Bill Pronzini: Snowbound

She wished she knew how to sublimate. That was what modern women did, wasn’t it? They sublimated their frustrations, they developed hobbies or joined committees or became Fern Libbers or played bridge or painted pictures or wrote stories or took jobs or studied astrology or Far East religions — things like that. Well, that was fine for modern women, but what about old-fashioned members of the “weaker sex” like Rebecca Hughes? She wasn’t a collector, and she hated card games, and she had no artistic talent of any kind, and the only jobs you could get in an area such as this were prosaic and totally unrewarding, offering no mental commitment whatsoever. There were no committees or clubs in Hidden Valley, you had to go to Soda Grove, and besides, she was neither a joiner nor a mixer, and if that wasn’t enough, she was afraid to drive any distance in snow and ice. She had no interest in astrology or Far East religions or any of the other passions of the Aware Woman. It was not that she was apathetic or incapable of individualism; she had always possessed a genuine fondness for literature and read extensively and considered herself well informed and had opinions and believed in certain causes. She belonged to several book clubs and regularly utilized the services of the mobile county lending library when it came through twice a month; she read until her eyes ached and her mind refused to grasp the meaning of words and sentences. And how much reading could you do? Too much-and not enough.

The simple truth was that she did not know how to sublimate; she was not modern, and she was not by any means “liberated.” She recalled clearly enough the time she had decided she was, two years previously, and her resolution to strike back at Matt in the most fitting manner: by doing exactly what he was doing, sauce for the goose as well as the gander. Why not? she’d thought then. Why couldn’t she, too, find solace and fulfill her needs in someone else’s bed?

And so she had called Rae Johnson, a girl in Reno whom she had gone to school with, a blackjack dealer in one of the casinos and a self-proclaimed free spirit, and Rae had said, Sure, come on over. Rebecca had told Matt she was going away on a visit for a short while, and he said he thought that was a fine idea, it would do her good-very eager to get rid of her because he was in the middle of one of his affairs then. She took the bus to Reno from Soda Grove, and Rae conducted her on a tour of all the clubs and introduced her to several male friends, sensing that Rebecca had come for a fling without anything having been said about it.

She had liked the man named Doug, she could no longer remember his last name, the moment she’d been introduced to him. Witty, charming, intelligent, easy to talk to, and when he had asked her up to his apartment for a drink, she consented readily enough; she had done a lot of drinking that night-something she seldom did because she was prone to violent and prolonged hangovers-and the liquor and the flashing neon and the bright sophisticated conversation had apparently dissolved all inhibitions, and she had needed desperately to be loved, it had been a long time then as it was a long time now. They sat together on his sofa and drank vodka gimlets, and he kissed her, put his tongue in her mouth, stroked her breasts almost casually-and all at once the euphoria and the anticipation and the passion faded away, and she was completely sober; she was like slick silver ice inside. She broke the kiss, and he looked at her smiling and suggested they go into the bedroom, and she could see the outline of his penis, half-erect, her eyes on him there and nowhere else, and fright spiraled inside her, and she couldn’t go through with it, she simply could not go through with it. She pushed away from him, flushed and ashamed, straightening her skirt and blouse, putting on her coat, not looking at him at all then; and even though he did not protest, was in fact nonchalant in his mild defeat, she had had the abased feeling that he was silently laughing at her.

She left Reno the next morning, not explaining to Rae because Rae knew by looking at her what the trouble was, and came back to Hidden Valley filled with the sense of resignation. There had been no more flings…

Aimlessly Rebecca left the bedroom and went downstairs, along the hallway into the bright copper-tone kitchen at the rear of the house. Again, she did not turn on the lights. She rummaged through one of the pine cupboards over the drainboard, looking for the coffee, and then remembered she had used the last of it during the afternoon-that was why she had called Matt, for God’s sake. No coffee then, and how about a nice hot cup of tea? Yes, fine, and it did not matter in the least that she hated the taste of the stuff.

She filled a kettle with icy tap water, set it on the stove, and went back to stand in front of the drainboard, waiting in the darkness for the water to heat. As she stood there, she found herself staring through the window over the sink, through the snowy dark and the ghostly pines at the faint haze of light in the cabin five hundred yards farther up the slope. Zachary Cain, reticent recluse, she thought. Never talks to anyone, seldom leaves the cabin. According to Matt, he buys five or six bottles of whiskey a week, which means he sits up there and drinks alone, and I wonder why, I wonder who he is?

When the water finally began to boil, she made the cup of tea and laced it liberally with sugar and carried it into the living room. As she sat again on the couch, she continued to wonder about the man named Zachary Cain-who he was, why he drank so much, what his reason was for coming to a place like Hidden Valley. And, even though it didn’t really matter, couldn’t really matter, if he too were somehow lonely.

Lying not-quite-drunk in the darkened cabin bedroom, Cain felt a sense of acute loneliness that was for the first time disassociated from Angie and Lindy and Steve.

The day had been another of the bad ones, filled with painful memories of his family that deepened what was an already mordant despair. But with the coming of darkness, those were not the only memories which had plagued him. Inexplicably, he found himself thinking of things he had locked away in a corner of his mind for the past six months.

There was his work, his abandoned profession. He had been an architect-a good one, a dedicated craftsman-and he recalled how it had been and how you could lose yourself in mathematics and blueprints and sheer creativity, and the way you felt when you saw one of your designs taking shape in wood and glass and stone, standing complete, an entity you alone had conceived.

There were the friends with whom he had willfully severed all relations, by disappearing from San Francisco without word shortly after the accident: Don Collins, another senior employee of the architectural firm for which he had worked and his closest friend; Bert Rhymer, whom he had known since their collegiate days at Stanford; Barry Kells, Fred Gaines, Walt Yamaguchi. And all the easy confidences they had exchanged, the interests they had shared, the laughter they had known.

There were the simple pleasures and relaxations, the little things that rounded out and made complete a man’s life: the look of San Francisco, the multifaceted jewel of lights that was The City on a warm spring or summer night; drinking ice-chilled beer and fishing languidly for bass beneath the cottonwoods and willows on the narrow waterways of the San Joaquin Delta; sailing on the Bay on bright windy afternoons, venturing under the Golden Gate Bridge and out onto the Pacific beyond Land’s End for a glimpse of San Francisco as the seafarers saw it; reading books and viewing old movies on television and listening to the immortal threads of sound woven long ago by Bix and Kid Ory and Satchmo and W. C. Handy. These, yes, and a dozen more.