So much fun to be with, he thought. She finds so much in each situation. As they drove along she spotted so many things that he missed… she lived so much more fully. Of course, she lived only in the present. And she had no ability to reflect. Or, for that matter, to read thoroughly or to contemplate. She had a limited span of attention, like a child. But, unlike a child—very unlike a child—she had the ability to pursue a goal over a long period of time … and once again he found himself wondering, How long a period? Years? All her life? Does she even give up, when she wants something?
He had the intuition that she never did give up, that when she appeared to yield, she was only biding her time.
And we’re all things that she wants or doesn’t want, he thought. I happen to be a thing she wants; she wants me as her husband.
Aren’t I lucky? Isn’t it possible that a man could have a fuller, happier life being used by an exciting woman like this, rather than living out his own drab, limited life? Isn’t this the trend in our society, the new role for men to play? Is it necessary that I pursue the goals I set for myself, by myself? Can’t I accede and permit another person, a more vital, active person to set goals for me?
What’s so wrong with that?
And yet he did feel it was wrong. Even in small matters… when, for instance, at the dinner table she served him salad, which he did not like, because she believed that he should eat salad. She did not serve him what he wanted; even in this she treated him as a child and served him what he ought to eat.
“Potatoes have vitamins and minerals in them,” Elsie had informed him. And both girls, playfully, called him a “nice big boy.” The biggest boy—the only boy—that ate dinner with them. Not actually a Daddy at all. Not like the man in the hospital.
I wonder if I’ll wind up hitting her, he thought. He had never in his life hit a woman; and yet, he already sensed that Fay was the kind of woman who forced a man into hitting her. Who left him no alternative. No doubt she failed to see this; it would not be to her advantage to see this. -
And his heart attack, he thought. When the time comes that I’ve given her what she wants, when she gets tired of me, on afraid of me, and wants to get rid of me, will I have a heart attack, too?
To some extent he felt afraid of her.
If she could get me to go this far, he thought, risk losing my wife, have an affair with her, then surely she could get me to go the rest of the way. Why not? Divorce Gwen and marry her. Assuming of course that Charley had been disposed of more permanently. And if I didn’t want to go through with it, if, at any time, I tried to shake loose.
I wouldn’t have much luck, he thought.
Let’s face it it’s probably too late now. I couldn’t break loose from her now.
But why not? All I’d have to do is simply stop seeing her. Am I so weak that I couldn’t go through with it?
Somewhere, he decided, Fay would find some means of drawing him back if she wished to. Some evening she would call up and say something, ask for something, and he would not be able to refuse; that is, he would not want to refuse.
Such a peculiar person, he thought. So complex. On the one hand she seems so agile, so athletic, and yet I’ve seen her appear so awkward that it embarrassed me. She gives the impression of a hand, worldly adroitness, and in some situations she’s like an adolescent: rigid, with ancient, middle class attitudes, unable to think for herself, falling back on the old verities. – .a victim of her family teaching, shocked by what shocks people, wanting what people usually want. She wants a home, a husband, and her idea of a husband is a man who earns a certain amount of money, helps around the garden, does the dishes … the idea of a good husband that’s found in cartoons in This Week magazine; a viewpoint from the most ordinary stratum, that great ubiquitous world of bourgeois family life, transmitted from generation to generation. Despite her wild language.
Just a little housewife—she had called herself that, one day, while she was taking off her clothes to go to bed with him. One afternoon, while her brother was off somewhere, in Petaluma, shopping. He had laughed to hear her call herself that.
Why am I so drawn to her? he wondered. Physical attractiveness? In the past he had never been drawn to thin women, and admittedly she was thin; sometimes she appeared even scrawny. Was it, perhaps, those middle class values? It seemed to him that there was, in her, something sturdy and sensible. Possibly I admire those values, he thought. I feel she’d make a good wife because she does believe as she does, because she is so middle class. This is a very unrevolutionany, conservative matter. Marriage is a conservative matter.
On some deep level I trust her, he decided. That is, I trust the training that has been inscribed on her, the heritage. Things that she did not invent and does not greatly control. Yet, she grasps that underneath all her flamboyance she’s quite an ordinary person—in the finest possible sense. She is not attractive because she is unusual and exciting but because she has found something exciting in the ordinary—that is, in herself.
To her, he said, “You’re a square. Aren’t you?”
Fay said, “Didn’t you know that? Good god, what did you think I was? A Beatnik?”
“Why are you interested in me?” he demanded.
“Because you’re good husband material,” Fay said. “I’m being very shrewd; there’s nothing romantic in this.”
That left him without a retort. Leaning back, balancing herself against the rock, she closed her eyes and enjoyed the sun, the racket of the surf, while he worried. They spent the remainder of the afternoon that way.
12
On Friday, in spite of my sister cursing me out in her usual terms, I walked up the road to Inverness Park to Claudia Hambro’s house and attended the meeting of the group.
The house had been built in one of the canyons, halfway up the side, on one of the twisting roads too narrow for cars to pass. The outside of the house had a damp appearance, as if the wood, in spite of paint, had absorbed moisture from the ground and trees. Most of the houses built in the canyons never dried off. Ferns grew on all sides of the Hambro house, some of them so tall and so densely packed in against the sides of the house that they seemed to be consuming the house. Actually the house was big: three stories, with a railed porch running along one side of it. But the foliage caused it to blend back into the canyon wall and become indistinct. I saw several cans parked in front of it, on the shoulder of the road, and that was how I knew where to go.
Mrs. Hambno met me at the front door. She wore Chinese silk trousers and slippers, and her hair, this time, had been tied back in a black, shiny rope, like a pigtail; it hung all the way down to her waist. Her fingernails, I noticed, had been lacquered silver and were long and sharp. She had on quite a bit of make-up; her eyes seemed extra dank and enlarged, and her lips so red as to be almost brown.
Two glass doors, propped back with books, let me into the living room, which had walls and ceiling of black wood, with bookcases everywhere, and chairs and couches, with a fireplace at one end over which the Hambnos had hung a Chinese tapestry showing the branch of a tree and a mountain in the distance. Six on seven people sat about on the chains. As I walked around I noticed a tape recorder and a number of spools of tape, plus quite a few copies of Fate magazine, a magazine devoted to unusual scientific facts.
The people in the room seemed tense, and considering why we had come I could not blame them. Mrs. Hambro introduced me to them. One man, elderly, with rustic-looking clothes, worked at the hardware store in Point Reyes. A second man, she told me , was a carpenter from Inverness. The last man was almost as young as I, a blond-haired man weaning slacks and loafers, his hair cut short. According to Mrs. Hambro he owned a small dairy farm up the coast on the other side of the bay near Marshall. The other people were women. One, huge and well-dressed, in her middle fifties, was the wife of the man who owned the coffee shop in Inverness Park. Another was the wife of a technician from the RCA transmitter out on the Point. Another was the wife of a garage mechanic at Point Reyes Station.