Boys and Girls Come Out to Play

by Nigel Dennis

  When Divver looked back on this marriage, in later life, he could remember scarcely anything about it. It was one of those relationships in which both parties do their best, but one party—in this case, Divver—is left with an uncomfortable sense of shame, that he can escape only by squaring his shoulders and resolutely seeking happiness with another woman. Only five years after the marriage was over he had seen a woman wheeling a baby in Washington Square, and it had been a few moments before he recalled that she had been his wife for two years. He had forgotten the street they had lived on, what they had done in their spare time; he only remembered in a vague way, and with rather condescending sadness, that he had matured very rapidly during those two years, until he had become too large for the nest.

  At the same time as his marriage he began to attend lectures on abnormal psychology. He discovered—it was the happiest discovery of his life—that there were people who were in the same fix as he was; that is to say, honest people who had abandoned their fathers, but who could not bring themselves to go all the way with the Communists. But these people always said—and Divver was soon happy to say the same—that they had a hell of a lot of respect for the Communists, who were hard-working and zealous; and they added that they wished like hell that their own consciences would let them go all the way with such admirable people instead of only permitting them to defend the Communists against ignorant critics and agree with them warmly on certain indisputable issues. These views suited Divver very well, and it was his growth of confidence and his feeling that after all he had a place in New York that perhaps made it hard for him to accept being married to a girl who had not shown the same signs of maturing, either politically or psychologically. But, at the time, the trouble that arose between the two of them expressed itself in a purely personal way.

  In the first place, their marriage was the result of feeling that since they were in and out of one another’s apartments so much it would be silly not to arrange things more sensibly. Divver had had to have two bathrobes, one for his place, one for her’s; she had begun by taking over one of his drawers for essential things, and then had gone on to keeping a nightgown and toothbrush there too. Her mother, who knew what was happening, had said hopefully that she supposed on the whole men were more honest these days; to which Divver had said modestly that today honesty was being given a chance for the first time in history, and that women at last had a chance to practise it. The girl must have agreed, because she found little peculiar, and nothing insulting, in being admitted without wedlock into every last secret of Divver’s puzzled mind—in fact, a strong point in the affection between them was her tender respect for the way he struggled with the idea of not marrying her, and his shame-faced gratitude to her for not pressing him in the matter. Divver used to say repeatedly that he found her attitude miraculous, considering what an ordinary, selfish, egotistical sort of person he was.

  Everything went well until, in spite of how hard they both tried, Divver grew more and more ashamed of himself. Each new stage of shame she matched with an assurance of fresh respect for him, until it became like a game in which the shuttlecock was shame when he hit it over the net and respect when she hit it back, but the same shuttlecock all the time. It was an exercise that soon left both of them almost too exhausted by shame and respect to go on leading semi-detached lives. “For Christ’s sweet sake, why am I—around like this?” Divver cried one evening after he had drunk too much. “Let’s get together really, like civilized people, for God’s sake!”—to which she replied promptly that neither for his sake nor her’s did she want him to take any step that he didn’t really want to take. Perhaps this reply seemed to him to be a reflection on his ability to make up his mind as a man should, because he at once went on to say that lately he had thought the whole business over in a most searching way and could now say with absolute certainty that marriage was what he most wanted. They agreed that a honeymoon would be silly, and though they spent that night together they were too conscious of the gap that deciding to get together had made to do anything but sleep nervously. Divver’s new mother-in-law kissed him warmly, and said that now at last she really knew she was a mother, a remark that made him a little frightened until his wife said that all mothers felt bound to make it, and that it had no meaning whatever.

  They enjoyed waiting for their respective leases to end, and when they took a new apartment they enjoyed fitting it out with their furniture, and boldly tossing out things that they would never have managed to get rid of alone. Divver was impressed, though he felt self-conscious, when his wife bought a reproduction of Rouault’s “Old King” and hung it in the living-room; she said it was like him.

  At this time there was some talk about the “freedom” they were to allow each other. But freedom was the last thing Mrs. Divver was interested in (she already felt tired), and Max, who thought he ought to want it, became so domesticated, or demoralized, in the first year of marriage that by the time he did feel the need to come and go in a mature way, he couldn’t bring himself to the point of saying so, much less of doing it. His wife even began to urge him to enjoy freedom, but he insisted that he didn’t need any more than he had and would say so when he did.

  The days of matching shame and respect were, of course, far away now; when they looked back on that predicament it seemed completely childish: “though no doubt it was necessary, for psychological reasons that we only now understand,” Max said. Mrs. Divver thankfully forgot all about it until, soon after she began urging her husband to go out more, the old problem came back—in a new form, but an equally honest and painful one. Mrs. Divver saw that although Max seemed to prefer staying in (he was reading a lot) to going out, he was growing moody. Even the hang-dog look of his student days was back. Mrs. Divver asked no questions at first, because she felt uneasy as to what he might reply, and she wanted to go on thinking that everything had been done for the best, carefully, if slowly, in the manner of educated, mature personalities who respect a union based on responsibility not restriction. But at last he was so depressed and silent that she had to press him to speak openly, which he did.

  It seemed that now he was ashamed of having married her, because he was not doing enough for her, not making their relation more significant—not loving her enough, he admitted finally, hardly daring to look at her as he spoke. She replied, just as she had replied in their childish days, that she realized he was not an ordinary man, and that he had strong outside interests and inside reserves, that she didn’t want him to be any different because those were the things she loved him for, and that what she might lose in delicate attention she found was made up for her in his character and intelligence and the confidence she drew from his honesty. He didn’t seem to be encouraged by this reply; she even thought he felt that she had failed to understand what he was talking about. Soon, this problem became the most important part of their lives, and it was not long before the old routine was re-established; he confessing to more and more shame, she avowing more and more respect. Mrs. Divver felt it was a cruel fate that the maturity and honesty which had turned their courtship into marriage should now possibly turn their marriage into divorce.

  But the marriage continued for another long year. During that time, Divver’s conscience grew so bad that his only relief was to sit beside his wife in the evenings and tell her in the fullest detail how inadequately he loved her. To put him at his ease, his wife used to sew or knit while he talked, until one day he confessed that it drove him half out of his mind to watch the needle going in and out with such tiny, precise stitches. So from then on, she just sat, only getting up now and then to make them both a drink.

  Divver talked in an unrepressed way, frowning, rolling his eyes, waving his arms, splaying his fingers and walking up and down. He would begin in a general way, talking of his egotism and his inability to lose himself totally in her, and as the hours passed, he would go on to describe, say, the sudden, intense feeling for her that had come over him when he was in a bar yesterday
or discussing a grave political turn with friends. This feeling, he would say, had encouraged him to think that love was really present—until he had taken it apart scrupulously and found it full of typical bourgeois deception and dishonesty. “I have only to think about it for twenty-four hours,” he would say, “and then it goes bad on me and I know it’s nothing to do with what I really feel about you.”

  At first these confessions did the marriage good, because after the day’s last pin-head of dishonesty had been frankly exposed, discussed and painfully marked down for what it was worth as an obstruction to happiness, Divver became unquestioningly affectionate with his wife, as though love’s emptied batteries had been surreptitiously re-charged while he was driving the other way. In fact, there were enough such revivals to make him suspicious of them, and thereafter when one occurred he would soon convict it of fraud by contrasting it with the conclusions he had reached through objective analysis. He realized, he told his wife sadly, that these spurts of love were at bottom nothing but wish-fulfilment dreams, provoked by his subconscious desire to evade his undoubtable guilt.

  Each of Divver’s confessions came from so deep inside him that when one had bloomed and Mrs. Divver had, as usual, plucked it by assuring him that his honesty was what she loved best in him, she was sure that he couldn’t possibly find one more thing to be ashamed of. But he always did, and, moreover, he was always passionately sure that his newest doubt was the most important doubt of all, beside which all the previous doubts he had told her about were trifles, a basic doubt fit to rank with the torments of the great religious philosophers. The worst of these came when he told her that for months he had been tortured by the need to tell her that he considered her stupid (yes, stupid, that was the word, there was no evading it!) and that all the other confessions he had made to her were, he now saw clearly, simply excuses for not frankly admitting this. He had been so horrified to think of the pain he would give her by speaking out, and by fear of the shame he would feel having done so, that he had led her astray with chatter about trifles. But now he realized that if their relationship were to be an honourable one, he must be truthful even about this. Then he begged her miserably to tell him frankly if at heart she believed that he was nothing but a dirty little worm.

  She answered that he was justified in speaking up, and that she was the last person to imagine that she was intelligent; she might well be stupid. As to her opinion of him, she said that she had stated it again and again and that it was no different now: she loved him as he was and felt sure that things would be all right if only he could believe that he was not a worm. At this, the most aggrieved look she had ever seen came into his face; he turned red, stammered, and at last said, with an incredulous groan: “Do you really know what it means for me to call you stupid? Can you really, honestly, feel it?”

  Mrs. Divver said no more at the time; but she must have been more hurt than she realized, because next time Divver begged her to state her honest opinion of him she found that she had collected a few complaints. Perhaps she also felt that mentioning them might be evidence of her not being so stupid after all. Divver seemed only too eager to hear them, but he was obviously disappointed when she told him that sometimes she felt he was lazy about the house and managed to be out of the way when there were chores to be done and people whom he disliked, to talk to. He explained, gently but a little contemptuously, as though she had convicted him of being a pickpocket when he was Jack-the-Ripper, that these defects were the least important symptoms of a character that was basically degenerate, wilfully destructive, and hog-tied by an infantile narcissism. At this, Mrs. Divver really did feel she was stupid, and said so, quite resentfully, and burst into tears. Divver began to console her at once, and at the same time plunged into terrible shame; they ended the evening more miserable than they had ever been before. But at least Mrs. Divver had made a start on the road to objective analysis, and from there on she grew bolder and even a little more subtle in telling Divver what she disliked about him, going so far as to invent items when necessary. She would state them only vaguely and hesitantly—as though she were tossing over a few limp bits of rubber, which Divver spent the rest of the evening blowing up into large, coloured, explosive balloons. For a while it seemed that there was now more balance in their relations, due to her having realized that intimacy depends upon co-operation, and two minds work better than one.

  At this time, in a sudden, helpless moment, Mrs. Divver made the silly mistake of telling a woman friend a little of what was wrong. The friend repeated it to her husband, who became indignant and passed it on to another couple, who also became indignant and felt it was their duty to tip off one or two other couples who liked Divver. At last it reached someone who felt angry and dutiful enough to reproach Divver for treating his wife like a slop-pail. Divver came home not only in the depths of shame but more torn in his vanity than ever before. He told his wife how terrible he had felt when he realized what he had been doing to her: “Yippy was dead right to tell me,” he said, “and I know he must have gone through hell wondering if he should or not: Yippy’s got guts. But why didn’t you tell me? Why did you just let me go on?” They both felt terribly ashamed, and Divver swore that he would never burden her in that way again, and made her swear that she would stop him instantly if he began.

  Mrs. Divver took courage from the quiet that fell on the apartment, until she found that her husband could speak as forbiddingly with his eyes, his neck, his shoulders, his leg muscles, as with his tongue: when he lay in bed asleep his joints cracked like the muskets of a firing squad. His rejection of normal speech soon became so nerve-racking that his wife told him that she didn’t expect him never to tell her anything at all. But at first he kept stubbornly to his promise, and Mrs. Divver had a hard time convincing him that his resolution was agony to her. When at last he returned to plain speaking, she found that he was no longer upset by her stupidity or his own mental degeneracy. On the contrary, he was now convinced, after weeks of silence which had given him a chance to sift things to the bottom, that he had ruined her mental equilibrium by not having given her proper physical satisfaction. From now on, he assured her, setting his jaw, their love-life would be different, and he would see to it that she lacked no attention that would help towards complete sexual fulfilment. Mrs. Divver turned white, and replied that she liked him as he was: but he was firm, and pushed the new project ahead with the same blunt integrity that he had given to their minds and psyches. At first he was contented by the simplest assurances on her part as to the extent of his success, but gradually his doubts returned and he was impelled to question her more and more scrupulously as to the degree and nature of her satisfaction. He also admitted that he had painful doubts as to whether he would ever really be able to do his sexual duty by her, and his efforts to prove that he could made her so uncomfortable that she began to have headaches, which she attributed to a family tendency to migraine. But although Divver was only twenty-five, he was already too well educated to be convinced by such a fairy-tale, and he soon began to say that he had failed as a bedmate just as he had failed as a helpmate. They began to sleep in separate rooms, but it was six months before he managed to tell her that it was now clear to him that they couldn’t remain together and that he had already ruined the best years of her life and could not bear the thought of ruining any more. He added, a few days later, that he had known this for the past year, and that all the burdens he had laid on her and the efforts he had made to make her sexually well-rounded had been merely efforts to escape from admitting the truth. Mrs. Divver answered that he had always been honest with her, but that if he felt that even honesty had failed there was nothing left but to go their own ways. They agreed that the real tragedy of the matter was that it had taken them some years to realize the fruitlessness of their being together at all—to which Divver added, one day while he was packing, that it now seemed clear to him that subconsciously he had wanted their relationship to end in tragedy ever since he first knew h
er.

  Mrs. Divver only saw Max once more. Five months after they had separated, he came around and rang her bell. From his look she knew that he had something on his mind. After a few preliminaries he came to the point: he had met another woman whom he liked very much, but he simply could not, he said, see the last of Mrs. Divver without admitting something that had been preying on his mind ever since the marriage ended. It had to do with his conscience—or rather, and this was the whole trouble, it had not to do with his conscience. During the last weeks of their marriage, he explained, he had given the impression that he suffered from a bad conscience at the thought of leaving her. But on analysing this feeling in the past weeks he had realized that at heart he didn’t really care about how painful she found their separation; he didn’t really suffer at all on her account. What he had thought was a bad conscience had been really a cowardly fear of what people might say when they knew he had left her.

  She answered that the distinction between conscience and cowardice didn’t seem to make much difference, since the marriage was over anyway. But he insisted—perhaps she hadn’t understood exactly, he said—that there was all the difference in the world: he was trying to tell her that he left her without an atom of regret, and, in fact, at this very moment felt no regret, although he did still feel scared when he met their friends. At this point she vaguely suspected that the object of his visit was to make himself so despicable a character in relation to her that he could feel like a reformed character in relation to the other woman. This was more than she could bear, so she merely said, with a hint of spite, that she was afraid she was too stupid to understand what he was talking about. She then asked him to leave, pretending that she was expecting a lover in a few minutes. Her next husband was an affable man who worked for a firm of distillers and took only normal interest in honesty; the firmness of their marriage was due to the respect he had for his wife, which was based on the fact that her first husband had been an intellectual.