Clandestine

Construction work and later bricklaying was mindless and exhilarating. The men I worked with and drank beer with were vital and raw. But Lorna was aghast when I stuck to this kind of work for eight months, liking it more each day. She thought I was wasting the overactive brain that I was trying so hard to quiet. And her resentment grew. She couldn't stand the anomaly of a successful attorney married to a laborer husband. An ex-cop accused Communist, yes; a working stiff, no. I noted the contradiction of a champion of the "working man" disdaining the very same in her own household.

"I didn't marry a hod carrier," Lorna said coldly.

*     *     *

I was beginning to wonder who she did marry. I began to wonder who I married. I started to feel a hollowness, a depression that was fifty times worse than fear. But I held on: rigorously continuing to earn through construction work and golf hustling at least as much as Lorna did as an attorney.

We split the household expenses fifty-fifty, and each contributed monthly stipends to our joint savings and checking accounts. At the end of each month when we did our bookkeeping, Lorna would shake her head at the sad equity of it. We had a running gag at these sessions. We would split the expenses fifty-fifty, but I would pay for everything connected with Night Train. Lorna was mildly amused by him, but considered my noble link to Wacky and the past an obscene object. She thought dogs belonged on farms. "And the beast is your burden," she would say as we concluded our paperwork.

One day early in '55, she didn't crack her usual jokes. She was drawn and cross that day. When I looked to her to deliver her line she flung a sheaf of papers at me and screamed, "It's so goddamned easy for you! Goddamnit, how can you live with yourself? Do you know how hard I work to make the money I do? Do you, Freddy, goddamnit? Don't you think it's sad that I went to school for eight years to become a lawyer and help people, while all you do is swing a hammer and hit golf balls? Goddamn you, you Renaissance bum!"

For the first time I felt my marriage vows begin to impinge me. I began to feel that I couldn't ever be the man Lorna wanted me to be. And for the first time I didn't care, because the Lorna of 1955 was not the Lorna I married in 1951. I started to get itchy to break the whole thing up, to blow it all sky high.

As my love for Lorna entered this awful, angry stasis, I felt stirrings of what I could only call the wonder. Wonder.

Years had passed. With the end of the Korean War and the discrediting of Joe McCarthy, a slightly more sane political climate was emerging. Time seemed to be opening new wounds in my present and healing the old ones in my past. If Lorna was the replacement for the wonder, maybe now it was time to reverse the situation.

Knowing I could never be hired as a police officer, I applied for a state of California private investigator's license, and was refused. I applied for positions as insurance investigator with over thirty insurance companies, and was rejected by each one.

So I hit more thousands of golf balls, recalling the trinity of my youth: police work, golf, and women. Women. The very word bit at me like a jungle carnivore, filling me with a venomous guilt and excitement.

One night I went to a bar in Ocean Park and picked up a woman. The old small talk and moves were still there. I took her to a motel near my old apartment in Santa Monica. We coupled and talked. I told her my marriage was shot. She commiserated; it had happened to her, too, and now she was "playing the field."

In the morning I drove her back to where her car was parked, then drove home to Laurel Canyon and my wife, who didn't ask me where I had spent the night. She didn't have to.

I did it again and again, savoring the mechanics, the art of briefly touching another lonely life. Lorna knew, of course, and we settled down to a quiet war of attrition: conversations of exaggerated politeness, awkward attempts at lovemaking, silent recriminations.

Inexplicably, my womanizing stopped as abruptly as it had begun. I was sitting in a bar in the Valley nursing a beer and eyeing the cocktail waitresses, when I was hit by the same eerie stillness that had come over me in the irrigation field on the day I had quit the cops. I didn't break down this time, I just became flooded with some incredible nonverbal feeling of what I can only think of as vastness.

I tried to explain it to Lorna: "I can't explain it, Lor. It's just a feeling of, well, mystery, of truth and illusion, of something much bigger than us or anything else. It's a feeling of commitment to something very vague, but decent and good. And it's not the wonder."

Lorna snorted. "Oh, God, Freddy. Are you getting religious on me?"

"No, it's not that. It's entirely different."

I searched for words and gestures, but none came. I looked at Lorna, who shrugged, with some contempt.