Recapitulation

by Wallace Stegner

  It was late, well after midnight. He saw the two of them enter the lobby, he saw that walk of hers that made him, even in passionless retrospect, want to pat her on the haunch the way one might pat a muscled quarterhorse. He saw himself only vaguely, assiduous but in tow. He saw the elevator man stand up from his stool inside his lighted cage, rocking on one heavy built-up shoe.

  Nola gave him her warm, sleepy smile. Bruce too smiled at him. He would have smiled at anyone on earth, and not simply because by that time he had been trained to smile for business reasons by J. J. Mulder. They were young, happy, and in love. They were what all the world is supposed to love, and they loved all the world. Probably they had in mind the same program: He would take her to her room, they would neck a while, they would part lingeringly, unwilling but not questioning the forms, and then he would go home. Tomorrow after work he would call her. They would go to a movie, take a walk, window-shop up and down Main Street, maybe drive up on Wasatch Boulevard and park above the valley lights. Summer stretched ahead of them, a succession of such days and nights.

  Nola stepped into the elevator. But as Bruce started to follow, the steel door slid briskly across in front of him. The elevator man looked at him through the crack. “Not upstairs,” he said.

  Bruce completely failed to take him in. “I don’t live here,” he said foolishly. “I’m only taking her to her room.”

  “Not in this hotel.”

  Still not sure he wasn’t joking, or that he had not misunderstood, Bruce tempted his good nature with a disarming smile. “Why? What might I do?”

  The elevator man’s eyes were as round as the eyes of a fish, and seemed to be surrounded by rings of cartilage. They goggled and stared, unamused. “Rules,” he said. “After eleven.”

  Past his head, Bruce could see Nola. Instead of storming out, as he half expected her to, she only looked astonished. “Come on, this is a bum joke,” he said to the elevator man. “What kind of hotel is it where you can’t go up to a room?”

  “She can go up.”

  “Suppose we want to talk a minute?”

  The goggle eyes rolled, indicating the empty lobby, lighted like a stage set.

  “What if we’d rather be alone while we talk?”

  Shrug.

  “Good Christ!” Bruce said, unbelieving.

  “No need to blaspheme,” the elevator man said meanly. Clang, the door slid shut. The brass needle above it started to creep up around the half circle of its dial.

  Furious, Bruce darted around the corner and sprang up the carpeted stairs three at a time. Inside the wall he could hear the laboring sigh of the cable, the click as the slow cage passed the second floor. He was at the third floor ahead of it, but stopped short of the hall, his hand against the wall at the top step. There was an irritable series of clicks as the operator jacked the cage to the floor level, then the rattle of the folding iron grate, then the clash of the door. Bruce heard no talk. Did she bawl him out? Was she going to make him take her back down to the lobby, where he presumably was?

  She appeared, walking past the stairhead. Her head turned very slightly, her eyes touched his with their very corners, at her left side her hand made a small, natural flicking motion. She went on without pausing.

  In two bounds Bruce was down to the landing and around the corner out of sight. Just in time. Above him he heard the shuffling of what he supposed was the operator’s heavy shoe and the rasping of what he knew, holding his own breath, was breathing. He listened like a tourist in the tabernacle waiting for the pin to drop. His ears were sticking two feet above his head, his heart was pounding so hard he was afraid the operator would hear it. It was like a movie chase out the windows and across the rooftops and through the alleys. He was pumped full of adrenalin and absolutely delighted. The operator of course couldn’t be sure he had come upstairs; he only suspected he had. And if Bruce couldn’t outfox that gimpy-legged cross between a bishop’s first counselor and a house detective, he was slower and less smart than he thought he was.

  Shuffling. Breathing. Then nothing. Was he sneaking down the stairs? No, he couldn’t be that quiet. Bruce waited. After quite a time he heard the elevator door slide shut, then the inner grille. But the shaft, encased in the wall right beside his ear, gave up no sigh of the descending cage. Within fifteen seconds he heard the door softly open again. The operator was standing up there waiting to see if his pretense of departing had decoyed Bruce into the open.

  He badly underestimated his opposition. Bruce went down to 2, where he could watch the dial. For a while it sat dead on 3, then it started down. He leaped back up to 3 and watched the dial there.

  The operator was a most suspicious snoop. The needle stopped at 2, but instead of going on down to the lobby, it started up again. Ready to explode with excitement and triumph, willing to play hide-and-seek all night if the fathead wanted, Bruce slipped halfway down and around the corner. Again the sound of doors, again a wait. Finally the sighing of the cable within the walls. Bruce went up to 3 and watched the needle descend clear to L and stay there. All right, then. He must have satisfied himself that the rule-breaker was not in the building.

  But he was, he was there like the Thief of Baghdad in the harem. The numbered doors flowed past him till he came to the right one. There he laid his cheek against the wood and scratched softly with his nails.

  She opened, pulled him in, closed and locked again. She had let her hair down, and she was laughing without noise, whispering, “How did you duck him? He was sure you’d come up. When I passed you, he was right on my heels almost.”

  “He’s got to be better than he is if he’s going to catch me.”

  He was breathless, boastful, aggrandized. The chase had worked on him; the whispering secrecy of her room, made illicit by the elevator man’s suspicions, worked on him more. His hands were full of her clean, thick, slippery hair, their bodies were locked together, there were long close kisses in the close hallway. They made a stumbling sideward progress, without unlocking lips or arms, until they reached the sofa and fell into it. There, temporarily jarred loose, they looked into each other’s eyes with their noses two inches apart.

  “Ah!” she said, and with her eyes wide open brought her lips close and put them with deliberate fierceness against his. “Ah, you!”

  Bruce said nothing, burrowing into her throat to kiss a knob of collarbone. She had a sweet warm odor. Her hair smelled of pine soap, a simple village folk smell that somehow defined her.

  “Sometime, sure,” he had told Holly on the porch of the tower house two months before. “Not right this week.” But here they were locked together, hungry, devouring one another. The escapade with the elevator man had quickened her as well as him. She was not phlegmatic, remote, or amused. She was aroused, and so was he.

  But he had not yet naturalized the idea that a girl he was in love with, a nice girl, might be so emotionally excited that she would go, as the phrase went, “all the way.” They necked passionately for a while, and then after an unmeasured time—half hour, hour—she pushed him away and sat up and stretched. Her eyes looked unfocused, the pupils enlarged to fill the whole iris. “Well,” she said, and laughed softly, and at once grew serious again and said, “How are you going to get out of here? You’ll have to walk right past the elevator.”

  “I’ll have to stay here all night and go out with the crowd in the morning.”

  He said it jokingly, programmed as he was for the game of assault and resistance, siege and defense, scaling ladders and boiling oil, that was their accepted pattern. He said it hoping that against all precedent she might agree, and half terrified that she would, and sure all the time that she would not.

  Erect on the sofa, her hair a tangled dark mass over her shoulders, she looked at him out of the corners of her eyes. He could see the glint of white eyeballs, and in the dark pupils a dot of red reflected from the down-on-the-floor lamp. They stared at each other, precarious between opportunity and inhibition.

  Then h
e saw that she was not going to give in. “No,” she said. “No. Not now.”

  “When, then?” Safe, he could be importunate.

  Her eyes moved on his face, memorizing him. She leaned and kissed him slowly. He took a handful of her hair and pulled it across her mouth and kissed her through it, an exciting, sexy kiss that at once relinquished and asserted.

  “Soon!”

  “Ah, you!” she said again. “I can’t seem to get enough of you tonight.” Then she removed herself from him, without moving at all. “How are you going to get past him?”

  “That’s my problem. When are you going to move out of this old ladies’ home?”

  “I’ve paid a week in advance.”

  “Don’t stay any longer. Let’s start looking for some other place tomorrow.”

  “All right. But you’ve got to go now. You’ve got to go go GO! My name will be mud if they catch you here.”

  “What can they do?”

  “I don’t want to find out. Write my father, maybe.” She took him by the ears and wagged his head back and forth, pecking him with kisses that hit and missed. “You!” she said a third time. “Get out of here! You’re driving me wild.”

  He yielded. He had always been going to yield. He knew the rules. But as they went through five more minutes of panting good-nights, as he finally broke away and sneaked down the stairs and with ridiculous ease caught the elevator man dozing on his stool, and slipped out the side entrance unseen, he was full of the awed realization that the rules were about to change. One of these days, the next time the opportunity presented itself, he would press her again, and the answer would be yes. It was yes tonight. There was no way to think around a fact like that. All he could do, driving home, was visualize that coming event in a dozen ways, each softer and more secret than the last.

  So there she was, retrieved by his computer along with all the rest of it. The old way of thinking of the memory as an attic was absurd. In attics things gathered dust. There was no dust on any of this. It was as fresh as if he had reached back only an hour. He could feel the humorous violence with which she took hold of him, he could smell pine soap.

  Without ever crossing the street to look into the hotel, he turned back along the wall of the temple block to where Brigham Young stood at the bright beginning of Main Street. The night was mild, with a steady flow of air from the mountains. The street reaching southward was Anystreet, Anywhere, and yet he knew it in its special and local identity. Simply by the way it lay on the earth he knew it. It lay on his mind that same way.

  He turned down it among the thin evening crowds.

  7

  As he walked, scraps of a poem were bothering the back of his mind. Something about being sick for home for the red roofs and the olives, something about It is a strange thing to be an American. McLeish? Whoever it was, Mason agreed. He had felt it all during his years abroad, when he represented in foreign countries a country to which he himself belonged only tentatively and temporarily and partially, but by which he had been shaped, evoked, limited, given opportunity, perhaps warped or damaged. Many a time he, too, had been sick for home, not for red roofs and olives, but for this city planted between the desert and the mountains. Yet as he walked in the shirt-sleeve night among the paragranite urns, planters, fountains, and stelae that crowded the tiled sidewalks of transformed Main Street, there was little that evoked memory or nostalgia. Home was another word for strange.

  His initial inclination to think well of it, to accept Progress, withered as he walked. Urban slick. He might have thought it attractive in Montreal or San Francisco, cities about which he held no illusions. But it wasn’t Salt Lake. A flock of bronze sea gulls rising from a sunken garden in front of the Prudential Building, new to him, revived his approval briefly. Then more paragranite, and fountains whose jets wagged like sheeps’ tails. What he remembered was shabbier, homelier, friendlier than this. A salmon turning inland after years in salt water should taste with certainty and gladness the waters of its birth.

  Something was missing, and it took him nearly a block to realize what. Streetcars. Now it was buses rank with diesel exhaust, silent on rubber. Then it was yellow streetcars with square wheels, clanking, pounding, groaning on curves, audible for blocks (and welcome, too, for their shelter in the rain, warmth in the cold). Their retracted front trolleys stuck out like unicorns’ horns, their rear ones popped blue sparks at the switches, and now and then jumped the cable and rained blobs of fire until the conductor hopped down and pulled the trolley away from the wire and set its wheel in place again. It was a favorite sport for boys to jerk the trolley and scatter, hooting derision as the conductor stormed out.

  If there were a streetcar in sight now he would take it; any number, it wouldn’t matter. 5, up First South to the university, or 6, down State Street to Murray, or the one, whatever number it was, that went north around Ensign Peak to Beck’s Hot Springs. On this alien new-city sidewalk he was homesick for the smell of ozone, the slickness of a caned seat, the dang of the motorman’s bell, the pink of the stop signal, the pneumatic sigh of opening and closing doors, the familiar car cards above the windows: Arrow Collars, BVD’s, Lux, Listerine (even your best friends won’t tell you), Paris Garters, Knox Hats, Stacomb, Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. And Herpicide, with its pictures of three stages of human defoliation: one of a man with thinning hair (Herpicide can save it), one of a man with only a fringe (Herpicide can still save it), and one of a man gone stony bald (too late for Herpicide.)

  It would be pleasant to ride clear to the end of some line, while the car emptied by ones and twos until at the last stop the motorman would rise from behind his curtain and open his door and step out and stretch, and leisurely engage the front trolley for the reversed trip back, while the conductor came down the aisle yanking on the brass handles of seats, two at a time, facing them the other way.

  Ends and beginnings, familiar and repetitive routines. When he first came to Salt Lake he had never even seen a streetcar—had barely made the acquaintance of the water closet. The pure American frontier savage, with everything to learn about how people live in groups, he had ridden every line in town, just to see where it went. For a while he had believed that the conductors carried little revolvers in the holsters next to the change boxes on their belts, and he was shamed by his own ignorance when he found they were only the punches with which they punched out transfers.

  Simply by its public transportation, Salt Lake had opened the door to membership just when he most needed something to belong to. It served native and stranger, young and old, Gentile and Mormon, alike. It prompted the beginning of a wary confidence. He knew where he was and how to get somewhere else, and he had a book of blue student tickets that would take him there.

  But this face-lifted street bled away a confidence that he had taken for granted. He felt the absence of old friends. He failed to recognize what he saw.

  The light was different, too. He remembered Main Street as white, lighted by electric signs outlined by scores of individual bulbs, some of them comfortably burned out. Now the whole of downtown, like downtown of every city in the world, was lurid with red and green and blue. He would never have noticed this anywhere else—he expected neon. But here where he remembered an earlier stage he found neon garish.

  Had he expected that the city would stand still in fact as it had in his mind, a Pompeii silenced and preserved as it was before neon, diesel buses, streamlined cars, balloon tires, parking meters? Before television, before even radio in anything but its crystal-to-superheterodyne forms? Before World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the counterculture? Before the Fall? Before sin and death? Did he think he could walk down Main Street as into a black-and-white, silent, wheels-running-backward 1920’s newsreel?

  Apparently he did. He wanted the womb kept warm.

  Nevertheless, there were some things, passing First South, that he carefully did not look for.

  At Fourth South, where rehabilitation ended and the old shabb
iness resumed, he was not tempted to go on into the shabbiness in search of familiarity. Instead, he crossed the street to the post office and started back up the other side. Most of what he walked past on his way back to the hotel was not there. It was as if the things he passed were inventions or dreams. But if inventions, persuasive; if dreams, indelible.

  He stopped before a place called the Cat’s Meow (and there was an echo in that—for a while in the twenties everything was the cat’s meow, or the bee’s knees, or the snake’s hips). It dealt in gifts and art objects, but throughout his years in Salt Lake it, or a building very close to it, was a clothing store, Mullett Kelley’s. Beyond the plastic and chrome and leather of the displays, beyond the reflections of lights and pedestrians and his own peering face, he saw the dim aisles and counters of 1923, the year of his summer job with the news company and his brief flirtation with the fleshpots of Saltair. There he stood with his hoarded pay in the pocket of his knee pants, selecting his first long-pants suit (electric blue) and his first grown-up shoes (Selz Sixes, so called from their six-dollar price tag)—Scotch-grain brogues with wing tips. And black silk socks.

  Not even the dazed adulthood of the long pants that the mirrors reflected back at him could give him the pleasure those black silk socks did. For months he would not look down at his feet in their shiny Selz Sixes and see his sleek ankles without a thrill of gratification. He was that way about gloves, too. He couldn’t help playing with them, pulling one on and snugging it around his fingers and clenching the fist to see the stitched back tighten into a wonderful smoothness, turning the upper part down to reveal his wrist merging into leather elegance. To any outsider, a scrawny kid, a plucked chicken. To himself, a creature of infinite interest, a marvel, transformed by clothes.

  All by himself he came to Mullett Kelley’s. Strange that his mother had let him. Perhaps because he had earned the money himself, perhaps because she understood his need for independence. Even the electric-blue suit she never criticized, though after one wearing he himself knew he had made a terrible mistake, and his father, at sight of it, threw a fit.