Desert of the Heart: A Novel

by Jane Rule

  “Now we’re getting to it.”

  “But Virginia Ritchie chose just that moment to slash her wrists.”

  “Jealous?”

  “Cut it out,” Ann said.

  “I’m just trying to get the picture.”

  “So I went to the hospital with her, and then, after Riesman and I had a little chat about my complexes, I stopped in at the Club.”

  “I didn’t see you.”

  “I didn’t go upstairs. There was this guy …”

  “Just tell me one thing: why didn’t you go home to mother?”

  “I don’t know. She’s—you know—different.”

  “Sure,” Silver said. “Different.”

  “Don’t you think some people are?”

  “This Evelyn Hall’s really rocked your boat, hasn’t she?”

  “Everybody rocks my boat,” Ann said, grinning suddenly. “There’s a cartoon that will sell.”

  Drawings never came singly. The first of these was the simple, comic sickness, passive, sexless. Then there was a man with an oar, beating off mermaids. In another, a woman wore a cockeyed red cross and was helping a wounded whale into her rowboat. They were good sketches, but, as Ann turned away from her drawing table to undress and to sleep, she was aware that she hadn’t caught herself. She did not often have the courage to. Instead she chose near misses to catch the breath but not to touch the heart. Aim at the apple on Master Tell’s head, not at the apple that tempted Eve. Eve’s Apple was her private sketchbook. In it were drawings she would not sell. They were drawings she often wished she had not made.

  Ann did not want to accept the view of the world she sometimes revealed to herself. Because she had named her needs and was determined to satisfy them, moral insight was a kind of despair. It involved judgment. To judge was to condemn. In Eve’s Apple were the portraits of the condemned, cruel, comic, tender, indifferent. Her mirrored insights, Ann was not sure whether they were reflections of conscience or vanity.

  Ann lay down and stared at the ceiling. From the hall below, she heard Evelyn calling to Frances. Ann closed her eyes, guilty not of erotic visions but of the ridiculous, beautiful inhibitions or desire, an infant’s lust for nurse or nun, for virgin mother. Ann sat up abruptly. What would you say, doctor, if you knew that my secret sin was dressing the world in virtue? Infantilism. She lay down again, and, self-mocking, curled herself into sleep.

  Frances woke her several hours later with the news of David Ritchie’s arrival.

  “Where is he now?”

  “Downstairs.”

  “Has he been to the hospital?”

  “No,” Frances said. “I think he hopes you’ll go with him.”

  “Oh, grand.”

  “I hated to wake you up, but I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “Oh well,” Ann said, swinging out of bed, “sleep is only one way of passing the time of day. How is he?”

  “Very upset, I should think.”

  “And contrite?”

  “I hope so,” Frances said firmly.

  “You have an attitude for every occasion, Frances.”

  “Don’t be ugly.”

  “It’s four o’clock now. Get me coffee and juice. I’ll have dinner downtown.”

  “Ann, where were you last night?”

  “Shacked up with a drunk from Frisco in the Rancho Something-or-Other Motel.”

  “Oh, Ann!”

  “Now, be a dear, Frances, and get me some coffee.”

  David Ritchie was dressed in his wedding suit. Ann did not know why she was sure of it, except that he looked such a used groom, a service button in place of his white carnation, guilt instead of fear trapped in his doubtful eyes. He was still a new husband five years after the fact.

  “I wanted to talk to you,” he said, holding the car door open for Ann.

  “Sure,” Ann said. As she watched him walk around the car, she wished she had offered to let him drive. “Do you want to go somewhere for a drink?”

  “Coffee?”

  “Sure.”

  “Could you tell me exactly what happened?”

  As Ann reported the details she knew, careful to keep her own interpretation of the events to herself, she wondered how useful exactly-what-had-happened could be to anyone. She remembered her own repeated questioning of Frances. What had her father said the night before? Exactly what had he said? How did he look in the morning? Where did he say he was going? Now, again, when the man phoned, exactly what did he say? Had he seen the accident himself? When did the doctor arrive? Ann had asked the same questions over and over again, had taken the answers away with her and worked over them, trying to reconstruct the death until it was as accurate and vivid as if she had been there herself. Even if she had been there, would seeing it have made her understand any better than she did now?

  “How much blood do you think she lost?”

  “I don’t know. As I told you, they gave her a transfusion at the hospital.”

  “Could you guess?”

  “I really couldn’t.”

  “A pint?”

  “Look,” Ann said, “can you estimate pints from a wet diaper?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “The thing is …” Ann went on more patiently, “that she’s right there to ask about it. Here’s a coffee shop. Do you still want to stop?”

  “If you wouldn’t mind.”

  Ann waited behind the wheel as he hurried around the car to open the door for her. His careful manners must have been taught him by his mother and not his father. He was subservient rather than protective. Every gesture was an apology for his manhood.

  “Do you want to hear my theories?” Ann asked, after they had ordered coffee. He nodded. “I don’t think Virginia had the slightest intention of killing herself. I think she had come to the conclusion that she didn’t want a divorce and didn’t know how to admit it.”

  “She wants me back?”

  “That would be my guess.”

  “Did she tell you about … us?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “She said she couldn’t ever … well … be my wife again. She wouldn’t even see me. And she said the kids mustn’t see me.” He stared at his coffee. “I don’t really blame her.”

  “Because you got drunk and went to bed with one of the girls in the office?”

  “Then she did tell you. …”

  “Oh, Dave, come on. You’re not really that contrite.”

  “What if she’d died?” he demanded.

  “She had no intention of dying.”

  “How do you know?”

  Ann paused. “I don’t really.” She was tired and vaguely ashamed of herself. If she was going to play God, the least she could do was to be good at it. And she was very bad at it with people like David Ritchie, with all the tourists. Just as she was certain of melodrama, she caught the faint, peppery odor of something quite other. Conscience? She didn’t know.

  “Will she see me?”

  “She asked for you,” Ann said.

  “Do you think she’ll give me another chance?”

  “Try her.”

  David Ritchie looked straight at Ann and swallowed, obviously moved. “I will,” he said.

  Ann would not have been surprised if, at that moment, the room had been filled with organ music. She imagined that David walked out of the restaurant in time to his own private wedding march. They drove to the hospital in silence.

  “I want to thank you, Ann … for everything.”

  Her father used to say, thanks for the sugar or a fur coat or a kindness, his voice an exaggerated haughtiness, “I’ll never mention it again.” Ann said, “Good luck, Dave.”

  She watched him walk up the hospital steps, not Everyman so much as Anyman, carrying his little guilt like an offering to the shrine of his wife’s righteous indignation. It was after six. Ann would have no time for a meal before work. She’d get a sandwich in her long break.

  “So all stories have a happy ending,” she told Si
lver as they stood together at the cashier’s counter, signing their IOU’s.

  “You need to get some sleep,” Silver said.

  “You don’t have to block my view. It doesn’t bother me.”

  Silver shrugged and turned away to her station, leaving Ann to watch Joyce and Bill, who leaned together at the other end of the counter, silently looking into each other’s eyes.

  “You want any change tonight, or has the boss got other plans for you?” the cashier asked.

  Bill started away from Joyce, embarrassed. Joyce turned to the cashier, bared her teeth, and then winked at Ann. Ann smiled before she turned away.

  “Ann?”

  “Yes, Bill.”

  “Has Silver spoken to you?”

  Ann looked up at him, questioning.

  “About the wedding?” he continued.”

  “Yes.”

  “They want us to witness together.”

  “I know.”

  “Are you going to?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  “It’s a little awkward. I …” he hesitated.

  “There’s nothing in the rule book about the witnesses having to be one flesh, is there?” His jaw tightened. “Bill, give up on it. It’s all right. And we don’t have to change the world over it. We can still go to the same weddings.”

  “Don’t you ever …? No, I don’t suppose you would.”

  Miss you, Bill? she wanted to ask. Yes, I miss you. Find it hard, Bill? Yes, I find it hard sometimes, but not as hard as it might have been if we’d gone on with it.

  “Tell Joe you’ll witness, for him.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Bill said.

  “You must have had a rough night last night,” Joyce said, swinging up onto the ramp with almost professional assurance.

  “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you, love.”

  “What are you feeding me?”

  Ann grinned and turned to a customer to make change. Two ramps away, under the wheels of an old stage coach suspended from the ceiling, Ann saw Janet, tired at the beginning of this Friday evening, the beginning of their week. Tomorrow Ken would take the baby down to the City. Then, of course, Janet would have time to sleep, if she could sleep. The days were so very hot. Ann’s own tiredness was insignificant, really. The energy she had spent was only the extra change she had found in a coat pocket, at the bottom of an old purse. Janet was drawing, day by day, on her life’s savings.

  “You stay on with the first relief,” Ann said to Joyce, “and take your break when I get back.”

  “You trust me?” Joyce asked.

  “I told you the place is full of mirrors.”

  “It’s not tips I want to pocket.”

  “I don’t own him. You’re welcome to him,” Ann said, stepping off the ramp before Joyce had a chance to reply.

  “You’re in a hurry,” the relief said as they passed on the floor.

  “I haven’t had any dinner,” Ann said. She took off her apron quickly, put it in her locker, and then stopped at Janet’s ramp on the way out. “I was wondering if you wanted to stay in town this week. We may have an empty room at my place by tomorrow. Anyway, I could put an extra bed in my room.”

  “Oh, thanks, Ann. I don’t know. There are so many things to do at home. Could I think about it? I’ll talk to Ken.”

  “Sure.”

  “I could let you know tomorrow.”

  Janet could not stay in town. With Ken and the baby away, she needed the house. It had become her Pandora’s box, the last place on earth where hope was trapped. While she waited, hope was the only company she could keep. Ann nodded to her refusal as they checked in on Saturday night.

  “You look awfully tired, Ann,” Janet said.

  “It’s the heat, that’s all. Every summer I think I’ll buy an air conditioning unit for my room. Then I never get around to it. Anyway, when I can’t sleep, I sometimes get some work done.”

  “What’s the latest on Lady Suicide and Anyman?” Silver asked as she joined them.

  “They’re flying off together into the sunset tonight,” Ann said.

  “It’s the B movies that always make me cry,” Silver said. “And speaking of B movies, Bill told Joe he’d stand. Have you heard I’m going to be a bride, Janet?”

  “I had heard, yes. Congratulations.”

  “According to the best books, you should congratulate Joe.”

  “Brides are always hypersensitive,” Ann said.

  “It’s losing their maidenheads and all,” Silver explained to the back Janet had turned to her. “Now what have I done?”

  “Nothing,” Ann said. “Ken took the baby down to the City today. She’s edgy. That’s all.”

  “Jesus, I’m tactful.”

  “You didn’t do anything, Sil.” Ann looked up at the great grotesque of a woman, stricken with unimportant, misplaced guilt, and wanted to laugh at and comfort her in the same moment. “Come on. We’ll be late.”

  As they pushed open the doors of the casino, the cold air cracked and pounded and shrieked and moaned with the Saturday night that was going on inside. All hands had been called, the brightly-shirted, white-hatted crew, riding herd on the shifting crowds, their hands on the silver. Across the floor, the down escalator, like a slow motion waterfall, fed the already flooding sea, the drain of doors clogged, backing up.

  Separated at once from Silver, Ann made her way through the crowd slowly, her eyes choosing paths that closed before she could follow them. Often she stood still, waiting for a way to move, then touched an elbow or shoulder or waist, carefully, gently moving the bodies of strangers out of her way. Before she reached the escalator, she had settled to the infinite patience, to the isolated peace she almost always felt in this crowd. Reality was so powerfully and presently restricted that nothing outside it had meaning. The plane that was taking off at that moment for San Francisco was no more than the conventional end of a magazine novella. Evelyn and Frances, sitting together over coffee, were passengers on a train Ann had not taken. Even Janet somewhere ahead of her and Silver somewhere behind her were lost in an archaic image of time and space.

  “Christ!” Joyce said, as they met on the ramp, “Silver wasn’t kidding about Saturday night. It’s hell.”

  Ann had time only to nod. Hands reached up on all sides, for change, for jackpot payoffs. In less than an hour she was at the cashier’s desk, buying more silver, and it seemed to her that she had sold most of it again before she was able to reach her ramp. Raised above the floor, it was like a small island of safety, but the currents of the crowd pulled her away from it again and again. She could hardly hear the shouting of a customer against the pounding, erratically belching machines, the spilling silver, and the magnified, disembodied voices of her friends, competing for the attention of the board.

  “I was beginning to think you’d never make it,” Joyce said.

  “So was I,” Ann answered, as they crossed at the center of the ramp, back to back so that their aprons would not foul.

  “Where in hell’s the key man? I’ve got eight jackpot payoffs waiting, two machines out of order.”

  “Here he is now,” Ann said. “I’ll witness this end.”

  “Mexican coins in the quarter machines downstairs. Keep an eye out,” the key man said.

  “Which eye?” Joyce growled good-naturedly. “Is he kidding?”

  “More or less,” Ann said, checking the coin escalators in the quarter machines while she made change. “Anyway, we’re all right now.”

  “Will you look at that?” Joyce said, nodding to the end of the ramp.

  A girl, dressed in white and burdened with orchids, chewed gum to the rhythm of her dime machine. Three machines away her button-holed groom idly spent his spare change. Ann went down to the five-dollar bill he waved.

  “Buddy, you’ve got the wrong idea,” the man next to him shouted.

  Another dug him in the ribs and made an obscene gesture. People nearby made faces of laughter, stared, nudged, poi
nted, began to press closer. The young groom continued to play his machine.

  “Why doesn’t somebody tell him?” the man next to him yelled.

  Shouts burst free of the already terrible noise, single catcalls, high notes of laughter. The young groom began to eye the crowd, watching for a way to get out. Someone thumped him on the back. A drunken grandmother rumpled his hair. When he shrugged her off, she grabbed at his carnation. He turned suddenly into the crowd, trying to shove through, but no one made way. His bride, separated from him now by a dozen people, chewed her gum and played her machine.

  Ann leaned over and shouted into her face, “Get him out of here before they tear him to pieces.”

  The bride in the white dress looked behind her, then back at Ann, and shrugged. The groom was moving away now with a mob escort of crude advisers and well-wishers. He smiled, got angry, smiled again. Only once he looked anxiously over his shoulder, but he could no longer see his bride.

  “What a wedding night, eh?” Joyce shouted. “The bride’s got a jackpot.”

  Ann reached for the microphone and read off the number of the lucky machine, her quiet voice sounding accurate and colossal across the room.

  Sunday morning, battered out of bed by the brutal sun and church bells, Ann sat at her drawing table, making exhausted sketches of the Detached Man and the Self-Contained Woman. Evelyn knocked and came in with juice and coffee.

  “It’s awfully hot up here, Ann.”

  “I don’t notice it much.”

  “You go ahead and work. I just want a book or two.”

  Ann nodded and turned back to her table.

  “Oh, before you settle again, Frances and Walter were talking about having an early picnic supper.”

  “Could you tell Frances I have to be out for supper tonight?”

  “All right.”

  Evelyn took the books she wanted and quickly left the room. Ann turned with the closing door, about to speak. Instead she put her head down on her arms, but it was too hot for even private melodrama. She could not cry. She could only sweat. Suffering was a winter luxury. Now all she did was balance her tiredness between work and work, the silent satire of her room and the crashing sentimentality of the casino. It was too hot, she was too tired for love.

  Willfully cut off not only from Evelyn but from everyone in the house, Ann tried to take rest also in her less voluntary isolation from her friends at the Club. Bill, giving more time to Joyce, gave less attention to his angry sorrow. And, as Ann felt relieved of his need, she was also relieved of her own desire for Bill. Silver’s growing preoccupation with plans for the wedding left Ann a little more wistful, but she was grateful, too, to be less often the direct object of Silver’s strong, crude verbs. On both Monday and Tuesday evenings, no one interrupted Ann’s rhythm of work. The hands that signaled, touched her sleeve, asked for nothing more than the change in her apron. Provider for and witness to the world, she stood on her ramp, surrounded by guns, reflected in mirrors, alone. Even Janet, working nearby under the weightless bulk of the hanging stage coach, was too preoccupied with worry to share it. When on Tuesday night Janet’s relief was late, Ann only signaled from a distance to let Janet know she could go home. Ann would wait.