He sits to put on his boots. He has to say that puberty was never a problem for him. Hell, he was driving by the time he was ten. He didn’t have any bowling alley or movie theater. He made do with the moon and the stars—and the girls on the blankets in the flatbed. He stamps his feet into his boots; his knees creak as he stands.

  Speaking of it, he says.

  He’s standing there, and there is no part of him that does not radiate his intention, the energy of it creating an almost visible aura, like any martial art or negotiation of power. His smile is still fabulous—all those teeth!—and the streaks in his brown eyes are black lasers.

  You interested in a little afternoon delight?

  It’s his usual ploy to avoid any conversation of consequence. She would laugh, but she’s learned not to.

  1.

  * * *

  At the top of the outside staircase, on the landing, Annette feeling suddenly as if she might fly, swoop out over the driveway’s cement apron, then up, into the wide endless blue sky above Dallas, loop-the-loop, light and free. Never again will she have to climb these black metal stairs!

  She inserts her key and slips into a shadowy kitchen. The stifling heat sucks the air out of her. Tiny stove, tiny refrigerator with minuscule freezer—a child’s kitchen—and always having to cook in her slip because of the heat. How had she stood it? She’s come from Lamar’s apartment, thrown on jeans and one of his cowboy shirts with pearlized snap buttons, but no panties, no bra. Barefoot. She feels her breasts loose and free beneath Lamar’s shirt, her nipples taut, chafed by its double-starched cotton. Tingling with newfound freedom, she opens the kitchen door, strides into the apartment—and there he is, sitting at the white molded-plastic table, his back to her. Her husband.

  She shrinks back—can she tiptoe out? But the board that always creaks has already done so, and despite the noise from the window unit grinding away, Howard’s turned around. He jumps up from the paper-and-book-strewn table. A university counselor has calmed her with statistics that prove the lack of correlation between Howard’s threats of suicide and their fulfillment, but the counselor also told her not to see him.

  She stands paralyzed as he walks toward her. You’ve come home, he says. I knew you would. I’ve prayed for it. He holds his arms out wide, Do not be afraid, for I have redeemed you. I have called you by your name, you are mine.

  His voice is loud and resonant in the small attic space, hot as always. Annette recognizes the verse: Isaiah 43. She shakes her cloud of dark hair and pushes past him without speaking.

  At the far end of the room, beneath the slant ceiling, miniature marble busts huddle on a bookshelf. Tiny heads: Chopin, Beethoven, Bach. She kneels down to wrap them in newsprint. Howard prowls around behind her, talking about their life together. Scholars. A life of the mind.

  In her mind, Annette sees triangles of ham alternating with triangles of cheese, stale slices of rye.

  She knew the first year of marriage she’d made a mistake. Too proud to admit failure, she’d thought her music would save her, Howard would change, she’d be able to bear it. When he started insisting the non-canonical gospels ought to be included in the New Testament, she realized his mind, the one she’d thought free, was, in fact, caged—circling a wheel of obsession, arguing a moot issue.

  Fine particles of marble glimmer in Beethoven’s curls.

  She wraps the head, stands, picks up her sack, walks toward the bedroom. Howard dogs her, crowding close, his breath raspy and loud. An Apocrypha scholar at Perkins Divinity, he’s lost any dignity he ever possessed. That first morning, with her standing barefoot, arms full of clothing, and Lamar gunning his truck down below—and Howard would not believe it. A man she’d met the night before? Someone she didn’t know?

  Howard, handsome in a regular way, body soft as biscuit dough, on his knees crying, and Annette just standing there, recalling the rough feel of bark as Lamar, the stranger with the fabulous smile, pinned her against a campus live oak. They’d fled the brightly lit fundraiser. Who was that dull event for? Why had she been there?

  Annette shakes open a second sack. Meeting Lamar only confirmed what she already knew: she and Howard have nothing; he’s the stranger. She begins wrapping objects on her bedside table. Her hands are large. They enable her intense playing style where, head lowered, she pulls all of herself inside in order to send it back out into fingers that dominate the keyboard—fingers now busy with newsprint. She has only to wrap these items and she’ll be out of here. No more drab parties. No more tedious ecclesiastical hair-splitting.

  How many scenes with Howard has she suffered in the past six months? Scenes with tears and recriminations that are actually only one scene repeated: How could she leave him for a cowboy? She never mentioned the Dallas real estate company Lamar owns, only the old ranch house in Rosetree. She never mentioned the expansiveness of the land and the sky—the adventure! the freedom! the sex!—because the scene always and only consisted of Howard threatening to kill himself. He had a gun; she mustn’t doubt that he would use it if she didn’t come back.

  Behind her, Howard’s hot, ragged breath. He knows she’s cutting class because he walked over to the music school to check. He heard she wasn’t showing up to practice, although he can hardly believe that.

  Annette pictures the practice rooms in the basement of the Meadows Building, no windows, airless, dark. She draws a deep breath—against her nipples, the starched cotton of Lamar’s shirt; between her legs, a ridge of stiff jean crotch.

  All your work! And what about the talent God gave you? Your hands that set pianos on fire? The concert career we’ve planned?

  On and on Howard rants, and Annette thinks only that she won’t ever again have to be shut away from life. Don’t respond to him, the counselor warned. No matter what.

  In the final moment, in the tiny kitchen, she turns around, both arms filled with paper sacks, to tell him how sorry she is, he’s a good person, but it just hadn’t—

  He shoves her out the door into the bright sun and she almost loses her balance. As she steps carefully down the staircase, a little fearful because her arms are full and she can’t hold on to the railing, he walks out to stand on the landing. He shouts after her, using the oracular voice he often practices, a big voice meant for a big congregation. If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. Words spoken by Jesus in the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas.

  Later that afternoon, drinking beer in a bar near the campus, she laughs with Cecelia about how frightened she’d felt. She can hardly believe it, but she was, for a moment, actually scared. Then her laughter fizzes into happiness. She feels giddy, she says. Loopy. She doesn’t say every cell in her body feels like it’s giving off light.

  I was dead, she says, and now I’m alive. I’m alive!

  Mehrangarh

  ON ACCOUNT OF THE TV CREWS CROWDING ARDITH’S YARD TUESDAY, IT WAS past dark when I headed out to her house and I missed the path we’ve worn through the pittosporum and got tangled up—that’s how come this scratch on my upper lip. It’s scabbing now, but I could taste the blood that night! I marched straight back to Ardith’s bedroom and told her she’s going to have to start coming to my house to get unzipped. She didn’t hear me, per usual. She was standing in front of the chifforobe unpinning her braid from its white crown. Ardith’s tall and large-boned with huge hands and feet. Nothing like me. I didn’t mention my lip, and she didn’t notice.

  I spoke louder. “The years we wasted on that boy. You’ve got to admit our project’s failed.”

  How could she deny it with reporters knocking at her door all afternoon? I’d sat out on my front stoop, watching. Nobody paid me the least mind. The spring air was fine, with cottonwood fluff from my tree floating through it like tiny lamb fleeces. Next door, the reporters cursed the fibers, swiped their faces, only to turn the next instant toward a TV camera, lethal and composed as any rattler. I might’ve been entertained if they hadn’t interrupted our canasta game. I was not eavesdropping but once I’d adjusted my aids, it was all I could hear: Chris Murphy, beleaguered oil and gas guru … raised by his grandmother here in Roswell, New Mexico … ongoing SEC investigation …

  The murmurings mingled with the cottonwood floaters and scent of honeysuckle to create a cloud of sweet-smelling nonsense. Neither Ardith nor I understood what the problem was with Chris’s oil business—something about pyramids—but when does Ardith ever admit anything’s wrong?

  “Who’s to say this isn’t God’s plan?” she mused, placing her hairpins in their saucer on top of the chifforobe. “To bring everyone down, so all can be equal? Isn’t that what Jesus preached?”

  I wanted to say God’s plan, my fanny, but I learned long ago you can’t argue with Ardith. She’s always certain she’s right. With her white braid hanging down and her long neck stretched up, she gets that look, as though she’s seeing something I can’t. It’s the India Influence. I’m a seeker, she says—all those holy men in loincloths, don’t you know? It gives her a sense of superiority.

  “We should’ve sent him to college,” I said. This brought her back to Earth.

  “How would Freshman Composition help a Maitreya bring world peace?”

  The eternal question. I turned around and stood, head bowed, so she could unzip me. Maitreya, great teacher—that’s the way she talks. She can’t help it. When she came home from California in ’47 jabbering about “the holy baby,” I knew something bad was going to happen. How did I know? My crying hands told me—and this is not a figure of speech. Osteoarthritis is a curse, but it’s also an early warning system.

  Here comes trouble with a capital T. My daddy used to say this. We might’ve ridden all day out to some sheep camp the other side of the Apache reservation, but here would come our old dog, Trouble, trotting through the scrub. It’s my hands say it now.

  When she turned around so I could unzip her—I can only use my thumb and forefinger, but I manage—she said, “For God’s sake, Lottie, quit clacking!” I jerked her zipper so hard, she stumbled. I can’t help it if my dentures don’t fit. I have a narrow jaw. Narrow feet, narrow hands. She’s the one built like a peasant.

  Never mind. I’m used to her abuse. We’ve been neighbors forty years and we’re more like sisters than friends. She, a child of Presbyterian missionaries, would have a biblical reference for my position in her life, but I don’t. I wasn’t raised beneath the walls of a miraculous fort in India. I grew up east of Claunch with windmills for water and scrub to every horizon. Sometimes I think that if I have to hear another word about Mehrangarh—built by angels and fairies, she says, rising sheer out of high rock—I’ll spit my teeth at her.

  We knelt down, per usual, on the floor beside her bed, our dresses sloppy around our shoulders. Ardith clasped her big hands together, I my small claws. But instead of praying, Ardith spoke to God about seeing Chris as a newborn. How many years have I had to listen to this? I’ll tell you. Thirty-seven and a half years.

  Her voice filled the room. She said she was straight off the train, thirsty as all get-out, drinking a glass of tap water at the kitchen table in Encino, but when she saw him, her thirst disappeared. All sound drained off. Joe looked like a fish, mouth opening and closing. Mary Ruth didn’t speak, just laid the baby in her outstretched arms.

  Ardith says she is “meant for the stage,” which just means her voice is loud. I, on the other hand, have to pull my spine straight to give my lungs space. It’s Ardith’s script, but I play my part.

  “The baby was warm!” I proclaimed.

  Again, her meant-for-the-stage voice: she expected her grandson to be a miracle, but a regular miracle, like all newborns. There’d been no warning of this. No Gabriel kneeling, lily extended.

  I’m not making this up; that’s what she said. No Gabriel kneeling, no lily. Who is she to expect an Archangel? I never expected a big life and I haven’t had it. I’m satisfied with small. But not Ardith. Normal life has never been enough to contain her, and she gets away with a lot. She just does. Her spirit is powerful.

  “His eyes smiled into me,” she said.

  “You recognized him,” I cried.

  “He hadn’t wanted to be born.”

  “He resisted until he had to be cut out!”

  “Who wouldn’t have lingered in unbornness?”

  “Knowing the sacrifice!”

  A whisper from Ardith, “Shrinking from grandeur into a tiny newborn.”

  We always chanted the final words together: “How courageous he was to consent.”

  It was what Ardith had said in ’47—and said and said until even I started thinking that baby in California had courage. I don’t know anything about babies. It’s a mystery why I never had one, except my body’s exceptionally small and I’ve got this growth, you can see it on my forehead. My mother called it an “angel kiss.” Ardith insists there’s a third, invisible eye there. I’m a rational person, but I go along.

  I know my angel kiss had nothing to do with bearing children, but if I’m marked outwardly, there might be a marker inside, a blister blocking some tube. I know I was lucky to get a husband—my daddy said it at the time, though Mama shushed him—even if it was only a Honeywell boy from the neighboring ranch. The sheep business is precarious. There’s always wolves or drought, or in the days before fences, cow patties dirtying the water. Sheep will not drink dirty water. The more land you have the better, so I never fooled myself into thinking Dogie’s marriage proposal was anything other than business. I do wish I’d understood that a boy named for the ewe’s rejected runt is always going to be hunting teat. Dogie and his women. I’d shut him out of my heart long before I met Ardith.

  She doesn’t remember how we first met. Me, I remember everything like it just happened. We were standing around a punch bowl at the Commandant’s house. It was a party to welcome Major Ephram Ridgeway, transferred from Fort Sam in San Antonio to be second in command on the Hill. (We call the New Mexico Military Institute “the Hill”—don’t know why, except Pennsylvania Street does rise.) And there was Ardith, Mrs. New Superintendent Ridgeway, tall, with her dark hair braided and coiled on top of her head like a crown, asking me about sheepherding. I couldn’t figure it out. Why did this queen want to talk about sheep? Then she said that Jesus was a shepherd, and she was a member of his flock, and I thought, Oh Lord, a holy roller. But what I said was—this was the first night we met, mind you, all the men except Dogie standing around in brown uniforms with their brass buttons shining to beat the band—“If you think it’s a fine thing to be in a flock of sheep, you’re plain loony. Even if the shepherd is Jesus.”

  Ardith and Ephram. Sounds like a magic act. I don’t believe in magic, but they were something, those two. Tall and beautiful and so in love. I was halfway in love with both of them myself. Ardith had fallen for Eph the first time she saw him play polo, because as a child in Jodhpur, she sooo delighted in watching the Maharaja play. I can still hear her saying it: I sooo delighted. I told her I’d been delighted to learn arithmetic sitting in the dirt by a bloody pile of docked lambs’ tails. If you take away three tails, how many are left?

  When Eph fell off his favorite polo pony and cracked his brain, that was trouble with a capital T. This happened three years before Chris arrived on our planet. That’s the way Ardith talks: arrived on our planet. She believes that if Chris had been here already, he could’ve saved his grandfather. I keep my dentures clamped tight when she speaks nonsense. I was patient with her Tuesday night, because I knew the trouble with Chris was going to be harder on her than Eph’s death ever was. She knew Eph wasn’t holy. She’s let slip plenty over the years about their imaginative sex life. I always just yawn. Does she think there’s anything I didn’t hear living with cowboys on a sheep ranch?

  Our prayers finished, Ardith hauled me standing. Per usual, my joints had rigored and I had to loosen up before I could walk home. I do this by raising one knee after another real high and stomping down hard. I was making my way back through the pittisporum, when a man slipped out of the shadows and said, Mrs. Honeywell? The stars swarmed, but I didn’t scream. I used up my fear a long time ago watching wolves prowl the edges of campfires. We’d never shoot them, but we’d strychnine a burro and leave it out for them to slink down and eat.

  This wolf smelled like garlic, not burro. His bald head glistened, but his face sprouted fur. He stepped up too close and asked could I comment on the accusations made against my neighbor’s grandson in the new bestseller, False Heroes?

  I should’ve known he was a reporter. “I refuse to dignify that book by talking about it,” I said. “Chris was a courageous young man who volunteered—volunteered—to go to Vietnam. He won plenty of medals, and nothing written by some ex-soldier can change that.” As I swept past him, he said, okay, he was patient, he’d be around. Here was his card.

  Normally three raisins plumped in gin works to silence my bones, but I lay in bed and stared at that card, propped against my Apache bowl on the bedside table, and I could not stop thinking about Chris—all our plans for him.

  * * *

  Mary Ruth was Ardith’s only child, and when she got sick—I still can’t talk about it. Some awful kind of cancer. Long story short: Mary Ruth passed. Ardith quit eating, we couldn’t either one of us play canasta, life didn’t seem worth dirt. Then Joe called and Ardith went to Encino to help with the baby. He was three, I think. One night, tucking him into bed, Chris told her that his mama had just floated through a corner of the ceiling. “Now she’s up by that long crack near the light bulb.” Ardith had always felt the presences, but Chris saw them. She took this as confirmation of holiness. She blew a kiss in Mary Ruth’s direction and turned out the light.

 

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