Diary of a Yuppie by Louis Auchincloss

usually talking through their hats and that two opinions always existed as to the degree of any villain's iniquity.
    "I never seem to be able to tie you down," she would complain.
    "Why should you want to?" I would retort. "Can't you live and let live?"
    But she couldn't. She was disturbed by my tolerance of opinions that she found obnoxious. She didn't, for example, think it was at all funny when I quipped: "Some of my best friends are anti-Semites," and she wouldn't go out with me for a week when I refused to sign a petition calling for an investigation of police brutality. Alice could be very stern indeed.
    But our greatest difficulty came over her father. Alice adored Jock Norton with a hero worship that made the faintest implied criticism of him seem a besmirching mud attack, and her suspicions of my habit of mental reservation made it hard for me to be convincingly enthusiastic. Besides, I didn't like Norton. It is always difficult to like someone who dislikes oneself, and Alice's father was always sniffing out the philistine that he obviously believed to be lurking under my exterior of good will.
    Norton was a man of studied amiability and sly sarcasms who would keep you under relentless oral examination until you began to sense how much hostility might underlie that probing curiosity. For years he had been in the habit of offering me exaggerated compliments with only the faintest note of mockery: compliments on my looks, my athletic aptitude, my popularity, my good marks, my interest in literature. But when, as undergraduates at Columbia, Alice and I began to go steady, a more acerb note crept into his treatment of me. He would keep his glinting eyes fixed on me as if I were some interesting freak, running his long fingers through his long greasy hair, chewing the ends of his glasses, twisting his thin restless body as if to defy me to define his undeniable charm, as he said such things as:
    "I never cease to marvel, dear boy, at your spirited enthusiasm for such florid decadents as Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds. That a young man who might play Stover in a film version of 'Stover at Yale' should interest himself in the lacquered prose of those two old queens bespeaks wonders for the tolerance of your generation."
    "But if I could write, Mr. Norton, I should like to write like Pater."
    "Ah, the bleak wind that blows from the pure hills of youth! Avast, ye spirits of the glorious dead who made fetishes of the pungent phrase, the club that was called a club, the Anglo-Saxon term, the four-letter word! Shades of Hemingway and O'Hara, begone! Henry James is god, and Pater is his prophet!"
    "Is it necessary to choose between writers? Can't we keep them all?"
    At this moment Norton became almost serious. "No! Nobody ever loved literature who loved it all! Of course we must choose!"
    I had the distinct feeling that Norton disliked the idea of anything sexual between me and his daughter, not so much because he wanted to keep her, in a Freudian sense, for himself, as because he did not want her to give pleasure to any man. He was jealous, really, not so much of me as of her. I am quite sure that I am not making up this homosexual side of Norton's nature. It was the only thing that really explained his hostility. So long as he could not have me for himself—and I believe he was not a practicing but an inhibited pederast—he did not want anyone—certainly not a woman, most of all his beloved daughter—to have me. Norton was drawn to good-looking young men, but he hated them for the very attraction that they exercised, and he did all he could to make them seem boobs in contrast to his brilliant self. Oh, they might have beautiful bodies, yes—much good it would do them!—but who had a mind as beautiful and a wit as sharp as Jock Norton?
    Of course, he always pretended friendship for me. He would even, on occasion, ask me to join him for dinner, just the two of us, at the Yale Club, where he always