The End of the Road (17 page)

“I could add some more things to the list of my inabilities.” I shrugged.

“Don’t bother. Don’t you see, Horner, if you could convince me that very much of what Rennie did was under your influence, it wouldn’t be good, because she shouldn’t have been in a position to be influenced very much. And if you convinced me that very little if any of it was your influence it still wouldn’t be good, because by our picture of her she couldn’t have chosen to do it. So it’s not that I’m trying to solve the problem by passing the buck. The thing is, I can’t be sure just what the problem is that has to be solved until I know just what happened and why each thing happened.”

I felt strong enough by this time to say, “I don’t think you’d have as much of a problem if you had more respect for the answer ‘I don’t know.’ It can be an awfully honest answer, Joe. When somebody close to you injures you unaccountably, and you say, ‘Why in the world did you do that?’ and they say, ‘I don’t know,’ it seems to me that that answer can be worthy of respect. And if it’s somebody you love or trust who says it, and they say it contritely, I think it could even be acceptable.”

“But once they’ve said it,” Joe said, “once they’re in a position to
have
to say it, how do you tell whether the love and trust that make it acceptable were justified?”

How indeed? All I could have replied is that I personally couldn’t imagine ever having to reach that question, but I could certainly imagine Joe reaching it.

“Well, that could never do, Jake,” Joe said, getting ready to go. “If that has to be your answer, I can’t see how to deal with you, and if it’s got to be Rennie’s I can’t see how to deal with her either. That answer simply doesn’t come up in the Morgan cosmos. Maybe I’m in the wrong cosmos, but it’s the only one I can see setting up serious relationships in. You ought to know, boy, that Rennie blames you for nearly everything that happened.”

I was a little surprised, but I simply wrinkled my forehead and made a quick
tch
in the left corner of my mouth.

“I don’t see why you shouldn’t believe her,” I declared.

“But you think it’s pretty ordinary of her, don’t you? The kind of thing you’d expect a
woman
to do?”

“I don’t have any opinion,” I said. “Or rather, I have both opinions at once.”

This observation nearly clenched Joe’s fists in disgust, and he left my room.

I could say that this conversation left me disturbed, but it seems more accurate to say that it left me stimulated: my disturbance was the disturbance of stimulation more than of guilt, the same disturbance that a complicated argument always produces—the disturbance, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but invariably exhilarating, effected by any duel of articulations, where the duelists have things of sufficient value at stake to make the contest, if after all a game, at least a serious game.

Articulation! There, by Joe, was
my
absolute, if I could be said to have one. At any rate, it is the only thing I can think of about which I ever had, with any frequency at all, the feelings one usually has for one’s absolutes. To turn experience into speech—that is, to classify, to categorize, to conceptualize, to grammarize, to syntactify it—is always a betrayal of experience, a falsification of it; but only so betrayed can it be dealt with at all, and only in so dealing with it did I ever feel a man, alive and kicking. It is therefore that, when I had cause to think about it at all, I responded to this precise falsification, this adroit, careful myth-making, with all the upsetting exhilaration of any artist at his work. When my mythoplastic razors were sharply honed, it was unparalleled sport to lay about with them, to have at reality.

In other senses, of course, I don’t believe this at all.

ONE OF THE THINGS I DID NOT SEE FIT TO TELL JOE MORGAN
(for to do so would have been to testify further against myself) is that it was never very much of a chore for me, at various times, to maintain with perfectly equal unenthusiasm contradictory, or at least polarized, opinions at once on a given subject. I did so too easily, perhaps, for my own ultimate mobility. Thus it seemed to me that the Doctor was insane, and that he was profound; that Joe was brilliant and also absurd; that Rennie was strong and weak; and that Jacob Horner—owl, peacock, chameleon, donkey, and popinjay, fugitive from a medieval bestiary—was at the same time giant and dwarf, plenum and vacuum, and admirable and contemptible. Had I explained this to Joe he’d have added it to his store of evidence that I did not exist: my own feeling was that it was and was not such evidence. I explain it now in order to make as clear as I can what I mean when I say that I was shocked and not surprised, disgusted and amused, excited and bored, when, the evening after the conversation just recorded, Rennie came up to my room. I’d had a brilliant day with my students, explaining gerunds, participles, and infinitives, and my eloquence had brought me around to feeling both guilty and nonchalant about the Morgan affair.

“Well, I’ll be damned!” I said when I saw her. “Come on in! Have you been excommunicated, or what?”

“I didn’t want to come up here,” Rennie said tersely. “I didn’t want to see you again at all, Jake.”

“Oh. But people want to do the things they do.”

“Joe drove me in, Jake. He told me to come up here.”

This was intended as a bombshell, I believe, but I was not in an explodable mood.

“What the hell for?”

Rennie had started out with pretty firm, solemn control, but now she got choky and couldn’t, or wouldn’t, answer the question.

“Has he turned you out?”

“No. Can’t you understand why he sent me up here? Please don’t make me explain it!” Tears were imminent.

“Honestly, I couldn’t guess, Rennie. Are we supposed to re-enact the crime in a more analyzable way, or what?”

Well, that finished her control; the head-whipping began. Rennie, incidentally, looked great to me. She’d obviously been suffering intensely for the past few days, and, like exhausted strength, it lent her all the sexual attractiveness that tormented women often have. Tender, lovelike feelings announced their presence in me.

“Everything that’s happened wrenches my heart,” I said to her, laying my hand on her shoulder. “You’ve no idea how much I sympathize with Joe, and how much more with you. But he sure is making a Barnum and Bailey out of it, isn’t he? This sending you up here is the damndest thing I ever heard of. Is it supposed to be punishment?”

“It’s not ridiculous unless you’re determined to see it that way,” Rennie said, tearfully but vehemently. “Of course
you’d
say it was, just so you won’t have to take Joe seriously.”

“What’s it all about, for heaven’s sake?”.

“I didn’t want to see you again, Jake. I told Joe that. He told me everything you said to him last night, and at first I thought you were lying all the way. I guess you know I’ve hated you ever since we made love; when I told Joe about it, I didn’t leave out anything we did—not a single detail—but I blamed you for everything.”

“That’s okay. I don’t have any real opinion on the subject.”

“I can’t blame you any more,” Rennie went on. “It’s too easy, and it doesn’t really solve anything. I guess I don’t have any opinion either—and Joe doesn’t either.”

“He doesn’t?”

“He’s heartbroken. So am I. But he’s determined not to evade the question in any way, or take a stand just to cover up the hurt. You don’t realize what an obsession this is with him! Sometimes I’ve thought we’d both lose our minds this past week. This thing is tearing us up! But Joe would rather be torn up than falsify the trouble in any way. That’s why I’m here.”

She hung her head.

“I told him I couldn’t stand to see you again, whether you were responsible or not. He got angry and said I was being melodramatic, evading the question. I thought he was going to hit me again! But instead he calmed down and—even made love to me, and explained that if we were ever going to end our trouble we’d have to be extra careful not to make up any versions of things that would keep us from facing the facts squarely. If anything, we had to do all we could to throw ourselves as hard as possible against the facts, and as often as possible, no matter how much it hurt. He said that as it stands now we’re defeated, and the only possible chance to save anything is never to leave the problem for a minute. I told him I’d die if I had to live with it much longer the way I’ve been doing, and he said he might too, but it’s the only way. I guess you think this is ridiculous, too.”

“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.”