“Horror gave place in my mind to indignation. What was he daring to say about my Katy, about this more than woman who could only be as pure and perfect as my own almost religious passion? ‘Are you seriously implying,’ I began…But Henry wasn’t implying. He was categorically affirming. Katy was being unfaithful to him with the young squirt from Johns Hopkins.
“I told him he was mad, and he retorted that I knew nothing about sex. Which, of course, was painfully true. I tried to change the subject. It wasn’t a question of sex—it was a question of nephritis, of a mother who needed her daughter’s care. But Henry wouldn’t listen. All he now wanted was to torture himself. And if you ask why he wanted to torture himself, I can only answer that it was because he was already in agony.
His was the weaker, the more dependent half of a symbiotic partnership which (so he believed) had just been dissolved abruptly. It was a surgical operation, without anesthetics. Katy’s return would have stopped the pain and instantly healed the wound. But Katy was not returning. Therefore (admire the logic!) it was necessary for Henry to inflict upon himself as much additional suffering as he possibly could. And the most effective way of doing that was to put his misery into lacerating words. To talk and talk—not, of course, to me, not even at me; only to himself—but to himself (and this was essential if he was to suffer) in my presence.
The part assigned to me was not that of the supporting character actor, not even that of the bit player who serves as confidant and errand runner. No, I was merely the nameless, almost faceless extra, whose business it had been to provide the hero with his initial excuse for thinking out loud, and who now, by simply being on the spot, imparted to the overheard soliloquy a monstrousness, a sheer obscenity, which it would have lacked if the speaker had been alone. Self-activated, the dung-slide gathered momentum. From Katy’s betrayal, he passed to her choice (and this was the unkindest cut) of a younger man. Younger and therefore more virile, more indefatigably lustful.
(Not to mention all that, as a doctor, he knew about physiology and the autonomic nervous system.) The person, the professional, the devoted healer—all had disappeared; and so by implication had Katy. Nothing remained except a pair of sexual functions frantically exploiting one another in the void. That he could have thought in these terms about Katy and her hypothetical lover was a proof, as I began obscurely to realize, that he thought in the same way about Katy and himself. Henry, as I’ve said, was a broken reed, and broken reeds, as you must have had innumerable occasions to observe, are apt to be ardent. Ardent, indeed, to the point of frenzy. No, that’s the wrong word. Frenzy is blind. Whereas lovers like Henry never lose their head. They take it with them, however far they go—take it with them so that they can be fully, gloatingly conscious of their own and their partners’ alienation.
Actually, this was about the only thing, outside his laboratory and his library, that Henry cared to be conscious of. Most people inhabit a universe that is like French café au lait—fifty per cent skim milk and fifty per cent stale chicory, half psychophysical reality and half conventional verbiage. Henry’s universe was modeled on the highball. It was a mixture in which half a pint of the fizziest philosophical and scientific ideas all but drowned a small jigger of immediate experience, most of it strictly sexual. Broken reeds are seldom good mixers. They’re far too busy with their ideas, their sensuality and their psychosomatic complaints to be able to take an interest in other people—even their own wives and children. They live in a state of the most profound voluntary ignorance, not knowing anything about anybody, but abounding in preconceived opinions about everything. Take the education of children, for example. Henry could talk about it as an authority. He had read Piaget, he had read Dewey, he had read Montessori, he had read the psychoanalysts.
It was all there in his cerebral filing cabinet, classified, categorized, instantly available. But when it came to doing something for Ruth and Timmy, he was either hopelessly incompetent or, more often, he just faded out of the picture. For of course they bored him. All children bored him. So did the overwhelming majority of adults. How could it be otherwise? Their ideas were rudimentary and their reading, non-existent. What had they to offer? Only their sentiments and their moral life, only their occasional wisdom and their frequent and pathetic lack of wisdom. In a word, only their humanity. And humanity was something in which poor Henry was incapable, congenitally, of taking an interest. Between the worlds of quantum theory and epistemology at one end of the spectrum and of sex and pain at the other, there was a kind of limbo peopled only by ghosts.
And among the ghosts was about seventy-five per cent of himself. For he was as little aware of his own humanity as of other people’s. His ideas and his sensations—yes, he knew all about those. But who was the man who had the ideas and felt the sensations? And how was this man related to the things and people around him? How, above all, ought he to be related to them? I doubt if it ever occurred to Henry to ask himself such questions. In any case he didn’t ask them on this occasion. His soliloquy was not a husband’s agonized debate between love and suspicion. That would have been a fully human response to the challenge of a fully human situation—and, as such, it could never occur in the presence of a listener so raw and foolish, so incapable of giving understanding help, as was the young John Rivers of thirty years ago.
No, this was essentially a less than human reaction; and one of the elements of its subhumanity was the fact, the utterly outrageous and senseless fact, that it was taking place in the presence of someone who was neither an intimate friend nor a professional counselor—merely a shocked young bumpkin with a too pious background and a pair of receptive but shuddering ears. Those poor ears! Lucidly expressed and richly documented, the scientific dirt fairly poured into them. Burton and Havelock Ellis, Krafft-Ebing and the incomparable Ploss and Bartels—like Piaget and John Dewey, they were all there in Henry’s built-in filing cabinet, accessible in the minutest detail. And in this case, it now became evident, Henry had not been content to remain the armchair expert. He had practiced what he preached; he had acted, systematically, on what he knew in theory.
How difficult it is, in these days when you can discuss orgasms over the soup and flagellation with the ice cream, how extraordinarily difficult it is to remember the strength of the old taboos, the depth of the silence by which they were surrounded. As far as I was concerned, everything that Henry talked about—the techniques of love-making, the anthropology of marriage, the statistics of sexual satisfaction—was a revelation from the abyss. It was the sort of thing that decent people did not mention, did not, I had fondly imagined, even know; the sort of thing that could be discussed and understood only in brothels, at rich men’s orgies, in Montmartre and Chinatown and the French Quarter.
And yet these horrors were being poured into my ears by the man whom I respected above all others, the man who, for intellect and scientific intuition, surpassed everyone I had ever known. And he was uttering his horrors in connection with the woman whom I loved as Dante had loved Beatrice; as Petrarch worshiped Laura. He was asserting, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world, that Beatrice had almost insatiable appetites, that Laura had broken her marriage vows for the sake of the kind of physical sensations which any hefty brute with a good knowledge of the autonomic nervous system could so easily evoke. And even if he hadn’t been accusing Katy of unfaithfulness, I should have been appalled by what he said. For what he said implied that the horrors were as much a part of marriage as of adultery.
I can hardly expect you to believe it,” Rivers added with a laugh, “but it’s the truth. Up to that moment I had no idea of what went on between husbands and wives. Or rather I had an idea, but it didn’t happen to be correct. My idea was that, outside the underworld, decent people didn’t make love except for the sake of having children—once in a lifetime in my parents’ case, twice in the Maartenses’. And now here was Henry sitting on the edge of his catafalque and soliloquizing.
Soliloquizing with the lucidity of genius, the uninhibited elaboration of infantility, about all the strange and, to me, appallingly immoral things that had happened under its funereal canopy. And Katy, my Katy, had been his accomplice—not his victim, as at first I had tried to believe, but his willing and even
