Free The End of the Road by John Barth Page B

that of the Athenians on the morning they discovered that Alcibiades had gelded every marble god in town. She was speechless.
    “Sit down,” I said, laughing at her consternation. “The point is, Rennie, that anybody’s position can be silly if you want to think of it that way, and the more consistent, the sillier. It’s not silly from Joe’s point of view, of course, granted his ends, whatever they are. But frankly I’m appalled that he expects anybody else to go along with him.”
    “He doesn’t!” Rennie cried. “That’s the whole idea!”
    “Why did he cork you once for apologizing, then—twice, I mean: just for the exercise? Why wouldn’t you dare tell him you felt sorry for him even if you did?”
    I asked these things without genuine malice, only as a sort of tease, but Rennie, to my surprise, burst into tears.
    “Whoa, now!” I said gently. “I’m terribly sorry I hurt your feelings, Rennie.” I took her arm, but she flinched as if I too had struck her.
    “Whoops, I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
    “Jake, stop it!” she cried, and I observed that the squint-eyed head-shaking was used to express pain as well as hilarity, and this it did quite effectively. When she had control of herself she said, “You certainly must think our marriage is a strange one, don’t you?”
    “Damnedest thing I ever saw,” I admitted cheerfully. “But hell, that’s no criticism.”
    “But you think I’m a complete zero, don’t you?”
    Ah. Something in me responded very strongly to this not-especially-moving question of Rennie’s.
    “I don’t know, Rennie. What’s your opinion?”
    By way of answer Rennie began what turned out to be the history of her alliance with Joe. Her face, chunky enough to begin with, was red and puffy from crying, and in a more critical mood I would have found her unpleasing to look at just then, but it happened that I was really impressed by her breakdown, and the curious sympathy that I’d felt from the time I first heard of her knockout—a sympathy that had little to do with abstract pity for women—was now operating more noticeably in me. This sympathy, too, I observed impersonally and with some amusement from another part of myself, the same part that observed me being not displeased by Rennie’s tearful, distracted face. Here is what she told me, edited and condensed:
    “You know, I lived in a complete fog from the day I was born until after I met Joe,” she said. “I was popular and all that, but I swear it was just like I was asleep all through school and college. I wasn’t really interested in anything, I never thought about anything. I never even particularly wanted to do anything—I didn’t even especially enjoy myself. I just dreamed along like a big blob of sleep. If I thought about myself at all, I guess I lived on my potentialities, because I never felt dissatisfied with myself.”
    “Sounds wonderful,” I said, not sincerely, because in fact it sounded commonplace: The Story of American Youth. It interested me only because it fitted well with the unharnessed animal that I had sometimes thought I glimpsed in Rennie.
    “You shouldn’t say that,” Rennie said flatly. “It wasn’t anything, wonderful or otherwise. When I got out of college I went to New York to work, just because my roommate had a job there and wanted me to go along with her, and that’s where I met Joe—he was taking his master’s degree at Columbia. We dated for a while, pretty casually: I wasn’t much interested in him, and I didn’t think he saw much in me. Then one night he grinned at me and told me he wouldn’t be taking me out any more. I asked him why not, and he said, ‘Don’t think I’m threatening you; I just don’t see any point to it.’ I said, ‘Is it because I don’t sleep with you?’ and he said, ‘If that was it I’d have gotten a Puerto Rican girl in the first place instead of wasting my time with you.’ ”
    “A good line,” I