Hard Rain Falling (33 page)

A month later they were married, and Sally supplied to him the two things he lacked: ambition and direction. She discovered he was really just a bum, whose only true love was sailing on the bay, and whose interest in acting stemmed from the fact that he knew he was good at it, and he knew people paid a lot of money to good actors. He hoped someday he would be discovered, but meanwhile he was content to live a marginal existence on borrowed money, unemployment, the GI Bill, or whatever presented itself. Another reason he liked acting, she discovered, was because actors worked at night, when you couldn’t sail anyway.

Sally changed his life. She quit college and got two jobs, doing high-fashion modeling in a department store days and selling tickets in a Market Street movie theater nights, supporting him while he suffered through books on acting and a few courses at San Francisco State, and took the meager roles offered by the San Francisco amateur theater. She did not make him sell his half-interest in his little El Toro boat, but she kept him so busy he hardly ever had time to go out on the Bay. When television or movie companies came to town to shoot exteriors, she made him go out for the extra parts, and meanwhile they were saving enough money to get to Hollywood. But the miracle happened, and he was “seen” in one of his television bits, recognized for the qualities Sally herself saw, and offered a contract.

For the next two years he was seen getting shot, clubbed, knifed, hanged, or otherwise knocked apart by the various avatars of the fastest gun in the West, and he had parts in two films. One was a science-fiction thriller in which he, an accountant for a firm engaged in top-secret government research, is “absorbed” by a blob of goo. In the other, an adventure story set in the big woods, he played a lumberjack who loses his nerve, and then dies topping a tree (the top of the tree splits, and he is squeezed half to death, and then falls). Then he got a good part on “Playhouse 90” as a farm boy who hungers after the wife of the hired man—a subplot to the main event, a rewrite of
Desire Under the Elms
with a big rock instead of a tree as the God-symbol; and then he was given his own series.

It was a Western, and he played the part of a sheriff in a small Colorado mining town. The device of the show was that he carried no gun, but had a knife up his sleeve. He would not pull the knife unless extremely provoked, but if he
did
pull it, woe unto the provoker, for he always aimed to kill. They filmed twenty-six original episodes, and five years later the series was still being shown as reruns. Meanwhile Walt Disney had given him a contract and he was a made man. He was a rich and famous actor. You see him all the time, these days, having serious conversations with dogs and sadly killing Indians.

Sally left him. She could not stand his success, the fact that without growing at all he had grown beyond her, and she could not stand seeing the talent she had loved being used as a mere device. This, she understood, had been what she herself had done, and it hurt her. Especially because
he
did not see it at all,
he
did not know that his great beauty as an actor was being wasted, used up, for trash. He was perfectly happy. When he was working he got up early in the morning and went to the studio, made up, sat and waited for his part, did exactly what the director asked, and when the shooting was over, went home. When he was not making a picture, he was sailing. He now had a 70-foot schooner with a paid crew of five, and the head of the crew, a salty old Mexican he had met in Santa Monica, was his constant companion and in fact appeared in all his movies in bit parts. When Sally left him he sold his house and moved out to the boat in Santa Monica, and when the divorce proceedings were held he appeared in court, agreed that Sally was to have one-third of his income, and shook hands with her. Everybody was happy but Sally.

When she came back to San Francisco she discovered that among the set whose central ambition seemed to be getting their names into Herb Caen’s column she had a certain currency as the ex-wife of one of the ascending giants of Hollywood, and so instead of reverting to her maiden name she kept his, using it as both a shield and an entrée. In Hollywood she had been a nothing, the wife of an actor, someone to whom you made a point of saying hello; in San Francisco, on the other hand, she was a celebrity in her own right, someone who had given up
all that
to return to the only really cultured and exciting city in the Western Hemisphere. Sally knew what a damned lie it was; she knew she had run away from all that excitement, all that bubbling creativity, because down there she had been only a bystander; she knew she had come back to San Francisco to find some thing, some place, where she could again be central. And so she married Jack Levitt. Which fact was duly reported by Herb Caen, and all San Francisco, or at least Sally’s set, was agog. Her friends were even more agog when they dropped around to the Telegraph Hill apartment and discovered that Sally didn’t live there any more and had left no forwarding address.

She was, in fact, through with café society. She had found something meaningful, and she was through with wasting her life. At last she was in love—this time it was truly love—and she awakened each morning with the brightness of it in her heart, and an eager joy at the prospect of transforming his life and hers into something permanent and meaningful.

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 the 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.