Did I feel, already then, something heartbreakingly intense about Myra – a peak reached, yet an imprisonment, because no matter how fast, she couldn’t get free? Later, we discussed love like, oh, such emancipated people. Judd insisted that sex should be quite free and apart from love, and Myra said breathlessly that’s what it was like in Russia, where women at last were as free as men. But what about children? asked Ruth. Judd said the state should take care of all children, as was of course suggested in Plato’s Republic. Didn’t he believe in parental love? Ruth inquired, and Judd declared he didn’t believe in emotion; emotion was illogical and weak.
He was deadly serious, his eyes burning. Ruth drew him on, so understandingly, with her way of making a man feel she understood on his own level. Judd was beyond any shyness now. Ideas poured out of him.
Put down coldly, that sort of talk sounds sophomoric, and yet it sounded bright and even important at the time. Why were children supposed to have emotional feelings for their parents? demanded Judd. Did children have any opportunity to select their parents? Or even vice versa? It was pure chance – one spermatozoon out of trillions. He, for example, certainly had very little in common with his father.
Now Judd had become vehement. Myra said, suddenly, “Let’s dance,” and led me on to the floor. Artie took Ruth.
Myra moved her long bare-feeling body into contact with mine, and it seemed utterly pliant, boneless. Her head fell back a little. “Oh listen to that trumpet!” Then, with a peculiar, sudden assumption of intimacy, she asked if I were going to marry Ruth, and I said, oh, we hadn’t gone that far. “But you’re in love with her?” she repeated.
I said, “How is one supposed to know?”
“You know, I think Judd is getting a crush on her,” she remarked, and I glanced at Judd alone at the table. His eyes were following Ruth.
“What about you and Artie?” I asked, out of form.
She answered with a peculiar eagerness and sincerity. She was fond of him, Myra said, since they had been kids, but of course Artie had a million girls. “Artie’s just a baby,” she confided. “He’s so immature. Although sometimes I do get worried for him. He has black moods – you wouldn’t imagine it. He’s deeper than he lets on.” Then suddenly Myra thrust her belly in and belly-rubbed for an instant. As the dance broke and we started back to the table, she said, “You know I’m just a tease. I try to prove to myself I can get every man I meet away from his date.” She squeezed my hand. “Friends?”
“Sure,” I said.
Ruth was flushed and so beautiful as she sat down. I looked from one girl to the other.
Myra made me talk about being a newspaperman – was it the best way to become a writer? – and I described going to the scene of the murder. We were on the favourite subject again. Artie got all excited about our interview with Captain Cleary about who hung out at the swamp. Nature lovers. Did I know that Judd was a big natural scientist? He had discovered some very rare bird – a crane or stork.
Ruth became quite interested, drawing Judd out, and soon we were discussing Judd’s question. Did birds have intelligence? He was convinced they could think. Thinking was choosing, he said, between one set of acts and another.
“Bushwah, it’s all mechanical reaction,” Artie declared. Every action had a mechanical cause – and from there we were soon on the question of free will. “With humans, too, it’s all mechanical,” Artie shouted. The trumpet was screaming high, but Artie outyelled it, in some passion to prove his point. “Schopenhauer!” he cried. “He proved there is no free will. We are all a bunch of slaves to our instincts!”
“If that is so,” Ruth said, “then no one is responsible for anything. Even criminals and murderers are not to blame, if there is no free will. It’s all cause and effect.”
“Of course!” said Artie.
“If you talk like that,” I said, “then you might just as well believe in God.”
“What?” Artie cried, falling into my trap.
“A determinist does not believe in God,” Judd corrected me. “He believes in absolute cause and effect, and nothing – no God – can intervene and change anything.”
“That’s right.” Ruth recognized the distinction and smiled to him. “People who believe in God believe God can change things, can punish them for doing wrong. So they still believe in a certain amount of free will.”
“There can be free will,” Judd said, “but it has nothing to do with right or wrong. That’s just old-fashioned moralizing.”
Ruth knit her brows. “What do you mean?”
Judd suddenly began to talk like a whirlwind, with passion, explaining his ideas to Ruth. If you accepted a set of regulations about right and wrong, you might as well believe in cause and effect, for everything was exactly laid out for you, what to do and what not to do – you had no choice. But if you believed in free will, then you had to feel free to choose. You had to say there were no rules. Of course, you might for your own convenience decide to accept some of the minor rules, the minor conventions like wearing clothes. But to prove you were free, you had to know you could break the rules, too.
He went on and on. Sometimes his ideas seemed jumbled, even contradictory, but every time I tried to cut in and argue, Judd would screech me down, throwing in names, labels, Nietzsche, and the Will to Power, and the Greek Stoics, and Kant, in a crazy kind of mixture. About all I could make of it was that the multitudes weren’t strong enough to make use of their free will. Only the few. Thus Spake Zarathustra.
Myra was saying philosophy was her worst subject, she wanted to dance, and Ruth was summarizing like an intelligent student. “Well, according to Artie’s idea, there isn’t any right and wrong because of fate; everything is determined forever.”
“Sure,” Artie said, “you are my fate!”
Ruth laughed, and went on to summarize Judd’s point of view. “But you say there isn’t any right and wrong, but for the opposite reason, because people do have free will and should use it to do exactly as they please.”
“That’s anarchy,” I said.
Anarchy was merely a simple way of putting it, Judd declared, as though to push me out of the argument. Ruth had her eyes intently fixed on Judd’s. The two of them seemed to have forgotten I was there. She asked whether he was really interested in law, in going to Harvard. He was interested in everything, Judd said, in language, in science – his was a universal mind, like da Vinci’s, and it would be a waste to study law.
But wasn’t he interested in law too? Ruth asked. Surely it would be fascinating; there were great lawyers like Jonathan Wilk who gave their lives to justice.
He laughed his clever laugh. After all, being a lawyer meant being able to argue on either side of a case, so a lawyer really couldn’t have any convictions about justice.
That part of it at least fitted with his ideas about right and wrong, Ruth said, so he ought to be interested in law after all.
It was a neat response and I saw his face quicken, for it showed she had followed him. I was beginning really to feel annoyed, and yet was too proud to break up their tête-à-tête. Then Artie and Myra were back at the table, and we all drank and drank.
Some time late that evening, the idea about Ruth could have come to Judd. Ruth was dancing with Artie. I saw Ruth cutting loose; the quietest girl can turn into a flashy dancer when she’s with one. Judd’s eyes were upon them, unwavering.
I imagine there coming to him in that moment a sensation like a double beat of the heart, a knowledge, an intention, a recognition: she is the one to whom he will do it.