Marjorie Morningstar (84 page)

“That wears off.”

While she combed her hair he sat in an armchair, smoking. She noticed how straight
he sat. Noel would have slouched to his collarbone in such a soft chair. Again she
had a strong urge to talk to him about Noel; and why not? she thought. It would pass
the time, and he might say something useful. She said, “How would you like to read
a twenty-page letter I once got? It’s the real story behind my trip.”

“Twenty pages?”

“Typewritten. Double-spaced. Easy on the eyes.”

“You carry this historic document around with you?”

She pulled a small bag out of the closet and took the letter from under books and
travel papers. “I’m curious to know what you’ll think.”

He began reading the worn dog-eared pages, laying them carefully one by one on his
lap, face down. She sat in another armchair, watching his face, and thinking that
this was a romantic moment indeed: a gorgeous bedroom on the
Queen Mary
, careening majestically in a night storm that rattled at the black porthole; a handsome
stranger in dinner clothes, with a mysterious air and a mysterious scar, alone with
her, reading an old love letter of hers; herself as pretty as she knew how to be in
a black dress which disclosed all she decently could of her shoulders and bosom; two
broad inviting beds. And yet, she thought, sex was as far from this room as from a
hospital ward.

Mike Eden’s eyebrows shot up, and he looked at her. He resumed reading, his lips curling
a bit.

“Stop right there,” she said. “What part are you reading?”

He took a slow puff at his cigar. “
If your encounter with that monster Noel Airman is to have any enduring value
—Is that the name of the man you’re pursuing to Paris? Noel Airman?”

“Yes. It’s rather a queer name—actually it’s a pseudonym—”

“Tall, blond, long jaw, great talker?”

“Good Lord,
yes!
”

“I know Noel.” She stared at him. “Don’t be so surprised, Marjorie. Half the Americans
in Europe do.”

“
You
know
Noel
?”

“Noel gets around. When you meet him you don’t forget him.”

“I’m aware of
that
,” Marjorie said, laughing uneasily, still staring.

He dropped the letter in his lap. “Shall I go on reading?”

“As you please…. Well! You’ve really knocked my breath out.”

Eden regarded her, puffing his cigar. “You and Noel Airman, eh? Interesting.”

“You don’t approve?”

“Battle of the century, I’d say.”

“It’s just about turned into that. So long as I win, that’s all right too. Where on
earth did you meet Noel?”

“Last year, in Florence.”

“Did you get to know him well?”

“About as well as most people do. That is to say, he owes me a couple of hundred dollars.”

She blushed and looked down at her lap. “That’s his worst trait.”

“Oh, mind you, Noel means to pay it back. Maybe he will, one of these years. It’s
not important. Noel’s great company. We hired a car and went tooling around the Italian
Alps with two other fellows, a painter and a Rhodes scholar on vacation. I paid Noel’s
share while he kept waiting for a check from America to catch up with him. It never
quite did.”

“Where is he now, do you know?”

“I can find out easily enough.”

“You’ll do me a great favor if you will.”

“Marjorie, are you crossing the Atlantic after a fellow without knowing where he is?”

“Well, I was sure I could locate him.”

He shook his head slowly, and went back to reading the letter. After a few moments
he said, “I don’t know. Now I somehow feel as though I’m prying.”

“Oh, go ahead. Finish it. What difference does it make? Care for some whiskey and
water without ice?”

“Ring for the steward. He’ll bring ice.”

“Not with you in here…. All right, grin. I’m a prude, Noel’s said so for years. You’ll
take it without ice or not at all.”

“Without ice, please, by all means.”

She opened a bottle of twelve-year-old scotch from Marsha’s gift basket. He accepted
the whiskey and water absently, drained the glass, and went on reading. “This is quite
a letter,” he murmured.

“I’m glad you’re enjoying it. I didn’t.” She refilled the glass and put it back in
his hand.

“The fact is, you probably did.”

“That’s too deep for me.” She propped pillows and lounged in the bed, sipping her
drink.

He put down the last page, looking at the glass in his hand, and said, “I could swear
I’ve already drunk this.”

“Gad, you really do concentrate, don’t you? I refilled it.”

“Thanks.”

“Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Does the letter repay all that attention?”

He laughed. “I got Noel furious one night. I analyzed his handwriting and told him
he’d never amount to anything.”

“What, you analyze handwritings, too? How are you on reading entrails?”

“Listen, there’s a lot in handwriting analysis. We were snowed in up in the Alps,
had nothing to do. I told him he had a fits-and-starts way of working, and no conscience,
and a mixture of conceit and terrible self-doubt, and that he shifted between extremes
of emotional dependence and independence. I’d only known him three days then.”

“Amazing.”

“So he said. What knocked him cold, though, was my telling him he’d been wavering
for years over marrying a girl. I was cheating a bit there, putting together scraps
of things he’d said. I said he shouldn’t marry her because he was just going to be
a charming bum all his life. Kidding, of course. He sulked all night and half the
next day.”

She said, “I just can’t see you and Noel together. I don’t know why. You seem to be
out of different centuries.”

“I’m a shipboard acquaintance. I’m not real. I’ll vanish when the anchor goes down,
like a ghost at cockcrow.”

“That sounds like Noel. But then you often do. It’s rather uncanny. I suppose that’s
what has me tagging after you.”

“Well, I’ll take that as a compliment. Noel’s a great talker.” He tapped the letter
on his lap. “Also quite a letter writer. If he could write like that for pay he’d
make a living. But most good letter writers can’t.”

“Noel can, don’t you worry. He makes plenty of money whenever he puts his mind to
it. All he needs is to steady down.”

“And you’re the one to steady him.”

“I think so. That’s what I’m going to Paris to find out, once for all.”

“Are you sure that’s the reason you’re going to Paris?”

“What do you mean? Don’t be enigmatic, you’re not psychoanalyzing me.”

He held out his glass, smiling. “More, please… Score one for you. It always gets me
mad when my analyst friends ask me some teasing question like that. Implying they
know a hell of a lot more about me than I do. Of course that’s their whole game, this
enigmatic wisdom. Though all it ever boils down to is that you’re really a homosexual,
or you’d dearly love to take an axe to your old lady. Something like that.”

She handed him the drink and staggered back to the bed. The rolling seemed worse.
She said, “Did you really study in Vienna?”

“Why, sure.”

“I find it hard to believe. All you seem to say about Freud is old Broadway jokes.”

Eden chuckled. “You sound like my analyst friends. I’ll admit I make stale jokes,
Marjorie. I’ve fallen into the habit, from arguing with them. I think I believed in
it all too strongly too young. Sooner or later you’re almost bound to rebel against
your boyhood faith. My folks didn’t have any, you see, and psychoanalysis rushed into
the vacuum, once I came upon the first book when I was sixteen… Anyway, it’s pointless
to argue this subject seriously, with real Freudians. You can’t win. Any position
you take against Freud isn’t an intellectual comment, it’s a symptom of nervous disorder.
Try to lick that! ‘You disagree with us, therefore you’re sick.’ They all concur that
I’m hostile to Freud because I’m in flight from some terrible subconscious secret.
Unnatural urge for an affair with a kangaroo, no doubt.”

Though he said it in a light tone, there was an odd quaver in his voice. Marjorie
looked at him keenly. He met the look, his eyes expressionless, and said, “Like to
take a chance on the dancing? You reel around and try to keep from crashing into pillars
and other couples. It’s fun, in a wild way.”

“I’d just as soon skip it,” Marjorie said. “Thanks.”

Eden said, swirling the whiskey and looking into the glass as he talked, “I’m in flight
all right, you know. But not from anything secret. I can date my break with psychoanalysis
as exactly as you probably can your meeting with Noel…. In fact, I’ll tell you about
it. Then maybe I’ll seem a little less weird to you. When I was twenty-three, Marjorie,
just starting to teach, I fell for the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen, and married
her in two weeks. Gradually it turned out that she was a dreadful phony. Told me she’d
dropped out of college to help support her family, when actually she’d flunked out
in freshman year. Told me she was taking French lessons and studying sculpture—complete
wild lies. She was just repeating things she’d heard from other girls. Boned up on
book-review sections in newspapers and talked about all the new books very impressively.
I was so blinded at the moment that she got away with it. Feminine wiles, pardonable
enough maybe, because God knows she was in love too—but a mistake. It’s one thing
to try to seem a little better than you are. It’s another thing, and a dangerous one,
to pretend you’re an entirely different person.

“It was bad almost from the start. I left Emily twice, and went back each time. She
would come on her hands and knees, crying, beautiful, swearing she’d do anything I
wanted,
anything
, go back to college, study nights. Once we were back together it was all forgotten.
She just didn’t have it in her to change. She’d sit at home and look mournfully at
me because I was so bored and out of love. I met a marvelous girl at school, a student
in one of my courses, brilliant, sweet, good—she’s married to someone else, she’s
a doctor now—and I begged Emily for a divorce. This went on for two hideous years.
At last she actually went to Reno. She came back after staying there three months
and consuming all our savings—and she hadn’t done a thing about the divorce. Not a
thing, simply sat there in Reno. She had an absolutely unbelievable capacity for doing
nothing and hoping dumbly for the best.” His voice was becoming hoarse and shaky.
“Well, this can either take two days or two minutes. In two minutes, I was driving
with Emily along a highway late at night. This was shortly after she’d returned from
Reno. We’d had some frightful quarrels, and then a miserable half-reconciliation.
I fell asleep at the wheel. We smashed into a railroad overpass. My skull was fractured
and Emily was killed instantly. Her neck was broken.”

He looked at Marjorie in a peculiarly embarrassed way, with a half-apologetic smile.
No words came to her dry lips and dry throat. After a while he went on, “There was
quite a bit of trouble with the police, of course. It takes a lot of red tape even
to die accidentally. But what with me nearly dead myself, and no insurance money,
and no other woman—this other girl had married long ago—the books were soon closed.
It was an accident, and that was that, for the record.

“But not for me. For me it was only the beginning. From a Freudian viewpoint there
are no accidents, you see. Or rather, accidents, mistakes, oversights, slips of the
tongue, are icebergs poking above the water and showing colossal masses of motivation
underneath. I fell asleep at the wheel, sure I did. But falling asleep is something
the unconscious mind can bring about. Drowsiness in special situations can be a hell
of a clue in unravelling a neurosis. That’s all too true. I had felt myself getting
drowsy, had even thought of asking Emily to take the wheel. What’s more, I actually
remember seeing the railroad overpass far down the highway just before I dozed off.
From the analytic point of view—in which I then believed, with religious intensity—there
isn’t the slightest doubt that I murdered my wife, getting rid of an intolerable burden
in the only sure way I could, and revenging myself for years of misery and a crippled
life.”

The bed heaved and rolled under Marjorie. She clung to the headboard with one hand.
Eden’s face had gone quite ashy, though his expression was calm and even unpleasantly
humorous. She said, “I don’t know enough about analysis to argue—but even if it were
true you wouldn’t be responsible, not in any real sense—”

He walked to the whiskey and poured his glass half full. “Exactly what my analyst
friends say—or almost exactly, Marjorie. I can give you the patter word for word,
I’ve heard it so often. ‘You have unconscious death wishes, but you don’t commit unconscious
murders. It’s a silly attitude. Your wife’s death isn’t really what’s troubling you.
You’re covering your unsolved neurosis by harping on the accident. Find out what’s
really
bothering you, and you’ll stop worrying about having murdered your wife.’

“Can you tie that, Marjorie, for obsessed mumbo-jumbo? I killed my wife, sure. But
that’s not what’s really bothering me. Hell, no. I was taken off the breast too early
in infancy,
that’s
what’s bothering me. And when I’ve gotten furious at this silly obduracy and started
raving at them—I could rave now, just remembering these arguments—why, they’ve sat
back and nodded wisely. More symptoms.

“Whenever I do manage to corner them completely with chapter and verse from Freud,
they say I’m the typical psychology teacher, all book-theory, no clinical experience.
All I know is what Freud
said
about these things. I don’t understand the scientific facts of human nature that
emerge from analytic practice to verify the theories, a little knowledge is a dangerous
thing and so on, with a hey nonny no…

“You see, these dogma-blinded bastards have never been involved in a fatal accident.
They can’t imagine what it’s like. They go blandly on spinning the old palaver, not
realizing that the packaged comfort they dispense is sheer poison to a man in my spot.