“Are you going?” Fay said.
“Maybe so,” I said, feeling embarrassed to admit it.
“I knew this would happen,” was all she would say. For the nest of the evening she refused to say another word to me; in fact it wasn’t until the next morning, when she wanted me to go down to the Mayfair and shop for her, that she said anything to me.
“Her whole family’s that way,” Fay said. At the closet she was putting on her suede leather jacket. “Her sister, her father, her aunt—it’s in their blood. Listen, insanity is an infection. Look how it’s infected this whole area, all around Tomales Bay, here. A whole group of people being influenced by that nut. When I first met her three years ago I thought, My god, what an attractive woman. She really is beautiful. She looks like some jungle princess on something. But she impressed me as cold. She has no emotions. She has no capacity to feel normal human emotions. Here she’s got six kids and yet she hates kids; she has no love for them or for Ed. And she’s always pregnant. She’s nuts. It’s the two-year-old mind that controls the world.”
I said nothing.
“She looks like some successful Marin County upper middle class suburban housewife that gives barbecue parties,” Fay said. “And instead she’s a grade A nut.”
Opening the front door she started out.
“I’m going down to San Francisco,” she said. “And visit Charley. You be sure and be here when the girls get home. You know how scared they are to get home and find nobody here.”
“Right,” I said. Since their father’s heart attack, both children had had a lot of anxiety during the night, bad dreams for instance, and spells of unmanageability. And Elsie had begun to wet her bed again. Both girls now asked for a bottle each night before going to bed. That probably had a good deal to do with the bed-wetting.
I knew that in actuality she was not going down to San Francisco to see Charley but was going to meet Nat Anteil, probably somewhere between Point Reyes and Mill Valley, possibly in Fairfax, and have lunch with him. They had been having trouble meeting each other, since his wife Gwen had become suspicious of the time they spent together and had insisted on accompanying him over in the evenings. Since his wife no longer permitted him to visit Fay by himself, he and Fay were up against it.
And in a small town where everybody knows everybody, it is very hard, if not impossible, to have a secret relationship. If you go into a bar with somebody else’s wife, you are recognized by everyone who is there, and the next day it’s written up in the Baywood Press. If you stop to buy gas, Earl Frankis, who owns the Standard Station, recognizes your car and you. If you go into the post office, you are recognized because the post master knows everyone in the area; it’s his job. The barber notices you as you walk by his window. The man in the feed store sits at his desk watching the street all day long. All the clerks at the Mayfair Market know everyone, since everyone charges there. So Fay and Nat had to meet outside the area if they were going to meet at all. And if their relationship became a matter of public knowledge, it was not my fault.
However, they had done fairly well in keeping it under cover. When I was downtown shopping, I didn’t hear anybody discussing it, either at the Mayfair or the post office or the drug stone. Several people asked me how Charley was. So they had been discreet. After all, even Nat’s wife was ignorant. All she knew for sure was that he and Fay had been together at Fay’s house several times, and no doubt Nat had told her that I was present, and possibly the two girls. Possibly he and Fay had even concocted a story to explain it—Fay had a set of the Britannica, for instance, and the big Webster’s dictionary, and Nat could always say that he was over using her various reference books. And she had already given the pretext that she needed help with her checkbook. And everybody in north west Marin County knew that Fay called up everyone and asked them for favors; she made use of everybody she met, and the sight of Nat Anteil driving over to her house or being driven over might stir no comment, as such, because he simply became another person ensnared, doing her work for her while she sat out on the patio and smoked and read the New Yorker.
The real fact was that for all her energetic bouncing around, her scaling cliffs and gardening and badminton playing, my sister has always been lazy. If she could she would sleep until noon. Hen idea of work is to spend two evenings a week—four hours—shaping clay pots, something that the Bluebirds did in the afternoon with about as much effort—and to them it was considered fun. The house had six or seven statues that Fay had made, and to me they looked like nothing on earth. Building a trf tuner, in my high school days, I used to spend whole days, ten hours without interruption. I never saw Fay spend more than an hour at any one thing; after that she became bored, stopped, did something else. For instance, she could not bear to iron clothes. It was too tedious for her. She wanted me to try my hand, but I simply couldn’t get the hang of it, and so it had to be taken down to San Rafael to a laundry there. Her idea of work, of creative work, was derived from the progressive nursery schools that she had gone to as a child in the ‘thirties. She had never had to work, as I had done and still do.
But I did not object to doing her work for her, as Charley did and, to some extent, Nat did. I could not be sure how Nat felt, or if he understood that in addition to her having an emotional relationship with him she was also employing him as she employed everyone else around her. In fact, she employed her children. She had persuaded them that it was their job to fix their breakfasts on Saturday and Sunday morning, and until I came she simply refused to cook breakfast for them on the weekends, no matter how hungry they got. Usually they had fixed themselves cocoa and jelly sandwiches and gone off to watch tv until afternoon. I put an end to that, of course, preparing for them an even heartier breakfast than I did on weekdays. It seemed to me that on Sunday especially they should have a really important breakfast, and so I fixed waffles for them, with bacon; sometimes nut waffles, or strawberry waffles—in other words, something that constituted a genuine Sunday breakfast. Charley, too, before his heart attack, appreciated this. Fay, however, complained that I was fixing so much food that she was becoming fat. She actually became irritable when she appeared at the breakfast table and found that instead of grape juice and toast and coffee and applesauce I had prepared bacon and eggs or hash and eggs and cereal and rolls. It made her angry because she wanted to eat it, and having no capacity to deny herself anything, she sooner on later ate what I had fixed, her lower lip stuck out with petulance throughout the meal.
One morning when I got up as usual before anyone else—about seven o’clock—and walked from my bedroom into the kitchen to open the drapes and put on water for Fay’s coffee and generally begin fixing breakfast, I saw that the door to the study had been shut and and locked from the other side. I knew that it had been locked,just to see it, because unless the lock is thrown the door hangs open slightly. Somebody had to be in there, and I suspected that it was Nat Anteil. Sure enough, about seven-thirty when the girls had gotten up and Fay was combing their hair, Nat appeared from the front part of the house.
“Hi,” he said to us.
The girls stared at him, and then Elsie said, “Where did you come from? Did you sleep here last night?”