Legends of the Fall

by Jim Harrison

  Sonia’s boyfriend was a bit too smart for Nordstrom’s taste, very glib with a tendency to talk incessantly in paragraphs with subordinate clauses and divagations wandering off waiflike through history and the arts. As a Harvard boy he also owned the aura of fungoid self-congratulation that Nordstrom identified with Ivy League types. Back in Los Angeles he had noted that graduates of Yale and Dartmouth and so on had automatic purchase even though they were swine, fools or plain stupid as was often the case, looking as they did at the rest of the country with careless indulgence as if it were an imposition on their lives. But then the boy was very kind to Sonia, almost feminine with her and it was plain to see that a permanent bond was formed. Nordstrom had wondered about the young man’s nervousness and Sonia had said that her lover had found Nordstrom a bit frightening at first. Nordstrom did have the peculiar habit of staring into anyone’s eyes for a minute or so before forming a sentence and this was unnerving to employees, lovers, waiters, even acquaintances and superiors.

  Despite this mutual anxiousness the summer went very well, especially with the arrival of August and Nordstrom’s month of vacation when they moved to the house in Marblehead. The sea took over then and Nordstrom was incredibly pleased that he had had the sense to take this huge stone house on the water with its tangled hedge of sea-rose, the days of warm blustery winds and the harbor dotted with sailboats. There was a modest swimming pool, a tennis court in a state of mild decay. Best of all Nordstrom liked to take his morning coffee on a veranda and stare at the sea, leaving newspapers, magazines and business correspondence unopened in favor of the sea, watching the surface of the sea with the same intensity whether stormy or becalmed. The other truly fine feature was an antique cast-iron grill from an earlier time when people prepared feasts rather than meals. Nordstrom spent all the first morning horsing its bulk from the backyard near the kitchen door around to the front so that he could cook and watch the sea at the same time. Then he puttered across the harbor in an old Chris-Craft runabout to shop for dinner.

  It was while cooking dinner that a strange feeling came over him that gradually forced a radical change in his life. It was an ache just above his heart between his breastbone and throat; at first it alarmed him and he placed a hand on his breast and stared out past the sea-rose to where the ocean buried itself in the haze of dusk. The sharpness of low tide mixed with the roasting meat and he looked down at the meat and sighed “Oh, fuck it.” He was rather suddenly not much interested in past or future, or even his breaking heart that perhaps now felt the first itch of healing. But he didn’t know that and cared less. The sigh seized his backbone, rippling up his vertebrae to his brain which felt delicately peeled, cold and clean. The feeling was so abruptly powerful that he decided not to examine it for fear that it would go away. He checked the temperature on the meat thermometer and went into the house to take the salad out of the refrigerator; he did not approve of cold salads. He put the small red new potatoes in water, ready to turn them on when he heard Sonia’s car. He opened a magnum of Burgess zinfandel to check it out, then put his finger in a sauce dish to taste again the marinade he had swathed the leg of lamb in after he had boned it: a mixture of olive oil, rosemary, crushed garlic, Dijon mustard and a little soy. The pungency of the sauce crept up his sinuses and he turned at the scratching of a stray cat at the kitchen door. He prepared a bowl of lamb trimmings and set it out on the back porch for the cat, a frayed old tom with battered ears staring at him from beneath a flowering crab tree whose pink blossoms perfumed the backyard. A sharp gust of sea breeze loosened some petals and they fell on the unblinking cat. The cat approached slowly with three petals stuck to its fur and wolfed the lamb scraps with a low growl, then stretched and lay down thumping its tail and returning Nordstrom’s stare. It seemed to him it was the first cat he had ever truly looked at in his life. They gazed at each other unblinking until tears formed to moisten his unblinking eyes. Then Sonia’s car pulled into the driveway and the cat became a gray blur and slid through the porch railing, more reptilian than mammal.

  The month fueled Nordstrom’s departure from what he thought of as normal life. He awoke fairly early, took his coffee, then helped the maid who came with the house to tidy up from the night before. Sometimes the music from the night still drummed in his ears, tingled in his brain until he learned to recapture melodies as he began the day’s shopping and cooking. Sonia was fluid enough to sense a change in her father’s personality and did not question his behavior. Nordstrom had insisted that she and Phillip bring up all the houseguests they wanted from Cambridge because he felt like celebrating.

  “What are we celebrating?” She laughed, then endured his stare, which seemed distant.

  Nordstrom was thinking that with her tan Sonia looked more like her mother, that her hazel eyes were captious and a bit giddy. “I have no idea really. Why not? Maybe I know it’s unlikely that there’ll be another month like this. Also I want the excuse to cook for a lot of people, to be honest.”

  She walked up and kissed him on the forehead and laughed again. “I wish you wouldn’t disappear every evening.”

  Nordstrom shrugged and watched the bright light in the room waver from a scudding cloud. She was the dearest creature on earth to him and still this didn’t make him melancholy as it once did. “I like to sit and watch it get dark. Then when I go to bed I like to listen to the music through the floor.”

  Sonia looked away in embarrassment. “You ought to get a girl friend. I mean, you’d probably be happier.”

  “So strange in these modern times to have your daughter tell you that you need to get laid. I’m saving it for marriage. ”

  “I didn’t mean to be coarse. I didn’t want you to think that Mother was the only woman in the world. You might even find something better, for Christ’s sake.”

  Nordstrom rolled his eyes and Sonia stomped out of the room. There was a kind of half friendly bitchery between Sonia and her mother that he had found incomprehensible, as if they were trying to playa game with razors. He poured a dollop of bourbon and went to the window, abruptly turning away when he saw that two of Sonia’s friends from college had taken off the tops of their bikinis. One of them, a rather plain girl all in all, had beautiful pear-shaped breasts that tilted up a bit and glistened with suntan lotion. Nordstrom felt a slight pulling low in his stomach that he was unable to blame on the whiskey. The girl had helped him with the dishes the night before and he had scarcely noticed her. In the past week or so, since the incident while basting the lamb, he had maintained with no particular effort the sensation of having just awakened from a lovely dream, but the difficulty was that certain things had become too utterly poignant to be borne up under. He would sit in the room in the dark listening to the music until it quit, sometimes not until near dawn. In between the records he heard the sea rising and falling against the breakwater. He found himself unable to read and without any interest in thinking. Thoughts, sensations and pictures passed through his mind but he let them float away. He wondered what a person blind from birth saw in his mind. He wondered about that sophomoric notion of what a man is, deprived of the input of the five senses. He wondered who was listening to the music from his bedroom, who was the listener and was startled. In sleeping the dreams of Laura had disappeared and he occasionally dreamt of women that didn’t exist. How could that be? He would wonder in the morning. He rigged a setline down on the beach using a doorknob for a sinker and a chicken liver for bait, as he had done as a boy, but at dawn when he pulled in the line there was only a small dead shark tangled in a large clump of seaweed. He mourned his errant curiosity and buried the shark with the same reverence he had buried the soul of the crow thirty years before.

  That night as he prepared dinner for a dozen absolutely stoned young people Sonia came into the kitchen and stared at him with her eyes flashing.

  “You really pissed me off today. I wasn’t trying to interfere in your life. You could at least talk to people. I keep telling them you’re my fath
er but they think you’re the cook.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with being a cook. But I’m going to take your advice and get a girl friend. A blond one with a huge ass that listens to country music.”

  Actually two of Phillip’s friends had asked for turkey sandwiches one morning thinking Nordstrom was the cook. They had been embarrassed later and one, a short plumpish Sephardic Jew from New York, had helped Nordstrom with dinner. He was an habitué of the same restaurant in the Village where Nordstrom had eaten with Sonia and Phillip. The young man was a fine cook and while they were preparing the food (filet of sole Bercy aux champignons) Nordstrom asked him about the waitress that had caught his eye. It proved to be a fatal question.

  “Oh my god just stay away. She’s an absolute kike cunt, a dancer with those big dark Monet eyes. She’d put you in the blender. I mean my god every well-heeled fool in town comes around with flowers and she treats them like dog-shit. She was married to this schvartze coke dealer, you know, a spade killer, and she had an affair with this writer who got his teeth beaten loose. But of course I’ll introduce you if you love the masochism bit. You don’t look like the type.” The young man had given off a melancholy laugh. “I like these dipshit English girls myself.”

  The night of Sonia’s anger Nordstrom capitulated and sat at the head of the table. He didn’t mind that the people he cooked for smoked marijuana as it seemed to sharpen their appetites. He had roasted some quail he had stuffed with green grapes, halved and soaked overnight in Calvados. They were eaten greedily which pleased Nordstrom and he talked at length with two Harvard MBA’s about the energy crisis and the consequences of Middle Eastern politics on oil imports. The two young men were surprised that the cook had been to Jidda, and had helped to negotiate an OPEC deal. They left rather hesitantly for a disco in Rockport with the rest of the crowd. Sonia kissed him and patted his back on the way out of the door.

  Nordstrom watched their taillights recede into the warm darkness and then fed the tomcat that had emerged from under the backporch. If no one else were around the cat would now enter the kitchen which tonight was hot and muggy with a rank low tide smell hanging in the air, a seaboard reminder of what a swamp in summer smells like. The cat ate the last single quail that Nordstrom had been thinking about having for breakfast but had decided the cat would enjoy more than he did. The cat ripped at the brown-roasted skin and even crunched down the bones. Nordstrom petted the animal until it went rigid and dashed for the kitchen door. It was the plain girl with pear breasts in a pale-blue caftan. She shrugged at Nordstrom as he let the cat out the screen door. She poured a glass of club soda and drank as if her life depended on it. Nordstrom didn’t remember her at dinner.

  “I got this perfectly goddamned sunburn today and felt sick as shit.” She talked out of the side of her mouth as was the strange habit of her class. Nordstrom could think of nothing to say so he put on his white cook’s apron and began the dishes. He had taken off his shirt while the cat ate and felt a bit naked, now that the girl was there.

  “Hope you’re having a nice time,” he said lamely.

  “Sure. Faboo, if I hadn’t fried the hell out of my skin like a perfect nitwit.” She paused and boldly appraised Nordstrom. “You’re a perfect dear to do all this cooking. I mean Sonia’s so lucky.” She sat down at the kitchen table and took a bag of papers from her purse and rolled a large joint, lit it and inhaled deeply. “I’m going to Santa Barbara tomorrow to visit my mother, if anyone gets up early enough to run to Logan.” She approached Nordstrom at the sink and put the joint between his lips, ignoring his shaking head. “This is pretty good shit, supposedly Hawaiian.”

  “I’ll take you to the airport,” he choked expelling the smoke.

  They looked at each other closely for a moment and there was a glimmer of comprehension Nordstrom decided not to admit to himself. He looked down at his hands buried in the soapy water. She left the room and put on a record, then returned and helped him with the dishes. Above the music they could hear a thunderstorm approaching from the west. The air grew even more still and warm. He felt the sweat flatten his hair and trickle down his back as he listened to her chatter about a career in fashion. She absentmindedly traced a finger down the sweat on his arm and he felt an involuntary shudder. Then she drew her caftan over her head and tossed it in the corner.

  “I don’t know about you but I’m perfectly suffocating and my burn itches.”

  She wore very slight, pale-beige panties and bra. She was burned, though not too badly, on the top of her breasts and just above and below her panty line. He reached out and touched a nipple beneath the fabric with a wet forefinger. She turned around and raised her arms. “My back isn’t as bad.” He wiped his hands on the apron and pressed them to the small of her back. Then she backed toward him, stumbling a bit in clogged sandals. He looked down at his hands and her buttocks craning outward. She reached behind her touching his hands, then slipped down her panties to just above her knees. “Go ahead. I’ve been thinking of this for an hour.”

  Nordstrom went ahead, as it were. On completion he collapsed backward to the floor with his pants around his ankles and the damp apron forming a small tent around his member. She laughed and he laughed. She lit him a cigarette and he smoked it without getting off the floor. She stepped out of her panties and took off her bra. She took a bottle of white wine out of the refrigerator and handed it to Nordstrom with a corkscrew. They abandoned the dishes and took a dip in the pool with the lights off, watching the approaching thunderstorm above the lights of Marblehead. They made love again with him sitting beneath her on a wicker lawn chair. The rain drove them indoors and they sat naked on the couch feeling the air cool gradually and watching the lightning and thunder explode above the ocean. They smoked another joint and danced. They fell asleep on the couch and did not hear the laughing voices that turned out the lights and record player.

  Another week and the summer was over. Nordstrom made a melancholy bouillabaisse for twenty and the next day everyone disappeared. Another week in Boston and Sonia returned to Sarah Lawrence and Nordstrom returned to work. In the evening he was palpably lonely and began dancing alone to the records left behind and with the same bittersweet ache in his chest. In a little more than another month, in the middle of October, late one night he received a call from his mother that said “your father is dead.”

  Nordstrom took the first available plane out of Logan for O’Hare at dawn. He smiled remembering a previous dawn when he had taken the girl to the airport and had run into an old business associate from Los Angeles. He had been startled when the man had said “sorry about your divorce!’ and when Nordstrom had introduced the girl as one of his daughter’s school chums it was plain that the man thought otherwise. But the meeting had made him feel buoyant driving against the traffic back to Marblehead; not only had he made love rather wonderfully, the word and idea of divorce no longer knotted his stomach or threw him into a fretful or melancholy state.

  There was a five-hour wait at Milwaukee for a North Central for Rhinelander so he chartered an idle Lear Jet, having enjoyed the plane when he was in the oil business as the closest domestic approximation to the thrill of a jet fighter. The fact of his father’s death had not penetrated much beyond his intellect and in a difficult, blustery landing he thought he might join him. The copilot had radioed ahead and his mother and a cousin, a sallow barber with a truly dirty mind, were waiting there to meet him. There were tearful embraces, then the barber could not help himself and quipped “it must be nice” as he eyed the Lear. Nordstrom said nothing. In previous visits when he had tried to conceal his success all of his old acquaintances had been terribly disappointed. Those who had stayed home didn’t want Nordstrom to be one of them—he was the stuff of their economic fantasies and any gesture to the contrary wasn’t appreciated. Walking to the car with his mother in a cold, light rain he remembered when his parents had come to Los Angeles for a visit. They considered Nordstrom’s home to be somewhat of a “mansi
on” as they called it, and on the next to the last day his mother had shyly asked him to see where Cary Grant lived. He drove her over a few blocks and pointed out an imposing home, having no knowledge or interest in the movie colony. He liked movies and novels, but had no curiosity about celebrities, actors, actresses or writers. His father had always wanted him to be a forest ranger and that still seemed to Nordstrom a noble pursuit. When his father was in Los Angeles he fished off the piers or took a headboat out of Santa Monica. Then his father would eat a great quantity of fried sand dabs just short of serious indigestion and talk about his first visit to Los Angeles in 1930. He had come from a poor family of Norwegian immigrants living in Chicago and when the Depression hit he spent four years as a young hobo drifting all over the troubled country.

  After some brief civilities at the wake at his mother’s house, jammed with friends and relatives, Nordstrom went to the funeral home and saw death itself. He stood at the open casket, the other visitors keeping distant to let the only son express his grief. He kissed his father’s cool forehead and tears flushed out of him and his body shook. He was convulsed with loss and the unthinkable fact of death. He was a boy again and it was beyond his comprehension and he whispered “Daddy” over and over until there were no more tears left in his body and he walked out of the funeral home and down the street to the edge of town where he walked down past a lake rimmed with cottages to a log road that led into the forest. He walked up this log road for a mile or so until finally the sun came through the disappearing clouds and he took off his trench coat. Now it was suddenly Indian summer in the forest and the hardwoods were a brilliant deep yellow and red, shifting away in the haze to umbrous hills with splotches of white birch and green pine. He walked until his feet became sore and then he spread his trench coat on a stump and sat on it. He thought about his father, even felt envy for those Depression days when he had traversed the country to “look things over.” Starting from nothing, everything was fine to his father beyond a subsistence level. He made money because he was competent, had wit and could not help making money. It was simply another world, Nordstrom thought. His own life suddenly seemed repellently formal. Whom did he know or what did he know and whom did he love? Sitting on the stump under the burden of his father’s death and even the mortality inherent in the dying, wildly colored canopy of leaves, he somehow understood that life was only what one did every day. He seemed to see time shimmering and moving up above him and through the leaves and down around his feet and through his middle. Nothing was like anything else, including himself, and everything was changing all of the time. He knew he couldn’t perceive the change because he was changing too, along with everything else. There was no still point. For an instant he floated above himself and smiled at the immaculately tailored man sitting on the stump and in a sunny glade back in the forest. He got up and pressed against a poplar sapling swinging back and forth to a harmony he didn’t understand. He looked around the clearing in recognition that he was lost but didn’t mind because he knew he had never been found.