Desert of the Heart: A Novel (12 page)

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.

When the relief did arrive, it was quarter to four. All Ann’s friends had gone. The few change aprons and key men on the graveyard shift were strangers to her. So were the tactful janitors who cleaned around late customers, a gay, drunken party of locals, scattered traveling salesmen, and a couple of old women, spending their pensions. Just as Ann stepped up to the cashier’s desk to check out her apron, a great trolley arrived, already loaded with sacks of change. The two cashiers turned away from Ann to the more important business of the night’s cash clearance. Ann stood, patiently counting out the stray coins from her change dispenser. Thirteen dimes … no, fourteen … no, twelve. She counted again and tried to stack the coins. They toppled over. Ann’s hand shook as she restacked. The nickels fell over. She stopped to rest, her elbows against the high counter, her head down. She tried again. Her hand shook violently. Her eyes focused through tears. She did not know how long she had been standing there, how long she had been crying. Odd to be crying.

“All right. Come on. Let’s have it,” the cashier said impatiently.

Ann kept her head bowed while the cashier took the count.

“You’re out fifty dollars.”

“I can’t be,” Ann said, trying to focus on the rolls of change, trying to count.

“Well, you are. Where’s your paper?”

“Paper?” Ann repeated, fumbling at the pocket in her apron, which was behind the change dispenser. “That’s it. Here we are.” She handed the cashier fifty dollars in paper money. “Sorry.”

“Are you going to make it home, kid?”

“Sure.”

“Don’t forget your locker key.”

“No.”

Ann found herself outside. The heat had fallen down over her like a sack. She struggled to breathe, to see, and found her way to the employees’ entrance as if it were at the other end of a maze. Her card, when she punched it, read four forty-five. She was still crying as she climbed the stairs to her attic room, as she took off her clothes and lay down to sleep. Tired. She was just tired. But for a long time she did not close her eyes. In the ruthless desert dawn, she still stared at the slanting ceiling and waited for the inevitable intensity of the full morning sun. Then, resigned, she slept.

Ann did not get up until late afternoon on Wednesday. She went over to the table and looked at her drawings of the Detached Man and Self-Contained Woman. Wryly she scribbled down names of new characters: Share Bath and Basement Suite, All Found and Unfurnished. Among these couples of forlorn comics, she would find a few for sale. But she hadn’t time or energy to begin sketches now. She herself was only semidetached and felt personal about everything. Even her body was so vulnerable that it was compromised by the heavy frontier pants she had to pull on. In her stiff, announcing boots, in her tight-sleeved, tight-necked, loud shirt, she threatened herself in the long mirror. But it was Wednesday. Tomorrow was her night off. Then she could rest, dressed in her own clothes.

“Ann, you look dreadful.”

“Thank you, Frances.”

“I’m serious. Do you feel all right?”

“Yes, I feel fine.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re home tonight for dinner. All this running around, not taking time to eat …” Frances was interrupted by Walter and Evelyn, who came into the dining room, carrying their glasses of sherry.

“So I said ‘Sold!’” Walter turned to Ann, put an arm around her waist, and almost lifted her from the floor. “Girl Childs, today I am a man.”

“What’s all this?”

“I’ve bought a car.”

“Hold dinner, Frances. We’ll go out and smear him with oil.”

“Isn’t it a shame I’ve already been circumcised?”

“Walter!”

“Sorry, Mom. Anyway, I’ve got wine for dinner.”

Walter followed Frances into the kitchen. The tones of his voice were loud and deep with pleasure, and Frances’ protesting laughter was almost girlish.

“He is excited,” Evelyn said, smiling. “You know, he almost makes me wish I’d had a son.” Ann looked up sharply. “He’s very generous with his pleasure.”

“He said he wasn’t going to buy a car until next summer.”

“But he got an awfully good buy.”

Ann shook her head. She wanted to disapprove, but she knew she was simply disappointed. She had liked loaning her car to Walt. She wasn’t really possessive of him, was she? Obviously, she must be. And now a little jealous, too? Her guilt made her angry. How long did Evelyn Hall think she had a right to stay, threatening Ann with her self-possession, her candid gentleness, her intelligence, her decency, until Ann could not eat a meal in peace, until she was driven out of her own house? Why couldn’t Evelyn leave her alone? Why did Evelyn leave her alone? Ann grinned. Fatigue and irritation had not quite canceled her sense of the ridiculous.

“All right, Walt,” she said, as he came back into the room, “I want the full story.”

“You’ll have it. What’s more, you’re going to have a demonstration. I’m going to pick it up on your way to work. Will you come with us, Evelyn?”

“I’d love to.”

Frances declined the same invitation. She would wait for a ride until Walt and Evelyn got home. Ann struggled against tiredness and reluctance into an almost acceptable mood. For her own sake, as well as for Walter’s, she did not want to be left out. She let herself be rushed through dinner, worked hard at a kind of wry gaiety, until, when the three of them got into Ann’s car, she felt almost identified with the role she played. After all, she and Walter were almost brother and sister; and Evelyn, amused, serene, indulgent, was almost old enough to be their mother. They were all, at that moment, more willingly related than blood would ever have allowed them to be. But, after Ann had exclaimed, teased, taken a ride around the block, she had to leave Walter and Evelyn. Without their need for her gaiety, it died. The almost real world was not real enough. Like saccharine, its aftertaste was slightly bitter.

Bill was waiting for her in the employees’ lounge. “Ann, I need you on relief tonight. Would you mind?”

“No, that’s fine.”

“With Joyce on the ramp, you’re the easiest one to move.”

“Sure. I don’t mind.”

It was a foul job, moving from one station to another all night long, twenty minutes here, forty minutes there. Each station had its own peculiarities. At one, the change apron did her own jackpot payoffs and had to keep a record. At another, she had to report directly to the cashier. And, because each station had different numbers and kinds of machines, a relief had to carry her full allotment of change, cups of silver dollars, an extra twenty rolls of nickels. If one girl was late coming back from her break, the relief had to make up the time by sacrificing her own time off. A few of the change aprons actually liked the job during the week because it broke the monotony of a slow evening. But Ann, like most of the others, preferred the set routine that freed her mind from the details of work, and tonight not only her mind but her body was reluctant.

She strapped her apron very high, carrying it like a fetus in its seventh month, careful to lift and turn the weight as if it were her own flesh, for she had to walk some distance with it, and maneuver on and off escalators, her back burning, the veins in her legs aching with the drag of sixty pounds of dead weight: the ironic emancipation of woman, martyred to nothing but her own belligerence, surely. Why did she do it? At the center of this desert industry, symbol of it, she wanted to take her place, for there was no nature. The apes could not have survived. Only man could have invented a living independent of earth, related to no physical need, yet satisfying them all. Out of his own nonanimal nature, he had found a weakness, a faith, by which he could survive. Ann was novice to her world’s only passionate belief. She moved from station to station, to serve and to witness.

At the third, she began to lose time. Her first break, which was supposed to be forty minutes, was only twenty-five. When she took her apron off, the sudden loss of weight seemed to disturb the law of gravity. She felt she could step into air, up and up over the crowd like a child’s balloon, not quite in control of herself. She drifted instead uncertainly into the ladies’ room where she asked the attendant to order her an illegal drink. Then she locked herself into one of the cubicles and sat down with her whiskey. The door next to her banged shut, and Ann stared at the pigeon-toed feet of a woman, who began vomiting noisily. Ann was due at her next station in five minutes. She took the escalator to the second floor, took an elevator from there to the fourth floor, which was the night club, where the band had always just stopped playing, where the floor show was always just about to begin, Ann nodded to the girl she was to relieve and took her place close to the crap table.

“The wife wanted a silver tea set sort of thing. So, when I was in the City, I thought, ‘Why the hell not?’ Do you know how much the goddamned things cost?” The speaker paused to watch his chips swept off the table. He placed new bets. “Fifteen hundred bucks! I was wild! I told the salesgirl, “Shit, it’s cheaper to buy a new wife.”

“Watch your language, sir,” the dealer said quietly.

“Watch your own,” the man answered, but good-naturedly. “What do you think you’re running, a Sunday school?”

“Yes sir, and taking up a collection,” the dealer said, sweeping the board clean again.

Ann did not like the fourth floor. She was glad, at the end of half an hour, to step back into the waiting elevator. A sign at the back read: “Thank you. You may have helped put a student through the University of Nevada. Frank’s Club Scholarship Fund.” Ann looked over at the elevator girl who stared at the closed door not six inches from her face. She had an aging, well-powdered black eye. Two young men stepped into the elevator when it stopped at the third floor.

“I told you to watch it,” the first said. “All these places are run by a bunch of crooks.”

“Jesus, fifty bucks,” the other said.

“Two?”

“Main floor,” Ann said.

As she reached her assigned ramp and signaled the girl on duty, she felt a hand on her arm. It was Jerry, the main floor boss.

“Ann, take a look over there, will you?”

Ann looked towards the roulette table he had indicated, saw the crowd, and recognized the standard symptoms of luck. Someone at the table must be betting heavily, winning enough to collect riders.

“Is that guy Janet Hearle’s husband? The drunk in the white shirt?”

Ann, who had met Ken Hearle only a couple of times, could not be sure at that distance. She remembered him a tall, crude-boned man, sweating quietly in a suit, a conservative academic farmer.

“I’m not sure, Jerry. I hardly think so.”

“Will you take a good look?”

“Sure.”

He had obviously lost a jacket and tie somewhere, and one patch of hair was still glued in place by the lacquer and comb of another, forgotten, mood. His face and neck were blotched with color, as if he had been slapped several times by a vicious but inaccurate hand. Ann stood near him, still uncertain.

“Ken?”

“Here’s a sweetheart,” he cried as he saw and obviously recognized her. “You’re just who I need.” He reached out and put an arm around her shoulder. “Will you tell this phony cowboy he can’t close me out of the game? Tell him I’m a relative. Tell him I’m a dependent. Tell him I’m a next of kin.”

The dealer’s eyes questioned Ann while the crowd encouraged her to defend the gambler.

“I’m not closing you out of the game, sir,” the dealer said coolly. “You’re welcome to bet as long as you observe the limits.”