Desert of the Heart: A Novel

by Jane Rule

  When the relief did arrive, it was quarter to four. All Ann’s friends had gone. The few change aprons and key men on the graveyard shift were strangers to her. So were the tactful janitors who cleaned around late customers, a gay, drunken party of locals, scattered traveling salesmen, and a couple of old women, spending their pensions. Just as Ann stepped up to the cashier’s desk to check out her apron, a great trolley arrived, already loaded with sacks of change. The two cashiers turned away from Ann to the more important business of the night’s cash clearance. Ann stood, patiently counting out the stray coins from her change dispenser. Thirteen dimes … no, fourteen … no, twelve. She counted again and tried to stack the coins. They toppled over. Ann’s hand shook as she restacked. The nickels fell over. She stopped to rest, her elbows against the high counter, her head down. She tried again. Her hand shook violently. Her eyes focused through tears. She did not know how long she had been standing there, how long she had been crying. Odd to be crying.

  “All right. Come on. Let’s have it,” the cashier said impatiently.

  Ann kept her head bowed while the cashier took the count.

  “You’re out fifty dollars.”

  “I can’t be,” Ann said, trying to focus on the rolls of change, trying to count.

  “Well, you are. Where’s your paper?”

  “Paper?” Ann repeated, fumbling at the pocket in her apron, which was behind the change dispenser. “That’s it. Here we are.” She handed the cashier fifty dollars in paper money. “Sorry.”

  “Are you going to make it home, kid?”

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t forget your locker key.”

  “No.”

  Ann found herself outside. The heat had fallen down over her like a sack. She struggled to breathe, to see, and found her way to the employees’ entrance as if it were at the other end of a maze. Her card, when she punched it, read four forty-five. She was still crying as she climbed the stairs to her attic room, as she took off her clothes and lay down to sleep. Tired. She was just tired. But for a long time she did not close her eyes. In the ruthless desert dawn, she still stared at the slanting ceiling and waited for the inevitable intensity of the full morning sun. Then, resigned, she slept.

  Ann did not get up until late afternoon on Wednesday. She went over to the table and looked at her drawings of the Detached Man and Self-Contained Woman. Wryly she scribbled down names of new characters: Share Bath and Basement Suite, All Found and Unfurnished. Among these couples of forlorn comics, she would find a few for sale. But she hadn’t time or energy to begin sketches now. She herself was only semidetached and felt personal about everything. Even her body was so vulnerable that it was compromised by the heavy frontier pants she had to pull on. In her stiff, announcing boots, in her tight-sleeved, tight-necked, loud shirt, she threatened herself in the long mirror. But it was Wednesday. Tomorrow was her night off. Then she could rest, dressed in her own clothes.

  “Ann, you look dreadful.”

  “Thank you, Frances.”

  “I’m serious. Do you feel all right?”

  “Yes, I feel fine.”

  “Well, I’m glad you’re home tonight for dinner. All this running around, not taking time to eat …” Frances was interrupted by Walter and Evelyn, who came into the dining room, carrying their glasses of sherry.

  “So I said ‘Sold!’” Walter turned to Ann, put an arm around her waist, and almost lifted her from the floor. “Girl Childs, today I am a man.”

  “What’s all this?”

  “I’ve bought a car.”

  “Hold dinner, Frances. We’ll go out and smear him with oil.”

  “Isn’t it a shame I’ve already been circumcised?”

  “Walter!”

  “Sorry, Mom. Anyway, I’ve got wine for dinner.”

  Walter followed Frances into the kitchen. The tones of his voice were loud and deep with pleasure, and Frances’ protesting laughter was almost girlish.

  “He is excited,” Evelyn said, smiling. “You know, he almost makes me wish I’d had a son.” Ann looked up sharply. “He’s very generous with his pleasure.”

  “He said he wasn’t going to buy a car until next summer.”

  “But he got an awfully good buy.”

  Ann shook her head. She wanted to disapprove, but she knew she was simply disappointed. She had liked loaning her car to Walt. She wasn’t really possessive of him, was she? Obviously, she must be. And now a little jealous, too? Her guilt made her angry. How long did Evelyn Hall think she had a right to stay, threatening Ann with her self-possession, her candid gentleness, her intelligence, her decency, until Ann could not eat a meal in peace, until she was driven out of her own house? Why couldn’t Evelyn leave her alone? Why did Evelyn leave her alone? Ann grinned. Fatigue and irritation had not quite canceled her sense of the ridiculous.

  “All right, Walt,” she said, as he came back into the room, “I want the full story.”

  “You’ll have it. What’s more, you’re going to have a demonstration. I’m going to pick it up on your way to work. Will you come with us, Evelyn?”

  “I’d love to.”

  Frances declined the same invitation. She would wait for a ride until Walt and Evelyn got home. Ann struggled against tiredness and reluctance into an almost acceptable mood. For her own sake, as well as for Walter’s, she did not want to be left out. She let herself be rushed through dinner, worked hard at a kind of wry gaiety, until, when the three of them got into Ann’s car, she felt almost identified with the role she played. After all, she and Walter were almost brother and sister; and Evelyn, amused, serene, indulgent, was almost old enough to be their mother. They were all, at that moment, more willingly related than blood would ever have allowed them to be. But, after Ann had exclaimed, teased, taken a ride around the block, she had to leave Walter and Evelyn. Without their need for her gaiety, it died. The almost real world was not real enough. Like saccharine, its aftertaste was slightly bitter.

  Bill was waiting for her in the employees’ lounge. “Ann, I need you on relief tonight. Would you mind?”

  “No, that’s fine.”

  “With Joyce on the ramp, you’re the easiest one to move.”

  “Sure. I don’t mind.”

  It was a foul job, moving from one station to another all night long, twenty minutes here, forty minutes there. Each station had its own peculiarities. At one, the change apron did her own jackpot payoffs and had to keep a record. At another, she had to report directly to the cashier. And, because each station had different numbers and kinds of machines, a relief had to carry her full allotment of change, cups of silver dollars, an extra twenty rolls of nickels. If one girl was late coming back from her break, the relief had to make up the time by sacrificing her own time off. A few of the change aprons actually liked the job during the week because it broke the monotony of a slow evening. But Ann, like most of the others, preferred the set routine that freed her mind from the details of work, and tonight not only her mind but her body was reluctant.

  She strapped her apron very high, carrying it like a fetus in its seventh month, careful to lift and turn the weight as if it were her own flesh, for she had to walk some distance with it, and maneuver on and off escalators, her back burning, the veins in her legs aching with the drag of sixty pounds of dead weight: the ironic emancipation of woman, martyred to nothing but her own belligerence, surely. Why did she do it? At the center of this desert industry, symbol of it, she wanted to take her place, for there was no nature. The apes could not have survived. Only man could have invented a living independent of earth, related to no physical need, yet satisfying them all. Out of his own nonanimal nature, he had found a weakness, a faith, by which he could survive. Ann was novice to her world’s only passionate belief. She moved from station to station, to serve and to witness.

  At the third, she began to lose time. Her first break, which was supposed to be forty minutes, was only twenty-five. When she took her apron off, the sudden loss of
weight seemed to disturb the law of gravity. She felt she could step into air, up and up over the crowd like a child’s balloon, not quite in control of herself. She drifted instead uncertainly into the ladies’ room where she asked the attendant to order her an illegal drink. Then she locked herself into one of the cubicles and sat down with her whiskey. The door next to her banged shut, and Ann stared at the pigeon-toed feet of a woman, who began vomiting noisily. Ann was due at her next station in five minutes. She took the escalator to the second floor, took an elevator from there to the fourth floor, which was the night club, where the band had always just stopped playing, where the floor show was always just about to begin, Ann nodded to the girl she was to relieve and took her place close to the crap table.

  “The wife wanted a silver tea set sort of thing. So, when I was in the City, I thought, ‘Why the hell not?’ Do you know how much the goddamned things cost?” The speaker paused to watch his chips swept off the table. He placed new bets. “Fifteen hundred bucks! I was wild! I told the salesgirl, “Shit, it’s cheaper to buy a new wife.”

  “Watch your language, sir,” the dealer said quietly.

  “Watch your own,” the man answered, but good-naturedly. “What do you think you’re running, a Sunday school?”

  “Yes sir, and taking up a collection,” the dealer said, sweeping the board clean again.

  Ann did not like the fourth floor. She was glad, at the end of half an hour, to step back into the waiting elevator. A sign at the back read: “Thank you. You may have helped put a student through the University of Nevada. Frank’s Club Scholarship Fund.” Ann looked over at the elevator girl who stared at the closed door not six inches from her face. She had an aging, well-powdered black eye. Two young men stepped into the elevator when it stopped at the third floor.

  “I told you to watch it,” the first said. “All these places are run by a bunch of crooks.”

  “Jesus, fifty bucks,” the other said.

  “Two?”

  “Main floor,” Ann said.

  As she reached her assigned ramp and signaled the girl on duty, she felt a hand on her arm. It was Jerry, the main floor boss.

  “Ann, take a look over there, will you?”

  Ann looked towards the roulette table he had indicated, saw the crowd, and recognized the standard symptoms of luck. Someone at the table must be betting heavily, winning enough to collect riders.

  “Is that guy Janet Hearle’s husband? The drunk in the white shirt?”

  Ann, who had met Ken Hearle only a couple of times, could not be sure at that distance. She remembered him a tall, crude-boned man, sweating quietly in a suit, a conservative academic farmer.

  “I’m not sure, Jerry. I hardly think so.”

  “Will you take a good look?”

  “Sure.”

  He had obviously lost a jacket and tie somewhere, and one patch of hair was still glued in place by the lacquer and comb of another, forgotten, mood. His face and neck were blotched with color, as if he had been slapped several times by a vicious but inaccurate hand. Ann stood near him, still uncertain.

  “Ken?”

  “Here’s a sweetheart,” he cried as he saw and obviously recognized her. “You’re just who I need.” He reached out and put an arm around her shoulder. “Will you tell this phony cowboy he can’t close me out of the game? Tell him I’m a relative. Tell him I’m a dependent. Tell him I’m a next of kin.”

  The dealer’s eyes questioned Ann while the crowd encouraged her to defend the gambler.

  “I’m not closing you out of the game, sir,” the dealer said coolly. “You’re welcome to bet as long as you observe the limits.”

  “What the hell do you care? You’re making money off me.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s a rule of the house.”

  “Okay. Okay. Just don’t spin that little wheel yet. Hang on to your ball.” With his free hand, he sprinkled chips across the board. He reached back to the stack before him and picked up twenty dollar chips, which he dropped on number six. “That’s the lucky number, sweetheart. Watch.” He leaned heavily on Ann, as the wheel spun, as the ball spun, slowly, more slowly, then dropped into number six. “There you are!” he cried. “Seven hundred smackeroos! And that bastard wanted to keep me out of the game!”

  “Now, why don’t you take it off and cash it in?” Ann asked.

  “Are you kidding? I’m just even. I’m here to make money.” Another customer handed him a drink. “Thanks, friend. Gotta send spies. They cut me off at the bar. Just as soon as I break the bank, I’m complaining to the management.”

  “Ken, listen …”

  “You listen. You watch. Didn’t you see that last one? Old number six? It’ll pay again. It’ll pay until midnight.” The luck riders listened and patterned their next bets after his. “It’s my lucky day.” He drained his glass and set it aside.

  “I’ll go and get Janet,” Ann said.

  “No, you won’t, not yet. You see,” he said, dropping his voice to a loud whisper, “she doesn’t like this place. She doesn’t like it at all; so I’m going to surprise her. I’m going to win a lot of money. Then I’m going to take it right up to the big man himself, and I’m going to say, ‘Here you are, you bastard. Now gimme back my wife.’” He smiled happily at Ann and did not notice his bets being swept off the board. “But it’s a surprise.”

  Ann caught sight of Jerry, standing at the edge of the crowd. She mouthed, “Go get Janet,” at him, and he turned away quickly.

  “Oops. The cowboy’s after my money again, but it can’t last, ladies and gentlemen. Just have a little faith and follow me. This is my lucky day.” He no longer placed his chips. They fell from his hand. In three turns of the wheel, he had only twenty dollar chips left in front of him. “Now comes the payoff. With this stack of chips, ladies and gentlemen, I intend to quit fooling around.” He put all his chips on number six. “Black six of August has to win.”

  “Ken!”

  He raised his head from where it rested against Ann’s hair and focused dimly on his wife. Bill and Jerry stood right behind her.

  “Shh … honey … shh.”

  “Ken!” Janet took hold of his arm.

  “Oh, Christ!” he said, as the ball dropped into number seven. “It’s past midnight after all. That’s the only trouble, ladies and gentlemen. Like the sign says, if you play long enough, you’ll lose.”

  “Ken.”

  He seemed to see Janet now for the first time. He looked down at her, bewildered.

  “What about Kenny, darling?”

  “He’s all right, honey,” he said softly. “He’s dead.”

  Ann turned to Bill and Jerry. “Help her get him out of here.”

  5

  EVELYN FELL AWAKE AS the front door closed. She checked the time by the luminous dial of her travel clock. It was four thirty. Ann came uncertainly up the stairs. The bathroom door closed quietly. The rush of water from the tap muted the sound of violent wretching. Evelyn sat up in bed, turned on the light, and lit a cigarette. It could not be a simple miscalculation of the number of drinks. Ann hadn’t had time to make such a mistake. In just a little over an hour, she would have had to be willful to get so drunk. The toilet flushed. The water was turned off, then on again. Ann was brushing her teeth. Evelyn got up, put on a robe, and combed her hair. She had accepted Ann’s awkward, unhappy evasiveness for a week, waiting for her to recover from rage at Virginia’s suicide attempt or from embarrassment about their conversation at Geiger Point. Or from a mood of defensiveness vaguer and more general than Evelyn could identify and understand. But Ann was not recovering. She was getting worse. Evelyn could stand it no longer. She did not know what she would do, but she had to make some kind of obvious gesture. When she heard the bathroom door open, she opened her own. “Do you need a towel?”

  Ann laughed softly. “How thoughtful. Thank you. How are you this morning?” She came into the room carefully, squinting against the light. She had washed off her makeup and had splashed
water over her hair and down the front of her shirt. Her face was white and blurred with fatigue. She took the towel Evelyn handed her and then sat down heavily in the armchair by the window. “Nice of you to be awake.”

  “You probably ought to go right to bed,” Evelyn said.

  “Nonsense. I’m much too drunk to go to bed.”

  “How did you get drunk so quickly?”

  “Not so quickly. I started on the sly early in the day. It’s my day off. I can celebrate.”

  “Because tomorrow’s Thursday?”

  “Today’s Thursday. At midnight, when all the stages turned into pumpkins, when the horses turned into rats, when not only little natural Gasella but all the people at the party turned into paupers, the place was lousy with glass slippers. Then the real miracle occurred: Wednesday turned into Thursday. Every midnight is a fairy tale, the end of one.”

  “So you celebrate every night.”

  “No. This is special. Today I’m celebrating the death of Kenneth Hearle, junior, aged two and a half, on Wednesday, August sixth, survived by his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, and God knows how many other relatives and well-wishers.”