Chapter 8

Such guilt as I felt could not be sustained, nor could such self-contempt.Killing it with sleep was out of the question, because I couldn't sleep, except fitfully. No great activity or overwhelming new mood appeared, to remove it from my mind. The loathing that I felt for myself soured my digestion, so that food lay like clay in my stomach; poisoned my consciousness, so that attempts at diversion -- books or movies -- were agonizing, and acting the professor was a bitter farce. As though to complement my mood, it rained for the next three days: one got soaked running from cars to buildings and from buildings to cars; the classrooms smelled of wet clothing, chalk dust, and stale air; students stared sullenly out the windows. To hear my own voice, prating of adverbs and prepositions like an insane parrot, sickened me; no one paid attention. Penned in my room alone with myself, I was frantic.

I believe a week of such self-revulsion would have brought me to suicide: certainly that was what occupied my mind a great deal of the tune. I envied all dead things -- the fat earthworms that lay squashed all over the wet sidewalks, the animals whose fried bodies I chewed at mealtimes, people decomposing in muddy cemeteries -- but I had at hand no means of self-destruction that I was courageous enough to use.

Stendhal claims to have once postponed suicide simply out of curiosity about the contemporary political situation in France: he wanted to see what would happen next. And, apart from cowardice, there was a similar thing that stayed my hand -- since the evening of my last interview with Rennie, Joe had not been to school. Shirley, Dr. Schott's secretary, announced that Mr. Morgan was ill, but that he was expected to return to work any day. The suspense involved in his absence was torturous, to be sure: was he actually ill, or had Rennie confessed her adultery? What was the specific connection between her confession and his absence? Most important of all, what would his reaction be? These were terrifying questions, but while they made me shrink at the thought of finally coming face to face with him, they also worked counter to any suicidal impulses; I could not kill myself at least until they were answered, if for no other reason than that from one very special point of view I would never learn whether doing away with myself had beencalled for.

On the third day, after lunch, Joe appeared at school and taught his afternoon classes. I paled when accidentally I met him in the main hallway between periods; my nervousness was made more excruciating by the fact that we had time to do no more than say hello to each other. He was entirely calm, but my feelings must have shown all over my face. I've no idea how I managed my last two classes.

At four o'clock I went to my office to grade my first batch of compositions, and a few minutes later Joe walked in. The two men who shared the office had gone home. Joe sat on the edge of the desk next to mine.

"How's it going?" he asked.

I shook my head, aching to tell him everything before he could tell me he already knew; but by this time I was so demoralized and confirmed in my weakness that all I could see was the remote possibility that he still didn't know. As long as this possibility still existed I was not strong enough to confess, and yet I knew very well that whatever happened to remove it would at the same time render my confession pointless.

"First batch of themes," I said, keeping my eyes on them. "How do you feel? Shirley said you've been sick."

"I have," Joe said. No doubt his face would have told me how to understand this reply, but I couldn't look him in the face. I pretended to examine a theme paper, and clutched at title hope that he was speaking literally.

"How about you?" he asked; there was no sarcasm in his voice, only curiosity. My heart lifted.

"Oh, as usual."

"No colds from all this rain?"

"Nope. I don't take cold easily." I could have laughed aloud with relief! Shame I would doubtless feel later, but just then the narrowness of my escape exhilarated me. He didn't know! Silently I thanked Rennie with all my heart -- almost loved her at that moment.

"What'd you have?" I asked, more steadily and cheerfully. "Mononucleosis or gonorrhea?" Now I even dared glance at him to see his response to my slight joke.

"Horner," he said painfully, "why in the name of Christ did you fuck Rennie?"

The question was like a blow to the head: I grew dizzy, and my stomach knotted up. For a moment it was impossible to talk. He waited, regarding me with, I think, fascinated disgust.

"Lord, Joe --" I croaked. At the first sound of my voice, at the sheer effort of speaking, tears filled my eyes, and I blushed and sweated. I had nothing to say.

Joe pushed his glasses back on his nose.

"Why'd you want to do it? What was your reason?"

"Joe, I can't talk now."

"Yes, you can," he said evenly. "You talk now, or I'll knock the crap out of you."

This, I should say, while entirely in keeping with his frank nature, was a double tactical error on Joe's part. In the first place, although the threat of violence frightened me, it also put me immediately on the defensive, and if defensiveness is an indication of guilt feelings, it is at the same time a release from them: a murderer bent on escaping punishment has little time to contemplate the vileness of his deed. Second, it seems to me that, generally speaking, the only way for a person to get truly honest answers from another person, and be confident of their honesty, is to create the suggestion that any answer will be received cordially, without punishment.

"I didn'twant to do it, Joe. I don't know why I did it."

"Horseshit. Maybe you don'tapprove of what you did, but you obviously wanted to do it, or you wouldn't have done it. What a man ends up doing is what he has to take responsibility for having wanted to do. Why did youthink you were doing it?"

"I wasn't thinking, Joe. If I'd been thinking I wouldn't have done it."

"Did you think I'd like the idea? What kind of a guy did you think I was?"

"I didn't think, Joe."

"You're being deliberately obtuse, Horner, and that irritates me."

"Maybe obtuse, but not deliberately. I don't know what unconscious motives I might have had, Joe, but whatever they were, they were unconscious, so I can't know anything about them." And, I was thinking, can't be held responsible for them. "But I swear I had no conscious motives at all."

"Don't youwant to be held responsible?" Joe asked incredulously.

"I do, Joe, believe me," I said halfheartedly. "But I can't give you reasons when I didn't have any. Do you want me to make up reasons?"

"What kind of picture did you have of Rennie and me, for God's sake?" Joe said, exasperated. "The thing that appalls me most is what you must have thought of our relationship, to pull a stunt like that! I know you made fun of a lot of things about us -- I always had to excuse a lot of your crap because I was interested in you. Did you decide that Rennie was easy game because I was driving her hard, or what? And don't you draw any distinctions between easy game and fair game? Did you really think you could split her off from me to the point where she'd keep something like that a secret?"

"Joe, for God's sake, I know it was a hell of a thing to do! I'm not defending adultery and deception."

"But you committed them. Why did you do it? Do you think I care what you think about the seventh commandment? I'm not objecting to adultery and deception as sins, Horner; I object to your screwing Rennie and then trying to get her to hide the fact from me. Listen, I don't give a damn about you. You've already forfeited any claims you might have thought you had to my friendship. On that level I'm through with you. It may well be that I'm through with Rennie, too, but I can't tell until I've heard the whole story. I want to hear your version of the business, if you've got one. I've already heard Rennie's -- that's what I've been doing for the last three days. But her memory's not perfect, and like anybody else's it's selective. Naturally, what I've heard puts the best possible interpretation on what she did, and perhaps the worst possible on what you did. Remember, boy,I wasn't there. Rennie's not playing innocent, but I want all the facts and all the interpretations of the facts."

"What can I say, Joe?"

He sprang down lightly from the desk. "I'll be up to see you after supper," he said. "I'd rather hear what you have to say without Rennie around. Don't worry," he added with some contempt; "I won't shoot you, Jake. I wouldn't have mentioned violence if Rennie hadn't said you expected it."

Well, I ate an uneasy meal, as might be expected. Nevertheless, the notion of suicide no longer entered my head. As if to symbolize my weather change, the rain let up during the late afternoon, and by six o'clock ceased altogether, though the sky was still overcast. Indeed, I even found myself adding my former intense guilt feeling to the list of my other weaknesses, and consequently regretting it along with the rest. I felt no better about what I'd done -- fornicating with their wives behind my friends' backs and then deceiving them about it were evils in terms of my own point of view whenever I could be said to have a point of view -- but I feltdifferently about it. Now that it was out in the open I felt truly relieved, and dealing concretely with Joe shifted the focus of my attention from my guilt to what I could do toward salvaging my self-respect. If I was going to live, I had to live with myself, and because much of the time I was a profoundly moral animal, the salvage job was the first order of business. What had been done had been done, but the past, after all, exists only in the minds of those who are thinking about it in the present, and therefore in the interpretations which are put upon it. In that sense it is never too late todo something about the past. Not that I wanted to recreate the incident,à la Moscow, in a way favorable to myself: my difficulty, precisely, was that I hadn't the desire to defend what I'd done, or the ability to explain it. The Jacob Horner that I felt a desperate desire to defend was not the one who had tumbled stupidly on Joe Morgan's bed with Joe Morgan's wife or the one who had burned in shame and skulking fear for days afterwards, but the one who was now the object of Joe's disgust -- the Horner of the present moment and all the Homers to come. And, for better or worse, the fellow who rose to the defense was still contrite -- profoundly contrite -- but no longer humble.

Joe came up to my room shortly after seven and sat not quite at ease in one of my grotesque chairs. The very fact of his coming there instead of asking me to come to his place, while no doubt the only way to operate, was, it seemed to me, another tactical error -- at least his manner was more subdued than it had been that afternoon. But, as he would have observed at once had I been in a position to point this out, Joe by his very nature had no tactic. It was, of course, the simple fact that he wasn't interested in prosecuting any case against me which made the job of defending myself more difficult, if not impossible.

"Let me explain my position in this, Jake," he began.

"God, Joe, yours is the only position that doesn't need it!"

"That's not right. The fact that you don't realize it's not right is part of your misunderstanding of Rennie and me."

"Joe, I realize perfectly well that you'd have been completely justified in beating the daylights out of me or even shooting me. I don't question my guilt."

"And I'm not interested in your guilt," he said. "This business of harping on your guilt and my right to be outraged is an oversimplification of the problem. By pretending that all the fuss is over broken commandments, you allow yourself not to take any of it very seriously, because you know as well as I do that those things aren't absolutes. I'm not interested in blaming anybody for anything. If you really understood us you'd realize that -- but of course if you really understood us this wouldn't have happened."

"I wish to Christ it hadn't," I said fervently.

"That's silly. If anything I'm glad it did happen, because it uncovered real problems that I didn't know existed. Try to remember that I'm not the least bit interested in or concerned about you. If that hurts your pride, all I can say is that your pride isn't the most important thing on my mind right now. If I can explain our problem to you, maybe you'll understand what's relevant and what isn't."

And so he explained it:

"The most important thing in the world to me -- one of my absolutes, I suppose -- is the relationship between Rennie and me. Rennie's already told me all the stuff she could remember having told you about us during your horseback rides. The fact that she told you is one of my problems, but since she did it's probably best to hear my end of it too.

"You know I met Rennie in New York while I was at Columbia. What attracted me to her was that she was the mostself-sufficient girl I'd ever met; maybe the only one -- our culture doesn't turn them out too generously. She was popular enough, but she didn't seem to need popularity or even friendship at all. If she ever felt lonely back then, I believe it was because she didn't always understand her own self-sufficiency -- certainly she didn't feel lonely very often. That's what attracted me. I had been in the Army before Columbia, and in a college fraternity before that, and I'd done plenty enough horsing around with women not to confuse one kind of attraction with another. Have you laid very many women, Jake?"

"Not very many," I replied modestly.

"I only asked because I wonder if that mixing-up of attractions might not be involved in your part of this business. Possibly it was in Rennie's: she'd never slept with any man but me before."

I squirmed with contrition.

"It was because of this self-sufficiency I thought I saw in her that I was able to imagine having the kind of relationship with her that she described to you -- a more or less permanent relationship. It would only be possible between two pretty independent people who had a complete respect for each other's self-sufficiency. The fact that we didn'tneed each other in any of the ordinary 'basic' ways seemed to me to mean that we could be damned good for each other in all kinds of other ways. But I think you've heard all this. It explains, incidentally, why Rennie's telling you all that stuff in the pine grove surprised me and bothered me -- not that privacy is so important in itself, but it's an indication of the kind of independence we thought we had.

"Now you must realize that I don't have any theories about sexual morality, for Christ's sake. Rennie and I never talked about it at all. But I believe we both tacitly assumed that any kmd of extramarital sex was out of the question for us in the same way that lying or homosexuality was out of the question: we hadn't the slightest need for it. Not only don't I have any philosophy about sexual morals -- I don't seem to have any automatic feelings about them, either. But Rennie did. Very strong ones. I'm sure she couldn't have defended them rationally -- no ethical program can be defended rationally clear down the line. Probably it was a carryover from her home life. But the fact that she felt strongly about marital fidelity was enough to make it our way of operating: her feeling didn't conflict with any private notions of my own, and for that matter it kind of suited the relationship we wanted, because it kept everything intramural.

"So that was my ideal of Rennie: self-sufficiency, strength (I could tell you a lot about her strength), and privacy. And there's our problem. According to my version of Rennie, what happened couldn't have happened. According to her version of herself, it couldn't have happened. And yet it happened. That's why even now we have a hard time believing it reallydid happen: we not only have to accept the fact that she did what she did, but also the fact that shewanted to do it -- don't think I'm accusing you of rape. Accepting those facts makes it necessary to correct our version of Rennie, and right now we can't see how any version that allows for what happened would also allow for the kind of relationship we thought we had. And that relationship was the orientation post that gave every other part of our lives -- everything we did -- its values. It's more important to me than being a great scholar or a great anything else. If we have to scrap it, all these other things lose their point. There's nothing emotional about all this -- it's as coherent a picture as I can make of the way I see what Rennie and I were doing, and why everything's got to be held in suspension now until we decide the significance of what happened. Rennie feels the same way. It's what we've been talking about for the last three days, and it's what we'll talk about for a long time to come, if she doesn't do away with herself while I'm up here with you."

My heart went out to him.

"I'm sorry, Joe."

"But that's beside the point!" he laughed, not humorously. "The only reason I'm interested in your share of this -- the reason I keep asking you why you did it and what you thought of Rennie and me to give you the idea of trying her out -- is that I have to know to what extent your actions influenced her actions."

"Joe, I swear, I take full responsibility for everything that happened."

"But I see you're not willing to help me. Do you take full responsibility for the fact that she was on top the first time? Was it you that bit yourself on your own left shoulder? Damn it, I told you Rennie wasn't playing innocent! What she and I want out of each other isn't possible unless we assume that we're free agents -- pretendwe are even when we suspect we aren't. Why do you insist on playing games like this, Jake? I'm obviously being as honest as I can. Just once, for God's sake, drop all the acting and be straight with me!"

"I'm doing my best, Joe," I declared uncomfortably.

"But you refuse to forget about yourself even for a minute! What do you want? If you're trying to make me feel good about you, I swear this isn't the way. I don't know whether anything you say will work that way, but the only chance at all is to be absolutely honest now."

"Well, it seems to me that you won't accept anything as honest except whatever it is that you want to hear, and I'm not sure what that is or I'd say it. Ask me questions, and I'll answer them."

"Why'd you screw Rennie?"

"I don'tknow!"

"What reasons do you think you might have had?"

"I couldn't give any reason that I think would be true."

"Hell, Horner, you don't justdo things. What was on your mind?"

"Nothing was on my mind."

Joe began to show anger.

"Listen, Joe," I pleaded. "Granted that everything people do is probably psychologically determined. Granted that I might have had any kind of unconscious motive for doing it -- pick any motive you want. But two things are true: if I had any motive, it was unconscious, so only a psychoanalyst could find out what it was -- if it was unconscious, then by definition I'm not conscious of it. I'm perfectly willing to allow psychic determinism, but we can never know which way we're predetermined to act, soin effect we're not predetermined at all. In the second place, even if an analyst could tell me why I did it, my unconscious motives would be beside the point as far as we're concerned. If you're going to talk ethics, then you have to discount everything but conscious motivations, since they're the only ones that can be argued from an ethical point of view. There's no reason not to do this -- it's perfectly possible to believe in psychic determinism and still talk ethics -- but you've got to allow for the fact that people -- maybe yourself excluded -- aren't going to have conscious motives for everything they do. There'll always be a few things in their autobiography that they can't account for. Now when that happens the person could still make up conscious reasons -- maybe in your case they'd spring to mind the first time you thought about an act after you did it -- but they'd always be rationalizations after the fact."

"That's all right," Joe insisted. "If I went along with everything you just said, I'd still have to say that even the rationalizing after the fact has to be done, and the person has to be held responsible -- has to holdhimself responsible -- for his rationalizings, if he wants to be a moral actor."

"Then you'll have to go further still and allow that sometimes a man won't even be able to rationalize. Nothing comes to mind. You don't accept it when I take full responsibility for everything that happened, and you won't accept it if I don't take any responsibility. But in this business I don't see what's in between."

I lit a cigarette. I was nervous, and happy and unhappy at the same time about the fact that despite my nervousness I felt pretty good, pretty sure of my mind, pretty satisfied at my ability to play a role that struck me as being at once somewhat abhorrent and yet apparently ineluctable. That is, I felt it to be a role, but I wasn't sure that anything else wouldn't also be a role, and I couldn't think of any other possible roles for me anyhow. If, as may be, this is the best anyone can do -- at least the best I could do -- why, then, it's as much as can ever be signified by the termsincerity.

"That's all beside the point," Joe said. "I'm not interested in how much responsibility you're willing to assume. What I want to know is what happened, so I'll know how much responsibility to hand out all around, whether you accept it or not. When did you get the idea you could make out with Rennie?"

"I don't know. Maybe not till we were in bed, maybe as soon as I met you all, maybe sometime in between. I wasn't aware of getting the idea."

"What did she do or say that gave you the idea?"

"I'm not sure Ihad the idea. The afternoon and evening I was out there, while you were gone, I could interpret everything she said and didn't say as evidence that she was prepared to make love with me, or I could interpret none of it as evidence. At the time I don't believe I was interpreting at all."

"What was said?"

"God, I can't remember conversations! Didn't Rennie tell you?"

"Sure she did. Can't you remember, or are you playing obtuse again?"

"I can't remember."

"Well, what the hell am I going to do?" Joe cried. "You claim you didn't have any conscious motives.. You aren't aware of any unconscious motives. You won't rationalize. You didn't make any conscious interpretations of anything Rennie did. And you can't remember any conversations. Have I got to agree with Rennie that you don't even exist? What else makes a man a human being except these things?"

"I could add some more things to the list of my inabilities." I shrugged.

"Don't bother. Don't you see, Horner, if you could convince me that very much of what Rennie did was under your influence, it wouldn't be good, because she shouldn't have been in a position to be influenced very much. And if you convinced me that very little if any of it was your influence it still wouldn't be good, because by our picture of her she couldn't have chosen to do it. So it's not that I'm trying to solve the problem by passing the buck. The thing is, I can't be sure just what the problem is that has to be solved until I know just what happened and why each thing happened."

I felt strong enough by this time to say, "I don't think you'd have as much of a problem if you had more respect for the answer 'I don't know.' It can be an awfully honest answer, Joe. When somebody close to you injures you unaccountably, and you say, 'Why in the world did you do that?' and they say, 'I don't know,' it seems to me that that answer can be worthy of respect. And if it's somebody you love or trust who says it, and they say it contritely, I think it could even be acceptable."

"But once they've said it," Joe said, "once they're in a position tohave to say it, how do you tell whether the love and trust that make it acceptable were justified?"

How indeed? All I could have replied is that I personally couldn't imagine ever having to reach that question, but I could certainly imagine Joe reaching it.

"Well, that could never do, Jake," Joe said, getting ready to go. "If that has to be your answer, I can't see how to deal with you, and if it's got to be Rennie's I can't see how to deal with her either. That answer simply doesn't come up in the Morgan cosmos. Maybe I'm in the wrong cosmos, but it's the only one I can see setting up serious relationships in. You ought to know, boy, that Rennie blames you for nearly everything that happened."

I was a little surprised, but I simply wrinkled my forehead and made a quicktch in the left corner of my mouth.

"I don't see why you shouldn't believe her," I declared.

"But you think it's pretty ordinary of her, don't you? The kind of thing you'd expect awoman to do?"

"I don't have any opinion," I said. "Or rather, I have both opinions at once."

This observation nearly clenched Joe's fists in disgust, and he left my room.

I could say that this conversation left me disturbed, but it seems more accurate to say that it left me stimulated: my disturbance was the disturbance of stimulation more than of guilt, the same disturbance that a complicated argument always produces -- the disturbance, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but invariably exhilarating, effected by any duel of articulations, where the duelists have things of sufficient value at stake to make the contest, if after all a game, at least a serious game.

Articulation! There, by Joe, wasmy absolute, if I could be said to have one. At any rate, it is the only thing I can think of about which I ever had, with any frequency at all, the feelings one usually has for one's absolutes. To turn experience into speech -- that is, to classify, to categorize, to conceptualize, to grammarize, to syntactify it -- is always a betrayal of experience, a falsification of it; but only so betrayed can it be dealt with at all, and only in so dealing with it did I ever feel a man, alive and kicking. It is therefore that, when I had cause to think about it at all, I responded to this precise falsification, this adroit, careful myth-making, with all the upsetting exhilaration of any artist at his work. When my mythoplastic razors were sharply honed, it was unparalleled sport to lay about with them, to have at reality.

In other senses, of course, I don't believe this at all.