Suddenly everything I saw was the enemy. The silk scarves, the smooth-handled canes, the expensive umbrellas in the warm window. The tall buildings named for a single man. The cars that passed in the dusk, their dashboards glowing like Christmas lights. The girls who went by me in the street. I felt a quick powerful stirring of lust, greater than any I had ever known. I stared at the girls ravenously, so frankly that they looked away. I saw their legs shiny in the nylons. I saw the behinds, the cunts, the breasts, the ears, the nostrils, the mouths, all cleavages, all openings. I stood in the street like a rapist. Under my coat I held myself. I knew the rapist’s desperation, his singleness beyond mere loneliness, his massive urgency greater than any legitimate need, greater even than the convention and morality and law that forbade its satisfaction. It was a confirmation of what I already knew about the uselessness of the senses. It was as if I had already abandoned them and was pressing, like some mute seeking his voice, toward a sixth sense, as yet unevolved; of containment, possession, the ability to know final things finally.
I stopped behind a girl who had paused to look in a window. It was a travel agency, and the whole window had been made over into a kind of crêche. Whoever had designed it had been very clever; it was very real. Oddly mature dolls lolled on some sunny, idyllic shore. In a toy sea, blue as ink, small boats bobbed. The sand around the edges of the sea was as white and fine as powdered sugar. Close to the shore tiny waves lapped perpetually at the knees of bending bathers. On the shore the dolls lay on colored pocket handkerchiefs while little white-coated waiters leaned over them with trays of drinks. Inside the miniature glasses the liquid shone like colored apothecary waters. Cabañas of vaguely biblical fabrics, like the thick- striped garments of Old Testament heroes, dotted the beach. In the background a model of a hotel, white and smooth as a pebble, shaped like some cement scroll, rose over the frontier of beach like a monument. No advertisement intruded; the place was not identified. It was Nassau, South America, Miami, Puerto Rico, one of the Rivieras. It was elsewhere and it was very real. It was only here that was not anywhere.
By watching the girl’s reflection in the glass I could see that she was having my insight — or at least part of it, a fraction of an inch of it. As she stared at the scene the corners of her mouth edged down in an unconscious, piecemeal bitterness and her nostrils flared in a brief flutter of desire. She turned away from the window protectively, as if she might escape the implications of what she had learned. ‘
“It’s a big boulevard, miss,” I said. “There are windows everywhere.”
She moved by me cautiously, downlooking. It was all I could do to keep from grabbing her, taking her to my hotel, holding her prisoner there.
It was true. Here wasn’t anywhere. Sunk in my finite body, things were helplessly reversed for me. I might have been a stone at the bottom of a well, dust in the corner of some closet. A cat who could look at a king. Big deal!
It was doom to know so much. As if I had just been told by some doctor who was never wrong that I had so many days to live. I knew what men rarely knew: the exact dimensions of the insuperable odds against them. Nor did this make me brave, as hopelessness sometimes does. It was disastrous. Now I would have to live always as though in the presence of some overwhelming fact of nature, like some primitive on the edge of the jungle, the vast desert.
Suddenly, however, as quickly as it had come, my lust began to subside. The knowledge that had caused it remained, but I could no longer see it in detail. All that was left was all that was ever left: a renewed desire, a controlled lust, a heightened hope. I continued down the boulevard, past the expensive shops, against the grain of the evening traffic, lascivious, dangerous, capable of heroic crime.
“We are the jet set,” Angel Farouk, the filling- station heiress, announced to the waiter.
“Ready, jet set, go,” Astarte Morgan, the central- heating heiress, said.
“Whee-ee-ee,” said Angus Sinclair, the contour-chair scion.
“Whee-ee-ee the people,” said Wylia De Costa, the miracle-drug widow.
“Let ’em eat cake,” said Rudy Lip, the international playboy and rat.
“Nobody knows the truffles I’ve seen,” Buster Bird, the white-paint tycoon, sang softly. “Nobody knows the truffles.”
“I say,” the general said, “I’m hungry.”
Angus Sinclair clapped his hands. “Caviar. Caviar for the general.”
The waiter presented a bottle smartly to Marvin Rilroyl, the wax-paper magnate. “Thirty-eight,” Marvin Rilroyl said. “A very good year.”
“The Nazis were in the Sudetenland,” the general said wistfully.
“I don’t know,” Astarte Morgan said, “Rome’s changed.”
“My God, what hasn’t?” asked Rudy Lip.
“Africa’s not the same,” Buster Bird said. “When I was on safari there last, I thought I was in some kind of zoo. They’ve spoiled Africa.”
“The Côte d’Azur isn’t azur any more,” Angus Sinclair put in.
“They’ve spoiled the world,” Angel Farouk said. “It’s not like it was in Grandad’s time.”
“Her granddad was a baron,” Angus Sinclair explained. “A robber baron.”
“I think I’ve planned my last campaign,” the general said.
“Ars longa, dolce vita breve,” said Wylia De Costa.
K.O. Bellavista, the movie starlet, turned to Marvin Rilroyl. “How much are you worth, Marvin?” she asked.
“Depends upon the market,” Marvin said. “My cotton is down, my land is up. My steels are mixed, my utilities off. My glamour stocks, of course—”
“Kiss me, darling,” K.O. said, “your glamour stocks are glamorous.”
“I know,” Astarte Morgan said, “let’s fly to Bombay.”
“Bombay Away,” the general said, and chuckled.
“People don’t talk like this,” I said.
“The best people do,” Angel Farouk said.
“Well, the best people,” I said.
“He’s cute,” Rudy Lip said unpleasantly. “Wherever did you find him?”
“Oh, he’s not mine, Rudy, but I found him in Washington, at the Vice-President’s party. He’s a kind of gate crasher, but it’s all absolutely high art with him. Boswell is devoted, aren’t you, Boswell?”
“I’m very pure,” I said.
“He’s an absolute pauper,” Wylia went on, “but he knows more people than I do. Tell them the people you know, Boswell.”