Desert of the Heart: A Novel

by Jane Rule

  “Yes, darling. You must teach me to do that.”

  “Now.”

  “No, not now. You must get up and have some breakfast.”

  “Evelyn?”

  “Little fish,” Evelyn said, rumpling Ann’s hair, for a moment roughly. “It’s an odd name for you.” Then she got up, took a towel and left the room.

  “Lady Macbeth,” Ann muttered viciously, but it did no good.

  She could not manage to be quite hurt, quite angry, quite frightened, or quite guilty. All the possibilities of negative emotion were there, however, threatening the stronger, single desire, which, like the scent of Evelyn’s perfume, was personal rather than sexual. She wanted to be with Evelyn. She wanted to know Evelyn. She wanted to be able to love Evelyn, whatever that meant. Half a dozen vague clichés came into Ann’s mind, jumblings of prayer book and movie magazine that had to do with fidelity, procreation, and healthy sexual attitudes. And with them came the half-formed cartoons. She got up out of bed. She hadn’t lost the battle against tenderness. She had changed sides. And now she faced her really formidable enemies. Line them up. Name them. Choose among them those to be killed, those to be captured, those to be converted. For, if she was to love Evelyn, she would have to fight her own whole damned world, and some of it she could not live without.

  Ann dressed and went down to get some breakfast. She tried to be as casual with Frances as Evelyn had been. It shouldn’t be difficult because Evelyn had used Ann’s own tactics. She had told the truth. But Ann had always used the truth to confound Frances, not to reassure her.

  “I hear you slept with Evelyn last night,” Frances said cheerfully.

  “Not exactly,” Ann wanted to say, but she checked herself. Then, as she watched Frances cracking an egg into the pan, she wondered why she had always kept herself away from Frances; for, conventional and blind as Frances tried to be, she was both intuitive and generous. For a moment Ann was actually tempted to say something, to ask a straight question, but her habit of isolation was too strong. Instead she said, “Two eggs please, Frances,” using the stupid, ancient ritual of food that Frances would understand.

  In her own room, she did not take out her sketchbook. She sat, staring at the empty table, staring at the implications of the decision she seemed to have made. She was going to court Evelyn, not simply her body, but her mind and her heart. “Don’t. It’s not worth the money.” Wise advice, perhaps. Odd how clearly she still held her mother’s voice in her unconscious, a voice she hadn’t heard for nineteen years. “And you’re one of the enemies I’m going to have to kill.” Somehow linked to that broken and grotesquely mended bone of memory was the lust of Ann’s body. Her proud sexuality, the range of her experience and the inventiveness of her skill must all be irrelevant now. If, in making love with Evelyn, her body yearned for obscure intimacies, they must no longer be substitutes for, a defense against, intimacies of person with person. Here was an enemy to be converted. But her real terror was for the world she lived in, that Evelyn did and would continue to find it empty and appalling. Ann could not leave the desert. In her human loneliness, the landscape had become her home. And she found it hard to imagine leaving the Club. Already she felt herself threatened with losing the visions she had there, which would mean losing the light she worked by. And her work? She did not know about that. Why must she fight this battle at all? Who was Evelyn to ask it of her? Did she ask it of her? Ann did not know. She asked it of herself. If she did not, she would lose something of herself that seemed terribly important. “I don’t even know what it is.” Ann’s eyes focused for a moment on the children. Perhaps it was something she had already lost along the way of these last four years, old habits of thinking, friends. Her friends had belonged to her father’s world. Most of them she had not seen since his death, except by accident. There were one or two people at the University she still called on very occasionally. There was Kate Buell. She hadn’t seen Kate for months.

  “I want Evelyn to meet Kate Buell,” Ann said that evening at the dinner table.

  “What a good idea,” Frances said. “You’d love Kate, Evelyn.”

  “Who is she?” Evelyn asked.

  “She’ll tell you about herself much better than we can,” Walter said. “She never stops talking.”

  “She’s an old lady,” Ann said. “Her husband was a newspaper man. She’s the daughter of a miner, raised in Virginia City. She’s lived in Nevada all her life. Why don’t I see if I can get her to come out to dinner with us on Thursday evening? She loves to be taken for a drive.”

  If Ann could find enough, recover enough of a world Evelyn could understand and like, the Club she went to at night might not be important, a privacy she could keep. But, after a night’s work there, Ann came home uncertain. The light in Evelyn’s room did not go on. She had not asked Ann to wake her, but her door had been left slightly ajar. Ann hesitated, then stepped quietly into the darkness of the room.

  “Are you awake?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t turn on the light.” Ann sat down on the edge of the bed and felt Evelyn’s hands reach for her shoulders, her neck, her face. Ann leaned down and kissed her. “Really awake? Do you want a cigarette?”

  “Can you find them in the dark?”

  “I think so.” Ann touched objects on the bedside table until she located the package, the matches tucked neatly into cellophane. She lit a cigarette, held the match a moment, then shook it out. “Here.”

  “How are you?”

  “I’m not sure,” Ann said.

  “Do you want a drink?”

  “No.”

  “Come to bed then.”

  “Do you want me?”

  “Very much. Now.”

  There was no urgency in Ann’s own body at first, only the desire to know Evelyn, to discover her desire, to serve it. In a physical simplicity she had never known before, could not have believed in, Ann joined Evelyn to the very images of her blood, speaking its wild, natural, insistent poetry until the silence they lay in was sleep.

  “Ann?”

  It was dawn.

  “You mustn’t stay, darling.”

  Reluctantly Ann roused herself enough to get up. When she looked down at Evelyn, she was already asleep again. Ann turned away quietly and went to her own room, knowing that one of her enemies in Evelyn had already been defeated.

  On Thursday Ann felt some confidence as she set out with Evelyn to get Kate Buell at the residence hotel where she lived.

  “Why don’t you drive now and let me maneuver doors and things?” Ann suggested as she got out of the car.

  “You’ll have to tell me where we’re going,” Evelyn said, sliding over into the driver’s seat.

  “I will. I’ll be right back.”

  Ann brought Kate down to the car proudly. She was a tiny woman, still light stepping and certain voiced at seventy-five. She was delighted to be going out, delighted to be meeting someone new, for she was aware that her conversation sought out fixed points in the past, that certain memories had become the refrain of her day; and old friends, though patient, could not feel the new wonder she did each time she recounted one of the richnesses of her life. A new audience always made her happy. But she was not simply absorbed in herself. She liked people. She liked ideas.

  “Those new cartoons in the Territorial Enterprise are simply brilliant, Ann,” she said, after they had settled in the car. “Have you seen them, Mrs. Hall?”

  “No, I haven’t. I haven’t seen any of Ann’s cartoons yet.”

  “You must. It’s a real gift she has, not just for drawing. Wit. Intelligence. Range. You know, I often think cartoons, the really good ones, are the most accurate record of our particular history, I don’t mean to belittle other things, but I think the time will come when people recognize the significance of this kind of comment much more than they do now. Ann, I was troubled by the one in the New Yorker about a month ago.”

  “Were you, Kate?”

  “Yes, I th
ought I could see that odd streak of inhumanity that’s in so much psychological humor these days. Are you working full time now?”

  “Turn right here, Evelyn,” Ann said. “No. I’m still at the Club.”

  “I wonder how much longer that’s going to be necessary for you.”

  “All my life, I suppose.”

  “Perhaps. Fidelity to any human place, except the heart, seems to me a dubious thing. But the landscape, that’s a different matter!” Kate looked ahead. “Are we going out of town?”

  “Yes, to a restaurant on the Tahoe Road.”

  “How lovely. Ann tells me that literature is your field, Mrs. Hall.”

  “Yes,” Evelyn said.

  “I have a great guilt about literature. I used to read it. Now I can’t read anything but fact or theology. And I wonder why. As we get old and begin to prepare ourselves for the new life, I think we should turn more and more to literature where fact and philosophy meet; but we don’t. We dwell, instead, in an actual past and indulge ourselves in mysticism, a fearful division. I still read Shakespeare, but only the comedies. Do you both see the light on the Virginia Hills? Don’t let an old woman’s talking distract you. Do you like the desert, Mrs. Hall?”

  “I’m beginning to,” Evelyn answered. “It’s still a little awe-inspiring.”

  “There is no gentler, more beautiful place on earth, I think. I’m quite foolish about it. I tried to move away once several years ago. All my good friends are in the City. My doctor’s there. It seemed sensible to live there; but, do you know, though I loved it for a month, I couldn’t stay. And it’s not my own past I missed. I can take that with me. It is this desert, the smells of it, the colors of it, the silence of it.”

  “Kate, have you read that newish book out on ghost towns?” Ann asked.

  “Yes, I have. I bought a copy, something I don’t often do nowadays. Have you read it?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Perhaps I should give it to you. Shall I?”

  “I’d love to borrow it.”

  “No, I’ll give it to you. Remind me on the way home so that I don’t remember after you’ve gone and feel embarrassed about my forgetfulness. It is lovely of you to think of me, Ann. I don’t get out often enough these days. It’s hard to make the effort.”

  Ann directed Evelyn on to the Tahoe Road, and they did not drive very far before they came to the restaurant Ann had chosen. It was still some distance to the mountains, but the building stood on a rise of ground that allowed a long, wide view of the desert to the north.

  “I think this is the place where young Ernie Trool plays the piano,” Kate said. “Do you know him, Ann?”

  “Not really. I know who he is.”

  “Your father knew his father. Ann’s father knew everyone in town,” Kate said to Evelyn.

  “Not quite,” Ann said smiling. “You’re the one who knows everyone in town.”

  “Not anymore. I did when I ran the newspaper. Then I certainly did.”

  “You ran a newspaper, Mrs. Buell?” Evelyn asked.

  “I certainly did and very badly, too,” Kate said, patting Evelyn’s arm.

  It was Evelyn’s arm she took, going up the stairs, Evelyn she asked to advise her about cocktails, Evelyn she addressed herself to more and more.

  “Come on,” Ann said, when the waiter arrived with the cocktails. “Let’s go out on the terrace. Will you be warm enough, Kate?”

  “With a martini, I’ll keep both of you warm as well.”

  It was not a large terrace. There were just three tables, and they were the only people to come out of doors. Kate stopped in the middle of a story about the newspaper.

  “Now listen,” she said, and surrounding the human stillness she commanded was the total stillness of the desert. “If I lost my sight, if I lost my sense of smell, I would still know where I was.”

  Ann watched Evelyn look out over the near sage into the far space of the evening, the desert already in the shadow of the great mountains, and she hoped she could read in Evelyn’s face some new awareness of the freedom and the peace of this still, unpeopled earth.

  “I must call you Evelyn,” Kate said suddenly. “It’s such a lovely name. Would it embarrass you to call me Kate? I know I’m an old woman, but everyone I love calls me Kate.”

  “Kate,” Evelyn said, smiling down at the old lady. “Of course, I’ll call you Kate.”

  “There are virtues in being old. Loving, for instance, is a very simple matter. One is no longer afraid of the instincts of the heart. You have one of the loveliest faces I’ve ever seen, Evelyn. It’s like your name, something one wants to say.”

  Ann smiled at Kate’s direct delight, at Evelyn’s unembarrassed pleasure. She heard Evelyn turn Kate’s attention then to the ballads her life had become. Ann had listened to these stories from the time she was a small child. She loved the familiarity of them, and sometimes, under her breath, she spoke with Kate the phrases that had not been altered in fifteen years. Her attention never really shifted, but sometimes Kate’s voice became the evening stillness, as light as the sound of some night bird. Ann rested.

  They left the terrace when their dinner was served and went in to Ernie Trool’s piano playing. Kate had to go over and speak to him at once. Evelyn and Ann went to the table.

  “Isn’t she wonderful?” Ann said.

  “Yes,” Evelyn answered. “Your world is full of wonders.”

  “Your lovely face, like your name,” Ann said quietly, “something one wants to say.”

  Ann drove back along the night road toward the brilliant fragments of light that were Reno. Then she went up with Kate to get the book Kate wanted to give her.

  “Will you bring Evelyn to see me again before she goes?” Kate asked.

  “Yes, Kate, soon.”

  As Ann turned away, she felt in Kate’s phrase, “before she goes,” a sudden urgency. She hurried back to the car, as if a simple moment or two could make a difference. She had so little time. She had already wasted so much of it.

  “Are you going to show me some of your work?” Evelyn asked as they were driving home.

  “Yes,” Ann said.

  “Tonight?”

  “If you like.”

  Ann offered Evelyn first the collection of cartoons she had done for local papers. Most of them were occasional pieces, making use of Nevada history or current events. There were a few protest cartoons, directed at the Nevada testing grounds. Evelyn stopped to study one rather careful sketch of an atomic explosion, captioned: “And the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.”

  “They’re all fairly standard stuff,” Ann said.

  “Are you a pacifist?”

  “I don’t suppose so,” Ann said. “I have reactions, moments when I think about changing the nature of the world, but I suppose the only thing you can change is your view of it. Shut one eye, cross them, close them both.”

  “Yet you produce protest cartoons.”

  “They sell. Oh, I don’t mean I don’t feel something about them, but cartoons aren’t very serious. They’re moments in time. They don’t last.”

  “Then you don’t agree with Kate?”

  “I like her ideas. Here, this is a collection of stuff I’ve sold in the big world.”

  Evelyn turned page after page without comment.

  “Like Kate, you find that streak of inhumanity that’s in so much psychological humor these days,” Ann said.

  “The sketching is brilliant. No, it’s not that they’re inhuman. They’re reluctant, somehow. Do you know what I mean? A kind of self-conscious satire. Not self-conscious. Oversimplified? It’s hard to say. I like individual ones, I don’t really know very much about cartoons.”

  “A little cowardly is what they are,” Ann said. “Just a little dishonest.”

  She reached for a final book, reluctant as her cartoons were, to expose the real vision she had. She had not ever shown Eve’s Apple to anyone, but she had to show it to Evelyn. She knew quite simply th
at the sketches in Eve’s Apple were the only real work she had ever done.

  “And where have you sold these?” Evelyn asked, taking the book from her.

  “I haven’t. I haven’t sent them out.”

  Ann watched over Evelyn’s shoulder as she turned the pages in silence. The awareness of an audience gave Ann the first distance from these sketches that she had ever had. She saw her own style, only hinted at in her published work. The drawings had size and weight. The lines were not threatened by tentative satire. They were boldly ironic.

  “Ann Childs,” Evelyn said finally. “You’re a moralist!”

  “No,” Ann said. “I have a knowledge of good and evil. That’s all.”

  7

  EVELYN OFTEN SPENT EVENINGS in Ann’s room, exploring her library, which was a random richness of unsettled taste. At first Evelyn had looked for books which she wanted to use; but, as she discovered underlined passages and comments in margins, she began to piece together the scattered commonplace book of Ann’s private study. She would sit at Ann’s table, surrounded by books, copying quotations.

  From Goethe: “Man is not born to solve the problem of the universe but to find out where it is.”

  >From Conrad: “All claim to special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and anger from which a philosophical mind should be free.”

  >From Langer: “Paradox is a symptom of misconception; and coherent, systematic conception, i.e., the process of making sense out of experience, is philosophy.”

  >Langer again: “ … peculiar Christian conception that identifies the devil with the flesh, and sin with lust. Such a conception brings the spirit of life and the father of all evil, which are usually poles apart, very close together.”

  >From Cooper: “Men feel far more than they reason, and a little feeling is very apt to upset a great deal of philosophy.”