The End of the Road (8 page)

Hour after hour I practiced riding at a walk, a trot, and a canter (both horses were three-gaited), bareback and without holding the reins. I learned how to lead a horse who doesn’t care to follow; how to saddle and bridle and currycomb.

Susie, my mare, had a tendency to nip me when I tightened her girth.

“Slap her hard on the nose,” Rennie ordered, “and next time hold your left arm stiff up on her neck and she won’t turn her head.”

Tom Brown, her stallion, liked to rear high two or three times just out of the stable. Once when he did this I was horrified to see Rennie lean as far back as she could on the reins, until Tom was actually overbalanced and came toppling over backwards, whinnying and flailing. Rennie sprang dextrously out of the saddle and out of the way a second before eleven hundred pounds of horse hit the ground: she caught Tom’s reins before he was up, and in a few seconds, by soft talking, had him quiet.

“That’ll fix him,” she grinned.

But “It’s your own fault,” she told me when Susie once tried the same trick. “She knows you’re just learning. No need to flip her over; she’ll behave when you’ve learned to ride her a little more strongly.” Thank heaven for that, because if Rennie had told me to flip Susie over, my pride would have made me attempt it. I scared easily; in fact, I was extremely timid as a rule, but my vanity usually made this fact beside the point.

At any rate, I became a reasonably proficient horseman and even learned to be at ease on horseback, but I never became an enthusiast. The sport was pleasant, but not worth the trouble of learning. Rennie and I covered a good deal of countryside during August; usually we rode out for an hour and a half, dismounted for a fifteen- or twenty-minute rest, and then rode home. By the time we finished unsaddling, grooming, and feeding the animals it was early afternoon: we would pick up the boys, ride back to Wicomico, and eat a late lunch with Joe, during which, bleary-eyed from reading, he would question Rennie or me about my progress.

But the subject at hand is Rennie’s clumsy force. On horseback, where there are traditional and even reasonable rules for one’s posture every minute of the time, it was a pleasure to see her strong, rather heavy body sitting perfectly controlled in the saddle at the walk or posting to the trot, erect and easy, her cheeks ruddy in the wind, her brown eyes flashing, her short-cropped blond hair bright in the sun. At such times she assumed a strong kind of beauty. But she could not handle her body in situations where there were no rules. When she walked she was continually lurching ahead. Standing still, she never knew what to do with her arms, and she was likely to lean all her weight on one leg and thrust the other awkwardly out at the side. During our brief rest periods, when we usually sat on the ground and smoked cigarettes, she was simply without style or grace: she flopped and fidgeted. I think it was her self-consciousness about this inability to handle her body that prompted her to talk more freely and confidentially during our rides than she would have otherwise, for both Morgans were normally unconfiding people, and Rennie was even inclined to be taciturn when Joe was with us. But in these August mornings we talked a great deal—in that sense, if not in some others, Joe’s program was highly successful—and Rennie’s conversation often displayed an analogous clumsy force.

One of our most frequent rides took us to a little creek in a loblolly-pine woods some nine miles from the farm. There the horses could drink on hot days, and often we wore bathing suits under our riding gear and took a short swim when we got there, dressing afterwards, very properly, back in the woods. This was quite pleasant: the little creek was fairly clean and entirely private, shaded by the pines, which also carpeted the ground with a soft layer of slick brown shats. I remarked to Rennie once that it was a pity Joe couldn’t enjoy the place with us.

“That’s a silly thing to say,” she said, a little upset.

“Like all politeness is silly,” I smiled. “I feel politely sorry for him grinding away at the books while we gallop and splash around.”

“Better not tell him that; he hates pity.”

“That’s a silly way to be, isn’t it?” I said mildly. “Joe’s funny as hell.”

“What do you mean, Jake?” We were resting after a swim; I was lying comfortably supine under a tree beside the water, chewing on a green pine needle and squinting over at Susie and Tom Brown, tethered nearby. Rennie had been slouched back like a sack of oats against the same tree, smoking, but now she sat up and stared at me with troubled eyes. “How can you possibly call Joe silly, of all people?”

“Do you mean how can I of all people call Joe silly, or how can I call Joe of all people silly?”

“You know what I mean: how can you call Joe silly? Good God!”

“Oh,” I laughed. “What could be sillier than getting upset at politeness? If I really felt sorry for him it would be my business, not his; if I’m just saying I feel sorry for him to be polite, there’s even less reason to be bothered, since I’m just making so much noise.”

“But that kind of noise is absurd, isn’t it?”

“Sure. Where did you and Joe get the notion that things should be scrapped just because they’re absurd? That’s a silly one for you. For that matter, what could be sillier than this whole aim of living coherently?”

Now I know very well what Joe would have answered to these remarks: let me be the first to admit that they are unintelligible. My purpose was not to make a point, but to observe Rennie. She was aghast.

“You’re not serious, Jake! Are you serious?”

“And boy oh boy, what could
possibly
be sillier than his notion that two people in the same house can live that way!”

Rennie stood up. Her expression, I should guess, was that of the Athenians on the morning they discovered that Alcibiades had gelded every marble god in town. She was speechless.

“Sit down,” I said, laughing at her consternation. “The point is, Rennie, that anybody’s position can be silly if you want to think of it that way, and the more consistent, the sillier. It’s not silly from Joe’s point of view, of course, granted his ends, whatever they are. But frankly I’m appalled that he expects anybody else to go along with him.”

“He doesn’t!” Rennie cried. “That’s the whole idea!”

“Why did he cork you once for apologizing, then—twice, I mean: just for the exercise? Why wouldn’t you dare tell him you felt sorry for him even if you did?”

I asked these things without genuine malice, only as a sort of tease, but Rennie, to my surprise, burst into tears.

“Whoa, now!” I said gently. “I’m terribly sorry I hurt your feelings, Rennie.” I took her arm, but she flinched as if I too had struck her.

“Whoops, I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Jake, stop it!” she cried, and I observed that the squint-eyed head-shaking was used to express pain as well as hilarity, and this it did quite effectively. When she had control of herself she said, “You certainly must think our marriage is a strange one, don’t you?”

“Damnedest thing I ever saw,” I admitted cheerfully. “But hell, that’s no criticism.”

“But you think I’m a complete zero, don’t you?”

Ah. Something in me responded very strongly to this not-especially-moving question of Rennie’s.

“I don’t know, Rennie. What’s your opinion?”

By way of answer Rennie began what turned out to be the history of her alliance with Joe. Her face, chunky enough to begin with, was red and puffy from crying, and in a more critical mood I would have found her unpleasing to look at just then, but it happened that I was really impressed by her breakdown, and the curious sympathy that I’d felt from the time I first heard of her knockout—a sympathy that had little to do with abstract pity for women—was now operating more noticeably in me. This sympathy, too, I observed impersonally and with some amusement from another part of myself, the same part that observed me being not displeased by Rennie’s tearful, distracted face. Here is what she told me, edited and condensed:

“You know, I lived in a complete fog from the day I was born until after I met Joe,” she said. “I was popular and all that, but I swear it was just like I was asleep all through school and college. I wasn’t really interested in anything, I never thought about anything. I never even particularly wanted to do anything—I didn’t even especially enjoy myself. I just dreamed along like a big blob of sleep. If I thought about myself at all, I guess I lived on my potentialities, because I never felt dissatisfied with myself.”

“Sounds wonderful,” I said, not sincerely, because in fact it sounded commonplace: The Story of American Youth. It interested me only because it fitted well with the unharnessed animal that I had sometimes thought I glimpsed in Rennie.

“You shouldn’t say that,” Rennie said flatly. “It wasn’t anything, wonderful or otherwise. When I got out of college I went to New York to work, just because my roommate had a job there and wanted me to go along with her, and that’s where I met Joe—he was taking his master’s degree at Columbia. We dated for a while, pretty casually: I wasn’t much interested in him, and I didn’t think he saw much in me. Then one night he grinned at me and told me he wouldn’t be taking me out any more. I asked him why not, and he said, ‘Don’t think I’m threatening you; I just don’t see any point to it.’ I said, ‘Is it because I don’t sleep with you?’ and he said, ‘If that was it I’d have gotten a Puerto Rican girl in the first place instead of wasting my time with you.’ ”

“A good line,” I remarked.

“He said he just didn’t feel any need for female companionship in itself: companionship to him meant a real exchange of everything on the. same level, and sex meant sex, and I wasn’t offering him either. You’ll have to take my word for it that he wasn’t just feeding me a line. He meant it. He said he thought I could probably be wonderful, but that I was shallow as hell like I was, and he didn’t expect me to change just for his sake. He couldn’t offer me a thing in return that would fit the values I had then, and he wasn’t interested in me like I was, so that was that.”

“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—”