Chapter 3

A turning down of dinner damped, in ways subtle past knowing,manic keys on the thin flute of me, least pressed of all, which for a moment had shrilled me rarely.

It began with Laoco?n on the mantelpiece, his voiceless groan. The set of that mouth was often my barometer, told me the weight of day; on Wednesday after my interview, when I woke and consulted him with a happening glance, his pain was simply Bacchic! That was something, now! Out of bed I sprang, unclothed, to put a dance on the phonograph while the spell should last. Against all of Mozart I owned a single Russian dance, a piece ofIlya Mourometz, measured and sprightly, lively and tight -- there, now, Laoco?n!

The dusty maple incandesced; sunshine fired the speckled windows and filled my room with a sparkle of light, and I danced like an unfurred Cossack, spinning and jumping. Once in a blue moon I felt that light -- sweet manic! -- and it lasted a scant three minutes, till a ring from the phone dispersed it.

I shut off the music, furious. A man with so short time to prance deserved a history of unanswered phones. "Hello?"

"Hello, Jacob Horner?" It was a woman, and I felt naked as I was.

"Yes."

"This is Rennie Morgan, Joe Morgan's wife. Say, I think Joe already asked you over for dinner tonight, didn't he? I just called to make it official."

I allowed a pause to lie along the line.

"I mean, after your interview, you know, we wanted to make sure you'd come on the right day!

"Jacob? Are we still connected?"

"Yes. Excuse me." I was checking my barometer, Laoco?n, who now looked dolorous enough. Batygh the Tartar had breathed on us.

"Well, it's all set, then? Any time after six-thirty: that's when we put the kids to bed."

"Well, say, Mrs. Morgan, I guess --"

"Rennie.Okay? My name's Renée, but nobody calls me that."

"-- I guess I won't be able to make it tonight after all."

"What?"

"No, I'm pretty sure I can't. Thanks a lot for inviting me."

"But why not? Are you sure you can't make it?"

Why not? Bitch of an Eagle Scout'sHausfrau, you spoiled my first real manic in a month of Sundays! I spit on your dinner!

"I'd kind of planned on riding up to Baltimore this afternoon, have a look around. Something came up."

"Oh, now, aren't you just getting out of it? Come on and say so; we're not committed to each other." This from a wife? "Don't be a chicken -- it doesn't make a damn to us if you don't like us."

So caught,flagrante delicto, I flushed and sweated. What was this beasthonesty ridden by a woman? An answer was awaited: I heard Joe Morgan's wife breathing in my naked ear.

Very discreetly I hung up the phone. Not only that: I walked the first three steps away on tiptoe before I realized what I was doing, and blushed again to notice it.

Ah, well, the spell was broken, and I knew better than to try Glière and hisIlya Mourometz again. He's the fizz that makes the collins bright, is Glière, but he's not the vodka; these manics can't be teased or dickered with. Now I was not only unmanic, I was uncomfortable.

And resentful! There's something to be said for the manic-depressive if his manics are really manic; but me, I was a placid-depressive: a woofer without a tweeter was Jake Horner. My lows were low, but my highs were middle-register. So when I'd a real manic on I nursed it like a baby, and boils plague the man who spoiled it! That was one thing. More's the damage to have it suggested, and by a woman, that my honesty was flagging. Can a man stomach it? That it was a fact was beside the point. Great heavens, Morgans, the world's notthat easy!

Even as I was dressing, the telephone rang again, with a doggedness that bespoke Mrs. Morgan. In a moment of lewdness (for I was pulling up my trousers at the time) I considered allowing that beskirted Diogenes to address her quest to my bare backside -- but I let the moment go. Rennie, girl, said I to myself, I am out; be content that I don't commit a lewdness with your voice, since you've aborted my infant manic. Ring away, girl scout: your quarry's not in his hole.

Later that morning I drove the thirty miles from Wicomico to Ocean City, there to fry my melancholy in the sun and pickle it in the ocean. But light and water only made it blossom. The beach was crowded with human beings whose reality I found myself loath to acknowledge; another day they might have been as soothingly grotesque as was my furniture, but this day they were merely irritating. Furthermore, perhaps because it was a weekday, there was not a girl on the beach worth the necessary nonsense involved in a pickup. Only a forest of legs ruined by childbirth; fallen breasts, potbellies, haggard faces, and strident voices; a rats' nest of horrid children, as unlovely as they were obnoxious. When one is not in the spirit of it, there are few things less diverting than a public beach.

When I reached the saturation point, about three o'clock, I washed the sand off me and headed back to the car. But one who felt as gloomily competent as I that day wouldn't leave Ocean City without at least going through the motions of picking up a girl, any more than one would leave Pikes Peak without spitting -- the trip were pointless otherwise. Along the boardwalk a few girls prowled in twos and threes, most wearing T-shirts with the name of either a college or a sorority printed on them. They met my glowering haughtily, each of us considering the other unworthy. I walked the three blocks to my car without seeing a target worth the ammunition, and so, like many a hunter nearing home, had finally to settle for even less satisfactory game or take none at all.

A woman of forty -- well preserved but definitely forty -- whose car was parked in front of mine, was wrenching the handle of her door in vain when I approached. She was slender, not very full-breasted, well tanned, and in no way extraordinary -- such an obvious target that I lost my taste for the hunt and walked past.

"Pardon me, sir: I wonder if you could help me?" I turned and glared. The woman had been all brightness with her classic request, but my stare made her falter.

"You'll think I'm stupid, I guess -- I locked my keys inside the car."

"I can't pick locks."

"Oh, I didn't mean that! My motel is just across the bridge. I was wondering if you'd run me over there, if you're going that way. I have another key in my suitcase."

It is small sport shooting the bird who perches on the muzzle of your gun, but what hunter could keep from doing it?

"All right."

The whole situation was without appeal, and as I drove Miss Peggy Rankin (her name) over the bridge from Ocean City to the mainland, I was made more desultory by the fact that I guessed she didn't deserve to be so severely judged. She appeared to be fairly intelligent, and indeed, had I been her husband I should doubtless have been proud that my wife still retained such trimness and spirit at age forty. But I was not her husband, and so I made no such allowances: she was a forty-year-old pickup, and only the most extraordinary charm could survive that classification.

All the way to the motel Miss Rankin chattered, and I honestly didn't hear a word of it. For me this was unusual, because, although I admired the ability to lose oneself in oneself, I was far too conscious of my surroundings, as a rule, ever to manage it. A real point against Miss Rankin, that.

"This is the place," she said presently, indicating the Surfside, or Seaside, or some such motel along the highway. I pulled into the driveway and parked. "Gee, I sure appreciate your doing this. Thanks a lot." She moved lightly out of the car.

"I'll take you back," I said, without any particular inflection.

"Oh, would you?" She was very pleased, but not overwhelmed with either surprise or gratitude. "Just a minute, while I run get my keys."

"Have you got anything cold to drink in there, Peggy? I'm pretty dry." This was as far as I was willing to go in the nonsense line just then: I decided that if she didn't ask me in, I'd take off at once for Wicomico.

"Sure, come on in," she invited, again not entirely stunned by my request. "There's no refrigerator in the room, but there's a soda fountain right next door here, and I've got whiskey. Why don't you get two large ginger ales, with lots of ice, and we'll make highballs."

I did, and we drank in her little room, she curled on the bed and I slouched in the single chair. The gloom was still on me, but it grew somewhat easier to endure; especially when we found that we could talk or not talk with a reasonable degree of ease. At one point, as might be expected, Miss Rankin asked me what I did for a living. Now, I didn't necessarily subscribe at all to honesty as a policy in adventures of this sort, and I can't imagine myself answering such stock questions truthfully as a rule; but "I'm a potential instructor of prescriptive grammar at the Wicomico State Teachers College" is so nearly the type of answer one usually dreams up at such moments that without really thinking about it I told her the truth.

"Is that so!" Peggy was genuinely surprised and pleased this time. "I graduated from WTC myself -- so long ago it embarrasses me to remember! I teach English at the high school in Wicomico. Isn't that a funny coincidence? Two English teachers!"

I agreed that it was, but in fact I was so appalled that I felt like turning in my highball and calling it quits. It was necessary to move very rapidly to keep the whole situation from disintegrating. There was only a half inch of highball left in my paper cup: I tossed it down, dropped the cup into the wastebasket, immediately went to the bed, where my colleague lay propped on one elbow, and embraced her with someélan. She opened her mouth at once under my kiss and thrust her tongue between my teeth. Both of us had our eyes quite open, and I was pleased to accept that fact symbolically.Let there be no horse manure between teachers of English , I declared to myself, and without more ado gave the zipper of her bathing suit a meaningful yank.

Miss Rankin froze: her eyes closed tightly and she clutched my shoulders, but my ungentle attack was not repulsed. The zipper undid her down to the small of her back and so gave me access to a certain amount of innocuous skin, but I could go no farther without her assistance.

"Let's take your bathing suit off, Peggy," I suggested cordially.

This injured her. "You're in a great hurry, aren't you, Jake?" she said quietly and more or less bitterly.

"Well, Peg, we're old enough not to be any sillier than we have to be."

She made a noise in her mouth, and, still holding my shoulders, pressed her forehead against my chest and began to cry a bit.

"By that you mean I'm too old for you to bother being silly with, don't you?" she observed between sobs. "You're thinking that a woman my age can't afford to be coy."

Fresh tears. Everybody was digging truth out of me.

"Why hurt yourself?" I asked over her hair to the whiskey bottle on the night stand.

"You're the one that's doing the hurting," Miss Rankin wept, looking me square in the eye through her tears. "You go out of your way to let me know you're doing me a favor by picking me up, but your generosity doesn't include wasting a little time being gentle!" She flung herself, not violently, upon her pillow, burying her face in it. "It doesn't make the least bit of difference to you whether I'm bright or stupid or what, does it? I might even be more interesting than you are, since I'm a little older!" This last piece of self-castigation, while it choked her completely for a moment, made her mad enough to sit up and glare at me defiantly.

"I'm sorry," I offered politely. I was thinking that even if she were talented as, say, Beatrice Lillie, is talented, one would not pick her up in order to witness a theatrical performance: one would purchase a theater ticket.

"Sorry you wasted your time on me, you mean!" Peggy cried. "Just making me defend myself is awful enough!"

Back to the pillow. Up again at once. "Don't you understand how you make me feel? Today is my last day at Ocean City. For two whole weeks not a soul has spoken to me or even looked at me, except some horrible old men. Not asoul! Most women look awful at my age, but I don't look awful: I just don't look like a child. There's a lotmore to me, damn it! And then on the last day you come along and pick me up, bored as you can be with the whole thing, and treat me like a whore!"

Well, she was correct, of course.

"I'm a cad," I agreed readily, and rose to leave. There was a little more to this matter than Miss Rankin was willing to see, but in the main she had a pretty clear view of things. Her mistake, in the long run, was articulating her protest. The game was spoiled now, of course: I had assigned to Miss Rankin the role of Forty-Year-Old Pickup, a delicate enough character for her to bring off successfully in my current mood; I had no interest whatever in the quite complex (and no doubt interesting, from another point of view) human being she might be apart from that role. What she should have done, it seems to me, assuming she was after the same thing I was after, was assign me a role gratifying to her own vanity -- say, The Fresh But Unintelligent Young Man Whose Body One Uses For One's Pleasure Without Otherwise Taking Him Seriously -- and then we could have pursued our business with no wounds inflicted on either side. As it was, my present feeling, though a good deal stronger, was essentially the same feeling one has when a filling-station attendant or a cabdriver launches into his life-story: As a rule, and especially when one is in a hurry or is grouchy, one wishes the man to be nothing more difficult than The Obliging Filling-Station Attendant or The Adroit Cabdriver. These are the essences you have assigned them, at least temporarily, for your own purposes, as a taleteller makes a man The Handsome Young Poet or The Jealous Old Husband; and while you know very well that no historical human being was everjust an Obliging Filling-Station Attendant or a Handsome Young Poet, you are nevertheless prepared to ignore your man's charming complexities --must ignore them, in fact, if you are to get on with the plot, or get things done according to schedule. Of this, more later, for it is related to Mythotherapy. Enough now to say that we are all casting directors a great deal of the time, if not always, and he is wise who realizes that his role-assigning is at best an arbitrary distortion of the actors' personalities; but he is even wiser who sees in addition that this arbitrariness is probably inevitable, and at any rate is apparently necessary if one would reach the ends he desires.

Which brings me back to Miss Peggy Rankin. "Get your keys," I said. "I'll wait for you out in the car."

"No!Jake !" she fairly shrieked, and jumped off the bed. I was caught at the door and embraced from behind, under my arms. "Oh, God, don't go away yet!" Hysteria. "Please, don't run out on me now! I'm sorry I made you angry!" She was pulling me as hard as she could, back into the room.

"Come on now; cut it out. Get hold of yourself." A forty-year-old pickup's beauty, when it is preserved at all, is fragile, and Peggy's hysteria, added to her previous weeping, left little of loveliness in her face, which normally was long, tan, unwrinkled, and not unattractive.

"Will you stay? Please, don't walk out that door -- don't pay attention to anything I said a while ago!"

"I don't know what to do," I said truthfully, trying to assimilate this outburst. "This whole thing means more to you than it does to me. That's no criticism of anybody. I'm really afraid I might louse it up for you, if I haven't already."

I was squeezed tightly.

"I'm in too deep to quit, Jake! If we don't go to bed now I'll go crazy."

"Nonsense."

Peggy's voice bordered on unintelligibility. "You're humiliating me! Don't make me beg you, for God's sake!"

By this tune she stood to lose either way. We went back to the bed: what ensued was, for me at least, pure discomfort, and it was of a nature to become an unpleasant memory for her, too, whether she enjoyed it at the time or not. It was embarrassing because she abandoned herself completely to an elaborate gratitude that implied her own humiliation -- and because my own mood was not complementary to hers. Her condition remained semi-hysterical and masochistic: she scarcely permitted me to move, flagellated herself verbally, and treated me like a visiting deity. No doubt about it, the old girl had been hard up; she did her best to make grand opera out of nature's littlecantus firmus, and if she didn't succeed it was more my fault than hers, for she strove elaborately. Another time I might have enjoyed it -- that sort of voluptuous groveling can be as pleasant to indulge as it is on occasion to indulge in -- but that day was not my day. That day had begun badly, had developed tediously, and was climaxing uncomfortably, if not distastefully: I was always uneasy with women who took their sexual transports too seriously, and Miss Rankin was not the sort whom one could leave shuddering and moaning on the bed knowing it was all just good clean fun.

That is how I left her, at five o'clock. At four forty-five she had begun, as I'd rather expected, to express hatred for me, whether feigned (this kind of thing can be sensuous sport) or sincere I couldn't say, since her eyes were closed and her face averted. What she said, throatily, was "God damn your eyes, God damn your eyes, God damn your eyes. . ." in rhythm with what happened to be in progress at the time, and I was not so committed to my mood that it didn't strike me as funny. But I was weary of dramatics, genuine or not, amusing or not, and when things reached their naturaldenouement I was glad enough to make my exit, forgetting entirely about Miss Rankin's keys. The lady had talent, but no discipline. I'm sure we neither wished to see the other again.

I ate at a roadstand outside Wicomico and finally got back to my room at six-thirty, feeling terrible. I was a man of considerable integrity within the limits of a given mood, but I was short on endurance. I felt bad already about this Peggy Rankin -- irritated that at her age she hadn't yet learned how to handle her position, how to turn its regrettable aspects as much as possible to her own advantage --and at the same time very much sympathetic with her weakness. I had, abstractly at least, a tremendous sympathy for that sort of weakness -- a person's inability either to control his behavior by his own standards or to discipline his standards, down to the last shred of conscience, to fit his behavior -- even though in particular situations it sometimes annoyed me. Everything that had happened with Miss Rankin could have been high sport -- the groveling, the hysterics, the numerous other things that I've not felt like sharing by recording them -- had she kept hard control of her integrity; but her error, I feared, was that she would recriminate herself for some time afterwards for having humbled herself in fact, and not in fun, and mine was in not walking out when I'd started to, regardless of her hysterics. Had I done so I'd have preserved my own tranquillity and allowed Miss Rankin to regain hers by despising me instead of both of us. I had remained, I think, both out of a sense of chivalry, to which I often inclined though I didn'tbelieve in it, and out of a characteristic disinclination to walk out on any show, no matter how poor or painful, once I'd seen the first act.

But there was a length of time beyond which I could not bear to be actively displeased with myself, and when that time began to announce its approach -- about seven-fifteen -- I went to sleep. Only the profundity and limited duration of my moods kept me from being a suicide: as it was, this practice of mine of going to bed when things got too awful, this deliberate termination of my day, was itself a kind of suicide, and served its purpose just as efficiently. My moods were little men, and when I killed them they stayed completely dead.

The buzzer from the front door woke me at nine o'clock, and by the time I got up and put a robe on, Joe Morgan and his wife were at my door. I was surprised, but I invited them in cheerfully, because I knew as soon as I opened my eyes that sleep had changed my emotional scenery: I felt fine. Rennie Morgan, to whom I was introduced, was by no means my idea of a beautiful woman; she looked like an outdoorsman's wife. Rather large-framed, blond, heavier than I, strong-looking, and exuberant, she was not the type of woman whom one (or at leastthis one) thinks of instinctively in sexual terms. Yet of course there I was, appraising her in sexual terms: no doubt my afternoon's adventure influenced both the nature and the verdict of my appraisal.

"Can I offer you anything to eat?" I asked her, and I was pleased to see that both of them were apparently in good spirits.

"No, thanks," Joe smiled; "we've eaten enough for three already."

"We saw your car out front," Rennie said, "and wondered whether the plane had gotten in from Baltimore yet."

"You Morgans will track a man to his very lair!" I protested.

Because we all seemed to be feeling friendly, and because Joe and Rennie had the good sense not to make acause célèbre out of afait accompli, if I may say so, I fetched bottles of ale from the case I had on ice down in the kitchen and told them the whole story of my day, omitting none but the most decidedly indelicate details (and those more from my own embarrassment than from Rennie's, who seemed able to take it straight), by way of entertainment.

We got on extremely well. Rennie Morgan, though lively, seemed to be just a trifle unsure of herself; her mannerisms -- like the habit of showing excruciating hilarity by squinting her eyes shut and whipping her head from side to side, or her intensely excited gestures when speaking -- were borrowed directly from Joe, as were both the matter and the manner of her thinking. It was clear that in spite of the progress she'd evidently made toward being indistinguishable from her husband, she was still apprehensive about the disparity between them. Whenever Joe took issue with a statement she'd made, Rennie would argue the point as vigorously as possible, knowing that that was what he expected her to do, but there was in her manner the same nervous readiness to concede that one might expect in a boy sparring with his gym teacher. The metaphor, in fact, if you add to it a touch of Pygmalion and Galatea, pretty well covers everything about their relationship that I could see that evening, and though I'd no ultimate objection at all to such a relationship -- after all, Galateawas a remarkable woman, and some uneasy young pugilists grow up to be Gene Tunney -- the presence of two so similarly forceful people was overwhelming: I several times caught myself whippingmy head from side to side as they did, at some especially witty remark, or gesticulating excitedly after their fashion while making a point.

As for Joe, the first hour of conversation made it clear that he was brilliant, one of the most brilliant people I'd met. He spoke slowly and softly as a rule, with a slight Southern accent, but one had always the feeling that this slowness did not come natural to him; that they were controls that he maintained over his normal ebullience. Only when the turn of the conversation excited him did his speech rise in volume and rapidity: at these times he was likely to scratch his head vigorously, jab his spectacles hard back on his nose, and gesture eloquently with his hands. I learned that he'd taken his bachelor's and master's degrees at Columbia -- the one in literature, the other in philosophy -- and had completed all the requirements except the dissertation for a doctorate in history at Johns Hopkins. Wicomico was Rennie's home town and WTC her alma mater: the Morgans were staying there while Joe made a leisurely job of the dissertation. Talking with him for an evening was tremendously stimulating -- I was continually impressed by his drive, his tough intellectuality, and his deliberateness -- and, like any very stimulating thing, it was exhausting.

We took to each other at once: it was clear in a very short time that if I remained in Wicomico we would be close friends. My initial estimate of him I had completely to revise; it turned out that those activities of his and aspects of his personality about which I had found it easy to make commonplace criticisms were nearly always the result of very careful, uncommon thinking. One understood that Joe Morgan would never make a move or utter a statement, if he could help it, that he hadn't considered deliberately and penetratingly beforehand, and he had, therefore, the strength not to be much bothered if his move proved unfortunate. He would never have allowed himself to get into a position like Miss Rankin's, for example, or like mine when I was circling around the college driveway on Monday. Indecision of that sort was apparently foreign to him: he was always sure of his ground; he acted quickly, explained his actions lucidly if questioned, and would have regarded apologies for missteps as superfluous. Moreover, four of my least fortunate traits -- shyness, fear of appearing ridiculous, affinity for many sorts of nonsense, and almost complete inconsistency -- he seemed not to share at all. On the other hand, he was, at least in the presence of a third party, somewhat prudish (he didn't enjoy my story) and, despite his excitability, seemingly lacking in warmth and spontaneity, though he doubtless had as clear reasons for being so as he had for being a scoutmaster -- he was a man whom it was exceedingly difficult to criticize. Finally, for better or worse he seemed completely devoid of craft or guile, and in that sense ingenuous, though by no means na?ve, and had no interest in any sort of career as such.

All this was exhausting, most exhausting, to encounter. We talked concentratedly until one-thirty in the morning (I could not begin to remember what about), and when the Morgans left I felt that the evening had been the pleasantest I'd spent in months; that in Joe I'd found an extremely interesting new acquaintance; and that I had no special wish to see this interesting new acquaintance of mine again for at least a week.

As they were leaving, Rennie happened to say, "Oh, Jake, we forgot to congratulate you about your job." (This sort of oversight, I later learned, was characteristic of the Morgans.)

"You're jumping the gun, aren't you?"

"What do you mean?" Joe asked. "Didn't Dr. Schott ever get hold of you?"

"Nope."

"Well, you got the job. The Committee met this morning and decided. I guess Schott called while you were in Ocean City, or while you were asleep this evening."

They both congratulated me, awkwardly -- for they were unable to express affection, friendship, or even congratulation easily -- and then left. I still felt too fine to sleep, so I read myWorld Almanac for a while and listened to Mozart'sEin Musikalischer Spass on the record player. I was beginning to feel at home in my room and in Wicomico; the Morgans pleased me; and I was still in an unusual state of excitement from the afternoon's sexual adventure and Joe's keen intelligence. But I must have been thoroughly fatigued by these things, too, and from my day on the beach, for at six-thirty in the morning I woke with a start, having dropped unintentionally into a sound sleep. TheWorld Almanac was still in my lap, open to page 96: "Air Line Distances Between Principal Cities of the World";Ein Musikalischer Spass was playing for what must have been the fiftieth time; and the sun, just rising between two dark brick houses across the street, shot a blinding beam directly over my lap into Laoco?n's face, contorted noncommittally in bright plaster.