Beyond any doubt, Charley didn't care for what she regarded as the civilized things in life, such as the longhair music she listened to on the hi-fi. I grant that he was a slob. But he was a slob when she married him; he was a slob that day in the roadside grocery store when he mistook the Mozart tune for a hymn. If she knew that, then she was wrong to disapprove of him as if it was some secret trait that he had concealed from her and then sprung on her after they were married. My god, Charley had always been completely honest with her—and he had given her everything in his power. Now, instead of driving his Mercedes, he drove a Buick because she preferred the color schemes and the automatic shift. In his own area, such as with cars, he knew more than she did; she was the barbarian, the slob. But that did not help him, since she did not choose to regard those areas as important. The fact that he could lay a good pipeline to the ducks' trough did not impress her; only slobs were good at that, and so her point was proved.
And yet she accepted, even used, his language.
I suppose that she was ambivalent about him, that on the one hand she thought of him as rough and masculine, which was vital to her—he qualified as a man sexually. What she wanted was, it seems to me, paradoxical; she wanted him to be a man, but at the same time to meet her own standards, and these standards, having been set for herself, were not a man's standards. On that point—her own sex—she had some confusion, too. She hated to do housework, I think, because it made her feel like a woman, and this was intolerable to her. No wonder Charley loathed doing her chores for her; if it was degrading for her to do them, surely it was worse for him—not because of his feelings about them—at one time he might not have minded—but because of their insignificance to her. Doing housework proved that a person was a drudge, a domestic, a servant, a maid; she could not bring herself to do them, but she was willing to let her husband do them. She could not, for example, bear to go down to the store and buy her Tampax; it was the sine qua non of proof that she was a woman, and so she got him to do it.
Naturally he came home and hit her.
But I didn't mind doing the housework, because for me it was a job, not a symbol. I got my meals in return, and a warm house … I got something back, and it seemed just to me. Living with them I was much happier and more satisfied than I had ever been at any time in my life, before or since. I liked being with the children and the animals; I liked building fires in the fireplace—I liked the barbecued steaks. Wasn't it more degrading for me to work for Poity at his tire-regrooving place?
The oddest part was Fay's feeling that this house belonged to her and that Charley, her husband, was somebody who came in and sat down in a chair and got that chair dirty. He sweated on the furniture. But again this might not have been her actual attitude, but more a pose; she might simply have wanted to keep the idea current that this was primarily her house, and that in the house her laws functioned. Down underneath she may have recognized perfectly well that without Charley and his money there would have been no house—but, like the drinking, a particular theory fitted her needs and so she entertained the theory. She let him know that the house was her sphere … and what did that leave him? An office down at his factory to work in at night, plus the factory itself … and possibly the outdoors surrounding the house, the bare unimproved fields.
And this, too, Charley tended to accept, because first of all he wasn't as quick with his tongue as she—and, in the final analysis, he imagined that since she was more intelligent and educated than he then she must, when they disagreed, be right. He considered her much the same as a book or a newspaper: he might grumble against it, denounce it, but ultimately what it said was true. He had no faith in his own ideas. Like everyone else, he too recognized himself as a grade A slob.
Take their friends, for instance. Take the Anteils. Both of them, Gwen and Nat, were obviously university people who had shared her interests in cultural and scholarly subjects. Here was a man, another man, not a woman, who showed up and sat around discussing—not business or plowing techniques—but Medieval religious sects. Fay and the Anteils could communicate, and so it became three to one, not one to one. Charley used to listen awhile and then go off to his study to do paperwork. This was true not only with the Anteils but with the Fineburgs and the Meritans and all the rest of them—artists, dress-designers, university people who had moved up to Inverness … all of them belonged to her, not him.
8
They took an hour off to fly kites. His got up off the ground and stayed, not falling but not going higher; he ran along the mushy pasture, splashing, unreeling the string, and still his kite stayed up the same height, only now the string was played out, parallel to the ground.
Off beyond the horse's barn, Fay raced like a water bug across a pond: her feet landed and rose, carrying her at enormous speed. Her kite shot straight up. When she stopped at the fence she turned, and they both saw nothing at first; the kite had gone so high that for a moment neither of them could spot it. The kite was directly above their heads, a true celestial object, launched out of the world's gravity.
The children screamed to be allowed to take the string of Fay's kite; they cursed Fay for not letting them fly it, and at the same time they marveled at her success. Admiration and anger … he stood gasping, holding his second-rate kite by its sagging string.
Having given her kite string to the children, Fay walked toward him, her hands in the front pockets of her jeans.
Smiling against the mid-day glare she reached him, halted and said,
“Now let's put you on the end of a string. And I'll fly you. ”
That filled him with wrath, terrible wrath. But at the same time he felt so winded and spent from the kiteflying that he could not express it; he could not even yell at her. All he could do was turn his back and without speaking start slowly in the direction of the house.
“What's the matter?” Fay called. “Are you mad again?”
He still said nothing. He felt depressed, a complete hopelessness. Suddenly he wished he could die; he wished he was dead.
“Can't you take a joke?” Fay said, catching up with him. “Say, you look as if you felt sick.” Putting her hand up she touched his forehead, the way she did with the children. “Maybe it's the flu,” she said. “Why did that upset you?”
He said, “I don't know.”
“Remember,” she said, going along with him, “that time you had gone into the duck pen to feed the ducks—it must have been the first time you fed them, after we had just gotten them—and I was standing outside the pen watching you, and all of a sudden I said, ‘You know, I think of you as a pet duck; why don't you stay in there and I'll feed you.’ Could you have been thinking of that? Did my remark about the kite make you remember that? I know that upset you at the time. It was really a dreadful thing to say; I can't imagine why I said it. You know I say every kind of thing—I have no control over my tongue.” Catching hold of his arm, she dragged against him, saying, “You know nothing I say means anything. Right? Wrong? Inbetween?”
“Leave me alone,” he said, jerking away.
“Don't go in,” she said. “Please. At least play badminton with me for a little while … remember, the Anteils are coming over for dinner tonight, so if we don't play now we won't get a chance to play—and tomorrow I have to go into the city. So couldn't we play, just for a minute?”
“I'm too tired,” he said. “I don't feel well.”
“It'll do you good,” she said. “Just for a minute.” Passing him, she raced across the field, the patio, and into the house. By the time he had reached the house, there she stood, holding up the badminton rackets and the shuttles.
The two girls appeared, shouting together. “Can't we play? Where's the other paddles?” Seeing that Fay had all four rackets, they struggled to get two of them away from her.
In the end they did play. He and Bonnie took one side, with Fay and Elsie on the other. His arms felt so tired that he could barely lift his racket to swat the shuttle. Finally, in runnin
g back to get a long one, his weary legs caught together, became rigid, and he tumbled over backward. The children set up a wail and hurried to him; Fay remained where she was, looking on.
“I'm okay,” he said, getting up. But his racket had snapped in half. He stood holding the pieces and trying to get his breath; his chest hurt and bones seemed to be sticking into his lungs.
“There's one more racket in the house,” Fay said, from the far side of the net. “Remember, Leslie O'Neill brought it over to play, and left it. It's in the cupboard in the study.”
He started into the house to get it. After a long rummaging about he found it; starting back out again he felt his head swim and his legs wobble like cheap plastic, the junk they used to make free toys, he thought. Toys they give away in cereal packages or hand out in stores…
Then he fell forward. As he fell he reached for the ground; he sank his hands into it and clutched it. He tore it up, stuffed it into him, ate it and drank it and breathed it in; he lost his breath, trying to breathe it in—he could not get it inside him, into his lungs. And, after that, he could not do anything.
Next he knew he lay in a big bed, his face and body shaved. His hands, his fingers on the bedsheets, looked like the pink fingers of a pig. I turned into a pig, he thought. They took my hair away and curled what was left; I've been squealing for a long time.
He tried to squeal but all that came out was a rasp.
At that, a figure appeared. His brother-in-law Jack Isidore peering down at him, wearing a cloth jacket and baggy brown pants, a knapsack on his back. His face had been scrubbed.
“You had an occlusion,” Jack said.
“What's that?” he said, thinking that someone had hit him.
“You had a heart attack,” Jack said, and then he went into a mass of technical details. Presently he went off. A nurse took his place, and then, at last, a doctor.
“How'm I doing?” Charley said. “Pretty robust for an old man. Lots of life in the old frame left. Right?”
“Yes, you're in good shape,” the doctor said, and left.
By himself, he lay on his back thinking, waiting for someone to come. The doctor eventually returned.
“Listen,” Charley said. “The reason I'm here is that my wife's responsible. This was her idea from the start. She wants the house and the plant and the only way she can get it is if I die, so she fixed it up so I'd have this heart attack and drop dead according to plan.”
The doctor bent down to listen.
“And I was going to kill her,” he said. “God damn her.”
The doctor departed.
After a long time, evidently several days—he saw the room get dark, then light, then dark, and they shaved him and washed him with warm water and a sponge, and had him urinate, and fed him—several persons entered the room and stood off together talking. At last, beside his bed, Fay appeared.
His wife had on a blue coat and heavy skirt and leotards and her pointed Italian shoes. Her face was orangish and pale, the way it often was early in the morning. Even her eyes were orange, and her hair. Her neck had wrinkles in it, as if her head had twisted back and forth. She carried her big leather purse under her arm, and as she came to the bed he smelled the leather of the purse.
Seeing her, he began to cry. The warm water from his eyes spilled down his cheeks. Fay got Kleenex from her purse, spilling things out on to the floor, and, crouching down, roughly rubbed his face dry. She scoured his face until it burned.
“I'm sick,” he said to her, wanting to reach up and fondle her.
Fay said, “The girls made you an ashtray and I had it fired down at the kiln.” Her voice sounded like the rasp that was his, as if she had been smoking too much again. She did not try to clear her throat as she usually did. “Can I get you anything? Bring you your toothbrush and pajamas? They didn't let me until I asked you. I have mail for you.” On his chest, near his right hand, she laid a stack of mail. “Everyone's writing, even your aunt in Washington, D.C. The dog is all right, the children miss you but they're not feeling frightened or anything, the horse is all right, one of the sheep got out and we had to get Tom Sibley to get it with his pickup truck.” She turned her head this way and that to stare at him.
“How's the plant doing?” he said.
“They all send their regards. It's doing fine.”
Later on, in the next week or so, he was considered well enough to be allowed to sit up and drink milk through a bent glass tube. Propped up on pillows he took in the sun. They put him in a cart and wheeled him around, raised and lowered him. Different people, his family, men from the plant, friends, Fay and the children, people from the area, came to see him.
One day as he lay out in the solarium, getting sun through the double windows, Nathan Anteil and Gwen Anteil came to see him, bringing a bottle of aftershave. He read the label on the bottle. It came from England.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Anything else we can bring you?” Nat Anteil asked.
“No,” he said. “Maybe the back issues of the Sunday Chronicle.”
“Okay,” Nat said.
“Has the place gone to pot? The house?”
“The weeds need to be roto-tilled,” Nat said. “That's about all.”
Gwen said, “Nat was going to ask you if you wanted him to do it.”
“Fay can operate the roto-tiller,” he answered. For a time he thought about it, the weeds, the gallon bottle of white gas, how long it had been since the roto-tiller had been started up. “She can't work the carburetor,” he said. “Maybe you could get it started up for her. It's hard to get the mix right, when it's been sitting.”
“The doctors say you're doing fine,” Gwen said. “You have to stay here a while longer and recuperate, that's all.”
“Okay,” he said.
“They're building your strength back up,” Gwen said. “It shouldn't be long. They're really good here; they've got a really good reputation here at the U.C. Hospital.”
He nodded.
“It's cold down here in San Francisco,” Nat said. “The fog. But the wind isn't so much as back up at Point Reyes.”
He said, “How does Fay seem to be holding up under this?”
“She's been very strong,” Gwen said.
“She's a very strong woman,” Nat said.
“The drive down here from Point Reyes is pretty bad,” Gwen said. “With the children in the car especially.”
“Yes,” he said. “It's about eighty miles round trip.”
Nat said, “She's come down every day.”
He nodded.
“Even when she knew she couldn't see you,” Gwen said, “she still made the drive, with the kids in the back of the car.”
“How about the house?” he said. “Can she manage okay in such a big house?”
Gwen said, “She told me that she's been a little uneasy alone at night, in such a big house. She had a couple of bad dreams. But she keeps the dog around. She has the kids come into her bedroom and sleep with her. At first she started locking all the doors, but Dr. Andrews said that once she got started on that there'd be no end of it, so she managed to throw off her fears, and now she doesn't lock any of the doors; she leaves them all unlocked.”
He said, “There's ten doors leading into that house.”
“Ten,” Gwen said. “Is that so.”
“Three into the living room,” Charley said. “One into the family room. Three into her bedroom. That's seven right there. Two in the kids' rooms. That's nine. So there's more than ten. Two into the hall, one from each side of the house.”
“That's eleven so far,” Gwen said.
“One into the utility room,” Charley said.
“Twelve.”
“None into the study,” Charley said. “I guess it's twelve. At least twelve. There's always one of them hanging open, letting out heat.”
“Fay's brother has been giving her a lot of help,” Gwen said. “He's been doing all the shopping and housecleaning for her, runn
ing all kinds of errands for her.”
“That's right,” Charley said. “I forgot about him completely. He's there, if anything happens.” It had been in his mind that Fay and the children were the only ones there, alone in the house, now, without a man. The Anteils had overlooked him, too. None of them considered it the same as there being a man in the house, and apparently Fay felt the same way. But anyhow Jack did the chores for her, so she did not have the burden of work around the house, along with her worry.
“There's no financial problems that you've heard her mention, is there?” he asked. “There shouldn't be. She has the joint checking account, and I have insurance that ought to be paying off around now.”
“She never mentioned any problem if there is one,” Gwen said. “She seems to have money.”
“She's always down at the Mayfair cashing a check,” Nat said, with a smile.
“She'll manage to get it spent,” Charley said.
“Yes, she seems to be doing okay,” Nat said.
“I hope she remembers the bills,” Charley said.
Gwen said, “She has a whole box of bills; I saw it on the desk in the study. She was going over them, trying to decide which ones to pay.”
“I usually do that,” Charley said. “Tell her to pay the utility bills. That's the rule. Always pay them first.”
“Well, there's no problem, is there?” Nat said. “She has the ready capital to pay all of them, doesn't she?”
“Probably does,” Charley said. “Unless this god damn hospitalization is running too much.”
Confessions of a Crap Artist Page 8