All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [185]
“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.
I did not make a decision not to be swallowed up. The instinct for self-preservation is more deep-seated than decision. A man doesn’t make a decision to swim when he falls into the creek. He starts kicking. I simply began to wriggle and squirm and kick. First, I recall, there was the matter of Lois’s friends (no friends of mine ever set foot in the slick apartment, if as a matter of fact, the people I knew in the city room and the speak-easy and the press club could be called friends). I began to take a distaste to the friends Lois had. There was nothing particularly wrong with them. They were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage. There were some who had what Lois, who was not too well informed on the subject, regarded as “position” but who didn’t have much money and liked Lois’s free likker. There were some who didn’t have any “position” but who had more money than Lois and knew which fork to use. And there were some who didn