Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [274]
Nevertheless I, who looked up to him all his life as the fairest of men, have difficulty justifying that bleak and wordless break; and that ripping-up of the rose garden, that was vindictive and pitiless. I wish he had not done that. I think he never got over being ashamed, and never found the words to say so.
IX
THE ZODIAC COTTAGE
1
I didn’t hear any car, I didn’t hear footsteps on the gravel or up the ramp, I caught sight of no movement through the wistaria. Just, suddenly she opened the screen and was standing there, white-skinned in a green summer dress, behind our half circle of Grandmother’s old wicker chairs drawn up in front of the television.
I was on the extreme right, she materialized on the left. It was all under my eye. In our abrupt immobility, the kinetic nervousness of our small arrested movements, we were like something out of an art movie, the camera focusing on mouths, hands, heads stopped in the motion of turning–successive images made portentous by the obsessiveness with which they were seen and the persistence with which they were returned to. Squashed scorpions on a white wall, two people talking, intensely unaware of being watched, in a parked car–Robbe-Grillet, that sort of thing. Last Year at Marienbad, revolving views around statues, moving views down halls, frozen and hypnotic and with held breath, and all the time the television screen jittering with meaningless motion as the Giant pitcher took his warmup throws for a new inning, and the catcher pegged down to second and the infielders peppered it around.
Ada, next to me, had twisted around and was sending out a squinted glare through the smoke of the cigarette that dangled between her lips. She knew who the woman was. So did Ed, in the next chair with a beer can between his feet. His eyes canted upward and sideward, he leaned and dropped his butt with a hiss into the can–a steady man getting his hands free in anticipation of trouble. Shelly had been interrupted in the act of clawing her hair back–a gesture which does not cease to trouble me, it is so like a deliberate provocation. Her liberation from the bra, which earlier in the summer was an occasional thing, seems now to be complete, an insistence, part of a life style that says take it or leave it. I have seen Ada eying her, disapproving, fascinated, and puzzled. I thought the visitor might note and misinterpret her costume; her arrogant nipples poked at the thin jersey, and her arm was raised as if to accentuate them. On her face the realization of who the visitor was came like a wind that turns up the underside of leaves in a tree.
Al Sutton, behind whom the woman had appeared, had leaped nimbly to his feet to offer his chair, and remained with his hand on the wicker back, while ten complicated responses went visibly through his computer, neutralizing each other. For a moment the only sound was the breath in his flat nostrils and the crowd noise of the ballgame. The wart flickered tentatively between his lips.
As for Lyman Ward, he twitched his chair around to face her, thinking furiously, above the pounding of his heart, She’s been sneaking around, spying.
“Hello, Ellen,” I said.
“Hello, Lyman.”
Her skin was pale and pure. There was no gray in her hair–though that means nothing. Her eyes were still her best feature–dark blue, large, inquiring, like the eyes of a rather solemn child. They flashed around us once, she smiled and slipped into the chair that Al pushed toward her, sitting with her knees together and her hands holding her white summer handbag in her lap. Her skirt was short enough to be fashionable but not so short it looked frivolous. The exposed thigh looked firm. I saw it–I saw all of her–with the eyes of these curious, cautious others, and I observed that Mr. Ward’s ex-wife, while not a beauty exactly, was an attractive older woman, well-preserved, well-dressed, citified in our slovenly country