The End of the Road (5 page)

But there was a length of time beyond which I could not bear to be actively displeased with myself, and when that time began to announce its approach—about seven-fifteen—I went to sleep. Only the profundity and limited duration of my moods kept me from being a suicide: as it was, this practice of mine of going to bed when things got too awful, this deliberate termination of my day, was itself a kind of suicide, and served its purpose just as efficiently. My moods were little men, and when I killed them they stayed completely dead.

The buzzer from the front door woke me at nine o’clock, and by the time I got up and put a robe on, Joe Morgan and his wife were at my door. I was surprised, but I invited them in cheerfully, because I knew as soon as I opened my eyes that sleep had changed my emotional scenery: I felt fine. Rennie Morgan, to whom I was introduced, was by no means my idea of a beautiful woman; she looked like an outdoorsman’s wife. Rather large-framed, blond, heavier than I, strong-looking, and exuberant, she was not the type of woman whom one (or at least
this
one) thinks of instinctively in sexual terms. Yet of course there I was, appraising her in sexual terms: no doubt my afternoon’s adventure influenced both the nature and the verdict of my appraisal.

“Can I offer you anything to eat?” I asked her, and I was pleased to see that both of them were apparently in good spirits.

“No, thanks,” Joe smiled; “we’ve eaten enough for three already.”

“We saw your car out front,” Rennie said, “and wondered whether the plane had gotten in from Baltimore yet.”

“You Morgans will track a man to his very lair!” I protested.

Because we all seemed to be feeling friendly, and because Joe and Rennie had the good sense not to make a
cause célèbre
out of a
fait accompli,
if I may say so, I fetched bottles of ale from the case I had on ice down in the kitchen and told them the whole story of my day, omitting none but the most decidedly indelicate details (and those more from my own embarrassment than from Rennie’s, who seemed able to take it straight), by way of entertainment.

We got on extremely well. Rennie Morgan, though lively, seemed to be just a trifle unsure of herself; her mannerisms—like the habit of showing excruciating hilarity by squinting her eyes shut and whipping her head from side to side, or her intensely excited gestures when speaking—were borrowed directly from Joe, as were both the matter and the manner of her thinking. It was clear that in spite of the progress she’d evidently made toward being indistinguishable from her husband, she was still apprehensive about the disparity between them. Whenever Joe took issue with a statement she’d made, Rennie would argue the point as vigorously as possible, knowing that that was what he expected her to do, but there was in her manner the same nervous readiness to concede that one might expect in a boy sparring with his gym teacher. The metaphor, in fact, if you add to it a touch of Pygmalion and Galatea, pretty well covers everything about their relationship that I could see that evening, and though I’d no ultimate objection at all to such a relationship—after all, Galatea
was
a remarkable woman, and some uneasy young pugilists grow up to be Gene Tunney—the presence of two so similarly forceful people was overwhelming: I several times caught myself whipping
my
head from side to side as they did, at some especially witty remark, or gesticulating excitedly after their fashion while making a point.

As for Joe, the first hour of conversation made it clear that he was brilliant, one of the most brilliant people I’d met. He spoke slowly and softly as a rule, with a slight Southern accent, but one had always the feeling that this slowness did not come natural to him; that they were controls that he maintained over his normal ebullience. Only when the turn of the conversation excited him did his speech rise in volume and rapidity: at these times he was likely to scratch his head vigorously, jab his spectacles hard back on his nose, and gesture eloquently with his hands. I learned that he’d taken his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Columbia—the one in literature, the other in philosophy—and had completed all the requirements except the dissertation for a doctorate in history at Johns Hopkins. Wicomico was Rennie’s home town and WTC her alma mater: the Morgans were staying there while Joe made a leisurely job of the dissertation. Talking with him for an evening was tremendously stimulating—I was continually impressed by his drive, his tough intellectuality, and his deliberateness—and, like any very stimulating thing, it was exhausting.

We took to each other at once: it was clear in a very short time that if I remained in Wicomico we would be close friends. My initial estimate of him I had completely to revise; it turned out that those activities of his and aspects of his personality about which I had found it easy to make commonplace criticisms were nearly always the result of very careful, uncommon thinking. One understood that Joe Morgan would never make a move or utter a statement, if he could help it, that he hadn’t considered deliberately and penetratingly beforehand, and he had, therefore, the strength not to be much bothered if his move proved unfortunate. He would never have allowed himself to get into a position like Miss Rankin’s, for example, or like mine when I was circling around the college driveway on Monday. Indecision of that sort was apparently foreign to him: he was always sure of his ground; he acted quickly, explained his actions lucidly if questioned, and would have regarded apologies for missteps as superfluous. Moreover, four of my least fortunate traits—shyness, fear of appearing ridiculous, affinity for many sorts of nonsense, and almost complete inconsistency—he seemed not to share at all. On the other hand, he was, at least in the presence of a third party, somewhat prudish (he didn’t enjoy my story) and, despite his excitability, seemingly lacking in warmth and spontaneity, though he doubtless had as clear reasons for being so as he had for being a scoutmaster—he was a man whom it was exceedingly difficult to criticize. Finally, for better or worse he seemed completely devoid of craft or guile, and in that sense ingenuous, though by no means naïve, and had no interest in any sort of career as such.

All this was exhausting, most exhausting, to encounter. We talked concentratedly until one-thirty in the morning (I could not begin to remember what about), and when the Morgans left I felt that the evening had been the pleasantest I’d spent in months; that in Joe I’d found an extremely interesting new acquaintance; and that I had no special wish to see this interesting new acquaintance of mine again for at least a week.

As they were leaving, Rennie happened to say, “Oh, Jake, we forgot to congratulate you about your job.” (This sort of oversight, I later learned, was characteristic of the Morgans.)

“You’re jumping the gun, aren’t you?”

“What do you mean?” Joe asked. “Didn’t Dr. Schott ever get hold of you?”

“Nope.”

“Well, you got the job. The Committee met this morning and decided. I guess Schott called while you were in Ocean City, or while you were asleep this evening.”

They both congratulated me, awkwardly—for they were unable to express affection, friendship, or even congratulation easily—and then left. I still felt too fine to sleep, so I read my
World Almanac
for a while and listened to Mozart’s
Ein Musikalischer Spass
on the record player. I was beginning to feel at home in my room and in Wicomico; the Morgans pleased me; and I was still in an unusual state of excitement from the afternoon’s sexual adventure and Joe’s keen intelligence. But I must have been thoroughly fatigued by these things, too, and from my day on the beach, for at six-thirty in the morning I woke with a start, having dropped unintentionally into a sound sleep. The
World Almanac
was still in my lap, open to page 96: “Air Line Distances Between Principal Cities of the World”;
Ein Musikalischer Spass
was playing for what must have been the fiftieth time; and the sun, just rising between two dark brick houses across the street, shot a blinding beam directly over my lap into Laocoön’s face, contorted noncommittally in bright plaster.

I GOT UP, STIFF FROM SLEEPING IN THE CHAIR,
showered, changed my clothes, and went out to breakfast. Perhaps because the previous day had been, for me, so unusually eventful, or perhaps because I’d had relatively little sleep (I must say I take no great interest in causes), my mind was empty. All the way to the restaurant, all through the meal, all the way home, it was as though there were no Jacob Horner today. After I’d eaten I returned to my room, sat in my rocker, and rocked, barely sentient, for a long time, thinking of nothing.

Once I had a dream in which it became a matter of some importance to me to learn the weather prediction for the following day. I searched the newspapers for the weather report, but couldn’t find it in its usual place. I turned the radio on, but the news broadcasters made no mention of tomorrow’s weather. I dialed the Weather number on the telephone (this dream took place in Baltimore), but although the recording described the current weather conditions it told me nothing about the forecast for the next day. Finally, in desperation, I called the Weather Bureau directly, but it was late at night and no one answered. I happened to know the chief meteorologist’s name, and so I called his house. The telephone rang many times before he answered, and then it seemed to me that I detected an uneasiness in his voice.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I want to know what weather we’ll be having tomorrow,” I demanded. “It’s terribly important: you see, I—”

“There’s no use your trying to impress me,” the meteorologist said. “No use at all. What made you suspicious?”

“Suspicious of what? I assure you, sir, I just want to know what the weather will be tomorrow. I can’t say I see anything suspicious in that question.”

“There isn’t going to be any weather tomorrow, if you must know.”

“What?”

“You heard me. I said there isn’t going to be any weather tomorrow. All our instruments agree. You mustn’t be skeptical. No weather.”

“But that’s impossible!”

“I’ve said what I’ve said,” the weatherman grumbled. “Take it or leave it. No weather tomorrow, and that’s that. Leave me alone, now; I have to sleep.”

That was the end of the dream, and I woke up very much upset. I tell it now to illustrate a difference between moods and the weather, their usual analogy: a day without weather is unthinkable, but for me at least there were frequently days without any mood at all. On these days Jacob Horner, except in a meaningless metabolistic sense, ceased to exist altogether, for I was without a character, without a personality: there was no
ego;
no
I
. Like those microscopic specimens that biologists must dye in order to make them visible at all, I had to be colored with some mood or other if there was to be a recognizable self to me. The fact that my successive and discontinuous selves were linked to one another by the two unstable threads of body and memory; the fact that in the nature of Western languages the word
change
presupposes something upon which the changes operate; the fact that although the specimen is invisible without the dye, the dye is not the specimen—these are considerations of which I was aware, but in which I had no interest.

On my weatherless days I merely existed. My body sat in a rocking chair and rocked and rocked and rocked, and my mind was as nearly empty as interstellar space. Such was the day after the Morgans’ visit: I sat and rocked from eight-thirty in the morning until perhaps two in the afternoon. If I looked at Laocoön at all, it was without recognition. But at two o’clock the telephone rang and startled into being a Jacob Horner, who jumped from the chair and answered it.

“Hello?”

“Jacob? This is Rennie Morgan. Will you have dinner with us tonight?”

“Why,
for God’s sake?” This Jacob Horner was an irritable type.

“Why?” repeated Rennie uncertainly.

“Yes. Why the hell are you all so anxious to feed me a dinner?”

“Are you angry?”

“No, I’m not angry. I just want to know why you’re all so anxious to feed me a dinner.”

“Don’t you want to come?”

“I didn’t say that. Why are you all so anxious to feed me a dinner? That’s all I asked.”

There was a pause. Rennie was one who took all questions seriously; she would not offer an answer simply to terminate a situation, but must search herself for the truth. This, I take it, was Joe’s doing. Another person would have asked pettishly, “Why does anybody ask anybody for dinner?” and thereby cloaked ignorance in the garb of self-evidence. After a minute she replied in a careful voice, as though examining her answer as she spoke.

“Well, I think it’s because Joe’s pretty much decided that he wants to get to know you well. He enjoyed the conversation last night.”

“Didn’t you?” I interrupted out of curiosity. I didn’t really see how she could have, for we had talked of nothing but abstract ideas, and Rennie’s determined but limited participation had been under what struck me as a tacit but very careful scrutiny from her husband. I don’t mean to suggest that there was anything ungenuine in Rennie’s interest, though it was awfully
deliberate,
or anything of the husband embarrassed by his wife’s opinions in Joe’s concern about her statements; his attention was that of a tutor listening to his favorite protégé, and when he questioned her opinions he did so in an entirely impersonal, unarrogant, and unpedantic manner. Joe was not a pedant.

“Yes, I believe I did. Do you think that there ought to be a kind of waiting period between visits, Jacob?”

I was amazed. “What do
you
think?”

Again a short pause, and then a solemn opinion.

“It seems to me that there wouldn’t be any reason for it unless one of us just happened to feel like not seeing the other for a while. I think sometimes a person feels that way. Is that how you feel, Jake?”

“Well, now, let me see,” I said soberly, and paused. “It seems to me that you do right to question the validity of social conventions, like waiting a certain time between visits, but you have to keep in mind that they’re all ultimately unjustifiable. But it doesn’t follow that because a thing is unjustifiable it’s without value. And you have to remember that
dispensing
with a convention, even a silly one, always involves the risk of being made to feel unreasonably guilty, simply because the conventions do happen to be conventions. Take drinking beer for breakfast, for instance, or going through red lights late at night, or committing adultery with your husband’s approval, or performing a euthanasia …”