Desert of the Heart: A Novel (14 page)

“I don’t know. Bigger than Tahoe. Around thirty miles long, I should think.”

“But there’s nothing here.”

“No, nothing but an Indian reservation to the east (we’re actually on reservation ground now) and a couple of gas stations and grocery stores on the road going north. People talk about developing the Lake. I suppose some day they will.”

“But there aren’t any trees.”

“No. Not even sage. Nothing can grow. The water’s alkaline. Lovely for swimming.”

Evelyn wanted to refuse. She wanted Ann to turn the car around and drive back to Reno, which, alien and hostile as it might be, was at least human. There was no way Evelyn could comprehend this unnatural, dead body of water, still, killing, blue. Yet she could not ask to leave. She lacked both the courage and the cruelty to refuse. As Ann drove the car down toward the edge of the Lake, Evelyn sat, silent with apprehension. They traveled along the paved road to the east for a while, then turned off on to rutted sand which took them to within two hundred yards of the water.

“Can you take the towels and blanket?” Ann asked, her voice thrown past Evelyn by the wind. “I’ll take the food.”

They labored across the barren, burning dunes to a small sand-cliff edge, where Ann told Evelyn to wait. As Ann disappeared over the side, Evelyn stepped closer to the edge to keep her in sight. There only twelve feet below was a narrow curve of beach, flat, hard and white with a kind of crude sand. Ann left the picnic basket and ran back up the shifting sand to help Evelyn down. The beach itself was sheltered by the cliff from the wind and from the sun and from the view of the unending shore line. In that great openness of water, desert, and sky, it was curiously private; but the security it provided was, for Evelyn, a frail illusion. She was, nevertheless, grateful for it. She set the blanket and towels down almost against the cliff itself, twenty feet from the water, and sat down to watch Ann who had kicked off her shoes and was wading out from the shore to plant a bottle of wine.

“The water’s marvelous,” Ann said, as she came back. “It’s a curiously gentle lake.”

Evelyn reached out nervously for a handful of rough sand. As she looked down at it slipping through her fingers, she caught at it suddenly.

“This isn’t sand at all.”

“No,” Ann said, kneeling beside her. “They’re tiny shells.”

White snail shells, no bigger than the head of a pin, caught along the lines of Evelyn’s palm. She studied them with uncertain wonder, then looked up at the beach itself, white with billions of dwarf deaths, free fossil washed, yes, gently, into petrified rhythms along the shore.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Ann asked.

“I suppose it is,” Evelyn said. “Don’t other people come here?”

“Occasionally, but not right here. I don’t know why people don’t come. Everybody goes to Tahoe, I guess. I’m glad. I like miles to myself.”

Evelyn watched Ann almost enviously. Was she really innocent enough that she could leave the world behind? “You could almost imagine there were no other people,” Evelyn said.

“Yes,” Ann said. “Almost.” She stood up and began to unbutton her shirt. “If we’re going to swim, we should. In another couple of hours, it will be too cold.”

Evelyn did not want to move. She could not imagine walking into the water of her own free will. Why was she so frightened? Irritated with herself, she stood up and reached for her suit. Ann, more quickly changed, waited for her at the edge of the water. Evelyn walked out of the shade of the cliff into the sun. She would not refuse. “Ready?”

Evelyn smiled. Something of Ann’s young animal eagerness touched her own memory. Evelyn had been a good swimmer, and even now, though her body had adopted the mannerisms appropriate to settled middle age, it was strong and capable. The water, as she looked right down at it, was clear and shallow, innocent somehow of its own great size. When she stepped into it, the quick shock of its coldness startled her into pleasure. She wanted to swim.

They did not swim together. Ann chose a solitude far out from shore. Evelyn swam near the edge, beyond the curve of cliff to another beach, longer and more open to the view. She grew braver, more curious, and her body, released from a long stillness of work, relaxed in the rhythm of pure, physical energy. When she finally turned and swam back to the small, private beach, Ann was already on the shore.

“You’re a beautiful swimmer,” Ann said.

“I used to be. It’s been years since I’ve done anything more than play in the surf.” She took the towel Ann handed her. “I wonder why.”

Ann spread the blanket out nearer the water in the sun. “It’s not too hot now. Are you thirsty? There’s wine, coffee, or water.”

“Water? What an odd, good idea!”

Evelyn stretched out on the blanket on her back. The muscles in her arms and legs were tired, but the sun warmed and quickened her blood.

“I feel simply marvelous,” she said, as Ann lay down beside her.

“It’s nice here.”

“I’m glad I came. An hour ago I wasn’t sure.”

“Why not?”

“The desert frightens me, I think. It looks too much like the seventh circle of hell. I’m afraid of damnation.”

“Why?”

“Why?” Evelyn repeated, peering at Ann from behind her hand. She lay back again and closed her eyes. “I don’t know. I’ve always supposed everyone is.”

“Well, they’re not. I, for instance, am a hell of a lot more frightened of being saved.”

Evelyn chuckled.

“I’m serious,” Ann protested. “Virtue smells to me of rotting vegetation. Here you burn or freeze. Either way it’s clean.”

“Sterile,” Evelyn said and felt the word a laceration of her own flesh.

“I wonder. It’s fertility that’s a dirty word for me.”

“Is it?”

“Yes, I’m terrified of giving in, of justifying my own existence by means of simple reproduction. So many people do or try to. And there are the children, so unfulfilling after all. And they grow up to do nothing but reproduce children who will reproduce, everyone so busy reproducing that there’s no time to produce anything. But it’s such a temptation. It seems so natural—another dirty word for me. What’s the point?”

“You’d have the human race die out?”

“No. We’ll multiply in spite of ourselves always. We’ll populate the desert. One day there will be little houses and docks all along this shore, signs of our salvation.”

“What would you have us do instead?” Evelyn asked.

“Accept damnation,” Ann said. “It has its power and its charm. And it’s real.”

“So we should all get jobs in gambling casinos.”

“We all do,” Ann said, her voice amused. “What do you think the University of California is? It’s just a minor branch of the Establishment. The only difference is that it has to be subsidized.”

“Are you talking nonsense on purpose?”

“No, I’m serious.”

“You think nothing has any value?”

“No, I think everything has value, absolute value, a child, a house, a day’s work, the sky. But nothing will save us. We were never meant to be saved.”

“What were we meant for then?”

“To love the whole damned world,” Ann said, delighted.

“‘In the destructive element immerse.’ Perhaps there’s some truth in it. I might learn. I don’t know. I’m old to learn. And I’m not sure I’d like a world without guilt or goodness. It might seem very empty.”

“Like the desert?”

“Yes,” Evelyn said.

She lay quiet then, the sun a dark heat against her closed eyes. She felt Ann turn and sit up. Guarding her face from the glare with her hand, Evelyn opened her eyes. Ann was looking down at her.

“Have you ever been special assistant to the Dean?”

“No,” Evelyn said.

As Ann bent down toward Her, Evelyn took hold of the soft, damp hair at the back of Ann’s neck and held her away. But, as Evelyn looked at the face held back from her own, the rain-gray eyes, the fine bones, the mouth, she felt the weight and length of Ann’s body measuring her own. Her hand relaxed its hold, all her flesh welcoming the long embrace. But simple physical desire could not silence her recovering brain. Slowly, carefully, almost painfully, she turned Ann’s weight in her arms until she could withdraw.

“I live in the desert of the heart,” Evelyn said quietly, “I can’t love the whole damned world.”

“Love me, Evelyn.”

“I do.”

“But you don’t want me?”

Evelyn looked at Ann, the child she had always wanted, the friend she had once had, the lover she had never considered. Of course she wanted Ann. Pride, morality, and inexperience had kept her from admitting it frankly to herself from the first moment she had seen Ann. Guilt and goodness must now keep her from admitting it to Ann.

“No relationship is without erotic feeling,” Evelyn said. She had heard it somewhere at a cocktail party, an academic cocktail party. Someone else had added, as she added now, “But that doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be acted upon.” Ann looked away. “I’m sorry, Ann.”

Evelyn wanted to say something else, to explain, to justify. “I’m married, Ann,” she wanted to say. “I mustn’t. I can’t.” But George could hardly save her now. He was not even a conventional excuse. “I don’t know anything about this sort of thing,” she wanted to say, but it was not true. If she had never actually made love to another woman, she was intellectually emancipated in all perversions of flesh, mind, and spirit. Her academic training had seen to that. “Forgive me, Ann,” she might say; but Evelyn did not really want to be forgiven.

She sat up and stared across the lake to the naked rock of the northern shore, to the sky which only a few moments ago had been a clear, empty blue.

“Is that a storm blowing up?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. It’s pretty far away.” A fresh, damp gust of wind came in off the water. “We probably ought to eat. Are you hungry?”

“Yes, I think I am,” Evelyn said.

She watched Ann wade out for the bottle of wine, that young, beautiful body she had so carefully admired an hour ago to take her mind off the terrors of the landscape. Its sudden erotic power bewildered and offended her, whose taste and decorum usually governed her private thoughts as firmly as they governed her public living. Evelyn blushed with impatience and embarrassment. Physical response was no more significant than a hiccup, a sneeze, a twinge of gas, functional disorders which caused discomfort but not alarm. If she were to mistrust her own psychic health and morality every time she crossed her legs during the ballet or the reading of a French novel, she would keep a psychiatrist and a minister as busy as a hypochondriac keeps a doctor. It was not important. To exaggerate a single kiss into significant guilt was a real loss of aesthetic distance. And Ann was not a child. It was no traumatic experience for her. Ann had found the bottle and was wading ashore. She did not force her steps. She moved with a slow, unconscious grace. Evelyn turned away and looked for a cigarette.

“Are you getting cold?” Ann asked. “Shall we change?”

“I’ll just throw a jacket over my shoulders.”

Their conversation, during the meal, was desultory and inconsequential. Ann was being entertaining. Evelyn, reluctant to ask Ann to control the situation, was nevertheless grateful to be moved in time and mood farther and farther away from the moment. Sudden, near lightning startled them both, and, as the first large drops of rain fell on the beach, they hurriedly gathered their belongings and started toward the car, leaving their unimportant intimacy like a scrap of paper on the empty beach.

“May I drive?” Evelyn asked, as they reached the car.

“Sure, if you like,” Ann said, handing her the keys.

The wheel, firm and restricting in Evelyn’s hands, gave her back a simple feeling of authority and independence. She was in control, and she had an excuse to keep her eyes away from the vast expanse of desert, away from Ann, carefully on the long, straight road back to Reno. Evelyn wanted to keep the storm behind them. Her foot hard on the accelerator, she drove toward the sunlight to the south, toward the open blue of the sky, but it was a losing race. The storm bellied over them, beyond them. Rain and wind struck the car at the same moment, knocking it almost off the road. Evelyn held the wheel firm in her memory of where the road had been. She could not see. Ann reached for the windshield wipers.

“A real cloud burst.”

Evelyn nodded, driving more slowly, leaning forward to see, playing the car against blasts of wind that seemed to come from every direction. She was not at all frightened now. The storm was a simple force that could be met and challenged, a welcome violation of the desert. Even the skidding gravel and the sudden disappearances of the road could not shake her confidence. Then, as they dropped over the crest of a hill, the rain stopped, and before them was a valley of brilliant, burning sunlight, arched with rainbows, edged with lightning. Its beauty broke into Evelyn’s vision like an explosion.

“This is the desert of the heart,” Ann said quietly.

“No!” Evelyn said, refusing to shout because she refused to lose control of herself.

She held the car steady through the aweful sunlight and back into the storm. As they reached the outskirts of Reno, in the full night of the storm, the culverts that had been dry three hours before roared with water. Low places in the road were flooded. Evelyn drove slowly, watching the red brake lights of the car ahead, which wavered through the watery darkness like giant fireflies.

“This is the most incredible place,” she said quietly, “the most incredible world.”

“Is it?”

“I’ve never seen a storm like this.”

“You’ve been driving it like a veteran.”

“Well, I did get us here, didn’t I?”

“With determination,” Ann said, laughing.

“I want a good, stiff drink when we get home.”

“You shall have one.”

A drink muted the desperation of Evelyn’s confidence. Sitting in the living room with both Frances and Ann, she began to relax into the decorous kindness and self-possession that was her habit, but, when Walter came in, she used his arrival to achieve her own departure. She went to her room, which was now familiar as well as impersonal, cell and sanctuary, a comfort as ambiguous as her work which she turned to at once. She read until she was ready to sleep.