Marjorie Morningstar (86 page)

“Curious that you, of all people, should be vain.”

“You’re quite right,” he said amiably. “With this chopped-up phiz of mine it’s ridiculous,
but I never have liked fat people.”

“Darling” (there it was again) “I didn’t mean that. It’s just that you have such an
unearthly detachment about everything else, I wouldn’t think you’d care.”

“A man who lives alone gets fussy about himself, Marjorie. He has nothing else to
fuss over.”

“Do you think you’ll marry again?”

“No.”

“That’s nice and definite.”

“Might as well live out the sunset this way.”

“Sunset indeed! Thirty-nine.”

“I’ve outlived Keats, Mozart, Marlowe, Alexander the Great, and Jesus. I’m satisfied.”

He had said things like this before. What distressed Marjorie most was his matter-of-fact
good humor about it. He sometimes sounded like a man with an incurable disease who
had become used to the idea. She stared at him as he ate his ice cream. He was a healthy,
vigorous man, with clear hazel eyes and a fresh sunburned skin; only his tense movements,
the rather rigid way he held himself, the habitual drumming of his fingers, were in
any way abnormal; and these things merely showed excessive nervousness. The gray hair
emphasized rather than detracted from the picture of vigor. She said, “Why do you
talk this way? Is it a line you consider amusing or smart? I don’t. It’s very upsetting.
It would be more upsetting if I’d known you longer. It gives me the chills, frankly.”

“I’m sorry. When I talk that way I’m not thinking, it’s such a matter of course to
me. Possibly it’s a subtle appeal for sympathy, but I hope not. I’m not aware of being
in the market for sympathy.”

“How can you feel in the sunset at your age? Don’t you think that’s very strange?”

“It’s hard to describe how I feel. It’s—I think it’s a bit like coming to the end
of a long book. The plot’s at its thickest, all the characters are in a mess, but
you can see that there aren’t fifty pages left, and you know that the finish can’t
be far off. Theoretically, the thing could go on for five hundred pages more, but
you know it won’t. Well, of course I haven’t got the book of my life in hand, or the
narrow band of pages still to read. I just have the sensation. It’s not at all an
uncommon thing, you know, this sense of an impending end. It’s a classic symptom of
neurotic anxiety. I certainly follow the anxious pattern, so you can call it a symptom
and stop worrying about it. People live to ninety with such symptoms.”

“Well, then, you should have the sense to laugh at yourself.”

“Unfortunately, Marjorie, so far as I’m concerned, expressions like ‘neurotic anxiety’
are just educated noise. Who really knows what the affliction is, what it comes from,
what it means? It’s like a wart. You can describe it and you can treat it empirically,
which is a three-dollar word for ‘by guess and by God.’ But that’s all. Some people
get over it. Some people live with it, as I say, to a ripe worrisome age. Some die
young, just as they knew they would. Not suicides, either. They run through the fifty
pages and the book is over. Somehow they knew.”

“That’s pure mysticism.”

“Well, I’m a mystic, more or less.”

She laughed, but he didn’t. She said, “Really, I’ve never met a mystic and I don’t
think you’re one. Where’s your sheet, your sandals, and your long hair? You’re far
too sensible.”

“There’s quite a lot in the literature,” he said, “about premonitions. I’ll grant
that when you’re engaged in a course of action that’s foolish or dangerous, and hiding
the folly or danger from yourself, the subconscious mind seizes on any gloomy fact
like a broken mirror, or an ominous slip of the tongue, or a black cat in the way,
to try to scare you into saving yourself. That accounts for a fraction of the cases.
But the truth is, we don’t know anything about the nature of time, and damned little
about the mind. I think some premonitions are real. I can’t explain why. I can’t explain
why an embryo grows five fingers, for that matter.”

“How can you compare the two? The way the embryo grows fingers is a scientific fact.
The chromosomes control that.”

His gloomy face lit with amusement. “How silly of me. I forgot about the chromosomes.
Well, let’s say my premonition is part of a neurotic anxiety, shall we? I’m in no
hurry to get into a grave, not any more. I find what I’m doing damned interesting.”

“The chemical business?”

“Don’t say it with such contempt. It’s a romantic trade.” He glanced at his watch.
“Bridge-playing time. Sure you won’t change your mind and come along?”

“Once was enough. I won’t play with a shark like you, I feel too idiotic. Anyway,
I’ve never liked cards much. Go ahead, have fun.”

Tom Jones
had never seemed duller than it did that afternoon. She read several pages over and
over, alone in a deck chair that heaved disagreeably. The sky turned leaden and then
disappeared as the ship was engulfed in a drifting gray fog. The sea, invisible a
few feet beyond the rail, smashed at the ship with menacing deep roars. She would
have liked one of Eden’s seasickness pills, but she didn’t want to interrupt him at
cards. He was another man when he played: forbidding, curt, abstracted. She closed
the book, lay back, and dozed.

“Tea?”

Eden was standing over her, wrapped in a trench coat and gray muffler; the deck steward
was beside him with the tea wagon. Rain was lashing the windows and it was almost
dark, though the overhead clock read only quarter to five. She rubbed her eyes and
sat up. “Why sure, I’ll have tea.”

After the steward had gone Eden said, “Want one of these?” She took the red capsule
gratefully from his palm, and swallowed it with a scalding gulp of tea. “Weather’s
getting wild again,” she said.

He nodded. A minute or so passed. “I’m sorry, Marjorie.”

“Sorry for what?”

“I should have sworn off that handwriting business years ago. I always come out with
something stupid. I shouldn’t have said Noel’s a son of a bitch.”

She smiled at him with a trace of indulgence. “Why, that’s exactly what he is. The
bad part is that I’ve always liked that about him, as well as everything else. Now
if you’ll concentrate your vast brain and write a book explaining why girls are drawn
to sons of bitches, you’ll really do humanity a service. You’ll be another Freud.”

He laughed, but his forehead knotted, the lines of concentration pulling in toward
the center. “It’s a good question. The heroes in romantic books, for instance, all
tend to be sons of bitches, don’t they? From Heathcliff down to Rhett Butler… Of course
my analyst friends would say all women are masochists at heart, or it’s the search
for the father as pain-inflicter, and all that. But setting aside such incantations,
let’s see… One thing is obvious. The son of a bitch, considered as a type, has vitality.
He’s a dasher, a smasher, a leaper. There’s promise in a son of a bitch. When you
go to buy a puppy, you know, you’re not supposed to take the sweet one that licks
your hand. You’re supposed to pick the most rambunctious rascal of the litter, the
one that’s roaring around, tearing the furniture, messing in the middle of the carpet,
giving all the other pups hell. He’ll make the best dog. A woman looking for a husband
is in a sense getting herself a domestic animal, so it would follow that—” Marjorie
burst out laughing. Eden said, “I’m quite serious. She feels something missing in
a guy who’s housebroken already. Instinct tells her that a son of a bitch will tame
down into a guy worth having, a hubby with a little zing to him, and the vital energy
to pull a heavy load a long way. She’s not wrong, exactly. But she has to make sure
she isn’t buying a congenital and unchangeable son of a bitch. That’s the big question
mark. Is the pup just displaying youthful high spirits, or is he a permanent biter
and messer?”

“I wonder if you were a son of a bitch in your day,” Marjorie said. “I rather think
so.”

“In my day? I’m one of the congenital ones.”

“No, you aren’t.”

“Don’t be fooled by my company manners, Marjorie. Of course it’s not my ‘fault,’ as
we used to say in Psychology 1. I had rather bad nerves to start with, and they’re
much the worse for wear. However, what with happiness pills, and the general calming
effect of a ship, and your balmy influence, I think I’ve been pretty nice so far.
With luck I may keep it up till we leave the ship, and then you’ll always remember
me pleasantly. That’s something to work for.”

“Why?”

She was peering at his face, but the twilight was so dim that she could scarcely make
out the features. He said, “Why, I’d enjoy believing there’s someone who thinks well
of me. That’s all.” At that moment a long string of yellow lights came on overhead
and broke the gloom. They were alone on the chilly glassed-in deck, except for one
white-headed lady asleep far down the line of vacant deck chairs. Eden’s profile looked
peculiarly familiar to Marjorie, as though she had known him in the Bronx in her childhood.

She said, after hesitating over the words for several seconds, “Mike, you’re Jewish,
aren’t you?”

His head turned slowly, and the dark stony look of his face scared her. Then, as though
at the flick of a switch, light and warmth flowed into his expression. “When did you
decide that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe during the ping-pong game. I’ve felt it, rather than decided
it, for several days.”

“Well, I don’t mind your thinking so. Just don’t go around
saying
so, please. It could prove a damned nuisance for me.”

“I won’t. Are you really in the chemical business?”

“Marjorie, shipboard acquaintances always shade the truth about themselves a bit,
for one reason or another. I haven’t shaded it to any unusual extent. And now let’s
get a long running start of martinis on the evening, shall we?” He threw aside his
blanket and abruptly got out of the deck chair, extending his hand to her.

He played cards that evening, while Marjorie watched the movie. She then danced with
a sheepish boy of twenty, travelling with his mother, who had been mooning at her
all during the voyage but had never before worked up the courage to approach her.
It occurred to her that at this boy’s age George Drobes had been a towering adult
to her. Twenty, in a man, now was clumsy adolescence.

Eden gathered her up at midnight, and they went to the Verandah Grill. He was in remarkably
high spirits; they danced, and then walked the decks, talking, until three. He woke
her the next morning at eight by telephoning her cabin. “It’s our last day together.
Don’t you want to make it full and beautiful? Get your bones out of the hay.”

“Dear me,” she yawned, noting that the weather was lovely again and that the ship
was riding very steadily, “don’t tell me you’re going to get all romantic and dashing
now that we’re practically in Europe. You should have fallen for me sooner. You bore
me. I’m going back to sleep.”

“Get out of that bed.”

“Nothing doing. Coffee in bed on a ship is the most wonderful thing in the whole world.
See you in about an hour. You’re a beast not to let me sleep, just because you’re
an insomniac.”

She hung up, rang for the steward, and went to wash and comb her hair, carolling
Falling in Love with Love
. As she opened the door of her bathroom to come out, she heard Eden’s voice say,
“There’s a man in the room.” She happened to be wearing her most fetching negligee,
rust-colored silk and chiffon, passably modest. After a swift glance in the mirror
and a pause to catch her breath she sailed out, brushing her hair and saying indignantly,
“You’re too chummy by half, do you know? Get out of here before I call the steward.”

There was a coffee service for two on the bureau, with fruit, rolls, and an elaborate
array of delicious-looking coffee cakes. He was in an armchair in the sunlight, calmly
drinking coffee and munching on a blueberry muffin. His eyes looked tired. He wore
a suit she hadn’t seen before, a beautifully cut navy-blue pin-stripe, and there was
a new book in his lap. He was very much the diplomat again, she thought, or else she
was actually falling for him and seeing him in a golden haze. There was a quality
in his scarred ugly face that drew her strongly. The word she thought of to describe
it—it seemed a stupid word—was goodness.

“Do you really want to throw me out? It’ll make a hell of a scandal,” he said. “It’ll
take two stewards, and I’ll go kicking and yelling. This coffee is fine, much better
than what we get in the dining room. Have some.”

She growled, “Well, I suppose anything goes on a ship. I’ve never had breakfast with
a man before while I’m in my nightgown. There’s always a first time.” She got into
her bed. “You’ll have to serve me, though. Where did this stuff come from? All I ever
order is coffee.”

“The steward’s an understanding soul. He’s my steward, too. Here.” He brought her
coffee and a cake.

They ate in silence, and she found herself wishing that this moment would prolong
itself for a week or so. After wrestling with a cautionary impulse, she told him this.

He nodded. “I needn’t tell you I feel the same way. It’s not merely that you’re so
pretty—although that helps, of course. You make me feel comfortable, somehow. You’re
worth several bottles of happiness pills.”

“Strange that you should say comfortable,” she said. “It’s the word that’s kept occurring
to me. And yet I don’t know anybody who’s ever made me more uncomfortable than you
have, every now and then.”

The lines of concentration appeared in his face. “Well, to tell you the truth, I barged
in here to have a talk with you that’s overdue. But the hell with it. I couldn’t be
more out of the mood. Some other time. Let me read you something by Thurber I came
across last night, it’s side-splitting.”

He read very well, and the piece was excruciatingly funny. They both laughed themselves
breathless. She said, “Lord, it’s a wonderful way to start the day, isn’t it, laughing
like that? Beats a cold shower. Let’s go out on deck. I’ll dress. See you in a few
minutes.”