Recapitulation

by Wallace Stegner

  “There’s no reason you shouldn’t know the details. Such as how many times I slept with her altogether. Six or seven? I wasn’t much of a tempest in her teapot.”

  “If this is bothering you I’ll stop.”

  But of course he couldn’t let her stop, because he was inventing this conversation, he needed her questions so that he could answer them. Also, as his invention, she was properly sympathetic and friendly. She thought of him as a man who had modestly distinguished himself, and she knew this episode in his past that she thought intimate and touching. She wanted the Nola episode to demonstrate something about his sensitivity, or constancy, or character. She wanted to believe that a deep distress had humanized his soul, and also she wanted him to have been Nola’s innocent victim. Even while he estimated her misconceptions with a good deal of irony, he wanted to keep her there, talking.

  The sound of a car—police car? someone running from the police?—came fast up South Temple from the direction of the Union Pacific station. He heard the foot come off the throttle as the car swerved around the Brigham Young monument, and then come down hard again. The sound hummed away eastward, diminishing, gone.

  He said, “If I tell you this sad story will you quit trying to invent it? Physically it never amounted to much. There just wasn’t opportunity. We didn’t want to be the kind of people who left used condoms in lovers’ lanes.”

  She was not bothered by his bluntness. She said, “I thought she went to the doctor.”

  “I don’t think she had herself fitted, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Why did she go, then?”

  “I doubt that she did.”

  “Why did she say she had to?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you think?”

  “What do I think? I think Forsberg had had her virtue, and she didn’t dare tell me. I think she cooked up that doctor story so there’d be an explanation in case I noticed.”

  “She was lying to you from the beginning.”

  “That isn’t fair. She was in love with me. She had this indiscretion in her past and couldn’t tell me because she knew I couldn’t take it.”

  There was a further question hanging in the dark between them, wherever they sat talking. Did he notice? Was it a virgin he lost his virginity to, down on that bedroll in the moon-flecked shadows of the cottonwoods beside the guggle of an irrigation ditch under the Capitol Reef?

  Evidently she didn’t feel that she should ask. The answer, in case she did, would be yes, he did notice, and no, she was not a virgin. Some doctor had done his job.

  He turned on his side to woo sleep. His body ached with tiredness, he pressed into the mattress with a ton’s weight. But in a moment this companion—interlocutor, old girl friend, lost possibility—came snuggling up, fitting herself to him, warm and comforting and female. It was unfortunate that she took that way of declaring herself, because her presence and her gesture told him something about himself, and moreover brought back that bedroll, that warm night, when after their second lovemaking Nola had crowded against him in exactly the same way, her breasts against his back, her breath warm and drowsy, her lips kissing the back of his neck, and on the verge of sleep murmured, “This is a nice formation.”

  He noted the terminology. He had noted it then, but chosen not to acknowledge what it suggested. Formation. A military term.

  “You were going to tell me about it,” Holly said.

  “There’s nothing really to tell. A piece of banal juvenilia. Summer love affair. Dates every night. Movies. Once in a while we’d go dancing at the Old Mill, that open-air place at the mouth of Mill Creek Canyon. Shirt-sleeve summer nights, big moons floating up over the Wasatch, lots of close-harmony singing. Lots of necking, seldom consummated. Standard erotic obsession.”

  “But you were working. You played tennis.”

  “Not much tennis. Joe and I entered two tournaments and didn’t last three rounds in either one. Joe was disgusted. So was his father. I was so groggy for sleep I was worthless. If I hadn’t been going to quit soon, I think he’d have fired me. I definitely wasn’t the industrious young man he’d thought of taking into the business.”

  “But you were ambitious. You were going off to law school. When did you tell Nola about that?”

  “Late. Very late. August. I made it sound as if the chance had just come up and it was such a great chance I couldn’t refuse it.”

  “You weren’t very honest with her, either.”

  “Each of us had something to tell the other that we were afraid the other couldn’t accept. We were both right.”

  “But you both had to accept it.”

  “I don’t know. I never admitted what was actually very clear. She never reconciled herself to my going away. It made a difference. She’d get black moods. It changed there, toward the end. A sort of desperation came into it. We did some unlikely things.”

  She waited, it seemed to him, in some hope that he would be explicit. He found that, though he had inked out that episode almost immediately, he hadn’t obliterated it, and that he regretted it as much now as he had then. He felt like taking out his pen and scatching over and over it until it was nothing but a rectangle of solid black.

  “You can’t want to hear every shabby detail,” he said.

  “Only if you want to tell me.”

  “I don’t.”

  “All right.”

  But he couldn’t let her back off so meekly. Apparently he still needed her for antiphonal purposes. “We double-dated one weekend with Jack Bailey and his swamp angel. Bailey had the use of somebody’s cabin at Brighton. We went along and shacked up with them.”

  “With that …!”

  “Cunt-hunter, yes.”

  “Oh, Bruce.”

  “I know. I was supposed to spread my cloak over mud puddles, not drag her through them.”

  “Why would you take her? Why would she go? She despised Bailey.”

  He rolled onto his back and opened his eyes. The room was as dusty with shadows as his mind. “Desperation?” he said. “The feeling that every day brought calamity closer? We were obsessed with one another, we couldn’t ever seem to be alone or free. So when Bailey came coiling down out of his cinnamon tree and whispered in my ear, I heard him as an opportunity. I had these visions of pines and stars and darkness, another round of Capitol Reef. So did Nola, I suppose. We thought we could ignore Bailey, or put up with him, and his girl as well, even though we both thought she was a disgusting chippie.”

  “Why would Bailey ask you? How did he know you were … you know, intimate.”

  “On matters like that Bailey was infallible. He thought when we disappeared from the prom we gave ourselves away. He was wrong about the circumstances but right in general.”

  “You put yourselves right in his hands.”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened, an orgy?”

  “It would certainly have been called an orgy in 1930.”

  “All together?”

  “Good God, you have got a lurid imagination. No. But not quite the Capitol Reef, either. There were two double beds in this one-room shack, with a blanket hung over a wire between them.”

  “It sounds so vulgar and grubby.”

  “It was all of that.”

  And when he came back from school the following June, starved for that girl, strung up like a fiddle string, denying the intimations of petulance and rejection he had been getting from her letters all through the spring, planning the surprise he had to propose—that she go with him to Reno, where his family had moved, and spend the summer at their cottage on Lake Tahoe; when he pulled up at her door after dark, dinnerless and bleary-eyed and hallucinating after eighteen hours on the road, expecting that the evening would be his and that the blackboard could be cleaned of everything and now at last the ordeal of absence was over; when she opened her door to him and he found that instead of spending the evening with him she had to sing with Jack Bailey out at the Old Mill, was al
ready in evening dress with her smooth shoulders bare—for Bailey—and really couldn’t, now how could she? Their act wasn’t over until one—see him afterward, she’d have arranged it otherwise but he hadn’t said he’d drive straight through, she hadn’t expected him until tomorrow—why, right then his mind had gone back to that shack in Brighton and arrived at a conclusion like a calculator flashing its instant sum. It went back now, and the sum was the same that had sent him off to Reno, alone, before noon the next day. Zero.

  7

  He can hear them through the door and through the years—the laughter, exclamations, screams, rebel yells. Reluctantly he puts his thumb on the latch and steps in on their party.

  The air is thick with cigarette smoke, but even smoke that thick can’t obscure the musty odor of the place itself. It is a smell that rises from corners, lies like a gas along the Congoleum floor, sifts down from rafter angles where pack rats have left accumulations. Put your nose to the rough studs and you smell it. It is the smell, among other things, of mice in various forms and stages: living nests of shavings and chewed rags, with a core of pink newborn things as naked as worms; abandoned nests stained with tiny urinations and peppered with tiny turds; old carcasses, paper-dry, found where the poison left them, or flattened in traps. Each is a special staleness, together they compose the total odor of a species: birth, copulation, death. Into their pervasive blend, like pigments into a mixing base, are wrapped other shack odors; dust, oilcloth, kerosene, candle wax, the linseed-oil fabric of the window shades, even a wholesome memory of spruce gum from studs and rafters.

  In this unbreathable atmosphere, made worse since they shut the door and windows against the night cold, and growing more unbreathable with every butt they add to the overflowing saucers on the floor, they are sitting cross-legged around a blanket playing strip poker. They have been playing for some time, for all are partly undressed. All are shoeless. Bailey has both socks, Bruce only one; the girls are barefoot. Both boys are bare to the waist. Nola still wears her skirt, but has lost her blouse. She manages to look modest in what he thinks he remembers was called a teddy.

  But Muriel. Well, Muriel has not been holding good cards. She is a large, well-padded girl even in her clothes. Now she sits, a creature out of a Turkish dream, in the puddle of her own flesh, held in from deliquescence only by her arms, crossed over her breasts, and by her straining panties.

  Leaning against the proscenium arch, the stage manager who has revived and is directing this period piece, he can read her mind. Why not? She is playing the part as he directs her to. She is conscious both of her charms and of the interest they arouse, but she would like it a lot better if Nola wasn’t sitting over there with her back straight and her face expressionless and everything covered up.

  Muriel doesn’t like Nola, or think she is so good-looking. She is willing to bet that when the time comes to peel, Nola will chicken out. And she is annoyed at the way Bailey, dealing a new hand and singing as he deals, raises his eyes to Nola at every card and puts a burbling emphasis into the words of his song.

  Though down in her heart I knowwww

  She’s not slow slowww

  And ohhh.

  Those eyes!

  What does he have to keep looking at her for? There’s plenty to look at here, for God’s sake.

  Like the waters still

  She’s very deep,

  She knows a heap

  I’ve found.

  She’s got that meet-me-later look

  And oh, she knows her book

  That little Quaker down

  In Quakertown.

  Deep my eye. She came up here to sleep with Bruce Mason. Where does she get off, trying to be demure? And where does Jack get off, watching her with that smirk on his face and his mustache twitching like a rat’s whiskers?

  Muriel has trouble picking up her cards without exposing herself. She has to lean over and scrape them up with her fingertips, not uncrossing her arms for a second. She sees Bruce’s eye wandering her way, and shoots him a look like a butcher knife. Let him watch his own girl, if he’s so hot to see something.

  Something is tickling the side of her breast where it bulges out under her arm. She jerks away with an exclamation from Jack’s stockinged foot. “Keep your old feet to yourself!” she says, and hugs herself tighter, the cards in her fingertips right in front of her nose. Her skin twitches as if the eyes on her were flies. She reminds Bruce of the kind of postcard for sale in places like Medicine Bow, Wyoming—an old cow stepping on her dragging udder, over the caption “You think you got troubles!”

  Next to her Bruce is studying his cards, but his mind is readable, too. He is a chemical machine, and every gland in his body is pumping into his blood the stimulants that the species has evolved to ensure its perpetuation. But if a machine, how complicated a machine! Assuming that the others are as complicated as he, this powwow across a gray army blanket is as intricate as anything in the universe.

  Muriel is hard to ignore. If he doesn’t keep his eyes open, he might miss something spectacular. Also she has a large, loose mouth, and some folklore rumor floating in his head speaks of the sexual apparatus and appetite of women with large mouths. Though he knows this is probably as reliable as the folklore about Chinese women, still he is intensely curious. He wishes he were sitting across from her, rather than next door, so that he could see without appearing to look.

  Standing by the door, qualmish with distaste, Mason tries to remind himself that this is Utah, 1930, long before Playboy, skin flicks, and the porno revolution made the female body as exciting as a meat market and sex as momentous as blowing your nose. This boy has never seen a naked woman, even Nola; their lovemaking has taken place in darkness or illusory moonlight, and in a blind fog of adoration. He never had a sister to surprise or spy on. Except for a few French postcards he has probably never seen a completely revealing photograph. And he is only a few years removed from the hilarious hormone-tormented shrimp who was tempted into copping feels in a Saltair crowd. But he has read books. The literary word that bulges in his mind is “pneumatic.” To his eyes, casually slanted in quick glances, Muriel looks as pneumatic as a pile of graduated inner tubes. Like the Michelin ad. When she moves, she afflicts him with all the symptoms of detached retina.

  That is one element of his complexity, that sexual excitement over a girl he is contemptuous of, that alertness to catch the most fleeting moment of revelation if Muriel should drop her arm. He is ashamed of his excitement even while it is as wild in his blood as an eel in a washbasin, for on his left, within two feet of him, her knee touching his, sits Nola, also partly undressed and in full jeopardy. If they were alone, he would be worshipping her calm brow and her golden arms and the hair that falls in dark waves down her back. But as it is, his interest in her is postponed or suppressed, almost denied, and is certainly secondary to his interest in the gross provocations of Muriel. In fact, he is glad that Nola is neither as undressed nor as sensual as Muriel. He feels toward her a protective, fatherly-brotherly-husbandly concern.

  At first, he was as enthusiastic as Bailey about this game, and he has cooperated with Bailey’s outrageous cheating. The girls are pathetically easy to cheat. Neither knows the least thing about poker; they don’t even know the value of their hands. Right under their noses he and Bailey have dealt off the bottom, drawn extra cards, and picked up cards they wanted from the discard pile. In the interest of mere plausibility it has been necessary to cheat themselves now and then, and lose a shoe or a shirt with roars of dismay.

  But the closer Muriel comes to the naked truth, the more complex Bruce’s response has become—all the more eager to get on with it, troubled at what is happening. Much as it arouses him to think of them sitting under the one hanging bulb as naked as newborn mice, and avid as he is to examine all of Muriel, it makes him stern and gloomy to think of Nola undressing in front of Bailey. Intimations of his own bad judgment and treachery bother his mind.

  Bailey has been workin
g on Nola, not by being pleasant and trying to charm her, but by a steady, bright-eyed, knowing attention, ironic compliments, baitings, innuendos, dares. He makes her pay attention by exaggerating precisely what she least likes in him. Every word is suggestive, every smirk a dirty joke. But he has been very John Gilbert about it: his mustache twitches like an eyebrow. What his effect has been it is hard to say. When he calls her Brown-Eyes, she gives him a smoky glance of contempt. When he sings to her one of his double-meaning snatches of song (“Mine in May, his in June”), she ignores him. But this afternoon, when they rode up to Solitude, and Bailey started racing her on the trail, she would not let herself be passed, and half killed her rented horse beating him to the lake.

  As she gathers her cards she ignores his Quakertown crooning, and there is a smolder like resentment in the olive skin of the cheek turned toward Bruce, and her eyes are veiled. She looks resentful, yet Bruce is uneasy. Outrageous as Bailey is, he gives off sparks. Things happen around him. He is wild in something like the way of Nola’s brother Buck, whom she adores.

  The truth is, it is Bailey, not Bruce, who has called the tune throughout this excursion. Bailey brought that color into Nola’s cheekbones and that set to her jaw. She came to be private with Bruce, but she has spent her whole time fending off Bailey’s kidding or ignoring Bailey’s off-color remarks. Now here she is in danger of undressing in front of him—and it is she for whom the strip poker was proposed, Bruce is sure. Bailey doesn’t have to go to all this trouble to get the clothes off Muriel.

  Muriel twitches like a horse, and Bruce’s eyes shift. Nothing but the extruded side of her water-balloon breast and her instant hostile glance. His own glance is opaque and indifferent as he turns it to Nola.

  By their rules, any item of clothing equals any other. Right now, she would have to risk her skirt to win one of Bailey’s socks. What else has she got on? The teddy, a brassiere, perhaps underpants. Or does the teddy take care of those? Three items, at most four. One loss will have her in trouble. Two, and she will be right where Bailey wants her.