The woman said, over her shoulder, with a wild little laugh, “Yes! Beautiful.”
The hike that day to Wild Cat Canyon Peak would be a hike uphill, into the sun. Splotched light and shadow on the trail, momentary spells of sun-blindness. The woman was thrilled to be outdoors, and hiking with the man. This man, to whom she’d been introduced with great promise seven weeks, four days before at a dinner party in a mutual friend’s home in the north Berkeley hills.
The hike had been the man’s suggestion. Or, rather, in his oblique way, which might have been (the woman thought) a strategy of shyness, like her own, he’d simply told her that he was going hiking that weekend, and would she like to join him?
In this way, the man had not risked being rejected. The woman had been made to know that if she came with him she was accompanying him.
The woman and the man had gone on walks together, by this time. But a hike of such ambition, to Wild Cat Canyon Peak, seemed to the woman something very different.
She’d said, with her wild little laugh, “Yes! I’d love that.”
IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON. Several hours the man and the woman had been hiking. And now single file down the mountain from Wild Cat Canyon Peak they were making their careful way. The woman was descending first, then the man. For the man was the more experienced hiker and wanted to watch over the woman whom he didn’t trust not to hurt herself. She’d surprised him by insisting upon wearing lightweight women’s running shoes on the trail and not, as he was wearing, hiking boots.
She hadn’t thought to bring water, either. The man carried a twelve-ounce plastic bottle of water for them both.
The man had been amused by the woman. Just possibly, the man had been a little annoyed by the woman.
Yet, he was drawn to the woman. He hoped to like her more than he did—he hoped to adore her. For he’d been so very lonely for too long and had come to bitterly resent the solitude of his life.
At the outset of the hike it had been an unnaturally balmy day in late March. At midday, the temperature might have been as high as sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. Now as the sun sank in the western sky like a broken bloody egg darkness and cold began to lift from the earth. The man had suggested to the woman that she bring along a light canvas jacket in her backpack, he knew how quickly the mountain trail could turn cold in the late afternoon, but the woman had worn just a pullover sweater, jeans, and a sun-visor hat more appropriate for summer. (The woman’s eyes were sensitive to sunlight even with sunglasses. She hated how easily they watered, tears running down her cheeks like an admission of female weakness.) She’d confounded the man by not bringing any backpack at all with the excuse that she hated feeling “burdened.”
Now in the gathering chill the woman was shivering. If she hadn’t clenched her jaws tight, her teeth would have chattered.
The trail had looped upward through pine woods to a spectacular view at Wild Cat Canyon Peak where a stone monument had been erected to the early twentieth-century environmentalist landowner who’d left many thousands of acres of land to the State of California for the park. Then, the trail looped down, in tortuous switchbacks, to the trailhead an hour’s hike away, and the parking lot which would be “gated,” as signs warned, at 6:00 P.M. It was already 4:40 P.M.
At the peak, the man had taken photographs with his new camera while the woman gazed out into the distance, at the spectacular view. At the horizon was a rim of luminous blue—the Pacific Ocean miles away. In the near distance were small lakes, streams. The hills were strangely sculpted, like those bald hills in the paintings of Thomas Hart Benton.
The man had given the woman water to drink. Though she’d said she wasn’t thirsty, he’d insisted. There’s a danger of dehydration when you’ve been exerting yourself, he said. Sternly he spoke, like a parent you could not reasonably oppose.
The man spoke with the confidence of one who is rarely challenged. At times the woman quite liked this air of authority, at other times she resented it. The man seemed always to be regarding the woman with a bemused air like a scientist confronted with a curious specimen. She didn’t want to think—(yet she thought, compulsively)—that he must be comparing her with other women he’d known, and was finding her lacking.
At the peak, absorbed in his photography, the man seemed to have forgotten the woman. How childlike, how self-contained and maddening! The woman had never been so at repose in her self.
For nearly an hour the man would linger at the peak, taking photographs. During this time other hikers came and went. It was no effort for the woman to speak with these hikers briefly while the man seemed oblivious of them. It wasn’t his way, he’d told the woman, to strike up conversations with “random” persons. Why not? she’d asked, and he’d said, with a look that suggested that her question was virtually incomprehensible to him, Why not? Because I’ll never see them again.
With her provocative little laugh the woman said But that’s the best reason for talking to strangers—you will never see them again.
At least the straggly-bearded young man with the massive dog—the English mastiff—hadn’t climbed to the top of Wild Cat Canyon Peak.
But other hikers with dogs made their way there. A succession of dogs, in fact, of all sizes and breeds, fortunately most of them well-behaved and disinclined to bark; several trailing their masters, older dogs, looking chastised, winded. The damp subdued eyes of these older dogs seemed to seek the woman’s own eyes.
“Nice dog! What’s his name?”
Or, she’d ask, with widened eyes, “What breed is he?”
The woman understood that her male companion had taken note of her fear of the mastiff, at the start of the hike. How she’d tensed at the sight of the ugly wheezing beast that had to be the largest dog of its kind she’d ever seen, nearly as large as a Saint Bernard, but totally lacking the benign shaggy aura of the Saint Bernard. How she’d stared at the slobbering jaws and glassy blind-seeming eyes—as if in recognition of something not to be named.
And so at Wild Cat Canyon Peak the woman made it a point to engage dog owners in conversations, in her bright airy friendly way. She’d asked about their dogs, she’d even petted the gentler ones.
As a child of nine or ten she’d been attacked by a fierce-barking German shepherd. She’d done nothing to provoke the attack and could remember only screaming and trying to run as the dog barked furiously at her and snapped at her bare legs. Only the intervention of adults had saved her, she’d thought.
The woman hadn’t told the man much about her life. Not yet. And possibly never. Her principle was Never reveal your weakness.
Especially to strangers, this was essential. Never reveal your weakness.
In a technical manner of speaking the woman and the man were “lovers” but they were not intimate. You might say—(the woman might have said)—that they were strangers, essentially.
The woman liked to say to her friends, to amuse them, that she wanted not to marry but to be married. She wanted a relationship that seemed already mature, if not old and settled, at the start. Newness and rawness did not appeal to her.
“Excuse me? When do you think we might leave?”—hesitantly the woman spoke to the man, not liking to interrupt his concentration.
In their relationship, the woman had not yet displayed any impatience. The woman had not raised her voice, not once.
At last, the man put away his camera, which was a heavy, complicated instrument, into his backpack. And the water bottle, which contained just two or three inches of water—“We might need this, later.” The man’s movements were measured and deliberate as if he were alone and the woman felt a sudden stab of dislike for him, that he took such care with trivial matters, and yet did not love her.
There were no restrooms on the damned trail—of course. These were serious hiking trails, for serious hikers. Longingly the woman recalled the restroom facilities at the trailhead, a considerable distance downhill. How long would it take, to hike back down? Another hour? For male hik
ers, stopping to urinate in the woods was no great matter; for female hikers, an effort and an embarrassment. Not since she’d been a young girl trapped on a hateful long hike in summer camp in the Adirondacks, had she been forced to relieve herself in the woods. The memory was hazy and blurred with shame, and humiliation at the very pettiness of the discomfort. If she’d told this to the man he would have laughed at her.
Driving to the park that day, the man and the woman had felt very happy together. It sometimes happened to them, unpredictably—a sudden flaring-up of happiness, even joy, in each other’s company. The man had been unusually talkative. The woman laughed at his remarks, surprised that he could be so witty. She’d been flattered that, a few days before, he’d visited her art gallery, and had purchased a small soapstone sculpture.
The woman had slid over in the passenger’s seat, to sit closer to the man, as a young girl might do, impulsively. How natural this felt, a rehearsal of intimacy!
They’d spent time together in the woman’s house, upstairs in her bed—but they hadn’t yet spent an entire night together. The man felt self-conscious in the woman’s house, the woman felt as if the man were a houseguest, to be treated graciously and not intimately. She hadn’t been able to sleep yet beside the man for the physical fact of him was so distracting, he took up too much space in her bed. Naked and horizontal, the man seemed much larger than he did clothed and vertical. He breathed loudly, wetly, through his opened mouth, and though he woke affably when she nudged him, the woman had not wanted to wake him often. She’d resigned herself to lying awake, listening to him breathe. Yet, her physical discomfort was acute—I can’t sleep, I will never sleep if this man is in my bed.
The woman had not ever been comfortable with a man in close quarters, unless she’d been drinking. But the man scarcely drank. And the woman no longer lost herself in drink, that life was behind her.
On the car radio a piano piece by the Czech composer Janáček—the title was translated “In the Mists.” The woman recognized the composition within a few notes. She’d played the piano cycle years ago as a girl. Her eyes filled with tears as she remembered.
Through the somber, distinctive piano notes in a minor—“misty”—key the man continued talking, as if he didn’t hear the music. Avidly the woman listened to the piano notes and not to the man’s words but the man’s voice was suffused with the melancholy beauty of the music and she felt how she loved him, or might love him.
He will be the one. It’s time.
The woman was forty-one years old. The man was several years older, she believed. The two had been introduced by a mutual friend, closer emotionally to the man than to the woman, who’d said to the man You will like Mariella. You will like her face and to the woman Simon is an extraordinary person but that might not be evident immediately. Give him time.
The man had been the director of a distinguished research laboratory in Berkeley, California, for many years. His work was predominant in his life. Scientific truth was sacrosanct, unassailable, as it was impersonal and transcendent. His work was what he’d leave behind of himself. He was idealistic, a zealot for science education and the preservation of the environment. He was famously generous with younger scientists. He was a legendary mentor to his graduate students and post-docs. He’d never married. He wasn’t sure he’d ever been in love. He had no children, though he’d always wanted children. He was dissatisfied with his life, outside the lab. He felt cheated and foolish, that others might pity him. Especially those younger colleagues whom he’d helped in their careers.
He’d been disturbed earlier that year, visiting one of his protégés at the Salk Institute who was married, had several children, and a scientist-wife; the young family lived in a split-level cedar house on three acres of wooded land. In this household the man had felt sharply the emptiness in his own life, in the underfurnished rented house near the university in which he’d lived for more than twenty years, imagining a kind of pride since, from this house, he could so easily bicycle or walk to the lab.
He’d gone away from the young family’s house shaken and shattered. And not long afterward, he’d been introduced to the woman of whom it was said You will like Mariella’s face.
The woman was also lonely and dissatisfied, but it was others with whom she was primarily dissatisfied, not herself. She’d had intense relationships with men since college but invariably she’d been involved with several men at the same time, seeing them simultaneously so that she was prevented from feeling much emotion for any of them. At the same time, she was deeply hurt if a man wasn’t involved exclusively with her. She’d seen her mother obsequious in her marriage. Her tall handsome father hadn’t valued the wife who’d humbled herself for him; he’d left her, when the woman had been a child, and he’d rarely visited his children. All her life she’d yearned for the absent man even as she’d resented him. Her fantasy was her father returning, and she and her mother spurning him with gales of wild laughter.
She’d thought It’s insane to be vulnerable, as women are. Nothing is worth such hurt.
Yet, she was an attractive woman. Within a small circle of friends she was highly popular, admired. She dressed stylishly. She had many social activities. She’d invested wisely in an art gallery. Despite this, much of her mental life was preoccupied with how she appeared in others’ eyes. She could barely force herself to contemplate her image in a mirror: far from beautiful, not even pretty, her face too small, heart-shaped, her chin too narrow, her eyes too large and deep-set. She hated it, she was petite. She’d have liked to be five feet ten inches tall, to walk with an air of female swagger, sexual confidence. At five feet three inches, she had no choice but to be the recipient, the very receptacle, of a man’s desire.
It disturbed her that she was so detached from her family, her relatives and girlhood friends. In the midst of a buoyant social occasion something inside the woman seemed to switch off. She could feel the deadness seeping into her, the chill indifference. Her women friends close as sisters hugging her, kissing her at the end of an evening, a friend’s husband slipping his arm around her waist to kiss her, just a little too hard, with too much vehemence—“Good night, Mariella!” And the coldness in her responded I don’t give a damn if I ever see any of you again.
She laughed at herself, such emptiness. A hole in the heart.
She could have wept. She would soon be forty-two years old.
Yet it happened, in the new man’s company, the woman felt a rare hopefulness. If she couldn’t love the man it might be enough for the man to love her; enough for them to have a child together, at least.
(What would the man have thought, if he’d known how the woman plotted? Or were these harmless fantasies, not likely to be realized?)
(In the woman’s weakest moments, she lamented that she had no children; she would soon be too old for children. Yet, young children bored her, even her young nieces and nephews, who she conceded were beautiful.)
Now, making her way down the trail, eager to be out of the park that had seemed so beautiful hours ago, the woman was feeling disconsolate. The long rest at the peak had enervated her. The man’s indifference had enervated her. As the sun shifted in the sky so she felt strength leaking from her.
Brooding and silent the man was walking behind the woman, sometimes so close he nearly trod upon her heels. She wanted to turn to scream at him—“Don’t do that! I’m going as quickly as I can.”
So absorbed was the woman in the voice inside her head she only half-realized she’d been hearing a familiar sound from somewhere close by—a wet chuffing noise, as of labored breathing. The trail continued to drop, turning back upon itself; another, lower trail ran parallel with it now, and would join with it within a few yards, and on this trail two figures were hurrying, one of them, in the lead, a large beast running on all fours.
The woman heard panting ahead. A sensation of fear washed over her.
She had no choice but to blunder forward. Appalled, she saw the massive do
g ahead, unavoidable. The damp shining eyes were fixed upon her, not blind-seeming now, but sharply focused. With a kind of canine indignation quickly shifting to fury the dog barked at the stricken woman, straining at his leash as the straggly-bearded young man shouted for the dog to sit.
The woman knew better than to succumb to panic, certainly the woman knew better than to provoke the massive dog. It is always a mistake to expose one’s weakness. Her terror of what those teeth and sharp claws could do to her.
She couldn’t help herself—she screamed, and shrank away. It was the worst possible reaction to the dog that, maddened by the woman’s terror, leapt at her, loudly barking and growling, wrenching the leash out of his master’s hands.
In an instant the mastiff was on the woman, snarling and biting, nearly knocking her onto the ground. Even in her terror the woman was thinking My face. I must protect my face.
Behind her, the man quickly intervened. He seemed to her fearless, astonishing—pulling her back, behind him, shouting at the dog’s master to call the damned dog off.
Futilely the young man was shouting—“Rob-roy! Rob-roy!” The dog paid not the slightest heed to his master, viciously attacking the man, on its hind legs and pummeling him as if to knock him down, that it might tear at his throat with its bared, yellowish fangs.
The frantic struggle could not have lasted more than a few seconds. Fiercely the man tried to shove the dog away, striking it with his bare fists, kicking at it. The straggly-bearded young man yanked at the dog’s collar, cursing. With great effort he managed to pull the furious dog away from the man who was bleeding badly from lacerations on his hands and arms and face.
The man had been knocked to one knee. The dog might have torn out his throat but the young man yanked back hard, as if to break the dog’s neck.
The terrified woman was cringing behind the man. Always she would remember how unhesitatingly the man had leapt forward to protect her, taking no heed for his own safety.
Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories Page 3
