‘I guess you prefer college girls? I guess, at least, you’d have more to talk about?’
‘It’s not that.’ There’d been a time when he and Evelyn had talked about collective conscience, Emile Durkheim, her senior thesis on Marcuse and Schelling, her dreams of working for the UN. But when he last opened up the Durkheim he’d brought with him to Nevada, Lenny found it so boring that he’d let it drop under the bed, to gather dust with a volume of French poems in which Evelyn’s ex-boyfriend had left an inscription. ‘I just … never dated much before college.’
‘Oh.’ Terra’s face empties politely. ‘First love, that’s rough. But, hey, sometimes these things don’t work out and it’s nobody’s fault. I know with me and Ronnie—’
Lenny tunes her out and concentrates on the bright words on the other side of the bridge: Harrah’s; Nevada Club; Reno, the Biggest Little City in the World. ‘There was an attraction, sure. But it wasn’t based on any real sense of understanding. How could it be when we didn’t understand ourselves? I’m not saying that’s how it was for you, Lenny; I just want you to know, I want to understand. I want to help you be happy, any way I can.’
She is close and warm, smells of stale fried food. Whatever she’s willing to do for his happiness, Lenny is too tired to even think about. But she’s looking at him again with those eyes, and he’s reminded of how she looked in the parking lot the other night, and was that really only twenty-four hours ago? ‘I really think it would help you to talk about it,’ she says, so softly it’s almost an incantation. ‘What you liked about her. What you miss.’
‘About … Evelyn?’
Terra nods solemnly. He has a sudden hollow sense that they’re both just actors. Nevertheless, as if caught in a beam of light, he senses there’s a script he should be following.
‘She came from a nice family,’ he hears himself say. Then, because this doesn’t convey the point exactly: ‘Her family was really nice.’
Terra blinks, unsurprised as a doll. ‘That must be hard.’
‘Yeah, I guess …’ he muses, ‘They helped me out a lot. Last year—’
He wants to talk about his father-in-law, Tom: the hours they’d spent speaking about a future without bombs or firearms. His mother-in-law, Margaret: how stylish and vivacious she was, how like Evelyn, the happy Evelyn who’d smiled at him sidelong and cooked wonderful meals and listened to him like he was interesting. His sisters-in-law, Vicky and Sally-Ann, who seemed cool and clever beyond their years, doodling psychedelic patterns in their notebooks, writing nonsense verse and limericks, marching for peace like summery versions of Evelyn with their long, tanned legs and center-parted blond-brown hair. He wants to talk about how nice it was to be part of that, when just two Thanksgivings earlier his sister Beth brutally informed him that he was an ‘accident’, that if it wasn’t for him their mother would’ve left Dr. Lynden long ago.
‘For her, I mean,’ Terra cuts in. ‘Think about it. It’s easy for you, getting away from your parents. But what if your parents are nice? How d’you get away from that?’
It’s Lenny’s turn to blink now. ‘I never thought of it like that.’
Terra smiles.
‘I’m glad I can help you see things differently, Lenny. Remember: this is only the beginning. We’re entering the new age and, sweetie? Don’t take this wrong, but I think you could use some enlightening.’
7.
His arm around her chair is a spiritual presence as much as a physical one. If she were to lean back a few inches, she would feel it skimming the fabric of her blouse, a delicious lightness. Instead, she keeps her spine straight, her rear scooched to the edge of the seat, her ankles crossed. It is important that they do not overstate the carnal elements of their relationship.
‘I see so much sensitivity in the younger generation,’ Jim reflects. ‘A sacrificial spirit and social conscience that all of us, and I mean all of us, could learn from. You must have observed it yourself, Tom.’
Evelyn notices her father shift at the familiarity of ‘Tom’ and feels a prick of annoyance. Her father isn’t one to bristle at informality, normally. But Rev. Burne nods and answers mildly.
‘I speak with a lot of students. There’s a visionary quality to their idealism that, unfortunately, tends to be viewed cynically by those in power.’
Jim inclines his luscious blue-black head in agreement. ‘That’s what I’m saying, Tom. That’s what I’m saying. The idealists, the young visionaries: they’re our guiding light. Maybe that sounds cliché, but I can’t afford to be cynical.’ He glances down, eyelashes flickering delicately against the slightly sallow, slightly sagging skin beneath his eyes. ‘I owe the success of my church here in California to two things especially: people power, and the vision of young idealists like Evelyn. I thank you for raising such a finely strung, compassionate young woman.’
He smiles, and though the smile isn’t directed at her, Evelyn feels her heart squinch up with the corners of his mouth. He makes her so happy. Why can’t they be happy for her?
‘Of course, it isn’t easy being young in these turbulent times. Being a sensitive young person.’ Jim unloops his arm from her chair, leans forward, and takes another tuna sandwich from the barely-touched pile. ‘And it’s a tragedy to see the marriage of these hopeful, sensitive newlyweds fall apart. But I pray you won’t blame them for their failure. It’s a common situation: two young people have growing to do, and they grow apart. They couldn’t have known they were so poorly matched.’
Evelyn hears her mother sniff, and her hackles rise once more. She hardens her face without looking Margaret’s way.
‘We don’t blame Evelyn. Or Lenny,’ Rev. Burne says, shining his gray eyes from his wife to Evelyn. ‘But I think you can appreciate, it comes as quite a shock: we plan to visit our daughter and son-in-law, and we not only find her living alone, but a married man—’
‘Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. I appreciate your point, Tom. And I want to be completely honest with you.’ Jim chews thoughtfully. ‘I was faithful to a sick woman for two decades. My wife, Rosaline, hasn’t responded to me sexually for many years. She supports this relationship.’ He dispenses of his sandwich with another large bite and licks his fingers. ‘I can’t speak for Evelyn, but since she and I have been relating, there’s been an improvement, I think. Happier. More confident. And I know she’s personally brought me great happiness.’
His arm circles back around her chair. His chest heaves valiantly beneath his cherry-red shirt. ‘I look into your daughter’s beautiful blue eyes and I think, that’s a sensitive, idealistic woman. I’m gonna change the world with this woman. Yes indeed, I love her greatly.’
With a rhapsodic tilt of his head, Jim falls silent, and Evelyn feels herself drawn to his serenity like a trained cobra. His face in repose has something doglike, bearlike, warmly mammalian in its handsomeness that makes her want to lean close and stroke it. Why can’t they be happy for her?
‘If you love Evelyn—’ Margaret willfully steadies herself to address Jim, cotton-candy hair sticking to the tear-tracks on her cheeks. ‘Why don’t you divorce your wife? ’
Jim smiles gently, as if he’s been expecting this question. ‘I’ve offered to marry Evelyn. She’s uninterested at this time.’ He glances at her and shakes his head in bemusement. ‘She and Rosaline have a wonderful friendship in their own right. I don’t interfere.’
To Evelyn’s mortification, Margaret starts to cry again.
‘In this situation, it would be honorable to intervene,’ Rev. Burne speaks up, and there’s a quivering thickness to his own voice that makes Evelyn take notice. ‘Coming here, seeing our daughter living this way … it seems it’s she who’s making all the sacrifices. I can’t see anything, on your part, that suggests an equal—’ Rev. Burne bows his head and pinches the bridge of his sharp nose. When he looks up, his eyes are red-rimmed and fixed on Evelyn. ‘You deserve better.’
<
br /> Evelyn doesn’t know if it’s rage clogging her chest or something else. ‘How can you …’ she tries, but it’s all wrong — her voice isn’t supposed to come out choked. ‘How can you say that, when Jim sacrifices so much for others? When he has given me so much?’
She is ashamed of the tears sliding down her cheeks, of the makeup that comes off when she wipes her eyes. She is ashamed to have let them shame her.
‘I don’t know, Evelyn …’ Rev. Burne shakes his head. His voice is a pale-pink hatchling. His narrow shoulders begin to shake. ‘I don’t know …’
It isn’t the first time Evelyn has seen her father weep. He wept burying the stillborn baby boy Margaret gave birth to between Vicky and Sally-Ann. He wept receiving the news that Adora, the teenaged girl who’d lived with them for a year in Sacramento, had died in an auto accident. He wept at her wedding to Lenny Lynden. But this time is different, as Jim warned her it would be. This time is like scavenging birds at her entrails.
‘I’m happy,’ she spits. ‘I’m so beautifully happy. Why can’t you be happy for me?’
Saying it, Evelyn almost believes the only obstacle between her and total happiness is the dejection on her parents’ faces, the water dribbling from their eyes. She tries to focus on the refreshments laid out on the table: the plate of shortbread, the soggy sandwiches, the six coffee mugs — Vicky’s and Sally-Ann’s abandoned for a game of fetch with Picnic. Everything disappears in a messy blur.
‘I told you, darlin’,’ Jim murmurs, encircling her shoulder. She can feel a smile blooming on his broad, handsome face. ‘I told you they wouldn’t understand.’
The drive back to Davis will take two hours. Vicky has a date with Ivan Babenko, a ‘very tall, very pink-cheeked’ college freshman. Sally-Ann has to practice a guitar solo for her ninth-grade Christmas showcase. Margaret is weighed down by a bag of lemons. Rev. Burne wants to wash the station wagon.
‘It needs a wash,’ he mumbles into his moustache, giving the windshield a tap. ‘Waterstains. We had some rain.’
‘That old car,’ Evelyn replies without a trace of nostalgia. ‘Try vinegar.’ Then: ‘Lenny took the DeSoto. It was too large for me anyhow. He’ll take good care of it.’
‘I know he will,’ Rev. Burne says. When he hugs her goodbye, she doesn’t flinch in his arms as she often used to. He’s unsure what to make of this.
Jim Jones, the married minister, their daughter’s Brylcreemed lover, has remained in the cabin to use the phone. Rev. Burne is quietly glad he doesn’t have to shake the man’s hand again. Margaret is glad and not-glad; she’d been nursing a childish, vengeful hope that she might show Jim Jones exactly what she thinks of him, turn her nose up at him, spit in his face, anything but act the meekly weeping pastor’s wife.
‘When life gives you lemons …’ Margaret says in an abstract, annoyed tone, lugging the bag of lemons into the passenger seat with her. ‘What if I don’t like lemonade?’
Evelyn is already on the porch, facing toward the cabin, glancing back at the station wagon as they honk and stutter out, clapping and working her mouth at the rogue black-and-white dog. From such a distance, she looks pure and put-together, like a woman with a nice life, a nice husband her own age, no bruises, no secrets. Margaret tries to believe that this is how it is. But the thought of that man glistens like a gun.
‘The way he spoke about his wife. As if she were some madwoman in the attic,’ she laments as the highway appears beyond the tree-barred dirt road. ‘Evie is so smart! I don’t understand …’
‘She’s independent,’ Rev. Burne agrees. ‘Stubbornly so. I suspect she needs to make her own mistakes.’ He frowns in apparent concentration as he turns the car onto the highway. ‘It is interesting that he is a minister, and that she’s so resistant to marrying him. It shows a certain awareness of the Oedipal overtones. I’m confident it can only be a phase.’
They are silent for a long time, thinking of Oedipus, Electra, the mysterious attachments of firstborn daughters. The valley is blurred, full of winter strangeness. Vicky wonders if her parents ever psychoanalyze her in her absence.
‘Evie always had real weird taste in guys,’ Sally-Ann blurts. ‘Remember that gloomy Elliot Goldberg?’
‘Elliot Goldberg!’ Margaret manages a laugh. ‘I remember him tragically fleeing the house while we were entertaining that party from Modesto United.’ She shakes her head. ‘Poor Elliot. You’d think there was a dark cloud constantly raining dead puppies over his head.’
At this, they all laugh. Sally-Ann keeps it coming. ‘Remember that grad student who wouldn’t eat our pineapple upside-down cake? The one who was doing the radiation experiments on beagles?’
‘You know it’s a good day when we’re joking about dead puppies. Good grief!’ Margaret throws back her head and wipes her predictably leaking eyes. ‘Here I go again.’
‘Broken again.’
‘Drunkenly blubbering again.’
‘I wish,’ she laughs. ‘Oh, Tom. Do you think those seminary students will mind if I just plonk a case of wine and a box of crackers on the table and call it a night?’
Maybe there will be wine. Maybe the lamb shanks will turn out tough. Maybe the potatoes will burn. Maybe the seminary students will stay on too long, and Sally-Ann will make up parlor games, and Vicky will return from her date in her mother’s borrowed red trench coat not especially in love and help with the dishes. Maybe the lights in the family home will go out one-by-one to the song of students weaving on bicycles, bumping into traffic poles, and Margaret will lie beside her husband not thinking of their firstborn daughter still standing on that porch, barefoot, lips steaming, watching her lover’s headlights disappear because, after all, Saturday night is Rosaline’s night; on Sunday morning he must dress for church. Maybe she will sleep and when she wakes in a dry-mouthed hot flash she will already be sobbing into her husband’s pajama shirt: That man doesn’t know Evelyn! Her eyes are gray, not blue. Sobbing, and maybe he will tell her he loves her, and maybe, most likely, life will go on. They are a lovely family; they know how to laugh at life’s misery.
8.
‘Hey, stranger,’ Terra says as she slides into the passenger seat, and the joke is that they’re strangers and not-strangers; that they’ve known each other less than a week but passed every day of this less-than-week together, almost every waking hour. Long, talky lunches she always pays for and after-lunch walks by the Truckee, where they watch a St. Bernard try to catch a fish, and shopping in town where she buys a belt buckle for Brother Gene with an engraving of a mountain and steam train (‘Old dudes like trains’) and falls in love with a pair of cowboy boots, eventually leaving them with tears in her eyes (‘No, it just wouldn’t be socialist to spend all that money on shoes!’). Long shifts at the Silver State where the other guys look at him differently, offer him free tokes in the alley and invite him to play blackjack and, when he leaves with her every night, make V-licking signs behind his back. And after these long shifts, driving and parking or, as they’ve been doing more lately, going to the casinos to order Shirley Temples and talk about the empty money-driven lives of all those gamblers, because actually it’s getting harder to sit in a parked car with her and not get a hard-on.
‘Hey.’ Lenny smiles. ‘What’s that basket?’
‘You know, Dorothea? When she heard we were going to Pyramid Lake. I guess she’s worried we’re gonna get stranded in the desert and starve.’ It impresses him how Terra is already on friendly terms with everyone in her all-female boardinghouse when he can’t even remember his landlady’s name. She sticks her nose into the basket as he starts the car. ‘It’s just some fruit and PB&J. Oh, and hot chocolate? I told Dorothea you like chocolate.’
As he drives out of town, Terra talks indiscriminately of the people she likes: ‘Dorothea’; ‘Carmen’, an older waitress from the Silver State; Brother Gene and his wholesome blond family. Lenny is amused by Terra
’s affection for that same tall white cop whom Evelyn seemed to loathe; sees it as proof of Terra’s sweet nature, her open heart. She talks about Gene’s horses; his horse-crazy daughters, Dot the Virgo, Bobbi the Sagittarius; about his son Roger who took her bareback riding; wild horses; will they see horses today; will they see Indians? Lenny feels a sting of jealousy at the mention of Roger Luce, who he knows to be tall and handsome, and the sting surprises him, seems like a good thing. Like her voice filling the silence is a good thing, her body next to his, the special glow of being on the road with a woman and somewhere to go. They both took tonight off work, with Jim’s permission. Lenny knows better than to think about what exactly is being permitted.
‘I think I see the pyramid,’ Terra says reverently when the open highway and grayish-tan land gives way to gravel and ochre vegetation. ‘Oops. Nope. That’s just some mountain.’
‘We’re almost there,’ Lenny assures her, though all he really knows is that she’ll believe whatever he tells her.
When he finally sees the expanse of marine blue beyond the crests of rock, he feels unaccountably proud of himself, as if he’s responsible for discovering that vast body of water in the middle of the desert. ‘Groooovy,’ Terra drawls as he pulls off the road, and before he’s even drawn the keys from the ignition, she’s exposing them both to a burst of fresh air.
As she trips gracelessly ahead of him through the sand, his eyes are magnetized by the curve of her denim-clad butt. ‘It’s like that beach from Planet of the Apes …’ he tries to distract himself with conversation, then realizes she probably hasn’t been to the movies in a while, between screwing bikers and playing home-on-the-range with the Luce family. Plus, she’s struggling with the picnic basket. ‘Oh, hey. Let me carry that.’
‘Lenny, you’re sweet.’ Terra bats her eyelashes and gives him a smile so saccharine he feels queasy. But he shoves the feelings aside and smiles back.
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