Someone was knocking. He got up and dressed to show the ticket to the conductor. When he was finished she'd turned her head in the other position so that her feet were beside him. She'd turned the righthand light on so that now the khaki paint was much whiter and brighter and there were two reflections in it, one on each side of her magnificent shoulders. She lay on her belly, reading. The hairs between her buttocks made pleasant shadows. They continued eastward, past darkness.
In the morning, the bed back up inside the wall, the two wide red armchairs basked, warming their faded felt in the murky light that also pleased prickly pears, plantations and white horses along the high river. Then they went into a tunnel; and the armchairs and the world were gone. Far away, a cloud-brain brooded atop a broad blue pyramid. That was the end of the end.
He said: I'll never forget.
But she only smiled bitterly and said: If you remember everything, what color was the thirteenth house we saw after Mexicali?
White, he said defiantly. It was white like your underpants. . Then their lives together were over, and they got off the train.
Sunset on the snowy rock-wrinkles haired with pines and spruces trapped him; sunset was as dreary as the evergreens crowded to shade last year's dirty snow. Last year he'd gone this road with her in the morning. They'd left the motel room in Tahoe on a snowy icy dawn whose light spread before them like the rest of their lives; and a man whose wife had left him gave them a ride to the junction. The man could hardly keep his eyes open. He had been driving all night. He was going to drive over the mountains to San Francisco. The lovers were worried about him. They warned him that he might have an accident if he didn't sleep before he went his winding icy road, but they were happy and he was sad so that he could not hear them. When he let them out, they were very glad to be free of him. His sadness had choked them like old snow. (Now the sadness of the one who remembered made him squeeze his fingernails into his palms. Did she ever remember now?) They stood in new snow, kissing. She said that the cold made her legs prickle, so he kissed her legs and then she laughed and said that she was warm. Half an hour later, two ladies who were going on a ski race picked them up and let them ride in the back of the carpeted van among bright clean skis. They let them out at breakfast time where the road made a T, east into California, west into Nevada. The lovers were going to Nevada. They waited for three hours, getting discouraged, and then a boxer came and took them down into the place where the desert day opened up before them like an endless noon.
It was the same time of year as then, but the rivers had not been so swollen that year. He would never see them with her again. This year they were pale and rushing, brown and white-flecked, drowning bushes.
The sun struck peaks with clanging strokes as it sank, dyeing them a lurid orange which made his heart pound with fear and despair.
The mountains of sadness were left behind. He said to someone, he didn't know who: Please don't ever let me see them again.
Then he went down into the green-gray evening desert.
P
