Something strange and unexpected and wonderful had happened to me as a result of being alone in that desert wilderness. Detached from home, I was transformed—I underwent a profound alteration of mood. From the first I’d been a restless searcher, tapping my rock hammer or threshing with my dry washer, scouring the canyons and ravines for bits and blebs of gold; but alone in the arid majesty of these mountains, their colors changing from hour to hour as the day waned, I came to see myself as very tiny and very lucky, grateful for each minute of solitude in this wilderness, a sense of well-being bordering on rapture.
It was a mental and mystical change, an affinity for the rocks and sand that no longer seemed impenetrable to me, but rather like living flesh that contained marvels. And the long spells in the canyons hardened me. I had never been healthier or stronger.
It helped that I was alone. Had there been another person with me I might not have felt it; or if I was continuously bumping into other searchers, being social as well as secretive, the delicate suggestion of happiness would have been smothered in idle talk. Being alone did not make me feel special; it made me feel almost insignificant, my ego diminished, and so it was easy for me to relate to the mice and the snakes I saw so often. I understood my relationship to them, how tiny and temporary I was, flickering among the stupendous rockfalls and mammoth boulders and stumplike mesas of fissured stone. I was colorless, I hardly mattered, and when I found a dead mouse, or the bones of a fox or coyote corpse, I was reminded of my conceit as a prospector and my fragility.
What mattered most was very simple: I was part of the natural world—not as hardy and resilient as any of these desert creatures I saw, far more susceptible to heat and thirst, and because of these vulnerabilities I was lucky to be alive. The activity of searching for gold—and later for gemstones—kept me busy and vital. But the search was largely a pretext for living well. I didn’t need much money—out here a gallon of water could mean the difference between life and death and was priceless. All material things were an encumbrance. I needed to travel light, to winnow my findings to fill my jar with assorted gold flakes and dust, and my pouch with rough gemstones—amethyst, garnet, turquoise, and jade. But I didn’t regard these finds as wealth; they represented the means—when I sold them—for me to return to the cliffsides like gothic spires, the hilltops like cathedral domes.
My being in the bosom of the wilderness granted me silence and self-reflection; my prospecting was a form of meditation. And as the weeks and months passed I became more and more suited to living in the austerity of rocks and stones and cactus, hardier than I’d ever been, but more than that, mentally strong. I saw that my hikes outside Littleford alone or with Melvin Yurick had been a preparation for this life. I liked the little victories of finding precious metal, but often these finds seemed to me merely a pretext for remaining in the desert, complaining to Mother or to Frank, I have work to do! but secretly cherishing my solitude, for what it revealed about myself, the purification of being here, how lucky I was. It was a spiritual awakening in one sense, but with my feet on solid ground, on bedrock, far from Frank’s orbit.
After that initiation, grubbing among the rocks of Castle Dome, and a spell of summer idleness on the California coast, I headed to northwest Nevada, as much for the freedom of the glittering hills and the sun-scorched desert as for the prospecting. I turned up gemstones here, rough beauties whose dusty faces I learned to polish—fire opals and black ones, turquoise scored with spiderweb matrix, and veiny variscite, ocherous yellow and arsenical green. They were dull and lumpy when I cut them free, but I buffed them into lustrous jewels. None of them were semiprecious to me.
It was always easy for me to find buyers, especially in Nevada, among the schemers and opportunists who referred to themselves as gemologists and called the gems I found “joolery.” They saw I was young, disheveled by the desert, a loner. I allowed them to underpay me, I marveled at their dishonesty; they took me for a fool, but for me it was crookery close-up. Wondering how low they’d go, I understood that their cheating was bottomless, a necessary lesson to me in human nature.
As a result, when Frank was next in touch and asked for another fifteen thousand (“To round it up to thirty, and I’ll pay you interest”), I knew exactly who he was. I demanded a written agreement, with a repayment plan over three years, which he provided, 6 percent interest, and what he described as “a balloon payment” at the end.
The rhythm of my year was now driving and digging in the desert, studying the features of rock formations to understand what was inside them, and selling what I collected. I sometimes visited the Zorrillas in Phoenix, and they said they were glad to see me. But I gathered from their evasions and silences that their business was covert, and had I not saved the life of Don Carlos that day in the ravine, and delivered him home, they would not have felt obliged to entertain me. I never referred to the story of Don Carlos being robbed and abandoned by his brother, Ramón, though I often wanted to mention Frank and to tell them I was happier with them than with my own family. I loved being away, especially on holidays like Christmas and Easter. Once you’ve been away, you stop liking the person you are at home.
I called Mother when I could, and she reported that Frank still inhabited his old bedroom. She sometimes passed the phone to him, but my talks with him were brief. Someone who owes you money is always an anxious conversationalist; there is that weight of an unspoken matter between you, and an unbudgeable obstruction of resentment.
With lots of time in the desert for reflection, and the clarity that solitude offered, it occurred to me that the vacation in Acapulco was not a gift to me. Frank had been dumped by Whitney but he’d already been given the ticket to the company junket—the big-time law firm he’d hooked up with had footed the bill at the resort. I’d gone as his spouse on a nonrefundable airfare ticket. It hadn’t cost him anything, but—given the impression he’d been generous—I’d loaned him the money he’d asked for. Nuanced scheming, very Frank.
His fortunes then improved. In a succession of phone calls I heard about his new courtship, an amazing romance when I put all the whispers, the confidences, and the boasts together. Frank had been on a sabbatical in Maine to ease his pain at having failed in his marriage and was looking for comfort in the landscape of spruce forests on the rocky coastline.
He’d remembered a rock hunting trip I’d taken as a geology student, one I’d told him about, my camping on the shore of a bay on one of those elongated coastal peninsulas, and my kayaking to nearby islands where there were the remains of old quarries from which great blocks of granite had been carved. I’d extolled the beauties of Eagle Island in Wheeler Bay, its smooth-sided quarry, its abandoned cabin in a bower of spruce trees.
Impressed by my long-ago praise, he’d gone to that bay for solace and rented a cottage on a hill at the head of the bay, a place I’d mentioned. It was easy for me to fit Frank to the cottage on the drumlin above the glacial grooving formed by the Laurentide Ice Sheet, the bedrock of granite that I’d mapped, the twists and folded layering of the metamorphism of the schist, the sediments and bedding of sea stacks, the angular fragments of volcanic tuff, and the glories of igneous granite varieties, especially those in the jumble of inclusions in the shatter zone of coastal hills, the fractures, the feldspar.
“Big bunch of rocks,” Frank had reported. “Filling station up the road sells lobster rolls.”
Shatter zone was the expression that came to my mind, because it seemed that Frank, who was a social animal, hating solitude, was having a miserable time in Maine and had no ambition to visit my old haunt on Eagle Island.
But stopping for gas one day at the Huddy station, and buying himself a lobster roll, he saw a pretty woman behind the counter. He had not seen her before. He struck up a conversation, saying, “What a lovely part of the world.”
The woman looked at him with widened eyes and bared her teeth and said, “I’d kill to get out of here.”
The desperation in her voice thrilled Frank. Here was an attractive woman who was in trouble. Frank saw an opportunity. And her sudden utterance was like a declaration of loss, of distraction and futility, and—Frank being who he was—her weakness made him feel strong. He’d been gloomy for the whole week at the cottage on the shatter zone, and now he brightened.
Relieved to see that shop was empty, no other cars at the gas pumps, he leaned and fixed his good eye on her and said, “How can I help?”
The woman began to speak; she stammered but failed to say a whole word, and then she put her hands to her face and sobbed into her fingers.
Frank was wearing a tweed coat, a folded handkerchief in his breast pocket. He plucked it out, flapped it open, and without a word, handed it to the woman. She thanked him in a whisper, her eyes reddened, her lips trembling.
I could add plausible dialogue to these factual details that I’d learned at the time, more colorful details that I was told later, and all of them had the ring of truth, because I knew Frank so well. He was stimulated by being in the presence of a helpless woman; he was needed, and even in her misery she was attractive, perhaps her pallor and her wounded eyes giving her a greater allure.
“It would take too long to explain.” Blowing her nose seemed to restore her, as though she was expelling her gloom into the hankie.
“I have plenty of time,” Frank said. “When do you get off work?”
“Five,” she said. “Shift change.”
“Coffee?” Frank said. “Or something stronger.”
“Coffee’s good,” she said. In a beseeching tone of apology, she added, “Are you sure? Because I have a real sad story.”
“I want to hear it.”
Frank returned to the gas station at five and parked a little to the side, signaling to the woman when she left the shop. She smiled when she saw him—the first time he’d seen her smile, shy and grateful. And she smiled again but nervously, as she slipped into his car.
“I don’t even know your name. I’m Frank.”
“I’m Frolic,” she said and blinked at him. “My parents were hippies; they came up here to escape New York City. People always laugh when I tell them my name.”
With solemnity, as if bestowing an award, Frank said, “Frolic is a very beautiful name.”
The woman lifted her hands and looked as though she was going to cry again.
“Where shall we go?” Frank said. “Somewhere quiet.”
“I don’t want anyone to see me,” Frolic said.
They bought coffee at a café in Rockland, and took it to a bench near the harbor, where they sat facing the sea, sipping it from their paper cups. To inspire trust, Frank would have gazed at her with his practiced squint of concern.
“This is nice,” Frank said, thinking, I must not rush her.
“You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.”
This stirred him; he liked the thought of a great tangle that would take his mind off his own emptiness and make him feel useful.
“It’s like this,” she said, twisting her fingers on her lap as she explained. She’d married young to a local man who worked in a factory that made preformed tub and shower units. It was hard work, the pay was poor, but they’d managed. The product was well known.
“Filberts,” Frolic said. “Big company. Fiberglass.”
The word fiberglass was spoken by the woman with a slight lisp, her lazy tongue lolling at her lips—the word, the lisp, thrilled Frank and he too eagerly locked his fingers.
Frolic’s husband, Warner, became asthmatic, his condition worsening, and finally he had such trouble breathing he had to resign and apply for workers’ compensation. He was given severance, a lump sum for which he’d signed a paper. He wasted away, struggling to breathe, even on oxygen, and after less than a year he died.
“Was there an autopsy?”
Frolic shook her head.
“Pleural abnormalities—very common among workers who use fiberglass. There are studies. Very similar to asbestosis—a lung killer.”
“Are you a doctor?”
“I’m an attorney,” Frank said. “And I can tell you that you have a case.”
The woman moved closer to him on the bench, she rested her head against his shoulder, she was sobbing again, between deep breaths, seeming to purr, a vibration that Frank could feel in his flesh, trembling through his body, like a motor that energized him.
“I want to help,” he said.
“But why?” She raised her head, incomprehension and anguish on her face. Tormented, Frolic was tragic and pale and lovely.
Frank became purposeful, taking charge, holding her hand, squeezing it as he questioned her further, details of her husband’s illness and their finances. The following day he visited her at home after work and put her medical bills in order. He studied the document her husband had signed, a liability waiver, clearing Filberts in advance of any responsibility. Frank explained to Frolic that the waiver was full of loopholes; Warner had not been advised of the risks of fiberglass and that he might end up fatally ill.
That was the beginning of Frank’s five-hour drives to Maine, to create a case, to initiate a lawsuit, and to meet with Filberts’s lawyers, who were at first dismissive. But after Frank laid out his case, showing that the waiver was unenforceable, they became attentive.
They knew that a court case and jury trial would attract attention, and probably a class-action lawsuit—obviously other Filberts workers had been affected—and heavy damages would follow. Frank offered them a proposal, naming a large sum. He never disclosed precise numbers to the public and he swore that this amount would remain confidential, so as not to attract other litigants.
Filberts settled. And as Frank had promised that he was taking the case pro bono, the whole chunk of money—millions—went to Frolic, who quit her job at the Huddy gas station. And then Frank began actively wooing her—though, really, he’d been wooing her from the moment she’d lisped the word fiberglass.
Frank was never happier than when he went to someone’s rescue and came away with a big payday. They had a short courtship and were married in her hometown in Maine. Mother attended. The Filberts settlement remained a secret. Frolic’s family organized the reception. She was a country girl, she was surrounded by brothers and sisters—seven or eight of them, an Irish family, her father a weaver, her mother a pastry chef at a local restaurant.
The way Mother described the occasion made Frank seem inconspicuous there, but I suspected that though this might have been true, he enjoyed a sort of celebrity, as the man who’d dried Frolic’s tears and made her smile. What pleased him, I guessed, was that Frolic’s family felt indebted to him for spiriting this simple widow away to a better life. But no one knew, except the bride and groom, that Frolic had become a multimillionaire.
Mother had used these words about Frolic—simple, humble, hardworking, decent. But who is simple? Everyone has depths and unanticipated moods and passions, as Frank was to discover in his life with Frolic.
“Sorry you couldn’t make it to the wedding,” Frank said to me. He was annoyed, and he went on at length about the beauty of the Maine coast, forgetting that it was I who had suggested he soothe his heart there.
I could have managed to go to the wedding, but I was still buoyant in my mystical mood of nonattachment, and I feared that the flight and the wedding celebration, and seeing Frank, would disturb my serenity. I sent flowers and a polished topaz, set in silver.
People go to weddings to size each other up, and if you’re in your twenties and unmarried they make remarks—You’re next or Your turn now. I wasn’t ready for that. I knew I’d changed, that I was happier and healthier where I was, and that I didn’t want to return to my earlier roles, as a son and a brother, or to be asked questions I couldn’t answer.
My slight regret was that in staying away I would be missing Frank’s long stories, the ones he saved for big events, with lots of listeners—his own wedding would have been a great occasion for dazzling his guests with his monologues. Or else boring them. His stories were always helpful to me in assessing his mood, yet I wasn’t very curious about him now. I was busy living my life, and moving on.