Robert Stone - Bear and His Daughter

He stood up, dizzy again. The altitude, the drug. He poured himself another glass of plonk.

“But you oughtn’t to die. You have work to do.”

“Maybe.”

“I think you’re a great poet. Even my mother does.”

“Does she?”

“She sure does. And all her friends.”

Rowan’s mother still lived on the commune in Mendocino. It was the place where, among flowers and flutes and midwifery, Rowan had been born. Rowan had spent a lot of her childhood there and Smart had seen very little of her.

“I had a poem for you, Rowan. I’ve been trying to remember it since I got west.” He took another sip of wine to slow the rush of his heart.

“Oh, you have to,” she said. “Take a little more crystal.”

“You minx!” he said. “You’ve poisoned me.”

“I’m not a minx. Or a mink or a weasel,” Rowan said. “I want my poem.”

“Once I spent years trying to remember a poem,” Smart told her. “Twenty years maybe.” He had seen the low range of mountains on the horizon through the little kitchen window and it was as though he were looking for his other lost poem out there. “It was a poem I wrote about a plane loaded with American salesmen breaking up over Mount Fuji. They’d won a selling contest, a free trip to the Orient. So they ended up falling down on Mount Fuji with their wives and their wallets and their Kodaks. Buddhist monks gathered up their bodies. I thought that was so amazing. But I lost the poem I wrote and I never could bring the sucker back.”

“Sure,” Rowan said. “Your Fall of Capitalism poem. I don’t want that one. I want the one you wrote for me.”

“God,” Smart said, “if I sit down I’ll never be able to stand up. How can you take that stuff?”

“Please,” she said, “try and remember. It’s important to me.”

“Rowan,” Smart said, “why don’t I cook for us? We’re letting good beef go to waste.”

“How can you be hungry?” she demanded. “I don’t want to eat.”

“Well,” he said, “maybe I’m not. But we should eat or we’ll get plastered.”

As though she were spiting him, Rowan finished the wine in her glass and poured more for both of them.

“I’ll make you remember,” she said. “I’ll make you remember me. Then you’ll remember my poem.”

She went up to him then and took his hand and kissed it. He put it against her flushed cheek and brushed her straight blond hair.

“My fanciulla del west, ” he said. He looked away from her at the sad greasewood landscape outside. “My cowgirl. My Rowan tree.”

When he sat down breathless on the sofa she nestled beside him.

“I was in Alaska, Rowan. Must have been twenty-five years ago. You were little. I saw these salmon going up the Tanana to spawn. I thought it was so moving.”

“I can see you standing there. Like a big bear.”

He began to cry. “Sorry, kid. I’m coming apart again, I guess.”

She put her arm under his and put his hand on her thigh and stroked it for a moment.

“Don’t you see,” she asked, “how our eyes are just the same?”

“Yeah. Well, see me standing there. In that white night.” With his hand still on her thigh, he leaned his head against the back edge of the sofa and looked at the fake wood panels on the trailer ceiling and tried to recite the poem:

Like elephants, swaying

Straining with the labor of each undulation,

They labor home.

The river is forever swift and young,

Forever renewed, beyond history…

He worked to catch his breath and had another swallow of wine.

But these, elephant-eyed

Under the skirl and whirl and screech of gulls

And swoop of eagles,

Are creatures of time’s wheel.

Under the pale ultra-planetary sky of the white night

I feel for them such love

And, for their cold struggle, such admiration

In my overheated heart.

“I can’t, baby,” he said finally. “Anyway, I don’t think it’s very good.”

“Such love,” she repeated.

“I don’t know what it was about,” he said. “I admired these fish. Being finished, coming home. They had done what they were meant to do. Whereas I never had.” He closed his eyes and put a hand on his chest, under which his heart was racing. “Or maybe it was just about the moment. I don’t know.”

“Such love,” she said.

“When whatever happened between you and me, Rowan … What shouldn’t have, what I shouldn’t have let happen. I was on that tour. I had come apart.”

“I see,” she said.

“And I wanted some comfort and love. I wanted it so much.” He was weeping. He wiped his nose, bearlike.

“And do you now?”

“Yes I do.”

She stood in front of him and took his hands and folded them behind her back. He withdrew them quickly. Rowan tensed and pursed her lips. Her anger frightened him.

“The poem is about us,” she said. When he tried to speak, she interrupted him. “Yes it is, it’s about us.”

He realized that she was trying to kiss him on the mouth.

“This is just drugs,” Smart said. He stood up, trying to escape. It was like a dream, suggesting something that had happened once before in another world. “John will be back. What will he think of you?”

She laughed and pushed herself against him, standing on tiptoes in her boots, pressing her face into his.

“John will not be back, Will. John is a Wind River Shoshone and his attitude is from that culture and believe me it’s peculiar to that culture. Besides, he’s a passive-aggressive.”

Smart collapsed back on the miniature sofa. She kept trying to kiss him, fondling him, at his belt, his clothes.

“Rowan,” he said, “my sweet. I’m lonely. I wanted to see you.”

“But you don’t want me.”

“Oh yes,” Smart said, “I want you. I want all the things we didn’t have. I do. But I can’t make them happen, can I?”

“But you don’t want me,” she said.

“Listen,” he said, “you were just a pretty girl.”

“Then we shouldn’t have done it before, should we?” Rowan said. She fixed him with the mirror of his eyes. “Then you never should have done it and I never should have gone for it. But I did. You’re the only one I want. Ever since then. All my life maybe.”

“I was drunk,” Smart pleaded. “I was on drugs. I was certifiable. I took some comfort. I was desperate.”

“Then,” she said, “what about me?”

“We fucked up, baby. It happens.”

She turned on him with such violence that he jumped. She was a big girl, strong as he had been, only an inch or so shorter than his six two. She resembled him so much.

“You like me like this. I know you do. I’ve been waiting for you all day.”

“God,” he said. “You’re still a child, aren’t you?”

He put out his hands and took her by hers and sat her down beside him.

“This is how it was, baby. I hardly knew you. It was as though you weren’t my daughter.” It was hard to face her grieving, crazy eyes. “You were the most gorgeous creature I had ever seen.” He laughed, against his will. “You were so adoring. I couldn’t help it.” He tried to embrace her but she avoided his embrace.

“I’m the only one of your children,” she said, “who has your eyes. We’re the same.”

“Just a beautiful young girl,” Smart was saying. And after a fashion he remembered or thought he remembered how it might have happened. As beautiful a young girl as he had ever seen. So young and gorgeous and besotted with him. What a fool he must have been, a weak, self-indulgent drunk. In those days, when he had let it happen, when he had done it, he had thought he could do no wrong. He had actually complained to friends of being made too much of. God knew what they had secretly thought of that, of him. As if no bills would ever be charged to his account.