You asked me something once, I do remember—not to be jealous. That I have worked on very hard. You won’t have any cause to complain. But when I asked for letters, I feel a little ashamed and selfish; yet I must tell you I’m no longer ashamed, for it has released in you a genuinely charming and far from dull writer. You have the power to give a most life-like image of your life. I felt I had been at the beach with Tavi who was so jealous of the dog who went into water with you! I felt I saw you cut your father’s hair with old-fashioned scissors. Darling, it is magical and abolishes in part the pain of separation. It’s true, it becomes a way to talk and be near.
Now, my love . . . I don’t want to be the problem of the unmarried woman to the Forest Service. The longer I stay the better for the tie-up with Flair magazine. I will wait for your letter. What if I come for your days off? Wednesday the 25th, wasn’t it? I could have days off with you, and keep busy in LA till your next days off. Will take my ticket tentatively for Tuesday, arriving Tuesday night, unless you advise me otherwise.
All my love . . . A
SIERRA MADRE, DECEMBER 7, 1950
After a long absence, Rupert’s tall and narrow silhouette appeared against the lights. Tavi the brown spaniel leaps to meet me. Rupert’s full and eager mouth. Always the firm, the tense and fervent kiss. Always under my fingers, his thin shoulder bones. Always the deep-set, large eyes. Always the sigh of relief, the exclamation: “Oh darling, it was too long.” Tavi demands attention. Rupert is elated and disturbed. He looks distraught, tense.
The 1936 Ford has been painted grey. The lock on the door is repaired. I kiss Rupert in the car with joy. We always lose our way. The metal bags are in the back. They have made this trip so often.
The web of lies is so immense I get lost in it. But now, at this moment, I am happy in a piercing, burning way, which balances all the pain. Tavi, Rupert and I. Like this, we made our first trip across the United States, south and west. Like this, we go to Mexico, we go to New Orleans, we go to the desert, or to San Francisco. I always have surprises in the metal bag: a compass, a Spanish beret. We will have eighteen days together. In the metal case there is a new shirt, or a hammock from Mexico, or sandals, or a wallet of fur, or a folk song book. Rupert always has a surprise of another kind, usually something he built for our home, shelves or a desktop sandpapered and stained. We drive to our various homes. Now we drive toward Sierra Madre, an hour away from Hollywood, where we live in a Forest Service house and Rupert is a ranger. In the summer he fights fires, he patrols with a green car, he rescues people who get lost in the canyon. In the winter he works on flood control, and on Sundays he patrols. He grants fire permits. He lectures on conservation. He examines fire hazards.
We drive towards the mountains and left of the Santa Anita race track. We drive towards very old sycamore trees and a navy blue sign reading “Sierra Madre.” Sierra Madre is a grand mountain behind our house. In the car, we climb. Tavi has his nose on my knee. The little car for two people is a shelter, fragile and a little rickety with tired springs, locks that do not work easily, a top that is difficult to lower or raise, windows that are not rainproof, and parts that break now and then from old-age maladies. But Rupert understands the car. He is confident and adept at repairing it. He is cautious in its care but reckless in his speeding. He is impatient in traffic, has to keep ahead of others, and curses the red lights and believes they are functioning only to frustrate him. He is always a little late and speeding, but he drives adroitly and has no accidents due to quick reflexes and decisiveness; his quick wits save him. Right there, in his care of the car and in his reckless speeding, is one of the million contradictions that form his constellated character. He meets me with fervor and emotional excitement, yet remembers to ask me all the task-master questions: Did you see about your naturalization? Did you find out about the divorce? Did you order the chair? Did you see the doctor?
About the naturalization: I began to use this as one of the myths to justify my departures. Americanization. Divorce. Jobs. Lectures. Magazine work. Publication of books. Christmas holiday with my family. Illness of Thorvald. Problems with the new book (A Spy in the House of Love). Disguises. Metamorphoses to cover my trips, my other life. The questions put by Rupert are answered with more lies. Only the passion and the love are true, so deeply true, and they justify the lies told to protect it.
This should be a joyous moment, a moment of finding each other again after I solved all the obstacles that pull me away. He does not know each return is a victory; each return has taken great efforts, great planning, great lavishness of acting in New York.
The dark mountains, the silhouettes of trees. Tavi is restless because home is at the top of the hill and we are climbing. I have evaded the solemn truths and emphasized the joy. Rupert turns to the left where there is a flagpole, a sign saying “government service only.” The house is plain, standard stucco, green and huge, but it is among large trees and made graceful by foliage carefully and artfully cut by Rupert. Below is the valley, and at our left are lights as if Florence were spread through the pines and sycamores. From here, illusion is permitted.
I get out of the car and Rupert takes out a valise, a red hat box, a toilet bag and the worn, much-traveled grey suede and black leather handbag that, if spilled accidentally, would throw on the ground proofs of my deceptions—traveler’s checks I can’t explain, money, Cuban passport . . . But it is the bag I carry and watch over.
Rupert has cleaned the house, has filled it with flowers and winter bushes, greens . . . He lights the candles. His surprises and mine are exchanged. We are tense with happiness. “It was too long, darling. Too long, too long.” Away from him I cannot sleep. Away from him I feel crippled, incomplete, not alive. It causes me pain. Pain in the body. The warmth of life, of the heart and of the body. It is about eleven at night. He has arranged not to work the next day so we can sleep in the morning if the telephone does not ring at eight o’clock with some tourist asking for information where to gather pine cones or where to find snakes. The bed opens on the French rose sheets I got when I sent for the belongings I had stored in Paris when the war began in 1939. Eleven years later, the same sheets from my life in Paris covered Rupert and me, the same blankets, and we dried our bodies with the same towels. On this bed Rupert does not sleep well without me. “You are my life, my all.”
I believed him at first to be a volatile, elusive, mobile, mercurial character, restless and homeless, unfaithful and unattached. I was wrong. His first wish is for a home. Traveling is secondary. His greatest need is security of the heart. He spends all his time with me. He likes to go out with me alone. He does not ask other people. When I leave for New York he does not rush out to enjoy his freedom. He withdraws. He flows when I am there. A friend describing him while I’m away said, “He becomes automatic, and not alive. He has that ‘where is Anaïs?’ look. He looks schizophrenic.” He comes to life now, his face alight, his smile dazzling. His hands are rough from rough work, but he knows how to caress. He has that sure, determined, even touch of knowing hands. He is a decisive, unfumbling lover. To slip between the sheets body to body gives us a joy we had lost. We make love hungrily and nervously. The keenness of it is almost unbearable. The sharp, clear resonance of skin and blood and nerves. Erotically we bloom, in a multitude of awakened cells, and the climax of pleasure is so prolonged, so far-reaching, that we both cry out. We hold on to each other as if to make the penetration permanent against all the separations demanded by life. I cannot leave again, I cannot leave again. This is so deeply felt, all through the body. I tease him because he has cut his hands and I want him to take care of them for his viola playing. I say, “I have a chipped husband.” He has a touch of poison oak, but only a touch, not as in San Francisco. No more bronchitis either, but there is always lurking the possibility of fragility, of sudden illness, of the bronchitis that sent him out of the army, of the inherited asthma. There is that radiance of health easily destroyed by a vulnerable temperament.
The first day is carefree. We go to Hollywood for a movie. We have dinner at the Café de Paris on Sunset Boulevard where the waitresses are French, as is the food, and there