Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
He wondered if the boy had lost the way. They had started out
on a driven track half-covered with small noisy stones; but it
faded, was found again for half a mile, where it followed the
rim of a dry wash, and then died away among the windswept
contours and little dusty bushes of the desert. The pick-up
roared on across long inclines of grey dirt. The boy kept his
foot down and stared straight ahead, as if unable to consider
the possibilities that lay to left and right. He was almost
smiling Robin couldn't decide if from nerves or from the pleasure a
local person has in scaring and disorienting a stranger. An
empty bottle rolled and clinked against the metal supports of
the bench-seat. Robin sat with his forearm braced in the open
window, and grunted involuntarily at each bump and drop:
academic research had never been so wayward or so physical.
He found that he was smiling too, and that he was not only
shaken but happy.
They reached a low crest and there beneath them spread
thirty or forty miles of silvery waste, crossed by the quick
eclipses of windy sunlight; the wide plain was rifted with
gulleys and dry riverbeds, and climbed distantly to mountains
which were radiant towers in the west and unguessable obscurities
in the blackly shadowed south. This was what he wanted
to see: it was what had brought a rich man and his architect
here half a century ago. It wasn't a terrain that could be
ploughed or grazed or humbled by use: nothing could have
altered unless by the gradual violence of winds and storm rains.
The pick-up slowed, and Robin imagined that even his guide,
who had surely seen nothing but this country all his life, was
responding to its magic or its admonishment.
`What are those mountains called?' he shouted over the churning
of the engine and the racket of stones and grit against the
bottom of the vehicle. The boy looked stoopingly across, and
out beyond Robin at the morning-bright bluffs to the west. He
nodded several times, perhaps he had only understood the
word mountains, or was hesitating before so many mountains,
with so many names.
Suddenly the cab was full of sand. The boy gave a wordless
shout and the pick-up pitched sideways, the windscreen was
dark with sliding sand, sand pumped through the open
windows in a pelting rattle and in a moment was heavy in their
laps and round their feet. Robin squeezed his eyes shut on the
sting of it, and felt the boy's arm in his side, scrabbling for
the gear-shift. He gulped a breath and was choking and spitting
out sand, while the van stood still, or was it vaguely sliding.
Then the engine rose to a scream, the sand came alive again,
and they were lurching upwards and ahead in a panic of
burning revs. Robin thought they wouldn't do it, weighed
down by the element they were struggling with. He wondered
if the sand was bottomless.
When they were free of it they shot forward across the slope,
as if the racing machinery couldn't be reined in; or as if the
invisible pit they had blundered into might follow after them,
like a hungry and offended spirit of the place, clothed in a
spiralling storm.
There wasn't much to see, and as Robin dawdled reverently
around with his camera and his notebook he was unsure if the
scare in the car had made the destination more preciously
perilous or more evidently not worth the effort. Much of the
house had been built of wood, marked grey and rose in Wright's
insouciant sketches, or of canvas, which was useless against
the freezing desert nights, and equally combustible. All that
remained standing, at the end of a terrace of fissured concrete,
was the rough bulk of the hearth and the chimney-stack, a
little tower of boulders, the bluntly symbolic heart of the place.
Robin knelt among ashes, paper rubbish, a half-burnt creosote-bush,
and squinted up the open flue at the square of bright
eggshell. People had been here, hundreds probably, scholars
and students, and the unfriendly reflective men who lived in
the spell of the desert. He touched the blackened stones and
thought of other lonely places roofless cottages on Welsh
mountains, pissed-in pillboxes squatting in the fields at home;
and there was something of the outpost in this ruined site, of
duty and homesickness. But then he straightened up and saw
the view.
Away to the right, the boy was bailing sand out of the
footwells of the car; he did it slowly, with an air of resentment
at his own folly, and doubtless respect for the heat. Nothing
was worth rushing except driving itself, of course, unlicensed,
off-road: that was the thrill for a teenage Indian with a father
drunk and hostile at nine in the morning. Robin felt the constraints
of the boy's silence drop away: the day was balanced
between the upland cool in which it had started and the steeper
heat to come. He took off his shirt, and felt deliciously both
hot and cold at the same time. He clambered up and away
from the site, among shaly hillocks, and chose a place to sit.
He had a copy of Wright's plans in his knapsack, and a
single photo of the finished house, leached of detail by sunlight
and reproduction a copy of a copy of a copy. From here he
could see the vestigial triangle of the layout, and, matching a
distant mountain with a grey shadow in the picture, admire
the defiant caprice of the project. He hoped he had shown a
similar spirit in coming here.
He had never seen a desert before, nothing much emptier
than the cropped Dorset heaths of his childhood, with clumps
of pine, and the broom-pods popping like pistol-caps in the
June heat; nothing much grander than Snowdon or Sca Fell.
He liked it, the warm smell of the sagebrush, and the bitter-green
herblike plants that grew sparsely under the rocks. The
place was desolate but the air was benign, and had high flickers
of birdsong in it what were they, springing upwards from the
shelter of bushes? Not larks. The word fieldfare came sheepishly
to mind.
He was twenty-three, and it was his first time in America.
He found the company of Americans made him stiff and
formal, though these were qualities he was unaware of in
himself before. His vocabulary felt embarrassingly large and
accurate, though in conversation he had a recurrent sense of
inarticulacy. He was doing research for a doctoral thesis, but
knew he was ignorant of the simplest things in the landscape
he had come, in part, to see. Still, he anticipated discovery;
as he sat frowning into the sun, with little breezes curling over
his naked back, he felt he had Americas in him he had never
been so alert or so free.
A little way off from the concrete standing he scuffed over
something white and squatted down to pick it out of the dust.
It was a rough piece of sanitary porcelain, about three inches
square, with the letters SEMPE on it, perhaps part of SEMPER,
forever. He smiled at that, and because there was also an
architect called Semper, so very different from Frank Lloyd
Wright. With a quick suppression of ethical doubt, he opened
his knapsack and dropped it in.
Back at the pick-up his driver sprawled behind the open
passenger-door and smoked a cigarette. His blue T-shirt was
dark with sweat, and his cheeks were red in his wide brown
face. He raised his eyebrows as if to say `All done?', and Robin
said, `Did you get it cleaned out?'
The boy flicked away the stub and stood up, shrugging his
head from side to side and tugging up his belt. The open bed
of the vehicle wouldn't have passed any very exacting inspection,
but it was probably good enough for this dusty country.
Robin assumed that no worse damage had been done. `Go
back,' said the boy, in a way that was both a question and its
answer, but also held a hint of a rebuff. Robin was faintly hurt
that, even after the fright they'd shared, his companion was
so uncompanionable; he hardened himself against him, and
protected his elation, which in some novel way sprang both
from the visionary light of the place and from a thrilled muscular
sense of himself. And a little bit, of course, from having
walked a site that was sacred at least to one of them. `Yes,
let's go,' he said airily, and turned for a last attempt at consuming
the view. The distances had begun their delusory
oscillations, He felt he wanted to store up the light inside him.
The black fabric of the seat was hot and Robin spread his
shirt over it. The car crept off up the hillside: he thought the
return journey might be more circumspect. For five minutes or
so they trundled across what still seemed to him unmarked
territory, unrecognisable from the outward ride. The boy continued
to stare narrowly ahead; then Robin realised he was
looking at him occasional glances, meant to be noticed. He
half-turned in his seat, with a smile that was ready to absorb
sarcasm, but could warm into friendship if that was allowed.
`So you big strong-guy.' His driver's social opener, impossible
to have predicted. And was it mocking or admiring after all?
Robin looked down at himself. In England, in Cambridge,
his friends made jokes about his natural pleasure in pulling his
clothes off jokes that he saw as admissions of envy and covert
excitement. But here in the desert maybe his unthinking health
and handsomeness struck a vulgar touristic note?
He explained himself solemnly: `I do a lot of rowing, actually.
And I play rugby' and then saw that neither term had the
remotest meaning here. He mimed a couple of pulls on the oars,
and then said, `Rugby is like American football, of course. In
a way.'
The pick-up rattled on, tilted on a long curving hillside so
that he slid a little towards the boy. He was wondering how
to salvage and further the conversation, and as he did so drifting
his fingertips unconsciously over the plumped biceps of
his other arm, angled in the open window. His mind ran on to
the later part of the day he needed lunch as if he was still in
training, the carbohydrate boost; then a nap in the louvred
half-light of the inn room, under the lulling sigh of the ceiling
fan; then writing up his notes on the Ransom House. And an
evening to follow, in a strange city; he knew there would be
drink in it, and he wanted there to be sex, though he couldn't
see how it would come about. Perhaps it was all that sport that
had made him susceptible to the smell of sweat; the unwashed
presence of the driver, the sharp warmth of his worked-in vest,
blustered across him in the cab. He slid an unusually sly glance
between the young man's legs, and was caught in a dreamlike
few seconds of conjecture, the simultaneous narrative of sex
that never happens. So that when the boy said, `Hey, don't tell
my pa', with his fullest and yet most anxious smile so far,
Robin thought for a moment that the fantasy was shared, or
that he must unknowingly have made a proposition. He found
he was blushing. `About sand-trap, man.'
Robin looked ahead and thought he saw the original trail
again. By and large he had been well treated. `Oh, no of
course not.' And really the idea was absurd he had the itch
as usual but he didn't fancy the boy, to whom such an activity,
whatever activity it was, might well have been repugnant.
For a dollar more he drove him on, past the desolate Indian
village and his father, scowling and stumbling by the road,
and right into Phoenix. Robin asked no questions, though he
registered the tense smoking of a second cigarette. To the boy
it was a kind of escape, if only to the familiar limits of a further
compound; while to Robin every store-front and hoarding and
road-sign had the saturated glamour of America: so that they
both felt pleasure, in separate and unshared ways. At first it
seemed a little embarrassing to rumble into town in a battered
old pick-up with a windscreen that was two arcs in a shield of
dirt; but then Robin sprawled and embraced his situation. He
wondered if he might be taken for someone local, but knew at
once he was too bright with involuntary interest for that. The
young people they passed outside a bar had long hair, and
beards, silver jewellery and bright, tatty clothes; one of them
was concentrating on a small recorder, whose failing notes gave
Robin a twinge of loneliness.
They took an indirect route, he suspected, to his hotel; maybe
the boy knew a short-cut, maybe he was conditioned to go a
certain way that he had learnt in going somewhere else. It was
midday, many of the streets were empty under the glare of the
sun. I need a baseball-cap, Robin thought: then I'll fit in.
There were breezes in the garden palms and shade trees of the
sidewalk, but the heat, though longed for, was slightly
shocking, like someone else's habitual luxury. They came
almost to a halt at the end of one of the bleak cross-alleys that
bisected the blocks a central gutter, garbage cans, cables, the
barred back-windows of stores and restaurants. The boy
pointed and said,
`Good bar, Blue Coyote', and nodded several times.
`Oh ... is it?' Robin squinted sceptically into the empty sun-struck
defile. He thought it must belong to a member of the
family. He hoped he wasn't suggesting they go there now.
`You like it.'
`Okay, thank you ... I'll remember that', looking forward
again, suddenly impatient for the hotel and the meal; but
thinking, so rare were his guide's pronouncements, that he
probably would remember it. And it turned out to be very
close to where they finally stopped, by the shabby-romantic
deco San Marcos, with its peeling pink lobby and display of
grotesque old succulents.
Robin found himself waiting for change, then was ashamed
at his meanness and raised his hand to stop the boy's unproductive
gropings in a back pocket; he thought he probably didn't
have change, and that he had gone just too far to save them
both from embarrassment. The boy gave a dignified nod. Robin
smiled his clean seducer's smile, though it was a mask to his
confusion, his fleeting apprehension not of the honoured
quaintness of being British, but of the class sense which tinted
or tainted all his dealings with the world. He stuck out a hand.
`I'm Robin,' he said.
`Victor,' the driver replied, and gave the hand a lazy shake.
`Hi!' said Robin; and then got out of the car.
The Blue Coyote had no windows, and so saw nothing of the
boulevard-raking sunset, or the gorgeous combustion westward
over the mountains. When he found you had to ring a bell, he
almost turned away, it was only a whim to have an early-evening
drink there; but the door half-opened anyway and he
was appraised by a stout young man who wore shades for the
task and who stood aside with an accepting `Yep'.
Any light in the room was husbanded and shielded by the
fake overhanging eaves of the bar and the hooded canopy
above the pool table. Even before the door had shut behind
him, Robin felt at a disadvantage. It was the gloomiest bar
he'd ever been in and seemed designed to waken unease in the
stumbling newcomer, eyed from the shadows by the dark-adapted
regulars. A hush had fallen as he entered. He felt
foolish to be so suggestible, so lightly carried here by his new
sense of ease and possibility. Then `Automatically Sunshine'
sang out from the juke-box and as if startled from hypnosis
the drinkers set down their glasses, the talkers resumed their
murmur, the pool-player blinked and stooped and potted his
ball.
The barman poured the beer straight into the glass, so that
the froth was at the brim in a second, and then over the brim;
and stood the half-full bottle by it on the wet counter. `So what
part of England are you from?' he said, with a frown that might
have meant distrust of England in general, or the suspicion that
he might not know the part, once named. He was a large man
in his fifties, with a black pencil moustache and an air of having
borne indignities.
Robin said, `Oh, sort of south-west. Dorset? Is where I grew
up.'
`Dorset. Oh yeah, I heard of that,' said the barman, taking
the dollar bill with a little twinkle of self-congratulation.
Robin turned and leant on the bar and scanned the room
with a pretence of indifference. He watched a long-haired
young man talking to an older businessman, who must just
have come from work; making a point to him with hands
jerked up and up in the air, and then, as the businessman
laughed, smiling at him and bringing his hands to rest on his
shoulders, the thumbs moving to a gentle caress behind his ears.
Robin looked quickly away, and at the man on a barstool
beside him, who he knew at once had been gazing at him with
the same unsubtle fascination. He took in the glossy dark
hair, the long humorous face, the legs apart in tight flared jeans.
`I guess I must have been in Dorset when I was down in
Plymouth,' he said.
`You might have passed through Dorset,' said Robin punctiliously;
`though Plymouth itself is in Devonshire.'
The man smiled in a way that suggested he knew that. `I'm
Sylvan,' he said.
Robin accepted the information broad-mindedly. `Robin, hi!'
he said, and extended his callused rower's hand.
`Oh, okay ...' Sylvan raising his hand from his knee and
complying with the courtesy; and smiling rather insistently as
if to press the stranger to a quick glowing acknowledgement
of something as yet unsaid. Robin knew what it was and hid
his indecision, and the snug sense of power it gave him, in an
English innocence.
`What took you to Plymouth?'
Sylvan looked down. `Oh, family. That kind of thing.' Then
bright and intimate again: `What brings you to the Valley of
the Sun?'
It was never easy saying these things to strangers. `Research,
actually.' He slid the rest of the beer gently into the tilted glass.
`Yeah, I'm doing some stuff on Frank Lloyd Wright?' He saw
he'd already got the habit of the interrogative statement. He
glanced up at Sylvan.
`Okay, so you've been out to Taliesin West, you've seen
the ... stumps, those big pillars of the Pauson House, all that's
left of them. What else?'
Robin smiled sportingly, and absorbed the fact that he was
a tourist among many others. `No, I've only just arrived.'
`First stop the Blue Coyote. A man who knows what he's
after.' Sylvan slapped the bar lightly. `I could do a lot of that
kind of research. Same again please, Ronnie,' to the turning
barman. `And another beer?'
`I'm fine,' said Robin. `No, I've been out to the ruins of the
Ransom House today.'
Sylvan paused and nodded. `Yeah. That's serious. I never
saw that. You know, if you're in school here, you get to do all
of that stuff. I remember the day he died, old Frankie Lloyd,
and the teacher comes in for art class and tells us with a real
catch in his voice, you know?, "ladies and gentlemen ..." We
were all pretty upset.' He looked at Robin with a wistful pout,
as if he still needed consoling. `So how the hell d'you get out
there? You got four-wheel drive?'
`I got an Indian from the reservation to drive me,' said Robin,
still proud of his initiative.
`Wo-ho! And you lived to tell the tale?'
`Just about, yes ...' and now he was uneasy about grudges
and feuds, the hardened candour with which a local hopes to
disabuse the naively fair-minded newcomer. He wouldn't tell
him about the sand-trap. `No, he was great. Just a kid.'
Sylvan looked at him with concern. `Well you were lucky,
man. Cos I'm telling you, they are the worst.'
It was true that Victor had been an unsettling driver. But
he'd also been clairvoyant. In the moment or two that Robin
disliked Sylvan he saw how beautiful he was; and surely available
to him, completely at his pleasure, if he said the word. He
had to frown away the smile that rose to his lips on a kind of
thermal of lust.
`It's the drink or it's the peyote,' Sylvan went on, fluttering
a hand beside his head to suggest a crazy befuddlement.
`Oh ...'
`You know peyote? Edible cactus. Gives you visions, man,'
Sylvan swaying his head and making a little crooning sound.
Then grinning and putting a reassuring hand on Robin's own,
and leaving it there. `No, it's part of their religion. Isn't that
great? Big ceremony, eat peyote, trip out ... Of course the kids
here are into all that now, the hippies? They go out in the
desert and they're out of their fuckin' heads for days on end.'
Robin wasn't sure if that was a good idea or not. He'd got
a kind of trance off the desert as it was, he could breathe in
and feel it again now, a partly physical elation; and something
else, that perhaps was religious, or at least philosophical, the
inhuman peace. He pictured that burnt-out folly, which was a
lesson taught to a wealthy family who presumed they could
make a home in such a place and lay a claim to it. Was it
$10,000 they'd spent just on drilling for water? He was
watching a very camp couple smoking and bawling with
laughter. He thought how he wasn't that kind of person. He
shifted his weight so that his leg pressed against Sylvan's knee.
He realised he'd had a plan for the evening involving dinner
and a phone-call; but the plan was meaningless in face of the
unplanned. With a little freeing twist he withdrew his fingers
and then slid them back between the other man's.
`So ...' said Sylvan.
Robin looked into his long-lashed, untrustworthy eyes. `Is
there a phone here?' he said. `I must just make a quick call.'
The phone was in the back by the Gents, in an area even
bleaker and more functional than the bar. He dialled and stood
gazing at the deadpan irony of an old enamel sign saying `NO
LOITERING'. He wasn't a loiterer. To him the words had only
ever meant `Get on with it!' When he made his infrequent visits
to the lays at Parker's Piece or in the Market Square, eyebrows
raised as if at the exploits of someone else, he always seemed
to find gratification at once, from a man who clearly was a
loiterer, and had probably been loitering for hours. He was
through to the operator, who sounded relaxed, almost sleepy,
but a nice woman, who took pleasure in bringing sundered
friends together. A man came past and nodded `Hi!' to him,
like an overworked colleague Robin gave an abstracted smile
and peered into the imagined middle-distance of the expectant
caller. He was both keen to talk and keen to have the conversation
over.
When Jane answered he was talking at once, and he felt it
like a rebuke when the operator spoke over him to ask her if
she would accept the call.
Then, `Hello Janey, it's me,' he said, `did I wake you up?' and
heard his words repeated, with a fractional delay, by the
unsparing mimicry of the transatlantic echo.
`No, I was awake,' she said, as if it might be an emergency.
`It must be quite late.'
`It's twenty past one.'
`Anyway, you're all right?'
`Is everything all right?'
`Yes, it's amazing, I can't tell you.'
`Because if it is, I'm so glad you rang.'
`Oh thank you, darling,' murmured Robin, with a vague
sense of undeserved success. `I just wanted to hear your voice,
and tell you I'm all in one piece' and the echo gave him back
his last words. When he spoke again, he found she was already
talking.
`Actually I was asleep. I'd just got off, I'm extremely tired,
but I'm so excited at the moment that it's quite difficult to go
to sleep.'
Robin had left her only two days earlier and her words were
at odds with his assumption that she must be missing him
terribly. He was jealous of her excitement, but also reassured,
in a way, that she could be excited without him; she seemed
to license his own unmentioned freedoms. `Has something
happened?' he asked lightly and cautiously. He was surprised
to hear a giggle, maybe just a sign of nerves.
`Something clearly has happened: in fact you probably
remember it. More important, something's going to happen.'
He thought how you never really pictured a friend when you
spoke to them on the phone: they had the shadowiness of
memory, of something not looked at directly; you saw a presence
in a half-remembered room or merely a floating image of
their house or street. The phone Jane was a subtly stronger
character darker, more capricious and capable than the
Jane he lived with and loved. He said, `Have you got another
interview?'
`Oh really.' There was a pause in which he pondered why
this was wrong. `Robin, I'm pregnant. We're going to have a
baby.'
It was the `we' that disconcerted him. He thought for a
moment she was referring to herself and some other man. And
even when he saw, almost at once, that he must himself be the
father, he retained an eerie sense that she had somehow done
this without him.
`Oh Janey, that's fantastic.'
`Are you pleased?'
`Of course I am. Christi When will it be? I mean it will
change everything.'
`Oh ...'
`Or a lot of things. Will we have to get married?'
`Well, we'll have to think about it, won't we? It's not till
June.' She sounded mischievous, dawdling; and also to Robin
indefinably larger. His blurred mental image of her had taken
on already the pronounced jut of advanced pregnancy.
He dawdled himself when the call was over, with its awkwardly
near-simultaneous `Bye's and `Love you's. His eyes ran
abstractedly over the `NO LOITERING' sign while the news
moved slowly and spasmodically through him. In a play or on
television the phrase `I'm pregnant' was often a clincher, it
solved things, or at least decided them. Robin gasped softly,
and chewed his lip, and then smiled and nodded in a good-humoured
acquiescence which there was no one there to see.
It was still the first moment, but he saw himself in the sleepless
moil of early parenthood, and felt a plunging anxiety, as if he
had inadvertently ruined not only his own young life but
someone else's too. But then nudging the worry came a reluctantly
conceded pride, a nostalgia for his friends at the crew's
steak dinner and the 1st XV feast, who would have stood
him drinks all night and shared in his achievement with foul-mouthed
shock and envy.
He probably couldn't tell Sylvan. He would go back into the
bar as if he hadn't just had a conversation that changed his
life. He saw perhaps he could forget the conversation, and put
off his new life till the morning. A beautiful man was waiting
for him and Robin glowed in the urgency and the lovely complacency
of their wanting each other. He wanted nothing in his
mind, in his sight, in his hands but Sylvan. He span back into
the bar almost in a panic for Sylvan.