Run River (24 page)

I’ve never been busier
, she told them at the wedding, and in fact she had not been. Although neither she nor Lily had ever joined the Junior League, Martha now became a provisional member, spent every evening and most afternoons in town, and at the end of February calculated that she had received proposals of marriage from two of the boys with whom she had grown up and had gone to bed with three, counting one who was married and not counting the man she had met at Nancy Dupree’s wedding reception whose last name she did not remember. (She believed he had something to do with shopping centers, but it was all mixed up in her mind, as in Everett’s, with Henry Kaiser.) Since everyone else was at the moment married that just about cleaned the situation up, and when she tallied up their assets and their liabilities, the balance was, as she had hoped it would be,
nada
.

All the connections had been broken, all the bridges burned miles back in the country she had crossed to achieve this insular victory. Even Ryder was included in her pervasive contempt: he could no longer touch her. There, the battle had turned. All the others had been civilian casualties, lost somewhere beyond the front lines: Channing was her dam on the Ruhr, her Guadalcanal, her Stalingrad. Thinking herself victorious, she despised all the vulnerable: all those who liked or disliked, wanted or did not want, damaged themselves with loving and hating and migraine headaches. She imagined that she had emerged triumphant, and that the banner she planted read
Noli Me Tangere
.

20

It was a season of promise for anyone with a little land or a little money or even nothing more than an eye on the main chance; it was a season of promise for Ryder Channing, back in town with his bride after a three-week honeymoon in Acapulco; and it should be, Martha thought some nights as she was going to sleep, a season of promise for her. The mornings were more difficult: some mornings she did not want to get up at all. Some mornings she could get up only if she had already scheduled every minute of the day, which she learned immediately to do. She went everywhere, met everyone. She met builders, promoters, people looking for factory sites and talking about a deep-water channel and lobbying for federal dams; people neither Everett nor Lily would have known existed had she not told them. She went to large parties at new country clubs, went to small parties at new apartment houses, and went, almost every afternoon, to inspect subdivisions opened by one or another of the boys she knew who were going into the real-estate business. Although Lily and Everett claimed to see no distinctions among the miles of pastel stucco houses, Martha knew better. It was, she explained, a matter of detail. Some builders used panels of redwood siding; others, an imitation fieldstone veneer around each door. In one tract (“Executive Living on Low F.H.A.”) each back yard included a small kidney-shaped swimming pool, a cabaña, and a neatly framed placard listing “Pool Rules”; most subdivisions, however, had only Community Pools, sometimes known as Swimming Clubs, and in any case surrounded by Cyclone fencing. Robles de la Sierra, a tract north of town, afforded prospective buyers “a setting with the romance of An Old Spanish Land Grant plus No Sewer Bonds, 40-Gallon Fast-Recovery Water Heaters, and Sidewalks In”; at Rancho Valley, selling points included a leaded-glass window on the exterior of each three-car attached garage, for “the same gracious finish throughout, VETS NO DOWN.” And if Lily and Everett wanted distinctions, they had only to consider Riverside City, the most distinctive feature of which was that it was “dedicated to the concept of Retirement.” Another distinctive feature of Riverside City was that it was a project initiated by Dupree Development Inc., and another was that Ryder Channing had in February been placed in nominal charge of development, but never mind that. It was a far, far grander scheme than might be indicated by the fact that Ryder was in charge of it. Although none of Riverside City’s projected 37,000 houses had yet been built, quarter-acre lots had been sold by agents all over the country, an artificial lake was under construction, and
esprit
among future citizens was renewed weekly by the four-page
Riverside City Sun
, mailed from the Dupree Building in Oakland. “QUESTION: Although we live at present in Chicago, we enjoy our subscription to the
Sun
because we intend to build a home on our lot in the near future. My question is, about the plastic lining now being installed in the bottom of Riverside Lake, won’t it make our lake look peculiar? ANSWER:
You can relax. The lining will be covered with six inches of earth, so unless you come out to inspect it now, you’ll never even see it
. QUESTION: What kind of plants grow best in Riverside City? ANSWER:
We suggest you correspond with two of our pioneer citizens-to-be, the Mesdames Ada Travers and Bertha Kling, founders of the Riverside City Garden Club. They have already collected an impressive file of government pamphlets on the horticulture of the area. There are no weeds growing under these ladies.”

Some nights at dinner Martha would announce that she planned to take some land and develop it herself and make them all rich; some nights she would sit at the table, not eating, and make Everett promise, again and again, that he and Sarah would never try to sell the ranch without her. Other nights she would not come to dinner at all, but would go instead to her room and lie in the dark with the sheet over her head, pretending, when Everett or Lily opened the door, to be asleep.

At six o’clock on the sixteenth of March, Martha was sitting in the bar at Del Paso Country Club wondering how it would feel to get laid in the rain on the golf course and listening to Sam Bradley, one of the river boys who had gone into real estate, explain how he had happened to join Del Paso: it was deductible and it was good business. Although they had been sitting in the bar an hour, Martha had seen no one she had ever seen before with two exceptions, the bartender and a gynecologist’s wife whose picture was frequently in the paper in connection with the Opera Guild. “Meet a President,” the pictures were always captioned. “No Stranger to the Gavel.” No matter how hard you tried it was difficult to keep up with who was who now, and on the whole Martha would rather be on the golf course, but there were always too many people, everywhere.

Did Sam know any of these people, she wanted to know.

What the hell difference did it make if he knew any of these people. All he wanted to do, as he had been telling her off and on for twenty minutes, was get the hell out of here and drive up to that Mexican place in Jackson for dinner.

She
loved
that Mexican place. She had told him three times she loved that Mexican place. But Jackson was fifty miles away and it had been raining for three days and she really did not feel like driving fifty miles and back in the rain in his Austin-Healey.

They could get another car. They could get his brother’s car. They could get her car. He hadn’t planned to take the goddamn Austin-Healey.

Since both his brother’s car and her car were approximately thirty-five miles from Del Paso and in the opposite direction from Jackson, that made it a drive of eighty-five miles each way. Besides, she did not even think the Mexican place was open week nights. Anyway there was illegal gambling there and he did not want, did he, to get caught in a raid. That wouldn’t be very good business, would it.

Go to hell, he said. He would telephone ahead.

All right, she said, go find out, and as Sam got up from the table she saw Ryder Channing walk in from the golf course with a balding fat man. It was the first time she had seen Ryder without Nancy Dupree since December and she was faintly depressed to find that she still could not look at him as she looked at other people. She had seen him walking through the door and had thought
Ryder
, just as she always had, without any of the instant judgments she normally made about people she saw. She had been making judgments upon Sam Bradley from the moment he picked her up; she had already made maybe twenty small judgments upon the man with Ryder. But when she looked at Ryder all she thought was
Ryder
.

The other man was, she learned when Ryder brought him to the table, a Cadillac dealer from down the Valley who played, although Ryder had beaten him 79-88, a great game of golf.

“The rain put you off your game,” Martha suggested to the Cadillac dealer.

He shrugged.

“You must have known Martha’s father,” Ryder said, not looking at Martha.

“Who’s your dad, Marty?”

“John McClellan.”

The Cadillac dealer looked blankly at Ryder. “Sure. Sure I know him. I probably run into him at Sacramento Rotary.”

“I don’t think so,” Martha said. “Actually he’s been dead since 1944.”

“Well,” said the dealer, “I wasn’t here in 1944.”

“How you been?” Martha asked Ryder.

“I’m fine. You look real good.”

“I’ve been sleeping and eating a lot. I hear you’re living in the old Carmelo place.”

“A friend of Bugsy’s family bought it and lent it to us until he decides what to do with it. We’re going to build as soon as Bugsy finds some plans she likes.”

“Great little girl,” the dealer said. “The finest.”

“I always liked the Carmelo place.” Martha smoothed her gloves in her lap. “They gave a dance once on the third floor and lined both the stairways with azalea. It was about the first dance I ever went to.”

“Termites,” the dealer said. “Rotten with termites.”

“Bugsy wants one storey,” Ryder said.

“Where is she?” the Cadillac dealer demanded querulously. “Why aren’t they here?” He turned to Martha. “She’s shopping with my wife. Mitzi said they’d meet us here at six-thirty.”

“It’s not quite six-thirty,” Ryder said. “I saw you last week at Nancy Slaughter’s. You were just leaving.”

“That’s right,” she said. “We were there a few minutes.”

“Listen, Marth.” He absently transferred some change from one pocket to another. “I’m glad I ran into you. I’m going to be out the river road tomorrow. Maybe I’ll stop by.”

“I won’t be home. But I’m sure Lily and Everett would like seeing you.”

“Some other time.” He stood up as Sam came back.

“Remember me to your dad, Marty,” the Cadillac dealer said.
“Hasta luego
for now.”

When Ryder arrived the next afternoon at two o’clock Martha was alone in the house: Lily had taken China Mary and the children to have their chest X-rays; Everett was out working on the levees. The rain had gone to the mountains and was melting the snow too fast. Although Lily had wanted Martha to come have her chest X-rayed with them (“Talk about sickly, you look tubercular right now”), Martha had refused: she wanted to lie down. She had not gotten home from Jackson until three
A.M
., and Sam Bradley, although she had told him it was not good business, had stayed until nearly five.
I can’t abide your kind
, she had ended up screaming at him; she did not know what had happened but it was the same thing that always happened. She would have a couple of drinks or simply get very tired or sometimes just wake up in the morning despising someone, everyone. If it happened in the morning she could lie there, hating, until it wore itself out, but if it happened around people she always ended up screaming. The very presence of Sam Bradley had seemed a personal affront to her: his bow tie a monument to both his vacuity and her lack of taste; his enthusiasm for the Mexican place in Jackson an affectation so transparent that she was mortified to have abetted it (he had greeted the cook warmly as “Mamacita,” and Martha had looked on with approval); his brand of cigarettes (not her own) the crushing evidence of his mediocrity, his blatancy, his subtle lack of the male principle. It had begun when Sam said that no matter what Everett said, Earl Warren was an intelligent and reasonable man; it could have begun as well had he merely said he liked her dress, or did not like a book he was reading. She had once turned viciously on Ryder for changing his shirt before dinner. His vanity. His shallowness. His carelessness. His thoughtlessness, his selfishness. Did he think the whole world existed simply to provide him with clean shirts. Even remembering it, she felt quite dizzy with loathing for Ryder.

“I thought you might be here,” Ryder said when she opened the door.

“I’m trying to sleep.” She did not ask him to take off his raincoat but simply stood there, trying for once to examine him closely, to make some final damning judgment. She remembered once seeing in his apartment a postcard from a girl, possibly even Nancy Dupree—it had been signed “XXXX and you know what, from B”—which read “Loved seeing you Saturday nite you looked so sexy in your white pants.” Although “sexy” was not a word she had ever applied to anyone, she had tried to see Ryder that way for several days. But all she had seen, then as now, was
Ryder
, and when she said, the next time he wore white pants, “You look fat-assed in those pants, Ryder, they don’t flatter you,” it was no judgment, only response.

“What are you looking at,” he said.

“I’ve been trying to sleep,” she repeated, defeated. “I’m not looking at anything.”

Fifteen minutes later he had her down on the floor; she had refused to go near the couch.

“You want it,” he said. She had her legs crossed and her face turned away from him.

“I do not.”

“What difference do you think it makes now.” He pushed her skirt up around her waist. “After I’ve screwed you maybe four, five times a week every week for the past five years.”

“Four and a half years,” she said faintly; his logic remained intact.

“Four and a half years.”

“I never wanted it.” Recognizing immediately that this clear untruth tended only to weaken her position, she amended it: “A lot of times I only pretended to want it.”

“You want it now, all right. You don’t have to start acting half-assed with me.”

After he had gone
(Whose girl? Your girl)
Martha went upstairs and lay on her bed until she heard, just as it was getting dark, the children’s voices downstairs.