But it was not going to be easy. For one thing, Jack did not get the carpet-laying job that promised to go to ten thousand a year. Perhaps the man doing the hiring didn’t like his face. So while the money they had lasted, Jack looked around for work. At Sally’s suggestion he applied to Federal Civil Service, taking the general entrance examination with hundreds of others, and despite the nervousness epidemic in the cafeteria where the tests were given, Jack thought he did pretty well; he felt almost certain of a rating of at least GS—6, and perhaps even higher. Meanwhile he and his parole officer looked for other kinds of work (Jack hadn’t told him about the Civil Service exam), and nights and afternoons he and Sally worked on their new apartment, trying to make it habitable.
When they were settled, there were paintings and drawings on all the walls, drapes on the windows, books and small objects on the shelves, food in the kitchen, and, somehow, perhaps through the expense of work they had put into the place, a sense of belonging, of habitat, that made them both feel comfortable and cozy just being there. The rent was $65.00 per month, and they paid their own gas and electricity, but the heat and garbage were free. They got a telephone at the cheapest rate, unlisted, and they were home.
Jack found a job parking cars for a nightclub on Broadway, and they waited for the answer from the Federal Civil Service. When it came and Jack read it out in the foyer of the building, he was not really surprised. Sally, however, exploded.
“If the fucking Federal Government won’t hire ex-convicts, how in the goddam hell do they expect anybody else to?”
“What did you expect?” Jack asked. He had not really felt irritated until Sally read the letter. She was standing in the kitchen, and he was leaning in the doorway. “They think I’m a rotten vicious criminal; would you hire a rotten vicious criminal?”
“What do they mean, `Untrustworthy’?” she blazed. “How would they know? Jesus Christ!”
“No use blowing your stack.” He took the envelope and letter from her hand and dropped it into the garbage sack under the sink. “I was a sucker to shoot for it.”
“That’s the goddamndest criminal piece of horseshit I ever saw in my life!” she yelled. She stooped down and retrieved the letter. “I’m going to take it to the American Civil Liberties Union! We’ll see what we’ll see!”
Jack was amused, but still angry. “That’ll do a lot of good. Listen, forget it.”
She stared at him. “Forget it? Why should I? It’s a criminal injustice. We have to do something about it!”
“Oh, come on. Sure it’s an injustice. It’s even a crime. So what? Don’t you think society ever commits crimes? Hell, they do it all the time. And get away with it. Listen, I committed some crimes, too, you know. And if I can, society can. They aint no better than me, and I aint no better than they are. We’re even, dig? Do you think I could look myself in the face if I didn’t think society was a crock of shit? God damn!”
“What’s getting to you?” she wanted to know. Jack’s face was red and his eyes burned angrily. He tried to pace up and down in the living room, but there was too much furniture in the way, and after stumbling twice, he threw himself into a chair.
“Whaddya mean, what’s gettin to me? Jesus! You act like you got rights or something? Are you out of your mind? Listen, I gave this a lot of thought, baby, and there aint no justice and so you might just as well forget it, and do what you can. Dig?”
“I hate it when you say `dig.’ That’s a disgusting word.”
“I’ll quit sayin it if you’ll stop yelling `fuck’ every three minutes. Okay?”
She stamped out into the kitchen, but came back in a few minutes still holding the letter. “The ACLU will tear these bastards apart,” she said. “The idea of prison is to reform people, they haven’t any right...“
“Now, where did you get that idea? The idea of prison is punishment, an any reforming done is strictly incidental. Society don’t give a fuck what happens to you, and you know it. Society is an animal, just like the rest of us.”
“I didn’t realize you were such a philosopher,” she said.
“I didn’t realize you were such an innocent,” he cracked.
But Sally did send the letter to the ACLU, and the ACLU did nothing, and the rolls of the Federal Civil Service remained pure, and Jack kept working at the North Beach parking lot.
Perhaps what held the marriage together in those early months was Jack’s naive sincerity as much as anything else. He really wanted to make a go of it. He had thrown most of his life away by looking out for Number One, he felt, and now it was time to be mature, to find the real meaning of his existence by looking out for other people, in making himself a family —he had never had a family of his own, and so, he reasoned, he could start with a clean slate, and do it according to the book.
He had heard enough and read enough about marriage to know that sex was central, the very root of the relationship between man and wife, and so he was very careful to be more than fond to Sally, to be passionate, to give her the kind of manly loving that had first drawn them together, the thing she had missed so much in her life—he would give her this, it would be the perfect ending and delicious beginning to each day, whether he felt like it or not. He decided it was his obligation, and for weeks after they were settled in the new place and he was getting used to the routine of work, he dishonestly pretended that everything was fine. But it was not; he knew it, denied it, felt it get worse, and finally would come home at two or three in the morning after the last drunk customer had been poured into the last expensive automobile, with his mind desperately fending off the hope that for once Sally would be asleep and he could crawl into bed and get some rest. He had read in a paperback mystery the line, “Sex is nice, but there are times when you’d rather cut your throat,” and he knew that feeling. He hated having to induce passion in himself, and he hated having to be deceptive in this, the admittedly central thing in their marriage—perhaps, he often thought, the only thing in their marriage. Because Sally’s desires seemed endless. Of course, he reasoned, this was lots better than the other way around. He had read about such things; the couple get married and from that day forward the old man has to play rapist to his neovirgin wife. He was glad Sally was not like that, but he wondered about himself.
Increasingly, the core of his anxiety was the fear that he was homosexual at heart. He could not ignore the facts of his life: until Sally, the highest point of his emotional development, as he was beginning to think of it, had been with Billy Lancing; and even though there was plenty of evidence to prove that he loved Sally more and in a very different way, he had been deeply involved with Billy, they had made love to each other, and now he was getting awfully tired of making love to his wife. He tried to picture how it would be with a man again and searched himself for a thrill of guilty pleasure, but always it seemed so stupid and ugly, seen, as it were, from the viewpoint of a third party. Again, he would wonder if it just wasn’t the basic difference, biologically, between men and women—that women could reach orgasm after orgasm, while a man just naturally went limp after a while. He wanted to ask somebody, stop a stranger on the street and say to him, “Listen, Mac, do you lay your wife twice a day? Or am I overdoing it?”
He could see what they meant when they said sex was important; he was hardly able to think of anything else. But he was also firmly resolved not to be the first to pull the “headache” bit or say, “Not tonight, honey, I’m beat.” That was a woman’s trick. And after all, Sally was the woman in the marriage, not him. He thanked the gods of biology that there were at least three or four days a month when even Sally would hold back, but he discovered that even then she was willing, if not eager, to please him in other ways, and not averse to being handled herself. So there was no respite. Often he wondered if everyone’s private life was as strange as his, so at variance with the public image of marriage. One thing was certain; it wasn’t anything like anything he had ever dreamed of. He was glad he had not stopped a stranger on th
e street, because he knew now the stranger would have lied, just as Jack would lie if somebody asked him about his private life. Maybe that was what they meant by “private.”
But of course there were other things to occupy him; the Sex Problem was enormous, but not all that enormous. There was also culture, the matter of what did he want to do with his life, how was he to improve himself in order to enjoy life to the fullest, to be able to draw pleasure from as many possible sources and to understand the natural pains of existence so they wouldn’t trouble him too much. He wanted a full life, which would have in it love, a kind of work he could love, sports, art, books, the theater, hobbies, friends, and most of all—most important, the pinnacle—children. This was very important to Jack. It was the reason people got married in the first place. It was the sole rational reason for monogamy—people got married so children could have parents and a home, and be brought up properly, with love, to understand the world and so not fight it, not be blinded as Jack had been for so many years by his own selfish egotism. Naturally, he wanted a son. He figured that having a son, and then perhaps another, and then a daughter or two, was the essential part of the fullness of life. He had seen enough of the emptiness of life to last him forever. He did not fool himself into thinking his life had been wasted; no, that was not it, just that he was through with emptiness, it was time now for the rich part. He felt, naively, that he was entitled to it. He had worked for it. He had thrown more than a quarter of a century into the earning of it.
He even reasoned, a little smugly perhaps, that people who hadn’t been through the mud as he had, and by that he meant people who hadn’t dragged themselves through the mud, hadn’t seen society and man at its and his worst as he surely had, were missing the really rich pleasures of life because they had nothing to compare them to. Having your own apartment, for example, might be pretty interesting to the ordinary citizen but it could never be as vital as it was to Jack, who felt an actual pleasure at the sense of paying for his own walls, walls that he could get out from behind any time he wanted. He also felt, again a little smugly, that his life had given him a better understanding of some of the works of literature that he was now conscientiously plowing his way through, because he had seen, felt some of the things they described, and he had not yet worn out the pleasures or forgotten the pains of “life,” which was supposed to be what literature was about.
At first Sally helped him. She took him to operas, where they sat in cheap seats, and explained to him as best she could what was happening and why it was supposed to be great; and she would accompany him to football and baseball games and listen when he explained to her what was going on and why it was supposed to be exciting. She took him to art movies, galleries, poetry readings, and it made her laugh and feel tender to see the way he seemed to be discovering everything for the first time. One day they packed a lunch and drove down the coast highway, and when they crested the hill overlooking Pacific Manor and saw the ocean and the long curved white beach, the land rising past the few houses to the soft brown mountains, Jack was entranced; it was such a sudden transition: from the mile after mile of Henry Doelger Homes, an endless series of repetitions of pink, blue, green, brown, and white houses; and then bursting over the hill to see all that wide blue ocean. He stopped the car on the shoulder of the highway and got out, just to have a good look. When he got back in, he said, “You know, I’d like to live out here some time.”
“It would be nice,” she admitted, “except for the way the salt air gets to everything and ruins it. And it’s so foggy most of the time.”
“I wouldn’t mind that. It’s so wide open.”
They drove through the scattered beach towns and up into the Devil’s Slide area past Pedro Point, and Jack could see the waves crashing into the ocher cliffs four hundred feet below the narrow rim of highway; the water looked impossibly deep and blue, and out a way from the cliffs there was a slow-moving ribbon of dirty-looking foam, and he wondered if that meant the tide was going out, or if it had anything to do with the tide at all. He realized that he really didn’t know anything about tides. There was so much for him to learn about things, even unimportant little things like tides, which everybody ought to know. It made him wonder where he had been all his life.
Eventually the road straightened out and they came to and passed the tiny ramshackle community of Montara, and then came to Moss Beach, and Sally showed him where to turn off onto the dirt road that led to the reef.
The tide was going out, and as they sat on the sand and ate their lunch, they could see the waves beginning to break dramatically over the long brown fingers of reef, and watched a calm lagoon form right in front of them. There was a kelpy iodine smell to the air, and Jack was overwhelmed by a desire to go out and wade in the lagoon, to get into the water. He took Sally by the hand and led her down to the edge of the sand and they waded out into the weed-filled, gently undulating water. She seemed to understand his mood and said nothing; she understood that he was discovering this immensity for the first time, and she did not want to spoil it for him by admitting that it no longer had the same attraction for her, that she had made the discovery when she was twelve and become bored with it by the time she was eighteen. But she followed Jack through the water, and climbed up onto the slippery reef with him, and watched him discovering the tide pools, squatting in fascination at the perfection of calm and beauty, the scuttling hermit crabs, the tiny green shrimp, the rock fish and snails and flowery anemones, such a peaceful community right there at your feet; listened to his exclamations of discovery and answered his questions about which animals were which, until needles of pain shot through the backs of her knees and her eyes smarted from the glitter of the sun on the water; but when she stood up and suggested that they get some coffee and have a cigarette he just gave her a dirty look and then went on staring down into the water, and she had to go back alone.
She watched him from the beach as he went farther and farther out on the reef, and saw him at last on the final edge, staring toward the open sea, breakers crashing beside his tiny figure, and she knew there were all sorts of romantic ideas pouring through his mind about life, the sea, nature, the size of the universe, man is a tiny creature, etc. etc. But she did not feel like sneering at him for it; she began to have images of this man, locked somewhere in a prison cell away from all possible thoughts of immensity, and she felt a great wave of pity for him, for the loss of his youth, for his naive, childlike expectation that the past was all over and he could just start from where he was and bury it all behind him and become a cultured person. It made her feel so bitter she wanted to cry.
Jack was having a hell of a fine time. He was playing a game with the ocean. He was standing at the very edge of the reef, watching the rollers swell in front of him, rising high above his head, and then break and crash at his feet. The game was a modified form of “chicken”—he had already seen that the reef undercut the waves so that they could not hit him full force, and he was watching the waves come in, testing himself for the fear-reaction, the urge to flinch and jump back when a big one rose over him: if he felt scared, the ocean won; if he didn’t, he won. It was really such a good game—because the waves were so beautiful and green when they rose before him, and he was watching their beauty and wondering why blue water turned green when it was really clear —that he forgot to feel the fear and won each round handily after the first few. He was not thinking of Sally at all, and hadn’t really thought of her since she had stood up to go and he had squinted up at her directly into the glare from the beach and seen her almost angry expression as she turned to go. Now he wasn’t thinking about much of anything, just watching the beautiful water. He had even forgotten about the tides, and so it was with a sense of genuine surprise that he watched one wave rise much higher than the others and race toward him, hitting him across the chest; he felt himself picked up like a leaf, felt a gentle force with greater strength than he had ever experienced carry him back across the reef, rolling him now ov
er the rock and then landing him in the lagoon, his arms and legs flying. He had a mouthful of salt water, and it tasted bitter. He flailed around trying to get his balance, and accidently his feet touched bottom, and abruptly he stood up. He was about twenty feet from where he started, in calm water up to his waist. The breakers seemed a long way off; as he watched, another one climbed the reef and sent a line of dirty suds toward him. He rubbed his mouth and laughed. He turned, thinking of Sally, and saw her standing, far away, beneath the bluff, her hands at her sides. He could not tell at that distance if she looked frightened or not, but he waved his arm to show he was all right and began wading toward her.
“You crazy jackass,” she said angrily. He felt suddenly like a little boy.
“I won’t do it again, Mommy,” he said.
Three skin divers in black wet-suits came down the bluff from the parking area, big, bulky men with gunnysacks and snorkel breathers and face masks in their hands; one of them saw Jack’s wet clothes, already beginning to steam in the sunshine, and laughed and said, “Fall in the water, buddy?”
“Fuck you, Mac,” Jack snarled at him. The man looked horrified, and moved away with his friends.
“For heaven’s sake,” one of them said.
Both Jack and Sally were happy and tired as they drove back to the city, even though they had headaches from the glare. They resolved that next time they came to the beach they would wear sunglasses.
When they got home they wanted to make love, but they were too tired. So they just took hot baths, and Sally went to bed with a book and Jack went to work. When he returned at two thirty she was sound asleep. With real relief he crawled in beside her, feeling the warmth of her body, and sank into a delicious, life-giving sleep.
Hard Rain Falling Page 27