Cassandra at the Wedding E-Book

Dorothy Baker

• Herausgeber: Daunt Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

'Knowing and wise . . . A dark comedy about marriage.' -- Guardian'I am not, at heart, a jumper. I think I knew all the time I was sizing up the bridge that the strong possibility was I'd attend my sister's wedding.'Cassandra Edwards is driving home to her family's Californian ranch to attend the wedding of her beloved identical twin, Judith. A graduate student at Berkeley, Cassandra is gay, brilliant, nerve-racked, miserable – and hell-bent on making sure her sister's wedding doesn't go ahead.Armed with a clutch bag full of pills and an unquenchable thirst for brandy, Cassandra arrives determined to make Judith see sense. But over the course of the next couple of days Cassandra unravels.A classic of twentieth-century American literature, Cassandra at the Wedding is a stylish, witty and insightful novel about love, loyalty and coming to terms with the only life you have.'Modern readers will relish the pin-sharp portrait of a tiny part of society, as if picked out in Californian sunlight. Really good writing like this doesn't age.' -- Guardian'Witty and assured. Her tone is dark but jaunty, the writing off-handedly smart.' -- London Review of Books'Baker's ear for dialogue is acute, her prose immaculate… this is a novel of exceptional quality.' -- TLS'The mastery of technique here is just about absolute.' -- New York Times'I – whose usual bed time is ten o'clock – stayed up all night reading that exquisite Cassandra at the Wedding – dazzled by the pyrotechnics of such an artist.' -- Carson McCullers

Leseprobe

‘Knowing and wise … A dark comedy about marriage.’ Guardian

‘Witty and assured. Her tone is dark but jaunty, the writing off-handedly smart.’ – London Review of Books

‘Baker’s ear for dialogue is acute, her prose immaculate… this is a novel of exceptional quality.’ – TLS

‘The mastery of technique here is just about absolute.’ – New York Times

‘I – whose usual bed time is ten o’clock – stayed up all night reading that exquisite Cassandra at the Wedding – dazzled by the pyrotechnics of such an artist.’ – Carson McCullers

Cassandra at the Wedding

Dorothy Baker

DAUNT BOOKS

In Memoriam David Park

Contents

Title PageDedication  Cassandra Speaks 1.2.3.Judith Speaks Cassandra Speaks  About the AuthorAlso by Dorothy BakerCopyright

Cassandra Speaks

1.

I told them I could be free by the twenty-first, and that I’d come home the twenty-second. (June.) But everything went better than I expected – I had all the examinations corrected and graded and returned to the office by ten the morning of the twenty-first, and I went back to the apartment feeling so footloose, so restless, that I started having some second thoughts. It’s only a five-hour drive from the University to the ranch, if you move along – if you don’t stop for orange juice every fifty miles the way we used to, Judith and I, our first two years in college, or at bars, the way we did later, after we’d studied how to pass for over twenty-one at under twenty. As I say, if you move, if you push a little, you can get from Berkeley to our ranch in five hours, and the reason why we never cared to in the old days was that we had to work up to home life by degrees, steel ourselves somewhat for the three-part welcome we were in for from our grandmother and our mother and our father, who loved us fiercely in three different ways. We loved them too, six different ways, but we mostly took our time about getting home.

It wasn’t three-part any more – the welcome. Our mother died three years ago (much too young but I’m not sure she thought so) and she would therefore not be present at Judith’s wedding. Unlike me. If I went, and of course I had to, I’d be very noticeably present in official capacity – the bride’s only attendant. She asked me by letter, and I didn’t give her a straight answer, because I’m shy, particularly of weddings, but I did say I’d be home the twenty-second, and I had unconsciously cleared the way by the twenty-first, which in June is the longest day of the year. After I got back from taking the examinations to the office, it began to feel like it. I walked around the apartment and looked two or three times inside the refrigerator, so cold, so white, so bare, and more times than that out the big west window at the bay with the prison islands in it and the unbelievable bridge across it. Unbelievable, but I’d got to believing in it from looking at it so often, and it had been looking quite attractive to me off and on through most of the winter. All but irresistible at times, but so was my analyst, and they cancelled each other more or less out.

I went out and stood on the deck and thought it over – how hot it would be at home, how searingly, curingly hot, and how nice it would be to see the dog and the current cat and my father and my grandmother. And my sister. Judith.

The bridge looked good again. The sun was on it, and it took on something of the appeal of a bright exit sign in an auditorium that is crowded and airless and where you are listening to a lecture, as I so often do, that is in no way brilliant. But lectures can’t all be brilliant, of course; they can be sat through and listened to for what there is in them, and if the exit sign is dazzling it can still be ignored. Besides, my guide assures me that I am not, at heart, a jumper; it’s not my sort of thing. I’m given to conjecture only, and to restlessness, and I think I knew all the time I was sizing up the bridge that the strong possibility was I’d go home, attend my sister’s wedding as invited, help hook-and-zip her into whatever she wore, take over the bouquet while she received the ring, through the nose or on the finger, wherever she chose to receive it, and hold my peace when it became a question of speaking now or forever holding it. I’d go, in all likelihood, and do everything an only attendant is expected to do. I’d probably dance attendance.

I didn’t even know who the groom was beyond that he was a graduate medical student she met in New York, and his name was Lynch, or maybe even Finch. Yes. Finch. John Thomas Finch. Where’d she meet him – Birdland?

I left the deck and went back into the apartment and locked the door and pulled the cord that closed the curtain across the west window. I’d had enough of the view for this semester. I wandered around and ended up at my desk, looking at the page that was in my typewriter, specifically page fifty-seven of my brute thesis, my impressions of the novel in France – my big academic lunge. I turned on my lamp, my desk lamp of countless adjustments, and read what there was of page fifty-seven and laughed out loud, but not because it was amusing – because it was such busy work, this whole thing of writing a thesis so that I could become a teacher instead of a writer, particularly when the thesis is about writers, very current ones, women mostly and young, not much older than I am but whom I was exploiting ruthlessly to provide me with a thesis. I’d really have preferred it the other way around, to be myself the writer and have all those others writing their theses about me; but I have a peculiar problem in that my mother was a writer – author of two novels, and three plays, and quite a few screenplays, all quite well known, and it’s not easy for the child of a writer to become a writer. I don’t see why; it just isn’t. It’s something about not wanting to be compared. And not wanting to measure up, or not measure up; or cash in either. It’s not that I have anything against my mother. I loved her, I think; but my mother’s only been dead three years, just short of three years, and I’d rather wait a decent interval and then try. Or not try. But first write the idiotic thesis and get the gap-stopping degree.

I pulled the page out of the typewriter, crumpled it up and dropped it into the wastebasket beside the desk, shuffled the other fifty-six pages until the edges lay smoothly together, put them into a folder and then into the top drawer, and snapped the cover onto the typewriter. If the apartment should catch fire while I was at the wedding, the world would never know what it was I was at such pains to say about the novel as currently practised in France by mere girls, and some boys. But it wouldn’t catch fire. And when I got back I would undoubtedly pull the crumpled page out of the wastebasket, uncrumple it, copy it word for word, and be back in business. Two weeks from now, maybe only a week.

It was increasingly clear to me that I intended to go, that I didn’t intend to spend another night, at least not this one, in the apartment. There were all kinds of indications: I stripped the sheets off my bed and put them into a laundry bag; and I folded the cover over the keyboard of the piano, a piano which was half mine, but which I’d scarcely touched, as they say of pianos, since Judith, who owned the other half, went to New York. I should have folded the cover over the keyboard nine months ago, and locked it. There was a key someplace.

But I didn’t stop to look for it and by three that afternoon I was halfway home, and sitting in a bar, one of the ones we used to stop at in the old days. It was quite dark and air-cooled and I had in hand a lemon squash with some vodka in it in deference to my grandmother who hates the smell of alcohol on anyone’s breath – particularly girls’ breaths. I’m very fond of my grandmother, we both are, and I’d picked up a box of chocolate cherries for her before I left town. They were out in the trunk of the car, melting, while I sat here in the cold bar getting solidified and hoping that I had not put the chocolates on top of the box with the dress in it – dress I’d picked up before I left town and charged to one of my grandmother’s accounts as she frequently implored me to do. It was a white dress, and it would probably do for the wedding. In fact I didn’t even have to wonder about it – it was very simple and elegant and costly, it would do for anything anywhere, and my grandmother, high as her standards are, would know it when she saw it and thank me for doing her so much honour. She liked to see girls look nice, she said so all the time, and whether or not this had anything to do with it I developed a taste for sweatshirts a full ten years ahead of the trend. Also for sneakers, and if I knew my grandmother, she would love this dress. It would be a big relief to her, besides serving to keep the account active.

I looked across the space behind the bar and saw my face in a blue mirror between two shelves of bottles. The bottles looked familiar enough, but I didn’t immediately recognise the face, mostly, I think, because I didn’t want to. It’s a face that’s given me a lot of trouble.

But I looked again in a moment or two, unable not to, and this time I let myself know who it was. It was the face of my sister Judith, not precisely staring, just looking at me very thoughtfully the way she always used to when she was getting ready to ask me to do something – hold the stopwatch while she swam four hundred metres, taste the dressing and tell her what she left out, explain the anecdote about the shepherd and the mermaid. They were the kind of thing a younger sister asks an older sister, and it was all right with me except that I wasn’t all that much older. I was only eleven minutes older. It was on our birth certificates that way. The one named Cassandra was two ounces heavier and eleven minutes older than the one named Judith.

By a firm act of will I forced the face between the shelves to stop being Judith’s and become mine. My very own face – the face of a nice girl preparing to be a teacher, writing a thesis, being kind to her grandmother, going home a day early instead of a day late or the day I said, and bringing something decent to wear. But it can give me a turn, that face, any time I happen to catch it in a mirror; most particularly at times like this when I’m alone and have to admit it’s really mine because there’s no one else to accuse.

I lifted my glass and said, ‘Here’s to you, Narcissus,’ and it was by no means the first time I’d been called by the wrong name, though it had never been this one. Lots of people refuse to commit themselves to any name-calling at all in our case. ‘Now which one are you?’ they say, and when I say I’m Cassandra they always say that’s what they thought, which would be exactly what they’d say if it had been Judith saying she was Judith. Or for that matter Judith saying she was Cassandra, or Cassandra saying she was Judith. They’d say that’s what they thought. We got very tired of it quite early in our lives. We never dressed alike. I was messy on principle, so that Judith could be neat; and then they’d forget which was the neat one, and have to ask. And we’d have to tell them. Very tiresome.

I finished off my lemon squash and moved down a few stools to a place where the cash register cut off a direct view of the mirror, but a man sitting a couple of stools over interpreted the move as a desire for companionship, and offered, quite nicely, to buy me a drink. I’d been intending to have another, at least I’d been wondering whether another would make the rest of the trip cooler or hotter, and once you start wondering you have more or less decided in favour of another. But the offer changed all that. It made me realise I had some place to go and that I should be getting there, not consorting with strangers in bars, and I thanked him and paid up and went out into the heat without ever looking at him. The truth is, I’m afraid of men, strange men and ones I know, though I know there’s nothing about them to be afraid of. But I am; they set my teeth on edge; and I got into my car and made what felt like a getaway without even waiting to fasten the seat belt. I figured that I could do that when I left the next bar.

I was driving my mother’s car – a Riley she exchanged one of her last royalty cheques for. It was four years old now, no, five – it was a year old when she bought it, she drove it a year and Judith and I’d had it three years, but people still looked sidewise, puzzled and interested, when it passed them – a classic that had begun to use quite a bit of oil. It was half mine and half Judith’s, I supposed, but nobody had ever said so. Our father told us to drive it back to Berkeley when we went back after our mother’s funeral, and we’d had it ever since and thought of it as our car. But it was not at all the same as the way we thought of our piano. We chose the piano. Nobody gave it to us. We found it in a Sunday Chronicle, slightly misspelled, but not every typesetter can be trusted with a name like Boesendorfer, it’s long and you don’t see it every day. We saw it, though, hiding among the classified advertisements, waiting to be identified and claimed, and we went to the address with our fingers crossed; and it was one. It was unmistakably a Boesendorfer, meant for us, and we became its co-owners right away. Without conferring. Without the slightest need to.

Next day we didn’t go to classes. It was the day we took possession of what we’d bought and saw it hoisted with pulleys and a winch from the street up to the deck of our apartment. It was wrapped in thick pads, very dusty, and the winch creaked and curses rang and dignity was nowhere about. I watched from the street, because I wanted to be there if it fell. But Judith watched from the deck and she was there when it was put down, legless, on its side. I was there, too, all out of breath, a few seconds later, and we watched two men named Otis and Carl put it on a dolly and roll it into our living room, and screw the legs into it and push it to the wall we’d cleared for it. Then Otis picked up the pads and the dolly and took them out and hooked them onto the winch, and Carl looked the apartment over, and us too, while I wrote him a cheque.

‘You girls twins?’ he said when I handed it to him, and I said no, cousins – cousins-german, as a matter of fact, and then he left and so did Otis, and Judith and I were suddenly alone with it, all black and scrolled and three-legged and ours. We were quite shy in the face of it, feeling all the weight of commitment, and not able, either one of us, to find much to say. I wandered around the place, into the bedroom, back to the living room, out to the deck, and Judith was standoffish too. She ran some arpeggios, standing up, but she didn’t do anything serious. And then sometime that afternoon we went down to the University, to the practice rooms and the music lockers, and Judith brought back a pile of her music and began to play the preludes and the fugues and all was well. I didn’t do another thing all day; I only listened and knew how good she was and what a piano we had, and later that night when she quit playing and came out onto the deck where I was looking at the lights and listening, she said, ‘We ought to live this way, don’t you think?’ It was as if I’d been waiting all my life to hear her say it, and I said yes, oh yes, how could we imagine it ever being any other way? Let’s never get stuck with outsiders, just be ourselves and keep it honest, now we’ve got this piano.

We stood leaning against the rail of the deck looking at the lights below and the stars above, the lights thicker and brighter and the stars cooler and more separate, and I remembered how bright the stars are on summer nights at the ranch with no ground lights to dim them out. We even had our own stars. Our father showed us how to find them at different seasons – Castor, there; Pollux, there, only we knew them by our own names. I looked now and couldn’t find them. They were probably somewhere behind Grizzly Peak, so I stopped looking for them and looked at Judith instead, and began to feel myself getting star-crossed. And she knew it.

‘We could live someplace else, couldn’t we?’ I heard her say. ‘We could live in Paris.’

‘We’d look just as much alike in Paris as we do here.’

‘But it wouldn’t matter; they’d overlook it. That’s why coloured people go to Paris.’

‘To be overlooked?’ I said. ‘I’m not sure I want to be overlooked. And I don’t want you to be either.’

‘We wouldn’t be. You could break down and start writing – and—’

‘Start writing what?’ I said, and I could feel my old chip in its place on my shoulder.

‘The thing you threw away,’ she said, very simply and unemphatically, as if she thought I shouldn’t have, and almost immediately there was no chip.

‘What about you?’ I said, ‘would you work too?’ and I didn’t get a fast answer but I got one that must have taken a great deal for her to put into words. She knew what she wanted, she said, at least she thought she did, and it wasn’t anything very hard and specific like giving concerts and having people pay to hear her. It had more to do with belonging to a tradition in music and staying in it and working at it in any capacity you can fit into – playing what’s being written, and what’s been written, composing too if you want to and can, but mostly trying to keep it alive and separate the chaff from the grain and keep them separate. Know which is which, and care, and that’s a life work.

While I listened to her I was wishing our father were listening too – it was so exactly the thing he’d been telling us since we were too young to remember, and not just about music, about everything. The pure faith of a sceptic. Maybe you don’t believe in concerts but you believe in music; you care what happens to it and you’re willing to contribute what you can for whatever it may be worth. Probably not much.

‘What are we having here?’ I said. ‘A revival meeting?’ and she said very quietly that she hoped so; it was time for us to decide on one thing or another, either be what we should be or become something else.

‘I don’t know what you’re trying to say,’ I said, but I did know. We’d been fraternising, call it, with all kinds of strangers. I had, particularly, for all the good it did me. I had been thinking of it as my Rimbaud phase – period of expansion – but it wasn’t only that. We had both been concentrating on going separate ways, having separate points of view, friends of our own, and likes and dislikes of our own. We’d been trying hard to break it up, and all we had to show for it was exhaustion and disgust. No other way of life would work, no other way felt right, and all it took to put us straight was a misspelled piano in a want ad. We know a misspelling when we see one, if it’s important, and the air was clear now; we’d made the decision, we owned a piano. We were committed to it, and it wasn’t as if it were just any piano; it was an incomparable piano, immaculate, peerless. The odd thing was that Judith is the pianist, I’m not, but I saw the ad and it never occurred to either of us to do anything but buy it together and have it be ours.

That’s how clear the air was, that first night of possession. I felt intoxicated, but not from natural causes. From the preludes and fugues and the mention of Paris, where they take you in and accept the fact that you’re being yourself and then overlook it, whatever it is. Wonderful city to establish one’s piano in.

‘Paris will do fine,’ I said, ‘though I remember when we were there they thought we were awfully cute.’

‘We were ten years old,’ Judith said. ‘We’re not cute now.’

I thought that over without looking at her to see for sure. I didn’t feel cute. I never felt so serious in my life; I’d never had the excitement of an earth-shaking decision, and while I was having it the telephone rang, and I told Judith to let it ring because it would be Liz Janko. It had been being Liz Janko for two months.

‘Janko Junko,’ Jude said, very perspicaciously, and I nodded in agreement, and we listened while the phone rang twenty times, and then quit.

‘Did you ever really like her?’ Jude asked me, as soon as it was quiet. It sounded like something she’d been wanting to ask me for two months.

‘No,’ I said, ‘not much.’

‘Then why?’

‘I’m polite. I was trying to stay out of your way.’

‘You can’t be that polite,’ she said. ‘I don’t have any way.’

I had to wait a minute before I could talk. I walked over to the deck door and closed it in case the telephone might ring again, and when I came back I said, ‘It’s not just her. I can’t stand any of them,’ and I went on, because there was no reason not to now that we had a future and some plans for it, and told her as honestly as I could how I’m constituted. With men I feel like a bird in the clutch of a cat, terrified, caught in a nightmare of confinement, wanting nothing but to get free and take a shower.

‘Birds don’t take showers,’ Jude said, and I had to give her instances of birdbaths and lawn sprays and sprinkling systems and fountains in parks, before I could get to what I had to tell her, which was nothing so simple as the cat-and-bird relationship, even without the shower, because I’m not afraid of women; they don’t terrify me slightly. Up to a point they fascinate me, and I said so.

‘Up to what point?’ Jude said, really wanting to know, and so I dredged for it, and said it seemed to have something to do with the old advice about not speaking to strangers and remembering that women are worse than men. Well – I could ignore the advice about women; and had. I could speak to them all right, but at the point they stopped being strangers I always wished they’d be strangers again.

‘They impose themselves,’ I said. ‘I get to feeling chased.’

‘How?’ Judith said, and I was spelling it for her when the telephone rang again, not more than ten minutes after we’d let it ring itself out.

‘They take over,’ I said, between rings. ‘They get pushy.’

‘Do you want me to answer it?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘but let’s unlist it, early tomorrow. And be different. Just us. Nobody else ever.’

The phone stopped after five or six rings, and Judith turned to me and said, ‘Thank you, thank you very much.’ And later, much later that night I woke up alive and went into the living room to make sure, and it was there against the white wall with a beam on it, a little halo of moonlight, or street light, that let me see J. S. Bach spelled across the book on the rack, and above the keyboard the name of the maker stretched out long in baroque lettering. Very correctly spelled. Bösendorfer.

I sat down on the bench for a while and then I went back to the bedroom and got into my bed. I was still in the revival mood, but very sleepy, and I said to myself, This above all. ‘This above all: to thine own self be true. And it must follow.’ But I didn’t precisely know what must follow, and I didn’t want to think. Just leave it the way it was, and sleep on it.

That was two years ago. Before New York, before any of this, and Judith told me sometime the next day that it had been the same for her – she got up that first night and went into the living room to see if it was really there, just to be sure she hadn’t dreamt the whole thing.

I didn’t stop at any more bars after the first one. Nor even at any orange juice stands. I fastened the seat belt during a red light in the next town and then kept moving because I wanted, consciously now, to get home and get it over with, the first part at least – see Judith, meet what’s-his-name, show gran the dress and give her the chocolates, and do whatever it might be with, or for, or to our father, depending on the mood I found him in, which of course I couldn’t know until I got there, quite a moody man. But in whatever mood I wanted quickly to see him, get him aside and have him explain things to me, how he felt about this wedding, mostly, and how he thought I should feel, and what the chances were, by and large, of Jude’s going through with it. He could bring me up to date and straighten me out quite fast if he didn’t happen to be engrossed in his work. He’d seen Judith, he’d talked to her and to the boy, or man, he’d know how it looked. Our father’s a philosopher, retired professor, in fact, of philosophy, but this makes him sound older than he is, he retired at an unconventional age, unconventionally early, and he’s lived almost since we were born on our ranch, making notes for a book on Pyrrhonic Scepticism, but mostly thinking, and drinking. He quit teaching because it irked him to have to meet appointments – to shave by the clock and put on a tie and arrive at a particular place at a particular time over and over. It wasn’t that way in Athens. A teacher in the golden age could stay in his bath however long he happened to wish to, and when he got out, some youth would be there with a towel and dry him off, and by the time he was dry and robed, the word would have got around and the young men would have gathered to question and to be questioned and end up convinced that the unexamined life is not worth living. We were raised that way ourselves; our father was Socrates, we were the youth and we sat at his feet. So did Jane, our mother, when she was home, which was probably more often than it seemed to us in those days. We liked to have her there with us at papa’s feet, because the questions were always so much trickier. Answers too. She was an incorrigible youth, the best youth we had.

The top was down on the Riley and I knew I was getting a burn on my nose and forehead. It came out in the valley papers the next day that this was the hottest June twenty-first since 1912, and if I’d known it I suppose I’d have stopped at one of our places and had another drink and put up the top before I went on. But I didn’t. It wouldn’t matter too much how I looked, an only attendant doesn’t have other attendants to compete with; she doesn’t have to be evenly tanned; if her forehead is flaking and her nose is peeling, tant mieux, so much the better for the bride. It’s her show anyhow. And besides, as I understood it, it wouldn’t be much of a show, no wedding guests at all, just gran and papa and Judith and I, and of course the famous medical student from Medicine Hat, or wherever. Who would we invite, though, if we wanted anybody? It would have to be old friends of Jane’s from Hollywood or New York, or old colleagues of papa’s from Cambridge. We didn’t have any friends around Putnam. Gran did, some, but we didn’t. We went all through grammar school and high school in Putnam, closest town to the ranch, we swam four years on the Putnam swimming team, but we just never mingled somehow. Everybody in town spoke to us and we spoke to them, but we didn’t hang around after hours. We never went to Sunday school, and not much to the movies or anybody’s slumber party, and we never served any soft drinks or had anybody stay all night at the ranch. We were insular, put it that way. We always came straight home from school because we liked what we had there at papa’s feet. We didn’t need people.

People came in droves, nevertheless, to Jane’s funeral, but that was because she had become something of a celebrity, even in Putnam where writers don’t count, and also because in our bereavement at the time of her death (though papa and gran had known for six months that she was going to die) nobody thought to tell the master of ceremonies that we naturally wanted the funeral to be private, the way we always wanted everything. We got to the chapel late, I remember, and they took us in by a side entrance and put us into a little room of our own behind a scrim and someone was playing ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’ quite imprecisely on a Hammond organ in some other room. I felt identified with the organ, droning along unable to be very clear. But I was clear enough to know that granny was close to collapse, and I knew from the smell that our father had been seeking comfort in his accustomed way, and I was aware that we were at a conventional funeral and that it had nothing in common at all with the only other funerals we’d been to – the one for the cat, and the bird, and the various frogs, and the mouse that got drowned in the bucket. But this couldn’t very well have been in that class, because Jane herself helped plan those, and this one had been thrust upon us while we weren’t looking – organ, words, people and all. It was big, mainly; when we had to come out from behind the scrim and go forth into the light of day it was like Armistice Day outside, people overflowing the sidewalk and out into the street. We made an inexcusably poor appearance in the face of such a turnout, Judith and I with no hats, no gloves, no dark glasses – our father with no chlorophyl lozenge, and our grandmother unable for once to take any pleasure in a tribute to her daughter’s reputation.

But that was a funeral and this was going to be a wedding. I sang a snatch of ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’ and allowed myself to imagine how I’d handle it if it were my wedding. Not this way, I knew that much. I’d either have one or not have one. I’d either come down an aisle, all the way, stop at an altar, repeat my vows with greater unction than the unction they were given me in, and allow all the people to watch me lift the veil. And once the pronouncement had been made I’d sail, as if walking on air, back up the aisle to the Mendelssohn recessional with a smile that would exactly indicate whatever the guests might like to think of it as indicating. Let them believe in it, let them throw rice and honk horns. Or. Or make it a simple appearance before a justice of the peace, with pick-up witnesses, no exhibitionism, no intruding of this ritual on anyone except the principals. Either this or that. But. But I’d never try to have it both ways, I’d never, I swear I’d never choose to come home with a stranger and enact before our household gods the brutal double ceremony of the destruction of Athens and the founding of something that could never at its best equal it. Or come anywhere near it. Or be spoken of in the same breath. From heights you can only descend. Ask anyone. Ask me, preferably.

The sun was low now. It lay on the horizon out to my right, a little shapeless the way it gets when it hits the ground. I was close to the place where I could leave the highway and take the cross-country road to the ranch. You come to a billboard that says IN TIPTON IT’S BURDICK’S. The sign has been there as long as I can remember, and that’s all it says. And then you come to a dairy, and very soon after the dairy you turn left across the northbound traffic, and you’re on a road that goes toward the mountains. Our ranch is in the foothills.