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-fl. 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 pipe line 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 sathe 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 significance 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 quo 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 the 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 night. 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 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 paper work. 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 kite-flying that he could not express it; he could not even yell at her. AU 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?” Faysaid, 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.