The Western Coast

by Paula Fox

  Walter said the rangers lived in the valley, and when they had vacations, often spent them on camping trips up to the headwaters of the Merced and Tuolumne rivers. “It’s another country there,” he said.

  They bought provisions at a small general store and afterward drove to the upper end of the valley. “Half Dome,” Walter said, pointing up at a great gray wafer tonguing out from the cliff which supported it. Annie crouched in the car.

  Walter parked close by a meadow in which three deer fed, their mottled backs warming in the sun. Nearby was a small lake surrounded by a delicate single rim of tall grass; it was still, velvet black, like a grape lying on a green leaf.

  “This is a good spot.” He pointed to three rough cabins raised off the ground on stilts. “There’s nobody there. We’ll leave our things in them. The bears come to steal food. Here.” He handed her a box of dry cereal. “Go feed the deer. I’ll set up everything.”

  He was so calm, so agreeable. He was someone she didn’t know.

  She walked into the meadow and the deer looked up at once, their neat heads poised. In that quiet greenness, it was strange to hear the roar of the falls. The deer appeared unafraid as Annie moved slowly toward them. She sat down in the grass a few feet away, and held out handfuls of cereal. The largest deer walked to her, nibbled at the cornflakes, and was soon followed by the others. They were so pretty, so delicate, yet for an instant, pressed by their warm flanks, her hands damp from their wet muzzles, she was afraid.

  She returned to find that Walter had built a small stone pit near the lake’s edge and on one of the stones was an open can of sardines, a loaf of bread, slices of onion on a leaf. He was gathering kindling wood. The expression of concentrated effort made him look young. He’d given himself over to it. He looked at her blankly as he picked up the coffeepot, then smiled out of his absorption, and she caught a glimpse of an earlier Walter, the promise of the years of his life ahead of him, in the swing of his own youth and strength. It was odd that time had merely smoothed out his face. Here, making a tent of twigs, blowing on the smoke, triumphant as the flame caught, his smile was artless.

  After they had eaten, they sat with their backs against a tree trunk and threw pebbles into the lake. Warmed by the sun, halfasleep, they hardly spoke. Once Walter took her hand and waved it toward the other side of the lake, where she saw the lumpy brown shape of a small bear as it made its way through the trees. Later, they took a walk and she tried to memorize the names of the plants and birds which Walter pointed out, but her mind refused to record, confounded perhaps by the reckless profusion of wildlife around them and partly by her surprise at Walter’s special learning.

  They ate an early supper. It had grown cooler. They roasted potatoes in the fire and broke them in half in their jiggling fingers. Night settled in gently, an emanation, a breath from the forest. They warmed their knees at the stone hearth and drank black coffee from Uncle George’s chipped enamel cups.

  In all the five days they spent in the valley, neither of them spoke of the months that stretched between the time of the bus station where Walter had left her that night and the moment she had stood on the wooden stoop and looked down at him in Laguna Beach. This time they spent was out of time—even the disagreeable parting from Uncle George was forgotten.

  In the valley, they lived without memory.

  Walks, climbs up the perilous rock steps of the Devil’s Cascade, encounters with clumps of bears snuffling at the base of trees like fat spoiled children, the smell of the forest at night, the lake into which they lowered themselves as in baptism, the deer so soon familiar, the sheep-smelling blankets with which they wrapped themselves at night, the making of the fire, the food they ate, the feel of different kinds of tree bark, the afternoon naps in the sunwarmed meadows, the thick, spongy, wet moss beneath the falls, glimpses of other campers far away, seen through their own languor as through a benevolent fog, the love they made that was, for once, at last, as effortless as sleep and, like untroubled sleep, fell naturally without thought into the rhythm of their hours.

  The valley held them in thrall—their histories, each so alien to the other, were erased from their consciousness. She thought, once, how odd it was that this release she felt was somehow connected with a surrendering-up of their divergent temperaments, those personalities which they seemed to have lost track of in the tunnel above the valley. There was nothing really personal in her observation of how easily he kept his pace on the steep paths, how expertly he made fires. And similarly, she noted how dispassionately his gaze followed her as she walked into the water of the lake, or fed the deer, or folded up the blankets early each morning.

  Yet somewhere, stirring at the back of her quietness like that bird over there in the woods among the leaves, was the knowledge that the spell would be shattered soon, would leave hardly a trace of itself when they left the valley.

  At the end of the week, they packed up. Walter dismantled the stone fireplace and kicked earth over their cooking ashes. Annie watched him intently through the car window. He put his hands in his pockets and walked slowly toward her. They drove down the valley, up the road to the tunnel, and as they emerged from the other side to the pleasant if undistinguished landscape she had first mistaken for Yosemite itself, he said, “Those goddamned bastards! Now we’ve got to stop off in Merced to return that junk they loaned us!”

  Bad magic. His words thrust her back into the scandalous, miserable time of his absence. She began, timidly, to tell him what the drive-in was like, but he brushed aside her tales of Ernie and the drunken cook. What he wanted to know, he said, was what she’d been reading, what meetings she’d gone to, if they’d given her any assignments, if she had seen anything of Paul Lavan.

  She hadn’t read much—it was so complicated and so boring.

  “Boring! What’s that got to do with it?”

  Well, she had gone to a few meetings, and she’d tagged along with a woman who was supposed to recruit some Mexicans—

  “What do you mean, recruit! The party doesn’t send people out with membership applications!”

  “The woman was supposed to be investigating jail conditions, but I thought the whole point was to get members…”

  He looked disgusted.

  “I don’t like Lavan.”

  “You don’t have to like him.”

  “I did read some books.”

  He grunted, but didn’t ask her what she’d read.

  They got to George’s and Herbie’s sheep ranch around two in the morning. She watched Walter drop the duffel bag among the weeds. As they left, he pressed his finger against the car horn until she grabbed his arm, begging him to stop.

  Later, they rested by the side of the road and he told her he’d gotten a job at Lockheed-Vega on the assembly line, and hoping to make some kind of peace between them, she described the rivetsorting work she’d done and how she’d been responsible for shutting the place down.

  “How did you shut it down?”

  “I went to the CIO.”

  “The CIO? Whatever did you have in mind!”

  “Oh, God!” she cried.

  “Annie, you’re so tangled, what’s to become of you?”

  She gave up. He could twist and turn all he liked; he could rebuke and tease and change his tune every two minutes. She’d play dead. Let him heave her around like a sack of grain.

  By the time they’d moved into a room on Cheremoya Avenue, the time they’d spent in Yosemite was only a dream, as insubstantial as those fancies which effortlessly, as though emanating from a source outside herself, took possession of so many of her waking hours.

  She went back to a job at the Greek’s, and Walter went on the night shift at Lockheed.

  Waiting on tables in the restaurant, she dreamed of concert appearances, of taffeta evening gowns. To customers’ demands for shrimp cocktails, she gave a noble, grave inclination of her head, deafened by cries of “Encore! Encore!” She wrote her autograph on her order pad beneath “steak MED/
R”; she arrived late at a party in her honor wearing an Irish revolutionary raincoat and a Garbo hat, and all heads turned toward her; in the stunned silence, she lit a Turkish cigarette; lovers circled her at an exact distance of three feet. She measured out the three feet. Even in her daydreams, the men who interested her were those who turned away, their impassive faces hidden by the curve of their hat brims.

  In that world of odorless perfume, of soundless applause, where Annie turned herself into a creature of infinite capacities as though bewitched, she knew at the same time that it was an act of her will. All at once the memory of a waterlogged body on a beach, the feel of the rough blue stuff of a policeman’s uniform against her thigh on a ride that had suddenly turned menacing, the smell of a basement where rats ran along wet floors, an admiring glance that became toxic in her own system, generating an intolerable self-revulsion, would shatter the dreams.

  Wrenched from these silent extravaganzas, she considered the worn furnishings of the room in which she and Walter lived, the kitchen of the restaurant where the Greek flung about his great mass, hollering orders in accents made unintelligible by his impatience, the smell of food frying in grease used over and over again, the apprehension which pursued her even into sleep as 1:00 A.M. drew near, at which time Walter, change jangling in his pockets, would unlock the door, undress in the dark, and crawl between the sheets next to her. These sheets were mere rags, even though Walter took them to the laundryman on Saturdays, bringing back last week’s load, the frayed scraps clean and neatly folded.

  One Friday night, he brought home a group of people from the plant. They went out bowling. Somewhere along the way, they picked up one of the men’s wives, a tall, shelf-breasted woman with red hair and a thick wet red mouth. Early in the morning, they returned to the Vogels’ room and began to drink bourbon. Annie sat on the floor, her back against the wall. The redheaded woman, Augusta, lay on the bed. Why in God’s name was she eternally laughing? Her legs were sprawled out, her mouth open, her hands flattened on the blanket, palms up and opened. Half-finished sentences, shouts of laughter, exclamatory cries whirled around above Annie’s head like dishes tossed from shelves. Other workers at the plant, foremen and inspectors, were execrated, ridiculed, damned forever. Laughter strained, won, and overcame words, coughs and gargles and snorts.

  Augusta’s husband, Junior, a thin small man with stubby pale hands, drank steadily from the bottle. He observed his wife on the bed, his black eyes squinting. There were too many girls in the plant, he told Annie, squatting in front of her. “Women!” he cried, then toppled back at once on his skinny haunches. “Ooops! I may have broke a little wind, yer honor!”

  She edged away. Junior plucked at his belt buckle. “They ought not to be so many women there,” he said. “Makes trouble.” At that moment, Annie saw Walter lean over and plant his mouth in the center of Augusta’s fleshy fig lips.

  “You were shocked,” he said, after they had all left. “I didn’t know that about you.” Still drunk, he giggled inanely. “Oh, Annie, so pure…”

  Several months later, Junior appeared in a Los Angeles courtroom on a rape charge. Annie and Walter went to the trial, where Walter was to be a character witness.

  “How can you witness something that isn’t there?” she had asked him.

  “You’d like him whipped down the street.”

  She recoiled physically from him. She wouldn’t want that done to anyone, she cried. But he’d managed, as he always did, to push her back into self-accusation. She would like to have asked him why he never saw his old friends, Paul Lavan, or those other people she’d met out at the big house in the valley. What about the party people he’d wanted her to know? In some sense, he was further away from her now than when he’d shipped out—working overtime almost every night, drinking heavily on weekends, or lurching from bowling alley to honky-tonk bar with Junior and his pack of loutish friends.

  The rape charge was dismissed for lack of evidence; on the courthouse steps, the alleged victim, a squatter version of Augusta, looked at Junior and emitted a shriek of equine laughter. “You still think he ought to be whipped down the street?” Walter asked Annie. “I never said that,” she protested hopelessly.

  Not long after Junior’s courtroom appearance, Annie came home from work and found yellow hairpins in the bed and a torn silk stocking. She sat for a long time with these things in her hands. When Walter arrived, his face and hands dirty with grease, she remained unmoving, the hairpins clutched in her fingers, the torn stocking falling across her lap. He washed at the sink. He sang to himself, “I got the blues—and I can’t be satisfied…”

  He looked down at her. He picked up the stocking. He smiled his old smile. “It was nothing,” he said.

  She was silent.

  “Somebody who said she knew you. How did you meet her? A girl named Karin. She came here this morning, said she’d been trying to reach you for months.”

  Annie opened her mouth and screamed.

  Walter threw himself at her clapping his hand over her mouth. She bit down on the soft flesh of his thumb pad.

  He jerked his hand away. She gasped for air.

  “Stop it! Stop it!” he cried.

  “You’re trying to kill me!” Her head fell back against the chair. She wept with open mouth—she was deranged. He stood silently, sucking his thumb, his eyes half shut. She slipped to the floor and lay on her stomach, her face pressed into the dusty carpet. He sat down beside her.

  “I won’t see her again,” he promised.

  A week later, on a Saturday afternoon when they were drinking coffee together at the table near the window, a large white envelope was poked beneath the door. She went over to pick it up. Inside was a sidewalk snapshot of Walter. Just behind him, wearing a silver-fox jacket, was the girl Karin. She put it on the table. He looked down at it.

  She took the old suitcase from the closet and began to pack. As she bent over, her mind on the sidewalk beyond this room, this life with Walter, a coffee cup hit her on the back of her head. She turned. He was standing there, his hands on his hips. She picked up a chair and ran toward him. He began to laugh. She broke the chair in front of him. They stood there with the jagged pieces of wood between them.

  When she got to the door, he called, “Wait!” She turned.

  “Why can’t we live like normal people?” he cried.

  She laughed all the way to the sidewalk, aware that she was attracting attention but, for once, indifferent to it. There were coffee grounds on her shoulders. She found a phone booth.

  “Hello?” asked a woman’s voice.

  “Is this Mrs. Shore?”

  “This is Eva.”

  “Is Mr. Shore—”

  His voice came on.

  “Max? This is Annie. Can I come there?”

  She heard a child’s voice in the background.

  “I don’t know what to do…” she muttered to herself. Max heard her.

  “Come right away,” he said. “But I can drive and get you.”

  “No. I’ll get there.”

  Chapter 14

  Nothing that Annie had seen secured her attention so much as Max Shore, his wife and child, and the way they lived in their three rooms among their books, their cooking pots, their child’s battered toys. Sometimes Eva was late for work and left before making their bed. From the studio couch in the living room, Annie, drinking a cup of coffee, watched Max at this task through the open door. When the bed was made, the day began even though Thomas had been up for hours by then, building and kicking over towers of blocks, or rolling canned goods across the narrow kitchen floor.

  They were kind to her. Eva tended to lower her voice when she spoke to Annie, as though she were convalescent. So she must have seemed to Eva, she knew. Her sense of her own strangeness grew apace with the efforts the Shores made to include her in their life.

  She was observing a marriage; in the midst of it, its essential nature eluded her. She waited for a revelation. It never came. Tho
mas had his routines, as fixed as rituals. His parents went about their tasks without consulting each other. They took turns cooking, but Max was responsible for disposing of the garbage and shopping for groceries, Eva saw to the laundry. On Saturdays, they cleaned the house together. In the evening, Max played chamber music on their record player. Eva called it chamberpot music. She preferred Paul Robeson or folk singers, Benny Goodman or Fats Waller.

  Thomas had violent tantrums during which he rolled on the floor like an infant madman, screaming till he choked. At other times, he was a self-absorbed little boy who amused himself by piling objects on other objects. Sometimes he lay in his father’s lap, sucking his thumb, staring dreamily up at the ceiling. Eva fed him his supper, her elbow on the table, a spoon thrust out toward Thomas’s open mouth. She drank a whiskey neat while she was feeding him, talking idly to Max about the day’s events. When Thomas flung a jar of applesauce into the air, he observed his mother implacably as she exhorted him. Mild arguments occurred about domestic matters—a leaking faucet, a chair leg that needed mending. Except for the child’s rages, the climate of life was lenient, forbearing. Yet Annie felt a mystery, some concealed drama of temperaments, an excess of emotion that was not so much dissembled as it was restrained. It was not to be found in the hard-surfaced quality of political talk, and she could only speculate about what went on behind the Shores’ closed bedroom door at night. She struggled against such speculation, but it won out, awaiting her every turn of thought.

  Once she picked Thomas up from the floor during one of his seizures. He bit her hand so it bled. Eva grabbed the wounded finger. Annie was astonished to feel Eva’s hands trembling. Max washed away the blood, his face stony. “I don’t know why,” Eva said, over and over again, as Max wound a piece of gauze around the finger. They both looked haunted. An hour later, it was as though nothing had happened.

  Annie was frequently present during political discussions, sometimes between Max and Eva, sometimes when visitors came. She was not exactly excluded but they talked around her in such a way as to make it clear she could listen but not participate. She didn’t, in any case, wish to take part. Phrases became familiar without ever yielding up their meaning. The world was laid out before her in blocks, like Thomas’s constructions, capitalists, workers, colonial peoples, the masses, the elite, the intelligentsia. In her mind, Annie, like Thomas, kicked away the blocks. It was a wearisome language despite the energy with which it was spoken.