Hard Rain Falling (34 page)

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 over 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.

Sally’s boredom with Jack’s program of discovery soon turned into criticism. He did see things from a rather special point of view, and after a while he was no longer listening to her recommendations as carefully, nor was he accepting her judgments of what was good and what was bad. Sometimes it got pretty irritating. Once, for example, he spent a month wading through
Ulysses
, which Sally told him was the greatest novel ever written. He threw it aside late one night and said to her, “Baby, I just can’t cut it. That book’s as full of shit as a Christmas goose. It’s too much for me. I like Bloom a lot, but I can’t stand his goddam crazy wife or that asshole Stephen. He’s just a turd. I don’t want to read about turds.”

“Maybe it is a little too advanced for you,” she said. She was, Jack realized, just sitting there doing nothing, and probably had been ever since he got home, and God knows how long before that.

“Maybe it is,” he said. “Maybe I should go back to comic books. How the hell can you sit there doin nothin? Don’t you go nuts?”

“I’m thinking,” she said. “But maybe you don’t know anything about that.”

“Oh, boy,” was all he could think of to say.

She giggled. “`Stephen Dedalus is a turd.’ That’s something you might see on the wall of a public toilet. Like, `Donald Duck is a Jew,’ or `Plato eats it.”’

“Do they write stuff like that in women’s rest rooms?”

“No,” she said. “I always use the men’s room.”

“We’re lucky,” he said abruptly. “We have a sense of humor. That saves us. A lot of times.”

“Saves us from what?”

“Oh, you know. Arguing.”

“I think argument is good for a marriage,” she said. “It cleans out the dirty little places; the stuff you might bury away.”

Jack agreed, and they had a long talk about marriage, and how difficult it was, and how lucky they were that each of them was such a fine example of a generous, warm, and loving human being. They went to bed feeling smug, satisfied that theirs was a perfect marriage. It was a feeling they often had, and sometimes it lasted for days. But more and more they found themselves arguing about things outside the marriage, things that did not really matter at all, like art, literature, music, or politics. While both of them admitted that taste was a very personal matter, they argued as if each had the proper taste and the other had to be kidding or was being
defensive
. Jack could not finish
Ulysses
, but read
From Here to Eternity
with rapt attention, and at the end hugged the book to his chest and said, “This son of a bitch has
really
been around! Man, what a book!” But Sally merely sneered and said, “Illiterate,” leaving Jack in the dark as to whether she meant him or James Jones.

“At least when he wants to say something, he says it,” Jack insisted. He began to illustrate from the text, and realized from the way Sally looked evasive that she had not actually read
From Here to Eternity
but knew what it was about from the movie and from book reviews. She admitted this, and did not see why it mattered.

She took him to a production of
Waiting for Godot
, perhaps rather cattishly hoping it would snow him and make him feel inadequate; but when they left the theater and she began talking about Beckett’s use of language, Jack interrupted her and said, “Hell, it seems simple enough to me. They’re waiting, that’s all. It don’t matter what for.”

“Doesn’t,” she said automatically.

“Doesn’t. They’re just waiting. What did you want?”

“It’s not that simple,” she said, but she was not sure why it was not that simple.

“I’ve done a lot of that waiting jazz,” Jack said. “I know what it’s like.”

“So have I,” Sally said. “What do you think I do all day?”

And it was true. Sally was waiting for—she did not know what. Waiting day after day, perhaps for the nerve to walk out. It was not really the marriage she had hoped for, and she often wondered sickly if any marriage could be. She felt chained by the marriage, trapped, her freedom gone. It was so maddening. She would sometimes just sit around the house all day, anticipating Jack’s return, allowing most of the housework to go undone, and when Jack did arrive, she would experience a sharp sense of disappointment. She did not know why. Often she would awaken with a feeling of resolve—to give the apartment a thorough cleaning, or to get a job so that they would have enough money to do more things; but the dullness of the morning routine of breakfast, toilet, dishes, and daily newspaper would take the edge from her resolve, and she would just sit. Looking through the classified ads for work was depressing, too. Women were always wanted for jobs, but no one seemed willing to pay a decent salary. With a twinge of guilt Sally realized that if she got a job, she would want to surprise Jack with it, not mentioning until he asked that she would be making more money than he was. And the plain fact was that such jobs required training, and she had none. She was getting older, and they were not having any fun, and she was becoming a housewife.

The afternoons were the worst times. Even if she had been busy, even if she had been a
good
housewife, there was nothing to do in the afternoon. She almost always wanted to take a nap by then, and Jack was up and around the apartment. If he left early, she was angry with him for deserting her in the apartment, and if he hung around, reading or sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee, she was resentful because he was in her way. By the time he did leave, she would be too full of coffee to nap, and too nervous to do anything but sit. It was driving her crazy. She felt that she actually might have gone out of her mind, if an incident hadn’t occurrred to break the monotony.