The Last Gentleman

here,” cried the man both privately and loudly, like a proverb, and hurried away.
    Though he had not eaten or slept since the day before, he drank two drinks and went swimming. Soon he was treading water in the deep dark end of the pool with Forney’s daughter, the only other young person present. Everyone called her Muzh or Moosh. She had the fitful and antic manner of one used to the company of her elders. In no time the two of them had their heads together, snuffling the water like seals. It was understood between them that they were being the young folk. Muzh had just returned from her college year abroad. Her shoulders were strong and sloping from bicycling around youth hostels. In the clear yellow water her strong legs bent like pants. She told him about the guests. Her way of speaking was rapid and confidential as if they had left off only a short time earlier. She rattled off some recent history. “Coop over there—” she spoke into the lambent water, nodding toward a distinguished silver-haired gent, “—is just out of the Doylestown jail, where he served six months for sodomy, though Fra says sodomy rates two to ten.” Who was Fra? (As usual, strangers expected him to know their, the strangers’, friends.) And had she, for a fact, said sodomy? He wrung out his ear. Unfortunately she was at that moment on his deaf side.
    She dawdled toward him, working the water to and fro through the sluice of her shoulder. On she went about the guests in her rapid, cataloguing voice, bent toward him, the waterline at his mouth, while he grew ever fainter with hunger and more agitated. As her knees brushed against his and she spoke of having transcended Western values, he seized her through the thick parts, fell upon her as much from weakness as desire, fainted upon her, the fine brown berry of a girl she was. “Zut alors,” she cried softly, and now perfunctorily, unsurprised, keeping herself flexed and bent away from him, she asked him about the transvaluation of values. “I couldn’t say,” he replied, disappointed. He had heard enough about values from Dr. Gamow. “No, really,” she said. “I am in something of a value crisis and so I’m deeply concerned. What can we do?” “Let’s go over yonder,” he replied, fainting with hunger and desire, and nodded to the dark polygon of the barn. “Zut,” she cried, but idly, and swam away. As he stood slack in the water, both lustful and shrunken with cold, she made forays in the water around him, flexing like a porpoise, came under him in the shallows, put him astride and unhorsed him in bluff youth-hostel style. “See you later,” she said at last and went away, but how said she it?
    Coming to himself all at once, he socked himself in the head. Swine, said he, staggering about in the shallows, white trash. Here you are in love with a certain person and bound south as a gentleman like Rooney Lee after a sojourn in the North, and at it again: pressing against girls like a horny dolphin and abusing your host besides. No more humbuggery! Leaping from the pool, he ran to the room Forney had shown him and, starved or not, threw a hundred combination punches and did thirty minutes of violent isomorphics until he dripped with sweat, took an ice-cold shower and read two pages of Living. Saints contemplated God to be rid of concupiscence; he turned to money. He returned to the pool, exhausted, ravenous, but in his right mind.
    â€œI apologize,” he told Muzh formally as they stood in line for cold cuts. “As a matter of fact I’ve been, ahem, in something of a value crisis myself and have not eaten or slept in quite awhile. I apologize for being forward with you.”
    â€œGood God,” said Muzh, brushing against him with several dorsal surfaces. “Don’t,” she whispered.
    â€œDon’t what?”
    She didn’t answer.
    Damn, thought he, and had to thrust his hand through his pocket to keep his knee from leaping.
    He ate three helpings of turkey and ham and rye bread and sat slack and heavy with his blood singing in his ears. Fortunately his host was brimming with plans for the morrow and put him to work after supper toting paraphernalia, cameras and insurance manuals, to the Chevrolet. Later he showed him the house.
    â€œYou’re going to like Mort Prince. He’s our kind of folks.” They had reached the cellar, which the engineer