All this is trivial, in a way, but it gave me a queer, lost feeling to be sitting there on the station platform gazing out over several hundred square miles of desert with the death-in-life of Los Palos at my back. I was nervous. My pipe tasted bitter and strong in my mouth and my heart felt as though it were beating faster than was necessary. There was no use speculating on why Jerry had sent for me, but the fact that he had done so bothered me. I had expected when we said goodbye to each other in New York that we would meet again rarely and casually. There had been an atmosphere of finality about that parting. Jerry, I had felt, now was a part of my past, but hardly of my present. And suddenly he had sent for me, begged me to come at any cost. All the way out on the Limited I had wondered whether he needed me because of Selena, and some quarrel he had had with her. Or perhaps the loneliness out here . . . But Jerry was not that sort of person. He knew how I felt about his wife, and he was proud, much too proud to admit that he was lonely with her, or that I, who of all people had been most opposed to his marrying her, could do anything to help him. Jerry never needed help.
And yet, what else could he want? He knew that it was inconvenient for me to come . . . I gave the whole thing up, but there was something disquieting about it just the same.
My own thoughts annoyed me. They were born of nothing more than irritation, perhaps, at being kept waiting in a dismal little town with nothing to do and a bad breakfast in my stomach. Los Palos was not my kind of place; I was incongruous in it. Even my clothes were ridiculously good and wholly inappropriate for such a town. I started to call myself a fish out of water until I looked again at the leagues of desert. They made the phrase a ludicrous understatement . . . Litotes, the Greek word for it was . . . There was no water out there, no water and even no moisture except perhaps, in the center of some cactus plant or the veins of a rattlesnake. There was nothing at all out there. Except one remote, minute, crawling pennant of dust with a dark speck at the head of it.
For three-quarters of an hour I watched that plume of dust come nearer. It grew with agonizing slowness, but long before I could make out the details of the car I felt sure it must be Jerry. Now and again the sun caught the windshield and flashed brightly back at me, sometimes car and dust cloud were hidden behind a brown swale in the valley floor, but as I was finishing my second pipe it swung up over a last rise down beyond the water tower, crossed the tracks, and roared up to the station.
My first thought was that Jerry looked marvelously well. He was wearing a white shirt, open at the neck and with the sleeves rolled up; his face, his neck, his forearms were burnt dark with sun, and his hair was bleached to a pale gold color. He jumped up on the platform and ran toward me. Again I had a moment of uneasy surprise. Never that I could remember did Jerry run except when he was playing some game. He sauntered toward you, usually. But now there was an eagerness in him; I knew at once that he was more than ordinarily glad to see me, and that, too, surprised me. But he gave me no time to think or to be surprised.
“Hi, Bark!”
“Hello, Jerry.”
“Sorry to be so damn late. Got a flat halfway here and lost a lot of time.”
“That’s okay,” I told him. “I’ve been giving Los Palos the once-over.”
He grinned swiftly. “Swell place, isn’t it? You ought to see it Saturday nights. Some of the stores stay open till half past eight or nine at night.” He looked at my bags. “These your things?”
“Well,” I said, “the rest of the crowd has gone and left these, so I better take them.”
“Hell,” he said, “it’s swell to see you.”
We got into the car. “By the way, want to pick up anything before we pull out? Last chance.”
“Listen,” I told him, “if you know a quick way out of this place, for God’s sake, take it.”
“Hold on,” he said and put the accelerator down on the floor-boards. We went out of Los Palos like a bat out of a belfry, and I didn’t look back. When we cut across the tracks and hit the desert road we were doing all of fifty, and in spite of the one-track, sandy cart trail we seemed to be on, we kept going like that. The big Packard swallowed the countless turns and dips and pitches of that road with a sort of dizzy recklessness, and after half an hour or so I began to feel uneasy at our unrelenting pace. After all, if anything happened, we were already a thirsty day’s walk from the nearest town, and the mountain range ahead of us appeared to be no nearer, I looked tentatively at Jerry. He was sitting easily behind the wheel, wrenching the car around the curves and meeting the savage roughness of the road with a sort of negligent carefulness that partly restored my confidence.
“Don’t spare the horses, you hard-riding Westerners,” I suggested.
He looked at me fleetingly. “It gets hot out here after eight o’clock in the morning,” he observed and went on driving.
And it was beginning to get hot. I took off my coat, vest, and tie, and stowed them in the rear seat, nearly getting pitched out in the process. Then I lit another pipe and tried to relax while we burrowed down one slope and up on the opposite side without slowing for an instant. From the station platform the country over which we were driving had looked fairly level, but I now saw that there was no flat stretch in it. And no end, either, though after a while we began to go up more often than down and I deduced that we were headed up the far side of the valley. The range ahead of us began to look less naked; I could make out trees in some of the canyons and we commenced to run quarteringly across a series of draws in which there were a few small, dry bushes.
I looked back. Los Palos was small and clear in the desert air, shrunk to the size of a Chinese ivory carving. Now and then its image wavered as I looked at it; the heat was beginning to rise from the baked sand and bare rock of the earth between. The ridges, the sharp, unweathered angles of the rocks, the wild, jumbled rise and fall of the land gave me a sense of isolation. Man was a stranger to this sort of country; it belonged on some airless planet circling sun-ward of the earth. I looked again at Jerry, glad that I was not alone, and saw in his face something that I had overlooked at the station. For all the brown of his skin, it was tighter over the bones of his face. There were wrinkles at the corners of his eyes that I had not seen before, and his lips were thinner and set together with a nervous firmness. He had to watch that devil’s road with all the concentration in him, of course; at the speed we were traveling, but even that failed to account wholly for the tension in his face. And I had the feeling that though he was glad I was with him, he wasn’t thinking about me much. Something else was occupying the part of his mind behind his driving reflexes. And I did not have the faintest idea what it was.
Sometime after eight o’clock in the morning our road turned gradually left and southward, and after a while we were running parallel to the mountains west of us. The motion up and down the barrancas began to be almost as regular as a long ground swell. After several miles we came to a deeper draw with a steep face to one side, and along its base a patch of shade. Jerry pulled the car into it and turned to me. In the sudden silence I could hear the bubble, bubble of the water boiling in the radiator.
“We’ll stop here a little and cool off,” he said and got out of the car.
We walked around some, and I told him it was lonely country.
“Yes,” he said. “It takes time to get used to it. Then you love it.”
“I suppose so.”
Suddenly he looked at me and grinned. “Hell, I forgot. We have breakfast.” He rummaged in the back of the car and brought out a thermos of coffee and several bacon sandwiches. I thought of another picnic meal—how long ago?—that we had eaten together on the running board of a car. I hoped this time . . . and then shut my thoughts off. The coffee was hot and exceptionally good.
“Selena seems to make better coffee than most brides,” I said to him.
He pushed at a pebble with his foot. “I made this,” he said. “Selena doesn’t cook.”
“None of the old biscuit jokes need a
pply?”
“No. She doesn’t really care much for food, one way or the other.” His voice implied he hadn’t said everything that was in his mind.
I wondered if this was his way of getting at something he wanted to tell me. “Well,” I observed, “at any rate, you certainly have it all over the Sanitary Lunch so far as coffee is concerned.”
“God, don’t tell me you had breakfast there!”
“Four bits’ worth.”
“I’m sorry. We should have stopped before. I just kept on driving without thinking, I guess.”
I finished my second bacon sandwich. “It’s okay. This makes up for it.”
“Too bad we haven’t any Scotch.”
So I knew he was thinking back too, but I made up my mind not to let him know. “Oh, hell, I’ve signed the pledge, or practically so. Abstemious is the word for me these days.”
He was silent a long time. “I’m glad you’re doing so well at the job.”
“I wouldn’t say that. But it’s an improvement over my performance awhile back. Hell, Jerry, I owe you an apology for a lot of things. I acted like a fool.”
He didn’t look at me. “You had reasons. In a lot of ways they were good ones.”
“I didn’t even have an excuse, really.”
He got on his feet and began walking up and down in front of me, looking at the ground. “Listen, Bark. Before we get there, I want to talk to you a little while. So you’ll know what you’re getting into and why I wired you.”
“All right.”
“First of all, don’t get the idea there’s anything wrong between me and Selena. I—well, I’m more in love with her now than I was when we got married.”
“Sure,” I said. “You’re a couple of swell people.”
“Thanks. And I’m going to sound like an ass when I tell you what’s on my mind. In one way, I’m happier than I’ve ever been before, and in another—well, everything’s just enough wrong so I’m worried.” He wet his lips and went on. “You aren’t married, so I don’t know quite how I can explain it to you. It’s just that everything goes so far, between us, and then it stops.”
I started to say something and stopped, embarrassed.
“No, It’s not that . . . We—I mean, the sex part of it is all right. It’s something I can’t put into words, exactly. But when you’re in love, you want to give everything to the person you love. Sex is only one aspect of it. Does this make any sense to you?”
“Of course, it does.”
“And you don’t only want to give everything to the person you love, but you want to be given everything in return. It’s a two-way proposition for each person.”
I quoted:
“My true-love hath my heart, and I have his.
By just exchange, one for another given.”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s got to be a just exchange. That’s the point.”
“And it’s not that way?” I asked him.
He stopped walking and faced me. “I feel all the time as though she was holding something back. Sometimes it’s almost as though she felt I wasn’t old enough to know something. And I can’t find out what it is. What it is she knows that I don’t. There’s something in between us, that’s all. And yet, she loves me, Bark.”
There wasn’t anything in this that I couldn’t give him a comforting answer to without having to open my memory to that fantastic story Parsons had told me, that story of Luella Jamison. There was, thank God, a more plausible explanation.
“After all,” I said, “you make her sound as if she had a sort of mother complex. And that’s natural enough, in a way. Don’t forget this is your first marriage, but it’s her second.”
He began to pace back and forth again, kicking at stones. “No, that’s not it.”
“Of course, it is.”
He shook his head, “Don’t forget, she wasn’t married long. And to LeNormand. That first marriage doesn’t count.”
A premonition of something unpleasant went through me; I don’t know what I expected him to say next, but what he did say shocked me for a moment.
“You see,” he said in a low voice and without looking at me, “when we got married she was a virgin.”
After I rallied from that sudden statement it did not appear so surprising after all, and I felt glad for him in an inexplicable way. And then I saw what he was getting at. It made it all the harder to explain something that he felt was missing between them.
At this moment a sense of loneliness so acute that it was almost like fear came over me. I remembered the bleached sterility of Los Palos with nostalgia. Here in the middle of an enormous and lifeless desert I was talking to the man who had been, who still was, my best friend, and yet if I could in any way have escaped from him I would have done so at once. No reason for my sudden gust of feeling presented itself, but I knew that I ought not to be there, that already the whole horrible web of circumstance that had caught us both and changed us, and from which I thought I had escaped, was closing in on me again. I looked at Jerry, and the tightness of his face began to make me feel afraid. He had changed, and there was a long gap of unshared time between us. A time when we had been growing and altering in different directions. I was afraid not of him, but of what he wanted with me.
“So you see,” he was saying, “it isn’t the ordinary thing at all. We’re not unhappily married. Don’t get that idea.”
“Hell,” I said, “I haven’t got any idea at all.”
He looked straight at me. “I’ve got to try to tell you what’s bothering me and then I want you to tell me something. Something that I’m sure you know. You’ve got to know it.”
“All right,” I said. “Anything I can tell you I will.”
“Selena and I got married pretty quickly after LeNormand’s death,” he said, and there was a perfectly objective tone in his voice; I could not tell whether he regretted the fact or not. “The rest of you didn’t approve of that. One of the things you and Dad both said, at various times, was that we ought to know each other better. You remember that?”
“Yes,” I told him.
“Why did you tell me that?”
It was a question I did not want to answer, so I parried it as smoothly as I could. “I guess both of us felt it was a little too rapid for, well, for being entirely sure of your happiness.”
He looked disappointed. “I imagined that was Dad’s idea, but I thought maybe you had something more definite in your mind.”
“No,” I said at once.
“Well,” he went on after a pause, “it wouldn’t have made any difference.” He stopped as if he wanted me to agree with him, or disagree. I couldn’t be sure which.
“I don’t see what you’re driving at.”
“Damn it!” he said harshly. “I don’t know any more about Selena than I did the day I married her.”
His voice seemed to ring in the trench of the barranca where we were. The sound of his words seemed to expand, to go into the ground and penetrate the rock wall under which we were standing. It echoed in the air, in the heat, in the sun that encompassed us. A year and a half had passed since Jerry had married Selena. In all that time she had not told him who she was or where she came from, then. The only possible explanation was the story Parsons had told me, the terrible theory that Selena was Luella Jamison.
He was watching me closely.
After a while he went on. “I don’t know if I can explain it to you. You know how, in stories, some little habit of the wife’s or the husband’s grows and grows out of all proportion in the mind of the other until finally there is an explosion? Well, that’s the way it is with me. And I’m afraid of the explosion. Bark, do you know that everything Selena ever says to me is based on nothing but the present or the future?” He stopped a moment and looked down the ravine and out across the desert. “You don’t notice how many things people say that go back to their childhood, or to their past. People they refer to, things they remember, familiarities with this and that. Everybody
is like that and doesn’t know it. Everybody but Selena.”
“Listen,” I said to him. “She had a shock, don’t forget. Naturally she doesn’t want to think back of that.”
He sighed. “No, Bark. She’s talked to me often enough about LeNormand, in a funny sort of way, and quite a good bit more about Collegeville. Faculty wives and all sorts of things. But never anything at all before that.”
I was afraid to ask what was in my mind, but I knew that it was then or never. “Doesn’t she ever talk about her family, even?”
He stared at me with dry eyes and a set mouth. “No. Never. That is—” and he stopped suddenly.
“You see,” I said, “you’re holding something back. It isn’t so bad as you make out.”
“Once,” he said, and his voice was tighter than before. “Once she said something about her family. At least, I suppose it was her family.” Then he was silent for quite a while. “It was when we were on our honeymoon in Bermuda. We had a little house to ourselves, you know. One night I woke up. Our bed was by the window and the full moon was coming through it in a perfect flood of light. She was lying there in it, in the moonshine, asleep.” He licked his lips and went on. “I saw her lying there, lovely, perfect, asleep, with the moon full on her face. You know how beautiful she is?”
I nodded.
“Well, I can’t tell you exactly what just looking at her did to me. It somehow made me a bigger person after a while. I stopped being myself or knowing anything except how much I loved her. And I leaned over finally and kissed her, and she woke up. She looked at me a minute and I could see she wondered why I had waked her. And then she smiled a little as if she knew how much I was loving her, and moved over closer to me. We lay there and looked out the window at the moonlight on the lawn and the trees and the distant ocean, and didn’t speak. Finally she sighed a little, or I thought she did, and said something in a low voice. It was meant to be to herself, I reckon, but I overheard it.” He stopped again.
The Rim of Morning Page 19
