“All right,” Wilbourne said. “To love, then.” There was a clock above the entrance—the ubiquitous and synchronised face, oracular admonitory and unsentient: he had twenty-two minutes yet. While it will only take two minutes to tell Mac what it took me two months to discover, he thought. “I had turned into a husband,” he said. “That was all. I didn’t even know it until she told me the store had offered to keep her on.
At first I used to have to watch myself, rehearse myself each time so I would be sure to say ‘my wife’ or ‘Mrs. Wilbourne’, then I discovered I had been watching myself for months to keep from saying it; I have even caught myself twice since we came back from the lake thinking ‘I want my wife to have the best’ exactly like any husband with his Saturday pay envelope and his suburban bungalow full of electric wife-saving gadgets and his table cloth of lawn to sprinkle on Sunday morning that will become his actual own provided he is not fired or run down by a car in the next ten years—the doomed worm blind to all passion and dead to all hope and not even knowing it, oblivious and unaware in the face of all darkness, all unknown, the underlying All-Derisive biding to blast him.
I had even stopped being ashamed of the way I earned the money, apologising even to myself for the stories I wrote; I was no more ashamed of them than the city employee buying his own bungalow on the installment plan in which his wife can have the best is ashamed of his badge of office, the rubber plunger for unstopping toilets, which he carries about with him. In fact, I had come to really like to write them, even apart from the money, like the boy who never saw ice before goes bugs about skating right after he learns how. Besides, after I started writing them I learned that I had no idea of the depths of depravity of which the human invention is capable, which is always interesting—”
“You mean, enjoys,” McCord said.
“Yes. All right—Respectability. That was what did it. I found out some time back that it’s idleness breeds all our virtues, our most bearable qualities—contemplation, equableness, laziness, letting other people alone; good digestion mental and physical: the wisdom to concentrate on fleshly pleasures—eating and evacuating and fornication and sitting in the sun—than which there is nothing better, nothing to match, nothing else in all this world but to live for the short time you are loaned breath, to be alive and know it—oh, yes, she taught me that; she has marked me too forever—nothing, nothing.
But it was only recently I have clearly seen, followed out the logical conclusion, that it is one of what we call the prime virtues—thrift, industry, independence—that breeds all the vices—fanaticism, smugness, meddling, fear, and worst of all, respectability. Us, for instance. Because of the fact that for the first time we were solvent, knew for certain where tomorrow’s food was coming from (the damned money, too much of it; at night we would lie awake and plan how to get it spent; by spring we would have been carrying steamer folders in our pockets) I had become as completely thrall and slave to respectability as any—”
“But not her,” McCord said.
“No. But she’s a better man than I am. You said that yourself.—as any man by drink or opium. I had become the Complete Householder. All I lacked was official sanction in the form of a registered Social Security number as head of a family. We lived in an apartment that wasn’t bohemian, it wasn’t even a tabloid love-nest, it wasn’t even in that part of town but in a neighborhood dedicated by both city ordinance and architecture to the second year of wedlock among the five-thousand-a-year bracket. I would be waked in the mornings by the noise of children passing in the street; by the time spring came and the windows would have to stay open I would have been hearing the fretful cries of Swede nursemaids from the park all day long and, when the wind was right, smell the smell of infant urine and animal crackers. I referred to it as home, there was a corner in it we both called my study; I had even bought the damn typewriter at last—something I had got along without for twenty-eight years and so well I didn’t even know it, which is too heavy and unwieldy to carry, yet which I would no more have dared desert than—”
“You’ve still got it, I noticed,” McCord said.
“—than—Yes. A good portion of any courage is a sincere disbelief in good luck. It’s not courage otherwise—than I would my eyelashes. I had tied myself hand and foot in a little strip of inked ribbon, daily I watched myself getting more and more tangled in it like a roach in a spider web; each morning, so that my wife could leave on time for her job, I would wash the coffee pot and the sink and twice a week (for the same reason) I would buy from the same butcher the groceries we needed and the chops we would cook ourselves on Sunday; give us a little more time and we would have been dressing and undressing inside our kimonas in one another’s presence and turning off the light before we made love. That’s it. It’s not avocation that elects our vocations, it’s respectability that makes chiropractors and clerks and bill posters and motormen and pulp writers of us.”
There was a loudspeaker in the bar too, synchronised too; at this moment a voice cavernous and sourceless roared deliberately, a sentence in which could be distinguished a word now and then—“train,” then others which the mind two or three seconds afterward recognised to be the names of cities far flung about the continent, cities seen rather than names heard, as if the listener (so enormous was the voice) were suspended in space watching the globy earth spin slowly out of its cradling cloud-wisps in fragmentary glimpses the evocative strange divisions of the sphere, spinning them on into fog and cloud again before vision and comprehension could quite grasp them. He looked at the clock again; he still had fourteen minutes. Fourteen minutes to try to tell what I have already said in five words, he thought.
“And mind, I liked it. I never denied that. I liked it. I liked the money I made. I even liked the way I made it, the thing I did, as I told you. It wasn’t because of that that one day I caught myself back from thinking ‘My wife must have the best.’ It was because I found out one day that I was afraid. And I found out at the same time that I will still be afraid, no matter what I do, that I will still be afraid as long as she lives or I live.”
“You are still afraid now?”
“Yes. And not about money. Damn money. I can make all the money we will need; certainly there seems to be no limit to what I can invent on the theme of female sex troubles. I dont mean that, nor Utah either. I mean us. Love, if you will. Because it cant last. There is no place for it in the world today, not even in Utah. We have eliminated it. It took us a long time, but man is resourceful and limitless in inventing too, and so we have got rid of love at last just as we have got rid of Christ. We have radio in the place of God’s voice and instead of having to save emotional currency for months and years to deserve one chance spend it all for love we can now spread it thin into coppers and titillate ourselves at any newsstand, two to the block like sticks of chewing gum or chocolate from the automatic machines.
If Jesus returned today we would have to crucify him quick in our own defense, to justify and preserve the civilization we have worked and suffered and died shrieking and cursing in rage and impotence and terror for two thousand years to create and perfect in man’s own image; if Venus returned she would be a soiled man in a subway lavatory with a palm full of French post-cards—” McCord turned in his chair and beckoned, a single repressed violent gesture. The waiter appeared, McCord pointed to his glass. Presently the waiter’s hand set the refilled glass on the table and withdrew.
“All right,” McCord said. “So what?”
“I was in eclipse. It began that night in New Orleans when I told her I had twelve hundred dollars and it lasted until that night she told me the store would keep her on. I was outside of time. I was still attached to it, supported by it in space as you have been ever since there was a not-you to become you, and will be until there is an end to the not-you by means of which alone you could once have been—that’s the immortality—supported by it but that’s all, just on it, non-conductive, like the sparrow insulated by its own hard non-conductive dead feet
