Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [138]
“I didn’t mean that, exactly. I was just thinking from the point of view of the modern reader. He might think you were ducking something essential.”
“That’s too bad. Hasn’t the modern reader got any imagination?”
“Well, you know. People nowadays understand things, they can sniff out the dishonesty when somebody tries to cover something up or leave it to the imagination. How would it be if every modern novel did it like Paolo and Francesca–‘That day they read no more’?”
“O.K., so I haven’t fooled you with my dishonest methods,” I said. “Just leave me there with old hypocritical Dante.”
“Oh, you know what I mean!” she said, and slid off her chair to sit cross-legged on the floor. “Times change! Like, people have got tired of all that covering up. You see kids who just throw off their clothes, they want to break down that barrier and get natural again. You see it all the time, it’s just . . . open. Like . . .” Earnest and pleased with herself, her bow bent against error, her lips touched with a live coal, she sat on my floor there and did her best to bring me into the twentieth century. She sat back on her braced hands and eyed me, ironic, superior, and ribald. “I don’t know if I should tell you this.”
“I don’t either.”
“Well . . .” Actually she was determined to tell me, she couldn’t have been stopped from telling me any more than some of her kids could be stopped from throwing off their clothes and cleansing the world of its hypocrisy. She bowed her head on her knees so that her hair fell to the floor, she lifted her head and looked at me half smiling through the foliage. “What would you say to something like this,” she said. “Suppose you were at a party where everybody knew everybody else-friends, you know?–and everybody was stoned, and it turned into a gang bang? Suppose four or five fellows banged this girl while everybody else watched. Would that seem crude to you, or dirty, or immoral, or something?”
“I’d have to say we’d come a long way from Grandma.”
She laughed, this lady missionary. “You’re not kidding. But how would you take something like that? It wouldn’t necessarily be crude, or vicious, or anything, would it? They’d just be doing their thing, what they felt. They wanted it and so did she, so they did it. I suppose that shocks you, doesn’t it?”
“Some things offend me. I’m not very easy to shock.”
“But why be offended?” she said, and leaned to hug her knees and fix her wide gray eyes on me. She had quit smiling. She looked, in fact, strained. “Isn’t it just an old-fashioned code that makes you feel that moral disapproval? Once you get rid of that, isn’t a scene like that just as natural as two people going to bed in a dark room? Isn’t watching it sort of like watching a show–Living Theater or something? Who loses anything?”
“It doesn’t sound as if anybody there had much to lose,” I said. “Assuming this really happened. Did it?”
She wagged her head, her chin on her knees. “It happened, yeah.”
“So nobody lost anything. Maybe they even gained something–VD, for example. I understand it’s making a comeback under the modernized rules.”
She shook off that suggestion almost irritably. Her mood had changed within two minutes into something somber and brooding and half angry. “So you don’t think it was natural, or like a show or a parlor game.”
I began to wonder if she was talking about herself; I’m still not sure she wasn’t. I said, “Would you take your parents?”
“Oh, wow!”
“Would you talk about it with them?”
“What do you think?”
“But you don’t mind talking about it with me. I’m as old as they are.”
“You’re different. You’re educated, you’ve been around, you’re not buried in the dark ages. I feel I can talk to you. Am I wrong?”
“I hope not,” I said. “But just now you were criticizing me for my dishonest treatment of Grandmother’s sex life.”
“Oh . . . crap,” Shelly said. Clearly I inhibit her more than she admits. “I don’t know. What do you think of a scene like that?”
“I think you’re describing