148
MAUREEN HOWARD
installed, its proprietor so lewd and self-interested that he is held in
check only by his own Rotary Club ambitions. The small factory town
has not retooled itself with a new morality. The old manners are a sham.
Gewinner's instincts are to withdraw on aesthetic grounds, but he
is
so
affronted by his brother who heads "The Project" with the villainy of a
robber baron and by his mother, who carries on as a heartless
grande
dame,
that he becomes a lonely saboteur. Like all of Williams' dreamers
Gewinner Pearce is after something private, romantic. His distaste for
"The Project," his hatred of the Laughing Boy Drive-In are almost in–
cidental compared to his solitary quest for a meaningful encounter with
beauty or some truth about the human heart - that glittering sentiment
that threads its way theatrically through Williams' work.
Here is Gewinner Pearce preparing for his evening of sabotage. He
is as well done as any major figure in one of the plays.
Then Gewinner would prepare to go out. He did not dress warmly.
He liked a feeling of chill which made him more conscious of the
self-contained life in his body. Chill air about his limbs made them
move more lightly, more buoyantly, and so he went out thinly clad.
He wore no undergarments. All that he wore on his nocturnal
prowlings was a midnight-blue tuxedo made of silk gabardine. Be–
fore getting into this garment Gewinner would bathe and anoint
himself like a bride, standing among a maze of indirectly lighted
mirrors in his shower room. His whole body would be sprayed with
pine-scented eau de Cologne and lightly dusted with powder.
Gossamer silk were his socks, nylons of the sheerest ply, and his
shoes weighed hardly more than a pair of gloves. Crystalline drops
cleared his eyes of fatigue, brushes polished the impeccable enamel
of his teeth and an astringent solution assured his mouth and throat
of an odorless freshness. Often this ritual of preparation would in–
clude internal bathing with a syringe, a warm enema followed by a
cold one, for Gewinner detested the idea of harboring fecal matter
in his lower intestines. He wore a single metal ornament which was
a Persian coin, very ancient, that hung on a fine silver chain. He
enjoyed the cold feeling of it as it swung pendulumlike across his
ribs and bare nipples. It was like carrying a secret, and that was
something that Gewinner liked better than almost anything
in
the
world, to have and to keep a secret. He also had the romantic idea
that someday, some galactic night, he would find the right person
to whom to make a gift of the coin. That person had not been
found, never quite, and there was the sad but endurable possibility
that the discovery would be postponed forever, but in the mean–
time the Persian coin was a delicately exciting reminder of the
fact that night is a quest.
