A shooting star, p.1
A Shooting Star, page 1
Wallace Stegner
A SHOOTING STAR
Contents
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
A SHOOTING STAR
Wallace Stegner (1909–1993) was born in Lake Mills, Iowa. The son of Scandinavian immigrants, he travelled with his parents and brother all over the West – to North Dakota, Washington, Saskatchewan, Montana and Wyoming – before settling in Salt Lake City in 1921. Many of the landscapes he encountered in his peripatetic youth figure largely in his work, as do characters based on his stern father and athletic, outgoing brother. Stegner graduated from university in Utah in 1930, and subsequently received a master’s and a doctoral degree from the University of Iowa. He married Mary Stuart Page in 1934, and for the next decade the couple followed Wallace’s teaching career – to the University of Wisconsin, Harvard, and eventually to Stanford University, where he founded the creative writing program, and where he was to remain until his retirement in 1971.
Stegner’s first novel, Remembering Laughter, was published in 1937. By the time of his death in 1993, he had published some two dozen works of fiction, history, biography, and essays. Among his many literary prizes were the Pulitzer Prize for Angle of Repose (1971) and the National Book Award for The Spectator Bird (1976). His collection of essays, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs (1992), was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other notable works include The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), A Shooting Star (1961), Wolf Willow (1962), All the Little Live Things (1967), Recapitulation (1979), Crossing to Safety (1987) and the Collected Stories (1990), all of which are available in Penguin Modern Classics.
For Mary
CHAPTER 1
EXCEPT for an occasional dry question, he left the talking to her, waiting while she fought out the difficult words. It was as if he applied a pump: she could feel the contents of her insides, discolored and poisonous, being exposed to his laboratory scrutiny. If he had said anything—anything!—to indicate that he felt as a wronged husband should feel. But that controlled suspension of judgment, that look not critical but only clinical, as if the gross symptoms of treachery were to be gathered together objectively like the symptoms of peptic ulcers. Any distress before or after eating? Any blood in the stools?
In the middle of it the telephone rang. He excused himself and left her—it felt like being left in an obstetrical chair—and when he returned he said in his dry and level voice that they would have to postpone it, he had to go out on a call.
She could not believe she had heard him right. “Now?” she said. “Right when we— Oh, Burke, isn’t this one time—”
“I’m sorry, I’m afraid I have to.”
His forehead, smooth and high under the thinning front hair, shone in the light from the hall. With a terrible, complicated feeling of pity, shame, and protectiveness she recognized in her very hands how his forehead felt, its smoothness and bareness, at times when she touched it testing for fever, or put her palm there to flatten out wrinkles of fatigue or strain. Yet she was still glaring at him, unable to control the warping of her mouth. “Somebody’s stomach ache?”
“Probably somebody’s appendicitis, yes.”
“Are you the only doctor in Pasadena?”
“She’s my patient.”
“I should think your wife might matter as much as …”
An indescribable grimace tightened in his face. He seemed to squint against a bad light. “Are you my wife?”
“Oh!” she cried. “If you go out at a time like this!”
For a second he seemed to weigh things in his mind. He made her feel the difference between his probity and her disreputable collapse. His jaws looked narrow and severe, and under the compressed lips she could see the bulge of his teeth. His gray eyes forced her toward a shameful self-judgment. “Other people’s emergencies won’t always wait on ours,” he said. “We can go on with ours in a half hour.”
Anger went through her as paralyzingly as if she had laid her hand on an electric fence. Her eyes felt scalded. For one long instant she stared into his gray glance, and then she spun away. She escaped into motion without thinking where she would go.
In the drive, her lights exploded against the porte-cochere with its clot of purple bougainvillaea, the motor awoke under her foot, her backing lights flared on lawn and flowerbed and the smooth boles of royal palms until she cramped into the turning circle. As she shifted the automatic drive lever she glanced furiously back at the entry. Dark. He had not followed her to the door.
Then, as an alternative to being consumed by her feelings, she willed herself to be as much a part of the car as the fuel pump. She became a photoelectric eye that responded to red and green and amber light, a switch that blinked back at an irritable blinking, a foot that forced jets of fuel through the carburetor, a pair of hands that spun smoothly the power-driven wheel. It was a night warmer than usual, a summer-shirtsleeve night. The eddying air was city-smelling, flavored by watered lawns, exhaust, flowers. Through it for quite a long time she drove as if at her own volition, capable of stoppings, turnings, and returnings. Yet she went as mindlessly as a plane on automatic pilot, and through a traffic pattern as compulsive as the structure of atoms. Her mind was clenched like a fist.
Later, a half hour or an hour, her street spun into a concrete whirlpool, and she was swept into a swift reach of freeway. On both sides, the service roads dazzled and winked their roadside businesses. Light gleamed off the beetle backs of cars, flooded from windows where mannequins had come out to inspect the crowds, rained against façades of glass and stucco, bored upward from moving searchlight lenses. Pausing for a red light while a trucker next door stared down at her from his high cab, she emerged from her automatism long enough to despise the cheap and frantic glitter of everything, and she tasted in her throat the poisonous carbon compounds of automotive waste.
She flickered her eyes off the trucker’s admiring glance, knowing exactly how she appeared to him—a good looking woman in a late-model convertible, something out of a motor ad, a cliché of desirability, absolutely at home on this main street of Vanity Fair. Then the stain of red light on the trucker’s face went amber, he lunged to his gears, she put her foot down and drew smoothly ahead.
Traffic thickened and began to stack up. She was smothered in trucks, buses, cars, big square trailers belted with lights, jalopies that crippled along limp-fendered and wobble-wheeled, showing quilts and cartons on their roofs and Negro or white or Mexican faces at their windows and feet over the tops of doors. An impatient car ducking out of its lane to squeeze through brought Sabrina’s foot down hard on the brake pedal. In the mirror she watched the lights behind her surge up big and ominous, and hunched her shoulders against the crash that did not quite come.
The even lanes of cars broke up around flares and standing men, the flashing red light of a police car, a pickup slewed sideways and a sports car on its side like a squashed bug. The wreck held her attention only while she was easing past it. Then the delayed traffic leaped out, but not fast enough to free her. Cruising behind a car that refused to speed up or move over, Sabrina edged over the double line. An opposing driver rode his horn, lights glared, horn howled and was gone, leaving her chased back into the dazzled dark of her own lane. “Toad,” she said. She might have admitted the justice of his protest, but she despised people who used their horns.
Again she sneaked over the double line, this time saw room, and whipped out to pass. More lights were coming, the driver she was passing increased his speed, risking a wreck to teach her a lesson. But her foot was down on more than three hundred horses. She lifted and poured by, cutting the passed car short to teach him a lesson. The hollow night filled with the whish and thud of the passing projectile. Sabrina lightened her foot, and, with her lane clear for two hundred yards ahead, settled back down to seventy.
She was coming onto the Grapevine, or what had been called the Grapevine in her childhood. Now it looped through the hills six lanes wide, its curves softened and its grades evened out, and only trucks or buses recognized it at all. They were already getting over into the slow lane, beginning to labor, shifting down: one, and then another, and then another, a succession of concussions of collapsed air. The white-lined highway curved away under planed cuts, above the shadows of filled ravines; she was winked at by the constant eyes of the crash fence. The horizon humped up into hills, and the stars gathered and came closer. Into her cockpit the wind eddied the sudden smell of dust and dry weeds, and it was that, with its suggestion of aromatic desert—that and the new openness and nearness of the sky—that turned loose her mind again.< br />
The picture came without warning, cameo-sharp and small: the hot butte of Monte Alban, and the two of them locked together in an exposed, sun-soaked tableau. Neither ten days of that romantic-novel insanity, nor anything that had happened tonight, had lessened her incredulity at herself in that context. Disbelief, as much as honesty, had made her tell Burke. She had had almost the feeling that he could waken her and talk her out of the dream.
She whispered the word “lover” to herself, and closed her eyes an involuntary moment and felt a nervous spasm tingle outward from under her ribs and pebble her skin with gooseflesh. She saw them kissing under the big open sky among temples and courts and the unexcavated mounds of ruins. Whoever was supposed to look after the place had crawled into the shade to sleep. There were only the two of them, watched by a burro who waggled flies out of his ears.
Mainly she remembered the intense searching of eyes that went on between kisses, as if they really were the windows of the soul and you could discover another person that way. She had traced all around his eye-sockets with her finger—why? To know him all through, even to his skull and skeleton? (Why else should her hand remember the cool smoothness of Burke’s forehead?) What made the excitement of knowing and being known? Men and women born incomplete and mad to be made whole? Then the most private act of life was a throwing away of everything the self meant. A woman with no one to give herself to might covet even the sterile intimacies of her analyst or her gynecologist. The profound touch, the unqualified permission …
A sob as unexpected as a hiccup jumped in her throat, and she drove with her face hardened and her teeth gritted and her eyes blurrily fixed on the white line unreeling past her left front wheel. Her chest was tight, her eyes stung, she pounded her hand on the wheel. The nature of what she had been coughing up into Burke’s clinical sight overwhelmed her, and obliterated the brief shiver of desire. For it was dirty, it had all been dirty and treacherous, and she hated herself, Bernard, the circumstances that had thrown them together in that Oaxaca hotel, the hypocrisy of their accidental meetings in the zocalo, the unadmitted conspiracy that had first created and then enlarged opportunity. How little for so much to turn on—a decision to go together, at hot midday and without a guide, up onto Monte Alban. All that pretense of relaxed friendliness with which a man on a buying trip treated a woman traveling without her husband. But he had known what he was suggesting when he wondered if she would like to go, and she had known what she was accepting. They had gone almost holding their breath, though they talked of Mixtec history.
And why did it have to turn out deserted as they both hoped it would? A dry plateau that whispered of a fantastic life now quiet: human sacrifices, ball games to the death, burials that heaped the dead with jewels, victory ceremonies around the temple whose every upside-down figure represented the chief of a conquered town. Why did it have to catch the throat with its desert valley spread below in miniature villages, white strings of roads, lines of trees and cactus fences, patches of milpas on the hillsides high up? All that beauty, and all that dry history whispering, See how it passes? How much has already passed? Their blood was clogged, their talk was like talk overheard, not spoken to be shared, and their mouths were dry with what was unsaid, barely hinted—until a moment when they turned toward one another and it was as if electricity leaped the gap.
That day they read no more.
And yet it was all so damnably Freudian and obscene, the two of them kissing among the ghosts in that place of tombs, helpless love and cureless treachery and inescapable consequences all combined in the first act of a wretched modern Liebestod. It occurred to her that there might be tragedy in it and in herself, the dignity of human passion and pain, but she could not retain that literary and schoolgirl idea. Knowing as much as a modern woman was supposed to know, who could be Iseult and believe in potions? Having knowledge of the endocrines, who could be Francesca and keep from laughing?
In her mind she inspected the two of them again, staged and brittle, like Vogue models posed in sports clothes against the ruined columns of Luxor or Baalbek, and she hated it, hated it. A little while ago, telling Burke, she might have managed to say how little she had wanted or expected this—how little, actually, she believed in it. She had said all the wrong things and failed to say the right ones; she had never made him understand in the slightest how it was.
It isn’t as if I’d wanted to, she said, framing the words carefully as if speaking them aloud. It isn’t as if I’d gone there with anything like that in my mind, some vulgar little cruise-ship affair. Yes, I was fed up. Yes, I was sick of seeing you a slave to the office—haven’t I been for ten years? I was sick of the life I led. We’d had that quarrel once too often. But it wasn’t anything deliberate, believe me. I went down there to get over it and come back rested. We might have lived happily ever after. I’m not the unfaithful type, darling, in spite of everything. I missed you down there, I was lonesome and restless and it just … happened. You’d never predict him as a person I’d fall in love with. He’s no younger than you, he’s nobody glamorous, just a buyer for a department store. I suppose it was his voice—he’s got a rich warm caressing sort of voice. But that shouldn’t be enough. He’s got three children and he drinks too much and he’s miserably tied. But darling … oh, damn.
The road crested and swept curving down. She saw the crawling lights of cars ahead and below, and far away the glow of towns. The night air here was soft and sweet. She found a cigarette in the glove compartment and pushed in the lighter and drove leaning forward, one hand out to catch the lighter when it popped. For the second or two of the act there was again a complete suspension of her mind. But when she held the red circle against the cigarette and drew in, the glow lighted her forehead and nose and the dark smooth wings of her hair. She watched her reflection in the windshield, drawing on the cigarette to brighten the image, exhaling to let it fade. It reassured her, in a way. It gave her an object to resist. She found it easier to think with her own faintly suggested face suspended before her. She always thought better in conversation than when she sat down by herself to muddle something out. The sense of an audience stimulated her; alone, she went in circles. Now she acknowledged the image in the windshield, barely a shadow of movement as the cigarette darkened, to be a dark division of herself, and she tried in an objective way, giving evidence, to explain to it.
Not to make an excuse of the fact that I’ve felt trapped, she said. I knew when I married him what a doctor’s life was. I knew he was ten years older than I was. I knew he was ambitious and proud. I agreed when he wanted to do it himself, without leaning on my money or connections. How could I blame him? I respected him for it. And God knows I wasn’t forced to marry him. I fell into his arms, and I swear I was a loyal wife, even after it got so tiresome and he organized the clinic and was always off at meetings or on calls. I did my duty. I kept his house and kept myself available and entertained myself as I could, and tried to be gay, and tried—was it my fault I couldn’t?—to bear his children. I was a good wife, I was, I was.
And yet when that happened down there, and it was clear what we were up to, did I feel terrified or ashamed? Oh, no. I felt the wildest sort of excitement, as if I had escaped. It isn’t fair to Burke, but that’s exactly how I felt. I went into it without a qualm. You would have thought I’d been waiting around all my life for the opportunity.
As if there weren’t always a million opportunities, as if you didn’t avoid opportunities the way you look both ways before crossing a street. Why this opportunity?
So it wasn’t, she said, watching her shadowy face glow and fade again—it wasn’t only hormones, it wasn’t the ugly sort of thing you hear some women talking about, who’s better in bed, who satisfies most. You’d think men were chocolates, and you could go through the box pushing a thumb through the bottoms or biting off a corner to see if they’re the kind you like, and putting them back if they’re not. Spitbacks, Barbara used to call them. But it wasn’t that. Keep it honest. I could have closed my eyes and it could have been Burke. And yet all the time I was feeling that exultation, as if at last I was free, and wanted, in ways I never had been before. There was something in it for me stronger than guilt or fastidiousness or anything else. I wasn’t swept off my feet; I swept myself off them.
