Dalva (15 page)

When the bellhop rang with the altered clothes Michael answered the phone. Out of curiosity I listened to him talk to the operator before I went into the bedroom.

“The day went away. It's dark outside,” he said.

I knew he might begin talking about other days when this had happened so I sent him off for a bath, then called housekeeping to change the bed. While his bathwater thundered I poured myself a drink and speculated about his secret life, his concealed ideas about himself. I'm sure this is equally true of most women—it is certainly true of myself—but I've only really studied the phenomenon in a half-dozen or so lovers. The secret life can be based in the childhood mythology of cowboys and Indians, the outlaw, and rambling gambler, or more recently, in the popular culture of detectives, rock music, sports, gurus, religious and political leaders. The roots seem always connected to sex and power, and how free they felt as children to enact feelings that ran counter to the behavior they were taught. It is usually deeply comic but also poignant: thus an outwardly loutish executive is inwardly a Southern gentleman who should have been a medical missionary (he thinks) to Africa, and is helpful to a fault in the kitchen; the defrocked Episcopalian intellectual becomes an inept Robert Ryan on a camping trip and the lovemaking, which was too polite in Santa Monica, becomes rowdy and wordless in a sleeping bag; the young cowboy becomes a stern father at dawn in the Wyoming motel room. Even the voice patterns change. He calls out from the tub for a glass of white wine, which is reasonable. I discover him covered to the eyes in bubbles.

“I found the packet in the cabinet. I'm thirty-nine and this
is the first bubble bath in my life. I'm doing something truly different! I feel pretty good but I'm hungry. Join me darling!”

Three
A.M.
by the travel clock. He became rather manic from raw nerves so I gave him another sedative about an hour ago. I can't sleep because he's holding my hand rather tightly and grinding his teeth. He smells like bubble bath and the Chinese food we had for a late dinner. I limited him to one bottle of Pouilly-Fumé at dinner and he found it impossible to sleep on such short rations; thus the sedative. Just before he slept he said he could see
the entirety of the United States topographically against the ceiling, and everything that happened throughout every area and state in history was whirling right before his eyes: with his arm he pointed out Duluth as a permanent settlement in 1852; how Fort Lewis became Fort Benton between 1846 and 1850; Yankton when it lost its title as capital of the Dakota Territory; he saw some friends of Cochise strangle themselves in jail; Wovovka dancing his ghost dance frightened him, and he turned on his pillow to face me.

“It's sort of like three-dimensional television only larger. That's why I usually sleep with the lights on. I drink because I'm excitable.”

“I understand the lights part but I'm not sure about the whiskey volume.”

“I'm going to ask you a personal question. Why didn't you ever have another baby?”

“My illness in the hospital when I was pregnant made me barren.”

“I'm very sorry. Perhaps you have more reason to drink than I do, and that's a hard thing for an alkie to say.”

“I know it is. I like a drink once in a while when I'm sure it's going to be a pleasure. Usually I prefer undiminished consciousness.”

“Dostoevsky said that to be too acutely conscious is to be diseased. It's troublesome statements like that that got me out of literature and into history. It's a mystery to me why white wine and Chinese food give me a hard-on. Maybe you have something to do with it.” He turned around and squirmed
under the sheet. “I hope so.” I was left with part of a very ample penis in my mouth when the sedative kicked in and his nuzzling turned into a snore. I moved a leg to avoid a repeat of the suffocation problem. I turned on the light and rearranged my one-hundred-eighty-pound hairy baby. I couldn't help laughing.

It actually had been a wonderful evening, starting with the bubble bath, during which we made love for almost ten seconds on the edge of the tub. “I must have overrevved,” he had said apologetically. He was stunned by his new clothes, then became dreadful in front of the mirror about paying me back. I stopped him short of prating about his lower-class upbringing by saying that in equivalent terms to his salary the clothes had cost me only a hundred dollars, and that if he continued I'd pitch them out the seventh-story window. He put on a Misoni sweater and some soft wool trousers, then said his first expensive clothes were giving him a hard-on. Since I was dressed for dinner I said that right now I'd prefer something to eat over another run at his hard-on. “It will only take a minute,” he said, with more than a trace of sarcasm. I knelt on the couch and he lifted my skirt. I admit it went on forever and was quite nice.

Before we could have dinner we had to find some vitamins for him. Luckily, our young cabdriver was a fitness type who worked nights in order to exercise all day, and knew of a nutrition center that was open late. The cabbie and Michael talked excitedly about decidedly Off Broadway vitamins and minerals with miraculous recuperative powers. “With apologies to the lady with you I can ball all night on three capsules of Nigerian Yohimbe,” the cabbie said. I remembered Michael lecturing Ted and Andrew on the wonders of trace minerals with a Calvados in one hand and a cigarette in the other, forcing himself to put one down so he could snort a line of cocaine.

At dinner Michael passed himself off at the expensive Chinese restaurant as a food critic probing the establishment's abilities with duck. He ordered a whole Peking duck; as an afterthought I slipped in a fish for myself. When the maître d'inquired what magazine he worked for Michael faked a huff,
saying he worked “anonymously” and paid his own bills. The intent of the ruse was solely to get carefully prepared food.

“You're basically dishonest about everything, aren't you?”

“I think ‘playful' is a better word. Obviously I get my ass in a sling once in a while. That's what you're doing in San Francisco isn't it? I feel unworthy but grateful.”

“Why would I want you to lose everything you haven't worked very hard for?”

“What an awful thing to say. You farm girls aren't very romantic, for God's sake. I think I'm owed a double whiskey for that insult.”

“No. Maybe tomorrow afternoon. I want to see if you have the D.T.'s in front of your chairman.”

“I was totally dry for ten, or seven, or five days when I had my appendix out. Also when I had the flu. Raymond Chandler said when he quit drinking the world lost its Technicolor. God created color to be seen. I will not blaspheme Him by ignoring the wonders of His handiwork.” And so on.

Now in bed I'm wondering if sleeping with him isn't more reality than I need, akin to a night in a dentist's chair. When we work on the papers he'll stay in Duane's quarters and absorb Rölvaag's spirit, whatever it might be.
He likes to say, We are in hell. Hell is our culture and its flood of trash, its almost total inundation by trash. That's part of his greed theory, and I am somehow a little guilty for having enough money to stay out of the trash flood. I said What about the work I've done, especially the last three years with those children? I didn't have to, he said. But I did. Now I'm thinking of the legs of that Yaqui deer dancer at the Pascua in Tucson at Easter who danced three days and three nights so the Lord could arise again. Dancing seventy-two hours on legs with antlers on his head and a blindfold, at my age he was with legs made of cables and wires of flesh. What was that word in high-school physics? Specific density, I think. How much of him there was in one place so if he wasn't dancing he would fall into the earth. Dancing under the overpass of Route 10 between L. A. and Texas with a thousand trucks per hour, he was from down in Mexico, they said, where he lived on a mesa getting ready to dance three days and three nights once a year.
I can smell the red dust raised by his feet, the Pharisees in black robes swirling up the dust around him. He jumped so far sideways my stomach hurt and there was a dizziness in the air as if there wasn't enough air to breathe. He was a deer.

Awake at bare first light because I thought Michael's rasping breath was Grandfather's and I had become a bird floating earthward above the south, the sunny side of the barn where we sat with the dogs out of the Nebraska wind. After he retrieved me from Chadron it took him only a week to die. The next morning the doctor told us to get Paul to come home, his father was dying. It took Paul two days to get there from Chiapas, by which time the quarter-horse friend had brought Rachel from Buffalo Gap. Naomi and Rachel liked each other a great deal which made me nervous, though only Grandfather, Rachel, and I knew the entire story. Rachel and Paul tried to track down Duane but he had disappeared from the place Grandfather had sent him. One morning a few days before he died Grandfather told me he had seen Duane in his sleep near a river town up in Oregon. They had talked and Duane was fine. Rachel was taking turns with me sitting beside his bed so I called her in because Grandfather wanted to tell her about seeing Duane. They spoke in Sioux and she became quite happy.

The usual late-November weather held off and every day was clear, sunny, but very cold. An ex-governor was there visiting Grandfather when Paul showed up. I don't remember ever being quite so happy to see someone. Paul hadn't been home since my father Wesley's funeral, and after he arrived Grandfather asked us to post a sign out on the gate for no more visitors. Paul was a strong person in every respect and it made us all feel much better that he was there. The governor said goodbye and Paul went in with Grandfather and closed the door. I helped Naomi and Rachel make dinner. That morning Grandfather said he wanted to eat his last pheasant, but a half-hour later he added that he thought he should eat his last venison stew and Bordeaux wine. I sent Lundquist off for both a deer and a few pheasants, not a difficult chore on the property.
An awkward moment came at lunch when Mrs. Lundquist, who had become quite crazy, showed up with the same Methodist minister who had been so unpleasant to me. Rachel and Naomi turned them away but they wouldn't go willingly. The preacher and Mrs. Lundquist knelt on the cold ground outside Grandfather's window—Lundquist made himself scarce out of embarrassment. I could see the kind old man peeking around the corner of the barn at the spectacle. Grandfather had been sleeping but when we reached him he was propped up by the window watching them pray with amusement. He gestured and I opened the window. “Thank you for your concern but I am going into the earth which is the best place I can think of.” That's what he told them.

The last morning of his life Grandfather was expansive, nearly ebullient, though he was so weak Paul had to carry him out to our seats on the hay bales behind the barn.

“I carried him and now he's carrying me. Isn't that the goddamnedest thing! Wesley was the fighter but Paul was the strongest. When Paul was angry he would start digging another irrigation ditch, or go way back to Omaha and sit in the library. Isn't that right, Paul?”

“You're right, Father. I'd do anything to keep off a horse.”

“You own any horses now, son?”

“As a matter of fact I got a half-dozen down in Sonoita. I bet Dalva told you. I like them because they're simple-minded and unreliable, like politicians. It's like owning a stable full of politicians that can't talk.”

“Dalva here can ride better than either of you boys could. Certain things skip a generation, though I've never been sure what they meant by that.”

Paul sat on one side of him and I sat on the other. He hadn't been drinking much but the doctor said it no longer mattered so I helped steady the flask at his lips.

“I got things set up pretty well for everyone but that's been so for years. I don't regret what I did in life. I wish I had done more of it. More of everything. It never occurred to me I wouldn't read all the books I owned. That's a funny thought, isn't it? I can see a hundred books right before my eyes I want to read right now. I never finished Bernard De Voto or H. L. Mencken. Son of a bitch. Dalva, I said to Paul I'm sorry I didn't
get down to see him, and he said I'm sorry I didn't get up here more often. Don't get angry with Naomi and run off forever.”