Conrad Aiken - Great Circle

— You’ve said it.

— What do you know about it, you’re not married.

— I don’t need to be.

— How many times have you told me that if you hadn’t been analyzed, you couldn’t know anything about analysis. Woops, my dear. I’ve been hit with a hammer. My head’s ringing.

— Go on with this idea — this might be helpful.

— Ask me an easier one, old chap. Would you like to see my spleen? It’s a nice little spleen, never yet broken, either. Bertha never understood that. No. Nor cleanliness either. The strange things she did. I read a short story once about this. Yes. Very good. A husband who had left his wife and his best friend fell in love with her. You see. They were quite amiable about it, they were still good friends, and the other fellow decided to marry her. You see. But he was damned inquisitive about the husband’s reasons, and one night when they’d dined together, he asked him, point blank, why it was. The husband merely said that it was something absolutely unmentionable, that it would be a terrible injustice to his wife to speak of it. Result — can you guess it? The friend went off by himself to Bermuda, and the wife was left high and dry.… Zingoids! I’ve got rings like Saturn. Can you see them.

— Not from here.

— Oh, yes, that lovely story of the idiot. What, from here? Ha, ha, ha.

— But those things can always be managed with a little understanding and patience. No need to get excited about them. And what about the pot and the kettle? Are you so damned immaculate yourself? I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts you sometimes don’t change your socks often enough, or let your toenails grow too long, or forget to shave, or smell of good honest male sweat. What about it. And Bertha probably never said a word of it, did she.

— Of course not. Why the hell should she. Women don’t feel the same way about the physical aspect of a man as he does about the woman. No. No. You know that, what’s the use arguing about it.

— The hell she doesn’t.

— The hell she does. She even likes a little uncouthness — a rough chin, a careless shirt or tie — dirty fingernails — you know damned well she does, Bill, so there’s no use trying to kid me. But Bertha is careless. She is unfeminine. Good Lord, you ought to see some of the underclothes she wears. They look as if they were made of cardboard, or sheet iron or something. Or cut out of circus tents. What the hell. Doesn’t a woman know any better than that?

— I suspect this is just a cover.

— Cover!.. What next. You make me laugh. I don’t say there aren’t other things, too, but that isn’t saying that this business didn’t hit me pretty hard. It would have hit anyone. You wait! Tom will get it. I’ll bet he’s got a surprise already.… Jesus. Jesus! I see disasters and I bring them back. Fecal madness. I didn’t want to think of it. I didn’t want to think of it. It’s like a sword, a red hot sword. When I think of it I go mad — I see it in every detail. What time did he get there. Did they have dinner together. When was the first time. Where. In what order did they go to the bedroom. She first? Both together? Oh, God, Bill. Isn’t it funny how, when a thought is too painful, you give way to definite physical impulses — find yourself actually averting your face, looking out of a window, making a gesture of erasure with your hand, as if at a child’s blackboard — making speeches too to yourself, words that have no sense in them, just to divert the current of your madness. The moon, Andrew, what price the raucous moon. Third alive, third rail alive. Why did you speak to me like that you pimply pimpernel. Or you address a picture on the wall, or a candlestick on the mantel, you pace up and down and fling words at it over your shoulder, madder and madder words, you swear at it, you call it a merd, a pimp, a slut, a whore, you take the candlestick and wring its neck, shouting, then smash it on the floor — and then you turn away from it ashamed, as if it were watching you, for you know that if you don’t turn away you’re going to cry abominably, you already feel the contraction in the throat, a rigidity in your eyes, a stare of blindness that begets tears. No. I won’t look at it. I won’t remember it. I won’t think of their going along the hall together, or to the bathroom. O God, O God, O God. Why did she do it. Why did she do it. Why the hell did she do it, Bill, how could she do it. If she’d come to me and confessed that she was falling in love with him, that would have been bad enough, would almost have killed me, but to wait like this till I was in New York—

— How do you know she did? What makes you think there was anything planned or deliberate in it? My impression, as a matter of fact, is that the whole thing was accident, an impulse.

— Don’t fool yourself. Fred says he’s suspected it for a week, and that Tom’s been going there every night during that time.

— That’s got nothing to do with it. I think it came by accident.

— I don’t believe you.

— You wouldn’t.

— Resistance, I suppose. Oh, damn you amateur analysts and all your pitiful dirty abstract jargon. Why can’t you say what you mean. Why can’t you call a spade a spade. What the hell’s the difference between the soul and the subconscious and the unconscious and the will. Or between castration complex and inferiority complex and Oedipus complex. Words. Evasions. Vanities, on the part of the respective respectable analysts. Nicht wahr . For the love of mud, define any one of them for me, so that I’ll know absolutely what they mean. Or tell me where they reside in the brain. Have you ever looked at a map of the brain? It’s like those imaginary maps of Mars. Full of Arabia Desertas. Canals, seas, mountains, glaciers, extinct volcanoes, or ulcers. The pock-marked moonface of the mind. And all that strange congregation of scars, that record of wounds and fissures, is what speaks and acts. I speak with it, you listen with it. What the hell. What have I got to do with it? Nothing. Something hurts me, and I act. Something else hurts me, and I speak. If I could act, I wouldn’t speak. Voilà . All your bloody psychology in a nutshell. For which reason, Bill, Cambridge, Mass., is the city of free speech. The women talk freely, the men sometimes act, but more often die. Isn’t it funny? The colossal humbug of it. But it’s changing, just the same, it’s changing. And that’s funnier still. All the gentle dodos going down Brattle Street in their rubbers to lecture on Grimm’s law or the finals in syphilis or the abrogation of the electron, and their fiendish hatchetfaced wives going to mothers’ meetings, where they discuss the psychology of the child, without knowing to begin with what the devil a human animal is, and meanwhile their adolescent sons and daughters are dancing naked on Belmont Hill or going on moonlit bathing parties au naturel at Gloucester, or simply getting quietly and lubriciously drunk together in Prescott Street or where have you. And the secret little affairs that go on. Good God! How the old dodos would faint if they knew about it. Just cast your eye over the list of our acquaintances. How many happy married couples? Eh? You could count them on your nostrils. X flirting openly with the wife of Y, while his wife, talking about it frankly everywhere, sets her cap at Z, and tells you at tea about the roses he sent her. If he does it, she said to me, why shouldn’t I? Where do the children come in. Then look at Ann. Did I tell you about my little flurry with Ann. No. It didn’t amount to much, but it was significant. Is that the word.… I feel funny. Rarefied. Is there any oxygen in here.

— Help yourself.

— I thought you’d gone.

— Oh, no. I’m waiting for Ann. Who is Ann. I never heard of her.