Desert of the Heart: A Novel

by Jane Rule

  “Sil …”

  “Go along now. Don’t keep her waiting.”

  Ann had to go back into the Club to find Evelyn. Her own nerves were raw by this time of night, and she hated going back into the noise and crowds she had just escaped. As she pushed open the back door, she ran into Walter.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Having a drink on Bill,” he said, anger raising the pitch of his voice. “Really on him. I threw most of it on him. Where’s Evelyn?”

  “In here somewhere. What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Forget it.”

  “Walt?”

  “Listen, Ann, some guys, when they get hurt, don’t have the sense to keep their mouths shut. Bill knows a lot of people. Things get around. I just came down to see if I could knock a little sense back into him.”

  “What things?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Are you going to get Evelyn or shall I?”

  “I’ll get her, but I want to talk to you, Walt. I want to know what’s going on.”

  “She shouldn’t come down here. It’s no place for a decent woman.”

  “Has Bill been talking about Evelyn?”

  “And you. It’s partly your fault. I know you don’t care what people think. You can afford to be indifferent. But Evelyn isn’t a change apron. She’s a university professor. It makes a difference.”

  “What difference?” Ann demanded.

  “Sometimes I don’t understand you,” Walter said, tiredly, tightly. “But I’m a simple, heterosexual male with an unexceptional I.Q. I haven’t even got an Oedipus complex. My only problem is that I’m a reactionary about women. I still think that’s what they are.”

  “You’re a nice guy,” Ann said gently.

  “Exactly. I’m going home.”

  “Have a drink with us?”

  “Thanks anyway. I’m tired.”

  “I’m sorry, Walt.”

  “I’ll never mention it again,” he said, but his attempt at the old joke was not really successful.

  Ann watched him out of the door and then turned to find Evelyn. She was watching a blackjack game where the betting was heavy. Her eyes were passive, and the stillness of her body made her seem in a kind of trance.

  “I could leave you here all night and you’d never know the difference.”

  “Sorry, darling,” Evelyn said, smiling. “I wait here not to be in the way.”

  Ann regretted her sharpness at once. How was Evelyn to know that it was just her unobtrusiveness that made her conspicuous? How could Ann explain it to her? She did not understand it very well herself. Bill’s viciousness, even under the circumstances, was uncharacteristic of him. And Silver’s controlled jealousy made no sense at all. As for Walter, though his knight-in-shining-armor complex had sometimes made him clank a little, she had never heard him talk about decency before. Understandable or not, there was a conspiracy developing that Ann could not be indifferent to. In that much, Walter was right. She ought to protect Evelyn. But Ann did not know how to tell her not to come down to the Club again without offering an explanation. Damn Bill! Damn them all! Why couldn’t she and Evelyn be left alone? There was so little time. Evelyn would go to court a week from today, from yesterday by now. Only one week. Why should Ann say anything? Mightn’t it be better just to be silent, to take the time they had, live in terms of it, and then let the whole thing go? Perhaps that was what Evelyn was doing. She accepted the present because it bore no relationship to the future. And wasn’t that the attitude Ann herself advocated? Before she had known Evelyn, yes, but now the temptation to take what there was was not as urgent in Ann as the temptation to risk the present for the future. She did not want Evelyn now as much as she wanted a world in which Evelyn was always possible. But she did not know what world that was, and in her ignorance and in her need she was silent.

  Evelyn did not go down to the Club early on Tuesday night. She had been busy with her own work. On Wednesday, Ann explained that she would have dinner with Silver, Joe, and Bill after the rehearsal and probably have a drink with Silver after work.

  “Might you be out all night?”

  “I don’t think so, but don’t wait for me.”

  Bill was waiting for her on the sidewalk outside the new Episcopal church. Dressed in a business suit, he always looked both younger and sterner than he did in frontier clothes, a choirboy who had outgrown his innocence but not his moral malice. Ann checked her anger. She must somehow also check his for today and tomorrow. It could wait.

  “They’re already inside,” he said irritably. “You’re late.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ann said, her upper lip curling over her teeth. “I couldn’t find my plate.”

  It hurt him to have to smile at their old joke, but the habit was stronger than his will. And his reluctant amusement gave Ann a brief, unkind pleasure. Her cheerfulness grew more resolute. She inquired about the emotional state of the bride.

  “She’s having an argument with the minister. She’s determined to walk down the aisle. He says, without anyone to give her away, she should come in from the vestry. She says she’s giving herself away, and that ought to do.”

  “Is Joe being any help?” Ann asked, a straight question possible now that she felt herself in tentative control of his mood.

  “None at all. When the minister said there wasn’t any point in her coming down the aisle by herself, Joe suggested that she could take up a collection as she came. I decided to wait for you out here at that point.”

  “I wonder if the wedding’s still going to be here,” Ann said, as they walked up the steps together.

  “Apparently Silver is an Episcopalian,” Bill said. “And the minister has, thank God, a sense of humor.”

  “It’s all so unlikely,” Ann said.

  “That’s what Joe and Silver like about it.”

  Bill held open one of the great doors. Ann hesitated, caught for a moment by the direct, bitter regret in Bill’s eyes. There was no way around it.

  “Let’s be as civil and unsymbolic as we can, shall we?”

  “I’m making an effort,” Bill answered coldly, nodding her through the door.

  She walked by him into the church, empty but for the three quarreling figures at the other end of the center aisle.

  “Look, I’m a J-J-J-Jew, at nose and heart anyway,” Joe was saying as he sat down on one of the altar steps. “It doesn’t matter to me what we do.” Then he saw Ann and Bill and leapt up again. “Here are two more Christians for you, F-F-Father. Be consoled. The b-b-balance of power has shifted.”

  “What’s the problem now?” Bill called as they walked down the aisle.

  “Silver wants me to go one step f-f-further into the sanctum-s-s-sanctorum than I’m supposed to so that, when we kneel, I can have a s-s-substitute for my Adler Elevators. Help me reason with her, Ann. She’s not bigger than both of us.”

  A compromise was finally achieved. Silver would walk down the aisle, but Joe would kneel beside her on the proper step. The rehearsal could now proceed. Ann and Bill stood quietly in their places, listening to the vows and watching the ritual movements. A nervous seriousness had come over Joe. His stammer was more pronounced than usual, and he sweated a little. Ann wondered how he really felt about marrying Silver. That he loved her there was no question, but taking Silver to wife was no ordinary gesture. Joe was only two or three years older than Ann, a tiny, highly geared man, passionately indifferent to his job on the local newspaper, devoted to his ambition to be a highly successful writer of pornography. With his ghetto intelligence, his amoral sentimentality, and aggressive, delicate body, he had chosen in Silver as unlikely and right a mate as he could find. But Ann could not see why he would want to marry her. What relevance God’s holy ordinance had to their union she could not understand. The minister handed a prayer book to each of them, and the rehearsal was over.

  It was still early. They had time for several drinks before they went into the Mapes dining room for di
nner. There was an embarrassment among them when they sat down together. Bill and Joe had had an argument about who was to be the host. Silver and Joe had had an argument about what it meant to “plight thee my troth.” Bill and Ann were no more than unnaturally polite to each other, Ann’s attempts at humor, unsupported, did nothing but increase the tension. She reached for an inconsequential question to break the silence that had fallen.

  “Is it two weeks you’re taking off, Sil?”

  “I’ve quit, love.”

  “Quit?” Ann repeated, unbelieving.

  Silver looked at Joe. He picked up a prayer book and paraphrased as he read.

  “Almighty G-G-God, Creator of mankind, who only art the well spring of life, has already bestowed upon these His s-s-servants the gift and heritage of ch-ch-children.” He put the book down and smiled tenderly at Silver.

  “He means I’m pregnant,” Silver said, and she blushed willfully.

  “Didn’t you know?” Bill asked, a mild malice in his tone.

  “I haven’t had a chance to tell her,” Silver said, in the quickness of her answer a regret for any malice of her own in telling Ann this way.

  Ann sat very still, fighting down the angry panic that had come over her, for she had realized suddenly that it was not Bill’s stiff reluctance to be pleasant that was creating tension. It was her own presence, and Silver wanted her to know it.

  “Well, what do you think of that, love?”

  It could not have been an accident, not with Silver and Joe; and, if it had been, Silver was not without recourse. They wanted a child. Naturally. They wanted a child.

  “When she couldn’t adopt you,” Joe said, “she wanted a little f-f-fish all of her own, one the g-g-game warden couldn’t take away.”

  Ann turned to Joe, feeling that she would smash his face in, but in his expression there was nothing but nervous concern. And he was a little drunk. Perhaps they all were. What difference did it make? Any of it.

  “Order champagne, Bill,” Ann said, “We must drink to the new little fish.”

  Then she laughed with a free loneliness that broke the tension and gave them all, except Bill, a moment of pure relief. He ordered the champagne and offered an earnest toast to procreation. When they left the hotel, Joe and Silver parting for the last time before the wedding, they were all recognizably drunk.

  “That’s what I should have done to you,” Bill said, as they wandered down the street toward the Club. “Not man enough, that’s what, but I have to tell you something. I’ve solved my problem, I’ve got a girl who’s already got a baby and I’m going to marry her.”

  “Are you?” Ann asked.

  “Yep, aren’t I, Sil?”

  “You say so,” Silver answered.

  “Well, but I asked her last night.” He turned to Ann. “Right after that little bastard, Walt, pitched a drink at me. And she accepted.”

  “Joyce?”

  “That’s the one,” Bill said. “So listen, honey, I’m sorry about all that I said about your girl friend. Each to his own taste, eh? Shall we shake on it? No hard feelings?”

  Ann took his hand and looked up at him. He was beginning to cry.

  “It’s just that I’m moved,” he said, grinning, “by my own bigness of heart. I didn’t really mean to apologize. I’ve just had you fired,”

  “Jesus Christ, Bill, can’t you lay off? Don’t you think she’s had enough for a while?”

  “It was your idea, wasn’t it? You said I ought to fire her, like we fired Janet, for her own good. It’s for your own good, honey. After tonight, you’re free.”

  Ann turned away from them both and walked down the street. If she had any serious doubt about her own sobriety, it left her when she met Joyce at their locker. Her smile was the last, clean, sharp pain Ann needed to clear her head. She was so sober that she could keep herself from saying, “Thanks,” with all the gratefulness she felt. She was a good loser. As she offered careful good wishes, she was also offering a world that she had lived in a long time. It was odd that she should be saying goodbye not to Janet, not to Silver, not to Bill, but to Joyce, the kid she had expected to be fired within a month.

  Perhaps the champagne had not quite worn off, after all, for Ann walked through the crowd to the jazz beat of the machines with a lightness of spirit she could not explain. And, when she mounted the ramp and looked out over the familiar human landscape among whose guns and stage coaches and mirrors she had spent the last four years of her life, fiercely defending it, fiercely loving it, she had no sense of regret. “Fidelity to any human place, except the heart, seems to me a dubious thing.” Ann turned to the sharp whistle of a key man and went down to witness a payoff.

  At four o’clock in the morning, alone in her room, Ann began a series of sketches, shaping in lines what she could not shape in words, that curious variety of experiences for and against which man is required to bear witness. But the fragments did not satisfy her. And so at last she turned her pencil against herself, bearing witness against the witness she was, and let herself become one of her own cartoons.

  It was Evelyn who woke her early in the afternoon.

  “There’s a telegram for you, darling.”

  Ann reached for it, not awake enough at first to know what it was, but, as she unfolded it, she remembered. She read the brief, impersonal message which relieved her of her duties at the Club. She could pick up her pay check, turn in her hat and apron within the next forty-eight hours.

  “Anything wrong?” Evelyn asked.

  “No. Just a bit of Bill’s weak wit.”

  “What time are you due at Silver’s?”

  “A little after seven. Are you going to go with Walt and Frances?”

  “I thought I would.”

  “It won’t be much,” Ann said.

  “Weddings never are, according to Frances.”

  “She’ll have a good cry just the same. Maybe that’s why.”

  “You don’t much want to go, do you?”

  “Well, I’m less reluctant than I would be if it were my own.”

  “It was a long night.”

  “Very,” Ann said, but she kissed Evelyn only absentmindedly as she got out of bed. “Have you decided what you’re going to wear?”

  “I haven’t much choice really. I didn’t think, when I packed, that I’d be going to a wedding.”

  “I suppose not,” Ann said, grinning.

  “I have a blue dress that ought to do.”

  “Blue? Yes, I like you in blue.”

  And Silver in champagne. Ann had not seen her dress, and, when Silver opened the door to let her in, Ann was surprised into approval. Silver could never have been simply respectable, nor could she be subtly elegant. She had the preposterous figure of a Petty Girl, a gorgeous vulgarity of breast and thigh, and she displayed her body to the public with a professional flair, but often with a mockery of decorations. This dress had a pure boldness that was beyond indecency, and the only jewelry Silver wore was a real diamond and sapphire bracelet.

  “It’s gorgeous, Sil.”

  “I’m gorgeous, love. Joe picked it out. He says clothes don’t make the woman; men do, and they want to see what they’re in for. Drink?”

  “Thanks.”

  The Scotch had been set out on the bar. Silver reached for ice and did not measure as she poured.

  “I wondered if you’d turn up at all,” she said.

  “Did you? It never occurred to me,” Ann said, taking the drink. “I should have called.”

  “Did the telegram come?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry,” Silver said. “I’m so damned sorry.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I would have quit anyway. I just hadn’t realized it yet. I didn’t know you were going to, of course.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Ann said. “I don’t have to do anything.”

  “About Evelyn, I mean.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t have to do any
thing about her either.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Don’t sound so moral,” Ann said, smiling. “Joe can make an honest woman of you. I’m not in the same position with Evelyn.”

  “You’re going to let her go?”

  “I don’t even know that I have a choice. If I have one … no, I won’t let her go.”

  Silver went over to the bar to pour herself another gin.

  “Do we have time?” Ann asked.

  “No,” Silver said. “I’m just taking it. Both the bride and the groom have the privilege of at least fifteen minutes in which to contemplate what a sick, sick, fucking, Christ-awful thing getting married is. That’s what the book says—or words to that effect.”

  “Come on,” Ann said, taking the drink from Silver’s hand. “Swear to God and save the dirty words for Joe. We’re not going to be late.”

  “And what do I say to you, little fish?”

  “Nothing,” Ann said. “Be speechless. Come on.”

  Ann stood at the end of the long center aisle and looked at the backs of the hundreds of people who filled the church. On Silver’s side, the front pews were filled with her ex-employees, backed by a small army of ex-customers. Toward the back was a colorful representation from Frank’s Club out on their long break, the key men holding their hats, the change girls and dealers wearing theirs. Among them, looking as out of place as they would have in a Charles Addams cartoon, were Walter, Frances and Evelyn. Joe’s side was drabber, but as crowded, and here and there flash cameras sat on laps like small children peering over the pews. A door to the right opened, and Joe stepped out, as tiny and stiff as the groom on a wedding cake. Bill was right behind him. Ann turned back to Silver and smiled.

  “He looks like a prize in a shooting gallery,” Silver whispered. “Well, let’s go get him. I’ll help you carry him home.”

  The organ stopped playing. The crowd shifted and then stood as the wedding march began. Ann set out slowly and cheerfully down the aisle, past the bright shirts and white hats, past the sudden, quiet blue of Evelyn’s dress, past the cameras and business suits, past the pastels of prostitutes to the two men who stood waiting. Only once did she look directly at Bill, but neither he nor Joe was looking at her. Their attention was tensely focused behind her. Only when she turned to take her place did she realize that Silver was not following her. Ann looked back and saw Silver still standing where she had been. She must have been waiting to have the aisle entirely to herself, but a long moment passed, and she did not move. The organ went on playing. The minister nodded at Silver encouragingly. Still she did not move. Apparently, after all, she could not give herself away. Then Joe, as easily as if it had been planned, walked up the aisle to her and offered her his arm. They walked down the aisle together, and the women in the congregation began to weep their easy tears of vicarious relief and triumph. One more among them was about to be saved. Even Ann’s throat tightened as that ridiculous pair arrived before the minister to take the vows they neither believed nor clearly understood for reasons their unborn child only partially explained, for reasons neither they, nor those who witnessed this marriage, would ever quite believe or understand.