Desert of the Heart by Jane Rule

Author:Jane Rule [Rule, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, lesbian, romance, Adult, Historical, Nevada, 1950s, Teacher
ISBN: 9781480429611
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1964-01-01T01:00:00+00:00

6

ANN WOKE ALONE, SAW the parcels on the drawing table, saw the Christmas wrappings on the floor, then turned into the space where Evelyn had lain and closed her eyes again. She did not sleep. She breathed a new fragrance, which was not so much sexual as personal, a faint perfume on her own arms, in her own hair. She felt the strangeness of the carefully arranged sheet that covered her. She listened to the morning silence of the room. Ann was the one to get up quietly and go, away from Bill, away from Silver, away from occasional strangers. She had never made love in her own room before. She had never been left before. She lay for some minutes, unthinking, peacefully bereft. Then quite suddenly her drifting consciousness caught on a sharp memory of the night before and hung there, unable to set itself free.

She sat up and shook her head fiercely, trying to dislodge an ambiguous wonder.

“It’s nothing,” she said to herself. “It’s nothing important.”

But it had not been just another casual night. She had thought about it, planned it, and worked toward it for over a week. It was an accomplishment, the result of a calculated campaign. For what? For nothing. It was waged against humor, decency, and aesthetic distance to free Ann from the weight of sentiment she would not carry around with her. Smash Evelyn, that image of Evelyn that had tempted Ann to a memory of innocence, of virtue, of salvation. Then view the shattered mother with slight distaste or distant curiosity, a little disappointed, vastly relieved.

“I think you’re lying to yourself.”

How could she be? Didn’t she fit neatly into her own image: Ann Childs, free-lance lover, proud craftsman of passion, cartooning cavalier against the mystic rose and all colors of blue? She was her own understood self. Denied the imagined romances and sweet sufferings of adolescence by actual experience which had sharpened her wit and dulled her appetite, she could indulge in the skills of lust for purposes of friendship or amusement or protection, but she could certainly not indulge in the clumsiness of love. Not love that woke her reaching for some lost joy as if it belonged to her permanently like an idea or a rib, making her safe singleness only partial, a poverty. No. She made love, as she made sketches, to keep her free. She made love to break love.

“Love.” An idea. A sound. A name. A calling. “Love.”

She had smashed no image. She had not even tried. And she felt no distaste, no disappointment, no relief. She felt, instead, a ridiculous tenderness that no self-mockery could defeat. It was foolish. It was dangerous. It did not make any kind of sense.

“I don’t want to make sense.”

Why did she have to? Even great men, the wise and the clever, abandon taste and fear sometimes, indulge themselves; “Dulce est despire.” Was that it? “It is sweet to be silly at times.” Father’s Latin. Father’s Horace. But need it be

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