Confessions of a Crap Artist

11

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?

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.

They carried the fishing equipment and their lunches from the car to the fence. Fay lifted one wine and slipped easily between it and the one below, but he found it necessary to use the gate; he did not feel as slim as she. Beyond the fence they followed a trail across a pasture and then they began to climb down a sandy slope overgrown with iceplant. Now he heard the ocean breakers. The wind became stronger. Under his feet the sand crumbled and gave; he had to lie down and take hold of the tangles of iceplant. Ahead of him, Fay skipped and tumbled, caught herself and continued on without a pause, telling him constantly how she and Charley and the girls and assorted friends of theirs had come here to this beach; how much trouble they had had getting down, what they had caught, what the dangers were, who had been scared and who not … he groped along after her, thinking that women could be divided into two distinct classes: those who were good climbers and then all the others lumped together. A woman who climbed well was not like the rest of them. Probably the difference pervaded every part of their physical and mental apparatus; at this moment it seemed crucial to him, a genuine revelation.

Now Fay had come to some rocky projections. Past her he saw what appeared to be a sheen drop, and then the tops of rocks far below, and the surf. Crouching down, Fay descended step by step to a ledge, and there, among the piles of sand and rock that had slid down, she took hold of a nope attached to a metal stake driven into the rock.

“From now on,” she called back, “it’s by rope.”

Good Christ, he thought.

“The girls can do it,” she called.

“I’ll tell you honestly,” he said, halting with his feet planted far apart, balancing himself with cane, “I’m not sure I can.”

“I’ll carry everything down,” Fay said. “Throw the packs and the fishing poles down to me.”

With care, he lowered things to her. Strapping the packs to her back, she disappeared, clinging to the rope. After a time she reappeared, this time far below, standing on the beach and gazing nearly straight up at him, a small figure among the rocks. “Okay,” she shouted, cupping her hands to her mouth.

Cursing with fright, he half-slid, half-stepped down the rock projections to the rope. He found the rope badly corroded, and that did not improve his morale. But for the first time he discovered that the cliff was not sheen; it had easy footholds, and the rope was merely for safety. Even without it, in an emergency, a person could get up and down. So taking firm hold of the rope he stepped down, foot by foot, to the beach. Fay, when he got there, had meanwhile gone off and was seeking a deep pooi in which to fish; she did not even bother to watch him descend.

Later, with their poles propped up against rocks, they fished in a pool which the withdrawing tide had left. Several crabs wandered about in the water, and he saw a many-legged starfish, a type he had never be– fore seen. Twelve legs … and bright orange.

“That’s a sea-slug,” Fay said, pointing to a nondescript blob.

They used mussels as bait. According to Fay it was possible to catch ocean trout. But they saw no fish in their pool, and neithen he non she expected much luck. In any case it was exciting, here on this deserted beach at the base of the cliff, accessible only by rope … no beer cans, no orange peels, only cockle shells and abalone shells, and the black, slippery rocks in which both cockles and abalone could be found.

He said, “Let me ask you something.”

“Okay,” she said sleepily. Leaning back against the rock she had gone almost to sleep. She had on a cotton shirt and water-stained canvas trousers and an old, torn pain of tennis shoes.

“Where is this relationship of ours going?” he said.

“Time will tell,” Fay said.

“Where do you want it to go?”

She opened one eye and studied him. “Aren’t you happy? My good god—you get fed glorious meals, you get to use my can, my credit card, I bought you a decent suit that isn’t two years out of style with my money—you get to screw me. Don’t you?”

That word had always bothered him, since he had first heard her use it. Now of course she would never stop; she had noticed his reaction to it.

“What more do you want?” she said.

He said, “But what do you want out of it?”

“I get a nice man,” she said. “A very pretty man. You know that. You’re the prettiest man I ever saw in my entire life; as soon as I saw you that day I wanted to take you to my bed and screw you. Didn’t I tell you that?”

With patience, he said, “Let’s look at the possibilities. First of all, your husband will either recover or he won’t. That means he’ll either be coming back from the hosp’tal or he won’t. Do you realize I don’t know how you feel toward him? Whether you’d prefer him to come back, and if he did come back—”

She interrupted, “You know, we could lie down on the sand and screw.”

“God damn you,” he said.

“Why?” she said. “Because I’m using the same words as you? What do you call it? You do it, whatever you call it. You do screw me; you have screwed me… five times. Listen,” she said, all at once becoming serious. “The last time when I was washing my diaphragm afterward—did I tell you?”

“No,” he said, with apprehension.

“It was eaten away. Corroded. Are you sure your sperm doesn’t have some sort of sulphuric acid in it? My good god, it was totally ruined—I had to drive down to Fairfax and get another, and I had to be measured again—she told me I always should be measured when I get a new diaphragm. I didn’t know that. I’ve replaced my diaphragm six on seven times without being measured. She told me the one I’ve been using is much too small. It’s a good thing it did wear out.”

After a pause he tried to resume his own topic. “I want to know if you’re interested in me on a permanent basis.”

“What if I said no?” she said.

“Well,” he said, “I’m just curious.”

“Does it matter? Why do you have to have these great answers? My good god.”

“Remember, I’ve got a wife,” he said, with growing outrage. “It’s important to me to know where you and I stand.”

“You mean, ‘are my intentions honorable’?”

“Yes,” he said finally.

Fay said, “I’m in love with you. You know how you affect me; nobody ever affected me that way in my entire life. But—you mean, you’re thinking about marriage, aren’t you? Could you support me? I have a house budget of twelve thousand a year… did you know that?”

“Yes,” he said.

“You couldn’t support me and the two girls on your salary.”

He said, “Presumably there’d be some kind of settlement.”

“I own one half the house,” she said. “Community property. My equity is worth about fifteen thousand. And I’ve got property that Charley gave me as a gift… stock in the Fond motor company. I get in about one hundred a month from that. And I’ve got one hundred and fifty more coming in from an apartment building in Tampa, Florida. So I get in two fifty a month, and that’s all I have, except that I’d get the Buick; it’s mine.”

“Would you consider splitting up from Charley?” he said. “If he recovers?”

“Well,” she said, “the girls like you. They’re afraid of Charley because they’ve seen him hit me. You’d never hit me. Would you? I really can’t stand that; I almost left him a couple of times. L god damn near drove over and got Sheriff Chisholm and had a felony wife-beating warrant sworn out… maybe I should have.” She paused, deep in thought. “I really should get the house. It’s actually mine. He should give that to me.”

“It’s a nice house,” he said. He thought to himself what it would be like. They would live partly—perhaps mostly—on Fay’s money, and in Fay’s house. The children would be Fay’s. The car, too. Of course, he would eat well … assuming that the settlement with Charley went in her favor. But suppose Charley hired lawyers and got after her with a change of adultery? Suppose they got after her with an unfit mother charge? Possibly she would wind up with no settlement at all, no alimony, no child-support.

“You wouldn’t have to support the kids,” she said. “I know he’d always see to their welfare.” He nodded.

“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.

On some deep level I trust her, he decided. That is, I trust the training that has been inscribed on her, the heritage. Things that she did not invent and does not greatly control. Yet, she grasps that underneath all her flamboyance she’s quite an ordinary person—in the finest possible sense. She is not attractive because she is unusual and exciting but because she has found something exciting in the ordinary—that is, in herself.

To her, he said, “You’re a square. Aren’t you?”

Fay said, “Didn’t you know that? Good god, what did you think I was? A Beatnik?”

“Why are you interested in me?” he demanded.

“Because you’re good husband material,” Fay said. “I’m being very shrewd; there’s nothing romantic in this.”

That left him without a retort. Leaning back, balancing herself against the rock, she closed her eyes and enjoyed the sun, the racket of the surf, while he worried. They spent the remainder of the afternoon that way.