Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [258]
And lay back down, thinking of the failure he had brought about for her, and staring blankly into the failure she had made for herself, her teeth set in her lower lip, her ears spying on him. When his pacing paused, the house was intensely quiet; it rang with silence. Outside, the great western night had closed in, with only distant, widely spaced pops of gun or firecracker from the town.
After a long time he came in–carrying his shoes, evidently, so as not to waken her. He undressed in the dark, his careful weight sagged the bed; she moved as if in restless sleep to give him all the room there was. He lay on his back, and she could hear, or feel, the faint rustle and movement of his breathing, slow and steady. Finally, without turning his head, he said softly up into the dark, “Asleep?”
The impulse to go on pretending was only momentary. “No. How were the fireworks?”
“Fine. The kids enjoyed them. We didn’t go clear in, we watched from the road.”
“I was hoping you would.”
“Couldn’t you see them from here?”
“Pretty well.”
“What did Frank want?”
“What? Frank?” She thought the bound of her heart must have shaken the bed; she lay breathing shallowly through her mouth.
“He was here, wasn’t he?”
“Yes,” she managed to say, giving up another possible lie. But her heart was now beating against her chest wall like a bird caught in a room. It was unbearably hot, she could not stand his warmth so close, and shifted her body and flung the light blanket impatiently off. “I guess he wanted to talk to you,” she said. “His life is all torn up too. He didn’t stay. We sat on the piazza and watched the fireworks for a little while. He said he’d see you tomorrow.”
“Ugh,” Oliver said, unmoving.
Half uncovered, she lay on her back. The night air moving sluggishly from the window tightened her damp skin. She tried to speak casually, and heard how badly she failed–what a bright falseness was in her voice. “How did you know he’d been here?”
“He left his gloves on the railing.”
He reared up and leaned and found her cheek with his lips. She did not turn her head, or respond. Quietly he lay back.
“Good night.”
“Good night.”
Her cheek burned as if he had kissed her with sulphuric on his lips.
6
For several weeks now I have had the sense of something about to come to an end–that old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air. But different now. Then, during prep school and college, and even afterward when teaching tied my life to the known patterns of the school year, there was both regret and anticipation in it. Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year’s mistakes and failures had been wiped clean by summer. But now it is not an ending and a beginning I can look forward to, but only an ending; and I feel that change in the air without exhilaration, with only a heaviness and unwillingness of spirit. With a little effort I could get profoundly depressed.
Part of my uneasiness comes as a direct result of living my grandmother’s life for her. For the last few days I have been studying the Xeroxed newspaper stories that finally arrived from the Idaho Historical Society, and though they do straighten out for me some facts that I have never until now understood, they also raise some questions that are disturbing. There is some history that I want not to have happened. I resist the consequences of being Nemesis.
But another part of what obscurely bothers me is the probability that Shelly will be leaving very soon, with consequences to me and to my routines that I can only contemplate with anxiety. And yet there is a sort of comic relief in Shelly, too. One result of throwing away