and the Australian crawl. They are never blemished in any way, for even something like a tiny beauty mark on the inside of a thigh or above the shoulder blade is enough to put me off, and their breaths must be as sweet at three in the morning as they are at noon. (I never see a woman who is dieting for diet sours the breath.) Arm hair, of course, is repellent to me though a soft blond down is now and then acceptable. I know I sound a prig. I’m not. I am — well, classical, drawn by perfection as to some magnetic, Platonic pole, idealism and beauty’s true North.
But if I’m demanding about the type I fall in love with — I do fall in love, I’m not Don Juan — I try to be charming to all women, the flawed as well as the unflawed. I know that times have changed and that less is expected of gentlemen these days, that there’s more “openness” between the sexes and that in the main, this is a healthy development. Still, in certain respects I am old-fashioned — I’m the first to admit it — and not only find myself incapable of strong language in the presence of a lady (I rarely use it myself at any time, even a “damn” even a “hell”) but become enraged when someone else uses it and immediately want to call him out. I’m the same if there’s a child about or a man over the age of fifty-seven if he is not vigorous. The leopard cannot change his spots. I’m a gentleman, an opener of doors and doffer of hats and after you firster, meek in the elevator and kind to the help. I maintain a fund which I use for the abortions of girls other men have gotten into trouble; if the young lady prefers, I have a heart-to-heart with the young man. And although I’ve no sisters, I have a brother’s temperament, all good counsel and real concern. Even without a sister of my own — or a brother either for that matter; I’m an only child — I lend an ear and do for other fellows’ sisses the moral forks.
Still, there’s fun in me, and danger too. I’m this orphan now but that’s recent (Father and Mother died early this year, Mother first and Father a few days later — Father, too, was courteous to women), and I’m afraid that when they were alive I gave my parents some grisly moments with my exploits, put their hearts in their mouths and gray in their hair. I have been a fighter pilot for the RAF (I saw some action at Suez) and a mercenary on the Biafran side, as well as a sort of free-lance spy against some of your South American and Greek juntas. (I’m not political, but the average generalissimo cheats at cards. It’s curious, I’ve noticed that though they steal the picture cards they rarely play them; I suppose it’s a class thing — your military man would rather beat you with a nine than a king.) I am Johnny-on-the-spot at disasters — I was in Managua for the earthquake — lending a hand, pulling my oar, the sort of man who knocks your teeth out if he catches you abusing the water ration in the lifeboat and then turns around and offers his own meager mouthful to a woman or a man over fifty-seven. Chavez is my friend and the Chicago Seven, though I had to stop seeing them because of the foul language. (I love Jerry Rubin too much to tear his head off, and I could see that’s what it would come to.) And here and there I’ve had Mafiosi for friends — wonderful family men, the Cosa Nostra, I respect that. And the astronauts, of course; I spent a weightless weekend with them in an anti-gravity chamber in Houston one time, coming down only to take a long-distance phone call from a girl in trouble. And, let’s see, sixty hours in the bathysphere with Cousteau, fathoms below where the ordinary fish run. So I have been weightless and I have been gravid, falling in free-fall like a spider down its filament and paid out in rappel. And in the Prix de this and Prix de t’other, all the classic combats of moving parts (my own moving parts loose as a toy yet to be assembled), uninsurable at last, taking a stunt man’s risks, a darer gone first, blinded in the world’s uncharted caves and deafened beneath its waterfalls, the earth itself a sort of Jungle Gym finally, my playground, swimming at your own risk.
Last winter I fought a duel. I saw a man whipping his dog and called him out. Pistols at fourteen paces. The fellow — a prince, a wastrel — could get no one to act as his second so I did it myself, giving him pointers, calling the adjustments for windage, and at last standing still for him as one of those FBI paper silhouettes, my vitals (we were on a beach, I wore no shirt, just my bathing suit, the sun, rising over his shoulder, spotlighting me) clear as marked meat on a butcher’s diagram, my Valentine heart vaulting toward the barrel of his pistol. He fired and missed and I threw my pistol into the sea. He wept, and I took him back to the house and gave him a good price for his dog. And running with the bulls at Pamplona — not in front of them, with them — and strolling at two a.m. through the Casbah like a fellow down Main Street, and standing on top of a patrol car in Harlem talking through the bull horn to the sniper. And dumb things too.
Father called me home from Tel Aviv a few weeks before he died.
He was sitting on a new bed in his room wearing only his pajama tops. He hadn’t shaved, the gray stubble latticing his lower face in an old man’s way, like some snood of mortality. There was a glass in his hand, his one-hundred-dollar bill rolled tight around the condensation. (He always fingered one, a tic.)