Desert of the Heart: A Novel

by Jane Rule

  “How very different you look,” Evelyn said.

  “I suppose I do,” Ann said, “dressed in my own clothes. I hope you don’t mind waking up.”

  “Not at all,” Evelyn said. “What time is it?”

  “After ten. It’s cooler today. I have to go up to Virginia City, and I wondered if you’d like to come along.”

  “Virginia City?”

  “It’s not very far, an hour’s drive.”

  “An hour’s drive,” Evelyn repeated, out on to the desert she had seen and dreamed. She could not lock herself away from it. She looked up at Ann, waiting there. “I’d like to go.”

  “Good. Can you be ready in an hour?”

  “Oh, twenty minutes,” Evelyn said.

  She drank her juice and coffee as she dressed, feeling reluctant and yet relieved. The desert, a derelict gold-mining town, a day in the heat both bored and frightened her. Wide awake she could not be quite so resolute, but two days in the isolation of her work had made her value human company. She was through with silence and righteous indignation.

  “Now you’re to have some breakfast,” Frances said, as Evelyn came down the stairs. “If you’re going with Ann, you’ll never get any lunch. She took me with her last week and didn’t feed me a single thing until I absolutely demanded tea at four o’clock.”

  “We’d had a four-course breakfast,” Ann protested.

  “Coffee, juice, a piece of toast, and coffee. That’s Ann’s idea of a four-course breakfast. I’ll just scramble you an egg,” Frances said, disappearing into the kitchen.

  Evelyn watched her, wondering how much Frances had to do with Ann’s invitation. If Frances had suggested it, was she thinking of Ann or of Evelyn? Probably both of them. Frances was, by nature, an organizer. She wanted to believe that happiness could be arranged. Well, perhaps it could.

  “Are you going to be late for anything?” Evelyn asked, turning to Ann.

  “Oh, no,” Ann said. “It’s just an errand.”

  “Well, I won’t need lunch if you don’t have any.”

  But they had lunch three hours later in the Bucket of Blood Saloon in Virginia City. While Ann sat at the bar, drinking draft beer and waiting for their hot dogs to be cooked, Evelyn moved away to look at the rock collections at the back of the building. They had gone first to the office of the Territorial Enterprise, where Ann had delivered some sketches. Then they had called on an alcoholic antique dealer who seemed to specialize in growing plants in ancient and ornate chamber pots. Ann had bought one for a friend named Silver. Up the hill from the main street was the old opera house. They had been let into the main auditorium by an attendant who had obviously run a speakeasy during prohibition. There among uncertain tourists, they walked across the sprung floor to the stage, where old posters and bits of scenery recalled the great performances of eighty years ago when Virginia City had been a city instead of a ghost town in thriving disrepair as it was now. Ann knew the facts and legends and talked with articulate energy to give Evelyn a real sense of the grand exploitation that had created and destroyed a way of life in fewer years than it took to forget the names of streets and barmaids. Without Ann, Evelyn would have been repelled by the shoddy self-consciousness of the second-rate relics, the pretentious commercial respect for so much colossal poor taste. But Ann’s attitude, which both admitted and admired the crude extravagance, the ruthless energy, the sudden death, made Evelyn vulnerable to an interest in the place. Now, studying the samples of gold and silver ore and trying to imagine the honeycomb of mines that lay beneath the town, she felt a reckless pleasure at being in a saloon called the Bucket of Blood about to eat a hot dog with a change apron from Frank’s Club. She was neither bored nor afraid. She was having a lovely time. Evelyn turned back to Ann and saw again the curious resemblance. It was as if Ann, sitting at the bar chatting with the bartender, were a much younger, freer Evelyn, an Evelyn who had never existed, at home in the world. She was a young woman no one need feel guilty of. Ann turned around and smiled. “Your hot dog’s ready.”

  “I am hungry,” Evelyn admitted, taking a place beside Ann. The bartender set out mustard and relish. “I said to Ann here, I thought she brought her mother in to see us. You two sure look alike.”

  “Yes,” Evelyn said. “I think we do.”

  After lunch, they went to the Catholic Church, which was more like a religious dime store than a place of worship. Small gold crosses and rosaries were on sale at half price. While Evelyn looked at the priests’ robes, woven of the local cloth of gold and silver, Ann told her a story of a fire in Virginia City. It had broken out in the mines first, fed by great drafts of air and the wooden timbers, until it burst through the earth and bloomed into a garden of flames. The men had to make a fire line across the city, blasting buildings to clear a path. The Catholic Church had been in the way. One of the mine owners had said to the priest, “Let us blast the church, and I’ll build you another bigger and better than anything this town has ever seen.” “Blast away,” the priest had said. And so they dynamited the House of God to save the city. But the miner was true to his word. He built a new church not only of wood but of gold and gems, and here it stood now, long after the city had disappeared, an empty monument to faith as the opera house was to culture.

  “Is it ever used as a church?” Evelyn asked.

  “In the summer. Now and then the grandchild of a gold miner is married here. But it has to depend on the guilty donations of the wealthy and this sort of cut-rate simony to survive. God can’t be defeated.”

  Ann took Evelyn then to the Protestant graveyard, a wasteland of dry grass and gray stone on a little hill overlooking the shallow valley. They wandered among the graves, reading the names and dates, the simple epitaphs.

  “This one I’ve always loved,” Ann said, stooping.

  Evelyn looked down and read aloud, “Rest, Papa, Rest.”

  “I would have put it on my father’s tombstone if he hadn’t insisted on a box in the crematorium. It’s just like a general post office. He had no taste about death.”

  “I’m not sure I blame him,” Evelyn said. “Would you want to be buried in a place like this?” She looked about her at the barren mountains, at the weathered wooden skeleton of the town, at the desert valley with its aging heaps of yellow slag.

  “Yes,” Ann said. “I like it here.”

  A wind had come up, and they stood in the shadow of a mountain. Evelyn shivered.

  “Come on. It’s time to go,” Ann said, and she took Evelyn’s arm to guide her back to the main path. “There’s one other place I like to stop on the way down.”

  They drove down the mountain to Geiger Point, where a few picnic tables and barbecue pits frailly furnished a landscape of outcroppings of rock and stunted trees. Here they stood together, looking down on the Washoe Valley and across to the higher mountains in the west. Evelyn tried to listen to Ann, to find each important landmark, but her imagination could not people this desert with wagon trains and Indians, which belonged to TV serials in one’s own comfortable living room. It was empty, with an open emptiness that swung up at her, that dragged her down. She seemed to be falling with the drifts and falls of buzzards, toward, then away from the giant feathers of steam that rose from the hidden hot springs far below.

  “Evelyn, are you all right?”

  Ann’s arm was around her shoulder. “I’m a little dizzy.”

  “Sit down here.”

  Evelyn sat down on a rock step and covered her eyes, struggling against a need to cry or be sick or sleep. She felt Ann’s hand on her shoulder move to the back of her neck, a strong, careful hand against her skin. Gradually she lost her consciousness of the earth’s spinning. It was still.

  “Well,” Evelyn said, straightening up, “how I welcome the convention of time and space.”

  “Have you been dizzy before?”

  “Umhum. It must be altitude.” Evelyn turned to Ann and smiled an apology. “I don’t awfully like … heights.” Or the adoles
cent depths of eyes, child, grown child. That will do.

  “You’re the second one this week I’ve almost lost,” Ann said, turning away. “I’m going to have to carry smelling salts.”

  Ann closed herself so quickly that Evelyn could have been uncertain of what she had seen, but she had taught too many students not to recognize the unguarded look and the silence. In her office, she would have known just how to behave. She would have assigned an extra essay on Donne and turned the longing into scholarship. Now, without a role to play, she was uncertain. She did not want to turn Ann away.

  “What did you major in at college, Ann?”

  Ann glanced back at Evelyn, her eyes amused. “I never got around to deciding. When I was at Mills, I thought about history or philosophy.”

  “But you left Mills.”

  “Yes, I made an indecent proposal to the special assistant to the Dean and was expelled.”

  The directness of the explanation shocked Evelyn into laughter.

  “It was funny,” Ann said, “really terribly funny. You see, I was only sixteen, and I didn’t know anything at all about your world. I was … is ‘naïve’ the word, I wonder?”

  “My world?”

  “You know, the decent, respectable academic world, the grove of grapefruit and lemon. The lady was apparently interested in the state of my soul or the nature of my problem, whatever the phrase is. She took me for a moonlight ride, parked, and then sat, waiting. I was terribly embarrassed. It didn’t occur to me that she was waiting for me to talk. I sat, too. Then finally I thought, ‘Oh, what the hell’ and kissed her. It shocks you, too, doesn’t it?”

  “Why did you do it?” Evelyn asked.

  “I thought that’s what she was waiting for. You see, around here, if somebody takes you for a moonlight ride, it isn’t to discuss the state of your soul.”

  “Even if it’s the assistant to the Dean?”

  “Well, I’d never been to college before. I’d never known an assistant to the Dean. And, by the time I did go to the University of Nevada, I was a good deal more worldly. I haven’t kissed an assistant to the Dean since.”

  “I can’t quite believe that.”

  “That I haven’t kissed …?”

  “Sorry, my pronoun reference is poor.”

  “What don’t you believe?”

  “What kind of a world did you grow up in, Ann?”

  “This one, and it doesn’t teach you much about the customs of natives in other parts of the country. But I’ve learned. Here I am, discussing the nature of my problem. I am not disoriented or confused. It will never seem really natural, but …”

  “In your mind,” Evelyn said slowly, hanging on to the conversation with growing uncertainty, “cliffs are not places for discussion.”

  “Why not?” Ann said, turning to Evelyn with an easy grin. “I really loved your world. It taught me a lot. I’m just more at home here. Feeling better?”

  “Yes,” Evelyn said, “not exactly at home, but better.”

  “Shall we go?”

  Evelyn walked to the car, her mind retracing as precisely as her steps did the path that had led her to the conversation just completed. But she could not discover how she had got there by going back. She only recognized that she had been at the edge of a cliff and had retreated.

  As they drove back to Reno, Ann began to tell Evelyn stories of Frank’s Club, which made her laugh, and they arrived back at the house gay and relaxed from the day’s outing. Walter was not at home for dinner. Virginia had asked to stay in her room. Only Frances sat down at the table with them. Like a latecomer to a cocktail party, she tried to hide her sobriety, but Evelyn and Ann could not quite catch her up into their own mood. Funny stories were replaced by half-serious discussion, which finally gave way to explanations.

  “What’s the news of Janet’s baby?” Frances asked.

  “Didn’t I tell you? The last operation’s on Monday.”

  “Who’s Janet?” Evelyn asked.

  Ann explained Janet to Evelyn. “So she drives ninety miles over the desert and ninety miles back every night.”

  “When does she sleep?”

  “When the baby does, I guess, and on her day off.”

  “Well, she’ll be going down to San Francisco then,” Frances said.

  “I don’t think so. Ken’s going to take the baby.”

  “Why?” Frances asked.

  “She’s afraid of losing her job. Anyway, she can’t afford to take time off.”

  “Well,” Frances said, “it’s hard, isn’t it? But just think how lucky they are that surgery can do what it can. Just a few years ago there wouldn’t have been any hope at all.”

  “When I look at Janet,” Ann said, “I wonder how lucky she is.”

  “You don’t know what it is to have a child and want it to live,” Frances said.

  “No, I suppose I don’t.”

  “I’ve left my cigarettes upstairs,” Evelyn said, excusing herself quickly.

  Frances was wrong: Ann might not know what it was to have a child and want it to live, but she must know what it was to want a child. Any woman knew that. And there was a generalization about womanhood that even Evelyn could share. She had wanted a child just as this young Janet wanted her child to live. Like Janet, she had been willing to sacrifice anything in the world for it. And she had sacrificed, before she was through, a good deal of the world she had known. At first it had been only the humiliation of doctors, for herself and for George. One appointment after another, one specialist after another, each result hopelessly successful: by clinical definition she and her husband were unquestionably female and male, fertile and potent. But there had been no child. After each alone had offered up his secret sex to the laboratories, had admitted to specialists his private, unscientific fears, together they submitted themselves to experiment, making love by the book, by the calendar, by the temperature chart. The cheapest and crudest pornography could not have been more destructive to the spirit of love, but the fact was accomplished. Evelyn conceived a child. When she lost it at three months, they did not try again. They talked once or twice of adopting children, but it was only talk. Neither any longer had confidence enough in himself or in the other to feel capable of children. And, as Evelyn realized what had happened to them, she felt a terrible guilt for the desire she had had. It was a sin to want so badly anything you could not have. That was an oversimplification, of course. And it wasn’t just the one thing, the wanting children. It was much more complicated than that. But it would have been easier, so much easier, if they could have left themselves to an old-fashioned childless fate. There might have been, even after the hope was gone, some tenderness left. The final horror had not been the losing of the child, a simple clinical failure. “It often happens that way,” the doctor had said. “You’ll see. There’ll be nothing to the next one.” He’d had a new pill, she remembered, and ordered the prescription by phone for her. When it arrived, she paid for it, opened the bottle and flushed the pills down the toilet. The doctor was exactly right. There would be nothing to the next one. She would never again say to her husband, “Now, tonight.”

  Frances was wrong. The doctors were wrong. And that young Janet, driving across the desert alone at night, must know that her frail, crippled, living wish was wrong. Or could she know? While the child lived, could she be ungrateful? Could anyone really give up before it was over?

  “Evelyn?” Ann was calling up the stairs. “I’ll be right there.” Evelyn picked up her cigarettes.

  “Stay there. I’m bringing up your coffee.” They met in the hall. “Frances is fixing a tray for Virginia. I thought we could have coffee in my room, and I’d show you some of my cartoons.”

  “I’d love it,” Evelyn said.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” Evelyn said as she followed Ann up the stairs to her attic room. “Virginia really shouldn’t spend so much time alone.”

  “She wants to go home,” Ann said, “back to her hu
sband, but she doesn’t know how to admit it.”

  “Do you think she won’t get her divorce?”

  “If she can think of a way not to. It’s hard for someone like Virginia to admit she’s wrong, even to herself.”

  Ann opened the door and held it for Evelyn. It was a large room. On the far wall, under the window, was a long drawing table. Racks above it held tubes of paint, bottles of ink, brushes, pens, pencils. Shelves underneath stored paper. One sketchbook lay open before a high stool. Otherwise, it was a work area as orderly as an operating theater. But Evelyn’s attention shifted almost at once from this focus of the room to the other walls. There were hundreds of books on bookshelves built to the eaves.

  “Look at the books! I’ve been living on four books for days with a library right above my head.”

  “Come up and get anything you want any time,” Ann said.

  She walked over to the drawing table and sat back against the high stool. Evelyn walked over to her.

  “And this is where you work.”

  “When I work.”

  “Who are the children?” Evelyn asked, looking down at five small photographs Scotch-taped to the wall.

  “That’s Kim from Korea, Ming from Hong Kong, Hung from Vietnam, Eftychia from Greece, and Carmela from Italy.”

  “Isn’t she a dear, little girl,” Evelyn said, looking at Eftychia.

  “She’s nine. She’s in the fourth grade. She wants to be a teacher. Carmela isn’t so practical. She’s all for coming to America to be a movie star.”

  “How did you find out about them?” Evelyn asked.

  “Answered an ad. They only cost fifteen bucks a month apiece.”

  “What a wonderful thing to do.”

  “It’s the easiest and cheapest way to have children I know,” Ann said. “They’re so little nuisance. A letter and a check a month is all they need.”