Joan Didion - Run River

Everett realized that he must be drunk; he did not know what Channing had on his mind, but resented the “we.” Martha was asleep on the couch, her head on Channing’s lap. Lily had not called; he had known she would not. A few hours ago he had tried seven San Francisco hotels, the only seven he could think of, as well as the Claremont and the Durant in Berkeley. No one was registered as McClellan at any one of the nine. There had been a Miss Knight at the Mark Hopkins but when Everett got her on the line it had not been Lily at all. It had been some woman who wanted to know if she had met him with the National Cash Register boys and hung up immediately when he said she had not.

Channing seemed not to have heard him. “The point is we need everything out here. Absolutely tabula rasa . Christ, within the next ten, fifteen years somebody could make a fortune in the agency business.”

“You mean real estate? Insurance?” Everett made a determined effort to follow Channing. “Or automobiles?”

“I mean ad vertising. Advertising agencies. You think branch offices are going to be enough for long, you don’t realize what we’re sitting on out here.”

Everett had never known anyone who worked for an advertising agency, and although he had from time to time read articles in Fortune about Bruce Barton and Albert Lasker, he had no clear idea of what people who worked for advertising agencies actually did. When he thought of an advertising agency at all, which was not very often, he thought about Albert Lasker sitting around an office looking out into the falling snow and thinking about toothpaste, maybe even squeezing toothpaste onto a toothbrush. The next panel in his mind showed an electric light bulb over Albert Lasker’s head and the single word “Irium.” The falling snow was for some reason an integral part of the picture, and Everett had never considered it happening in California. Albert Lasker and Irium belonged to another world, a world teeming with immigrants and women who spent the day in art galleries and elevator operators who called you by name if you were a crack Life photographer. There was a kind of movie that always began that way, an elevator operator saying good morning to a crack Life photographer. They never called it Life but it was all part of the same goddamn world and it was always the same goddamn elevator operator.

The elevator operator brought him back to Channing, who had claimed to be sitting on the ground floor with the button pushed go. Speaking of go, he began to wonder why Channing did not go home to Mather Field or wherever it was he slept and he began to wonder why Martha was asleep with her head in Channing’s lap. Picking up her sweater from the floor, he moved to spread it across her bare legs.

She shifted in her sleep, flinging one arm back across Channing’s knee. “Ry-der?” she whispered.

“Go back to sleep,” Channing ordered.

Apparently reassured, she withdrew her arm. Everett dropped her sweater and poured what was left of a bottle of bourbon into his glass. They did not seem to be drinking martinis any more and there was only a puddle of warm water in the ice bucket.

“You’re like a goddamn radio announcer,” he said suddenly to Channing. “You’d make one hell of a radio announcer.”

“Maybe so,” Channing said amiably. “Maybe I’ll look into it.”

“Charm. That’s what you got, Channing, is charm. C-H-A-R-M.”

He could not now think why he had turned on Channing, but because he was now, whatever the reason, more or less committed to it, he stood up, rocking a little on the balls of his feet while he watched Channing.

Channing stood up, waking Martha, who lay rubbing her eyes with one hand and trying to smooth her hair with the other.

“What is it,” she said, her eyes still closed.

“Your brother,” Channing said, “could use a sandwich.”

“Screw a sandwich. I’ve just been telling your gentleman friend, in words of one syllable, that he’s not in your class.”

“Everett.” Martha stood up, tucking her dress into her belt without taking her eyes from his face. “You shut your mouth, you hear me?”

“All right,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

She meant it, all right: he recognized that the tremor in her voice was not for Channing’s ears alone. She’s in thrall , Lily had laughed at the beginning of the summer. “Haven’t you ever read in books about women in thrall? Martha’s in thrall.” “What does that mean out of books?” he had asked. “It means he’s the first man she ever slept with,” Lily said, not laughing then, and he had slapped her, had hit her across the face with all the revulsion he had felt that night on the terrace toward Francie Templeton. He’s pretty good. Or anyway he used to be, I wouldn’t know .

When he started upstairs Martha was still standing there with Channing. She did not move her eyes from Everett, and she shook her head, almost imperceptibly, as if she wanted Channing to stop stroking her hair but was not really aware he was doing it. For an instant Everett wanted to go back down and get her, tell her to pick up her sweater and a fresh bottle of bourbon and get in the car, tell her that they were going to San Francisco to bring Lily home. But he did not know where to find Lily, and he was afraid that Martha would begin screaming if he even paused on the stairs. He had not heard her scream since they were children, but it was a scream he had never forgotten, all panic and blind hatred, so piercing it was almost sweet, and as he looked down at Martha standing rigid in Channing’s casual embrace it seemed to him that he could almost see the scream beginning in her eyes.

The bed was littered with things Lily had dropped when she was packing: her hairbrush, a satin case with stockings spilling from it, her book of telephone numbers, an alligator handbag he had given her on her last birthday. He looked in the bag and found nothing but pennies, tobacco crumbs, a couple of the silver dollars she always carried (“for luck, Everett baby”), and an old shopping list: Arden hand lotion, white socks for Knight, birthday for E., two curtain rods for back bedroom, call Mother about platter .

He brushed it all to the floor and pulled back the sheet. There was a note scribbled on a page from a calendar: Everett darling I’ll try to make everything all right. Please. L . Well, no one could say Lily had not hit her stride with this one. Notes under the sheet.

He crumpled the note and dropped it, then bent to retrieve it because he did not want China Mary to find it when she came to clean in the morning. He sat then on the edge of the unmade bed and absently rubbed the satin tie of Lily’s nightgown across his face and listened to the faint sound of the phonograph from downstairs.

Give me land, lots of land

Under starry skies a-bove

Don’t fence me in …

Well to hell with Martha. Let her make her own bed. With a goddamn radio announcer.

Keep me baby please keep me , she had said that night with the fire down low and her hair still wet with the lake water: touched, Everett had accepted it as a trust. Or anyway he had wanted to, had longed to believe that she meant it, even as he knew that it was something women said; even as he remembered others who had said that or almost that.

Not that there had ever been, for Everett, that many others: the first had been Doris Jeanne Coe, Doris Jeanne of the glass-blue eyes, the lank blond hair, the bad teeth, and the smile that seemed to Everett at sixteen infinitely perverse. Two years older than Everett, Doris Jeanne was behind in school not from native inability, which had never held anyone back in the county consolidated school system, but simply because she had stayed out of school two years when her family moved out from Oklahoma in 1933. Her mother was tubercular and Doris Jeanne, the oldest child, stayed home to help with her brother and four sisters; their father used to be a farmer but now, according to Doris Jeanne, he fixed things, and Doris Jeanne thought California was strictly a drag.