Desert of the Heart: A Novel (19 page)

She did not, therefore, complain when Silver suggested that they should go to the top of the Mapes for an early dinner. Ann did not like the place. It irritated her to have to thread her way through gaming tables to get to the bar or the dining room. And the noise of the three or four machines being played got on her nerves. Away from the Club, she did not want to have to put up with it. Silver had thought Evelyn should see the view, but the desert and the mountains were as unreal as a picture postcard from here, and the town looked cluttered and dusty and embarrassed about itself. Ann struggled to hide the impatience she felt with the world Silver wanted to show Evelyn.

“Why don’t you come down to the Club with us after dinner?” Silver suggested.

“Not tonight, Sil!” Ann protested at last

“Tonight’s the best night. You haven’t seen Frank’s Club until you’ve seen it on a Saturday night.”

“I should get back,” Evelyn said. “I’ve taken off enough time today. I’ll come down some other night.”

“You should have been there last night,” Silver said.

Ann got up from the table and excused herself. She went into the ladies’ room, washed her face with cold water and ran cold water on her wrists. She did not want to be reminded of last night. She was suddenly terribly tired, and the thought of going back to work depressed her. She did not even want to go back to the table. The gaiety had worn off, like champagne in the middle of the day. She felt stale and strained and a little unreal.

“Are you all right, Ann?”

“Yes, I’m all right,” Ann said, startled by Evelyn’s appearance in the room.

“You look tired.”

“I am a little, just for the moment.”

“I’m sorry you have to work tonight.”

“Well …” Ann said vaguely. “Oh, I wanted to give you the keys to my car. Would you drive it home for me?”

“Sure, but how will you …?” Evelyn did not finish her question, obviously regretting it.

Ann wanted to say that she would come home, but the very power of her desire prevented her. She dreaded another night with Silver and was angry with that dread. She felt her silence turn Evelyn away. “I’m afraid, Evelyn,” Ann wanted to say, and “Take me. Somehow make me come home,” and “I don’t know what to do, Evelyn,” and “I’ve got to go home with Silver.” But she said nothing, and they went back to the table in silence. Silver had already paid the bill and was anxious to leave. Giving Evelyn Ann’s dress to take home, they parted company with her at the alley.

“It’s a beautiful dress, Sil,” Ann said, as they walked up the alley together.

“I wonder why I’ve never bought you anything before,” Silver said. “I used to like to dress my women as well as undress them. I guess I’ve lost the knack since Joe.”

They were silent.

“You don’t really want to come back with me tonight, do you?”

“I do, sure. I’m just tired.”

“I wish I could decide which one of you to be jealous of.”

“Jealous?” Ann asked, genuinely surprised, for, though she had felt on this afternoon somehow unfaithful to Silver, her infidelity had been to Silver’s person, not to the relationship between them. “You aren’t really.”

Silver turned and looked down at Ann with tired impatience. “I sometimes don’t understand how a person with brains like yours can be so stupid about people.”

“But why should you be jealous? You never have been. What about Joe?”

“What about him?” Silver demanded, stopping and turning on Ann, but she broke her pose of rage almost before she had taken it up. “Little fish,” she said quietly. “Little fish, I’ve bought you a wedding dress, the only present I ever gave you. Pewter.” Her voice went wry. “The color of your eyes.”

“Sil, don’t!” Ann said, astonished.

“No, I won’t.” They had reached the employees’ entrance. “I’ll meet you here tonight and give you a lift to your place.”

“I don’t want a lift to my place,” Ann protested angrily.

Silver smiled, recovering something of the self-assurance Ann so loved in her. “I know you don’t, love. I know you don’t. But I’m giving it to you anyway. We can’t argue with the game warden.”

“I don’t want to go home, Sil!” Ann said, her voice an urgent, tight-throated whisper so that she would not be overheard by other employees passing by them.

“You two taken to the streets?” Joyce asked, coming up behind them. “I didn’t recognize you for a minute.”

“We’d better change,” Silver said. “We’re late.”

Ann pulled off her cotton dress and slip, kicked off her shoes, and stood in her bra and pants taking off her jewelry.

“Not bad,” Joyce said, standing by her, adjusting the cord on her hat.

“I didn’t know you were interested,” Ann answered lightly.

“I’m not,” Joyce said. “Just curious.”

Ann turned quickly to the locker and took out her shirt.

“Ann, I’m just kidding around.”

Ann did not trust her voice to answer. She buttoned her shirt roughly and reached for her trousers.

“Then you do mind,” Joyce said.

Ann could not distinguish between concern and malice. “Get off my back,” she said tightly. “And stay off.”

When she turned around, Joyce had gone. Ann took her hat and apron and hurried up the stairs. She was late, and the crowd that confronted her when she pushed open the door would neither take her in nor let her through. She hesitated for a moment in the deadly cold air, in the brain-splitting noise. Then she stepped into that wall of human flesh, using her elbows and the heels of her boots to cut a way through.

At three thirty, when she walked out of the door, she had no idea how the hours had passed. Only her legs and back told her that she had stood and carried the weight for the allotted time. Silver was waiting.

“Lose anything tonight?” she asked, amiably.

“Nothing but my mind,” Ann said.

“I had a rare time,” Silver said. “A slightly stoned man of God was preaching to the dollar machines, ‘Man can’t live by bread alone.’ I should think he’ll be glad to know it tomorrow morning unless he’s on the American plan. And this other guy, a real philosopher type …”

Silver talked their way to the car, talked their way to Ann’s house. When she stopped the car, she was still talking.

“Oh, shut up, Sil,” Ann said, taking hold of the lapels of Silver’s shirt and offering her mouth as an interruption to the endless story.

“Have a good time, little fish,” Silver said gently. “I’ll see you in church.”

Ann got out of the car, and Silver pulled away quickly and noisily like a high-school kid. The light in Evelyn’s bedroom went on. Ann looked up at it, resentful and glad.

“Lady of the City, Mother,” she said softly as she walked up to the house, “Game Warden, Lover. Rich Ann, Poor Ann, Beggar Ann, Thief. ‘Take. Eat,’ said the serpent.” And then she sang, “You’re the apple of my eye.” But, as she closed the front door behind her, she knew she had hopscotched to the final square. “The game’s up,” she said in her sheriff’s voice, but it really was. “I didn’t hear you, Mother, until the fourth time you called. And now I’m on the first step. And now I’m on the second step … Evelyn?”

Evelyn opened the door and took Ann into her arms.

“I’m so glad you’re home,” she said quietly.

“I want a bath,” Ann said, “and a drink.”

It was a long bath, in which Ann entertained herself with phrases of songs, punch lines of bad jokes, and a muted Sunday rhetoric that ranged from bits of Plato to a good imitation of Billy Graham. The rehearsal over, she was ready to entertain Evelyn. She drank two large Scotches to accompany herself and tried not to notice whether Evelyn was amused or not. Then she got up and stretched herself out on the bed next to Evelyn. She closed her eyes and heard, echoing in the painful, empty vault of her skull, her mother’s voice, hard and clear, “Don’t. It’s not worth the money.” What in hell did that mean? She was asleep.

When she woke, Evelyn was up and dressed, reading at her desk.

“Frances!” Ann said.

“Good morning, my darling. It’s all right. I told her you’d had a couple of drinks with me and fallen asleep.” Evelyn got up and walked over to the bed. “Which is quite true.”

“Did you sleep?”

“Very well. And so did you, except for one or two initial nightmares.”

“That must have been pleasant for you.”

“It was. You’re lovely asleep.”

“But awake …?”

“Shy and full of conversation. Interesting conversation though.”

“You say so little.”

“You don’t give me a chance. The minute you stop talking, you’re asleep.”

“Talk to me now,” Ann said.

“And I’m not sure that what you say isn’t often misleading.” Evelyn held Ann’s face in her hands gently. “Do you always tell such long, irrelevant stories?”

“Probably.”

“There’s only one solution then. I must have you like this, and, while you’re telling and telling, I can find my own ways about you. But perhaps your body can mislead me, too, take sudden turnings I only clumsily follow. …”

“I want you.”

“In a while, my darling. In a while. You mustn’t be impatient. You’re hardly awake.”

Ann turned, the longing of her body straining against the last reluctance of her mind, and she felt Evelyn’s tentative, almost casual beginning gradually give way to an authority of love. Ann was held urgently, brought into being, then restrained, caught again, held, until she wanted nothing ungiven, until she wanted nothing, until she came to wonder, not asking any longer, but naming, “Evelyn.”

“Yes, darling. You must teach me to do that.”

“Now.”

“No, not now. You must get up and have some breakfast.”

“Evelyn?”

“Little fish,” Evelyn said, rumpling Ann’s hair, for a moment roughly. “It’s an odd name for you.” Then she got up, took a towel and left the room.

“Lady Macbeth,” Ann muttered viciously, but it did no good.

She could not manage to be quite hurt, quite angry, quite frightened, or quite guilty. All the possibilities of negative emotion were there, however, threatening the stronger, single desire, which, like the scent of Evelyn’s perfume, was personal rather than sexual. She wanted to be with Evelyn. She wanted to know Evelyn. She wanted to be able to love Evelyn, whatever that meant. Half a dozen vague clichés came into Ann’s mind, jumblings of prayer book and movie magazine that had to do with fidelity, procreation, and healthy sexual attitudes. And with them came the half-formed cartoons. She got up out of bed. She hadn’t lost the battle against tenderness. She had changed sides. And now she faced her really formidable enemies. Line them up. Name them. Choose among them those to be killed, those to be captured, those to be converted. For, if she was to love Evelyn, she would have to fight her own whole damned world, and some of it she could not live without.

Ann dressed and went down to get some breakfast. She tried to be as casual with Frances as Evelyn had been. It shouldn’t be difficult because Evelyn had used Ann’s own tactics. She had told the truth. But Ann had always used the truth to confound Frances, not to reassure her.

“I hear you slept with Evelyn last night,” Frances said cheerfully.

“Not exactly,” Ann wanted to say, but she checked herself. Then, as she watched Frances cracking an egg into the pan, she wondered why she had always kept herself away from Frances; for, conventional and blind as Frances tried to be, she was both intuitive and generous. For a moment Ann was actually tempted to say something, to ask a straight question, but her habit of isolation was too strong. Instead she said, “Two eggs please, Frances,” using the stupid, ancient ritual of food that Frances would understand.

In her own room, she did not take out her sketchbook. She sat, staring at the empty table, staring at the implications of the decision she seemed to have made. She was going to court Evelyn, not simply her body, but her mind and her heart. “Don’t. It’s not worth the money.” Wise advice, perhaps. Odd how clearly she still held her mother’s voice in her unconscious, a voice she hadn’t heard for nineteen years. “And you’re one of the enemies I’m going to have to kill.” Somehow linked to that broken and grotesquely mended bone of memory was the lust of Ann’s body. Her proud sexuality, the range of her experience and the inventiveness of her skill must all be irrelevant now. If, in making love with Evelyn, her body yearned for obscure intimacies, they must no longer be substitutes for, a defense against, intimacies of person with person. Here was an enemy to be converted. But her real terror was for the world she lived in, that Evelyn did and would continue to find it empty and appalling. Ann could not leave the desert. In her human loneliness, the landscape had become her home. And she found it hard to imagine leaving the Club. Already she felt herself threatened with losing the visions she had there, which would mean losing the light she worked by. And her work? She did not know about that. Why must she fight this battle at all? Who was Evelyn to ask it of her? Did she ask it of her? Ann did not know. She asked it of herself. If she did not, she would lose something of herself that seemed terribly important. “I don’t even know what it is.” Ann’s eyes focused for a moment on the children. Perhaps it was something she had already lost along the way of these last four years, old habits of thinking, friends. Her friends had belonged to her father’s world. Most of them she had not seen since his death, except by accident. There were one or two people at the University she still called on very occasionally. There was Kate Buell. She hadn’t seen Kate for months.

“I want Evelyn to meet Kate Buell,” Ann said that evening at the dinner table.

“What a good idea,” Frances said. “You’d love Kate, Evelyn.”

“Who is she?” Evelyn asked.

“She’ll tell you about herself much better than we can,” Walter said. “She never stops talking.”

“She’s an old lady,” Ann said. “Her husband was a newspaper man. She’s the daughter of a miner, raised in Virginia City. She’s lived in Nevada all her life. Why don’t I see if I can get her to come out to dinner with us on Thursday evening? She loves to be taken for a drive.”

If Ann could find enough, recover enough of a world Evelyn could understand and like, the Club she went to at night might not be important, a privacy she could keep. But, after a night’s work there, Ann came home uncertain. The light in Evelyn’s room did not go on. She had not asked Ann to wake her, but her door had been left slightly ajar. Ann hesitated, then stepped quietly into the darkness of the room.