Sundown, Yellow Moon

by Larry Watson

Janice pretended to punch Randy in the ribs. “And where were you planning to take me?”

  “The Haystacks, of course!” That was an area north of town whose dirt roads and isolated groves had once provided teenagers a private place to park. Marie had spent her share of time in cars with fogged windows out at the Haystacks, and on one occasion her and her boyfriend’s passions ran so hot that as their bodies pressed and undulated against each other, they didn’t notice that her glasses had slipped from the armrest and gotten trapped under them. In the car’s muffled silence the snapping of the plastic frame made a sound like a breaking bone. Marie had no trouble recalling the incident or the boyfriend in whose arms she’d rolled around on the car seat.

  Laughing, Janice said, “I’m ready to go. But won’t your wife wonder where you are?”

  “Hell, we’ll be back before she knows I’m gone.”

  “So, Speedy Gonzales, I guess that hasn’t changed.”

  Randy Oslund affected a stricken expression and clapped his hands over his heart, but Marie could tell Janice’s remark caused him no real pain.

  In spite of the jokes, Marie recognized that their feelings for each other were genuine, though the emotion likely had more to do with history and nostalgia than with still-fresh desire or affection. The intimacy of their display, however, no matter that it was feigned or performed for an audience, shocked Marie. Was there a door to the past that she had somehow left open, and did that explain her dreams? Or had the dreams pushed open the door?

  But while Randy and Janice shocked Marie, she also envied them. She could easily imagine her husband acting like Randy Oslund with an old girlfriend. And inviting Marie over to meet the woman. Unlike Marie, he talked openly about women with whom he once had relationships, even to the extent of describing their sexual behavior. Marie had once accompanied her husband to an Austin, Texas, medical conference, and he introduced her there to a woman he had dated during his first year of medical school. A neonatologist, she soon excused herself to attend a seminar, and then Marie’s husband told Marie about how the woman had never seemed to warm to him during their time together, and how she’d preferred to make love on all fours, a position that no doubt suited her because it didn’t require her to touch him or look at him. And that anecdote reminded him of another woman who, from that same position, would reach back and grab his testicles, a move that once brought a yelp of pain from him that she mistook for ecstasy.

  Even when such frankness embarrassed Marie, she knew it signaled his confidence with her, and she had to admit it was preferable to a husband who hoarded and cherished his memories of other women.

  Her husband detached himself from the group of men and returned to Marie’s side. “Babe, I’m going to join these gentlemen up in their room. Someone needs a physician’s second opinion.” He pressed the tips of his thumb and index finger together and, bringing them to his lips, inhaled audibly. Although he had, in deference to his status as a physician and a father, stopped buying marijuana years ago, he could not turn down an invitation to smoke someone else’s.

  “Be careful,” Marie said. “Please.”

  As he walked away grinning, he said, “If you can’t trust the class of ’63, who can you trust?”

  Rhonda, Janice, and Randy also walked away, leaving Marie with her old friend.

  Peggy leaned close, bringing with her the scent of cigarette smoke and hair spray. “Guess who’s here—and he’s looking for you?”

  Marie felt herself blush. “How can anyone be looking for me? How does anyone know who’s here and who isn’t?”

  “Okay, asking. He’s asking if you’re here.”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Just think for a minute. I believe you know.”

  “Oh, please, Peggy. This isn’t junior high. Just tell me.”

  Peggy smiled coyly. “I don’t believe I will. Anyway, keep standing right here. I’m sure he’ll find you.” As if she were enacting an exit she had rehearsed, Peggy bowed and backed away.

  One of them was looking for her. . . . Marie tried to determine which former boyfriend that was likely to be. She couldn’t believe that shy young man would seek her out. Instead, he would stake out a position, just as he had on that winter night when he’d stood on a street corner and watched the house—was it Peggy’s?—where Marie was attending a slumber party. It was after midnight when someone saw him out there and told Marie. She stepped into her shoes and ran out to him in her pajamas. While they both stood shivering under a streetlamp, he explained that it wasn’t that he hadn’t trusted her when she’d told him she’d be there, but his worry caused his faith to tremble. So perhaps he was watching Marie now from some dark corner, waiting for her to notice him, then approach him, and say, “I’ve been dreaming about you.”

  When Marie finally severed the relationship with him, both he and she shed tears. Finally, however, his moodiness, his inaccessibility, and his passivity wore her out. She felt she expended so much energy in closing the distance between them, in sending out signs of affection so he could learn through imitation to match them with his own, in fulfilling the needs he could not or would not articulate for himself, that she was losing too much of herself. Simply put, he exhausted her.

  Yet he was not the likeliest candidate to be searching for her. No, if someone was sorting through the assemblage, checking name tags and staring into faces until he found Marie’s, it was probably her first boyfriend, that smiling, intense, determined-to-get-what-he-wanted-at-any-cost young man. Why wouldn’t he cross identity boundaries in her dreams? He could seldom be restrained in the time he and Marie were together.

  When Marie was sixteen, she traveled with her family to a Minnesota lake for their summer vacation. Marie hadn’t wanted to go. Although the summers of her adolescence seemed long, two weeks apart from her boyfriend was a deprivation too much to bear. She wrote him twice a day, and she promised him, almost to the minute, when they would be reunited. Her father pulled into the driveway, and Marie jumped from the car. She ran into the house, heading for her basement bedroom from where she would telephone her boyfriend and tell him she was back—Come over right away!

  But he was already there, waiting for her just inside her bedroom door.

  Once Marie’s fright subsided, her joy at seeing him—after fourteen days and nights!—took over and she launched herself into his arms. In the busyness of unloading the car and unpacking suitcases, Marie’s parents didn’t notice that her boyfriend was already there when the family arrived; they assumed he had hurried over in record time to see Marie.

  Over the next few weeks, Marie learned that that had not been the only day he’d taken the key from under the pot of geraniums and let himself into the house. He confessed that he had been in there almost every day, and as evidence he had hidden little notes throughout her room. She put her hand under her pillow and found a note; she opened a drawer and found another. He put one in her jewelry box and tucked another inside a high school yearbook. None of the notes said anything more than “Hi there!” “It’s me!” “Surprise!” and initially Marie found them endearing. But when she came across one taped to the back of a framed photograph of her parents, she suddenly felt a chill. The site of that note—“It’s me again!”—was certainly more innocent than the drawer where she kept her pajamas, nylons, brassieres, panties, and slips, but the note on her bureau changed everything that surrounded it. Suddenly Marie’s room felt less like hers; it had been transformed into a space anyone might occupy. The bedroom door fit poorly in its frame and only with great effort could it be pushed or pulled to shut tight, and even then the door had no lock. Not that it mattered. As those little scraps of paper—“Guess who!”—demonstrated, Marie had no threshold she could cross where the world wouldn’t follow. When Marie broke up with him a few months later, she told him it was because they were becoming too serious, a phrase that back then almost always meant the girl no longer knew how to restrain her boyfriend’s sexual demands or how to keep her own desi
re from duplicating his.

  Marie hadn’t finished her glass of wine, but she made her way back to the bar. From there she thought it would be easier to not only see someone approach but also to read the history in any face’s features.

  In fact, Marie had barely reached out her glass to the young bartender to ask for a refill when a man unexpectedly thrust his face in front of her and demanded, “Why’d you break my heart?”

  Startled, Marie pulled back, and when she did, she saw who was confronting her. Fortunately, she caught herself before she made matters worse and spoke the words that came first to her tongue. Oh, Terry, it’s only you.

  Instead, Marie greeted that pop-eyed, mock-belligerent face with, “Hello, Terry. It’s nice to see you.”

  “Why? So you can rip my heart out and stomp on it and finish the job?”

  They both knew what he was jokingly referring to. Throughout their grade-school years Terry Bart had had a crush on Marie. He plagued her on the playground, following her everywhere, teasing her, making her his special target in dodge-ball; he went blocks out of his way just so he could walk past Marie’s house after school. Finally, when they reached junior high, he became bold enough to ask Marie if she would go with him to a school dance. “I’m sorry,” she told him, “but I’m going with Danny McCabe.” Danny was an eighth grader and someone with whom Terry knew he could not compete. In the next few years Terry learned to make a joke of the rejection, but Marie knew his sense of defeat and disappointment had been real. In high school when she was briefly between boyfriends, Marie consented to attend a party with Terry, and though she tried to make it clear to him that he would never be more than a friend, he still tried, drunkenly, roughly, persistently, to kiss her at the party. Marie eventually pushed him away and left the party, walking home through four inches of fresh snow in kitten heels.

  “Do you still live in Bismarck, Terry?”

  “You mean you haven’t kept track of my every move? Denver. We’ve lived in Denver for the last seven years.”

  “We?”

  “My wife. We met at Augustana. She’s right over there.” Terry pointed across the room, but in the dim light his direction was useless. “Can you wait right here? I’ll go get her. She’d love to meet the girl who broke my heart. God knows she’s heard enough about you.”

  The idea of being introduced to Mrs. Bart in that context held no appeal for Marie, and as soon as Terry left, she slid away from the bar. She wanted to head toward the door and then wait for her husband over by the elevators, but that meant stepping into the light. Anyone looking for her, whether an old boyfriend or an aspirant like Terry, would find her easier to spot if she left the banquet room’s shadows.

  She circled behind the bar, back by the troughs of iced beer and soda and the stacked boxes of inexpensive wines and liquors. One of the bartenders, a young man not much older than Marie’s sons, looked at Marie and raised an eyebrow conspiratorially in her direction. Just as Randy Oslund had done earlier, Marie raised her finger to her lips, and the bartender smiled and nodded in understanding. But what, Marie wondered, did the young man believe he understood?

  What if Terry Bart, and not one of Marie’s ex-boyfriends, were the anonymous seeker Peggy had told her about? Wouldn’t that make sense? Terry was there; he had obviously been looking for her. Perhaps Marie was fleeing from a rendezvous she had already had. . . .

  Ceiling-to-floor draperies encircled the room, and Marie moved close to the heavy dark fabric. She had no idea what the curtains were for, but she was ready to adapt them for her own purposes, to step inside a fold or opening and vanish from sight. As unobtrusively as possible she began to move around the room, all the while glancing back at the entrance so she wouldn’t miss her husband when he returned.

  As soon as he came into view, she planned to run to him and tell him they must leave immediately, that it had been a mistake to come there, that she wanted nothing to do with the past and certainly wanted none of its scenes enacted ever again. It wasn’t feasible to leave Bismarck tonight, but she’d insist they leave first thing in the morning. She couldn’t bear the thought of being in the city in the full exposure of daylight.

  Just ahead a small knot of people stood in Marie’s path. She could try to go around them, a move that would necessitate leaving the available cover and possible escape route of the draperies; she could go back in the direction from whence she had come; or she could stop right where she was and wait, hoping she wouldn’t be noticed and that they would soon disperse and clear the way ahead. She stood still.

  Someone in the group ahead must have said something funny, because every one of them either threw their head back or bent over with laughter. Almost as if they were in on the joke, the people at the table nearest her also began to laugh uproariously.

  Suddenly, through the sounds of all that merriment and beneath the room’s general din, came a voice, barely more than a whisper, and from right behind her. A man said—she thought she heard him say—“Would you like to go to Paris with me?”

  Marie didn’t recognize the voice, but given the room’s noise and its poor acoustics, how could she? It could have been her husband speaking to her and she wouldn’t have been able to identify him.

  And perhaps the man wasn’t even addressing her. If she waited for just a moment before turning around, he would certainly repeat his question and then she would know exactly who was there and why.

  The question never came again, but eight years later, when Marie stood on the Pont des Arts with the man she loved, she was sure that, in spite of her dreams’ efforts to confuse her, her decisions in life had been the right ones. At that moment in Paris, however, who was beside her seemed of less importance than the fact of the May sun warming her back and lighting the gilt of a building that looked to her like a wedding cake.

  Although the relationship-cancer that eventually put an end to the us that was Marie and me may well have been in place on that Christmas Day when she came to check on my health—indeed, maybe it was present from the very beginning—we continued to see each other after she transferred to the University of Minnesota. I drove to Minneapolis, she rode the bus to Grand Forks, or we met in Bismarck when we both went back there for one school vacation or another. But in none of our meetings, letters, or many telephone conversations did we ever make arrangements for permanence, and eventually the simple fact of the 315 miles between us may have been too much to overcome. When we each began to find excuses not to make the journey—an exam to study for, a paper to write, a lecture to attend, a party not to be missed, a snowstorm predicted, a car with a fussy carburetor—our life together was all but over. We both decided to attend summer school at our respective institutions (one of us, I don’t remember who, must have been the first to make that choice, and the other no doubt followed suit out of spite). Our breakup, like my parents’, was not the result of a single explosive incident but more a gradual loss of the energy relationships use for fuel. By autumn of 1965 we were finished.

  At first I told myself that was all right. My pride had been wounded—Marie didn’t have to transfer to another school. Then another girl briefly captured my interest. A creative writing professor overpraised my poems and stories and told me I could be admitted to the University of Iowa’s MFA program. He was wrong, but the damage was done; my head was turned. When I graduated, I, like Marie, left North Dakota for an adjoining state, but she headed east and I went west, to the University of Montana and its new graduate writing program. Once there, I was, I told myself, exactly where I wanted to be and ready to begin realizing my deepest literary aspirations. The mysteries of the human heart could be known, and I would devote my life to the careful search for words to convey that knowledge.

  Then on a winter morning, after three days of warm Chinook winds rolling down the Rockies, after a night of drinking in a Missoula, Montana, bar with a group of students who shared my naïve ambitions, I woke with a profound hangover and a refrain running through my brain as if on
a perpetual circuit: I need Marie, I need Marie, I need Marie, I need Marie, I need Marie . . . the vowels—eye ee ah ee eye ee ah ee eye ee ah ee—sounding for all the world like the siren of a Parisian police car. The words may not have come to me previously in quite that form, but the emotion that underlay them, I realized, had never left me and never would. That feeling, as if it too had been covered in snow, surfaced in January’s thaw.

  Sunk though I was that morning in self-pity and despair, my sense of irony was still intact. When Marie and I were together, I used to worry that someday I would lose her to Gene because, while I could make and state the case that I wanted her, he could make the stronger claim by asserting that he needed her. Now, however, it was too late for both of us. I had lost touch—wonderful phrase!—with Marie, and though this is another sequence I can’t be entirely sure of, she may have already found the man she would marry, a man who, unlike the boys of Keogh Street, would answer her wants and needs.

  As long as my mother was alive—and it took many years before her two-packs-a-day habit caught up to her—I returned to Bismarck every year. Once I married (more of that soon) and eventually started teaching, largely because I needed to find work that provided benefits and brought in a paycheck larger and steadier than the erratic royalties and option money that came my way, those annual returns to my hometown were usually in the summer. At decade-long intervals, however, I made certain that those trips were in the summer. Specifically, I made it a point to be in Bismarck during the days when the class of 1963—Marie’s class—held its reunion.

  But as far as I knew, she never returned. And why would she? In the late 1960s Marie’s father was transferred, and her family moved to Illinois, and even if Marie had had enough pleasant memories of the city and her time there—enough, that is, to overpower her association with the lurid, tragic Raymond Stoddard affair—she had never been attached to the past. A writer I revere, William Maxwell, once said, “I don’t think I have outlived any part of my life, it all seems to coexist,” and while I could say the same thing about my life, that sentiment was never Marie’s. Remember her advice to Gene? He had to “stop pulling the past up to the present.” Besides, had she come back to Bismarck, for a high school reunion or any other reason, what good would it have done me? She would have been in the company of the man she’d married, a doctor she met in Minneapolis when she was in graduate school and he was interning. To this day they live in Edina, a Minneapolis suburb, with their four sons.