Legends of the Fall

by Jim Harrison

  The first indication of dancing in his life had begun quite by accident. As a sophomore scholarship student at the University of Wisconsin he had noted that he couldn’t possibly reach the men’s gym from a classroom in the allotted ten minutes. Yet in 1956 four semesters of physical education were an absolute requirement. At registration he approached his track coach who remembered Nordstrom from fall term for having won the half mile and the shotput in’ his section, an oddity that removed Nordstrom if only momentarily from the anonymous pile of sophomores. The track coach suggested he run between classes, a bit unrealistic in view of all the unshoveled snow on the campus sidewalks. A muscular middle-aged woman sitting next to the track coach behind the registration desk recommended that Nordstrom take modern dance, which was held in the women’s gym and only a short walk away from the classroom buildings. Nordstrom signed up and walked away with scattered imaginings of competence at the waltz, fox-trot, samba and rumba. As an economics major working thirty hours a week in the statistics library he had no social life and rather thought this enforced dancing would open up some new vista of romance.

  The shock that neared paralysis in effect was that the class taught truly modern dance à la Martha Graham. He was the sole man among thirty young women in leotards and his ears rang and his mouth dried in embarrassment. It was the nature of his upbringing to stick things out and this, in addition to not wanting to admit his stupidity, kept him in the class. But the paralysis remained with him and other than the perfunctory warming up exercises he could not move. He feared that the girls who were strikingly midwestern, largely dumpy and ill formed, thought him a “homo,” the commonest word in the dorm. After a few weeks he had the minimal wit to change his position in the back row until he was directly behind the loveliest girl in the class. Her name was Laura and Nordstrom often saw her in the library studying with her boyfriend, a gaunt and lanky basketball star. Her grace at the exercises threw Nordstrom into a trance of lust that gave the class a dream-like atmosphere. He wore an especially tight jockstrap to conceal the results of her postures, the especially taut flex of her high buttocks and how she knelt and stretched like the most beautiful dog on earth with his nose not more than a few feet behind. He only spoke once to her to tell her she shouldn’t chew her knuckles one day after class. She simply stared at him as if preoccupied and walked away.

  As winter semester slid into spring the class became more painful because the new warmth allowed the girls to wear leotards without leggings. Nordstrom thought Laura’s legs far surpassed any he had seen in bathing suit ads in magazines. It enraged him that the basketball player might have gone “all the way” with her as they said at the time. She never turned around to meet the eyes burning into her backside. And Nordstrom was pathetically flunking the class which meant an additional semester of physical education. He was desperate. On the hot late May afternoon in which the final exam was held—a four-to-six-minute solo dance of one’s own devising—Nordstrom drank deeply from a pint of schnapps his father had given him at Easter vacation for his nerves. He had been up all night studying for an economics exam with the aid of a green and white time-released Dexedrine spansule. He felt he had done well in the exam and there remained only the dance before he could carry his suitcase to the station and take the bus from Madison to Rhinelander in northern Wisconsin for the summer. By the time he reached the gym he felt like the damp and rotting lilac blooms he had noted along the path beside the river. The blooms reminded him of the odor of the gym and the schnapps tingled in his brain which seemed to be sweating like his body. He wondered why he could dance in his imagination while his body remained stiff, almost frozen in the self-consciousness of its unruly lack of grace.

  In the gym there were only four girls left who hadn’t completed the solo test. Laura leaned against a window casement in the shadow of a long stream of sunlight waiting her turn. Nordstrom picked the next window and glanced at her somewhat furtively but turned away when he found her staring at him. He watched a plump girl thump and twist around to a Modern Jazz Quartet number and smiled idiotically with tension. The teacher approached him with a smile and said that she wanted him to watch the next performance closely and then merely react to it in his own dance. He swallowed with difficulty and nodded as Laura put on a Debussy record and began to dance with an inconsolable grace. He felt a lump arise beneath his breastbone and swim toward his throat, then the emergence of the inevitable hard-on at which point he put a hand in his pocket and squeezed it painfully to make it go away. By the time she finished he was a moon walker with feet of tingling fluff.

  In fact he scarcely noticed when the teacher wrapped a blindfold around his eyes. Laura had gotten up slowly from the floor where she had lain on her stomach limply in imitation of death, with the soft, damp leotard drawn up tightly between her legs dividing the buttocks which owned a sheen of sweat. Then he was blinded and the teacher said that would relax him. He heard Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin above his breathing and went berserk with the berserk music.

  Twenty-three years later in a large apartment in Brookline, Massachusetts, the event still seemed the most extraordinary of his life. It had taken that long to dance alone again. The teacher had removed the blindfold, laughed and kissed his forehead. He saw Laura standing by the door then abruptly leave. He buried his face in the towel, returning freely to his native embarrassment. He got drunk with some acquaintances in the dorm and missed his bus, barely awakening to make the bus the next day. Throughout the summer he brooded while working for his father’s small company that specialized in building cabins for the cottagers that came to northern Wisconsin from the cities each summer. His family were provident Scandinavians and Nordstrom had worked summers since his twelfth year, saving for college he had thought, but really simply “saving” as is the want of the stern, mostly snowbound Lutherans of the north. While others were playing baseball he learned rough carpentry, how to mix mortar, and finally how to lay blocks and bricks. And that particular summer he volunteered for all the roughest jobs: digging well-pits, the foundation work, unloading cement blocks and mortar and carrying the squares of roofing up the ladders. He was trying to exhaust his infatuation with the girl in manual labor but secretly fantasized a run-in where he would thrash her basketball player. He had been embarrassed when his grades had arrived and the “A” in Modern Dance had amused his father into saying, “You must cut a rug.”

  To abbreviate our tale, Nordstrom spent nearly another year before he made contact with Laura again. Frankly, he lacked imagination. He would stare at her name and number in the student directory, sigh and occasionally go out with a girl from his hometown who had at least a fashionable promiscuity in her favor. But she was a cheerleader type and often when he hovered above her punching away, Nordstrom thought of this act of love as only a tolerable form of masturbation. His mind was elsewhere. Once he saw Laura across the floor at a basketball game and he had to leave, so deep did his heart plummet. Then in mid-May, in a tavern habituated by the sorority and fraternity sorts where he only stepped in one Friday afternoon to get out of the rain he felt, of all things, a wet finger in his ear as he stood at the bar.

  “You never called me. I thought you would call me,” Laura said.

  He was stunned and they drank for a while with two of her “sisters,” Nordstrom very quickly to overcome shyness; then even more quickly when a group of athletes joined them. The athletes arm-wrestled to see who would buy pitchers of beer and to their surprise Nordstrom beat them having been raised on the sport and the labor it takes to be good at it. Then the athletes bet on Nordstrom against all comers until he was tied by a Polish football tackle and Laura stood and said she had to go back to the house to get ready for her date. Nordstrom was stunned and followed her to the door. She put an arm around him and said she was tied up for the weekend except perhaps Sunday afternoon and to stop by at three.

  Years later Nordstrom pondered the degree of accident in human affection as do all intelligent mortals
. What if it hadn’t rained that Friday? How tentative and restless an idea: he ended up marrying Laura because it rained one Friday afternoon in May in Madison, Wisconsin. The rain led directly in specific steps to the Sunday afternoon which began in a light rain and a drive in her car into the country with a half-gallon of red Cribari wine. Then the rain lightened and it became warm and muggy and they walked through a woodlot into a field of green knee-high winter wheat. At the far edge of the field he spread his trench coat at her insistence and they sat down and drank the wine. She wore penny loafers, no stockings, a brown poplin skirt and a white sleeveless blouse. Sitting there while she laughed and talked he felt totally lucky for the first time in his life. Her legs were brown because she had gone to Florida for spring vacation. She stared upward at the marsh hawk. He stared downward at her legs and the skirt slipping upward a bit while she leaned back to gaze at the hawk skirting the field in quadrants. He was transfixed and wanted to lay there until the green wheat grew through him.

  “You’re looking up my legs,” she said.

  “No I wasn’t.”

  “If you’re honest you can kiss them.”

  “I was.”

  He kissed her legs until neither of them wore anything. And the hawk now perched in a tree in the woodlot could see an imprecise circle of flattened green wheat and two bodies entwined until late in the afternoon when it began to rain again. The man tried to cover the girl with the coat but she stood up, did a dance and drank more wine.

  Such simple events last lovers a long time. Scarcely anyone can turn their backs on the best thing that has happened to them. So she went to California for the summer and he retrieved her for the last year of school in the fall after a hundred letters both ways. He bloomed as much as perhaps he ever would and they were married to the mild disgust of her ambitious parents and the delight of his own the week after graduation. They moved to California where she worked for a small company that made documentary movies for corporations and he worked for a large oil company. They lived in a duplex out in Westwood and after one year Laura gave birth to a daughter, returning to her career a year later. It was the sexual mystery that made their marriage last eighteen years. The word “mystery” is still appropriate despite the implacable vulgarizing of the media, so total in attempt that it must express our desire to smash this last grace note in our lives. (On the way back from California after the summer before their senior year they had made love in the car in the daylight, standing up for novelty in gas station bathrooms, like dogs back in the roadside evergreens with pine needles sticking to knees and palms, on a picnic table in North Dakota, on motel room floors, in a sleeping bag in a cold fog near Brainerd, Minnesota, in a movie theatre (East of Eden) in La Crosse, Wisconsin:

  Do you want to screw Julie Harris?

  I don’t know. Never thought about it.

  Do you want to screw James Dean?

  Of course. Don’t be silly. But he

  just died.

  The marriage had been unhappy for years before it ended rather amicably. He suspected that she had a lover and the lover had turned out to be a good friend of the family, Martin Gold. Both Nordstrom and Laura had been successful but never together. She traveled a great deal as a line producer and he made a great deal of money with the oil company. The sole meeting point had been their daughter Sonia, a rather fragile child until the summer of her twelfth year when it seemed she gained health and vitality overnight. But this seemed to remove their only mutual concern and they faded into their careers. Laura became more important to her company which gradually had entered the television market with feature specials and made-for-TV movies, most of them shot on location. Nordstrom owned a nagging jealousy over the glamor of her business compared to the boardroom composure of his own. Businessmen are by and large hapless wretches like anyone else and Nordstrom had that rare particular strength of the well disciplined, intelligent, good-looking man who never shoots off his mouth; terribly solid, never slick with the “sticktoitiveness” that Nordstrom’s father-in-law so admired when he saw the fruits of the labor—a fine home in Beverly Glen.

  They may have gone on indefinitely in this stasis but one night at dinner their daughter, with the terrifying intensity of a sixteen-year-old, told them they were both cold fish. Laura only laughed but Nordstrom was deeply hurt: to have worked so hard for sixteen years only to be called a cold fish by your own daughter. But then he was bright enough to know he was a bit of a cold fish, what is known in the business world as a hatchet man. Until this particular moment the idea had never bothered him.

  That night after the unpleasantness of dinner Nordstrom broke with the rigidity of his drinking habits that confined him to two highballs after work and a little wine with dinner. He drank a lot of brandy and tried to talk on more intimate terms with his daughter. She was receptive though it later occurred to him that she was being kind. He had been so much what is thought of as a “model father” that he didn’t really know his daughter and she, like any child, played the same formal though skittish game. After their talk he noted that he had smoked a half-dozen cigarettes in succession and promised his daughter a BMW when she graduated from college if she wouldn’t smoke.

  Then he talked with Laura about getting a less demanding job, or anyway something different. But she was preoccupied readying herself for the driver. She was taking the “red-eye” to New York for two days on business. They stood in the kitchen talking and he asked if they could quickly make love. She said no it’ll mess up clothes, then offered a blow-job. So Nordstrom sat back in the breakfast nook getting what turned out to be half a blow-job because the driver rang the doorbell. Laura kissed him on the forehead and left, the job barely half done as it were, though Nordstrom didn’t mind, being a good enough lover to prefer the process to the conclusion. Now he felt totally alone and an edge of panic crept into his soul that would stay with him for years. He thought, “What if what I’ve been doing all my life has been totally wrong?” He sat in the den the entire night thinking it all over. By dawn he decided he wanted to escape into the world rather than from it: there was nothing particularly undesirable or repellent in his life, only a certain lack of volume and intensity; he feared dreaming himself to death, say as a modest brook in a meadow eases along sleepily to a great river just beyond the border of trees.

  The most vexing thing in the life of a man who wishes to change is the improbability of change. Unless he is an essentially sound creature this can drive him frantic, perhaps insane. Nordstrom knew that at base business was a process of buying or manufacturing cheap and selling dear. Long before he took Economics 101 at the University of Wisconsin he had been attracted by the simple grace of capitalism: his father would build three cabins for five thousand and sell them for eight thousand; years later the cabins would be built for fifteen thousand and sold for twenty-two thousand, but despite this variation in price over the years to account for the increase in materials and labor—and inflation—it amounted not oddly to the same amount. His father was without greed and despite the urging of Nordstrom would not expand the business, say to ten cabins a year. In the oil business it was a trifle more complicated in that the big profits came from outsmarting the regulatory and tax structures and swindling the Arabs (he was amused when the situation reversed itself). It was pretty much a gentleman’s game within the infrastructure.

  But it was all ruined during that long night in the den, no matter that the poison, like the changes Nordstrom wished to make in his life, was slow in coming. Between his thirty-seventh and fortieth year he began going to a number of plays and screening parties with his wife and was filled with a curious envy over the easy familiarity show business people had with each other, no matter that the “lust for profit was the same as the oil business. There was at least a sense of play involved and Nordstrom had forgotten how to play, in fact had never learned. So he bought a sailboat but it turned out that there wasn’t any particular place to go from Newport Beach. He played tennis with his daug
hter feverishly and built an expensive court behind their home, but she broke her ankle at Sun Valley and they never played tennis again. He tried skiing in Aspen; he went skeet shooting; he quail hunted with oil friends on an island near Corpus Christi and was nearly bitten by a rattlesnake. The rattlesnake incident was so actual that it secretly thrilled him for months; he reached under a mesquite bush to retrieve a dead quail, heard the strange sound but reacted slowly because he had never heard it before, and the snake’s open mouth hurtled forward barely grazing his shirt cuff. He changed his hairstyle. He bought himself a silver ring in Cabo San Lucas where he went marlin fishing. He bought a camera. He began reading biographies and a few novels. One silly evening when Laura was away his daughter rolled a joint for him and he laughed until his stomach hurt, then became tight and mildly frightened. He screwed his secretary and felt sad. He bought a sports car which only his daughter and wife drove. He bought an expensive painting of a pretty girl washing her feet. He took up cooking when he resigned his arduous job in the oil business for a simpler one as a vice-president for a large book wholesaler. He learned to cook Chinese, French, Italian and Mexican food. He rented a van and drove north to the wine country around San Francisco, tasted the wines of many vineyards and returned with as much as the van would hold. He had visited, by referral, a high-priced, exotic whorehouse in San Francisco to fulfill a fantasy of being in bed with two women at once. It cost him three hundred dollars not to get a hard-on, his first experience at unsuccessful love. He brooded all the way back to Los Angeles. He brooded about his cock, he brooded about the young filmmaker friend of Laura’s whom he had backed on an unsuccessful venture. It wasn’t the money so much (the loss would be absorbed in the tax advantage) but the suspicion that Laura might have made love to the young man on an air mattress in the shrubbery near the Jacuzzi in the backyard. He brooded about his boredom with money because everything had been provided for by his own wit and the death of Laura’s father. He brooded about his daughter’s departure for Sarah Lawrence only three months distant. Suddenly he was terribly lonely for the greenery, the cold lakes, the thunderstorms and snow of his childhood. He brooded about whether or not his wife had fucked an African when she had visited Kenya for a film the month before. Had she ever been in bed with two men, in an effort similar to his own abortive attempt? Nordstrom was appalled when his member rose up under his belt at the thought. It was time to pull things together.