CHAPTER 14
“DON‘T YOU UNDERSTAND,” SHE SAID, HER FACE CONTORTED with icy fury as she struggled to free herself from my amorous grasp, “that we’re finished making love? Your virginity is cured, isn’t that enough? Can’t you leave me alone? Haven’t we committed enough sins already?”
So that was it. Sin. The nuns, damn them, were still with her.
After supper we had strolled aimlessly through Globe, both of us reluctant to return to our hotel room. The moon hadn’t risen yet and the murky streetlights didn’t illumine much of the town. In fact, however, neither of us was interested in sightseeing. Rather, we were afraid of the intimacy of the room and the demands and the conflicts that had already become part of our intimacy. I would have the same experience, not too often, but often enough, in my marriage later on. In the rhythm of attraction and repulsion, communion fighting with individuation, bodily desire contesting with mental hurt, love struggling with resentment and anger, I would find myself drawn to my partner and repelled by her. And she would feel the same way.
But this was not my wife. This was my first love. I did not understand what she felt and I did not understand my reaction to her reaction. Hence I did not know what to do, but was pretty well convinced that whatever I would do, I would make a mess of it.
Safe prediction.
Globe was Camelot. I was Gawain or Lancelot or Galahad or maybe Prince Valiant (and I’d been so busy with other things that morning that I had missed both the comics and the Cub scores). She was Guinevere or Aletha or some other such desirable woman. (I didn’t know the Parsifal version of the legend, much less the more memorable, it seems to me, Airt MacConn version, in which both grail and princess are firmly and indeed definitively captured by the quester.) And up there in the mountains, lurking as a dark wall in the distance, was the grail, or the pot of gold, either at the end of a rainbow or in the charge of some mean-spirited leprechaun.
It was an absurd fantasy. There was no Lost Dutchman Mine. I was interested in a grand old folktale, not a real lode. I didn’t need or even want the gold. I had read the story during a bad (and lonely) night in the South China Sea and thought it might be fun to poke around the Superstition Range someday. Nothing more than that.
Well, if I did find buried treasure …
This was not, in fact, Camelot, only an aging copper town. There was no Grail, only a worn-out legend. She was not a magic princess, only a badly confused and uneducated, if very intelligent, child. And I was not Lancelot du Lac.
Or was I?
I might not love her, exactly, but at the moment I was certainly in her thrall. And it seemed that was where, among other locales, she didn’t want me.
“We’d better get some sleep. Tomorrow is likely to be another long hot day.”
She nodded reluctant agreement. “It’s hot enough now, isn’t it?”
So, with notable lack of enthusiasm, we dragged ourselves back to the Dominion and rode silently up the creaking cage elevator.
In the room we discovered that the fan worked only when we turned on the light. Hence the air in the room was stagnant and heavy, even though we had left the windows open when we went down for supper. As soon as I turned on the light—a single bulb in the center of the high ceiling—a myriad of bugs began to pound against the screen.
“Can’t you turn off the light?” she snapped. “The moon is up now.”
“So it is.”
I stood on a chair, and by extending my six-foot-one frame to its maximum, barely managed to twist the light bulb sufficiently loose so it went off and the fan continued its noisy rotation.
“Be sure to put it back in the morning.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She turned her back on me and with the quick, sure motion with which women remove dresses (a motion I’ve come to love) slipped out of her sundress. The grace of her movement and the even greater grace of her body so delicately revealed deprived me of what little reason I had left.
I grabbed her, swung her around, pulled her against my chest and began to kiss her. She struggled to escape; so aroused was I that I hardly noticed. Then her resistance aroused me all the more. We wrestled wordlessly (she was a fierce little warrior). I sensed that she was about to quit, to let me have my hollow victory. Then came her barrage about sin. I gave up, not a minute too soon for either of us.
“I don’t think we’re sinning,” I pleaded. Hurt, rejection, humiliation quickly replaced my clumsy passion.
“Then what would you call it?” Her lips were drawn in a tight, bitter line. She faced me, clad in her girdle and stockings, hands on hips, a furious little Amazon with wildly heaving breasts and thin, bitter lips. “ ‘Fornication’ is the usual name, isn’t it?”
If there was sin involved, it was in my failure to tell her I loved her, my hesitancy in making that plane reservation for Chicago, and my pusillanimity in substituting an Apache pendant for the ring I ought to have given her.
“Well, at least you didn’t come after me with a carving knife.” I slumped into the only chair in the room.
“Not yet,” she snapped.
“I didn’t think it was sinful,” I said slowly. “I won’t force you, now or ever; but I do feel a little rejected.”
“Whether you think it’s sinful or not”—she would have made a fine mother superior at the moment, with more clothes on—”God thinks it’s sinful.”
“I don’t believe in God.”
“That doesn’t matter.” She snatched open her case, plucked out a pitiably tattered beige velvet robe and threw it around herself. “God will still punish you.”
“Wait a minute.” I searched for an answer in the depths of my memory, convinced that I had the textbook on my side. “I’ve had college religion courses, we called them ‘theology’ at Notre Dame. And we learned that you can’t sin unless you know that what you’re doing is sinful. And”—I was warming to my task of specious casuistry—”since sin is an offense against God and since I don’t believe that there is any such, I didn’t sin. In fact”—I was now addressing the jury—”I am incapable of sin.”
Quad erat demonstrandum.
She frowned, trying to find the holes in my reasoning. “Very nice appeal, Counselor. The women in the jury are doubtless swayed by your good looks, but the Judge is skeptical.”
“You or God?”
“But if there is a God, won’t He hold it against you?”
“Not if I’m sincere and in good faith and invincibly ignorant.”
“What does that mean?” She folded her arms across her tightly bound robe.
“It’s not my fault that I’m wrong about God—assuming, for the sake of the argument, that I’m wrong, which I doubt.”
“You’re too well-educated for me.”
“That’s a cop-out, but it doesn’t matter.” I was quickly losing interest in the argument and, to tell the truth, in lovemaking. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I certainly will not force you to commit sin.”
“It doesn’t make any difference for me,” she said automatically, sagging to the edge of the bed. “I’m damned anyway.”
“I won’t argue with that absurd notion.” I sighed, opened my suitcase and rummaged through it for my loose leaf journal. “And we were told in theology class that it does too make a difference. More sin simply puts you deeper in hell.”
“Hell,” she stated as she rose from the bed, “is hell. I assure you of that. What are you doing?”
“Digging out my journal. I learned during the war that if you don’t make an entry at the end of every day, you soon give it up.”
“That would be bad?”
“I like to write.”
“I see.”
I still keep the journal, it’s been useful for this book, but for many other tasks too. Now I mostly dictate it to a tape recorder—you don’t have to scribble away on a hard windowsill by indistinct daylight when you have a tiny Sony that fits into your coat pocket. Sometimes I dictate into our JVC video camer
a, which amuses my wife greatly. She thinks it a hilarious vanity in a man who, if she is to be believed, is normally not vain enough. Moreover, she finds my obsession with Japanese gadgets bizarre in a man who fought the Japanese for three years.
To which I reply that there is no point in holding a grudge.
But I held a grudge that night.
“Why don’t you dig a modest nightdress out of that huge bag of yours, go into the bathroom and put it on while I finish this task. It’s important to me even if you find it childish.”
“I didn’t say it was childish.” She opened her bag, adroitly rearranged its contents to eliminate the disorder created by her hasty search for a robe, pulled out the same old-fashioned gown she had worn last night, shook it, and carried it toward the bathroom.
“You’ll be terribly hot in that.”
“I am not unaware of the fact.”
I turned to my notebook.
She paused at the bathroom door. “I’m sorry, terribly sorry. I was worried about your soul, not mine.”
“I see.”
“I didn’t meant to hurt or humiliate you.”
“You didn’t,” I said, resolutely not looking up from my notes, “hurt or humiliate me.”
She closed the door softly. I was both hurt and humiliated and now disgusted. And there was no point in lying to her because she could read my mind anyway.
“By tomorrow night,” I scrawled the words in angry shorthand, “I would be rid of her.”
The sentence tore at my soul. Nonetheless, I added, “good riddance.”
“Will you be angry if I ask you why you’re writing that?”
“I like to write.” I looked up. She was sitting in the bed, huddled under the sheet, arms across her knees. “I didn’t hear you coming out of the bathroom.”
“Who will read it?”
“I can’t imagine that anyone else would be interested. I write the personal stuff in shorthand anyway. So don’t try to peek when I’m in the bathroom.”
“I wouldn’t do that.” She sounded sad, beaten.
Let up on her, you idiot. It’s not her fault. She’s had a harsh life.
“We have a family tradition of keeping diaries while we’re in the service. Grandpa Keenan’s is fascinating. I hope to get it published someday. My father hasn’t shown me his yet. But when I went into the Navy he suggested I keep the tradition alive.”
“You’re out of the Navy now.”
“That’s right, I am.” Then I tried to soften the anger in my wounded male pride. “Maybe if decide to be a writer someday, I’ll find it useful.”
“Do you want to be a writer?” There was so much reverence in her voice that I had to look up at her. Across the room in the moonlight there was an awed little girl watching me.
“Not like Robert Penn Warren or Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevksy. I don’t have that kind of talent. Maybe just little books for my kids and grandkids, if I ever have any.”
“How do you know you don’t have the talent?”
“Do I look like a writer? Or act like one?”
“What does a writer look like and act like?”
I paused in my scribbling. She was reading my mind again. So she knew about that dream, too.
“Maybe someday I’ll know, if everything works out. Go to sleep now, Andrea; we have a hard day ahead of us tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir, Commander, sir.” She stretched out on the bed, turned her head against the wall, and feigned sleep. “Good night.”
“Good night, Andrea.”
I thought about another “Good riddance” on the page and thought better of it.
Instead I wrote these fateful words: “These last twenty-four hours have been the most remarkable day in my life. I am confused, uncertain, and terribly apprehensive about our trip tomorrow. I would get out of it if I could. She taught me how to love a woman physically and I’ll never be able to thank her enough for that grace.…” I hesitated, my pencil above the almost invisible page. Yes, she was wrong. It was grace, not sin. “She also is nun-ridden, erratic, unpredictable, and possibly a little crazy. She thinks she will die soon and be damned to hell forever. Crazy, but, darn it, I still love her.”
I finished my notes, closed the journal book, and laid it on the dresser. Somewhere in my duffel bag there were some navy-issue pajamas. I pulled them out in the dark, took off my clothes, tossed them on the floor and pulled on the pajama bottom. I’d be damned if I’d wear the top too. I wasn’t going to suffocate because of her change of heart.
Then I remembered to pick up my clothes and put them on hangers. There was no point in having another fight with my traveling companion.
I drew the shades, turning off the moonlight. The old fan continued to rumble uncertainly above our heads. It sounded a little like Roxinante in extremis.
Then I slipped quietly into bed next to my Dulcinea, maintaining the fiction that she was already asleep.
The Superstition Range was out there, stretching off toward Phoenix and the Sky Harbor airport. Tomorrow night the two of us could be on a DC-4 for Chicago. And Butterfield.
When I had pulled down the shades I’d caught a brief glimpse of the Sleeping Beauty Mountain in the moonlight. It had somehow looked sinister. My imagination, probably.
Without any conscious decision, I searched for her hand. It was easy enough to find. Our fingers closed on each other.
And I made the remarkable discovery that there are some activities that are, in their own way, more pleasurable than orgasm.
Such as a slight sign of reconciliation.
I almost told her then that I loved her. But I fell asleep before the words came out of my mouth.
I woke up sometime before morning—it was still dark—to hear the woman next to me in bed softly sobbing. Who was she?
Then I remembered. I wrapped my arms protectively around her. “Go back to sleep, Andrea, I’ll take care of you. Always.”
The tears stopped. She sighed peacefully. In a few moments she was asleep again in my arms. I fell asleep too, silently repeating my promise.
But “always” turned out to be substantially less than a day.
CHAPTER 15
WHEN I WOKE EARLY THE FOLLOWING MORNING, THE NAKED blue sky was already threatening a day without pity. The high clouds were gone, the sun was a sizzling orange in the east, the air heavy with the smell of nauseous heat.
My charge was peacefully asleep in my arms. I had slept peacefully too, come to think of it—the first night of serenity in months. Perhaps we were both exhausted from our exertions on the bridal bed in Superior.
At rest she was even more the small, innocent girl child. I eased away from her and out of the bed so as not to awaken her, shaved, dressed, and packed my duffel.
The room clerk had said that a store down the street opened early for the fishermen trade—Lake Roosevelt, over in the next canyon (the Salt River) was a mecca, he said, for fishermen. So I tore a blank page out of my journal and wrote a note to Andrea: “Gone shopping. If you wake before I come back, I’ll see you at breakfast.”
I almost added “Love,” but again the word would not come. So I left the note on the mirror in the bathroom, kissed her on the forehead, and, carrying my duffel, stole silently out of the acrid, musty room. Not much of a place for lovemaking anyway. I asked the night clerk, who was still in charge, directions to the store and emerged into the early-morning unease of Globe, Arizona. Like the Dominion Hotel, Globe was careworn. It had known better days and did not expect to see their likes again. Yet somehow it was more charming than Miami or Superior. Maybe it was the bustle of a county seat or the feeling that one was on the top of very high hills or the faint afterbreath of a Western boom town in which the old buildings were so steeped that they would never lose a touch of their allure.
I decided that I would not want to live in a place like Globe. Worse than the pall of poverty that seemed to hang over the whole Queen Creek area was the atmosphere of discouragement—too many men, some
of them still young, walking the streets in the light of early morning with heads bowed in defeat.
(Mining towns always look poor, even when they are prospering. I saw Globe on TV during a recent strike. I was struck by how little the feeling of poverty had changed.)
I purchased bread and cheese and oranges and several thermos bottles for water and a couple of bags of chocolate-chip cookies. I hesitated about a bottle of wine and then decided that I wouldn’t drink much of it anyway, so it would not interfere with the curves and the hairpin turns on the Apache Trail. I packed my supplies, except for the thermos jugs, in the trunk of the car next to my duffel.
Andrea was waiting for me in the dining room, which early in the morning smelled of unwashed laundry. She was wearing “my” blue slacks and white blouse and looked even paler than usual and unbearably weary. The top button of her blouse was open.
“Good morning.” She did not sound as if she thought there was anything good about it.
“I’ve been out buying provisions.”
“What I like about this ship is that we have an effective commanding officer.” Her smile was feeble, but it still made me forget about the sun. “We have not only a happy ship but a well-fed ship. What are the thermoses for? Aren’t there lakes along the trail?”
I told the enduringly bored waitress that toast, bacon, and coffee would be fine for me.
“Sure, right along the trail, and sometimes a thousand feet down. They’re man-made lakes, partially filled canyons. If you’re thirsty and a mountain sheep, you don’t need a thermos.”
“The captain of this ship is not only effective, he is provident. He reads his guidebooks even if it means rising with the sun.”
“He tries hard. Even though this is a cruise ship, he remembers his wartime experiences and superb training he had at Annapolis.”
The Search for Maggie Ward Page 16