Love Maps Page 16

  “What?” she asks after a moment.

  He puts his hands on her hips, then breaks away. “Nothing.” He wanders over to the furnace, presses his hand to it, and inspects the rust on his palm.

  “We ought to go back soon,” she says. “You’re getting a sunburn.”

  “We have to go to one more place.”

  “Where?”

  “Come.” He mounts his horse and sets off at a determined clip.

  She follows behind, starting to worry. His shoulders look rigid. He’s tightening. She closes her eyes. She hates praying; she’s her father’s daughter. If there are any gods, they’re the old-fashioned kind, only lightly concerned with what’s happening on earth. But she needs to do something. She won’t be able to handle it if he goes back to that catatonic distance.

  They ride over miles of burning sand until they reach a scaffold, about forty feet high. On the ground, there are rusty bits of metal and some bleached planks of wood. Philip dismounts.

  “It’s the opening of an old shaft,” he says. “The scaffolding was for the hoist.”

  “I see,” she responds, although she doesn’t.

  He puts his hands on her hips again. She smiles, trying to look encouraging. It seems like that’s what he wants. His grip tightens. He is clamping her. She wiggles. He lets her go.

  “Franco and I came here when we ate the peyote.” He walks over to the scaffolding. “I climbed this. There was a full moon.”

  She follows him to the shaft opening. It’s covered by planks of wood, but just barely. You can see the blackness through the cracks. Air steams out, hotter than the desert, foul-smelling. Sarah wrinkles her nose.

  “Sulfur, I think. Cinnabar is made out of mercury and sulfur.” He edges closer.

  “Will you get back from there? You’re making me nervous.”

  “It’s covered up.”

  “With wood that would rot if you put a penny on it.”

  “It won’t rot.” He raps his fist against a plank. “The air’s too dry.” He rubs the wood, though it could give him a splinter.

  “Please, Philip, let’s go.” She feels like she has disappointed him. “It’s not that I don’t like this place, it’s just that it’s late.”

  “I’m sorry, it was a stupid idea. This is where we were fighting when he kissed me,” he says quietly.

  A cold weight gathers in Sarah’s chest and she turns away from him. The horses wait patiently, their long unkempt tails whisking at flies.

  *

  The next morning when Sarah wakes, Philip is gone. “You just missed him,” Tori says. “He went for a ride.”

  Sarah runs back upstairs, worried that he decided to scatter Conningsby all by himself, but the trophy is still there. She feels the phantom residue on her fingers, washes her hands and brushes her hair.

  “It’s better this way,” says Tori. “We need to get meat for the chili, and two’s better than three in that pickup.” It’s been decided that after they scatter the ashes, they’ll have goat chili for supper. Conningsby had been famous for his goat chili.

  It takes a couple of hours to get to the ranch where the meat is sold, then another hour or so listening to the rancher’s daughter play piano and complimenting the rancher’s wife on her lemon cookies, then two more hours bumping along the road back. It is midafternoon by the time they return. They can still scatter the ashes, but they can’t dawdle. Sarah hops down from the pickup and gets the meat from the cooler in the back. She follows Tori in through the front door. Inside, Philip is sprawled on the sofa, sunburned and snoring. Tori frowns. He forgot to take off his boots; they’re dusty, and her sofa is clean.

  Sarah unwraps the meat and pounds as hard as she can, hoping the sound will wake him up. They can put the chili on low and ride out to the canyon and come back just as it’s ready. But he doesn’t stir. She chops onions and the tears run down her face.

  Tori comes in and licks the spoon. “You’re on the right track,” she says, sniffing at the steam that comes up from the pot. “A few more hours and we’ll have a blue ribbon.”

  He still hasn’t woken up. Sarah cleans the dishes and washes the lettuce and smokes a cigarette. Tori suggests a game of Russian Bank. Fine. Tori shuffles the cards; they are soft and nicked from years of use. They each win a game and are setting the board for the tiebreaker when Philip enters, his face wrinkled with sleep.

  “Smells good.”

  “It’s too late to go to the canyon.”

  Philip shrugs and pours himself a Scotch. He drinks it quickly and pours another. He’s drunk by the time they have dinner. Sarah doubts that he can even taste the food, although he compliments her on it.

  She lies next to him as he snores, repulsed by the booze on his breath. She shakes him. “Why did you run off? You could have waited for me.” He stops snoring and rolls over, his face to the wall, his back to her.

  *

  In the morning he’s hungover and pale beneath his sunburn. He waves away breakfast and saddles his horse.

  “What are you doing now?”

  “I’m going scouting.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know if the canyon’s the best place.”

  “But that’s what we decided. You’re not going to find anything more beautiful.”

  “I’ve got to go, Sarah.”

  “Do you want me to come with you?”

  “No.”

  Sarah returns to the canyon by herself. She throws pebbles at the cliff. The swallows zoom out of their holes, chattering angrily. She steps into the stream and the water magnifies her toes. She won’t think about him, she’ll think about her and Maya picking mint in the stream near Roncesvalles. She takes off her clothes and wades into the deepest part, gasping at the cold. She submerges herself. The water is crystal clear. Above, a ribbon of sunlight floats on the surface. She reaches up, and the ribbon breaks into fragments.

  *

  The next day Philip again goes scouting, and again she returns to the canyon, this time with her camera. She takes pictures of the water, the reflections of the ripples on the rock, the petroglyph. She shoots two rolls. When she gets back, he still hasn’t returned. Tori tells her not to worry; Conningsby had his moments too.

  “This isn’t a moment. It’s been going on forever.”

  “He doesn’t seem that bad. He was talking nicely this morning.”

  “To you.”

  “To you too.”

  “He didn’t say anything. He said good morning.”

  “Some women would find that loquacious. You let him be. You’ve got your own business to attend to.”

  “What business?”

  Simon Perez had called while she was taking pictures. He wants her to call back. Sarah sighs. She’s supposed to feel something; she’s been waiting for this call for months, and it’s a good sign that he called her out here—it means she’ll probably get the show at the Galley. But Philip isn’t here. He’d make her feel excited. Without him, all that hoping and wishing seems absurd. What is a show other than hanging your paintings in a different room than they’re usually in? Still, she calls him back.

  “Sarah!” Simon is exuberant. He launches into a tale about last night’s party, a bepimpled stallion in a shower cap, some joke that Sarah doesn’t get, but she laughs anyway, a little bit of her waking up to Simon’s charm and the pleasures of the art world. It’s not that bad, hanging your stuff in a room. There’s nothing wrong with it. Yet gazing out the window and hearing Simon yammer away, she thinks the sky out here would crush him. It’s so vast. It would crush almost the entire scene—the art and the artists and the critics and the collectors, they’re all dependent on the smaller scale of Manhattan. There you compare yourself to a building, here you are up against the earth, the mountains, the fucking galaxy. Maybe that’s why Philip wanted to come. He’s an insect out here, he’s nothing. Maybe he won’t go back to the canyon because once he scatters the ashes, he’ll have to leave and become something a
gain.

  “Baby, are you going to do it?”

  “What?”

  “My love map, ding-dong, I want you to paint my love map. How many times do I have to say it?”

  She claps her hand over her mouth, suppressing a groan. So much for pooh-poohing shows, she can feel the disappointment rising. What happened to the big Texas sky and its enforced perspective? These fucking love maps. She’s sick of making them. Their appeal has to do with the exact way the subway map is replicated, the curve of the green line, the circles and squares of the red line, just the right shade of purple for the 7, so painting them means executing the same strokes, mixing the same colors, over and over again. The only things that change are the locations of fucking and splitting, the number of dots, the distribution and promiscuity. They’ll be like her scale paintings, annoyingly popular, while the stuff she cares about gets ignored. But she can’t say no. Philip hasn’t worked for months, and who knows if he ever will again?

  “The mystic’s map,” Simon is saying. “That big bang on the Lower East Side, what’s that about?”

  “He said it was a physical union with god. He didn’t come, but he was drenched in sweat and trembling like when he was first with his wife.”

  “Some kind of god,” Simon says. “Give him my number.”

  Sarah smiles politely even though, of course, Simon can’t see her. Outside, Tori pushes a wheelbarrow out to the stables. “I should go,” she says. “It looks like Tori needs help.”

  “When are you getting back?” Simon asks. “I want you to do a show in December.”

  “More love maps?”

  “No. Whatever you want.”

  *

  Sarah circles around the house. Where is Philip? He has to know right now, this instant. He’d always said she’d get a solo by the time she was forty. He’d been more confident than she. He’d even offered to bet, but she hadn’t thought it was a good idea to bet against herself. He would have won, although only by a hair, seeing as she was turning forty-one in a minute.

  She shivers, not from the evening air but from the realization that it’s actually happening. She hugs herself. It’s pathetic. She knows it’s pathetic. The sky is laughing at her and poor Philip is riding around, demented, alone, who knows where? A show won’t make her happy and it means nothing in the long run, but in the short run, damn it, it feels sweet. Where is he? She climbs onto the rock.

  Tori appears in front of her. “Do you see him?”

  “Maybe.” There’s a blurry shape on the horizon. Could be a horse, could be a man.

  “Well, I’m popping the champagne—Coors, that is,” says Tori. “We can’t wait forever.”

  Chapter 17

  Connecticut, October 1997

  A shower. That’s what she needed. She was a disaster of sweat, booze, tobacco, leaf mulch. She pulled back the curtain and turned on the faucet. Ah, hot water, better than raking. She washed her stomach, her navel, her C-section scar. She started to hum an old song of Maya’s. She wrapped herself in a towel and dripped downstairs. The wine bottle seemed to have disappeared. She poured a nip of Scotch and pretended to be Max Sr., stirring it with his finger, smacking his lips. She opened the record cabinet. The needle jumped over some dust, hit on a groove, and there was her voice.

  Sarah lay on the couch, gazing at the picture of Maya’s back, the glimmer of her skin in the blackness of the stage. The house started rolling again, lurching and keening. Her stomach churned. She tore upstairs, grabbed at the rim of the toilet, and vomited. The lurching stopped. She flushed, shuddering with disgust, and splashed water on her face. Downstairs, Maya’s voice swelled. Philip had accused Sarah of wanting to have lunch with Maya, dinner with himself, as if it were horrible to want both. Maybe he had been right, but how could she not want both?

  She remembered a fiberglass cow, white with black spots, its hooves shockingly pink. It had been in a supermarket, somewhere on the road, when she was a little girl. Ma had gaped, appalled.

  “It’s just a cow, Ma.”

  “What’s the meaning?”

  “It’s a decoration.”

  “It’s not a cow. It’s got no udders. Not a bull either.”

  “It’s pointing out the dairy, that’s all.” Sarah was Max’s age, and matter-of-fact. What is, is. An udderless cow, why protest? But she understood now. Ma had been appalled at the willful erasure, the falseness and stupidity. How can you understand anything if you erase sex?

  Sarah shivered. She had to get dressed. But what should she wear? How could she make these decisions? What time was it? She sneezed. She needed some clothes; she was too naked. She put on an Irish sweater and some old jeans and lit another cigarette. The telephone rang. She choked on the smoke. It rang again.

  Chapter 18

  West Texas, October 1989

  Philip is in his hole, that’s what Sarah’s calling it. It’s not really a hole, it’s that putrid mine shaft, but it’s easier if she thinks of it as a hole in the ground.

  “Maybe he’s looking for something,” Tori had said.

  A meager hope. Buried treasure? Quicksilver drippings?

  They are in the truck, Sarah and Tori. Tori picked her up from the Fort Stockton airstrip, and they’re driving southward, on the now-familiar two-lane highway, her suitcase sliding and scraping in the pickup bed. She has no idea what’s in there. She remembers throwing in some jeans and a jar of marmalade that has probably cracked open. She wasn’t thinking straight; she had just gotten Tori’s message.

  She shouldn’t have gone back to New York. She knows that. Tori does too. The air in the pickup is thick with it. You go off to paint pictures and leave your husband piling empty tequila bottles in my garden? But Tori had urged her to go: get back to your studio, prepare. And she’d insisted that Philip stay. Sarah suspects that this was because he still hadn’t scattered the ashes, and Tori wanted them in the house or nearby, didn’t want Philip leaving with his trophy still intact. He hadn’t been drinking then. That began after Sarah left. She shouldn’t have left. You don’t leave when things are going to hell. But things had been going to hell for so long. She stares at the dashboard, the old-fashioned knobs, the dried flowers in the ashtray, Tori’s fragile, weathered hand.

  “Do you want me to drive, Tori?”

  “No. Am I weaving?”

  “No. I just thought you might be tired.”

  “You’re the one who looks tired.”

  “When did he start drinking?”

  “About ten days ago. I told him if he planned to carry on like that, he couldn’t stay at my house. So he left. Got a room at the Kiva Hotel.”

  “There’s a hotel out here?”

  “Down by the Rio Grande. From the seventies, some optimist’s dream of a Wild West tourist trap.” Tori laughs. “The optimist left, but the Kiva stayed. They get dope-runners, herpetologists, I suppose some river rafters.” Sarah clears her throat. “Anyway,” Tori continues, “they called when Philip disappeared. He owes them about a thousand bucks in margaritas. He was drinking pitchers for breakfast.”

  “He’s never done anything like this before.”

  Tori whistles. “Look at the horns on that one,” she says, eyeing a longhaired bull.

  “That’s great, Tori.”

  “There used to be thousands of cattle out here. When I was a kid, we’d take the stage up to Marfa. You should have seen it then. Miles and miles of gama grass, no fences, huge herds of cattle and sheep, and every few hours a lonely cowpoke ogling my mother. The animals overgrazed. When I came back from Europe, it was a different place, pretty much like you see now: barren fields, barbed wire.”

  Sarah leans against the window, tired of Tori’s subject-jumping. Maybe Philip isn’t in that shaft. Maybe it’s all in Tori’s head. She’s singing now, Ma’s old circus song: “Divine Serpentine, you are yours and I am mine …” There’s no question that she’s acting erratic. Well … she’s over ninety; she’s got the right. Sarah cheers inwardly. Maybe they’ll get
there and Philip will come out of Tori’s house, sane and sober, mildly puzzled. “I thought you had to prepare for that show.” “Well, yes, darling, but I missed you.” Then what? She and Philip go back to New York and leave a Tori-gone-bonkers alone in the desert? Well, yes—she wants to stay here. That’s clear enough. No pills. No placements. No machines.

  “Tori?” Sarah says. Tori finishes her song before glancing over. “How do you know that Philip is in the shaft?”

  “Because I rode out there and yelled for him to come up, and he yelled back, No.”

  “But how did you know to go out there?”

  “Oh, I just had a suspicion.”

  “Why?”

  “He and Franco used to go out there before.”

  “Was he thinking of scattering the ashes there?”

  “Oh gosh, I hope we have enough gas.”

  “The tank’s full, Tori. Don’t you remember? We filled it in Fort Stockton.”

  “Oh yes, so we did.”

  “You sure you don’t want me to drive?”

  “I’m fine, Sarah. Men like smelly holes. My father was particularly fond of Shaft 8, and you’ve never smelled anything worse—cordite, sweat, and piss. Philip’s is more sulfurous.”

  “It smelled like rotting metal.”

  “My father called it the smell of life. He believed that chaos gave birth to order, rot to growth, that sort of thing. He died in a mine. Did you know that? Surrounded by elementals and muck and rubble. My mother said that’s what you want: to die from what you love.”

  “Philip can’t die in a mine shaft. He doesn’t love mining.”

  “That’s why you’ve got to get him out. He’s been down there for two days, and all he has is a bottle of tequila.”

  “I thought you said you dropped down some water.”

  “Oh yes, you’re right. That was smart of me.”

  Sarah rubs her eyes. “You sure about this, Tori?”

  “Rojo.”

  “Huh?”

  “I just remembered, the guy who drove the stage when I was a kid, his name was Rojo.”