Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [91]
“When you’re here I love it. Look at it, who wouldn’t? It’s wonderful for Ollie. But when you’re gone I go crazy with boredom and loneliness.”
He threw the last pebble and brushed the sand from his hands, looking away down the beach, across the trickle of water that came from the lagoon behind them, cut through the dike of drift, and braided across the sand to meet the incoming foam. The water against the foot of the promontory was uneasy and sinking, and Susan looked past her husband to the windows in the cliff, and through them to the heaving sea beyond, pure and sunlit and brightly focused and small like a view through reversed binoculars. As she watched, the whole sea lifted, a green billow rose and drowned the cave and lashed against the rock. Over the promontory’s furzy top she saw an explosion of turnstones tossed up just above the burst of spray. They were like sandpipers at the edge of the surf–they lived inches from the water and their feet were never wet.
The spray fell back, the turnstones settled out of sight, the hollow shore boomed, the green water was sucked away from the inside of the cliff, the rock streamed, the windows opened, pouring, and through them she saw again the miniature, bright, far glimpse of whitecapped sea, and a line of horizon marked in dark blue.
Oliver took his eyes off the tumultuous embrace of land and sea, and turned them on her. He smiled without showing his teeth, a rubbery lip-smile. Then, as if the attempt had generated the reality, he was really smiling. He shook his head, shrugged, banged his hands on his thighs and threw them into the air like a little explosion of spray or seabirds. “All right. I’ll tell Conrad. Potosí is out .”
His magnanimity nearly broke her down. In a choking voice she managed to say, “I’m sorry. I know what it costs you.”
“It doesn’t cost me much. Some excitement I’d probably have enjoyed. I wouldn’t have enjoyed the separation. I needed to be reminded that you and Ollie can’t really live in places like that.”
“Something else is sure to show up.”
“I suppose. But that’s the only thing in a month. Every mining engineer in San Francisco is sitting in his empty office playing solitaire.”
“We can hold out a long time yet.”
“If I don’t find something we can hold out about three more weeks.”
“We haven’t touched my money. I’ve got the commission for that Boyesen ballad, and I’ve been drawing Santa Cruz. I’m sure I can sell Thomas another article . . .”
“That’s fine,” Oliver said. “I’m proud of you. It’s not your success we have to worry about. Meantime it’s my job to support my family. Next time we move I want to have the train fare.”
“Will you never let me forget that?” she said, and send him a smiling, pleading, puckered face. When he got that mulish look there was no talking to him. She had only herself to blame. So in a pretense of relaxation and freedom from care she leaned back against the driftwood log and sighed as if happily and tipped her face upward toward the sky scoured by the sea wind.
“You mustn’t worry,” she said. “Your chance will come. I didn’t mean it when I said this place drove me crazy. How could it, it’s so beautiful. I’ve missed you, that’s all. Now you’re back, and Ollie is so healthy and happy, and it’s lovely.” He did not answer, and she had to lie there stiffly relaxing until her back began to hurt. She straightened. “I gather nothing came of your experiment with cement.”
“When I got through with it it was still limestone and clay. It never even made clinker.”
“Couldn’t you try again?”
“Sure. I’ll take some more samples back tomorrow. I’ve got to have something to do besides walk from office to office and sit with my feet on other people’s desks. But that’s just an experiment, not a job.”
“You say there’s a big demand for hydraulic cement if anyone in this country could learn how to make it.”
“Demand? Sure. It’s all shipped in from England now.”
“It might be profitable.”
“What are you dreaming about?” Oliver said. “Suppose I did succeed in making it.