Recapitulation

by Wallace Stegner

  “What would they do if we stranded them?”

  “Probably just what they’re doing now.”

  “How would they get back?”

  “That’s their problem.”

  “If we did that to them, they’d talk to get even.”

  “They’ll probably talk anyway.”

  “Maybe only to me. Jack thinks it’s smart to pretend he knows everything you do. He likes to get the goods on people. He wants everybody to be as dirty as he is. But he might not talk except to me.”

  “Damn Bailey.”

  “We should have known better.”

  “I should have, you mean. I know the bugger. I’ve known him from away back.”

  He is shivering, running his hand up and down her back, his nose in the fragrant part in her hair. “Can you imagine us making love in there while those two listen? With nothing but that curtain in between?”

  She makes no response for a long time. The response she finally does make has a grudging, argumentative quality: “They’ll be too busy to pay attention to us.”

  “Maybe.” Overwhelmed again, he cries, “Ah, why isn’t it like the Capitol Reef?”

  “It will be again.”

  “But we’ve only got two weeks more!”

  In his arms she goes quiet. It is the wrong thing to have said. For at least a minute he stands there crowding her against him, kissing her, moving his hands on her back and sides, trying to revive the passion that was there only seconds ago. But he seems to have put it out. Finally her husky whisper says, “Let’s go. I’m cold.”

  In silence, following the slash of the light, they go back into the woods along the narrow path. Short of the cabin Nola stops. “Give me the flashlight.”

  He watches the disembodied blob of light float and waver down toward the privy. When it disappears, he relieves himself in the bushes. Under the firs it is very black, with only two or three brittle stars showing through the roof of trees. It is as still as it is dark. All Brighton has gone to bed except the two of them, who most want to. In his thin shirt he is shivering. His feet are icy, and sore from the rocks and twigs of the trail. He is glad when the light blooms again down in the blackness, and comes toward him darting left and right until it finds him and holds. When she arrives, he folds her once again into a shivering, miserable embrace. But she doesn’t respond. In a moment she is leaning back with both palms against his chest.

  “Bruce.”

  “What?”

  “I hate to tell you. I’ve got the curse.”

  “Oh.”

  Stupidly he stands there. For just an instant he wonders if she is lying, if this is punishment. Then with a bitter, strange, husky little cry she lays her face against his chest. “Oh, damn, damn, damn!”

  The father-brother-husband in him has already stepped forward, perhaps too promptly, to replace the lover. He is concerned and practical. “Well, did you …? Are you prepared?” (And if you are, says some subliminal prompter, why did you let me bring you up here?)

  “No, I’m not due. The altitude must have brought it on. Sometimes it does.”

  The little things one learns about women.

  “Maybe we should go in.”

  “No. I can cobble something.”

  “But … in there? With them around? It’s all name and no game!”

  “If you don’t want to,” she says.

  “I could take you home and come back tomorrow and get them.”

  “Oh” she cries huskily. “Can’t you get it through your head? I don’t want to leave you! I don’t want you to leave me!”

  Her violence awes him. He stands and has nothing to say. Then her whisper asks, “Could you go in and get my little overnight bag?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s on the bed.”

  Concerned with what he may interrupting, he knocks several times. Then he pushes open the door. “Here I come, ready or not.” He shoots the flashlight beam across the shack to the right-hand bed. The air in the shack is so bad that he turns his mouth inside out. “Gahhh! How do you stand it in here?”

  “We were doing fine till you came along,” Bailey’s voice says. “You finally coming to bed?”

  “I just came in to get something.”

  He gets it and turns back. The diffusion of the light, just before he turns it off, shows their noses, side by side. On second thought he revives the light, returns to the bed that he and Nola will share, kneels on its sagging mattress, and heaves the window above the bed wide open till it sticks.

  “What the hell you doing?” Bailey says.

  “Opening up. It smells like a fox farm in here.”

  “Then when you get through opening up what are you gonna do? I don’t want to seem inquisitve, Mason, but are you gonna be in and out all night?”

  “Don’t mind me. Go right ahead with whatever you were doing.”

  “Sure. What are you doing, out in the cold and dark?”

  “Looking at stars.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, for Chrissakes settle down. You could interrupt something important.”

  “I doubt that. We’ll give you ten minutes and then we’ll be in.”

  He finds the door, and closes it on their grumbles and murmurs.

  Nola stands where he left her. She takes the bag and flashlight and says,

  “Go a little way away. I’ll whistle.”

  So he gropes along what he thinks is the path, stumbles into bushes, stubs his feet on rocks and roots, and at length stands staring into blackness that writhes with dim shapes as much in the eye of the beholder as beauty is supposed to be. At length her low whistle summons him.

  “Bailey’s going to give us a bad time when we go in,” he says.

  “Let Bailey look after himself and we’ll look after ourselves.”

  “All right. I’d better give him a warning, though.”

  Again he knocks, and again he waits before he pushes the door open. He and Nola do not speak. With a slash of the light he shows her where the bed is, and after a second or two gives her another wink to make sure she has found it. The bed complains when she sits down on it, and his heart flinches. They won’t be able to so much as roll over without those two assuming things.

  Softly, feeling with distaste the grittiness of the floor under his bare feet, he finds his way across the cabin without the light and sits down beside Nola. She is already undressed, and she comes against him bare and loose when he touches her. From the other bed, a few feet away behind the blanket, Bailey says, “Pardon my curiosity, but it just occurred to me to wonder where you two were gonna sleep. Don’t tell me you’re gonna climb into the same bed.”

  “Shut up, Jack.”

  Snickers, murmurs. “I never would have believed it,” Bailey says.

  “Pipe down.”

  “So much a lady. So resentful of vulgar slurs.”

  “Shut up, you son of a bitch, or I’m coming over there with the ax. I’m not kidding.”

  A moment’s silence. “Why, he’s offended,” Bailey says. “Chivalry is not dead.” Murmurs. Snickers.

  Nola lifts her knees and slips into the bed. “Once more,” Bruce says furiously. “I’m warning you, Bailey. Once more.” He waits. Nothing but rustlings and smothered laughter. He slides his pants down and off and gets in beside his true love. She turns to him and they meet, silently grappling. He feels the barrier she has built against him, and it only makes more excruciating his desire. Their springs do not talk, as those of Muriel and Bailey do. There are no murmurs and snickers from this side. He goes into her arms the way gophers used to go into his little Oneida jump traps back in Saskatchewan—head first, and were gone.

  Kissing her, he finds that her face is wet. Her nails dig into his back. The other bed is silent. Some uncounted time later it awakens again to creakings and rustlings that soon steady into rhythmic squeaking. Bruce and Nola lie locked in their hard unrewarding grapple. His arms are dead and his side aches f
rom the unrelenting rigidity of his position. He feels that this balking of desire is somehow his fault. He hopes that Nola is asleep, and so will not stir and risk wakening her. Listening to Bailey and Muriel make their carnal love, he is fascinated, and filled with disgust, and bitterly ashamed. And he is not at all sure that Nola is not listening, too, and somehow blaming him.

  BAM!

  Someone has shot through the shack with a shotgun. Bruce is sitting up with his feet over the edge, every hair on end and his heart, after one enormous bound, thudding in his chest. He is aware that Nola is up on her elbow behind him. A paralyzed silence has overtaken the rhythmic squeaking next door.

  “Holy Christ!” says Bailey’s voice out of the dark. “What was that?”

  Bruce, glaring around in blackness, groping for the misplaced flashlight, feels how comprehension struggles by slow osmosis from capillary to capillary.

  Mason, too, up on his elbow in the dim hotel room, struggles toward the same realization, or an equivalent one.

  Someone down in the street has shot off a gun.

  The window above them, jammed open without a prop, has let loose and dropped with a bang.

  He eases back down. Bruce says to Bailey, “The window fell shut.”

  It is all fading, dimming, slowing down. His heart slows from its painful pounding. Off in the dark behind the curtain he hears the rustling begin again. Bailey snorts through his nose, laughing, making a sound as if he is talking with his face between breasts. His whisper is confidential, amorous, nuzzling. “Jesus, that’s a new one. How’d you like that, kid? Coitus alarmus …”

  Mason feels for the girl who was lying beside him, but she is gone.

  IV

  1

  He awoke at seven with a headache and the feeling that there was something he was supposed to do. It took a moment to think: flowers for the funeral. Not an errand important enough to wake a man up after only four or five hours of disturbed sleep. But he was used to waking with jobs on his mind. Mornings had always been his best time, his day-organizing time. His friends used to be amused at his little black book, in which he jotted down appointments, reminders, obligations, shopping lists, which, as soon as each item was taken care of, he inked out so blackly that they could not be read. He was a man, they said, indifferent to where he had been, interested only in where he was going. Thinking with some irony that they would have had to change their description if they could have been in his head for the last eighteen hours, he got out his book and set up the morning.

  Flowers

  Settle with Philips at the Home

  Funeral: be there 11:30

  Call Joe

  Not much. He wished there were more. Sight of the sweater and box beside his bed suggested to him that if he didn’t have things to do, he could again be seduced into messing around in the past like a scavenger in a dump. For a man uninterested in where he had been, the broken newsreel his mind had played through the night was as disconcerting as a failed lie detector test. He got into the shower and washed all that away.

  He was already in the hall, and closing the door on his way to breakfast, when the telephone rang. Surprised, suspicious, his responses leveled out to flat caution, he went back and answered it.

  “Mr. Mason?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you hold for Mr. Richards?”

  He held, wondering what Mr. Richards, and then he came on: Herbert Richards, one of the Assistant Secretaries of State. “Hello, Bruce?”

  “Yes. Good morning. What’s up?”

  “I’m sorry to hunt you down on the road, especially since your secretary said you’re on an unhappy errand.”

  “It’s all right. A mercy, as they say. She was very old.”

  “Still. No fun.”

  “No. Were you calling to commiserate with me?”

  “All right, Your Excellency. No, as a matter of fact. I’m calling to see if you’ll help us out for a month or so.”

  “Help you out how?”

  “Covering the OPEC meeting in Caracas.”

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t already got that covered. It comes up in two weeks.”

  “I know. Sure we’ve got it covered. How’s your Spanish?”

  “Terrible.”

  “Doesn’t matter. There are plenty of people to look after the Venezuelans and Ecuadoreans. It’s the Arabs we’re worrying about, and we haven’t got an Arabist who comes close to you. How about it?”

  “June 14 is pretty close.”

  “I know,” the earnest electronic voice said. “We were going to go with Henry Knoll. He isn’t Bruce Mason, but he knows his way around. But Henry just came up with bleeding ulcers. He doesn’t need an OPEC meeting. So we had a huddle last night and asked ourselves why not the best? You worked for Aramco for years, you’ve served in both Saudi Arabia and Iran, you know all the Middle Eastern countries, you’re fluent in Arabic, you know Yamani and most of the others, you’re not now officially in the Department, your magazine is influential. You won’t be exactly invisible, but at least you’ll have a front. And they’ll talk to you. They trust you. You represent a friendly and informed constituency. Don’t say no. You’re the only one who can do this.”

  “I’d have to be briefed.”

  “And debriefed. We figure a month altogether.”

  Mason ran a calendar through his head, estimating. “I drove over here, wanting to see the desert again. That means I have to drive back. I couldn’t get to California before tomorrow night, even if I left right after the funeral. Today’s what? Wednesday? Say this afternoon and tomorrow to drive back, and Friday and Saturday to get the office squared away. The earliest I could fly to Washington would be Sunday, the earliest I could be in the office would be Monday morning.”

  “Monday morning is great.”

  “Well, all right, then. Do I come as a consultant, or do I get briefly hired as a Department employee, or what?”

  “Can we leave that till you get here? We want to do it the best way for you.”

  “All right.”

  “You’re already cleared as a consultant, anyway. Have you got TR vouchers?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “Good. Just come on, then. I’ll look for you Monday morning. If you get in early on Sunday, call me at home. Come out and stay with us in Bethesda, if you’d rather.”

  “A hotel’s easier on both you and me,” Mason said. “I’ll have my secretary try the Hay Adams. Otherwise the Shoreham. I’ll see you Monday morning.”

  “Great. I’m absolutely delighted you’ll do this.”

  “Did you really have any doubts?”

  “No,” Richards said, and laughed. “Bring your black book.”

  “I’m making an entry in it right now.”

  “Marvelous, marvelous. Till Monday, then.”

  “Hasta luego.”

  “Hasta la vista. Goodbye. Thanks, Bruce.”

  “Goodbye. Thanks for thinking of me. This could be fun.”

  The Middle East pursued him. While he was breakfasting in the coffee shop he read in the Tribune that Adnan Khashoggi, who had been investing Saudi petrodollars in the United States for years, had yesterday opened an International Trade Center out on the flats beyond the Jordan. Mr. Khashoggi was not personally present for the ribbon cutting because he had been subpoenaed in the Lockheed bribery affair, and was staying out of the country. Nobody quoted in the Tribune seemed disturbed by this cloud on the Trade Center. In Utah, apparently, a petrodollar was a dollar.

  It amused Mason to find Khashoggi active in Utah. He had known Khashoggi’s father years ago, when he was court physician to Ibn Sa’ud, back in the time when Socal, the forerunner of Aramco, was hauling Saudi Arabia hand over hand into the twentieth century, and when Riyadh was a mud fort with neon quotations from the Koran around its walls. Now here was the son planting a piece of the Saudi-owned twenty-first century on the banks of the creek where Mason had caught suckers when he was thirteen or fourteen—a creek called
the Jordan by zealots who compared themselves to the Children of Israel, and took it as a sign and a wonder that their promised land, like that to which Moses led his people, lay at the far edge of a biblical wilderness on the margin of a dead sea.

  Wilderness no longer. The air outside was city air, the heat was city heat. The night’s coolness was already shriveling upward along the faces of buildings, and the crowds hurrying to work sought, as Mason did, the shady side of the street.

  The flower shop to which the doorman had directed him turned out to be run by a Nisei woman with mainly gold teeth. She was so prompt with suggestions, and so sympathetic to his needs, that within twenty minutes he was writing her out a check, and her son in a denim apron had begun to lay out the order on the table at the rear of the shop. The flowers, they promised, would be delivered within an hour.

  Mason opened his black book and drew a rectangle around “Flowers” and inked in the rectangle until it was solid black.

  Now item two. It had been on his mind as a mildly distasteful duty that he would have to go up and sort out his aunt’s few shabby possessions, give to her friends, if any, what they could use, if anything, and dispose of the rest to the Goodwill or the Relief Society or the trash can. Philips, the director, had fore-stalled him by sending down to the funeral parlor his aunt’s watch and wedding ring, along with Nola’s conscientious box of returnables. But there were still his aunt’s last bills, the closing out of the account. He borrowed the Nisei woman’s telephone and made a call.

  Philips, it turned out, had already taken steps. Mr. Mason had got the personal belongings, the watch and ring and such? Yes. And the box of his own belongings? Yes. The rest was so minimal that he had taken the liberty of giving it either to her friends or to the Goodwill.

  Mason hung up feeling vaguely rebuffed, as if Philips had failed in cordiality. But he drew a rectangle around Aunt Margaret’s problems and inked them out. Now there was only the funeral, nearly three hours away, and the calling of Joe, which he began evading as soon as he thought of it. He felt half irritable, nursing his shadowy headache. He wished he could dispose of these trivial details and get started back to San Francisco. He was already thinking ahead to Washington and Caracas, leaning into the routine preoccupations and challenges of his life. At the same time, he was thinking almost aggrievedly that Aunt Margaret was a true Mason. She left nothing, not even duties. No will to read, papers to sort, house to clear out and sell, lawyers to see. Where she went down there was not even an oil slick.