Adios, Scheherazade

The shack was slab-sided, so that it looked like a log cabin on the outside and like an ordinary wooden shack on the inside. There were two double bed bunks on opposite walls, wooden, built in. There were a couple of old dressers, an old library table with four kitchen chairs in the middle of the room, and a stone fireplace against the wall opposite the door. The whole thing was very rustic and woodsy, and looked like the set of half the vaudeville routines and stage melodramas of all time.

What we were engaged in was a vaudeville melodrama, though neither of us more than barely suspected it.

Why do I speak for Betsy? How do I know what she suspected, what she thought, what she knew or didn’t know? I can’t speak for her, and there’s no sense acting as though I can.

So. I didn’t more than barely suspect what I was involved in, and I didn’t spend any time thinking about it. Johnny lit a couple of kerosene lamps as I carried our luggage in from the car, then he leered one or two bits of country humor and left. Betsy and I stood in the doorway, watching his red taillights flicker away through the trees, jouncing along the grassy dirt road back the two miles to the highway, and then he was gone and we were alone and the overcast night was pitch black everywhere except for the dim yellow glow of kerosene lamps in the room behind us. We stood looking at the darkness, stood in the doorway with our arms around each other’s waist, and the knowledge of being alone and being tied together and being shackled suddenly for life began to creep in toward us from the dark — began to creep in toward me from the dark — sanity coming out of the darkness (which is the only place you ever find sanity, and why the lost and the crazy and the screwed-up need so much light), and I felt myself thickening, like a can of paint when the lid’s been left off.

Then Betsy, far too brightly, said, “Well! Guess we better unpack!”

So that was the beginning of it. Busy work. Doing things. Bather than stand in that doorway and face the darkness and think our thoughts until we came to truth and comprehension, we turned our backs, we shut the door, we began to scurry about and do things. Unpack the suitcases. Study the refrigerator. Build a fire. Show each other the kerosene lamps. Poke the fire, that’s something you can do often when your wood is so green it hisses. Look at the food in the cabinets. Plan a snack. Cook the snack. Eat the snack. Make love. Make plans. Busy busy, that’s the ticket.

I wonder how many people there are like that. They made a wrong turn somewhere back along the trail, they are hopelessly lost in the woods, and so they keep busy busy busy so they won’t have time to notice. Because noticing won’t do any good, noticing will just make you feel bad, since there’s nothing to be done. Nothing to be done.

And after a while you get used to the wrong road, you get to like it, it’s the only road you’ve got. So then, if something else goes wrong and you lose that road, too, you begin to miss that road. Like I miss Betsy. I shouldn’t have married her, she shouldn’t have married me, whatever love we had for each other was too fragile and too febrile to build anything on, but I got used to the wrong turning, used to the life we lived together, it was the only life I had, most of the time it was pleasant, it was easy, if it wasn’t great at least it wasn’t horrible, and now there’s a great empty hole in the world in front of me, a hole in the future, and I’m marching into this great black pipe with nothing in it but me. All alone. Me.

There was one great thing that happened in the shack. I’d rather think about that than about the future, so that’s what I’ll think about.

The shack had no windows. The nights up there were cool, but this was August, remember, and the days were pretty hot. In the middle of the day, with the sun beating down on the roof through the trees, the inside of the shack could get really hot. What we finally worked out, we left the damper open on the fireplace and opened the door, and that caused enough movement of air to make the interior livable.

There’s somebody at the door. Now, I mean, present tense, not back there in the shack. They rang the bell just a second ago and now they did it again.

It wouldn’t be Betsy. The door’s unlocked, and Betsy would just come in, she wouldn’t ring the bell. And if it isn’t Betsy I don’t care who it is.

The windows here face the rear of the house, and I don’t have any lights on anywhere else, so they can’t be sure I’m home, whoever they are. Would it be Kay, come out to comfort me? I hope to Christ it isn’t, I might be just stupid enough and lonely enough to take her up on it.

I’m not going to answer. It’s long after midnight, Monday the 27th of November is down the drain for good, I have three days left in which to write nine chapters, this current episode on the treadmill is almost over, I’m not going to break into it by answering the door. I don’t want to know who’s there.