The End of the Road (14 page)

She was speechless.

“Don’t you understand,” I smiled, my testicles aching, “that I’m probably less interested in sex than any other man you’ve ever met?”

“Oh, my
God!”

“I enjoy it, all right, just as I’d enjoy having a lot of money, but I’m not willing to put up with any nonsense to get either.”

“Not even a common respect for a woman’s dignity!”

“That’s it, right there,” I said soberly: “a common respect, a common courtesy, a common this, a common that. Add it all up and what it gives you is a common relationship, and that’s a thing I’ve no use for. You don’t seem to be my kind of girl, Peggy, and I could have sworn you were. My kind of girl doesn’t want common respect; she wants uncommon respect, and that means a relationship where nobody makes the common allowances for anybody else.”

“I don’t believe you,” Peggy said, aghast and troubled.

“You’re testifying against yourself, then,” I said quietly. “Don’t you understand that all this rigmarole of flattery and chivalry—the whole theatrical that men perform for women—is
disrespect?
Any lie is disrespect, and a relationship based on that nonsense is a lie. Chivalry is a fiction invented by men who don’t want to be bothered with taking women seriously. The minute a man and woman assent to it they stop thinking of each other as individual human beings: they assent to it precisely so they won’t have to think about their partners. Which is completely useful, of course, if sex is the only thing that’s on your mind. I may as well tell you, Peggy, now that it’s too late, that you’re the only woman I ever dared try to respect before, and take completely seriously, on my own terms, just as I’d take myself. No lies, no myths, no allowances, no hypocrisy. That’s the only kind of relationship with a woman that I could ever stay interested in vertically as well as horizontally.”

Peggy burst into nervous laughter.

“You mustn’t laugh at that, Peggy,” I said gravely.

“Oh, my God!” she laughed. “Oh, my
God
!”

I turned from the wheel and very carefully socked her square on the cheek. The blow threw her head back against the window, and immediately she began crying.

“As you see, I’m still taking you seriously,” I said.

“Oh!”

“Try to understand, Peggy, that I’m
just not that interested
in laying women. I can do without. But I will not have my Deepest Values thrown in my face! I’m not a man who strikes girls. To hell with girls. What I want is a female human being that I can take as seriously as myself. If you’re not interested, get out, but don’t laugh at the only man who’s ever taken you seriously in your whole life.”

“Jake, for God’s sake!” Peggy sobbed, embracing my lap and all that waited impatiently therein. “I’m so sorry I could die!” Fresh tears. “What a horrible spot a woman’s in!”

I patted her head. “Our society makes sincerity sound like the greatest hypocrisy of all.”

“Jake?”

“What?”

Because she’d lost her summer tan, her red eyes looked redder than they had in July.

“I’ll die if you say it’s too late.”

I smoothed her hair. “I socked you, didn’t I? Nothing’s less chivalrous than that.”

“Thank God you did!” she smiled bravely. She inspected the welt on her cheek in the mirror. “I wish it would never go away.”

“I really
was
just bringing you home, you know, Peggy,” I smiled, playing the kicker at the end of my hand. “When can I see you?”

She was properly amazed. “Jake?”

“What?”

“Oh, Jake,
now!
You’ve got to come up to my apartment right now!”

I made a mental salute to Joseph Morgan,
il mio maestro,
and another to Dr. Freud, caller of the whole cosmic hoe-down: up to Miss Peggy’s flat we tripped. A
pas de deux,
an
entrechat,
and that was that. I left on promises of greater things to come, which I had no special plans to keep.

He having stood me in such excellent stead that afternoon, it was rather a pity that, come nightfall and my first really clandestine visit to Rennie, I was no longer prepared to be Joe Morgan or any other sort of dancer. I was never highly sexed. For me the intervals between women were long, as a rule, and I was not normally disturbed by doing without sexual intercourse. A condition of erotic excitement such as I’d entertained during most of this first school day was almost as rare as a manic with me, and almost as easily dissipated. After the one game I was good for, I was as unarousable as a gelding.

That, I think, is not how Rennie had found me on the evening of our first adultery, shortly after we’d played Peeping Tom on Joe—the sheer energy required to be the spirited lover is difficult, but not entirely impossible, for me to muster—but that’s how I felt on this evening when I went to her. I was neither bored nor fatigued nor sad, nor excited nor fresh nor happy: merely a placid, undesiring animal.

The initial act had been a paradigm of assumed inevitability. Three days after our eavesdropping Joe went to Washington to do research in the Library of Congress, and before leaving he asked me to keep Rennie company during his absence—a very Morganesque request. I went out there and spent the afternoon playing with the boys. It was not
necessary
for me to do this at all, but neither was it obviously compromising. Rennie quite unsuggestively invited me to stay for dinner, and I did, though I had no special reason not to eat as usual in a restaurant. We scarcely spoke to each other. Rennie said once, “I feel lost without Joe,” but I could think of no appropriate reply, and for that matter I was not certain how extensive was the intended meaning of her observation. After dinner I volunteered to oversee the boys’ bath, spun them a bloodcurdling bedtime story, and bade them good night. I could have left then, but my staying to drink ale with Rennie during the evening certainly had no clear significance. We talked impersonally and sporadically—much of the time nothing was said, but mutual silences were neither unusual nor uncomfortable with Rennie—and I truly remember very little of our conversation, except that Rennie mentioned being weary and thanked me for having helped with the children that day.

The point I want to make is that on the face of it there was no overt act, no word or deed that unambiguously indicated desire on the part of either of us. I shall certainly admit that I found Rennie attractive that day. Her whole manner was one of exhausted strength: throughout the afternoon her movements had been heavy and deliberate, like those of a laborer who has worked two straight shifts; in the evening she sat for the most part without moving, and frequently upon blinking her eyes she would keep them shut for a full half minute, opening them at last with a wide stare and a heavy expiration of breath. All this I admired, but really rather abstractly, and any sexual desire that I felt was also more or less abstract. We spoke little of Joe, and not at all about what we’d seen through the living-room window.

Then at nine-thirty or thereabouts Rennie said, “I’m going to take a shower and go to bed, Jake,” and I said, “All right.” To reach the bathroom, she had to go through a little hallway off the living room; to get my jacket, I had to go to an open closet in this same hallway, and so it is still not quite necessary to raise an eyebrow at the fact that we got up from our chairs and went to the hallway together. There, if she turned to face me for a slight moment at the door to the bathroom, who’s to say confidently that good nights were not on the tips of tongues? It happened that we embraced each other instead before we went our separate ways—but I think a slow-motion camera would not have shown who moved first—and it happened further (but I would not say
consequently)
that our separate ways led to the same bed. By that time, if we had been consciously thinking of first steps—and I for one certainly wasn’t—I’m sure we both would have assumed that the first steps, whoever made them, had already been made. I mention this because it applies so often to people’s reasoning about their behavior in situations that later turn out to be regrettable: it is possible to watch the sky from morning to midnight, or move along the spectrum from infrared to ultraviolet, without ever being able to put your finger on the precise point where a qualitative change takes place; no one can say, “It is exactly
here
that twilight becomes night,” or blue becomes violet, or innocence guilt. One can go a long way into a situation thus without finding the word or gesture upon which initial responsibility can handily be fixed—such a long way that suddenly one realizes the change has already been made, is already history, and one rides along then on the sense of an inevitability, a too-lateness, in which he does not really believe, but which for one reason or another he does not see fit to question.

I could illustrate this phenomenon, in the case at hand, clear up to the point—well, up to the point where the cuckolding of Joe Morgan was pretty much an accomplished fact; but delicacy, to which I often incline, forbids. We spent a wordless, tumultuous night together, full of tumblings and flexings and shudders and such, exciting enough to experience but boring to describe; for the neighbors’ sake I left before sunrise.

It is with reason that I say no more than this about our adultery: the whole business was without significance to me. I had no idea what was on Rennie’s mind—and no wish to penetrate until afterwards her characteristic taciturnity—but I know that my own was empty. It was not a case of weatherlessness; my mood was one of first general and later specific desire, combined with a definite but not inordinate masculine curiosity: in other words, first I wanted to copulate, then I wanted to copulate with Rennie and in addition to learn not only “what she was like in bed,” but also what the intimate relationship (I do not mean sexual relationship) would be like which I presumed would be established by our intercourse. Although I was not often gregarious or even very sociable, I could maintain a thoroughgoing curiosity about one or two people at a time.

That was all. Other than these half-articulated sentiments there was nothing on my mind. Rennie, a bed partner rather too athletic for my current taste, more than satisfied my desires, both general and specific, and my curiosity was satisfied that it would be satisfied as time went on. I cannot call my share in the act gratuitous in the sense of its being unmotivated—I knew why I went along with it—but I would call it both specifically (if not generally) unpremeditated and entirely unreflective. The fellow who committed it was not thinking ahead of his desire.

The next day I became engrossed in reading several volumes of plays that I’d borrowed from the college library at the Doctor’s behest, and gave the matter no more thought of any sort. It was insignificant, unimportant, and, as far as I was concerned, inconsequential. I didn’t read often, but when I got a fit on I read voraciously; for the next four days I scarcely left my room except to eat, and I read seven collections of plays—some seventy or eighty plays in all. The day after I finished the last volume was the first day of the school term, the day of this chapter, and it was, I think, not at all my love-making of five days earlier, but the release from my heavy diet of vicarious emotions, that induced my highly erotic mood.

In the evening, after supper, I felt tortoise-like, even lichen-like, and, left to myself, I’d have sat rocking in my chair, buried in comfortable torpidity, until bedtime. This inertia, which must be distinguished from both weatherlessness and Penn Station-type immobility, is mildly euphoric—my mind is neither empty nor still, but disengaged, and the idle race of fugitive thoughts that fill it spins past against a kind of all-pervasive, cosmic
awareness,
almost palpable and audible, which I can compare only to the text “I feel the breath of other planets blowing,” from Schönberg’s Second String Quartet, or, less esoterically but about as accurately, to the atmospheric rustle on a radio receiver when the volume is turned on full. It is a state from which I can remove myself at will, but I’m usually reluctant to do so. It turned out that, as in the case of my July manic, a telephone call from Rennie dispelled it.

“Jake, I think you’d better come over here,” she said. “I have to see you.”

“All right.” I had no feeling about going, except the special, non-urgent curiosity previously mentioned. “When?”

“Now. Joe’s at his Scout meeting.”

“All right.”

I readily assumed that what was in the offing was a polishing of the crown of horns we’d already placed on Joe’s brow; as I drove out to the Morgans’ I attempted, halfheartedly, to be pleased by the irony of my friend’s being at a Boy Scout meeting at the time. But it didn’t work. Indeed, I was somewhat irritable, not a bit desirous; felt commonplace, conventional;
wanted
to feel conventional; didn’t want to think about myself. Perhaps as a result, for the very first time since I’d met the Morgans, I experienced a sudden, marvelous sensation of guilt.

And, following immediately on this sensation, the guilt poured in with a violent shock that slacked my jaw, dizzied me at the wheel, brought sweat to my forehead and palms, and slightly sickened me. What in heaven’s name was I doing? What, for God’s sake, had I done? I was appalled. Does Jacob Horner betray the only man he can think of as a friend, and then double the felony by concealing the betrayal? I was anguished, as never before in my life. What is more, my anguish was pretty much unself-conscious: I was not aware of watching Jacob Horner suffer anguish. Had I been, I believe I’d have seen a face very like Laocoön’s.

The instant assumption of this burden of guilt crushed me. I wanted to turn back, or, better, keep on going, out of Maryland, and not come back. This was a new feeling for me, and I had not the strength or courage, or the complexity, even to be curious about it, as I usually am about my rare moments of intense feeling. But I hadn’t nerve enough to escape. I parked in front of Rennie’s house, and after a while went inside. I had no idea what to do: certainly I was incapable of repeating the offense.

Rennie answered the door, dead white. As soon as she saw me she tried to say something, choked on it, and burst into tears.