The Rim of Morning

by William Sloane

  “This is odd,” I thought to myself. “But I suppose she is partly right.” Aloud I said, “And I give out clues to what I don’t say as well as to what I do?”

  “Of course.”

  “Hmm.” I decided to try her out. “Suppose you tell me, then,” I said, mentally deciding that her theory was ridiculous, “what I’m thinking now?”

  She laughed. “Stop the car. I’ll give you a demonstration.”

  I pulled up along the edge of the road.

  “Now,” she said, “you don’t believe I’m right. Just sit back a moment and listen.”

  I leaned back in the seat and waited. Selena was not smiling any more, but I did not feel that she was wholly serious, either. I felt suddenly and uncomfortably that she was amusing herself at my expense. Gradually I felt that she wanted me to do something. What, I did not know at first, and I looked at her puzzledly. She never smoked, of course, but I thought I might offer her a cigarette. The silence between us was getting uncomfortable. I pulled my case out of my pocket and extended it to her. “Have a cigarette,” I said.

  The tension between us snapped at once. “Drive ahead,” she said. “You know I never smoke, Bark.”

  “Listen,” I said. “What the hell was all that about?”

  She said composedly, “I just asked you for a cigarette without speaking. And you offered me one.”

  That was that. I thought about it as we drove along, but I didn’t come to any conclusion. “It’s a good stunt,” I said once.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I hope you don’t pull that sort of thing on your poor defenseless husband.”

  “Oh,” she said, lightly, “Jerry isn’t a bit like you.”

  And with that I had to be content.

  We had a picnic lunch out by the lighthouse, and watched the waves come in, and it was all very agreeable except for a few minutes in which Selena undertook to explain to me the theory of neap and flood tides, all in response to some idle remark of mine about how far above the water the high-tide mark seemed to be that day. I was too sleepy and full of sandwiches and iced beer to care much. But it annoyed me mildly that she should know everything like that. A certain amount of ingenuous ignorance, I decided, was a great factor in feminine charm.

  Riding home that afternoon, I thought to myself that I had never before spent a day alone with a person and learned so little about them. Inevitably it is an irritating thing to have a person—man or woman—refuse to let you see a single inch into his or her character. My stock of small talk had run out, and I was simply driving along the turnpike, watching the road and the other cars and thinking of little, when a curious thing happened. Selena reached forward suddenly and ratched up the emergency. Instantly the car began to skid; the tires screamed on the asphalt, and I had the devil of a time keeping us from turning turtle.

  In the middle of my struggle with the wheel a bright yellow roadster full of prep school kids shot out of a narrow drive in front of us and swerved roaring off down the highway. They must have missed our front bumper by inches. I unlocked the emergency and we rolled on; sweat was running off me in rivulets. It was the closest call I ever had in my life; undoubtedly Selena’s quick yank on the brake had saved us from an ugly smash. As I thought of it I realized that the road down which the yellow car had come was entirely hidden from the highway by a stone wall and a belt of trees. There was no way I could have known that that car was coming.

  “God!” I said to Selena, who was sitting perfectly quietly beside me. “Thanks! That was too close. I can still hear the angels singing.”

  She nodded quietly. “There was no way you could see that road.”

  “No,” I agreed. “Damn kids like that. Their parents oughtn’t to give them cars.” She was silent, and a belated question came into my mind. “How did you know they were coming?”

  “I—what is it Jerry says?—I had a hunch.” And she smiled.

  “Well,” I told her, “keep on having them!” But it seemed to me that she acted with amazing speed and directness for a woman with nothing but a hunch.

  I ought to have felt grateful to her, and in a way I did. In another, the incident had in it one of the seeds of the irritation and uneasiness that Selena always seemed able to evoke in me. How had she known that car was coming? I went back a day or so later and looked at the place; there was absolutely no way of seeing past the wall and the trees. The only explanation was a sort of clairvoyance. Hunches as good as that one of hers simply couldn’t be due to chance.

  The months that followed flowed into one another without anything of importance to this story. I was getting on well in my work, and devoting more and more time to it in consequence. I saw less of Jerry and Selena that winter than I had expected to, and I could see, when we did meet, that Jerry was delighted with my progress and puzzled by it. He himself was not deeply interested in the statistical work he was doing, though I understand he did it brilliantly. On several occasions he told me that most of it bored him. He admitted he put in a little time at his office as he could, and I wondered if he was growing lazy, which would have been unlike him, or just what he was doing that occupied the rest of his time. One evening I found out.

  He and Selena and Dad and Grace were to come round to my apartment for a buffet supper on a Sunday night. I liked to give a sort of informal meal once or twice a month that way and ask just the people I really was fond of. I suppose partly because I was making some money and wanted to spend it on entertaining the people who’d done so much for me, especially Dad. Sunday was the best night for my schedule, and Grace was glad to come because Fred was playing in a golf tournament somewhere in Florida.

  This particular time Jerry and Selena came early. The cocktails were not even ready and I was in my shirt sleeves, but Jerry was so plainly excited and enthusiastic over something that details like that didn’t matter. He had something under his arm, and as soon as the greetings were over he presented it to me with a flourish.

  “Here, Bark. With the compliments of the author.” And he grinned.

  It was a thin, gray-covered little magazine with a three-deck title, some sort of journal of mathematics. I ran my eye down the table of contents, and sure enough, there was the name of Jeremiah Lister.

  “I’ll be damned!” I said, turning over the leaves to his article. “What hath God wrought!”

  “You may well say that,” he told me exultantly. “That obscure and droopy-looking little publication is more exclusive than the Racquet Club. And I have crashed its austere gates.”

  “Well,” I said, sparring for time and looking at the article, “this is a surprise. And my novel only half done. You’ve beaten me to publication, all right.”

  Jerry’s piece occupied only two pages and it might as well have been a Sanskrit inscription for all the sense I could make out of it. There was a short editorial foreword by the brain that conducted the magazine in which Jerry’s work was spoken of as “brilliant,” “original,” and “highly suggestive.” After looking helplessly at the text for a few seconds, I said, “I bet Selena helped you with this.”

  “No,” she said, apparently taking my jest seriously, “I didn’t help him.”

  “I should say not,” he added. “She was opposed to the thing from the start. She told me it was a waste of time, but even in the face of discouragement I persevered. I like doing stuff in that field.”

  “As that immortal opus we had in school, Fraser and Squair’s French grammar, would say, ‘chacun à son goût.’ ” I was really pleased about the article. Jerry was a bright lad, all right.

  “What does that mean?” asked Selena.

  “Every man to his own brand of folly,” I told her.

  She looked surprised. “But this isn’t foolish. Jerry’s article is absolutely correct.”

  “I was being flippant. The real translation is, ‘every man to his own taste.’ ”

  “Oh.”

  Jerry said, “Don’t try to read the thing, Bark. Just put i
t away on your shelf of first editions. It’ll be a collector’s item someday.”

  “Nuts,” I told him. “I’m intellectual as hell. Everybody knows that. I’m going to leave this lying round on the living room table to impress people.”

  He laughed. “It’ll be all over rings from highball glasses in a week, then.”

  I took it across to the bookcase. “In that case, I’ll put it beside the Gertrude Stein book Grace gave me for Christmas. The two of them will serve to remind me that there are plenty of things I’ll never be able to understand.”

  Selena followed me. “Who is Gertrude Stein?” she asked me, with interest. “A woman mathematician?”

  “Not exactly,” I informed her. “Here. Take a look,” and I handed her the volume.

  She opened it and looked at the first few pages. “Are there people who understand this?” she asked me.

  “Well, there are people who say they do.”

  She went over to the sofa and sat down with the book. I hung up their coats and began mixing a cocktail. In a few minutes Selena got up and put the Gertrude Stein back on the shelf.

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “You ought not to put Jerry’s article next to it.”

  “I’m just teasing him,” I told her.

  “Don’t pay any attention to him, darling,” said Jerry, lolling back in my best chair. “He’s trying to keep me from getting a swelled head.”

  I poured the cocktails. They were good. Grace came in and we had another round. I showed her Jerry’s piece.

  She wrinkled her forehead over it for a minute. “Goodness, Jeremiah my sweet, I don’t see how you have time for such things with a wife who looks like Selena.”

  Jerry blushed and laughed. “What I haven’t got time for,” he said, “is my job at Howard and Neurath, Statisticians. I’m quitting the end of next week.”

  “You are?” I was surprised, though I knew he was not tremendously keen about working in an office.

  “Yes,” he said, “I’ve about decided that what I really want to do is teach.”

  It seemed right to me, and I told him so.

  “First, though, I’ve got to get a Ph.D. That means writing a thesis.”

  “Swell,” I told him. “I can think of nothing more repulsive than writing a thesis, but you’re the type to enjoy it.”

  “Thanks. It’ll be a year’s work, anyway. Selena and I are thinking of going to that place of Dad’s out west.”

  I remembered then that the Listers owned some sort of house in Arizona or New Mexico that neither Dad nor Jerry, I think, had ever been to. An artist or somebody left it to them, but they’d never made any use of it.

  “Isn’t it way the hell and gone in a desert?” I asked him.

  “Yes. But it’ll be quiet and give me a good chance to work. We won’t be lonely.” He looked fondly at Selena.

  Grace turned to Selena. “Are you going to let this entirely mad young man make a female anchorite out of you, Selena? I wouldn’t tolerate it for a moment!”

  “She doesn’t mind,” said Jerry.

  “No,” Selena admitted. “I don’t see any reason why we should not go. Only I wish Jerry didn’t have to write this thesis he has in mind.” She turned to me. “Can’t he teach without writing anything?”

  “Well,” I told her, “you can’t get a job these days in any good college without a Ph.D. And that means a thesis, as Jerry says.”

  “I see,” she said, and her voice sounded thin and curiously disappointed. I did not understand why, but she was an incomprehensible woman.

  They left within a few weeks, and we all went down to see them off. When the train had pulled out into the cavernous gloom of the Grand Central cave and left us standing on the platform, I felt an obscure feeling of sadness and foreboding. Jerry and I had been growing apart, of course, as our lives diverged, but this time, as we separated, it felt like the end of something.

  We wrote, of course, from time to time. Jerry’s letters were postmarked “Los Palos,” and at first they came about once a week. Gradually they grew more infrequent, and so did mine. I gathered that he and Selena were enjoying their lonely life out there, but in the last one or two of his scrawls there was an unfamiliar note that I could not quite analyze:

  “Selena seems to like the country out here [he wrote me in June] and it certainly is big and impressive after you get over the bareness. I’m working hard and making real progress; the only trouble is that there are so many things I’d like to be working on at once. My study window looks right out over fifty miles of desert—it would be as easy as hell to get lost out there and nobody would ever find you. Selena walks a lot and sometimes I get worried for fear she won’t get back before dark, but I guess she can take care of herself. You’d get a kick out of this place, Bark; why don’t you come out here sometime later?”

  I wrote him and said that I’d like to come sometime, but that I was hellish busy and doubted if I’d find much time even for a week’s vacation. His letter left an uncomfortable impression in my mind, though. I felt that he wanted me to come and was too proud to ask me. Then, when I thought it over, I realized that he was just lonely, and I stopped worrying about him.

  A month later my doorbell rang at nine o’clock in the evening. It was a Western Union messenger. The telegram said:

  CAN YOU COME AT ONCE MEETING LIMITED TUESDAY MORNING LOS PALOS HOPE TO SEE YOU

  JERRY

  I cursed, got leave of absence from my office, and caught the Century the next day. Dad came down to the train with me.

  “You’ll let me know at once,” he said, “if it’s anything serious.”

  “Sure,” I told him.

  Both of us were wondering why Jerry had wired only to me, and what had happened, but there was no certainty of reaching him in time with a telegram from us. They had no telephone at Cloud Mesa, and Dr. Lister thought it was too far from Los Palos for Jerry to come in every day.

  As the train pulled out, I saw his anxious face watching me through the glass of the Pullman window. I gave him a grin that I hoped was reassuring, and settled back in my seat. Something told me that what was ahead was all of a piece with the strangeness of the last year and a half. The switch points clattered under the wheels, and the train began to rush northward, through the tunnel under Park Avenue.

  12. CONVERSATION PIECE

  LOS PALOS lies along one side of the railroad tracks. In the sharp light of early morning it had an almost surrealist clarity of outline. I stumbled down the Pullman steps, half awake, and looked it over without pleasure.

  Only one building in the ragged row that faced me beyond the highway was of brick. The rest were wood, cracked and bleached with sun and want of paint. A shambling rogues’ gallery of stores, saloons, garages, and restaurants. There seemed to be no reason for the town’s existence. Beyond the highway and the tracks the bare, gigantic sweep of brown valley fell away for mile upon mile without a single spot of green or the solitary cube of a house. There was not even the interruption of a fence. It was far from cold, but I shivered as I looked into that immense emptiness of desert and turned back to Los Palos.

  On my right the scrubby façade of Main Street terminated in a blazing red-and-white service station, and to the left, at the other end of town, was another, equally garish in yellow and scarlet, to mark where the town ended and the desert began. The station itself was a drab frame building without even the dubious distinction of the jigsaw scrollwork that belonged with its period. Beyond it, towering over the whole town, stood the water tower.

  Los Palos, in short, was simply one of those desert towns, born when the railroad was building, maintained in a precarious, stunted life while desert-pastured cattle were still worth shipping to market, and dying slowly ever since the profits had gone out of ranching. As I looked it over, it seemed already half swallowed in the immeasurable miles around it, like an old, battered tramp steamer foundering slowly out of sight of land on a calm sea. It depressed me. If this was Jerr
y’s contact with the rest of the world, certainly Cloud Mesa must be a solitary place. I stretched my eyes across the valley to the westward, and though there was a rampart of naked mountains far, very far away, I could see nothing that corresponded with his descriptions.

  There was no one on the platform but a thin old man in a shiny blue serge suit whom I took to be the station agent. He looked at me for a few minutes, idly, and went inside the building. Main Street was deserted, and none of the stores seemed to be open. Certainly nothing in Los Palos was worth waking up for as early as quarter of six in the morning. I put my two suitcases down where Jerry was sure to see them if he drove up before I came back, and strolled across the highway—Main Street—to look for breakfast.

  After some wandering up and down I discovered the Sanitary Lunch, where one unshaven counterman collected a breakfast of sorts with maddening deliberation. My impatience proved pointless. The coffee tasted like the lees of the water tower, the baked apple had been there a long time, and the bacon would have disgraced a camping trip the first morning out.

  “Ain’t come in yet.” And then, after a silence of several minutes, “That’ll be four bits.”

  I paid him and got out. Main Street had waked up while I had been eating; I noticed a man sweeping the sidewalk in front of the Tres Hermanos saloon, and a small dog several doors away was smelling at the base of a telephone pole. And just before I crossed the street a dusty Hudson sedan, moving at better than sixty miles an hour roared through Los Palos in about fifteen seconds. I looked after it enviously and went back to the station. There was nothing there, of course, but I sat down on the baggage truck and lit a pipe.

  The country was something to look at. If you are used to the little landscapes of Long Island, of New Jersey, even of upstate New York, it takes quite a while to realize the real size of Western scenery. The southernmost peak of the range across the valley was probably as far from where I sat as New York is from Philadelphia. And there was scarcely a thing to catch the eye between me and it. I sat there and let my gaze range over the wide floor of the valley and pretended that time was passing. After a while I consulted my watch and it was five minutes after six. I had been in Los Palos less than half an hour; it occurred to me that anyone who could stand fifty years of the place would have lived five ordinary lives anywhere else.