248
PHILIP
L.
GREENE
"But nobody answered the question," Marsha said. "Who
is
Merle? I vote for James Mason."
"I hear he is Jewish," Lil said. Murray really broke up on that
one.
"What's so funny?"
Lil
asked. She was beginning to get sore.
Larry said, "Murray has a big anti-Jewish complex. He is tIle
only analyst in New York who refuses Jewish patients. He even married
a shikse."
Lisa smiled. "But I really think Jewish. He must be out of luck."
We finally decided that Merle was Anthony Franciosa, and
stopped for coffee and cake. Murray picked it up again at the table.
"You are not playing the game right.
If
you want to show what
impression people have of others why not ask some dangerous ques–
tions. It's only in discomfort that we find emotional truth. Heres
one:
If
somebody was drowning would this person jump in, call tor
help, or run away? Or, even better, if this person had a perverse
habit, what would it be? That's a good one, because the responder
would reveal his own tastes in perversion."
Everybody boldly agreed and I felt then that there really was a
difference between intellectual life in the city and the wasteland of
suburbia. Murray went out to be the guesser, and we decided on
Tibby Barrett as "it," since most of us knew her slightly and it would
lessen our personal embarrassment. Murray popped the question about
perversion and we went around.
Lisa, sitting in Marsha's Saarinen Womb Chair, was first. She
blushed a little, thought for a while, and then said:
"If
this person
had a perverse habit, I would say he likes to smell armpits."
"Not much of a perversion," said Murray. "You know what
Freud says about the olfactory sense and primitive man's delight in
all smells."
"But this is twentieth-century civilized man," said Lisa. "Who
today likes to handle and smell his own excretion?"
Larry, who was next, said loudly, "As a matter of fact, that was
going to be my statement about our person, that he likes to smell
human feces."
Tibby was next. I figured this was pretty rough stuff for a
closed-in upstater, but she came out with a lulu.
It
almost broke up
the game.
"If
this person was a female and had a perverse habit,"
