The End of the Road (19 page)

“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 verbs
with
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 be
he,
but I thought John to be
him!
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 not
your
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 word
horse
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 symbol
x
stand for?”

“x?
Anything. It’s an unknown.”

“Good. Then the symbol
x
can represent anything we want it to represent, as long as it always represents the same thing in a given equation. But
horse
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 word
horse
would mean
grammar 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 symbol
horse
shouldn’t always refer to grammar book instead of to
Equus 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 word
horse
would refer to
Equus 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 say
horse
when we mean
Equus caballus,
and
grammar 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 you
do
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 rebel
is
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 Laocoön, 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 said
he’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?”

“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 not
just
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.”