Banana Rose (22 page)

“Not sure. Hey, Bert, where’s Columbine?” The attendant turned to Bert.

Bert took the cigar out of his mouth and grinned as though he had just been asked something sexual. “Columbine, huh? What do you want with that?” I was too tired and too eager to see Anna to be bothered with Bert. I didn’t say anything. He pointed north. “Take this road up to the next light, turn left, go five blocks. There’s a stop sign. Make a left, and there she is. What number do you want?”

“Eight twelve.”

“Should be four blocks down.”

I repeated the directions to make sure I’d got them straight. It was a watery gray dusk and the flatness of the land gave it a big feeling. I parked in front of 812, a big white clapboard house. I rang the bell. A man with a big belly answered.

“Is Anna here?” I could hear the television in the background. There was a commercial on about Pepto-Bismol.

“No,” he answered through the screen door.

“Well, do you know where she is?”

“She lives up there.” He opened the screen and pointed to a door on the second floor.

“Thanks.” I ran up the outside stairs and rang the doorbell four times in a row. No answer. I sat down on the top step and rested my head in my hand. What had I done? What if she had gone away for a few days? I decided to check out the neighborhood and then come back.

I walked to the corner and turned left onto Spitz Avenue. It was dark out now. “Where could Anna be?” I was feeling foolish for arriving without contacting her first. I passed a bar on the corner called the First Avenue. Its storefront had that art deco kind of glass brick. I turned around, opened the door, and walked in. It was the type of place where I imagined Anna went. In the dim light I could see a long wooden bar with black booths opposite and a jukebox lit up emerald green. I sat in the first booth. No one else was in there.

“Can I help you?” The old waiter wore a white apron.

“Yes. Can I have a glass of sherry?”

“You mean cherry? We have cherry-flavored brandy. Blackberry and strawberry, too.”

“No, sherry. You know,” I said.

“How do you spell it?”

“S-h-e-r-r-y.”

“Nope, never heard of it.”

“Okay, can I have a glass of Chablis?” I paused. “I mean, white wine.”

The waiter scratched his head. “I’ll see if I can find you some.” He came back with a beer glass filled to the brim with white wine. “Seventy-five cents, please.” He held out his hand. I gave him a dollar and told him to keep the change.

What a bargain, I thought, until I tasted the wine. It tasted like squirrel piss. The lonesomeness of Nebraska entered the bar as a smoky mermaid. She made me thirsty and I drank the terrible wine too fast. Lonesomeness left me. I began to miss her because in her place came the ocean. The barstools and the jukebox lights were swimming. I got up and backstroked out the door. The night was humid.

I made a left instead of a right down Spitz Avenue and became slightly lost. A car of teenage boys in a convertible zoomed by and yelled, “Orange-ade tonight!” I thought I’d like to Orangeade with them and watched the car disappear in the distance down the great boulevard of Dansville, Nebraska. The truth was, I was suddenly happy and at ease. I’d always fantasized about small towns. Now this Jewish girl from Brooklyn was finally getting to be part of small-town America. On this night I walked casually down a small-town street in khaki shorts looking like everyone else. Well, not quite. I was dark and I had a heart tattoo on my left shoulder blade. I had dropped acid about fifteen times, and that alone made me a stranger to this town in the middle of America.

On my first acid trip I’d watched a red rose in a vase tremble, opening its petals. I watched it for ten minutes, and in those ten minutes it had opened completely and with it my heart. By the end, I was screaming in glee and my friends ran in from the next room, afraid I was freaking out and about to jump out the window. I tried to tell them that the rose and I were one, that my insides were the same red as the petals on the flower. They looked at each other and worried about me. In that moment, I understood lonesomeness and knew that behind it was the rose, that without the rose there was no lonesomeness. You can only be lonesome if you once had a connection.

If there was so much lonesomeness in Nebraska, I thought, there must have once been some great connection. I felt I understood this place as I walked back toward Anna’s. The trees seemed particularly inviting. The house lights swam in my eyes as though I were squinting. I had gotten the heart tattoo after that first acid trip. Where was Anna anyway? This time as I walked down Columbine, I knew she was home.

Anna didn’t seem that surprised to see me at first, not that excited either, but she warmed up. That was the way she was. As though she’d put her emotions out on the laundry line to dry and then left them there. I had to yell at her, “Hey, Anna, don’t forget that love T-shirt you left out on the line. It’s gonna fade in the Nebraska sun.” She turned her face to me, smiling, and she remembered. Emotion. She seemed to be more beautiful than she’d been nearly a year and a half ago. She was wearing a pink shirt, and her hair was long. I’d forgotten about her cheekbones. She sure had them. Her face was like a valentine that came to a point at her chin.

“So, you’re going to marry Gauguin,” she said, looking up from her mason jar filled with lemonade. It was 2
A.M.
We were sitting cross-legged on her brown couch, facing each other. As usual, Anna had a small place, one room. The bed was near the couch. We’d been sipping her homemade drink slowly for the last two hours.

“Yes, I’m going to marry Gauguin.”

“How come?” Anna asked.

“Because I can’t be without him, and I’m going to be thirty.”

“What does that have to do with it?” She was good at asking questions.

“I don’t know. When I hit thirty, I just want to be married. I never did before in all the years in Taos.”

Anna looked at me suspiciously. I wasn’t feeling too sure. I shrugged my shoulders. “It’s something I have to live out. I’m still in love with him. He’s my golden boy.” I put my finger on a slat of the Venetian blind and pressed it so it bent and I could see out the window. It was quiet outside and there was a Chevy pickup parked across the street.

I glanced back at Anna. She was really looking at me, in a way I’d never seen before. It made me nervous. I caught her gray eyes. They held me like a dash in the middle of a sentence. My nerves disappeared. I heard twigs snapping. She bent toward me and placed her lips on mine. I suppose someone would call this a kiss. I wasn’t sure, because she was a woman and I was a woman, but, yes, it was one pair of lips against another. I closed my eyes. She kissed me again. I walked through doors, down long gray corridors with windows high up opening onto a blue sky. I kept walking.

After my mouth had been kissed to the color of plums and the shape of Italian tomatoes and my body was a pregnant fruit, Anna stood up. She led me over to the nearby bed, and she lay down. I lay down really close to her, as if I were a paper clip and she a horseshoe magnet. Anna slowly unbuttoned my cotton blouse. This was a woman’s hand that now put its face over my right breast. I felt the awe of a child flying down a water slide in summer. I dove down, down into dark water.

We became hips, legs, small tender creases, lips between our legs, mounds of rough hair and sucking sounds, licking saliva and salt. Anna wasn’t Anna. Nell wasn’t Nell. We were woman, one woman, and I took woman into my arms for the first time. I wasn’t sure if I was hugging Anna or Anna was hugging me or I was hugging myself. But it was the delicacy of her face that astonished me the most. Could this be what a woman’s face is like? This cheek, these lashes, this shadow around the nostrils? I ate Anna whole that night as though she were a watermelon and my face dripped with pink juice.

The next morning, I wasn’t quite sure what had happened. Between Anna’s plaid sheets, I turned and asked her, “Anna, did we make love last night?”

She yawned and stretched her long body out until it seemed to fill the small room. She looked at me as though I were crazy. “Nell, you weren’t
that
drunk from the First Avenue. Yeah, we made love.” Then she smiled, remembering I was a neophyte. “Some would call it that.” She rolled onto her side. “Are you okay? You’re not freaked out?” She bent to kiss me again. The sun filtered through the blinds and made stripes across the bed. I didn’t want to kiss Anna anymore. I felt nervous again. What was I doing? Did I have to marry her, too? “I’m going to take a shower.” I jumped up from the bed.

In the shower, I let the water pour over my face and hair for a long time. I couldn’t think straight, feeling I was supposed to do something. I didn’t know what it was, but I didn’t want to do it. I used the big blue towel hanging on the rack to dry myself, bending and rubbing it over my calf. My leg stretched out in front of me, heel on top of the pink toilet seat cover. Suddenly I remembered a rainstorm I had once seen when I lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, before Taos. I was standing by the screen door watching the rain hit the street and bounce an inch or two. The green lawns were soggy. The smell was as fresh as steel. I remembered that I had thought of that storm when Anna and I went to bed in the middle of the night. Anna was thunder cracking open clouds. She touched my breast and it poured and poured.

I finished drying and stepped out in Anna’s red robe. She was sitting at the kitchen table in a white T-shirt. I went over and sat across from her.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“You tell me.”

“Oh, Anna.” I ran my finger along the crack in the wooden table, avoiding her eyes. She was in pain, scared. I’d better get talking, I thought.

“Anna, I’ve never made love to a woman before. I liked it”—I hesitated—“but I’m getting married. I thought I’d spend the day with you, leave tomorrow morning. I don’t think I want to make love again. I could sleep on the couch.” I was an idiot. She wouldn’t look at me.

“Shit.” I got up and stood by her, stroking her hair. “Please, Anna, I love you.” I told her about the rainstorm and the doors I walked through when she kissed me. “Look, it was great. I’m fucked up. I don’t think I can handle anymore, and besides, I have to see Gauguin tomorrow.” I knelt down next to her. “Anna, help me.”

She was stiff for a moment. Then she reached out her hand and touched my cheek. She asked, “You don’t hate me, do you? You know, for making love with you. You’re not disgusted, are you?”

“No, no, never!” I looked at her so straight and clear that cantaloupes could have broken open. It felt good. I was sure of us again.

She smiled. “Let’s go down to the Uptown for breakfast. I’ll read you something I wrote.”

“Is it okay?” I asked.

“What?”

“That I don’t want to make love anymore?”

“Yeah. It was something we’ve had to do for a long time but didn’t get around to until now.”

I beamed. “You mean you always wanted to make love to me?” I felt proud. My friend wanted me.

She turned to me. “Sure. The thought crossed my mind. Didn’t it occur to you?”

“No,” I replied. “I didn’t think about it, because I didn’t know how. I’d never made love to a woman. But I’ve always been crazy about you.”

“Me, too.”

The Uptown was eight blocks from Anna’s house, and you had to enter through an old hotel lobby. “C’mon, I want you to meet Jackson, the cook. He’s a friend.” We piloted between black round tables to the kitchen door in the back. “Hey, Jackson, come over here a minute. This is my friend, Nell.”

I could hear him whisper to her, “One of your sweethearts?”

“Naa, just a friend.” She looked at me.

I felt weird. Now everyone thought I was a lesbian. Anna and I sat at a back table. There was a deer’s head mounted on the wall opposite us.

“What’s up?” Anna asked.

“Nothing,” I answered.

“C’mon, Nell, something’s wrong.”

I couldn’t hide. She knew. It was easier to lie to Gauguin. If I said “Nothing,” he let it pass whether he believed it or not. Anna was going to push. In truth, I liked it. She cared. “Well, to tell the truth, I’m feeling like a lesbian.”

“Don’t worry, you’re not.” She said it fast and nasty.

“Fuck you.” I looked down at my napkin.

We sat quietly for a while. I ordered pecan pancakes, fresh-squeezed orange juice, and tea. She wanted fried eggs and potatoes. We both relaxed.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Me, too. Why don’t you read to me?”

Anna had put the novel aside for a while and was writing short stories. She pulled a notebook from her jacket pocket and read me one. It was about a kid on a bicycle. He fell into an anthill. The ants covered him and he went crazy. “Did you like it?” she asked.

“Yeah.” I wasn’t sure what to say. It was pretty gruesome. Then I thought of something. “Anna, do you remember when Gauguin and I went backpacking at Bandelier? You were still in Taos then.”

“Yes.” She wasn’t sure what I was getting at. She wanted me to talk about her story.

Instead I told her about how I’d swallowed the turquoise pearl that the ants carried out of their hill on top of the ruins.

“Yeah, uh, Nell, what’s the point?” I think Anna wanted to punch me.

“Wait, I’m getting to it. Ants are deep. My story shows it. They are messengers from the old world. I think your short story is deeper than you think.” I was smiling, proud of my conclusion.

“Nell, I haven’t read this to anyone. Can’t you say something else?”

“I said it was deep, what else do you want?” I couldn’t help it—I started laughing. Old Anna and her writing. This time she did punch me, but she was laughing, too. Actually, I thought Anna was doing really well with her writing, because she could laugh about it. She was more relaxed.

“From your cards, it sounded as if you did a lot of painting in Boulder.” Anna pushed some hair from her eyes.

“Yeah, I did.” I nodded. “I was so happy in Taos, you’d think I’d have painted more there. In some odd way I thought my painting was tied up with Gauguin’s music. And then I was also sustained by you; knowing you were across the valley writing helped me to paint. I felt supported. But in Boulder I was all alone.”