Sundown, Yellow Moon

by Larry Watson

  Darkness, which on dwindling autumn days hasn’t much patience anyway, could wait no longer and now filled the room. As if any movement required enormous effort, my father partially lifted from his chair, reached up, and twisted on the light above the dining room table before sitting heavily back down. For a moment, we squinted at one another in the sudden illumination as if we were verifying the company we kept. The brothers smiled at me to see that I was one of them.

  With the same abruptness but none of the violence with which Marie rose from my table only days before, I stood. “I have to go,” I said. “Back to Grand Forks.”

  “You’re spending the night,” my father said. It was not a command but a gentle reminder. My suitcase already stood in the bedroom that had always been reserved for guests.

  “I can’t stay.”

  The brothers regarded me quizzically. I hadn’t time to concoct an excuse because I had nothing more than a spontaneous impulse to flee. Yes, the more time that passed with no word from Marie, the more my fear and concern increased, but something additional was working on me—in me—and trying to push me toward the door. I hadn’t sufficient time or maturity or wisdom to absorb the lesson Marie had tried to teach me, but perhaps without her recent angry words on the subject I wouldn’t have sensed anything wrong in how those brothers lived.

  I repeated my words, “I have to go,” and both my father and my uncle looked at me strangely, an indication, I hoped, of what I was to them, a stranger, not their kind, not someone who dwelt in the past, whether refashioned or otherwise.

  “We were thinking,” Uncle Burt said, “that we’d walk downtown for supper. Get some steaks at the Windmill.” He spoke so calmly, so mildly, that he must have perceived me to be in an agitated state.

  “I can’t. There’s . . . there’s a . . .” I started to explain, to try to explain, that a girl was out there somewhere, a girl I had to find. But I stopped short when I realized that I was speaking to men unlikely to understand. My father had left the woman he loved—didn’t he? didn’t he still love my mother?—for this, this boy’s life. And Burt? Well, in the previous few minutes I had suddenly moved much farther down the road toward comprehending my uncle’s nature, something that I wouldn’t have full understanding of for years to come.

  “I can’t stay.”

  The brothers looked at each other again, and maybe in that instant they both recalled something about youth that they had forgotten, no matter that they were living in the house where they must have first felt youth’s passions. “I’ll get his suitcase,” Burt said.

  Or perhaps Burt left us alone so that we could have a father and son talk, during which I would disclose what was troubling me. But I was not interested in anything that might delay my departure.

  My father was the one to snap the silence stretching tauter between us, and he did it with the question that was always his easiest substitute for intimacy. “Do you need any money?” He stood and reached for his wallet.

  That question might have been my entrée to say, Money? I do indeed need money, and lots of it. I’m getting married and soon. But I had already determined that the distance I had closed that day between my father and me was for nothing more than traveling convenience. “I’m okay,” I said.

  “Gas? I believe the only station open today is the Conoco you passed on the way into town.”

  “I filled up in Minot.”

  He nodded. “The Studebaker still does well on mileage?”

  “Almost as good as your old Rambler.”

  His faint smile told me that I had pleased him by recalling one of his vehicles. His pleasure would have been diminished if I’d told him that I remembered that car, would always remember that car, because it had been parked in the Stoddards’ driveway on that day. I hadn’t a single image in my memory cache of his emerald-green Rambler in front of our house.

  Burt clumped into the room with my suitcase, I took it from him, and my father and I walked out into the October evening’s chill. I opened the trunk and lifted the suitcase in.

  “That theory you have about Monty Burnham cheating old Mr. Stoddard out of his cabin . . . did you tell Mom about it?”

  “That subject wouldn’t be . . .” He paused, as though his concern for the precision of language was coming back to him. “An area of interest for her. Not any longer.”

  When I drove away, my father was gazing up into the bare branches of a maple tree that overhung the house and no doubt dropped a good many of its leaves onto the roof and into the rain gutters every year. If that tree had been there when he was a boy, it couldn’t have been more than a sapling.

  Back in Grand Forks I resumed my search for Marie, phoning, driving by, and looking into all the places I had tried only a few days before. I even tried some new locations. Since it was Saturday night, I checked a few bars, though Marie disliked them and their atmosphere. There were undoubtedly parties throughout the city, and while Marie was not averse to attending them, I had no way of knowing where they might be held.

  It was well past midnight when I gave up and returned to my apartment. My roommate was not there, but that was not unusual. Somewhere on campus there was a laboratory he could get into and study in, no matter what the hour. I checked the kitchen table and the stand the telephone sat on to see if he had left a note informing me that Marie had called. There was nothing.

  For many of the hours since Marie had run out, I had been in motion, and that had enabled me to keep my anxieties under control. But once I stopped moving, with no destination or mission but to get up the next morning and begin again, my fears leaped to the fore, and though they had no specific form, that didn’t mean they didn’t have the power to rattle me right to the core. I didn’t believe that Marie would try to harm herself. A quarrel like ours would never be enough to shake her love of and commitment to life. Similarly, she would never contemplate ending the life inside her, even if that had been possible, and, need I remind you, in 1964 abortions were not only illegal but generally unavailable. And while those beliefs might have had their birth in her Catholic background, it wasn’t the church that sustained them. She and I had both forsaken the religions we grew up in, and besides, Marie’s strongest faith had always been reserved for the values and certainties of her own character. But my fear didn’t need sharp definition. I had only to imagine the permanence of what was presently true—Marie was lost to me—to experience a dread unlike any other.

  During the days and hours and minutes of my futile hunting for Marie, I had begun increasingly to feel like a failure, not as a searcher but as a lover, a mate. I was sure of my love for her, yet I questioned its power—shouldn’t it have been strong enough to lead me to her, no matter where she might be?

  On Sunday morning I added a new location to my search circuit. I drove past Saint Michael’s Cathedral, making sure I passed when crowds of congregants were exiting. No luck. I had tried libraries, bars, and churches, hometowns and old boyfriends; I had staked out her family and her dormitory, and nothing, not the personal or the institutional, had yielded results. By mid-afternoon the October sky had darkened to a stony gray and a cold autumn wind had begun to blow. I decided to go back to my apartment to try the telephone for a few hours.

  And there she was. In my kitchen.

  Marie Ryan was sitting in the same chair that she had knocked over in her haste to get away from me. On the table in front of her was an educational psychology textbook. A cigarette was burning in the ashtray, and an open Coke was near at hand. She was wearing a floral print blouse and tan corduroy slacks. She had kicked off her shoes.

  “Rob let me in,” she said. “And I helped myself to a Coke. I hope you don’t mind.”

  I had driven her away by failing to respond as I should have to the news she had brought me, and now I was failing again and knew it even while it was happening. She had brought herself to me—back to me—and rather than overturning the table—or any other obstacle standing between Marie Ryan and me—and wrapping he
r in my arms, I remained where I was across the room, noting her brand of cigarettes, the angle of her shoes under the table, the pallid green of the Coke bottle contrasting with the living green of her eyes. In my life there have been so many times when, rather than like a hand opening and reaching, I have been a fist, closed and tight. I have never told my writing students this, but I have long known there are two ways to make use of yourself in your fiction: You may stand back and notice, as Saul Bellow says is our human purpose, or you may live fully and store up experiences that may one day find their way into your art. The cigarettes were Pall Malls. The toes of her loafers were scuffed because when she sat in a chair, she usually folded her legs under her, with her toes touching the floor.

  At least I had the good sense—or was it so?—not to immediately demand where she had been or to try to shame her with all the searching I had done.

  “Look,” I said, “I’m sorry. I’ve had time to think about it. And really, it’s good news, you being pregnant, and we—”

  She waved off my little speech. “Forget it. My mistake. False alarm. Aunt Bertha’s back.” It was a phrase Marie and her friends used as their euphemism for menstruating.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Please. Give me some credit. Yes, I’m sure.” She crushed out her cigarette and closed her textbook. “Relieved?”

  And I knew enough not to answer that one. “I was worried about you.”

  “I know, I should have called you. I was pissed off. What can I say? I’ve just been so on edge lately. I think it’s that statistics class—it’s killing me.”

  “So where were you?”

  “A girl down the hall from me was driving to Minneapolis, so on a whim I said I’d ride with her. I stayed with my sister.”

  I hadn’t thought to call there. “I was worried. . . .”

  “I should have called. I know that. I’m sorry.”

  We might have continued like that, mired in my guilt-inducing expressions of worry and her subsequent apologies, but Marie saw a way out. She walked over to me, looped her arms around my neck, and kissed me vehemently enough to loosen—slightly—my clenched self.

  If you have never experienced simultaneous passion and relief, I recommend it; the concoction is powerful and obliterating. It mattered then only that I was holding her again.

  After a few moments of breathless kissing, I turned Marie around 180 degrees and pulled her tight to my chest. She reached up and back and again put her arms around my neck. This exposed her exactly as I wanted, allowing me to unbutton her blouse and caress those magnificent breasts. Gradually I ran my hands down the concavity of her stomach and dipped my fingers inside her waistband. Since her slacks rode low—hip-huggers, in the parlance of the day—that move brought me very close to where I wanted to be.

  When I reached down a little farther, however, Marie dipped and twisted her torso, and I had no choice but to pull my hands away. “Huh-uh,” she said, and between quickened breaths added, “I told you. I have my period.”

  She spun around another 180 degrees, kissed me again, and asked, “Or was that a test?”

  “I forgot. For a moment.”

  “You have a very short memory.” She tugged at my belt. “We could do something else. . . .” Now it was her hand squeezing its way inside my waistband.

  “That’s okay.”

  “What’s the matter—afraid of accumulating debts you can’t repay?”

  Oh, how well she knew me! “I’m just happy to have you back.”

  “I can feel how happy you are,” she said.

  Since early childhood, the existence that has held the most appeal for me is one of unruffled routine, and almost immediately after those sirens came wailing down Keogh Street, I wanted things to revert to what seemed to me the calm of what had been. Taking the wrong lesson from those tumultuous days, I wanted—or so I believed—a return to a life in which I could take certain things for granted. This desire for placidity is perhaps too strong in me, and as a consequence I have often convinced myself it’s present when in fact something is still roiling below the surface.

  Nevertheless, it seemed to me that once Marie came back from her brief trip to Minneapolis, our lives quickly returned to what they had been, and it seemed that that was what we both wanted. We soon resumed having sex, although for a few months we were a bit more cautious. We were both busy with work and our studies, but we were together as often and, if questioned I would have said, as happily as before. When the semester ended, we packed up the Studebaker and drove together back to Bismarck for the holidays.

  Where I promptly fell ill with strep throat, and for a few days I lay in bed with a fever and a throat so sore I could barely swallow. By Christmas day I felt better, but I still used my sickness as an excuse not to attend church with my mother and sister. After church they would go to the Christmas luncheon held every year by the Burnett sisters, another ritual I was pleased I could pass on. For a few hours I would have the house to myself.

  I poured myself a cup of coffee, lit the first cigarette I could smoke in days, and, still in my pajamas, sat up in bed with the copy of The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway that Marie gave me for Christmas. (The book, the Scribner’s paperback edition priced at $2.95, is still on my shelf.) I had barely begun to read when someone knocked on my bedroom door. I’d thought I was alone in the house, and I hadn’t heard the doorbell, but I wasn’t startled for long. The door eased open, and there was Marie’s smiling face.

  “Are you feeling up to company?”

  “Yours—yes.”

  She was skipping out of church too, she said, and when she took off her coat, I could see she was dressed for mass in a wool skirt and a turtleneck.

  “I think God will forgive me,” she said, “if I spend the morning tending to the sick.”

  “Not necessary. I’m feeling much better. Really.”

  Throwing back my blankets, I started to get up, but Marie pushed me back onto the bed. “I told you. I’m here to nurse you back to health.” She took my cigarette from me, inhaled, and then put it out.

  “The first thing I have to do,” she said, pulling my T-shirt off, “is make sure your lungs are clear.” She put her ear to my chest, but any pretense of listening soon fell away as she covered my torso with kisses.

  She sat up. “Your heart seems sound, but I wonder . . . can it stand up to a little excitement?”

  “I’m willing to risk it.”

  Without any more talk, Marie kicked off her shoes, pulled her sweater off over her head, unhooked her brassiere, wriggled out of the girdle that she needed only to hold up her nylons, and stepped out of her panties. She made no effort to fold or neatly stack her garments, but left them all lying in a small pile on the floor. Then, wearing nothing but her skirt, she climbed onto my narrow bed.

  I reached for her, but she brushed my hands away. “We can’t have you exerting yourself. Not in your weakened condition. You lie still and let me”—she pulled her skirt up to her hips and straddled me—“take care of you.”

  What was happening in that bedroom that had been mine when I was a boy was of course a boy’s fantasy—a beautiful girl enters his room and gets into his bed. Inevitably I remembered when Marie had come to my room in quite a different way and for quite a different purpose—the night when, scratching on my screen, she woke me, and we went out together to search for her boyfriend. And suddenly through that tiny fissure of memory Gene squeezed his way into the bedroom.

  But only for an instant.

  With Marie moving rhythmically above me, her eyes half-closed, her breasts rising and falling, how could I think for long of anything but her? She leaned forward, pinning down my wrists and reminding me that I wasn’t to grab or touch. Then she sat back, putting her hands on her own buttocks. When she bent down again her hair fell forward over her face and mine, and within that tent every breath I took was full of her heat and essence. Then, arching back up, she tossed her head and shook her hair back over her shoulde
r, but in the room’s furnace-dried electric air, a few strands still floated free. Having taught me what I must not do, Marie now caressed her own breasts. The winter wind gusted hard and rattled the storm window in its frame, and when I came, it was with the same kind of shudder and gasp I might have displayed had I been dropped naked into snow. Marie’s orgasm was a less dramatic trio of softly uttered ohs.

  My memory of what happened is reliable, but occasionally my brain tries to put something before when in fact it was after. The mind performs these reversals or alterations no doubt because it has a narrative sense that life lacks and wants its stories to be as dramatic, harmonic, emphatic, and orderly as possible.

  For example, I keep wanting to remember that it was on that Christmas Day that Marie, lying in my arms, us sharing a post-coital cigarette, announced that she was transferring to the University of Minnesota. But I know that wasn’t so. I know it. She received notification before Christmas that she had been accepted into a special, experimental program that would allow her to seamlessly combine the completion of her undergraduate degree with teacher certification and admission to graduate study. When I traced my finger along her naked clavicle, feeling for that tiny irregularity where the bone broke, I knew—we both knew—that a separation lay ahead for us. We had already had our discussions of the difficulties that would pose, but we always concluded those conversations quickly with assurances that our love would overcome any problems.

  And I know that when we made love in that narrow bed it was not for the last time. I know that. Just as I know that our relationship didn’t end that day. But perhaps because the mind wants the symmetry of a story that would both begin, as this one did, and end on Keogh Street, it tries to force my memory to delete the remaining six months of our relationship. Maybe I misremember the end of our life together so I can make Marie’s educational opportunity responsible rather than my own behavior on the day when she told me she might be pregnant. And maybe something in the way Marie and I made love that day—made love and made memory—tinged it with valediction, a farewell fuck for each to remember the other by. It may have been nothing more than what seemed a game that day—don’t use your hands!—but perhaps it was in fact Marie’s wish, still unconscious at that point, not to be contaminated by my touch.