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?”
Nat said, “No, I just walked in the front door. Nobody heard me.” He seated himself at the breakfast table and said, “Could I have some breakfast?”
“Of course,” Fay said, showing no surprise at seeing him. Why should she? But she did not even go through the motions of pretending, of asking him why he had come over so early… after all, nobody comes calling at seven-thirty in the morning.
I put out an extra plate and silverware and cup for him, and presently there he was eating with us, having his grapefruit and cereal and toast and bacon and eggs. He had quite an appetite, as always; he really enjoyed the food that he got to eat, the food that Charley Hume sick in the hospital provided.
As soon as I had cleared the table and done the dishes I went off into my room and sat down on my bed to record, in my notebook, the fact that Nathan Anteil had spent the night.
Later in the morning, after Nat had departed and I was busy sweeping the patio, Fay approached me. “Did it bother you,” she said, “fixing breakfast for him?”
“No,” I said.
With ill-concealed agitation, she hung around me as I worked. Suddenly she burst out in her impatient manner, “You’re no doubt conscious that he spent the night in the study. He was working on a paper last night and he couldn’t make it home he was so tired, so I — said, you can sleep in the study. It’s perfectly all night, but when you go down to visit Charley don’t say anything to him; it might get him all upset for nothing.”
I nodded as I worked.
“Okay?” she said.
“It’s none of my business,” I said. “It’s not my house.”
“True,” she said. “But you’re such a horse’s ass there’s no telling what you might do.”
To that, I said nothing. But as I worked I was busy constructing, in my head, a more vivid method of presenting the true facts to Charley. A dramatization, such as you see on tv when they are showing the effects of, say, Anacin or aspirin. Something to really drive the message home to him.
( eleven )
In Nat Anteil’s mind a suspicion had appeared, and he could do nothing to get rid of it. It seemed to him that Fay Hume had gotten herself involved with him because her husband was dying and she wanted to be sure that, when he did die, she would have another man to take his place.
But, he thought, what’s so bad about that? Is it unnatural for a woman who has two children to take care of, plus a big house, plus all those animals and all that land, to want a man to take the responsibility off her shoulders?
It was the deliberateness of it that bothered him. She had seen him, selected him, and set about getting him despite the fact that he was married and had a life already planned for himself. It did not matter to her that he wanted to get his degree and support himself and his wife in the modest fashion that he now engeged in; she saw him only as a support to her life. On at least that was his suspicion. He could not pin her down; she appeared genuinely emotionally involved with him, possibly even against her will. After all, she was taking a terrible risk,jeopardizing her house and home, her whole life, by her meetings with him.
He thought, When it comes down to it, I don’t fully understand her. I have no way of knowing how deliberately she acts, how conscious she is of the consequences of her actions. On the surface she seems impatient, childish, wanting something in the immediate present, with no concern for the future. She plays for the short haul. Admit. tedly, she saw me and Gwen and wanted to meet us; there’s never been any doubt of that. And she herself admits that she’s selfish, that she’s used to having her own way. That if she’s denied something she has a tantrum. Hen having an affair with me –when she’s a social pillar of the community, owns such a large and important home, here, knows everyone, has two children in school– proves how short-sighted she is. Is this the action of a woman thinking about long-term consequences?