The Bachelor

by Andrew Palmer

  I looked away. Sadie was grilling the other attendant about the mountain pine beetle. It’s actually a natural phenomenon, the attendant was saying, the pine beetle has been here for hundreds of years. Yes, Sadie countered, but never in such numbers; what we were seeing couldn’t be natural. Oh no, it was natural, said the attendant, it’s just that the forest was getting old, and mature trees had a tougher time fighting off the beetles. That may have been true, but didn’t it also have something to do with warmer temperatures, with climate change? No, it was really about the forest getting old, it was a natural process, nothing to worry about. So it shouldn’t concern us that the ranch looked totally different now than it did even ten, twelve years ago? Well, it was true some new views had opened up. New views? It looked like a hurricane had come through. Had the attendant been outside recently? It didn’t look very natural to Sadie. And what was their plan with the remaining trees? Were they treating any with chemicals? Which ones? Carbaryl? Chitosan? Was it safe to drink the water? The attendant assured Sadie the water was perfectly safe. “It’s a natural process, ma’am.”

  Sadie thanked her and turned from the desk, smiling at me and shaking her head. “Oh!” she said, turning back. “Do you happen to offer any ex-employee discounts? My friend used to work here a long time ago.” The attendant, with a look of feigned solicitude that said, Thanks for asking me a question I can answer, said that they did in fact offer such discounts, and asked for my name, which I gave. After staring at the screen for a few seconds she asked me to spell it out; I did. “Hmm,” she said, “you’re not coming up.” I assured her I really did work here for a summer. The longer she searched, the more I wanted to come up. For a second I considered appealing to Jarry, who was still occupied with the young family. “I’m sorry, you’re not in the system,” said the front desk attendant. Sadie started to protest, but I talked over her: It’s okay, we appreciate your help, thanks for trying….“If you’re not in the system,” the attendant said as Sadie and I walked away.

  “You’re not in the system,” Sadie said as we got back in the car.

  “If you’re not in the system…”

  “There’s nothing we can do. So sorry!”

  “I’m not in the system.”

  She started the car. “I got a yurt! Sorry I didn’t consult you. The moment that stupid woman said the word I said, ‘Yes! That’s what we want.’ ”

  I said a yurt was fine with me: there hadn’t been yurts when my family used to come here and I was always up for something new. On the way to our yurt we talked about yurts. Had they even existed when I was growing up? Neither of us remembered yurts from the eighties or nineties, though Sadie said she had a dim sense of the seventies being a yurt-heavy decade. America was in the midst of a yurt revolution, we agreed. Yurtmania. Return of the Yurt.

  Our yurt was one of seven that formed a yurt circle, maybe seventy yards in diameter, on the side of a south-facing hill from which the rest of the ranch, in the absence of pines, was almost completely visible. Words like denuded, godforsaken, and moonscape shuffled through my mind. Between the cabin area and the main campground rose an enormous structure that hadn’t been there before; it looked vaguely like a ski jump. The yurt was appointed with woodstove, couch, kitchen table, toaster, a queen bed, and two bunk beds. We dropped off our stuff there and went for a walk through the denuded godforsaken moonscape.

  It was late afternoon and no one else was out; was anyone else even staying here? The wind, angry the pines were gone, assaulted our unprotected faces, and I thought of our first walk together, through the freezing streets of northwest Des Moines, back when I used to live there, another time, when Sadie was my mother’s friend. We walked toward and through the main campground, which was empty, to the base of the big new structure: not a ski jump, according to a banner attached to a fence, but a “Snowflex summer tubing slope,” the third of its kind in North America and the first in Colorado; a “magic carpet” conveyed tubers to the top, and from there they slid down on a composite material whose surface mimicked certain qualities of packed snow. We’d have to come back in the summer, Sadie said, and I said yes, we definitely would.

  From there we walked through the cabin area, where we saw a smattering of parked cars but no people. I recognized one of the cabins my family had stayed in from its name, Buckeye, carved into a block of wood that hung from two posts by the driveway. An informational placard at the area’s entrance addressed the pine beetle damage: Mountain pine beetles, a natural presence in pine forests….As forest health is addressed on the Ranch, more great things are happening. New views have opened up, and though the scenery has changed…“People are so stupid,” Sadie said. “We just have no idea what we’re doing on this planet.” Soon, the placard said, the pines would be replaced by new growths of aspen and subalpine fir.

  As we walked past the library Sadie asked, “So that’s where you used to go to avoid thinking about—what was her name?”

  “Laura.”

  “Laura. Your first love?”

  How did she know?

  “And you imagined you’d end up marrying her?”

  “No. I didn’t believe in marriage then.”

  “That’s right. I forgot. Sorry. It’s just that—well, when I met Ryan, in spite of what I’d seen happen to my parents, I thought, ‘Oh, how lovely! We’ll buy a house and have kids and jobs and buy furniture and protect each other from the world. Well. I wish I could tell my twenty-two-year-old self what marriage was really like. Not that it’s bad.”

  “I’m not sure your marriage is the normal model,” I said.

  “No marriage is the normal model. That’s what you don’t find out until you’re married. Marriage is a negotiated common reality with another person.” It sounded like she was reciting a definition from a dictionary. “It is about protection, I got that right at least. But what you’re protecting is your spouse’s solitude, his own unshareable experience. We love for selfish reasons. Everyone does. It’s a way to get to another place. I’ll be the first to admit I’ve used Ryan, and if you pestered him enough there’s a chance he’d admit how much he’s used me, too.”

  Pretending to reach for my phone, I said, “What’s his number?” and Sadie smiled indulgently.

  “How long were you and Laura together?” she asked.

  “Three and a half years? Four years? I don’t know. I guess it depends on how you count.”

  “And who hurt whom?”

  I laughed at Sadie’s brazenness, still not quite used to it. “I don’t know. We hurt each other.” Without looking at her I sensed she was dissatisfied with my answer. “I guess I probably hurt her more,” I admitted. I thought of Ellen, the coworker I’d kissed—once, and chastely—a few weeks before Laura and I broke up.

  “Is that typical for you? Are you the hurter?”

  Again I laughed, almost embarrassed, then considered her question seriously. “I guess I’ve been on both sides. I’ve been hurt. And sometimes it hurts to be the hurter.”

  “Of course. But it can also feel good to hurt. It’s a question of power. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.”

  I said I did but I was trying very hard at the moment to renounce that kind of power. Its satisfactions, I said, were shallow.

  “What an adult thing to say,” Sadie said. I felt patronized but let it pass.

  We walked down the dirt road to our yurt through wind that seemed to come from the top of Sheep’s Head Mountain, carrying the alpine tundra with it. We bowed our heads and gritted our teeth and Sadie slipped her arm through mine. The sun dropped behind a western ridge.

  We entered our yurt and fed the stove with complimentary wood and sat on the couch, thawing. Then Sadie changed into a dress and we drove into town for dinner. We wanted to eat at the Italian or burger place or both but found neither and ended up eating panini at a combination Mexican restaurant a
nd crêperie. We were both tired but also reluctant to return to the darkness of the ranch, the spartan yurt, so we walked down the street to the nearest bar, where we each had two drinks and watched sad-looking men get rejected by slightly less sad-looking women. Everyone wore boots and cowboy hats, and we tried not to make ourselves conspicuous. Finally we left, everyone watching us, and drove back to the ranch. When we got to the yurt, which was no longer warm, Sadie changed into pajamas and we rushed into bed. She took a top bunk, I the bottom. I lay awake for a long time.

  * * *

  —

  Day three of our trip began at dawn. Stopping at Sheep’s Head Mountain Ranch meant we’d have to drive for fifteen hours, give or take, in order to get to House Above the Morning Clouds before the “glass people” arrived the next morning. We breakfasted on potato chips and gas station coffee, listening to Morning Edition until, some ways past Steamboat Springs, we entered the Land Without Radio (Sadie’s moniker), a state we’d pass in and out of all day, and allowed ourselves to be absorbed by the scenery, which was flattening out but still looked vaguely “mountainy,” we agreed. Soon, though, the mountains gave way to desert, and we took turns napping while the other drove, neither of us having slept well the night before. We listened to Top 40, oldies, country, until we reached that moment on all road trips when the music, instead of propelling you forward, starts to weigh you down. Then talk radio, if we could find it, silence if we couldn’t. We picked up sandwiches in Salt Lake City, and ate them to guard against the encroaching emptiness of the salt flats just beyond.

  Not long after we passed from Utah to Nevada, at a moment when it seemed impossible that we could cross this desert and another mountain range in half a month, much less half a day, I offered to read to Sadie out loud. She said that sounded lovely and I extracted from my backpack Berryman’s Collected Poems, which I’d hastily packed the morning of our departure. Was poetry okay? I asked. Poetry was great.

  “I’ve been interested in this poet John Berryman lately,” I said, and probably I shouldn’t have been surprised that Sadie knew all about Berryman, had read many of his Dream Songs years ago, and what’s more felt a strong connection with him due to the sad coincidence of their both losing their fathers in tragic circumstances when they were children. “There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart,” she quoted. “I forget the rest of the poem.” “So heavy,” I said. “So heavy,” she said—“that’s right.”

  I started from the beginning of Love & Fame, the last of Berryman’s books to be published during his lifetime. Written between and during stays in the hospital for alcoholism and related illnesses and injuries, it recounted the poet’s sentimental and artistic education, paying special attention to his romantic triumphs and attendant losses. I fell in love with a girl, it begins. Next line: O and a gash. The next poem finds Berryman feasting on Louise. The next begins, O lithest Shirley! The one after that makes passing mention of the great red joy a pecker ought to be / to pump a woman ragged. From the next: My love confused confused with after loves / not ever over time did I outgrow. “No kidding,” Sadie said when I read those lines. “He’s fixated. He’s obsessed with women.” I told Sadie his attitude toward women had always been a little troubling to me, not only because of the more or less explicit Oedipal impulse behind it, but because he treated them—not all of the time, but often—as little more than conquests. “He was an old-fashioned womanizer,” I said.

  “He was a product of his time.”

  “He slept with his students.”

  “Everyone slept with their students back then.”

  I murmured a vague objection, and Sadie laughed in embarrassment or indulgence.

  What happens when you read out loud to someone is that you are and are not yourself. You’re Berryman and Berryman’s myriad personas and the characters that populate his poems, his life, and you’re your eight-year-old self reading to your sister, your four-year-old self being read to by your brother, and you’re your parents, and your parents’ parents; and the part of you that’s aware of all this is what remains of yourself, and the part of you that’s listening to him, to Berryman, to Berryman’s personas, is Sadie.

  We will all die, & the evidence

  is: Nothing after that.

  Honey, we don’t rejoin.

  The thing meanwhile, I suppose, is to be courageous & kind.

  By the time we got to the California border—I’d been reading by flashlight since the middle of Nevada—Berryman had transitioned from self-aggrandizement that was more or less indistinguishable from self-doubt to a professed letting go of the ego, the better to praise our Lord and maker, Master of beauty, craftsman of the snowflake, and my voice was shot. Sadie mused about Berryman’s sudden religious conversion. It was just another way to be seen, she said. Love and fame—both were ways to be seen, but both distorted as much as they revealed. Only God could see us perfectly. “Unfortunately, God doesn’t exist,” she said.

  “Which is why Berryman jumped off a bridge,” I offered.

  At the checkpoint a bureaucrat confiscated an orange, and soon we were climbing the Sierra Nevadas. We stopped for a bathroom break at a rest area near the top, and I took us down the other side. As I switched lanes to pass a semi I told Sadie about how when I was a kid, I understood turn signals not as signals but the actual mechanisms by which cars switched lanes. “One of those childhood causality mistakes,” I said. A few minutes later she said, “I want to tell you something.” I think this was the first time I’d heard her say that. Go ahead, I said, and Sadie said, “I’ve really enjoyed this. Am really enjoying it. I hope we stay friends after this is over.” I thanked her and said I was really enjoying it, too, and we rolled down the mountain and into the valley through the mild night.

  We passed Sacramento, Davis, Vacaville, Fairfield, and finally took our exit. A few minutes later we were driving through dark vineyards. We rolled down our windows; the air was almost warm; we felt as though we’d driven from winter to spring. Soon we reached the base of our mountain and began, once again, to climb. For maybe half an hour we wound up a steep gradient past long gated driveways that led to mansions that shone forth from the darkness. The road leveled out and faded into gravel. The rumble of our tires on a cow grate surprised us. We passed a small pond or reservoir on which I could make out a dock and wooden raft, then curved up through a forest and came to a stop in front of an iron gate in the center of which was wrought a gigantic D. Had we arrived? “I don’t see a house.” “Dave said we’ll know it when we see it.” I pushed open the gate and held it open while Sadie drove through—it was cooler here than down in the vineyards—and then we continued climbing, climbing. We entered into a series of switchbacks. The gravel faded into dirt. We hit an enormous crater of a pothole and Sadie slowed our pace to a crawl. An animal—coyote? raccoon? bobcat?—scurried out of the headlights and into the trees, leaving an afterimage of its eyes. “This is insane,” Sadie said and I agreed. The trees became sparser, then disappeared, and we rounded a bend that felt like a ridge and then we knew it was a ridge because on one side of the road instead of the darkness that indicated Earth’s reassuring solidity we saw, or seemed to see, spread out against the sky, the yellow and red and whitish blue lights of an entire city. “Fairfield,” Sadie said. “Incredible,” I said, and we drove on at an even slower pace until Fairfield disappeared behind a tree.

  Then more climbing, no signs of human life, only the darkness of mountainside and sky, which was clouded over, starless. We didn’t speak. Dave had told us his house was on top of a mountain, but I think we’d both imagined it as more of a hill. It must have been well after midnight by now. We hit a fork in the road, the first since the gate, and chose what we decided was the “main” road, slightly wider than the other. After some time we reached another gate, this one chain-link. I got out to see if it was locked; it slid open. “Keep going?” “We haven’t reached the top ye
t, so…” More climbing, a level section through treeless plain, more climbing, one of us let out a laugh, which made the other laugh, too: what were we doing here? A bit later we passed what looked like a water tank, surrounded by a bunch of metal boxes, pipes. A low stone wall ran alongside the road, which turned back into asphalt. We were close. The last stretch was the steepest of them all; it felt like the first slow ascent on a roller coaster. I was still wondering if the Volvo would make it up when I realized it had.

  The headlights lit up a two-car garage door. Sadie found the opener Dave had given her; she pressed the button a few times before it took. The “tricked-out Jeep” was parked in one spot; we took the other, closing the door behind us. As we got out of the car Sadie gave me a look that said, We made it, and I’m scared, and This is very strange, and I hope you’ll be okay here, and possibly other things. On the concrete wall, next to the door to the house proper, was a panel of maybe fifty buttons. Light switches. We leaned in close to make out their labels: Living Room, Pool, Kitchen 1, Kitchen 2, Library, Guest 1, Guest 2, Atrium, East Balcony, Entrance, Living Area…Sadie’s finger found a button labeled “All.” She looked at me. I nodded. She brought the house to light.

  What our eyes saw, our minds could make no sense of: a dizzying array of lines and light; light from a thousand sources or just one, but infinitely mirrored and refracted, fractured; rooms made of light; light audible, like bells; pools and showers of light, fields of light; light shifting, light shimmering, light within light; light shattering in fugal, in centrifugal shards. Impossible constellations flickered and dissolved. Lines met, or failed to meet, at odd angles, a collision of incompatible geometries. Reflections dissolved in reflections of reflections. Someone had poured a cup of stars into a bowl of broken glass. Room spilled onto boundless room; we moved or were moved through them. Rooms? Or was the structure one big room? And was that a tree growing out of the floor? Is that a ceiling or the sky?