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By Root 6194 0

a wonderful thing that an elderly man should still keep up an active erotic and vivid fluent emotional life. I did not agree. But when Renata called me up, weeping on the phone, and said she had never cared for this Flonzaley, she wanted me back, I said, “Oh, thank God, thank God!” and hurried straight over. That was the end of Miss Doris Scheldt, of whom I had been very fond. But fond was not enough. I was a nymph-troubled man and a person of frenzied longings. Perhaps the longings were not even specifically for nymphs. But whatever they were, a woman like Renata drew them out. Other ladies were critical of her. Some said she was gross. Maybe so, but she was also gorgeous. And one must bear in mind the odd angle or slant that the rays of love have to take in order to reach a heart like mine. From George Swiebel’s poker game, at which I drank so much and became so garrulous, I carried away one useful idea—for an atypical foot you need an atypical shoe. If in addition to being atypical you are fastidious—well, you have your work cut out for you. And is there still any typical foot? I mean by this that such emphasis has fallen on the erotic that all the eccentricity of the soul pours into the foot. The effects are so distorting, the flesh takes such florid turns that nothing will fit. So deformity has overtaken love and love is a power that can’t let us alone. It can’t because we owe our existence to acts of love performed before us, because love is a standing debt of the soul. This is the position as I saw it. The interpretation given by Renata, something of an astrologer, was that my sign was to blame for my troubles. She had never come across a more divided screwed-up suffering Gemini, so incapable of pulling himself together. “Don’t smile when I talk about the stars. I know that to you I’m a beautiful palooka, a dumb broad. You’d like me to be your Kama Sutra dream-girl.”

But I hadn’t been smiling at her. I smiled only because I had yet to read any account of the Gemini type in Renata’s astrological literature which was not entirely correct. One book in particular impressed me; it spoke of Gemini as a mental feeling-mill, where the soul is sheared and shredded. As to her being my Kama Sutra girl, she was a very fine woman, I still say that, but she was by no means fully at ease in sex. There were times when she was sad and quiet and spoke of her “hang-ups.” Now we were going to Europe on Friday, our second trip this year. There were serious personal reasons for these European flights. And if I couldn’t offer mature sympathy to a young woman, what did I have to offer? As it happened I took a genuine interest in her problems, I sympathized fully with her.

Still, I owed it to common realism to see the thing as others might see it—an old troubled lecher was taking a gold-digging floozy to Europe to show her a big time. Behind this, to complete the classic picture, was the scheming old mother, the Señora, who taught commercial Spanish in a secretarial college on State Street. The Señora was a person of some charm, one of those people who thrive in the Midwest because they are foreign and dotty. Renata’s beauty was not inherited from her. And on the biological or evolutionary side Renata was perfect. Like a leopard or a race horse, she was a “noble animal” (see Santayana, The Sense of Beauty). Her mysterious father (and our trips to Europe were made to discover just who this was) must have been one of those old-time strongmen who bent iron bars, pulled locomotives with his teeth, or supported twenty people on a plank across his back, a grand figure of a man, a model for Rodin. The Señora I believe was really a Hungarian. When she told family anecdotes I could see her transposing from the Balkans to Spain. I was convinced that I understood her, and for this claim I gave myself a strange reason; this was that I understood my mother’s Singer sewing machine. At the age of ten I had dismantled the machine and put it together again. You pushed the wrought-iron treadle. This moved the smooth pulley, the needle went up and down. You