I hung around, but it didn't do any good. Governor Stanton sat in the living room and had another drink by himself and looked over the evening paper. We clung together in the porch swing, and listen to his paper rattle when he turned the page, and whispered that we loved each other. Then we just clung without talking, for the words began to lose their meaning, and listened to the rain beat the trees.
When a little break came in the rain, I got up, went inside, and shook hands with the Governor, then came out, kissed Anne good-bye, and left. It was a stiff cold-lipped kiss, as though the summer never had been at all, or hadn't been what if had been.
I went on back to Stat. I felt that I couldn't wait for Christmas when she would come home. We wrote every day, but the letters began to seem like checks drawn on the summer's capital. There had been a lot in the bank, but it is never good business practice to live on your capital, and I had the feeling, somehow, of living on the capital and watching dwindle. At the same time, I was wild to see her.
I saw her Christmas, for ten days. It wasn't like the summer. She told me she loved me and was going to marry me, and she let me go pretty far. But she wouldn't marry me then, and she wouldn't go the limit. We had a row about that just before she left. She had been willing to in September, but now she wouldn't. It seemed that she was, in a way, breaking a promise, and so I got pretty mad. I told her she didn't love me. She said she did. I wanted to know why she wouldn't go on, then. "It's not because I'm afraid and it's not because I don't love you. Oh, I do love you, Jackie, I do," she said, "and it's not because I'm a nasty old nicey-pants. It's because you are the way you are, Jackie."
"Yeah," I sneered, "you mean you don't trust me, you think I wouldn't marry you and then you'd be the ruined maid."
"I know you'd marry me," she said, "it's just because you're the way you are."
But she wouldn't say any more. So we had an awful row. I went back to State a nervous wreck.
She didn't write to me for a month. I held out about two weeks, and then began to apologize. So the letters began again, and far off somewhere in the great bookkeeping system of the universe somebody punched some red buttons every day on a posting machine and some red figures went on the ledger sheet.
She was back at the Landing in June for a few days. But the Governor was not well and before long the doctors packed him off to Maine to get him out of the heat. He took Anne with him. Before she left, it was just like Christmas, and not like the summer before. It was even worse than Christmas, for I had my B. A. now and it was time for me to get into the Law School. We had a row about that. Or was it about that? She said something about law and I blew up. We made it up, by letter, after she had been in Maine six weeks, and the letters began again and the red figures fell like bloody little bird tracks on that ledger leaf bearing my name in the sky, and I lay around Judge Irwin's house and read American history, not for school, not because I had to, but because I had, by accident, stepped through he thin, crackly crust of the present, and felt the first pull of the quicksand about my ankles. When she came back for a week or so in the fall, with her father, before she went off to some refined female college in Virginia, we spent a lot of time in the bay and in the roadster, and made all the motions we had made before. She flew down from the diving tower like a bird. She lay in my arms in the moonlight, when there was moonlight it was not the way it had been.
For one thing, there was the incident of the new kiss. About the second or third time we were together that fall, she kissed me in a new way, a way she had never used before. And she didn't do it in the discriminating, experimental way she had done thing the summer before. She just did it, in the heat of the moment, you might say. I knew right away she had picked it up from some man up in Maine that summer, some summer bastard in white flannel pants with vowels that clicked like dominoes. I told her I knew she'd been fooling with some fellows in Maine. She didn't deny it, not even for an instant. She just said, "Yes," as cool as could be, and asked me how I knew. I told her. Then she said, "Oh, of course," and I got pretty mad and pulled away from her. She had kept her arm around my neck the whole time.
She just looked at me, still cool, and said, "Jack, I did kiss a man up in Maine. He was a nice boy, Jack, and I liked him a lot and he was fun to be with. But I didn't love him. And if you and I hadn't had that row and I hadn't felt that the world had sort of come to an end and I wouldn't be with you again, I wouldn't have done it. Maybe I wanted to fall in love with him. To fill up the empty place you left, Jackie.–Oh, Jackie, there was a place, an awful big place–" And with a simple unthinking gestured, she laid her right hand on her heart. "But I couldn't," she said. "I couldn't fall in love with him. And I quit kissing him. Even before we made up, you and I." She reached out and laid her right hand on one of my hands, and leaned toward me. "For we did make up, you and I," she asked, "didn't we, Jackie-Bird?" She laughed a quick laugh that welled up in her throat, then asked, "Didn't we, Jackie-Boy? Didn't we? And I'm happy again!"
"Yeah," I said, "we did."
"Aren't you happy?" she asked, leaning.
"Sure," I said, and was as happy, I suppose, as I deserved to be. But the thing was there all the time, breathing back there in the dark of my mind and waiting to pounce. Even though I forgot it was there. Then, the next night when she didn't kiss me in the new way, I felt the thing stir. And the next night. Because she didn't kiss that new way I was even angrier than I had been when she had. So I kissed her the way that man in Maine had done. She drew back from me immediately and said, quite quietly, "I know why you did that."
"You liked it well enough up in Maine," I said.
"Oh, Jackie," she said, "there isn't any place called Maine and never was, there just isn't anything but you and you are all forty-eight states together and I loved you all the time. Now will you be good? And kiss me our way?"
So I did that, but the world is a great snowball rolling downhill and it never rolls uphill to unwind itself back to nothing at all and nonhappening.
Even though the summer just past had not been like the summer before, I went on to State again and got my job hashing and did some newspaper reporting and entered the Law School and loathed it. Meanwhile I wrote letters to Anne at the very refines female college in Virginia, and the capital on which those checks were drawn dwindled and dwindled. Till Christmas, when I came home and Anne came home. I told her I simply loathed the Law School, and expected (and, in a twisted way, wanted) hell to pop. But hell did not pop. She merely reached over and patted my hand. (We were sitting on the couch in the Stanton living room, where we had clutched and clung until we had finally fallen apart from each other, she in a kind of withdrawn melancholy, and I in the fatigue and irritation of desire too long protracted and frustrated.) She patted my hand, and said, "Well, don't study law, then. You don't have to study aw."
"What do you want me to do then?"
"Jackie, I never wanted you to study law. It was your idea."
"Oh, was it?" I asked.
"Yes," she said, and patted my hand again. "Do what you want to, Jackie. I want you to do what you want. And I don't care if you don't make money. I told you long back I'd live on red beans with you."
I got up from the couch. For one reason so she couldn't pat my hand in that way which suddenly reminded me of the way a nurse pats the hand of a patient, a sort of impersonal pat intended to be soothing. I stood well back from her, and spoke firmly. "All right, you'll eat red beans with me. Let's get married. Tomorrow. Tonight. We've fooled around long enough. You say you love me. All right, I love you."
She didn't say anything, but sat there on the couch with her hands lying loose in her lap, and lifted her face, which suddenly was tired and drawn, and looked up at me from eyes which gradually brightened with unshed tears.
"You love me?" I demanded.
She nodded slowly.
"And you know I love you?" I demanded.
She nodded again.
"All right, then?"
"Jack," she sa
id, then stopped for a moment. "Jack, I do love you. I guess I feel sometimes that I might just kiss you and hold you tight and close my eyes and jump off a cliff with you. Or like that time when you dived down to me and we kissed in the water and it seemed like we'd never come up. Do you remember, Jack?"
"Yes," I said.
"I loved you like that then, Jack."
"Now?" I demanded, "what about now?"
"Now, too, Jack, I guess I could do it now, too. But it's different, too."
"Different?"
"Oh, Jack," she exclaimed, and for the first time, at least the first time I ever remembered, made the gesture of lifting her hands to her temples, that gesture to control distraction which was never to become characteristic but which I was to see again. "Oh, Jack," she said again, "things have happened, so much has happened. Since then."
"What has happened?"
"Oh, it's just that getting married isn't like jumping off a cliff. Love isn't either, isn't like jumping off a cliff. Or getting drowned. It's–it's–oh, I don't know how to say it–it's trying to live, it's having a way to live."
"Money," I said, "if it's money you–"
"It's not money," she interrupted, "I don't mean money–oh, Jack, if you only could see what I mean!"
"Well, I'm not going to get a job with Patton or anybody round here. Or have them get me a job. Not even Irwin. I'll get a job, I don't care what kind, but not with them."
"Darling," she said tiredly, "I'm not trying to make you come here. Or get a job with Patton. Or anybody. I want you to do what you want. Just so it is something. Even if you don't make money. I told you I'd live in a shack."
So I went back to the Law School and by dint of consistent effort succeeded in busting out before the end of the year. It took a lot of attention to get busted out, for a man just can't achieve that by the ordinary means at State. He has to work at it. I could have simply resigned, of course, but if you simply drop out or resign, you might be able to come back. So I busted out. Then while I was celebrating my busting out and was pretty sure Anne would be sore and throw me over, I got involved with a pal of mine and two girls and there was a small scandal, which got into the papers. I was an ex-student then, and so the University couldn't do anything about it. Anne didn't do anything either, for I guess I was an ex-Jackie-Bird by that time.
So Anne went her way and I went mine. My way was to work for a newspaper and hang around the lower part of the city and read books on American history. Finally I was taking courses at the University again, just spare time at first, then seriously. I was entering the enchantments of the past. For a while it looked as though Anne and I had made it up, but somehow a gear slipped and it was like before. I didn't finish the Ph. D. So I went back to the _Chronicle__, where I was reported and a damned good one. I even got married. To Lois, who was damned good looking, a lot better looking, I suppose, that Anne, and juicy while Anne was inclined to bone and muscle under flesh. Lois looked edible, and you knew it was tender all the way through, a kind of mystic combination of filet mignon and a Georgia peach aching for the tongue and ready to bleed gold. Lois married me for reasons best known to herself. But one was, I am sure, tat my name was Burden. I am forced to this conclusion by the process of elimination. It could not have been my beauty, grace, charm, wit, intellect, and learning, for, in the first place, my beauty, grace, and charm, were not great, and in the second place, Lois didn't have the slightest interest in wit, intellect, and learning. Even if I had had them. It could not have been my mother's money, for Lois's own widowed mother had plenty of money, which Lois's father had made from a lucky was contract for gravel, a little too late to give those things called advantages to his daughter at her most impressionable age. So it must have been the name of Burden.
Unless it was that Lois was in love with me. I put this possibility in the list merely for logical and schematic completeness, for I am quite sure that the only things Lois knew about love was how to spell the word ad how to make the physiological adjustments traditionally associated with the idea. She did not spell very well, but she made those adjustments with great skill and relish. The relish was nature, but the skill was art, and _ars longa est__. I knew this despite the very expert and sustained histrionics of which Lois was capable. I knew it, but I succeeded in burying it out in the back yard of my mind, like a rat that has been caught in the pantry gnawing the cheese. I didn't really care, I suppose, as long as nothing happened to make me have to face the fact. And once in my arms, Mrs. Burden was very faithful or very discreet, for nothing ever happened. And the arrangement was perfect.
"Jack and I are perfectly adjusted sexually," Lois used to say primly, for she was very advanced in what with her passed for thought and was very sophisticated in her language. She would look around at the faces of the guests in the very slick modernistic apartment (her taste ran that way and not to balconies overlooking charming old patios, and her money paid for rent), and would tell them how perfectly adjusted she and I were, and in telling them would add about two extra chocolate-cream-puff syllables to the word _sexually__. For a while I didn't mind her telling the guests how well adjusted we were. It even flattered my ego, for nobody would mind having his name coupled with that of Lois or having his picture taken with her in a public place. So I would beam modestly around the little groups, while Lois told them about that perfect adjustment. But later it began to annoy me.
As long as I regarded Lois as a beautiful, juicy, soft, vibrant, sweet-smelling, sweet-breathed machine for provoking and satisfying the appetite (and that was the Lois I had married), all was well. But as soon as I began to regard her as a person, trouble began. All would have been well, perhaps, had Lois been struck dumb at puberty. Then no man could have withstood her. But she could talk, and when something talks you sooner or later begin to listen to the sound it makes and begin, even in the face of all other evidence, to regard it as a person. You begin to apply human standards to it, and human element infects your innocent Eden pleasure in the juicy, sweet-breathed machine. I had loved Lois the machine, the way you love the filet mignon or the Georgia peach, but I definitely was not in love with Lois the person. In fact, as the realization grew that the machine-Lois belonged to, and was the instrument of, the person-Lois (or at least to the thing which could talk), the machine-Lois which I had innocently loved began to resemble a beautiful luscious bivalve open and pulsing in the glimmering deep and I some small speck of marine life being drawn remorselessly. Or it resembled the butt of wine in which the duke was drowned, and I was sure-God the Duke of Clarence. Or it resembled a greedy, avid, delicious quagmire, the solemn temples, the gorgeous palaces, towers, battlements, libraries, museums, huts, hospitals, houses, cities, and all the works of man might be swallowed up, with the last luxurious sigh. Or so, I recall, it seemed. But the paradox is that as long as Lois was merely the machine-Lois, as long as she was simply a well-dressed animal, as long as she was really a part of innocent nonhuman nature, as long as I hadn't begun to notice the sounds she made were words, there was no harm in her and no harm in the really extraordinary pleasure she could provide. It was only when I observed that this Lois was mixed up with the other Lois, with certain human traits, that I began to feel that all the works of man might be swallowed up in the quagmire. It is s delicate paradox.
I did not make a decision not to be swallowed up. The instinct for self-preservation is more deep-seated than decision. A man doesn't make a decision to swim when he falls into the creek. He starts kicking. I simply began to wriggle and squirm and kick. First, I recall, there was the matter of Lois's friends (no friends of mine ever set foot in the slick apartment, if as a matter of fact, the people I knew in the city room and the speak-easy and the press club could be called friends). I began to take a distaste to the friends Lois had. There was nothing particularly wrong with them. They were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage. There were some who had what Lois, who was not too well informed on the subject, regarded as "position" but who didn't
have much money and liked Lois's free likker. There were some who didn't have any "position" but who had more money than Lois and knew which fork to use. And there were some who didn't have very much of either position or money, but who had some credit at the better clothing stores and who could be bullied by Lois. They all read _Vanity Fair__ or _Harper's Bazaar__ (according to sex, and some read both) and _Smart Set__, and they quote Dorothy Parker, and those who had been merely to Chicago licked the spittle of those who had been to New York, and those who had been merely to New York licked the spittle of those who had been to Paris. As I say, there was nothing particularly wrong with these people, many of whom were quite agreeable and attractive. The only thing I found wrong with them, I admit as I look back, was that they were Lois's friends. First, I developed a certain reserve in my dealings with them, then I developed an attitude with Lois defined as snotty. After one of my exhibitions Lois would try to discipline me by withholding the sweets of her gender.
That was the matter of Lois's friends. But there was, second, the matter of Lois's apartment. I took a distaste for the apartment. I told Lois I didn't want to live there. That we would get a place on which I could afford to pay the rent out of my salary. We had some rows on that point, rows which I didn't expect to win. Then the sweets would be withheld.
That was the matter of the apartment. But there was, third, the matter of my clothes and what Lois loved to call my "grooming." I was accustomed to thirty-dollar suits, shirts that had been worn two days, a bimonthly haircut, unpolished shoes, a hat with a brim that looped and sagged, and fingernails always broken and sometimes dirty. And I regarded the habit of pressing pants as something which had not come to stay. In the early days when I looked on Lois as merely the luscious machine, I had allowed certain scarcely perceptible changes to be made in my appearance. But as I began to realize that the noises that she made with her mouth resembled human speech and were more rudimentary demands for, or expressions of gratification at, food or copulation, a certain resistance began to grow in me. And as the pressure to improve my grooming increased, so the resistance increased, too. More and more often, accustomed objects of my wardrobe disappeared, to be replaced by proclaimed or surreptitious gifts. Originally I had interpreted these gifts as springing from a misguided and love-inspired attempt to give me pleasure. In the end I understood that my pleasure was the last consideration involved. The crisis came when I polished a shoe with a new tie. A row ensued, the first of many occasioned by the divergence of our tastes in haberdashery. And the sweets would be withheld on that account.
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