Season was sitting with her feet up in the living-room, reading a copy of Vogue. The television was tuned to a special programme about Mid-Eastern oil, but the volume was turned down to a mutter. She didn’t even look up as Ed came into the room, unzipped his tan leather jacket, and sat down in the big library chair that had once been his father’s. Season always called this chair ‘the witness stand’, and she had wanted to throw it out when they first moved in; but to Ed, sitting in his father’s once-sacrosanct seat was one of those small but important parts of taking over South Burlington. It was no fun being an emperor if you didn’t have the throne that went with the job.
The living-room was decorated in soft blues – stylish, tasteful, with antique French furniture upholstered in ultramarine velvet. There were tall vases of flowers all around and a marble bust of Ralph Waldo Emerson on a slender mahogany torchère. The room was a perfect reflection of Season’s personality – cool, ordered, stylish, and discreetly expensive.
‘You’re late,’ said Season, turning over a page.
Ed unlaced his boots. ‘Didn’t Ben tell you I was going to be held up?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But the fact that I was told doesn’t alter the fact that you’re late. It was a fish souffle, and I’ve had to throw it away.’
‘You threw away my supper?’
She turned another page. ‘You don’t really care for flat fish soufflé, do you? I wish you’d told me. I would have kept it for you.’
‘Season—’ he said.
She looked up at last. She was a tall girl of thirty, with a thin oval face and alarmingly wide blue eyes. Her blonde hair was scraped back on her head and held with a tortoiseshell comb. In her silk Japanese pants suit, all pastel colours and loose pleats, she looked as if she was all wrists and ankles. She was pretty, and sharp, and Ed had loved her from only about three minutes after meeting her.
Some men found Season intimidating, both physically and conversationally. But Ed was a good four inches taller, and he had a slow dark masculine assurance about him – thick black hair, dense black eyebrows, deepset eyes of refreshing green – and the warm seriousness of whatever he said had always seemed to be able to enfold itself around her prickliest comments and render them harmless.
‘I’ve asked Dilys to make you an omelette,’ she said. ‘What about you?’
‘I don’t feel hungry any more. The act of cooking was enough to satisfy me.’
‘What about the act of throwing it all away?’
‘That satisfied me too.’
‘So I’ve come home to a satisfied wife?’
‘If you like.’
‘We’ve got a serious problem out there in the fields.’
‘Oh, yes?’ she asked. ‘Don’t tell me the computers are striking for more off-time. Or is it a human problem?’
‘It’s a crop problem. There’s a kind of blight. The wheat’s rotting right in front of our eyes. So far it’s spread over fifteen or twenty acres, and it’s still spreading.’
‘What are you going to do about it?’
‘I’m not sure yet. I don’t even know what kind of a blight it is.’
‘It’s probably a curse from your father.’
‘Season – we’ve got twenty acres of rotten wheat out there and that isn’t funny.’
Season uncurled herself from the sofa, stood up and walked across to the inlaid French drinks cabinet. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I’ve drunk enough yet to be funny. Do you want one?’
‘Scotch,’ said Ed. He pulled off his boots and laid them down beside his chair. Season glanced at them as if she was expecting them to start tap-dancing on their own. She mixed herself a strong daiquiri and pineapple juice and poured out a Chivas Regal on the rocks for Ed.
‘There you are, my lord and master,’ she said, handing him his glass.
‘Sally in bed?’ asked Ed, drinking, and then wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
‘She went up about a half-hour ago. She despaired of her father, just like I did.’
Ed let out a short, testy breath. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry about the soufflé. Willard came down like a bat out of hell and wanted me to go take a look at this blight. It’s very serious. Jack’s doing some tests on it tonight and tomorrow we’re going to send some samples across to Wichita. I had to go. I didn’t have any choice.’
Season sat down again. ‘All right,’ she said, more softly. ‘Abject apology accepted. I just don’t think I’m ever going to get used to the way I went through a wedding ceremony with an actuary in New York City and wound up married to a wheat farmer in Kansas. What do they call it? Not culture shock. Maybe horticulture shock.’
‘I’m just hoping this blight doesn’t spread in a compound ratio,’ said Ed.
‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Season, trying to look interested.
‘Compound growth means that the wider it spreads, the wider it spreads. It starts off by blighting two acres, then six, then ten, and so on. If it goes on like that, we won’t have a farm by the middle of next week.’
‘I hope you really don’t believe what you’re saying,’ said Season, wearily. She stirred her cocktail with her finger, and then licked it.
‘I don’t know,’ said Ed. ‘I’ve seen samples of rust, and the rot you get when you don’t dress your seeds with fungicide, but America has fewer wheat-disease problems than almost any other country in the world. What America spends on crop fungicides in any one year wouldn’t keep the town of Emporia in hotdogs. The only real problem we get is drought.’
‘Well, Farmer Hardesty, you should know,’ said Season, sipping her drink and looking at the television.
Ed stood up. ‘I guess I’ll go say good night to Sally. Do you want to tell Dilys to start my omelette?’
‘What did you say?’ asked Season, her attention momentarily distracted by a television picture of running camels.
‘I said I’m going up to say good night to Sally.’
‘Well, don’t. She’ll be asleep by now.’
He ignored her and went all the same. When he was halfway up the curving staircase, he heard her call, ‘Your seven-league boots are squealing because you left them behind.’
He paused, and said, ‘Tell them I’ll send my magic socks down to pick them up later.’
Season appeared in the doorway, holding his boots in her hand. ‘Take the goddamned things now!’ she snapped, and hurled them after him, one at a time. ‘Every time you come home you make the living-room look like a goddamned thrift store!’
The boots clumped on the stairs and then rolled back down again. Season kicked them across the hallway and then stalked back into the living-room. Ed slowly descended the staircase, collected them up, and went up to see Sally with an expression that Season had once described as his ‘Grant Wood face’.
Sally was lying curled up in her old-fashioned carved oak bed, under the early-American patchwork comforter that Season had bought for her at a fashionable store on Lexington Avenue in the eighties. She was almost asleep, but not quite, and when Ed looked in at the door, she stirred and raised her head from the pillow and smiled at him.
‘Hi, Daddy,’ she said, sleepily.
‘Hi yourself.’
‘I waited for you but you didn’t come home. Mommy threw your supper down the sink-disposal.’
‘I know,’ said Ed, sitting on the edge of the bed and running his hand through his daughter’s long blonde curls. ‘Dilys is going to fix me an omelette.’
‘You’ll have indigestion if you don’t eat regular. My teacher told me.’
‘Your teacher’s quite right. I was busy on the farm, that’s all. Some of the wheat went bad.’
Sally looked up at him. Although she was only six years old, she looked exactly like her mother. Fair-haired and leggy, with those wide blue eyes like some startled character out of a Disney cartoon. Ed leaned over her and kissed her, and she had that childish smell of soap and cookies and clean clothes.
‘I love you,’ he said, with a grin.
‘I love you, too,’ she told him.
They were silent for a moment. Then Sally said, ‘Is this a darned farm?’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘I don’t know. Mommy was talking on the telephone to Auntie Vee today and she kept saying “this darned farm”.’ Ed touched the tip of her nose with his finger. ‘Darned is one of those words that grown-ups use when they mean pesky.’
‘What does pesky mean?’
‘It means something that irritates you. Something that gets on your nerves.’
‘Does the farm get on Mommy’s nerves?’
‘Sure it does. It gets on my nerves sometimes. But it’s important. It’s what people call a heritage. It’s something that’s been handed down from father to son, something that belongs to one family, and stands for everything that family is. You’re a Hardesty, see, and this is the Hardesty farm. When people meet you, they think – aha, that’s the little girl who lives on the big wheat farm in Kingman County, Kansas.’
Sally thought about that and then she said, ‘Will you come with us?’
Ed frowned. ‘Will I come with you where?’
‘To Los Angeles. To visit Auntie Vee.’
‘I didn’t know you were going to Los Angeles to visit Auntie Vee.’
‘Well, Mommy said so on the telephone. She said we’d try to get away some time this week.’
Ed sat up straight. ‘Did she? Well… I guess if she said so, then you must be. I don’t know if I’ll be able to come with you, though. August is a pretty busy time on the farm.’
‘Try to come, won’t you? I want you to come.’
Ed kissed her again and then stood up. ‘Sure, I’ll try to come. Now why don’t you get yourself some sleep?’
He tucked her in tight, and then closed her door and crossed the landing to the master bedroom. Once more, Season’s taste and stylishness was all around. The rugs were rich pink and there was white-and-gold rococo furniture everywhere, chairs and commodes and side-tables all genuine eighteenth-century French. The bed was a half-tester, draped with pink velour and covered with a gold-embroidered bedspread. Ed watched himself thoughtfully in the gilt cheval mirror as he stripped off his plaid riding-shirt, his faded blue jeans, and his undershorts. Naked, he was lean and muscular, with a crucifix of black hair across his chest. Since he’d taken over South Burlington, he’d lost twenty pounds.
He was tying up his bathrobe when Season walked in. ‘Dilys is just beating your eggs now,’ she said.
He turned around. ‘That’s good. Sally’s teacher thinks I’m going to suffer from indigestion if I don’t eat regular.’
‘Is Sally still awake?’
‘Only just.’
Season went to her dressing-table and began to take off her diamond earrings. ‘You haven’t asked me how my day went yet,’ she said.
He stood behind her, so that she could see his face in the mirror. ‘I don’t have to ask. I know you were bored stiff.’
She put her earrings away, and then she started unbuttoning her silk suit. Underneath it, she was nude, except for a small pair of white backless panties. She had a skinny, fashion-model’s figure, with small wide-nippled breasts and long, lean thighs. She took the comb out of her hair and began to brush it. She left her pants suit on the floor for Dilys to pick up later.
‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I wasn’t totally bored. The day did have its moments.’
‘Like when?’
‘A man came to steam-clean the rug in the hall. He was quite good-looking in an artisan kind of way. He told me he had eight children.’
‘Anything else?’ he asked her. His face was expressionless.
‘Mrs Lydia Hope Caldwell phoned. She wants me to join the Daughters of Kansas. She spent twenty minutes telling me what a great privilege it was and how it was hardly ever accorded to newcomers.’
‘What did you tell her?’
‘I told her I was overwhelmed, of course.’
He watched her naked body in the mirror. He wondered if it was just her nudity he found so desirable, or whether it was her nudity combined with her sharp and critical personality. He stepped closer to her and laid his hand on her shoulder and kissed the side of her forehead. She kept on brushing her hair as if he wasn’t there.
‘Then, of course, you called your sister in LA,’ he told her.
‘That’s right.’
He ran his hand down the soft curves of her back, and slipped it under the elastic of her pants, so that he was cupping the cheek of her bottom. The tips of his fingers were almost touching her vulva, but not quite.
‘You called your sister in LA and told her how sick you were of this darned farm. All these tedious acres of wheat, all these simple, honest farming folk. All these tractors and all these crop-dusters.’
‘All these down-home actuaries,’ she put in.
‘That’s right,’ he nodded. ‘And then you invited yourself to spend a few weeks in Beverly Hills, along with Sally, totally ignoring the fact that Sally has to go back to school, and that I’m going to need you this month more than I’ve ever needed you before.’
Season stood utterly still, as if she was pretending to be a statue. Their two faces were reflected side by side in the mirror, and neither face betrayed anything at all. They were playing their usual game of testing, questioning, and teasing, to see whose façade cracked first. In New York, they had played it in fun, and only occasionally. Here in Kansas, it had started to become much more than an amusement, and much more to do with the survival of their relationship.
Ed’s fingers stayed where they were.
Season said, ‘I haven’t rushed into this, you know. I’ve had plenty of time to think about it.’
‘You didn’t mention it to me.’
‘Of course I mentioned it. What do you think we’ve been doing, every single night since we came here? Butting our heads together just to see how much it hurts? Ed, my darling. I’m bored with South Burlington, I’m bored with Wichita, I’m bored with the entire state of Kansas, God bless it, and I have to escape for a while.’
‘Is that it? You’re bored?’
She gently reached behind her back and took his hand away. Then she went over to the bed and sat down. There was a silver cigarette box on her bedside table and she took out a Kool and perched it at the side of her pale-lipsticked mouth as if she was Humphrey Bogart.
‘Isn’t it enough?’ she asked him. ‘I used to be a magazine editor. Now I’m like something out of an A. B. Frost drawing.’
‘Who the hell’s A. B. Frost?’ he demanded. ‘For Christ’s sake, isn’t that typical of you? You complain that you’re discontented, and when I ask you why, you say that it’s because I’ve condemned you to live like some person in some picture by some goddamned obscure artist I’ve never even heard of. A. B. Frost, for Christ’s sake.’
‘A. B. Frost was very well known,’ said Season, lighting her cigarette. ‘He travelled through Kansas and Iowa in the eighteen-nineties, sketching fanners. Good, devout. Godfearing, crop-loving farmers.’
‘You make that sound like a disease.’
She blew out smoke. ‘I don’t mean to. But this bucolic existence is just about driving me crazy. I have to get away.’
‘You knew what it was going to be like. We talked about it for long enough.’
‘Of course I knew what it was going to be like. Well, I had a fair idea. But it was what you wanted, wasn’t it? Even if I’d told you that wild mules wouldn’t have dragged me to South Burlington, you still would have found a way to get me here.’
He looked at her for a long time. The way the bedside lamp shone on her long blonde hair, and cast those curving shadows from her breasts. ‘Do you really hate it that much?’ he asked her.
She tapped ash from her cigarette and shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe I’ll get used to it.’
‘Do you want me to give it up?’
‘How can you give it up? You’ve signed all the papers, you’ve taken out all the loans, you’ve made yourself responsible for the lives and jobs of hundreds of people.’
‘I could sell it,’ he said.
‘Oh, sure, you could sell it. And then you’d spend the rest of your life complaining because I made you give up the only thing you ever really wanted to do. Face it, Ed, that’s been your destiny since you were born. To reap and to sow, to plough and to mow, and to be a farmer’s boy.’
He sat down next to her. She didn’t look at him, but smoked her cigarette as if she was racing to finish it.
‘It’s me, too, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘It’s not just South Burlington.’
She still didn’t look at him. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘These days, I find it hard to separate one from the other. It’s just like you’re always telling Sally. The Hardestys are South Burlington, and South Burlington is the Hardestys. It’s one of those homespun equations that don’t make any logical sense, or even any genetic sense, but which people believe in like E equals me squared.’
‘I love you, you know,’ he said simply.
‘You love the idea of me. I don’t know whether you actually love me. Not me, as a person. Not me, as an educated and independent person who suddenly finds herself isolated by her husband’s chosen way of life – cut off from friends and style and civilisation. I’m getting neurotic, do you know that? I have fantasies of shopping at Gimbel’s. I wake up in the night with unnatural cravings for one of Stars’ pastrami sandwiches.’
He took her hand. Her Tiffany engagement ring winked a tiny rainbow at him. ‘Listen,’ he said, hoarsely, ‘you can go to New York whenever you want. Fly tomorrow, if you feel like it.’
‘Ed,’ she said, slowly shaking her head, ‘that just isn’t the point. I want New York but I want you, too. New York on its own isn’t enough. I’m your wife, I happen to love you, but I also happen to have mental energies and psychological requirements which aren’t being fulfilled. At the moment, the two most important needs in my life are totally incompatible, and that’s the problem.’
He stared down at the shaggy pink rug. ‘I don’t know what to suggest,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to stay here and yet you don’t think it’s a good idea if I sell the place.’
‘I think if you sold the place it would gradually destroy our marriage,’ she said. ‘Not straight away, but gradually and very effectively.’
‘So going to Los Angeles for a while is going to hold it together?’
‘I don’t know. But it’s going to give me some time to think. You too.’
He said, unhappily, ‘I don’t think I feel like thinking. Not about us.’
Season leaned over and kissed him, twice, very gently and lovingly. ‘We have to,’ she said. ‘And if I were you, I’d go down to the kitchen and see if that omelette’s ready, otherwise you’re going to feel like you’re eating a window-cleaner’s leather.’
He stayed where he was for a while. He felt tired, and trapped, and he wasn’t sure which way to move. Somehow, in New York, he had found it much easier to be positive, much easier to make clear-cut decisions. But on a farm like South Burlington, clear-cut decisions weren’t called for. You needed to sniff the wind, and make guesses, and alter your guesses to suit the changing weather. Farming was a life of constant compromise, and somehow the compromises were beginning to creep into his marriage.
Maybe Season was right. Maybe if she took a short vacation in Los Angeles it would help them both. But on the other hand, maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe it would take them even further apart. After all, once Season began to mix with those Hollywood types, all those BPs and would-be movie stars, life at South Burlington would probably seem even duller than ever.
Maybe she would begin to think of Ed as nothing more than a stolid farmer. Something out of A. B. Frost.
‘Are you going to bed now?’ he asked Season.
‘I was considering it,’ she said. ‘But I won’t if you can think of something else to do around here.’
He shook his head.
‘That’s what I told Vee,’ she remarked. ‘Farming in Kansas is nothing but fertilising, furrowing, fooling-around and fornication.’
He got up. ‘I won’t be too long,’ he said. ‘I have to call Charlie Warburg.’
‘Charlie Warburg? From the finance company?’
‘That’s right.’
She frowned as she watched him walk across the room to the door. ‘He’s in charge of losses, isn’t he?’
‘Kind of.’
‘So what you were saying about that wheat blight – you were serious about that? Is it really so bad?’
‘I don’t know yet. It could be.’
‘Ed—’ she began.
He paused by the bedroom door. She looked as if she was about to say something, but it was plain that she couldn’t find the words. She sat there, with her arms crossed over her bare breasts, and looked at him with an expression that could have meant I’m sorry, or I wish we’d never met, or anything at all. Ed waited a moment longer, and when she didn’t say anything, he closed the door and went downstairs.