Desert of the Heart: A Novel Read online

  “Janet’s baby?”

  “Janet’s ex-baby. Please do not send flowers. Donations to a fund to pay the surgeon’s fee for a successful heart operation may be addressed to …”

  “Thank God,” Evelyn said quietly. It was over then.

  “Oh, I intend to. I intend to. Mind you, I think He’s a bit late. Two and a half years and several thousand dollars ago, it might have been more useful. But I’m a practical sort. I’d like to send a donation to the anti-heart fund for research on how to stop it quickly and cheaply. And we must write a poem. Have you got a newspaper? They have poems ready-made, just like TV dinners. A three-course grief with rhymed gravy. I bet Frances has a bottle downstairs.”

  “I have one right here,” Evelyn said.

  “Are you a secret drinker? I wouldn’t have thought so, but then I’m easily deceived. I can even deceive myself.”

  “Do you want a drink?”

  “No, I don’t want a drink.”

  “Coffee?”

  “No! Sober me up and I can’t be sad.”

  “Why not?”

  “At the Club we have a name for people who bet with a man who’s winning. We call them luck riders. I’m a grief rider. I have all this capacity for grief and nothing of my own to grieve about.”

  “You don’t grieve. You rage.”

  “Do I? Well, I shouldn’t. There’s nothing wrong with the world.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Quite. If drunk. I’ll tell you a secret. I don’t believe in the signs, not really. But then I don’t gamble either. I have a sign of my own: ‘If you don’t play, you can’t lose.’ It’s not a mass philosophy, you understand.”

  “I don’t think I do understand.”

  “Oh yes you do,” Ann said, getting up out of the chair slowly. “And, what’s more, you approve. Never mind. Why don’t we go to Pyramid Lake tomorrow afternoon?”

  “Ask me again when you wake up.”

  “No,” Ann said firmly. “I don’t want the chance to change my mind.”

  “Do you think you’ll want to?”

  Ann gave Evelyn a long, significant, not quite focused look, intended to make her laugh. “My tragedy is comedy,” she said. “I’m in love with the whole damned world. The only problem is maintaining aesthetic distance. You’re elegant at it.”

  “Am I? Yes, I suppose I am.” Evelyn held the door open. “Get some sleep.”

  Ann went off, singing softly:

  “The other night our baby died.

  It neither cried nor hollered.

  It lived but twenty hours.

  It cost us forty dollars.

  It was a lousy baby anyhow.

  We didn’t like it anyhow.

  It died but for to spite us,

  Of spinal meningitis.”

  Evelyn closed the door, cautious and regretful. Simple comfort was something you could not offer without risk to anyone but a small child. Yet adults needed it, too. Where were they to get it? From lovers. From children. If you had neither? Did you learn to live without it? She had learned. By now she was “elegant” at maintaining aesthetic distance from suffering and from delight that were not her own. “If you don’t play, you can’t lose.” She did understand. She did approve, didn’t she? Ann was making melodrama of a death that did not belong to her. She was right to make fun of herself. But there was passion in this sparring, grieving, angry comic that had to find an acceptable disguise somewhere between sentimentality and brutality so that the world could decorously and sympathetically respond. She was just too truthful to make a success of it.

  “Must I be careful?”

  Evelyn snapped out the light and walked away from the question to the window, where she lifted the shade. The tree-defined patch of dawn was sea-gray, oddly oppressive, the tentative predication of a storm. Ann might be forced to change her mind about Pyramid Lake. Evelyn felt a quick, protesting disappointment. She very much wanted a fair day.

  The morning suffered only a fitful overcast. Above the city, the sky was occasionally quite blue, and by early afternoon the sun had consumed any alien possibility of rain. Evelyn worked, for the first time really grateful for the heat. The weather could break some other day.

  Ann knocked at her door at three o’clock. She was dressed in pedal pushers. Her hair was freshly washed. Her eyes had a young clarity of recent and heavy sleep.

  “Well, you look quite recovered.”

  “I am,” Ann said. “Did I ask you to go to Pyramid Lake today?”

  “You did.”

  “And did you accept?”

  “I told you to ask me again when you woke up.”

  “I see,” Ann said and then paused with mock thoughtfulness. “Well, I’m awake. Will you come?”

  “Yes.”

  “Frances is packing a picnic supper for us. You’ll have to change. Have you got slacks and a suit?”

  “Yes.”

  “And some sort of jacket. There’s sometimes a wind in the evening.”

  Ann’s energy quickened the ordinary preparations into importance and pleasure. She teased extra pieces of chicken from Frances, chose towels to match bathing suits, and sent Evelyn to the attic for a book of particular poems, Eliot if she liked, or Auden, but not Thomas, not Frost. Their landscapes suffered in this particular out-of-doors. Her gaiety had only a slight brittleness about it, as if she remembered but refused to include her tiredness and her angry, uncertain grief of the night before.

  Evelyn took her mood from Ann. As they drove through the outskirts of the town and arrived at the desert’s edge, she did not allow herself the reluctance and vague dread that threatened her. Instead, she was determinedly curious, observant, gay. Ann listened, answered, and turned sometimes to Evelyn, her eyes easily forsaking the straight, empty road before them.

  “They say, wherever the sage grows in abundance, the soil is very rich. If there were water, this whole valley would be valuable farmland. Around Salt Lake City, the Mormons did irrigate, of course; but they had the rivers.”

  “And the vision?” Evelyn suggested.

  “Perhaps. But Mormons settled in this part of the country, too. In some of the little towns, like Genoa, Mormon houses are the historic sites. I’ll take you there some time. The Mormons started duplex building in the west, a different front door for each wife. But they couldn’t manage here. It’s no place for the God-fearing visionary. The men who stayed either knew they were damned or didn’t believe in damnation. It’s still so.”

  “What category are you in?”

  “I?” Ann turned to Evelyn. “I don’t know. One of the damned, I suppose. It’s hard not to believe in an Old Testament sort of world. Fire and brimstone have weathered some four hundred towns into dust already. Every place is a Sodom or Gomorrah: it’s only a matter of time, and very little time at that. The faithful say the plain was well watered, even as the Garden of the Lord, before He destroyed the cities. I don’t believe it. There was never water here, not fresh water.”

  “But you love the whole damned world,” Evelyn said, “or so you claimed last night.”

  Ann smiled. “Yes, I do. The desert seems to me the simple truth about the world.”

  “What simple truth?”

  “The earth’s given out. Men can’t get a living from it. They have to get it from each other. We can’t have what we need, but we can take what we want. It’s true everywhere. Here it’s easy to see.

  “I don’t agree,” Evelyn said. “Everywhere is not a desert.”

  “But the desert’s beautiful,” Ann said. “Look.”

  Reluctant, Evelyn watched the place of Ann’s vision, a wind-shaped land of dry, muted grays, tans, and greens. But, as Evelyn looked, she forced herself to see, too, a bolder ochre, a deep orange, an almost clear blue-green. The wind took up the tumbleweed which rode the stubble of sage like the shadows of clouds. The sky was clear, and the scent of sage, sharp in the heat, gave even the dust a kind of clarity. The road cut straight across the uneven f
loor of the plain, its line never broken because it continually merged with its own horizons, but in the unexpected pockets were sudden views. The car rushed up a rise of land to the crest of a subtle hill, and there at the center of the endless desert was a vast body of water.

  “Ann!” Evelyn cried. “Stop!”

  Ann pulled the car off the road. Below them, a mile away, the southern shore of the lake was a long, straight line, bone-white against a blue so deep it seemed the night of the day sky. Five miles away, the land rose again in severe steps of rock, not so much shaped by as ascending, escaping from the water. To the left and north, the far shore disappeared. The water met and closed with the sky.

  “How big is it?” Evelyn asked.

  “I don’t know. Bigger than Tahoe. Around thirty miles long, I should think.”

  “But there’s nothing here.”

  “No, nothing but an Indian reservation to the east (we’re actually on reservation ground now) and a couple of gas stations and grocery stores on the road going north. People talk about developing the Lake. I suppose some day they will.”

  “But there aren’t any trees.”

  “No. Not even sage. Nothing can grow. The water’s alkaline. Lovely for swimming.”

  Evelyn wanted to refuse. She wanted Ann to turn the car around and drive back to Reno, which, alien and hostile as it might be, was at least human. There was no way Evelyn could comprehend this unnatural, dead body of water, still, killing, blue. Yet she could not ask to leave. She lacked both the courage and the cruelty to refuse. As Ann drove the car down toward the edge of the Lake, Evelyn sat, silent with apprehension. They traveled along the paved road to the east for a while, then turned off on to rutted sand which took them to within two hundred yards of the water.

  “Can you take the towels and blanket?” Ann asked, her voice thrown past Evelyn by the wind. “I’ll take the food.”

  They labored across the barren, burning dunes to a small sand-cliff edge, where Ann told Evelyn to wait. As Ann disappeared over the side, Evelyn stepped closer to the edge to keep her in sight. There only twelve feet below was a narrow curve of beach, flat, hard and white with a kind of crude sand. Ann left the picnic basket and ran back up the shifting sand to help Evelyn down. The beach itself was sheltered by the cliff from the wind and from the sun and from the view of the unending shore line. In that great openness of water, desert, and sky, it was curiously private; but the security it provided was, for Evelyn, a frail illusion. She was, nevertheless, grateful for it. She set the blanket and towels down almost against the cliff itself, twenty feet from the water, and sat down to watch Ann who had kicked off her shoes and was wading out from the shore to plant a bottle of wine.

  “The water’s marvelous,” Ann said, as she came back. “It’s a curiously gentle lake.”

  Evelyn reached out nervously for a handful of rough sand. As she looked down at it slipping through her fingers, she caught at it suddenly.

  “This isn’t sand at all.”

  “No,” Ann said, kneeling beside her. “They’re tiny shells.”

  White snail shells, no bigger than the head of a pin, caught along the lines of Evelyn’s palm. She studied them with uncertain wonder, then looked up at the beach itself, white with billions of dwarf deaths, free fossil washed, yes, gently, into petrified rhythms along the shore.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” Ann asked.

  “I suppose it is,” Evelyn said. “Don’t other people come here?”

  “Occasionally, but not right here. I don’t know why people don’t come. Everybody goes to Tahoe, I guess. I’m glad. I like miles to myself.”

  Evelyn watched Ann almost enviously. Was she really innocent enough that she could leave the world behind? “You could almost imagine there were no other people,” Evelyn said.

  “Yes,” Ann said. “Almost.” She stood up and began to unbutton her shirt. “If we’re going to swim, we should. In another couple of hours, it will be too cold.”

  Evelyn did not want to move. She could not imagine walking into the water of her own free will. Why was she so frightened? Irritated with herself, she stood up and reached for her suit. Ann, more quickly changed, waited for her at the edge of the water. Evelyn walked out of the shade of the cliff into the sun. She would not refuse. “Ready?”

  Evelyn smiled. Something of Ann’s young animal eagerness touched her own memory. Evelyn had been a good swimmer, and even now, though her body had adopted the mannerisms appropriate to settled middle age, it was strong and capable. The water, as she looked right down at it, was clear and shallow, innocent somehow of its own great size. When she stepped into it, the quick shock of its coldness startled her into pleasure. She wanted to swim.

  They did not swim together. Ann chose a solitude far out from shore. Evelyn swam near the edge, beyond the curve of cliff to another beach, longer and more open to the view. She grew braver, more curious, and her body, released from a long stillness of work, relaxed in the rhythm of pure, physical energy. When she finally turned and swam back to the small, private beach, Ann was already on the shore.

  “You’re a beautiful swimmer,” Ann said.

  “I used to be. It’s been years since I’ve done anything more than play in the surf.” She took the towel Ann handed her. “I wonder why.”

  Ann spread the blanket out nearer the water in the sun. “It’s not too hot now. Are you thirsty? There’s wine, coffee, or water.”

  “Water? What an odd, good idea!”

  Evelyn stretched out on the blanket on her back. The muscles in her arms and legs were tired, but the sun warmed and quickened her blood.

  “I feel simply marvelous,” she said, as Ann lay down beside her.

  “It’s nice here.”

  “I’m glad I came. An hour ago I wasn’t sure.”

  “Why not?”

  “The desert frightens me, I think. It looks too much like the seventh circle of hell. I’m afraid of damnation.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” Evelyn repeated, peering at Ann from behind her hand. She lay back again and closed her eyes. “I don’t know. I’ve always supposed everyone is.”

  “Well, they’re not. I, for instance, am a hell of a lot more frightened of being saved.”

  Evelyn chuckled.

  “I’m serious,” Ann protested. “Virtue smells to me of rotting vegetation. Here you burn or freeze. Either way it’s clean.”

  “Sterile,” Evelyn said and felt the word a laceration of her own flesh.

  “I wonder. It’s fertility that’s a dirty word for me.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes, I’m terrified of giving in, of justifying my own existence by means of simple reproduction. So many people do or try to. And there are the children, so unfulfilling after all. And they grow up to do nothing but reproduce children who will reproduce, everyone so busy reproducing that there’s no time to produce anything. But it’s such a temptation. It seems so natural—another dirty word for me. What’s the point?”

  “You’d have the human race die out?”

  “No. We’ll multiply in spite of ourselves always. We’ll populate the desert. One day there will be little houses and docks all along this shore, signs of our salvation.”

  “What would you have us do instead?” Evelyn asked.

  “Accept damnation,” Ann said. “It has its power and its charm. And it’s real.”

  “So we should all get jobs in gambling casinos.”

  “We all do,” Ann said, her voice amused. “What do you think the University of California is? It’s just a minor branch of the Establishment. The only difference is that it has to be subsidized.”

  “Are you talking nonsense on purpose?”

  “No, I’m serious.”

  “You think nothing has any value?”

  “No, I think everything has value, absolute value, a child, a house, a day’s work, the sky. But nothing will save us. We were never meant to be saved.”

  “What were we meant for
then?”

  “To love the whole damned world,” Ann said, delighted.

  “‘In the destructive element immerse.’ Perhaps there’s some truth in it. I might learn. I don’t know. I’m old to learn. And I’m not sure I’d like a world without guilt or goodness. It might seem very empty.”

  “Like the desert?”

  “Yes,” Evelyn said.

  She lay quiet then, the sun a dark heat against her closed eyes. She felt Ann turn and sit up. Guarding her face from the glare with her hand, Evelyn opened her eyes. Ann was looking down at her.

  “Have you ever been special assistant to the Dean?”

  “No,” Evelyn said.

  As Ann bent down toward Her, Evelyn took hold of the soft, damp hair at the back of Ann’s neck and held her away. But, as Evelyn looked at the face held back from her own, the rain-gray eyes, the fine bones, the mouth, she felt the weight and length of Ann’s body measuring her own. Her hand relaxed its hold, all her flesh welcoming the long embrace. But simple physical desire could not silence her recovering brain. Slowly, carefully, almost painfully, she turned Ann’s weight in her arms until she could withdraw.

  “I live in the desert of the heart,” Evelyn said quietly, “I can’t love the whole damned world.”

  “Love me, Evelyn.”

  “I do.”

  “But you don’t want me?”

  Evelyn looked at Ann, the child she had always wanted, the friend she had once had, the lover she had never considered. Of course she wanted Ann. Pride, morality, and inexperience had kept her from admitting it frankly to herself from the first moment she had seen Ann. Guilt and goodness must now keep her from admitting it to Ann.

  “No relationship is without erotic feeling,” Evelyn said. She had heard it somewhere at a cocktail party, an academic cocktail party. Someone else had added, as she added now, “But that doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be acted upon.” Ann looked away. “I’m sorry, Ann.”

  Evelyn wanted to say something else, to explain, to justify. “I’m married, Ann,” she wanted to say. “I mustn’t. I can’t.” But George could hardly save her now. He was not even a conventional excuse. “I don’t know anything about this sort of thing,” she wanted to say, but it was not true. If she had never actually made love to another woman, she was intellectually emancipated in all perversions of flesh, mind, and spirit. Her academic training had seen to that. “Forgive me, Ann,” she might say; but Evelyn did not really want to be forgiven.