Christopher Isherwood - A Single Man

George lies down on one of the inclined boards, in order to do situps. This is always something you have to think yourself into; the body dislikes them more than any other exercise. While he is getting into the mood, Webster comes over and lies down on the board next to his. Webster is maybe twelve or thirteen, slender and graceful and tall for his age, with long smooth golden boy-legs. He is gentle and shy, and he moves about the gym in a kind of dream; but he keeps steadily on with his workout. No doubt he thinks he looks scrawny and has vowed to become a huge wide awkward overloaded muscle-man. George says, ‘Hi, Web’ and Webster answers, ‘Hi, George’ in a shy secretive whisper.

Now Webster begins doing his situps, and George, peeling off his tee shirt on a sudden impulse, follows his example. As they continue, George feels an empathy growing between them. They are not competing with each other; but Webster’s youth and litheness seem to possess George, and this borrowed energy is terrific. Withdrawing his attention from his own protesting muscles and concentrating it upon Webster’s flexing and relaxing body, George draws the strength from it to go on beyond his normal forty situps, to fifty, to sixty, to seventy, to eighty. Shall he try for a hundred? Then, all at once, he is aware that Webster has stopped. The strength leaves him instantly. He stops too, panting hard; though not any harder than Webster himself. They lie there panting, side by side. Webster turns his head and looks at George, obviously rather impressed.

‘How many do you do?’ he asks.

‘Oh – it depends.’

‘These things just kill me! Man!’

How delightful it is, to be here! If only one could spend one’s entire life in this state of easy-going physical democracy! Nobody is bitchy, here, or ill-tempered, or inquisitive. Vanity, including the most outrageous posings in front of the mirrors, is taken for granted. The godlike young baseball player confides to all his anxiety about the smallness of his ankles. The plump banker, rubbing his face with skincream, says simply, ‘I can’t afford to get old.’ No one is perfect and no one pretends to be. Even the half-dozen quite wellknown actors put on no airs. The youngest kids sit beside sixty- and seventy-year-olds, innocently naked, in the steam room, and they call each other by their first names. Nobody is too hideous or too handsome to be accepted as an equal. Surely everyone is nicer in this place than he is outside it?

Today, George feels more than usually unwilling to leave the gym. He does his exercises twice as many times as he is supposed to; he spends a long while in the steam room; he washes his hair.

When he comes out on to the street again, it is already getting toward sunset. And now he makes another impulsive decision: instead of driving directly back to the beach, he will take a long detour through the hills.

Why? Partly because he wants to enjoy the uncomplicated relaxed happy mood which is nearly always produced by a workout at the gym. It is so good to feel the body’s satisfaction and gratitude; no matter how much it may protest, it likes being forced to perform these tasks. Now, for a while at least, the vagus nerve won’t twitch, the pylorus will be quiet, the arthritic thumbs and knee won’t assert themselves. And how restful, now that there’s no need for stimulants, not to have to hate anyone at all! George hopes to be able to stay in this mood as long as he keeps on driving.

Also, he wants to take a look at the hills again; he hasn’t been up there in a long time. Years ago, before Jim even, when George first came to California, he used to go into the hills often. It was the wildness of this range, largely uninhabited yet rising right up out of the city, that fascinated him. He felt the thrill of being a foreigner, a trespasser there, of venturing into the midst of a primitive alien nature. He would drive up at sunset or very early in the morning, park his car, and wander off along the firebreak trails; catching glimpses of deer moving deep in the chaparral of a canyon, stopping to watch a hawk circling overhead, stepping carefully among hairy tarantulas crawling across his path, following twisty tracks in the sand until he came upon a coiled dozing rattler. Sometimes, in the half-light of dawn, he would meet a pack of coyotes trotting toward him, tails down, in single file. The first time this happened, he took them for dogs; and then, suddenly, without uttering a sound, they broke formation and went bounding away downhill, with great uncanny jumps.

But, this afternoon, George can feel nothing of that long-ago excitement and awe; something is wrong, from the start. The steep winding road, which used to seem romantic, is merely awkward, now, and dangerous. He keeps meeting other cars on blind corners and having to swerve sharply; by the time he has reached the top, he has lost all sense of relaxation. Even up here, they are building dozens of new houses; the area is getting suburban. True, there are still a few uninhabited canyons, but George can’t rejoice in them; he is oppressed by awareness of the city below. On both sides of the hills, to the north and to the south, it has spawned and spread itself over the entire plain. It has eaten up the wide pastures and ranchlands, and the last stretches of orange grove; it has sucked out the surrounding lakes and sapped the forests of the high mountains. Soon it will be drinking converted sea water. And yet it will die. No need for rockets to wreck it, or another ice age to freeze it, or a huge earthquake to crack it off and dump it in the Pacific. It will die of over-extension. It will die because its taproots have dried up; the brashness and greed which have been its only strength. And the desert, which is the natural condition of this country, will return.

Alas, how sadly, how certainly George knows this! He stops the car and stands at the road’s rough yellow dirt edge, beside a manzanita bush, and looks out over Los Angeles like a sad Jewish prophet of doom, as he takes a leak. Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city . But this city is not great, was never great, and has nearly no distance to fall.

Now he zips up his pants and gets into the car and drives on, thoroughly depressed. The clouds close in low upon the hills, making them seem northern and sad like Wales; and the day wanes, and the lights snap on in their sham jewel colours all over the plain, as the road winds down again on to Sunset Boulevard and he nears the ocean.

The supermarket is still open; it won’t close till midnight. It is brilliantly bright. Its brightness offers sanctuary from loneliness and the dark. You could spend hours of your life here, in a state of suspended insecurity, meditating on the multiplicity of things to eat. Oh dear, there is so much! So many brands in shiny boxes, all of them promising you good appetite. Every article on the shelves cries out to you, take me, take me; and the mere competition of their appeals can make you imagine yourself wanted, even loved. But beware – when you get back to your empty room, you’ll find that the false flattering elf of the advertisement has eluded you; what remains is only cardboard, cellophane and food. And you have lost the heart to be hungry.

This bright place isn’t really a sanctuary. For, ambushed among its bottles and cartons and cans, are shockingly vivid memories of meals shopped for, cooked, eaten with Jim. They stab out at George as he passes, pushing his shopping-cart. Should we ever feel truly lonely if we never ate alone?

But to say, I won’t eat alone tonight; isn’t that deadly dangerous? Isn’t it the start of a long landslide – from eating at counters and drinking at bars to drinking at home without eating, to despair and sleeping-pills and the inevitable final overdose? But who says I have to be brave? George asks. Who depends on me, now? Who cares?