(five)
The boy and girl, in rust-colored turtle necked wool sweaters and jeans, rested their bikes against the pharmacy building and leaned against each other. The girl lifted a finger and brushed a speck from the boy’s eye. She and the boy conferred at their leisure. Her face, in profile, with its ringlets of chestnut hair, was like the profile on an earlier coin, possibly a coin from the ‘twenties or the turn of the century… .an archaic profile, the face of allegory: mild, introspective, impersonal, gentle. The boy’s hair had been cut to the shape of his head, a black cup. Both he and the girl were slender. He stood slightly taller.
Beside him, Fay watched through the windshield of the car as the boy and girl moved away together. “I have to know them,” she said. “I think I’ll get out and go ask them to come up to the house and have a martini.” She started to open the car door. “Aren’t they beautiful?” she said. “Like something out of Nietzsche.” Her face had become remorseless; she would not let them get away, and he saw her keeping her eyes on them, not losing sight of them. She had them in view; she had located them. “You stay here,” she said, stepping onto the ground and starting to close the car door after her; her purse, from its leather strap, swung against the car. As she started off her prescription-ground sunglasses fell from her arms, to the gravel parking lot. With haste she snatched them back up, hardly noticing if the lenses remained intact. So concerned was she with making contact with the boy and girl that she began to lope. And yet she retained her grace, the poise of her lean legs. She ran after them with consciousness of herself; she kept in mind what impression her appearance would make on them and on the other people who might be watching.
Leaning out of the car, he called after her, “wait.”
Fay paused questioningly, with impatience.
“Come back,” he said, in a false tone of voice, making it sound as if she were going in to shop and he had remembered some item.
Her head shook, gesturing no.
“Come on,” he repeated, this time stepping out.
Without moving toward him or any farther away she waited as he approached her. “God damn you, you motherfucker,” she said, as he got up to her. “They’re going to get on their god damn bikes and peddle away.”
“Let them,” he said. “We don’t know them.” Her determined interest in them, the extent of the fascination that showed on her face, had made him suspicious. “What do you care about them?” he demanded. “They’re just kids — no more than eighteen at the most. Probably up for a swim in the bay.”
“I wonder if they’re brother and sister,” Fay said. “On if they’re married and on their honeymoon. They can’t live around here. They must be just visiting. I wonder who would know them. Did you see which way they came from? From which end of town?” She watched the boy and girl peddle off up the hill of highway One. “Maybe they’re on a bicycle tour of the United States,” she said, shading her eyes to see.
Having lost them, she got back into the car with him. As they drove home she conjectured.
“I can ask Pete the Postmaster,” she said. “He’d know them if anybody does. Or Florence Rhodes.”
“God damn you,” he said, “what do you want to meet them for? You intend to screw them? Which? Both?”
“They’re so pretty,” Fay said. “They’re like something that dropped out of the sky; I have to know them or perish.” She spoke in a flat, harsh voice, with no sentimentality. “The next time I see them I’m going up to them and tell them point blank that I can’t stand not to know two such fascinating people, and who the hell are they and why.”
“I guess you’re pretty lonely up here,” he said presently, feeling indignation and melancholy. “Living up in the country where there’s nothing to do and nobody worth knowing.”
“I just don’t intend to overlook a chance to meet somebody,” Fay said. “Would you? If you were me? You know I like to have people over at dinnertime — otherwise it’s nothing but child-feeding and dishwashing and mat-wiping and garbage-disposing.”
He said, “You crave society.”
At that, his wife laughed. “I crave it like crazy. I’m almost out of my mind for it. That’s why I spend most of my time in the garden. That’s why I always go running around in blue jeans.”
“You Marin County society matrons,” he said, halfjoking, half with wrath. “Sipping coffee and gossiping.”
“Is that how you see me?”
“Ex college queen,” he said. “Ex sorority girl marries well-to-do man, moves to Marin County, starts modern dance group.” He saw, to their right, the white clapboard three-story hall in which the dance group met. “Culture to the farmers and milkers,” he said.
“Kiss my ass,” Fay said. And after that neither of them said anything; they stared ahead, ignoring each other until he had entered the driveway and was parking.
“One of the girls left the door open,” Fay said in a low voice as she stepped from the car. The front door of the house stood open, and the collie’s tail could be seen. Without waiting for him she walked away and into the house, leaving him by himself.
It bothers me, he thought. Her reaction to those two young people. Because — why? Shows something is lacking. She doesn’t get something she should get.
True, he thought. Neither of us do. We both crave it… he had first noticed the boy and girl himself, had called his wife’s attention to them. The soft fluffy sweaters. Warm colors. The pure skin, such freshness. What had they conversed about in such low tones? The girl stroking the boy’s face, soothing and cherishing him… deep in their combined world, while standing before the Tomales Bay Pharmacy, in the middle of Saturday afternoon, with the sun shining down. And neither of them perspiring … –
Barely touched by us, he thought. Not even aware. We’re shadows drifting around, going nowhere.
The next day, while he was in the post office buying stamps, he saw the boy and girl again. This time he had driven down alone, leaving Fay home. He saw them, with their bikes, at the corner, apparently trying to decide on something; they had stopped on the curb.
An impulse came to him to stroll out of the post office and up to them. Lost? he would ask. Trying to find some house in particular? No street numbers; too small a town.
But he did not. He remained in the post office. And presently they pushed their bikes from the curb, into the street, and wheeled off out of sight.
At that he felt empty.
Too bad, he thought. Opportunity missed. If Fay had been here, out the door she would have gone. That’s the difference between us; I would think of it, she’d do it. Be doing it while I was trying to figure out how to do it. Just start doing it — she wouldn’t think.
That’s what I admire about her, he thought. Where she’s superior to me. Now, that time… when I met her. I would just have stood there forever, staring at her, wishing I knew her. But she started talking to me, asked about the can. Without hesitation.
It occurred to him that if Fay hadn’t started up a conversation with him that day in the grocery store, back in 1951, they never would have met. They wouldn’t be married now; there would be no Bonnie and Elsie; no house; he wouldn’t even be living in Marin County. She makes life over, he realized. She controls life, whereas I just sit on my can and let it happen to me.
God, he thought. And she’s certainly got firm control of me; didn’t she engineer this whole business? Get me, get the house?
All the money I earn, he thought, goes into maintaining that damn house and everything in it. It drains, it absorbs. Devours me and everything I make. And who gets the benefit from it? Not me.
Like the time she got rid of my cat. He had found the cat hiding in a supply shed down at the plant, and for almost a year he had fed it in the office, buying cat food for it and giving it scraps brought back to the office from his lunch. It had been a large fuzzy gray and white cat, a male, and in the year it had become devoted to him, tagging around after him, which amused both him and his employees. It never paid attention to anyone else. One day Fay had stopped by the office for something and had seen the cat, had noticed its devotion to him.