Chapter Seven 1 страница

After my visit to Anne Stanton's apartment that morning in late May, I was out of town for a while, about eight days. I left her apartment that morning and went down to the bank and drew out some money and got my car out of the garage and packed a bag and was headed out. I was headed out down a long bone‑white road, straight as a string and smooth as glass and glittering and wavering in the heat and humming under the tires like a plucked nerve. I was doing seventy‑five but I never seemed to catch up with the pool which seemed to be over the road just this side of the horizon. Then, after a while, the sun was in my eyes, for I was driving west. So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old‑field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: _Flee, all is discovered__. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and see the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them‑thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.

It was just where I went.

The second day I was in Texas. I was traveling through the part where the flat‑footed, bilious, frog‑sticker‑toting Baptist biscuit‑eaters live. Then I was traveling through the part where the crook‑legged, high‑heeled, gun‑wearing, spick‑killing, callous‑rumped sons of the range live and crowd the drugstore on Saturday night and then all go round the corner to see episode three of "Vengeance on Vinegar Creek," starring Gene Autry as Borax Pete. But over both parts, the sky was tall hot brass by day and black velvet by night, and Coca Cola is all a man needs to live on. Then I was traveling through New Mexico, which is a land of total and magnificent emptiness with a little white filling station flung down on the sand like a sun‑bleached cow skull by the trail, with far to the north a valiant remnant of the heroes of the Battle of Montmartre in a last bivouac wearing huaraches and hammered silver and trying to strike up conversations with Hopis on street corners. Then Arizona, which is grandeur and the slow incredulous stare of sheep, until you hit the Mojave. You cross the Mojave at night and even at night your breath rasps your gullet as though you were a sword swallower who had got hold of a hack‑saw blade by mistake, and in the darkness the hunched rock and towering cactus loom at you with the shapes of a visceral, Freudian nightmare.

Then California.

Then Long Beach, which is the essence of California. I know because I have never seen any of California except Long Beach and so am not distracted by competing claims. I was in Long Beach thirty‑six hours, and spent all of that time in a hotel room, except for forty minutes in a barbershop off the lobby of the hotel.

I had had a puncture in the morning and so didn't hit Long Beach till about evening. I drank a mild shake, bought a bottle of bourbon, and went up to my room. I hadn't had a drop the whole trip. I hadn't wanted a drop. I hadn't wanted anything, except the hum of the motor and the lull of the car and I had had that. But now I knew that if I didn't drink that bourbon, as soon as I shut my eyes to go to sleep the whole hot and heaving continent would begin charging at me out of the dark. So I took some, took a bath, and then lay on the bed, with my light off, watching the neon sign across the street flare on and off to the time of my heartbeat, and drinking out of the bottle, which, between times, I set on the floor by the bed.

I got a good sleep out of it. I didn't wake up till noon the next day. Then I had breakfast sent up and a pile of newspapers, for it was Sunday. I read the papers, which proved that California was just like any place else, or wanted to think the same things about itself, and then I listened to the radio till the neon sign began to flare on and off again to the time of my heartbeat, and then I ordered up some food, ate it, and put myself to sleep again.

The next morning I headed back.

I was headed back and was no longer remembering the things which I had remembered coming out.

For example. But I cannot give you an example. It was not so much any one example, any one event, which I recollected which was important, but the flow, the texture of the events, for meaning is never in the event but in the motion through event. Otherwise we could isolate an instant in the event and say that this is the event itself. The meaning. But we cannot do that. For it is the motion which is important. And I was moving. I was moving West at seventy‑five miles an hour, through a blur of million‑dollar landscape and heroic history, and I was moving back through time into my memory. They say the drowning man relives his life as he drowns. Well, I was not drowning in water, but I was drowning in West. I drowned westward through the hot brass days and black velvet nights. It took me seventy‑eight hours to drown. For my body to sink down to the very bottom of West and lie in the motionless ooze of History, naked on a hotel bed in Long Beach, California.

To the hum and lull of the car the past unrolled in my head like a film. It was like a showing of a family movie, the kind the advertisements tell you to keep so that you will have a record of the day Susie took her first little toddle and the day Johnny went off to kindergarten and the day you went up Pike' Peak and the day of the picnic on the old home farm and the day you were made chief sales manager and bought your first Buick. The picture on the advertisement always shows a dignified, gray‑haired, kindly old gent, the kind you find on the whisky ad (or a gray‑haired, kindly, sweet‑faced old biddy), looking at the home movie and dreaming gently back over the years. Well, I was not gray‑haired or dignified or kindly or sweet‑faced, but I did have a showing of my home movie and dreamed gently back over the years. Therefore, if you have any home movies, I earnestly advise you to burn them and to be baptized to get born again.

I dreamed gently back over the years. And the stocky man with the black coat and spectacles leaned over me as I sat with my colored crayons on the rug before the fire and he held me the candy and said, "Just one bite, now, for supper's almost ready." And the woman with the pale hair and the blue eyes and the famished cheeks leaned over me and kissed me good night and left the sweet smell in the dark after the light was out. And Judge Irwin leaned at me in the gray dawn light, saying, "You ought to have led that duck more, Jack. You got to lead a duck, son," And Count Covelli sat straight in an expensive chair in the long white room and smiled from under clipped black mustache and in one hand–the smallish, strong hand which could make a man wince at its clasp–held the glass and with the other stroked the big cat on his knee. And there was the Young Executive with his hair laid on his round skull like taffy. And Adam Stanton and I drifted in the yawl, far out, while the white sails hung limp in the breathless air and the sea was like a hot glass and the sun burned like a barn on the western horizon. And always there was Anne Stanton.

Little girls wear white dresses with skirts that flare out to show their funny little knees, and they wear round‑toed black patent‑leather slippers held by a one‑button strap, and their white socks are held up by a dab of soap, and their hair hangs down the back in braid with a blue ribbon on it. That was Anne Stanton and it was Sunday and she was going to church to sit still as a mouse and rub her tonguetip pensively at the place where she had just lost the tooth. And little girls sit on hassocks and lean their cheeks pensively against the dear father's knee while his hand toys with the silken locks and his voice reads beautiful words. That was Anne Stanton. And little girls are fraidy‑cats and try the surf with one toe that first day in spring, and when the surf makes a surprising leap and splashes their thigh with the tingle and cold they squeal and jump up and down on thin little legs like stilts. That was Anne Stanton. Little girls get a smudge of soot on the end of the nose when they roast wieners over the campfire and you–for you are a big boy and do not get soot on your nose–point your finger and sing, "Dirty‑Face, Dirty‑Face, you are so dirty you are a disgrace!" And then one day when you sing it, the little girl doesn't say a thing back the way she always had, but turns her big eyes on you, out of the thin little smooth face, and her lips quiver an instant so that you think she might cry even tough she is too big for that now, and as the eyes keep fixed o you, the grin dries up on your face and you turn quickly away and pretend to be getting some more wood. That was Anne Stanton.

All the bright days by the water with the gull flashing high were Anne Stanton. But I didn't know it. And all the not bright days with the eaves dripping or the squall driving in from the sea and with the fire on the hearth were Anne Stanton, too. But I didn't know that, either. Then there came a time when the nights were Anne Stanton. But I knew that.

That began the summer when I was twenty‑one and Anne Stanton was seventeen. I was back from the University for vacation and I was a grown man who had been around. I got back from the University late in the afternoon, had a quick swim, ate my dinner, and bolted off to the Stanton house to see Adam. I saw him sitting out on the gallery reading a book (Gibbon, I remember) in the long twilight. And I saw Anne. A was sitting in the swing with Adam, when she came out the door. I looked at her and knew that it had been a thousand years since I had last seen her back at Christmas when she has been back at the Landing on vacation from Miss Pound's School. She certainly was not now a little girls wearing round‑toed, black‑patent‑leather, flat‑heeled slippers held on by a one‑button strap and white socks held up by a dab of soup. She was wearing a white linen dress, cut very straight, and the straightness of the cut and the stiffness of the linen did nothing in the world by suggest by a kind of teasing paradox the curves and softness sheathed by the cloth. She had her hair in a knot on the nape of the neck, and a little white ribbon around her head, and she was smiling at me with a smile which I had known all my life but which was entirely new, and saying, "Hello, Jack," while I held her strong narrow hand in mine and new that summer had come.

It had come. And it was not like any summer which ever had been or was to be again. During the day I would be with Adam a lot, like always, and a lot of the time she would tag along, for that was the way it had been before, she'd tag along for she and Adam were very close. That summer Adam and I would play tennis in the early morning before the sun got high and hot, and she would come to the court with us and sit in the dappled shade of the mimosas and myrtles and watch Adam beat the tar out of me as usual and laugh like bird song and mountain brooks when I got my feet tangle up in my own racket. The she might play me some, for she was pretty good and I was pretty bad. She was pretty god, all right, for a light‑built girl, and had a lot of power in those small round arms, which flashed in the morning sun like wings. She was fast on her feet, too, and there would be the whipping skirt like a dance's, and the flicker of white shoes. But of those mornings I chiefly remember her far over yonder across the court, tiptoe, poised to serve, at the moment when the racket is back of her ribbon‑bound head, with the pull of the arm lifting the right breast, and the left hand, from which the ball has just risen, still up, as though to pluck something out of the air, the face lifted gravely and intensely to the bright light and the wide sky and the absolutely white ball hung there like the spinning world in the middle of brilliance. Well, that is the classic pose, and it is too bad the Greeks didn't play tennis, for if they had played tennis they would have put Anne Stanton on a Greek vase. But on second thoughts, I guess they would not have done it. That is the moment which, for all its poise, is too airy, too tiptoe, too keyed up. It is the moment just before the stroke, before the explosion, and the Greeks didn't put that kind of moment on a vase. So that moment is not on a vase in a museum, but is inside my head, where nobody else can see it but me. For it was the moment before the explosion, and it did explode. The racked smacked and the sheep gut whanged and the white ball came steaming across at me, and I missed it as like as not, and the game was over, and the set was over, and we all went home, through the motionless heat, for the dew was off the grass now and the morning land breeze had died.

But back then there was always the afternoon. In the afternoon we always went swimming, or sailing and then swimming afterward, all three of us, and sometimes some of the other boys and girls whose folks live down the Row from the Landing or who were visiting there. Then after dinner we would get together again and sit in the shadow on their gallery or mine, or go to a movie, or take a moonlight swim. But one night when I went down, Adam wasn't there–he had had to drive his father somewhere–and so I asked Anne to go down to the Landing to a movie. On the way back, we stopped the car–I had the roadster, for my mother had gone off somewhere with a gang in her big one–and looked at the moonlight on the bay beyond Hardin Point. The moonlight lay on the slightly ruffling water like a swath of brilliant white, cold fire. You expected to see that white fire start eating out over the whole ocean the way fire is a sage field spreads. But it lay there glittering and flickering in a broad nervous swath reaching out yonder to the bright horizon blur.

We sat there in the car, arguing about the movie we had just seen and looking up the swath of light. Then the talking dies away. She had slid down a little in the seat, with her head lying on the top of the back cushion so that now she wasn't looking out toward the horizon but up into the sky–for the top of the roadster was down–with the moonlight pouring down on her face to make it look smooth as marble. I slid down a little, too, and looked up at the sky, and the moonlight poured down over my face, such as it was. I kept thinking that now in a minute I would reached over and take hold. I stole a look sidewise and saw how her face was smooth as marble in the moonlight. And how her hands lay supine on her lap, the fingers curling a little as though to receive a gift. It would be perfectly easy to reach over and take her hand and get started and se where we wound up. For I was thinking in language like that, the stale impersonal language of the College Boy who thinks he's such a God‑damned big man.

But I didn't reach over. It seemed a thousand miles across that little patch of leather to where she lay with her head back and her hands in her lap and the moonlight over her face. I didn't know why I didn't reach over. I kept assuring myself that I wasn't timid, wasn't afraid, I said to myself, hell, she was just a kid, what the hell was I hanging back for, all she could do would be to get sore and I could stop if she got sore. Hell, I told myself, she wouldn't get sore anyway, she knew what was up, she knew you didn't sit in parked cars with boys to play checkers in the moonlight, and she had probably been worked over plenty, somebody had probably run the scales on her piano. I played with that thought a second, and then all at once I was both hot and angry. I started up in the seat, a sudden tumult of something in my chest. "Anne," I said, "Anne–" and didn't know what I was going to say.

She turned her face toward me, not lifting her head from the back of the seat, just rolling it on the leather cushion. She lifted a finger to her lip, and said, "Sh, sh!" Then she took the finger away, and smiled directly and simply across the thousand miles of leather cushion between us.

I sank back. We lay there for quite a time, with that space between us, looking up at the moon‑drenched sky and hearing the faintest whisper as the water lipped the shingle along the point. The longer we lay there, the bigger the sky seemed. After a long while I stole another sidewise look at Anne. Her eyes were closed, and when I thought that she wasn't looking up into that expanding sky, too, I suddenly felt alone and abandoned. But she opened her eyes–I was spying and saw that happen–and again was looking up into the sky. I lay there and looked up and didn't think of anything in the world.

Back then there was a train that passed the crossing just out of Burden's landing at eleven‑forty‑five at night. The train always blew for the crossing. It blew that night, and I knew it was eleven‑forty‑five. And time to go. So I sat up, touched the starter, turned the car around, and headed home. We hadn't said a word and we didn't say a word, until we pulled up in front of the Stanton house. Then Anne slipped out of the car, quick as a wink, poised there a moment on the shell drive, said, "Good night, Jack," in a low voice and with a last flicker of the smile she had smiled at me across the thousand miles of leather cushion two hours back, and ran up the steps of her house, light as a bird. All of this before I had a chance to begin to collect myself.

I gaped at the blackness of the doorway back in the shadow of the gallery–she hadn't turned on a light when she entered–and listen hard as though I were waiting for a signal. But there wasn't a sound except that nameless stir of the night which comes even when there isn't a breath of wind and you are too far from the beach to get the whisper and riffle that is always there, even when the sea is quietest.

Then, after a few minutes, I switched on the motor again, and exploded off the Stanton property with a grind of tires that must have scattered the shells of the drive like spray. On the road down the Row I just pushed the accelerator to the floor board and let all those drowsy bastards up in those white houses have the works. I was letting that cutout snatch them bolt upright in bed like a cannon. I roared on out about ten miles till I hit the pine woods where there wasn't anybody to snatch up except hoot owls and some stray malarial squatter who would be lying off yonder as God's gift to the anopheles in his shack on the edge of the tidelands. So I turned the roadster around and eased on back with the throttle cut down to nothing, just drifting along in the roadster, lying back on the leather, like a boat drifting on a slow current.

At home, as soon as I lay back on my bed, I suddenly remembered–I didn't remember, I saw–Anne's face lying back, with the eyes closed and the moonlight pouring over it, and I remembered that day of the picnic long back–the day when we had swum out in the bay, under the storm clouds, when she had floated on the water, her face turned up to the purple‑green darkening sky, her eyes closed, and the white gull passing over, very high. I hadn't thought of that since it happened, I guess, or if had thought of it, it hadn't meant a thing, but all at once, lying there, I had the feeling of being on the teetering verge of a most tremendous discovery. I saw that the moment tonight was just an extension of the moment long back, on the picnic, that this moment tonight had been in that moment all the time, and I hadn't known it, I had dropped it aside or thrown it away, but it had been like a seed you throw away to find, when you come back that way again, that the plant is tall and covered with bloom, or it had been like a little dirt‑colored stick you throw into the fire with the other trash, but the thing is dynamite and there is an awful bang.

There was an awful bang. I popped up in bed like those drowsy bastards when I gave them the cutout. But this was more so. I sat up in bed and was absolutely filled with rapture. It wasn't like anything that had ever happened to me. It stopped my breath and I could feel my veins swelling to burst as when you take your deepest dive and think you'll never come up. I felt that I was right on the verge of knowing the real and absolute truth about everything. Just one instant and I would know it. Then I got my breath. "Jesus," I said out loud, "Jesus!" I stretched my arms out as wide as I could, as though I could grab the whole empty air Then I thought of the image of the face on the water, under the purple‑green darkening sky, with the white gull flying over. It was almost a shock to remember that, to have the image come back, for the thing which had, apparently, provoked the rapture had itself been lost and forgotten in the rapture which had exploded out into the whole universe. Anyway, now I saw the image again, and all at once the rapture was gone, and I experienced a great tenderness, a tenderness shot through and veined with sadness, as thou the tenderness were the very flesh of my body and the sadness the veins and nerves of it. That sounds absurd, but that was the way it was. And for a fact.

Then I thought, quite objectively as though I were observing the symptoms of a total stranger: _You are in love__.

I was, for a moment, bemused by that thought. That I was in love. And that it wasn't a bit like the way I had thought it would be. I was surprised, and a little bit awed by the fact, like a person who learns unexpectedly that he has inherited a million dollars, all lying up there in the bank for him to draw on, or who learns that the little stitch in the side is cancer and that he is carrying around inside himself that mysterious, apocalyptic, burgeoning thing which is part of himself but is, at the same time, not part of himself but the enemy. I got out of bed, very carefully, handling myself with awe‑struck care as though I were a basket of eggs, and went to the window and stared out into the moon‑drenched night.

So the College Boy, who had thought he was such a God‑damned big man and knew everything and who had, that evening, looked across the little space of leather cushion and had thought the stale impersonal thoughts almost as a kind of duty to the definition of what he considered himself to be–so he hadn't reached out his hand across that little space and now as a result of that fact stood buck‑naked in a shadowy room before an open window and stared out into enormous moon‑soaked, sea‑glittering night while off yonder in the myrtle hedge a mocking bird hysterically commented on the total beauty and justice of the universe.

That was how the nights became Anne Stanton, too. For that night in the roadster, Anne Stanton had done her trick very well. It was a wordless and handless trick, but it didn't need word or hands. She had rolled her head on the leather seat back, and touched her finger to her lips to say, "Sh, sh," and smile. And had sunk her harpoon deeper than ever. Queequeg sunk it, through four feet of blubber to the very quick, but I hadn't really known it until the line played out and the barb jerked in the red meat which was the Me inside of all the blubber of what I had thought I was. And might continue to think I was.

Anne Stanton was the nights, all right. And the days, too, but in the days she was not the total substance, rather the flavor, the distillate, the climate, the breath, without which the rest wouldn't be anything at all. There would be Adam with us often, and sometimes the other people, with books, sandwiches, and a blanket in the pine woods, on the beach, at the tennis courts, on the shadowy gallery with a phonograph going, in the boat, at the movies. But sometimes she would let her book slide down to the blanket and lie back staring up into the high arch and tangle of the pine boughs, and I would begin to spy on her until, in a minute, it would be as though Adam weren't there. Or on the gallery she would be laughing and jabbering with all the others while the phonograph worked away, and then I would catch sight of her suddenly still and pensive, just for a moment it might be, with her eyes fixed off beyond the gallery and the yard, and again, just for that moment, it would be as though Adam and the others weren't there.

Or we would go down to the hotel, where there was a high‑dive tower, a good high one because the hotel was pretty swank and had exhibitions and races there now and then. Anne was crazy about diving that summer. She would go up high–she worked up higher and higher, day by day–and stand up there in the sunlight poised there at the very verge. Then when she lifted her arms, I would feel that something was about to snap in me. Then down she would fly, a beautiful swan dive, with her arms wide to emphasize her trim breasts, and her narrow back arched and her long legs close and sweet together. She would come flying down in the sunlight, and as I watched her it would be as though nobody else were there. I would hold my breath till whatever was going to snap inside me snapped. Then she would knife into the water, and he twin heels would draw through the wreath of ripple and the flicker of spray, and be gone. Adam sometimes got sore as hell at her for going up so high. "Oh, Adam," she'd say, "oh, Adam, it'll all right, and it's wonderful!" And up the ladder she'd go. Up and plunge. Up and plunge. Up and plunge. Over and over again. I used to wonder what her face was like just at the moment when she entered the water. What expression was on it.

But sometimes in the day we would be quite literally alone. Sometimes she and I would slip off and go to the pine woods and walk on the soundless matting of needles, holding hands. And then there was a little diving float, with just a single low board, anchored about a hundred yards off the beach, near Stanton slip. Sometimes we would swim out there when other people were pranking on the beach, or when nobody was there, and lie flat on our backs on the float, with our eyes closed, and just the fingertips touching and tingling as though they were peeled skinless with the nerves laid bare, so that every bit of my being was focused there.

At night we were alone pretty often. It had always been Adam and I, with Anne tagging along, and then, all at once, it was Anne and I, and Adam tagging along or, more likely, back up at his house reading Gibbon or Tacitus, for he was great on Rome back then. The change came more easily that I had expected. The day after that night in the roadster I played tennis with them in the morning as usual, and in the afternoon went swimming with them. I found myself watching Anne all the time, but that was the only difference. I couldn't see any change in her. I began to doubt that anything had happened, that I had even taken her to the movie the night before. But I had to see her that night.

I went up to their house just about dusk. She was on the gallery, in the swing. Adam, it turned out, was upstairs writing a letter he had to get off. He would be down in a few minutes, she said. It was something for their father. I didn't sit down, though she asked me. I stood at the top of the steps, very uneasy, just inside the screen door, trying to think up what I would say. Then I blurted out, "Let's go out on the slip, let's walk." And added lamely, "Till Adam comes down."

Without a word, she got up, came to me, gave me her hand–that was her own doing and the fact set blaring and bonging all the fire bells and calliopes and burglar alarms in my system–and walked down the steps with me, down the path, across the road, and toward the slip. We stayed out on the slip a long time. Adam could have written a dozen letters in that time. But nothing happened out on the lip, except that we sat on the end, our feet dangling over, and held hands, and looked over the bay.

On the side of the road toward the bay, just opposite the Stanton house, there was a big thicket of myrtle. When we got there, going hand in hand on our way back to the house, I stopped there in the protection of the shadow, drew her to me a little clumsily and abruptly, I guess, for I had had to key myself up to the act, plotting it all the way up the slip–and kissed her. She didn't put up any protest when I did it, just letting her arms hang limp, but she didn't return the kiss, just taking it submissively like a good little girl doing what she's told. I looked her in the face, after the kiss, and its smoothness was shaded by a reflective, inward expression, the kind of expression you see sometimes on a child's face when it is trying to decide whether or not it likes a new food it has just tasted. And I thought, my God, she probably hadn't been kissed before, even if she was seventeen, or almost, and I almost burst out laughing, the expression on her face was so funny and I was so happy. So I kissed her again. This time she returned the kiss, timidly and tentatively, but she returned it. "Anne," I said, with my heart bursting and my head reeling, "Anne, I love you, I'm crazy about you."

Дата добавления: 2015-10-28