Jim Harrison - Legends of the Fall

Years later Nordstrom pondered the degree of accident in human affection as do all intelligent mortals. What if it hadn't rained that Friday? How tentative and restless an idea: he ended up marrying Laura because it rained one Friday afternoon in May in Madison, Wisconsin. The rain led directly in specific steps to the Sunday afternoon which began in a light rain and a drive in her car into the country with a half-gallon of red Cribari wine. Then the rain lightened and it became warm and muggy and they walked through a woodlot into a field of green knee-high winter wheat. At the far edge of the field he spread his trench coat at her insistence and they sat down and drank the wine. She wore penny loafers, no stockings, a brown poplin skirt and a white sleeveless blouse. Sitting there while she laughed and talked he felt totally lucky for the first time in his life. Her legs were brown because she had gone to Florida for spring vacation. She stared upward at the marsh hawk. He stared downward at her legs and the skirt slipping upward a bit while she leaned back to gaze at the hawk skirting the field in quadrants. He was transfixed and wanted to lay there until the green wheat grew through him.

"You're looking up my legs," she said.

"No I wasn't."

"If you're honest you can kiss them."

"I was."

He kissed her legs until neither of them wore anything. And the hawk now perched in a tree in the woodlot could see an imprecise circle of flattened green wheat and two bodies entwined until late in the afternoon when it began to rain again. The man tried to cover the girl with the coat but she stood up, did a dance and drank more wine.

Such simple events last lovers a long time. Scarcely anyone can turn their backs on the best thing that has happened to them. So she went to California for the summer and he retrieved her for the last year of school in the fall after a hundred letters both ways. He bloomed as much as perhaps he ever would and they were married to the mild disgust of her ambitious parents and the delight of his own the week after graduation. They moved to California where she worked for a small company that made documentary movies for corporations and he worked for a large oil company. They lived in a duplex out in Westwood and after one year Laura gave birth to a daughter, returning to her career a year later. It was the sexual mystery that made their marriage last eighteen years. The word "mystery" is still appropriate despite the implacable vulgarizing of the media, so total in attempt that it must express our desire to smash this last grace note in our lives. (On the way back from California after the summer before their senior year they had made love in the car in the daylight, standing up for novelty in gas station bathrooms, like dogs back in the roadside evergreens with pine needles sticking to knees and palms, on a picnic table in North Dakota, on motel room floors, in a sleeping bag in a cold fog near Brainerd, Minnesota, in a movie theatre (East of Eden) in La Crosse, Wisconsin:

Do you want to screw Julie Harris?

I don't know. Never thought about it. Do you want to screw James Dean?

Of course. Don't be silly. But he just died.

The marriage had been unhappy for years before it ended rather amicably. He suspected that she had a lover and the lover had turned out to be a good friend of the family, Martin Gold. Both Nordstrom and Laura had been successful but never together. She traveled a great deal as a line producer and he made a great deal of money with the oil company. The sole meeting point had been their daughter Sonia, a rather fragile child until the summer of her twelfth year when it seemed she gained health and vitality overnight. But this seemed to remove their only mutual concern and they faded into their careers. Laura became more important to her company which gradually had entered the television market with feature specials and made-for-TV movies, most of them shot on location. Nordstrom owned a nagging jealousy over the glamor of her business compared to the boardroom composure of his own. Businessmen are by and large hapless wretches like anyone else and Nordstrom had that rare particular strength of the well disciplined, intelligent, good-looking man who never shoots off his mouth; terribly solid, never slick with the "sticktoitiveness" that Nordstrom's father-in-law so admired when he saw the fruits of the labor—a fine home in Beverly Glen.

They may have gone on indefinitely in this stasis but one night at dinner their daughter, with the terrifying intensity of a sixteen-year-old, told them they were both cold fish. Laura only laughed but Nordstrom was deeply hurt: to have worked so hard for sixteen years only to be called a cold fish by your own daughter. But then he was bright enough to know he was a bit of a cold fish, what is known in the business world as a hatchet man. Until this particular moment the idea had never bothered him.

That night after the unpleasantness of dinner Nordstrom broke with the rigidity of his drinking habits that confined him to two highballs after work and a little wine with dinner. He drank a lot of brandy and tried to talk on more intimate terms with his daughter. She was receptive though it later occurred to him that she was being kind. He had been so much what is thought of as a "model father" that he didn't really know his daughter and she, like any child, played the same formal though skittish game. After their talk he noted that he had smoked a half-dozen cigarettes in succession and promised his daughter a BMW when she graduated from college if she wouldn't smoke.

Then he talked with Laura about getting a less demanding job, or anyway something different. But she was preoccupied readying herself for the driver. She was taking the "red-eye" to New York for two days on business. They stood in the kitchen talking and he asked if they could quickly make love. She said no it'll mess up clothes, then offered a blow-job. So Nordstrom sat back in the breakfast nook getting what turned out to be half a blow-job because the driver rang the doorbell. Laura kissed him on the forehead and left, the job barely half done as it were, though Nordstrom didn't mind, being a good enough lover to prefer the process to the conclusion. Now he felt totally alone and an edge of panic crept into his soul that would stay with him for years. He thought, "What if what I've been doing all my life has been totally wrong?" He sat in the den the entire night thinking it all over. By dawn he decided he wanted to escape into the world rather than from it: there was nothing particularly undesirable or repellent in his life, only a certain lack of volume and intensity; he feared dreaming himself to death, say as a modest brook in a meadow eases along sleepily to a great river just beyond the border of trees.

The most vexing thing in the life of a man who wishes to change is the improbability of change. Unless he is an essentially sound creature this can drive him frantic, perhaps insane. Nordstrom knew that at base business was a process of buying or manufacturing cheap and selling dear. Long before he took Economics 101 at the University of Wisconsin he had been attracted by the simple grace of capitalism: his father would build three cabins for five thousand and sell them for eight thousand; years later the cabins would be built for fifteen thousand and sold for twenty-two thousand, but despite this variation in price over the years to account for the increase in materials and labor—and inflation—it amounted not oddly to the same amount. His father was without greed and despite the urging of Nordstrom would not expand the business, say to ten cabins a year. In the oil business it was a trifle more complicated in that the big profits came from outsmarting the regulatory and tax structures and swindling the Arabs (he was amused when the situation reversed itself). It was pretty much a gentleman's game within the infrastructure. But it was all ruined during that long night in the den, no matter that the poison, like the changes Nordstrom wished to make in his life, was slow in coming. Between his thirty-seventh and fortieth year he began going to a number of plays and screening parties with his wife and was filled with a curious envy over the easy familiarity show business people had with each other, no matter that the lust for profit was the same as the oil business. There was at least a sense of play involved and Nordstrom had forgotten how to play, in fact had never learned. So he bought a sailboat but it turned out that there wasn't any particular place to go from Newport Beach. He played tennis with his daughter feverishly and built an expensive court behind their home, but she broke her ankle at Sun Valley and they never played tennis again. He tried skiing in Aspen; he went skeet shooting; he quail hunted with oil friends on an island near Corpus Christi and was nearly bitten by a rattlesnake. The rattlesnake incident was so actual that it secretly thrilled him for months; he reached under a mesquite bush to retrieve a dead quail, heard the strange sound but reacted slowly because he had never heard it before, and the snake's open mouth hurtled forward barely grazing his shirt cuff. He changed his hairstyle. He bought himself a silver ring in Cabo San Lucas where he went marlin fishing. He bought a camera. He began reading biographies and a few novels. One silly evening when Laura was away his daughter rolled a joint for him and he laughed until his stomach hurt, then became tight and mildly frightened. He screwed his secretary and felt sad. He bought a sports car which only his daughter and wife drove. He bought an expensive painting of a pretty girl washing her feet. He took up cooking when he resigned his arduous job in the oil business for a simpler one as a vice-president for a large book wholesaler. He learned to cook Chinese, French, Italian and Mexican food. He rented a van and drove north to the wine country around San Francisco, tasted the wines of many vineyards and returned with as much as the van would hold. He had visited, by referral, a high-priced, exotic whorehouse in San Francisco to fulfill a fantasy of being in bed with two women at once. It cost him three hundred dollars not to get a hard-on, his first experience at unsuccessful love. He brooded all the way back to Los Angeles. He brooded about his cock, he brooded about the young filmmaker friend of Laura's whom he had backed on an unsuccessful venture. It wasn't the money so much (the loss would be absorbed in the tax advantage) but the suspicion that Laura might have made love to the young man on an air mattress in the shrubbery near the Jacuzzi in the backyard. He brooded about his boredom with money because everything had been provided for by his own wit and the death of Laura's father. He brooded about his daughter's departure for Sarah Lawrence only three months distant. Suddenly he was terribly lonely for the greenery, the cold lakes, the thunderstorms and snow of his childhood.