Three Short Novels

by Gina Berriault

  On either side of the highway stretched rows of low, tangled vines, their green muted by the fine dust concocted of hot sun and vast open fields. For miles she drove through sun-bleached hills, ranging in color from almost white to a dark gold, and early in the afternoon she turned along by the sea. Her body felt fragile, but the sun on her bare arms and legs and on the crown of her head was a healing warmth. They found a pink stucco motel, primly neat, fronted by geometrical patches of grass and gravel, and ringed by cypress. The walls of the room were coral pink and the spreads on the twin beds were also coral, scrawled with white nautical designs. They left their cases on the beds and walked to the restaurant close by, whose enormous sign was like a lighted tower signaling ships at sea.

  She walked in, aware of their complementary beauty, the young mother and her young son, both pretending an easy familiarity with the place, although his pretense, she knew, was the result of shyness. He walked behind her, yet she knew, from having turned other times in other restaurants to ask him something, just how he looked, how one thumb was hooked in his back pocket and how he glanced neither to the right nor to the left but kept his gaze down to the level of her ankles.

  She was glad to see that there were waiters here and no waitresses, and to their young waiter she made evident her consciousness of him as a man in the way she rested her elbow on the table and set her profile on view, and in the way she took a cigarette from her purse and smiled at him to light it for her. She shared her graces between the waiter and her son who, because of his attack on Russell, had made the unspoken demand of him to treat him as the man he was to become; and, afraid of that demand, she required an obvious flirtation with the waiter, almost an infatuation. The waiter’s eyes wobbled away when their glances met. He told them, as he picked up soup bowls and laid down salad bowls, keeping his elbows close to his sides, that the weather yesterday had been very nice, the sun up hot and early. It was time, he said, for the fog to roll in. “Is there any fog on the horizon?” he asked, like one denied the sight of the day, although the restaurant’s front windows looked out to sea. She reported that they had seen no fog, nothing, and laughed with the waiter over his moody refusal to glance out the window at the clear day that others were free to roam around in.

  The tide was out when they strolled down to the water, so far out it left exposed a wide stretch of wet sand reflecting the sandpipers running over it. With his trouser legs rolled up, gesturing widely, David told her that the water was drawn far out like that before a tidal wave. He seemed elated by the prospect. She walked in step with him over the firm wet sand and through cool gusts of wind raised by the breakers. The flock of sandpipers rose up incredibly swift, skimming over the waves, turning so fast in one instant, flashing white, then dark. Far up the beach, the flock curved in again and landed. On the horizon lay a slate-blue bank of fog.

  “You want to bet tomorrow is foggy?” she said, hugging herself against the thought of it. “There’s nothing more dreary than fog by the ocean. Let’s go to the mountains somewhere. Let’s do that.”

  Once they had canceled their room, however, and carried their bags to the car, her desire to leave the town grew less and they spent several hours wandering the streets where the smart shops were, and they stayed on to eat a late supper out on the wharf. On the drive to the Santa Cruz mountains, he talked awhile about the day’s trivia, uneasy, she knew, over his changing voice; then he was silent. She asked him if he were awake and heard no reply, but she suspected that the night and their aloneness for miles forced him to dissemble sleep.

  It was past midnight when she drove into the parking area of a cabin motel, and whether he had slept for hours or had fallen asleep a moment before they arrived, he woke up only long enough to carry in his overnight bag and to undress and climb into bed. She switched off the paper-shaded lamp that stood on the small table between the beds and undressed by the yard light. She lay with her back to him and the room, her gaze on the vine that webbed the screen high in the wall, afraid to move, afraid that the small sound of the turning of her body would be enough to wake him.

  16

  The morning was hot and filled with the chitter of birds. David was already gone from the room when she awoke; she heard him talking in the yard with a woman. She peered out through the screen. The yard was struck with sun, a shock of white space in which she could not locate him.

  They ate their breakfast at a cafe near the motel and took the trail suggested to them by the proprietor, climbing up through the silence of the day that seemed to resound off the mountains in waves. Small lizards ran off the narrow trail into the dry grass, stopping to lift their heads and look back. David kept his eyes on a large bird circling so that he could name it for her; but it soared away as if it were swept off to the side by some wide current of heat. When she climbed ahead of him, he darted side to side so that his voice could reach around her, and when she came along behind him, he paused on the trail to turn and tell her something to her face, and sometimes he walked backwards. A dog was barking down below, and the sound was isolated by the silence, and magnified and like another sound, a sound she had never heard before, the barking of a beast that went by the name of dog. This discovery of the unfamiliar in the dog’s barking set off an elation in her breast. A delight in the preposterous. And she was delighted with herself for running away from her husband, for running away from her marriage, for running away from everything that bound her.

  She stepped off the trail into a clearing and sat down on a rock in the scanty shade of a tree, counting on the prosaic act of resting and smoking a cigarette to bring her down to the prohibitive world again. A long time ago someone had begun to erect a cabin in the clearing and had given up. Around them lay rusty chains and saw blades, a mound of yellow newspapers, pulpy and mixed with the gray stuffing of a moldy mattress; and the giving up, after hauling up the trail the materials of the future, was further cause for the ridiculous elation that the barking of the dog had set off. The sun was directly overhead, the shade was not enough, and the sweat ran down from under her breasts to where her shorts were belted in. David had taken off his shirt and was wiping his chest and face with it. Up in the tallest tree an insect was making a ringing noise, a high-pitched humming like a sound of torment, as though the sun was slowly burning its edges away.

  David spoke to her, but all she heard was the waiting silence after his voice. She wanted him to know her body again as he had known it as an infant or to know her body as he had not known it, like a lover who had been unconscious of who it was he had loved, who had loved a woman for a time and yet not known the person she was; and she wanted to know his body as she had known it and claimed it when he was an infant and as it would be in the years to come when he was apart from her, and she wanted this knowledge of each other to put them forever apart from everyone else, as covertly wise persons were apart. She glanced over at him as he leaned against a tree two yards away from her. Gazing at her, he looked stricken and pale in the sun, like someone waiting to be sacrificed. She ground her cigarette into the dirt. There were dry pine needles and rust-colored leaves on the ground, and as though she were concerned about starting a blaze, she continued to grind the cigarette with the sole of her shoe, sending all the wanting down into the earth.

  They went down the trail to the highway, he following her from afar. On the edge of the highway, as they walked together again, unspeaking, she placed her hand on his shoulder, needing to assure herself that she had meant him no harm.

  In the motel swimming pool, in the midst of countless children, she was kicked by beating feet, water splashed in her eyes and shouts rang in her ears, and she dodged small, sharp elbows. She often lost sight of him; once saw him talking to a girl a year or two older than he, both of them holding to the edge of the pool and with only their heads above water. The girl’s light brown hair in wet strands to the shoulders, the small, delicate profile, the unformed and forming spirit, brought her a moment’s anguish. Surrounded by splashing
young bodies, she suspected that if she were to drown she would not be missed, that she would lie at the bottom of the pool, and for hours, for the entire day under the sun, the young bodies would splash above her. Even when her body was discovered she would not be missed. So now, in the time before she was drowned, in the time before the water seeped under her cap and the chlorine turned her bleached hair green and she became a grotesque drowned woman, in the time before she was dead and revealed, she must experience a union with him that was more than with any other person on earth. It was not enough to have given him birth, it was not enough to be his mother, that union was not enough. Mothers were always of the past and never of the future. A boy rose straight up out of the water directly in front of her, bumping against her legs and breasts. For a second he looked at her with bright, unseeing eyes; then he struck away from her and was at once lost among the other shrill and splashing children. Frightened, she climbed from the pool, away from all the quick, contemptuous bodies in the water.

  When she had dressed, she walked down the highway to the cafe. She slipped a morning paper from the rack and was opening it to read at the counter while she drank her coffee when David got onto the stool beside her, his body wet, his bare feet coated with the dust of the highway. Unspeaking, they ate side by side, he with his back humped and his head bent down, and shivering a little. Some water ran down his temple, some dripped from his trunks to the floor. She was pleased with his alarm—it was like an outburst, a confession—and at the same time she was afraid of it and of the pleasure that she took in it.

  While he put on his clothes, she waited for him in the yard, and they walked for miles along the highway, past motels and cabins and streams. Not only the exercise but the immense, vertical, judicial monotony of the forest was tiring. She saw the forest as austere and disinterested, but she knew that, if they were to rest again among the trees, the judicial aspect would dissolve within the heat and the silence.

  On the way back they ate supper at a small restaurant in another motel, sitting at a green Formica table; then they returned to their cabin and lay down on their beds, flat on their backs, with their dusty shoes still on. The air was cool with the onset of evening and the yard light in the trees began to filter into the room as the twilight deepened. He slipped off her sandals and tucked around her feet the Indian blanket that lay folded at the foot of the bed. After taking off his shoes he lay down again on his bed, watching her. In the yard a group of guests were talking together. She knew by their voices and laughter who they were—provincials, churchgoers, probably off a tour bus.

  “Sounds like a bunch of fools,” she said. She sat up, lit a cigarette, and, leaning back against the wall, with the red glass ashtray on her lifted knees, she comically mimicked the voices, the cackling laughter, attempting to destroy the importance of the ones who saw no reason within the unreasonable and who never forgave an aberration. But she knew that her ridicule would fail if only because she wanted it to fail. She wanted those densely stolid persons out in the yard to interfere. They were judges, a convocation of judges.

  David lay gazing at her, absorbed by the suspect interplay of her low voice with their loud ones. When the group wandered away, she got up, covered him with a blanket, then lay down again under her own blanket. Later in the night she heard him undressing in the dark and lying down again. A wind was rising, rattling twigs against the roof, and she fell asleep within the mingling of darkness and wind and trees.

  17

  They returned to the city in the morning and found the house unlocked and all her husband’s belongings gone. He had taken nothing more than his personal possessions—his clothes and his papers and his few books on real estate and his skis, but all that was left, everything that belonged to the house and to her, was less, as if most of the intrinsic value was gone. After a few days, this devaluation of the objects passed and she began to cherish each one as if each were proof of her attempt to build a sound and lasting marriage. She polished silver, fine wood, and brass, and when everything was polished and the settlement arrived at—after hours in her attorney’s office haggling with Russell’s attorney—and the house and its furnishings hers and the divorce filed, she was again alienated from the house. Each time a man was gone from her life she felt that the time with him had deprived her of all sorts of possibilities with another, with others. She felt that she had forfeited another kind of life for herself.

  In the fall David began his first year in high school. Often he did not return home until a few minutes before supper, and after supper he wandered out again. She began going out to parties, as much to be with her friends as to avoid her son’s avoidance of her, and sometimes she was the last to leave a party, coming home in the early morning.

  With her cousin Teresa she opened a shop where imported craft was sold—brassware from India, sweaters from Sweden, glass from Mexico, something from almost everywhere. The shop was located in a block of other small, high-class shops—a florist and an interior decorator and a designer of chic maternity clothes. Sitting in a crimson sling chair all day, reading paperbacks, she was more bored than she had ever been in her life. With a graceful gliding down of her hands to pick up an object for a customer, with a graceful cupping of the object, stroking it as if it were alive, she attempted to engross herself in the shop, in the objects tinkling and glittering, fragile, transparent, iridescent, gilded. But the attempt failed, and she sold her interest and looked for another occupation to keep her away from the house and to engage her.

  She served as a volunteer saleswoman in a shop operated by the young matrons’ league to which she belonged; clothes discarded by wealthy women were sold there at very low prices and the proceeds given over to charity. The hours dragged while she fended off, with her cigarettes and mint chocolates, the stale smell of the place, of the dry-cleaned clothes mixed with the smell of shop dust. One afternoon, alone, she found the staleness unbearable. The staleness had got into the nice, clean garments that hung in rows under discarded prints of van Gogh and Currier & Ives and Chagall, also for sale; the staleness was in the shoes, worn to the shape of the past owners’ feet and whitened or blackened, and with new rubber heels; the staleness was in the thin carpet whose colors and pattern were worn down to a drab gray; it was in the table on which her elbows rested, the scars evident under the coat of chartreuse paint. It seemed to her that the staleness had been present in the garments even while they were being worn by whoever had bought them first, and that it was present in everything that covered the body or decorated the house because, soon enough, the dress and the vase and the rug and the necklace would all belong to the past. A light, cold rain was falling; the Chinese paper lantern with its silk tasseled cord, hanging from the ceiling, shook a little, and the wind suddenly banged against the door with the weight of a falling body. She put on her raincoat and locked the door.

  By taxi she went up the hill to the Mark Hopkins hotel and, after ordering a drink in the bar off the lobby, she telephoned the man she had spent the night with two nights before, a married man who kept an apartment of his own as a condition for remaining with his wife and two children. She wanted desperately to lie with him in the afternoon while others were at work, while others engaged in their acts of charity, while everything went on that always went on. She required his need of her in an hour when he ought to be engaged in something else, in whatever was the protocol, the ritual, the complexity of his occupation; she required the certainty that she had persuaded him to come to her for that hour and to postpone all else.

  “So I ran out,” she said, leaning back against the wall of the booth, her voice down low in her throat, her mouth close against the phone. “Let me tell you I couldn’t get out of that smelly place fast enough. I felt like I was smothered.”

  “Listen, Viv,” he interrupted. “I’m snowed under here.”

  “Me too, me too. Nicky, love, I know just how you feel.” She was unable to let him go, unable to get set for the plunge down into panic. “Listen, c
an you drop everything for a minute and come up here? I mean we can go and sit at the top, if you want, and watch the rain come down on the roofs way down beneath us. Don’t you think that’d be exciting?”

  “I can’t,” he said, his voice impersonal suddenly. “I’d love to, but I can’t.”

  “Well, if you’d love to, you’ve got to do it,” she said. “Think of all the opportunities you’ve had in your life to do the things you’d love to do and didn’t do. I met a man the other night whose brother just threw everything over and went to Tahiti. Thriving, really, a canning executive, just like you, only in St. Louis, can’t remember, or Iowa, and never came back. Got six mistresses over there, no seven, and all that beautiful scenery. If you’d try and make a list of all the things you let yourself miss, you couldn’t, you’d break right down and cry. Go on, start making your list. You don’t have to write it down, just make it in your head. Go on.” She gave him a few seconds and felt the loss of the hour, of the man, of whatever value she wanted him to impart to her with his acquiescent desire. “Listen, if you don’t want a drink, you might want to do something else,” she said, afraid that he had not understood the reason for her call. “You might want a different kind of break in the middle of the day. You want to go up to your place? You want to meet me there?”—trying with her husky voice, with the murmurous volition of her voice, to convince him of his need of her at that hour.

  “There’s nothing I’d like better,” he said. “But there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “Nicky, baby. Baby, you there?” she pleaded, her voice like her voice in his ear or over his body.

  “Viv,” he begged.