Desert of the Heart: A Novel

by Jane Rule

  >From Toller: “I have respect for nothing but my work. The work commands me; that is all I serve.”

  >From Sappho: “ … … But I say Whatever one loves, is.”

  Ann had not underlined a verse which caught Evelyn’s attention:

  Now I know why Eros,

  of all the progeny of

  Earth and Heaven, has

  been most dearly loved.

  She did not write it down. She was not, at the moment, so much interested in finding her own reflection as she was in finding Ann’s. These books were like old photograph albums, through which she searched to find the candid or posed moments of Ann’s mind. In some of the quotations she could hardly recognize Ann, a blur among dozens of youngsters who identified with the large, euphoric generalities of western intellectual heroes, but perhaps Ann was being ironic. Where she did not comment, Evelyn could not be sure. Occasionally, and always in the most cryptic and particular statements, Evelyn recognized at once that idiosyncratic imagination which was Ann; however, though Evelyn could always recognize it, she could not always understand it. She looked down at another marked verse in Sappho:

  People do gossip

  And they say about

  Leda, that she

  once found an egg

  hidden under

  wild hyacinths.

  For the arrogant, the world is a vicious but essentially harmless place? Evelyn’s was a willing, but uncertain suspension of disbelief. The pieces of Ann did not quite fit together, the several separate worlds she seemed to live in, her amoral behavior and her moral judgment, her sympathy and her rage, her brashness and her delicacy. Who was she?

  Evelyn set the book aside and stood up. It was only two o’clock. She had, perhaps, two hours to wait. “And now I know why Eros …” she said quietly, as she stretched and yawned, a suggestion of desire informing all her nerves. Extraordinary … not that she should feel desire but that she should not have felt it, consciously, for years. And with the awakening of her body had also come passions of other sorts which were not really new because she dimly recognized them as belonging to a person she had almost grown into before her life had taken the long detour of marriage. She had never been, except in her mind, a real adventurer, but she had not been afraid; or, if she had, fear had been no more than a seasoning that had increased her appetite, particularly for people. Before her marriage to George, and even during the first few years after the war, they had both had a lot of friends; but, as they grew apart from each other, they had isolated themselves. George was the first to refuse people, but Evelyn had also withdrawn, not wanting the simplest kind of intimacy for fear that it might expose her failure. Now she was exposed, and the very vulnerability that had terrified her—had she expected to be stripped and whipped in the public square?—gave her a reckless courage. For someone who had had nothing but stock responses, and most of them negative, for almost ten years, the anarchy of desire and curiosity seemed a kind of salvation. Evelyn gave herself to it with the zeal of a convert.

  No, she gave herself to Ann. It was only through Ann that Evelyn reached out to this world. She felt she could be interested in and care about anyone and anything that mattered to Ann: Silver, the desert, Kate, cartoons. That was Evelyn’s nature. When she had learned to play the piano, she did not want to be a concert pianist; she wanted to be an accompanist. When she had begun to draw, her ambition was to be a portrait painter. And her love of language had not turned her to writing but to criticism. She took the value of her own identity from the person or idea she served. Was that true? Was she weak then, not, after all, crushingly strong as she had seemed to be? Was she dependent? “Sure,” George would say, “the way a puppeteer is dependent on a puppet. And you have an appetite for people, all right. You eat them.” “Not the tough ones,” she answered and heard in her own voice, for the first time, the ancient, unspoken scorn for her husband’s weakness. “I’m ashamed of him. I was humiliated by him.” And she had felt some kind of monster, incapable of sympathy, incapable of love. She had been a kind of monster. He had created her so, asking of her a subservience to his ailing will, which demanded both that she support him in the public world and depend upon him in their private living, be his manhood and his wife. And she had tried, an error she could hardly blame him for entirely. She chose to try to hide her own sense of inadequacy. As she scorned him, she scorned herself. Neither of them should be ashamed of anything in themselves but their willing participation in the obsolete pattern their marriage had become. What difference did manhood make? What difference did womanhood make?

  It was curious that, at the very time she was giving up all the external images of womanhood, Evelyn should become increasingly aware of her own femininity, and it was not a synthetic maternity as she had expected it to be. Oh, at moments Ann sleeping was a child, her child. And sometimes, when she saw the thin, vicious scars on Ann’s wrists, she had to fight down an animal rage which was protective. But these emotions were occasional. Now, waiting, she had a wonderful, physical impatience to have Ann home, and her memory of the nights before made her anticipation confident. She had grown almost vain about her body, and she had begun to discover, underneath the strict discipline she had imposed upon her mind, an inventiveness. She could talk whimsically, sometimes even wittily to call up in Ann not admiration so much as delight. Evelyn wanted to be charming, provocative, desirable, attributes she had never aspired to before out of pride, perhaps, or fear of failure. Now they seemed almost instinctive. She was finding, in the miracle of her particular fall, that she was, by nature, a woman. And what a lovely thing it was to be, a woman.

  “I’d like to go back to Pyramid Lake,” she said to Ann when she came home.

  “Would you really?”

  “Yes, and I also want to go to the Club. I almost went down tonight, and then I was a little afraid to without asking you first. When Silver suggested it on Saturday, you were so firm.”

  “I didn’t think you wanted to go.”

  “You make love with Silver, don’t you?” Evelyn asked suddenly, surprised at her own directness.

  “I have.”

  “Do you make love with a lot of people?”

  “Not a lot. Some. Do you mind?”

  “I don’t know,” Evelyn said, but she remembered the fierce physical jealousy she had felt when Silver had bought the dress for Ann. She did not want to lie. “Yes. I suppose that’s terribly backward … reactionary of me, is it?”

  “No.” Ann smiled. “Fidelity is one of those green, sane words that grow like weeds in everyone’s garden.”

  “You don’t approve of it?”

  “I don’t know. I think I’m allergic to it, that’s all.”

  “Must I be promiscuous to avoid giving you a rash?”

  “No,” Ann said sharply.

  “Oh? It’s only your own fidelity you’re allergic to.”

  “Don’t make it sound so final. I have a transient personality. I outgrow things or move away from them. Tomorrow I might decorate a whole house with fidelity and find I can live with it without so much as an itch.”

  “For a while.”

  “For a while,” Ann agreed. “I don’t really understand how people take the marriage vows. How did you? It’s one thing to forsake the past, but how can you forsake the future?”

  “I suppose it never occurred to me that I had one.”

  “Is that why you married George?” Ann asked roughly. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right. One direct question deserves another. It’s just that I don’t seem to be able to answer yours as easily as you answer mine. I think I married him because I thought I loved him. And I wanted to be married. But it can’t be as simple as that, can it?”

  “I don’t think that’s very simple. Why did you want to be married?”

  “I wanted children. I wanted to live in a house. I wanted to be a woman.”

  “Is that being a woman?”

  “I thought so,” Evelyn said, “but I w
as a very conventional young woman, darling.”

  “Why are you divorcing him?”

  “I have to,” Evelyn said.

  “Talk to me, Evelyn,” Ann demanded. “Talk. I have to hear. I have to know,”

  Evelyn looked steadily at Ann. If she told her, really told her, of the grotesque inhumanity she had helped to create and maintain over these last years, what hope would there be of surviving it? Would Ann find anything left of her that was delighting, perceptive, loving? The dangerous euphoria of the last days snapped like a nerve in the back of her neck. Pride and anger rose to cover fear. Evelyn had been out of her mind to enter into this relationship. Yes, out of her mind. Ann was an attempted moral suicide from which Evelyn had just come to.

  “Evelyn,” Ann said from a great distance. “Evelyn, listen to me.”

  “No,” Evelyn said.

  “I have to know, Evelyn. I love you. You have to tell me,”

  Evelyn turned toward the door.

  “Evelyn?”

  “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” Evelyn asked. “I don’t suppose so. I suppose in a way you’re quite innocent, but I’m not.

  “No,” Ann said wryly, “you’ve been thrown out of the garden.”

  Her answering anger touched Evelyn as no gentleness or pleading could have done. She reached out and took hold of Ann’s shoulders. “Not for eating apples, though. I eat people.”

  “A mixed mythology,” Ann said. “Why are you afraid?”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “You are.”

  “I’m afraid for you then.”

  “I don’t believe that. You may be afraid of me, and perhaps you ought to be. I don’t know. I suppose, in a way, you’re quite right: I don’t know what I’m doing, except risking a dubious but essential world on a whim called Evelyn Hall. You may be someone I want to eat. Who knows? I think I won’t eat you, though. I don’t think you’ll let me. And you can rest assured in me, too. I shall be nobody’s meal.”

  “You don’t know. You don’t know.”

  “What are you afraid of?”

  “Myself,” Evelyn said. “I can’t imagine that you could, knowing me, love me. And I can’t imagine, if you did, that it would be a good thing.”

  “Why?”

  “Ann, my husband is in and out of a mental hospital, and his doctors have told me that the only thing I can do for him is to divorce him. I’m some kind of poisonous alter ego for him, an ideal, a judge. I told the doctors I couldn’t divorce him. I had married him. They sent me to my minister who very gently and tactfully explained the moral loopholes, how one can escape through the infinite insight and generosity of God. Apparently, in the eyes of God, if you’ve done a fairly thorough job of destroying someone, you don’t have to go on being faithful to him. You can quit. Not only can you, you’re required to break the letter of the law to observe the spirit. That assumes, of course, that something of the spirit has survived. I have to divorce George. I have no other choice.”

  “You don’t want to divorce him?” Ann asked.

  “Shall I tell you the truth? No, I don’t. I’d rather he’d die.”

  “Why are you horrified? Do you think it’s an unusual feeling? It’s as normal as imagining how sorry the world will be when you’re dead. He probably wishes you were dead, too, or wishes he were dead. It’s about the same thing.”

  “But I have destroyed him.”

  “You have not. That’s an arrogance you damned well better get over.”

  “Arrogance?”

  “I don’t know the man,” Ann said quietly, “but I assume he’s had some experiences that have had nothing to do with you. Did you give birth to him? Did you raise him? Did you go off to war with him? You may not have helped him any, Evelyn. You may even have clarified his nightmares, been the subject of several of them. But destroy him? No. He’s still alive, after all. The doctors tell you you can help him by divorcing him. What’s so appalling about that? Have you ever thought you could have an operation for him? Have you ever thought you could have his dreams for him? Have you ever thought you could die for him? There are things people have to do alone. Going mad is one of them. Apparently he has to go mad, and you can’t go with him. He has to be free.”

  “But not to go mad,” Evelyn said. “In order to keep from going mad.”

  “What have you done to him?”

  As Evelyn began to speak her monologue of petrified guilt, she realized that she had at last come to the trial she had expected, but not in the public courts of law to be judged and sentenced by official strangers. They conspired with her to set her free. Nor was her confession to be offered to God, Who had, by casually forgiving, apparently already condemned her. Her judge was to be this young image of herself, whose arrogance and morality and innocence she curiously believed in. As Evelyn watched Ann’s face, she found she could speak not only of guilt but of anger and of need. And finally she could ask: “And what on earth does my love for you mean? Isn’t it some final perversion of inadequacy and need?”

  “You’ve been talking about the sin of putting moral names to immoral behavior. Perhaps you can make the same mistake in reverse, call love perversion.”

  “But how do you know it isn’t a rationalization?”

  “I don’t,” Ann said. “Loving you scares hell out of me.”

  “Do I look like your mother?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “Do you really remember her?”

  “Very well,” Ann said. “The last time I saw her I was six. I was playing in the sand. We lived in Carmel. I saw her walk away down the beach. She never came back.”

  “Where did she go?”

  “To one of her lovers, I suppose. Dad said she suffered from nymphomania. He blamed himself for being intolerant, which is only to say he was in love with her and didn’t get over it.”

  “What about Frances?”

  “He was fond of her. But I think, to the day he died, he hoped he’d find Mother again. He had me, too, of course. We both used to look for her. It was a game we played. Even after Frances and Walter moved in, Dad would always say, Who’s Daddy’s sweetheart?’ The answer was ‘Mommy is.’ Then he’d say, ‘Who’s Daddy’s other sweetheart?’ I was. Frances wasn’t really even in the hierarchy. He was good to her. He cared about her, but he kept right on looking for Mother.”

  “How did you feel about her?”

  “I thought I adored her. I suppose I really hated her, jealous of her hold on my father, hurt by her leaving of me, but I didn’t know it until he died. I’ve been busy murdering his image of her ever since.”

  “And doesn’t that have something to do with me?” Evelyn asked.

  “Yes,” Ann said, “I think so. I’ve always made love with women to prove to myself that they aren’t, after all, the mother I’m supposed to be looking for, to prove that she doesn’t exist. So you could probably say my loving of you is a perversion and a destructive one.”

  “Does it feel that way to you?”

  “No, not at all,” Ann said, “but my feelings can be very willful.”

  “I’m not really afraid of your feelings.”

  “No. You see yourself as a classic case history. And, if you’re doomed to sexual inadequacy and sterility, you anyway have enough morality left not to take out your frustrations on people you really care about. If forced to a choice, you’ll keep dogs.”

  “I think so,” Evelyn said, refusing to flinch at Ann’s brutal accuracy.

  “Evelyn. Evelyn. You’re not as simple as that. You’re not in a textbook. You’re a human being.”

  “And you?”

  “I’m less certain about me,” Ann said, grinning. “But I’m willing to behave as if I were human. I’m willing to gamble on the possibility. And so are you. Why have you loved me at all?”

  “Lack of social orientation. Latent homosexuality. Moral amnesia. Masochism. Revenge. But I’m willfully ignorant in these matters. My terms are probably very inaccurate.”
>
  “And so, though you hate to hurt me, you know you’ve made a terrible mistake. You hope I’ll forgive you. You hope we can go on being friends.” Ann’s tone was uncertainly comic, an occasional syllable tipping into satiric anger. “Why have you loved me at all?”

  “Because I couldn’t help loving you,” Evelyn said, feeling the tight control leave her voice. “Because I can’t help loving you, your wild, inaccurate emotions, your bizarre innocence, your angry sense of responsibility, your wrongheaded wit, your cockeyed joy, your cowboy boots, your absolutely magnificent body, your incredible eyes. I can’t help it. I don’t know how anyone could.”

  “There’ve been thousands, I should think,” Ann said, the warmth returning to her voice. “But I’m glad you’re not one of them. I don’t intend to let you go, Evelyn.”

  But what do you intend to do, Evelyn wondered, and what do I intend to do? She could recover from this particular, personal fear and moral panic in Ann’s arms, more certain of Ann than she had been, more certain of herself. But each moment they spent together involved them in a relationship they must somehow take responsibility for. It was easy enough to forsake the past, but could you forsake the future? Perhaps. Nothing before her mattered so much as being with Ann now.

  Being with Ann, Evelyn found it hard to remember what it was in the desert that had so terrified and appalled her. She drove the easy, straight road to Pyramid Lake as comfortably as she might have driven the road to Santa Cruz, but she was glad that they would not arrive at the boardwalk and crowded beach. There were few places left in the Bay Area where anyone could go and expect even an uncertain privacy. Privacy was what she wanted. They were both already growing restless with the caution they had to use when they were together in the house, reticent in other people’s company, always aware of the thinness of walls, the vulnerability of doors when they were alone. And dawn, which came so soon after Ann got home, was becoming a symbol of the world’s intrusion. They could not ever sleep a night through together.