The disintegration of Rennie that September was not often an entertaining spectacleto observe, for although, as she pointed out, it is not self-evident that every personality is valuable simply because it's unique, nevertheless I could seldom enjoy contributing to the unhappiness of people whom I'd come to know at all well. There is no humanitarianism in this fact: for humankind in general I had no feeling one way or the other, and the plight of some specific people, Peggy Rankin for example, I must say concerned me not at all. This is merely a description of my reactionism -- I wouldn't attempt to defend it as an assumed position.

The trouble, I suppose, is that the more one learns about a given person, the more difficult it becomes to assign a character to him that will allow one to deal with him effectively in an emotional situation. Mythotherapy, in short, becomes increasingly harder to apply, because one is compelled to recognize the inadequacy of any role one assigns. Existence not only precedes essence: in the case of human beings it rather defies essence. And as soon as one knows a person well enough to hold contradictory opinions about him, Mythotherapy goes out the window, except at times when one is no more than half awake.

There were such times, but they were few. The latter part of the evening just described was one: when at length I carried Rennie to the bed (excited by her heaviness) I was able to do so only because, for better or worse, enough of my alertness was gone to permit me to dramatize the situation as part of a romantic contest between symbols. Joe was The Reason, or Being (I was using Rennie's cosmos); I was The Unreason, or Not-Being; and the two of us were fighting without quarter for possession of Rennie, like God and Satan for the soul of Man. This pretty ontological Manichaeism would certainly stand no close examination, but it had the triple virtue of excusing me from having to assign to Rennie any essence more specific than The Human Personality, further of allowing me to fornicate with her with a Mephistophelean relish, and finally of making it possible for me not to question my motives, since what I was doing was of the essence of my essence. Does one look for introspection from Satan?

As for Rennie, she had by that time very nearly reached the condition of paralysis, and it was, I believe, with something like relief that she allowed me to cast her in the role of Mankind; what drama was onher mind I couldn't say. I took her home afterwards.

"Aren't you going to come in for a while?" she asked numbly.

But my little play had dissipated with my sexual ardor, and I was vegetable.

"Nope. I'll see you around."

For the rest, I felt mostly a generalized pity for the Morgans, especially for Rennie. Joe, after all, was behaving pretty consistently with his position, and that knowledge can be comforting even in cases where the position leads to defeat or disaster, as when a bridge player plays out a losing hand perfectly or an Othello loves not wisely but too well. But Rennie no longer had a position to act consistently with, not even the position of acting inconsistently, and yet, unlike my own, her personality was such that it seemed to require a position in order to preserve itself.

She came to my room three times during September and once in October. The first visit I've already described. The second, on Wednesday of the following week, was quite different: Rennie seemed warm, strong, even gay and a little wild. We made love zestfully at once -- she went so far as to tease me for being less energetic a lover than her husband -- and afterwards she talked animatedly for an hour or so over a quart of California muscatel she'd brought with her.

"Lord, I've been silly lately!" she laughed. "Mooning and crying around like a schoolgirl!"

"Oh?"

"How in the world could I have taken this business so seriously? You know what happened to me last night?"

"No."

"I popped awake at three in the morning -- wide awake, like I've been doing every night since this business started. Usually I get the shakes when that happens, and either sit up the rest of the night shivering and sweating or else wake up Joe and go over the whole thing with him again. Well, last night I woke up as usual, and the moon was shining in and I could see Joe lying there asleep -- he looks adolescent when he's asleep! -- and for some reason or other while I was watching him he started picking his nose in his sleep!" She giggled at the memory and burped slightly from the wine. "Excuse me."

"Certainly."

"Well, that reminded me of that night we peeked in on him through the living-room window, only this time instead of hurting me it just struck me funny! The whole thing struck me funny, and how we were taking it. Joe seemed like a teenager trying to make a tragedy out of nothing, and you just seemed completely ineffectual. Does this make you mad?" She laughed.

"Of course not."

"And I've been being a runny-nose little girl myself, crying all over the place and letting you two bully me around about such a stupid thing. I felt just like I feel when I let the kids get me down. Lots of times when the kids scream and fight all day I get so worked up at them I end up screaming and crying myself, and I always feel silly afterwards and a little bit ashamed. How can grown people make so much fuss over something so silly? Especially married people with kids?"

"Poor little coitus," I smiled. In fact, Rennie's high spirits produced a contrary feeling in me: the happier she grew, the more glum I became, and the more she professed to take the matter lightly, the graver it seemed to me.

"Such a completely insignificant thing to take seriously! It's hardly worth thinking about, much less breaking up a marriage over! I could sleep with a hundred different men and not feel any different about Joe!"

"Well, now," I protested snappishly, "of course nothing's significant in itself, but anything's serious that you want to take seriously. There's no reason to make fun of another man's seriousnesses."

"Oh, stop it!" Rennie cried. "You're as bad as Joe is. I think all our trouble comes from thinking too much and talking too much. We talk ourselves into all kinds of messes that would disappear if everybody just shut up about them." She drank another glass of wine -- her fourth or fifth -- while I still nursed my first one. "You know what I think? I think none of this would have happened if we all didn't have so much time on our hands. I really do. You claim you don't know how you could ever have begun the whole business, but I think you did it because you're bored."

"Is that so?"

"You don't have any ambitions, you're not very busy or very handsome, you live by yourself. I think of you up here all day long, rocking in your rocking chair, daydreaming and cooking up schemes, just because you're bored. I think the key to your whole character is that you're just bored."

"I'm not just anything," I said without conviction. "Maybealso bored, but neverjust bored." Rennie, it was clear, was practicing a little layman's Mythotherapy herself: anybody who starts talking in terms of keys to people's characters is making myths, because the mystery of people is not to be explained by keys. But I was too glum just then to take more than perfunctory note of her playwriting.

"Well,I think you're just bored; I don't care what you think. I don't care what you or Joe either one thinks about this mess or about me any more: I've stopped taking it seriously. I've even stopped thinking about it."

"Good for you."

"That gets under your skin, though, doesn't it?" she laughed. "It takes the fun out of it when I stop being hurt. Well, the devil with you! I've stopped being hurt. Look how down in the mouth you are. You look like you've messed your pants or something." The idea amused her; she giggled vinously. "That's just how Joe looked this morning -- gloomy as a prophet. You're pouting because your game is spoiled. Now cheer up and get drunk with me or else take me home."

I emptied my glass and refilled it. "You realize, of course, that I don't believe a word of this. It's brave, but it's not convincing."

"You don't dare believe it," Rennie taunted.

"I don't dare to, and you couldn't if your life depended on it."

"I don't care," Rennie declared. "I don't give a damn."

"I don't believe Joe knows anything about it either."

"I don't care."

"He wouldn't get gloomy. He'd walk out."

"That's what you think. We're tied tighter than that. I don't know why I worried in the first place; no piece of nonsense like this could break Joe and me up. It would take a stronger person than you, Jake. You don't really know anything about Joe and me. Not a damned thing."

"I said last time you should tell him to go to hell."

"Maybe I'll tell you both to go to hell."

"Okay, girl, but watch that left hook of his when you do."

This remark canceled the effects of at least three glasses of muscatel.

"I don't think Joe would ever hit me again," she said seriously.

"Then skip home with that quart of muscatel in you, tweak his nose for him, and tell him you can't think seriously any more about anything as silly as your sex life," I suggested. "Tell him the whole trouble is he thinks too much."

"He wouldn't hit me, Jake. He'd never do that again."

"He'd fracture your damn jaw for you. Tell him he's acting like a high-school boy! He'll lay you out cold and you know it. Come on, I'll go along with you. If you're right we'll all three chuckle and chortle and snot our noses. We'll shake hands all around and our troubles will be over."

Rennie was entirely sober now.

"I hate you," she said. "You won't let me even try to be halfway happy again for a minute, will you? I can't even pretend to be happy."

And(mirabile dictu) as soon as she assumed my glumness, I was free of it -- took up her lost gaiety, in fact, and poured myself another glass of muscatel.

"You feel great, don't you?" Rennie cried.

"Happy, happy human perversity. I'm genuinely sorry, Rennie."

"You're genuinely cheerful!" she said, whipping her head from side to side.

But such precarious good spirits as these of Rennie's and such unnecessary cruelty as this of mine were rare. Just as the second visit had borne little resemblance to the first, the third (and last in September) was nothing at all like the second. By this time I was involved enough in teaching so that my moods more and more often had their origin in the classroom. On this particular day, the last Friday in September, I felt acute, tuned-up, razor-sharp, simply because in my grammar class that morning I'd explained the rules governing the case forms of English pronouns: it gives a man a great sense of lucidity and well-being, if not downright formidability, to be able not only to say, but to understand perfectly, that predicate complements of infinitives of copulative verbs without expressed subjects go into the nominative case, whereas predicate complements of infinitives of copulative verbswith expressed subjects go into the objective case. I made this observation to my awed assemblage of young scholars and concluded triumphantly, "I was thought to behe, but I thought John to behim! Questions?"

"Aw, look," protested a troublesome fellow -- in the back of the room, of course -- whom I'd early decided to flunk if possible for his impertinence, "which came first, the language or the grammar books?"

"What's on your mind, Blakesley?" I demanded, refusing to play his game.

"Well, it stands to reason people talked before they wrote grammar books, and all the books did was tell how people were talking. For instance, when my roommate makes a phone call I ask him, 'Who were you talking to?' Everybody in this class would say, 'Who were you talking to?' I'll bet ninety-nine per cent of the people of America would say, 'Who were you talking to?' Nobody's going to say, 'To whom were you just now talking?' I'll bet even you wouldn't say it. It sounds queer, don't it?" The class snickered. "Now this is supposed to be a democracy, so if nobody but a few profs ever say, 'To whom were you just now speaking?', why go on pretending we're all out of step but you? Why not change the rules?"

A Joe Morgan type, this lad: paths should be laid where people walk. I hated his guts.

"Mr. Blakesley, I suppose you eat your fried chicken with your fingers?"

"What? Sure I do. Don't you?"

The class tittered, engrossed in the duel, but as of this last rather flat sally they were not so unreservedly allied with him as before.

"And your bacon at breakfast? Fingers or fork, Mr. Blakesley?"

"Fingers," he said defiantly. "Sure, that's right, fingers were invented before forks, just like English was invented before grammar books."

"But notyour fingers, as the saying goes," I smiled coolly, "and not your English -- God knows!" The class was with me all the way: prescriptive grammar was victorious.

"The point is," I concluded to the class in general, "that if we were still savages, Mr. Blakesley would be free to eat like a swine without breaking any rules, because there'd be no rules to break, and he could say, 'It sounds queer, don't it?' to his heart's content without being recognized as illiterate, because literacy -- the grammar rules -- wouldn't have been invented. But once a set of rules for etiquette or grammar is established and generally accepted as the norm -- meaning the ideal, not the average -- then one is free to break them only if he's willing to be generally regarded as a savage or an illiterate. No matter how dogmatic or unreasonable the rules might be, they're the convention. And in the case of language there's still another reason for going along with even the silliest rules. Mr. Blakesley, what does the wordhorse refer to?"

Mr. Blakesley was sullen, but he replied, "The animal. Four-legged animal."

"Equus caballus,"I agreed: "a solid-hoofed, herbivorous mammal. And what does the algebraic symbolx stand for?"

"x?Anything. It's an unknown."

"Good. Then the symbolx can represent anything we want it to represent, as long as it always represents the same thing in a given equation. Buthorse is just a symbol too -- a noise that we make in our throats or some scratches on the blackboard. And theoretically we could make it stand for anything we wanted to also, couldn't we? I mean, if you and I agreed that just between ourselves the wordhorse would meangrammar book, then we could say, 'Open your horse to Page Twenty,' or 'Did you bring your horse to class with you today?' And we two would know what we meant, wouldn't we?"

"Sure, I guess so." With all his heart Mr. Blakesley didn't want to agree. He sensed that he was somehow trapped, but there was no way out.

"Of course we would. But nobody else would understand us -- that's the whole principle of secret codes. Yet there's ultimately no reason why the symbolhorse shouldn't always refer to grammar book instead of toEquus caballus: the significance of words are arbitrary conventions, mostly; historical accidents. But it was agreed before you and I had any say in the matter that the wordhorse would refer toEquus caballus, and so if we want our sentences to be intelligible to very many people, we have to go along with the convention. We have to sayhorse when we meanEquus caballus, andgrammar book when we mean this object here on my desk. You're free to break the rules, but not if you're after intelligibility. If youdo want intelligibility, then the only way to get 'free' of the rules is to master them so thoroughly that they're second nature to you. That's the paradox: in any kind of complicated society a man is usually free only to the extent that he embraces all the rules of that society. Who's more free in America?" I asked finally. "The man who rebels against all the laws or the man who follows them so automatically that he never even has to think about them?"

This last, to be sure, was a gross equivocation, but I was not out to edify anybody; I was out to rescue prescriptive grammar from the clutches of my impudent Mr. Blakesley, and, if possible, to crucify him in the process.

"But, Mr. Horner," said a worried young man -- in the front row, of course -- "people are always finding better ways to do things, aren't they? And usually they have to change the rules to make improvements. If nobody rebelled against the rules there'd never be any progress."

I regarded the young man benignly: he would survive any horse manure of mine.

"That's another paradox," I said to him. "Rebels and radicals at all times are people who see that the rules are often arbitrary -- always ultimately arbitrary -- and who can't abide arbitrary rules. These are the free lovers, the women who smoke cigars, the Greenwich Village characters who don't get haircuts, and all kinds of reformers. But the greatest radical in any society is the man who sees all the arbitrariness of the rules and social conventions, but who has such a great scorn or disregard for the society he lives in that he embraces the whole wagonload of nonsense with a smile. The greatest rebelis the man who wouldn't change society for anything in the world."

So. This troubled my bright young man no end, I'm sure, and to the rest of the class it was doubtless incomprehensible, but its effect on me was to add to my already-established sense of acumen the delicate spice of slightly smiling paradox. The mood persisted throughout the day: I left school with my head full of the Janusian ambivalence of the universe, and I walked through the world's charming equipoise, its ubiquitous polarity, to my room, where at nine o'clock that evening Rennie found me rocking in my chair, still faintly smiling at my friend Laoco?n, whose grimace was his beauty.

She was nervous and quiet. We said hello to each other, and she stood about clumsily for a minute before sitting down. Clearly, some new stage had been reached.

"What now?" I asked her.

She made no answer, but ticked her cheek and gestured vacantly with her right hand.

"How's Joe?"

"The same."

"Oh. How're you?"

"I don't know. Going crazy."

"Joe hasn't been giving you a hard time, has he?"

She looked at me for a moment.

"He's God," she said. "He's just God."

"So I understand."

"All this week he's been wonderful. Not like he was just after he got back from Washington -- that wasn't normal for him. You'd think it was all over and done with."

"Why shouldn't it be? That's how I felt the day after it happened."

She sighed. "So, I just mentioned offhand that I didn't feel like coming up here any more -- didn't see any point to it."

"Good."

"He didn't say a word. He just gave me a long look that made me wish I was dead. Then tonight he saidhe'd pretty much come to accept this as a part of me, even though he couldn't understand why it had started, and he'd respect me more if I was consistent than if I repudiated what I'd done. Then he said he didn't see any need to talk about it any more, and that was that."

"Well, by God, then, the trouble's all over with, isn't it?"

"Except that I don't particularly believe him, and even if I did, I don't recognize myself any more."

"That's not so awful. I almost never do."

"But Joe always does. So nothing's solved as long as I can't be as authentic as he is, and see myself in what I do as clearly as I see him in what he does. Joe's always recognizable."

I smiled. "Almost always."

"You mean that time we spied on him? Oh, Jesus!" She shook her head. "Jake, you know what? I wish I'd been struck blind before I looked in that window. That's what started everything."

Sweet paradox: "Or you could say that's what ended everything. But it would start or end anything only for a Morgan. Certainly not for a Horner. In my cosmos everybody is part chimpanzee, especially when he's by himself, and nobody's terribly surprised by anything the other chimpanzees do."

"Not Joe, though."

"Maybe the guy who fools himself least is the one who admits that we're all just kidding.'"

Sweet, sweet paradox!

"Joe and I have done a real Marcel Proust on this thing," Rennie said sadly. "We've taken it apart from every point of view we could think of. Sometimes I think I've never understood anything as thoroughly in my life as I do this, and other times -- like after I was up here last time, and now -- I realize I don't understand any more than I ever did. It's all still a mystery. It tears me up even when I don't see anything to be torn up about."

"What does Joe think of me lately?"

"I don't know. I don't think he hates you any more. Probably he just doesn't care to deal with you. He thinks your part in it was probably characteristic of you."

"Which me, for heaven's sake?" I laughed. "How about you?"

"I still despise you, I think," Rennie said unemotionally.

"Clear through?"

"As far as I can see."

This thrilled me from head to foot. I had been not interested in Rennie this night until she said this, but now I was acutely interested in her.

"Has this been just since we slept together?"

"I don't know how much of it is retroactive, Jake; right now I think I've disliked you ever since I've known you, but I guess that's not so. I've had some kind of feeling about you at least since we started the riding lessons, and as far as I can see now it was a kind of dislike. Abhorrence, I guess, is a better word. I don't believe in anything like premonitions, but I swear I've wished ever since August that we'd never met you, even though I couldn't have said why."

I felt way high on a mountaintop, thinking widely and uncloudedly; hundred-eyed Argus was not more synoptic.

"I'll bet I know one point of view you and Joe didn't try, Rennie."

"We tried them all," she said.

I felt like the end of an Ellery Queen novel.

"Not this one. And by the Law of Parsimony it's good, because it accounts for the most facts by the fewest assumptions. It's simple as hell: we didn't just copulate; we made love. What you've felt all along and couldn't admit to yourself was that you love me."

"That's right," Rennie breathed, looking at me tautly.

"It could be. I'm not being vain. At least I'm notjust being vain."

"That's not what I meant," Rennie said, and she had some difficulty saying it. "I meant -- it's not right that I've never admitted it to myself."

Now her eyes showed real abhorrence, but it was not clear in them what or whom she abhorred. I grew very excited.

"Well, I'll be damned!"

"That's one of the things that destroys me," Rennie said. "The idea that I might have been in love with you all the time occurred to me along with all the rest -- along with the idea that I despise you and the idea that I couldn't really feel anything about you because you don't exist. You know what I mean. I don't know which is true."

"I suppose they're all true, Rennie," I suggested. "While we're at it, did you ever consider that maybe Joe's the one who doesn't exist?"

"No." She whipped her head slowly. "I don't know."

"I don't think you have to be afraid of the idea that you feel some kind of love for me. Certainly it doesn't imply anything one way or the other about your feeling for Joe, unless you want to be romantic about it. In fact, I don't see where it implies anything, except that the whole affair is less mysterious than we'd supposed, and maybe less sordid."

But Rennie clearly accepted none of this.

"Jake, I can't make love to you tonight."

"All right. I'll take you home."

In the car I kissed her gently. "I think this is great. It's funny as the devil."

"That's about right."

"Did you tell Joe you suspected this along with the rest?"

"No." She lowered her eyes. "And I can't ever tell him. That's the thing, Jake," she said, looking at me again. "I still love him more than he or anybody else suspects, but what we had before is just out. This makes it impossible. Even if it's actually not true that I love you, the possibility that I might -- the fact that I'm not sure I don't -- kills everything. It doesn't solve any problems: itis the problem. Can you imagine how it makes me feel when he says he's accepted my relationship with you, and tries to act as if nothing had happened? The whole damned thing's a lie from now on -- has been ever since I first admitted to myself that I might love you."

"Nothing has to be wrecked, Rennie."

"It's already wrecked, what Joe and I had before, and it was the finest thing any man and woman ever had. There's no room in it for lies or divided affections. I feel like I've been robbed of a million dollars, Jake! If I'd shot him I couldn't feel worse!"

"Do you want me to come inside with you?" I asked.

"No."

"Aren't you just postponing things?"

"I'm postponing as much as I possibly can," she said, "for as long as I possibly can. I'm desperate, and that's the only thing I can think of to do."

"Joe might have allowed for the same possibility all along," I offered. "He's sharp and deep, and not afraid to look at all the alternatives."

"It wouldn't make any difference."

"I just don't see where the situation is desperate. It wouldn't be in my world."

"I'm not surprised," Rennie said. I wasn't sure whether she was crying or not, since it was dark in the car. I daresay she was. We sat for some minutes without speaking, and then she opened the door to get out.

"God, Jake, I don't know where all this will lead to."

"Neither does Joe," I said lightly. "Those were his very first words."

"For Christ's sake try to remember one thing, anyhow: if I love you at all, I don'tjust love you. I swear, along with it I honestly and truly hate your God-damned guts!"

"I'll remember," I said. "Good night, Rennie." She went in without replying, and I drove home to rock a bit and contemplate this new revelation. I was flattered beyond measure -- I responded easily and inordinately to any evidence of affection from people whom I admired or respected in any way. But -- well, perhaps this is specious, but the connoisseur is by his very nature a hair-splitter. The thing is that even in my current mood I couldn't see much of a paradox in Rennie's feelings, and I was piqued that I could not. The connoisseur -- and I had been one since nine-thirty that morning -- requires of a paradox, if it is to elicit from him that faint smile which marks him for what he is, that it be more than a simple ambiguity resulting from the vagueness of certain terms in the language; it should, ideally, be a really arresting contradiction of concepts whose actual compatibility becomes perceptible only upon subtle reflection. The apparent ambivalence of Rennie's feelings about me, I'm afraid, like the simultaneous contradictory opinions that I often amused myself by maintaining, was only a pseudo-ambivalence whose source was in the language, not in the concepts symbolized by the language. I'm sure, as a matter of fact, that what Rennie felt was actually neither ambivalent nor even complex; it was both single and simple, like all feelings, but like all feelings it was also completely particular and individual, and so the trouble started only when she attempted to label it with a common noun such aslove orabhorrence. Things can be signified by common nouns only if one ignores the differences between them; but it is precisely these differences, when deeply felt, that make the nouns inadequate and lead the layman (but not the connoisseur) to believe that he has a paradox on his hands, an ambivalence, when actually it is merely a matter ofx's being part horse and part grammar book, and completely neither. Assigning names to things is like assigning roles to people: it is necessarily a distortion, but it is a necessary distortion if one would get on with the plot, and to the connoisseur it's all good clean fun.

R............