Marjorie Morningstar (85 page)

“Ordinarily, Marjorie, you understand, the wonderful thing about psychoanalysis is
that it
frees
you from responsibility and guilt. You walk into the doctor’s office an adulterer,
a liar, a drunk, a phony, a failure, a pervert. In due time, after lying around on
a couch and babbling for a year or so, it turns out you’re none of these things at
all. Shucks, no, it was your Unconscious all the time. An entirely different person,
a guy named Joe, so to speak. Some occurrence in your childhood sex life has festered
into a sort of demon inside you. Well, you track this demon down, recognize it, name
it, exorcise it. You pay your bill and go your way absolved.

“That’s all perfectly fine. Unless you happen to have been in a fatal accident and
killed somebody. Then this whole scheme turns upon you. It can absolutely destroy
you mentally. Because don’t you see—this is what my benighted friends will
never
see—it’s just as horrible to believe that a demon under the surface of your brain
took charge and caused you to kill, as it is to believe that you killed in cold blood.
More so, possibly. Because if you think about it, the implication is that subsurface
devils possess you and can cause you to commit any number of shocking crimes.

“Well, I went through agonies I won’t bore you with, but the end of it all was a terrific
nerve crisis, out of which I emerged unable to teach. I gave up psychology, and I’ve
never gone back to it. It’s seven years since I’ve glanced into a professional journal,
let alone a book in the field. In fact I have a kind of horror of the subject. I got
interested in making money. Making money is fun, you know, and very absorbing, I’m
good at it. I started out by getting a job, and eventually went into business for
myself. I play a lot of cards, and read a lot of books, and that brings you up to
date.”

There was a marked contrast between these casual last words and the low strained tone
in which Eden said them. He was standing by the porthole, holding on to one of the
metal dogs, and as the ship rolled, black water crashed against the glass, and purple
lightning showed in the turbulent sky. The scar across his white forehead looked like
another streak of lightning. Marjorie, greatly disturbed, said to break the silence,
“It seems like a terrible waste. You must have been an excellent teacher.”

“I was. Freud had been my ruling passion for about fifteen years. What an awful emptiness
it left behind—and this on top of the loss of Emily! Believe me, having a sudden silent
vacuum of death in my life, instead of a problem, was shock enough. Giving up teaching
really did me in. For two years I was so close to suicide that—and I swear this to
you—I didn’t do it simply because I didn’t want to give strangers the trouble of cleaning
up a mess that used to be me.

“Marjorie, I’ve sat in hotel rooms for weeks, reading straight through Scott, Trollope,
Zola, Balzac, Richardson, Reade, Lever, all the talky old novelists, just to keep
from thinking. Because if I thought, the only thing I could think about was killing
myself. Not for any dramatic reason, mind you. Not out of guilt or despair or anything.
Simply because it was too much pointless effort to live. It was an effort to suck
in air, when I thought about it. Seeing colors was a nuisance. Just to see a red and
green neon sign and distinguish the letters was work, stupid work. And panic, I lived
in torpor or panic, I knew nothing else, nothing, for two years….

“Well, I guess I pulled out of this schizoid state, which was what it was, because
I was meant to live, and not die. I don’t know what else did it. And I emerged with
this jeering attitude about analysis, which you call making Broadway jokes. It’s second
nature by now.

“Once you lose faith in all that, believe me, you really lose it. An unbelieving Catholic
is nothing to an unbelieving Freudian. Where’s their id and their libido, anyway?
In the brain? In the kidneys? When I was a kid arguing religion we used to say nobody
ever saw a soul in a test tube. Well, who ever caught an id in a test tube? It’s all
a lot of metaphors—and when you take metaphors for facts, what you have is a mythology.
Mind you, the old man was a Homer or a Dante, in his way, quite up to writing out
a mythology that would span the entire range of moral judgments. That’s what his work
has become. The Freudians say they make no moral judgments—I used to say so myself
with great assurance—but the fact is, they do absolutely nothing else. They
can’t
do anything else, because their business is evaluating and guiding behavior. That’s
morality. What they mean is they don’t make
conventional
moral judgments. They sure don’t….

“All right, now I’ll shut up about this, obviously it’s my King Charles’ head. I haven’t
gotten going this way in ages. In sum, Freud says I’m a murderer, and I say the hell
with him, and that’s my little story, Marjorie.” He was pacing again. He stopped at
the armchair, picked up Noel’s letter, and flourished the pages at her. “Our friend
Mr. Noel Airman really touched off this outburst, if you want to know. Noel’s quite
an iconoclast, isn’t he? Probably impressed you deeply. Rightly so. He’s a wonderful
talker. Still, Noel is very much a creature of his time, so he takes the current myths
for solid facts.” He tossed the letter on the bed at Marjorie’s feet in an openly
contemptuous gesture. “The one thing in all those twenty pages that Noel takes seriously
is the analytic explanation of his own conduct. He’s right proud of it. It never occurs
to him that the Oedipus complex really doesn’t exist, that it’s a piece of moralistic
literature. He’s as orthodox as your own father, Marjorie, in his fashion, but he
doesn’t know it. Judas priest, how well I know the type! Sweeping the dust of orthodoxy
out the front door, and never seeing it drift in again at the back door, settling
down in somewhat different patterns. The vilest insult you can hurl at them is to
tell them they believe in something. Yet all Noel Airman really is, Margie, is a displaced
clergyman. You have no idea, till you’ve read the literature of neurosis, how full
the woods are of these displaced creatures. Brave skeptics all, making a life’s work
out of being dogmatic, clever, supercilious—and inwardly totally confused and wretched.”

Marjorie said, startled, “Noel once talked about becoming a rabbi. He wasn’t serious,
really. But he worked himself up terrifically over it.”

Mike Eden grinned. “It’s just as well Noel didn’t become a rabbi. It would have been
hard on the husbands in the congregation.” He walked to the whiskey bottle, picked
it up, then set it down again without pouring. “I believe I have half emptied this
bottle in less than an hour. Also more than half emptied my brain. I feel remarkably
good. I feel like the Ancient Mariner after spinning his yarn for the Wedding Guest.”
He came to the bed and stood beside her. “I’m thirty-nine. How old are you?”

“Twenty-three. Twenty-four in November,” Marjorie said uneasily, looking up at him.
“Why?”

“When I got out of college,” Eden said, “you were five years old.”

“I guess that’s right,” Marjorie said. “I’m not thinking clearly.”

“Of course you’re not. I’ve stupefied you with words.” He took her hand. “Well, maybe
I’ve demonstrated one thing to you that may prove useful in time. Noel Airman isn’t
the only man in the world who can talk. As a matter of fact, Margie, it’s a completely
negligible accomplishment.” He pulled her to her feet, and kissed her once on the
mouth, a real kiss. She leaned back in his arms, astonished, unprotesting, and more
than a little stirred. She said softly, “Yes? What’s this?”

Mike Eden’s look was tender, shrewd, and extremely melancholy.

“Plain self-indulgence, I guess. I’ve always liked blue eyes and brown hair, and girls
about as tall as you. Good night, Margie.”

He went out, leaving her rather stunned.

“Let me have a cigarette, darling.” Marjorie said it without thinking, but then the
endearing word rang strange in her ears. They were sitting side by side on deck chairs
in morning sunlight, wrapped in blankets, reading. It was the fourth day of the crossing.

He passed the cigarettes and matches from his lap to hers without looking up. He was
reading
The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft;
Marjorie had glanced at it and thought it a very dull book, but he was absorbed in
it. He had the ability to go into a virtual trance over a printed page. He read swiftly
and his taste was queer; the first day he had been finishing a fat tome,
The Theory of Money and Credit
, and he had since gone through a couple of mysteries, a long paperback novel in French,
and a book by Wodehouse over which he had laughed like a fool.

She liked to look at his face when he read. His brows, the lines of his mouth and
cheekbones, even the scar, seemed to converge to the middle of his forehead. She admired
and envied the visible concentration.

Lighting her cigarette, she studied him, wondering how “darling” had happened to slip
out. Marjorie had been thinking a great deal about Mike Eden in the past few days.
She was quite sure she wasn’t in love with him. His occasional kisses were pleasant,
and she liked to dance with him; his arm around her waist felt good; but the charming
little uneasiness that she had always experienced, dancing with Noel, wasn’t exactly
there. Once, however, she had come to the main lounge and found him dancing with another
girl, and a pang much like jealousy had gone through her. She did feel comfortable
near him, and rather lost away from him. At the moment, sitting beside him in the
paired intimacy of two deck chairs, she felt tranquil and in health as she seldom
had in recent years. All this didn’t square, she realized, with the kind of desperate
love that was supposed to be driving her across the Atlantic after Noel Airman; but
she had heard and read enough about shipboard romances to take what was happening
with several large grains of salt. There was something dreamlike and misty about her
present tranquillity—rather as though she were continually taking Eden’s “happiness
pills”; and she strongly suspected that the day she set foot on solid earth again
the old ache for Noel would rush through all her nerves, while Eden would fade to
a forgotten shadow.

Meantime, the serene peace of the crossing, however unreal, was hers to enjoy; and
she was enjoying it heartily.

“There goes the Gestapo,” she murmured. He glanced up at Hilda strolling by on the
arm of the man in the green jacket. The two Germans ignored Eden and Marjorie, as
they had been doing for the past couple of days. Marjorie said, “I suppose it was
inevitable that those two team up.”

“Pure blood calling to pure blood,” Eden said with a grimace, turning back to his
book.

“Her ankles really are pretty bad.”

“Mm,” Eden said.

“Mine aren’t.”

Eden reluctantly took his eyes from his book and inspected the bulky outline of Marjorie’s
blanketed form. “You’re a captivating dish from head to toe. I can’t tell you how
much I envy Noel Airman. Especially since he’s a thousand miles from here, and can
read in peace if he wants to.” He took a cigar out of a case in his pocket.

“You don’t really envy him. You think he’s a worthless worm, and that I’m throwing
myself away on him.” The fragrant cigar smoke drifted past her nose. “You know, I’ll
be sorry when this trip is over.”

“Why? You’ll rush panting into Noel’s arms a few hours after we land, and life will
blaze brightly forever after.”

“Don’t be so superior. I’m well aware that Noel will be as much trouble as he’s always
been, or more. But I feel so marvelously detached from all my problems—even from Noel—here
on the boat. I haven’t had such a respite in years. It’s doing wonders for my nerves.
I’d like to just ride back and forth on the
Queen Mary
three or four times before I tackle Noel.”

“I don’t think you need it.” He started to read again, calmly drawing on the cigar.

Marjorie had struck one of the discursive essays in
Tom Jones
. She felt very little like reading, and very much like talking. She picked up a pad
of writing paper and scrawled her name on a sheet. “How about analyzing my handwriting?”

Yawning, he put the book aside, marking his place with the flap of the jacket. “This
is as bad as being married. Are you sure you want your soul to be seen into? Write
a few lines. Signatures are meaningless.”

She scrawled a speech from
Pygmalion.
“Pretty dull handwriting,” she said, “now that I look at it.”

He studied the paper, puffing out his cheeks. “It’s changed quite a bit.”

She blinked. “How can you know that? Did Noel show you my writing?”

“No. It’s a handwriting that’s undergoing change, that’s all.”

“Gad. Uncanny.” The fact was that much of the elegance she had once cultivated had
dropped out of her writing in the past year or two—the Greek
e
’s, the long heavy vertical lines, the smart initial letters.

For about ten minutes he was silent, staring at the page, now and then nodding. She
became self-conscious. “Well, say something.”

Crumpling the paper, he threw it across the deck; the wind whipped it out over the
rail. “Sorry. I can’t see a thing. Get your money back from the cashier.”

“You dog, you can’t get away with that.”

He was looking at her with unusual warmth, a small smile in the corners of his mouth.
“I’ll tell you just two things I observed. Then I’m off to order some coffee. First,
I’m afraid Noel’s a pretty dirty son of a bitch, after all. Second, your handwriting
is almost exactly like Anitra’s.”

“Anitra?”

“The girl I didn’t marry.”

At lunch he had a meager vegetable salad and ice cream. She said, “What are you, a
vegetarian or something? I don’t think I’ve seen you eat meat on this trip.”

“I weigh 180 pounds. Until a year ago I never went over 160. I’m not going to balloon
into middle age if I can help it.”