Eden said, “The Waldorf-Astoria just fools you because the sidewalk outside isn’t rolling. It’s in just as bad shape as the Titanic ever was.”
“All right, shut up!” she said. “You’re too morbid for me. I’m feeling better. Or maybe I’m so scared I can’t feel anything else. Let’s go back inside.”
They stood blinking in the pinkish light of the quiet passageway.
“Back in the Waldorf,” he said. “Cosy, isn’t it?” His face glistened with rain.
She panted, “So, that’s a storm at sea.”
“I hope you’ll be spared from ever finding out what a storm at sea is like. What do you want to do now? How do you feel?”
Marjorie, holding to a fire extinguisher on the bulkhead, felt the deck falling away slantwise under her feet, but the motion didn’t seem to bother her. “Sort of as though I’ve had novocaine all over. Warm and numb. I’m not seasick.”
“Good.”
“But I think I’ll go to my room. I’m all blown about. Come along.” As they reeled down the passageway, hanging to the handrails, she said, “That pill was marvelous, Mike. The fact is, I feel a bit looped.”
“That wears off.”
While she combed her hair he sat in an armchair, smoking. She noticed how straight he sat. Noel would have slouched to his collarbone in such a soft chair. Again she had a strong urge to talk to him about Noel; and why not? she thought. It would pass the time, and he might say something useful. She said, “How would you like to read a twenty-page letter I once got? It’s the real story behind my trip.”
“Twenty pages?”
“Typewritten. Double-spaced. Easy on the eyes.”
“You carry this historic document around with you?”
She pulled a small bag out of the closet and took the letter from under books and travel papers. “I’m curious to know what you’ll think.”
He began reading the worn dog-eared pages, laying them carefully one by one on his lap, face down. She sat in another armchair, watching his face, and thinking that this was a romantic moment indeed: a gorgeous bedroom on the Queen Mary, careening majestically in a night storm that rattled at the black porthole; a handsome stranger in dinner clothes, with a mysterious air and a mysterious scar, alone with her, reading an old love letter of hers; herself as pretty as she knew how to be in a black dress which disclosed all she decently could of her shoulders and bosom; two broad inviting beds. And yet, she thought, sex was as far from this room as from a hospital ward.
Mike Eden’s eyebrows shot up, and he looked at her. He resumed reading, his lips curling a bit.
“Stop right there,” she said. “What part are you reading?”
He took a slow puff at his cigar. “If your encounter with that monster Noel Airman is to have any enduring value—Is that the name of the man you’re pursuing to Paris? Noel Airman?”
“Yes. It’s rather a queer name—actually it’s a pseudonym—”
“Tall, blond, long jaw, great talker?”
“Good Lord, yes!”
“I know Noel.” She stared at him. “Don’t be so surprised, Marjorie. Half the Americans in Europe do.”
“You know Noel?”
“Noel gets around. When you meet him you don’t forget him.”
“I’m aware of that,” Marjorie said, laughing uneasily, still staring.
He dropped the letter in his lap. “Shall I go on reading?”
“As you please…. Well! You’ve really knocked my breath out.”
Eden regarded her, puffing his cigar. “You and Noel Airman, eh? Interesting.”
“You don’t approve?”
“Battle of the century, I’d say.”
“It’s just about turned into that. So long as I win, that’s all right too. Where on earth did you meet Noel?”
“Last year, in Florence.”
“Did you get to know him well?”
“About as well as most people do. That is to say, he owes me a couple of hundred dollars.”
She blushed and looked down at her lap. “That’s his worst trait.”
“Oh, mind you, Noel means to pay it back. Maybe he will, one of these years. It’s not important. Noel’s great company. We hired a car and went tooling around the Italian Alps with two other fellows, a painter and a Rhodes scholar on vacation. I paid Noel’s share while he kept waiting for a check from America to catch up with him. It never quite did.”
“Where is he now, do you know?”
“I can find out easily enough.”
“You’ll do me a great favor if you will.”
“Marjorie, are you crossing the Atlantic after a fellow without knowing where he is?”
“Well, I was sure I could locate him.”
He shook his head slowly, and went back to reading the letter. After a few moments he said, “I don’t know. Now I somehow feel as though I’m prying.”
“Oh, go ahead. Finish it. What difference does it make? Care for some whiskey and water without ice?”
“Ring for the steward. He’ll bring ice.”
“Not with you in here…. All right, grin. I’m a prude, Noel’s said so for years. You’ll take it without ice or not at all.”
“Without ice, please, by all means.”
She opened a bottle of twelve-year-old scotch from Marsha’s gift basket. He accepted the whiskey and water absently, drained the glass, and went on reading. “This is quite a letter,” he murmured.
“I’m glad you’re enjoying it. I didn’t.” She refilled the glass and put it back in his hand.
“The fact is, you probably did.”
“That’s too deep for me.” She propped pillows and lounged in the bed, sipping her drink.
He put down the last page, looking at the glass in his hand, and said, “I could swear I’ve already drunk this.”
“Gad, you really do concentrate, don’t you? I refilled it.”
“Thanks.”
“Well?”
“Well, what?”
“Does the letter repay all that attention?”
He laughed. “I got Noel furious one night. I analyzed his handwriting and told him he’d never amount to anything.”
“What, you analyze handwritings, too? How are you on reading entrails?”
“Listen, there’s a lot in handwriting analysis. We were snowed in up in the Alps, had nothing to do. I told him he had a fits-and-starts way of working, and no conscience, and a mixture of conceit and terrible self-doubt, and that he shifted between extremes of emotional dependence and independence. I’d only known him three days then.”
“Amazing.”
“So he said. What knocked him cold, though, was my telling him he’d been wavering for years over marrying a girl. I was cheating a bit there, putting together scraps of things he’d said. I said he shouldn’t marry her because he was just going to be a charming bum all his life. Kidding, of course. He sulked all night and half the next day.”
She said, “I just can’t see you and Noel together. I don’t know why. You seem to be out of different centuries.”
“I’m a shipboard acquaintance. I’m not real. I’ll vanish when the anchor goes down, like a ghost at cockcrow.”
“That sounds like Noel. But then you often do. It’s rather uncanny. I suppose that’s what has me tagging after you.”
“Well, I’ll take that as a compliment. Noel’s a great talker.” He tapped the letter on his lap. “Also quite a letter writer. If he could write like that for pay he’d make a living. But most good letter writers can’t.”
“Noel can, don’t you worry. He makes plenty of money whenever he puts his mind to it. All he needs is to steady down.”
“And you’re the one to steady him.”
“I think so. That’s what I’m going to Paris to find out, once for all.”
“Are you sure that’s the reason you’re going to Paris?”
“What do you mean? Don’t be enigmatic, you’re not psychoanalyzing me.”
He held o
ut his glass, smiling. “More, please… Score one for you. It always gets me mad when my analyst friends ask me some teasing question like that. Implying they know a hell of a lot more about me than I do. Of course that’s their whole game, this enigmatic wisdom. Though all it ever boils down to is that you’re really a homosexual, or you’d dearly love to take an axe to your old lady. Something like that.”
She handed him the drink and staggered back to the bed. The rolling seemed worse. She said, “Did you really study in Vienna?”
“Why, sure.”
“I find it hard to believe. All you seem to say about Freud is old Broadway jokes.”
Eden chuckled. “You sound like my analyst friends. I’ll admit I make stale jokes, Marjorie. I’ve fallen into the habit, from arguing with them. I think I believed in it all too strongly too young. Sooner or later you’re almost bound to rebel against your boyhood faith. My folks didn’t have any, you see, and psychoanalysis rushed into the vacuum, once I came upon the first book when I was sixteen… Anyway, it’s pointless to argue this subject seriously, with real Freudians. You can’t win. Any position you take against Freud isn’t an intellectual comment, it’s a symptom of nervous disorder. Try to lick that! ‘You disagree with us, therefore you’re sick.’ They all concur that I’m hostile to Freud because I’m in flight from some terrible subconscious secret. Unnatural urge for an affair with a kangaroo, no doubt.”
Though he said it in a light tone, there was an odd quaver in his voice. Marjorie looked at him keenly. He met the look, his eyes expressionless, and said, “Like to take a chance on the dancing? You reel around and try to keep from crashing into pillars and other couples. It’s fun, in a wild way.”
“I’d just as soon skip it,” Marjorie said. “Thanks.”
Eden said, swirling the whiskey and looking into the glass as he talked, “I’m in flight all right, you know. But not from anything secret. I can date my break with psychoanalysis as exactly as you probably can your meeting with Noel…. In fact, I’ll tell you about it. Then maybe I’ll seem a little less weird to you. When I was twenty-three, Marjorie, just starting to teach, I fell for the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen, and married her in two weeks. Gradually it turned out that she was a dreadful phony. Told me she’d dropped out of college to help support her family, when actually she’d flunked out in freshman year. Told me she was taking French lessons and studying sculpture—complete wild lies. She was just repeating things she’d heard from other girls. Boned up on book-review sections in newspapers and talked about all the new books very impressively. I was so blinded at the moment that she got away with it. Feminine wiles, pardonable enough maybe, because God knows she was in love too—but a mistake. It’s one thing to try to seem a little better than you are. It’s another thing, and a dangerous one, to pretend you’re an entirely different person.
“It was bad almost from the start. I left Emily twice, and went back each time. She would come on her hands and knees, crying, beautiful, swearing she’d do anything I wanted, anything, go back to college, study nights. Once we were back together it was all forgotten. She just didn’t have it in her to change. She’d sit at home and look mournfully at me because I was so bored and out of love. I met a marvelous girl at school, a student in one of my courses, brilliant, sweet, good—she’s married to someone else, she’s a doctor now—and I begged Emily for a divorce. This went on for two hideous years. At last she actually went to Reno. She came back after staying there three months and consuming all our savings—and she hadn’t done a thing about the divorce. Not a thing, simply sat there in Reno. She had an absolutely unbelievable capacity for doing nothing and hoping dumbly for the best.” His voice was becoming hoarse and shaky. “Well, this can either take two days or two minutes. In two minutes, I was driving with Emily along a highway late at night. This was shortly after she’d returned from Reno. We’d had some frightful quarrels, and then a miserable half-reconciliation. I fell asleep at the wheel. We smashed into a railroad overpass. My skull was fractured and Emily was killed instantly. Her neck was broken.”
He looked at Marjorie in a peculiarly embarrassed way, with a half-apologetic smile. No words came to her dry lips and dry throat. After a while he went on, “There was quite a bit of trouble with the police, of course. It takes a lot of red tape even to die accidentally. But what with me nearly dead myself, and no insurance money, and no other woman—this other girl had married long ago—the books were soon closed. It was an accident, and that was that, for the record.
“But not for me. For me it was only the beginning. From a Freudian viewpoint there are no accidents, you see. Or rather, accidents, mistakes, oversights, slips of the tongue, are icebergs poking above the water and showing colossal masses of motivation underneath. I fell asleep at the wheel, sure I did. But falling asleep is something the unconscious mind can bring about. Drowsiness in special situations can be a hell of a clue in unravelling a neurosis. That’s all too true. I had felt myself getting drowsy, had even thought of asking Emily to take the wheel. What’s more, I actually remember seeing the railroad overpass far down the highway just before I dozed off. From the analytic point of view—in which I then believed, with religious intensity—there isn’t the slightest doubt that I murdered my wife, getting rid of an intolerable burden in the only sure way I could, and revenging myself for years of misery and a crippled life.”
The bed heaved and rolled under Marjorie. She clung to the headboard with one hand. Eden’s face had gone quite ashy, though his expression was calm and even unpleasantly humorous. She said, “I don’t know enough about analysis to argue—but even if it were true you wouldn’t be responsible, not in any real sense—”
He walked to the whiskey and poured his glass half full. “Exactly what my analyst friends say—or almost exactly, Marjorie. I can give you the patter word for word, I’ve heard it so often. ‘You have unconscious death wishes, but you don’t commit unconscious murders. It’s a silly attitude. Your wife’s death isn’t really what’s troubling you. You’re covering your unsolved neurosis by harping on the accident. Find out what’s really bothering you, and you’ll stop worrying about having murdered your wife.’
“Can you tie that, Marjorie, for obsessed mumbo-jumbo? I killed my wife, sure. But that’s not what’s really bothering me. Hell, no. I was taken off the breast too early in infancy, that’s what’s bothering me. And when I’ve gotten furious at this silly obduracy and started raving at them—I could rave now, just remembering these arguments—why, they’ve sat back and nodded wisely. More symptoms.
“Whenever I do manage to corner them completely with chapter and verse from Freud, they say I’m the typical psychology teacher, all book-theory, no clinical experience. All I know is what Freud said about these things. I don’t understand the scientific facts of human nature that emerge from analytic practice to verify the theories, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and so on, with a hey nonny no…
“You see, these dogma-blinded bastards have never been involved in a fatal accident. They can’t imagine what it’s like. They go blandly on spinning the old palaver, not realizing that the packaged comfort they dispense is sheer poison to a man in my spot.
“Ordinarily, Marjorie, you understand, the wonderful thing about psychoanalysis is that it frees you from responsibility and guilt. You walk into the doctor’s office an adulterer, a liar, a drunk, a phony, a failure, a pervert. In due time, after lying around on a couch and babbling for a year or so, it turns out you’re none of these things at all. Shucks, no, it was your Unconscious all the time. An entirely different person, a guy named Joe, so to speak. Some occurrence in your childhood sex life has festered into a sort of demon inside you. Well, you track this demon down, recognize it, name it, exorcise it. You pay your bill and go your way absolved.
“That’s all perfectly fine. Unless you happen to have been in a fatal accident and killed somebody. Then this whole scheme turns upon you. It can absolutely destroy you mentally. Because don
’t you see—this is what my benighted friends will never see—it’s just as horrible to believe that a demon under the surface of your brain took charge and caused you to kill, as it is to believe that you killed in cold blood. More so, possibly. Because if you think about it, the implication is that subsurface devils possess you and can cause you to commit any number of shocking crimes.
“Well, I went through agonies I won’t bore you with, but the end of it all was a terrific nerve crisis, out of which I emerged unable to teach. I gave up psychology, and I’ve never gone back to it. It’s seven years since I’ve glanced into a professional journal, let alone a book in the field. In fact I have a kind of horror of the subject. I got interested in making money. Making money is fun, you know, and very absorbing, I’m good at it. I started out by getting a job, and eventually went into business for myself. I play a lot of cards, and read a lot of books, and that brings you up to date.”
There was a marked contrast between these casual last words and the low strained tone in which Eden said them. He was standing by the porthole, holding on to one of the metal dogs, and as the ship rolled, black water crashed against the glass, and purple lightning showed in the turbulent sky. The scar across his white forehead looked like another streak of lightning. Marjorie, greatly disturbed, said to break the silence, “It seems like a terrible waste. You must have been an excellent teacher.”
“I was. Freud had been my ruling passion for about fifteen years. What an awful emptiness it left behind—and this on top of the loss of Emily! Believe me, having a sudden silent vacuum of death in my life, instead of a problem, was shock enough. Giving up teaching really did me in. For two years I was so close to suicide that—and I swear this to you—I didn’t do it simply because I didn’t want to give strangers the trouble of cleaning up a mess that used to be me.
“Marjorie, I’ve sat in hotel rooms for weeks, reading straight through Scott, Trollope, Zola, Balzac, Richardson, Reade, Lever, all the talky old novelists, just to keep from thinking. Because if I thought, the only thing I could think about was killing myself. Not for any dramatic reason, mind you. Not out of guilt or despair or anything. Simply because it was too much pointless effort to live. It was an effort to suck in air, when I thought about it. Seeing colors was a nuisance. Just to see a red and green neon sign and distinguish the letters was work, stupid work. And panic, I lived in torpor or panic, I knew nothing else, nothing, for two years….