Night of Fire and Snow

by Alfred Coppel

  Miguel bit his lips and prayed, “Let it be Luis. Please, God, let it be Luis—”

  The sounds of lovemaking were unmistakable: the labored breathing, the soft passionate cries from Becky, and through it all, the asinine creaking of the boat in the water.

  Miguel wanted to call out and tell them to sheer away; he wanted to warn them that the tide was carrying them close to the Nereid; but he only sat rigidly, holding his coffee cup, knowing he had to know who else was in the boat with Becky.

  “Jesus, listen to that!” Tom whispered.

  Miguel nudged him into silence.

  “They’ll drift right past us and out into the bay,” Tom said. “They’re too drunk and too screw-happy to know what they’re doing, whoever they are. Some goddam boat is liable to run them down.”

  Miguel thought coldly: I hope some boat does. If it isn’t Luis in that dinghy, I hope they drown.

  But he knew better. He stood up suddenly and called out, “Ahoy the dinghy! You better show a light there!”

  The voice that came back to him was like a dash of ice-water in his face. He didn’t even hear what it said so laughingly. Because the voice was Raoul’s.

  Miguel dropped to the seat and hung his head. He felt sick. “Becky,” he said through clenched teeth. “Christ, with Becky!”

  He felt Tom’s arm around his shoulder. He burned with shame. He wrapped his hands around the railing and squeezed with all of his might, fighting the ache inside.

  After a long while, he looked up at Tom and bared his teeth in a grimace that bore little resemblance to a smile. “I guess we’re in the same boat. That’s a pun, Uncle,” he said tightly.

  “I’m laughing, Spicko,” Tom said quietly.

  “So am I.”

  He turned around and looked out over the water. I’ll never forgive you, he thought. Either one of you.

  THIRTEEN

  He sat in semi-darkness in the rear cabin of the big Douglas. He was looking out the window at the lights of New York which were fading astern. It was nearly midnight. They would arrive in San Francisco about six-thirty in the morning, which was an ungodly time to arrive anywhere. Particularly if you were not sure what it was you planned to do when you did get there.

  He wanted to see Dorrie, of course. But he would procrastinate about that because it might well mean seeing Alaine, too. Possibly he would end up by avoiding that contretemps entirely. He could always send the music box to Dorrie if he had to.

  The solution was unsatisfactory and he knew it.

  He considered seeing Esther. It had been almost three years since he had last gone to the Convent of the Holy Name and asked for Sister Cecilia. He remembered the pale, unfriendly face under the starched white coif. She hadn’t been pleased to see him. He would not be surprised to find that she had done penance for the sin of lack of charity. Charity—was it charity for a sister to greet her brother? Did all family ties come to an end when the gold band was slipped on a nuns finger? He knew so little about religion any more. He had forgotten everything Concha might have taught him.

  He thought of his nana’s shining black eyes and the incredibly erect way she carried herself. Such odd fragments of memory persisted. He remembered that Raoul used to say that Concha had the body of an angel and the face of a devil. And it was true, because smallpox had destroyed what looks she might possibly have developed. He could very vaguely remember that when he was still small enough to be carried in her arms, she would give him her breast to suckle when he was fitful or restless. And she had done it so naturally that it had been years before he learned that it was a shameful thing for a boy of five to be suckling on a milkless breast.

  She had been one person who had loved him without question, without reservation, and without hope of recompense. A simple woman, sturdy, ignorant, faithful, and in a way a civilized person could never be, selfless. Selfless with a great selfishness, because to be devoted was, for her, to be happy.

  He wondered what it would be like now, if he were to bring Concha out of that little village in the Sierra Morena where she was living. It was an insane notion, really. To bring back a symbol of childhood so that you could feel there was one place on earth where you really belonged.

  No, Concha was gone for good. There was no reanimating the past. Olinder had suggested that what he was seeking was a kind of fetal peace. He wondered if that were so. Fetal peace and a tragic love. That last was Alaine’s particular gibe. If you could call anything Alaine said a gibe. Gibes were cruel and there was no cruelty in Alaine. She had tried hard to be everything he wanted her to be and when she saw that he chose to wall himself away from her, she only wished to be free.

  No one could call that unkind, or even ungenerous. On the contrary, it was the most liberal gesture Alaine could make.

  It was a scene Miguel had recreated in his mind a hundred times, trying to acquit himself well.

  It always came out the same way. The whole is equal to the sum of its parts, no more and no less. There was no miracle of non-Euclidean mathematics that was going to make his behavior decent and understandable. No non-Aristotelian system of logic would prevail here.

  He had willfully (what other word was there?) carried on an affair with his best friend’s wife. He had broken it off once only to start it all again more binding than before. He was bound to Nora by ties he could not grasp himself, so how could he expect Alaine to understand that they were important ties?

  Alaine could only see that her husband belonged to another woman. Quod erat demonstrandum. And Alaine’s mind worked with a prosaic simplicity and directness that baffled him. Baffled him all the more, because he, himself, couldn’t supply the answers to the supremely uncomplicated questions Alaine asked.

  “Why can’t you let me love you? Why can’t you let anyone love you?”

  Lovely questions. He recalled taking refuge in a sorry display of temper, pacing about the apartment and saying that all he wanted out of life was for people to leave him the goddam hell alone and let him do what he wanted to do.

  And Alaine had finally asked him for a divorce.

  He had been spending more and more time in Hollywood with Nora. Much more time, really, than his writing commitments down there required. Alaine knew what held him there and she took it for a time, remembering, perhaps, that they had been happy in Europe and hoping that they might be again. But Alaine wasn’t the sort to take abuse forever and in the end she had told him that she was tired and that she wanted a divorce.

  He had not seen her since that day more than two years ago now. He sent money when he could, and small gifts that Dome might like, and occasionally a short note—impersonal as he could make it. She, in turn, wrote when something came up that he should be consulted about. Dorrie’s tonsillectomy, the insurance on the car, the subleasing of the flat on Sacramento Street when she moved to the house in Seacliff. Polite notes, as impersonal as his own. Notes from a woman who had been his wife, who had borne him a child, and who was now making a life without him.

  He sighed and turned on the reading lamp, opening the paperback Hemingway. He had always thought A Farewell to Arms was the finest love story ever written. Another of Alaine’s favorites, along with Auden and Brahms.

  He couldn’t concentrate on the story. He found himself thinking of Tony Ayula and that ugly scene at the cocktail party. He had made an enemy, that much was sure. Ayula wouldn’t rest until he found a way to pay him back for that punch in the mouth.

  Under certain circumstances, though, Ayula would be only a latent danger. If he could mend his fences—and his ways, he added dryly—and hurried down to see Ziegler and above all Nora as soon as they arrived on the Coast, he could still have the Artfilm job. He was sure of it.

  The bitter truth was that he needed the work. His money wasn’t going to last forever. It was easy to be an individualist as long as you were solvent. But his solvency dwindled with each traveler’s check he cashed.

  AD the lovely agonies, he thought, all the great desi
gns—they came finally to this. Money. The stars in the eyes were shaped like dollar signs. Perhaps I should have written about that.

  Once Karl had commented on the fact that bartenders had more security in America than writers. And then he had asked the unanswerable question, “But which contributes more to society, a man who will listen to your troubles or a man who commits his own to paper?”

  It was, at the moment, a question Miguel found disturbing. It was one his father might have asked.

  He decided to pick up a copy of Kathryn Bellamie’s damned book in Chicago and see if he could struggle through it.

  It was a rainy, gray day in the winter of 1952 that Alaine asked Miguel for her freedom. The very sound of the word divorce shook him. He could never hear it without thinking of the night Maria died.

  He went to the window and stood there moodily, looking out at Grace Cathedral and the shiny wet streets of San Francisco. He could feel Alaine watching him.

  He was thinking that he didn’t like this flat and never had. He remembered the apartment on Telegraph Hill, the walk-up where they had lived during the last years of the war. He hadn’t liked that, either.

  I’m cursed with discontent, he thought angrily.

  It was all wrong. The money from the new movie job was coming in. Steinmetz liked The Exile almost as well as he had liked the first book. Alaine’s health was good. Dorrie was in nursery school—

  And Nora was waiting for him in Malibu. The perfect picture of a modem marriage, he thought with asperity. It was enough to ward off the memory of Raoul’s last days, the late arrival from Europe, the bitter words with Becky.

  Only now Alaine, in her simple way, was trying to upset the delicate balance he had achieved.

  “You act as though this is the first time in history a man’s been unfaithful,” he said.

  Alaine shrugged her shoulders and sat down on the tapestry chair before the dark, cold fireplace. The afternoon light was dull and the wind from the south would bring more rain. “Maybe I’m just not civilized enough.”

  “I’d say you’re being positively Noel Cowardish,” he said. “Is it so easy to ask me for a divorce?”

  She shook her head. “You know it isn’t.”

  “I told you I’d stop seeing Nora.”

  “I don’t believe you, Mike. You’ve said it too often.”

  When he said nothing and remained staring out of the window at the gray day, she went on.

  “I’m not sure it would be the right thing for you, anyway. Maybe—God help me—Nora is right for you, after all.”

  He turned and looked at her. “You can be saintly when you try, Allie.”

  She turned her face away. “Please, Mike—don’t be cruel. You can cut me to ribbons with your tongue. You know that. I’m not trying to be saintly. I’m being selfish. Completely selfish. You are sucking the life out of me. You’re turning me into something ugly inside. I don’t want it to go on like this. I’ll end up hating you.”

  Miguel turned back to the window. “You don’t mention Tom in all this. You’re dying to, aren’t you? Why don’t you go ahead?”

  “What happened to Tom wasn’t your fault, Mike.”

  “That’s what the Board of Inquiry said.”

  “I’m talking about you and me, Mike.”

  He saw her suddenly simply as an obstruction. An obstruction between him and some vaguely grasped future with all his problems solved and all his questions answered. Somehow, it didn’t have anything to do with Nora, and the very qualities he had always admired in Alaine were at this moment the most damnable.

  “This is what I mean,” she said faintly.

  “What do you mean, in the name of heaven?”

  “This. This. Can’t you feel it? But of course you can. You shut yourself away from me. You withdraw to some place inside yourself where I can’t follow. It’s what I can’t bear about it, Mike. I wanted to be more than just someone sharing your house and your bed. But I’m not. I’m simply in your way. I’m just one thing more to make you feel dragged down, ashamed, guilty—Oh, I don’t know what, I just don’t know.” Her face was pale and controlled. Only her hands moved, twisting a handkerchief in her lap. “I want a divorce, Mike.”

  “No, Allie.”

  “But it’s for you, don’t you see that? I’m no good for you any more.”

  “No, Alaine. No divorce,” he said harshly.

  She stood up and faced him. “Mike, what if there were someone else for me, too? Someone who could—I don’t know—make me happy? That’s an insipid word, isn’t it? No, suppose there were someone I wanted. Would you let me go then?”

  He looked at her. “I’d kill the son of a bitch.”

  She began to laugh. There was the thinnest thread of hysteria in the sound. “That isn’t being very consistent, is it? I mean for you to come here to me from Nora and say something like that?”

  “Is there someone else?”

  Alaine shook her head almost regretfully. “No, no—how could there be? I told you a long time ago I was a oneman woman. I’m not in style. I’m a Victorian at heart. But I can’t go on this way, Mike. God help me, I simply can’t.”

  He stood mutely watching her. There was nothing he could say. He was torn by a desire to be free and by a terror of being alone. He had always known it would come to this sooner or later, and he had promised himself that he must stop the thing with Nora before it did. But he hadn’t been able to stop. It was almost as though Tom, in some obscene way, had wedded them. What lust has joined let no man put asunder—

  Raoul must have known this would happen to me sooner or later, Miguel thought. God, how he must have known! It must have been like looking in a mirror. Absalom, son of David.

  Alaine said sorrowfully, “You can’t let anyone love you, Mike. You simply can’t. If they try, you destroy them.”

  “Don’t talk nonsense, Allie,” he said in a low voice.

  “It isn’t nonsense. I’ve tried so hard, Mike. And you just shut me out. Tom loved you, too—that’s the hurtful thing about it. And you need to be loved. You need it so much. But you just can’t let it happen, can you? Even your father—”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Miguel said heavily.

  “I’m so tired, Mike,” Alaine said. “Please.”

  “All right. I’ll go.”

  She sat down and simply waited. He walked reluctantly to the door. “There’s a place in Malibu I can rent. I’ll send you the address,” he said. “I’ll send someone for my things.” He paused, waiting for her to say something, but she sat silently.

  “If you insist on a divorce, I won’t fight you. But—“ He had to beg for something and he didn’t know how. He stumbled badly over the words. “I’m asking you to wait. Please wait.”

  Her voice was scarcely audible in the gloomy room. “All right,” she said. “Now please go.”

  He remembered her drawn face and the darkness of her eyes in shadow. She was dressed in black, he remembered that too. Black for mourning.

  He was touched and filled with pity but there was nothing he could do. When you built a barrier, it worked both ways.

  FOURTEEN

  The forests of Pennsylvania had given way to the farmlands of Ohio and northern Indiana in the darkness below. Miguel could see the occasional flash of lightning north of the airliner’s track. Isolated thunderstorms, towering into the high darkness over the Great Lakes. He could see, too, the faint fan of a single automobile’s headlamps far below, crawling through the gelid, starless night. Ahead, glowing amber, were the lights of South Bend, then Gary—with the feathers of flame from steel converters fingering the gloom.

  Over the Atlantic he had felt disembodied, as though the airplane carrying him were stationary in limbo, having no relationship to the sea below. But here now, flying over the broad breast of America, the feeling was reversed. It seemed to him that the land reached up to slow the aircraft; as though each cubic foot of soil below demanded attention before rel
inquishing him to the next.

  He was conscious of a strange sense of possession, a feeling of involvement with the colossal earth that lay supine beneath the trembling wings.

  He tried to analyze it and found that he could not. The reasons for it lay somewhere beyond the scope of his understanding.

  Perhaps, he thought, it was simply because everything that had ever happened to make him the man he was had taken place here—in this land. Alaine was here, and Dorrie, and if that other child had a grave it was surely in this American earth.

  He turned away from the window and gazed unseeing at the lights in the cabin ceiling. He was remembering that night with Tom in Paradise Cove. At seventeen the knowledge that his father was having an affair with Becky had been shattering. It needed, again, as with everything else, the perspective of years to expand the point of view from that tiny nucleus to include the outermost electron rings of human activity.

  That was something Alaine always tried to tell him, and even knowing she was right, he had always resisted it. He would counter with the argument that the universe was always egocentric and the things that happened to you were the only ones with any reality.

  The terminal building at Chicago was huge and dirty, the long lanai-like passageway around the L-shaped structure was littered with refuse. It was hot, with a gusty wind blowing off the lake. At this hour of the morning, there was little activity. A few servicemen dozed on wooden benches and here and there a late-traveling businessman hurried toward the boarding gates. Most of the counters were closed and Miguel had to walk the long trek to the restaurant to find a newsstand. He bought a copy of the Bellamie book, noting the dark young Adonis in Spanish morion the artist had depicted on the jacket and the bosomy Irish girl with her dress falling off one shoulder. They looked very like Clift and Nora.

  Miguel put the book in his pocket and walked back to the gate where Continental Airlines Flight 666 was refueling.

  The big Douglas DC-6 gleamed silver in the floodlights. It looked awkward and earthbound with the crewmen clustered around it, pumping fuel from yellow-painted tank trucks into the broad wings. The running lights went on and off with patient monotony as dollies loaded the baggage of the deplaning Chicago passengers.