Into the Valley (8 page)

18.

On the map from the gas station, they were a few jagged circles alone, disconnected. She took the freeway in her hurry to get there.

It was private land, she understood. She would not be allowed to drive in the buttes. But she felt suddenly desperate to see their desultoriness up close. Geological anomalies, mountains in the middle of a valley. She felt some aspect of them must elucidate something, must point her in a direction.

To her right the shoulder was a streak of yellow grass dotted with trash. On and on, unvarying. Still, in this unending line, B. found herself waiting for something to appear. How could she be waiting? There was no sign that anything but the line of yellow grass would continue. This waiting, she sensed, was part of the problem. The feeling that if she just waited, somehow things would be resolved. Descend on her, materialize, make themselves clear. She felt programmed for it, she realized, as if to wait had been implanted in her body before she was born.

She sped up the car.

A crew of orange-vested men flashed by in the yellow line, picking up the trash. The blip of their faces pained in the heat. On another stretch the thump of a dead animal. The freeway streaming on. In her head a nursery rhyme drummed:
Seventeen, eighteen, maids in waiting.

Her eyes watered from the smog. She rolled up her window. She reached out to touch the checkbook, but the ostrich-skin purse was on the floorboard out of reach.

The buttes when they finally rose in her windshield were ugly. Mounts of yellow brown in the haze, bare land with a few shrubs and oaks in its crevices. She drove on, determined. She reached the base and pulled onto a dirt road. At a locked gate not far in she parked. She got out; the dead engine pinged. At the gate, she climbed awkwardly over in her dress, stumbling in her heels as she jumped down. She followed along barbed wire, the hillside smelling of dry mustard and dust.

The sun blazed down. There were no buildings anywhere. Bits of trash from other trespassers, a beer bottle, silver pull tabs, crumpled brown bags. The silver tabs were flashing a message maybe.
Thirteen, fourteen, maids a-courting, fifteen, sixteen, maids in the kitchen.
She watched the tabs, then gave up and walked on.

She left the road and began hiking up the hillside. There was “chaparral”—this one classification of tangled green bushes so foreign to her when she came west that she'd had to learn the name—and oak trees scattered and stooping. The powder-blue dress chafed at her underarms. Her heels were blistering. She took off the shoes. The dead grass and rocks pricked her feet but she could not put her throbbing soles back in the heels.

She felt whatever she was looking for must be farther on.

The top was not far. The sun fell in one pure burn into her skin. Finally she collapsed under one of the oaks, throat dry, too hot to continue. The flatness of the valley spread for hundreds of miles below, the mountains in the far distance like figments behind the haze. She could not make out any message, no revelation in any of it. She leaned against the tree. The feeling of solitude, at least, was pleasurable. No one would disturb her here. She closed her eyes.

In her mind, two women swirled. The first from a party, the only contact she'd had with “the scene.” A man in line at the supermarket had asked B. whether the grapes in her basket were picked by Mexican migrant workers, and when she could not say
they hadn't been, he'd begun declaiming about seasonal labor movements and the exploitation of brown-skinned “proles” by capitalist dictators (“in this so-called ‘democratic' society”) and then asked her to coffee. He had a wisp of awful breath and a slight droop to his left eye. Perhaps out of curiosity, or to occupy the hours, as with Daughtry, she'd accepted. When they met he did not ask her thoughts on anything. He listed his work in the service of the poor and downtrodden and disdained the “bourgeois café” where he had suggested they meet. He invited her to a party. The breath was worse, of a person who never flossed, whose teeth held rotting pieces of food. But she thought of the basement apartment and the long weekend ahead and again she accepted.

The party was in a run-down Victorian in the neighborhood where the young people flocked. Stairs led to a railroad flat with fewer people than B. had imagined, a phonograph playing a rock band she did not know, one sagging couch. Pages from books were taped to the wall, a Dylan Thomas poem, an illustration of what she guessed from the many arms and blue skin was some Hindu god, an astrological chart over a dying, half-brown ficus in the corner. Her date left to talk to friends and a woman near the liquor table handed B. a paper cup of wine and began asking her whether she understood that an orgasm was a basic human right. “I mean like food and oxygen,” the woman clarified. She demanded to know whether B. let strangers call her by her first name. “They do it at the doctor's office, the dry cleaner's, and you need to
tell
them. Instruct them. ‘It's
Miss Smith,
thank you.' I mean, would they call a man by his first name?” The woman glowered, seemingly at the dry cleaners and grocery men in her mind. “It's the insidious shit that keeps us down.”

Her voice began stirring up the carsickness. B. drank more wine. But the tight spinning at the back of her neck seemed to coat the room and yellow the walls. B. excused herself to the bathroom to escape and wandered into a dark hallway that seemed to go on forever. At the end of it was a woman. She sat in the dark on the floor, wearing, B. could just make out, a short dress the weight of a handkerchief, with African-looking patterns and a deep V in front showing her nipples; her hair went past her shoulders, her sandals snaked up her legs. She did not move at B.'s approach. Her trance was total, her head tilted back, her eyes rolling under their lids. B. understood from all these signs that the woman was on a “trip,” that she was beyond herself, in another realm. B. had no interest in acid. But she could not stop watching the woman. She would have reached out to touch her, to ask for her advice somehow, to look into her eyes—perhaps help her cover the nipples—if B.'s date had not found her, with his sulfurous breath and another story about organizing the workers (to which B. asked if he spoke Spanish and to which he'd replied that this was beside the point). He led her back into the party and B. lost the woman in the dark.

The other woman swirling in her mind was dead. B. had heard about it from one of the secretaries: the woman had been running across the street—her hair and nails clearly just done, the cherry red polish shining brightly in the sunlight—and then she had gone up and over the hood of a car and onto the ground. Her grocery bag torn and a wine bottle staining the asphalt and freshly cut daisies shivering in blood. All of which details B. saw vividly in her mind, the secretary having mentioned none of them. B. remembered thinking at the time that this woman had probably felt everything was “working out.” She'd bought the wine and picked the flowers and manicured her nails. And B. had felt a strange relief for her.

She sat like this under the oak tree, her mind confused but soft, the two women swirling, for she did not know how long. The heat dissolved. At some point, the chaparral shivered on the hillside. Stories of mountain lions pierced her trance briefly, but she did not want to move. She felt as if she was just on the other side of something—an answer? a riddle? But
the woman from the party frightened her and the woman in the
street was dead. There was nothing to put together. She grazed her fingernails back and forth in the dirt.

When the chaparral below her rustled again, she forced herself up. She climbed higher through the hard dirt and dried grass. She looked back for the mountain lion and at that moment stabbed the sole of her foot. The piece of glass was partway in. She removed it. She limped along without stopping. The top of the buttes was too near.

When she got there, it felt as if she were in one of the banks. The silence and remove, the calm and peace. A pleasant cloudiness spread through her, making nothing particular about her in that moment, everything fluid and easy to deflect; no stories, no afflictions; she was only a vapor. Her foot stung, her mouth gluey, the sun burning directly on her scalp. A trickle of blood ran from her foot; the cut was marbled with dirt. And yet in this moment above the pink smogged air, she could occlude from her mind further thoughts about waiting, marriage, about things “working out,” about the drugged woman at the party and the dead woman in the street. She thought vaguely she must get a
bandage. She thought vaguely, I'd like to sleep here. It was only the idea of the mountain lion that kept her from lying down in the dirt and dead grass to stay. Finally, after an hour or so, she forced herself to go down again the way she'd come, limping on the side of her foot.

Something on the way down glinted in the sun. A pocket knife in the grass, the blade open. She could not think why it would be there. She picked it up and took it with her. Her mind was already losing its relaxedness, the pleasant cloudiness dissipating. Thoughts began to crowd her again
. . .
Seventeen, eighteen, maids a-waiting
. . .
She walked faster. The cut brushed on each step.

By the time she came back to the Mustang, the sun was coming down the western half of the sky. Her feet and hands were filthy, her face and shoulders red. Flies buzzed her neck. In the car, she tore a piece of the map and wiped away the blood and wrapped the paper around her foot. She put the heels back on. When she tilted the rearview, there was a streak of dust across her chest and a fingerprint of blood at her collar bone. She tilted the mirror away and drove.

She drove south. Huge trucks barreled by her on the freeway. She was light-headed from hunger and thirst. She stopped at a taco stand off an exit ramp. A small Mexican man stood at a window in the side of a trailer, a short heavyset woman behind him at a grill. There was no shade anywhere as the late afternoon sun bore down on them. The smell of onions and sizzling pork made B. momentarily sick. She braced herself against the counter. The woman handed her a paper cup of water. “You alright, ma'am?” B. gulped it down and nodded, trying to smile. She ordered a taco and an orange soda. There was a third Mexican leaning on the trailer, chatting with the cook in Spanish. He was laughing and B. saw him look at her feet, the torn map, her dress. When the taco was ready, she went back to the Mustang although it was stifling inside. She gulped down the soda in one pull. She took a few bites of the taco but nausea and dizziness made her stop and she wrapped it back in its tinfoil and put it on the floor. She lay across her seats for a moment, trying to push through the dizziness.

She never should have left the buttes, she thought.

She made herself rise and start the engine. The light was copper through the car but B. did not notice it. She repeated to herself the nursery rhyme. Then she repeated to herself to the rhythm of the concrete breaks:
get there, get there, get there.
Her foot throbbed. Images of the realtor and the blue-smeared eyes of the girl returned. And it was not until the sky turned gray and the fields had dimmed that she finally realized: the banks were closed.

19.

When she entered the next town, a college town, there was already a sliver of moon. In the absence of a bank she must get to a motel and lie down, she told herself. But first a bandage. She scanned the streets for a drugstore. Everything deserted, the campus empty. The student-rented houses looked derelict even in the dark, couches on sidewalks, sagging stairs and porches, overgrown straw lawns. She parked the car to find a corner store at least. She walked through the abandoned campus. Crickets buzzed loudly. Her feet were raw in the bone-colored heels, the wound oozing through the paper. She sat on a bench. A few young people passed along the cement paths, in and out of pools of lamplight. The crickets droned on, the air smelled of grass, the night was hot. From nowhere it seemed a man came out of the dark and sat next to her.

“Best time to be here,” the man said. “No students.”

“It's very quiet.”

“Quiet. Obscured.”

She did not turn her head to him, in part because she knew she must look terrible, in part because she was afraid to see his face, she did not know why. “I'm trying to find a drugstore,” she finally said.

“Are you alright?” He turned toward her then, and she made herself look. He was maybe a decade older than she, but tanned and handsome, thick brown hair that had begun to gray at the temples. She wished she had the energy to take out her compact.

“Yes. My foot is cut a little, that's all.”

“Everything's closed now,” he said. Dozens of sprinklers exploded on, the jagged arcs thrusting in the dark.

“I have some bandages at my house,” the man eventually said. “It's just down across the way there.”

“Oh. I don't know
. . .
”

“I'm harmless, I promise. You could infect the cut walking on it like that.”

She'd seen his wedding ring, wide and shiny. He spoke in a slow liquid manner, possibly from drinking, she thought. But a quality in his voice was reassuringly authoritative (he must be a
professor, she decided); she felt too tired to argue.

“Alright. Thank you.”

She put back on her heels. They walked along one of the paths, the sprinklers catching their ankles. The house, oppo
site the quad, was a small Craftsman with every light on. The woodwork inside was mahogany, the ceilings low and the walls crowded with bookshelves, a comforting feel, although she wished the blazing lights would go away. B. noticed various charcoal sketches on the walls of nude women with giant engorged nipples. In one corner a tall heavy African mask. Piles of papers scattered across the tables and chairs.

He led her into the bathroom. There was a shaving kit open on a shelf, a can of woman's hairspray and an open jar of cold cream, as if two people were still in the midst of getting ready. The man motioned her to sit on the side of the tub and ran the water until it was warm, then bent down next to her and washed her hands, then her feet. She smelled the man's aftershave and the liquor on his breath; his tanned hands on her skin briefly made her stiffen. The white washcloth turned brown with dirt; B. blushed, embarrassed. When her foot was washed he moved her to the toilet seat and swabbed the cut with antiseptic, then reached for her dress and picked off a few spurs. B. waited for him to finish with gauze and tape for her foot but he stood up and put everything away.

“Shouldn't it be bandaged?”

“No. It needs to develop a protective layer. Open air.”

“Stay for a drink,” he added.

He left the bathroom before she could respond and she hobbled behind him on the side of her foot. She realized then a radio had been on, beating out a twisting, low and mournful jazz that made the house drowsy. She sat down on a couch next to more papers.

“You don't live around here,” he said, handing her a glass.

“No. Visiting.” She thought briefly she should not be drinking with a stranger, she should get back on the road and find a motel. But the tiredness and light-headedness (did she have a bit of sunstroke?) made her unable to move.

“And why on earth, dear lady, would you visit Chico? You have an Aunt Alma here or some other bad luck?”

“No, I've just been driving.” She did not feel like knitting together the explanation in her mind. She drank her scotch.

“We haven't been here long,” the man said. “Still finishing the dissertation. We're out from New York. That's where my wife is now. That faraway galaxy called New York
. . .
” He peered dolefully into his drink.

“I'm from the East too.”

He did not seem to hear her. “So you're really just driving? No obligations, no appointments? Sounds lawless.”

She fidgeted. Some of the papers from the couch fell onto the floor. She bent to pick them up.

“Don't bother about those. No point.”

“Does your wife like it out here?”

“Oh, she's busy enough keeping me in line, you know.” He laughed but it was not cheery. He fiddled with a thread on the arm of his chair. “It's been an adjustment for her, cooking more, keeping up a house instead of an apartment. I mean, she paints and sketches too, of course.” He pointed at the charcoals.

The drawings troubled B. She tried to find them modern, but the nipples were out of proportion, bellicose. “They're very interesting,” she said.

“How old are you?”

Suddenly a chorus of drunk voices crowded in through the windows. “Well, helloooo, Professor! Helloooo, helloooo! Another one of your ‘conferences'?” Howls of laughter, catcalls.

The man raised his hand in embarrassed greeting. It was impossible with all the lights to make out any faces in the dark.

“Don't give that grade 'til she earns it!” someone yelled, then more howls of laughter. The man's face looked like it would turn red if it weren't so mellowed. A few more mutterings and hoots and the commotion faded out.

“The frats stay here all summer,” he explained. “Amazing they survive to fall.”

“Thirty.”

“Pardon?”

“I'm thirty years old.”

He looked her up and down. “Well. What a nice change. I'm usually in the company of nubile student-girls—severely off-limits, of course—or mommies and widows.” He got up and went into the kitchen. She heard the slamming of cabinets and the suction of a freezer door, ice clinking.

When he came back, he held a refilled drink in one hand and the bottle in the other. He sat back across from her in the slouchy arm chair, tearing more thread out of the upholstery, widening the hole. “
I saw pale kings, and princes too,/Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;/They cried—‘La belle Dame sans merci/Hath thee in thrall!'
You made me think of that. Keats. My dissertation.”

“Well, thank you
. . .
I think
. . .
It's lovely.”

“What I find lovely, and fascinating, is exactly what a thirty-year-old woman is doing driving around the valley for no reason.”

“It's not for no reason.”

“No?”

The lights felt momentarily blinding. She drank more scotch. “Can you turn some of the lights off, please? I have a bit of a headache.”

“Whatever the lady wants.” He walked around the room and hallway until all the lights were off except a small lamp on an end table. She picked at a stain on her dress, hoping he would drop the subject.

“It's funny,” he went on, “I find I can talk more easily to single women of a certain age. I tend to go out of bounds. Not always appreciated in normal, civilized speak. I've found that mature-yet-not-coarsened sensibilities appreciate the out-of-bounds from time to time.”

“I can't talk to people easily,” she said. The dimmed room relaxed her; it might be the alcohol, she realized. “In college I was passable at it, but not anymore
. . .

“What do you and your wife talk about, usually?” she asked.

“Ha! That's funny.” But he didn't laugh, only drank more.

“No, really.”

“Oh, c'mon. We're married. What do married people talk about? You're obviously not married.”

She peered into her scotch with a vague irritation. “No.”

“In fact, now I'm putting it together,” he said, leaning forward, the mellowed face brightening. “Thirty and unmarried. That's it: you're on a quest. A midlife journey. Something mystical even.

“I ran away from the East too,” he went on without waiting for corroboration. “Didn't want all that baggage and dusty claptrap. Not to mention the tenure tracks were for the picking out here—forgive the pun.
The days of peace and slumberous calm are fled
. . .
”

“I don't really read poetry,” B. said.

“Most people don't.” He got up to refill their drinks and then sat down beside her on the couch. He stretched an arm out behind her shoulder. She found she didn't mind.

“How old is your wife?” It was the scotch, she realized. The scotch was making her open, calm.

“You're awfully interested in my wife.”

“You asked my age.”

“Look, let's get to this. What are you, pregnant? A dyke? Wanted by J. Edgar Hoover?”

“I just think it will help.” She was suddenly aggravated. “To get away from the city for a while. It's really none of your business anyway.”

“I'm sorry,” he said. His face filled with what looked like true remorse. “That was wrong of me.” He drank down the rest of his glass. “I like a few drinks, honestly. I get uncivilized sometimes. It's why my wife is out east at the moment.”

They sat silent.

“Hey, do you know the one about the blonde and the drunk professor? Hilarious. Just wait a few days and I'll remember the punch line.”

She smiled.

He stood up, slightly swaying. “We need a bit of dancing, I think.” He held out his hand.

She hesitated. But it was all nice, the talking, the drinking, the dimness. She rose and took his hand. They began to shuffle together back and forth clumsily, she on the side of her foot. His smell was richer in the dark. The room swirled around her as they rocked, the books and the
objets d'art
taunting with their French titles and hanging breasts, the burning cities and Jayne Mansfield's decapitated head in the newspapers at their feet.

He murmured in her ear. “Take me with you. Sounds like a good time. I'll be your helmsman.” He kissed her wrist.

She thought in a part of her mind that she should not let a married man kiss her. But she liked him breathing in her ear, she liked a handsome professor trying to figure her out.

They danced cheek to cheek (he was not much taller than she when they stood together), his skin salty, cologned. She felt the swaying had to do with the room, not their own bodies, it rocked her into a kind of trance. The carsickness was buried underneath the layers of scotch. She should drink more often, she thought.

“I played with paper dolls when I was younger,” she whispered into his ear. The image appeared to her as they danced: a dozen ladies' punch-out outfits with tabs on her bedroom floor, flouncy chartreuses and roses and tangerines. “It was always the point to see her in something different. One dress grew tiring and you tried another, and it was pretty for a while, and then again it was tiring.” She paused. “I didn't have any thoughts about this when I was a girl.” He brought her forearm to his mouth and sucked on it for a moment, his dry lips and rough tongue spurring on the memory of the dolls. “But now it seems so disturbing to me. That I would think of the doll with no care or concern but what new different dress to wear. What did she do all day? I never thought about it. I never thought about what her days would be like.”

“They were just paper, darling.” Now he nuzzled her neck. “Just dolls.”

“But I should have considered
. . .
” The scotch had gone all through her body and the kisses tingled on her skin, rippling inside her. Her thoughts splintered. The jazz was swirling in a low moaning wail.

“Is your wife ever nauseous?” she asked abruptly.

“Nauseated,” he corrected, licking her collarbone. “I wouldn't know, we don't talk about female things.” He unzipped the back of her dress. Her back spasmed when his fingers brushed it. He took down her bra straps and cupped her breasts. “No more about her,” he whispered.

He moved her to the couch. He emptied the last bit of scotch into their glasses and finished his in a single go. He pressed her back on the couch and began kissing his way down her breasts and onto her stomach. Somewhere again she thought she must stop; he was married. But the sensation of the kissing and the scotch and having confessed about the dolls made her malleable, new. At her navel he stopped as if struck by something. “People don't really talk, you know. The hippies think we're so rotten and bourgeois, and they don't talk any more than we do—communicate, I mean. I mean, what are they really saying to each other with all this ‘turn on and groove'? It's all another way to obfuscate. Cover over the void. Just a different language of avoidance.”