Seaview (17 page)

It comes around to affect the other sticks in time. The small wires between the sticks are the processes that cause behavior. One end is head process, the other end is, well, you know, the other end, another kind of consciousness—D. H. Lawrence, et cetera.

And it could be something as small as a symbol or a photograph you look at, after many years, that starts the chain, the net, reaction. The focus of the thing, its integrity, is the matrix; this is what we call ‘meaning.' Out here we analyze it. But in there, when we are one of the sticks, we can't do that. A breeze pushes against one stick or wire, and we, on the other side, or in the middle, or very close to the one that the breeze pushed, are moved a little. There is no help for it, and we're moved before we know it. So that knowing is always after the fact of definition. But look how the sticks seem to ache when they are still. They want moving; that's about all they really have. That is the story I wanted to tell you,” she said, glancing up at Bob White. “I call this story
The Integrity Sphere
.”

She was out of breath from talking, so she stood quietly
beside them, looking into the window. They both seemed able to see the sphere as she saw it; at least, they attended to it. They were in front of an architect's window in Aspen, Colorado. It was after he had gone to the river where he had let out the cocaine from the plastic bag that had been in the Kansas City Diamond matchbox, let it mix its rush with that of the swift stream. It was after noon. The Buckminster Fuller Tensegrity Sphere was on a piece of dark felt covering a table. It stood there, airy and both powerful and fragile. It was made of quarterinch pieces of pine doweling five inches long, screw eyes, and thin wire. None of the sticks touched each other, and the wires in the screw eyes did not touch the sticks. Gravity seemed to play no part in its structure. It was the structure that was powerful, the materials that were weak. He held her shoulder. Bob White stood on the other side of her. There seemed no room in the sphere for free movement. Open as it was, an open matrix, it seemed claustrophobic to him. He wondered if he could push on it hard enough to break it.

He thought he probably could, quite easily. But what would be left then? She leaned against him. He pressed her shoulder when she finished talking.

“That was a pretty good story,” Bob White said, and then he moved his hands from where they hung at his sides and began a soft clapping in front of his waist. She turned to him, away from the window, and when she did that Allen took his hand from her shoulder and began his own soft clapping also. People passed by them, but the clapping was so soft that they did not notice it. They both bobbed a little as, from either side, they turned in to face her, clapping lightly. They were smiling, breaking into light laughter, and she stepped back from the window a little and bowed a little to each of them as they clapped. As they began to finish they moved closer, in to one another, making a kind of circle. When they were done, they were touching against each other in various ways.

THEY DROVE OUT THE END OF THE TOWN AT FIVE-THIRTY in the morning, before it was completely light, and headed up Independence Pass. At the top they would come to the ridge of the Continental Divide, the watershed; they would be leaving the West then as they descended, and after they had passed through Denver they would enter the plateau entrance into the

Great Plains. They rose up from the town, but before they were high enough to see back to it in its wholeness, they were closed off from it by the mountains.

“It's gone,” Melinda said as she turned her head back from the rear window.

The pine stands were thick and grew close to the road. There were small meadows of aspen, their leaves shimmering silver as the sun came up. At one point, well back in a meadow behind other trees, they had a glimpse of a ripe cottonwood, like a huge dandelion gone to seed, dropping its puffs in drifts on the light morning wind. The forks of small rivers ran down to turn along the road or go under it, falling away on the other side. After a while, at about eleven thousand feet, they came to timberline; the large trees were gone, and the high meadows of wild flowers and moss and low scrub began. Near the top they passed a ghost town, a long-abandoned mining village: dozens of log buildings returning to the meadow they were in, reclaimed very slowly, a peaceful and nonviolent death, though perhaps of a passionate history. Then they came to the top of the mountains.

There was a sign and a marker and a place to park. Off to the left, up a gradual slope, there was a pile of boulders on a hill, a place that seemed to be the ultimate top of things. With the exception of the hill, at the parking place everything seemed to slope away from them, gradually. The sign said:
Independence Pass, Elevation 12,095 feet
. They got out of the car and sat at a redwood picnic table near the parking area. They drank hot coffee from the thermos they had brought with them. The air was very crisp and thin, and Melinda was very pale in the sun.

“This is very high up,” she said.

“It is, indeed, very high up,” he said to her.

“Could be higher,” Bob White said, and he took his coffee cup with him and started to stroll up the slope to the pile of boulders.

When he was gone, Melinda put her cup down and began to talk. For the first time in a month, she talked extensively about her dying. She said she thought it was time to take stock some: a lot had happened, and a lot was going to happen. She mentioned the Tensegrity Sphere with a wan smile. She talked about his getting rid of the cocaine, the close call in Tombstone, the sense she had from what he had told her about Richard. Nobody would let this slip, she thought, least of all him. She said she knew there was more to come. She turned toward Allen on the bench, under the few high clouds and the sun. He sat hunched over, elbows on the table, hands cupping his coffee. She said she wanted to get back to the Cape. He said he knew that.

But she said she had to go beyond her concern for him. She had that, but she had really only herself at the bottom. He was a concerned party, but the party he was concerned with would not be there long, and he would have to make his decision, finally, without regard for her. She said all this sounds very romantic, but it is not romantic; it is the way things can be when you are going to die and you know it. Whatever else, she would not use the gun, and she did not want him to use it on her, even if things got really bad. And if somehow he had to leave her, that was okay too.
She said she did not mean to sound callous about it; it was simply the way things were.

While he listened to her, looking over at her at times, he thought in part of the impossibility of reading another's feelings and thoughts in their behavior, in their face and posture and the movements of their body. At least for him it was a difficult thing, difficult to be sure of. Only when he played golf was it all clear and sure. Elsewhere he avoided it, because when he tried to do it he found he was most often wrong. It was especially hard, he thought, with people one had some closeness with. He had had a friend once who had asked it of him, and his inability to see is what had choked off the friendship. If his friend were troubled, he would not speak of it and confide until he was asked about it, and the way you were supposed to know that he was troubled, to unlock him, was to read it in his expression, the way he carried himself, the subtle tones in his voice. If you did not read him, it was because you were insensitive to his feelings. But he had never been able to read people in this way, except on the golf course, where somehow there was a kind of objectivity, a set of brackets, in which he could see behavior clearly and understand it. Too often when his friend sent out his cues, he saw them as a desire for privacy, and he did not engage him.

But Melinda talked to him, had always done so, and he did not have the burden of being judged for missing the nature of her feelings in her behavior. He felt himself as an isolate person all the time, but Melinda broke into that with her talking; she knew how to talk, and she had learned not to ask him to reciprocate in the talking, knowing how hard a thing it was for him, and she knew that when he did speak, he meant what he said. He thought, were he to put all this into words between them, they could both say that this understanding kept them together.

“If we get to the Cape in a while, I'll die there, and then you'll have to figure the rest for yourself. If somehow we don't get there, we'll have to play it by ear. What I want to say is that I think it's a good idea to lay it out here and now, because we could get
separated, and we might not have talked. It's not that I really have much to say to you that I haven't said. God knows, we've said it enough recently. It's just, now we've talked and we don't need to feel that there were things we should have said and didn't get to. You know what I mean?”

“I know what you mean,” he said.

“Well, is there anything you want to say? You really don't need to. But I thought, maybe, well, this might be your chance if there were anything.”

“I can't think of anything right now,” he said, “but it would be good for me if I held you.”

“Come on,” she said.

As he slid awkwardly along the bench to her, he felt selfish. He did have things to say to her, but he despaired of the possibility because he could not articulate them, and if he did say anything it would not be the thing he wanted to say. He knew that all talk was of this kind, but at his very core he could not participate in it, could not begin to speak his feelings. It was as if he were his feelings and utterance would be to lose that part which was uttered: small bits of his being jettisoned, dissolving in the air, like pieces of flesh cut from his arms with a paring knife, peels cast into a fire. She saw much of this as he came over to her.

“It's all right,” she said, “it's all right.” And like the child he was, who at bottom was dumbfounded and bewildered at the talk and behavior of adults, he came and put his head down under her arm, his ear against her warm breast above her shallow breathing, and he did a thing that was like weeping somewhere inside himself; he could not wear it on the outside. It was too much like talking, the possibility of the dumb and stupid image made real: his literal heart torn from his chest, to lie still and gushing and bloody on his shirt sleeve. But he felt very close to her, and she felt very close to him. They felt somewhat in common, because what they had removed from between them was forms. They both knew that this was what the talking and the inability to talk were designed to do; they were nothing but catalyst for this
touching. He had thought to hold her, still thought he was doing so, but it was she who was holding him. She put her palm against his cheek, pressed him into her breast. He put his left hand on her knee. They sat in the open place on the top of the mountain at Independence Pass, and after a while they heard the scuffing of Bob White as he kicked a few pebbles loose on his way down from the boulders, and they released each other.

“What did you see up there?” Melinda asked him when he reached the table, and he smiled at them before he gave what he knew to be both the real and the cliche answer.

“More mountains,” he said, “higher ones.”

 

 

THEY DROPPED DOWN IN THE EAST OF THE WATERSHED into the steep cuts and the broader valleys below and headed by way of Boulder into the outskirts of Denver. They drove through the heart of the city and out the other side, down into the foothills, and made the decision to head north into Wyoming, up to Cheyenne. They got to Cheyenne at midday, saw some posters announcing a rodeo, found a motel in which they unloaded and changed, and were at the rodeo by one-thirty. They spent the afternoon watching the cowboys ride broncos and Brahma bulls and rope calves. Bob White spoke about rodeos in his neck of the woods.

At one point, between events, Allen took Melinda back to where they stabled the animals in split-rail pens, so that she could see them up close. There was a place where the pens were set in a U-shape, and by walking into the U. they were almost surrounded by them. The animals' smell was strong, but they were not at all skittery; they seemed very placid and very wise, in a way very professional. One horse came over to the fence and put his nose on the top rail. He and Melinda felt the horse's muzzle. It felt like kid glove, but the best part was the feel of the soft hot breath touching their palms and tickling between their fingers.

They spent the night in Cheyenne and were up and back on the road early in the morning, heading out into the flat lands of
the Great Plains. They were not in a hurry, and they drove the old highways and secondary roads, passing close to farms and through small towns. In one town in Nebraska, just the other side of the Mountain – Central time-zone line, they saw a marker announcing that the local agricultural college had restored a piece of prairie as a project. An arrow on the sign pointed the direction, off the main drag, into the few blocks of residential area. The street was on the far side of the town, and they turned into it.

At first it was lined with two – and three-story brick houses from the 'twenties and 'thirties. There were large, old trees in the yards. Two blocks in, the newer, frame ranch houses started. The prairie was between two of the ranch houses, on the other side of the street. They parked across from it, got out, and went over to it.

It was less than a half-acre in size, and it too would have been a ranch house, so the plaque in front of it said, had it not been for a young professor and his class at the college. They had discovered that it was land that had, somehow, never been cultivated or farmed. They had acquired it and let it return to its natural state. It was what the Great Plains had been like at the time of the dominance of the Comanches and the coming, or attempted coming, of the Spanish. The weeds, grasses, and flowers growing in it were well over their heads when they entered it. There were paths cut through it, and they walked these, separating. Though the paths cut back across themselves, they could not see each other, even though they were often no more than a few feet apart. They sounded to each other like small animals or birds in brush, out of sight, as they came close to each other. They talked into the air to each other, over the high growth. Melinda found dew glistening on a spider web across a path and announced this, ducking carefully under it. Allen came upon very strange flowers, small and blue, on thin stalks.