Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [121]
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