Christopher Isherwood - A Single Man

Again, Grant seems about to attempt some kind of a protest. But this time his mumbling is still lower. Even George can’t understand him. George takes a big drink of his coffee, feels the kick of it in his nearly empty stomach, and finds himself suddenly high. ‘Really, Cynthia my dear!’ he hears himself exclaim. ‘How can you talk such incredible nonsense?’

Grant giggles with astonishment. Cynthia looks surprised but rather pleased. She is the kind of bully who likes being challenged; it soothes the itch of her aggression.

‘Honestly! Are you out of your mind?’ George feels himself racing down the runway; becoming smoothly, exhilaratingly airborne. ‘My God, you sound like some dreary French intellectual who’s just set foot in New York for the first time! That’s exactly the way they talk! Unreal! American motels are unreal! My good girl – you know and I know that our motels are deliberately designed to be unreal, if you must use that idiotic jargon, for the very simple reason that an American motel -room isn’t a room in an hotel, it’s the Room, definitively, period. There is only one; The Room . And it’s a symbol – an advertisement in three dimensions, if you like – for our way of life. And what’s our way of life? A building code which demands certain measurements, certain utilities and the use of certain apt materials; no more and no less. Everything else you’ve got to supply for yourself. But just try telling that to the Europeans! It scares them to death. . . . The truth is, our way of life is far too austere for them. We’ve reduced the things of the material plane to mere symbolic conveniences. And why? Because that’s the essential first step. Until the material plane has been defined and relegated to its proper place, the mind can’t ever be truly free. One would think that was obvious. The stupidest American seems to understand it intuitively. But the Europeans call us inhuman – or they prefer to say immature, which sounds ruder – because we’ve renounced their world of individual differences, and romantic inefficiency, and objects-for-the-sake-of-objects. All that dead old cult of cathedrals and first editions and Paris models and vintage wines. Naturally, they never give up, they keep trying to subvert us, every moment, with their loathsome cult-propaganda. If they ever succeed, we’ll be done for. That’s the kind of subversion the Un-American Activities Committee ought to be investigating. . . . The Europeans hate us because we’ve retired to live inside our advertisements, like hermits going into caves to contemplate. We sleep in symbolic bedrooms, eat symbolic meals, are symbolically entertained – and that terrifies them, that fills them with fury and loathing because they can never understand They keep yelling out, “these people are zombies!”. They’ve got to make themselves believe that, because the alternative is to break down and admit that Americans are able to live like this because, actually, they’re a far far more advanced culture – five hundred, maybe a thousand years ahead of Europe, or anyone else on earth, for that matter. Essentially, we’re creatures of spirit. Our life is all in the mind. That’s why we’re completely at home with symbols like the American Motel-Room. Whereas the European has a horror of symbols because he’s such a grovelling little materialist —’

Some moments before the end of this wild word-flight, George has seen, as it were from a great altitude, Andy Leach enter the dining-room. Which is indeed a lucky deliverance, for already George has felt his engines cut out, felt himself losing thrust. So now, with the skill of a veteran pilot, he swoops down to a perfect landing. And the beauty of it is, he appears to stop talking out of mere politeness, because Andy has reached their table.

‘Did I miss something?’ Andy asks, grinning.

A performer at the circus has no theatre-curtain to come down and hide him and thus preserve the magic spell of his act unbroken. Poised high on the trapeze under the blazing arcs, he has flashed and pulsed like a star indeed. But now, grounded, unsparkling, unfollowed by spotlights yet plainly visible to anyone who cares to look at him – they are all watching the clowns – he hurries past the tiers of seats toward the exit. Nobody applauds him any more. Very few spare him a single glance.

Together with this anonymity, George feels a fatigue come over him which is not disagreeable. The tide of his vitality is ebbing fast, and he ebbs with it, content. This is a way of resting. All of a sudden, he is much, much older. On his way out to the parking-lot he walks differently, with less elasticity, moving his arms and his shoulders stiffly. He slows down. Now and then, his steps actually shuffle. His head is bowed. His mouth loosens and the muscles of his cheeks sag. His face takes on a dull dreamy placid look. He hums queerly to himself, with a sound like bees around a hive. From time to time, as he walks, he emits quite loud prolonged farts.

The hospital stands tall on a sleepy by-passed hill, rising from steep lawns and flowering bushes, within sight of the freeway itself. A tall reminder to the passing motorists – this is the end of the road, folks – it has a pleasant aspect, nevertheless. It stands open to all the breezes; and there must be many of its windows from which you can see the ocean and the Palos Verdes headland and even Catalina Island, in the clear winter weather.

The nurses at the reception-desk are pleasant, too. They don’t fuss you with a lot of questions. If you know the number of the room you want to visit, you don’t even have to ask for their permission; you can go right up .

George works the elevator himself. At the second floor it is stopped and a coloured male nurse wheels in a prone patient. She is for surgery, he tells George, so they must descend again to the ground floor where the operating rooms are. George offers respectfully to get off the elevator but the young nurse (who has very sexy muscular arms) says, ‘You don’t have to’, so there he stands, like a spectator at the funeral of a stranger, furtively peeking at the patient. She appears to be fully conscious, but it would be a kind of sacrilege to speak to her; for already she is the dedicated, the ritually prepared victim. She seems to know this and consent to it; to be entirely relaxed in her consent. Her grey hair looks so pretty; it must have been recently waved.

This is the gate, George says to himself.

Must I pass through here, too?

Ah, how the poor body recoils with its every nerve from the sight, the smell, the feel of this place! Blindly it shies, rears, struggles to escape. That it should ever be brought here – stupefied by their drugs, pricked by their needles, cut by their little knives – what an unthinkable outrage to the flesh! Even if they were to cure it and release it, it could never forget, never forgive. Nothing would be the same, any more. It would have lost all faith in itself.

Jim used to moan and complain and raise hell over a head-cold, a cut finger, a pile. But Jim was lucky at the end; the only time when luck really counts. The truck hit his car just right; he never felt it. And they never got him into a place like this one. His smashed leavings were of no use to them for their rituals.

Doris’s room is on the top floor. The hallway is deserted, for the moment, and the door stands open with a screen hiding the bed. George peeps over the top of the screen before going in. Doris is lying with her face toward the window.

George has gotten quite accustomed by now to the way she looks. It isn’t even horrible to him any more, because he has lost his sense of a transformation. Doris no longer seems changed. She is a different creature altogether; this yellow shrivelled manikin with its sticks of arms and legs, withered flesh and hollow belly, making angular outlines under the sheet. What has it to do with that big arrogant animal of a girl? With that body which sprawled stark naked, gaping wide in shameless demand, underneath Jim’s naked body? Gross insucking vulva, sly ruthless greedy flesh, in all the bloom and gloss and arrogant resilience of youth, demanding that George shall step aside, bow down and yield to the female, prerogative, hide his unnatural head in shame. I am Doris. I am Woman. I am Bitch-Mother Nature. The Church and the Law and the State exist to support me. I claim my biological rights. I demand Jim.