There’s nothing unique in that, I replied. He and how many million others?
I bent over to fix my shoe laces and there, right under the bench, were two whole peanuts. I grabbed them.
One for you and one for men I said. You see how Providence looks after one!
The peanut gave her the courage to stretch her legs. We rose stiffly and headed back over the bridge.
You’re not such a bad sort, she said, as we climbed forward. There was a time when I positively loathed you. Not because of Mona, not because I was jealous, but because you didn’t give a damn about any one but your own sweet self. You struck me as ruthless. But I see you really have a heart, don’t you?
What put that into your head?
Oh, I don’t know. Nothing in particular. Maybe it’s that I’m beginning to see things in a new light now. Anyway, you no longer look at me the way you used to. You see me now. Before you used to look right through me. You might just as well have stepped on me … or over me.
I’ve been wondering, she mused, how the two of you will get along, once I’m gone. In a way it’s I who have held you together. If I were more cunning, if I really wanted her all to myself, I would go away, wait for the two of you to separate, then come back and claim her.
I thought you were through with her, said I. I had to admit to myself, however, that there was logic in her observation.
Yes, she said, all that’s past. What I want to do now is to make a life for myself. I’ve got to do the things I like to do, even if I fail miserably … But what will she do? that’s what I wonder. Somehow I can’t see her doing anything of consequence. I feel sorry for you. Believe me, I mean it sincerely. It’s going to be hell for you when I leave. Maybe you don’t realize it now, but you will.
Even so, I replied, it’s better this way.
You’re certain I’ll go, eh? No matter what happens?
Yes, I said, I’m sure. And if you don’t go of your own accord, I’ll drive you away.
She gave a weak laugh. You’d kill me if you had to, wouldn’t you?
I wouldn’t say that. No, what I mean is that the time has come…
Said the walrus to—
Right! What happens when you leave is my affair. The thing is to leave. No back bending!
She swallowed this as one does a lump in the throat. We had come to the summit of the arch, where we paused to view the retreating skyline.
How I hate this place! she said. Hated it from the moment I arrived. Look at those bee-hives, she said, indicating the skyscrapers. Inhuman, what! With arm extended she made a gesture as if to sweep them away. If there’s a single poet in that mass of stone and steel I’m a crazy Turk. Only monsters could inhabit those cages. She moved closer to the edge and spat over the rail into the river. Even the water is filthy. Polluted. We turned away and resumed our march. You know, she said, I was brought up on poetry. Whitman, Wordsworth, Amy Lowell, Pound, Eliot. Why, I could recite whole poems once upon a time. Especially Whitman’s. Now all I can do is gnash my teeth. I’ve got to get out West again, and as soon as possible. Joaquin Miller … did you ever read him? The poet of the Sierras. Yes, I want to go naked again and rub against trees. I don’t care what any one thinks … I can make love to a tree, but not to those filthy things in pants who crawl out of those horrid buildings. Men are all right—in the open spaces. But here—my God! I’d rather masturbate than let one of them crawl into bed with me. They’re vermin, all of them. They stink!
She seemed on the point of working herself into a lather. Of a sudden, however, she grew quiet. Her whole expression changed. Indeed, she looked almost angelic.
I’ll get myself a horse, she was saying now, and I’ll hide away in the mountains. Maybe I’ll learn to pray again. As a girl I used to go off by my lonesome, often for days at a stretch. Among the tall redwoods I would talk to God. Not that I had any specific image of Him; He was just a great Presence. I recognized God everywhere, in everything. How beautiful the world looked to me then! I was overflowing with love and affection. And I was so aware. Often I got down on my knees—to kiss a flower. ‘You’re so perfect!’ I would say. ‘So self-sufficient. All you need are sun and rain. And you get what you need without asking. You never cry for the moon, do you, little violet? You never wish to be different than you are.’ That’s how I talked to the flowers. Yes, I knew how to commune with Nature. And it was all perfectly natural. Real. Terribly real.
She stopped to give me a searching look. She looked even more angelic now than before. Even with a crazy hat on she would have looked seraphic. Then, as she began to unburden herself in earnest, her countenance changed again. But the aureole was still about her.
What derailed her, she was trying to tell me, was art Some one had put the bug in her head that she was an artist. Oh, that’s not altogether true, she exclaimed. I always had talent, and it cropped out early. But there was nothing exceptional in what I did. Every sincere person has a grain of talent.
She was trying to make clear to me how the change came about, how she became conscious of art and of herself as an artist. Was it because she was so different from those about her? Because she saw with other eyes? She wasn’t sure. But she knew that one day it happened. Overnight, as it were, she had lost her innocence. From then on, she said, everything assumed another aspect. The flowers no longer spoke to her, or she to them. When she looked at Nature she saw it as a poem or a landscape. She was no longer one with Nature. She had begun to analyze, to recompose, to assert her own will.
What a fool I was! In no time I had grown too big for my own shoes. Nature wasn’t enough. I craved the life of the city. I regarded myself as a cosmopolitan spirit. To rub elbows with fellow artists, to enlarge my ideas through discussion with intellectuals, became imperative. I was hungry to see the great works of art I had heard so much about, or rather read about, for no one I knew ever talked about art. Except one person, that married woman I told you about once. She was a woman in her thirties and worldly wise. She hadn’t an ounce of talent herself, but she was a great lover of art and had excellent taste. It was she who opened my eyes, not only to the world of art but to other things as well. I fell in love with her, of course. How could I not do so? She was mother, teacher, patron, lover all in one. She was my whole world, in fact.
She interrupted herself to inquire if she was boring me.
The strange thing is, she resumed, that it was she who pushed me out into the world. Not her husband, as I may have led you to believe. No, we got along well, the three of us. I would never have gone to bed with him if she hadn’t urged me to. She was a strategist, like you. Of course, he never really got anywhere with me; the best he could manage was to hold me in his arms, press his body to mine. When he tried to force me I pulled away. Evidently it didn’t bother him too much, or else he pretended it didn’t. I suppose it sounds strange to you, this business, but it was all quite innocent. I’m destined to be a virgin, I guess. Or a virgin at heart.
Oof! What a story I’m making of it! Anyway, the point of it all is that it was they, the two of them, who gave me the money to come East. I was to go to art school, work hard, and make a name for myself.
She stopped abruptly.
And now look at me! What am I? What have I become? I’m a sort of bum, more of a fake than your Mona really.
You’re no fake, said I. You’re a misfit, that’s all.
You don’t need to be kind to me.
For a moment I thought she was going to burst into tears.
Will you write to me some time?
Why not? If it would give you pleasure, why of course.
Then, like a little girl, she said: I’ll miss you both. I’ll miss you terribly.
Well, I said, it’s over with. Look forwards, not backwards.
That’s easy for you to say. You’ll have her. I’ll…
You’ll be better off alone, believe me. It’s better to be alone than with some one who doesn’t understand you.
You’re so right, said she, and she gave a shy little laugh. Do you know, once I tried to get a dog to mount me. It was so ludicrous. He finally bit me in the thigh.
You should
