Desert of the Heart: A Novel (26 page)

“I’m not going to marry anyone.”

“You can forsake the past, but how can you forsake the future?”

“But that’s one thing I know.”

“How can you know, darling? Perhaps women live better together for a while, but men and women seem to be such an unbreakable habit in the scheme of things that, why, even Silver and Joe finally marry.”

“For a while then,” Ann said.

“Give up my job, perhaps not be able to get another? And, if I did teach here, what kind of a life would we have, I at the University all day, you at the Club all night?”

“That’s no problem,” Ann said. “I’ve been fired.”

“Fired?” Evelyn repeated. “Why?”

“Oh, these things happen. It doesn’t matter. I would have quit anyway.”

“What will you do?”

“Darling, my father left me money invested in things, and I make pretty good money on cartoons. I don’t really need to work.”

“Then why don’t you come to California with me?”

“I don’t think I could, Evelyn. I don’t think I could leave.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

“Afraid of being saved?”

“Perhaps,” Ann said, smiling. “Or of being turned into a pillar of salt somewhere along the way.”

9

W
HEN EVELYN WENT DOWN
to breakfast Friday morning, she found Frances and Walter sitting with their coffee. They were both self-consciously silent for a moment. Then Frances got up and hurried off to the kitchen to fix Evelyn something to eat.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to dash,” Walter said. “I’m already late.”

Evelyn sat down alone to eat the grapefruit that had been set out for her. She had probably interrupted nothing more than the rare moment of privacy Frances and Walter had, but she felt uneasy. When Frances came back into the room with a plate of bacon and eggs, her cheerfulness seemed strained. She spilled Evelyn’s coffee when she tried to pour her a second cup and made a complicated task of cleaning it up. Evelyn wanted to ask her what was wrong, but Frances was not shy. If she wanted to talk, she would; if she did not, the kindest thing Evelyn could do was to ignore her nervousness.

“What time’s your appointment with the lawyer?” Frances asked.

“Not until ten thirty. I have lots of time.”

“Evelyn, I don’t want you to think I’m meddling in your private affairs. That’s the last thing I want to do.” Frances hesitated, as if she were waiting to be encouraged or cut off, but, when Evelyn offered no comment at all, she went on. “Walter’s told me something very unpleasant this morning. He should have told me days ago but he didn’t. I can understand why he didn’t, but he should have, just the same. I don’t know whether it’s really important or not, but, if anything happened and I hadn’t let you know about it, I’d never forgive myself.”

“What is it?”

“It has to do with Bill. He’s been in love with Ann, you know. Up until several months ago, all of us thought she was probably going to marry him. Then, just like that, it was over … for Ann anyway. It wasn’t for Bill. Of course, he was hurt, but I never would have thought, even so, that he could behave the way he’s been behaving.”

“How has he been behaving?”

“He’s been doing a lot of talking, Evelyn. About Ann, mostly, but for some reason I don’t quite understand, except that he must think it’s a way of hurting Ann, he’s been talking about you.”

“About me?”

“I wouldn’t say anything about this at all if Bill hadn’t told Walter he was thinking of going to your husband’s lawyer. Walter told him he was out of his mind.”

“To my husband’s lawyer? To say what? To do what? Why?”

“To make trouble in the divorce proceedings. Evelyn, I haven’t any idea what arrangements you’ve made. I don’t know anything about your divorce. It’s none of my business, but, if there were any possibility that your husband would like to make trouble … sometimes men do, at the last minute, because of money or …”

“But what could Bill say? What was he thinking of saying?”

“He was thinking of offering evidence to prove that you and Ann …” Frances hesitated in embarrassment “… are lovers. He even asked Walter if he’d testify, and he said he could get the names of a couple of army pilots who were in a helicopter. It sounded just crazy to me, and Walter said he was pretty sure Bill wouldn’t go through with it, but he wasn’t positive. If you went into court without knowing and something came of it …”

Evelyn sat, staring at Frances.

“It may be nothing at all, Evelyn. It probably isn’t. Do forgive me. I just didn’t feel I had any right not to say something. You know Walter and I would do anything we could. He was terribly upset. He didn’t even want to tell me.”

“Dear God,” Evelyn said softly.

“Has he any evidence? Is there any real danger?”

Evelyn did not answer.

“What is all this about a helicopter?”

“One afternoon when we were swimming at Pyramid Lake, one flew over, that’s all.”

“How did Bill find out about it?”

“I don’t know. Ann thought it was funny. She probably told it to him or to Silver, just as a funny story. Has Walter talked to Ann about any of this?”

“Not really, not about Bill’s going to the lawyer anyway. I think he did tell her that Bill was being unpleasant.”

“So he fired her because of me.”

“Fired her?”

“Yes,” Evelyn said. “She was fired yesterday.”

“Well, that, anyway, is no cause for anything but celebration. Bill may not know it, but that’s the biggest favor anyone ever did for Ann.”

“Do you think so?” Evelyn asked wryly. “If she’d chosen to leave, that would be one thing.”

“Choose or not, she’s out of there. That’s what matters. Oh, Evelyn, if you’d only take her with you, get her right out of here …”

“I may not get out of here myself,” Evelyn said. “Ann’s lost her job. She may be dragged through court as well. If she is, I won’t have a job either.”

“Would your husband make trouble if he could?”

“I wouldn’t have thought so, but I wouldn’t have thought a perfectly strange young man would take it upon himself to go to a lawyer either. There are a great many things I wouldn’t have thought. I’ll simply have to find out.”

“If there’s anything I can do …”

“Do?” Evelyn repeated. “It’s been done, Frances. Excuse me.”

Frances had already excused her. She wanted love for Ann and did not much care how she got it. Had she no capacity for moral indignation or at least moral doubt? Did it never occur to her, because of the sentimental trash that filled her head, that love might be a devastating obscenity? Frances cherished convention. How could she then so willingly trade her dream of Ann’s white wedding for what might turn into a vicious absurdity in the public courts of law? Her own white wedding had, of course, turned into a vicious absurdity in the public courts of law. And so had Evelyn’s. Or so it was about to. Three people, Ann’s father, Ann’s mother, and Frances had all been willing to let Ann suffer the ruined exposure of their own lives.

“I will not,” Evelyn said aloud in the empty quietness of her room.

But how could she stop it? If Bill had spoken to the lawyer, if the lawyer had written to George, would George he tempted to do anything about it? He did not want the divorce, had only agreed to it under pressure, finally persuaded by being offered all of their joint property; but he could accomplish nothing by a countercharge. Evelyn would have let him get the divorce in the first place if he had wanted to. But would he be tempted, because he felt her his judge, to expose her, to ruin her academic career? She would be no better than he then.

“I am no better,” she said. “And I never have been.”

But she had confessed this truth to herself before. She had already seen that her own needs had been as destructive as his. It was George who had not known it. Would he choose, given the revelation and opportunity, to prove it? There was no real evidence. What could those two army pilots say? Neither Walter nor Frances would testify. Silver? The whole thing was a vicious absurdity!

“Vicious absurdity or not, it’s true.”

And could she, under oath, deny it?

“I could not.”

Evelyn picked up her purse and gloves, went back downstairs, and left the house. She did not turn toward town. She chose instead the street she had walked her first evening in Reno, past the morning lawns of playing children, past the neighborhood store, to the short hill, that little rise of ground that could obscure the fact of empty miles of desert. Evelyn did not hesitate. She walked on up the hill and along the three short blocks that brought her to the desert’s edge, cut off from the town by nothing but a broken bit of barbed wire fencing. She ducked through it and stepped out onto the desert itself. The heels of her shoes sank a little in the sandy soil, but she went on walking out into the sun that this morning seemed robbed of its intensity by a cool wind coming off the mountains. The scent of the sage was still hot and clear as spice, but it was not as strong as it had been. And the bolder colors, which she had once had to look for, revealed themselves even in the greater distances. This vast, empty, silent place promised autumn. Evelyn could feel it. “If I lost my sense of smell, if I lost my sight, I would still know where I was.” “There was never water here, not fresh water.” The earth requires the insignificant vulnerability of living cells to build its silence of dust and fossil, consuming life, transforming death into monumental mountains and grains of sand. No man’s investment of sons will ever claim this land, nor will his genius for destruction change it. The scattered seed and the shattered atom fall indistinguishably together upon the silence like fertile rain, the land reclaiming man.

Evelyn had walked half a mile into her own vision of the desert before she turned and looked back at the curiously regular edge of town she had left: “When they were got out of the wilderness, they presently saw a town …” And Faithful was tried there and died there, but for defending his convictions, not for giving them up. If he’d surrendered divine faith to human faith, he would not have been killed; nor would he have escaped, however. He would have stayed.

Evelyn began to walk slowly back the way she had come, neither Faithful nor Christian. There is no allegory any longer, not even the allegory of love. I do not believe. Even seeing and feeling, in fact, what I do not believe, I do not believe. It’s a blind faith, human faith, hybrid faith of jackass and mare. That’s the only faith I have. I cannot die of that. I can only live with it, damned or not.

“If nothing happens, if Ann isn’t dragged into this, I’ll let her go. I’ll never touch her again.”

And if she is?

“I won’t go to court. I won’t get the divorce. I’ll go back to George. If only she isn’t dragged into this, I swear I’ll …”

Swear to whom?

“To chance, to fate, to the little gods of the desert and the lake, to the one large god whose ordinance I may not, after all, break, to everything I don’t believe in, to everything I know, to my own blind, human faith. I’ll never touch her again.”

It seemed a long way back to the broken barbed wire. It seemed a long way back past the house, where Ann must still be asleep, to the center of town and Arthur Williams’ office. As Evelyn rode up in the elevator, she made herself think, not of the universal images among which she could not quite find her place, but of the petty, unpleasant facts which were her own to deal with.

“Here for the dress rehearsal?” the secretary quipped cheerfully.

Evelyn nervously considered her dress, which was not what she had planned to wear in court, before she recognized the irrelevant humor that was intended. Her belated smile was a wry apology, a social straw the secretary floundered for through three measures of unmusical laughter. In the embarrassed silence that followed, Arthur Williams’ office door opened, and a grim-boned, awkward woman struggled out through the elaborate, ritual farewell Arthur Williams imposed on all his clients. Evelyn, as apprehensive as she would have been if she were about to be asked to dance, braced herself for his greeting, but she was better prepared than she had been before and managed to maintain some dignity of her own in spite of him.

“I’ve been able to arrange a hearing for ten o’clock Monday morning,” he said quietly once he was settled at his desk. “I assume you’d like it private.”

“Please,” Evelyn said. “Is it possible?”

“And customary. There shouldn’t be any reason for the judge to refuse. Has Mrs. Packer agreed to be a witness?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Now, you’ll have to answer a few questions about your place of residence because only permanent residents of Nevada can be granted divorces. When I ask you for your address, you must give Mrs. Packer’s address. I will also ask you if you have any other home or place of legal residence. The answer is ‘no.’ Then I will ask you if it has been your intention, and still is your intention, to make Reno your home and residence for an indefinite period of time. The answer is ‘yes.’”

“But I plan to leave Reno almost at once.”

“An indefinite period of time is variously defined, Mrs. Hall.”

Because the plane might be late, she could swear that she intended to make her home in Reno for an indefinite period of time? Evelyn wondered if the divorcees who stayed on in Reno were those who, having broken their marriage vows, could, nevertheless, not bring themselves to commit perjury. It was a last ditch morality she knew she could not take seriously. Perhaps, being able to answer two of the three questions honestly was an unusual privilege. She was learning to treat laws as most people treat poems, making them mean whatever she wanted them to without reference to the author’s intention or achievement. Her aptitude tests had always indicated that she would be a clever lawyer.

Arthur Williams went on to outline a number of factual questions: the date of their marriage, the date of their separation. He explained why the written agreement of settlement should be entered as evidence but not merged in the decree the court might award.

“Then I will ask you to describe to the court the defendant’s acts of cruelty upon which you rely as a cause for divorce. You need only mention his refusal to work, his extravagant spending, his extreme rudeness to your friends, his indifference to you.”