In which case everyone in the world is just plain rotten and we might as well throw down the barricades and let the Mongol ponies ride through the streets. Because, discounting any egotistical notions I may have about myself, I imagine I’m more or less the same as any other male walking the streets. I work hard for a living, and I’ve got a wife and a family and a mortgage: I come home nights, usually, and I’ve got my private dreams and disappointments, my illusions, my hopes, my fears. I tell dirty jokes, and I smoke, and I drink, and I react to Marilyn Monroe. I’m an average American male.
I’m Felix Anders, so to speak.
But I’m not Felix Anders, he thought. Felix is playing a game, and I’m not playing. I’m serious, I’m dead serious. I’m drowning in an ocean of morality and all the while I thought I knew how to swim. All the while I thought I was a sensitive, sensible man who could reconcile action with ethics, frivolous speculation with responsible behavior. Perhaps I am not sensible or sensitive, but I am a monogamist and I want only one woman. And at the same time I don’t want to hurt Eve. But what makes me believe a clean break would hurt her more than falsely living a failure? Oh, yes, yes, face it, it’s a failure, the marriage is a failure. Somewhere long before Maggie there was no more fun and no more surprise. There was only failure. And that’s where Felix comes in again because Felix says all marriage is an ugly disappointment, all marriage is the burial ground of identity. And if Felix is right, what makes me think it’ll be any different with Maggie?
If Felix is right, won’t I start another alliance with another woman five years, ten years, fifteen years after marrying Maggie? Does marriage automatically become a quagmire of boredom and disillusionment from which escape is an absolute necessity? Escape or die? Escape or be buried alive?
But how can I hurt Eve? How can I willfully hurt someone I’ve loved, lived with, shared with, dreamed with, grown with? How can I hurt someone who is an essential part of me? And how can I consider her an essential part of me and still think of leaving her? And what about the kids? What do Chris and David mean to me? What’s my role as father? What’s my true relationship to them? Hello, Chris, hello, David, pat on the head, don’t wet the bed, don’t do this, don’t do that, here now give me a kiss before you go to sleep, an accidental relationship. What do they mean to me, and what do I mean to them?
What does my father mean to me?
He’s a crashing bore who puts me to sleep every time he opens his mouth. Will Chris and David think I’m a bore when they grow up? Will I be able to sit across a restaurant table from a grown-up son and have an intelligent, interesting conversation with him? Or do all parents turn into crashing bores? What’s a parent but a judge and a jury and a pain in the ass? What real affection does Chris feel for me? Or David?
Questions, questions, questions.
Where are all the answers? Who’s giving out the answers today? Isn’t there a man who stands on street corners with answers? A man like Roger Altar who has all the pat endings in a big bag of tricks? But try to apply those endings to reality, just try. In real life, you pick a happy ending, and there are fourteen other people involved who’ve decided on fourteen different endings. And all the endings are in conflict, and either you stick to your own ending and make a lot of people unhappy, or you take one of their endings and make yourself unhappy.
I don’t want to hurt people, he thought.
I really don’t want to hurt anyone. Do I have to kill Eve to prove something to myself? And what am I proving after I’ve killed her? I’m simply proving that I’m willing to indulge my own selfish whims to their most ridiculous extreme. I am destroying her in order to build a new image of myself, which image may or may not be valid.
But it is valid.
It is the only valid image of me.
I want the job in Puerto Rico, and I want Maggie. I do not want one or either; I want both.
I, I, I, the enormous ego of me, the enormous self-centred universe of me! But what else is life about? Isn’t it all about me? The happiness of me, and the sadness of me, and the hopes of me, and the shattered or realized dreams of me? Isn’t ME the most important concept and hasn’t it always been? Why did I marry Eve if not to please ME? Was I thinking of her, was I thinking of how magnanimous I was being in showering upon her the rains of this magnificent being who is me? Wasn’t I thinking of myself alone and of how much Eve pleased ME? Am I not the sum total of the universe? Doesn’t the universe have its nucleus in each and every solitary individual who shouts “I, I, I!” against the total oblivion of anonymity?
I, I, I!
I want the job in Puerto Rico, and I want Maggie.
He reached for the ignition key.
And in the second it took him to twist the key and start the engine, he decided to accept the Baxter proposal, divorce Eve, and take Maggie with him to Puerto Rico.
26
The men met in a midtown bar on a Monday afternoon two weeks later.
By that time Larry had formulated a tentative plan of action. And the one certainty in that plan, it seemed to him, was the Baxter proposal. He had realized early, and with some loss of assurance, that he could not definitely count upon Maggie’s affirmative reaction to his scheme. He would, after all, be asking her to make a decision which he himself had reached only after grave consideration. He could not expect her to leap into a new experience blindly, without first giving it serious thought. He did, in truth, feel she would readily agree to anything he suggested. But he was certain that the presentation of the Puerto Rican job as a fait accompli, the concept of the island as a sanctuary, would help her in deciding to sever whatever ties still bound her to Don. And so he did not discuss his decision or his scheme with her. He would do that after he spoke to Baxter. The acceptance of the Baxter proposal was his foundation; upon that he would build.
The bar at five o’clock was full of editors and publishers discussing their fall lists. As Larry waited for Baxter, he found himself inadvertently eavesdropping, hoping to hear some discussion of Altar’s name or the new book. The hot topic of discussion, though, seemed to be a new novel by a fifteen-year-old Indian girl who — judging from the wild enthusiasm — had very important things to say about sex and saris. Larry couldn’t imagine what important things a fifteen-year-old girl had to say about sex. He mused that he was surely approaching middle age when he began considering adolescence unimportant, and then in self-defense tried to learn the title of the book so that he could buy it and read it with appreciative tolerance for the very young. Apparently none of the editors or publishers were interested in the title. They were solely concerned with discovering how a fifteen-year-old Indian girl had come to know so much about sex. They were climactically discussing a particularly inflammable chapter of the book when Baxter walked into the bar.
Larry rose and signaled to him, and he came to the table immediately, his hand extended.
“Good to see you, Larry,” he said. “I need a drink. Where’s the waiter?”
They shook hands, and then ordered. Baxter made himself comfortable and said, “I was hoping Eve would be with you.”
“No, not today,” Larry said.
“I like that girl,” Baxter said. “How is she?”
“Fine.”
“I like her a great deal,” Baxter said, and Larry felt a first indefinite twinge of warning. “Ah,” Baxter said, “here’re the drinks.” He waited while the drinks were put down, and then he picked up his glass. “Something wrong with the times,” he said. “Do you know that? I really look forward to this drink at the end of the day. Look forward to it? By God, I need it! I’m a mild alcoholic, I’m sure. But all I know is that after a day of pounding and pounding and pounding, I need this drink. Cheers.” He drank. “How’s Eve?” he asked.