Joan Didion - Run River

“It’s too early, Francie,” he kept repeating softly, sober enough to see that neither of them was in condition to swim in the river, “it’s still running cold.” As he extricated the halter strap from her fingers and began to tie it again at the back of her neck, she at first dropped her head docilely, then, without saying anything, reached between his legs. “Don’t, Francie,” he said, getting to his feet and lifting her up; she had begun crying then, her hands over her face and the big diamond she had inherited from her grandmother blazing suddenly in the spotlight from a passing cruiser. When he tried to take her hands and hold her she wrenched away. “Go screw yourself,” she had whispered, “that’s probably the only way you like it anyway.” He had hoped she would not remember it later, and had not really thought she would. (The next morning he told Lily that while she was inside dancing he had been singing songs with Francie Templeton, and she had laughed: “Everett baby. That’s not much your style.”)

“We had quite a sing for ourselves, didn’t we,” Francie said now, handing him a glass and touching it with her own. “To the old songs.”

“That’s right, Francie. The old songs.”

“Quite a sing,” she repeated reflectively. “On the Occasion of the Victory in Europe. A regular narrative by Norman Corwin.” She paused. “You think Francie’s changed since you went away.”

“You always look the same, Francie,” he said quickly, embarrassed that she had caught him out. She was wearing an old denim skirt and a wrinkled shirt which probably belonged to Joe; he knew that she must have been drinking most of the day.

“Well, yes and no.” She poured more bourbon into her glass and waved him toward a wicker bench. “Yes and no. I’m thirty-seven years old today.”

“Happy birthday.” He wondered if she had a celebration in mind.

“Ha. It’s not my birthday at all. I’ve been thirty-seven years old for months. Now old Joe,” she added thoughtfully, “is forty.”

Everett smiled gamely. He knew that Joe was thirty-six. Joe was ten years older than he was almost to the day. He happened to know that much with certainty because once Joe had come down drunk for a game at Stanford and collared Everett after lunch at the Deke house and explained all through the first quarter how much they had in common, give or take ten years. One of the things they still had in common, Everett recalled, was fifty dollars Joe had borrowed that day because Francie had temporarily left him and transferred all the money in their joint checking account into her private account, where she said it belonged in the first place.

“Forty — years — old,” Francie said. “Or anyway he is almost. Sic transit old Joe, and all that.”

“That’s right, Francie.” She was sitting on the low brick wall that edged the terrace, her body in profile to him, and he was nervous that she would fall from the wall and down one story onto the lawn.

“Tell me about the war,” she said, swaying gently, almost crooning. “Tell me about how you were out defending democracy in El Paso and other foreign fields while old Joe here kept the home fires burning.”

“I appreciate Joe’s helping out after my father died.” He was uncomfortably aware that Francie had at some point passed beyond neighborly conversation.

“Oh yes,” she said. “Oh my yes. Joe was helping out down there right along.”

“Martha and Lily appreciated it.”

Francie sat holding her knees with her arms, her eyes closed.

“I’ll bet Lily did,” she said pleasantly. “He’s pretty good.”

Everett said nothing. It did not seem possible that he had heard Francie correctly, but the words seemed to hang on in the warm air, as continually and unmistakably audible as a prolonged high note on a piano. Although he had never been good at extracting subtleties from conversations, he tried, now, to imagine something else Francie could mean, to remember a word he had missed that would, once inserted into its proper place in the conversation, clear the entire thing up. But all he could remember was Lily, how she had been this spring (had sat reading night after night until he had asked her to come to bed, had turned away afterwards every time all spring— what do you care , she had whispered once, what did you care when you were in Texas —had gotten up and brushed her hair and returned to one or another of a series of books on sacred architecture she brought home from the county library); he remembered Lily and he considered Francie.

“Or anyway he used to be,” Francie said in the same pleasant voice, unmarred by any trace of alcohol. “I wouldn’t know any more. These days I’m just old Joe’s cross, or you might say I’m the curse that Joe was born to, his albatross, his middle of the night. His checkbook. You might put it that way.”

Francie paused, chewing a piece of ice. “Because frankly, Everett,” she added finally, “I like to drink.”

Everett said nothing. Beginning immediately to preserve what could be preserved, extending his carefulness of heart, he remembered stories he had heard about wives in wartime, and how it meant nothing. It would mean nothing to him if he could stop thinking about Lily, and think instead of a generalized Wife.

“You might even say I’d rather drink. So you see.”

Everett stood up.

“I have to go, Francie,” he said gently.

He had not seen, but he could not much blame Joe.

He had not seen: there was the crux of it. He sat on the sun porch holding the picture of Lily and Martha and Sarah and himself in the reefer coats until the first light came through the east windows, as if by tracing his finger down the crack in that yellowed snapshot he could recoup all their mortal losses, as if by merely looking long enough and hard enough he could walk back into that afternoon, walk back into Lily Knight’s house, holding Martha by the hand, and begin again; could run with Martha up from the dock to where Lily cried beneath the lilac in the twilight and be home free.

He did not want to see Lily that morning, did not want to face her reddened eyes, her exhausted voice. You want to know who it was . She had placed the burden on him; all that had happened was in some way his responsibility. When China Mary came to the house he asked her to take Lily a tray, no orange juice, and to see that she stayed in bed awhile. “She’s tired,” he said. “The heat gets her. Try to keep Knight and Julie out.”

He left the house then for the south fields to watch the last hops come down. Although he normally came to the house for lunch, at noon he instead drove one of the trucks down to a bar on the highway and had two bottles of Lucky Lager and a bologna sandwich wrapped in cellophane. While he drank the second bottle of beer he listened on the bartender’s radio to the Yankees beating the Red Sox in the seventh at Fenway Park and did not think about Lily. By seven o’clock, when he started back to the house, the entire ranch was stripped bare of the vines. They had been picking all week, and this was the day he had liked least all of his life: the day the last hops came down, the day summer ended. All he could see as he walked back to the house were the bare poles, the broken strings hanging motionless in the heat, the dust stirred up by the picking machines. Tomorrow they would start the kiln, and during the next four or five days while the hops dried the whole year could go to waste. The kiln and the crop with it could go up in a flash of dry flame, and beyond taking the most elementary precautions there was nothing he could do about it. During the next week the agents from the insurance companies would be dropping by the ranches where the hops were drying, watching their risks; almost every August a kiln burned somewhere in the Valley. Last year it had been on the Messner place, up the Cosumnes River, the night they were to have finished.