Reading Executioner's Song I Have to Say I Think Norman Mailer Was a Westerner Deep Down

I am reading this and I am thinking: there is nothing that will make Norman happy. And I am saying to myself: if this won't make you happy you may as well make it as plain and straightforward as you like, not elaborate too much because why bother? Also I am considering the empty west in which every road ends in the desert and the lives are so dustblown and unaesthetic that a man can be shot by the State and his ashes scattered from a plastic breadbag marked 59cents and the bag is seen neither insulting nor funny but merely expedient, as is that burnt human body and the bodies that body shot before in turn getting shot. There is a grid of streets to the gray desert. There are the pastel buildings thrown up and adolescent. The all-you-can-eats and the fiberglass steeples. A cheapness over the land showing how tired they were who stopped here and how ambivalent their arrival. This is where they were when their boots wore through and it was time to plant anyway is what these buildings say. They must have eaten in silence and hurried, for the fuel not for any convivial enjoyment, those who built this place. They raised this place to be done with a job. So Mailer was a Jersey Jew? To read this and his other books, so various in style, and his Wikipedia bio is to know he felt truly western, which is to say: his ashes in a breadbag and his every road into the dust.

Gone Away Backward

And here is Lady Soleil, recently of River Hills, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Until a month ago known to her suburban friends as Linda Schlitz, mother of two insolent daughters, now estranged. Until a year ago married to Big Dave Schlitz, also of Milwaukee, who left her with debts she hadn't suspected and a mortgage payment she could not carry. Now sleeping in the back seat of her ten-year-old minivan in a trailhead parking lot off of Utah State Route 144 in the Big Yellow Pine National Forest, a place she can scarcely imagine despite watching it from her lawnchair several hours a day since she pulled into this overlook a week ago. She sits in the shade and watches. The mountain above her, green, yellow, and black, impassive like an animal, giving nothing. The palisade of red rock denying any passage west, almost denying even thought of what might lie beyond. To the south, rolling elk meadows and almost beyond sight the crossing at Kolob Town where 144 reaches into the desert like an arm, laden with the gaudy costume bangles of irrigated alfalfa fields, alien green in all the unmoved desert. And east the canyonlands, so inscrutable not even the rain can touch them, a hundred miles or more, for all she knew, of sandstone so contorted she imagined it seething at a violent boil and motionless only because her time here is so brief that her patient watching, for days, is but a shutter-click, a moment so brief that God's great cooking of the world can only be guessed at or suspected but not known. Below her seat at the edge of the overlook parking lot there is a strip of rattling grass, a pair of leaning pines, and then a precipice. She took a day to approach that edge, her toes curled to grip the gravel. She underhanded a stone over the edge and some time later the report of its impact returned to her, a sound flat and honest, followed by the lies of its echoes. The wind hissed in the pines. Cliff swallows preceded the sound of their passage. Far below a chaos of fractured boulders.

As abrupt as this edge, midlife had come upon her. Until Big Dave's disappearance she had filled her golden skin perfectly: her strong legs, her wide and muscled rump, her high and global breasts, her pleasant and pretty face, all had been in a flawless, tight wrapper of golden shiny skin. Men had always looked, in the summer, and though she was modest and unassuming in all ways, she did enjoy their approving glances and dressed to bare her legs, always shaved and moisturized. And then they stopped looking. She noticed one day. It was right about when Big Dave left, and, though she never said so aloud, she considered her sudden aging to be his fault. She felt broken and discarded, or used up. She imagined he looked at her one day when she was forty-five and saw the softening of her waist and neck, the slackening and spotting of her skin, and the sagging of her breasts and left for someone younger. She had never been beautiful, but she had come, in some ways, to rely on her ripeness and gleaming health, and then it was gone. Her smooth-cheeked cuteness had passed into a moment of handsomeness, and now she looked to herself, in the rearview mirrors, simply exhausted and slack.

But through all this loss and sadness she felt an almost continual new hope. It surprised her every day, this surge of new life in her. It got her through selling the stuff of her marriage, the furniture and the house. Her daughters' piano. Almost everything. In fact, as the house emptied her hope grew. She joined a women's group, mostly middle-aged divorcees, and hired a therapist, something she had never considered and that Big Dave would have scorned. Her new friends and new ability to confess and unburden herself brought her into contact with a world of new ideas. She began mindfulness meditation. She let her hair grow and stopped coloring it. In a giddy shopping spree she replaced her old beige, white, and navy wardrobe with new bold colors and flowing fabrics. She changed to comfortable shoes. She had her chart done, and her cards read. She covered the old ________ High School Honor Role bumper sticker with a quote exhorting lovingkindness. With the money from the sales she went on a meditation retreat and hired a diet consultant. She gained weight and thought little of it. All in a year. The transformation had felt effortless, even ecstatic, as though she were simply relaxing into a true identity that had hibernated through her long years as wife and mother. She was happy.

And then she met Sunflower at an energy-work retreat. Sunflower latched onto her immediately. Tiny, vibrant, and talkative, Sunflower took Linda in, almost as a student. She had been attending the retreat for years and had acquired a kind of seniority. She knew the ropes. They received cabin assignments and Sunflower, without asking Linda, traded her cabin number with Linda's assigned roommate, and they spent the week together. The first night they stayed up laughing and gossiping, unloading about their exes. The second night Sunflower produced a bottle of chilled rose' and they drank it from mugs and Sunflower whispered in Linda's ear and they fell back on the bed snorting in hilarity and they became lovers.

And then at the end of the week Sunflower left without a word and Linda was free. She went back to the empty house to vacuum, quit after one room, left the vacuum standing there, got into the minivan still packed from the retreat, and drove west. She followed the energy. She got on I-80 and followed it until the Rockies loomed, then south to Colorado Springs, then west again, on smaller and smaller roads she let a delicate warmth guide her to this spot, where a back spasm led her to pull over in the night and in the morning the sun rose like a great fierce eye over over the canyonlands and the purple shadows drew back and the world opened up to her alone on all the vast mountain and she sat under the pines and wept for all she had lost and all she would lose and that her daughters, too, would lose everything, and that the future would keep opening up like this, some vast inscrutable conspiracy of a universe of canyons now white, then yellow, then orange and pink and red and purple and black then pale blue and white again for all time no matter what. And the warmth in her chest roused her from the lawnchair and took her down the mountain, her minivan coughing its last miles into the green, the chugging wheel-lines, the ferment of corrals, the dusty lots, the tight hunkered houses, and into the gravel lot beside the Trading Post where the dust of her arrival drifted into a small crowd of Saturday farmers' market shoppers and the smell of coffee confirmed that she had arrived.