Desert of the Heart: A Novel (22 page)

“Lack of social orientation. Latent homosexuality. Moral amnesia. Masochism. Revenge. But I’m willfully ignorant in these matters. My terms are probably very inaccurate.”

“And so, though you hate to hurt me, you know you’ve made a terrible mistake. You hope I’ll forgive you. You hope we can go on being friends.” Ann’s tone was uncertainly comic, an occasional syllable tipping into satiric anger. “Why have you loved me at all?”

“Because I couldn’t help loving you,” Evelyn said, feeling the tight control leave her voice. “Because I can’t help loving you, your wild, inaccurate emotions, your bizarre innocence, your angry sense of responsibility, your wrongheaded wit, your cockeyed joy, your cowboy boots, your absolutely magnificent body, your incredible eyes. I can’t help it. I don’t know how anyone could.”

“There’ve been thousands, I should think,” Ann said, the warmth returning to her voice. “But I’m glad you’re not one of them. I don’t intend to let you go, Evelyn.”

But what do you intend to do, Evelyn wondered, and what do I intend to do? She could recover from this particular, personal fear and moral panic in Ann’s arms, more certain of Ann than she had been, more certain of herself. But each moment they spent together involved them in a relationship they must somehow take responsibility for. It was easy enough to forsake the past, but could you forsake the future? Perhaps. Nothing before her mattered so much as being with Ann now.

Being with Ann, Evelyn found it hard to remember what it was in the desert that had so terrified and appalled her. She drove the easy, straight road to Pyramid Lake as comfortably as she might have driven the road to Santa Cruz, but she was glad that they would not arrive at the boardwalk and crowded beach. There were few places left in the Bay Area where anyone could go and expect even an uncertain privacy. Privacy was what she wanted. They were both already growing restless with the caution they had to use when they were together in the house, reticent in other people’s company, always aware of the thinness of walls, the vulnerability of doors when they were alone. And dawn, which came so soon after Ann got home, was becoming a symbol of the world’s intrusion. They could not ever sleep a night through together.

“Shall we go to the same place?” Evelyn asked.

“Yes, I think so.”

“Does anyone else go there?”

“I’ve never seen anyone else, and it’s a weekday anyway. There won’t be anyone else on the lake at all until suppertime.”

“Good,” Evelyn said. “We can swim without suits.”

“You are getting reckless.”

“I feel reckless all the time. This afternoon I want to be reckless.”

Evelyn drove toward each rise of ground, expecting the water; but, when they came upon it, it was as if she had never seen it before, a great reach of sky that had fallen suddenly and quietly upon the land. She did not pull over to the side of the road; she let the car drop over the crest and down to the lake shore.

“I like the way you drive,” Ann said.

“Do you? How do I drive?”

“I’d have to show you. It’s the next turn off.”

The sun was hot, the sand fiery under foot, but a cool, dry wind came off the lake that gave a freshness to the air. Evelyn stopped for a moment before she walked dawn to the beach. The long, clean line of the horizon was broken only occasionally by an outcropping of rock, clearly defined against the heat-washed sky, and the massive shadow reflections of the land trembled on the wind surface of the water.

“See the islands out there? They gave the lake its name,” Ann said. “I’ve never been out to them, but the story is that they’re a treasure hoard of Indian arrowheads … also alive with rattlesnakes. I wonder if it’s true.”

The mention of rattlesnakes made Evelyn look around her quickly. She had before been so absorbed in the psychic dangers of the desert that it had not occurred to her to consider its simple, natural dangers.

“Don’t worry,” Ann said. “You don’t often see them this close to the water.”

“But, if they’re on islands. …” Evelyn said and then hesitated. “I don’t really care. I’m not afraid of them.”

She walked down to the water, to the waves of white shells along the shore. She stooped down for a handful of them, curious to discover them again. Their tiny perfection, infinitely repeated, seemed the more miraculous because of the huge, simple size of the landscape. It was no wonder that a Christian God had not been at home here. It would take the many animistic gods of men less confident of their own dominant spirit to describe the powers of this world. Evelyn thought of the Catholic Church in Virginia City. Faiths transplanted changed their nature or died in climates alien to them. Like the redwoods of California. She had heard that in Australia they had grown with dangerous speed for sixty years and then had died. She felt no terror in the idea, only a shifting of focus. Perhaps people also changed. Evelyn looked up into Ann’s watching eyes.

“What are you thinking?”

“I was wondering if people changed when they moved from place to place.”

“The word is ‘adjust,’ I think. People change, standing in one place.”

“Or don’t adjust and don’t change.”

“Why do you still wear your wedding ring?”

“I can’t take it off,” Evelyn said. “I’ve tried.”

Ann knelt down beside her and took her left hand. Slowly, but without hesitation, she eased it off Evelyn’s finger, held the empty gold ring in her hand for a moment, and then gave it to Evelyn.

“How did you do it?” Evelyn asked, bewildered.

“I worked one summer at a jeweler’s.”

Evelyn looked down at the ring and at the white band of skin that remained around her ring finger. “I wonder what I’ll do with it.”

“It’s a tradition in Reno for people to throw them into the Truckee. Then old men fish for them and sell them cheap to the kids who come from California to get married.”

“So that’s why they were shouting at me.”

“Who?”

“The old men below the bridge. They were panning for gold.”

“That’s right.”

“I don’t think I want to do that,” Evelyn said. “I wonder if there’s anything you can do with a wedding ring that isn’t embarrassingly symbolic.”

Ann made no suggestion.

“Well,” Evelyn said, “thanks,” and she dropped the ring into her jacket pocket, its weight immediately reminding her that this was only a temporary and not at all satisfactory solution.

“I’m good at buttons, too,” Ann said, a gentleness in her teasing. “And zippers … and hooks.”

“Ever work in a corset shop for the summer?”

“No,” Ann said. “I’m an honest amateur.”

“Are we really safe?”

“I don’t know about me,” Ann said. “You’re certainly not.”

“Oh, neither are you, my love.”

She reached for Ann, but Ann turned out of her arms quickly and waded into the water. A dozen yards away, but still in the shallows, she turned back to Evelyn. For a moment Evelyn did not move. The candor of Ann’s absolute nakedness, not caught in unselfconsciousness like a young nude in a romantic painting, but fully aware of her erotic power, roused in Evelyn an arrogance of body, a lust that burned through her nerves like the fire of the sun they both stood in. This was the freedom she wanted, an animal freedom exposed to the emptiness of sky and land and water. As she stepped forward, Ann flipped into the water and was gone. “I know why you’re called Little Fish,” she said softly, and the power of her body, as she swam, was an aggressive power. She was a stronger swimmer than Ann, confident in the chase. Not thirty yards from shore, Evelyn reached out with her left arm and caught Ann’s thigh. Ann rolled over on her back, and they came together, turning, weightless in the water.

“In the sun, too,” Ann said. “On land.”

And it was Ann, then, who dominated and controlled their bodies. Her free, inventive wildness, the physical intimacies she demanded, aroused every vague, animal desire in Evelyn that had been left unnamed, her body growing as demanding as Ann’s until Ann’s ecstatic cry broke the world silence like the cry of some mythical water bird. They lay still then, exhausted and peaceful.

“Is that what it’s like with Silver?” Evelyn asked.

“No,” Ann said. “Not like that.”

“With anyone else?”

“No.”

“My God, I feel possessive of you. It frightens me a little. If I think of anyone else making love with you, I want to go at them with a meat ax.”

“That
is
a little excessive,” Ann said. She was idly tracing Evelyn’s backbone with her lips. “I hate to cover you, but I’m afraid you’ll get burned.”

She got up and walked over to where they had left their clothes. Evelyn watched her, still unaccustomed to her independent nakedness.

“You’d better put these on,” Ann said. “Do you want to wash off first? I’m going to. We’re just a bit sandy.”

“I haven’t the energy,” Evelyn said, grinning. “I’ll just brush off and take a swim later.”

She sat up and dusted her shoulders and breasts with her shirt before she put it on. Then she stood up reluctantly to pull on her underwear and trousers, watching Ann, who had swum out about a hundred yards from shore. Just as she was about to sit down again, Evelyn became aware of the sound of a distant motor. She listened. It was not a car. It must be a speed boat. She looked down the lake, but the curve of cliff blocked her view.

“Ann?”

Ann waved.

“Can you see a boat?” Evelyn shouted, but the sound of the motor was now so loud that she knew Ann could not have heard her.

She squinted at the stretch of water where she expected the boat to appear. There must be at least two of them. She wished Ann were out of the water and dressed. Damn the boats! Then suddenly, not around the cliff but over it, came a helicopter, no more than a hundred feet off the ground. Evelyn could see the two men in it quite clearly. They were in uniform. It was an army plane. The men saw her, grinned and waved. She did not wave back. The plane dropped fifty feet and hovered right over her head. Then it shied off, leaving her in a storm of sand, and went out over the water. They had seen Ann. Through an open window, they were shouting and waving, the plane not twenty-five feet above the water, hanging there like an obscene, giant insect.

“Get away!” Evelyn shouted. “Get away from her!”

Her ridiculous, ineffectual fury was lost in the racket of the motor. What were they doing here? What right had they here? The plane dipped away from Ann and came back over the beach. The settling sand rose up again.

“Damn you!” Evelyn shouted. “Get out of here!”

She saw their good-natured faces again as they waved. The plane rose up and moved off along the eastern shore.

“How did you like that?” Ann called as she came in to the beach, staying under water until she could reach the towel Evelyn waded out to give her.

“I didn’t. What on earth are they doing here?”

“I don’t know. I suppose every now and then they do a routine inspection. Lucky, weren’t we?”

“You don’t really mind, do you?” Evelyn asked.

“No. I thought it was funny, didn’t you?”

“I should have,” Evelyn said, “but I didn’t. I was furious.”

“Why?”

“I want you to myself, I suppose.”

“Ah, darling,” Ann said, laughing. “I’m not a fish. They’d have to get closer than that to do any real damage.”

“I’m sure they were flying lower than they’re supposed to.”

“No doubt about that. Evelyn?”

Evelyn grinned reluctantly. “There’s sand all over the picnic basket.”

“Never mind,” Ann said. “I’ll take you into town and buy you a steak, how’s that?”

“That’s fine.” Evelyn heard the plane engine getting louder again. “But let’s get out of here quickly.”

Ann pulled on a shirt and trousers, and they grabbed their belongings and started up the cliff. They needn’t have hurried so, however. The helicopter stayed a sedate distance up and out from shore, the men nodding and saluting with exaggerated politeness. It was not until they had driven some way that Evelyn thought of her ring. She reached into her jacket pocket, knowing that it was gone. She said nothing about it to Ann. Losing it was probably the best thing she could do with it. She looked down at her hand. It would take longer to lose the mark it had left.

Though Ann did not actually refuse to take Evelyn to the Club, she was vague about setting a time; and, since Evelyn had asked to go, Ann was monosyllabic about her evenings at the Club. Perhaps the stories she had told and the explanations she had given created a Frank’s Club that existed only in her own mind, an image which she did not want destroyed by Evelyn’s independent view; but the Club was too important to Ann for Evelyn to be able to ignore it. When a specific invitation was not forthcoming, Evelyn decided on a time of her own. Silver had said that Saturday night was the night to see the Club, but Ann had protested. A Friday night seemed to Evelyn the right compromise. She wondered when, during the evening, she should go. Her own nervousness about the town made her consider going before dark; but, because she was determined to explore all of Ann’s world without fear, she chose instead the early hours of the morning. After all, Ann moved about the public streets unescorted at three and four o’clock every morning. There was no reason to be afraid.

There was a problem about getting down to the Club. Evelyn could not ask for Ann’s car, and she did not want to ask for Walter’s. He would offer to go with her, and, because his company would be a great comfort to her, she did not want it. A cab at that hour of the night, ordered for Frank’s Club, was an impropriety Evelyn was reluctant to commit. She smiled at herself. She could come to Reno for a divorce. She could lie naked in the public day making love to another woman, but she could not call a cab at midnight to go to a gambling casino. She chose, instead, to walk.

The quiet, residential streets, dark with carefully planted trees opening occasionally to the clarity of desert sky, were not at all unpleasant, and Evelyn felt an exhilaration to be on her way at a time when the hours usually dragged with her waiting for Ann. She met no one until she turned north on University Avenue, walking past the darkened Public Library and the Post Office to the bridge that crossed the Truckee. There were not many people, but there was no furtiveness even in the single loiterers who stood along the bridge, quite unselfconsciously enjoying the coolness of the night. Evelyn had only one moment of uncertainty as she passed the courthouse on the north shore. There were half a dozen old men sitting on its shadowed steps, perhaps the same old men who spent their days on the banks of the river, waiting for the unwanted gold people tossed to them like stale bread to the ducks. Evelyn was glad she wore no ring and glad in the dark that no one could see how recently she had taken it off. When she turned to walk toward Virginia Street, she saw ahead of her a bright neon day and crowds of people. It was exactly the same scene she had encountered at nine o’clock that first morning, but at this time of night it seemed more natural, like a carnival or country fair. The crowds were friendly. People shouted to each other from across the street, sang, shook hands with exasperated motorists stalled in the pedestrian traffic, joined together, handed each other money, set out for another casino sure of winning again or winning back what they had just lost. There were drunks, but they were not isolated. People jollied them along, helped them when they stumbled, leaned them up against walls or offered to buy them another drink. And the rhythm of the machines gave a rhythm to the noise until it seemed to Evelyn that they were all part of a huge, exuberant jazz symphony. There were even couples dancing to it here and there along the sidewalk.