Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [120]
“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