Recapitulation (29 page)

The room hangs in its small-hours stillness above the stillness of the street. He feels bleak and old, done with, excluded and a failure, and is angry with himself for feeling so. For the dream, now that he has come fully awake, he neither wants nor believes. It lies to him about himself and it lies about the episode it pretends to recall. Some inferiority or self-doubt has been warping the facts in order to prove something. There was no repudiation then, and no failure. However fumbling and green he was, he was not unsuccessful, nor was Nola unwilling. The end of that initiation was not disappointment but a great grateful tenderness. Still the censor bans the rerun.

The trouble with the censor is that it knows too much. It has another, and much longer, and presumably far more important life to remember and keep under control. It is wary about accepting the illusion of wholeheartedness that would have to accompany this uncensored dream. It knows that the girl and first love are both victims, and so is the boy who took them joyriding. They cluster at the edge of consciousness like crosses erected by the roadside at the place of a fatal accident.

“So what are you saying?” asked some interlocutor in some anteroom of sleep. “That it wasn’t just a Dear John situation? That you got really hurt?”

“No,” Mason said. “That’s not what I’m saying.”

“She left a mark on you.”

“A heart with an arrow through it.”

“If she didn’t mean anything, why couldn’t you finish that dream?”

“Embarrassment. I’m too old to be having erotic dreams. And of course she did mean something. She meant a great deal, then.”

“You keep saying you’re a thing that lasts. You know what the Red Queen said to Alice.”

“What?”

“ ‘It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.’ ”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

It must mean something, or he would not have worked it into this conversation. But he couldn’t make sense of it, and let it go. Finally his interlocutor—he perceived that it was both Holly and the woman of the St. Georges terrace, and that she was smiling at him with a certain fondness and with an air of sympathetic and ironic knowledge—said, “You’re like a nailhead that’s been
painted over. You think you’re all covered up, but I can still see you under there. She was the biggest thing in your life, and she threw you down.”

“And I recovered. I’d have recovered faster if she hadn’t chosen to unload me just when my family was being wiped out, too.”

“But you worshiped her, didn’t you? When she let you go to bed with her it was like a religious experience.”

“Yes. All right. But let’s not talk about a bloody nose as if it were a broken head. She wounded me where I was most vulnerable, in my vanity and my self-confidence. She preferred another lover. She was a grown woman with a body and I was a boy with brains. The body always says hurry, the brains may say wait. When I went away she found out that she hated being on the shelf like a purchase with a deposit on it. She had desires that wouldn’t let her wait. I could have waited indefinitely, no matter what I said or thought.”

“Could you? You just admitted she was like a religious experience. You think sex is holy, don’t you?”

“Not the way I see it in the movies and in the lives of my junior colleagues.”

“
Ought
to be holy, then.”

“Sure, it ought to be. I’m that old-fashioned. Mystery, the profoundest agitation and self-sacrifice. Nothing to be cheapened or played with. Not just a jazzy incident on the pleasure circuit. Not the great god Orgasm.”

“That’s what you didn’t like about Jack Bailey.”

“Didn’t like but couldn’t help being fascinated by.”

“Why didn’t you ever marry?”

“Mainly because as soon as I got out of law school I took a job off in a country where the native women went veiled and stayed behind walls, and where there weren’t any others. Even if I had been anywhere where I might have met a woman I wanted to marry, Saudi Arabia was no place to take a wife. By the time it all opened up after the war, I was petrified in my bachelor habits. Get it out of your head that Nola spoiled me for all future women. We had a brief affair.”

“Was it so brief? All summer. You went to that wedding at the beginning of June and you didn’t go away to school until September.”

“But it was 1930,” he reminded her or himself. “In Salt Lake City. You girls had this thing called a reputation to be careful of. Nola’s apartment was always full of roommates and their dates. In those days there weren’t any motels. In a hotel, in a town the size of Salt Lake, you were bound to run into someone you knew. You didn’t take her home, the way they seem to now, and expect your parents to bring the two of you breakfast in bed. That left the automobile. You remember how it was.”

“I wasn’t prying after details. I only said it mattered to you.”

“There’s no reason you shouldn’t know the details. Such as how many times I slept with her altogether. Six or seven? I wasn’t much of a tempest in her teapot.”

“If this is bothering you I’ll stop.”

But of course he couldn’t let her stop, because he was inventing this conversation, he needed her questions so that he could answer them. Also, as his invention, she was properly sympathetic and friendly. She thought of him as a man who had modestly distinguished himself, and she knew this episode in his past that she thought intimate and touching. She wanted the Nola episode to demonstrate something about his sensitivity, or constancy, or character. She wanted to believe that a deep distress had humanized his soul, and also she wanted him to have been Nola’s innocent victim. Even while he estimated her misconceptions with a good deal of irony, he wanted to keep her there, talking.

The sound of a car—police car? someone running from the police?—came fast up South Temple from the direction of the Union Pacific station. He heard the foot come off the throttle as the car swerved around the Brigham Young monument, and then come down hard again. The sound hummed away eastward, diminishing, gone.

He said, “If I tell you this sad story will you quit trying to invent it? Physically it never amounted to much. There just wasn’t opportunity. We didn’t want to be the kind of people who left used condoms in lovers’ lanes.”

She was not bothered by his bluntness. She said, “I thought she went to the doctor.”

“I don’t think she had herself fitted, if that’s what you mean.”

“Why did she go, then?”

“I doubt that she did.”

“Why did she say she had to?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you think?”

“What do I think? I think Forsberg had had her virtue, and she didn’t dare tell me. I think she cooked up that doctor story so there’d be an explanation in case I noticed.”

“She was lying to you from the beginning.”

“That isn’t fair. She was in love with me. She had this indiscretion in her past and couldn’t tell me because she knew I couldn’t take it.”

There was a further question hanging in the dark between them, wherever they sat talking.
Did
he notice?
Was
it a virgin he lost his virginity to, down on that bedroll in the moon-flecked shadows of the cottonwoods beside the guggle of an irrigation ditch under the Capitol Reef?

Evidently she didn’t feel that she should ask. The answer, in case she did, would be yes, he did notice, and no, she was not a virgin.
Some
doctor had done his job.

He turned on his side to woo sleep. His body ached with tiredness, he pressed into the mattress with a ton’s weight. But in a moment this companion—interlocutor, old girl friend, lost possibility—came snuggling up, fitting herself to him, warm and comforting and female. It was unfortunate that she took that way of declaring herself, because her presence and her gesture told him something about himself, and moreover brought back that bedroll, that warm night, when after their second lovemaking Nola had crowded against him in exactly the same way, her breasts against his back, her breath warm and drowsy, her lips kissing the back of his neck, and on the verge of sleep murmured, “This is a nice formation.”

He noted the terminology. He had noted it then, but chosen not to acknowledge what it suggested. Formation. A military term.

“You were going to tell me about it,” Holly said.

“There’s nothing really to tell. A piece of banal juvenilia. Summer love affair. Dates every night. Movies. Once in a while we’d go dancing at the Old Mill, that open-air place at the mouth of Mill Creek Canyon. Shirt-sleeve summer nights, big moons floating up over the Wasatch, lots of close-harmony singing. Lots of necking, seldom consummated. Standard erotic obsession.”

“But you were working. You played tennis.”

“Not much tennis. Joe and I entered two tournaments and didn’t last three rounds in either one. Joe was disgusted. So was his father. I was so groggy for sleep I was worthless. If I hadn’t been going to quit soon, I think he’d have fired me. I definitely wasn’t the industrious young man he’d thought of taking into the business.”

“But you
were
ambitious. You were going off to law school. When did you tell Nola about that?”

“Late. Very late. August. I made it sound as if the chance had just come up and it was such a great chance I couldn’t refuse it.”

“You weren’t very honest with her, either.”

“Each of us had something to tell the other that we were afraid the other couldn’t accept. We were both right.”

“But you both had to accept it.”

“I don’t know. I never admitted what was actually very clear. She never reconciled herself to my going away. It made a difference. She’d get black moods. It changed there, toward the end. A sort of desperation came into it. We did some unlikely things.”

She waited, it seemed to him, in some hope that he would be explicit. He found that, though he had inked out that episode almost immediately, he hadn’t obliterated it, and that he regretted it as much now as he had then. He felt like taking out his pen and scatching over and over it until it was nothing but a rectangle of solid black.

“You can’t want to hear every shabby detail,” he said.

“Only if you want to tell me.”

“I don’t.”

“All right.”

But he couldn’t let her back off so meekly. Apparently he still needed her for antiphonal purposes. “We double-dated one weekend with Jack Bailey and his swamp angel. Bailey had the use of somebody’s cabin at Brighton. We went along and shacked up with them.”

“With that …!”

“Cunt-hunter, yes.”

“Oh, Bruce.”

“I know. I was supposed to spread my cloak over mud puddles, not drag her through them.”

“Why would you take her? Why would she go? She despised Bailey.”

He rolled onto his back and opened his eyes. The room was as dusty with shadows as his mind. “Desperation?” he said. “The feeling that every day brought calamity closer? We were obsessed with one another, we couldn’t ever seem to be alone or free. So when Bailey came coiling down out of his cinnamon tree and whispered in my ear, I heard him as an opportunity. I had these visions of pines and stars and darkness, another round of Capitol Reef. So did Nola, I suppose. We thought we could ignore Bailey, or put up with him, and his girl as well, even though we both thought she was a disgusting chippie.”

“Why would Bailey ask you? How did he know you were … you know, intimate.”

“On matters like that Bailey was infallible. He thought when we disappeared from the prom we gave ourselves away. He was wrong about the circumstances but right in general.”

“You put yourselves right in his hands.”

“Yes.”

“What happened, an orgy?”

“It would certainly have been called an orgy in 1930.”

“All together?”

“Good God, you have got a lurid imagination. No. But not quite the Capitol Reef, either. There were two double beds in this one-room shack, with a blanket hung over a wire between them.”

“It sounds so vulgar and grubby.”

“It was all of that.”

And when he came back from school the following June, starved for that girl, strung up like a fiddle string, denying the intimations of petulance and rejection he had been getting from her letters all through the spring, planning the surprise he had to propose—that she go with him to Reno, where his family had moved, and spend the summer at their cottage on Lake Tahoe; when he pulled up at her door after dark, dinnerless and bleary-eyed and hallucinating after eighteen hours on the road, expecting that the evening would be his and that the blackboard could be cleaned of everything and now at last the ordeal of absence was over; when she opened her door to him and he found that
instead of spending the evening with him she had to sing with Jack Bailey out at the Old Mill, was already in evening dress with her smooth shoulders bare—for Bailey—and really couldn’t, now how could she? Their act wasn’t over until one—see him afterward, she’d have arranged it otherwise but he hadn’t said he’d drive straight through, she hadn’t expected him until tomorrow—why, right then his mind had gone back to that shack in Brighton and arrived at a conclusion like a calculator flashing its instant sum. It went back now, and the sum was the same that had sent him off to Reno, alone, before noon the next day. Zero.

He can hear them through the door and through the years—the laughter, exclamations, screams, rebel yells. Reluctantly he puts his thumb on the latch and steps in on their party.

The air is thick with cigarette smoke, but even smoke that thick can’t obscure the musty odor of the place itself. It is a smell that rises from corners, lies like a gas along the Congoleum floor, sifts down from rafter angles where pack rats have left accumulations. Put your nose to the rough studs and you smell it. It is the smell, among other things, of mice in various forms and stages: living nests of shavings and chewed rags, with a core of pink newborn things as naked as worms; abandoned nests stained with tiny urinations and peppered with tiny turds; old carcasses, paper-dry, found where the poison left them, or flattened in traps. Each is a special staleness, together they compose the total odor of a species: birth, copulation, death. Into their pervasive blend, like pigments into a mixing base, are wrapped other shack odors; dust, oilcloth, kerosene, candle wax, the linseed-oil fabric of the window shades, even a wholesome memory of spruce gum from studs and rafters.