Desert of the Heart: A Novel

by Jane Rule

  She sat up and stared across the lake to the naked rock of the northern shore, to the sky which only a few moments ago had been a clear, empty blue.

  “Is that a storm blowing up?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. It’s pretty far away.” A fresh, damp gust of wind came in off the water. “We probably ought to eat. Are you hungry?”

  “Yes, I think I am,” Evelyn said.

  She watched Ann wade out for the bottle of wine, that young, beautiful body she had so carefully admired an hour ago to take her mind off the terrors of the landscape. Its sudden erotic power bewildered and offended her, whose taste and decorum usually governed her private thoughts as firmly as they governed her public living. Evelyn blushed with impatience and embarrassment. Physical response was no more significant than a hiccup, a sneeze, a twinge of gas, functional disorders which caused discomfort but not alarm. If she were to mistrust her own psychic health and morality every time she crossed her legs during the ballet or the reading of a French novel, she would keep a psychiatrist and a minister as busy as a hypochondriac keeps a doctor. It was not important. To exaggerate a single kiss into significant guilt was a real loss of aesthetic distance. And Ann was not a child. It was no traumatic experience for her. Ann had found the bottle and was wading ashore. She did not force her steps. She moved with a slow, unconscious grace. Evelyn turned away and looked for a cigarette.

  “Are you getting cold?” Ann asked. “Shall we change?”

  “I’ll just throw a jacket over my shoulders.”

  Their conversation, during the meal, was desultory and inconsequential. Ann was being entertaining. Evelyn, reluctant to ask Ann to control the situation, was nevertheless grateful to be moved in time and mood farther and farther away from the moment. Sudden, near lightning startled them both, and, as the first large drops of rain fell on the beach, they hurriedly gathered their belongings and started toward the car, leaving their unimportant intimacy like a scrap of paper on the empty beach.

  “May I drive?” Evelyn asked, as they reached the car.

  “Sure, if you like,” Ann said, handing her the keys.

  The wheel, firm and restricting in Evelyn’s hands, gave her back a simple feeling of authority and independence. She was in control, and she had an excuse to keep her eyes away from the vast expanse of desert, away from Ann, carefully on the long, straight road back to Reno. Evelyn wanted to keep the storm behind them. Her foot hard on the accelerator, she drove toward the sunlight to the south, toward the open blue of the sky, but it was a losing race. The storm bellied over them, beyond them. Rain and wind struck the car at the same moment, knocking it almost off the road. Evelyn held the wheel firm in her memory of where the road had been. She could not see. Ann reached for the windshield wipers.

  “A real cloud burst.”

  Evelyn nodded, driving more slowly, leaning forward to see, playing the car against blasts of wind that seemed to come from every direction. She was not at all frightened now. The storm was a simple force that could be met and challenged, a welcome violation of the desert. Even the skidding gravel and the sudden disappearances of the road could not shake her confidence. Then, as they dropped over the crest of a hill, the rain stopped, and before them was a valley of brilliant, burning sunlight, arched with rainbows, edged with lightning. Its beauty broke into Evelyn’s vision like an explosion.

  “This is the desert of the heart,” Ann said quietly.

  “No!” Evelyn said, refusing to shout because she refused to lose control of herself.

  She held the car steady through the aweful sunlight and back into the storm. As they reached the outskirts of Reno, in the full night of the storm, the culverts that had been dry three hours before roared with water. Low places in the road were flooded. Evelyn drove slowly, watching the red brake lights of the car ahead, which wavered through the watery darkness like giant fireflies.

  “This is the most incredible place,” she said quietly, “the most incredible world.”

  “Is it?”

  “I’ve never seen a storm like this.”

  “You’ve been driving it like a veteran.”

  “Well, I did get us here, didn’t I?”

  “With determination,” Ann said, laughing.

  “I want a good, stiff drink when we get home.”

  “You shall have one.”

  A drink muted the desperation of Evelyn’s confidence. Sitting in the living room with both Frances and Ann, she began to relax into the decorous kindness and self-possession that was her habit, but, when Walter came in, she used his arrival to achieve her own departure. She went to her room, which was now familiar as well as impersonal, cell and sanctuary, a comfort as ambiguous as her work which she turned to at once. She read until she was ready to sleep.

  Evelyn’s dreams that night were literally pedestrian. Childhood playmates, half-forgotten acquaintances, college friends, several quite unlikely colleagues, walked casually and continuously through the peculiar, storm-shadowed sunlight on great crosses of pavement, crucifixes like airstrips flattened against the desert. They said nothing. They did nothing but walk up and down the hours of the night, limited by patterns of concrete. Evelyn was not in her dreams. She witnessed them as if her vision encompassed the world, and she was aware that she had created it; yet she could not, or would not, feel responsible for it. As she recognized one after another among the girl children, the young women, the aging female relatives, each seemed to merge with an image of Ann. Then Ann had the face of Carol. All the figures were Carol, and words which were neither seen nor heard thought themselves into the landscape, creating it again: “This is the desert of the heart.” Evelyn, distant, omniscient sleeper, stirred in disbelief, woke in protest.

  At once she had a perfect knowledge of the dreams’ significance, followed by a perfect contempt for the lies they told. With love she had condemned no one but George to a wasteland. These dozens of females, Carol-faced and Ann-bodied, were aberrations of an overactive and naïve conscience, a ridiculous melodrama of the psyche.

  But Evelyn’s mind, informed, logical, and ruthless, could not quite destroy the image of the dreams. All day she struggled through desolation toward an oasis of work, and she did not arrive. It was her mind that betrayed her with fragments of other visions, worlds of words juxtaposed. Out of them she involuntarily composed a hollow woman prayer of her own, rhetorical, mocking, terrible, from the Twenty-Third Psalm, The Inferno, and The Second Coming.

  “It’s your Sunday school morality that drives me up the wall,” George said. “You’re so God-damned sure of yourself you don’t even have to believe in God.”

  She kept her back to him and went on kneading the bread dough.

  “You have the I.Q. to go mad but not the emotional courage.” She went out the back door to get the clothes off the line. “All intelligent women are latent homosexuals. I like you in trousers.”

  She was on her knees, weeding the garden.

  “They say husbands often have their wives’ nervous breakdowns. I wonder if I’m going through yours.”

  She was ironing his shirts.

  “You’re so kind to me, so forgiving. If only you could be generous enough to have sins of your own, I could forgive you.”

  Surely guilt and goodness will follow me all the days of my life unless I can dwell in the desert forever. For Thine is the … City of Dis, the River of Blood, the Wood, the Burning Sand. There is no beast to wake. There is only yesterday’s empty cradle relieving no one of the future. They are innocent, these suicides, profligates, blasphemers, sodomites, and usurers, against whom God, Nature, and Art have been violent. Only the good can be guilty. And surely guilt and goodness will follow me all the days of my life unless I can dwell in the desert forever, a voluntary exile, a permanent resident.

  “But I can’t,” Evelyn said aloud. “And it isn’t necessary. At the end, I can go. At the end, I’m free.”

  She would not cluster fragments of memory into fixed shapes of fear and failur
e. If she had been wrong before, the error was in her nature, not in her will. She had never excused herself. She had never indulged her weaknesses as if they were needs. Surely she could not be judged for a nature her will had never consented to. She had been good.

  “I have been good.”

  But wrong, over and over again, wearing one ill-fitting uniform after another of the world’s conventions. The only dress that ever suited her was her academic gown, but it was hardly appropriate for the daily occasions of her living. She could not be a wife with a wardrobe for parades.

  “I should never have gone back to the university at all.”

  But what else could she have done? Clumsy, terrified of machinery, she had spent one month, overalled and goggled in a shipyard, making an incredible amount of money that she did not need. A signed letter of protest to the San Francisco Chronicle about the treatment of the American Japanese lost her a more reasonable job with the government. She had finally settled on volunteer work at Oak Knoll Naval Hospital where she spent her days writing angry, apologetic love letters for armless and eyeless sailors. The evenings she spent sitting at the desk in her one-room apartment, writing love letters of her own to George, her old friend and new husband, somewhere in the Pacific. Or she visited next door with Carol and the baby. She often wrote to George about the baby. She knew it was silly, but, after she had talked about the books she had been reading, there was not very much else to say. They had both overwritten the past until speaking of it was like rehearsing a play after the production is over. And each of them was reluctant and superstitious about speaking of the future. They had to write of a suspended present, of which most of the details were either censorable or not interesting enough to record. The only person with whom Evelyn could share the unimportance of her day was Carol, who like Evelyn, only waited for the war to be over. If Carol had gone on waiting, perhaps Evelyn would have, too.

  “What else could I have done?”

  Carol, standing there, saying in so flat a voice, “It’s happened.”

  “What?”

  “Sam’s dead.”

  Evelyn had gone back to Carol’s apartment with her. They had sat together, waiting for grief. It had taken time, but they were patient, and when it came, Carol did not really weep. She began to rock herself gently and then to wail, high in her throat, like a distant singing. Evelyn sat beside her, an arm around her shoulder, letting her rock, letting her croon her song of disaster into the early hours of the mild California morning until the factory whistles screamed in the day.

  “You must sleep now,” Evelyn said.

  She undressed Carol and put her to bed. She could not stop rocking. She would not stop wailing. Finally Evelyn changed into one of Carol’s nightgowns and lay down beside her.

  “Sleep now.”

  Carol turned into Evelyn’s arms, her face pressing against Evelyn’s breast. As she began to suck, the rocking and wailing stopped. Evelyn looked down at the infant grief she held in her arms. She rested a hand on Carol’s temple and watched over her long after she had fallen asleep, Evelyn’s own grieving sympathy turning slowly into rage.

  For this curled need in her arms could be the end of waiting, months and years wasted in longing until, at last, the desire for comfort and nourishment could be nothing more than a perversion of the flesh, a blind sucking. Carol would wake, and in decorous forgetfulness they would cancel out this night. The baby would also wake, his need reason enough for the day. But, if George were to die, what day could Evelyn wake to? What day did she wake to even now, the meaning of her life dependent on a man she had not seen and would not see for months, might never see again? There was no role to play. There was no marriage. Not now at this moment. And this moment was all there might be for her or for George or for anyone. If George were teaching, if George were writing a book, his coffee, his shirts, his card catalogues would be purpose enough for Evelyn. But he was not teaching and writing. He was on an island somewhere, waiting to kill or to be killed. He could not help it. She could not help him. Even his underwear was the business of the United States Government.

  “Then I’ll teach. I’ll write. I’ll make a world for you.”

  She had been wrong. It was not a world for George. It was a world for herself, but she had not meant it so.

  That first week after Sam’s death a letter had arrived from George. Evelyn did not know what to do with it. She went to her own apartment almost guiltily, not so much to find privacy to read the letter as to hide it from Carol, but Carol followed her into the room.

  “Letter from George?” she asked. “It’s all right. I had one from Sam, too. Even dying takes a while by mail. I wonder how many more will come.”

  “George isn’t dead,” Evelyn said angrily.

  “I’m sorry,” Carol said. “Evelyn, I’m sorry.”

  They had forgiven each other, but their absent husbands, who had once made up a part of their friendship, became an awkwardness between them, Sam forming the large letters of his canceled future, George minutely and conservatively reporting the present. Carol, for Evelyn’s sake, did not speak of Sam, and Evelyn, for Carol’s sake, did not speak of George. The silence gave the two women a reserve that perhaps protected them from an intimacy they did not quite forget and did not really wish to remember; and it may also have helped Carol to give up her memory of Sam. It forced Evelyn to move George from the center of her concern into the few quiet corners of the day that she could save. At first, she had found it difficult, but gradually, after she had returned to the university and was busy with teaching and preparing for her Ph.D. examinations, George’s minor role in her life seemed quite natural. She had, after all, lived with him only several months before he had gone overseas. Before that she had been a student. A student again, working in a world she understood and valued, Evelyn was really very happy.

  With the baby, Carol could not work, but she needed money. Evelyn needed time; so she paid the grocery bill, and Carol did the cooking. It was pleasant to come home to a meal already prepared, to see the baby, to tell the day, and then to settle to work. Sometimes Carol went out. Evelyn enjoyed that, too, for often, when she was alone with the baby, she allowed herself to imagine her own children.

  There was nothing unusual in the relationship between Evelyn and Carol. It grew out of affection and circumstance. There must have been relationships like it all over the country, young women separated from their families and friends, separated from their husbands, living at the quiet edge of oceans, waiting together. When the men began to come home, first from the Atlantic, then from the Pacific, there was enough joy and relief and inexperience to cover regret. Carol married again just a month before George came home and moved east with her new husband. Evelyn might have been lonely if her own future had not been immediate.

  Nothing unusual. Nothing at all. Except, perhaps, that single night. And surely grief excused the blind, passionate needs of the flesh. For the rest, the moments of unacknowledged tenderness and vague desire, the unconsenting will must surely ransom nature. And, if Evelyn sometimes looked back on that year with Carol, remembering ease and delight, it was no betrayal of George. Evelyn simply accepted the new knowledge that friendship is a happier, less significant relationship than marriage. And one she would prefer? It was not a thought she allowed herself. George had said, after he had been out of work for six months, “What you need is a wife, not a husband. That’s what I should try to be.” Perhaps it was true. At the time, Evelyn could not have admitted it. She not only worked but insisted on doing all the jobs around the house. She cooked like a farmer’s wife, baking her own bread, canning. She would not send even the sheets to the laundry, and, though she loathed sewing, she made her own clothes. If she could not bear a child, there were a hundred other conventions through which she could prove she was a woman. And George would never have played wife. They were very alike really, she and George. He had frenzies of building cupboards, mending the roof, chopping wood. They lived in the middle of Berkel
ey as if they were homesteading a thousand miles from civilization. Yet nothing they did could cancel the central failure each felt in himself and in the other.

  “So we’ve given up. We’ve admitted it. I’ve admitted it. What difference can anything make now?”

  As some people cannot smoke, as others are poisoned by alcohol, Evelyn could no more than entertain despair as a habit of mind. Even as she scorned the old image of herself, she could not give it up until she could find another to replace it. And, though her mind admitted a number of possibilities, her imagination continually faltered. Sitting across the dinner table from Ann, Evelyn studied her with the intensity and distance she might have given a painting. What she saw was no longer an imperfect reflection of herself but an alien otherness she was drawn to and could not understand.

  Evelyn did not know any longer who she was. Perhaps she had never known. Perhaps her identity had always been made up of bits and pieces of other people, her thumbs, her collarbone, her ears, her left-handedness, even the tones of her voice dictated by the random and absolute coupling of genes. Her tastes and her moods had been handed down to her from a great uncle, a second cousin, a father. Not exactly handed down. Everyone was the common property of inheritance. The self was, surely, the will that shaped the arbitrary and meaningless fragments into identity. The will chose. Or was it, too, dictated to by an inherited morality?

  “But my particular bones refuse my will.”

  Mistaken then. Badly mistaken. The will? Or the nature?

  “I don’t know.”

  The will bakes bread the nature chokes on. The nature turns the wheel the will breaks on.

  “I don’t know.”