E. Doctorow: Loon Lake

She thought of it like cooking or changing the baby, a responsibility of domestic life. I wanted to awaken her surprise her but I was in no hurry. I enjoyed her the way she was. One morning with the light showing the streaks in the window shade I studied her face as she lay in my arms and suddenly her eyes flew open and she stared at me fearfully but not moving in that second or two before she remembered where she was who she was who I was. She drew a sharp breath and her green eyes swam with life. I hugged her and decided I loved her. I put her on her back and made love to her and took my time about it and detected a degree of thought or contemplation in her before the thing was done and she jumped out of bed to see to her baby.

Ahead of us on the road each morning a lowering sky, I felt under it as under a billowing tent as far as the eye could see. The roads became straighter, the land flattened out. No snow now, what blew across the land was a gritty red dust that shimmered on the road in the sun in rainbows of iridescence. Also accreting spindly balls of desert rubbish bouncing over the rocks and blowing up against the fences like creatures watching us go by. We went through one-street towns with red brick feed stores and tractors parked in the unpaved streets. We passed foreclosed farms with notices slapped on the fenceposts like circus bills. The towns were less frequent. There were no rivers creeks mountains trees, just this rocky flatland. But one day Sandy yelled to stop the truck. I pulled over. She thrust the baby in my hands and jumped down from the cab and ran back along the ditch. I watched her in the mirror. She came back with a sprig of tiny blue flowers, she was so happy, she tied them with a string and hung them from the sun visor.

The desert didn’t alarm her. She had grown up in the mountains but country was country and she knew its rules and regulations. She knew the names of snakes and birds and pointed out the dry beds of creeks. One day the truck broke down in the middle of nowhere and she turned all around with her hand shading her eyes wise Indian maid and figured where to get help by the way the land was fenced. I remember that. We found a ranch about three miles down a dirt road intersecting the road we were on, just as she predicted.

But it was slow going, I began to think we were strung between outposts of civilization, the shadow range of mountains that cheered me when I first saw it one late afternoon seemed each new day as far away on the windshield. I didn’t know what we would do in California but I knew it would take as much money as we could save to do it with. I came awake at night and wondered what I had in mind. The truth was I had no ambition, no ideas, no true desire or hope for anything. I was aware in the darkness of the forced character of my affections. I’d find myself angry at Sandy. I liked to surprise her in her sleep and be in her before her body could respond to make it easier. She would come awake gasping but throw her arms around me and hold on for dear life.

One evening, trying to do something about the way I felt, I found a reasonably good roadside café and we had steaks and beans and red wine. There were candles in little red glasses on the table.

“Clara told me about you,” Sandy said.

“What?”

“Oh, long before I dreamed anything like this.”

“What did she say?”

“Just that she was sweet on you. You know. The way girls talk.”

“Yeah, well, I was sweet on her too.”

“I thought you was married. I thought she was your wife!”

“Yeah, well, she’d be anything you wanted if you wanted it badly enough.”

A particularly cold day, with the enormous blue sky turned almost white, we saw a man and a woman and a boy at the side of the road beside their old Packard touring car. I pulled up. Their gears were locked. A decision was made that the man would remain with the car and its heavy freight of steamer trunks and crates. He wrapped a scarf around his head and folded his arms and sat down on his running board and his family got up in the truck with us to ride to the next town. The woman must have been in her forties. She wore a dusty black coat with a fur collar half rubbed away and a tired felt hat that was nevertheless set off at a smart angle. She said her husband was a pharmacist. He had had his own store back in Wilmington, Delaware. Now they were on their way to San Diego, where they hoped to make a new start. “A new start!” Sandy said. “Why, that’s what we’re doing!”

When we had dropped them I said, “What do you mean we’re making a new start?”

“What?”

“All they want is to open another drugstore. They want to do what they’ve always done. That’s what a new start means.”

“Well, I was just chattin with that lady.”

“You think I want a job in an automobile factory? Or is it your new start you’re talking about? I mean this furniture of yours we’re dragging three thousand miles: Is that your new start? So you can find some rooms and put the furniture in them just the way you had it in Jacktown? That kind of new start?”

“I don’t know why you’re so put out with me.”

“Because if that’s what you mean, say so. Let’s settle it here and now. I’m not your husband and even if I was I wouldn’t make my living as a stoolpigeon.”

She looked at me now in bewilderment, and holding her baby to her, sat as far from me as she could get. She stared out the windshield with her chin on the baby’s head. God knows her remark was innocent enough. But the confidence behind it I found irritating — as if living and traveling with her I must fit her preconceptions. I suppose what really bothered me was the strength of character behind this. I felt if she didn’t even know what she was doing as she did it, I couldn’t hope to change her.

Then of course in a few miles Joe was sorry, he apologized, which encouraged her to sulk and afterward to regain her good cheer.

Sandy could have said he was traveling on her money. But it never occurred to her. It occurred to him, however — he was not unaware of his talent for using other people’s money, he was not unaware of his attraction to other men’s wives, he was not unmindful that his life since leaving Paterson had been a picaresque of other men’s money and other men’s women, who in hell was he to get righteously independent with anyone? This kid was giving him her life everything she owned and all he could do was kick her in the ass for it.

He wondered seriously if love wasn’t a feeling at all but a simple characterless state of shared isolation. If you were alone with a woman your feelings might change from moment to moment but the circumstance of your shared fate did not change. Maybe that’s where the love was, in the combined circumstance. This was not the Penfield view but it could be argued. Joe looked at other couples old and young and wondered what they saw in each other, working their little businesses, or pushing their jalopies west, or eating their meals together or holding the hands of a child between them. Maybe all the world’s pairs, dreary and toothless and stumbling drunk, or picking at garbage pails or waiting on the street for a flop knew about love as, say, he and Clara Lukaćs never had. They knew it could incorporate passion or prim distaste, it might be joyous or full of rage, it might carry extreme concern of any kind, or unconcern, but it was presumed to survive challenge. All it was, was a kind of neutral constancy. Sandy knew it! You just made the decision, all you needed to do was decide to have it and love was yours. Nothing grand, nothing monumental, and not a prison either, but a sort of sturdy structure of outlook, one that wouldn’t break under the weight of ideas and longing feelings terrors visions and the world’s awful mordant surprises.