Joan Didion: Run River

Before she left she gave him what cash she had, about $20, and straightened the bedroom so that he could sleep.

“Don’t worry,” she said.

He sat slumped in a chair.

“I said don’t worry,” she repeated, holding his head against her.

It was apparent that he needed someone, and as she drove out to the ranch she imagined that he needed not someone but her. Whether it was true or not did not much matter: she was already committed.

“You can’t dance at all,” Everett said to her. “You never could dance worth a damn.”

He said it in a motel room outside Salinas on a spring evening in 1957; they had driven down to look at a stock ranch, 840 acres for $225,000, which was, Everett thought, on the high side for a stock ranch but was $85,000 less than the eventual buyer, a Stockton syndicate, asked one year later for the eight acres of it with cloverleaf access to a proposed freeway south. (In the end, however, the joke was not upon Everett after all, since the route of the freeway was shifted five miles east.) In the motel there had been glass doors to the lighted swimming pool, Muzak piped in through the walls, and wall-to-wall tweed carpeting on which they had tried, after three drinks before dinner, to dance.

“Nobody can dance on a rug,” she said.

“You couldn’t dance at the Palladium.”

Although she had never considered herself even a mediocre dancer, she was hurt; in the haze of three drinks she embroidered bitterly upon past hurts. A month before she had bought a red chiffon dress which he claimed not to like on her, although he knew (in fact because he knew, he said it because he knew) that she had wanted a red chiffon dinner dress from the time she was in school and had seen one on a girl at a dance; before Christmas, the day she came home from two weeks in Carmel, he had not been at home but (by a deliberate effort, she was certain now) in Reno.

“I’m not that bad a dancer,” she said, wondering what had happened to the girl in the red chiffon dress, what brilliant marriage she had made, what adoring husband was even then leading her (leading: there was the key to good dancing) across the polished floor of what fashionable hotel.

“I told you, you can’t dance at all. You don’t listen to the beat. I don’t know what you’re listening to but it isn’t the beat.”

“Then let’s not dance.” She sat down on the bed and began brushing her hair.

He sat down, without speaking, and pretended interest in an advertising leaflet bearing a photograph of a man identified as “The Salinas Valley’s Number One Restaurateur, a Ph.D. of Beef.” There was also a drawing of a steer wearing a crown, with the legend “Where Premium Beef Is King.”

“You’re deliberately starting it again,” she said. “You’re deliberately doing it again.”

Everett said nothing.

“You do it,” she added, “because you’re insecure.”

“Cut it out, Lily.” He stood up and straightened his tie in the mirror. “You ready to go?”

She picked up her sweater, and they did not speak again (if you did not count queries for the benefit of the waiter, and she did not) until halfway through dinner, after Everett had left the table to say hello to a cattleman he had seen in the bar.

“Eat your dinner,” he said when he sat down again. “Or is there something the matter with it.”

“I was waiting for you.”

“You were.”

She did not say anything.

“That’d be the first time.” He picked up his drink. “That’d be the goddamn first time.”

“When did you ever care.”

“That’s right. When did I ever care. When did you.”

“I care right now.”

“That’d be the goddamn first time,” he repeated.

She saw the vein tightened on his forehead and tried to eat a bite of abalone. Everett had not touched his dinner and was on his sixth or seventh martini, she did not know which. That’d be the goddamn first time . What it was not the first time for, at any rate, was this scene: she supposed they said different words each time but it was always the same scene, and although she could not remember when or how it had begun, it seemed now that they were condemned to play it out together all the days of their lives, raking their memories for fresh grievances, cherishing familiar ones, nourishing the already indestructible shoots of their resentment with alcohol and with the inexhaustible adrenalin generated by what she supposed was (at least she did not know any other name for it) love. It did not seem to matter any more who had first resented whom, or for what. It did not seem to matter what either of them did any more: it could begin out of nothing. It could begin when they were trying hardest to keep it away, could tear apart all their tacit promises, could invade even the cunningly achieved anonymity of motel rooms with wall-to-wall tweed carpeting, rooms in which they had thought they might begin again; rooms in which she could feel, in the first glow of the first drink, that Everett was someone she did not know at all, someone to whom she might seem the gifted, graced, charmed woman she had wanted to be.

“Stop it,” she said, putting down her fork.

He beckoned to the waiter. “Stop what.”

By midnight Everett had fallen asleep in his clothes on one of the two double beds. Lily sat rigid in a straight chair on the far side of the room; to have lain on even the other bed would have implied domesticity, a truce. When he woke and told her to go to bed she turned away, turned her face toward the window which looked out on nothing but the Lincoln. She could not sleep, she said, in the same room with him. She had managed to sleep, he said, in the same room with plenty of other people, hadn’t she. No, she had not. And what did it matter if she had. When had he ever cared. He had slapped her then and she twisted away, and he took her in his arms and it was all right again for a while. It’s going to be all right baby , he said, it’s going to be fine now , and she said over and over Please Christ Everett keep us , and he said Lily, baby, we’ll get through the next few months all right and then you take a trip, you take the kids on a trip, go somewhere you want to go and baby when you come home it’ll be all right, you’ll see .

Later she had begged Everett to go with them on the trip that summer but he would not. Knight liked everything, liked Paris and London and Rome and New York, but Julie was homesick and wanted her father, and Lily was homesick too. Although she sent postcards almost every day to Everett and to her mother, neither wrote frequently: her mother twice, once to observe that Duke Snider had been off his game for a week, once to complain that the Wells Fargo Bank would allow her to subordinate not three hundred but only one hundred acres to the Paradise Valley All-Electric Homes people; Everett three times, each letter an exercise in the stiff, impenetrable optimism he reserved for all mailed communications. In Paris she received a cable from Ryder, asking if she could lend him five thousand dollars; she cabled that she could not, and then wondered guiltily where he would get the money.

After she was home, all she could remember of the trip at all was the fat Italian on the flight from New York to San Francisco, the Italian not from Italy but from New Jersey; she remembered him with a clarity she would have preferred to forego. He lived in New Jersey, was married to a woman who weighed 234 pounds, and had business in San Francisco: those were the only three facts she ever knew about him.

Idlewild that night had been hot and swept by fitful warm rains, everything smelling of the same sweet mildew that had always meant New York to her. The plane was delayed, and Lily sat (alone, because Knight and Julie were staying over a week to visit Sarah in Bryn Mawr) in the surgically lighted litter of the waiting room reading the real-estate advertisements in a Town and Country someone had left behind. She had on a white silk suit she had bought on sale the day before at Hattie Carnegie, and thought she presented rather a pleasant contrast to the other passengers, one of whom, an aging blonde, had on Capri pants; another of whom, an extraordinarily seedy minister, had stripped down to his pants, an undershirt, and a clerical bib. He was fanning himself with the New York Daily Mirror , and Lily hoped that he would not sit next to her on the plane, because she was quite certain that before they reached San Francisco she would be telling him, in a helpless drive to win his approval, what faith and works meant to her.