Chapter 10

The disintegration of Rennie that September was not often an entertaining spectacleto observe, for although, as she pointed out, it is not self-evident that every personality is valuable simply because it's unique, nevertheless I could seldom enjoy contributing to the unhappiness of people whom I'd come to know at all well. There is no humanitarianism in this fact: for humankind in general I had no feeling one way or the other, and the plight of some specific people, Peggy Rankin for example, I must say concerned me not at all. This is merely a description of my reactionism -- I wouldn't attempt to defend it as an assumed position.

The trouble, I suppose, is that the more one learns about a given person, the more difficult it becomes to assign a character to him that will allow one to deal with him effectively in an emotional situation. Mythotherapy, in short, becomes increasingly harder to apply, because one is compelled to recognize the inadequacy of any role one assigns. Existence not only precedes essence: in the case of human beings it rather defies essence. And as soon as one knows a person well enough to hold contradictory opinions about him, Mythotherapy goes out the window, except at times when one is no more than half awake.

There were such times, but they were few. The latter part of the evening just described was one: when at length I carried Rennie to the bed (excited by her heaviness) I was able to do so only because, for better or worse, enough of my alertness was gone to permit me to dramatize the situation as part of a romantic contest between symbols. Joe was The Reason, or Being (I was using Rennie's cosmos); I was The Unreason, or Not-Being; and the two of us were fighting without quarter for possession of Rennie, like God and Satan for the soul of Man. This pretty ontological Manichaeism would certainly stand no close examination, but it had the triple virtue of excusing me from having to assign to Rennie any essence more specific than The Human Personality, further of allowing me to fornicate with her with a Mephistophelean relish, and finally of making it possible for me not to question my motives, since what I was doing was of the essence of my essence. Does one look for introspection from Satan?

As for Rennie, she had by that time very nearly reached the condition of paralysis, and it was, I believe, with something like relief that she allowed me to cast her in the role of Mankind; what drama was onher mind I couldn't say. I took her home afterwards.

"Aren't you going to come in for a while?" she asked numbly.

But my little play had dissipated with my sexual ardor, and I was vegetable.

"Nope. I'll see you around."

For the rest, I felt mostly a generalized pity for the Morgans, especially for Rennie. Joe, after all, was behaving pretty consistently with his position, and that knowledge can be comforting even in cases where the position leads to defeat or disaster, as when a bridge player plays out a losing hand perfectly or an Othello loves not wisely but too well. But Rennie no longer had a position to act consistently with, not even the position of acting inconsistently, and yet, unlike my own, her personality was such that it seemed to require a position in order to preserve itself.

She came to my room three times during September and once in October. The first visit I've already described. The second, on Wednesday of the following week, was quite different: Rennie seemed warm, strong, even gay and a little wild. We made love zestfully at once -- she went so far as to tease me for being less energetic a lover than her husband -- and afterwards she talked animatedly for an hour or so over a quart of California muscatel she'd brought with her.

"Lord, I've been silly lately!" she laughed. "Mooning and crying around like a schoolgirl!"

"Oh?"

"How in the world could I have taken this business so seriously? You know what happened to me last night?"

"No."

"I popped awake at three in the morning -- wide awake, like I've been doing every night since this business started. Usually I get the shakes when that happens, and either sit up the rest of the night shivering and sweating or else wake up Joe and go over the whole thing with him again. Well, last night I woke up as usual, and the moon was shining in and I could see Joe lying there asleep -- he looks adolescent when he's asleep! -- and for some reason or other while I was watching him he started picking his nose in his sleep!" She giggled at the memory and burped slightly from the wine. "Excuse me."

"Certainly."

"Well, that reminded me of that night we peeked in on him through the living-room window, only this time instead of hurting me it just struck me funny! The whole thing struck me funny, and how we were taking it. Joe seemed like a teenager trying to make a tragedy out of nothing, and you just seemed completely ineffectual. Does this make you mad?" She laughed.

"Of course not."

"And I've been being a runny-nose little girl myself, crying all over the place and letting you two bully me around about such a stupid thing. I felt just like I feel when I let the kids get me down. Lots of times when the kids scream and fight all day I get so worked up at them I end up screaming and crying myself, and I always feel silly afterwards and a little bit ashamed. How can grown people make so much fuss over something so silly? Especially married people with kids?"

"Poor little coitus," I smiled. In fact, Rennie's high spirits produced a contrary feeling in me: the happier she grew, the more glum I became, and the more she professed to take the matter lightly, the graver it seemed to me.

"Such a completely insignificant thing to take seriously! It's hardly worth thinking about, much less breaking up a marriage over! I could sleep with a hundred different men and not feel any different about Joe!"

"Well, now," I protested snappishly, "of course nothing's significant in itself, but anything's serious that you want to take seriously. There's no reason to make fun of another man's seriousnesses."

"Oh, stop it!" Rennie cried. "You're as bad as Joe is. I think all our trouble comes from thinking too much and talking too much. We talk ourselves into all kinds of messes that would disappear if everybody just shut up about them." She drank another glass of wine -- her fourth or fifth -- while I still nursed my first one. "You know what I think? I think none of this would have happened if we all didn't have so much time on our hands. I really do. You claim you don't know how you could ever have begun the whole business, but I think you did it because you're bored."

"Is that so?"

"You don't have any ambitions, you're not very busy or very handsome, you live by yourself. I think of you up here all day long, rocking in your rocking chair, daydreaming and cooking up schemes, just because you're bored. I think the key to your whole character is that you're just bored."

"I'm not just anything," I said without conviction. "Maybealso bored, but neverjust bored." Rennie, it was clear, was practicing a little layman's Mythotherapy herself: anybody who starts talking in terms of keys to people's characters is making myths, because the mystery of people is not to be explained by keys. But I was too glum just then to take more than perfunctory note of her playwriting.

"Well,I think you're just bored; I don't care what you think. I don't care what you or Joe either one thinks about this mess or about me any more: I've stopped taking it seriously. I've even stopped thinking about it."

"Good for you."

"That gets under your skin, though, doesn't it?" she laughed. "It takes the fun out of it when I stop being hurt. Well, the devil with you! I've stopped being hurt. Look how down in the mouth you are. You look like you've messed your pants or something." The idea amused her; she giggled vinously. "That's just how Joe looked this morning -- gloomy as a prophet. You're pouting because your game is spoiled. Now cheer up and get drunk with me or else take me home."

I emptied my glass and refilled it. "You realize, of course, that I don't believe a word of this. It's brave, but it's not convincing."

"You don't dare believe it," Rennie taunted.

"I don't dare to, and you couldn't if your life depended on it."

"I don't care," Rennie declared. "I don't give a damn."

"I don't believe Joe knows anything about it either."

"I don't care."

"He wouldn't get gloomy. He'd walk out."

"That's what you think. We're tied tighter than that. I don't know why I worried in the first place; no piece of nonsense like this could break Joe and me up. It would take a stronger person than you, Jake. You don't really know anything about Joe and me. Not a damned thing."

"I said last time you should tell him to go to hell."

"Maybe I'll tell you both to go to hell."

"Okay, girl, but watch that left hook of his when you do."

This remark canceled the effects of at least three glasses of muscatel.

"I don't think Joe would ever hit me again," she said seriously.

"Then skip home with that quart of muscatel in you, tweak his nose for him, and tell him you can't think seriously any more about anything as silly as your sex life," I suggested. "Tell him the whole trouble is he thinks too much."

"He wouldn't hit me, Jake. He'd never do that again."

"He'd fracture your damn jaw for you. Tell him he's acting like a high-school boy! He'll lay you out cold and you know it. Come on, I'll go along with you. If you're right we'll all three chuckle and chortle and snot our noses. We'll shake hands all around and our troubles will be over."

Rennie was entirely sober now.

"I hate you," she said. "You won't let me even try to be halfway happy again for a minute, will you? I can't even pretend to be happy."

And(mirabile dictu) as soon as she assumed my glumness, I was free of it -- took up her lost gaiety, in fact, and poured myself another glass of muscatel.

"You feel great, don't you?" Rennie cried.

"Happy, happy human perversity. I'm genuinely sorry, Rennie."

"You're genuinely cheerful!" she said, whipping her head from side to side.

But such precarious good spirits as these of Rennie's and such unnecessary cruelty as this of mine were rare. Just as the second visit had borne little resemblance to the first, the third (and last in September) was nothing at all like the second. By this time I was involved enough in teaching so that my moods more and more often had their origin in the classroom. On this particular day, the last Friday in September, I felt acute, tuned-up, razor-sharp, simply because in my grammar class that morning I'd explained the rules governing the case forms of English pronouns: it gives a man a great sense of lucidity and well-being, if not downright formidability, to be able not only to say, but to understand perfectly, that predicate complements of infinitives of copulative verbs without expressed subjects go into the nominative case, whereas predicate complements of infinitives of copulative verbswith expressed subjects go into the objective case. I made this observation to my awed assemblage of young scholars and concluded triumphantly, "I was thought to behe, but I thought John to behim! Questions?"

"Aw, look," protested a troublesome fellow -- in the back of the room, of course -- whom I'd early decided to flunk if possible for his impertinence, "which came first, the language or the grammar books?"

"What's on your mind, Blakesley?" I demanded, refusing to play his game.

"Well, it stands to reason people talked before they wrote grammar books, and all the books did was tell how people were talking. For instance, when my roommate makes a phone call I ask him, 'Who were you talking to?' Everybody in this class would say, 'Who were you talking to?' I'll bet ninety-nine per cent of the people of America would say, 'Who were you talking to?' Nobody's going to say, 'To whom were you just now talking?' I'll bet even you wouldn't say it. It sounds queer, don't it?" The class snickered. "Now this is supposed to be a democracy, so if nobody but a few profs ever say, 'To whom were you just now speaking?', why go on pretending we're all out of step but you? Why not change the rules?"

A Joe Morgan type, this lad: paths should be laid where people walk. I hated his guts.

"Mr. Blakesley, I suppose you eat your fried chicken with your fingers?"

"What? Sure I do. Don't you?"

The class tittered, engrossed in the duel, but as of this last rather flat sally they were not so unreservedly allied with him as before.

"And your bacon at breakfast? Fingers or fork, Mr. Blakesley?"

"Fingers," he said defiantly. "Sure, that's right, fingers were invented before forks, just like English was invented before grammar books."

"But notyour fingers, as the saying goes," I smiled coolly, "and not your English -- God knows!" The class was with me all the way: prescriptive grammar was victorious.

"The point is," I concluded to the class in general, "that if we were still savages, Mr. Blakesley would be free to eat like a swine without breaking any rules, because there'd be no rules to break, and he could say, 'It sounds queer, don't it?' to his heart's content without being recognized as illiterate, because literacy -- the grammar rules -- wouldn't have been invented. But once a set of rules for etiquette or grammar is established and generally accepted as the norm -- meaning the ideal, not the average -- then one is free to break them only if he's willing to be generally regarded as a savage or an illiterate. No matter how dogmatic or unreasonable the rules might be, they're the convention. And in the case of language there's still another reason for going along with even the silliest rules. Mr. Blakesley, what does the wordhorse refer to?"

Mr. Blakesley was sullen, but he replied, "The animal. Four-legged animal."

"Equus caballus,"I agreed: "a solid-hoofed, herbivorous mammal. And what does the algebraic symbolx stand for?"

"x?Anything. It's an unknown."

"Good. Then the symbolx can represent anything we want it to represent, as long as it always represents the same thing in a given equation. Buthorse is just a symbol too -- a noise that we make in our throats or some scratches on the blackboard. And theoretically we could make it stand for anything we wanted to also, couldn't we? I mean, if you and I agreed that just between ourselves the wordhorse would meangrammar book, then we could say, 'Open your horse to Page Twenty,' or 'Did you bring your horse to class with you today?' And we two would know what we meant, wouldn't we?"

"Sure, I guess so." With all his heart Mr. Blakesley didn't want to agree. He sensed that he was somehow trapped, but there was no way out.

"Of course we would. But nobody else would understand us -- that's the whole principle of secret codes. Yet there's ultimately no reason why the symbolhorse shouldn't always refer to grammar book instead of toEquus caballus: the significance of words are arbitrary conventions, mostly; historical accidents. But it was agreed before you and I had any say in the matter that the wordhorse would refer toEquus caballus, and so if we want our sentences to be intelligible to very many people, we have to go along with the convention. We have to sayhorse when we meanEquus caballus, andgrammar book when we mean this object here on my desk. You're free to break the rules, but not if you're after intelligibility. If youdo want intelligibility, then the only way to get 'free' of the rules is to master them so thoroughly that they're second nature to you. That's the paradox: in any kind of complicated society a man is usually free only to the extent that he embraces all the rules of that society. Who's more free in America?" I asked finally. "The man who rebels against all the laws or the man who follows them so automatically that he never even has to think about them?"

This last, to be sure, was a gross equivocation, but I was not out to edify anybody; I was out to rescue prescriptive grammar from the clutches of my impudent Mr. Blakesley, and, if possible, to crucify him in the process.

"But, Mr. Horner," said a worried young man -- in the front row, of course -- "people are always finding better ways to do things, aren't they? And usually they have to change the rules to make improvements. If nobody rebelled against the rules there'd never be any progress."

I regarded the young man benignly: he would survive any horse manure of mine.

"That's another paradox," I said to him. "Rebels and radicals at all times are people who see that the rules are often arbitrary -- always ultimately arbitrary -- and who can't abide arbitrary rules. These are the free lovers, the women who smoke cigars, the Greenwich Village characters who don't get haircuts, and all kinds of reformers. But the greatest radical in any society is the man who sees all the arbitrariness of the rules and social conventions, but who has such a great scorn or disregard for the society he lives in that he embraces the whole wagonload of nonsense with a smile. The greatest rebelis the man who wouldn't change society for anything in the world."

So. This troubled my bright young man no end, I'm sure, and to the rest of the class it was doubtless incomprehensible, but its effect on me was to add to my already-established sense of acumen the delicate spice of slightly smiling paradox. The mood persisted throughout the day: I left school with my head full of the Janusian ambivalence of the universe, and I walked through the world's charming equipoise, its ubiquitous polarity, to my room, where at nine o'clock that evening Rennie found me rocking in my chair, still faintly smiling at my friend Laoco?n, whose grimace was his beauty.

She was nervous and quiet. We said hello to each other, and she stood about clumsily for a minute before sitting down. Clearly, some new stage had been reached.

"What now?" I asked her.

She made no answer, but ticked her cheek and gestured vacantly with her right hand.

"How's Joe?"

"The same."

"Oh. How're you?"

"I don't know. Going crazy."

"Joe hasn't been giving you a hard time, has he?"

She looked at me for a moment.

"He's God," she said. "He's just God."

"So I understand."

"All this week he's been wonderful. Not like he was just after he got back from Washington -- that wasn't normal for him. You'd think it was all over and done with."

"Why shouldn't it be? That's how I felt the day after it happened."

She sighed. "So, I just mentioned offhand that I didn't feel like coming up here any more -- didn't see any point to it."

"Good."

"He didn't say a word. He just gave me a long look that made me wish I was dead. Then tonight he saidhe'd pretty much come to accept this as a part of me, even though he couldn't understand why it had started, and he'd respect me more if I was consistent than if I repudiated what I'd done. Then he said he didn't see any need to talk about it any more, and that was that."

"Well, by God, then, the trouble's all over with, isn't it?"