The End of the Road (20 page)

But Rennie clearly accepted none of this.

“Jake, I can’t make love to you tonight.”

“All right. I’ll take you home.”

In the car I kissed her gently. “I think this is great. It’s funny as the devil.”

“That’s about right.”

“Did you tell Joe you suspected this along with the rest?”

“No.” She lowered her eyes. “And I can’t ever tell him. That’s the thing, Jake,” she said, looking at me again. “I still love him more than he or anybody else suspects, but what we had before is just out. This makes it impossible. Even if it’s actually not true that I love you, the possibility that I might—the fact that I’m not sure I don’t—kills everything. It doesn’t solve any problems: it
is
the problem. Can you imagine how it makes me feel when he says he’s accepted my relationship with you, and tries to act as if nothing had happened? The whole damned thing’s a lie from now on—has been ever since I first admitted to myself that I might love you.”

“Nothing has to be wrecked, Rennie.”

“It’s already wrecked, what Joe and I had before, and it was the finest thing any man and woman ever had. There’s no room in it for lies or divided affections. I feel like I’ve been robbed of a million dollars, Jake! If I’d shot him I couldn’t feel worse!”

“Do you want me to come inside with you?” I asked.

“No.”

“Aren’t you just postponing things?”

“I’m postponing as much as I possibly can,” she said, “for as long as I possibly can. I’m desperate, and that’s the only thing I can think of to do.”

“Joe might have allowed for the same possibility all along,” I offered. “He’s sharp and deep, and not afraid to look at all the alternatives.”

“It wouldn’t make any difference.”

“I just don’t see where the situation is desperate. It wouldn’t be in my world.”

“I’m not surprised,” Rennie said. I wasn’t sure whether she was crying or not, since it was dark in the car. I daresay she was. We sat for some minutes without speaking, and then she opened the door to get out.

“God, Jake, I don’t know where all this will lead to.”

“Neither does Joe,” I said lightly. “Those were his very first words.”

“For Christ’s sake try to remember one thing, anyhow: if I love you at all, I don’t
just
love you. I swear, along with it I honestly and truly hate your God-damned guts!”

“I’ll remember,” I said. “Good night, Rennie.” She went in without replying, and I drove home to rock a bit and contemplate this new revelation. I was flattered beyond measure—I responded easily and inordinately to any evidence of affection from people whom I admired or respected in any way. But—well, perhaps this is specious, but the connoisseur is by his very nature a hair-splitter. The thing is that even in my current mood I couldn’t see much of a paradox in Rennie’s feelings, and I was piqued that I could not. The connoisseur—and I had been one since nine-thirty that morning—requires of a paradox, if it is to elicit from him that faint smile which marks him for what he is, that it be more than a simple ambiguity resulting from the vagueness of certain terms in the language; it should, ideally, be a really arresting contradiction of concepts whose actual compatibility becomes perceptible only upon subtle reflection. The apparent ambivalence of Rennie’s feelings about me, I’m afraid, like the simultaneous contradictory opinions that I often amused myself by maintaining, was only a pseudo-ambivalence whose source was in the language, not in the concepts symbolized by the language. I’m sure, as a matter of fact, that what Rennie felt was actually neither ambivalent nor even complex; it was both single and simple, like all feelings, but like all feelings it was also completely particular and individual, and so the trouble started only when she attempted to label it with a common noun such as
love
or
abhorrence.
Things can be signified by common nouns only if one ignores the differences between them; but it is precisely these differences, when deeply felt, that make the nouns inadequate and lead the layman (but not the connoisseur) to believe that he has a paradox on his hands, an ambivalence, when actually it is merely a matter of
x’s
being part horse and part grammar book, and completely neither. Assigning names to things is like assigning roles to people: it is necessarily a distortion, but it is a necessary distortion if one would get on with the plot, and to the connoisseur it’s all good clean fun.

Rennie loved me, then, and hated me as well! Let us say she
x-
ed me, and know better than to smile.

During this month I had of course seen Joe any number of times at school, even though our social relationship had ended. If it had been possible I’d have avoided him altogether, not because I felt any less warmth, admiration, or respect for him—on the contrary, I felt more of all these things, and sympathy besides—but because the sight of him invariably filled me with sudden embarrassment and shame, no matter what feelings I had at other times. To feel, as Joe did, no regret for anything one has done in the past requires at least a strong sense of one’s personal unity, and such a sense is one of the things I’ve always lacked. Indeed, the conflict between individual points of view that Joe admitted lay close to the heart of his subjectivism I should carry even further, for subjectivism implies a self, and where one feels a plurality of selves, one is subject to the same conflict on an intensely intramural level, each of one’s several selves claiming the same irrefutable validity for its special point of view that, in Joe’s system, individuals and institutions may claim. In other words, judging from my clearest picture of myself, the individual is not individual after all, any more than the atom is really atomistic: he can be divided further, and subjectivism doesn’t really become intelligible until one finally locates the subject. I shall say that, if this did not seem to me to be the case, I should assent wholeheartedly to the Morgan ethics. As it is, if I say that sometimes I assent to it anyway and sometimes not, I can’t really feel that this represents any more of an inconsistency than can be found in the statement “Some people agree with Morgan and some don’t.” In the same way, when upon confronting Joe in the hallways, in the cafeteria, or in my office I felt terribly ashamed of the trouble I’d caused him—when in my mind I not only regretted but actually repudiated my adultery—what I really felt was that
I
would not do what that Jacob Horner had done: I felt no identity with that stupid fellow. But as a point of honor (in which some Horner or other believed) I would not claim this pluralism, for fear Joe would interpret it as a defense.

Only once in September did we have what might be called a conversation. It was very near the end of the month, when, happening to see me alone in my office, he came in to talk for a few minutes. As always, he looked fresh, bright, clean, and sharp.

“Mr. MacMahon’s complaining that his horses are getting too fat,” he said. “How come you quit your riding lessons?”

I blushed. “I thought the course was finished, I guess.”

“You want to pick them up again? It’s right much trouble for him to take time to exercise them as much as they need.”

“No, I guess not. I’ve kind of lost interest, and I don’t think Rennie would enjoy it very much.”

“Don’t you? Why shouldn’t she?”

I should say there was no malice evident in his voice, but I couldn’t help thinking I was being embarrassed purposely.

“You know why not, Joe. Why do you even suggest it?” I was suddenly indignant on Rennie’s behalf. “I feel uncomfortable as hell criticizing you, but I don’t see why you’re so determined to make her feel worse than she does already.”

He jabbed his spectacles back on his nose.

“Don’t worry about Rennie.”

“You mean it’s a little late for me to start being thoughtful. I agree. But unless you’re out to punish her I don’t know why you make her come up to my room and all.”

“I’m not out to punish anybody, Jake; you know that. I’m just out to try to understand her.”

“Well, don’t you understand that she’s pretty much shot these days? I’m surprised she’s held up this long.”

“She’s pretty strong,” Joe smiled. “You probably don’t realize that in a way Rennie and I have been happier in the last few weeks than we’ve been for a long tune.”

“How come?”

“For one thing, since this started I’ve shelved the dissertation for a while, so we’ve had more time together than usual. We’ve talked to each other about ourselves more than we ever did before, necessarily, and all that.”

I was appalled. “You can’t say she’s been happy.”

“Not in the way you probably mean, I guess. We certainly haven’t been
carefree;
but you can be pretty much happy without being carefree. The point is we’ve been dealing with each other pretty intensely and objectively—exploring each other as deep as we can. That part of it’s been fine. And we’ve been outdoors a lot, because we didn’t want to ruin our health over it. We’ve probably felt a lot closer to each other than ever, whether we’ve solved anything or not.”

“Do you think you have?”

“Well, we’ve certainly
learned
some things. For one thing we’ve found all kinds of ties that we weren’t aware of before, so that we probably wouldn’t break up even if the thing doesn’t straighten itself out. I doubt if I respect her as much as before—how could I? At least not for the same things. But she’s been awfully good in this. Pretty damned strong most of the time, and I appreciate that. What do you think of my friend Rennie these days?”

“Me?” I hadn’t been especially thinking about what I thought of her, at least since her revelation of two nights earlier. Now I had to think about it quickly. “Oh, I don’t know,” I stalled.

“You must have had a strange picture of us both before. I’d like to know what you think of her now. Are you disgusted with her for not knowing how she feels?”

I leaned back in my chair and regarded the red pencil with which I’d been correcting grammar exercises.

“As a matter of fact,” I said, “I might be in love with her.”

“Is that right?” he asked quickly, bright with interest.

“I wouldn’t be surprised. It was right a couple of days ago, anyhow. I don’t feel it very strongly now, but I don’t feel that I’m not, either.”

“That’s great!” Joe laughed: what he meant, I believe, was
That’s interesting.
“Is that what you felt when you went to bed with her the first time? You could have said so.”

“No. I didn’t feel that way then.”

“Does Rennie know about this?”

“No.”

“How does she feel about you?”

“Not long ago she despised me. A week or so ago she said she didn’t give a damn.”

“Does she love you?” he asked, smiling.

Now I’ve said all along that Joe was without guile, but it’s almost impossible really to believe that a man is without guile. It is perhaps a great injustice that I couldn’t entirely trust that open smile and clear forehead of Joe’s, but I confess I did not.

“I’m pretty sure she despises me,” I said.

Joe sighed. He was sitting in the swivel chair next to mine, and now he put his feet on the desk in front of him and clasped his hands behind his head.

“Did you ever consider that maybe I’m to blame for all of this? A lot of things could be explained neatly if you just said that for some perverse reason or other I engineered the whole affair. Just a possibility, along with the rest. What do you think?”

“Perversity? I don’t know, Joe. If I see anything perverse it’s your sending Rennie up to my place now.”

He laughed. “I guess you could call all my encouragements of you two perverse now that we know what happened, but if any of it was really perverse it was unconsciously so. But you can’t really believe it’s perversity that makes me insist on her going up to your place. That business really is a matter of testing her. She’s got to decide once and for all what she really feels about you and me and herself, and you know as well as I do that if it weren’t for those trips to your place she’d repress that first business as fast as she could.”

“Don’t you think you’re just keeping the wounds open?”

“I guess so. In fact, that’s exactly what I’m doing. But in this case we’ve got to keep the wound open until we know just what kind of wound it is and how deep it goes.”

“It seems to me that the important thing about wounds is healing them, no matter how.”

“You’re getting carried away with the analogy,” Joe smiled. “This isn’t a physical wound. If you ignore it, it might seem to go away, but in a relationship between two people wounds like this aren’t healed by ignoring them—they keep coming back again if you do that.” He dropped the subject. “So you love Rennie?”

“I don’t know. I’ve felt that way once or twice.”

“Would you marry her if she weren’t married to me?”

“I don’t know. Honestly.”

“How would you take it if it turned out that the best answer to this thing was some kind of a permanent sexual relationship between you and her? I mean a triangle without conflicts or secrecy or jealousy.”

“I don’t think that’s an answer. I’m the kind of guy who could probably live with that sort of thing, but I don’t believe either Rennie or you could.” As a matter of fact, I was interested to notice that at the very mention of marriage and permanent sexual attachments I began to grow tired of the idea of Rennie. Happy human perversity! There was little of the husband in me.

“I don’t either. What’s the answer, Jake? You tell me.”

I shook my head.

“Shall I shoot you both?” he grinned. “I already own a Colt forty-five and about a dozen bullets. When Rennie and I first got going on this thing, the time I was out of school for three days or so, I dug the old Colt out of the basement and loaded it and put it on the shelf in the living-room closet, in case either of us wanted to use it on ourselves or anybody else.”

By God, that statement thrilled me! Perhaps it was Joe Morgan, after all, that I loved. He stood up and clapped me amiably on the shoulder.

“No answers, huh?”

I shook my head. “Damned if I know what to say, Joe.”

“Well,” he said, stretching and walking out the door, “it’s still there in the closet. Maybe we’ll use it yet.”