“Now, though I was a Communist in those days, I believed in God. The God I believed in was a Jewish-Brahmin-Zen-Buddhist mystic who wore a yarmulke and squatted in a room filled with art treasures, telling his beads. You prayed to this God and he turned a deaf ear. He was supposed to, you understand. Acceptance of fucking suffering was what he taught. He bled in four colors over the art treasures and posed crazy riddles. He answered all questions with questions. Revelation was when he said, ‘The meaning of life is as follows,’ and he’d pick his nose with his little finger. Profound? Bull- crap, my young friends who still believe in such a God, a tongue-tied God who is not so much indifferent as bewildered by life. Go ask him questions? Go talk to walls. You can’t give in to him — give in to him and you’re dead. I wish I had them here now, those old students from Nebraska in 1933. I would take back everything I told them. Everything. I would use the chairman’s syllabus, rotten as it was.”
In the dim light I tried to watch Morty’s eyes. In the dark, smoky room they seemed singed, unable to focus. “Marry six wives,” he was saying. “Take women in adultery! Spin theories! Write articles! Write books! Win through!
“I’m not like that God I told you about. I’ll tell you what it all means. I’m fifty-six years old and I’m a dying Jewish anthropologist and the other day one of our leading philanthrophists called me a little Yid and threw me out of his house and I know what it’s all about. It’s mistakes! It’s learning not to accept. Accept nothing— there’s no such thing as a gift. It’s learning to make mistakes. Make lulus. Make lulus only. Don’t crap around with errors, don’t waste your time on faux pas. Go for the lulus. And if you’ve got to believe in God, you young people who have got to believe in God, try to picture him as some all-fucking-out lulu maker who wouldn’t have your heart on a silver platter.”
Suddenly Morty stopped, and rubbed his hand across his forehead. What had seemed like freckles on his thin young face appeared as liver spots on the backs of his old man’s hands.
“What about the chairman of the department, Morty, and the network of spies?” someone asked.
“What about him?” Morty said, revived. “The chairman of the department hated my mystic-Eastern-Bolshevik-Jewish guts, and his network of spies were two kids, one a moronic football player from Omaha, the other a fantastically busted coed from a farm outside Benton, Nebraska. She appears in my book, The Flatlands, if you care to know further what she was like. She and the football player kept a perfect stenographic record of everything I ever said in that class. As a matter of fact, they did me a favor; two thirds of my book came from those notes. The girl herself told me what they were up to when I had the class over for coffee once. I think she had fallen in love with me. I think she liked me a lot. Well, it made me sick to find out about it, just sick. What was it, Hitler Germany? Anyway, I wasn’t rehired for the second term, and by the time I found out what was happening it was too late to get back into the Columbia night school, so those bastards out there cost me a half of a year. Seriously, the State of Nebraska is a very bad place.”
Two of the dancers had sat down and were embracing in one corner of the room. Billie Holliday was singing “Sophisticated Lady.” When she came to my favorite part I sang along with her softly.
I was propped against a wall, my legs out in front of me, like someone sitting up in bed. A girl beside me kept filling my glass. My hand was in her lap, though neither of us seemed conscious of this.
“Those are stupendous lyrics,” I said to the girl. “Is that what you really want?” I sang. “Stupendous.” I chuckled to myself. I jiggled my behind forward a few inches and leaned back lower against the wall. Above me the last dancers moved dreamily to the music. My face was beginning to get that stunned, flushed feeling it always has when I’m drunk. As the couple danced by I could see the girl’s garter straps. I watched these happily until her partner suddenly turned her and moved her back toward the other end of the room.
“This bottle is empty,” the girl next to me said. “There’s another in the pocket of my coat. I’ll go get it.”
“Sophisticated lady,” I said.
The girl stood up a little clumsily and moved off toward the bedroom. I got up and followed her. She had to step carefully over and around several people lying about on the floor. She was like someone crossing a stony road barefoot, and it was very pleasant to watch the look of intense, almost deadpan concentration on her face. We went into the bedroom and she snapped on the light.
“Oh, look,” she said excitedly. “Look at all the hats and overcoats on the bed. Look at them all. I think that’s the most wonderful sight.” Bending down she scooped them in her arms and held them against her face. She put them down very gently.
“I really think that’s the most wonderful sight. Don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“When I was little and my parents had company, they’d put their hats and overcoats down on the bed that very way.”
“Yes,” I said, kissing her. “I love you.”
When I let her go she looked at me curiously for a moment and shrugged. “Let’s find that bottle,” she said.
After she found her coat and took out the bottle we went back to the living room and took up our old positions against the wall. Morty was still talking but I had stopped listening to him, though I still heard the pleasant rumble of his Eastern-Jewish-Bolshevik voice. I put my hand back in the girl’s lap. There was a boy sleeping somewhere near my left shoe. He sat up suddenly and turned to us. “What’s he been saying?” he asked us.
The girl shrugged, and he turned to a somewhat older student who had been sitting in a deep easy chair all evening long. “What’s he been saying?” he asked.
“He’s been explaining how Ohio is essentially an immoral state.”
“Oh, that’s rich,” the boy said, turning back to us. “That’s really rich. He’s been explaining how Ohio is essentially an immoral state. Morty’s a regular moralist. He can tell you the relative moral positions of the states the way some people can name the capitals.”
The kid hadn’t bothered to lower his voice and Morty heard him. “I can,” he said. “I can. What do you think, culture isn’t reflected in morality? What would be the point? What would be the point? I’m a professional anthropologist,” Morty said. “I know these things.”
“He says that per capita North Dakota is the most virtuous state in the Union,” my girl said.
“Not now,” I whispered. “I don’t care about that now.”
“He says people from Connecticut are the least virtuous,” the girl with garter straps said. “I’m from Connecticut,” she said, lifting her dress. “Whee.”
“Tell us about the Empty-Seat Principle, Morty,” someone said. Most of the people in the room laughed.
“What are you laughing? Don’t laugh. What are you laughing?” Morty said, smiling himself. “It’s perfectly scientific.” He popped some pills into his mouth. “After one ride on a rush-hour bus I can tell you the precise moral position of a culture.”