Chapter 10 1

"Except that I don't particularly believe him, and even if I did, I don't recognize myself any more."

"That's not so awful. I almost never do."

"But Joe always does. So nothing's solved as long as I can't be as authentic as he is, and see myself in what I do as clearly as I see him in what he does. Joe's always recognizable."

I smiled. "Almost always."

"You mean that time we spied on him? Oh, Jesus!" She shook her head. "Jake, you know what? I wish I'd been struck blind before I looked in that window. That's what started everything."

Sweet paradox: "Or you could say that's what ended everything. But it would start or end anything only for a Morgan. Certainly not for a Horner. In my cosmos everybody is part chimpanzee, especially when he's by himself, and nobody's terribly surprised by anything the other chimpanzees do."

"Not Joe, though."

"Maybe the guy who fools himself least is the one who admits that we're all just kidding.'"

Sweet, sweet paradox!

"Joe and I have done a real Marcel Proust on this thing," Rennie said sadly. "We've taken it apart from every point of view we could think of. Sometimes I think I've never understood anything as thoroughly in my life as I do this, and other times -- like after I was up here last time, and now -- I realize I don't understand any more than I ever did. It's all still a mystery. It tears me up even when I don't see anything to be torn up about."

"What does Joe think of me lately?"

"I don't know. I don't think he hates you any more. Probably he just doesn't care to deal with you. He thinks your part in it was probably characteristic of you."

"Which me, for heaven's sake?" I laughed. "How about you?"

"I still despise you, I think," Rennie said unemotionally.

"Clear through?"

"As far as I can see."

This thrilled me from head to foot. I had been not interested in Rennie this night until she said this, but now I was acutely interested in her.

"Has this been just since we slept together?"

"I don't know how much of it is retroactive, Jake; right now I think I've disliked you ever since I've known you, but I guess that's not so. I've had some kind of feeling about you at least since we started the riding lessons, and as far as I can see now it was a kind of dislike. Abhorrence, I guess, is a better word. I don't believe in anything like premonitions, but I swear I've wished ever since August that we'd never met you, even though I couldn't have said why."

I felt way high on a mountaintop, thinking widely and uncloudedly; hundred-eyed Argus was not more synoptic.

"I'll bet I know one point of view you and Joe didn't try, Rennie."

"We tried them all," she said.

I felt like the end of an Ellery Queen novel.

"Not this one. And by the Law of Parsimony it's good, because it accounts for the most facts by the fewest assumptions. It's simple as hell: we didn't just copulate; we made love. What you've felt all along and couldn't admit to yourself was that you love me."

"That's right," Rennie breathed, looking at me tautly.

"It could be. I'm not being vain. At least I'm notjust being vain."

"That's not what I meant," Rennie said, and she had some difficulty saying it. "I meant -- it's not right that I've never admitted it to myself."

Now her eyes showed real abhorrence, but it was not clear in them what or whom she abhorred. I grew very excited.

"Well, I'll be damned!"

"That's one of the things that destroys me," Rennie said. "The idea that I might have been in love with you all the time occurred to me along with all the rest -- along with the idea that I despise you and the idea that I couldn't really feel anything about you because you don't exist. You know what I mean. I don't know which is true."

"I suppose they're all true, Rennie," I suggested. "While we're at it, did you ever consider that maybe Joe's the one who doesn't exist?"

"No." She whipped her head slowly. "I don't know."

"I don't think you have to be afraid of the idea that you feel some kind of love for me. Certainly it doesn't imply anything one way or the other about your feeling for Joe, unless you want to be romantic about it. In fact, I don't see where it implies anything, except that the whole affair is less mysterious than we'd supposed, and maybe less sordid."

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: itis 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'tjust 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 aslove orabhorrence. 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 ofx'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 shex-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 thatI 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.