Run River

by Joan Didion

  She followed Joe downstairs and closed the door behind him, and by the time Everett came home she had straightened the bedrooms, talked twice to Ed McGrath (Well, it’s done. All I can tell you is it’s done. We’ll try to make it all right later), and made soup from potatoes and onions and cream, a kind that had comforted her as a child, but before she gave it to Everett she took him to bed and held him against the night and the rain and Martha lying outside the house. When she finally went downstairs in the dark, barefooted, to get the soup, the telephone was ringing.

  “You’re lying to me,” Ryder Channing said.

  “Ryder. Stop shouting.”

  “You lied to me. Get her on the telephone.”

  “You’ve been drinking. Go to sleep.”

  “I said get me Marth.”

  “Ryder. Please.”

  “You’re lying to me. Get her to the phone.”

  “I told you. She’s dead.”

  “Screw you,” he said. “Screw you all.”

  Everett sat by the bedroom window, the rain splashing from the peeling window sill onto his knees.

  “Who called?” he asked without looking up.

  She put the tray on the table in front of him and closed the window. “My mother,” she said.

  22

  The third spring after Martha died (it was 1952, but that was not the way time was reckoned on the ranch) Lily asked Everett if he wanted to divorce her.

  He did not. Of course he did not.

  What, then, did he want.

  He did not, he said, want anything.

  It was the year they seldom talked. When they did talk, they talked always about the same thing, although they never called it by name, never even referred to it out loud except very late at night or when they were very tired: You made me get it, she would say. Over seven years, the August day she went to San Francisco by herself had become, in its manifold evidence of mutual error, the heaviest weapon in both their arsenals, the massive retaliation each withheld until all else had been exhausted. She was convinced that year not only that she had gone to San Francisco for Everett (in a sense she had, and he knew it, and there was the lever) but that Everett had in fact robbed her of her womanhood: she had heard stories of women who after abortions could not become pregnant again, and although she did not want another child, Everett did. You made me get it. At such times she would pack a bag for Knight and Julie and take them to stay at her mother’s. There in her own room, with the ebony chest brought from the Orient, the stacks of unread Dominican alumnae magazines, and the flowered lawn curtains she had made on her mother’s treadle sewing machine the summer she was thirteen, the corrosiveness within her would subside, and she would begin to see Everett not as the blight of her womanhood but, on the contrary, as her only hold on sanity. He had not held on to Martha but he would hold on to her. She would imagine Everett dead then, and cry inconsolably for half an hour or forty-five minutes. None of the others could help her. Joe could not help her and none of the others could help her, none of the one-night, two-night stands, none of the times when she had simply not known what else to do, how else to talk to someone, none of it could help her but Everett, and she would make Everett love her. After she had stopped crying she would resolutely put on her dark glasses, kiss her mother goodbye in front of the television set (if it was an afternoon when the Dodger games were being televised, her mother sometimes seemed not to have known she was even in the house), and drive back to the ranch. Occasionally she would be gone only a few hours, and she would not then tell Everett that she had left him again.

  The fourth spring after Martha died, Lily decided that it would be all right if they could go away together occasionally, leave the ranch. Again and again she asked Everett to take her somewhere, and at last they went, one weekend in June, to a party in San Francisco with some people Everett had known at Stanford. There were two views of the Bay Bridge, one of California Street, and four potted avocado trees (all the girls with whom he had gone to Stanford were now, Everett explained, mysteriously bent upon breaking the Calavo trust); there were repeated assurances that (alternately) Herb Caen or Barnaby Conrad or Dolly Fritz would be dropping by later; and there was Ryder Channing.

  She had not seen Ryder since before Martha’s death; she had not even talked to him on the telephone since those first few months, when he would sometimes call the house, drunk, and talk, about nothing in particular, for thirty or forty minutes. When he called during the day she had talked to him, but when he began calling late at night she had finally, without telling Everett, made a point before she went to bed of muffling the telephone so that they could not hear it ringing. After that she had only heard about him, here and there, from one or another of the few people they saw: none of the reports quite tallied but none of them were good. She would hear first that he was seen with a succession of unidentified girls in bars frequented by the very young; then that he was never seen, had become a virtual recluse. He was asking for sympathy all over town; he was rude, abusive, burning all his bridges. Nancy was leaving him; he had left Nancy. He had been taken off the Riverside City project because he was pulling some fast ones on Larry Dupree; he had been removed because he never appeared, showed no interest. Finally: he had moved to San Francisco to follow Nancy; they had moved together to San Francisco because her father ordered them to.

  When she first saw him, standing by the bar and laughing, none of it seemed possible: Ryder had never looked better. Deeply tanned and wearing a blue blazer, he had about him the air of the men one saw in liquor advertisements, an air which suggested untroubled afternoons spent sailing off Belvedere, expensive steaks in good restaurants, and the smooth absence of eccentricity achieved only by the recently rich. It was not until she had talked to him for a few minutes that she saw that there was something about his face which belied the sun tan, made the blue blazer seem a kind of fancy dress. His gaze flickered around her without ever quite settling upon her; his smile was less a smile than a tic.

  He had, he assured her, the world by the tail. Or just about.

  “I’m glad, Ryder.”

  He just about had it licked, he insisted. He guessed she had heard things were rough for a while, but she could rest assured that it would be smooth sailing from here on in.

  “I’m glad,” she said again. She had heard that he sometimes hinted, drunk, that Martha’s death had caused the disorder in his life, and wondered if he had so deceived himself. The disorder had been there always. Even Martha had seen it: He’s the kind of man, she had once said, who when your father’s dying or you’re having a miscarriage or a note’s due at the bank, depend on him, he won’t be around.

  “How’s Nancy,” she added.

  Nancy, he declared, could not be better. Nor could he. And they had been meaning to get in touch with her because—what a coincidence running into her tonight!—they were moving back to the Valley. He was going into an operation of his own, had some deals going, nothing he was free to talk about but very big irons in the fire. He’d be working his ass off but it was going to be worth it.

  “That’s fine, Ryder,” she said; she wondered where Nancy was.

  Although she heard, in July, that Ryder and Nancy Channing were in Sacramento again, she did not talk to him until one afternoon in September when he called and asked her to meet him in town. She couldn’t possibly, she told him; please, he said, all pretense gone from his voice. I need you. You’re the only friend I’ve got.

  When she arrived at the address he had given her, a one-storey house in a new subdivision south of town, she saw that he had been alone for days, perhaps weeks: there were books thrown on the floor (he had always been sloppy and she recalled Martha saying that he did not sleep well), dirty shorts and socks and shirts strewn on the chairs, and every flat surface was littered with the remnants of whatever he had been eating—celery stalks, stale ends of bread, the torn plastic wrappings from processed cheese. In the bathroom there were dark hairpins on the floor, distinctly not
Nancy’s, and the sheets on the bed where she sat with him and finally lay with him had not been changed when Nancy would have changed them. He looked as disheveled as the house did, and talked incoherently: he had clearly been drinking. Nancy was in Piedmont, he did not know for how long. The deal on which he had been working had not quite gone through, but never mind that. It would. You had to wait these things out, they didn’t build Stonestown in a day.

  Before she left she gave him what cash she had, about $20, and straightened the bedroom so that he could sleep.

  “Don’t worry,” she said.

  He sat slumped in a chair.

  “I said don’t worry,” she repeated, holding his head against her.

  It was apparent that he needed someone, and as she drove out to the ranch she imagined that he needed not someone but her. Whether it was true or not did not much matter: she was already committed.

  23

  “You can’t dance at all,” Everett said to her. “You never could dance worth a damn.”

  He said it in a motel room outside Salinas on a spring evening in 1957; they had driven down to look at a stock ranch, 840 acres for $225,000, which was, Everett thought, on the high side for a stock ranch but was $85,000 less than the eventual buyer, a Stockton syndicate, asked one year later for the eight acres of it with cloverleaf access to a proposed freeway south. (In the end, however, the joke was not upon Everett after all, since the route of the freeway was shifted five miles east.) In the motel there had been glass doors to the lighted swimming pool, Muzak piped in through the walls, and wall-to-wall tweed carpeting on which they had tried, after three drinks before dinner, to dance.

  “Nobody can dance on a rug,” she said.

  “You couldn’t dance at the Palladium.”

  Although she had never considered herself even a mediocre dancer, she was hurt; in the haze of three drinks she embroidered bitterly upon past hurts. A month before she had bought a red chiffon dress which he claimed not to like on her, although he knew (in fact because he knew, he said it because he knew) that she had wanted a red chiffon dinner dress from the time she was in school and had seen one on a girl at a dance; before Christmas, the day she came home from two weeks in Carmel, he had not been at home but (by a deliberate effort, she was certain now) in Reno.

  “I’m not that bad a dancer,” she said, wondering what had happened to the girl in the red chiffon dress, what brilliant marriage she had made, what adoring husband was even then leading her (leading: there was the key to good dancing) across the polished floor of what fashionable hotel.

  “I told you, you can’t dance at all. You don’t listen to the beat. I don’t know what you’re listening to but it isn’t the beat.”

  “Then let’s not dance.” She sat down on the bed and began brushing her hair.

  He sat down, without speaking, and pretended interest in an advertising leaflet bearing a photograph of a man identified as “The Salinas Valley’s Number One Restaurateur, a Ph.D. of Beef.” There was also a drawing of a steer wearing a crown, with the legend “Where Premium Beef Is King.”

  “You’re deliberately starting it again,” she said. “You’re deliberately doing it again.”

  Everett said nothing.

  “You do it,” she added, “because you’re insecure.”

  “Cut it out, Lily.” He stood up and straightened his tie in the mirror. “You ready to go?”

  She picked up her sweater, and they did not speak again (if you did not count queries for the benefit of the waiter, and she did not) until halfway through dinner, after Everett had left the table to say hello to a cattleman he had seen in the bar.

  “Eat your dinner,” he said when he sat down again. “Or is there something the matter with it.”

  “I was waiting for you.”

  “You were.”

  She did not say anything.

  “That’d be the first time.” He picked up his drink. “That’d be the goddamn first time.”

  “When did you ever care.”

  “That’s right. When did I ever care. When did you.”

  “I care right now.”

  “That’d be the goddamn first time,” he repeated.

  She saw the vein tightened on his forehead and tried to eat a bite of abalone. Everett had not touched his dinner and was on his sixth or seventh martini, she did not know which. That’d be the goddamn first time. What it was not the first time for, at any rate, was this scene: she supposed they said different words each time but it was always the same scene, and although she could not remember when or how it had begun, it seemed now that they were condemned to play it out together all the days of their lives, raking their memories for fresh grievances, cherishing familiar ones, nourishing the already indestructible shoots of their resentment with alcohol and with the inexhaustible adrenalin generated by what she supposed was (at least she did not know any other name for it) love. It did not seem to matter any more who had first resented whom, or for what. It did not seem to matter what either of them did any more: it could begin out of nothing. It could begin when they were trying hardest to keep it away, could tear apart all their tacit promises, could invade even the cunningly achieved anonymity of motel rooms with wall-to-wall tweed carpeting, rooms in which they had thought they might begin again; rooms in which she could feel, in the first glow of the first drink, that Everett was someone she did not know at all, someone to whom she might seem the gifted, graced, charmed woman she had wanted to be.

  “Stop it,” she said, putting down her fork.

  He beckoned to the waiter. “Stop what.”

  By midnight Everett had fallen asleep in his clothes on one of the two double beds. Lily sat rigid in a straight chair on the far side of the room; to have lain on even the other bed would have implied domesticity, a truce. When he woke and told her to go to bed she turned away, turned her face toward the window which looked out on nothing but the Lincoln. She could not sleep, she said, in the same room with him. She had managed to sleep, he said, in the same room with plenty of other people, hadn’t she. No, she had not. And what did it matter if she had. When had he ever cared. He had slapped her then and she twisted away, and he took her in his arms and it was all right again for a while. It’s going to be all right baby, he said, it’s going to be fine now, and she said over and over Please Christ Everett keep us, and he said Lily, baby, we’ll get through the next few months all right and then you take a trip, you take the kids on a trip, go somewhere you want to go and baby when you come home it’ll be all right, you’ll see.

  Later she had begged Everett to go with them on the trip that summer but he would not. Knight liked everything, liked Paris and London and Rome and New York, but Julie was homesick and wanted her father, and Lily was homesick too. Although she sent postcards almost every day to Everett and to her mother, neither wrote frequently: her mother twice, once to observe that Duke Snider had been off his game for a week, once to complain that the Wells Fargo Bank would allow her to subordinate not three hundred but only one hundred acres to the Paradise Valley All-Electric Homes people; Everett three times, each letter an exercise in the stiff, impenetrable optimism he reserved for all mailed communications. In Paris she received a cable from Ryder, asking if she could lend him five thousand dollars; she cabled that she could not, and then wondered guiltily where he would get the money.

  After she was home, all she could remember of the trip at all was the fat Italian on the flight from New York to San Francisco, the Italian not from Italy but from New Jersey; she remembered him with a clarity she would have preferred to forego. He lived in New Jersey, was married to a woman who weighed 234 pounds, and had business in San Francisco: those were the only three facts she ever knew about him.

  Idlewild that night had been hot and swept by fitful warm rains, everything smelling of the same sweet mildew that had always meant New York to her. The plane was delayed, and Lily sat (alone, because Knight and Julie were staying over a week to visit Sarah in Bryn Mawr) in the s
urgically lighted litter of the waiting room reading the real-estate advertisements in a Town and Country someone had left behind. She had on a white silk suit she had bought on sale the day before at Hattie Carnegie, and thought she presented rather a pleasant contrast to the other passengers, one of whom, an aging blonde, had on Capri pants; another of whom, an extraordinarily seedy minister, had stripped down to his pants, an undershirt, and a clerical bib. He was fanning himself with the New York Daily Mirror, and Lily hoped that he would not sit next to her on the plane, because she was quite certain that before they reached San Francisco she would be telling him, in a helpless drive to win his approval, what faith and works meant to her.

  She smiled distantly at a man who had smiled at her. Apparently Italian, about her age, the man wore a suit of such deliberately obscure cut and color that it appeared to be a parody on a Brooks Brothers suit. The suit was complemented by—and such would be the phrase—a narrow black string tie with a heavy gold tie clasp, an absurdly small hat, and a candy-striped shirt with French cuffs, which he shot several times as he repeatedly opened and closed the attaché case in which he had for some reason secured his ticket. It was not until after he had settled himself next to her on the plane that she noticed the cuff links, which were representations of two of the Caesars, and it was not until he accidently brushed his hand against her knee and then drew it away that she noticed the ring, which was large, diamond, and on his little finger.

  It was about then that she noticed, as well, that he had been and was still drinking. You’re skinny but you’re good-looking, he announced thickly, his first words to her. Although she was taken back she smiled, lowered her head and looked up at him and smiled. She always smiled that way at men she did not know, unable to think of anything else to do and wanting them to want her, recognize her as the princess in the tower. In this particular case, however, she smiled also because the stewardess had looked with disapproval upon the man, who was making little effort to conceal his intention to stay drunk for the next three thousand miles. The disapproval of the stewardess suggested a kind of pact between Lily and her seat mate, and she sealed it by accepting a swallow of what seemed to be very good Scotch, although she did not like Scotch, from his flask.