And yet, he thought, I consider myself a mature and responsible person, and I’m involved with her. I have a wife, a family, a careen to think about, yet I’m jeopardizing everything in this involvement; I’m throwing away the future –possibly– for something in the present.
Can we know our own motives?
He thought, Actually a human being is an unfolding biological organism that’s every so often gripped by instinctive forces. He can’t perceive the purpose of those forces, what their goal is. All he’s conscious of is the stress they put on him, the pressure. They force him to do something. But why … he can’t tell that at the time. Perhaps later. Someday I may look back and see exactly why I got involved with Fay Hume, and why she risked everything to get involved with me.
Anyhow, he thought, I have this conviction that whatever the reason, it’s some deeply serious, deeply responsible calculated matter, and not the caprice of the moment. She knows what she’s doing, better than I.
And, he thought, she’s using me; she’s the prime mover in this, has always been, and I’m nothing but her instrument. So what does that make me? Where does that put me? Is my life to be turned to the serving of another person, a woman who is determined to keep her family on a sound operating basis and doesn’t mind breaking up somebody else’s marriage, future, dreams, so that she can accomplish it?
But if she’s not conscious of this, if she’s acting instinctively, can I hold her morally responsible?
Am I thinking like the college boy that I am?
For days now he had tormented himself with such notions. And he seemed to be getting himself deeper into the circular swamp of pure reasoning. It was his philosophy class all over again, where debate led not to solution on insight but to further and further debate. Words begat words. Thoughts begat a feverish preoccupation with thinking, with logic as such.
Who would know? Fay? Her brother? Charley?
Surely if anybody knows, it would be Charley Hume, lying there in his hospital bed.
Or, Nat thought, maybe he never worked it out either. From what Fay had said, apparently Charley had been ambivalent toward her, sometimes loving her with hopeless devotion, sometimes feeling so trapped, so victimized and degraded, so turned into a thing, that he had bounced one thing after another off her head. Charley, lying in the hospital, knew no more than he ever had; he had a dim intuition –at times– that his wife had used him to build a grand new house for her own purposes, that she used her children, too, and everyone else, but then that intuition faded out and he was left with his frantic love for her. Wasn’t this a historic pattern between men and women? Women got the upper hand indirectly, through cunning.
And the trouble is, he realized, once you get started thinking along these lines, once you start looking for indications that you are being used, you can find evidence everywhere. Paranoia. If she asks you to drive her to Petaluma to pick up a hundred pound sack of duck feed, which she obviously can’t lift herself, is that a sign that you are no longer a man, a human being, but merely a machine capable of picking up a hundred pounds and thrusting it into the back of the car?
Doesn’t everybody pick their friends because they’re useful to them? Doesn’t a man marry a woman who flattens him, does things for him such as cooking, buying him clothes? Isn’t that natural? Is love natural when it binds together people who otherwise would be of no practical value to each other?
On and on he reasoned.
One Sunday afternoon he and Fay drove out to the Point, to the McClure’s ranch. This area might someday become a state park, this wild, moon-like plateau that dropped off at the ocean’s edge, one of the most desolate parts of the United States, with weather unlike that of any other part of California. For now however it belonged to the various branches of the McClure family and was used, like most of the land of the Point, for the raising of top-grade dairy herds. The McClures had already donated a stretch of coast to the state and this had been made into a public beach. But the state wanted the rest of their ranch. The McClures loved the area, loved their ranch, and the fight over the land had gone on for some time, with the issue still in doubt. Almost everyone in the area wanted to see the McClures keep their ranch.
At the moment it required a friendship with somebody in the McClure family to get permission to cross the ranch to the coast. The road through the ranch –perhaps twelve miles in length– consisted of crushed red gravel, deeply rutted from winter rains. A car that slipped into a nut on into the pasture became mired. And there were no phones by which to call the AAA.
As they drove, bouncing along, the car sliding from side to side, Nat became more and more conscious of their isolation out here. If anything happened to them they could get no help. On each side of the road semi-wild cattle roamed. He saw no telegraph poles, no wires on signs of electricity. Only the rocky, rolling grass hills. Somewhere ahead was the ocean and the end of the road. He had never been out here. Fay of course had, several times, driven out here to collect abalone. The road did not seem to bother her; at the wheel she drove confidently, chatting with him about various matters.
“The trouble with owning a VW or any sports can up here,” she told him, “ is that if you hit a deer, you get flipped. You’re dead. On a cow. Some of those cows weigh as much as a
To him that seemed an exaggeration. But he said nothing. The ride had made him carsick and he felt like a child again, being driven by his mother.
In some respects that epitomized his problem with her. She had an attitude toward men like that of a mother toward children; she took it for granted that men were frailen, shorten-lived, less good at solving problems than women. A myth of the times, he realized. All consumer goods are aimed at a female market . – . women hold the purse-strings and the manufacturers know that. On tv dramas, women are shown as the responsible ones, with men being foolish Dagwood Bumsteads…
I went to so much trouble, he thought, to break away from my family –in particular my mother– and get off on my own, to be economically independent, to establish my own family. And now I’m mixed up with a powerful, demanding, calculating woman who wouldn’t bat an eye at putting me back in that old situation again. In fact it would seem perfectly natural to her.
Whenever they went out somewhere in public together, Fay always took a long look in advance at his choice of clothes. She made it her business to see if she approved. “Don’t you think you should put on a tie?” she would say. It never occurred to him to pass judgment on what she wore, to tell her for example that he thought shorts and a halter should not be worn into a supermarket, or that a suede leather coat, chartreuse slacks, dark glasses, and sandals constituted a grotesque outfit, not worthy of being worn anywhere. If she wore colors that clashed, he simply accepted it as part of her; he took it as a postulate of her existence.
The rutted rock trails along which they drove ended at a cypress grove on the edge of the ocean cliffs. In the center of the grove he saw a small old farmhouse, well-kept, with a garden and palm tree in front of it, and side buildings that looked much older than any he had seen in California except for the Spanish adobe buildings which of course wene now all historical monuments. The farmhouse and side buildings –unlike other farm buildings he had seen– were painted a dark color. The garden, too, had a brown quality, and the palm tree had the thick, hairy quality usual with trees of its kind. The buildings seemed deserted, so completely so that he wondered if anyone had been there in the last month. But everything had remained in good order. Here, so far away from cans and people, no one came to do any damage. Even marauders were absent, this far out.
“Some of these buildings are a hundred years old,” Fay told him as she drove the car from the road –it ended at a closed gate– and onto a small grassy field. At a barbed wire fence she stopped and shut off the motor. “We walk from here,” she said.