Psychology and Other Stories (7 page)

“It's biological basically,” said Rodney. “Their
mode opérant
is basically nurturing. So it makes sense that they're looking for someone to protect them, someone to provide for them.”

“Someone to bring home the bacon.”

“Someone to slip them the salami.”

Archie didn't know what to say to this. Earlier, when a pack of Downsfield girls had come into the diner and ordered malteds, Rodney had said, with something like sickened awe, “What I couldn't do with a pair of gazongas like that.” This kind of statement always rendered Archie speechless. What
did
one do with a pair of gazongas? Or, for that matter, a nice set of legs or a smashing ass? He understood the sentiment behind such comments: “That girl is physically attractive to me.” It was their peculiar figurative expression, half nonsensical, half obscene, that bemused him, as if Rodney
were speaking in some kind of childish masonic code. And when he himself tried to speak this language it always rang false. He simply could not say things like “I wouldn't kick
her
out of bed” or “Now
there's
a can I could drink from” without feeling like an imposter, or a troll. Although, in fact, he felt that way—guilty, dirty, stupid—whenever he even looked at a pretty girl. No doubt some prehistoric part of him longed to subdue and degrade her, pull her by the hair back to his cave. Probably that was why the salacious words turned to ashes in his mouth: shame.

But most of the time, talking to Rodney was easy. Archie did not have to try so hard. Not that Rodney was stupid; he could not spell, perhaps, but he had life smarts. And the two of them had a lot in common. Rodney too was the only child of a widowed mother. He too had transferred to Pervcliffe, just last year. He too had hated it at first.

“One summer,” Archie said, “when I was about thirteen, my mother got it into her head that I needed a tutor. Of course, you can't really blame her …”

Rodney leaned back and nodded nonchalantly in the direction of the door. Two Downsfielders had just come in.

“Nice,” Archie mumbled.

He recognized the brunette.

She was the one he sometimes saw in his vision, embracing him from behind on that lonesome desert road.

“Ask them to join us.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Wait here.”

Archie could not watch. He hung his head over his plate and stuffed cold french fries in his mouth.

“Hey, you haven't met my roommate Arch yet, have you? Ladies, this is Arch my roommate. Arch my roommate, this is Sandra. And this is Meagan, my future ex-wife.”

The girls laughed obligingly, as if they had already heard this joke but were too polite to say so. Archie saw with horror that he had extended his hand in greeting; now it hung in the air above the table, unnoticed, unacknowledged, irrefutable proof of his awkwardness. Did one even shake hands with girls? He grasped the ketchup bottle, as if this had been his goal all along, just as the girl of his dreams held out her hand to him.

“Hi Arch his roommate, I'm Sandra his future ex-wife's future ex-roommate.”

Archie rangily upended the bottle, insouciantly slapped half a pint of ketchup onto his plate, and grinned wisely up at the girl of his dreams. Through a mouthful of half-chewed french fries he said, “Peeaarreeaagghh.” He tried again, this time with greater emphasis: “
Pee
aarr
ee
agghh.” The girl furrowed her brow and leaned closer. He felt the sweat break out on his back. He looked wildly at Rodney, who looked wildly at him. The other girl eyed him with remote distaste, as if she had picked him up on the sole of her shoe on her way to a wedding. The mass of sodden potato in his mouth seemed, meanwhile, to have expanded, so that smiling rangily or insouciantly or in any other way was out of the question; the best that he could manage, by waggling his eyebrows and bringing his lips together, was a sour, maniacal moue. Recognizing that the only way out of this predicament was to chew, he abandoned all attempts at non-verbal communication and began madly to chew. Then he bit his tongue.

Why did he do that?

Why did one bite one's tongue? Presumably because one was afraid of what one was about to say. What had he been about to say? Something stupid and inadequate, no doubt. But if his secret motive had been to avoid looking stupid, he surely could not have hit upon a worse solution than screaming in agony, spewing bloody
mush from his mouth, and galumphing out into the night. Either his unconscious was even stupider than he was, or his problems went deeper than he realized.

Perhaps it was not the girl he'd been afraid of, but himself. What would he have discovered if he'd allowed himself to spend even a few minutes in conversation with a pretty girl? That he didn't care? That he wasn't nervous? That he was afraid to be around girls not because he might make an ass of himself, but because it might not matter if he did? Maybe what he really felt around beautiful girls was not love, but terrifying, vertiginous indifference.

But that didn't make any sense either, because, by the doctor's logic, an indifference to the opposite sex would only point to a repressed attraction to them. But no: to qualify as a reaction-formation, wouldn't it have to be stronger than mere indifference, something more like active hatred or repugnance? Unless, of course, it was possible to form a reaction-formation
to
a reaction-formation. Perhaps he so loved women that the sight of a pretty girl crippled him; disgusted by this weakness, he clamped down on it so hard that his lust underwent a subterranean transformation into loathing; but, being even more ashamed of his loathing than he had been of his lust, he clamped down again, until his troll-like, rapacious, destructive urges were refined into commonplace lust and wretched infatuation …

But if one could form a reaction-formation to a reaction-formation, what prevented one from forming a reaction-formation to a reaction-formation to a reaction-formation? What prevented infinite regress? And more importantly, how did one ever discover one's true feelings? A loop had no starting point.

All he knew for certain was that he had not
meant
to bite his tongue. His unconscious, apparently, did not want him talking to girls.

*

Archie returned to the library and to “A Song of Myself,” which Clayton Fishpool had brought to his attention as one of the best poems ever written—“in the English language, at least.” Archie had perceived its brilliance the first time he read it. To think that someone had thought to write such long, unrhymed lines as long ago as 1858! And he liked the idea of grass as the “beautiful uncut hair of graves.” That was poetry, all right.

But his second reading left him discomfited. There was an awful lot of talk of men, for one thing. Men, to Archie's way of thinking, were (like automobiles, politics, and wheelbarrows) not quite proper subject matter for poetry. But Whitman gave them as much attention as women, perhaps more. And what could be made of lines like these?

I am enamoured of growing outdoors,

Of men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods …

I can eat and sleep with them week in and week out.

On his first reading, he had chalked this sort of thing up to the innocence of earlier times: Whitman could not have known what people would one day mean when they said “sleep with” someone. But how did Whitman know what men tasted like? Was this just poetry—that is, saying what you didn't mean, not saying what you did mean—or was this something else?

Let's be blunt
, he said to himself.
Let's cut to the chase. Let's not mince words.

It was possible that Walt Whitman had been a homosexual. Many famous writers had been. (He could not at the moment think of any, aside from Oscar Wilde.) One could enjoy their works without being homosexual oneself. Though possibly it helped…

Was Clayton Fishpool a homosexual? Was that why he had befriended Archie, invited him to join the Literary Club? Because he had recognized in him a kindred spirit?

Just like the man in the wood outside Templeton.

But that was different. Archie had been, after all, in that wood on the edge of town near the public toilets, a known meeting place for homosexuals. The man could perhaps be forgiven his assumption.

Well, what if Clayton Fishpool had made a similar mistake?

From the stacks, Archie pulled every book by Lytton Strachey the library owned and returned with them to his carrel. He did not believe he would find what he was looking for. After all, it wasn't the sort of detail you could expect to find in a scholarly introduction or the biographical note on the dust jacket. He had already resigned himself to the futility of his task when he came upon, in
Lytton Strachey by Himself
, an autobiographical essay that quickly came to the point:

Perhaps if I could have lain with Bunny … And then I smiled to think of my romantic visions before coming—of a recrudescence of that affair, under Duncan's nose—and of his dimness on my arrival, and of how very very little I wanted to lie with him now!

There could no be question of what “lie with” meant here—not with “romantic visions” and “that affair” in the same sentence. But he read on, just to be sure.

As the first flush of victory at having confirmed a wild hypothesis began to fade, it was replaced by an at first pleasurable, then disquieting, shock of recognition. For, in many ways, Strachey was exactly like him, he was exactly like Strachey: indecisive, self-doubting, filled with daydreams and velleities, addicted to introspection and to self-dramatization: “I imagined myself reading about myself in a novel
by Tolstoy—reading quickly, and turning over the pages as fast as I could, in my excitement to know what would happen in the end.”

But as he read on, the shock of recognition faded too, and with it the worry about what it might portend, what it might prove about Clayton Fishpool or about himself.

And then the vision of that young postman with the fair hair and lovely country complexion who had smiled at me and said ‘Good evening, sir,' as he passed on his bicycle, flashed upon me. My scheme of meeting him in the long lane past the village recurred to me, and then I began embroidering romantic and only
just
possible adventures which might follow: the bedroom in the inn at Norwich, and all the rest. But there was the necessity of talking to him first; and I went once more through the calculations of time and place, and saw that my plan really might, if I had the nerve, come off …

He read quickly, turning over the pages as fast as he could, to find out what would happen next.

“
You fiend!” exclaimed the Duchess. “How dare you kiss me
!”

Such, if we may believe tradition, was the ideal first line proposed by a “psychologist” when asked to give an opening for a story that would grip attention and foster interest.

Here was a man who was trying to apply his knowledge of human nature. He knew that an exclamation gets attention. He knew that most people are interested in the nobility. He knew that everyone is interested in sex. He tried, successfully or not, to cram an appeal to all of these into one short sentence. He was an applied psychologist.

H.K. Nixon

MR. CUSTARD DROVE THE SPEED LIMIT.
He was in no hurry. In fact, he had never felt less anxious in all his life.

He always stopped for hitchhikers, because driving bored him and he liked to have someone to talk to. He had in fact just come from Loyola (well, he'd been there a few days ago; he did not know what day it was now, exactly) but he saw no reason not to go back, if that was where circumstances conspired to take him. Francine had set up an appointment for him in Carbon, towards which he had more or less been heading, but he would have missed the meeting by now anyway, and he could always make it up later. He did not set great store by schedules or appointment-making like some people did, but preferred to arrive at places and events naturally, in the fullness of time. He was, in the lingo of Dr. Yard, “open to experience.”

“Now what takes you ladies to Loyola?”

The one in the front with him, the skinny one, did not want to answer, but the one in the back had been raised with better manners.

“We missed our bus,” she said.

“Going to meet someone,” said the skinny one.

“Bad luck,” said Mr. Custard, as if this were his professional diagnosis. “For you ladies, that is. Good luck for me!”

The skinny one made a derisive sound, and Mr. Custard realized that unflappable cheerfulness, which worked so well with middle-aged and older ladies, would have limited effectiveness with these two.