“No opinion,” I said, meaning I felt contradictory opinions.
“One of the things he thinks we mustn’t do is drop you yet, or let you drop us. That’s why he brought me up here. Refusing to see you again is—evading the issue.”
“Well, I’m happy as hell to see you, but I must say I’m all in favor of evading any issue if it’s both painful and insoluble. Aren’t you?”
With all her heart, I could see, she was indeed.
“No,” she said determinedly. “I agree with Joe completely.”
“Well, what are we supposed to do? Talk philosophy?”
Head-whipping. “Jake, for Christ’s sake, tell me honestly what you think of Joe.”
“I honestly have a number of opinions,” I smiled.
“What are they?”
“Well, in the first place—not first in order of intensity—he’s noble as the dickens.”
Rennie laughed and cried at once.
“He’s noble, strong, and brave, more than anybody I’ve ever seen. A disaster for him is a disaster for reason, intelligence, and civilization, because he’s the quintessence of these things. There’s nobody else like him in the United States. I believe this.”
Rennie so melted that, had I chosen, I could have embraced her at that moment without protest.
“In the second place,” I said, “he’s completely ridiculous. Contemptible. A buffoon, a sophist, and a boor. Arrogant, small, intolerant, a little bit cruel, and even stupid. He uses logic and this childish honesty as a club and a shield at the same time. Or you could say he’s just insane, a monomaniac: he’s fixed in the delusion that intelligence will solve all problems.”
“But you know very well he could reply to that!”
“Sure, he can defend his position and his method, but he can’t solve this problem happily in terms of it. But you know, all these versions of him are complimentary, because they’re extreme. My last opinion, which I don’t hold any more strongly than the others, is that he’s a little bit of all these things, but mainly just a pretty unremarkable guy, more pathetic than tragic, and more amusing than contemptible. Faintly grotesque and in the last analysis not terribly charming or even pleasant. Kind of silly and awfully naïve. That’s our Joseph. Not a man to take too seriously, because he simply doesn’t represent his position brilliantly enough or even coherently enough. I should add that I feel all these things about myself, too, and some more besides.”
“Jake, you know he could answer all those charges.”
“Sure. The beauty of it is that it doesn’t make any difference whether he can or not. They’re not charges: they’re opinions. Hell, Rennie, don’t get the wrong idea: I like Joe all right.”
“You’re acting awfully superior.”
I laughed. “One of my opinions, along with the one that I’m inferior to Joe in most ways, is that I’m superior to him in most ways. You be honest with me now: what does Joe really have on his mind in sending you up here?”
“We’ve had to agree that even if you’re the one who started the whole thing, I couldn’t have allowed you to influence me if I hadn’t wanted to be influenced. You took advantage of a weak time in my life, but you didn’t rape me. I can’t deny Joe’s statement that if I ended up in bed with you it’s because when all’s said and done I wanted to, no matter how repugnant the idea is now. So Joe insists that all my dislike for you now is beside the point. He asked me how I’d have felt three weeks ago if he’d suggested that I make love to you, and I had to say, ‘I don’t know.’ Then he asked me how I’d feel if he suggested it now, and I told him I was horrified and repelled by the idea. He said that’s the sort of reaction we have to guard against, because it obscures the problem. We have to be as honest as possible about what we really believe, and not confuse it with what we think is safe or prudent to believe, and we have to act on our real beliefs so we can know where we stand. And apparently—this is what Joe said—I believe it’s all right for me to make love to other men, at least to you, whether I want to admit it to myself or not, since I did it.”
“Good Lord!”
“Jake—he sent me up here to do it again.”
“But you disagree with him about this, don’t you?”
She did, of course, as much as she’d disagreed about the necessity of not evading the whole issue, but she’d already committed herself to agreeing with him on that, and for that matter on everything else. It took her a moment to answer.
“I hate the idea, Jake! Everything in me recoils at the idea. But that hate is just like my feelings about you. Nobody has to point that out to me. I’m lost, Jake! I’m not as strong as Joe or even you. I’m not strong enough to get caught in this!”
Well, now. It occurred to me that Joe’s position, while entirely illogical (Rennie’s single adultery, of course, did not at all necessarily imply that she believed extramarital sex was generally “all right” with either other men in general or me in particular: at most it implied that she’d been willing to do it just once), afforded me a chance to really persecute her if I wanted to. It was a great temptation to cut short the conversation and say, “Okay, babe, there’s the bed”; but I was not in a Rennie-torturing mood.
“Are you willing to do it, then?” I asked her.
“No! God, it’s the last thing in the world I could ever do again!”
“Joe’s insane. You know, I could say this strikes me as being perverted as hell on his part.”
“Go ahead and say it. Then you won’t have to try to understand him.”
“That’s a wonderful line,” I laughed. “It cancels out any possible criticism anyone could ever make of him! That line and the one about his being strong enough to be a caricature of himself—those two defenses make anybody unassailable.”
“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 lett
ing 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.
10
The Disintegration of Rennie That September Was Not Often an Entertaining Spectacle
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.