I got up from the couch. For one reason so she couldn't pat my hand in that way which suddenly reminded me of the way a nurse pats the hand of a patient, a sort of impersonal pat intended to be soothing. I stood well back from her, and spoke firmly. "All right, you'll eat red beans with me. Let's get married. Tomorrow. Tonight. We've fooled around long enough. You say you love me. All right, I love you."
She didn't say anything, but sat there on the couch with her hands lying loose in her lap, and lifted her face, which suddenly was tired and drawn, and looked up at me from eyes which gradually brightened with unshed tears.
"You love me?" I demanded.
She nodded slowly.
"And you know I love you?" I demanded.
She nodded again.
"All right, then?"
"Jack," she said, then stopped for a moment. "Jack, I do love you. I guess I feel sometimes that I might just kiss you and hold you tight and close my eyes and jump off a cliff with you. Or like that time when you dived down to me and we kissed in the water and it seemed like we'd never come up. Do you remember, Jack?"
"Yes," I said.
"I loved you like that then, Jack."
"Now?" I demanded, "what about now?"
"Now, too, Jack, I guess I could do it now, too. But it's different, too."
"Different?"
"Oh, Jack," she exclaimed, and for the first time, at least the first time I ever remembered, made the gesture of lifting her hands to her temples, that gesture to control distraction which was never to become characteristic but which I was to see again. "Oh, Jack," she said again, "things have happened, so much has happened. Since then."
"What has happened?"
"Oh, it's just that getting married isn't like jumping off a cliff. Love isn't either, isn't like jumping off a cliff. Or getting drowned. It's–it's–oh, I don't know how to say it–it's trying to live, it's having a way to live."
"Money," I said, "if it's money you–"
"It's not money," she interrupted, "I don't mean money–oh, Jack, if you only could see what I mean!"
"Well, I'm not going to get a job with Patton or anybody round here. Or have them get me a job. Not even Irwin. I'll get a job, I don't care what kind, but not with them."
"Darling," she said tiredly, "I'm not trying to make you come here. Or get a job with Patton. Or anybody. I want you to do what you want. Just so it is something. Even if you don't make money. I told you I'd live in a shack."
So I went back to the Law School and by dint of consistent effort succeeded in busting out before the end of the year. It took a lot of attention to get busted out, for a man just can't achieve that by the ordinary means at State. He has to work at it. I could have simply resigned, of course, but if you simply drop out or resign, you might be able to come back. So I busted out. Then while I was celebrating my busting out and was pretty sure Anne would be sore and throw me over, I got involved with a pal of mine and two girls and there was a small scandal, which got into the papers. I was an ex-student then, and so the University couldn't do anything about it. Anne didn't do anything either, for I guess I was an ex-Jackie-Bird by that time.
So Anne went her way and I went mine. My way was to work for a newspaper and hang around the lower part of the city and read books on American history. Finally I was taking courses at the University again, just spare time at first, then seriously. I was entering the enchantments of the past. For a while it looked as though Anne and I had made it up, but somehow a gear slipped and it was like before. I didn't finish the Ph. D. So I went back to the _Chronicle__, where I was reported and a damned good one. I even got married. To Lois, who was damned good looking, a lot better looking, I suppose, that Anne, and juicy while Anne was inclined to bone and muscle under flesh. Lois looked edible, and you knew it was tender all the way through, a kind of mystic combination of filet mignon and a Georgia peach aching for the tongue and ready to bleed gold. Lois married me for reasons best known to herself. But one was, I am sure, tat my name was Burden. I am forced to this conclusion by the process of elimination. It could not have been my beauty, grace, charm, wit, intellect, and learning, for, in the first place, my beauty, grace, and charm, were not great, and in the second place, Lois didn't have the slightest interest in wit, intellect, and learning. Even if I had had them. It could not have been my mother's money, for Lois's own widowed mother had plenty of money, which Lois's father had made from a lucky was contract for gravel, a little too late to give those things called advantages to his daughter at her most impressionable age. So it must have been the name of Burden.
Unless it was that Lois was in love with me. I put this possibility in the list merely for logical and schematic completeness, for I am quite sure that the only things Lois knew about love was how to spell the word ad how to make the physiological adjustments traditionally associated with the idea. She did not spell very well, but she made those adjustments with great skill and relish. The relish was nature, but the skill was art, and _ars longa est__. I knew this despite the very expert and sustained histrionics of which Lois was capable. I knew it, but I succeeded in burying it out in the back yard of my mind, like a rat that has been caught in the pantry gnawing the cheese. I didn't really care, I suppose, as long as nothing happened to make me have to face the fact. And once in my arms, Mrs. Burden was very faithful or very discreet, for nothing ever happened. And the arrangement was perfect.
"Jack and I are perfectly adjusted sexually," Lois used to say primly, for she was very advanced in what with her passed for thought and was very sophisticated in her language. She would look around at the faces of the guests in the very slick modernistic apartment (her taste ran that way and not to balconies overlooking charming old patios, and her money paid for rent), and would tell them how perfectly adjusted she and I were, and in telling them would add about two extra chocolate-cream-puff syllables to the word _sexually__. For a while I didn't mind her telling the guests how well adjusted we were. It even flattered my ego, for nobody would mind having his name coupled with that of Lois or having his picture taken with her in a public place. So I would beam modestly around the little groups, while Lois told them about that perfect adjustment. But later it began to annoy me.
As long as I regarded Lois as a beautiful, juicy, soft, vibrant, sweet-smelling, sweet-breathed machine for provoking and satisfying the appetite (and that was the Lois I had married), all was well. But as soon as I began to regard her as a person, trouble began. All would have been well, perhaps, had Lois been struck dumb at puberty. Then no man could have withstood her. But she could talk, and when something talks you sooner or later begin to listen to the sound it makes and begin, even in the face of all other evidence, to regard it as a person. You begin to apply human standards to it, and human element infects your innocent Eden pleasure in the juicy, sweet-breathed machine. I had loved Lois the machine, the way you love the filet mignon or the Georgia peach, but I definitely was not in love with Lois the person. In fact, as the realization grew that the machine-Lois belonged to, and was the instrument of, the person-Lois (or at least to the thing which could talk), the machine-Lois which I had innocently loved began to resemble a beautiful luscious bivalve open and pulsing in the glimmering deep and I some small speck of marine life being drawn remorselessly. Or it resembled the butt of wine in which the duke was drowned, and I was sure-God the Duke of Clarence. Or it resembled a greedy, avid, delicious quagmire, the solemn temples, the gorgeous palaces, towers, battlements, libraries, museums, huts, hospitals, houses, cities, and all the works of man might be swallowed up, with the last luxurious sigh. Or so, I recall, it seemed. But the paradox is that as long as Lois was merely the machine-Lois, as long as she was simply a well-dressed animal, as long as she was really a part of innocent nonhuman nature, as long as I hadn't begun to notice the sounds she made were words, there was no harm in her and no harm in the really extraordinary pleasure she could provide. It was only when I observed that this Lois was mixed up with the other Lois, with certain human traits, that I began to feel that all the works of man might be swallowed up in the quagmire. It is s delicate paradox.