Solo Faces (2 page)

“Well …,” she said helplessly. The stirrings of a well-being close at hand, even of a possible happiness, were confusing her. “I suppose you can have it. What’s your name?”

He hardly saw her the first few days. Then, briefly appearing in the doorway, she invited him to dinner.

“It’s not a party or anything,” she explained.

The candles were dripping on the tablecloth. The cat walked among dishes on the sink. Louise drank wine and stole glances at him. She had never really seen his face. He was from Indianapolis, he told her. His family had moved to California when he was twelve. He had quit college after a year.

“I didn’t like the cafeteria,” he said. “I couldn’t stand the food or the people who ate there.”

He had been in the army.

“The army?” she said. “What were you doing in the army?”

“I was drafted.”

“Didn’t you hate it?”

He didn’t reply. He was sitting with his arm curved around the plate, eating slowly, like a prisoner or a man who has been in mission houses. Suddenly she understood. “Oh!” she almost said. She could see it: he was a deserter. At that moment he looked up. Don’t worry, she tried to tell him silently. She admired him, she trusted him completely. He had hair that had gone too long without being cut, fine nostrils, long legs. He was filled with a kind of freedom that was almost visible. She saw where he had been. He had crossed the country, slept in barns and fields, dry riverbeds.

“I know …,” she said.

“You know what?”

“The army.”

“You wouldn’t have recognized me,” he said. “I was so gung ho, you wouldn’t believe it. We had a captain, Mills was his name. He used to tell about the chorus of soldiers that gathered outside when General Marshall was dying. They stood in the dusk and sang his favorite songs. It was just the idea of it. The other guys, what did they care? But I wasn’t like them. I believed. I was really a soldier, I was going to officer candidate school and become a lieutenant, I was going to be the best lieutenant in the whole damned army. It was all because of that captain. Wherever he went, I wanted to go. If he died, I wanted to die.”

“Is this true?”

“I used to copy the way he dressed, the way he walked. The army is like a reform school. Everyone lies, fakes. I hated that. I didn’t talk to anyone, I didn’t have any friends, I didn’t want to be soiled. You’re probably not interested in this. I don’t know why I’m telling you.”

“I am interested.”

He paused, thinking back to a period of faith.

“We had a first sergeant, an old-timer, he could hardly write his name. We called him Bobo. I knew he liked me, I didn’t know how much. One night at a beer party I went up to him to ask about my chances for promotion. I’ll never forget it. He looked at me, he kind of nodded. He said, ‘Rand, I been in the army a long time, you know?’ In ‘knee arm forces,’ is what he actually said. ‘My old man was a marine, I tell you that? A China Marine. You probably never heard of the China Marines. They were the worst soldiers in the world. They had houseboys cleaned their rifles for them and shined their shoes. They had White Russian girl friends. Why, they didn’t even know how to roll a pack. I was a kid there; I remember all that. Tell you something, I was in Korea—a long time ago—that was rough. I was in Saigon. I’ve soldiered everywhere, you name it. I’ve jumped in snowstorms, we couldn’t even get a squad assembled till two days later. I’ve jumped at night. I’ve jumped into rivers—by mistake, that was. I’ve known guys from all over, and let me tell you something: you are one of the best soldiers I ever seen!’ ”

“Did he mean it?”

“He was drunk.”

“What happened?”

“I never even made corporal.”

The immense southern night had fallen. It glittered everywhere, in houses along the beach, supermarkets open late, the white marquees of theaters.

“Here,” she said, “have some wine.”

“I could have been a captain, I could have worn bars.”

His blue shirt was faded, his face strangely calm. He looked like a cashiered officer, like a man whose destiny has been denied him.

“I thought you were a deserter,” she confessed.

“An apostate,” she heard him say.

That night he slept in her bed. They would have been enemies otherwise. She knew she was hasty and nervous. Perhaps he wouldn’t notice. The bed was very wide, her marriage bed. The sheets had scalloped edges. It was the first time since her divorce, she confided.

“My God,” she moaned, “can you believe that?” And a while later, “Was that story you told me true?”

“Sure it was.”

“About the marines?”

“What marines?”

In the morning she followed him to work.

Women look like one thing when you don’t know them and another when you do. It was not that he didn’t like her. He would watch as she sat, dressing for the evening, before a folding mirror. In the circle of light her mysterious reflection did not even acknowledge him but watched self-absorbed as she applied the black around her eyes. Her necklaces hung from a deer antler. There were pictures cut from magazines tacked to the wall.

“Who is this?” he said.

“Hm?”

“Is this your father?”

A brief glance.

“That’s D. H. Lawrence,” she murmured.

A young man with a mustache and fine brown hair.

“You know who that looks like?” he said, amazed. He could hardly believe it. He turned toward her to let her guess, herself. “Louise …” he said, “look.”

She was staring at her reflection.

“Can you believe these thin lips?” she wailed.

Yes, then he liked her. She was sardonic, pale. She wanted to be happy but could not be, it deprived her of her persona, of what would remain when he, like the rest of them, was gone. Something was always withheld, guarded, mocked. She was impatient with her son, who bore it stoically. His name was Lane, he was twelve. His room was down the hall.

“Poor Lane,” she would often say, “he’s not going to amount to much.”

He was failing at school. The teachers liked him, he had lots of friends, but he was slow, vague, as if living in a dream.

There were nights they returned from somewhere in the city, weary from dancing, and weaved down the hallway past his door. She was making an attempt to be quiet, talking in whispers.

Her shoe dropped with the sharpness of a shot onto the floor.

“Oh, Christ,” she said.

She was too tired to make love. It had been left on the dance floor. Or else she did, halfheartedly, and like two bodies from an undiscovered crime they lay, half-covered in the early light, in absolute silence except for the first, scattered sound of birds.

On Sundays they drove to the sea. In the whiteness of spring the sky was a gentle blue, a blue that has not yet felt the furnace. Small houses, lumberyards, flyblown markets. The final desolation of the coast. The streets of Los Angeles were behind them, the silver automobiles, men in expensive suits.

Seen picking their way down the slope from the highway to the beach, half-naked, towels in their hands, they seemed to be a family. As they drew closer it was even more interesting. She already had a stiffness and hesitation that are part of middle age. Her attention was entirely on her feet. Only the humorous, graceful movements of her hands and the kerchief around her head made her seem youthful. The man was following her, tall and resigned. He hadn’t learned that something always comes to save you.

She was a woman who would one day turn to drink or probably cocaine. She was high-strung, uncertain. She often talked about how she looked or what she would wear. Brushing the sand from her face, she wondered, “What would you think of—white? Pure white, the way they dress at Theodore’s?”

“For what?”

“White pants with nothing underneath, white T-shirts.” She was imagining herself at parties. “Just the red of lipstick and some blue around the eyes. Everything else is white. Some guy comes up to me, some smart guy, and says, ‘You know, I like the color of your nipples. You here with anyone?’ I just look at him very calmly and say, ‘Get lost.’ ”

She invented these fantasies and acted them out. One minute she would accept kisses, the next her mind would be elsewhere. She was never really sure of him. She never dared commit herself to the idea that he would stay. Afraid of what might happen, she was frivolous, oblique, chattering to herself like a bird in a forest so as not to be aware of the approach of danger.

Early one morning he rose before five. It was barely light. The floor was cool beneath his feet. Louise was sleeping. He picked up his clothes and went down the hall. On top of rumpled sheets Lane was sleeping in his underwear. His arms were like his mother’s, tubular and smooth. Rand shook him lightly. The eyes glinted open.

“You awake?” Rand asked.

There was no reply.

“Come on,” he said.

O
N THE CAR WINDOWS
, mist had formed. Newspapers lay on the lawns. The streets were empty. Buses were driving with their lights.

The freeways were already full, a ghostly procession. Over the city lay a layer of clouds. To the east the sky was brighter, almost yellow. The bottom was spilling light. Then suddenly, breaking free from earth, the molten sun.

The buildings of downtown appeared, tall and featureless. They seemed to turn slowly and reveal an unknown face of greater detail, a planetlike face lit by the sun.

A river of cars was pouring inward out of a brilliance that obscured the road signs. Some twenty miles farther, among the last apartment buildings and motels, were the first open hills. There was less traffic now, nurses driving homeward, Japanese, bearded blacks, their faces bathed by dawn like true believers. It was seven o’clock.

Near Pomona the land began to open. There were orchards, farms, vacant fields, the fields that once made up America. A countryside more calm and pure lay all about, covered by soothing clouds. The blue air of rain hung beneath. A group of white objects tilted like gravestones drifted by on the right.

“What are those?”

Rand looked out at them.

“Beehives,” he said.

The sky was breaking into bright fragments.

At Banning they turned off. They were far from the city now, a generation away at least. The houses were ordinary. There were trailers, limping dogs. The road had begun to climb into barren hills. At each curve was a view of wide, patterned farmland falling away below. Ahead was emptiness, land that had no owner.

“It’s nice from here on,” Rand said.

The mountains were the color of slate, the sun behind them. The valley, wide with a silver highway, was seen for the last time. Beyond it a great range of mountains had appeared, peaks still white with snow. The road was silent, smooth.

“How high are we?”

“Two, three thousand feet.”

The scrub trees vanished. They were speeding through forests of pine. Along the roadside lay banks of snow.

“Look, a dog.”

“That’s a coyote.”

It turned before they reached it and disappeared into the trees.

They dropped down into a valley and small town. Gas stations, a triangular park. It was all familiar. He knew the way as if it had been yesterday. A wooded road past houses with names like Nirvana and Last Mile, then some green water tanks, and there it was, a great dome of rock, its shoulders gleaming in the sun. A tremor of excitement went through him. The sky was clear. It was nearly nine o’clock.

They parked, the doors on both sides open, and changed their shoes. Rand got a small rucksack and coil of rope, red as flannel, from the trunk. He led the way, down off the road to a half-hidden path. They followed this for a while and then turned upward and began to climb. The pines were tall and silent. The sun trickled through them to the forest floor. Rand moved steadily, unhurriedly, almost with a pause between his steps. There was no point in wasting strength here. Even so, it burned the legs; sweat began to glisten on their faces. Once or twice they paused to rest.

“This is the hardest part. It’s not much farther,” Rand said.

“I’m okay.”

A large boulder which only an ice age could have borne was up ahead, close to the base of the main rock which seemed to have lost its size. The great slabs that almost plunged into the forest had vanished. Only a few of them, the lowest, could be seen.

Rand uncoiled the rope. He wrapped it twice around the boy’s waist and watched as the knot was tied. The other end he tied to himself.

“You want to go first?” he said.

It was easy at the start. With the unschooled agility of a squirrel, Lane moved upward. After a while he heard a call,

“That’s a good place to stop.”

Rand began to climb. The rock felt warm, unfamiliar, not yet giving itself over. Lane was waiting in a niche forty feet above the ground.

“I’ll just go on,” Rand said.

Now he went first, the boy belaying. As he climbed he put in an occasional piton. He hammered them into cracks. A metal link, a carabiner, was snapped to the piton and the rope run through it.

Far below was a small upturned face. Rand climbed easily, assured in his movements. He looked, felt, tried, then without effort, moved up.

The rock is like the surface of the sea, constant yet never the same. Two climbers going over the identical route will each manage in a different way. Their reach is not the same, their confidence, their desire. Sometimes the way narrows, the holds are few, there are no choices—the mountain is inflexible in its demands—but usually one is free to climb as one will. There are principles, of course. The first concerns the rope—it is for safety but one should always climb as if the rope were not there.

“Off belay!” Rand called. He had reached a good stance, the top of an upright slab. There was a well-defined outcrop behind him. He placed a loop of nylon webbing over it and clipped to that. He pulled up what free rope there was, passing it around his waist to provide friction if necessary.

“On belay!” he called.

“Climbing,” came the reply.

Lane had watched him carefully, but from below he could not tell much after a while. It seemed, in places, there must have been some trick—there was no way to climb—but with the rope tugging gently at him, he managed. It was steeper than it looked. He was slight, flylike. He should have been able to cling to the merest flaws. His foot slipped off a tiny hold. He somehow caught himself. He put his toe back where it had been, with less confidence. This part was very hard. He stared up, his legs trembling. The slabs above were sheer, gleaming like the side of a ship. Beyond them, a burning blue.