Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [236]
“After he invested three years in this ditch?” Oliver said. “I brought him back first thing. He’s bossing the diversion dam and the Big Ditch, while Wiley bosses the Susan.” He took her arm. “Come on, don’t you want to see your house?”
She came along, feeling obscurely rebuked. Old friends to greet, the whole canyon family restored as a surprise for her, everything as it was. She heard the children shrieking inside as they explored the house, and she shook Wan’s hand with both her own in fierce, overdone enthusiasm. She hurt her face with smiling, she examined the rooms with the eagerness of a housekeeper.
But her mind went steadily on something else, bubbling along like dark water under sunlit ice. Just now she had searched Oliver’s face for signs of drink, prying at him to discover if she had made a mistake to return, all but asking him outright what he had done and what he intended to do. Had he, when he mentioned Frank, been searching her face for an answer to a question of his own? Had he seen an answer? For her heart had leaped at the name, the gladness had come before the fear, and before the furtive, alert sense of how dangerous it was to show what she really felt. Had he seen that?
She almost wished he would ask, so that they could have it out, so that she could promise and therefore demand a promise from him: she thought of it as a sort of trade, in which each must give up something. She was shaken and in danger; she was also determined to lie in the bed she had made when she married him.
As she walked from room to unfinished room making pleased or judgmental noises, she was resenting her husband’s wordlessness, she smoldered with grievance that he would not submit to talking their problems out. It was harder to get words from him than it was to get gold from rock. He tortured her with his silence. What did he mean, bringing Frank back on the project? Was he testing her? Tempting her? Was he so dense that he did not feel the undercurrent in his house?
Why don’t you come out with it? she felt like saying to him in anger. I’m sure you think there’s something. Why don’t you say it, so I can tell you there isn’t?
2
I am going to have to ask myself a question not too different from the one Grandmother wanted to ask Grandfather. What does it mean for my future, such as it is, that I sit at my desk at ten-thirty in the morning with a half-emptied bourbon and water at my elbow? For quite a while it has been getting easier to put down the old aching bones by a little roll over to the liquor cupboard. What am I to infer from the fact that every day for the past two weeks I have been half stoned before lunch?
I know perfectly well what I am to infer. I’m close, I’m maybe over the line. Pain, is that the reason? Am I a pathetic broken creature becoming a juicehead, as Shelly puts it, to dull my agonies? Nothing so dramatic. My kind of pain isn’t the screaming kind, it’s only the tooth-gritting kind.
Am I beginning to draw the dividends on my investment in isolation? Stir crazy? Rodman might think so. Sit out on that mountain doing nothing but read his grandmother’s letters, it’d drive anybody to drink.
Or am I feeling my isolation threatened? Do I hear Rodman and Ellen and that cat’s-paw of a doctor conspiring to move in and capture me? Am I some Kafka creature sweating in its hole?
Maybe all of those reasons, maybe none of them. I have never been a very social type: age and infirmity only confirm what youth and health used to crave. For years I have spent every morning in the study, just as I do now. It is true I used to be pulled out by classes, meetings, examinations, visitors, trips to the library, and a lot else. My afternoons used to have more in them than eight laps on the crutches and a little conversation with Shelly or her mother. My evenings used to go, as they do now, to reading, but very often they went to dinners, friends, concerts, shows. I used to think