“No difference,” he said. “No difference. It’s finished. Impulse. Again impulse.”
He pushed the teacup away from him suddenly. A little brown tea spilled over onto the table. “What happens to my project now?” he said wearily.
“What project, Morty?”
“It was my opportunity. I won the Nobel Prize. Now I could have earned it.”
“Morty, what project? What is it?”
“Gibbenjoy was going to give me thirty thousand dollars,” he said.
“What? Why? What for?”
“For my project. Before it’s all changed. I was going to show the UN what they were really dealing with. It’s finished,” he said.
I couldn’t think. I had cost the man thirty thousand dollars. “The prize money,” I said. “You’ve still got the prize money.”
“Alimony,” he said hopelessly, “a few lousy suits.”
When we left Morty insisted on paying both checks.
Yesterday and tonight, the strangest thing.
Morty called the night before last and I went with him to a party in his honor at the apartment of one of his grad students. Almost everybody except myself was from the University, and almost everybody except Morty was as young or younger than myself. Kids. Mostly grad students but some undergraduates and a handful of freshman girls.
I had the impression that none of them, though they call him Morty and not Dr. Perlmutter or Professor, really like him. They are embarrassed, I think, by his friendship, and out of some queer propriety disapprove of him both as a teacher and as a man. Morty does not deal with people professionally. After seeing him at that party I can imagine him striking up morbidly personal relationships with the very savages he had gone to study. I can hear him referring, in the manner of the very rich or the very old, to intimate situations, to his four brothers and their wives, to his days as a student, to his love affairs, using always first names, as though the natives might be expected to respond as he himself had responded. I don’t know what Morty’s stories would sound like in the savage babble of some South Seas or African or Indian tongue but I know that he would be able to put into them all his absurd, vulnerable humanity.
“These are good friends,” Morty insisted to me as we watched them dance in the dim apartment. “They’re my students and my friends. I like young people.”
“Do you, Morty?”
“Certainly,” he said. “I like young people. I like everybody who hasn’t made it.”
I had told Morty my story when I went to his apartment the night after I had met him. I had wanted to tell him about the trouble I had caused him, about my lie, but he was so resigned and even pleasant about his loss that I never did. For all his volatility, Morty is apparently an optimist, with that solid, purblind sort of faith that defies all the bad breaks. One wants to shake such people, to rub their nose in their troubles. (I can barely abide so profound an advantage as my clearer vision over my friends gives me.) The temptation always is to defile, to mar sublimity with some deft slash. How many times in museums, when the guard is not looking, do we seek to touch some ancient painting, to press our thumbnail into a dry crack and shatter some vulnerable square inch of the painter’s immortality? I have left my finger marks on the shellacked surfaces of masterpieces; I have unraveled the corners of priceless tapestries. It is a constant temptation to record obscenities in our neighbor’s wet cement. It is the same with opposite conditions. We lie to the sick man, puff some friend’s failure. We are exterior decorators.
All of us had a lot to drink. Morty, who is a slight man, does not hold his liquor well, though in many ways he is keener drunk than sober, quicker to sense offense, more concerned with people’s reactions to him. He began to talk, first to individuals and then to the room at large. Morty does not have to force people to listen to him. He knows so much and despite his naïveté has experienced so much that one is eagerly a part of his audience. Only when he talks about his concern — himself — does the interest of others flag. Yet he seems to sense this, for he brings out his subject in a subtle, almost deceitful way, and only after he has finished do we realize that what we had thought was a professional anecdote is really a revelation about Morty himself, a confession.
As he talked people took up casual positions around the room. Most of us continued to drink and two or three couples danced, though one of the dancers had turned down the phonograph. A few people maintained their own private conversations, but these were pitched almost subliminally beneath the level of Morty’s. The result was a comfortable, almost soporific buzz which gave us all, I think, a peculiarly distant sense of toleration. It was as if interest persisted while wonder slowly died. I had the sense, too, that at last we had come to terms with ourselves and with each other, as though we were sitting there in the room naked, as indifferent to each other’s nakedness as to our own. There was something only vaguely sexual in all this, a sense of infinite availability, as though each of us had been given a kind of promissory note. It was like bountifulness in dreams. There was so much and all time to contemplate it. Perhaps this is what Morty means when he says he likes young people, for it is chiefly among young people, I think, that this illusion of plenty is generated.
“When I was a young instructor,” Morty was saying, “before I got my degree, I went out to the Midwest. Maybe you saw my book, The Flatlands. The title is a pun. What did I know, a punk kid from the big city? Well, I wasn’t trusted. I had been hired by the University of Nebraska for a turn in summer school — I’ve been a teacher in fourteen state universities and seventeen private institutions, five of them abroad, where my reputation, let’s face it, is greater than in this country, and I’ve never stayed any place more than three semesters running in my whole career — which, incidentally, is the secret of how I manage to produce so much. Stay in the night schools and the summer sessions, you young teachers, and compete for the temporary chairs here and abroad. At that time I had no record, a very scanty bibliography — I was a kid. Probably the only reason they took me on at all was that in May — it was 1933—I had come back from the Pizwall camp in Tespapas on the Upper Amazon and I had these pictures — phonies, incidentally, which I bought in Hollywood one time, stills from some Tarzan picture. In one shot you could barely see Elmo Lincoln’s leg. Well, who needs pictures? To tell you the truth, I don’t even bother with a camera any more. A tribesman, I don’t care where he’s from, is the craziest son of a bitch in the world if he thinks you want pictures of him. He’s always got to gild. Explain to him all you want is an ordinary picture and he turns into a silly whore — pardon my French. He puts flowers where he’s never put flowers in his life, or beads in his nose, or he climbs into skins or something. These pictures in the magazines give me a laugh.
“But Nebraska could get me cheap, and after all I had been with Pizwall — though frankly, at the risk of talking disrespectfully of the dead, I never cared much for his system of collecting data. Anyway, even if I was cheap, and even if I had been at the Tespapas digs, I was an unknown quantity and Nebraska didn’t feel it could trust me. Not only was I Jewish but I was an easterner, and in those days — it’s no secret — I was a Communist, too. I would be again. I was no damned nineteen-thirties liberal. I would be again if conditions changed, but what’s the sense of revolution if you’re not revolting against intolerable conditions? I’ve seen intolerable conditions, and these aren’t intolerable conditions. Anyway, the kind of conditions I’m talking about have almost nothing to do with economics and never did. They have more to do with the culture itself, with national attitudes. I was in Rome once — this will illustrate what I mean, I think — and I was having lunch and wine in a sidewalk cafe—”