The Early Stories (74 page)

We sat in a ring around the fire, the heart of a collapsing star, fed anew by paper plates. The man of the older couple, in whose breath the champagne had undergone an acrid chemical transformation, told me about his money—how as a youth just out of business school, in the depths of the Depression, he had made a million dollars in some deal involving Stalin and surplus wheat. He had liked Stalin, and Stalin had liked him.
“The thing we must realize about your Communist is that he's just another kind of businessman.” Across the fire I watched his wife, spurned by me, ardently gesturing with the teen-age boy who was not her son, and wondered how I would take their picture. Tri-X, wide open, at
¹
/
₆₀
; but the shadows would be lost, the subtle events within them, and the highlights would be vapid blobs. There is no adjustment, no darkroom trickery, equal to the elastic tolerance of our eyes as they scan.

As my new friend murmured on and on about his money, and the champagne warming in my hand released carbon dioxide to the air, exposures flickered in and out around the fire: glances, inklings, angels. Margaret gazing, the nick of a frown erect between her brows. Henrietta's face vertically compressing above an ear of corn she was devouring. The well-preserved woman's face a mask of bronze with cunningly welded seams, but her hand an exclamatory flash as it touched her son's friend's arm in some conversational urgency lost in the crackle of driftwood. The halo of hair around Ian's knees, innocent as babies' pates. Jenny's hair an elongated flurry as she turned to speak to the older couple's son; his bearded face was a blur in the shadows, melancholy, the eyes seeming closed, like the Jesus on a faded, drooping veronica. I heard Jenny say, “… 
must
destroy the system! We've forgotten how to
love!
” Deirdre's glasses, catching the light, leaped like moth wings toward the fire, escaping perspective. Beside me, the old man's face went silent, and suffered a deflation wherein nothing held firm but the reflected glitter of firelight on a tooth his grimace had absent-mindedly left exposed. Beyond him, on the edge of the light, Cora and Linda were revealed sitting together, their legs stretched out long before them, warming, their faces in darkness, sexless and solemn, as if attentive to the sensations of the revolution of the earth beneath them. Godfrey was asleep, his head pillowed on Margaret's thigh, his body suddenly wrenched by a dream sob, and a heavy succeeding sigh.

It was strange, after these fragmentary illuminations, to stumble through the unseen sand and grass, with our blankets and belongings, to the boats on the shore of the pond. Margaret and five children took the rowboat; I nominated Jimmy to come with me in the kayak. The night was starless. The pond, between the retreating campfire and the slowly nearing lights of our neighbors' houses, was black. I could scarcely see his silhouette as it struggled for the rhythm of the stroke: left, a little turn with the wrists, right, the little turn reversed, left. Our paddles occasionally clashed, or snagged on the weeds that clog this pond. But the kayak sits lightly, and soon we put the confused conversation of the rowers, and
their wildly careening flashlight beam, behind. Silence widened around us. Steering the rudder with the foot pedals, I let Jimmy paddle alone, and stared upward until I had produced, in the hazed sky overhead, a single, unsteady star. It winked out. I returned to paddling and received an astonishing impression of phosphorescence: every stroke, right and left, called into visibility a rich arc of sparks, animalcula hailing our passage with bright shouts. The pond was more populous than China. My son and I were afloat on a firmament warmer than the heavens.

“Hey, Dad.”

His voice broke the silence carefully; my benevolence engulfed him, my fellow-wanderer, my leader, my gentle, secretive future. “What, Jimmy?”

“I think we're about to hit something.”

We stopped paddling, and a mass, gray etched on gray, higher than a man, glided swiftly toward us and struck the prow of the kayak. With this bump, and my awakening laugh, the day of the dying rabbit ended. Exulting in homogenous glory, I had steered us into the bank. We pushed off, and by the lights of our neighbors' houses navigated to the dock, and waited some minutes for the rowboat with its tangle of voices and picnic equipment to arrive. The days since have been merely happy days. This day was singular in its, let's say,
tone
—its silver-bromide clarity. Between the cat's generous intentions and my son's lovingly calm warning, the dying rabbit sank like film in the developing pan, and preserved us all.

How to Love America and
Leave It at the Same Time
 

Arrive in some town around three, having been on the road since seven, and cruise the main street, which is also Route Whatever-It-Is, and vote on the motel you want. The wife favors a discreet back-from-the-highway look, but not bungalows; the kids go for a pool (essential), color TV (optional), and Magic Fingers (fun). Vote with the majority, pull in, and walk to the office. Your legs unbend weirdly, after all that sitting behind the wheel. A sticker on the door says the place is run by “The Plummers,” so this is Mrs. Plummer behind the desk. Fifty-fivish, tight silver curls with traces of russet, face motherly but for the brightness of the lipstick and the sharpness of the sizing-up glance. In half a second she nails you: family man, no trouble. Sweet tough wise old scared Mrs. Plummer. Hand over your plastic credit card. Watch her give it the treatment: people used to roll their own cigarettes in machines with just that gesture. Accept the precious keys with their lozenge-shaped tags of plastic. Consider the career of motelkeeper, selling what shouldn't be buyable—rest to the weary, bliss to the illicit, space to the living. Providing television and telephones to keep us in touch with the unreal worlds behind, ahead. Shelter, a strange old commodity.

Untie the bags from the roof of the car. Your legs still feel weird, moving. The kids have the routine down pat: in three minutes in and out of their room and into the pool. Follow at a middle-aged pace, taking care not to disarray the suitcase in removing the bathing suits. The wife looks great, momentarily naked, but she claims she has a headache, after all those miles.

Wait until the kids get bored with yelling and splashing. Then, beside the pool, soak in the sun. Listen to the town. You have never heard of the town before: this is important. Otherwise, there are expectations, and a plan. This is not to say the town need be small. America conceals
immense things. Here are thousands of busy souls as untangent to you as individual rocks on the moon. Say the town is in California, on the dry side of the Sierras; though it could as well be in Iowa, or Kentucky, or Connecticut. Out of nowhere, here it has arrived. Listen. The wavelets in the pool lap the tile gutter. The rush of traffic along Route Whatever-It-Is doesn't miss you; it sings, sighs, cruises, processes hurtling multitudes, passes like a river. Nearer by, car tires chew the gravel, creeping closer. Look. Two long-haired children in patched jeans, their clothes full of insignias, pale, scarcely older than your own children, emerge, with a reluctance somehow loving, from a crumpled green Volkswagen, and walk to the motel office. A far-off door slams. Retreating tires chew the gravel smaller and smaller. In the other direction, a laundry cart rattles. And beyond all this, enclosing it, like a transparent dome, an indecipherable murmur, like bees in the eaves or the continual excited liquid tremolo of newly hatched birds hidden in a tree trunk, waiting to be fed.

A siren sounds.

It sounds distant, then proximate, then distant again, and lower-pitched. This cry of emergency cuts through the afternoon like a crack in crystal. Disaster, here? An accident up the road, which might have been you, had you pressed on? A heart attack, high in the mountains? Relax. Let the lordly sun dry the drops of water on your chest. Imagine an old Californian, with parched white beard and a mountain goat's unfriendly stare, his whole life from birth soaked in this altitude, this view, this locality until an hour ago unknown to you and after tomorrow never to be known again—imagine him dead, his life in a blood-blind moment wrenched from his chest like a root from a tummock. The thought, curiously, is no more disturbing than the chuckling rush of traffic, than the animal ripple of the kids having returned their bodies to the pool, than the remote distinct voice that now and then, for reasons of its own, monotonously recites numbers into a kind of megaphone, an amplification system. “Fifteen … twenty …” Something to do with the disaster? An air alert? The voice drones on, part of the peace. Further sirens bleat, a black police car and a square white truck with blue flashers smoothly rip by, between the motel and the Mexican restaurant across Route Whatever-It-Is.

Beyond the restaurant's red tile roof lies a tawny valley; beyond it, a lesser range of mountains, gray, but gray multitudinously, with an infinity of shades—ash, graphite, cardboard, tomcat, lavender. Such beauty wants to make us weep. If we were crystal, we would shatter. The amplified

voice goes on, “Twenty … thirty …” The kids begin to squabble. You have had enough sun. Time to reconnoitre.

The wife says her headache is better but she will stay in the motel room, to give herself a shampoo. Walk, family man, with the kids, out from the parking lot and down the main street. The heat from the sidewalk swims across your shins. The high mountain sun gives a tinny thin coating of glory to the orange Rexall signs, the red tongues of the parking meters, the pink shorts of girls whose brown backs are delicately trussed by the strings of minimal halters, the rags of Army-surplus green being worn alike by overmuscled youths and squinting, bent geezers. They drift, these natives, in their element. Love them because they are here. There is no better reason for love. They squint through you. To acquire substance, enter a store and buy something. Discover that the town offers postcards of itself; it is self-conscious, commercial. It contains many sporting-goods stores, veritable armories in the war against the wilderness—fishing rods, ski poles, hunting slingshots, collapsible rafts, folding tents, backpack racks, freeze-dried fruits in aluminum wrap, fanciful feathered fishing flies in plastic capsules, tennis rackets, tennis shirts, tennis balls the colors of candy. Your boys are enchanted, your girls are bored. Purchase five postcards, some freeze-dried pears for tomorrow's long drive through the desert, and exit. Out on the hot pavement, the little girl's sandals flop. She has been begging for new ones every day. Her hair is still wet from the motel pool. Take her into a shoe store. Solemnly the salesman seats her, measures her foot size. Marvel at the way in which his hand deigns to touch this unknown child's sticky bare foot. Alas, what he has in her size she does not like, and what she likes he does not have in her size. Express regret and leave. Crossing the dangerous thoroughfare, you take her hand, a touch more tender with her, having witnessed the tenderness of others. Across the street, in a little main square pared to insignificance by successive widenings of the highway, an old covered wagon instead of a statue stands. Think of those dead unknown—plodding flights of angels—who dared cross this land of inhuman grandeur without highways, without air conditioning, without even (a look underneath confirms) shock absorbers, jolting and rattling each inch, in order to arrive here and create this town, wherein this wagon has become a receptacle for (a look inside discovers) empty cans of Coors Beer, Diet Pepsi, and Mountain Dew.

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

•  •  •

Or, alternatively, get into the car at the motel and drive around the back streets: a wooden church, a brick elementary school with basketball stanchions on a pond of asphalt, houses spaced and square-set and too clean-looking. There is something sterilizing about the high air here. The lawns look watered, like putting greens. They contrast vividly with spaces of unkempt parched hay. The houses out of their rectilinear, faintly glistening fronts strive to say something, a word you are anxious to hear, and would drive forever to hear finally. But the kids are bored, and beg to go “home.” Home is the motel.