“We could rent horses and ride down into the Canyon,” Hale says. “Wouldn’t that be fun?”
“No,” she says. She has started to cry again.
“Maybe your cats would all be there waiting for you.”
“Do you think I’m a fool? That I think my cats are in the Grand Canyon?”
“There’s a mysterious elephant burial ground in Africa, isn’t there?”
“So what? What does that have to do with me?”
“Come on, Gloria. Get out of the car.”
“No,” she says, but Hale can tell that she’s wavering. It must be very hot in the car. Gloria looks terrible, sweating and crying. Her ice-cream cone is melting and running down her wrist.
“When you get out we can freshen up over there, by the refreshment stand. And you can buy us a couple of hot dogs for dinner.”
“You think I’m going to get out now and buy you dinner?”
“Come on, Gloria,” he says, trying to pull the door open as if it’s unlocked. She moves away from the door.
“Then leave,” Hale says. “You’ve got the keys. Go home.”
“And then what would happen to you? I’d drive away and leave you here, and some pretty girl would give you a ride, and soon I’d see you again. You’d come after me.”
“Of course I would, Gloria. I love you.”
“No!” she cries. “I don’t think you love me at all.”
He tries the door again, but of course it does not open. Gloria has moved into the driver’s seat now, but she makes no attempt to start the car. She is crying too hard to drive, anyway. Figuring that the car won’t be going anywhere, he climbs on the hood and mournfully, chewing the last of his ice-cream cone, gazes into the vast pit of the canyon.
Four Stories About Lovers
I
His wife is a very sick woman, because she thinks these things through very thoroughly. He wouldn’t be surprised to find out that she likes the big white house so much not because it’s big or white, but because the post office is across the street. She is very sick, and she mails letters to him from the post office. She gets up at night, and while other wives might read or do housework with their insomnia, she writes him a letter — usually a brief note, actually — and pulls the raincoat over her nightgown and crosses the street to the post office. Some nights when he too has insomnia, he raises himself to one elbow and parts the curtains to watch her. She is a pretty wife, and he’ll be glad when she’s come back to bed.
The matter of reading the letters, the matter of reading the letters. He is never sure what is best to do. He very rarely throws them out, though. He can’t tell what reaction she wants — it seems to be neither extreme nor anything that he’s tried yet in the in-between range. For example: one morning, reading a note detailing what hotel she went to at what hour with her lover (she doesn’t let his name slip), he screamed with frustration, banged his hands on the breakfast table. She sipped coffee, shrugged. Another time he handed the note back to her saying, “So what?” She smiled, shrugged. There was also the time he asked her if she wanted to see a psychiatrist, and she said they hadn’t helped anyone she knew, or the time he telephoned her mother and her mother said she didn’t want to get involved. Sometimes he dreams that the messages will stop coming, that the mail will bring only blessed bills. Sometimes when he looks out the window to see her crossing the road at night a thought goes through his head: it’s not for you. It’s for someone else. That’s no consolation, though, because if it’s to someone else, chances are it’s to her lover. He accepts her getting out of bed to do something related to him — mail him a letter — but what of her awakening to jot a fond message to someone else?
She said that she wanted a big house so the baby could run and play. They have one daughter, Elizabeth, who is five. He liked the house, but wasn’t it too close to the road? She watched the baby, unlike other mothers, so what did it matter? Besides, it was the size of the house that mattered. The house had so many possibilities. When they first moved in she spent so much time redoing the house that she couldn’t have had time for a lover. The messages were few and far between at that time. But in the fall Elizabeth went to kindergarten and most of the rooms were finished, and then he began to get the messages daily, and sometimes there were two a day. From the first he never thought they were a joke, and maybe that was where he bungled — if he had only scoffed at them she might have seen that he genuinely didn’t believe it. There had been an envelope addressed to him in his wife’s handwriting and she had brought it to him while he was having breakfast, and he had smiled, expecting some kind of joke, and of course he had been doubly let down. If only he hadn’t recognized the handwriting.
The notes are different now. The first notes, the fall notes, were brief, specific, and often personally insulting. The winter notes were longer, less specific, more … what might be called mystical. She felt that she was becoming a part of something large, large and important. In the spring there were rhymes, or little drawings, sometimes a combination: a sketch of a little animal-groundhog? — with a verse: “We went to the zoo/The sky was so blue/The sky was so blue/Then what did we do?/Then what did we do?” Now the notes are questioning — no easy clues as in the spring notes: “There is something vast and warm as summer, and at times I am as warm as summer, but other times I am cold and pull up the blanket in my sleep. How, exactly, does the mind let you know you are cold? What signal makes me move when I intend not to move?”
One night he says her name out loud, whispers “Janet” in his sleep. Either asleep or awake she puts her arm out to stroke his side. He knows why he woke up, though — not her touch, but what he was thinking. What signaled him? What will happen now?
As a joke, almost, he writes her a message when he gets to work and has his secretary mail it. All day he thinks, Do I need a psychiatrist? Answered by, Who have they helped? Should I speak to her mother again? Answered by, Didn’t she already tell you to leave her alone? He goes home, has dinner, plays with Elizabeth, does a little work, and goes to bed. For hours he turns in the bed, wondering what will happen. More than that, though, he is lonesome and wishes Janet would wake up. He thinks of pretending to be asleep and rolling over on her, or of calling her name — no whispering, right out loud. A cheap trick. He kicks the covers off and looks at whatever objects he can see in the room in spite of the dark and in spite of his limited perspective. And then she stirs too — for covers? No — she’s quietly getting out of bed.
“A message?” he whispers.
“Yes.”
This is the first time they have ever discussed the messages when she’s in the process of writing them.
“Coffee?” he asks.
“All right.”
She sits sleepily across from him at the kitchen table, and for a while as she drinks the coffee he thinks she’s forgotten about the notes she intended to write. Almost mechanically she scrawls a few words on a pad and puts a piece of paper in an envelope, then drops the envelope on the counter and walks beside him down the hall to bed. It’s a humid night and the sheets feel sticky. He has trouble going to sleep. Finally he stops trying and throws his legs over the side of the bed.
“Getting up?” she says.
“Yes.”
“It’s so humid it’s hard to sleep.”
He gets up and walks across the floor.
“Mail the letter while you’re up,” she says.
“No,” he says. “I refuse.”
The room is silent, and then she laughs. He goes back to the bed. She’s half on his side of the bed and makes no attempt to move. He lies down anyway. She begins to whisper — about something vast that surrounds them. Doesn’t he feel its presence? What can they do? He rests an arm across her stomach. He can’t answer the question when she whispers to him any better than he can when she writes it. He takes his arm away and pounds the bed.