Joan Didion: Run River

Everett sat on the dock fifteen minutes before Lily came. He heard her long before he saw her, because now at one o’clock the moon was entirely down. Although house lights flickered on the water downriver, the mile and a half of McClellan riverfront showed only the even flash of the Coast Guard channel markers; the light on the dock was gone, burned out he didn’t know when. Remind Liggett , he thought, abruptly alarmed about the dock light. (A dock light first, a torn fence next, maybe the pump goes off and loses its prime: before long the whole place would come crumbling down, would vanish before his eyes, revert to whatever it had been when his great-great-grandfather first came to the Valley.) Through the growth of oak and cottonwood Everett could see a single light on the third floor of the house; the lower stories were blocked out by the levee.

During those fifteen minutes Everett thought only of the dock light (Liggett should watch these things) and of the hops. Although he still held his father’s.38-caliber revolver in one hand, he did not think about that, any more than he thought about Ryder Channing’s flashlight, still burning, its thin light filtering through three inches of muddy water, caught there in the tangle of roots that showed where the current had undercut the bank. Next week they would be taking the hops down, stripping the vines from the strings. Each August, just before picking, Everett was suffused with a single fear, an apprehension specific in exactly the sense that nightmares are specific: the unshakable conviction that his kiln would explode as the hops dried. He could never sleep during the week the hops were drying. Sometimes he would go downstairs and sit all night in the kitchen, because he could see the kiln from the kitchen window. It was not, this or any year, that the loss of the crop could ruin him: he had fewer acres in hops this summer than any since his father’s death, fifteen years before. There was no longer any money in hops: everyone on the river was getting out of them. “It’s a combination of factors,” he had tried to explain, repeating by rote what the buyers told him, to his sister Sarah and her third husband when they came through in June on their way from Philadelphia to the Islands. (“Not Honolulu, Everett,” Sarah had corrected him. “Maui. Oahu’s been ruined for years.”) “Your shares aren’t paying what they used to pay because we aren’t making what we used to make. For one thing people aren’t drinking as much beer as they used to drink. For another the brewers are making what they call a lighter beer, using fewer hops.”

The loss of the hops would not matter to Sarah. Nothing about the ranch had ever mattered to Sarah. But Everett had seen little all week but that familiar image: his drying kiln burning, the flames breaking out against a night sky and still (impossibly, as in a nightmare) throwing no light into the dark. It would happen this year for certain , he thought now.

When he heard Lily he sat perfectly still, aware suddenly of the.38 in his hand, the blood on the sleeve of the Dacron suit Lily had bought for him at Brooks Brothers in San Francisco. He heard her high heels on the wooden steps down the river side of the levee (Jesus Christ , he thought with abstract tenderness, high-heeled shoes to get screwed on the beach) , heard her pushing aside the oak branches, heard her call his name.

Everett , she called, long before she could have seen him on the dock. She called him, not Channing, answering the question he had never asked: would she hear the shot and come to him or would she come as usual to meet Channing; would she come to him, knowing, or would she come to Channing, come clean and unaware from the shower where she had been maybe twenty minutes before, come intending to take the boat downriver half a mile, meaning to lie there with Channing on the stretch of sand where Knight and Julie gave beach parties. (He had heard the shower when he went into the house to get the gun. Standing in their bedroom after he had taken the gun from the drawer, he had watched the steam through the open bathroom door, had listened to her humming a song to which she could never remember the words, we will thrive on keep alive on/just nothing but kisses.) Well, she had heard the shot and come to him: she had called Everett .

Still holding the gun, he got to his feet. Lily stood in the clearing by the dock, looking first at him and then at Channing’s body where it lay sprawled over a rotting log. In that moment before either of them spoke, it occurred to Everett that Lily was not as pretty as she had once been. No one had ever called her beautiful, but there had been about her a compelling fragility, the illusion not only of her bones but of her eyes. It was not that her eyes were any memorable color (hazel, her driver’s license must say), any extraordinary shape. It was simply that they seemed larger than anything else about her, making her very presence, like that of someone on a hunger strike, a kind of emotional claim. It exhausted him to look at her now: her eyes were too large.

“I guess he came here to meet you,” Everett said, swiping at a mosquito with his free hand. He did not look at Channing’s body.

She did not speak.

Unable to think, Everett wished that they could go back to the house and to bed; he wanted to make her a drink, bourbon with crushed ice the way she liked it, sit with her in the dark calm beneath the mosquito netting.

“There was no need,” she said finally, her voice barely audible. “No need.”

She began crying then. Everett stood watching until her sobs took on the helpless, automatic quality which meant that she was losing control, crossing an invisible border into some unmapped private terror. Sudden or expected death, the sight of a stranger planting daffodil bulbs, or the recollection of some commonplace, forgotten afternoon (say when they had taken the children to look at the seahorses in Golden Gate Park and the seahorses had been gone) could tap Lily’s reserve of hysteria. (“That’s how people should live,” she had said about the planter of daffodils; he had suggested that she set out some daffodils around the house.) He wondered without interest if Channing had ever seen Lily cry. He supposed he had. He supposed every son of a bitch on the river had.

He laid the gun on the dock and walked over to her. Her sweater had fallen from her shoulders, and he stooped to pick it up from the dirt. It was a pink cashmere sweater that belonged to Julie; one of the name tapes Lily had bought when they sent her down to school at Dominican was sewn in the neck. Julia Knight McClellan . Julie was as pretty now as Lily had once been. Although her fine, almost white blond hair had always reminded Everett of his sisters (“She may look like Sarah but she looks nothing like the way Martha looked,” Lily had said this summer, nearly screaming. “I don’t know how you can even say that”), Julie looked, on the whole, more and more like Lily: she moved the way Lily moved, had even the shy, hesitant smile which by now was only a mannerism for Lily. (Only about an hour ago, at the Templetons’ party, had he not looked across the room to see Julie brush a strand of hair from her face with Lily’s own rapid, tentative gesture? Lily , he had thought, his face suddenly cold with relief and shame, in that instant between seeing the gesture and realizing that it was not Lily at all, but Julie. Until that moment when he thought he knew he had refused to ask himself where Lily was. Only then did he realize that he had not moved from the room in half an hour, had stayed there deliberately so that he might believe Lily to be on the terrace, or downstairs in the room with the piano. We will thrive on keep alive on/just nothing but kisses . Julie had been wearing a white dress cut low in back, and he had stared at her sunburned back as if he had never seen it. What he had never before noticed was that her back was exactly like Lily’s. You could see the small bones. Both Lily and Julie stood very straight, holding their narrow shoulders back as if to hide the bones. He had been staring at Julie’s back as if in trance, wondering with intense irritation why she had not worn a dress which covered her bones, when he felt someone’s hand on his shoulder. In his irritation, he jerked away; it was Francie Templeton. “You need a drink, Everett,” she had laughed; he smiled and put his arm around her bare shoulders. “Sure, Francie,” he had said. “Sure I do.”) She was already gone then , he thought now, trying for the first time to make chronology of it.