The Last Gentleman

pornography in order to set it at naught.
    Women, of course, are the natural pornographers today, because they are not only dispossessed by science of the complexus of human relations (all but the orgasm) but are also kept idle in their suburban houses with nothing to do but read pseudo-science articles in the Reader’s Digest and dirty novels (one being the natural preamble of the other). U.S. culture is the strangest in history, a society of decent generous sex-ridden men and women who leave each other to their lusts, the men off to the city and conventions, abandoning their wives to the suburbs, which are the very home and habitation of lewd dreams. A dirty deal for women, if you ask me.
    Don’t be too hard on Rita. She is peeved, not perverted. (The major discovery of my practice: that there are probably no such entities as “schizophrenia” and “homosexuality,” conceived as Platonic categories, but only peevishness, revenge, spitefulness, dishonesty, fear, loneliness, lust, and despair—which is not to say we don’t need psychiatrists. You people don’t seem to be doing too well, you know.)
    The only difference between me and you is that you think that purity and life can only come from eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ. I don’t know where it comes from.
    The engineer rose unsteadily from the floor of the sunken living room, where he had been reading Sutter’s casebook, and went into the bathroom. As he urinated he gazed down at the maroon toilet seat and the black tile floor. Once, he remembered, his father had visited the home of a rich Syrian to draw up a will. “They had black sheets on the bed,” he confided to his son with a regular cackle. And in truth there seemed even now something Levantine and fancy about tampering with the decent white of bathrooms and bedsheets.
    He folded the Esso map into the casebook and went down to the camper. Reading Sutter’s casebook had a strange effect upon him. His mind, instead of occupying itself with such subjects as “American women” and “science” and “sexuality,” turned with relief to the most practical matters. He drove into a filling station and while the motor was being serviced studied the Esso map, calculating almost instantly and clairvoyantly the distance to Jackson, New Orleans, and Shreveport. When the attendant brought over the dip stick, exhibiting its coating of good green Uniflow, slightly low, he savored the hot sane smell of the oil and felt in his own muscles the spring of the long sliver of steel.
    14 .
    Sure enough, just over the saddle of the farthest ridge, the last wrinkle of the Appalachians, which overlooked a raw new golf links and a snowfield of marble-chip rooftops of five hundred G.E. Gold Medallion Homes, he found the mailbox and driveway. Up the rocky slope swarmed the sturdy G.M.C., shouldering like a badger, and plunged into a thicket of rhododendron. Thick meaty leaves swept along the aluminum hull of his ship and slapped shut behind him. He took a turn in the woods but there was no sign of Kitty. While he waited for her, he lay in Jamie’s bunk and again studied the map he had found in Sutter’s apartment. Sutter’s casebook disturbed him; there were no clues here. But the map, with its intersecting lines and tiny airplanes and crossed daggers marking battlefields, was reassuring. It told him where to go.
    The towhees whistled in the rhododendron and presently the branches thrashed. There stood Kitty in the doorway with light and air going round her arm.
    â€œOh, I’m glad to see you,” he cried, leaping up and grabbing her, hardly able to believe his good fortune. “You are here!” And here she was, big as life, smelling of dry goods and brand-new chemical blue jeans. They were not quite right, the jeans, too new and too tight in the thigh and too neatly rolled at the cuff, like a Macy’s girl bound for the Catskills, but it only made his heart leap all the more. He laughed and embraced her, held her charms in his arms.
    â€œWhoa now,” she cried flushing.
    â€œEh?”
    â€œGet the game on the radio.”
    â€œGame?”
    â€œTennessee is ahead.”
    â€œRight,” he said and turned the game on but instead of listening told her: “Now. I can tell you that I feel very good about the future. I see now that while I was living with your family I was trying too hard to adapt