Dean’s brief marriage to Inez and return to Camille

Dean’s brief marriage to Inez and return to Camille is a compressed sequence of departures, divorces, and remarriage that reveals how little stability Dean’s relationships provide. While Sal lies sick in Mexico City, Dean announces that he has divorced Camille and is going to New York to marry Inez; soon afterward, he does marry her, only to leave and return to Camille and their two daughters.

The Departure from Mexico City

The episode begins with Sal feverish, delirious, and unconscious from dysentery. When he comes to, he finds Dean bending over a kitchen table and preparing to leave Mexico City. Dean tells him that Stan will look after him, that he has obtained a divorce from Camille, and that he is driving to New York that night to return to Inez. His words turn Sal’s illness into the setting for another abrupt change in Dean’s domestic life: even as Sal is barely able to speak through his pain, Dean is already moving on to the next marriage.

Dean’s farewell combines affection with necessity. He says that he wishes he could stay and hopes he can come back, but insists that he must get back to his life. Sal clutches his cramping belly and groans; when he looks up again, Dean stands beside him with his old broken trunk. Dean pulls the blanket over Sal’s shoulders, a small act of care that sits beside the larger abandonment. Sal does not recognize him, and Dean understands this, sympathizing as he leaves.

Marriage to Inez and Return to Camille

Dean drives from Mexico City and sees Victor again in Gregoria. He pushes the failing car as far as Lake Charles, Louisiana, where its rear end finally drops on the road, as he had expected it would. He wires Inez for airplane fare and flies the remaining distance. Arriving in New York with his divorce papers, he and Inez go immediately to Newark and marry.

The new marriage lasts only briefly before Dean reverses direction again. That same night, after reassuring Inez that everything is all right, he gets on a bus and heads across the continent to San Francisco to rejoin Camille and their two baby girls. The reassurance is set against the sorrow and strain of the departure: Dean tries to make the situation seem coherent even as he leaves his new wife almost as soon as he has married her.

Repetition and Consequence

By the end of this sequence, Dean has been married three times, divorced twice, and is living with his second wife, Camille. The striking arithmetic gives the episode its force: marriage does not mark a settled destination but another turn in Dean’s restless movement between partners and households. His declaration that he has to return to his life acquires an ironic edge when that life means leaving one wife to go back to another.

Sal’s judgment changes after he recovers. At first he accepts Dean’s departure without protest, but later he recognizes how hurtful it was to be left sick and calls Dean a rat. That anger does not erase his attempt to understand the impossible complexity of Dean’s life and the pressure of his wives and woes. The episode therefore holds the injury and the attachment together: Dean leaves Sal at a moment of vulnerability, while Sal’s later account makes room both for condemnation and for sympathy.