“How would you feel about using my money?” she said.
“How would you feel?” he said.
“It wouldn’t bother me. Money is money, nothing more. It would be money I got from him.”
He said, “Suppose something went wrong and you didn’t get it. You wound up with no money, with only my means of support.”
“You could stop your studying,” she said. “Go to work fulltime. Couldn’t you earn enough in the real estate game to support us? I know a man, a San Francisco man, who earns about fourteen thousand a year in real estate. Men make fortunes in real estate.” She went on, then, to tell him of all the deals, all the quick riches and comfortable livings that she had heard about among realtors and land speculators. Her apartment building in Tampa, for instance. It had cost them almost nothing. Charley was very good at picking up property cheap… their ten acres here in Marin County hadn’t set them back, much, and at one time they had had options on all sorts of acreage around Marin County, including some very choice land.
“I think,” he said, “I’d be a lot better off ultimately if I went on and got my degree.”
“Oh balls,” she said. “My god, I’ve got a BA and I couldn’t eann a nickel with it; I tried. I wasn’t qualified for any high-paying jobs, any professional jobs, and when I applied for the usual stuff they give to business school graduates –typing and shorthand stuff, office stuff– they were suspicious of me because I had a degree. They told me I ‘wouldn’t be happy.’ That was before I was married, of course. I’d rather be dead than work in an office, now that I’ve had a chance to live a really happy life. I love it up here in the country; this is such a beautiful area. I wouldn’t go back to the city for anything in the world. It would kill me.”
He thought, The message is clear. She wouldn’t make any attempt to put me through school. She wouldn’t permit any drop in her standard of living. She wouldn’t even be willing to leave Marin County or her house; she would want –expect– to go on exactly as she is, but with me instead of Charley as her husband.
In fact, she would get everything she’s gotten from Charley, but without Charley. He’s the only pant she doesn’t care for. She’d like to have me in his place. But everything else the same.
We wouldn’t have a combined life, a mutual life. I’d simply be fitted into a slot from which Charley got jerked out. I’d enter her life and occupy a certain area.
But, he thought, would it be so terrible a life?
The house was far more of a house than any he could hope to buy or build or rent on own by himself, with his limited wage-earning capacity. And she was certainly an exceptional person. She made a superb companion to a man; she swore, she climbed, she played games– she was willing to try anything. She had a real sense of adventure, of exploration.
One day they had gone together up to the oyster beds to buy a quart of fresh oysters. When she had seen the oyster boat, and the rakes, she had immediately wanted to go out and be with the men gathering the oysters; she asked what time the boat left –it was a barge, carrying two on three men, plus their equipment– and if she could go along. All of them, the Mexican oyster-opener, the tough-looking owner, and himself — they had all been impressed by this slim woman who had no compunction, no anxiety.
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.