Love Maps Page 15

  “Philip!”

  He bumps into her.

  “Stop.”

  He blinks.

  “Take a shower and we’ll talk about this after you’ve had a rest.”

  He takes a shower, but he won’t lie down. She sits him at the kitchen table, makes him eat scrambled eggs and drink a glass of water.

  *

  They leave that night, in a car from the Avis on 72nd Street. He did not invite her, but she can’t allow him to drive alone; his abilities are too iffy. And there’s also the pull of Tori and the land. The more she thinks about it, the more eager she is to see that land.

  A block from the garage, Philip barely misses banging into a taxi. Then he sideswipes a Broadway island. “That’s enough,” says Sarah. “I’m taking the wheel.” She gets them out of the city, onto a miraculously uncrowded New Jersey Turnpike. In the dark, it looks like an interstellar landing pad, all blinking lights and bulbous tanks and orange flames shooting out of stacks. The back of the car is filled with food—stuff he likes, or used to—crisp, tart apples, Stilton cheese, sourdough bread from Zabar’s. The first day, he doesn’t touch a thing. The second day, she forces him.

  “Eat.” She slices the bread in her lap and hands him a piece.

  “Can I have a napkin?” he says.

  She gives him a paper napkin from a deli. He spreads it on his lap, tears the bread into small bits, puts a piece in his mouth, and chews for about five minutes. She places a slab of Stilton onto his napkin. He looks at it.

  “You need protein.”

  He crumbles the cheese and eats a morsel. Eighteen-wheelers whiz by. A fine drizzle fogs up the windshield. In thirty minutes, he eats half a piece of bread and an ounce of cheese. He won’t touch the knife. She gets him to eat an apple by cutting it up herself, not into quarter wedges but into skinny little pieces about the size of a thumbnail.

  *

  The third day, it’s dry and sunny and the flats and mounds and rises of scrubby West Texas surround them. Sarah turns off the interstate, onto the same two-lane that Max had driven when she was nine and had never met Tori and thought of her as the glamorous lady in the art deco poster. A flat, straight road with no one on it. Safe enough for Philip to drive; she cedes the wheel. The road stretches before them, the pavement bleached almost white, with black cracks and a weather-beaten median strip. When she was a kid, it was dirt. She’d kneeled in the backseat, looking out the rear window, the dust rolling up behind them, its yellowness against the blueness of the Cadillac, the chrome-tipped fins looking regal and somewhat mysterious. Max had loved that car. He’d bought it from a bookie in New Jersey, and Ma was always after him to get rid of it, convinced that it would bring them bad luck.

  She stares out the window, tablelands of ocotillo, lechuguilla, yucca, creosote, faded to a dusty green. The sky is not as vast as she remembers; it’s whitish and limp. The heat gets into the car, negating the effects of the air conditioner. She peers out the window. A cow. A tarantula. A buzzard. She plays with the radio, but there are no stations.

  “When are we going to get there?” she asks.

  Philip smiles, acknowledging her.

  They get there in the evening, the light deep and rich, the air twenty degrees cooler. Victoria emerges from the house, tiny-limbed, blue-jeaned, spry on her cane. Sarah is out of the car before Philip cuts the engine.

  “Tori! You look great.”

  “I don’t know about great,” says Tori. She has shrunk, and her skin is bunched into wrinkles and so splattered with age spots you can barely discern its original color.

  “Nice boots,” Sarah says.

  “Thank you.” Tori glances down at a pair of freshly polished cowboy boots. “They’re new. They want me in those awful white things, but I need boots, something to anchor me. I’ve gotten so damn skinny.”

  “You look great.”

  “You said that, dear.”

  Philip stoops over to kiss her.

  “Philip Clark,” she says. “Glad to see you. You remember me?”

  “Of course.”

  “You don’t look too different. A little more haggard.” Tori cackles and slaps him on the back. “How about a gin and tonic?”

  They sit on the porch, sipping their drinks, looking out on Tori’s tangled tomato vines. She talks about the bugs that have gotten into them, and how she can’t get rid of them. Philip asks her questions about pesticides, fertilizers, irrigation.

  “You going to take up gardening?” Sarah asks.

  “Maybe.” Philip smiles. A smile that doesn’t seem forced. Sarah rests her drink on her belly and gazes at the foothills. The land smells good in the evening, turpentine-y from the creosote.

  *

  That night in bed, she reaches for his hand under the covers. His fingers curl through hers, stronger and warmer, getting back to the right temperature. He disentangles his hand and cups her ass. “It’s good we came,” he murmurs.

  We.

  “Yes.” He hasn’t touched her like this since February. She had forgotten what it felt like. She had become almost as much of a shell as he.

  He’s asleep now, snoring. She props herself up against the pillows. Beyond the window the moon is almost full and the pale sand glimmers. On the sill is the tin cup with Conningsby’s ashes. It looks better in the dark, silhouetted, so you see only the shape and not the material. She gets out of bed, pads over to the window, and fingers the cool, smooth surface of the jar. She picks it up. It feels light, too light. She becomes uneasy, imagining the ashes sucked away, leaked, or stolen. She glances at the bed. Philip’s breathing remains steady. She unscrews the top. It’s too dark to see anything inside. She dips her finger in, feels something gritty, probably ash, but how would she know? She hasn’t handled ash before, not human ash. How could anyone tell? It might have belonged to Conningsby, or a stranger, or a dog or a cat. It could have come from a fireplace. Old Miss Merriweather could have mixed it up with sand and crumbly bits of charred steak bones, hoarded Conningsby all to herself. How would anyone ever know? She brushes the stuff off her skin, then screws the top back on. She can still feel the residue in the creases of her fingers. She wipes her hands on her nightgown, feeling guilty.

  She creeps out of the room and down the stairs, careful of the rickety floorboards. In the hallway, she takes a jacket off a nail and heads outdoors. The air is sharp and cool and smells of juniper, and the bushes and dry desert weeds rustle in the breeze. She sits on a rock, hugging her knees.

  This is where Conningsby had put her on his saddle and given Sarah her first horse ride. The next day, she and Max had gone to visit him at his corral. He had offered Max a horse and asked if he wanted to come get a cow and calf that had wandered from the pack. She’d been surprised. Max had never given any indication that he knew how to ride. She sat on the ledge of the horse trailer cab and proudly watched them go. Her father on a horse! Riding the range! He even had a cowboy hat, an old one of Conningsby’s. They disappeared into the scrub. When they reappeared, they were four tiny dots—two horses, two cows—against the smudge of the Christmas Mountains. Max had taught her about perspective. She decided to observe it in action. As Conningsby and Max grew nearer, they moved from specks to slightly larger forms, exactly as they were supposed to. Then they became definable, Max with his beard, Conningsby with his brown half-Indian face, the cow and the skinny-legged calf. They were larger, but not quite as large as she had been expecting. Maybe if you watched perspective unfold, it didn’t work as well as it should. Maybe she’d shrunk them.

  Her father dismounted, groaning good-naturedly. She walked over to him, hoping he’d spurt up at the last minute. He didn’t. He was at most a head taller than her, with bloodshot eyes and hair coming out of his ears.

  He and Conningsby messed around with the horses’ saddles. Conningsby was not as short as her father. And he looked good in his cowboy hat. Her father looked funny in his; it didn’t go with his beard. And his accent. She had to have known that he h
ad an accent, but she hadn’t really heard it until then. He pointed to a spot on the cow’s throat and said, “This is where the shochet slits it.”

  She had left soon after they returned. Max was speaking about his childhood in a coherent, edifying way, and she had walked off. Why? Even at that age, she’d wanted to know where he came from. In that mood, he might have told her the name of the village. He might even have told her the real name of his family.

  *

  Sarah wakes, discombobulated. There’s a strand of Philip’s hair on the pillow, but no Philip. She hears his voice downstairs. And Tori’s. She smells coffee. She stretches out, and is rewarded with a glimpse of her girlhood self, lounging in the Cadillac with her cast sticking out the window, Max at the wheel. Max wasn’t used to driving in the city and didn’t know the one-way streets. They’d inevitably roll up to school an hour late, but that was fine with her. Nothing she’d learned applied—no Latin, no pi, no Pythagoras. Instead: spitballs, the Pledge of Allegiance, Henry Hudson’s birthday.

  She gets up. She feels good. She likes the thought of Max, solo, driving around New York, brown eyes bulging, comically shaking his fist at the one-way-the-wrong-way signs. And she likes the way these pictures mingle with the smell of coffee and the tingling on her skin, an epidermal reminder that Philip had let her hold his hand, had half-held hers, had groped her ass. She checks the table. The urn with Conningsby’s ashes is still there. Looking innocent and untouched. Had she really opened it and rubbed his ashes?

  She puts on jeans and goes downstairs. Tori and Philip sit at the table in the kitchen, Tori talking about local politics, Philip nodding, rolling up his shirtsleeves.

  “Good morning,” Sarah says.

  “Morning.” Philip pours her a cup of coffee, then pushes himself up from the table and peers out the window. “I’m going riding,” he says. “Want to come?”

  “Yes.”

  Tori gives them directions to a canyon where she scattered her portion of Conningsby’s ashes. She’s hoping Philip will scatter his there too, but she doesn’t push very hard, just sends them off, saying it’s a good place to have a picnic. They take her most sedate horses and start right after breakfast, before it gets too hot. Philip leads and Sarah follows, enjoying the fresh air and the unfamiliar rhythm of her horse. The sun gets higher in the sky. She takes off her hat and wipes the sweat from her forehead. Philip reins in his horse and turns toward her; his body is loose, and the easy curl of his spine fills her with pleasure. She is no longer a field of muons, and he’s no longer dark matter. He smiles. A roadrunner darts through the dust, its crest bobbing.

  “It’s beautiful,” she says.

  “Yes,” he says.

  They continue side by side. She asks him when he learned to ride.

  “When I was a kid.”

  “You never told me that.”

  “Never came up.”

  “Did you ride seriously?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, did you jump over things and wear those funny hats?”

  “No, that was for girls. But I learned how to ride. Conningsby and I would trot around in the woods behind the castle.”

  “That’s funny. I always think of you two in the basement, hunched over that model.”

  “Well, that was the main thing we did, the lasting thing.” They come to an arroyo. The horses’ shoes strike against the rocks. “I was fascinated by that kid,” Philip says. “The deaf-mute. Conningsby didn’t talk about him often. I was always hovering, hoping he’d give me more information.”

  “What about the kid?”

  “I suppose it was because he was all alone. No parents, ministers, coaches. Robinson Crusoe and only ten or eleven, or however old he was. I remember wondering what would happen if the North Koreans bombed Terre Haute and everyone left. I would wander around the wreckage, the only one. I loved thinking about that. What building I would live in, how I would eat. I remember almost wishing it would happen.”

  “Philip, you didn’t pack his ashes in the saddlebag, did you?” she asks, realizing that’s where their picnic is.

  No, Philip says, he didn’t pack them at all. Today is for scouting, not scattering. They pass an electric fence. Philip tells her the land beyond it is part of the fake silver mine that Alligator had sold to the gringos.

  “That’s a pretty serious fence. Maybe there was silver there after all.”

  “Not silver,” he says. “Uranium. It was discovered well after Alligator’s time.”

  They wind through boulders piled on top of each other and reach the mouth of the first canyon—not the one they’re headed for, one that they must pass through to get there. The scrub gives way to thick cottonwood trunks and silver-green leaves, then the trees clear and a waterfall drops from sixty feet.

  “God,” says Sarah, “it’s gorgeous.” The reflection of light and water plays on the rocks. “Why didn’t Tori scatter the ashes here?”

  They dismount and search for a petroglyph Tori told them about. “There it is,” Philip says. A pockmarked line esses up and down, lighter than the dark sandstone. “Looks like a snake. No wonder Tori likes it.”

  “Did I ever tell you about when I first met her?” Sarah asks. “I was so disappointed. I thought she was going to be this art deco, snake-dancing queen—instead she was an old stick in polyester pants. But she hadn’t given up the snakes, just the dancing. She had a big bull snake living under the couch in the parlor. She said it was for catching mice, but I think she kept it for company.” She runs her finger along the petroglyph. “I wonder who carved it.”

  “An Apache, probably.”

  “Could be earlier,” Sarah says.

  “Could be.”

  She tells Philip about a Hopi Indian she and Maya met on some tour ages ago. He had taken them to see some petroglyphs and explained that they were the equivalent of bathroom graffiti. The sign of the beaver clan with eight lines below meant that the carver had done it with eight beaver ladies.

  Philip laughs. “You’ve told me that story before. You love that story.”

  “It’s true. I do.”

  His hand grazes her thigh. She grabs it and kisses his palm. He wanders down the trail looking at the cliff walls, the lines of red, yellow, buff rock, the sharp blue of the sky. She leans against a cottonwood tree. It’s insane how good he looks. As if he’d taken a magic pill and returned to himself. Yet she shouldn’t go overboard. He’s still thin. He walks cautiously.

  He skips a pebble in the stream. “Three times!” he shouts. “I’m trying for four.” He combs the shore for a better rock. He’s lost his caution. He looks like a kid. They should have had a kid. They should have tried earlier. He would have been able to hold himself together for one. They eat their picnic there. Philip bites right into an apple and cuts healthy slabs of salami as if he’s never been squeamish about food or penknives. They lie down afterward and gaze at the sky. The cliff swallows dart and swoop, and the clouds shift-shape.

  “Do you still want a kid?” she asks. They haven’t had sex since that terrible night.

  He says nothing, then covers her hand with his. They’re still looking up at the sky. He rolls over on his side, his eyes soft and thoughtful. He traces the curve of her cheek. She smiles. He kisses her on the lips. They fall into a tacit, superstitious silence, as if they’ll puncture something if they talk. They wade in the stream. It’s shallow but cold. They forget their solemnity and splash and shout, then sit on a warm rock, drying their feet in the sun.

  “This is a good place,” Philip says. “We can scatter him here. It will be our canyon.”

  *

  They mount their horses, more stiffly now, the saddle leather harder under their bums. A couple miles later they get to Tori’s canyon, a drier place with thinner trees and dusty bushes. They rein in their horses and stay there a few moments, feeling, to Sarah’s mind at least, nothing. The emptiness of ritual. But that’s not exactly it—it’s the inability to transfer it from
person to person. The place must mean something to Tori. They turn their horses back and head out.

  In the desert flat, the sun shines brighter and hotter than it did in the morning. Sarah wishes she’d brought sunglasses. It hurts just looking at the sand. She’s relieved when they get to the arroyo; they’re almost home. Then Philip veers off the path. “Where are you going?” she shouts, following after him.

  “The ghost town.”

  “Huh?”

  “Didn’t Tori ever tell you about the ghost town?”

  No. The land is dusty and flat and gets hotter with every step. In a few miles they come to a grid of wind-carved adobe walls.

  “Who lived here?” she asks.

  “I thought you knew. This was for the miners. Tori’s father owned a big mercury mine—actually, a bunch of them—and he built the miners this town. He was an idealistic guy. It was supposed to be a workingman’s paradise.” Philip points out an old park. In the center is the shell of a fountain that supposedly ran with quicksilver. He’s in his element; he loves playing tour guide. He walks their out-of-town guests through lower Manhattan, regaling them with tales of architect rivals, Mohawk Indians, lost subways. Now he’s stopped in front of a corroded old furnace. “This is where they heated the ore,” he explains. “Mercury comes in an ore called cinnabar. You fire it up, and the mercury turns into a gas. All you have to do is catch the gas and condense it. The problem is—”

  “It’s poisonous.”

  “That too. But also fuel. They burned every mesquite shrub, every cottonwood on both sides of the Rio Grande. That’s why those canyons are so special. The miners didn’t go there. It’s the only place within hundreds of miles where you get such thick old trees.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Conningsby told me. We had a couple good rides, just the two of us.” Philip wets his lips. He wants to say something else.