Angle of Repose (83 page)

“Ah-ha!” cried Shelly Rasmussen. “You old dickens! Come on now, no secrets from me!”

Leaning over his chair, her great breasts hanging like water-filled balloons inches from his nose, she tried to tear his protecting hands away. He fought her off but she was back at once. He fought her off again, and she got hold of the tube and pulled, so that he had to spread his hands to cover his emerging organ, yanked like a fish out of water. “Ha ha!” she said. “You old dickens, look at that!”

To his horror, he felt the stump of his leg begin to swell and lift, filling with pleasurable warmth. It rose until it lifted clear out of his lap like a fireplace log, its stitched and cicatriced end red and swollen. He saw Shelly Rasmussen’s admiration. She laughed, softly and hoarsely, and reached again.

“No!” he cried. “No!”

Weakly he pissed down the tube, and at once the great stump subsided, sank, went flabby, collapsed into his lap. Shelly Rasmussen took one disgusted look and grabbed up her turtleneck and left. She didn’t bother to shut the door, and now Ellen Ward stood above him looking down. Her eyes were dark, and their edges were red with crying, she touched the deflated stump with tenderness. “You see?” she said. “It wasn’t right to let
her.
It’s my job.”

Her face was close to his, so close that he could see the mottled coloring of the irises and the smudged skin under the tight curly hair of her brows where she had darkened them. She bent closer still, her mouth tender, her eyes sad. The eyes grew enormous, widened until they filled the whole field of his vision, shutting out the glare of light on white tile, the aseptic porcelain, the blank mirror. Closer and larger grew her eyes until, blurred by proximity, inches from his own, they were the eyes that a lover or a strangler would have seen, bending to his work.

 

That was the dream I woke from half an hour ago, my pajamas soaked with sweat, my bottle full–it was a piss-the-bed dream if I ever had one, but confusingly like a wet dream of adolescence too. It took me, in fact, all of five minutes to persuade myself that it was all a dream, that I had really pissed the bottle full instead of having an emission, that none of those women had been there, that Ada had had no heart attack, that Shelly had not come in brawling like a drunken logger to rape me in my bath. It made me think, I tell you. I am not so silly as to believe that what I dream about other people represents some sort of veiled or occult truth about them, but neither am I so stupid as to reject the fact that it represents some occult truth about
me.

For a while I lay here feeling pretty bleak–old, washed-up, helpless, and alone. It was as black as a coalmine, there was no sound through the open window, not the slightest threshing or singing of the pines. Then I heard a diesel coming on the freeway, taking a full-tilt run at the hill. In my mind I could see it charging up that empty highway like Malory’s Blatant Beast, its engine snorting and bellowing, its lights glaring off into dark trees and picking up the curve of white lines, a blue cone of flame riding six inches above its exhaust stack, its song full of exultant power. I listened to it and felt the little hairs rise on the back of my neck, tickling me where my head met the pillow.

Then the inevitable. The song of power weakened by an almost imperceptible amount, and no sooner had that sound of effort come into it than the tone changed, went down a full third, as the driver shifted. Still powerful, still resistless, the thing came bellowing on, and then its tone dropped again, and almost immediately a third time. Something was out of it already; confidence was out of it. I could imagine the driver, a midget up in the dim cab, intent over his web of gears, three sticks of them, watching the speedometer and the steepening road and the cone of fire above his stack, and tilting his ear to the moment when the triumphant howl of his beast began to waver or shrink. Then the foot, the hand, and for a few seconds, a half minute, the confident song of power again, but lower, deeper, less excited and more determined. Down again where the grade stiffened past Grass Valley, and then down, down, down, three different tones, and finally there it was at the dutiful bass growl that would take it all the way over the range, and even that receding, losing itself among the pines.

I reached the microphone off the bed table and told my dream onto tape, for whatever it may be worth, and now I lie here on my back, wide awake, cold from my sweating, the plastic microphone lying against my upper lip and my thumb on the switch, and wonder if there is anything I want to say to myself.

“What do you mean, ‘Angle of Repose?” she asked me when I dreamed we were talking about Grandmother’s life, and I said it was the angle at which a man or woman finally lies down. I suppose it is; and yet it was not that that I hoped to find when I began to pry around in Grandmother’s life. I thought when I began, and still think, that there was another angle in all those years when she was growing old and older and very old, and Grandfather was matching her year for year, a separate line that did not intersect with hers. They were vertical people, they lived by pride, and it is only by the ocular illusion of perspective that they can be said to have met. But he had not been dead two months when she lay down and died too, and that may indicate that at that absolute vanishing point they did intersect. They had intersected for years, for more than he especially would ever admit.

There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance, said the Ellen Ward of my dream, that woman I hate and fear. I am sure she meant some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning-together from the vertical which produces the false arch. For lack of a keystone, the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone.

It will do to think about. For though Ellen Ward was not here this afternoon and evening, I am sure she will be here, or her representatives will be here, sooner or later. If she does not come of her own volition, or at Rodman’s urging, I can even conceive, in this slack hour, that I might send for her. Could I? Would I?

Wisdom, I said oh so glibly the other day when I was pontificating on Shelly’s confusions, is knowing what you have to accept. In this not-quite-quiet darkness, while the diesel breaks its heart more and more faintly on the mountain grade, I lie wondering if I am man enough to be a bigger man than my grandfather.

The sequel to the National Book Award-winning
Spectator Bird finds
Joe Allston and his wife in California, scarred by the senseless death of their son and baffled by the engulfing chaos of the 1960s.

ISBN 0-14-015441-8

 

Stegner’s Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece–the story of a century in the life of an American family and America itself.

 

A fascinating look at the old American West and the man who prophetically warned against the dangers of settling it.

ISBN
0-14-015994-0

 

Stegner portrays more than thirty years in the life of the Mason family in this harrowing saga of people trying to survive during the lean years of the early twentieth century.

ISBN
0-14-013939-7

 

Thirty-one stories, written over half a century, demonstrate why Stegner is acclaimed as one of America’s master storytellers.

 

This story of the remarkable friendship between the Langs and the Morgans explores such things as writing for money, solid marriages, and academic promotions.

 

Blending fact with fiction, Stegner creates a full-bodied portrait of Joe Hill, the Wobbly labor organizer who became a legend after he was executed for murder in 1915.

 

Bruce Mason returns to Salt Lake City not to perform the perfunctory arrangements for his aunt’s funeral but to exorcise the ghosts of his past.

ISBN 0-14-026673-9
REMEMBERING LAUGHTER

In the novel that marked his literary debut, Stegner depicts the dramatic, moving story of an Iowa farm wife whose spirit is tested by a series of events as cruel and inevitable as the endless prairie winters.

 

Sabrina Castro follows a downward spiral of moral disintegration as she wallows in regret over her dissatisfaction with her older and successful husband.

 

Essays, memoirs, letters, and speeches, written over a period of twenty-five years, which expound upon the rapid changes in the West’s cultural and natural heritage.

 

Stegner’s National Book Award–winning novel portrays retired literary agent Joe Allston, who passes through life as a spectator–until he rediscovers the journals of a trip he took to his mother’s birthplace years before.

ISBN 0-14-013940-0

 

Living and Writing in the West

Sixteen brilliant essays about the people, the land, and the art of the American West.

ISBN 0-14-017402-8

 

A History, a Story, and a Memory
of
the Last Plains Frontier

Introduction by Page
Stegner

In a recollection of his boyhood in southern Saskatchewan, Stegner creates a wise and enduring portrait of a pioneer community existing on the verge of the modern world.

ISBN
0-14-118501-5

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