“Yes,” he said.
She went on, “Force you to stay in the real estate business when you actually want to –” She hesitated. “Go on into a profession. Whatever it is.” Her eyes twinkling, she said, “What did you say you wanted to be?”
“Maybe a lawyer,” he said.
“Oh god, then you could sue me,” she said.
“I want to marry you,” he said. “I want to divorce Gwen and marry you.”
“What’ll we do with Charley?”
“Can’t you ask him for a divorce?” he said, feeling the tension everywhere in him.
Fay said, “It’s wrong. I know it’s bourgeois of me — it shows what a bourgeois nogoodnick I am. I just feel divorce is wrong; a marriage is for life.”
“Well,” he said, feeling futile, “then that’s that.”
“I guess that’s misplaced loyalty,” she said. “But I can’t help it. When I married him I married him for better or worse; I took those words seriously.”
He said, “So the only way you could leave him would be if he died.”
“If he died,” she said, “I’d have to remarry. For the girls’ sake. They need a father; it’s the father who establishes the authority in the home. He relates the family to the outer world, to society. The mother does nothing but keep everyone fed and clothed and warm.”
After a pause, with some trepidation, he said, “Why don’t you ask him?”
“Ask him what?”
“Which he’d prefer,” he said, feeling that he was making a mistake to say it, but, at the same time, wanting to say it to her. “Being dead on being divorced.”
At that, she got the fierce, cold look that he had seen only once or twice before. But when she spoke her voice was completely under control, as calm as he had even heard it. It had, in fact, a deeply national tone to it, as if she were speaking out of the depths of her wisdom and experience, from the most educated part of her. Not from emotion at all, but from the most widely-accepted, the most incontrovertible knowledge. “Well,” she said, “it’s a lot to ask a man, to take on the responsibility for children, especially another man’s children. I don’t blame you. You have a relatively easy life, as it is. In the long run I doubt if you could sustain this family. I’d really have to be married to a man who could support me. Let’s face it. You haven’t got the capability to do that.” She smiled at him, the brief, aloof smile that he had come to recognize. Almost a gracious smile.
There was nothing much more for him to say. Going to the closet he got his coat.
“Are you walking out on me?” she said.
Nat said, “I don’t see any point in staying.”
“Better you should walk out now,” she said. “It’s probably better for you, too, in the long run. Anyhow it’s easier. Isn’t it?”
“No,” he said. “It isn’t.”
“Oh, it is,” she contradicted. “It’s the easiest thing in the world. All you have to do is put on your coat and go back home to Gwen.” She followed after him, to the door. Her face had a white, throbbing quality. “Won’t you kiss me good-bye?” she said.
He kissed her. “I’ll see you,” he said.
“Say hello to Gwen,” she said. “Maybe we could all get together for dinner some evening. Charley should be back from the hospital in another week on so.”
“Okay,” he said. Hardly believing that it was happening, he shut the door after him and walked across the gravel and cypress needles to his can. The outdoor light came on; she had put it on for him. The light remained on until he had backed from the driveway. Then, as soon as his car reached the road, the light went out.
In a daze, he drove home.
Suppose I hadn’t started to clear the dinner dishes, he thought. Would it not have happened? It would have, he decided. Sooner or later. Our mutual hostilities and doubts would have swum up and clashed; it was only a question of time. It was inevitable.
But he still could not believe it, and now, as he drove, he began to be afraid of how he would feel when he did believe it. How it would affect him when it began to become real.
When he drove up in front of his own house he saw a strange can parked there. Getting out, he walked up the steps and into the house.
In the kitchen, Gwen sat at the table with a glass of wine in front of her. Across from her sat a man he had never seen before, a blondhaired young man wearing glasses. Both of them glanced up with dismay. But almost at once Gwen regained her composure.
“Home early,” she said in a brittle, hostile voice. “I thought you were probably going to stay longer.”
“Who’s this?” Nat said, indicating the young man. His heart labored inside him. “I don’t feel like coming home and finding a strange car parked in front of the house.”
“Oh,” Gwen said, in the same voice; its venom, its vast amount of loathing for him, staggered him. He had never heard her speak with such sarcasm, such giving to each syllable a sense of cruelty, the articulation of cruelty toward him, cruelty toward everything. As if, at this moment in their relationship, she could feel nothing but this. Nothing else remained. It was her total feeling. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought you and Fay would be together for the nest of the evening. Maybe the nest of the night.”
The young man started to get to his feet.
“Don’t leave,” Gwen said, shifting her attention to him, but still using the same tone. “Why should you leave?” To Nat, she said, “We’re right in the middle of working something out. Why don’t you go away and come back some other time?”
“Working what out?” he said.
“An understanding,” she said. “Between the two of us. This is Robert Altrocchi. He lives down the road. Where the birds are. He raises parakeets and sells them to the dime stones in San Francisco.” Nat said nothing.
“Do you mind?” Gwen said. “If we go on?” She made a motion of dismissal toward him. “Go drive off,” she said.
To the young man, Nat said, “Get out of here.”
Arising with elaborate slowness, Altrocchi pushed away his wine glass and said, “I was going. I have to get to work.” At the doorway he halted and said to Gwen, “I’ll see you at the usual time, then?”
Ignoring Nat, she said, “Yes. Call me or I’ll call you.” Now she had gotten into her voice –no doubt with great care– a tone of affection. “Good night, Bob.”
“Good night,” Altrocchi said. Presently they heard the front door close, and then the man’s car drive off.
“How’s Fay?” Gwen said, still seated at the table. She sipped her wine, eying him above the glass.
“Fine,” he said.
“It’s okay for you to be with her,” Gwen said in a wavering voice, “but not okay for me.”
“I don’t want to come home and find a strange car here,” he said. “I never brought Fay here,” he said. “It’s wrong to bring somebody here. That’s unfair. You can go out and see anybody you want, but don’t bring them here. It’s my house, too.”
“We can’t go to his house,” Gwen said, raising her voice. “He’s married and they have a six-month-old child.”
Hearing that, he felt crushing melancholy and hopelessness. So this was the consequence of his relationship with Fay. Not only had his own marriage been marred, ruined, but somebody else’s, a man he had never seen before in his life, a man with a new baby.
“If it’s okay for you –” Gwen began.
“I gave you the example,” he interrupted.
She said nothing.
“You’re paying me back,” he said. “This is my payment. Some guy I never saw. His wife and child have to suffer so you can get back at me. I want to marry Fay. I’m serious. You’re not. Are you? You know you aren’t.”
Gwen said nothing.
“This is terrible,” he said. “This is the worst thing I ever heard. How could you do a thing like this?”
On his wife’s face the expression of suffering and determination increased. Everything he said only made her feel more strongly.
“One of us has to get out,” he said.
“Okay,” she said. “You get out.”
“I will,” he said. Going into the bedroom he sat down on the bed. “I don’t feel like it right now,” he said. “Later.”
“No,” Gwen said. “Now.”
“Go to hell,” he said, feeling perspiration stand out on his forehead. “Shut up,” he said weakly. “Don’t talk to me any more, or I can’t be responsible.”
Gwen said, “Don’t threaten me.” But she stopped talking to him and went off by herself into the living room. He heard her seat herself on the couch.