Gryphon: New and Selected Stories

Surprised by Joy

1

BECAUSE THEIR PSYCHIATRIST had recommended it, they both began to keep journals. Jeremy’s was Woolworth-stationery drab, and Harriet’s was sea-blue with the title “A Blank Book” printed in gold script in the upper right-hand corner. Thinking that pleasant images would relieve the tone of what was to follow, she sketched a wren in flight, a Victorian lamppost, and an ash tree on the first page. Then she changed her mind and blacked the drawings out. There weren’t any drawings in the book Jeremy used. His writing was tiny and defiant. His first sentence, which was undated, read: “Benson told us it would help if we wrote down our thoughts, but I don’t have any thoughts, and besides, the fact is that I don’t feel like writing a goddamn thing.” That was the end of the first entry.

One night Jeremy came home and found all the silverware — knives, forks, spoons, gravy bowls, and ladles — lined up according to type on the living-room carpet in front of the Hide-A-Bed sofa. Harriet said she wanted to do an inventory, to make sure the place settings were all present and accounted for. She threatened to count all the dishes, and all the books. A week later when he arrived home she was standing on her head with her legs crossed and her knees positioned against the wall. He put down his briefcase, hung up his coat, and sat in his chair. “So,” he said. “What’s this?”

“An article I read says it helps.” Upside down, she attempted a smile.

“Standing on your head.”

“Yeah. Think about it: the brain under stress needs more blood, the cerebral cortex especially. The article says that when you stand up you feel an instant of physical exhilaration.” She closed her eyes. “The plumber came out this morning. The faucet’s fixed.”

“Physical exhilaration.” He turned away from her to stare out at the street, where two children were roaring by on their Big Wheels.

“They say you’ll feel better.”

“Right. What article did you say this was?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. “It sounds like Parade magazine. How much did the plumber charge? God, I could use a drink. I have the most amazing willpower.” He glanced at her. “Did you cry a lot today?”

“No. Not much. Not like last week. I even did two full baskets of laundry. After lunch, when the plumber was gone, that was hard. For about ten minutes I couldn’t help it and locked myself in the bathroom and then I wrote in the journal. Gretchen called and invited me into her weaving class. Do you think I should? It seems so dull and womanish. How was your day?” She tumbled backward, stood up, and looked at him with an unsteady, experimental smile.

“Do you feel exhilarated?” She shrugged. He said, “I feel the usual. Carrying around the black box.” He rose, went to the kitchen for a beer, and clomped down the stairs to the basement, where he played his clarinet while watching television with the sound off. His music consisted of absentminded riffs in eerie unrelated keys.

They had brought their child home to a plain three-bedroom brick bungalow of the type referred to as a “starter house” for young married couples. Its distinguishing characteristics were those left by the previous owners. Jeremy and Harriet had never had time to redecorate it; as a result, their bedroom was covered with flocked jungle-orange wallpaper, the paint in Harriet’s sewing room was oyster-gray, and the child’s room had been painted blue, with two planets and four constellations mapped out on the ceiling with phosphorus dots and circles. At the time, their child was too little to notice such things: she gurgled at the trees outside and at the birds that sang in the shrubbery below her windowsill.

This child, Ellen, had been born after many difficulties. Harriet had had a series of ovarian cysts. She ovulated irregularly and only when provoked by certain powerful hormonal medications that left her so forgetful that she had to draw up hourly schedules for the day’s tasks. She had the scars to prove that surgical procedures had been used to remove her enlarged ovaries piece by piece. The baby had been in a troublesome position, and Harriet had endured sixteen hours of labor, during which time she thrashed and groaned. Jeremy watched her lying in the hospital gown, his hands pressed against her lower back, while her breathing grew louder, hoarse and rhythmical. Their Lamaze lessons proved to be useless. The lights glared overhead in the prep room and could not be dimmed. In its labors her body heaved as if her reproductive system were choking in its efforts to expel the child. Her obstetrician was out of town on vacation in Puerto Vallarta, so the delivery was finally performed by a resident, a young woman who had a short hairdo and whose purple fingernail polish was visible through her surgical gloves.

The oyster-gray paint and the phosphorus planets in the house suited Ellen, who, when she was old enough to toddle, would point at the stars on the ceiling and wave at them. At this time she could not pronounce her own name and referred to herself as “Ebbo” or, mysteriously, as “Purl.” On a spring morning she climbed from the crib onto the windowsill in pursuit of a chickadee singing outside. Cheered by the sun, Harriet had left the window open to let the breeze in. Ellen pushed herself past the sill and managed to tumble out, breaking the screen. She landed on a soft newly tilled flower bed next to a bush. When Harriet found her, she was tugging at flower shoots and looking pleased with herself. She said, “Purl drop.” She shrugged her right shoulder and smiled.

They latched the screen onto a stronger frame and rushed around the house looking for hazards. They installed a lock on the basement door so she wouldn’t tumble downstairs, and fastened shut the kitchen sink’s lower cabinet so she wouldn’t eat the dishwasher detergent. She lived one day past her third Christmas, when for the first time she knew what a Christmas tree was and could look forward to it with dazed anticipation. On Christmas Day she was buried up to her waist in presents: a knee-high table complete with cups and saucers, finger puppets, a plastic phonograph, a stuffed brown bear that made wheezing sounds, a Swiss music box, a windup train that went around in a small circle, a yellow toy police car with a lady cop inside, and, in her stocking, pieces of candy, gum, a comb, and a red rubber ball her mother had bought at Kiddie Land for twenty-five cents.

On December 26, Jeremy and Harriet were slumped in the basement, watching Edmund Gwenn in Miracle on 34th Street for the eighth or ninth time, while Ellen played upstairs in her room. They went through three commercial breaks before Harriet decided to check on her. She hadn’t been worried because she could hear the phonograph playing a Sesame Street record. Harriet went down the hallway and turned the corner into Ellen’s room. Her daughter was lying on the floor, on her side, her skin blue. She wasn’t breathing. On her forehead was blood next to a bright cut. Harriet’s first thought was that Ellen had somehow been knocked unconscious by an intruder. Then she was shouting for Jeremy, and crying, and touching Ellen’s face with her fingers. She picked her up, pounded her back, and then felt the lump of the red rubber ball that Ellen had put in her mouth and that had lodged in her throat. She squeezed her chest and the ball came up into the child’s mouth.

Jeremy rushed in behind her. He took Ellen away from Harriet and carried her into the living room, her arms hanging down, swinging. He shouted instructions at Harriet. Some made sense; others didn’t. He gave Ellen mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and kept putting his hand against her heart, waiting for a pulse.

Later they understood that Ellen had panicked and had run into the edge of the open closet door. What with the movie and the new phonograph, they hadn’t heard her. The edge of the door wasn’t sharp, but she had run into it so blindly that the collision had dazed her. She had fallen and reached up to her forehead: a small amount of blood had dried on her hands. She had then reached for her stuffed raccoon; her left hand was gripping its leg. She was wearing, for all time, her yellow pajamas. In the living room, waiting for the ambulance, Harriet clutched her own hands. Then she was drinking glass after glass of water in a white waiting room.

Their parents said, oh, they could have another, a child as beautiful as Ellen. Her doctors disagreed. Harriet’s ovaries had been cut away until only a part of one of them remained. In any case, they didn’t want replacements. The idea made no sense. What they thought of day and night was what had happened upstairs while they were watching television. Their imaginations put the scene on a film loop. Guiltily, they watched it until their mental screens began to wash the rest of the past away.

For the next two months they lived hour to hour. Every day became an epic of endurance, in which Harriet sat in chairs. Harriet’s mother called every few days, offering excruciating maternal comfort. There were photographs, snapshots and studio portraits that neither of them could stand to remove. Nature became Harriet’s enemy. She grew to hate the sun and its long, lengthening arcs. When living trees broke open into pink and white blossoms in the spring, Harriet wanted to fling herself against them. She couldn’t remember what it was about life that had ever interested her. The world began a vast and buzzing commentary to keep her in cramps, preoccupied with Ellen, who had now irresistibly become Purl. The grass no longer grew up from the ground but instead stood as a witless metaphor of continuing life. Dishes and silverware upset her, unaccountably. She couldn’t remember who her friends were and did not recognize them on the street. Every night the sky fell conclusively.

Jeremy had his job, but every evening, after seeing about Harriet, he went straight down to the basement where the television set was. He played his clarinet, drank beer, and watched the local news until it was time for dinner. He opened the twist-top beer bottles and drank the beer mechanically, as if acting on orders. After overhearing the music he played, Harriet began to call it “jazz from Mars,” and Jeremy said, yes, that was probably where it came from. He paid attention to things at work; his music could afford to be inattentive.

He came upstairs when dinner was ready. This meal consisted of whatever food Harriet could think of buying and preparing. They didn’t like to go out. They often ate hot dogs and potato salad, or hamburger, or pizza. Jeremy sometimes fell asleep at the dinner table, his head tilted back at the top of the chair, and his mouth open, sucking in breaths. Harriet would drape one of his arms around her neck and lower him to the floor, so he wouldn’t fall off the chair while asleep. They had talked about getting chairs with arms to prevent accidents of this kind; they both assumed they would spend the rest of their lives falling asleep at the table after dinner.

They started seeing Benson, the therapist, because of what happened with the Jehovah’s Witnesses. In mid-May, the doorbell rang just after dinner. Jeremy, who this time was still awake, rose from the table to see who it was. Outside the screen door stood a red-haired man and a small red-haired boy, eight or nine years old, dressed in nearly identical gray coats and bow ties. The father was carrying a copy of Awake! and The Watchtower. The boy held a Bible, a children’s edition with a crude painting of Jesus on the cover. Leaving the screen door shut, Jeremy asked them what they wanted.

“My son would like to read to you,” the man said, glancing down at the boy. “Do you have time to listen for a minute?”

Jeremy said nothing.

Taking this as a sign of agreement, the man nodded at the boy, who pushed his glasses back, opened the Bible, and said, “Psalm forty-three.” He swallowed, looked up at his father, who smiled, then pulled at the red silk bookmark he had inserted at the beginning of the psalm. He cleared his throat. “Give sentence with me, O God,” he read, his finger trailing horizontally along the line of type, his voice quavering, “and defend my cause against the ungodly people; O deliver me from the deceitful and wicked man.” He stumbled over “deceitful.” The boy paused and looked through the screen at Jeremy. Jeremy was watching the boy with the same emptied expression he used when watching television. The boy’s father touched his son on the shoulder and told him to continue. A bird was singing nearby. Jeremy looked up. It was a cardinal on a telephone wire.

“For thou art the God of my strength,” the boy read. “Why hast thou put me from thee? and why go I so heavily, while the enemy oppresseth me?”

For the first time, Jeremy said something. He said, “I don’t believe it. You can’t be doing this.” The father and the boy, however, didn’t hear him. The boy continued.

“O send out thy light and thy truth, that they may lead me, and bring me unto thy holy hill, and to thy dwelling.”

Jeremy said, “Who sent you here?” The father heard what he said, but his only reaction was to squint through the screen to see Jeremy better. He gave off a smell of cheap aftershave.

“And that I may go unto the altar of God,” the boy read, “even unto the God of my joy and gladness; and upon the harp will I give thanks unto thee, O God, my God.”

“You’re contemptible,” Jeremy said, “to use children. That’s a low trick.”

This time both the boy and his father stared in at him. Harriet had appeared and was standing behind Jeremy, pulling at his shirt and whispering instructions to him to thank them and send them on their merry way. The father, however, recovered himself, smiled, pointed at the Bible, and then touched his son on the head, as if pressing a button.

“Why art thou so heavy, O my soul?” the boy read, stuttering slightly. “And why art thou so disquieted within me?”

“Stop it!” Jeremy shouted. “Please stop it! Stop it!” He opened the screen door and walked out to the front stoop so that he was just to the right of the father and his boy. Harriet crossed her arms but otherwise could not or did not move. Jeremy reached up and held on to the man’s lapel. He didn’t grab it but simply put it between his thumb and forefinger. He aimed his words directly into the center of the father’s face. “Who sent you here?” he asked, his words thrown out like stones. “This was no accident. Don’t tell me this was an accident, because I’d hate to think you were lying to me. Someone sent you here. Right? Who? How’d they ever think of using kids?” The bird was still singing, and when Jeremy stopped he heard it again, but hearing it only intensified his anger. “You want to sell me The Watchtower?” he asked, sinking toward inarticulateness. Then he recovered. “You want my money?” He let go of the man’s lapel, reached into his pocket, and threw a handful of nickels and dimes to the ground. “Now go away and leave me alone.”

The stranger was looking at Jeremy, and his mouth was opening. The boy was clutching his father’s coat. One of the dimes was balanced on his left shoe.

“Go home,” Jeremy said, “and never say another word about anything and don’t ever again knock on my door.” Jeremy was a lawyer. When speeches came to him, they came naturally. His face in its rage was as white as paper. He stopped, looked down, and hurriedly kissed the boy on the top of the head. As he straightened up, he said softly, “Don’t mind me.” Then, mobilized, Harriet rushed out onto the stoop and grabbed Jeremy’s hand. She tried smiling.

“You see that my husband’s upset,” she said, pulling at him. “I think you should go now.”

“Yes, all right,” the father mumbled, blinking, taking the Bible from his son and closing it. The air thickened with the smell of his aftershave.

“We’ve had an accident recently,” she explained. “We weren’t prepared.”

The man had his arm around his son’s shoulders. They were starting down the walk to the driveway. “The Bible is a great comfort,” the man said over his shoulder. “A help ever sure.” He stopped to look back. “Trust in God,” he said.

Jeremy made a roaring sound, somewhere between a shout and a bark, as Harriet hauled him back inside.

Benson’s office was lodged on the twentieth floor of a steel-and-glass professional building called the Kelmer Tower. After passing through Benson’s reception area, a space not much larger than a closet, the patient stepped into the main office, where the sessions were actually conducted. It was decorated in therapeutic pastels, mostly off-whites and pale blues. Benson had set up bookshelves, several chairs, and a couch, and had positioned a rubber plant near the window. In front of the chairs was a coffee table on which was placed, not very originally, a small statue of a Minotaur. Benson’s trimmed mustache and otherworldly air made him look like a wine steward. He had been recommended to them by their family doctor, who described Benson as a “very able man.”

Harriet thought Benson was supposed to look interested; instead, he seemed bored to the point of stupefaction. He gave the appearance of thinking of something else: baseball, perhaps, or his golf game. Several times, when Jeremy was struggling to talk, Benson turned his face away and stared out the window. Harriet was afraid that he was going to start humming Irving Berlin songs. Instead, when Jeremy was finished, Benson looked at him and asked, “So. What are you going to do?”

“Do? Do about what?”

“Those feelings you’ve just described.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t think there’s anything you’re supposed to do. It’s a choice. If you want me to recommend something, I can recommend several things, among them that you keep a journal, a sort of record. But you don’t have to.”

“That’s good.” Jeremy looked down at the floor, where the slats of sunlight through the venetian blinds made a picket fence across his feet.

“If you don’t want my help,” Benson said, “you don’t have to have it.”

“At these prices,” Jeremy said, “I want something.”

“Writing in a journal can help,” Benson continued, “because it makes us aware of our minds in a concrete way.” Harriet cringed over Benson’s use of the paternal first-person plural. She looked over at Jeremy. He was gritting his teeth. His jaw muscles were visible in his cheek. “Crying helps,” Benson told them. “And,” Benson said slowly, “it helps to get a change of scene. Once you’re ready and have the strength and resources to do it, you might try going on a trip.”

“Where?” Harriet asked.

“Where?” Benson looked puzzled. “Why, anywhere. Anywhere that doesn’t look like this. Try going to someplace where the scenery is different. Nassau. Florida. Colorado.”

“How about the Himalayas?” Jeremy asked.

“Yes,” Benson said, not bothering to act annoyed. “That would do.”

They both agreed that they might be able to handle it if it weren’t for the dreams. Ellen appeared in them and insisted on talking. In Jeremy’s dreams, she talked about picnics and hot dogs, how she liked the catsup on the opposite side of the wiener from the mustard, and how she insisted on having someone toast the bun. The one sentence Jeremy remembered with total clarity when he woke up was: “Don’t like soggy hot dogs.” He wouldn’t have remembered it if it hadn’t sounded like her.

She was wearing a flannel shirt and jeans in Jeremy’s dream; in Harriet’s she had on a pink jumper that Harriet had bought for her second birthday. Harriet saw that she was outgrowing it. With a corkscrew feeling she saw that Ellen was wearing a small ivory cameo with her own — Harriet’s — profile on it. She was also wearing a rain hat that Harriet couldn’t remember from anywhere, and she was carrying a Polaroid photograph of her parents. Harriet wondered vaguely how dead children get their hands on such pictures. In this dream Harriet was standing on a street corner in a depopulated European city where the shutters were all closed tight over the windows. Near her, overhead in the intersection, the traffic light hanging from a thick cable turned from green to amber to red, red to green, green to amber to red. However, no cars charged through the intersection, and no cars were parked on the street. A rhythmic thud echoed in the streets. Leaves moldered in the gutters. Harriet knew that it was a bad city for tourists. In this place Ellen scampered toward her down the sidewalk, wearing the pink jumper and the rain hat, the photograph in her hand, the cameo pinned near her collar. She smiled. Harriet stumbled toward her, but Ellen held out her hand and said, “Can’t hug.” Harriet asked her about the hat, and Ellen said, “Going to rain.” She looked up at the bleary sky, and, following her lead, so did Harriet. Flocks of birds flew from left to right across it in no special pattern, wing streaks of indecision. Clouds. Harriet gazed down at Ellen. “Are you okay?” Harriet asked. “Who’s taking care of you?” Ellen was picking her nose. “Lots of people,” she said, wiping her finger on her pant leg. “They’re nice.” “Are you all right?” Harriet asked again. Ellen lifted her right shoulder. “Yeah,” she said. She looked up. “Miss you, Mommy,” she said, and, against directions, Harriet bent down to kiss her, wanting the touch of her skin against her lips, but when she reached Ellen’s face, Ellen giggled, looked around quickly as if she were being watched from behind the shuttered windows, reached both hands up to cover her mouth, and disappeared, leaving behind a faint odor of flowers.

“Such dreams are common,” Benson said. “Very very common.”

“Tell me something else,” Harriet said.

“What do you want me to tell you?”

“Something worth all the money we’re paying you.”

“You sound like Jeremy. What would be worth all the money you’re paying me?”

“I have the feeling,” Harriet said, “that you’re playing a very elaborate game with us. And you have more practice at it than we do.”

“If it’s a game,” Benson said, “then I do have more practice. But if it’s not a game, I don’t.” He waited. Harriet stared at the giant leaves of the rubber plant, standing in the early-summer light, torpid and happy. Jeremy hadn’t come with her this time. The Minotaur on the coffee table looked inquisitive. “What is the dream telling you about Ellen, do you think?”

“That she’s all right?”

“Yes.” Benson breathed out. “And what do you have to worry about?”

“Not Ellen.”

“No, not Ellen. The dream doesn’t say to worry about her. So what do you have to worry about?”

“Jeremy. I don’t see him. And I have to worry about getting out of that city.”

“Why should you worry about Jeremy?”

“I don’t know,” Harriet said. “He’s hiding somewhere. I want to get us both out of that city. It gives me the creeps.”

“Yes. And how are you going to get out of that city?”

“Run?” Harriet looked at Benson. “Can I run out of it?”

“If you want to.” Benson thought for a moment. “If you want to, you will run out of it.” He smoothed his tie. “But you can’t run and pull Jeremy at the same time.”

After Jeremy’s dream, she no longer served hot dogs for dinner. That night she was serving pork chops, and when Jeremy came in, still in his vest but with his coat over his shoulder, she was seated at the table, looking through a set of brochures she had picked up at a travel agency down the block from Benson’s office. After Jeremy had showered and changed his clothes, he was about to take a six-pack out of the refrigerator when he looked over at Harriet studying a glossy photograph of tourists riding mules on Molokai. “It says here,” Harriet announced, “in this brochure, that Molokai is the flattest of all the islands and the one with the most agricultural activity.”

“Are you going on a quiz show? Is that it?”

She stood up, walked around the dining-room table, then sat down on the other side. She had a fountain pen in her hand. “Now this,” she said, pointing with the pen to another brochure, “this one is about New Mexico. I’ve never been to New Mexico. You haven’t, either, right?”

“No,” Jeremy said. “Honey, what’s this all about?”

“This,” she said, “is all about what we’re going to do during your two weeks off. I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit here. Want to go to Santa Fe?”

Jeremy seemed itchy, as if he needed to go downstairs and play a few measures of jazz from Mars. “Sure, sure,” he said. He rubbed his eyes suddenly. “Isn’t it sort of hot that time of year?”

She shook her head. “It says here that the elevation’s too high. You can stay in the mountains, and it’s cool at night.”

“Oh.” Then, as an afterthought, he said, “Good.”

She looked up at him. She stood and put her hand on his face, rubbing her thumb against his cheek. “How’s the black box?” she asked. She had recently started to wear glasses and took them off now.

“How’s the sky?” he asked. He turned around. “The black box is just fine. I move around it, but it’s always there, right in front of me. It’s hard to move with that damn thing in your head. I could write a book about it: how to live with a box and be a zombie.” He reached for a beer and carried it to the basement. She could hear the television set being clicked on and the exhalation of the beer bottle when he opened it.

2

The flight to Albuquerque took four hours. Lunch was served halfway through: chicken in sauce. The flight attendants seemed proud of the meal and handed out the plastic trays with smug smiles. Jeremy had a copy of BusinessWeek in his lap, which he dropped to the floor when the food arrived. For much of the four hours he sat back and dozed. Harriet was closer to the window and dutifully looked out whenever the captain announced that they were flying over a landmark.

In Albuquerque they rented a car and drove north toward Taos, the destination Harriet had decided upon, following the advice of the travel agent. They stopped at a motel in Santa Fe for dinner. Appalled by the congestion and traffic, they set out after breakfast the next morning. As they approached the mountains, Jeremy, who was driving, said, “So this is the broom that sweeps the cobwebs away.” He said it softly and with enough irony to make Harriet wince and pull at her eyebrow, a recent nervous tic. The trip, it was now understood, had been her idea. She was responsible. She offered him a stick of gum and turned on the radio. They listened to country-western until the mountains began to interfere with the reception.

In Taos they drove through the city until they found the Best Western motel, pale yellow and built in quasi-adobe style. They took showers and then strolled toward the center of town, holding hands. The light was brilliant and the air seemingly without the humidity and torpor of the Midwest, but this atmosphere also had a kind of emptiness that Jeremy said he wasn’t used to. In the vertical sun they could both feel their hair heating up. Harriet said she wanted a hat, and Jeremy nodded. He sniffed the air. They passed the Kit Carson museum, and Jeremy laughed to himself. “What is it?” Harriet asked, but he only shook his head. At the central square, the streets narrowed and the traffic backed up with motoring tourists. “Lots of art stores here,” Harriet said, in a tone that suggested that Jeremy ought to be interested. She was gazing into a display window at a painting of what appeared to be a stick-figure man with a skull face dancing in a metallic, vulcanized landscape. She saw Jeremy’s reflection in the window. He was peering at the stones on the sidewalk. Then she looked at herself: she was standing halfway in front of Jeremy, partially blocking his view.

They walked through the plaza, and Harriet went into a dime store to buy a hat. Jeremy sat outside on a bench in the square, opposite a hotel that advertised a display of the paintings of D. H. Lawrence, banned in England, so it was claimed. He turned away. An old man, an Indian with shoulder-length gray hair, was crossing the plaza in front of him, murmuring an atonal chant. The tourists stepped aside to let the man pass. Jeremy glanced at the tree overhead, in whose shade he was sitting. He could not identify it. He exhaled and examined his watch angrily. He gazed down at the second hand circling the dial face once, then twice. He knew Harriet was approaching when he saw out of the corner of his eye her white cotton pants and her feet in their sandals.

“Do you like it?” she asked. He looked up. She had bought a yellow cap with a visor and the word “Taos” sewn into it. She was smiling, modeling for him.

“Very nice,” he said. She sat down next to him and squeezed his arm. “What do people do in this town?” he asked. “Look at vapor trails all day?”

“They walk around,” she said. “They buy things.” She saw a couple dragging a protesting child into an art gallery. “They bully their kids.” She paused, then went on, “They eat.” She pointed to a restaurant on the east side of the square with a balcony that looked down at the commerce below. “Hungry?” He shrugged. “I sure am,” she said. She took his hand and led him across the square into the archway underneath the restaurant. There she stopped, turned, and put her arms around him, leaning against him. She felt the sweat of his back against her palms. “I’m so sorry,” she said. Then they went up the stairs and had lunch, two margaritas each and enchiladas in hot sauce. Sweating and drowsy, they strolled back to the motel, not speaking.

They left the curtains of the front window open an inch or so when they made love that afternoon. From the bed they could see occasionally a thin strip of someone walking past. They made love to fill time, with an air of detachment, while the television set stayed on, showing a Lana Turner movie in which everyone’s face was green at the edges and pink at the center. Jeremy and Harriet touched with the pleasure of being close to one familiar object in a setting crowded with strangers. Harriet reached her orgasm with her usual spasms of trembling, and when she cried out he lowered his head to the pillow on her right side, where he wouldn’t see her face.

Thus began the pattern of the next three days: desultory shopping for knickknacks in the morning, followed by lunch, lovemaking, and naps through the afternoon, during which time it usually rained for an hour or so. During their shopping trips they didn’t buy very much: Jeremy said the art was mythic and lugubrious, and Harriet didn’t like pottery. Jeremy bought a flashlight, in case, he said, the power went out, and Harriet purchased a key chain. All three days they went into the same restaurant at the same time and ordered the same meal, explaining to themselves that they didn’t care to experiment with exotic regional food. On the third afternoon of this they woke up from their naps at about the same time with the totally clear unspoken understanding that they could not spend another day — or perhaps even another hour — in this manner.

Jeremy announced the problem by asking, “What do we do tomorrow?”

Harriet kicked her way out of bed and walked over to the television, on top of which she had placed a guide to the Southwest. “Well,” she said, opening it up, “there are sights around here. We haven’t been into the mountains north of here. There’s a Kiowa Indian pueblo just a mile away. There’s a place called Arroyo Seco near here and—”

“What’s that?”

“It means Dry Gulch.” She waited. “There’s the Taos Gorge Bridge.” Jeremy shook his head quickly. “The D. H. Lawrence shrine is thirty minutes from here, and so is the Millicent A. Rogers Memorial Museum. There are, it says here, some trout streams. If it were winter, we could go skiing.”

“It’s summer,” Jeremy said, closing his eyes and pulling the sheet up. “We can’t ski. What about this shrine?”

She put the book on the bed near Jeremy and read the entry. “It says that Lawrence lived for eighteen months up there, and they’ve preserved his ranch. When he died, they brought his ashes back and there’s a shrine or something. They call it a shrine. I’m only telling you what the book says.”

“D. H. Lawrence?” Jeremy asked sleepily.

“You know,” Harriet said. “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”

“Yes, I know.” He smiled. “It wasn’t the books I was asking about, it was the quality of the books, and therefore the necessity of making the trip.”

“All I know is that it’s visitable,” she said, “and it’s off State Highway Three, and it’s something to do.”

“Okay. I don’t care what damn highway it’s on,” Jeremy said, reaching for the book and throwing it across the room. “Let’s at least get into the car and go somewhere.”

After breakfast they drove in the rental car out of town toward the Taos ski valley. They reached it after driving up fifteen miles of winding road through the mountains, following a stream of snow runoff, along which they counted a dozen fishermen. When they reached the valley, they admired the Sangre de Cristo Mountains but agreed it was summer and there was nothing to do in such a place. Neither blamed the other for acting upon an unproductive idea. They returned to the car and retraced their steps to the highway, which they followed for another fifteen miles until they reached the turn for the D. H. Lawrence shrine on Kiowa Ranch Road. Jeremy stopped the car on the shoulder. “Well?” he asked.

“Why do we have to decide about everything?” Harriet said, looking straight ahead. “Why can’t we just do it?”

He accelerated up the unpaved road, which climbed toward a plateau hidden in the mountains. They passed several farms where cattle were grazing on the thin grasses. The light made the land look varnished; even with sunglasses, Harriet squinted at the shimmering heat waves rising from the gravel.

Jeremy said, “What’s here?”

“I told you. Anyhow, the description isn’t much good. We’ll find out. Maybe they’ll have a tour of his inner sanctum or have his Nobel Prize up in a frame. The book says they have his actual typewriter.”

Jeremy coughed. “He never won the Nobel Prize.” Harriet looked over at him and noticed that his face was losing its internal structure and becoming puffy. Grief had added five years to his appearance. She saw, with disbelief, a new crease on his neck. Turning away, she glanced up at the sky: a hawk, cirrus clouds. The air conditioner was blowing a stream of cool air on her knees. Her gums ached.

“Only two more miles,” Jeremy said, beginning now to hunch over the wheel slightly.

“I don’t like this draft,” she said, reaching over to snap off the air conditioner. She cranked down the window and let the breeze tangle her hair. They were still going uphill and had reached, a sign said, an elevation of nine thousand feet. Jeremy hummed Martian jazz as he drove, tapping the steering wheel. The little dirt road went past an open gate, then cut in two, one fork going toward a conference center indicated by a road marker, the other toward the house and shrine. They came to a clearing. In front of them stood a two-story house looking a bit like an English country cottage, surrounded by a white picket fence, with a tire swing in the backyard, beyond which two horses were grazing. They were alone: there were no other cars in sight. Jeremy went up to the door of the house and knocked. A dog began barking angrily from inside, as if the knocks had interrupted its nap. “Look at this,” Harriet said.

She had walked a few steps and was looking in the direction they had come from; in the clear air they could see down the mountain and across the valley for a distance of fifty miles or so. “It’s beautiful,” she said. Jeremy appeared from behind her, shielding his eyes although the sun was behind him. “What’re you doing that for?” she asked.

“You have dark glasses. I don’t.”

“Where’s the shrine?” she asked. “I don’t see it anywhere.”

“You have to turn around. Look.” He pointed to the picket fence. At its north corner there was a sign that Harriet had missed.

SHRINE

“That’s very quaint,” she said. “And what’s this?” She walked toward the fence and picked a child’s mitten off one of the posts. Mickey Mouse’s face was printed on the front of the mitten, and one of his arms reached up over the thumb. She began laughing. “It doesn’t say anything about Mickey Mouse in Fodor’s. Do you think he’s part of the shrine?”

Jeremy didn’t answer. He had already started out ahead of her on a path indicated by the black pointing finger. Harriet followed him, panting from the altitude and the blistering heat, feeling her back begin to sweat as the light rained down on it. She felt the light on her legs and inside her head, on her eardrums. The path turned to the right and began a series of narrowing zigzags going up the side of a hill at the top of which stood the shrine, a small white boxlike building that, as they approached it, resembled a chapel, a mausoleum, or both. A granite phoenix glowered at the apex of the roof.

“The door’s open,” Jeremy said, twenty feet ahead of her, “and nobody’s here.” He was wearing heavy jeans, and his blue shirt was soaked with two wings of sweat. Harriet could hear the rhythmic pant of his breathing.

“Are there snakes out here?” she asked. “I hate snakes.”

“Not in the shrine,” he said. “I don’t see any.”

“What do you see?”

“A visitors’ register.” He had reached the door and had stepped inside. Then he came back out.

She was still ten feet away. “There must be more. You can’t have a shrine without something in it.”

“Well, there’s this white thing outside,” he said breathlessly. “Looks like a burial stone.” She was now standing next to him. “Yes. This is where his wife is buried.” They both looked at it. A small picture of Frieda was bolted into the stone.

“Well,” Jeremy said, “now for the shrine.” They shuffled inside. At the back was a small stained-glass window, a representation of the sun, thick literalized rays burning out from its center. To their left the visitors’ register lay open on a high desk, and above it in a display case three graying documents asserted that the ashes stored here were authentically those of D. H. Lawrence, the author. The chapel’s interior smelled of sage and cement. At the far side of the shrine, six feet away, was a roped-off area, and at the back an approximation of an altar, at whose base was a granite block with the letters DHL carved on it. “This is it?” Jeremy asked. “No wonder no one’s here.”

Harriet felt giddy from the altitude. “Should we pray?” she asked, but before Jeremy could answer, she said, “Well, good for him. He got himself a fine shrine. Maybe he deserves it. God damn, it’s hot in here.” She turned around and walked outside, still laughing in a broken series of almost inaudible chuckles. When she was back in the sun, she pointed her finger the way the sign had indicated and said, “Shrine.”

Jeremy stepped close to her, and they both looked again at the mountains in the west. “I used to read him in college,” Harriet said, “and in high school I had a copy of The Rainbow I hid under my pillow where my mother wouldn’t find it. Jesus, it must be ninety-five degrees.” She looked suddenly at Jeremy, sweat dripping into her eyes. “I used to have a lot of fantasies when I was a teenager,” she said. He was wiping his face with a handkerchief. “Do you see anyone?” she asked.

“Do I see anybody? No. We would’ve heard a car coming up the road. Why?”

“Because I’m hot. I feel like doing something,” Harriet said. “I mean, here we are at the D. H. Lawrence shrine.” She was unbuttoning her blouse. “I just thought of this,” she said, beginning to laugh again. She put her blouse on the ground and quickly unhooked her bra, dropping it on top of the blouse. “There,” she said, sighing. “Now that’s better.” She turned to face the mountains. When Jeremy didn’t say anything, she swung around to look at him. He was staring at her, at the brown circles of her nipples, and his face seemed stricken. She reached over and took his hand. “Oh, Jay, sweetie,” she said, “no one will see us. Honey. What is it? Do you want me to get dressed?”

“That’s not it.” He was staring at her, as if she were not his wife.

“What? What is it?”

“You’re free of it.” He wiped his forehead.

“What?”

“You’re free of it. You’re leaving me alone here.”

“Alone? Alone in what?”

“You know perfectly damn well,” he said. “I’m alone back here.” He tapped his head. “I don’t know how you did it, but you did it. You broke free. You’re gone.” He bent down. “You don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“Yes, I do.” She put her bra and blouse back on and turned toward him again. His face was a mixture of agony and rage, but in the huge sunlight these emotions diminished to small vestigial puffs of feeling. “It’s a path,” she said. “And then you’re surprised. You get out. It’ll happen to you. You’ll see. Honestly.”

She could see his legs shaking. His face was a barren but expressive landscape. “Okay,” he said. “Talk all you want. I was just thinking …” He didn’t finish the sentence.

“You’ll be all right,” she said, stroking his back.

“I don’t want to be all right!” he said, his voice rising, a horrible smile appearing on his face: it was a devil’s face, Harriet saw, and it was radiant and calm. Sweat poured off his forehead, and his skin had started to flush pink. “It’s my pleasure not to be all right. Do you see that? My pleasure.”

She wiped her hands on her cotton pants. A stain appeared, then vanished. “You want that? You want to be back there by yourself?”

“Yeah.” He nodded. “You bet. I feel like an explorer. I feel like a fucking pioneer.” He gave each one of the words a separate emphasis. Meanwhile, he had separated himself from her and was now tilting his head up toward the sky, letting the sun shine on his closed eyelids.

She looked at him. In the midst of the sunlight he was hugging his darkness. She stepped down the zigzag path to the car, leaving him there, but he followed her. Once they were both in the car, the dog inside the ranch house began its frantic barking, but it stopped after a few seconds. She took Jeremy’s hand and scanned the clouds in the west, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the east, trying to see the sky, the beckoning clouds, the way he did, but she couldn’t. All she could see was the land stretched out in front of her, and, far in the distance, fifty miles away, a few thunderheads and a narrow curtain of rain, so thin that the light passed straight through it.