“Did you fling yourself at him then?”
“No. I was hurt, and I told him he wasn’t so hot himself.”
“Good!”
“You’re silly to say that, Jake.”
“I retract it.”
“Don’t you see that right now you’re doing all the things that Joe would never do? Those pointless remarks, half teasing me. Well, Joe just shrugged his shoulders at what I said and walked off, leaving me on the bench—he didn’t give a damn for courtesy.”
“On the bench?”
“Yes, I forgot to tell you. The night all this happened my roommate and I were having a party for some reason or other, and all our New York friends were there—just ordinary people. We’d been drinking and talking silly and horsing around and all: I can’t even remember what we did, because I was still in my fog then. About halfway through the evening Joe had said he wanted to go walking, and I hadn’t especially wanted to leave the party, but I went anyhow. We walked around in Riverside Park for a while, and when we sat on the bench I thought he was going to neck. He’d never bothered much with that before, and I was kind of surprised. But he came out with this other instead and then walked off. I realized then for the first time what a complete blank I was!
“I went back to the party and got as drunk as I could, and the drunker I got, the more awful everybody seemed. I discovered that I’d never really listened to people before, what they said, and now when I heard them for the first time it was amazing! Everything they said was silly. My roommate was the worst of all—I’d thought she was a pretty bright kid, but now that I was listening to her she talked nothing but nonsense. I thought if I heard another word of their talk I’d die.
“Finally, when I was good and drunk, my roommate tried to get me to take a fellow to bed with me. Everybody else had gone but two fellows—my roommate’s boy friend and this other guy—and they’d made up their minds to sleep with us. My roommate was willing if I was willing, and you know, I was disgusted with her, not because of what she wanted to do but because she was too dumb to do anything clearly. But Joe had made me feel so awful and useless, once he’d opened my eyes, that I just didn’t give a damn what happened to me; I assumed he was gone for good.
“It was funny as hell, Jake. I was a virgin, but that had never meant anything to me one way or the other. This fellow wasn’t a bad guy, just a thin, plain-looking boy who worked in an office somewhere, and with the liquor in him he was pawing and poking me like a real he-man. When I decided I didn’t care what happened to me I grabbed him by the hair with both hands and rubbed noses with him. I was bigger than he was, and he fell right off the couch!
“My roommate and her boy friend were already in the bedroom, so I helped the guy take his pants down right in the living room. He was scared to death of me!
He wanted to turn off the lights and turn on the music and undress me in the dark and spend a half hour necking before he started and this and that and the other—I called him a fairy and pulled him right down on the rug and bit him till the blood came. You know what he did? He just lay there and hollered!”
“Lord, I don’t blame him!” I said.
“Well, I knew if he didn’t do something quick it would be too late, because I was hating myself more every second. But the poor boy passed out on the floor. I thought it would be fun to straddle him like he was and give him artificial respiration—”
“My God!”
“I was drunk too, remember. Anyhow, I couldn’t make it work right, and to top things off I got sick all over him.”
I shook my head in awe.
“Then I was so disgusted I walked out of the place and went over to Joe’s room—I lived on a Hundred and Tenth and he lived on a Hundred and Thirteenth, right near Broadway. I didn’t give a damn what he did to me then, after this other guy.”
“I won’t ask you what he did.”
“What he did was take one look at me and throw me in the shower, clothes and all: remember I’d vomited all over myself. He turned the cold water on and let me sit there while he fixed some soup and tomato juice, and then he put pajamas and a robe on me and I ate the soup. That was all. I even slept with him that night—”
“Hey, Rennie, you don’t have to tell me all this.”
Rennie looked at me, surprised.
“No, I mean slept. He didn’t make love to me, but he’d never have slept in a chair all night just for propriety’s sake. Don’t you want to hear this?”
“Sure I do, if you want to tell it to me.”
“I do want to tell it to you. I’ve never told anybody this stuff before, and Joe and I have never even mentioned it, but nobody ever suggested to me before that our marriage might look silly, and I think it’s important to me to tell you about it. I don’t believe I ever even thought about it until you started making fun of us.”
“I admire Joe’s restraint,” I said uncomfortably.
“Jake, he is a Boy Scout in some ways, I guess, but he had another reason, too. When I was sober he told me he just wasn’t so hard up he had to take advantage of me when I was helpless. He said he’d like to make love to me, but not just for that—anything we did together we had to do on the same level, understanding it in the same way, for the same purpose, nobody making allowances for anybody else, or he just wasn’t interested. But he told me he’d like a more or less permanent relationship.
“ ‘Do you mean marry me?’ I said. He said, ‘It doesn’t make a damn to me, Rennie. I’d rather get married, because I don’t like the horseshit that goes with most mistress-lover relationships, but you’d have to understand what I mean by a more or less permanent arrangement.’ What he meant was that we’d stay together as long as each of us could respect everything about the other, absolutely everything, and working for that respect would be our first interest. He wasn’t much interested in just having a wife or a mistress, but this other thing he was intensely interested in.
“Do you know what we did? We talked about it almost steadily for two days and two nights, and all that time he wouldn’t touch me or let me touch him. I didn’t go to work and he didn’t go to class, because we both knew this was more important than anything else we’d ever done. He explained his whole attitude toward things, all of it, and asked me more questions about myself than I’d ever been asked before. ‘The world is full of tons and tons of horseshit, and without any purpose,’ he said. ‘Only a few things could ever be valuable to me, and this is one of them.’ We agreed that on every single subject, no matter how small or apparently trivial, we’d compare our ideas absolutely impersonally and examine them as sharply as we could, at least for the first few years, and he warned me that until I got into the habit of articulating very clearly all the time—until I learned how to do that—most of the more reasonable-sounding ideas would be his. We would just try to forget about my ideas… He wanted me to go back to school and learn a lot of things, not because he thought scholarship was so all-important, but because that happened to be his field, and if I stayed ignorant of it we’d just get farther and farther apart all the time. There was to be no such thing as shop talk, no such thing as my interests and his interests. What one of us took seriously both ought to be able to take seriously, and our relationship was first on the list, over any career or ambition or anything else. He told me that he would expect me to make the same heavy demands on myself and on him that he made on himself and would make on me, and that they always had to be the same demands.”
“God!”
“Do you see what that meant? Joe had no friends, because he would expect a lesser degree of the same kind of thing from a friend—expect them to be sharp and clear all the time. So I scrapped every last one of my friends, because you had to make all kinds of allowances for them; you couldn’t take them as seriously as all that. I had to completely change my mind not only about my parents, but about my whole childhood. I’d thought it was a pretty ideal childhood, but now I saw it as just so much cottonwool. I threw out every opinion I owned
, because I couldn’t defend them. I think I completely erased myself, Jake, right down to nothing, so I could start over. And you know, the thing is I don’t think I’ll ever really get to be what Joe wants—I’ll always be uncertain, and he’ll always be able to explain his positions better than I can—but there’s nothing else to do but what I’ve done. As Joe says, it’s all there is.”
I shook my head. “Sounds bleak, Rennie.”
“It’s not!” she protested. “Joe’s wonderful; I wouldn’t go back if I could. Don’t forget I chose to do this: I could walk out any time, and he’d support the kids and me.”
But it seemed to me that she chose it as I choose my position in the Progress and Advice Room.
“Joe’s remarkable,” I agreed, “if you go for that sort of thing.”
“Jake, he’s wonderful!” Rennie repeated. “I’ve never seen anybody anything like Joe, I swear. He thinks as straight as an arrow about everything. Sometimes I think that nothing Joe could think about would ever be worth the sharpness of his mind. This will sound ridiculous to you, Jake, but I think of Joe like I’d think of God. Even when he makes a mistake, his reasons for doing what he did are clearer and sharper than anybody else’s. Don’t laugh at that.”
“He’s intolerant,” I suggested.
“So is God! But you know why Joe’s intolerant: he’s only intolerant of stupidity in people he cares about! Jake, I’m better off now than I was; I wasn’t anything before. What have I lost?”
I grinned. “I suppose I should say something about your individuality, Rennie. People are supposed to mention individuality at times like this.”
“Joe and I have talked about that, Jake. God, please of all things don’t accuse him of being naïve! He says that one of the hardest and most essential things is to be aware of all the possible alternatives to your position.”
“How did he mention it?”
“First of all, suppose everyone’s personality is unique. Does it follow that because a thing is unique it’s valuable? You’re saying that it’s better to be a real Rennie MacMahon than an imitation Joe Morgan, but that’s not self-evident, Jake; not at all. It’s just romantic. I’d rather be a lousy Joe Morgan than a first-rate Rennie MacMahon. To hell with pride. This unique-personality business is another thing that’s no absolute.”
“To quote the gospel to you, Rennie,” I said: “it doesn’t follow either that because a thing’s not absolute it isn’t valuable.”
“Stop it, Jake!” Rennie was getting upset again.
“Why? You could just as well take the position that even though Rennie MacMahon wasn’t intrinsically valuable, she was all there was. Let me ask you a question, Rennie: why do you think Joe is interested in me? He must know I’m not going to go along with any program of his. I make allowances for everybody, most of all for myself. God, do I make allowances for Joe! And certainly he’s been making allowances for that. Why was he so anxious to have me talk to you? Didn’t he know I’d tell you I think this whole business is either funny or appalling, depending on my mood?”
“Jake, you haven’t seen how strong Joe is, I guess. That’s the finest thing of all: his strength. He’s so strong that he wouldn’t want me if anybody could convince me I was making a mistake.”
“I don’t see much strength in this premeditated horseback riding thing. Anybody who didn’t know better would think he was trying to fix me up with you.”
Rennie didn’t flinch. “He’s so strong he can afford to look weak sometimes, Jake. Nobody is as strong as Joe is.”
“He’s an Eagle Scout, all right,” I said cheerfully.
“Even that,” Rennie said; “he’s so strong he can even afford to be a caricature of his strength sometimes, and not care. Not many people are that strong.”
“Am I supposed to be a devil’s advocate, then? I’d be a damned good one.”
Now Rennie was uneasy. “I don’t know. I guess this will insult you, Jake. I honestly don’t know why Joe’s so taken with you. He’s never been interested in anybody before—we haven’t had any friends, or wanted any—but he said after your interview that he was interested in you, and after your first few conversations he was pretty much excited. What he told me was that it would be good for me to get to know a first-rate mind that was totally different from his, but there must have been more to it than that.”
“I’m flattered,” I said, and to my mild annoyance I really was. “You think there must be more to it than that because you can’t see anything first-rate about me?”
“Never mind that. What scares me sometimes is that in a lot of ways you’re not totally different from Joe: you’re just like him. I’ve even heard the same sentences from each of you at different times. You work from a lot of the same premises.” Rennie had been getting more nervous all the time she spoke. Now she shuddered. “Jake, I don’t like you!”
This calmed me: my own discomfort disappeared at this pronouncement, and my mood changed as if by magic. I was now a strong, quiet, half-sinister Jacob Horner, nothing like the wise-cracking fop who’d heard the earlier part of Rennie’s history. I smiled at Rennie.
“I wish Joe hadn’t thought of this idea,” she said. “I don’t like anything about it. I don’t want to be unfair to you, Jake, but I think I was much happier a month ago, before we met you.”
“Tell Joe about it.”
The squint-eyed head-whipping, not in hilarity.
“Joe thinks I’ve come farther than I have,” she said tersely. “Already I feel guilty about telling you so much. That was weak; almost like I’ve been dishonest with him.”
“I’ll tell him we’ve talked about it,” I said.
Rennie breathed shakily and shook her head.
“That’s it, see? I can’t tell you not to tell him, but if you did I’d be lost. I’d never catch up again.”
I could see that easily enough: it was a little germ of Rennie MacMahon that had made the confidences.
“You must have realized that some people would think the whole Morgan plan was just plain funny.”
“Of course I did. But they were just ‘some people.’ What scares me is that anybody could grant all of Joe’s premises—our premises—understand them and grant them and then laugh at us.”
“Maybe that’s what Joe was after.”
“It could be, but if it was he overestimated me! I can’t take it. He could take it and not worry—you remember when he was talking about the kids’ physical efficiency and you suggested that they snap each other’s pajamas? That’s what I meant when I said he’s strong enough to be a caricature of himself—all the things about him that you’ve made fun of. When you suggested that, it scared me, really scared me. I didn’t know what he’d do. God, Jake, he can be violent! But he just laughed and had the kids do what you said.”
“He’s got you scared to death, Rennie. Is it because of the time he socked you?”
Every time I mentioned this Rennie wept. That blow had struck harder than God imagined.
“I’m not that strong, Jake!” she cried; “it’s my fault, but I’m not strong enough for him.”
Said I, “I understand that God is a bachelor.”
Like Joe’s earlier disquisition on values, this history of the Morgans’ domestic problems was not delivered to me all in so handy a piece as I’ve presented it here. What happened was that, once it got started, our daily equitations changed their character. Now we generally rode silently and with amusing purposefulness directly to the little creek in the pine grove for our talk, and spent as much as an hour there instead of twenty minutes. It is interesting to note that Rennie never spoke of the matter while riding: in fact it was with ill-concealed lack of relish that she mounted Tom Brown every morning. But we always headed for the grove—the horses would doubtless have gone there without our direction, and I will admit that more than once Susie and I took the initiative in heading that way.
Back at the Morgan apartment Rennie would clam up completely unless Joe questioned her d
irectly about our morning. This, of course, he did often, and when it became quite necessary Rennie would lie grimly to him about the nature of our conversation. Grimly and clumsily: it was not pretty to watch. Joe listened carefully, and, as a rule, noncommittally, and sometimes smiled. Probably he knew she was lying, although it is hard for one who is aware of the truth to judge effectively its disguise. But if he knew, it didn’t worry him. He was indeed very strong.
He and I got along better all the time. He argued exuberantly with me about politics, history, music, integrity, logic—everything; we played tennis and gin rummy together, and I proofread two or three improperly split infinitives out of the manuscript of his dissertation—an odd, brilliant study of the saving roles of innocence and energy in American political and economic history. My attitude toward Joe, Rennie, and all the rest of the universe changed as frequently as Laocoön’s smile: some days I was a stock left-wing Democrat, other days I professed horror at the very concept of reform in anything; some days I was ascetic, some days Rabelaisian; some days super-rational, some days anti-rational. Each time I defended myself vehemently (except on my uncommunicative days), and Joe laughed and took me to pieces. It was a pleasant enough way to kill the afternoons, I thought, but Rennie grew increasingly morose as August progressed. At the pine grove she shuddered, rationalized, talked, and wept. She was caught.
As for me, I was still undecided whether what I had learned of her unusual self-effacement evidenced a great weakness or an extraordinary strength; there is no way to gauge such things when they are carried out so completely. But I found her altogether, if inconsistently, more attractive, I believe, and the observing part of me now thought that it pretty well understood the attracted part (many, many other “parts” were totally unaffected one way or the other): I think Rennie’s attraction for me lay in the fact that, alone of all the women I knew, if not all the people, she had peered deeply into herself and had found nothing. When such is the case, the question of integrity becomes meaningless.