Exposition, Chapter 9 (p. 174-183)

They decided to take a short break and sat on the grass of a shaded area by the stream's side. Steinbeck waited to see if anybody else had anything to say, then resumed his story.

"I think Fate must have some mechanism of sliding balances, because that next summer another woman came, and it must have seemed an omen to Nathaniel, who had watched so many years pass bringing only men. The impression must have been doubled by the fact that this next woman was almost an exact opposite from Charlotte.

"She was quiet and reserved. She seemed to have one of those codes of conduct that dictates that anything fun must disguise some evil impulse. I can't say whether her morals were religion-based or not, but if they were, it's likely that she saw our lifestyle as a prime point of entrance for the devil and herself as a kind of missionary saving us through conversion. At least that's the only way that I've found to explain her remaining here for more than a day or two, because she was humorless and uninterested in philosophical discussion.

"Her age was difficult to determine. Her behavior bespoke an older woman preparing for the grave and its posthumous rewards, but on the other hand, she was gorgeous, and that made her look very young, since we tend to attribute beauty instinctively to youth, as we attribute truth inherently to beauty until we are proven wrong."

"Well the young do, anyways," interrupted Huck.

"Perhaps the elderly do, as well," D. defended the idea. "As one ages, youth must become a broader category, and beauty in an older person must make those who match his or her age feel younger by association."

Huck ceded the point. He was outnumbered.

"So while Nathaniel had been entirely prepared to deal with a whore, he was ill-fitted to handle what he got: a saint," Steinbeck continued. "It would be a lie to suggest that there were any of us who didn't have our secret fantasies about this newcomer. Men will often brag about lascivious intentions that they don't really have, but when faced with apparent purity, they will usually dream quietly of tearing it down. Very few will admit to this as a goal, perhaps, because it hides a jealousy and a malicious will to destroy that which they do not feel they themselves have. Or perhaps this is another lie, and they are reserved because they desire purity themselves and in their obtuseness feel as if their natural impulses make them inferior.

"Whatever the case, we all played our little games of flirtation, with the possible exception, again, of John, who seemed uninterested in the whole affair where it went beyond the benefit of persuading everybody to leave him to his business. Nathaniel played his hand by becoming quiet, almost pious, himself, but because that state of being was new to him, his behavior seemed surreptitious instead. He would often find excuses to break his silence to chide her about one thing or another. One day he found her alone in the central garden and said, 'Well, it seems apparent that you intend to stay for a while.'

"To which she responded coyly, 'I thought I might.'

"'Then you'll have to choose a name.'

"'Why? It's silly.'

"'It is not silly,' Nathaniel justified the tradition. 'It is an opportunity to pick a name that suits you. It can be a chance to be different, maybe even to finally be who you are.'

"'Aren't I who I am regardless of my name?'

"Nathaniel thought for a moment. 'It's hard to tell if a name affects who you become or if who you become affects what your name is thought to represent.'

"The woman smiled a smile which, though it may have been a trick of the light, seemed a shade sinister. 'Fine,' she said. 'Call me Lolita.'"

Steinbeck grinned at a chuckle from D.

"Despite, or perhaps in the face of, her new name, and I can tell that you appreciate the irony of it, Lolita became even more constrained around Nathaniel, almost to the point of coldness. Needless to say, this conduct infuriated and further intrigued Nathaniel until he seemed on the verge of insanity with it. Maybe he saw Charlotte's absence as a rejection and, since he had somehow come to expect lust and rejection in that order, felt that Lolita was unjustly rejecting him without the benefit of the lust.

"'Why did she choose that name, damn it?' he would often say. To tell the truth, the majority of us came to believe that the entire charade was no more than a game and that Lolita would eventually succumb to Nathaniel as we all, in our own ways, had done."

Standing up and brushing dirt and grass from his bottom, Huck suggested that they get moving. Without a significant break in the story, Steinbeck and D. agreed and followed him.

"With Charlotte, Nathaniel had convinced himself that a slut was pure and honest, and now in honesty and purity he heard a sensual promise. And because when the situation is taken in this way the futile games become just so much waiting, Nathaniel grew impatient.

"'I wish we could just skip all this nonsense, regardless of the ending,' he said. 'I could handle not having her if rejection didn't follow so much teasing. I wish she wouldn't play these games.'

"'Maybe she isn't playing any games,' John suggested.

"'Oh she is. She's hiding something, and I think she's being untrue to herself.'

"John didn't agree, but he was sick of the topic. The whole situation was an annoyance to him. He walked away, probably to find himself a bottle, and called back, 'I knew there would be trouble having a girl that pretty in our small community.'

"But none of it mattered to Nathaniel. He had written the story in advance and came to believe that he could hurry the inevitable climax if he could only better play his part, and for his part he took that of the doting courtier. He began following her around and servicing her, which, to a woman who saw herself in the service of a higher morality, must have seemed either to represent one successful convert, to be a reward for good work done and a helper toward a more rapid success, or simply to be inappropriate.

"There are events in our lives that, no matter how we try, we can never quite follow back to their beginnings. Sometimes the progression from one stage to another is so subtle that the climax comes before we've noticed the accumulating pressure. Sometimes there might not have been a gradual acclimation, and an event comes as tornadoes do, unpredictably because we haven't the perspective to see their beginnings below, above, or around us. One such event thrust out of Lolita and slashed open wounds which may never heal in any of us.

"I don't know what turmoil inside her spun its way through to her actions. Perhaps her purity had been a disguise or a method of suppressing a part of herself that she did not like. Maybe she discovered that, despite the sinfulness of it, she enjoyed the power that she had come to have over the Pequod, especially over Nathaniel. I believe that it is just a mild shift that turns an angel into a devil, because any true opposites must pivot on a single idea. And to ask why the change took place and why it went in the direction that it did is to wonder why a vast body of water swells out of season and picks its way randomly across a field, destroying one farm while irrigating another.

"It would be impossible for me to explain the circumstances that brought John and Lolita out into the woods together. I cannot fathom what he could have done to break her resistance or how she might have manipulated him as part of some secret plan. Nor do I understand how, with all these acres to wander, Holden came to be napping against a nearby tree, concealed by bushes. The real John Steinbeck thought of virtue as a constant across the human spectrum and sin as something that every generation must learn or invent. Perhaps it is learned by accident through misdeeds that adults consider themselves to be too late to suppress and that are discovered by the young, or perhaps the young misconstrue the significance of virtuous acts and invent sin in that way. I cannot pick and choose between these options because I do not know the thoughts of any of those involved. It is possible that Holden had stumbled upon a vile act that John and Lolita wished to conceal deep in the forest. Or it is equally possible that John and Lolita's lovemaking was as pure an act as can be, and it was Holden who, peering through the bush at the two naked bodies writhing against each other, witnessed an act that he did not understand, but that both titillated and disgusted him.

"If this last is the case, then it would seem that so much time of obscurity among the ranks had made him eager for a chance to stand out, even if in a negative way, and to effectuate a change. He sought no council but snuck away from the scene after he had taken what enjoyment he could from it and brought an anthill crashing down by telling Nathaniel what he had witnessed. But he couldn't have expected Nathaniel to react the way that he did.

I imagine Holden thought that the news would bring him into Nathaniel's consciousness and that Nathaniel would wait and take out whatever aggravation he had on John and Lolita. But Nathaniel was gone before the couple had returned. With a terrifying look at Holden, he stormed off, and none of us saw him for several days.

"The rest of us, having seen only Nathaniel's reaction to something Holden had told him, accosted the young man with our minds already set. We told him that it had been a cruel thing to do. But Holden chastised himself the hardest, and none of us were inclined to exacerbate his pain. Perhaps that is the reason he took on so, taking the blame entirely upon himself and pleading with us all to search for Nathaniel because the look on his face when he left would haunt him forever if anything disastrous happened.

"Martin was the first to exonerate Holden, because he was not used to being near somebody who was more vulnerable than himself. Huck, here, pointed out that Holden was only confused and fumbling between choices. Just when we had all calmed down as much as was possible, Huck went off looking for Nathaniel and John and Lolita returned. For Jake and Nick, the fire rekindled, and they raged. 'You knew how he felt about her,' said Jake to John. John merely shrugged and was wordlessly helpless. Holden looked at them as if ashamed. Martin stood in the corner watching the whole spectacle with detached interest.

"Again, the energy drained from those who were expending it. Huck returned after dark saying that Nathaniel had disappeared but would come back when he was ready. Late in the night, Lolita dressed in a white shroud that she had found somewhere. She walked barefoot down to that lake, filled the pockets with stones and swam out as far as she could. It must have taken a tremendous force of will because, though the stones in her pockets kept tugging her down, she wanted to make sure that she was far enough out that a spurt of indecision would be insufficient to regain the night air. As she died, she was thinking that she hoped her sacrifice was enough.

"When Nathaniel came back and was told about the tragedy, he began to cry and then forced himself to smile as if to reserve at least a little victory over death. To him, death was an enemy that he would one day defeat in a fair wrestling match, and he could not comprehend why somebody else would simply roll over.

"'You know,' he said to no one and everybody, 'it would have been possible for Charlotte to screw every man here, and I wouldn't have suspected or cared, because I didn't love her.'

"He started to walk toward his room, but Jake called his name. I think Jake wanted to say something beautiful and reassuring, but he just dropped his arms and put his chin to his chest. 'I'm sorry,' he said.

"We all knew that Nathaniel blamed himself, but I don't think that the fault lay with any of us. I think Lolita had been disgusted with herself long before any of us had met her, and now that others knew her shame, she understood that she had been correct all along — she was transparent and would never be able to hide her vain sinfulness."

The three came solemnly to D.'s rock. The afternoon had taken on a cool demeanor, and the woods were silent. D. regarded the stone and then turned to look for something familiar in the surrounding trees. "This way," she said. "I think."

When they had broken through the line of shrubbery that bordered the stream, D. turned her head to Steinbeck and asked, "So how does your story end?"

Steinbeck considered the question and laughed. "Well it hasn't ended yet; I'm still alive." Then he added, "And relatively young, as well."

"You know what I mean."

After nodding, Steinbeck confessed, "This story doesn't have a very satisfactory ending. I guess the only way to end it is with the end of that summer. It had come to a close quickly, but with the sweetness sucked out of it as with murky water at the bottom of a lake. I guess we were all anxious to turn the page and begin a new chapter. That's the real Steinbeck's sentiment, not mine, though I believe it's a good metaphor.

"Nathaniel's problems that summer were not so simply abated. They had seeped through the pages, as it were. Nathaniel, like many of Steinbeck's characters, and probably the author himself, was struggling with greatness. Steinbeck once wrote that 'a man's importance can be measured by the quality and number of his glories,' but 'glory' has always seemed to be too subjective and broad a concept by which to define the value of a human life.

"In Nathaniel's mind, he had caused Lolita's death. I don't know how he came to that conclusion, but he did come to it. Those last days of the summer, he tried with all his might to discern what sin Lolita had thought she had committed, because he believed that he was the one who had made an innocent impulse on her part seem sinful. Nathaniel had always been inclined to try for the larger picture of life, believing it to be dangerous to consider only specific aspects, but now, without knowing it, he was doing something exponentially more dangerous: peering only at one thing. One act. One line in what can only be handled safely with a view to the intertwining of many lines. No matter the path one takes, if that path is followed as far as it can be, we end where we began: with the choices made by the individual in a world of interaction. And none can shoulder the blame of others or fully understand their faults. We can only choose for ourselves.

"Huck once told me that it is too easy to follow the course of a group, be it society or religion or political party."

D. looked to Huck, but he showed no inclination to contradict Steinbeck this time.

"And as individuals, we are all responsible for our own lives, at the end of which we must look back and decide whether we labored for good or for evil. But we all want it to have been good, and here is where we must account for the group to measure how our conceptions of good and evil compare to those of others. There will always be somebody to contradict anything that we can possibly say, and since this is inevitably true, we have no string of constancy to which we can hold except to be honest always: to ourselves and to the world.

"To lie is to contradict any purpose that we could possibly believe that we have. Perhaps this can be the only test when we return, as we always do, to a heterogeneous society. No matter what we do, it cannot be good unless we are willing to share it with others. If we wish to hide it, we cannot truly believe in it ourselves. Maybe this is why so many are miserable in these days: too much time spent trying to justify lies so that we can never do anything but good in our own eyes. I think that it was the lie, whichever way it was directed, that killed Lolita. We're all suicidal in a way. How else can we explain modern society?

"I believe that this was the devil that Nathaniel battled for so long, and I think that at the end of that summer, he came to a point in his reasoning at which he realized that all of his reasoning and logic were the problem. One option is to struggle through it, thinking that it is just another of an endless series of problems to be worked out. Another option is to drop the whole thing by believing that finally your current conviction is the correct one. Nathaniel's conviction at the time was that humans can't choose to know everything; they can strive for it, but they'll never achieve it. But he believed that you can choose to know nothing. The former is to question why we are alive, and the latter is simply to live. This is the option that he chose for himself at that time.

"The day before I left, he said to me, 'I never saw either Charlotte or Lolita, because I created them. I used to be able to see through my expectations and see what really was. I have to find that again, and I think the answer might be to not look so hard. I never saw either of them. They were only ideas in my own head.'

"And it must have been a sad moment watching them go, his ideas, as he closed the door on them. But, like death, it is only a momentary pain, for once you've turned the bolt, you forget why you had opened the door at all. Nathaniel built a wall in his head that could not be passed in either direction, and only time would tell if the wall would prove to be a tomb or a cocoon.

"For my own part, I disagreed, and I told him as much when I said to him that perhaps the only thing to which we have an undeniable right is experience and asked him what value there could be to experience without learning."

As Steinbeck voiced this question, a glint of light came through the shrubbery and D. gasped. "I didn't realize that it was so close!"

They pushed through a final thicket, and there, where she had left it, was D.'s car. She walked around it and inspected the outside, then turned to Huck and Steinbeck with a look of childlike joy.

"Well," said Steinbeck.

"So I s'pose this is it," said Huck.

"Yes," D. told him, "I guess it is."

She took her keys from her pocket.

"How 'bout a g'dbye hug'n'kiss?"

Tearing, but not knowing why, D. complied. Then, without a word, she turned back to her car and put the key in the lock on the door. There was an unreasonably loud click as the door unlocked. Steinbeck and Huck looked at each other, waved to D., and turned to leave.

"Wait!" D. called after them. "You haven't finished your story yet."

Steinbeck, taking a moment to realize that the call was to him said, "Yes, I think I have."

"No, you haven't. You have to tell me what words of wisdom Nathaniel offered you in response to your question."

Steinbeck smiled. "Oh." He shrugged the implication that they hadn't been significant words. "Only that he would get well. Then he repeated it, 'I will get well. I haven't the right to do otherwise.'"

With that, Steinbeck, then Huck, turned and walked back toward the grumbling of the brook. D. opened her car door, and the hot, stagnant air of civilization rushed out to her. On the passenger seat was the duffel bag full of the clothes that she had told John negated her need to follow him home.

The wind has picked up, and the sky is darkening to the far west, bringing the brook's children so they can fall to earth and cause her to overflow and grace the legs of the trees. The trees will brighten at the renewed youth of their company, and Summer will begin.

But we never leave our routines in the simple hopes of breaking our routines. We leave for the promise of difference, in the hope of something new, and, ultimately, to increase our store of stories.