by W. S. Penn
45.
“I feel like Duz.”
Delia Tompson was making tea, and I sat at the kitchen table while the Proctor put the car in the garage. Delia swirled boiling water in the teapot to warm it before she added tea bags and fresh hot water. “Irish Breakfast all right?”
“Sure,” I said, watching her, surprised once again at the way Delia wasn’t a woman who was once beautiful, not a woman people would say “held her age,” but a woman who was still beautiful—more so the more you knew her. Unlike some people whose faces looked like a herd of Gilas had crawled across them, leaving them lined and saggy with disappointment, the lines on her face—the result of laughter alternating with thoughtful concentration—gave her character.
“You know I really appreciate this,” I said as she set the cups on the table.
“You’re welcome,” she said. “Besides, you can help out around here. That will let the Proctor spend more time finishing up this series of articles.”
After passing out from a headache bumping eight on the Richter scale, I’d spent the past four days being prodded like a frog in Biology Lab and injected with varying derivatives of codeine. The Tompsons had agreed to let me stay in their guest room while I made the studio over their garage livable. Together, we had convinced the resident surgeon, Hacksaw Satherwaite, that I would fare better in their house than in a college infirmary with V.D. cases, fakers of mono, and the random attempted suicide.
Delia composed a long letter asking, for fear of hurting mother’s feelings, if my living with them was all right with her. Mother replied with a Xeroxed diagram of her house’s floor plan. She’d labelled each bedroom of the house as her study, her bedroom, and the room the Stanford student was lodged in, drawing little blue-coated soldiers in each one to indicate occupied territory. Father lived in a one-bedroom apartment so he was less a problem of tact than a problem of tactics. He wanted me to have the tumor out in the college clinic; I insisted on the Stanford Medical Center.
“It’s not that I distrust Hacksaw Satherwaite,” I explained to Delia. “It’s his loneliness. He looks like USC’s place kicker in the last seconds of a tie game with UCLA. He looks at me, and his eyes swim with hesitant visions of glory.”
“This is my head we’re talking about,” I’d tell the Tompsons over dinner. “I’ve got to have something there to protect my neck from falling objects, don’t I?”
“The way I understand it,” the Proctor said after my first visit to Dr. Joshua “you-can-call-me-Josh” Weinstein at Stanford, “is that this could be pretty serious.”
“Like the red wheelbarrow,” I said, trying to be upbeat. “It all depends.”
I moved in above the Tompsons’ garage. It was a slow time. At first it was slow because of the shock to my adrenal glands, after Delia flushed my entire supply of amphetamines down the toilet. After my brain recovered and I could remember a word longer than two syllables, the waiting passed pleasantly, and like an old dog who no longer has to guard the house, I began to put on weight.
“Nothing worse than a fat Indian,” I said to Sara, who came by almost daily to visit.
“A fat and happy Pinko,” she would reply. “It’s good to see.”
“You know,” Delia said shyly one night over Cornish game hens, “if Sara would like to … I don’t mean to butt in, so forgive me if I am … but if you would like to have Sara spend the night now and then …”
“What’s the matter?” Proctor Tompson asked. “You look, to say the least, flabbergasted.”
“No. I mean, yes, I am,” I said, looking from him to Delia and trying not to blush. “I mean, Sara and I are just friends. Good friends.”
“Through no fault of hers,” Delia said.
“To be Sara’s boyfriend … that would be like being invisible. Just being her friend reduces me to the outlines of a dork whenever we go into a bar together. You know, the comments the ridge-bellied roundheads make about what’s a queen like her doing with a guy like me.”
Delia laughed. She knew what I meant, if the Proctor didn’t. “Do you think Sara wants to date ridge-bellied roundheads?”
I confessed I didn’t.
“Sex gets in the way of friendship. You end up jealous and protective and worried, and the jealousy eats you up inside. And,” I added, before either of them could say anything, “I am the jealous type. I’ve never been able to swallow that crap about jealousy being possessiveness. When Woody tells Joanne that she’s being possessive, all he means is that he’d like to go out and screw around some. He uses the schmaltzy liberal line to excuse himself because Joanne doesn’t and because he expects her to be there when he wants. Faithfulness saves a lot of time. Besides,” I added, laughing, “keeping you from getting V.D.”
“That’s Woody, not you,” the Proctor said, refilling my wine glass.
Delia said, “Jealousy is only a matter of bad faith. It doesn’t have to eat you up inside if you don’t let it. As your Grandfather might say, jealousy can eat you up inside only if there’s nothing inside to begin with. As for sex …”
“What about sex?” the Proctor said, winking.
“Sex doesn’t have to interfere with friendship. Does it?”
“Definitely not.” Proctor Tompson raised his glass in a toast to his wife. “It’s a matter of having the supply match the demand. You, Alley, are going to have trouble accomplishing that if you can’t grasp the economic nature of life. From your final last term,” he said gently, “I’d say you’ve always had a good deal of trouble just making change.”
Living with the Tompsons, blushing my way through conversations (mother had always leaned toward the cabbage patch theory of sex and birth), I began to see possibilities. They seemed a long ways away. Never before had I seen a couple that didn’t carp at each other. I’d always assumed that the happiness the Tompsons seemed to have together was partly show in front of company, but now I had the chance to overhear their voices behind the late night doors. Sure, they got angry and upset. But even when they argued, they didn’t fight. When they did raise their voices, there seemed to be a basic assumption beneath them that said, ‘even though I think you are absolutely wrong in this matter, there is nothing the matter with your being wrong.’ It was as great a pleasure as realizing that Laura P.’s monologues about Grandfather were a kind of love.
The next time Sara dropped by, I was outside mowing the lawn with my shirt off. My first wish was that I could hide my clumsy, round body away from her. I could barely push the mower, my arms weak with a mental phlebitis.
“What’s wrong?” Sara asked, finally, having noticed the way I redirected her attention away from my body toward anything—anything else.
“Nothing. Why do you ask?”
“Nothing,” she said, mimicking me. Her tone seemed hurt. “Nothing. I come by to see if maybe you’d like to go for a walk or a drive and you act like I’ve got every communicable disease in the book.”
“I have to finish the lawn,” I said.
“I can wait. How long will it take?”
“I don’t want you to wait. Listen, Sara.” I felt an unreasonable loathing for the way her expression seemed to say that she was willing to overlook what I had just said. “I don’t want a girlfriend.” I meant to add that I didn’t think I could endure the incongruity of being her boyfriend. It came out, “I don’t want to be your boyfriend.”
Sara looked stung, bitten by teeth that wouldn’t let go. “Nobody’s begging, Spike.” She wheeled and walked off down the street.
As I watched her, it seemed as if the trees parted in the breeze on purpose, letting the sunlight play across her proud shoulders, illuminating her figure with the lightness and color of a Mary Cassatt painting as she walked slowly away. In the same way that a Cassatt can speak to you, I thought I heard a voice—not Grandfather’s, but a voice like out of the maple trees—telling me that for all the slowness I’d been hiding behind, this wasn’t slowness but fear, that I had been afraid of something like this ever s
ince the days in which I’d tried to teach Bernie Schneider to sneak up on the prey from downwind.
“Except,” the voice whispered, “you have a choice Bernie didn’t have. He drowned beneath the cargo of his hopes and desires; you are about to drown beneath the cargo of your unrealistic fears.”
Without wondering where the voice had come from, I grabbed my shirt and stumbled down the sidewalk after her.
“Sara.”
She turned with all the grace she had had on the day I’d met her, and for a moment I felt like the sailor whose radar has picked up a storm, deciding whether to run from it or to sail straight ahead into it.
“Listen, could we talk? Could we go for that drive?”
When she reached out her hand, I took it shyly, overwhelmed by the sensation that her hand—its size, softness, the length of her fingers—fit in mine.
46.
We drove in Professor Quinin’s Impala to Lake Arrowhead. On the way, I tried to explain the only way I knew how, by talking about something else.
“Remember last semester when we were supposed to read Billy Budd for your father’s class? Remember how I couldn’t reread it and how angry you were because you thought that I thought it wasn’t a good book?”
Sara reached over and slipped a Jerry Jeff Walker tape into the car’s tape deck. “Do you mind?”
“Uh-uh. Anyway, it wasn’t that I didn’t like Billy Budd.”
“I know,” Sara said.
“What?”
“Go on. You were saying …?”
“It’s that every time Billy can’t speak up to Captain Vere and tell him the truth, I get frustrated, angry. It was bad enough when we had to read the book in high school. When our teacher made us watch the movie I cut my palms with my fingernails I was squeezing them so hard. I couldn’t stand someone who couldn’t speak up, confronted as Billy was with injustice, so I pretended I was slow and refused to write a paper on it. Now, well, now I know why I can’t reread Budd. It’s because he can’t speak. He’s tongue-tied, speechless, because things are so plain to him and he’s confused by the fact that things aren’t plain to Vere. I hate him for it because … in case you haven’t noticed … I … I am just …”
“Like him,” Sara said, steering the car through a set of curves as we climbed into the mountains. “I know that.”
She parked the car just inside the ranger kiosk. “Want to walk?”
As we got out of the car, she looked at me across the roof of it.
“Except you’re not as good as Billy was,” she said. Coming around the car and taking my hand, she said, “But Billy always was something of the wimp. You know, too good. It’s easier to deal with someone who’s a little evil than with someone who’s too good. We don’t believe someone can be that good. And if we do begin to believe it, all we can do is kill him for being everything we’re not.”
We walked through the trees down towards the footbridge that cut across the tip of the arrow’s head. “That’s why you began writing stories.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s the only way you can say the things you can’t say in person.”
Sara crossed the bridge ahead of me, swinging down from the far end of the bridge towards a group of rocks that stuck up out of the water beside the shore. A solitary fisherman drifted in the center of the lake about a hundred yards away from us. He glanced at us once. In the distance, out where the lake was wider, a speedboat curled away from the fisherman.
“You know I used to think that one day you’d hand me a story and even if it wasn’t good, even if it wasn’t about love, I’d know it was written for me, to tell me things you couldn’t say?”
“Are you kidding?” I said. I poked at the water with a stick. A crayfish scurried backwards beneath the shelter of the rocks. I felt like a young boy whose experience with girls had yet to begin. Awkward, scared, as though the driver in the speedboat might zip down the lake and whisk her away, both of them laughing at me. Like all fear, this one snowballed: If acquired the betrayal I’d felt when Pamela had died and its whiteness was muddied by the repeated and boring frustration of Allison DeForest. Sara was women, in other words.
But then, I thought, so is Elanna.
“So is your mother,” Sara said. “Look. Alley. It’s how you look at it. You know how David believes that nothing is accidental, that everything is foreordained but that it’s possible we can’t understand how or why?”
“Yeah. But I don’t agree,” I said, thinking of Coyote and how it was his immediate cleverness, his ability to meet the accident of Ilpswetsichs and win out, that created Real People.
“It doesn’t matter!” She sounded exasperated or tired. I wasn’t sure which. “David looks at life one way. You look at it another.”
She stopped and thought a moment. The fisherman reeled in what looked to be a lake bass, fighting it all the way.
“David sees the whole board. You see the board cut in two by a power saw. You worry about where the sawdust comes from. David believes he knows where the sawdust came from. But wherever it comes from, neither of you can put the sawdust back.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. The fisherman reached toward the bass with his net.
“Neither do I,” Sara said, laughing so loud that the fisherman turned his attention away from his catch just long enough to lose it. “Let me try putting it another way. Men and women have been at each other forever. Right?”
I shrugged.
“Since Adam and Eve. But consider. Maybe Eve got tired of competing with God for Adam’s attention. You know, every time they went off to be together, here comes old Loud Voice, telling Adam to get out there and name some more names? Maybe Eve decided she’d give up Paradise to find out whether Adam loved her. Not out of weakness but out of desire, out of love. Maybe, even, she knew who the snake was—the same way you think you can recognize one of Death’s disguises?”
“She must have been smart enough, I guess. Otherwise, she would’ve been a cheerleader for the Hittites.”
“Exactly. So if you see it that way, then what Adam did was not give up Paradise but choose Eve. Out of love. Greater love for her than for old Loud Voice. Maybe Adam and Eve together chose to be human beings, to share not only that apple but their lives and deaths. You see? It can become a positive action and the reason for it is what you call sawdust.
“I wish I could convince you of the possibility, at least,” she said. “The reason Adam ate that apple was the same one I had when I’d take speed with you. I wanted to be a part of what you were living, even if it was bad for me.”
Was it possible? Sara Baites loved me?
“Yes, Alley. That’s what I mean.”
The sun was dropping toward the blanket of trees lining the ridge of mountains behind Lake Arrowhead as Sara Baites and I hiked in and out of the thickets of trees along the shore.
“All we need is a soft sunset filter on the camera lens and a dog,” I said, starting to laugh and then feeling sad. It hadn’t been very long since father had had Running Dog put to sleep and the mere thought of the trusting but questioning look Running Dog must have had on his face could make me cry. Sentiment had begun to do that to me: When I felt strongly about one thing, the memory of another could reduce me to sloppy and stupid sentimentalism, though I usually managed not to show it. In this case, shaken by the notion that Sara Baites might be in love with me, the thought of Running Dog made my heart cry.
“So?” Sara said. “What do you think?”
I shook my head and looked away for a moment, biting my lip. Taking her hand, I drew her away from the lake shore and through the trees toward the cabins and frame buildings of a summer camp I hoped was still there.
The main building, a Lincoln Log structure with a low peaked roof that hovered over a lodge hall with an open fireplace, a restaurant-sized kitchen and an open-sided eating deck with picnic benches, was occupied by thin balding men in orange saris.
“Hari, hari,” one of them said, ro
unding a corner and nearly bumping into us.
“Hari,” I said, trying not to laugh—not at him or his friends but at the way my hopes had never considered this reality. “Do you mind if we stroll around?” I asked. The fellow’s face remained as inexpressive as Grandfather’s had ever been.
“Au-buom,” he said, smiling. He reached into a fold in his sari and pulled out a joss stick. His other hand procured a lighter which he used to light the stick. Then he handed it to Sara who took it.
“Thank you,” Sara said. He held out his hand until I dug out fifty cents and dropped them into his palm and he disappeared as gently as he’d come.
“This used to be a summer camp,” I said, steering Sara away from the main building towards the creek that divided the main building from the campers’ cabins. Cabin number three, the one called “Eagle’s Nest” by our counselor, which Bernie and I had changed to “Spotted Eagle’s Nest,” personalizing it the best we could, was still there. Though it was little more than a raised plank floor sided by worm-eaten split logs, with unscreened windows and a doorway that had never known a proper door, it was still there. Inside were the metal bunk beds with wire mesh springs on which Bernie had nightly tossed, waiting for Rolf to sneak his pants on and creep out of the cabin towards his rendezvous with Tammy.
Sara touched me on the shoulder, as if she knew that this former camp, this cabin meant something to me, even if I didn’t know exactly what.
“There is a tale,” I said, turning to her, my voice sounding like Grandfather’s when he told me about the creation of the Nu-mi-pu. “About the creation of dreams.”
I was beginning to realize that Bernie Schneider had not been the only one, all those years ago, to invent the image of Tammy and then to sink beneath the weight of her imagined perfection. I, too, a round little boy whose disguise was what Dr. Bene called slowness, had invented an image, had taken on a cargo of dreams. Mine had only lacked a name, lacked a name and a place and remained airy substance, the dream of a woman who was represented by all women.