Three Short Novels by Gina Berriault Page A

“There’s nothing more dreary than fog by the ocean. Let’s go to the mountains somewhere. Let’s do that.”
    Once they had canceled their room, however, and carried their bags to the car, her desire to leave the town grew less and they spent several hours wandering the streets where the smart shops were, and they stayed on to eat a late supper out on the wharf. On the drive to the Santa Cruz mountains, he talked awhile about the day’s trivia, uneasy, she knew, over his changing voice; then he was silent. She asked him if he were awake and heard no reply, but she suspected that the night and their aloneness for miles forced him to dissemble sleep.
    It was past midnight when she drove into the parking area of a cabin motel, and whether he had slept for hours or had fallen asleep a moment before they arrived, he woke up only long enough to carry in his overnight bag and to undress and climb into bed. She switched off the paper-shaded lamp that stood on the small table between the beds and undressed by the yard light. She lay with her back to him and the room, her gaze on the vine that webbed the screen high in thewall, afraid to move, afraid that the small sound of the turning of her body would be enough to wake him.

16
    T he morning was hot and filled with the chitter of birds. David was already gone from the room when she awoke; she heard him talking in the yard with a woman. She peered out through the screen. The yard was struck with sun, a shock of white space in which she could not locate him.
    They ate their breakfast at a cafe near the motel and took the trail suggested to them by the proprietor, climbing up through the silence of the day that seemed to resound off the mountains in waves. Small lizards ran off the narrow trail into the dry grass, stopping to lift their heads and look back. David kept his eyes on a large bird circling so that he could name it for her; but it soared away as if it were swept off to the side by some wide current of heat. When she climbed ahead of him, he darted side to side so that his voice could reach around her, and when she came along behind him, he paused on the trail to turn and tell her something to her face, and sometimes he walked backwards. A dog was barking down below, and the sound was isolated by the silence, and magnified and like another sound, a sound she had never heard before, the barking of a beast that went by the nameof dog. This discovery of the unfamiliar in the dog’s barking set off an elation in her breast. A delight in the preposterous. And she was delighted with herself for running away from her husband, for running away from her marriage, for running away from everything that bound her.
    She stepped off the trail into a clearing and sat down on a rock in the scanty shade of a tree, counting on the prosaic act of resting and smoking a cigarette to bring her down to the prohibitive world again. A long time ago someone had begun to erect a cabin in the clearing and had given up. Around them lay rusty chains and saw blades, a mound of yellow newspapers, pulpy and mixed with the gray stuffing of a moldy mattress; and the giving up, after hauling up the trail the materials of the future, was further cause for the ridiculous elation that the barking of the dog had set off. The sun was directly overhead, the shade was not enough, and the sweat ran down from under her breasts to where her shorts were belted in. David had taken off his shirt and was wiping his chest and face with it. Up in the tallest tree an insect was making a ringing noise, a high-pitched humming like a sound of torment, as though the sun was slowly burning its edges away.
    David spoke to her, but all she heard was the waiting silence after his voice. She wanted him to know her body again as he had known it as an infant or to know her body as he had not known it, like a lover who had been unconscious of who it was he had loved, who had loved a woman for a time and yet not