Philip Dick - Confessions of a Crap Artist

“This is my wife Gwen,” the boy said. “My name is Nathan Anteil.” They came a few steps into the kitchen and stood self-consciously, watching me fix martinis, as if they didn’t want to drink but did not know how to stop me. So I went on fixing the drinks. Married, I thought.

“You look like my brother,” I said to the boy. And with surprise I thought, He doesn’t look like Jack at all, not a bit. Jack is horrible-looking and this boy is stunning; what’s the matter with me? “Don’t you think he could be my brother?” I said to Charley.

“Well,” Charley said, “you’re both on the lanky side.” He, too, seemed ill-at-ease, but obviously pleased at having gotten them to come along with him. “I’ll have some of that Danish beer,” he said. To the Anteils, he said, “How about some imported dark beer?” Passing me, he opened the refrigerator door. “Try some,” he said, getting the opener.

Presently we were seated in the living room, Charley and I on chairs, the Anteils on the couch. Gwen and I drank martinis; they drank beer.

“Nat’s in the real estate game,” Charley said.

At that, the boy got a cross expression on his face. Both he and his wife seemed to fluff up. “That’s somewhat misleading,” Gwen said. “Nat is getting his degree in history,” she explained to me. “He just works down there so we can pay the bills.”

“There’s nothing wrong with real estate,” Charley said with uneasiness, apparently realizing that he had offended them.

“History,” I said, dazzled by our good fortune. “There’s a retired history professor from the University of California living up here—he raises peaches. We’ll have to introduce you to him. He and I play chess once a month. And there’s an archaeologist across the bay in Point Reyes Station. Where do you live?”

“In Point Reyes,” the boy said. “We’re renting a little house there, on the hill above the creamery.”

“And down in Olema,” Charley put in, “there’s a guy who used to write articles for Harper’s . And an old guy who still does illustrations for the Saturday Evening Post –he’s living in what used to be the Olema city hall. Picked it up for four thousand dollars.”

Talking to the Anteils, I found that they came from Berkeley. The girl’s parents owned a summer cabin in Inverness, and the two of them—Nat and she—had come up and stayed in the area, and had gotten to like it, naturally, as anyone does who sees it. They knew a few people in the area, mostly in Inverness, and they knew the public beaches and the park and what birds they could expect to see. But they hadn’t been to any of the private beaches; they didn’t know any of the big ranchers and had never even heard of Bear Valley Ranch.

“Good god,” I said. “Well, we’ll have to take you there. The road’s barred by three padlocked gates but I can get the key; we know them and they let us drive across the ridge to their beach. It’s so big it’s got something like six thousand wild deer on it.”

“It’s a huge place,” Charley said.

We talked for a while about the area, and then I told Nat about a paper I had written in college about the Roman general Stilicho.

“Oh yes,” Nat said, nodding. “That’s an interesting period.”

“We discussed Rome, he and I. Gwen wandered around the living room. I saw, now, after being closer to them for a time, that a difference between them existed, one that I hadn’t noticed originally. At the start, spying them from a distance, I had tended to lump them together in my mind, to find them equally attractive and desirable. But now I saw that there was with Gwen an absent-mindedness, almost a vapidness. She lacked the acuteness of her husband. And it seemed to me that much of the resemblance between them was not accidental; the girl had deliberately styled her manner of dress so that it matched his, and I saw, too, that the ideas—the intellectual material—common to the two of them originated in him. In discussions, Gwen took little or no part. She retired, like many wives.

It seemed to me that Nat relished talking to a woman who could hold her own with him on his own subject. As we talked, he became more stern; his forehead wrinkled, and his voice dropped to a low, determined pitch. Weighing his words carefully he gave me a long theory of his on the economic situation in Rome during the reign of Theodone. I found it fascinating, but toward the end my attention began to wander.

During a pause, while he tried to recall the name of a particular Roman administrative district, I couldn’t refrain from bursting in with, “You know, you’re so young.”

At that, his eyes opened wide and he stared at me. “Why do you say that?” he said slowly.

I said, “Well, you take all this so seriously.”

Quite brusquely he said, “It’s my field.”

“Yes, I know,” I said. “But you’re so intense. How old are you? Come on, tell me. You seem so much younger than us.”

With apparent difficulty, Nat said, “I’m twenty-eight.”

That surprised me. “Good god,” I said. “We thought you two were only eighteen on nineteen. Another generation.” His face, at that, got even darker. “It’s hard to believe you’re really twenty-eight,” I said. “I’m thirty-one,” I said. “I’m only three years older than you, but my god, it’s another generation.”

We talked some more about the area, and then the Anteils arose and said that they had to get back. I felt tired, now. I was sorry they had to leave, but at the same time the meeting between us and them had, in the final analysis, disappointed me. Nothing of any importance had come out of it, although god knows what I had expected. We made a tentative date to get together for dinner one evening toward the end of the week, and then I sent Charley off to drive them home.

After the three of them left the house I went into the bathroom and took a couple of Anacin. My head hurt and I decided that probably it was eyestrain. But anyhow I returned to the living room and got down from the bookshelf a book by Robert Graves that dealt with the Roman period; going outdoors on the patio I made myself comfortable on the chaise longue and began to reread the book—it had been several years since I had read anything on the Roman period, and I felt that if I was going to discuss it with Nat I should bone up on it.

How odd it was. – .we had wanted so badly to meet the Anteils; we had been drawn to them so intensely, and now that it had come about—not boredom, surely, but—not what we had expected, somehow. And yet I felt terribly tense. My entire body, all my muscles, were drawn up and tense. Leaving my book I went to the kitchen and poured myself another martini. Here I was, keyed-up and feeling irritable. The sun hurt my eyes, and that always indicated that I was getting into a foul mood. Or perhaps I was pregnant again. My legs certainly ached; all those big thigh muscles hunt, as if I had, for the last hour or so, been carrying an enormous load.

Lying down on the concrete, outdoors on the patio, I began doing a few exercises. Certainly I could still get my legs up as well as ever. My stomach felt somewhat bloated, though. So I got the trowel and began weeding in the garden, a good exercise, that squatting and weeding; the best in the world.

A day on so later, during the afternoon, I got a phone call from Mary Woulden about the Bluebirds’ peanut sale fund. During our discussion she mentioned that the Anteils had told about meeting Charley and me.

“Oh my god,” I said, “do you know them? Why didn’t you say so? We turned heaven and earth over to try to meet them—when we first laid eyes on them we swore we’d get to know them and invite them up to the house, and we finally just had to walk up to them cold and introduce ourselves and invite them up.”