Desert of the Heart: A Novel Read online

  If there is no face in the mirror, marry. If there is no shadow on the ground, have a child. These are the conventions the will consents to. But there is a face. There is a shadow. They are simply unsuitable.

  “I’m a case of mistaken identity.”

  So is George? So are we all? When we are children, emulating the giants, being little men and little women; when we are grown emulating the dwarfs, being little people. But we are not petty, George with his unpaid-for machinery, I with my cookbooks and clothespins. There is no house big enough to contain our failure. We should be granted tragic space.

  “The desert,” Evelyn said quietly. “But I’m afraid. I’m afraid of damnation.”

  It was a fear duller than the first involuntary vision of the empty desert. Her dreams had since populated it with so many people she knew, and Ann was, in fact, so at home in it that Evelyn felt her reaction shifting from her glands to her mind where fear, in a negative morality, could be called cowardice and then should be overcome.

  In a week, fragments of poems, desire and tiredness, worked against fear and guilt until Evelyn had established a new, tentative and precarious balance between what she called nature and will. It was the same distance she restored between experience and understanding, but the way between was different. The moral landscape had altered. Melodrama turned into quiet satire so that she could gently mock rather than furiously accuse and justify herself. Her habit of reserve remained.

  Ann did not challenge it. She was busy during the day, working in her room. In the evening she was taken up with her job and her friends at the Club. And, though a tiredness still sometimes stained her face, she was not tense and restless as she had been. Her conversation at the dinner table was amiable and affectionate. She was kind to Frances, gentle with Walter, casual and careful with Evelyn.

  “I’m going Christmas shopping tomorrow afternoon,” Ann said to Evelyn on Wednesday night. “Would you like to come?”

  “Christmas shopping at this time of year?”

  “I have to get packages off to Vietnam and Korea and Hong Kong right away. The deadline for Greece and Italy is only a month away. I thought I’d do it all at once.”

  “For the children. I see. What kinds of things do you get?”

  “Clothes, mostly, and a few canned foods. I always put in a toy or two and school supplies as well.”

  “I’d love to go,” Evelyn said.

  The excursion, unlike those of the previous two Thursdays, presented no problems.

  They set out right after lunch. Ann had a list for each child, which included measurements and sizes, fifty dollars in cash, and a plan for shopping. In the boys’ department at Penney’s, they stood together, Evelyn measuring the waists of khaki shorts, the legs of blue jeans, the shoulders of T-shirts, Ann feeling materials, examining stitching, matching colors.

  “No loud patterns,” Evelyn said to the clerk. “Plain white or khaki or dark blue.” She had rehearsed the names and sizes so that she could say, “It’s too big for Kim, but it might do for Ming Kin,” and she had asked Ann about different climates so that she could say, “That’s too heavy a material for Hung, in long trousers anyway.”

  Never so much interested in boy children, Evelyn was surprised at the delight of choosing among such ordinary clothes exactly the right size, color, and material. Each child, who had been only a name and a face in a photograph, became a person with special tastes and needs. Evelyn pronounced their names possessively, proudly, and asserted their individuality against the random suggestions of clerks. When the boys’ clothes had been bought, they went to the girls’ department. Here Evelyn had a more difficult time being practical. Carmela, dreaming of being a Hollywood movie star, would so love a bottle-green velvet, which was just her size, and there was a beautiful white sweater for Eftychia. While Ann looked for durable materials and dark colors, Evelyn lingered with extravagance. Once, when she looked up, she found Ann watching her.

  “I’m being silly,” Evelyn said.

  “It would be fun.”

  “No, not when they need things so badly. But it’s fun to think about.”

  School supplies were even more of a temptation than clothes. Evelyn had never outgrown her childhood love of erasers, paper clips, chalk, pencil boxes, and small pads of paper.

  “Now remember,” Ann said, laughing at the handfuls of small treasures Evelyn was collecting, “the parcels can’t cost over ten dollars.”

  “Oh, I know,” Evelyn said, “but look at these stickers of birds. They’re just ten cents.”

  “Put them in then.”

  They chose carefully among toys for the useful and educational. There were pocketknives and flashlights and scissors, map puzzles and picture books.

  “We’re running over our budget,” Ann said. “We won’t be able to put in any food, but it doesn’t matter. I can send extra money. That’s better anyway. They can get a lot more things they probably like better.”

  “It’s sad to be finished,” Evelyn said. “I like feeling mother of all the world.”

  “We’re not finished. After dinner, we have to wrap everything up in Christmas paper. I like that even better than shopping.”

  They sat on the floor in Ann’s room, sorting their purchases. On Ann’s worktable were five, sturdy cardboard boxes, stacks of newspaper, a box of Christmas wrapping paper.

  “Oh, and I mustn’t forget the photographs,” Ann said, getting up and opening a drawer.

  “What are they?”

  “A picture of me for each of them. They like pictures.”

  “Let me see.” Evelyn held out her hand for the five small snapshots. “When were these taken?”

  “Three or four months ago.”

  “Who’s the man?”

  “Bill, a friend of mine at the Club.”

  “I like his face.”

  Ann turned away to get the box of wrapping paper. “Now, which ones do you want?”

  “Carmela and Eftychia, may I?”

  “Sure.”

  “Or should I take one of the boys and one of the girls? That’s what I’ll do! Give me Hung, and you take Eftychia.”

  Ann smiled. “But the lovely thing about these children is that you can have favorites. You can even like girls better than boys (my preference in the adult world only), and no one will grow up with bad bathroom habits or unattractive aggressions. If anyone does, it isn’t your fault. Childbirth without pain, Motherhood without guilt, Mother without child.” Ann paused. “I wonder if I could get that: ‘Mother Without Child.’ If I got it, I couldn’t sell it.”

  “You know, I still haven’t seen any of your cartoons.”

  “Another night. We have work to do.”

  Their wrappings were very different, Evelyn’s careful and traditional, Ann’s bold and handsomely shabby. She worked more quickly than Evelyn because she didn’t stop to count, to admire, to compare, to play with. When she had finished two stacks of presents, she went downstairs for glasses and whiskey. They stopped for a drink.

  “Where’s Frances?” Evelyn asked.

  “In bed with a book.”

  “I should think she’d like to be in on this.”

  “No. Didn’t you notice at dinner? All the things she wasn’t saying?”

  “Like what?”

  “‘Charity begins at home.’ Or ‘People busy doing good have no time to be good.’ Or ‘Woman’s place is in the home,’ her own, that is. She doesn’t really believe any of it, but I just generally make her nervous.”

  “She’s devoted to you.”

  “I love Frances, in an irritable sort of way.” Ann got up. “I’ll leave these last two piles for you, okay? I’ll start packing the boxes.”

  It was midnight when they stacked the five parcels, complete with customs declarations, on Ann’s worktable. Ann poured them another drink, and they sat down on the bed together and surveyed the untidy gaiety of scraps of tissue paper, scattered stickers, bits of ribbon. Evelyn reached down to pick things up.<
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  “Don’t bother. I’ll do that in the morning. I like the mess.”

  “What an extraordinary, ordinary day,” Evelyn said, leaning back against the wall, “like bringing water to a picnic.”

  “Tired?”

  “Not exactly. Are you?”

  “No,” Ann said.

  “You look terribly uncomfortable.”

  “I am. I like standing up or lying down.”

  “Lie down then. Here, I’ll move.”

  Ann turned her head, awkwardly propped against the wall, and looked at Evelyn.

  “I sometimes think I can forecast the weather in your eyes,” Evelyn said.

  “What’s your prediction?”

  “Hot and clear.”

  “I want you,” Ann said.

  “I want you.”

  And, if you can’t have what you need, you take what you want. Accept damnation. It has its power and its charm. You love the whole damned world in the alien, not quite accurate image of yourself.

  “Take off your clothes.”

  “Turn out the light.”

  Then, among the unseen scraps of Christmas paper, in the close heat of an attic room, with blind, gentle precision you take for its own sake the grotesque miracle of love.

  Evelyn lay back, Ann asleep against her right shoulder. She stared at the dark shapes of parcels on the drawing table. Christmas Eve for the Mother without Child. She must have the emotional courage to go mad. It had taken only three weeks. Virginia Ritchie in three weeks had slashed her wrists, a transient despair to save her life. Evelyn could not despair. Then she could not be saved. She looked down at Ann’s young, sleeping body.

  “Damn the will then,” she said softly. “I don’t want to be saved. I want you.”

  6

  ANN WOKE ALONE, SAW the parcels on the drawing table, saw the Christmas wrappings on the floor, then turned into the space where Evelyn had lain and closed her eyes again. She did not sleep. She breathed a new fragrance, which was not so much sexual as personal, a faint perfume on her own arms, in her own hair. She felt the strangeness of the carefully arranged sheet that covered her. She listened to the morning silence of the room. Ann was the one to get up quietly and go, away from Bill, away from Silver, away from occasional strangers. She had never made love in her own room before. She had never been left before. She lay for some minutes, unthinking, peacefully bereft. Then quite suddenly her drifting consciousness caught on a sharp memory of the night before and hung there, unable to set itself free.

  She sat up and shook her head fiercely, trying to dislodge an ambiguous wonder.

  “It’s nothing,” she said to herself. “It’s nothing important.”

  But it had not been just another casual night. She had thought about it, planned it, and worked toward it for over a week. It was an accomplishment, the result of a calculated campaign. For what? For nothing. It was waged against humor, decency, and aesthetic distance to free Ann from the weight of sentiment she would not carry around with her. Smash Evelyn, that image of Evelyn that had tempted Ann to a memory of innocence, of virtue, of salvation. Then view the shattered mother with slight distaste or distant curiosity, a little disappointed, vastly relieved.

  “I think you’re lying to yourself.”

  How could she be? Didn’t she fit neatly into her own image: Ann Childs, free-lance lover, proud craftsman of passion, cartooning cavalier against the mystic rose and all colors of blue? She was her own understood self. Denied the imagined romances and sweet sufferings of adolescence by actual experience which had sharpened her wit and dulled her appetite, she could indulge in the skills of lust for purposes of friendship or amusement or protection, but she could certainly not indulge in the clumsiness of love. Not love that woke her reaching for some lost joy as if it belonged to her permanently like an idea or a rib, making her safe singleness only partial, a poverty. No. She made love, as she made sketches, to keep her free. She made love to break love.

  “Love.” An idea. A sound. A name. A calling. “Love.”

  She had smashed no image. She had not even tried. And she felt no distaste, no disappointment, no relief. She felt, instead, a ridiculous tenderness that no self-mockery could defeat. It was foolish. It was dangerous. It did not make any kind of sense.

  “I don’t want to make sense.”

  Why did she have to? Even great men, the wise and the clever, abandon taste and fear sometimes, indulge themselves; “Dulce est despire.” Was that it? “It is sweet to be silly at times.” Father’s Latin. Father’s Horace. But need it be silly? “This meeting and melting into one another, this becoming one instead of two … the desire and the pursuit of the whole is called love.” Didn’t that make a kind of sense? And think of the real poets, even now in a world shrewd from love. The hundreds of indefensible sweetnesses “(for love are in we am in I are in you)” are child-tongued, crude, and innocent. Why not?

  Easier to know why. The sciences of love tell the truth, explaining away in -exes and -ologies and -alities and -isms all myth and private reality. In womb thou art, to womb returneth, oh, but clinging to small flowers and double nakedness and shells and spindrift clouds to decorate the tomb. Scarred on the walls are the tender and reckless imaginings of a world outside, a simple mystery of sun.

  “Get up and decorate the tomb then,” Ann said, angry and hopeful, not knowing whether she would scrawl “Evelyn” across the wall like a dirty word or print it with the careful inaccuracy and pride of a small child for his own name.

  She put on a cotton smock, a gift from Frances, her cliché and concession to Ann’s craft, and sat down on the high stool to try her first sketches of “Mother Without Child.” Frances brought breakfast to her room. Ann heard her grumbling at the far edge of consciousness. She was absorbed in work, hiding there, until it was time to dress for dinner and for the Club.

  Evelyn came out of her room just as Ann reached the hall.

  “A good day’s work?” Evelyn asked, smiling.

  “I don’t know. I never know right away. You?”

  “A good day.”

  “I didn’t get out to mail the packages.”

  “I should have thought to do it for you.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Ann stood, awkward and defenseless. If Evelyn had been either indiscreet or distant, she would have known what to do. But decorum was a climate in which Evelyn lived. Within it she could move with a kind of candor Ann could neither imitate nor reject. And she had no attitude of her own. She did not know what to feel.

  “Will you have a drink with me tonight when you come home?”

  “You’ll be asleep.”

  “Wake me then,” Evelyn said, unsuggestive, direct.

  Ann nodded and turned away to the stairs. They walked together into the dining room where Frances and Walter were already waiting for them.

  “You look absolutely sweet today,” Walter said to Ann. “Are you in love?”

  “She’s had a decent night’s sleep,” Frances said.

  “And a good breakfast. That was good coffee, Frances.”

  “You see? There is something wrong with her,” Walter said, turning to Evelyn to find an ally.

  “You’re projecting,” Ann said.

  “I am not. I’m in a miserable mood, not a bit sweet.”

  “What’s the matter?” Evelyn asked.

  “I’ve been jilted—again, the second time in one summer. Last time I could blame it on Ann’s car. This time, I haven’t even that excuse. And everybody here’s been ignoring me as well. Tonight Mother won’t even go to the movies with me. When a man can’t get his own mother to go to the movies with him …”

  “I don’t like sad movies,” Frances said. “If you’d go to something cheerful …”

  “When I’m suffering? Evelyn, will you go to the movies with me?”

  “I ought to work. Sure, I’ll go to the movies with you.”

  Ann smiled quickly to conceal an unreasonable envy. After all, if she ha
d wanted to spend time with Evelyn, there had been the whole day. And, if she chose, she could spend what was left of the night. If she chose … why was it that Walter could always find needs simple enough to be answered if not by one person, then by another? He took what there was, a car, an absent-minded affection, a piece of pie. Ann took only reluctantly what was offered or asked for something else. And, when she got what she wanted, she almost always managed to be suspicious of her need or the gift itself, in this case both. Ann looked over at Evelyn. The wry celebration of images had left her head. Only the questions remained. Evelyn looked back at Ann and smiled. Then she turned her attention to Walter again, willing to explore with him his cheerfully broken heart. Ann left them over coffee, engrossed in amiability.

  Silver was waiting for Ann by the board. “Have you heard? It worked. Janet’s been fired.”

  “Bill can work miracles when he puts his mind to them,” Ann said, grinning. “When did it happen?”

  “Yesterday. They sent her a telegram. Bill doesn’t know exactly what it said, but they gave her enough to cover all Ken lost that night as well as medical expenses.”

  “Did Bill say anything about how he worked it?”

  “All the floor bosses went in together. They weren’t in there more than five minutes. The old man just said, ‘How much?’ And that was that.”

  “Glory be to Hiram O. Dicks.”

  “Joyce is moving into your locker with you. For a straight bitch, she’s not a bad kid, you know?”

  “She’s fine,” Ann said. “I like her. I’d better go down.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Silver said. “You free this weekend?”

  “Well, yes and no. What’s on your mind?”

  “You. Joe’s gone down to the City for the weekend to buy his Adler Elevators for the wedding. I thought maybe I ought to do some shopping, too, buy something wifely and useless like a dress. How do you think I’d look in a dress?”

  “Just a plain, old, ordinary dress?”

  “That’s it. Both breasts covered and a zip up the side.”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “But I’m counting on you to help.”

  “I suppose I have to. I’m your maid of honor.”