Marjorie Morningstar (58 page)

“I guess I look like a fish when I’m enthralled,” Marjorie said. “For God’s sake,
go on.”

“It’s hard to describe how it was. For a while half my mind was holding back, you
might say, watching the development of this fantasy in my own brain with cool amusement,
but little by little it took over my whole spirit, and by dawn I was panting over
the idea as I haven’t panted about anything—including a girl—since I was eighteen.

“It all started, Margie, with that charming Sapersteen woman, and her precious little
Neville the Devil. What she said about your Passover, when she blew up, was pretty
much what I’d been thinking—folk legends, primitive totemism, and so forth. It occurred
to me that anything that woman said must be wrong. She sounded exactly like one of
these characters I play chess with here, a dreary ass with a headful of Modern Library
Giants. That’s when I started to pay attention to the seder. I started to read your
prayer book and listen to the melodies. My mind began to catch fire. You know what
offended me most about my father’s after-dinner speech? The fact that I actually was
beginning to feel what he said he was feeling—the power of the whole Exodus yarn,
the terrific charm of an observance practiced by Jews who crumbled to powder a thousand
years before Shakespeare was born, and observed in exactly the same way by your father
in 1936 on West End Avenue. It’s electrifying, when you think about it—”

“Maybe your father really felt it, too, Noel. Why not?” She was very excited.

“Darling, take my word for it, the man’s a phonograph. Now, please understand me,
Marjorie, I don’t
believe
your Exodus story or anything else about your religion. But what I suddenly realized
that night was,
what does that matter
? Suppose it isn’t literally true? Suppose it’s emotionally true, poetically true?
Does that count for nothing? Is
Macbeth
true? It’s a childish ghost story, but nothing truer has ever been written. Well,
all this is old stuff, it’s straight Santayana, but it came alive for me the other
night, wildly alive. And I thought to myself, why must this thing dry up and die?
How much literal truth is there in this lousy world? How much truth of any kind is
there? This religion is full of fire and comfort, it’s beautiful, it’s a way of life
far wiser and better than random scrambling for dough….

“And then—I remember distinctly I was in a bar on Broadway in the Forties, and the
man beside me, with a scraggy pink face, was ogling a fat whore in blue satin two
stools down—it hit me: I’d go to some theological seminary, study day and night, master
Hebrew, give myself two years of the most fanatic work, or at most three—

“Margie, I’ve wandered into temples, you know, just for the hell of it, to hear young
rabbis preach. I really think they must all be subnormal. It’s inevitable, when you
think about it. What man with any kind of brains and will power goes in for the pulpit
in a commercial society? You get the bunnies, the misfits, the mama’s darlings, and
so forth—

“And I thought, why, glory be, I’d have the field to myself. I’d be a national sensation.
I’d start a whole trend of talented intellectuals back into this field. It would spread
to the Christian denominations—I’m sure they have the same problems—oh, I tell you,
by the time dawn came I was the biggest thing since Moses, and better, because I was
going to cross that old Jordan myself, and be first man into the Promised Land. I
was also somewhat fried. But not feeling it, believe me.”

Noel put aside the two chess pieces, which he had been jumping incessantly from square
to square. He bolted several more oysters. Marjorie said, “Is this what you’ve been
working on for the last four days? I think Sam Rothmore’s likely to forgive you—”

“When I got home I took down the Bible and got into bed and started to read. You’d
think I’d have fallen asleep. Not at all. I was so stimulated, my nerves were strung
so tight, that I read the Old Testament straight through in about eighteen hours,
not skipping anything. It’s not so long, you know. I’ll bet
The Brothers Karamazov
is longer. I didn’t eat. All I did was drink coffee. But as soon as I finished the
last page, I did fall asleep. I don’t know to this hour how long I slept. It was blazing
day when I woke up. I staggered out and went to Fourth Avenue, and hunted up a history
of the Jews, and a book on the customs and ceremonies. Then I took those home and
read them straight through. That only took a few hours. Now maybe I should have stopped
at some point and called Sam Rothmore, and explained that I’d suddenly gotten religion
and he’d have to excuse me for a few days. But I tell you, Margie, Sam Rothmore might
have been on Mars for all I knew or cared.

“So there I was, still reading, it must have been late afternoon, four or five. I
hadn’t talked to anybody or eaten for two days. My head was swirling with Moses and
Isaiah, with phylacteries and Talmud sages, with the Spanish Inquisition and the separation
of milk and meat dishes, the whole picturesque mass tumbling in my brain—when the
bell rang, and in walked Imogene with a suitcase.” Noel chuckled at Marjorie’s groan.
“She was dog-tired, famished, thirsty, covered with grime. She’d just come on a bus
from Tulsa, Oklahoma, to New York—walked out on her husband after a bloody fight,
and hocked nearly all her clothes for the bus fare. This so-called oil man she married
turned out to be just a shady hick promoter. But she was really in love with the guy,
so she stuck it out for three years, and then quit. All this she told me sort of weeping
into a few scotch and sodas. Which rather surprised me, as I never figured Imogene
to have any more feelings than a buffalo. Why she picked my place to come to, I’m
not sure. Probably because out of all that dizzy crowd we ran with I’m the only one
whose name’s still in the phone book.

“Well, so I told her to take a shower and change her underwear and so forth, and I
took her out and bought her a steak, and she perked up amazingly. We got to talking
of old times, and the crazy things we’d done in that crowd, and we laughed and got
pretty drunk and all that, and then her fatigue caught up with her, and she went to
sleep in my bed. And I was out walking the streets again, trying to pick up the threads
where I’d left off.

“Margie, this may strike you as the strangest part yet. It had all vanished—vanished,
faded like a dream. I didn’t have anything left. Well, no, I had something. Sorry,
cigarette?” He was lighting one.

She took it, hardly aware of what she was doing, her gaze fixed on his drawn stubbly
face and gleaming eyes. “What did you have left?”

“Revulsion,” Noel said, “fearful depressed revulsion, luckily relieved with amusement
at myself, the most colossal jackass in the whole Village full of jackasses. I was
back in the twentieth century. I was Noel Airman, and there were autos and neon signs
all along the street, and a plane going by overhead in the night sky, with its red
and green lights blinking. And the notion that I might become a rabbi was about as
silly as the thought of my climbing Mount Everest some summer afternoon in sneakers.
My mind had exploded in a crazy fantasy, that’s all. The whole incident would make
me fear for my mental health, if I didn’t have a good idea of what caused it. Imogene
pulled me back from the brink. I’ll always be grateful to the dull cow.”

Marjorie shook her head slowly, sadly. “I sometimes wonder if you are quite sane.
What living man ever tried to absorb a religion in a couple of days, starting from
total ignorance? It was lunacy. The marvel is that you actually went through all that
reading. No wonder you had such a violent reaction, it was absolutely inevitable—but
it proves nothing. Heaven knows I don’t want you to become a rabbi, that part was
wild, but some of the things you’ve just said make sense, Noel—”

He laid his hand on her arm and patted it. “Marjorie, my dear, please give it up,
you’re wasting breath. This fantasy was the last gasp of my resolve to try to become
respectable, which really went glimmering after I’d been at your seder an hour. I
saw what you were, and what I was. I shut the realization out of my mind with this
whole burst of sickly enthusiasm because I’m in love with you, and because I know
in your case love means marriage. Back of this whole dream was the delicious figure
of the young would-be actress Marjorie Morningstar, a reformed, sedate, utterly charming
spouse with downcast eyes. Oh, you were in it, all right, but incidental, casual,
in true daydream fashion, the real motive masked.”

Something in his tone when speaking of her frightened Marjorie. She said hurriedly,
“Well, but you say you’re working on something—”

“Yes.” He drummed on the table with the fingers of both hands. “I’m suddenly ravenously
hungry. I’ve got to have a steak or I’ll kill myself. You, too?”

“Noel, I just had lunch.”

“I keep forgetting.” He rapped loudly with a chess piece, and when the woman came
he said, “How about a steak, rare, just off purple, and some home fries? And rolls,
huh?”

The woman beamed. “Good. You need some meat on your bones, Mister Airman. Iss better
than oysters.” She hurried out.

“I feel like having a cigar, too, right this second,” Noel said. “I’m full of queer
yens. Can it be that I’m pregnant? Intellectually, maybe. Stop me if I start eating
chalk. I’ll be right back.” She could see him buying a cigar from the bartender. He
came back smoking it. “You know, I don’t smoke half a dozen cigars a year. But this
one tastes ambrosial.” He dropped down beside her and puffed.

“Margie, out of all this turmoil, this queer and rather shattering crisis I’ve been
through, I think I’ve gotten a tremendous idea. One advantage of such a shaking-up
is that you see things new and clear again for a while—the way everything tastes good
and looks good, you know, when you’re recovering from a grippe. You see, I had to
ask myself this question: granted that religion is a pathetic dream, what isn’t? What
do you really believe? What do you want? What’s good?

“Well, it’s a hell of a thing, I tell you, when all the old philosophic puzzlers come
at you suddenly, with the same urgency as—for instance—‘What restaurant shall I eat
at tonight? How can I get this girl into bed? Where can I get hold of some more money?’—the
questions people really spend their time trying to answer. I believe I’ve hit on a
fresh answer, a serious and original idea, that is going to make a bit of a noise.

“I’m still struggling to reduce it to words. Whether I’ll ever be able to get it right,
I don’t know. It could be a book—rather short, but rather difficult—or a long Socratic
dialogue, or a series of connected essays. I’m just writing it out raw, now. Maybe
it’ll never be anything but this white-hot fragment as it stands, a
pensée
, but I don’t think so, I’m certain the form is going to hit me all at once, like
a revelation, the way the idea itself did.

“I’m a philosophy major from way back, you know, and even when I was having this religious
seizure, as you might call it, I could ticket it in my mind. Santayana slightly tinctured
with James, taking on a sudden feverish personal color. And my revulsion wasn’t against
your religion, but all religions. They’re all more or less alike. You can’t blame
the human race for preferring some bright storyteller’s dream or other to the black
cold meaningless dark of the real universe. And if one has to make a choice among
the durable fantasies, I don’t know that your religion is worse than any. But I have
an incurable temperamental preference for facts, however cold and nasty. That disposes
of Reverend Airman, twentieth-century evangelist extraordinary.

“But I honestly can’t ticket this new idea of mine. And believe me, Margie, I know
the classic answers, I’ve read all the philosophers, soaked them up. You see, they
all suffer from one fatal defect. They’re philosophers.
That
, they can’t help. That’s the cage they can’t get out of. They love words. Thinking
is pleasant to them. They can’t help conceiving the highest good in terms of intelligence
and morality. They can’t avoid it, that’s their nature, they think in those terms
the way a cat meows. Whereas the plain people in God’s green world have little morality
and less intelligence. People let the butterfly fanciers catch all the butterflies
they want, and they let philosophers make up all the philosophies they want. It isn’t
as though the philosophers were thereby making sizable sums of money and sleeping
with the prettiest women, which would be a serious matter. Philosophy seems to the
world a highly involved form of sour grapes, by which very clever men prove to themselves
that it really isn’t worth while to make lots of money and get the pretty women. But
the world’s absolutely sincere in respecting and praising philosophers, Margie. Its
attitude can best be summed up as follows: ‘Philosophy is the real stuff all right.
Everybody in the world ought to be a philosopher, except me.’

“Okay. Religion’s an old worn-out comedy. Philosophy’s the sour grapes of ineffectual
geniuses. What’s left? Anything? A great deal, obviously. The world moves, it’s well
organized, people rush around like mad, work hard, laugh—there’s no chaos, no mass
suicide. There must be
something
under the activity, some guiding sustaining idea, some driving belief we all have
that keeps us going. What is it?

“You’ll say Marxism contains the answer to all my questions. That is, you won’t, but
everybody else who’s ever warmed the bench where your pretty behind is now resting
would say that. But it’s no answer at all. Even granting that Karl with the Smith
Brothers’ beard really did figure out a better way to make the world’s goods and pass
them around—I don’t grant it, and I can argue for a week against it, very effectively—but
all right, let’s say Marxism’s absolutely true. The big question remains, why should
anybody
bother
to be a communist? Why the dedication? Why the drudgery? Why improve society? Why
do
anything?
What do we really want? What keeps us all moving—communists, capitalists, songwriters,
little Marjorie Morgenstern too, for that matter, from West End Avenue, with a dream
of an electric sign on West Forty-fourth Street blazing out
Marjorie Morningstar?
” He paused, looking intently into her face.