Dalva (13 page)

As I walked to the restaurant I felt a sharp pang beneath my breastbone that I was bent on leaving the place that had been a relatively happy home. All my moves had been so
radical—New York City and Los Angeles had alternated with remote regions of Montana, Minnesota, Michigan, and Nebraska. There had been short, unsuccessful attempts to live in foreign countries—France, England, Mexico, Brazil—but I was so thoroughly an American that my homesickness led to a premature return; out of forty-five years well over forty-three had been spent in New York or Los Angeles, or in areas so remote that my friends in those cities found them laughable.

I was in the pub part of the restaurant and standing near the window when Ted's car pulled up. As everyone knows, Californians tend to be car snobs with a sharp eye out for such small items as a limousine with rental licenses. Ted's was his own, a silver 600 Mercedes with the back set up as an ambulatory and convertible office. He spent so much time between Malibu and Beverly Hills and the airport it was easy to justify the extravagance, and the IRS cooperated. I had ridden in the car only a few times before I decided the silliness was overwhelming. There was the additional idea that envy along with self-pity serve as our most repulsive emotions, and it was no fun getting out of the car only to be stared at by people to whom such things mean a great deal. Ted, however, dismissed this as bogus Midwestern modesty.

“You look awful,” I said. And he did as he smiled out from a pale and fatigued puffiness.

“I was celebrating. I passed the antibodies test. I'm clean, and now I'm going to be careful.”

I reached across the table and took his hand. To moralists the scene would be ludicrous, perhaps disgusting, but I'm not a moralist and he was a dear friend. He had refused to take the test out of fear but I had helped him into it. If an act of love spreads a fatal disease, I argued, then you give up the act of love. His happiness was tempered by the fact that one of his closest friends had flunked the test.

“That's it for him. Kaput. No more love. The odds are he won't even get it himself. But what I want now is for you to talk Ruth out of marrying this Mexican grocer. He's much more dangerous than the batty priest.”

“Behind every ex-artiste is a snot,” I countered, misquoting Auden.

“That's true but you'll admit Latin men are all sweetness,
mi corazón
and that sort of thing, until she says yes; then they become bullies.”

“That's true generally but Ruth is smart enough to know if he's different.”

“No, she's not, for Christ's sake. She's full of vague longings. She's pre the last three or four fucking wars. She's Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf. She's half goddamn nitwit every day and a hundred percent nitwit when it comes to men. I still love her but she won't listen to me.”

“Of course you love her,” I said without irony, “but that doesn't make you worth listening to on the subject. Some of your choices for me when I came to town weren't quite on the money.”

“I agree. I thought you were different. Just promise me you won't let her make the move until you look the guy over.”

I weakened and made the promise. We were interrupted by a young Australian graduate student from Darwin who said hello with a blush and slipped me an envelope. He said he was going home for a few months, then hurried off.

“I'll give you a C-note if I can read it.”

“Where's the money?” I said.

Ted handed over the bill, and took the envelope with pleasure. “What a disappointment! ‘My dearest Dalva, Here is the fifty I owe you. Thanks, Harold.' Jesus, tell him to change his name. Harolds go nowhere. Harold Stassen. Name me another. I bet you slept with the poor boy.”

“Of course. One afternoon in here he was reading Doris Lessing and I like Doris Lessing. Now I've tripled my money.”

“Doubled! Ruth says you're going back home. You're going to have to down-shift to farmers.”

“There're a few cowboys left. Besides I'm going back to work, buy some horses and dogs, and grow old.”

“I'd like to organize a large bet on your return here or to New York. You need neutral territory to live in. Ghosts make you old. You never heard from the boy again, did you?”

“No. I'm hoping he'll contact Uncle Paul, who's looking for him.”

“Good. Nothing shakes my faith like queer crimes. They're terribly embarrassing.”

“Sex crimes always are. I took a whole graduate course in
crimes of a sexual nature. It's much worse than the newspapers print.” Suddenly in my mind it was winter in Minneapolis and I could hear the professor's cold, passionless monotone, really the only sort of voice appropriate to the subject. There were too many photos, some in color.

“Are you listening? I said Why don't you go to San Francisco a day or two early? Andrew said that creep might be back in town.”

“Of course. Why not.” I tried to regather myself from Minneapolis.

The food at lunch was so unremarkable as to be soothing—“bangers and mash” the English call it. Ted treated it as an adventure. He had the very rare ability to find life interesting in its most minimalist details. His early admission that he couldn't create anything had served to broaden his energies rather than narrow them. Absolute self-acceptance isn't all that common. He wanted to cancel his appointments so we could drive up to Trankas and take a beach walk. He had become active in a land syndicate composed of moguls anticipating growth to the north. Now he considered it all a “healthy pursuit” and wanted to show me part of the land. I begged off, saying the moving company had sent over cartons and I wanted to start packing. To prolong the meeting he tried to start a quarrel over my intention to drive my old ‘81 Subaru all the way to Nebraska.

Back at my apartment I decided to have a few drinks while packing, something I've always done when moving, to savor the full banality of the process. I would pack a box, I decided, then mix a drink and write in this journal, then pack another box, and so on, until I fell asleep. It seemed a delightful plan so I changed into my Levis and a “Fuck Hate” T-shirt that one of Ted's musician friends had given me. There was a nagging desire to try to call my Australian graduate-student friend but I subdued it. I poured a few fingers of Herradura tequila and began by packing some precious objects while I was still totally sober: an alabaster peach given to me by a Brazilian; a stuffed crow, rather tattered, inherited from my father; a boar-hoof
Yaqui rattle; a true pearl necklace that was my grandmother's; a glass-encased Peruvian butterfly; a moon-white coyote skull found on a walk with Grandfather; my father's high-school class ring. I remember at the time that Grandfather told me the coyote had died very old because the teeth were worn down, the incisors chipped. Two of the teeth were loose so we had glued them back securely into the jaw. Lastly, there was Duane's necklace, which I had gotten back during a night-mare.

Tequila and a skull. Pearls and a butterfly, a stone-hard peach. We didn't leave Buffalo Gap that day until late in the afternoon, because Rachel wanted Grandfather to sleep as long as possible. I called Mother, who kindly pretended nothing had happened. I said we should be home by midnight. The fire in the fireplace drew evenly and I noticed the wind had stopped. I went outside, sat on the ground in the afternoon sun, and petted the dog, who dashed off and retrieved his largest filthy bone. I didn't hear Rachel come up behind me until she spoke.

“I'm sorry what my son did to you.”

“I'm not. Anyway, he didn't do it to me, we did it together.”

“I hope you're as strong as you talk.”

“I better be,” I said, laughing. “Or I'm really up shit creek.”

She sat down beside me on the ground and said something in Sioux to the dog, who immediately played dead. Then she pulled his ear and he came back to life.

“I look old because I was drunk as I could be for over ten years. I was a whore in Denver until I lost my looks. Then your grandfather found me. You know that Duane is no good for you.”

“That's what I'm told. I guess we're related and that makes it wrong.” Now my face burned and there were tears in my throat.

She put her arm around me. “Don't blame your dad. We were after each other the moment we met. I was cleaning the cabin and washing dishes when your dad came in from hunting
with your grandfather. Paul says, Look who I found to help us out in the cabin. Paul saw me in Buffalo Gap and gave my dad fifty bucks to get me to come help. That was more cash than we had ever seen. So I helped your dad cook dinner and I thought, This is the man in the world I want. Then your grandfather says to me in Sioux, which shocked me because I thought they were pure white, I better get you out of here before my sons get in a fight. Wesley is married and Paul isn't so pick on Paul. Or me. That's what he said. I think it was 1942. But next day I went off on horseback with your dad and that evening everyone got drunk and your dad and Paul got in a fight over me. The next day your granddad took me back to town. . . .”

Rachel stopped herself and turned around, hearing Grandfather close the door. He stood there with his otter-skin coat buttoned to the neck despite the freshet of south wind. He beamed feverishly at us and said “My girlfriends,” then was overcome and couldn't continue as he looked out over the valley. I'm sure he was saying goodbye to this retreat he had discovered soon after World War I. Rachel rose and they embraced. She walked with him to my car which he patted, then laughed as if sharing the knowledge with us of how absurd the aqua convertible looked in the landscape.

The first stop was for whiskey to quell his cough. The late-October twilight was abrupt and soon we were driving straight into the moon which had emerged unrecognizably at the end of the road. This enormous moon delighted him and as the moon lifted the landscape brightened, the outlines of the Sand Hills against the sky were dulcet and blurred. When we hit a dip in the road where a creek crossed, the yellow cottonwood leaves swirled around the car. He fiddled with the radio and swore when he found nothing classical, then found a country station playing Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. He told me he had danced to this band with a pretty
señorita
on a horse-buying trip to Fort Worth before World War II. Then he asked me to pull over so we could put the top down. I said we shouldn't because it was getting colder and he was sick but he insisted.

Later we stopped at a roadhouse owned by an old crony of his and ate fried steaks and looked at a scrapbook full of
pictures of hunting, bird dogs, and horses. “So this is Wesley's daughter. You don't say,” said the old man. Back in the car it seemed colder but still he wanted the top down. He didn't seem drunk, and I remembered that Naomi said in the old days you would have thought Grandfather was Lord Byron himself. Now we were only an hour or so from home and he told me to sing him asleep. I said I wasn't too musical but sang Jim Reeves, Patsy Cline, awful renditions of Sam Cooke, and Elvis Presley's “Heartbreak Hotel.” He couldn't sleep and chanted something in Sioux several times and I asked him what it meant. He said it meant “Take courage, the earth is all that lasts.” He seemed a little embarrassed by how somber the words sounded, so he sang a dirty song from World War I, which he copied down for me the next day:

Here's to the Kaiser, he's on his last hitch.

We're after his ass the damned son of a bitch.

We'll enter his palace, and shit on the floor,

And hang Old Glory right over the door.

Then out of the palace and up the brick street,

We'll piss on all Germans we happen to meet.

We'll eat all his sauerkraut, and drink all his gin

And kick his damned ass right out of Berlin.

And when all is over

We'll go home en masse

And tell all our friends

That old Bill kissed our ass.