Free Run River by Joan Didion Page A

underwear in a shop specializing in trick holsters and mesh briefs embroidered with the days of the week, and ran into a Sacramento girl, Janie Powers, in the Riverside lobby. Apprehended by Janie as she stood, that first morning, wondering whether Everett would think himself slighted if she ate breakfast without waking him, Lily could not at first think how to explain her presence in Reno; as it turned out, she did not have to. “I’m getting a div orce ,” Janie caroled across twenty-some feet of lobby. “What are you doing?” Although Lily could not remember knowing that Janie had even been married, she supposed she must have heard and forgotten; she could never keep straight the social details which so absorbed her mother. “I’m going out to buy a sweater,” Lily said guiltily. “I’m just up for a few days and I forgot an extra sweater.” “Never mind that,” Janie said. “I’ve got dozens. Have breakfast with me.” Once they were seated, Janie launched into a monologue about her husband, who was being très impossible (“I can’t even spend one night on the California side of the lake or he’ll contest my residency, he’s got somebody watching me night and day” ), and it was not until they had finished a second cup of coffee that she again asked what Lily was doing in Reno. “Nothing special,” Lily said, pretending to look for a clock. “Listen. I promised to wake up my mother.”
    Two days later, Everett saw Janie Powers sitting at a blackjack table in Harold’s Club and asked her to have dinner with him and Lily. (“You darlings,” Janie kept saying at dinner. “Up here on a honeymoon and this sweet little thing keeping it a secret from Janie.” After two whiskey sours and a bottle of wine, Janie was struck by “the irony of it: Lily getting married, me getting—anyway. Très symbolique.” )
    Other than Janie, they saw no one. Everett slept late in the mornings (Lily seemed to have known, always, the way he would look and feel beside her in bed, a comfortable if not particularly electrifying thing) and shot craps a little in the afternoons; Lily got up early, careful not to wake him, and walked by herself up one side of Virginia Street and down the other, stopping always on the bridge to watch the ducks on the Truckee River. She had asked Everett, thinking it might be wifely, if she could get him some toothpaste or shorts or something; he had looked at her a long time, laughed, and said that he could take care of himself. One morning she thought she saw the son of the justice who had performed their marriage, and she turned immediately into a coffee shop and began dropping nickels into a slot machine. Although she did not want him to see her, it seemed important that she see him (had it, after all, happened?), and after he had passed by she ran out and watched until he turned the corner, but could not be certain that he had been the one. All she could remember clearly was his voice, an Okie voice: Ain’t she the prettiest little bride we had all week, now . One evening they had dinner on the California side of Lake Tahoe; another they drove at twilight over the Geiger grade to Virginia City and found, there in the cemetery on the hill, the grave of someone in Everett’s family. Francis Scott Currier: B. 1830, D. 1859. R.I.P. 2000 miles from home, 1½ miles from the Ophir . They played tennis twice, and Lily ate lobster, in the dining room at the Riverside, for the first time in her life. It seemed then that the lobster alone lent those few days in Reno a distinct air of celebration, the flavor of a wedding trip.
    When Everett took Lily home a week after their marriage, Edith Knight presented him with a kiss on each cheek and Lily with a list of two hundred people who had been invited to the reception. A practiced saver of situations, she had already begun a scrapbook pasted with clippings from the Sacramento and San Francisco papers. Each showed Lily in a white middy blouse, her