Some nights at dinner Martha would announce that she planned to take some land and develop it herself and make them all rich; some nights she would sit at the table, not eating, and make Everett promise, again and again, that he and Sarah would never try to sell the ranch without her. Other nights she would not come to dinner at all, but would go instead to her room and lie in the dark with the sheet over her head, pretending, when Everett or Lily opened the door, to be asleep.
At six o’clock on the sixteenth of March, Martha was sitting in the bar at Del Paso Country Club wondering how it would feel to get laid in the rain on the golf course and listening to Sam Bradley, one of the river boys who had gone into real estate, explain how he had happened to join Del Paso: it was deductible and it was good business. Although they had been sitting in the bar an hour, Martha had seen no one she had ever seen before with two exceptions, the bartender and a gynecologist’s wife whose picture was frequently in the paper in connection with the Opera Guild. “Meet a President,” the pictures were always captioned. “No Stranger to the Gavel.” No matter how hard you tried it was difficult to keep up with who was who now, and on the whole Martha would rather be on the golf course, but there were always too many people, everywhere.
Did Sam know any of these people, she wanted to know.
What the hell difference did it make if he knew any of these people. All he wanted to do, as he had been telling her off and on for twenty minutes, was get the hell out of here and drive up to that Mexican place in Jackson for dinner.
She loved that Mexican place. She had told him three times she loved that Mexican place. But Jackson was fifty miles away and it had been raining for three days and she really did not feel like driving fifty miles and back in the rain in his Austin-Healey.
They could get another car. They could get his brother’s car. They could get her car. He hadn’t planned to take the goddamn Austin-Healey.
Since both his brother’s car and her car were approximately thirty-five miles from Del Paso and in the opposite direction from Jackson, that made it a drive of eighty-five miles each way. Besides, she did not even think the Mexican place was open week nights. Anyway there was illegal gambling there and he did not want, did he, to get caught in a raid. That wouldn’t be very good business, would it.
Go to hell, he said. He would telephone ahead.
All right, she said, go find out, and as Sam got up from the table she saw Ryder Channing walk in from the golf course with a balding fat man. It was the first time she had seen Ryder without Nancy Dupree since December and she was faintly depressed to find that she still could not look at him as she looked at other people. She had seen him walking through the door and had thought Ryder, just as she always had, without any of the instant judgments she normally made about people she saw. She had been making judgments upon Sam Bradley from the moment he picked her up; she had already made maybe twenty small judgments upon the man with Ryder. But when she looked at Ryder all she thought was Ryder.
The other man was, she learned when Ryder brought him to the table, a Cadillac dealer from down the Valley who played, although Ryder had beaten him 79–88, a great game of golf.
“The rain put you off your game,” Martha suggested to the Cadillac dealer.
He shrugged.
“You must have known Martha’s father,” Ryder said, not looking at Martha.
“Who’s your dad, Marty?”
“John McClellan.”
The Cadillac dealer looked blankly at Ryder. “Sure. Sure I know him. I probably run into him at Sacramento Rotary.”
“I don’t think so,” Martha said. “Actually he’s been dead since 1944.”
“Well,” said the dealer, “I wasn’t here in 1944.”
“How you been?” Martha asked Ryder.
“I’m fine. You look real good.”
“I’ve been sleeping and eating a lot. I hear you’re living in the old Carmelo place.”
“A friend of Bugsy’s family bought it and lent it to us until he decides what to do with it. We’re going to build as soon as Bugsy finds some plans she likes.”
“Great little girl,” the dealer said. “The finest.”
“I always liked the Carmelo place.” Martha smoothed her gloves in her lap. “They gave a dance once on the third floor and lined both the stairways with azalea. It was about the first dance I ever went to.”
“Termites,” the dealer said. “Rotten with termites.”
“Bugsy wants one storey,” Ryder said.
“Where is she?” the Cadillac dealer demanded querulously. “Why aren’t they here?” He turned to Martha. “She’s shopping with my wife. Mitzi said they’d meet us here at six-thirty.”
“It’s not quite six-thirty,” Ryder said. “I saw you last week at Nancy Slaughter’s. You were just leaving.”
“That’s right,” she said. “We were there a few minutes.”
“Listen, Marth.” He absently transferred some change from one pocket to another. “I’m glad I ran into you. I’m going to be out the river road tomorrow. Maybe I’ll stop by.”
“I won’t be home. But I’m sure Lily and Everett would like seeing you.”
“Some other time.” He stood up as Sam came back.
“Remember me to your dad, Marty,” the Cadillac dealer said. “Hasta luego for now.”
When Ryder arrived the next afternoon at two o’clock Martha was alone in the house: Lily had taken China Mary and the children to have their chest X-rays; Everett was out working on the levees. The rain had gone to the mountains and was melting the snow too fast. Although Lily had wanted Martha to come have her chest X-rayed with them (“Talk about sickly, you look tubercular right now”), Martha had refused: she wanted to lie down. She had not gotten home from Jackson until three A.M., and Sam Bradley, although she had told him it was not good business, had stayed until nearly five. I can’t abide your kind, she had ended up screaming at him; she did not know what had happened but it was the same thing that always happened. She would have a couple of drinks or simply get very tired or sometimes just wake up in the morning despising someone, everyone. If it happened in the morning she could lie there, hating, until it wore itself out, but if it happened around people she always ended up screaming. The very presence of Sam Bradley had seemed a personal affront to her: his bow tie a monument to both his vacuity and her lack of taste; his enthusiasm for the Mexican place in Jackson an affectation so transparent that she was mortified to have abetted it (he had greeted the cook warmly as “Mamacita,” and Martha had looked on with approval); his brand of cigarettes (not her own) the crushing evidence of his mediocrity, his blatancy, his subtle lack of the male principle. It had begun when Sam said that no matter what Everett said, Earl Warren was an intelligent and reasonable man; it could have begun as well had he merely said he liked her dress, or did not like a book he was reading. She had once turned viciously on Ryder for changing his shirt before dinner. His vanity. His shallowness. His carelessness. His thoughtlessness, his selfishness. Did he think the whole world existed simply to provide him with clean shirts. Even remembering it, she felt quite dizzy with loathing for Ryder.