Desert of the Heart: A Novel (13 page)

“What the hell do you care? You’re making money off me.”

“I’m sorry. It’s a rule of the house.”

“Okay. Okay. Just don’t spin that little wheel yet. Hang on to your ball.” With his free hand, he sprinkled chips across the board. He reached back to the stack before him and picked up twenty dollar chips, which he dropped on number six. “That’s the lucky number, sweetheart. Watch.” He leaned heavily on Ann, as the wheel spun, as the ball spun, slowly, more slowly, then dropped into number six. “There you are!” he cried. “Seven hundred smackeroos! And that bastard wanted to keep me out of the game!”

“Now, why don’t you take it off and cash it in?” Ann asked.

“Are you kidding? I’m just even. I’m here to
make
money.” Another customer handed him a drink. “Thanks, friend. Gotta send spies. They cut me off at the bar. Just as soon as I break the bank, I’m complaining to the management.”

“Ken, listen …”

“You listen. You watch. Didn’t you see that last one? Old number six? It’ll pay again. It’ll pay until midnight.” The luck riders listened and patterned their next bets after his. “It’s my lucky day.” He drained his glass and set it aside.

“I’ll go and get Janet,” Ann said.

“No, you won’t, not yet. You see,” he said, dropping his voice to a loud whisper, “she doesn’t like this place. She doesn’t like it at all; so I’m going to surprise her. I’m going to win a lot of money. Then I’m going to take it right up to the big man himself, and I’m going to say, ‘Here you are, you bastard. Now gimme back my wife.’” He smiled happily at Ann and did not notice his bets being swept off the board. “But it’s a surprise.”

Ann caught sight of Jerry, standing at the edge of the crowd. She mouthed, “Go get Janet,” at him, and he turned away quickly.

“Oops. The cowboy’s after my money again, but it can’t last, ladies and gentlemen. Just have a little faith and follow me. This is my lucky day.” He no longer placed his chips. They fell from his hand. In three turns of the wheel, he had only twenty dollar chips left in front of him. “Now comes the payoff. With this stack of chips, ladies and gentlemen, I intend to quit fooling around.” He put all his chips on number six. “Black six of August has to win.”

“Ken!”

He raised his head from where it rested against Ann’s hair and focused dimly on his wife. Bill and Jerry stood right behind her.

“Shh … honey … shh.”

“Ken!” Janet took hold of his arm.

“Oh, Christ!” he said, as the ball dropped into number seven. “It’s past midnight after all. That’s the only trouble, ladies and gentlemen. Like the sign says, if you play long enough, you’ll lose.”

“Ken.”

He seemed to see Janet now for the first time. He looked down at her, bewildered.

“What about Kenny, darling?”

“He’s all right, honey,” he said softly. “He’s dead.”

Ann turned to Bill and Jerry. “Help her get him out of here.”

5

E
VELYN FELL AWAKE AS
the front door closed. She checked the time by the luminous dial of her travel clock. It was four thirty. Ann came uncertainly up the stairs. The bathroom door closed quietly. The rush of water from the tap muted the sound of violent wretching. Evelyn sat up in bed, turned on the light, and lit a cigarette. It could not be a simple miscalculation of the number of drinks. Ann hadn’t had time to make such a mistake. In just a little over an hour, she would have had to be willful to get so drunk. The toilet flushed. The water was turned off, then on again. Ann was brushing her teeth. Evelyn got up, put on a robe, and combed her hair. She had accepted Ann’s awkward, unhappy evasiveness for a week, waiting for her to recover from rage at Virginia’s suicide attempt or from embarrassment about their conversation at Geiger Point. Or from a mood of defensiveness vaguer and more general than Evelyn could identify and understand. But Ann was not recovering. She was getting worse. Evelyn could stand it no longer. She did not know what she would do, but she had to make some kind of obvious gesture. When she heard the bathroom door open, she opened her own. “Do you need a towel?”

Ann laughed softly. “How thoughtful. Thank you. How are you this morning?” She came into the room carefully, squinting against the light. She had washed off her makeup and had splashed water over her hair and down the front of her shirt. Her face was white and blurred with fatigue. She took the towel Evelyn handed her and then sat down heavily in the armchair by the window. “Nice of you to be awake.”

“You probably ought to go right to bed,” Evelyn said.

“Nonsense. I’m much too drunk to go to bed.”

“How did you get drunk so quickly?”

“Not so quickly. I started on the sly early in the day. It’s my day off. I can celebrate.”

“Because tomorrow’s Thursday?”

“Today’s Thursday. At midnight, when all the stages turned into pumpkins, when the horses turned into rats, when not only little natural Gasella but all the people at the party turned into paupers, the place was lousy with glass slippers. Then the real miracle occurred: Wednesday turned into Thursday. Every midnight is a fairy tale, the end of one.”

“So you celebrate every night.”

“No. This is special. Today I’m celebrating the death of Kenneth Hearle, junior, aged two and a half, on Wednesday, August sixth, survived by his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, and God knows how many other relatives and well-wishers.”

“Janet’s baby?”

“Janet’s ex-baby. Please do not send flowers. Donations to a fund to pay the surgeon’s fee for a successful heart operation may be addressed to …”

“Thank God,” Evelyn said quietly. It was over then.

“Oh, I intend to. I intend to. Mind you, I think He’s a bit late. Two and a half years and several thousand dollars ago, it might have been more useful. But I’m a practical sort. I’d like to send a donation to the anti-heart fund for research on how to stop it quickly and cheaply. And we must write a poem. Have you got a newspaper? They have poems ready-made, just like TV dinners. A three-course grief with rhymed gravy. I bet Frances has a bottle downstairs.”

“I have one right here,” Evelyn said.

“Are you a secret drinker? I wouldn’t have thought so, but then I’m easily deceived. I can even deceive myself.”

“Do you want a drink?”

“No, I don’t want a drink.”

“Coffee?”

“No! Sober me up and I can’t be sad.”

“Why not?”

“At the Club we have a name for people who bet with a man who’s winning. We call them luck riders. I’m a grief rider. I have all this capacity for grief and nothing of my own to grieve about.”

“You don’t grieve. You rage.”

“Do I? Well, I shouldn’t. There’s nothing wrong with the world.”

“Are you serious?”

“Quite. If drunk. I’ll tell you a secret. I don’t believe in the signs, not really. But then I don’t gamble either. I have a sign of my own: ‘If you don’t play, you can’t lose.’ It’s not a mass philosophy, you understand.”

“I don’t think I do understand.”

“Oh yes you do,” Ann said, getting up out of the chair slowly. “And, what’s more, you approve. Never mind. Why don’t we go to Pyramid Lake tomorrow afternoon?”

“Ask me again when you wake up.”

“No,” Ann said firmly. “I don’t want the chance to change my mind.”

“Do you think you’ll want to?”

Ann gave Evelyn a long, significant, not quite focused look, intended to make her laugh. “My tragedy is comedy,” she said. “I’m in love with the whole damned world. The only problem is maintaining aesthetic distance. You’re elegant at it.”

“Am I? Yes, I suppose I am.” Evelyn held the door open. “Get some sleep.”

Ann went off, singing softly:

“The other night our baby died.

It neither cried nor hollered.

It lived but twenty hours.

It cost us forty dollars.

It was a lousy baby anyhow.

We didn’t like it anyhow.

It died but for to spite us,

Of spinal meningitis.”

Evelyn closed the door, cautious and regretful. Simple comfort was something you could not offer without risk to anyone but a small child. Yet adults needed it, too. Where were they to get it? From lovers. From children. If you had neither? Did you learn to live without it? She had learned. By now she was “elegant” at maintaining aesthetic distance from suffering and from delight that were not her own. “If you don’t play, you can’t lose.” She did understand. She did approve, didn’t she? Ann was making melodrama of a death that did not belong to her. She was right to make fun of herself. But there was passion in this sparring, grieving, angry comic that had to find an acceptable disguise somewhere between sentimentality and brutality so that the world could decorously and sympathetically respond. She was just too truthful to make a success of it.

“Must I be careful?”

Evelyn snapped out the light and walked away from the question to the window, where she lifted the shade. The tree-defined patch of dawn was sea-gray, oddly oppressive, the tentative predication of a storm. Ann might be forced to change her mind about Pyramid Lake. Evelyn felt a quick, protesting disappointment. She very much wanted a fair day.

The morning suffered only a fitful overcast. Above the city, the sky was occasionally quite blue, and by early afternoon the sun had consumed any alien possibility of rain. Evelyn worked, for the first time really grateful for the heat. The weather could break some other day.

Ann knocked at her door at three o’clock. She was dressed in pedal pushers. Her hair was freshly washed. Her eyes had a young clarity of recent and heavy sleep.

“Well, you look quite recovered.”

“I am,” Ann said. “Did I ask you to go to Pyramid Lake today?”

“You did.”

“And did you accept?”

“I told you to ask me again when you woke up.”

“I see,” Ann said and then paused with mock thoughtfulness. “Well, I’m awake. Will you come?”

“Yes.”

“Frances is packing a picnic supper for us. You’ll have to change. Have you got slacks and a suit?”

“Yes.”

“And some sort of jacket. There’s sometimes a wind in the evening.”

Ann’s energy quickened the ordinary preparations into importance and pleasure. She teased extra pieces of chicken from Frances, chose towels to match bathing suits, and sent Evelyn to the attic for a book of particular poems, Eliot if she liked, or Auden, but not Thomas, not Frost. Their landscapes suffered in this particular out-of-doors. Her gaiety had only a slight brittleness about it, as if she remembered but refused to include her tiredness and her angry, uncertain grief of the night before.

Evelyn took her mood from Ann. As they drove through the outskirts of the town and arrived at the desert’s edge, she did not allow herself the reluctance and vague dread that threatened her. Instead, she was determinedly curious, observant, gay. Ann listened, answered, and turned sometimes to Evelyn, her eyes easily forsaking the straight, empty road before them.

“They say, wherever the sage grows in abundance, the soil is very rich. If there were water, this whole valley would be valuable farmland. Around Salt Lake City, the Mormons did irrigate, of course; but they had the rivers.”

“And the vision?” Evelyn suggested.

“Perhaps. But Mormons settled in this part of the country, too. In some of the little towns, like Genoa, Mormon houses are the historic sites. I’ll take you there some time. The Mormons started duplex building in the west, a different front door for each wife. But they couldn’t manage here. It’s no place for the God-fearing visionary. The men who stayed either knew they were damned or didn’t believe in damnation. It’s still so.”

“What category are you in?”

“I?” Ann turned to Evelyn. “I don’t know. One of the damned, I suppose. It’s hard not to believe in an Old Testament sort of world. Fire and brimstone have weathered some four hundred towns into dust already. Every place is a Sodom or Gomorrah: it’s only a matter of time, and very little time at that. The faithful say the plain was well watered, even as the Garden of the Lord, before He destroyed the cities. I don’t believe it. There was never water here, not fresh water.”

“But you love the whole damned world,” Evelyn said, “or so you claimed last night.”

Ann smiled. “Yes, I do. The desert seems to me the simple truth about the world.”

“What simple truth?”

“The earth’s given out. Men can’t get a living from it. They have to get it from each other. We can’t have what we need, but we can take what we want. It’s true everywhere. Here it’s easy to see.

“I don’t agree,” Evelyn said. “Everywhere is not a desert.”

“But the desert’s beautiful,” Ann said. “Look.”

Reluctant, Evelyn watched the place of Ann’s vision, a wind-shaped land of dry, muted grays, tans, and greens. But, as Evelyn looked, she forced herself to see, too, a bolder ochre, a deep orange, an almost clear blue-green. The wind took up the tumbleweed which rode the stubble of sage like the shadows of clouds. The sky was clear, and the scent of sage, sharp in the heat, gave even the dust a kind of clarity. The road cut straight across the uneven floor of the plain, its line never broken because it continually merged with its own horizons, but in the unexpected pockets were sudden views. The car rushed up a rise of land to the crest of a subtle hill, and there at the center of the endless desert was a vast body of water.

“Ann!” Evelyn cried. “Stop!”

Ann pulled the car off the road. Below them, a mile away, the southern shore of the lake was a long, straight line, bone-white against a blue so deep it seemed the night of the day sky. Five miles away, the land rose again in severe steps of rock, not so much shaped by as ascending, escaping from the water. To the left and north, the far shore disappeared. The water met and closed with the sky.

“How big is it?” Evelyn asked.