Diary of a Yuppie (20 page)
And now I come to a final matter. I think I am going to discontinue this journal. I believe that to some extent it has constituted a kind of muffled dialogue between myself and Alice. I have written down all the things I couldn't tell her or that she couldn't or wouldn't understand. My yellow pages have formed a useful catharsis for all my resentment of her persistent unfairness to me. But now that I am faced with the prospect, or at least the hope, of our permanent accord, I have begun to wonder if I may not be doing myself some actual harm by so carefully recording my acts and then attributing motives to them. Am I trying to be my own god? My own creator? I feel that I know what sort of a being Robert Service is until he becomes a character on the page before me. And then he seems to take on a different personality. Is it because I have drawn him too well or too ill?
At the end of
Marius
Pater arranges a semiconversion to Christianity to give his hero a final solution in his search of philosophies. But as Pater never quite believed in anything but beautiful words and artifacts, he could not bear to bring Marius all the way to God, and he allowed him a death by disease as opposed to a threatened martyrdom. What would he have done for me?
A semiconversion? Why not? I may, in giving up my journal, rejoin my fellow men. If I act and look like a "nice guy," will I not be one? Quite as much as
you, hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère
! Oh, yes, for if there should ever be a reader of this page, it would be such a one. It would have to be such a one, for there are no othersâexcept perhaps Mr. Hawkins and, in her best moments, Alice.
Will there be anything left of Robert Service if I
do,
in the end, become what Alice would like me to be? Ah, but will there be anything left of Alice? I shall have had my revenge or my redemption. Perhaps there is no difference.
Well, it's over now. Douglas has left and Alice has gone to change her dress. We are going out once again to an expensive restaurant, but not to celebrate the merger. We have something quite different to celebrate.
Not that Alice was easy with me. After she had closed the door behind Doug, she came back and took a rather formal stand before the fireplace. It was not the first time she had done this.
"Last year I might have reconsidered the whole question of our reconciliation after hearing what Doug has just told me. But now I think I have reached the point where I may be able to accept you for what you are. As Margaret Fuller accepted the universe. Do you remember what Carlyle said when he heard that? 'By Gad, she'd better!'"
I looked at her in silent consternation. Who was this new grave, sarcastic Alice?
"Anyway," she continued, "could I ever have reasonably expected you to be other than you are?"
"Is that so bad a thing?"
"No. And, anyway, perhaps your thesis is correct. Perhaps you
are
like everyone else. And I'm the one who's all along been crazy."
"Not crazy. I never called you that, Alice."
"You only thought it. But that's all right. I never minded your thinking it. And now I'm going to have something else to think about besides you and me and the girls."
I jumped to my feet in excitement as I took in the meaning of her smile. "You couldn't know that already, could you?"
"It's been more than a month, you know. I'm pretty sure." She allowed me to embrace her. "Oh, Bob," she murmured in a more feeling tone as she suddenly clasped my head and stared into my eyes, "it's just what we need to keep us from thinking too closely about each other for a while. Have we been becoming morbid?"
A son at last! For, of course, it will have to be a son after what I have gone through. I am very happy, and don't I deserve to be? The gods are with me, after all.
