All the King's Men (54 page)

“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 said, 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 speakeasy 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.

They were withheld on many accounts. But never for very long at a stretch. Sometimes I would capitulate and apologize. My early apologies were sometimes sad and, for the moment, even sincere, though sometimes sincere with a kind of self-pity. Then later, they became masterpieces of irony,
double-entendre
_, and histrionics, and I would lie in bed, uttering them, aware that my face in the dark was twisted into a mask of self-congratulatory cunning, bitterness, and loathing. But I wasn’t always the one to crack first, for sometimes the juice machine-Lois got the upper hand over the dry and brittle person-Lois. She might utter an invitation in a low voice tense with hatred, and then in the subsequent process avert her face from me, or if she did look at me, she would glare like a cornered animal. Or if she did not invite me, she might collapse in the heat of a scuffle which she had undertaken against me in all seriousness but which had proved too much for the dry and brittle person-Lois and had given the other Lois the upper hand. In any case, whether she cracked or I, we demonstrated, in the midst of tangled bedclothes, unspoken loathing, and the wreckage of somebody’s self-respect, that we were, as Lois had affirmed to her guests, perfectly adjusted sexually. And we were.

The fact that the adjustment was so perfect merely meant that in the end, with the deep-seated instinct for self preservation, I was consorting with common whores. I was at that time on the evening edition, and finished my stint about two in the afternoon. After a couple of drinks and a late lunch in a speakeasy, then a couple more drinks and a game of billiards at the press club, I might call on one of my friends. Then at dinner, if I managed to get home to dinner, and in the evening I would study Lois with a clinical detachment and a sense of mystic regeneration. It even got so that almost at will I could produce an optical illusion. I could look at Lois in a certain way and find that she seemed to be withdrawing steadily, the whole room elongating with her, until it would be as though I were staring at her through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. By this practice I gained great spiritual refreshment. I finally grew so adept at it that I could hear her voice, if it was one of her vituperative and not sullen evenings, as though it were coming from a great distance and were not, as a matter of fact, even addressed to me.