Several of his daydreams that afternoon involved Karla, and they were not helpful daydreams. He felt absurd for even attempting to do what he was doing, and no one had ever been better at calling attention to the absurdity of what he was doing than Karla.
“Duane, I can’t believe you’re doing this,” she would have been sure to say. “You can’t read a book that long. The only long book you ever read was Lonesome Dove, and if the miniseries had been on first you wouldn’t have read that one, either.
“Just because some gay doctor wants you to, you’re going to waste a whole year reading a book that don’t interest you,” she would tell him. “You always just let women push you around any old way, Duane.”
Still, even though he felt silly, Duane pressed on and finally came to the end of the tenth page. Relieved, he immediately went out into his garden and thought no more of Proust that day.
On the second day he had every bit as much trouble getting himself to sit down with the book as he had had the day before. Again, he felt silly, and when he went to his cabin and got the two other volumes of the book he felt even sillier.
But then, halfway through the second day’s reading, after he had looked up “Merovingian,” “transvertebration,” and a few other words that would not fit easily into a conversation with Bobby Lee, while reading a page that he had had to start on for the third or fourth time—at one point a tractor stalled in the alley right behind the trailer house; he had to let the driver into the big house so he could call for help—Duane was rereading a passage about an old man whose wife had died: “It’s a funny thing, now; I often think of my poor wife, but I cannot think of her for very long at a time.”
Duane, who had read the passage at least twice without attending to anything that was going on—he had not, so far, been able to keep any of the characters except the maid straight in his mind—stopped at that passage and reread it with a different attention. What the old man said was a precise description of how his own memory worked when he thought of Karla. He might remember Karla a dozen times a day, but he remembered her briefly, in flashes, for a second or two, or half a minute at most. His reveries about Karla were frequent, but they were also brief.
The family in the book made a little joke of what the old man said about remembering his dead wife—“often, but for only a little” became a kind of catchphrase, a joke but an affectionate one.
That evening—his reading done, his garden watered—Duane decided to walk to the cabin, rather than bicycling. It had rained a little in the midafternoon and the country still smelled of rain. While he walked he thought again about the passage about the old man, his dead wife, and the little joke the family had made about him. It reminded him of the way people in Thalia—people who had known him all their lives, people who cared about him—had begun to joke about his marrying again. Those jokes too, he realized, were kindly meant. Probably it was also healthy—after all, death hung over his neighbors too. Joking about an old widower who was looking for a young woman who would give him a lot of sex probably protected them somewhat from the thought that they too might be widowed and alone. What would these neighbors who wished him well think if they knew he had been foolish enough to fall in love with a woman who would never be likely to give him any sex—perhaps would never even know that he wanted her? Falling in love with a gay psychiatrist was not the future any of the jokers were predicting for him.
The old man who thought of his wife often but only for a little while had unwittingly stated a truth that Duane had arrived at but had not articulated, which was that grief was intermittent, momentary, and private. Once he had had an intense memory of Karla while he was standing in the street gossiping with an old man about the greedy Arabs and the low price of oil. The conversation went on predictably, the oilman never suspecting that Duane had just been riven by a vision of his wife as he had seen her once years before, getting out of the shower, one leg cocked up because she had a sticker in her heel. It was just a moment on the street, and it soon passed, but it was also the most intense spasm of regret and longing that he had felt since Karla’s death—and yet it didn’t even derail a conversation on that most familiar of topics, the price of oil.
Reading that little passage that connected so precisely with something he himself had felt made Duane feel a little hopeful about reading Proust. Perhaps the long effort ahead would not be completely barren. Even so, he was glad to be walking through the rain-freshened country, and not reading. He was happy just to be out in the air, smelling the country, hearing the birds, inspecting the creek beds. To the west huge thunderheads were still rolling in off the Staked Plains, with now and again snake tongues of prairie lightning shooting out beneath them. No smell was quite as pleasing to him as the smell of the grassy prairies after a summer rain.
That night he sat late in front of his cabin, watching the immense white clouds move in slow battalions across the sky. Thunder rumbled in the far distance, and lightning continued to flicker. Now and then there would be a few splattering drops of rain, but the rain was not continuous enough to drive him inside. To the north, beneath the clouds, he could see the glow of lights from Wichita Falls. Honor was still there, perhaps packing for her coming trip to China. Duane wondered whether Honor thought of him at all, or realized that he was interested in her as a woman. The clouds passed and the night became clear. Duane dozed a little in his chair, but he did not go to bed. At 4 A.M., with the sky still dark, he walked back to town and began to water his garden.
13
AT THE BEGINNING OF OCTOBER Duane picked the last of his tomatoes—the summer of the great garden was over. He rolled up the little irrigation system that he had installed himself and stored it in the garage. He did some raking and tidying up and then had the same young farmer come back and turn the land over with his plow. Next summer he meant to preserve what vegetables the people didn’t take. Whatever he preserved he meant to sell for modest prices. He had picked up a book about bee culture and was considering getting some bees. Though the Karla Laverne Moore Memorial Garden had been a wild success, Duane didn’t intend to rest on his laurels. He had been blessed with ideal weather, a thing not likely to happen two years in a row. He knew he needed to think about a better irrigation system, and to keep studying his seed catalogues assiduously, for new varieties of vegetables he might grow. A young man from Wichita Falls showed up, wanting Duane to invest in a vegetarian restaurant, just on the basis of what he had heard about the garden—Duane wished the young man well, but declined to invest. During the fall he got letters from a number of environmentalist groups, wanting him to give them money, or come to their meetings, or—in one or two cases—accept awards. Duane ignored the letters, declined the awards. A man from as far away as Mississippi called and tried to convince him that bullfrog farming was the coming thing, but this proposition also failed to interest him. He was becoming adept at the graceful refusal.
From time to time he saw this child or that. Julie came home one day because she only trusted her old family dentist to pull her wisdom teeth. Then Nellie showed up to attend a bridal shower for an old friend. “How’s Zenas?” Duane asked. “How’s Goober?”
“Still competing,” Nellie said. “Goober’s opening a new restaurant in Dallas and he’s bringing a chef over from France.”
“How does Zenas plan to compete with that?” he asked.
“Investing in a Broadway show,” Nellie informed him.
Dickie he saw on the road now and then. Usually Dickie would be traveling at top speed and, once he noticed his father, would brake so hard that Duane would be engulfed in a cloud of dust. After gossiping amiably for a few minutes Dickie would speed off, engulfing Duane in another cloud of dust.
Jack, still in Montana, had not been heard from, which was nothing new.
Every time Duane stopped in to visit with Ruth Popper she quizzed him about the book his psychiatrist had wanted him to read—she was invariably dissatisfied with the brevity of his answers.
“All I know so far is that it’s about some people in France,” he told her.
“Be more specific,” she demanded. “I can’t read. It’s spiteful of you to tease me this way.”
“Ruth, I’m not teasing you,” Duane said. “It’s a long book and so far I’m not understanding much of it. Some of the sentences are as long as old Preacher Jenson’s sermons. Remember old Preacher Jenson? One of his sermons lasted nearly two hours.”
“Who cares? I didn’t go to his church,” Ruth said. “Besides, no sentence is that long.”
“If you could see, I’d show you,” he told her.
“Bring the book and read one of the sentences to me,” she said. “If it takes you two hours to read it I’ll apologize.”
This Duane resolutely refused to do. He felt silly enough just reading some of the sentences to himself.
In November he turned sixty-four. The girls came home and conspired with Dickie and Annette to give him a big surprise party, catered by Goober’s new French chef. Bubbles and Willy showed him their school pictures: there they stood in their smart uniforms. The chef babbled in French to the two French girls who were helping him serve. The chef refused to make spaghetti, which prompted Barbi to give him the finger. Duane had a sense of unreality. The older kids now seemed like children from a family other than his own. A steady stream of French poured out of the kitchen—it was as if Proust had tried to come to Thalia in order that Duane would have a better chance to understand his book.
Then the next morning they were all gone again. Though Duane had been happy to see them, he was also deeply relieved that they were gone. A strong norther was blowing; he put on a coat and walked to the cabin. He loved his family, but even the brief time he had spent with them made him long for the simplicity of his solitude.
That winter Duane stayed mostly in his cabin, going into Thalia rarely and Wichita Falls not at all. From one of the gardening-equipment catalogues he ordered a small wagon and used it to haul supplies out to his cabin. He had saved a certain amount of produce from his garden—onions, carrots, potatoes, turnips—and kept it stored in the little shed, where he occasionally still did a little woodworking.
But woodworking didn’t engage him, that winter. He wanted more vigorous exercise and so began to cut wood. He worked his way through a sizable mesquite thicket, cutting the wood into burnable chunks and hauling them to the road in his wagon. He stacked the wood in neat piles along his fence line and put up a sign that said: Firewood, Help Yourself! He worked at his woodcutting even on the coldest days. The woodpile, though, attracted few takers. Traffic along the little country road consisted mostly of roughnecks or hunters, few of whom had fireplaces.
In the winter, at his daughters’ insistence, he had a complete physical, which revealed him to be a sixty-four-year-old man in perfect health. His blood pressure was normal, his cholesterol low, his PSA scarcely registered.
On his way home from the physical he stopped by Jody Carmichael’s to buy some twenty-two shells. Now and then he bagged a squirrel or a rabbit and made himself a good stew, using the vegetables in his storeroom. He told himself he was not going to inquire about Honor Carmichael, but he didn’t have to. While he was paying for the twenty-two shells Jody handed him several photographs.
“The girls made it to the Great Wall,” Jody said. “I tried to talk them into going to Macao—that’s the gambling island—but they didn’t want to go to Macao.”
It was clear from the pictures that the girls had made it to the Great Wall and a good many other places too. There was a picture of them on a tour boat in Hong Kong harbor, a picture of Honor on a camel, a picture of them in a huge square of some sort, a picture of Honor on a bicycle. In all the pictures Honor looked lovely and happy—Angie looked sour and bored. Duane politely worked his way through the photographs and then handed them back to Jody. Even seeing a picture of Honor Carmichael was disquieting—but he couldn’t tell her father that.
That afternoon, restless, he walked the creeks for several hours, carrying his twenty-two. It was cold—he was in the mood for squirrel stew and was keeping his eye out for squirrels, but ended up shooting a wild turkey instead, making a lucky shot on a big hen turkey. Duane dressed the turkey—it was a lot more meat than he needed. But it was only a week until Christmas. The children were all going to Vail—Jack had even consented to come down and ski with his siblings. They all urged Duane to go but he declined. He had planned a Christmas dinner with Ruth and Bobby Lee—now he wouldn’t even have to buy a turkey.
Two days before Christmas he got a Christmas card from Honor Carmichael. It was merely a standard Christmas card, of the sort doctors sent to their patients, but Honor had signed it and added a little note that said, “I hope your reading’s going well.”
Duane had supposed that his crush on Honor Carmichael was finally wearing off, but the sight of her handwriting on the card told him otherwise. He was as smitten as ever. He thought of sending her a Christmas card in return, but it was too late, the mails were clogged, and he didn’t think that he had the nerve to hand-deliver it.
On Christmas Eve Bobby Lee got the news that his PSA had soared. The news—understandably—plunged him into a deep depression. He arrived for the Christmas dinner so drunk he could barely stand up.
“I’ll soon be dead and up in heaven, where my other ball is,” he said, several times. Duane had bought him a deer rifle for Christmas, but began to regret the gift. In his present mood Bobby Lee might just shoot himself with it.
For the past several Christmases Ruth had spent the whole day telling everyone good-bye. She was fond of insisting that the present Christmas would undoubtedly be her last. She meant to do it this time too, but Bobby Lee’s bad news upstaged her.
The two of them bickered rancorously while Duane cooked the turkey.
“Why would you think your testicle would be in heaven?” Ruth inquired. “The Lord—if there is a Lord—is not going to waste his time storing people’s body parts—particularly not body parts from down there.”
“Down where?” Bobby Lee asked, very drunk.
“You know where I mean,” Ruth said. “I doubt you’ll get to heaven anyway, but if you do you can forget that other testicle being there.”
“Can’t we talk about something besides dying?” Duane asked. “It’s Christmas.”
“It’s hard being without a sex life when everybody else is celebrating,” Bobby Lee said.
“I’m without a sex life,” Duane pointed out. “Ruth’s without a sex life. You ain’t the only one.”
Ruth took offense at the remark.
“Speak for yourself, Duane,” she said. “You aren’t privy to my intimate secrets.”
Her rejoinder took both of them aback.
“Excuse me,” Duane said. “I didn’t know you had a boyfriend.”
“If an old crone like you can have a sex life when I don’t get one, then I’m moving away,” Bobby Lee said. “I don’t want to live in a town where such things can happen.”
“Duane’s the one who really needs a sex life,” Ruth said. “He’s in perfect health. What’s the point of perfect health if there’s no sex? It just means it ain’t perfect health—it’s wasted health.”
“I’d prefer it if we dropped the whole subject,” Duane said.
In fact, though, he had begun to ask himself the same question. An appealing Mexican woman, who worked in a small café where he sometimes ate on his rare trips to Wichita Falls, had been flirting with him lately. Occasionally, if the café wasn’t too busy, she’d sit and chat with him for a minute. The woman’s name was Maria—she was in her late forties, unpretentious, frank, cheerful. Lately her image had begun to come into Duane’s mind at night, competing in his fantasies with Honor Carmichael’s. The flirtation, so far, had been light. Duane knew very little about Maria—didn’t know whether she was married, a widow, or what. He just knew that she liked him. She was there, a possibility—indeed, the only possibility.
Toward the end of dinner Ruth grew lachrymose, saddened by the thought that her last Christmas dinner was nearly over. She insisted they all drink brandy. She and Bobby Lee got drunker, tried to dance, cried, forgave each other for a lifetime of mutually insulting behavior. Duane sat on the couch and watched a football game he had no interest in. He began to miss Karla. Whatever her faults, Karla always managed to pull off splendid Christmases. At her Christmas dinners everybody ate so much that they lacked the energy to be hostile. Duane didn’t have the skill, or even the interest.
While Ruth and Bobby Lee indulged in an orgy of forgiveness he washed the dishes.
When he left, Bobby Lee had passed out on the couch and Ruth was asleep in her rocking chair, snoring loudly.
Before he pedaled away Duane took the precaution of hiding Bobby Lee’s pickup keys. Bobby Lee was not popular with the local constabulary—if he woke up and drove off in his drunken state they would be sure to pounce on him.
Duane rarely drank brandy—he was drunker than he realized, so drunk that he pedaled right off one of the low wooden bridges, smashing his bike and gashing his forehead. He had to walk the rest of the way to the cabin, bleeding freely. He thought of Karla. She always liked it when he did something foolish. She would laugh her head off if she saw him as he was then.
What Honor Carmichael would think of such behavior he didn’t know.
14
THROUGHOUT THE WINTER, usually in the afternoon, when he was done with woodchopping and errands, Duane, each day, read his ten pages of Proust. Reading the ten pages became his balance to woodchopping. It was mental woodchopping, though he did not always feel that he was getting the wood cut, where the Proust books were concerned. Even after three and a half months, when he finished volume one, he still could not rid himself of the feeling that he was doing something inappropriate. He knew that if Bobby Lee, or one of his own children, discovered him reading such a book they would have been completely bewildered. People would think he was trying to pretend to be smarter than he was.
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