The End of the Road (18 page)

“But in his case they’re true,” Rennie insisted.

“What time is he picking you up?”

“We assumed you’d drive me home afterwards,” she said glibly.

“After we’d finished?”

“Stop it, please!”

“Well, are you ready to go? Home, I mean?”

She looked at me, bewildered.

“He’s not going to examine you each time, is he?” I grinned. “He couldn’t tell anyhow. All you have to do is swear on your scout’s honor we did our duty.”

Now for the first time she saw the real nature of her dilemma: she had to choose between going to bed with me, which was repugnant to her, and lying to Joe, which was also repugnant to her, since the third alternative—asserting her own opinion by simply refusing to comply with his policy decisions at all—was apparently beyond her strength.

“Oh, God! What would you do if you were me, Jake?”

“I’d have told him to go to hell!” I said cheerfully. “I wouldn’t have come up here in the first place. But since you did, if I were you I wouldn’t hesitate to lie to him. Give him a string of gory details. Tell him we made love five times and committed sodomy twice. He’s asking for it. I’ll bet he won’t send you up here again if you make it sound hot enough. It’s the old trick of getting rid of a bad law by overenforcing it.”

Rennie bit her knuckle and whipped her head shortly.

“I can’t lie to him. I can’t ever do that again.”

“Then tell him to go to hell.”

“You don’t understand how this thing has affected him, Jake. He’s not insane; I couldn’t even call him neurotic. I believe he’s thinking more clearly and intensely than he ever has in his life. But this is a life-and-death business with him. With both of us. It’s the biggest crisis we ever had.”

“What could he do if you just said you won’t string along with him on this one thing?”

“I can imagine him walking out flat, for good, or killing himself or all of us. I can even imagine him bringing me right back up here and coming up himself to make sure—”

“To make sure you do what you’re supposed to want to do? God, this is funny!”

“He’d think I was letting him down completely. Throwing up my hands.”

“Well, then, for Christ’s sake let’s go to bed. If you can’t pretend to take him seriously, let’s really take him seriously. I guarantee he won’t send you up here again.” I stood up. “Come on, girl: you can tell him all the things I said before and be telling the truth. We’ll give old Joe an object lesson.”

“How can you even
think
of it?” Rennie cried.

To tell the truth, my feelings were ambivalent as usual. Rennie’s conflict was the classical one between what she liked and what she approved of—rather, between her dislike of further adultery and her disapproval of lying to Joe—but mine was between two things that I approved of and also between two things that I liked. I approved of disengaging myself from any further participation in the business that had so disrupted the Morgans’ extraordinary relationship (which, I might as well add, I regarded as a strikingly ideal one, as a matter of fact, but which I knew better than to think I could have enjoyed personally in very many of my moods) yet at the same time I approved of the idea of going along with Joe on this point, both because I had pledged my co-operation and because I really believed that one good dose of his medicine would make him change his prescription. Also, though I was at times entirely capable of enjoying sexual sadism, I was not just then in a frame of mind to like an intercourse that would be pure torture for Rennie; nevertheless, as I mentioned earlier, her suffering exerted a powerful physical attraction on me. My guilt feelings, incidentally, although I’d still have agreed to their propriety, had got lost in the melodrama of Joe’s new step. I was too entirely astonished and intrigued by his action to devote much attention to feeling guilty.

“I’m not taking a stand,” I declared. “I’m an issue evader from way back. I’ll go along with you any way you want.”

“I can’t do it!” Rennie wailed.

“Let’s go home, then.”

“I
can’t!
Please,
please,
either throw me out or rape me, Jake! I can’t do anything!”

“I’m not going to make up your mind,” I said.

This too, I suppose, was sadistic, but it was pretty much honest; I really couldn’t have done very wholeheartedly either of the things she requested, and it is easier to sit still halfheartedly than to do dramatic things halfheartedly. Rennie sobbed for a full two minutes, huddled in her chair: this affair was indeed tearing her up.

Ah me, and there were so many other ways it could have been handled. Perhaps, I reflected, what would eventually destroy both Morgans, after all, was lack of imagination. I glanced up at Laocoön: his agony was abstract and unsuggestive.

THE DISINTEGRATION OF RENNIE THAT SEPTEMBER WAS NOT OFTEN AN ENTERTAINING SPECTACLE
to observe, for although, as she pointed out, it is not self-evident that every personality is valuable simply because it’s unique, nevertheless I could seldom enjoy contributing to the unhappiness of people whom I’d come to know at all well. There is no humanitarianism in this fact: for humankind in general I had no feeling one way or the other, and the plight of some specific people, Peggy Rankin for example, I must say concerned me not at all. This is merely a description of my reactionism—I wouldn’t attempt to defend it as an assumed position.

The trouble, I suppose, is that the more one learns about a given person, the more difficult it becomes to assign a character to him that will allow one to deal with him effectively in an emotional situation. Mythotherapy, in short, becomes increasingly harder to apply, because one is compelled to recognize the inadequacy of any role one assigns. Existence not only precedes essence: in the case of human beings it rather defies essence. And as soon as one knows a person well enough to hold contradictory opinions about him, Mythotherapy goes out the window, except at times when one is no more than half awake.

There were such times, but they were few. The latter part of the evening just described was one: when at length I carried Rennie to the bed (excited by her heaviness) I was able to do so only because, for better or worse, enough of my alertness was gone to permit me to dramatize the situation as part of a romantic contest between symbols. Joe was The Reason, or Being (I was using Rennie’s cosmos); I was The Unreason, or Not-Being; and the two of us were fighting without quarter for possession of Rennie, like God and Satan for the soul of Man. This pretty ontological Manichaeism would certainly stand no close examination, but it had the triple virtue of excusing me from having to assign to Rennie any essence more specific than The Human Personality, further of allowing me to fornicate with her with a Mephistophelean relish, and finally of making it possible for me not to question my motives, since what I was doing was of the essence of my essence. Does one look for introspection from Satan?

As for Rennie, she had by that time very nearly reached the condition of paralysis, and it was, I believe, with something like relief that she allowed me to cast her in the role of Mankind; what drama was on
her
mind I couldn’t say. I took her home afterwards.

“Aren’t you going to come in for a while?” she asked numbly.

But my little play had dissipated with my sexual ardor, and I was vegetable.

“Nope. I’ll see you around.”

For the rest, I felt mostly a generalized pity for the Morgans, especially for Rennie. Joe, after all, was behaving pretty consistently with his position, and that knowledge can be comforting even in cases where the position leads to defeat or disaster, as when a bridge player plays out a losing hand perfectly or an Othello loves not wisely but too well. But Rennie no longer had a position to act consistently with, not even the position of acting inconsistently, and yet, unlike my own, her personality was such that it seemed to require a position in order to preserve itself.

She came to my room three times during September and once in October. The first visit I’ve already described. The second, on Wednesday of the following week, was quite different: Rennie seemed warm, strong, even gay and a little wild. We made love zestfully at once—she went so far as to tease me for being less energetic a lover than her husband—and afterwards she talked animatedly for an hour or so over a quart of California muscatel she’d brought with her.

“Lord, I’ve been silly lately!” she laughed. “Mooning and crying around like a schoolgirl!”

“Oh?”

“How in the world could I have taken this business so seriously? You know what happened to me last night?”

“No.”

“I popped awake at three in the morning—wide awake, like I’ve been doing every night since this business started. Usually I get the shakes when that happens, and either sit up the rest of the night shivering and sweating or else wake up Joe and go over the whole thing with him again. Well, last night I woke up as usual, and the moon was shining in and I could see Joe lying there asleep—he looks adolescent when he’s asleep!—and for some reason or other while I was watching him he started picking his nose in his sleep!” She giggled at the memory and burped slightly from the wine. “Excuse me.”

“Certainly.”

“Well, that reminded me of that night we peeked in on him through the living-room window, only this time instead of hurting me it just struck me funny! The whole thing struck me funny, and how we were taking it. Joe seemed like a teenager trying to make a tragedy out of nothing, and you just seemed completely ineffectual. Does this make you mad?” She laughed.

“Of course not.”

“And I’ve been being a runny-nose little girl myself, crying all over the place and letting you two bully me around about such a stupid thing. I felt just like I feel when I let the kids get me down. Lots of times when the kids scream and fight all day I get so worked up at them I end up screaming and crying myself, and I always feel silly afterwards and a little bit ashamed. How can grown people make so much fuss over something so silly? Especially married people with kids?”

“Poor little coitus,” I smiled. In fact, Rennie’s high spirits produced a contrary feeling in me: the happier she grew, the more glum I became, and the more she professed to take the matter lightly, the graver it seemed to me.

“Such a completely insignificant thing to take seriously! It’s hardly worth thinking about, much less breaking up a marriage over! I could sleep with a hundred different men and not feel any different about Joe!”

“Well, now,” I protested snappishly, “of course nothing’s significant in itself, but anything’s serious that you want to take seriously. There’s no reason to make fun of another man’s seriousnesses.”

“Oh, stop it!” Rennie cried. “You’re as bad as Joe is. I think all our trouble comes from thinking too much and talking too much. We talk ourselves into all kinds of messes that would disappear if everybody just shut up about them.” She drank another glass of wine—her fourth or fifth—while I still nursed my first one. “You know what I think? I think none of this would have happened if we all didn’t have so much time on our hands. I really do. You claim you don’t know how you could ever have begun the whole business, but I think you did it because you’re bored.”

“Is that so?”

“You don’t have any ambitions, you’re not very busy or very handsome, you live by yourself. I think of you up here all day long, rocking in your rocking chair, daydreaming and cooking up schemes, just because you’re bored. I think the key to your whole character is that you’re just bored.”

“I’m not just anything,” I said without conviction. “Maybe
also
bored, but never
just
bored.” Rennie, it was clear, was practicing a little layman’s Mythotherapy herself: anybody who starts talking in terms of keys to people’s characters is making myths, because the mystery of people is not to be explained by keys. But I was too glum just then to take more than perfunctory note of her playwriting.

“Well,
I
think you’re just bored; I don’t care what you think. I don’t care what you or Joe either one thinks about this mess or about me any more: I’ve stopped taking it seriously. I’ve even stopped thinking about it.”

“Good for you.”

“That gets under your skin, though, doesn’t it?” she laughed. “It takes the fun out of it when I stop being hurt. Well, the devil with you! I’ve stopped being hurt. Look how down in the mouth you are. You look like you’ve messed your pants or something.” The idea amused her; she giggled vinously. “That’s just how Joe looked this morning—gloomy as a prophet. You’re pouting because your game is spoiled. Now cheer up and get drunk with me or else take me home.”

I emptied my glass and refilled it. “You realize, of course, that I don’t believe a word of this. It’s brave, but it’s not convincing.”

“You don’t dare believe it,” Rennie taunted.

“I don’t dare to, and you couldn’t if your life depended on it.”

“I don’t care,” Rennie declared. “I don’t give a damn.”

“I don’t believe Joe knows anything about it either.”

“I don’t care.”

“He wouldn’t get gloomy. He’d walk out.”

“That’s what you think. We’re tied tighter than that. I don’t know why I worried in the first place; no piece of nonsense like this could break Joe and me up. It would take a stronger person than you, Jake. You don’t really know anything about Joe and me. Not a damned thing.”

“I said last time you should tell him to go to hell.”

“Maybe I’ll tell you both to go to hell.”

“Okay, girl, but watch that left hook of his when you do.”

This remark canceled the effects of at least three glasses of muscatel.

“I don’t think Joe would ever hit me again,” she said seriously.

“Then skip home with that quart of muscatel in you, tweak his nose for him, and tell him you can’t think seriously any more about anything as silly as your sex life,” I suggested. “Tell him the whole trouble is he thinks too much.”

“He wouldn’t hit me, Jake. He’d never do that again.”