Three Short Novels (10 page)

“I'm not Anna,” she said. “Don't talk to me that way,” as if he had shouted that other wife into her grave.

“You're all Anna,” he cried. “You're all alike. Sometimes I start to call you Anna.” He stood up to unbuckle his belt but the rage against her forced him to put on his shirt again. His hands shook as they went down the buttons.

She began to walk around the room, frightened by his accusation that she was as his wife Anna had been. She had not thought that the desperation in herself was as much as in that other woman, but this comparing them roused in her the fear that it was as much. “If I'm Anna,” she cried, “then I can tell you how she felt. You want to know how she felt? Everything she said against herself was against you, because she was afraid to say it against you.”

“She wasn't afraid to say it!” he shouted. “What makes you think she was afraid?”

“Sometimes I say it, but I'm afraid when I say it,” she told him. “Every time I say something against you to your face, it's like a terrible falling, like I've cut the ground out from under my feet.”

“That
is
the ground under your feet!” he shouted. “That
is
the ground.”

“No, it's true,” she said, twining her fingers. “It's true what I say. That's the way she felt, I
know
. She couldn't bear you anymore, but she couldn't cut the ground away. That's a terrible thing, not to be able to bear the ground under your feet. What do you do then but die?”

“You blame me for it?”

She gave him a look of scorn, and was appalled by the slipping away of the ground. He came toward her and she waited, unable to expect that he would strike her. He struck her and she fell to her knees, clinging to him. He grasped her arms and flung her off. When she got to her feet, he followed her. “Go on! Goddamn! Go on! Go on, faster!” he shouted. “You know the way, you know the way. Take off your goddamn nightgown. What's that on for when you run naked in the hallway? He'll think you're dressed to go out, looks like a goddamn dress to go out in.” He grasped the hem of it, but she swung around, striking at him, and, missing him, fell against her son's door.

Above her, she saw her son strike Russell in the chest. The boy flew at the man, all his taciturnity released into rage, into shouting and striking. Russell flung him away, and when the boy fell against the wall, struck him in the face with the back of his hand and left them. David helped her into his room and locked the door, and they sat together on his bed, trembling, listening to Russell's sobs and his screams at the sobs to stay down, and they heard the rush of water in the basin. Then he left the house, raced the engine of his car, and roared away.

She ran down the stairs and bolted the door, afraid that he would return, afraid that later in the night, wherever he was, in some hotel room, he would be forced to return. She lay down in her bed. She was not concerned with her son; he could take care of himself and his own wounds. If he was trembling, it was with fear of things beginning, of woundings and conflicts beginning; he was not trembling with the fear of endings.

15

I
n the morning they packed a few clothes and left the house, wanting to be away if Russell returned. On the drive down to Monterey, David drowsed in the sun beating into the open car, his head lolling back against the seat. She glanced at his face; as dearly familiar as it was, she always found more than a touch of the unfamiliar, and now the bruise increased the strangeness. As she drove with the drowsing boy, it seemed to her that his elusiveness was an accusation that she had always, since his birth, held other persons to be more valuable than he, that all her time was spent in the company of other persons for whom she must make herself valuable, when who were the others, after all? He was to repay her in kind, she knew. It was inevitable. He was to spend his life in the company of persons whose value for him she would never be able to comprehend, and she felt a deep stirring of curiosity about that life of his beyond his fourteen years and about those persons, some not yet born, who were to rake his mind and his heart with their being.

On either side of the highway stretched rows of low, tangled vines, their green muted by the fine dust concocted of hot sun and vast
open fields. For miles she drove through sun-bleached hills, ranging in color from almost white to a dark gold, and early in the afternoon she turned along by the sea. Her body felt fragile, but the sun on her bare arms and legs and on the crown of her head was a healing warmth. They found a pink stucco motel, primly neat, fronted by geometrical patches of grass and gravel, and ringed by cypress. The walls of the room were coral pink and the spreads on the twin beds were also coral, scrawled with white nautical designs. They left their cases on the beds and walked to the restaurant close by, whose enormous sign was like a lighted tower signaling ships at sea.

She walked in, aware of their complementary beauty, the young mother and her young son, both pretending an easy familiarity with the place, although his pretense, she knew, was the result of shyness. He walked behind her, yet she knew, from having turned other times in other restaurants to ask him something, just how he looked, how one thumb was hooked in his back pocket and how he glanced neither to the right nor to the left but kept his gaze down to the level of her ankles.

She was glad to see that there were waiters here and no waitresses, and to their young waiter she made evident her consciousness of him as a man in the way she rested her elbow on the table and set her profile on view, and in the way she took a cigarette from her purse and smiled at him to light it for her. She shared her graces between the waiter and her son who, because of his attack on Russell, had made the unspoken demand of him to treat him as the man he was to become; and, afraid of that demand, she required an obvious flirtation with the waiter, almost an infatuation. The waiter's eyes wobbled away when their glances met. He told them, as he picked up soup bowls and laid down salad bowls, keeping his elbows close to his sides, that the weather yesterday had been very nice, the sun up hot and early. It was time, he said, for the fog to roll in. “Is there any fog on the horizon?” he asked, like one denied the sight of the
day, although the restaurant's front windows looked out to sea. She reported that they had seen no fog, nothing, and laughed with the waiter over his moody refusal to glance out the window at the clear day that others were free to roam around in.

The tide was out when they strolled down to the water, so far out it left exposed a wide stretch of wet sand reflecting the sandpipers running over it. With his trouser legs rolled up, gesturing widely, David told her that the water was drawn far out like that before a tidal wave. He seemed elated by the prospect. She walked in step with him over the firm wet sand and through cool gusts of wind raised by the breakers. The flock of sandpipers rose up incredibly swift, skimming over the waves, turning so fast in one instant, flashing white, then dark. Far up the beach, the flock curved in again and landed. On the horizon lay a slate-blue bank of fog.

“You want to bet tomorrow is foggy?” she said, hugging herself against the thought of it. “There's nothing more dreary than fog by the ocean. Let's go to the mountains somewhere. Let's do that.”

Once they had canceled their room, however, and carried their bags to the car, her desire to leave the town grew less and they spent several hours wandering the streets where the smart shops were, and they stayed on to eat a late supper out on the wharf. On the drive to the Santa Cruz mountains, he talked awhile about the day's trivia, uneasy, she knew, over his changing voice; then he was silent. She asked him if he were awake and heard no reply, but she suspected that the night and their aloneness for miles forced him to dissemble sleep.

It was past midnight when she drove into the parking area of a cabin motel, and whether he had slept for hours or had fallen asleep a moment before they arrived, he woke up only long enough to carry in his overnight bag and to undress and climb into bed. She switched off the paper-shaded lamp that stood on the small table between the beds and undressed by the yard light. She lay with her back to him and the room, her gaze on the vine that webbed the screen high in the
wall, afraid to move, afraid that the small sound of the turning of her body would be enough to wake him.

16

T
he morning was hot and filled with the chitter of birds. David was already gone from the room when she awoke; she heard him talking in the yard with a woman. She peered out through the screen. The yard was struck with sun, a shock of white space in which she could not locate him.

They ate their breakfast at a cafe near the motel and took the trail suggested to them by the proprietor, climbing up through the silence of the day that seemed to resound off the mountains in waves. Small lizards ran off the narrow trail into the dry grass, stopping to lift their heads and look back. David kept his eyes on a large bird circling so that he could name it for her; but it soared away as if it were swept off to the side by some wide current of heat. When she climbed ahead of him, he darted side to side so that his voice could reach around her, and when she came along behind him, he paused on the trail to turn and tell her something to her face, and sometimes he walked backwards. A dog was barking down below, and the sound was isolated by the silence, and magnified and like another sound, a sound she had never heard before, the barking of a beast that went by the name
of dog. This discovery of the unfamiliar in the dog's barking set off an elation in her breast. A delight in the preposterous. And she was delighted with herself for running away from her husband, for running away from her marriage, for running away from everything that bound her.

She stepped off the trail into a clearing and sat down on a rock in the scanty shade of a tree, counting on the prosaic act of resting and smoking a cigarette to bring her down to the prohibitive world again. A long time ago someone had begun to erect a cabin in the clearing and had given up. Around them lay rusty chains and saw blades, a mound of yellow newspapers, pulpy and mixed with the gray stuffing of a moldy mattress; and the giving up, after hauling up the trail the materials of the future, was further cause for the ridiculous elation that the barking of the dog had set off. The sun was directly overhead, the shade was not enough, and the sweat ran down from under her breasts to where her shorts were belted in. David had taken off his shirt and was wiping his chest and face with it. Up in the tallest tree an insect was making a ringing noise, a high-pitched humming like a sound of torment, as though the sun was slowly burning its edges away.

David spoke to her, but all she heard was the waiting silence after his voice. She wanted him to know her body again as he had known it as an infant or to know her body as he had not known it, like a lover who had been unconscious of who it was he had loved, who had loved a woman for a time and yet not known the person she was; and she wanted to know his body as she had known it and claimed it when he was an infant and as it would be in the years to come when he was apart from her, and she wanted this knowledge of each other to put them forever apart from everyone else, as covertly wise persons were apart. She glanced over at him as he leaned against a tree two yards away from her. Gazing at her, he looked stricken and pale in the sun, like someone waiting to be sacrificed. She ground her cigarette into the dirt. There were dry pine needles and rust-colored leaves on
the ground, and as though she were concerned about starting a blaze, she continued to grind the cigarette with the sole of her shoe, sending all the wanting down into the earth.

They went down the trail to the highway, he following her from afar. On the edge of the highway, as they walked together again, unspeaking, she placed her hand on his shoulder, needing to assure herself that she had meant him no harm.

In the motel swimming pool, in the midst of countless children, she was kicked by beating feet, water splashed in her eyes and shouts rang in her ears, and she dodged small, sharp elbows. She often lost sight of him; once saw him talking to a girl a year or two older than he, both of them holding to the edge of the pool and with only their heads above water. The girl's light brown hair in wet strands to the shoulders, the small, delicate profile, the unformed and forming spirit, brought her a moment's anguish. Surrounded by splashing young bodies, she suspected that if she were to drown she would not be missed, that she would lie at the bottom of the pool, and for hours, for the entire day under the sun, the young bodies would splash above her. Even when her body was discovered she would not be missed. So now, in the time before she was drowned, in the time before the water seeped under her cap and the chlorine turned her bleached hair green and she became a grotesque drowned woman, in the time before she was dead and revealed, she must experience a union with him that was more than with any other person on earth. It was not enough to have given him birth, it was not enough to be his mother, that union was not enough. Mothers were always of the past and never of the future. A boy rose straight up out of the water directly in front of her, bumping against her legs and breasts. For a second he looked at her with bright, unseeing eyes; then he struck away from her and was at once lost among the other shrill and splashing children. Frightened, she climbed from the pool, away from all the quick, contemptuous bodies in the water.

When she had dressed, she walked down the highway to the cafe. She slipped a morning paper from the rack and was opening it to read at the counter while she drank her coffee when David got onto the stool beside her, his body wet, his bare feet coated with the dust of the highway. Unspeaking, they ate side by side, he with his back humped and his head bent down, and shivering a little. Some water ran down his temple, some dripped from his trunks to the floor. She was pleased with his alarm—it was like an outburst, a confession—and at the same time she was afraid of it and of the pleasure that she took in it.