Desert of the Heart: A Novel (25 page)

A compromise was finally achieved. Silver would walk down the aisle, but Joe would kneel beside her on the proper step. The rehearsal could now proceed. Ann and Bill stood quietly in their places, listening to the vows and watching the ritual movements. A nervous seriousness had come over Joe. His stammer was more pronounced than usual, and he sweated a little. Ann wondered how he really felt about marrying Silver. That he loved her there was no question, but taking Silver to wife was no ordinary gesture. Joe was only two or three years older than Ann, a tiny, highly geared man, passionately indifferent to his job on the local newspaper, devoted to his ambition to be a highly successful writer of pornography. With his ghetto intelligence, his amoral sentimentality, and aggressive, delicate body, he had chosen in Silver as unlikely and right a mate as he could find. But Ann could not see why he would want to marry her. What relevance God’s holy ordinance had to their union she could not understand. The minister handed a prayer book to each of them, and the rehearsal was over.

It was still early. They had time for several drinks before they went into the Mapes dining room for dinner. There was an embarrassment among them when they sat down together. Bill and Joe had had an argument about who was to be the host. Silver and Joe had had an argument about what it meant to “plight thee my troth.” Bill and Ann were no more than unnaturally polite to each other, Ann’s attempts at humor, unsupported, did nothing but increase the tension. She reached for an inconsequential question to break the silence that had fallen.

“Is it two weeks you’re taking off, Sil?”

“I’ve quit, love.”

“Quit?” Ann repeated, unbelieving.

Silver looked at Joe. He picked up a prayer book and paraphrased as he read.

“Almighty G-G-God, Creator of mankind, who only art the well spring of life, has already bestowed upon these His s-s-servants the gift and heritage of ch-ch-children.” He put the book down and smiled tenderly at Silver.

“He means I’m pregnant,” Silver said, and she blushed willfully.

“Didn’t you know?” Bill asked, a mild malice in his tone.

“I haven’t had a chance to tell her,” Silver said, in the quickness of her answer a regret for any malice of her own in telling Ann this way.

Ann sat very still, fighting down the angry panic that had come over her, for she had realized suddenly that it was not Bill’s stiff reluctance to be pleasant that was creating tension. It was her own presence, and Silver wanted her to know it.

“Well, what do you think of that, love?”

It could not have been an accident, not with Silver and Joe; and, if it had been, Silver was not without recourse. They wanted a child. Naturally. They wanted a child.

“When she couldn’t adopt you,” Joe said, “she wanted a little f-f-fish all of her own, one the g-g-game warden couldn’t take away.”

Ann turned to Joe, feeling that she would smash his face in, but in his expression there was nothing but nervous concern. And he was a little drunk. Perhaps they all were. What difference did it make? Any of it.

“Order champagne, Bill,” Ann said, “We must drink to the new little fish.”

Then she laughed with a free loneliness that broke the tension and gave them all, except Bill, a moment of pure relief. He ordered the champagne and offered an earnest toast to procreation. When they left the hotel, Joe and Silver parting for the last time before the wedding, they were all recognizably drunk.

“That’s what I should have done to you,” Bill said, as they wandered down the street toward the Club. “Not man enough, that’s what, but I have to tell you something. I’ve solved my problem, I’ve got a girl who’s already got a baby and I’m going to marry her.”

“Are you?” Ann asked.

“Yep, aren’t I, Sil?”

“You say so,” Silver answered.

“Well, but I asked her last night.” He turned to Ann. “Right after that little bastard, Walt, pitched a drink at me. And she accepted.”

“Joyce?”

“That’s the one,” Bill said. “So listen, honey, I’m sorry about all that I said about your girl friend. Each to his own taste, eh? Shall we shake on it? No hard feelings?”

Ann took his hand and looked up at him. He was beginning to cry.

“It’s just that I’m moved,” he said, grinning, “by my own bigness of heart. I didn’t really mean to apologize. I’ve just had you fired,”

“Jesus Christ, Bill, can’t you lay off? Don’t you think she’s had enough for a while?”

“It was your idea, wasn’t it? You said I ought to fire her, like we fired Janet, for her own good. It’s for your own good, honey. After tonight, you’re free.”

Ann turned away from them both and walked down the street. If she had any serious doubt about her own sobriety, it left her when she met Joyce at their locker. Her smile was the last, clean, sharp pain Ann needed to clear her head. She was so sober that she could keep herself from saying, “Thanks,” with all the gratefulness she felt. She was a good loser. As she offered careful good wishes, she was also offering a world that she had lived in a long time. It was odd that she should be saying goodbye not to Janet, not to Silver, not to Bill, but to Joyce, the kid she had expected to be fired within a month.

Perhaps the champagne had not quite worn off, after all, for Ann walked through the crowd to the jazz beat of the machines with a lightness of spirit she could not explain. And, when she mounted the ramp and looked out over the familiar human landscape among whose guns and stage coaches and mirrors she had spent the last four years of her life, fiercely defending it, fiercely loving it, she had no sense of regret. “Fidelity to any human place, except the heart, seems to me a dubious thing.” Ann turned to the sharp whistle of a key man and went down to witness a payoff.

At four o’clock in the morning, alone in her room, Ann began a series of sketches, shaping in lines what she could not shape in words, that curious variety of experiences for and against which man is required to bear witness. But the fragments did not satisfy her. And so at last she turned her pencil against herself, bearing witness against the witness she was, and let herself become one of her own cartoons.

It was Evelyn who woke her early in the afternoon.

“There’s a telegram for you, darling.”

Ann reached for it, not awake enough at first to know what it was, but, as she unfolded it, she remembered. She read the brief, impersonal message which relieved her of her duties at the Club. She could pick up her pay check, turn in her hat and apron within the next forty-eight hours.

“Anything wrong?” Evelyn asked.

“No. Just a bit of Bill’s weak wit.”

“What time are you due at Silver’s?”

“A little after seven. Are you going to go with Walt and Frances?”

“I thought I would.”

“It won’t be much,” Ann said.

“Weddings never are, according to Frances.”

“She’ll have a good cry just the same. Maybe that’s why.”

“You don’t much want to go, do you?”

“Well, I’m less reluctant than I would be if it were my own.”

“It was a long night.”

“Very,” Ann said, but she kissed Evelyn only absentmindedly as she got out of bed. “Have you decided what you’re going to wear?”

“I haven’t much choice really. I didn’t think, when I packed, that I’d be going to a wedding.”

“I suppose not,” Ann said, grinning.

“I have a blue dress that ought to do.”

“Blue? Yes, I like you in blue.”

And Silver in champagne. Ann had not seen her dress, and, when Silver opened the door to let her in, Ann was surprised into approval. Silver could never have been simply respectable, nor could she be subtly elegant. She had the preposterous figure of a Petty Girl, a gorgeous vulgarity of breast and thigh, and she displayed her body to the public with a professional flair, but often with a mockery of decorations. This dress had a pure boldness that was beyond indecency, and the only jewelry Silver wore was a real diamond and sapphire bracelet.

“It’s gorgeous, Sil.”

“I’m gorgeous, love. Joe picked it out. He says clothes don’t make the woman; men do, and they want to see what they’re in for. Drink?”

“Thanks.”

The Scotch had been set out on the bar. Silver reached for ice and did not measure as she poured.

“I wondered if you’d turn up at all,” she said.

“Did you? It never occurred to me,” Ann said, taking the drink. “I should have called.”

“Did the telegram come?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry,” Silver said. “I’m so damned sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter. I would have quit anyway. I just hadn’t realized it yet. I didn’t know you were going to, of course.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Ann said. “I don’t have to do anything.”

“About Evelyn, I mean.”

“I don’t know. I don’t have to do anything about her either.”

“Don’t you?”

“Don’t sound so moral,” Ann said, smiling. “Joe can make an honest woman of you. I’m not in the same position with Evelyn.”

“You’re going to let her go?”

“I don’t even know that I have a choice. If I have one … no, I won’t let her go.”

Silver went over to the bar to pour herself another gin.

“Do we have time?” Ann asked.

“No,” Silver said. “I’m just taking it. Both the bride and the groom have the privilege of at least fifteen minutes in which to contemplate what a sick, sick, fucking, Christ-awful thing getting married is. That’s what the book says—or words to that effect.”

“Come on,” Ann said, taking the drink from Silver’s hand. “Swear to God and save the dirty words for Joe. We’re
not
going to be late.”

“And what do I say to you, little fish?”

“Nothing,” Ann said. “Be speechless. Come on.”

Ann stood at the end of the long center aisle and looked at the backs of the hundreds of people who filled the church. On Silver’s side, the front pews were filled with her ex-employees, backed by a small army of ex-customers. Toward the back was a colorful representation from Frank’s Club out on their long break, the key men holding their hats, the change girls and dealers wearing theirs. Among them, looking as out of place as they would have in a Charles Addams cartoon, were Walter, Frances and Evelyn. Joe’s side was drabber, but as crowded, and here and there flash cameras sat on laps like small children peering over the pews. A door to the right opened, and Joe stepped out, as tiny and stiff as the groom on a wedding cake. Bill was right behind him. Ann turned back to Silver and smiled.

“He looks like a prize in a shooting gallery,” Silver whispered. “Well, let’s go get him. I’ll help you carry him home.”

The organ stopped playing. The crowd shifted and then stood as the wedding march began. Ann set out slowly and cheerfully down the aisle, past the bright shirts and white hats, past the sudden, quiet blue of Evelyn’s dress, past the cameras and business suits, past the pastels of prostitutes to the two men who stood waiting. Only once did she look directly at Bill, but neither he nor Joe was looking at her. Their attention was tensely focused behind her. Only when she turned to take her place did she realize that Silver was not following her. Ann looked back and saw Silver still standing where she had been. She must have been waiting to have the aisle entirely to herself, but a long moment passed, and she did not move. The organ went on playing. The minister nodded at Silver encouragingly. Still she did not move. Apparently, after all, she could not give herself away. Then Joe, as easily as if it had been planned, walked up the aisle to her and offered her his arm. They walked down the aisle together, and the women in the congregation began to weep their easy tears of vicarious relief and triumph. One more among them was about to be saved. Even Ann’s throat tightened as that ridiculous pair arrived before the minister to take the vows they neither believed nor clearly understood for reasons their unborn child only partially explained, for reasons neither they, nor those who witnessed this marriage, would ever quite believe or understand.

“Wilt thou, Joseph …” forgotten man, cuckolded by the angel of life before he ever got to the altar “ … take this woman, Silvia …” Silvia? Who in hell was she?

“I w-w-w-will.”

“Wilt thou, Silvia … forsaking all others …?” A vow only your enemies would help you keep.

“I will.”

From this day forward, Joe stammered his promise to love and to cherish. And Silver promised back, giving her troth, for what it was worth, defined in her mind not as fidelity but as some hidden part of herself which Joe would have the ingenuity to discover.

“Bless, O Lord, this Ring … perform and keep the vow and covenant betwixt them made (whereof this Ring given and received is a token and pledge) … Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder.” Unless you’ve worked in a jewelers’ store and know how without the slightest awkwardness or pain….

They had knelt and stood, kissed and turned to the mounting joy of organ music, in whose hilarious upper registers Ann could almost imagine bells and falling coins. She turned and took the arm Bill offered her to follow them out of church. On the way up the aisle, she saw Joyce, near the back on the groom’s side. She looked away to find Evelyn, in whose expression she could read nothing but simple acknowledgment. “You’re going to let her go?” If I have a choice, no, I don’t intend to let her go.

“What do you intend to do then?” Evelyn asked. She was standing at Ann’s drawing table, looking at the sketches Ann had done the night before.

“Anything that will keep you here,” Ann said.

“I have a job, darling,” Evelyn said. She walked over to the bed and sat down beside Ann. “I have to be back in California at the end of next week.”

“Give it up.”

“You can’t give up a job just like that. Anyway, what would I do? I’ve given George the house and the car. I have my books and my clothes and about two hundred dollars in the bank. That’s all.”

“I have plenty of money. I’ll buy you a house and a car. If you wanted another job sometime, you could get one here.”

“When you got tired of supporting me? When a young man as handsome as Bill, as dear as Joe, and a good deal brighter than both of them came along?”