Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [139]
“Yeah,” Shelly said. “I knew I shouldn’t have told you. I don’t know. I suppose it is sick. But . . . Isn’t sex the business of the people having it? That’s what Larry always says. Shouldn’t they be able to do it as they please, in public if that’s the way it suits them? The audience can walk out if it isn’t entertained.” Irritable and moody, she shook her hair back and leaned back on her braced hands and scowled at me. Then the scowl broke. “But that’s a different thing from your book. In a book, I think sex ought to be written about just like anything else.”
I twitched the chair a little further askew. I liked neither the confessional nor the evangelical aspects of that conversation. “Ah,” I said, “is it like everything else?”
Ho ho ho. Good. We were off the confessional. “All right,” she said, “it’s your book. Just pretend you’ve had a fan letter signed ‘Modern Reader’ saying ‘I like your book fine but why do you draw the curtain across the love scenes’?”
“I thought it was the light I turned off.”
“Same thing.”
She was laughing, bowed over her cross-legged Yogi squat with her hair hanging to the floor. If I had not been what I am, her mother’s broken doll, a grotesque, and three times her age at that, I would have thought she had excited herself with her own talk, confessional, evangelical, or otherwise. Her eyes had a moist shine in them that a sound man would have had to make a decision about. I suppose the piquancy for her is not in the talk, which is standard fare in the crowd she has been running with, but in getting the Gorgon to discuss these emancipated matters with its stone lips.
I said, “When you come right down to it, I neither pulled the curtain nor turned off the light. If you’re going to be a literary critic you’re going to have to learn to read what’s there. In that scene you just typed, the room is full of refracted moonlight and the door is wide open and the curtains are pulled back and the night air of the mountains is blowing through. For Victorians they weren’t doing so badly. It’s just unfortunate that their little love scene didn’t do everything a love scene is supposed to do.”
“Why? Didn’t the housecleaning last?”
“Maybe a half hour. Then she found out that if he joined the Survey he’d be posted for winter field work in California, and the next summer he might be almost anywhere in the West. She’d either have to trail around boarding in the nearest town, or go back to Milton.”
“So I suppose she wouldn’t let him take it.”
“She wouldn’t have put it that way. She was worried about her child, she wondered if he’d ever have a secure home to grow up in, I suppose she wondered how she’d get along herself, without anybody artistic and intellectual to talk to. So they debated and hesitated a couple of days, and then when Grandfather was offered the managership of the Adelaide mine, he took that instead. That way, she could go on planning an expansion of the cabin, to be ready for her child and next summer’s guests. It isn’t quite Living Theater, I guess, but it’s the sort of thing her life was made of.”
She was watching me with her big gray upturned eyes and sucking on the bent knuckle of her thumb, which she now released with a slurping sound and said, “I thought she was going to quit making decisions that fouled up his career.”
“So did she. In a pinch she couldn’t help herself.”
“He let her lead him by the nose. Was he sort of soft?”
“He was no good at the talkee-talkee,” I said. “He loved his wife and child. He had just been, for a Victorian, exceptionally well loved. It wasn’t an easy decision. It could have gone either way.”
“I suppose,” Shelly said. “I guess I don’t understand this home business of hers, either. She’s not only a culture hound, she’s got a terrible property