O Manahatta, Mother of Waters

You Chipmunk with Crocodile Eyes, you silverfish with cockroach shell, you creeping ape and armpit-tickling baboon, you prune-poisoning pit worm, you river rat of Riverside Drive, you spark of bubbling cheese (causing dreaded pizza-mouth), you crab with clappers and grinding jaw, you skinny beast from mama's lair, you itchy babbler with a head for a heart, you bat-winged cruiser among dog-walking fillies, you mongrel, you slug, you logic-chopping ranter, you Dan Shaper, you ...

But I think this little abstract summary covers enough of the expressions of disapproval with which I have been greeted in the mild climate of a Manhattan striving for triumph in the form of love and nuzzling embraces in the arms of cash. I have sometimes been criticized in New York, New York. Having now given full justice to my detractors, I can proceed to personal dispraise of myself. Why am I so critical? A touch of modesty has been beaten into me by my ill fortune, unworthy enterprises and steady derogation by my dearest friends, including Barbara. I am a depressed fellow.

And yet I am lucky. I have a swinging job, writing come-on letters for a mass magazine. I have good health, an accurate ear at music, not much belly, a strong forehand drive, and a nosy look which sets me apart from the crowd although it does not make me handsome. Also, I have always seen clearly that the free life, utterly free, leads to boredom and slavery, moods and melancholia. Therefore, I not long ago set myself a duty: to discover true love amid the American ruins of political greatness, triumphant work, and the togethered family. Full of hope, with wispy will, I chased the will of the wisp. What did I do? I sat on the parapets of risk and waged my moral equivalent of war. But how? I took off my pants and made jokes. I unzipped, unbuttoned, undid, climbed aboard and sprinkled the sheets. And all this rustle was sweet to the hearts of ladies. "I suffer," I told Barbara, hoping that this would be enough for someone.

She smiled happily, buttering toast. "I always knew you were a poet," Barbara said, and a soft light came into her doubtful eye. "I always knew I would love a poet. Should I cut off the crusts?"

"But I'm a chronic complainer, not a poet! a melancholic! a wounded veteran with a three-percent disability!"

Sweetly she murmured, "I don't hear any complaints tonight, Dan."

I could take a hint. She had already cut off the crusts, so I had to eat them separately (I do like the crusts). Later we slouched sleepily out of the kitchen, bound for a Sunday of rest, but I fell to silent nibbling, and of course desire flared up from the ashes. Those crusts give strength, I sometimes think. No rest on Sunday for the man full of hope, an agile broken-field runner through nettles of melancholia. (I had scratched legs.) We sometimes staggered through long Sunday afternoons, stunned and goofy with love-making, bumping each other, reading the Times, touching, picking up, and then finally at nightfall, finding the phoenix rising once more out of the Sunday papers. I shall return to Barbara again in good order. In the meantime, friends, I should like to approach head-on the prime matter of every man's life in America. (The ladies are only a symptom, albeit a jolly or distressing one.)

What to do? How to live? The man who believes he has a purpose in life is indeed fortunate--he does; and it doesn't matter too much that his purpose is not what he thinks it is. I believed that my purpose was to be a nostalgic lover, optimistically, even politely asking women to be more than human, S.V.P.; I was standing in line, cruel after some gentle perfection, and searching, of course, that fair vision of innocence and experience, tenderness and strength. Ah, her way of pulling on her galoshes! Oh, her technique at leaving the crusts on the toast! her wrists! her ability to hum Mozart! her thighs! her careful driving!... Since women are no better off than men, my foolish ambition charmed, cajoled, pleased and wounded; I wore narrow suits and learned to dance the cha-cha and to mumble the words; I made girls grieve and felt happily relieved of their grief when I said to them: "No more, pal."

Was I some sort of monster? Not exactly. Did I annihilate a crowd of tender lovaroonies, cheeks all damp with tears? No. They wiped their eyes of me and continued with love longing, hoping but warned, dressing and un-dressing with care, with pursed lips, kicking off their panties but placing their shoes carefully under the bed. In other words, I was finding wives for other men.

Like my friend Peter Hatton, I became this way for unhappy love of a married woman. But while Pete was a blushing and desperate adulterer, willing to hide in basements and closets, I was different. I blushed and was desperate, but who was that lady you saw me without last night? My wiry, shrill, hysterical wife, my former wife. I lusted after her with an adulterous passion. Boom, boom--the end of marriage.

So what next in my life after that? Happy freedom. Shrieks of laughter. Love equals life. Suffering equals life. Hatred equals life equals love, so live it up, down, sideways and arsy-versy. Sometimes there is a natural progression in the affairs of men. And sometimes, let me tell you, an unnatural progression. Unnaturally, as an ambiguous lover of women, I came early to the love of one wild woman, one wild woman to cross; and turned off in my love, I then danced down the Venus flytrap path of phallic reconnoitering (narcissism, voyeurism, frottage, sadism, masochism and other apolitical interests).

All this was rather tiring. I left Cleveland.

When I came one fall to live in towered Manhattan, it was a brilliant, dry, sun-laden season of awakening blood and bones; the girls were lovely on Fifth and Madison and in the Village; the bright hope and nerve of that city sustained me. Of course, I had fully complex attitudes of defiance (unexpressed) toward my trivial job (writing come-on letters); this produced an occasional ugly temper, as it does in most Americans, who don't much care for their jobs, who don't do anything they consider important; and like most American men, I trivialized my work discontents by blaming psychology--that is, my mother, my sister, my aunts and the rest of the dream world of women; and I carried my little green Harvard sack of obsessions, compulsions, rages, hysterias, and all the other equipment of the sensitive and wily young chap. But let's be fair: I enjoyed the season and my lungs were healthy. I tripped along the streets with heightened spirits after my long rest in suffering. I bowed gratefully to the city and would have tipped my hat if I wore one.

My best friend, Peter Hatton, living deep in his double pursuit of money on Wall Street and ladies in showbiz, came out of this mirror-faced image of an obsession long enough to tuck me gently into Manhattan. Hip and bachelor Pete showed me the town. Vaguely he thought that I was in danger of killing myself, not because I had made any serious gestures of the sort, but because he had thought of ending the whole business when in a state of jittery love. He thought I was more like him than he was. (Intense Dan, Divided Pete.) A truly sympathetic chap, Peter's sympathies were deepened by the fact that he was able to overcome a pitiful conception of himself. He had never married, though when we were both B.A.R. men in the 100th Division--jumping over hedges with those heavily personal weapons, proud of our scavenged paratroop boots, 18 years old--we had both thought we were fighting for the Happy Home with some cute bride. A man changes with weathering time. It's not that we were unalterably opposed to Mom's apple pie; we just developed greater appetite for the twist-and-twirls, and could buy our pie in bake shops.

Back to 1960.

"This is Riverside Drive, where the girls live," he remarked as he led me on a series of nature walks for my health, "and this is Madison Avenue," he added on the crosstown bus, since a slow ride is good for neurasthenia, "where the models all live, and this," as we strolled along the East River for a sea change, "is where you can find some excellently stacked and discreet Social Register chicks."

"But where?" I was hard up and put down.

"Are you maybe, sonny my pal, a bit horny?" he solicited of me.

"Not so's I can't stand it." But I was so hard up I could not stand it; bad dreams, shaky hands, bloodshot eyes. Crawling through a mine field under fire and getting my paratroop boots all dirty had not oppressed me as sorely as did my work-empty, love-empty, consuming life. And repetitive, itemized dreams of work and love disasters. And worse--emptiness echoing after down the corridors of days. Me all alone, with a fire-escape stairway hanging onto nowhere in the Manhattan summer: lonely, isolated, cut off, all by myselfified with a stiff neck in the early hours of morning just from the sheer nervousness of it all. It's a lovely city at certain intense moments, both hard and cajoling--but (continued on page 74) O Manahatta(continued from page 60) what do you do with the rest of the moments?

Peter cocked his head at me and estimated my ability for erotic abstinence. "You're a weak womanizer," he stated evenly--more insults! I had to take that from my best friend! and also philosophy: "A sad sack," he said, "who needs women to carry him off into self-knowledge."

"Also to get laid."

"OK, OK. By a woman who won't be hard on you at first."

"You know it."

"'Cause they're all hard on you in the end," he rumbled sadly like a Russian Orthodox priest remembering the plague, famine, earthquake and civil strife of yore. He wet his lips. "Lord save us," he said.

"You know it, but cut the chatter and help me," I said, abandoning urbanity with a certain faint whine in my voice. We strolled and gazed into the brackish water of the East River and felt the weight of the fuming city filling us with hope and that curious lifting, floating, pleasurable anxiety which is unique to New York. At my back lay a waffled row of luxury apartments--ahead, scrubby islands in the river. Behind, doorways and doormen and sports cars and elegant dogs leaving elegant droppings: afore, hospitals and indigent camps and nurseries for drying out juvenile dope addicts, stashed away on sand bars in the East River. O Manahatta!

Once before, years ago, on my first visit to New York, I had strolled here with Peter and we had dreamed of conquering the city in one vague King of the Mountain gesture. Now, at age over-30, I was a boy again, only with my ideas sorted: (a) making out (girls), and (b) making it (money). Manhattan groaned in its slow turmoil at our backs. There remained the real question--what to do with a man's life on earth? Peter used his solemn word about me: "You have the look of idle grief--hair sticking up from your scalp in two little tufts. Angry sleeping."

"Shut up. I'll buy me a scissors, a little one."

"Spruce fellow. Never waste time."

As a matter of fact, I was not absolutely idle in my search for true love. There had been a New York lady just before my New York transplantation; I had encountered her beyond the Holland Tunnel; she came after my conjugal disaster but before the beginning of my New Life. An actress appearing in summer stock in Hiram, Ohio, she loved to play Shakespeare and Shaw. Much of the time she also played showgirls in Las Vegas, and in fact had the long legs, the endless legs of the showgirl, and a chinless face that looked fine from behind a glass of champagne. She was not pretty, she was tall and leggy with a pouting chinless face, and she drank, and she was totally frozen, and she had been the old-fashioned concubine of a wild Texas rancher whom she described as wearing square ties and carrying a cubic wad. But that was in Las Vegas, and in the East she played Shakespeare. Would she still be frigid east of the Mississippi? How would she make out with a man who wore slender Ivy ties, carried a slender, child-support wallet? Read on dear friends!

Her name was--well, call her Goneril. I had to strain all on tippytoe to try to kiss her high chinless face, and when I got up there, it was likely to bite and close with firm disgust, thus driving me back down to lower altitudes.

Nevertheless, she seemed to be the only wheel in town (I knew her from Hiram), and I kept on trying, like Tenzing, stubbornly hoping to scale the peaks. Perhaps idleness would have become me better, for Goneril was an isolating drinker. Let us do her justice: Before becoming a showgirl, a Shakespearean actress, a Las Vegas concubine and an occasional performer in pornographic films, she had received a B.A. with a major in dramatic arts from the University of Oklahoma at Norman. She was prepared. Nevertheless she drank. With foolish Midwestern vanity and morality, seeking to change the world through the miracle of love-making, I struggled to keep her from getting tanked up. I thought that I wanted her to yield soberly, just soberly, because I was nice, tweed-bearing, male, irresistible. She resisted soberly; it was hot within my tweeds. But soberly she liked me for trying, and later kept inviting me to parties in the busy little neighborhood around Sixth Avenue and Carnegie Hall where all her friends seemed to camp like gypsies in studios and lofts.

How I found out that she had acted in pornographic films was that she invited me to a party to raise money for the defense of her pal Alabam, who had been busted for heroin. Alabam, out on bail, or perhaps just out because the police wanted the joy of following him, was a photographer, a cameraman, a pale drawling moviemaker artist with a face like a potato and a voice like a drum majorette from a high school on the Georgia border. The men of this world were all busy in his business, and the girls, too, making location trips on Long Island, where they gathered about a swimming pool or in a house and enacted Tillie and Superman, Tillie and the Hairdresser, Tillie and the Traveling Salesman, Tillie, Her Husband, and the Boss, and other classic tales of American Legion repertory. Their contribution to the Nouvelle Vague was Tillie and the Hipster, in which the hero wore both a false nose and a false beard.

Goneril was Tillie--a star at last!

"What are you doing with all these crooks and con men?" I had whispered, crowding her into a corner, nuzzling her hopefully in an effort to wear her down. (I still thought one could wear a lady down to willingness by nuzzling. How wrong I was.)

"These are not crooks and con men," she whispered back indignantly, "these are prosperous makers of pornographic art. They are very well off--some of them contribute to their college alumni funds. They all own sports cars and subscribe to several magazines. Only a few of them have ever even dabbled in being crooks and con men."

"Now?" I demanded. "You want to go to bed with me now?"

"I thought," she said, drifting away, "you wanted to discuss the sociology of low life, but it turns out all you want is that same old thing. What care you for a girl's mind and sociology?"

And she left me lonely in my corner, studying my shoes, with sifting wisps of garrulous marijuana gaiety camouflaging my square Cleveland ruminations. I really cared for her mind and sociology! If only she knew! (Tillie and the Sociologist)

Later I chatted with a 52nd Street stripper, a garment-center model, and even a few of the industry's prosperous commercial organizers (male), but my aching overloaded heart was not in it. Superman winked at me across the room, indicating a willingness to be soul mates. I left him alone with his copy of Zen Archery in Pictures, An Illustrated Introduction to Eastern Mysticism for Younger Readers (Quiz Questions at Rear). I sought out Goneril.

"Later," she said. "Maybe."

It was then, dear colleagues, that I took notice that drinking rather heavily, her chinless face inclined more kindly toward me from its six-foot-plus-heels height. Whiskey seemed to have a spiritual influence on my behalf--it spoke kind words of me.

Poor Tillie the Toiler, poor Goneril, I think I thought: she is a potential alcoholic and an actual drunk, she leans toward a self-destructive style of life. (At least I so translate my prudery, snobbery and pedantism.)

I know that many of you readers out there beyond the flowerpot in my window might perhaps appreciate hearing more about the craft of pornographic film art, its promoters and businessmen, its artists at the camera and in the canvas director's chair, its lovely starlets filled with hope and its fantastic leading (continued on page 128) O Manahatta(continued from page 74) men, such as stalwart Superzen over there, still reading his educational comic book; but this is not one of those tales of young American business in a changing world. I am determined to speak of nothing but love and its annexes here. I must merely remark that the secret of the amazing true-to-life performances of the leading men in the stag art cinema industry--this to allay your anxiety--can be ascribed to Stop Action Photography. Feel better now? Yes? Look, they stop the camera, then start it again, and go on. Listen, they splice. Pay attention: they continue after interruptions. Got it?

Ok. Back to the party.

Goneril began to sing and stagger, and finally all six feet of her, still yammering an Elizabethan bawdy ballad, fell wall-to-wall down. "Hey-ho, and a hey nonny no," she remarked. Then from below she complained about Lessing's "Laokoön," which she claimed to have been the subject of her thesis, and her life in Oklahoma, and her father who died, and her mother who should have died; and I wrestled with her, not for the pleasure in it, which was minimum, but merely to get the glass away. But it was hopeless. She bounced on her bum; she held the glass steady and drank; she declared that where the bee sucked there sucked she. When she passed out, I looped her over my arm and lugged her vaguely cab-ward. She wound about me three times, like a cobra, as I tried to prevent her head from going bounce-bounce on the stairs.

"Need some help?" asked Superzen, nose still buried in his book.

"Yes."

He put his finger on his place. "Hmm?"

"Never mind, pal."

Others waved languidly. There were understanding looks, tolerant smiles. Goneril was their little girl and she was so slleepy. Whoops--hair tangled in my legs. Why so topsy-turvy, Goneril pal? Whoops, don't tip me.

"Ba-ba, yo-all," said Alabam. "Real nice of yo-all to fall uppa ma pad."

Goneril awoke briefly into startling clarity in the cab. She explained that Alabam said yo-all because he meant both of us. The singular form of the pronoun in Southern is "yo." "I got an A minus in dialects, honey," she said. Then she lapsed into her coma again. I would give her a B plus for comas.

Bitter at being left all alone (psychologically if not sociologically), I brought her home and tucked her six feet of feminine dishabille onto the couch. Morally limited by a sense of obligation, I believed it my duty to care for her, although there were girls back at the benefit and I might merely have left Goneril and my conscience dormant in a corner. Now I did not have the strength to undress her inert body and drag it, together with her absent soul, into bed. She breathed hard about a bee every time I tried, so I finally buzzed at her, "Goodbye, I'm going!"

No answer.

"You blasted, sauced-up souse, farewell!"

No answer.

"Goodbye! Sleep well! I leave you now!"

She was passed out cold-kaput. I departed on tiptoe. Why? I was disoriented.

And returned to my studio room on the Upper West Side, by subway, brooding over The New York Times and thinking of what a hard hard life it is to be a 30-year-old boy in New York City. You know those mild melancholies, intense depressives, awkward exhibitionists, erotic celibates, healthy hallucin-ators--you know us artist types. If only I were an artist. If only the night weren't so black and the subway so hot and my pants so sticky. If only all was beautiful, a few inches less of alcohol in Goneril, a few less cares on my shoulder and ideas in my head. A blue-faced man lay unconscious on a seat of the subway car; I thought he was dead; perhaps he was; then the dead man sat up and went on with his crossword puzzle. When I thought he was dead, he was only sharpening his pencil by friction against the underside of the seat. He had a system. Everyone but me had a system.

Systems for copemanship led me straight back to conscience. There was Goneril, stretched out fully clothed on her couch. She might stop breathing. She might light a cigarette and burn to death. I had not even done her the courtesy of undressing her. She might wrinkle her frock. She might awake and feel so lonely. Poor Goneril, said conscience; poor me, said I.

It was my duty to go back and look after her--all those snaps and straps and juts of feminine responsibility, all that weakness and hope. It was enough to make a man's heart diminish in sorrow. A tear formed like a stalactite in my right eye and there was a renewed straining of desire above my knees.

You'd think an angel such as I, wanting to do so much good, would just sprout wings and fly over to Sixth Avenue and 57th Street, wouldn't you? But instead I had to take the subway back again. It was the middle of the night by now: washwomen, naphtha fumes from the lobbies of buildings, autumnal chill in the early September air. I had a slight jag on; I pranced, I ran up the stairs; I was very tired, too. Without malice or forethought, I had nevertheless tastefully left Goneril's door ajar for some possible charitable entry. She lived over a shoe repair. I climbed the stairs, my head filled with sad fantasies of Goneril strangled, Goneril burned to death, Goneril in dire peril. Poor Goneril, lost Goneril, I knew her slightly.

There she sat, smoking a cigarette, already much less drunk. "Oh, hello," she said. "Where'd you go?"

I explained how worried I was.

She was touched. I had traveled so far for her. My second thoughts often thrill my friends. "Gee," she said, "I suppose a girl could set herself afire. Had a nuncle died that way--perished he did lay smoke poisoning mostly from the upholstery. Better if you have Danish furniture." Prudently she ground out her cigarette, performing this maneuver with that unnecessary elaboration which indicates serious thought, failure on the drunkmeter test, and leaves the butt spread powdering in the saucer. She then looked up, touched the curl at her forehead, shook her head abruptly to let some air in, smiled gratefully, and said in a mild sweet voice, "Dan? Want me to do some nastiness for you? You name it."

"Never mind," I said.

"I bet you never tried that."

"No," I admitted, "all I really want..."

"I know how, honest. I'm not perfect, but I've practiced."

"...is true love for my personal qualities," I finished, blushing. (According to Freud, the blush is upward displacement of lower-down excitement. I upward displaced, head swelling.)

"Dan?" she said. "I think you're nice, you know?"

I knew. And with true love we sought the origins and secrets of niceness and downward displacement of blushing in each other's arms. She was so tall that I was mostly in her arms rather than the customary Western European reverse, but there was much benefit anyway and we forgot our griefs. The next morning she awoke sober and made orange juice and English muffins and tea, which she brought to our bed, smiling and not so tall (barefoot, shaking her hair out). After we finished smoking the tea and had a cup of coffee, I bobbed off into the mid-Manhattan noon with full contentment, cartwheeling inwardly while keeping a careful grip on a newspaper, convinced that sex had finally begun for me on that wild grave island of Manhattan.

But I was premature. I could never get to Goneril unless she was drunk, and so finally had to give her up. Those breakfasts were fine, but who can eat pumper-nickel bread while encased in the steel helmet of a hangover? Farewell, sweet lady. Goodbye. Dos svidanye. Adieu. Too bad you like consoling things of the spirits better than consoling spiritual things. More spiritual doings in a moment, doc.

• • •

Act Two. Summertime. Our hero has been youthified by the lightened air and Dacron-cotton suits.

Summer, O Manahatta, mother of waters! Cigar-smoking psychologists in transparent nylon sport shirts worry away the season in group therapy; slum kids build their orange-crate fires at the curbs, and howl with rage as umbrella-carrying pederasts offer them a quarter for an old orange box and a bit of comfort--howl for more money; the dry winds sweep up the side streets, carrying dawn wakefulness to the depressed and insomnia to the worried; ductless models stipple the pavements stiffly with their heels aclack and their unblinking eyes held open (personally) by Helena Rubinstein and Revlon; the college beatniks flood their sports cars into Greenwich Village, sweltering and breaking its boundaries under the need for Bohemias to consume; fights break out all day, and ambulance sirens scream for the fallen, the stroked and attacked, mugged by anxiety, unable to breathe. But yet Manhattan is somehow a wild and savory summery place, and if you step on it, it squeals. Much love is enjoyed in the worst heat.

"I do fear," meditated aloud my friend Peter Hatton, "that Goneril is not the proper lady for a lad of your sensibility."

"You know it, pal."

"Too alcoholic."

"Amen. Praise the soda."

"Past and future, I've traveled that way myself. We must work out something truer, deeper, more valid."

"And a little less tall, too, huh, Pete?"

During the next few days we visited various friends of Peter's skirt-pursuing interregnum, before he had got himself committed to his present girl. There was a gracious Indian lady with a Brahmin spot on her forehead; sinuous, sensuous and soothing, she had much delighted him; a painter, she had also painted him into a delicate mythological study in which he appeared as a tiger and she as a languishing and submissive maiden. He had bid goodbye to Miss India with a dozen long-stemmed American Beauty roses, thinking of possible future kindness, and now here I was, hoping for present kindness.

"Foresight," Pete said, hitching up his pants. "Besides, she's great. Expert. They got like a little tradition in India."

"What a woman has, every woman," I glumly philosophized, "is what we want, the real diamond. But we demand looks, wit, expertness instead."

"That's the setting, man, and you can't tell the diamond without the setting. Now this Amanda-baby, listen, she got such settings--"

Amanda-baby had loved to undress him, bathe him, suavely give him joy, and who cared if her romantic Hindu sari had a faint odor of moth balls? The prospect of a full airing of Indian-Pakistan border troubles delighted me. ("But do moth balls make you sneeze, pal?" Peter asked.) I didn't care. Her apartment had a view of the East River and the borders of the Bronx, so why not sniff a bouquet of dichlorocide? What's so great about flowers?

Ah, she had grace and style and a little bowing, sweeping way of walking across her tile floors. There was tea in little cups and a stack of recent quality paperbacks. But alter she performed the preliminary rites of hospitality, I discovered marks of aging and hardening on her fine Eastern countenance. Well, that wasn't so bad. But Pete soon established a nostalgic rapport with her that made any interference from my personal wave length a case of international jamming. No. I left them, claiming a stomach-ache, with a certain resentment for my pal Pete, The Indian Giver.

There was also a girl of 28 (Debbie) who lived with her mother. You know those girls of 28 who have cute virginal ways? She was always being shocked; she wrote coy notes with little pictures of animals instead of her signature; men were always bothering her though she wanted to be a lot of fun. "Like I mean I want him to really like me, the real me, first. Do you really feel you know me, Dan?" Her mother was desperate to get the real her married; the daughter tried to care. She just wanted to be a lot of undergrad fun at 28. Though she and her mother had a nice view of Manhattan from the top of a mid town hotel-apartment, I said nyet. A man her mother's age finally married Debbie, and I wonder if she has stopped circling her i's. (That's a fun penmanship, friends.)

And then a compact little blonde actress who disliked me at once though I found her cute, and found her cute again, and finally she liked me a little. Virginia admired Henry James (the later novels), had graduated from Bennington, and possessed unusually shapely bones in her knees. But feeling for me is very important to me. She later married a rock-'n'-roll singer whom she had met backstage at the Apollo Theater, whither she had wandered in order to congratulate him. These pure little things do dearly love the smell of guitars and exertion. I should have been warned by the way she went sniffing about me, tucking her nose here and there, complaining in her finishing-school accent because... I blush to say it. Let me let her say it.

"Dan, you have no smell."

"No?"

"No nice Bee Oh."

"No?"

"Do you have to shower every evening? Is it necessary to your obsessive compulsion? Do you have to be such a bore? Are you running away from earthiness, darling?"

"Boor you mean?"

"Bore I mean," she said, pouting. That word usually means the end of serious enterprise. End of her.

And then there was this girl, Karen. How to explain? It's rather delicate. I just floated around, couldn't find her anyplace. Was I there or was I not? Hard to feel, hard to say. At the time it just seemed some unhappy physical phenomena phenomenaling it up to my disgrace and her chagrin. "Aw baby" she said. "Aw honey," I said, Now it seems that there was probably some spiritual meaning to this trouble at discovering the close, hot, holding woman which was supposed to be with me in Karen's bed. I remember that she had queer distant green eyes as her arms pressed me in, eyes made of water colors, washing in and out of focus, both cool and vague. Trouble, trouble.

So I left Karen, too. (Or was I ever with her?)

Will Dan Shaper find True Love in Heartless, Floating Manhattan? Can our local, yokel boy from Ohio be immortal, due to passion and snug ladies? Is there hope in love, love in the pursuit of love? Or is he really pooped? (Read on! Karen saw a doctor, got sewed, got married; but not to me.)

As the Bible says, "They drank and were full of drink." I made love and was full of love. But the situations are not parallel. The drunkards satisfy themselves. I hoped to be satisfied by another. "An important quibble!" I said to Peter.

"Have a smoke," he said.

"I mean it, pal. If politics and work have lost their meaning in our lives, we make love bear too much of the burden."

Peter concentrated somberly, his curious long lashes fluttering against the eye-socket shadows on his cheeks. He chose carefully from his cigar case, just as if there were differences among the slender cigars he fetched out; he picked one from among its identical brothers, ran it under his nose, sniffed, back and forth, ducking the rough texture and delicate aroma, relishing; and at last began to smoke. All this ironical silent activity saved his having to make ironical judgments on my state. I could get angry and say, "You're wrong, take back those words," but how could I say, "Take back that twirling sniff of your Upmann No. 4?" Smoking a cigar is easier than making up one's mind, and often does no greater harm. Peter's being a stock salesman did no special harm; his widows liked to discuss IBM and their deceased husbands with him. Even his being a salesman of flattery and candlelight dining did no real harm--it merely confirmed his place as an easer in life, an enjoyer, a backward relisher, as Freud put it, "polymorphous perverse" in the newest Continental style. It was also a pleasure to be Peter's friend. His smoking of cigars was easy on the lungs.

"You can't live like a joke!" I nevertheless said. "Who do you think you're illustrating?"

"Whom," he said.

"Take that thing out of your mouth and answer me."

He sucked thoughtfully, bugged out his eyes by a delicious act of inhaling, held the cigar between thumb and fore-finger, and commented evenly: "All right. You want some politics? Go start a movement. You want some frontiers to conquer? Go open up the Great West. You wanna be innerdirected, pal? Inner-direct your sweet masculine self into a hot job of work and grow up to be a tycoon, why not?"

I shrugged.

"Otherwise," he said, putting the cigar back in its thumb-and-forefinger notch, "don't bug me with the impractical. Adam chose Eve because there was none other. Here's your problem: now lots of others!"

I bowed my head before this implied sacrifice of womanhood. So many of them, sacrifices and women! So much responsibility!

"All right!" he announced, leading the firing squad with his Upmann No. 4. "I don't ask you to give up your ideals. Far be it from me and on the contrary. This is the time of mucho ideals--maybe! That's a consumer product, too. Ideals. So there's this chick--maybe!--she has like a little amble to her walk, I like her myself but there's this little problem, she ..."

Always thinking, Peter would always find a problem about this Barbara he was considering for me. Always hopeful, I had my lips pinched to resolve Barbara's problem, whatever it was.

My friend Pete, as you can see, was unwearied by his semiproductive exertions on my behalf. His form was good, and in this game of girl-finding, it should be the form that counts (seldom is). I say "semiproductive exertions" because my failure to make a true, tender, chipper, joyful connection was mitigated by the incidental brute socializing which may come along with basic rejection. Is that too formally stated? Ok: I made out often. And parties, receptions, openings and other social duties came to fill the idle hours in my harassed 35-hour work week. For example, standing in the IRT subway one velvet early evening at the 96th Street-Broadway stop, we met another friend of Pete's, that very Barbara girl, again an actress, but one who did not act very much because she had inherited a large apartment house which had yielded in turn a large sum of money, so much per brick: she had broken it down brick by brick, dollar by dollar, being a precise girl, musing over the death of her parents and the birth of her real estate career. "But I'm an actress," she said, "I care not for money only everlasting glory--"

"Movies? Film libraries?"

"-- in the hearts of grateful audiences," she concluded. "But I do wish they wouldn't breathe garlic over the footlights. I mean that in all friendliness to my public."

Comes with the glory," I said.

I would have cared no more if she described herself as a painter, a writer or an astrophysicist; what worked itself out of her glintings, her glancings, her shy turnings of her ankle as she chattered on, her challenging smile and her fluttering lashes, was this: she was a genuine girl, a womanly girl, a girlish woman, one of the rare surviving examples of that beautiful species: Barbara. She had a frail fringe of hair fallen from the coif over her neck (careless) and a fringe like just the shadow of bangs combed across her forehead (deliberate). And she was old enough for laugh lines about the mouth, but no frown lines; laugh lines up from the corners of her eyes, but no frown lines, or rather, that delicate tracery was thought lines, consider lines, feeling lines. The top button of her blouse was undone. Joy lines and maybe-yes lines. I could see one freckle floating on high proud flesh. She was tanned from weekends at Lloyd Harbor, and as she laughed, I could see where the tan ended just below the freckle, and then lace cut off my prying. Barbara. Richly brushed hair and creamy skin and full laughing cheeks. And a high curve of rump under her skirt. And witty? Very smart. Smart lines around the eyes.

Peter observed the debris of excavation going on in my slum heart and murmured, "Dig We Must for a Growing New York." And whispered, "I dig, boy."

Barbara was wearing a double-breasted and belted trench coat, as if trying out for a British spy movie. She had a flushed, round, lascivious face and stood with heft, it seemed to me, secure on Barbara's green earth, which in this case happened to be the subway station. Two people meet, they like their way of standing, they make quick decisions: connection: we all three knew it. Somehow, in straightening out the introductions as we waited for the Seventh Avenue Express, it came clear that she had never been married, but that she knew people who had been married: in fact, her best friend had children, one each by two unsuccessful marriages. "Lucky Eunice! I'd like to have a child," Barbara said in a rush of heavy feeling.

"Well," I said, "then let's take the Local."

In the ensuing laughter at my small joke (Dan is suave! Dan makes joke!), my friend Peter ducked out and Barbara and I did take the local train down to the Battery, talking all the while over the roar of the subway, deciding, bantering and bumping, deciding, tricking with our bodies, deciding, strolling in that little park at the jag-tooth end of Manhattan, deciding; and later, at dusk, we had a snack of roast beef sandwich followed by Jell-O. This was all our stomachs could manage in their agony of anticipation. "Hell, let's take a cab," she said.

We had decided. We returned to her apartment by cab, rolled about on the carpet, and did various things that you are supposed to do under the stress of strong emotion, and sometimes not even then. Well, I did like her. I felt grateful that I could still invent these games anew after my season of salt in the wounds instead of on the ripe tomatoes.

Barbara had, at odd moments, a cautious calculation in her large, lidded eyes: What would he like now? She sought to please, overeducated in love, but she was sincere. This is a popular commodity in Manhattan. "I sincerely you loverly," the boy says. And the girl replies: "I sincere you very much, too."

There we were, Prince Dan and Princess Barbara, gallantly writhing, breathing hotly with all the rush of nature in our ears, lord of perfumed, heaving breasts and queen of flushing, tense, gamboling body--next thing you know, we could be Mr. and Mrs. D. Shaper, third house down the block. "I sincere you four children ... I sincere you a barbecue pit ... I sincere you duodenal ulcers, a compact car, and long blue evenings before the TV ..."

Barbara carried the true essence of wife like a perfume within her, just as I have the true essence of husband--that longing for completion in the accepted mode. No experience can teach us, nor age do anything but kill us. Such as we have no faith in statistics. We like kids.

"You do? I do, too," she said.

She was longing for love, that girl Barbara--a big husky healthy Central Park West orphan of the sort that used to be called "strapping." But despite her large bones and flushed cheeks, she had obtained a delicate education. Miss Whosit's, Smith, Junior Year in Paris, and then the rapid death of both parents to complete her knowledge of both fate and the full extent of her holdings. She had come down from college for the double funeral (automobile on turnpike), wild with grief, uncombed, but swinging her diaphragm in the purse she had bought in Florence:

"A swinging chain means a warm seat ..."

Ah, but that fine old proverb dates from the introduction of modern plumbing in England. And Barbara was not a mere sanitary convenience. Oh no, not her. She had unusual feminine resources of warmth, devotion and hysteria.

And she buttered toast nicely.

And she enjoyed hand-squeezed orange juice, hand-squeezing it.

When with improving fortunes I looked for a new apartment, something with more dignity than my furnished room, which is known as Alimony Studio, it seemed convenient to pitch my camp near Barbara's digs. I was not convinced, but when she found me the apartment, I fell into it without further elaborate thought. She decorated for me--Danish and American. Hell, a place to live in is merely a home. We took to lounging and scrounging and loafing together (try it on Danish furniture, friends! cricks in the back!), going to parties and movies, doing nothing and making love, tickling each other and trying out different things off the furniture, on the broad-loom, in the crickless bed. It was pleasant and easy, and when it seemed too marital for me, wounded in my recent conjugal Iwo Jima, I simply stayed away from her for a clay or two. She understood. Understood? All right, bided her time.

Ok. Unlike a wife, she was even warmer when I returned. She cared, her heart throbbed for me, just me. Sex made no demands for performance on me: this was unlike my former wife, who often had an expression on her face as she said goodnight: "Ok, you got a B plus this evening." But Barbara did not grade me; she cared. Consequently I had the sneaky, Oedipal satisfaction of imagining my former failure like a chandelier hanging above us, swinging rhythmically and squeaking, "A plus! A plus!"

"You're still reacting," said Pete. "Watch out, you'll be caught."

"I'll be careful," I insisted.

"Caught," he said.

"Careful," I said, though those A pluses did bemuse me. Once or twice, of course, I had my doubts ("To doubt is human"--Dan Shaper, circa 1960). For example, I discovered Barbara's eye watching me across the pillow, figuring out how to do good to me. A cold eye, it seemed at that moment, encased within this glistening triumphant female body, sleek for action: a coldly doubting eye. Well, who doesn't take an occasional B minus?

It's true that the weeds of pride and ambition and revenge often. sprout in love's garden. But this is organic farming, and if the plant is strong enough, the weeds will disappear.

Such weedy moments aside, I drifted contentedly. We ate jam sandwiches and I smeared honey on her breasts and licked it off, thereby achieving an effect of single-entendre humor; also it led to noisy tickling, happy struggle, giggling, shouts and silence. We took showers together. We rode the great ride. We refreshed the dream of pleasure, and ran dripping through spacious rooms. And all this--pleasant thought--was temporary! I could stop when I liked! When we wearied of closed rooms, we strolled without aftergrouch on Broadway, stopping to buy me a shirt or her a hairclip, sitting still for a pizza and a beer, aged 32 and 26 respectively. I had my life organized. I was even making a little more money--doing my job well.

At Thanksgivingtime, Barbara made a banquet for me, not for friends, just for Barbara and me: a cool house to blow on desire, hot food to satisfy the stomach, and not too much of it. But her smile, her voice of ease and control. But crispy celeries, sweet butter, hot rolls and delicate Cornish hens, with bones so sweet that I wanted to take them in my teeth and crunch them into twiggy morsels. Ah she knew the ways of the body. Barbary, is there a hitch in all this fine stunting? Aye.

One day she remarked that I must owe a lot of invitations to friends who had had me to dinner or drinks. Sure, quite a lot. Well, wouldn't I like to ask them up to her pad? Sure, why not? And thus repay all those debts? Yes? Get them off my conscience?

"But I'm not really so worried by such debts, Barbary. They like having me." I thought of Goneril and Karen and so many tense ladies with the elastic line of girdle showing through skirt and the double track of fret between the eyes. No, I didn't need to pay these debts.

"Yes, but still it would be nice."

"Yes, OK Barbary, nice."

"Ok, a week from Friday?"

"Ok."

"Ok! Leave it to me."

At the time I was interested in other matters, two French films I think it was. I'm a focused fellow. I did not listen well enough. "Let's make the double feature," I said.

But she persisted. "Let me have your address book. I'll send out the invitations, OK?"

I handed it over. There was a small, banana-shaped qualm about letting her see for herself how few irresistible, fascinating, delicious girls there were in my book--just names. But knowing Barbara and her inner comfort, I felt that she would be neither jealous nor smug. As it turned out, she was glad to invite them. She invited them all. She invited everybody, couples, singles, male, female, the long and the short and the tall. And her friends. And her friends' friends. It was a large party, with lots of ice, liquor and food, and a heap of umbrellas outside the door. It didn't rain, it merely looked cloudy, but that's how big the party was--enough to provide a heap of timid umbrellas. Seeing all my acquaint ances gathered like this made me a little drunk.

Ah, New York! Friendship, love, power, contacts! People from all over! The United Nations! Negroes, Jews, Christians, Mohammedans! Musicians! Gerontologists! Actresses and models! Zen Buddhists! Pederasts! Educated policemen! Alleyway thugs! Oh, life begins at Manhattan soirees. So I lounged about, enjoying things, while capable, hysterical Barbara managed her evening. I crowed with laughter at my friends' jokes. There was some peculiar elation in the air, and I felt that if I put my little finger on it, it would rise like an invisible nipple to my touch.

But where? It was like mood music in fi so hi that only a dog's ear could make it out. I twitched, I growled, I prowled amid the elegances of Barbara's six years in the same apartment. And yet there was something else--a soupcon of a soupçon. Oh, well--why worry?

I poked about, chortling contentedly. Barbara's Scotch rose like an invisible extra brain in my brain. My little finger was happy about things. It and I allowed as how (generous small finger!) we might wait until everybody had left and give Barbara a hand (four other fingers) with cleaning up. After all, it was partly for me, else why invite all the folks in my address book?

They started out. For some reason, obscurely compelled into an idiot grin and ducking bows, I found myself at the door, saying goodbye with a drink in my hand. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

"Bye, Dan. Congratulations. I hope you're very happy."

"So long, Dan. She's a lovely girl."

"Ciao, man." (Head waggily working.) "You go pretty fast, keed. What's the date?"

I thought to answer, "Today's the 21st," but then it came to me! This was my engagement party. Without my knowing it, I was supposed to be married next! Oh, ow, ouch. My brain jiggled between my ears and shook out a message to my heart: Look what's happening! And heart sent back a rush telegram: Use your eyes! Rush hour this time!

Without my knowing it, Barbara had staged an engagement party for us?

For us?

For me?

Pow, went my mental fist, my moral knee, my spiritual and ideal gouging toe. In other words, after the guests left I glared across the debris of food and drink and ash at shyly Hushed, happy Barbara, surrounded by ruined cheese and wisps of expired cigarettes and half-finished glasses and emptied bottles. Someone had forgotten his umbrella. Someone had left his wrist watch in the bathroom. Barbara lowered her eyes beneath my silent accusation. Her lip quivered. It is said to be the lower lip which quivers, but in her case I believe it to have been the upper. And her nose twitched. Tears on the verge. Guilt! She felt guilty for having misled and misinformed poor Dan Shaper--me, just a small child of divorce from Ohio. I helped her pile the dishes in the for the maid the next day, and then I bid her adew.

• • •

Sometimes, like any man who lives alone, I fell into a stuporous wild depression of an afternoon, late, when the sugar goes down in the blood and before I took my first evening drink, and I wanted to cry out to some girl: "I love you, love you! Love me!" At such times, Christmas carols made me weep and I pranced with a mad smile up and down the slopes of Riverside Drive. I wanted to wire to this tender beauty of my life: "Join me! Come quick! Hurry! Marry me!"

But who? Goneril in her own pornographic madness? Amanda? Karen with her impossible floating isolation? Barbara? They, too, had their late-afternoon blues, but we could do nothing for each other. Thank God for the grassy slopes to climb, the gin to drink. Not that I drank or climbed all that much. Just enough to open my pores to sweat, to put the sugar back in my blood. But sometimes, released, sweating lightly in a bulky-knit sweater, with a drop o' sugar circulating in my veins, I wondered if maybe Barbara ... Barbara ... if I hadn't been too hard on a human being. Didn't I also try to work things my personal way?

I met her by accident in the street about six months later. She had become fat and perceptive; fat because she had gained weight and perceptive because she caught the look on my face. "I've been eating too much," she explained. But it was pretty firm, even as she walked away.

I met her again a year later, when she had slimmed to her usual flamboyant physical grace. She told me that she was about to be married and I felt a hectic flush on my face. "You never blush. Why?" she asked me.

"Oh, I guess I was holding my breath," I said. "I never blush."

Her laughter thrilled out triumphantly, like bells. "But you're blushing now!"

I knew but one way to put the blush on the other side of the body (flush of beard on tender skin, rush of blood to warm extremities, hectic churn of heart). Would she come to my rooms for a quiet talk?' I roundabout inquired. She blushed.

"I'd love to but."

Thanks for the memories, in other words. She knew too well the rug, the couch, the bed, the ceiling.

"But I won't, I wouldn't," I protested. "After all, you're about to be married."

"Thanks, pal. You were always sensitive to my most delicate feelings."

"Thank you," I returned snappishly. "So why not?"

"Why not?" Dreamily her lips moved, remembering, why-not saying, recalling, as we silently let the cab transport us. I squirmed in the seat to gape at the Empire State Building like a tourist. My knee struck hers, there was a crackle of static in my head, I was grounded, and she said, "What you thinking about?"

"A friend in analysis. Look, he has everything--he's a songwriter with two big hits this year, money money money, and no indictments for possession or peddling, and a white Italian sports car, I forget the make, it was hand-tooled, and he cruises in possession of all this town down Fifth Avenue. Poor fellow."

She cocked her pretty little slimmed-down cheeks at me.

"Yes, poor fellow, I said, Barbara. He'd look at the long mast and tower of the Empire State Building and all he could think was: Wouldn't it hurt to fall on that? Poor fellow. In analysis."

"Poor anal fellow," she echoed with classic feminine compassion.

Thus we held hands, but it was sympathy for a tense unnamed friend. Brooding about his costiveness and the troubles of the rest of the world, we sank upward in a padded elevator to my pad (someone was moving: thus the pads), and we talked through the long afternoon over cigarettes for her and long cigars for me and coffee and brandy, just like jolly little Englishmen, as it grew darker in the room. Confidentially, I told her the truth: I don't like engagement parties when it's I who is getting married but I haven't been informed of it. That was why I had cut out so abruptly.

"I exaggerated," she admitted.

"And now?"

"He really asked me," she said. "He wants me. He's nice. I've learned not to hurry --"

"Or ask very much," I said spitefully.

She smiled, shrugged and showed her bright edge of malice, speaking softly: "Since you don't know anything about him..."

She had me there. "What's his name, hm?"

Soft-sell, she blew smoke and gazed at me in the gathering dusk. "A friend of Pete's on the Street. Partner in a small firm. Doesn't matter about his name."

"What is it?"

"I don't expect you'll be meeting him. A different life." She shrugged. "Tim Furlow."

It was like a blow at my knees, a low tackle, but I kept my balance. I didn't know him, had never heard of him, but the name gave him reality. He had flesh, blood, a head, a job, and arms around my Barbary: Tim Furlow. That seasick lurch of jealousy. I played rockily for survival, speaking silly words into the deepening twilight: "You look slim."

"Lovely," she corrected me.

"I meant that."

"I know. I'm lovely, but not slim."

At this sticky point the talk would have been over, with Barbara simply saying goodbye, but my life was saved by that stage prop, the telephone. It rang tingaling, it ranted, insisted. I was staring." Better answer," Barbara said, and I did, and it was nothing much. But when I returned I pulled the lamp, I shut away the light, it was evening, there was only our own electricity in the air and darkness, we both sighed. That rush of night outside my window gave us our enclave of silence and deliberation, encased us in its kangaroo pouch, made us unwilling to part.

"How's Pete?" I asked her. (She was better on silence than I.)

"You said already. You know Pete--always chasing, mourning that ideal of his. Poor Pete."

"You call so many men poor, god-damnit."

She smiled. She was above the battle. I had tried to woo her with a pensive carol, and she had heard a calypso about bananas and donkey maidens. I was on my way to being a joke to her: "Poor Dan." She knew me too well, just as I knew the chase of women too well (always chasing, mourning?) without knowing women at all. If to love is to know, I was an ignorant man. If to love is to accept, I had been a refusing man. Oh-oh: fast self-reproach was going on.

I drew my deepest breath and Barbara did not blow away.

Oh-oh, I thought again.

I did not want the slow death of chicken pox--that is, depleasuring myself with one too many chicks. Or to suffer obscure failures at age 45 in the room of a 17-year-old. Or simply to diminish frazzled into boredom--the worst of all fates, the most contemporary--like so many chasers. Out of determination, I had remained young, but the effort was making me old.

All these thoughts danced like specks of earth dust over my eyeballs.

"Marry," I said to Barbara.

"Of course," she said brightly, "I'm going to."

"No. Me."

She caught her breath as if I had struck her. Surprise is always a surprise. She went to the window and looked out at ailanthus, the tree of heaven, in the courtyard. She wept silently and I did not touch her. At last she turned back to me, without asking if I loved her, and said, "Do you think you can live like that? Accepting someone else's--even a girl's--way? Making mistakes sometimes? Forgiving?"

"Yes," I said.

"Yes," she said.