“Well, I guess I pulled out of this schizoid state, which was what it was, because I was meant to live, and not die. I don’t know what else did it. And I emerged with this jeering attitude about analysis, which you call making Broadway jokes. It’s second nature by now.
“Once you lose faith in all that, believe me, you really lose it. An unbelieving Catholic is nothing to an unbelieving Freudian. Where’s their id and their libido, anyway? In the brain? In the kidneys? When I was a kid arguing religion we used to say nobody ever saw a soul in a test tube. Well, who ever caught an id in a test tube? It’s all a lot of metaphors—and when you take metaphors for facts, what you have is a mythology. Mind you, the old man was a Homer or a Dante, in his way, quite up to writing out a mythology that would span the entire range of moral judgments. That’s what his work has become. The Freudians say they make no moral judgments—I used to say so myself with great assurance—but the fact is, they do absolutely nothing else. They can’t do anything else, because their business is evaluating and guiding behavior. That’s morality. What they mean is they don’t make conventional moral judgments. They sure don’t….
“All right, now I’ll shut up about this, obviously it’s my King Charles’ head. I haven’t gotten going this way in ages. In sum, Freud says I’m a murderer, and I say the hell with him, and that’s my little story, Marjorie.” He was pacing again. He stopped at the armchair, picked up Noel’s letter, and flourished the pages at her. “Our friend Mr. Noel Airman really touched off this outburst, if you want to know. Noel’s quite an iconoclast, isn’t he? Probably impressed you deeply. Rightly so. He’s a wonderful talker. Still, Noel is very much a creature of his time, so he takes the current myths for solid facts.” He tossed the letter on the bed at Marjorie’s feet in an openly contemptuous gesture. “The one thing in all those twenty pages that Noel takes seriously is the analytic explanation of his own conduct. He’s right proud of it. It never occurs to him that the Oedipus complex really doesn’t exist, that it’s a piece of moralistic literature. He’s as orthodox as your own father, Marjorie, in his fashion, but he doesn’t know it. Judas priest, how well I know the type! Sweeping the dust of orthodoxy out the front door, and never seeing it drift in again at the back door, settling down in somewhat different patterns. The vilest insult you can hurl at them is to tell them they believe in something. Yet all Noel Airman really is, Margie, is a displaced clergyman. You have no idea, till you’ve read the literature of neurosis, how full the woods are of these displaced creatures. Brave skeptics all, making a life’s work out of being dogmatic, clever, supercilious—and inwardly totally confused and wretched.”
Marjorie said, startled, “Noel once talked about becoming a rabbi. He wasn’t serious, really. But he worked himself up terrifically over it.”
Mike Eden grinned. “It’s just as well Noel didn’t become a rabbi. It would have been hard on the husbands in the congregation.” He walked to the whiskey bottle, picked it up, then set it down again without pouring. “I believe I have half emptied this bottle in less than an hour. Also more than half emptied my brain. I feel remarkably good. I feel like the Ancient Mariner after spinning his yarn for the Wedding Guest.” He came to the bed and stood beside her. “I’m thirty-nine. How old are you?”
“Twenty-three. Twenty-four in November,” Marjorie said uneasily, looking up at him. “Why?”
“When I got out of college,” Eden said, “you were five years old.”
“I guess that’s right,” Marjorie said. “I’m not thinking clearly.”
“Of course you’re not. I’ve stupefied you with words.” He took her hand. “Well, maybe I’ve demonstrated one thing to you that may prove useful in time. Noel Airman isn’t the only man in the world who can talk. As a matter of fact, Margie, it’s a completely negligible accomplishment.” He pulled her to her feet, and kissed her once on the mouth, a real kiss. She leaned back in his arms, astonished, unprotesting, and more than a little stirred. She said softly, “Yes? What’s this?”
Mike Eden’s look was tender, shrewd, and extremely melancholy.
“Plain self-indulgence, I guess. I’ve always liked blue eyes and brown hair, and girls about as tall as you. Good night, Margie.”
He went out, leaving her rather stunned.
Chapter 43. THE PREMONITION
“Let me have a cigarette, darling.” Marjorie said it without thinking, but then the endearing word rang strange in her ears. They were sitting side by side on deck chairs in morning sunlight, wrapped in blankets, reading. It was the fourth day of the crossing.
He passed the cigarettes and matches from his lap to hers without looking up. He was reading The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft; Marjorie had glanced at it and thought it a very dull book, but he was absorbed in it. He had the ability to go into a virtual trance over a printed page. He read swiftly and his taste was queer; the first day he had been finishing a fat tome, The Theory of Money and Credit, and he had since gone through a couple of mysteries, a long paperback novel in French, and a book by Wodehouse over which he had laughed like a fool.
She liked to look at his face when he read. His brows, the lines of his mouth and cheekbones, even the scar, seemed to converge to the middle of his forehead. She admired and envied the visible concentration.
Lighting her cigarette, she studied him, wondering how “darling” had happened to slip out. Marjorie had been thinking a great deal about Mike Eden in the past few days. She was quite sure she wasn’t in love with him. His occasional kisses were pleasant, and she liked to dance with him; his arm around her waist felt good; but the charming little uneasiness that she had always experienced, dancing with Noel, wasn’t exactly there. Once, however, she had come to the main lounge and found him dancing with another girl, and a pang much like jealousy had gone through her. She did feel comfortable near him, and rather lost away from him. At the moment, sitting beside him in the paired intimacy of two deck chairs, she felt tranquil and in health as she seldom had in recent years. All this didn’t square, she realized, with the kind of desperate love that was supposed to be driving her across the Atlantic after Noel Airman; but she had heard and read enough about shipboard romances to take what was happening with several large grains of salt. There was something dreamlike and misty about her present tranquillity—rather as though she were continually taking Eden’s “happiness pills”; and she strongly suspected that the day she set foot on solid earth again the old ache for Noel would rush through all her nerves, while Eden would fade to a forgotten shadow.
Meantime, the serene peace of the crossing, however unreal, was hers to enjoy; and she was enjoying it heartily.
“There goes the Gestapo,” she murmured. He glanced up at Hilda strolling by on the arm of the man in the green jacket. The two Germans ignored Eden and Marjorie, as they had been doing for the past couple of days. Marjorie said, “I suppose it was inevitable that those two team up.”
“Pure blood calling to pure blood,” Eden said with a grimace, turning back to his book.
“Her ankles really are pretty bad.”
“Mm,” Eden said.
“Mine aren’t.”
Eden reluctantly took his eyes from his book and inspected the bulky outline of Marjorie’s blanketed form. “You’re a captivating dish from head to toe. I can’t tell you how much I envy Noel Airman. Especially since he’s a thousand miles from here, and can read in peace if he wants to.” He took a cigar out of a case in his pocket.
“You don’t really envy him. You think he’s a worthless worm, and that I’m throwing myself away on him.” The fragrant cigar smoke drifted past her nose. “You know, I’ll be sorry when this trip is over.”
“Why? You’ll rush panting into Noel’s arms a few hours after we land, and life will blaze brightly forever after.”
“Don’t be so superior. I’m well aware that Noel will be as much trouble as he’s always been, or more. But I feel so marvelously detached from all my problems—even from Noel—here on the b
oat. I haven’t had such a respite in years. It’s doing wonders for my nerves. I’d like to just ride back and forth on the Queen Mary three or four times before I tackle Noel.”
“I don’t think you need it.” He started to read again, calmly drawing on the cigar.
Marjorie had struck one of the discursive essays in Tom Jones. She felt very little like reading, and very much like talking. She picked up a pad of writing paper and scrawled her name on a sheet. “How about analyzing my handwriting?”
Yawning, he put the book aside, marking his place with the flap of the jacket. “This is as bad as being married. Are you sure you want your soul to be seen into? Write a few lines. Signatures are meaningless.”
She scrawled a speech from Pygmalion. “Pretty dull handwriting,” she said, “now that I look at it.”
He studied the paper, puffing out his cheeks. “It’s changed quite a bit.”
She blinked. “How can you know that? Did Noel show you my writing?”
“No. It’s a handwriting that’s undergoing change, that’s all.”
“Gad. Uncanny.” The fact was that much of the elegance she had once cultivated had dropped out of her writing in the past year or two—the Greek e’s, the long heavy vertical lines, the smart initial letters.
For about ten minutes he was silent, staring at the page, now and then nodding. She became self-conscious. “Well, say something.”
Crumpling the paper, he threw it across the deck; the wind whipped it out over the rail. “Sorry. I can’t see a thing. Get your money back from the cashier.”
“You dog, you can’t get away with that.”
He was looking at her with unusual warmth, a small smile in the corners of his mouth. “I’ll tell you just two things I observed. Then I’m off to order some coffee. First, I’m afraid Noel’s a pretty dirty son of a bitch, after all. Second, your handwriting is almost exactly like Anitra’s.”
“Anitra?”
“The girl I didn’t marry.”
At lunch he had a meager vegetable salad and ice cream. She said, “What are you, a vegetarian or something? I don’t think I’ve seen you eat meat on this trip.”
“I weigh 180 pounds. Until a year ago I never went over 160. I’m not going to balloon into middle age if I can help it.”
“Curious that you, of all people, should be vain.”
“You’re quite right,” he said amiably. “With this chopped-up phiz of mine it’s ridiculous, but I never have liked fat people.”
“Darling” (there it was again) “I didn’t mean that. It’s just that you have such an unearthly detachment about everything else, I wouldn’t think you’d care.”
“A man who lives alone gets fussy about himself, Marjorie. He has nothing else to fuss over.”
“Do you think you’ll marry again?”
“No.”
“That’s nice and definite.”
“Might as well live out the sunset this way.”
“Sunset indeed! Thirty-nine.”
“I’ve outlived Keats, Mozart, Marlowe, Alexander the Great, and Jesus. I’m satisfied.”
He had said things like this before. What distressed Marjorie most was his matter-of-fact good humor about it. He sometimes sounded like a man with an incurable disease who had become used to the idea. She stared at him as he ate his ice cream. He was a healthy, vigorous man, with clear hazel eyes and a fresh sunburned skin; only his tense movements, the rather rigid way he held himself, the habitual drumming of his fingers, were in any way abnormal; and these things merely showed excessive nervousness. The gray hair emphasized rather than detracted from the picture of vigor. She said, “Why do you talk this way? Is it a line you consider amusing or smart? I don’t. It’s very upsetting. It would be more upsetting if I’d known you longer. It gives me the chills, frankly.”
“I’m sorry. When I talk that way I’m not thinking, it’s such a matter of course to me. Possibly it’s a subtle appeal for sympathy, but I hope not. I’m not aware of being in the market for sympathy.”
“How can you feel in the sunset at your age? Don’t you think that’s very strange?”
“It’s hard to describe how I feel. It’s—I think it’s a bit like coming to the end of a long book. The plot’s at its thickest, all the characters are in a mess, but you can see that there aren’t fifty pages left, and you know that the finish can’t be far off. Theoretically, the thing could go on for five hundred pages more, but you know it won’t. Well, of course I haven’t got the book of my life in hand, or the narrow band of pages still to read. I just have the sensation. It’s not at all an uncommon thing, you know, this sense of an impending end. It’s a classic symptom of neurotic anxiety. I certainly follow the anxious pattern, so you can call it a symptom and stop worrying about it. People live to ninety with such symptoms.”
“Well, then, you should have the sense to laugh at yourself.”
“Unfortunately, Marjorie, so far as I’m concerned, expressions like ‘neurotic anxiety’ are just educated noise. Who really knows what the affliction is, what it comes from, what it means? It’s like a wart. You can describe it and you can treat it empirically, which is a three-dollar word for ‘by guess and by God.’ But that’s all. Some people get over it. Some people live with it, as I say, to a ripe worrisome age. Some die young, just as they knew they would. Not suicides, either. They run through the fifty pages and the book is over. Somehow they knew.”
“That’s pure mysticism.”
“Well, I’m a mystic, more or less.”
She laughed, but he didn’t. She said, “Really, I’ve never met a mystic and I don’t think you’re one. Where’s your sheet, your sandals, and your long hair? You’re far too sensible.”
“There’s quite a lot in the literature,” he said, “about premonitions. I’ll grant that when you’re engaged in a course of action that’s foolish or dangerous, and hiding the folly or danger from yourself, the subconscious mind seizes on any gloomy fact like a broken mirror, or an ominous slip of the tongue, or a black cat in the way, to try to scare you into saving yourself. That accounts for a fraction of the cases. But the truth is, we don’t know anything about the nature of time, and damned little about the mind. I think some premonitions are real. I can’t explain why. I can’t explain why an embryo grows five fingers, for that matter.”
“How can you compare the two? The way the embryo grows fingers is a scientific fact. The chromosomes control that.”
His gloomy face lit with amusement. “How silly of me. I forgot about the chromosomes. Well, let’s say my premonition is part of a neurotic anxiety, shall we? I’m in no hurry to get into a grave, not any more. I find what I’m doing damned interesting.”
“The chemical business?”
“Don’t say it with such contempt. It’s a romantic trade.” He glanced at his watch. “Bridge-playing time. Sure you won’t change your mind and come along?”
“Once was enough. I won’t play with a shark like you, I feel too idiotic. Anyway, I’ve never liked cards much. Go ahead, have fun.”
Tom Jones had never seemed duller than it did that afternoon. She read several pages over and over, alone in a deck chair that heaved disagreeably. The sky turned leaden and then disappeared as the ship was engulfed in a drifting gray fog. The sea, invisible a few feet beyond the rail, smashed at the ship with menacing deep roars. She would have liked one of Eden’s seasickness pills, but she didn’t want to interrupt him at cards. He was another man when he played: forbidding, curt, abstracted. She closed the book, lay back, and dozed.
“Tea?”
Eden was standing over her, wrapped in a trench coat and gray muffler; the deck steward was beside him with the tea wagon. Rain was lashing the windows and it was almost dark, though the overhead clock read only quarter to five. She rubbed her eyes and sat up. “Why sure, I’ll have tea.”
After the steward had gone Eden said, “Want one of these?” She took the red capsule gratefully from his palm, and swallowed it with a sc
alding gulp of tea. “Weather’s getting wild again,” she said.
He nodded. A minute or so passed. “I’m sorry, Marjorie.”
“Sorry for what?”
“I should have sworn off that handwriting business years ago. I always come out with something stupid. I shouldn’t have said Noel’s a son of a bitch.”
She smiled at him with a trace of indulgence. “Why, that’s exactly what he is. The bad part is that I’ve always liked that about him, as well as everything else. Now if you’ll concentrate your vast brain and write a book explaining why girls are drawn to sons of bitches, you’ll really do humanity a service. You’ll be another Freud.”
He laughed, but his forehead knotted, the lines of concentration pulling in toward the center. “It’s a good question. The heroes in romantic books, for instance, all tend to be sons of bitches, don’t they? From Heathcliff down to Rhett Butler… Of course my analyst friends would say all women are masochists at heart, or it’s the search for the father as pain-inflicter, and all that. But setting aside such incantations, let’s see… One thing is obvious. The son of a bitch, considered as a type, has vitality. He’s a dasher, a smasher, a leaper. There’s promise in a son of a bitch. When you go to buy a puppy, you know, you’re not supposed to take the sweet one that licks your hand. You’re supposed to pick the most rambunctious rascal of the litter, the one that’s roaring around, tearing the furniture, messing in the middle of the carpet, giving all the other pups hell. He’ll make the best dog. A woman looking for a husband is in a sense getting herself a domestic animal, so it would follow that—” Marjorie burst out laughing. Eden said, “I’m quite serious. She feels something missing in a guy who’s housebroken already. Instinct tells her that a son of a bitch will tame down into a guy worth having, a hubby with a little zing to him, and the vital energy to pull a heavy load a long way. She’s not wrong, exactly. But she has to make sure she isn’t buying a congenital and unchangeable son of a bitch. That’s the big question mark. Is the pup just displaying youthful high spirits, or is he a permanent biter and messer?”