Читать книгу Mr. Smith - Louis Bromfield - Страница 4

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This time I think I can do it. It is the fourth time I have tried but always something got in the way, something like a fog or a wall or something in between and perhaps a mixture of the two, but it wasn’t any good. I would get to a certain point and could go no further. What I was trying to do would simply get beyond my reach. When I tried to go on putting on paper what I felt, everything became confused, and no matter how long or how late I sat in the rumpus room working, I got nowhere and afterward whatever I had written had to be torn up and burned.

It couldn’t be left about the house for anyone to pick up and read. I did not even dare to risk tearing it into bits and putting it into the garbage lest some person, maybe the garbage collector, might out of curiosity begin piecing it together, and I knew that if anyone put together enough of the pieces, he would go on because he might recognize someone in the tale and be compelled to patch and piece and read on and on. You see, it is all about my own life and Enid’s and the lives of all the people in Oakdale.

All that I had written was chock-full of dynamite, because, in reality, it was written for myself alone as a kind of purge. I had to put everything down and am doing the same thing now, because that is the only way it can be done. Any cheating, any disguise and compromise, I discovered very early, simply destroyed the thing I was compelled to do in order to save myself. And so I wrote about everything truthfully and objectively, perhaps as much as it is possible for one man to do. You see, this is to be my one accomplishment in life, the single achievement in which I can take pride—if I ever get it finished. All else I have done is largely meaningless, routine, average, banal, without savor or satisfaction. Perhaps too late in life I discovered that I must do something in which I could take satisfaction, but more than that I had to find out why I am, what I am, why my life should be such a desert. It would, I hoped, act as a purge which would permit me either to go on living or to regard death with a contented eye and a satisfied spirit.

Try it sometime, if you have the leisure and the inclination. Try writing down truthfully (or as near as you can come to truth) everything about yourself—what you have thought, what you have done, how you feel toward your neighbors and your own family. It is very difficult. Perhaps it is impossible—even for myself—sitting here on this godforsaken, rank, and hellishly beautiful island in the midst of the South Pacific, as detached from the world which made me as it is possible for a man to be detached from his past ... without being dead.

In writing the truth, I find, as I found even at home in the house in Oakdale (which is the rich suburb of Crescent City), that I was cutting myself off from everything and everyone about me. You understand, I saw my friends, my acquaintances, even my wife and mother clearly for the first time. And so I stumbled upon things which should scarcely be spoken, let alone put on paper, and I found, very quickly, that what I was writing should never come to the eye of anyone, at least so long as I was alive. There were too many people involved, people who were friends or acquaintances or even enemies (if I ever had any real enemies), and most of them lived and still live in Crescent City. I knew some of them from childhood. Some lived in the same suburb as I, in nice expensive houses built by middle-class people moderately successful in life like Enid and myself—houses which were “decorated” by a professional who came from Chicago.

They were all decorated alike in rather rich-looking muddy colors because the decorator, who was a shrewd man and became very rich by knowing his clientele, was aware that these people (like Enid and me) wanted nothing revolutionary. They wanted something that looked “rich” but not strange. The reds of the curtains and the upholstery were never quite red, nor the yellows yellow. All the colors were dimmed and muddy. “Off-white” was an expression he was fond of using when he gestured with his long white well-kept hands, and “off-white” got somehow fixed in my brain as a symbol of so many things in the lives of all my friends and of Enid and myself.

The decorator—Mr. Banville by name—had a whole jargon which infuriated me the whole time he was in and out, doing Enid’s decoration after we built the new house. He spoke of “occasional chairs” and “scatter rugs” and “gorgeous drapes” and “lovely homes.” It was a kind of chatter, a kind of second-rate decorator’s gobbledegook which was used by all of Enid’s friends. It belonged, I suppose, with the vast amount of hogwash, shady thinking, and falsity which has been sold us by the hucksters of the great advertising agencies—things like “pure” salt and “fortified” bread and “toasted” cigarettes.

Who wants to use pure sodium chloride on food when rock salt or natural sea salt is so much better for the health and makes food taste so much better? No Frenchman could be sold “pure” salt. He knows too well what good food is. And who wants “fortified” bread when nature provides all the vitamins and minerals and a better flavor than any great chain baking company could ever provide? And what does “toasted” tobacco mean? They are all slogans and ideas, false and meretricious, which advertising has sold us all. They assault our eyes from hideous signboards desecrating the landscape, they ravage our ears when we are listening to radio, the news or a good piece of music. And presently everybody, like a herd of ducks, begins to believe the nonsense and hear it in his sleep and to repeat over and over again saying, “Quack, quack! quack! Pure salt, fortified bread, occasional chairs, scatter rugs, vitamins, ranch-type houses. Keep your movements natural. Quack! Quack! Quack!”

That is exactly how Enid and her friends sounded when they talked about Mr. Banville and his decorating. Since he it was who decorated virtually all the houses in our suburb, they all looked alike. Except for the shape of the rooms, you couldn’t tell whether you were in your own house or someone else’s. But it made the women all happy I suppose. They did not envy each other unless one of them, whose husband had suddenly made a rich strike, bought a near Old Master or a genuine piece of antique furniture. Such an event always caused great excitement and discussion and criticism as if someone had thrown a stick into the circle of ducks in a pond and set them all quacking more loudly than ever. And sometimes, as when Mary Raeburn came back from Europe and furnished part of the big old family house with the beautiful things which she had collected over there, it confused some of the newer and richer inhabitants of our suburb and led to the wonderful remark attributed to Mrs. Hershall, who didn’t have much background but a great deal of depression money (owing to Hershall’s being very liquid financially and buying up all the things other people had to sell in order to keep their heads above water). She was quoted as saying, “What a pity Mary Raeburn’s money gave out before she finished the house and she couldn’t afford new furniture!” This, of course, was an absurd statement because, as everyone knew, Mary Raeburn was rich enough to buy and sell the Hershalls many times over.

But during those long evenings when, after the kids had gone to bed and Enid had left me alone in the rumpus room to work, all of these things and many more kept getting in the way of putting down on paper what I knew I had to put on paper. Somehow just when I was getting to where I could see things clearly and put it all down in writing, I would become lost in a cloud of “occasional chairs” and “scatter rugs” and golf scores and building plans and servant troubles. It was like drowning in a flood that was filled with flotsam and jetsam made up of all sorts of rubbish which looked like junk but when regarded separately and individually all became terribly important. I knew it was junk and that our lives were cluttered up with it, but the knowledge made no difference except that it simply confused me still further.

It was a struggle to get those few hours of peace late at night when I could sit down and try to think things out. I wanted to get it all on paper because I felt with a terrible urgency that if I could once get it on paper in concrete form, it would stop troubling me, gnawing away at my happiness and the happiness of Enid and the children and their futures, as well as because the whole thing was affecting me and my business. I hadn’t any heart in the business any more. I couldn’t go on building it up, increasing the amount of my income by more and more commissions on more and more insurance premiums. I was confused and I was tired, and it isn’t right for a man to be tired in his late thirties. Then he should be at his best and most vigorous with the vigor of youth blended with the wisdom and experience he should have acquired by that time.

It wasn’t anything physical. I was strong as an ox in that way with a good physique and no sign of a slight potbelly or any excess weight. I was tired in the head and in the spirit. Now I think it came partly from never being alone, because in the world in which I lived, nobody ever seemed to want to be alone. Indeed, they seemed to have a terror of it. They all wanted to lunch together, or play golf together, or go to the country club or the women’s clubs together, or meet in the hotel bar or in the corner drug store to kill time over the pinball machines. And in the suburbs, with all the houses built close to each other, where a two-hundred-foot lot was an estate, there was never an evening alone. Either we were going to some party or outdoor barbecue, or someone was coming to us or just dropping in “because they didn’t have anything to do that evening.” And even when I was at home, there were always Enid and the children, Ronnie and Esther.

They all had the idea that no one could enjoy himself unless there were several people in the room with the radio playing. Even reading wasn’t possible because the children were always interrupting and Enid, who had no taste for reading, would insist on conversation, not of a sustained and interesting kind on any particular subject, but just rattling along, always breaking in upon your thoughts just when something was becoming clear, or raddling your attention just as you had lost yourself in a novel or a biography or popular book about science.

Of course, it got a little worse as she grew older and fell into the habits of our neighbors and insisted on having a cocktail or two before dinner when we were alone. I didn’t mind the cocktail. I liked it because often enough I came home tired and bored. The office had been full of people, and then I had had lunch with the boys at the hotel or the Club and after that the office again and then to the drug store to pick up the big-city papers and more of the boys there around the pinball machine and sometimes it meant going into the hotel bar for a quickie with more greetings, more drinks, and more confusion, and then home. The only time I was ever alone for a moment was in the toilet, and even there I nearly always found some other man who hung around talking over the partition rather than be alone or go back to his work.

When I got home one of two things happened. I found Enid with all the cocktail apparatus laid out and herself full of house-keeping troubles and gossip or with another couple or one or two women who had come in because their husbands happened to be out and they were left alone. Or it would be a party somewhere and we’d go for dinner at seven-thirty and finally, after so much drink that everyone had become boisterous or quarrelsome, sit down to eat about nine or nine-thirty. The interim had been spent in drinking enough to reach that level where they could all enjoy themselves and forget that flooding torrent of little things which made them both tired and unhappy. Sometimes weeks would go by when I was never alone for a second, because even after I had gone to bed Enid was there beside me in the other bed imposing upon me secretly and powerfully, even when she didn’t speak, the fact that she was there and that we were (by God!) a happily married, prosperous couple who might serve as a model for the rest of the world. At times there seemed to me that there was a certain malignance in this silent, psychotic pressure.

She was very determined about our being a model happily married couple. She was determined about it even in her sleep. You could almost feel her imposing the illusion upon you. I do not know whether she believed it or not but she certainly believed that she believed it. I have always been a fairly good-natured man and, I think, honestly, kindlier than most, but sometimes I have been known to lose my temper and when that happened I was for a little while quite insane, perhaps with the stored-up repression of not speaking my mind when I should have done so. On such occasions I would never have wanted to face myself for I am aware that I could become viciously cruel and say things which were like stripping the skin from a living body.

In our world that was an easy thing to do, because it was largely a world of illusion and to shatter any illusion was a criminal thing to do. That, I think, is why so many people in our world were afraid to be alone—because, in spite of anything they could do, solitude would permit the creeping in of small thoughts and corroding doubts which were like maggots, little doubts which could, as they grew and multiplied, destroy the whole fabric of existence and create in its place the bare skeleton of despair. Once in our small world and many times elsewhere, when a man or a woman committed suicide, people would say, “I can’t imagine why he (or she) did such a thing. He had plenty of money. He had a nice family. Apparently he had no worries.”

But I think I know the reason. The maggots had gone to work, and presently the whole structure fell because a man or woman realized with a horrible and devasting sense of futility that everything added up to nothing, that nothing had ever happened to him or ever would, that he was merely killing time until he died, like those men about the pinball machine in the corner drug store, nice fellows, kindly most of them, prosperous enough at middle age to take it easy, who would spend hours each day around a pinball machine killing time until they died. Only they kept themselves distracted by talking and drinking and playing golf and watching the little lights light up and never being alone so that the maggots could never go to work on them. And a few years later a heart attack or kidneys weakened by too much drinking in order not to think or to drown the boredom would get them and nobody would miss them very much and certainly not the world itself. They left enough money to take care of their families and that was all right and pretty soon they were forgotten. On their tombstones might have been written with a monotonous uniformity, “He lived without ever being alive. Nothing ever happened to him.”

Of course presumably love can happen to you, the kind of overwhelming love which annihilates all else, which partakes of passion and voluptuousness and cleanses the spirit, even presumably a love which goes on and on; but it never happened to me and certainly it never happened to most of the people I have known. Marriage in the world I know is usually a process of finding someone congenial, of “good” family, and possessed of a little money, with whom at the moment you experience a rather vague and somewhat temporary desire to sleep. If its the first time the experience has happened to you, you think the whole thing is “Tristan and Isolde” but presently it turns out that it isn’t and the whole thing breaks up or you get used to it or presently you get bored with it and go out and buy it by the night or take to half-tipsy necking with some middle-aged woman in the back seat of a parked car at the country club or down some suburban lane. Or maybe you’re pious and churchgoing and don’t step out at all and finally put love on the same level as old-fashioned Saturday-night bath or a dose of Carter’s Little Liver Pills. But Tristan and Isolde or Hero and Leander! I never heard of it in my world. I know some nice well-adjusted elderly couples who have made a go of it, and they are perhaps the nicest and wisest people there are because with all passion spent they were still able to remain on affectionate terms, with common interests and a respect for each other’s individuality and personality.

Enid, if you had asked her, would have told you that our life together was radiantly happy and that we were the ideal married couple, but anything on the level of Tristan and Isolde she would have considered frightening and dirty. That wasn’t love; it was passion. Real love was respectable like the muddy colors Mr. Banville used in his “gorgeous drapes.” It wasn’t that she was frigid or that she disliked going to bed with me. I think she liked it well enough if I wasn’t too demanding and I know she wanted to keep it up long after I was willing to call it a day (which didn’t help matters). It was only that love should fit into its proper place in her picture of things and not crowd out anything else.

More than once I have overheard her discussing the whole business with a couple of other women and they all seemed to be in agreement. The only time any of them in our world kicked over the traces was when they got well along into middle age and the maggots got to work and it occurred to some of them that maybe they had missed something and had better make up for lost time before it was too late. That was when they took to the back seats of parked cars with a bottle of Bourbon and a middle-aged neighbor. Sometimes it was pitiful and sometimes comical, but it was always a little frantic and never very romantic.

The trouble is that in our world—and indeed among most Americans—nobody ever experiences passionate love. Nobody ever cares enough to murder or kill themselves over love. They just arrange a divorce and then marry again somebody they think they love, sometimes again and again in a kind of chain-store legalized adultery. Or they take to a bottle of Bourbon and the back seat. It must make it very difficult for those who try to write tragic novels. You can’t make authentic tragedy out of trivial superficial characters. Nobody could make tragedy or even drama out of Enid.

The trouble with Enid was that she was always living up to the pattern or rather the illusion she had created for herself. In a way she was always acting a part—that of the devoted wife and mother with an adoring husband who could not live without her. If I went to the end of the garden to lie alone with a book in the hammock she would presently appear with some mending, to sit on the bench and begin one of those thought-shattering running commentaries on life, the neighbors, the cook, etc., etc., etc. She had persuaded herself completely that I was much happier having her there with me and, subconsciously, of course she was not seeing a husband who wanted a little peace to read and think and was in reality quietly hating her, nor was she seeing herself as a very limited woman, emotionally and intellectually, just quacking like a duck because she could not be alone and because she thought she was fascinating and “holding” her husband (a subject under constant consideration in her circles). No, it was not like that at all. She saw it in her own way and convinced herself of the truth of her vision of us as a couple who preferred constantly to be with each other and were restless and lonely if not perpetually in each other’s company. It was a hellish illusion but a very common one at which she and her friends actually worked.

Of course when I found that the only peace and solitude was to be had after midnight and took to shutting myself up in the rumpus room to work at this thing which I had to do, she became disturbed. I sometimes think she resented this rebellion of mine, which broke her great pattern and illusion, more than if she had actually discovered I had been unfaithful to her. By shutting myself into solitude away from her I had betrayed her and the role for which she had cast herself and me. Sometimes I struggled with what I was trying to do until two or three in the morning, but instead of sensibly going to bed and to sleep, she would remain awake no matter how tired she was, wandering aimlessly about the house with the radio playing, changing from station to station as they closed down one by one for the night.

At other times, just when I would begin to make some progress on what I was trying to do, I would hear her footsteps overhead and everything would be ruined. At first I believed this was accidental but later on I think she came to know that by turning up the radio or banging the door of the refrigerator or walking across the floor above my head she could thwart me and presently force me back into her pattern from which I had rebelled so mildly for a little while. You see, what she could not bear was not only that I had broken the illusion by wanting to be alone and shutting myself up but that I had escaped from her. When I was in the rumpus room working, the thin door put me in another world into which she could not enter and roam around.

The rumpus room was built into the house long after it was finished and we moved into it. I don’t really know why we built it because we had above-stairs a perfectly good and big living room, a pleasant screened veranda, a terrace, and I had a small room for my fishing rods, some papers, my guns, and my books, few enough in the beginning but increasing in number as life seemed to lose something of its excitement and I took to books as an escape and for a time as a kind of hobby.

The rumpus room occupied some unused space in the basement and was finished in waxed cypress. At one end there was a bar with four high stools upholstered in bright red leather. The chairs were covered with a kind of red dyed sailcloth, and for some reason I have forgotten, since there was nothing whatever nautical in my life or my family’s, it was decorated with pictures of sailing vessels and bits of rope cable. It is likely that Enid saw some such room in the Garden and Home magazines and proceeded to copy it. There was of course a card table and several rather expensive unused games stowed away on the shelves and a radio, an old one replaced by a newer model. It was the only room in the house in which there was any really pure color that was not muddy or “off” some other color. I suppose this was to encourage and even possibly to denote gaiety. The curtains were of red and white checked cotton stuff.

Such a room was, I suppose, remotely descended from prohibition times, but by the time we built our own room everyone seemed to have one. They were a part of all the houses constructed in Oakdale, as much a part of every house as a bathroom. At first the room seemed to bring something into our lives, but I am inclined to think that what it brought in was not simply what we thought it was—a new element of gaiety and unaccustomed spontaneity. The real pleasure it brought us was the pleasure of creating, a pleasure rare enough in our world. When the house itself was built, everything was left to the architect, partly because, despite the fact that both Enid and myself had spent four years in college and been graduated “complete” with diplomas, we did not know anything about architecture or the history of architecture beyond what was called “colonial” or “early American.” We had heard about “Gothic” but not much more than that. It was not that we had skimped our studies in the field of architecture or had not remembered what we had been taught. It was simply that in all the years we had spent in school we had never been taught anything at all about architecture which was a curious commentary on four years of training which was designated as a course in the “liberal arts.”

We did not even allow the architect to bully us, for we had no ideas strong enough to provide any opposition. We had just what everyone else had in Oakdale and ours was wrapped up in a package which the architect labeled “Georgian.” But in the creation of the rumpus room he had no part. The contractor did the whole thing under our direction, and so in a way the rumpus room was the only part of the house with which we had anything to do or which properly we could call our own. Perhaps that is the reason I liked it best of all the rooms in the house and chose it as a kind of fortified refuge against Enid and indeed all of Oakdale.

At first we used to bring people down there for a drink or two but after a time we came to use it less and less. It was more comfortable to sit upstairs in the living room or in summer it was pleasanter to sit outside on the terrace. And presently we came to abandon it altogether to the children and as a sleeping place for my setter who, I think, never really liked it. Essentially it was an ugly room, with its marine affectations and checked curtains and ugly uncomfortable early-American furniture. Finally it came into some real use when I discovered that it was the one place in the house where for a few minutes at a time I could lock myself in and be alone, not “sharing” everything with Enid.

After a while she developed a new angle—that I must not stay up so late because it was ruining my health and I was not getting enough rest and then on top of that grew still another angle—that because I was staying up so late I was neglecting my insurance business, and with prices going up and the children to educate we wouldn’t have enough money to go on living in Oakdale in the kind of house we were living in. I think there was at least a certain sincerity in this because she, like most of her friends, lived in a perpetual terror of having to scale down the way they lived. If anyone in their world encountered such a catastrophe, the others leapt in for the kill with slobbering lips like animals pouncing upon and killing one of their number who has been hurt. It would begin, “Have you heard Mrs. So-and-So has had to give up her cook?” or, “You know, Molly is doing her own cleaning now. Tom must be losing money.” And sometimes the very rumors and gossip would bring about the final collapse, hardship, and tragedy. To fail materially in that world, to slip down the scale, was as much a tragedy as having one’s sixteen-year-old daughter go on the street. That was why such morbid emphasis was placed upon all material things from bathrooms to interior decorators to automobiles. They were a symbol of wealth like strings of shells worn about the necks of savages. I think Enid did actually worry about our sliding down the scale of material things.

But she kept trying constantly to thwart me, to disturb and disrupt what I was doing, always of course with the inference that she loved me so much she was worried about my health and happiness. I have no doubts that at times she did believe all this sincerely, but for a great part of the time this was not at all the motive of her concern. It is one of the confusing things about life that all is not black or white but very mixed up, and from the moment I began writing and shut myself away from her, our relations steadily became more unsatisfactory. Of the two of us I was the one who suffered least from the whole experience, from the late hours and the lack of sleep—at least to judge from physical appearance and reactions. She it was who became more and more nervy and short-tempered, who lost weight, who developed dark circles beneath her eyes. If anything I was happier and felt better, probably because the hours which I spent alone there in the rumpus room, doing not only what I wanted to do but what I had to do, were more restful to me than the hours of disturbed sleep spent in the twin bed next to her when I could feel, awake or asleep, that curious, almost desperate determination to impose upon me the pattern of an existence which was what she felt our life ought to be.

At first she would not even leave me in peace but would come to the door of the rumpus room from time to time and open it and walk into the room and say, “Darling, don’t you think it is time to go to bed? You’ve been working too long.”

And at first I was polite and told her to go on to bed and that I was quite old enough to decide for myself, but when the annoyance continued I had the courage at last simply to lock the door. The first time she made the discovery of the locked door and, on trying it, failed to get any answer, she went around the outside of the house and climbed into the small areaway outside one of the cellar windows opening into the basement room in which I had shut myself up. She could not quite manage to squeeze herself through so small an opening. The knocks on the door had disturbed me in what I was doing, and I had scarcely re-established my train of thought when the scuffling noise in the areaway (at the back of the room where she could not see me) ruined everything all over again and I left the card table on which I worked and went to investigate.

There she was, as you might say, “stuck” in the areaway. The window was too small to admit her into the room and the areaway was too small and deep for her to climb out unaided. She was merely trapped and threshing about.

I tried to keep my temper and said, “Wait, I’ll go outside and give you a hand.”

When I got outside I reached down and pulled her out. I said, “What on earth were you trying to do?”

But she was hysterical and crying and could not answer at first. Then standing there in the darkness she said, “I thought something had happened to you. I thought you’d had a heart attack or something.”

“I only wanted to be left alone,” I said.

Then her hysteria began to turn to anger and she answered, “I don’t know what you mean. I don’t bother you. All you needed to have done was answer my knock. That wouldn’t have hurt you.”

I started to explain that interruptions upset me in what I was doing and then checked myself. What was the use? She would merely go back to trying to find out what it was that I was doing.

“It’s only because I love you so much,” she said. “I was frantic when I thought something had happened to you.”

So my solitude and all chance of writing was gone again for that night. I had to fetch whisky for her and make a pretense of contrition over causing her such alarm, although for the moment I wished her dead.

All this you might have said was caused by my own weakness and lack of decision. You might have said that I should have told her to mind her own damned business or that I should have gone away to Maine or the Rocky Mountains. But it is not so easy as that, as any decent married man with reasonable kindness and affection in him well knows. I liked my children. Indeed at times I loved them in genuine fashion. I liked to find them there when I returned from the office. I liked occasionally to read the funnies to them. And in a physical sense I liked my own house and the garden which I had made painfully and slowly out of bare, unfertile, filled suburban soil into a small and blooming paradise. I liked peace and remained a peaceful man and even a patient one save for those rare outbreaks of violent temper when physically it became impossible for me to bear any more. “Bear any more what?” you might ask, and I could not really answer you because what I had to endure was at once so confused, so intangible, and yet so concrete and real.

It was not Enid alone. It was the whole of that life, all outwardly so prosperous with two cars in the garage, a country club, a large, beautifully “decorated” home, two children and a moderately good-looking and well-dressed wife—all, in short, which you might say the average American man could possibly want or desire. Enid was perfectly a part of the pattern and acted her role as if superbly cast for it, and like the possessive American wives of so many prosperous and apparently happy American husbands, she wanted not to lose her husband, and I speak not only in the physical sense but of something far more subtle. She wanted to keep the domination of him so that he did what she wanted, provided her with what she desired, shared every thought with her, made her friends his friends but all without his ever suspecting that these things were happening.

She had too, of course, an extraordinary faculty, perhaps not so singular and uncommon as it appeared to me, of lying in small things and believing actually that she was telling the truth. It was a part, I think, of her acting a role. So long as she kept within the role she had conceived for herself in the domestic drama she had created to include me and the children and the house and the neighbors, she believed herself sincere and honest and justified in almost any tactic. And of course in the back of her mind there was always, without any doubt, the steel-clad conviction that she knew “best” and that everything she did was for my good and the children’s good and that in reality she was perfectly selfless in the whole matter. These tactics lie, half recognized, deep in the minds of countless American wives, and as the method succeeds with the passing of time, it becomes a rigid and relentless thing, so calloused over by practice that it is not recognized at all. It becomes merely a daily way of life. At times it seems to me “the American way of life,” at least in the prosperous upper-middle-class life I have known. The variations are infinite but the pattern is the same.

This process may drive a husband close to madness and it has undoubtedly caused more than one murder, or he may simply ignore it and spend more and more time at the Elks or playing golf and restrict his misery merely to the hours which, for the sake of his children or out of profound sense of respectability, he spends at home with his wife.

The situation centering about the rumpus room grew worse and not better. It infuriated her, I think, that I had at last devised a way of being alone for a little time. Her own pride was strong enough not to permit a repetition of climbing down the areaway to get at me, and she realized, I think, the absurdity of screaming and pounding on the door in order to force me to open it. But never would she go to the bedroom until I myself went to bed. She even took to washing odd bits of clothing in the washing machine of the adjoining basement room, an action for which there was no necessity since she had a laundress for two days a week as well as a part-time cook and housemaid. When at last we went to bed it was usually in silence, a very hurt silence on her part, which she made certain I would recognize not only by the thickness of the atmosphere but by deep sighs and much tossing about, so that she kept my irritation alive long into the night and at times made me hate her for being even in the same room with me.

You see, she managed always, in her own eyes at least, to put me in the wrong, to imply that I neglected her and was cruel to her and caused her great suffering, and in her heart she sincerely believed this, tending and fostering a whole situation which in fact existed only in so far as she created it—all of this simply because there were times when I wanted to be alone from her and from everyone.

Of course what maddened her most—and I cannot quite blame her for this—was not merely the knowledge that I had found a way of locking myself up alone so that she could not reach me but the fact that beyond the faint pounding of the typewriter, which late at night was always spasmodically in her ears, she did not know what I was thinking or what I was putting on paper. When she asked me what I was writing, I answered truthfully enough that I did not know. It might be a novel; it might be a kind of autobiography. It might merely be a pile of rubbish, but it was something I had to do if I was to continue living.

To her, of course, this was the merest hogwash. Nobody had to behave in such a ridiculous fashion. What did I mean by “continue living?” et cetera, et cetera. No other husband behaved in such an absurd fashion.

She would not even believe that I was telling her the truth as nearly as I was able to tell it. She wanted to read what I had written, but I refused because I was genuinely shy about my ability to write anything and because if I had let her see it she would have understood none of it and some of it, in which I wrote about her and her friends, would have driven her into fury or perhaps into despair. It never for a moment occurred to her that I had a right to privacy or even to my own thoughts. I was merely betraying her.

I had great trouble in concealing the few pages which I preserved from time to time because they seemed to be what I wanted to accomplish. I knew well enough that in the curious pattern of behavior and illusion she created, she would have no scruples whatever in reading the stuff if she could lay hands upon it. She felt, I knew, that this was her right, even as she felt it her just and honorable right to examine at times the contents of the drawers in my desk and the cards and addresses in my wallet. Early in our marriage I found that she felt it perfectly all right to open and read letters addressed to me, and when I protested, although there was at the time nothing for me to hide, she said, “I don’t see what’s wrong about it. My mother always read all our letters, even my father’s. We’re married aren’t we?” She stopped the practice openly, but she continued to steam open and reseal much of my correspondence.

At this pilfering she was not very skillful. She put things back in what she believed was the proper order and sequence but always the contents of drawer and wallet were just enough disturbed for me to know that she had been at it again. She never mentioned this practice perhaps because she never found anything that might have been incriminating, yet she could not stop doing it over and over again. She did it not, I think, because she suspected me of infidelity but simply because she had to know everything about me (which of course she never did know). It was all a part of what she called “sharing” our life. “A happy husband and wife,” she would say, “should share everything. There should be no secrets.”

This deformity even extended in reverse to her own behavior. If I did not ask her each evening where she had been, whom she had seen, what she was planning for the next day, she would pout in her peculiar way, which was not a pout at all but a kind of acid aggressive sulkiness, and say that I was never interested in what she and the children were doing or in what happened to them. It wasn’t only that she wanted to share me, inside and out, but she wanted me to share her whether I wanted to or not or felt like it at the moment. Of the two, I think the latter was, if anything, the worse experience.

So you see, I think, why I tried four times to do what I am doing now and each time failed, lost and befogged by the life around me, so that my purpose and any pattern I had devised soon began to crumble into chaos. This time, sitting in the wet hot jungle on the other side of the world, with no companionship but a tough extrovert Army sergeant whose only concern is his appetites and his functions, and three younger soldiers who lead their own separate and somewhat peculiar existences, I may finish up what I must do, which is to straighten out and put on paper in some concrete form the pattern and significance, if any, of my own existence. If I do not succeed I may kill myself. I have been very near to it a dozen times and I have not committed the final act simply because of the strong feeling that I must live until I have done this job. Then I may kill myself or I may feel that, in putting down on paper the pattern, I shall be freed not only of the life and the little world which I came to hate but even perhaps of myself—the self who got me into all the mess and then was not courageous enough to smash everything in a determination to escape.

This passionate desire all began one October morning nearly a dozen years ago while I was shaving and suddenly looked into my own eyes and saw myself. Perhaps it has happened to other men and perhaps it failed to affect them in the same way as it affected me or perhaps they shrewdly and quickly turned away from the mirror and then back again in order not to find themselves this time but merely a face, a characterless almost inanimate face, from which they were scraping a few bristly hairs as they had done thousands of times before. Perhaps that is what I should have done ... but I didn’t.

I stood there with my razor poised, looking into my own eyes, thinking, “This is you? This is the guy you have to live with for the rest of your life? What is you? Are you decent and kindly or a monster? What is it you want? Whither are you bound? Why are you shut off from everyone and everything in spite of every effort to lose yourself? Where did you come from and where will you end? What are you here for? What are you doing with this short space of time permitted you on earth? What becomes of you when this flesh dies and withers away? What are you missing? What precious experience ... what richness, what unknown pleasures and delights and satisfactions have you not had while life rushes on day after day with never any time to be alone, to think, or to do anything but the monotonous secure round of a mildly prosperous existence? What is your significance—a mere speck in the universe but immensely important to yourself? In short, what are you? Why the hell do you exist? Why do you go on living?”

These were morbid and even dangerous thoughts for a prosperous insurance broker living in a suburb with a wife and two children.

I do not know how long I stood there looking into my own blue eyes which somebody—it sounds like Ruskin—referred to as “the windows of the soul.” The face was perhaps a better-looking than average face, with a straight nose, a rather full mouth, blondish slightly curling hair, a rather stubborn chin, and large close-set ears. The face was agreeable enough and told the passer-by something—the stubbornness in the chin, the sensuality of the mouth pinched a little at the corner as if that sensuality had never been satisfied, the vigor that was in the large ears. But it was the eyes which told everything, rather large blue-gray eyes set fairly well apart. It was the eyes which fascinated me, for they came nearest to telling me what I was, the eyes which betrayed to me on that October morning the doubts and fears and dissatisfactions which I had never recognized or allowed myself to recognize until that morning.

Something extraordinary happened in that moment. All the surroundings, I was aware, were the same—the familiar bathroom with the initialed towels, the birds singing in the garden outside, the occasional yelp of one of the children as they quarreled while getting ready for school, the voice of Enid admonishing them. It was all the same but suddenly everything became different. The sounds I heard, even the familiar initialed towels (selected by Mr. Banville to match the walls and toilet seat), took on a significance. They meant something, all fitting together in a pattern of—what shall we say?—oppression, monotony, futility, imbecility? I cannot say. Suddenly I hated my house, my wife, my daily existence, even for a moment, my own children. Everything has remained different ever since that morning.

Presently I heard a knock on the door and I heard Enid’s voice asking, “Are you all right? Is there anything wrong?” and I knew that I must have been staring at myself for a long time, completely lost to such things as time or appointments or offices or whether someone else wanted to use the bathroom.

Startled back into reality I answered, “I’m okay. I was just thinking,” and I heard her faint laugh as if something deep in her soul found the process of thinking merely ridiculous.

I finished shaving and dressing and went off to the office and presently forgot all about the experience, but the forgetfulness was merely temporary. In the days that followed the memory of the unnerving experience kept returning to me, and I found that unless I deliberately shaved in a hurry without once looking into my own eyes, I would slip back again into regarding myself as if I were a stranger—a questioning and querulous stranger.

You might say that this whole process was, in the terms of the new psychology, the beginnings of narcissism, but this would not be true since narcissism implies love of self even to the point of the physical, and this was certainly not true of me. It was not my self but another self in which I was interested and which I tried to study. It was not even egotism. I think I can describe it only as a fierce desire to explore the thing which in the last analysis was me, and in exploring it, of course, I could not exclude the things, the influences, and the people around me and in a way the whole of living as it touched me and I touched it.

Well, that is how it happened, and I advise you never to begin such a process of examination for there is no end to it until you cease to exist and it is very certain that even though the body dies and decays, we still have no assurance that the spirit, the ego, the soul, or what you will dies with it, so there is perhaps really no end to the thing at all. Better live like an animal, directly as my Sergeant does, concerned only with food and women and enough money to provide him with both. He likes doing things with his hands and is very good at it. He can make up radio sets out of tin cans and rig up elaborate laundry machines and trick shower baths. He has no doubts. He is, I think, incapable of worry. He can only be annoyed when he has not enough to eat or there is not a woman at hand when he wants her.