“MISS GILES—” CORDIALLY, THE motel manager smiled. His name was Farnsworth, she remembered. Norman Farnsworth. “How’ve you been?”
“Fine, thanks. How’ve you been?”
“Very well—considering that the season hasn’t started yet. But you don’t mind the heat, I seem to remember.”
“It’s a dry heat. And I’ve missed the desert.”
“Well, you can pretty much take your pick of cabins—at summer rates. Would you like one with a kitchenette? The price works out to be the same as a single room, in season. And there’s only a couple of restaurants in town that’re open.”
“All right. Fine.”
“How long’ll you be staying?”
“I’m not really sure.”
Ruefully, he chuckled. “Not that it matters. You can stay the whole month of September, or what’s left of it, no problem.” As he spoke, he filled out a registration card and presented it to her, along with a pen. She signed the card, copied the license number of the rental car from its plastic key fob, and gave him her VISA card. As he took an impression and filled out the blank form, he said, “I should tell you that the phones in the cabins aren’t working. We’re changing the system, putting in a better one. But it won’t be ready until next week, maybe longer. They have to come from San Diego, the installers. That’s a problem. And there’s a problem with getting the new equipment, too. Or so they say. But there’s a phone booth by the road. And there’s another one here—” He pointed. “Just around the corner from the office.”
“That’s all right. I’m not expecting any calls. A booth is fine.” She took her VISA card and a key, thanked him, and left the small air-conditioned office. As she opened the door, the desert heat met her with a force that was almost palpable. Walking to the car, she looked at the pool, so clear and cool, so infinitely inviting, somehow so reassuring. She would go to her cabin, change into her bathing suit, and give herself to the water.
She signed the chit, slipped her VISA card in her wallet, and drank the last of her wine, a better-than-average Cabernet Sauvignon. She’d ordered a bottle with her dinner, something she seldom did. When she rose from the table, she momentarily lost her balance, steadied herself against the table, then began walking toward the door. On a September night in the desert, off-season, mid-week, the restaurant was almost deserted. The only diners were two tables of “townies”: local, year-round residents who traded on the winter residents who began arriving in mid-October—and began leaving in mid-May. Whenever she’d come to Borrego Springs during the season she’d felt like an outsider, with no entrée to either the affluent winter residents or the ordinary citizenry. But the desert itself had always called to her, for reasons she’d never been able to fully understand, but which had little to do with people, either the tourists or the townies. Words like “vast” and “elemental,” and “irreducible,” had always surfaced when she thought of the desert, but she’d never been able to work the separate words into a meaningful whole.
Outside, at seven-thirty in the evening, the heat was less intense than it had been just an hour before, when she’d entered the restaurant. Her car was parked close by, a blue Nissan, rented at the Los Angeles airport. She stood beside the car, then leaned against it, her head lifted, looking up into the sky. To the east, the horizon was lightening; soon the moon would rise. To the west, only a few miles distant, mountains rose rank upon rank, diminishing shades of purple against a sky still blushed a fading orange by the setting sun. Farther to the west, beyond the mountains, the Los Angeles Basin began, that enormous smog-shrouded network of freeway-linked communities that crowded the shores of the Pacific from San Diego in the south to Newhall in the north: millions upon millions of people living in a shallow depression that, without Colorado River water brought over the mountains, would hardly support a few hundred thousand, herself probably not included.
She’d left the Nissan’s windows open, as most people did, in Borrego Springs. She got in the car and sat motionless for a moment, looking out at the desert night. The year-round population of Borrego Springs was about two thousand, tripling or quadrupling when the winter residents arrived. The town was laid out around a central circle, the circular hub of four roads. One road led to the east, out to the town’s small airport, and then across the desert to the Salton Sea. Another road led west from the circle toward the mountains, passing an upscale motel and two small shopping malls. Both of the malls were upscale, too, catering to the affluent “snowbirds” that came from as far away as New York and Chicago. The roads to the north and south led out from the circle to the town’s residential districts. Some of the houses were small; others were elaborate desert haciendas, most of them Spanish-styled. A few miles out of town, both north and south, developers had built planned desert resorts: high-styled, high-priced condominiums clustered around the obligatory golf courses, tennis courts, swimming pools, and artificial lakes, all kept perpetually green by water pumped to the surface from an aquifer that, some said, could be depleted in a hundred years.
She started the car, made a U-turn in the middle of the deserted street, entered the central circle, and turned out to the right, heading south. Aware that the wine had dulled her reflexes, she drove slowly, with exaggerated care. Her motel, the Ram’s Head, was almost a mile south of the circle, where the townspeople’s small stucco houses thinned out and the haciendas began, each one built on more than an acre of desert land. Except for an illuminated roadside phone booth built close beside the motel entrance, the discreet blue of the Ram’s Head’s small neon sign was the only blemish of commercialism that local ordinances had allowed to intrude into the gathering darkness. The juxtaposition of the sign and the phone booth set against the dark, starry vastness of the desert night was provocative, evoking the subtleties of a Hopper painting, a comment on the uneasy coexistence of commerce and nature.
She drove slowly past the motel and continued south toward the open desert, the only car on the wide, string-straight county road. Occasionally she passed house lights set back from the roadside and scattered among the trees that grew so dramatically once water was brought up to the desert floor. Ahead was an intersection: a gravel road angling into the hard-topped road from the west. The graveled road rose gently, climbing a rise that lead to the mountains, only a few miles away. She slowed, turned, drove up the gentle rise for perhaps a mile before she pulled the Nissan onto the shoulder of the road. She switched off the engine and headlights, set the brake, got out of the car. Yes, her timing had been perfect. To the east, just visible above the far horizon, a new moon was rising. She would stand here in this vast, elemental silence, in this place she’d come to so often before, searching for the eternal illusion of inner peace that, sometimes, she had seemed to fleetingly find. Beneath these stars, she would wait for the moon to rise, Shakespeare’s celestial orb, connected so mysteriously to life on earth. She would give as much of herself as she could to the soul-settling silence of the vista—and take as much as she could, in return.
Then she would return to the motel. And make the phone call.