ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF
529
chral that it was church for him, and all his other houses (with the
exception of the town house, a complex affair) were no more than
boudoirs for his pleasure, doll houses in liege to the attractive child–
hood he had never spent except for some rare bitch-perfumed hours
with his mother.
Yes, this was a house for rare occasions, and he visited it seldom,
and never in summer when Provincetown was a whore's trunk of
frying hot dogs, boat excursionists from Boston, battalions of the gay
and regiments of the hip-he saved it for rare weekends in fall and
winter, and so far as most people knew, it was not even his house–
he had given it on virtually permanent loan to the most extraordinary
of his former call girls, a tall dignified Negress with a velvet sen–
suality who had made her fortune in company with Marion, and
now-her various investments concealed-was a rich hostess of no
small reputation in many parts of New York, her parties indeed so
well run that her net of fine jazz captured the best of intellectual
stimulation-what little there was in that dying electric city. This
Negress, who had through her career a series of names (the last, by
which people now knew her, being Cara Beauchamp) had found in
herself a set of exquisitely parallel personalities like hand-worked
nesting tables, and so had avoided the hermetic fate of many call
girls and almost all prostitutes-she had dissolved that cyst of char–
acter, that prison of non-perceptive muscles which maroons even a
high grade whore in self-pity, hysteria, and loathing for her material.
No, this one was fluid, she had a touch of accommodation for all
perverse duties, blown into a not uncool flame by her fortune in
studying with a master. So she was capable of using her encyclo–
pedic knowledge of the colliding congesting rhythms in the bodies of
the .strangers she met; and the shyest poor parcel of a man, a dis–
tinguished physicist let us say, ashy, halfway to the grave, with a
dull grey suit and black scuffed shoes dulled to grey, and a pallor
of face whose equivocal good health was yellow, and whose oncoming
death was grey, was capable still of appealing to her: somewhere in
that habit-haunted body and far-departed mind, somewhere in that
racked frame which had all the animal magnetism of a catatonic
worm (chill and bitter-smelling in its parts) there was a piston of
will which would (all whore-patience and art properly applied) give
her a memorable night even if the poor will-driven gentleman were
