Richfield & Rivers Mystery Series 3 - Venus Besieged (17 page)

"I
was thinking"...she began and looked deeply into my eyes as I groaned over
what great hands she had..."that we should get married." My eyes
snapped open wide and all formerly receptive orifices clamped shut. Seeing my
startled look she released her hold on me and giggled.

Is
my near-death experience coming down to a wedding band?
What in the world had prompted a woman who heretofore
wouldn't live with me suddenly to want to marry me? My mind locked up as I
tried to decide what exactly marriage meant between the two of us, since no one
really offered marriage to lesbians in the way I'd come to think of it—two
nervous people in monochromatic colors meeting at the end of an aisle alongside
a quartet of women all wearing brightly colored clothing—the colors alone
telling you who the happy people were.

"Married?"
My voice didn't sound like my voice at all, but more like a voice I'd rented
from some very nervous person.

"You
said you wanted us to live together—"

"I
do!" I said, aware I'd uttered the very words that in another context had
me freaked out. Lesbians didn't have to get married; that was in fact the
beauty of being a lesbian. You could get up any morning and decide this wasn't
the bed you wanted to share or the relationship you wanted to wear. Good-bye
was no more complicated than tossing your clothes in a bag and computer and
books into the Jeep.

Then
straight people started muddying the water by denying gay people marriage, and
pretty soon perfectly normal gay people were demanding it. If straight people
wanted to punish gay people, they should demand they get married. Let them have
to hire divorce attorneys and pay alimony and suffer like straights.

"Somehow
I don't think you mean that," Callie said, waiting for me to return from
my mental machinations.

"I
do!" I repeated and wondered why in hell those two words kept coming out
of my mouth at every opportunity. "It's simply that we haven't even lived
together yet. Don't you think we should live together first? You didn't want to
do that and now you want to get married."

"We're
living together now in this cabin. Living together isn't a matter of physical
location. It's a matter of being physically, mentally, and spiritually in
tune."

"You
always act like I'm off-key—out of tune," I squeaked.

"You're
afraid of being married to me, aren't you?" She leaned back, observing me
and smiling slightly.

"Absolutely
not!" I said and broke into a sweat. "We got cheated out of our first
Thanksgiving—we didn't get to eat the turkey." I changed the subject
abruptly.

"We've
had the best Thanksgiving ever. Turkey's in the fridge waiting for you."

I
went immediately to the fridge as if the wire shelves held the meaning of life
and put my head inside to cool off. Admittedly I was having a hot flash and
couldn't decide if it was biochemical or matrimonial.

Callie's
proposal was startling and I couldn't think about anything else. She didn't
mention it again, but it couldn't have been more present for me. I was
afraid—she had that right—afraid.
What am I afraid of? I'll tell you what
I'm afraid of—the ring. The ring signifies that life as I know it is over. No
more private dinners with Barrett Silvers, that's what the ring means. No
worrying about anyone showing up bringing Tupper suppers and looking for a
quickie. I would be forced to see things differently
—
to analyze my every
move to determine if a particular act could be construed as cheating on her: is
that lying to her, would that be disloyal to her? The simplest thing could
become a reason for her to take the ring off and throw it across the room at
me. That's it, then, the ring is a weapon! It's a marital weapon used as mind
control. If my mind strays, look at the ring. Wow! Lord of the Rings has an
entirely different...ring to it.

I
glanced over to see if Callie was reading my mind, but she seemed engrossed in
her computer screen and not tapping into my thoughts, for which I was grateful.

We
dropped matrimony as a general topic for the rest of the day, and by the
following afternoon I thought we'd deserted all serious topics in favor of
sightseeing, including a trip to a riverbed where Indian artifacts were
routinely found. For centuries Native American women had knelt on the rocky
soil to fill pots with drinking water, catch fish for the evening meal, or wade
into the icy stream where perhaps dirt and worry fell like the leaves from the
overhanging trees to drift away on the river's current.

The
tranquility of the open spaces took me by surprise, and I sighed deeply, which
seemed to release decades of anxiety and bring me into some kind of harmony
with the earth. Red clay beneath my feet needed only water to become an earthen
vessel or adobe bricks, and perhaps God, when no one was looking, had scooped
up the rich red clay into a celestial hand and morphed this beautiful substance
into the red people themselves: hard but fragile, faces painted like pottery,
fighting until broken.

The
bright light on Callie's golden hair held me transfixed as she offered her hand
to pull me up from the ground for a climb to the top of a mesa where tribal
elders had once offered prayers. Walking hand in hand, we now felt even closer
as a couple, seemingly baked together in Sedona's kiln, only poor Elmo fretting
over the workout his short legs were getting.

We
roamed around in the red dirt for what seemed like hours, then got back in the
Jeep, where Elmo promptly passed out and Callie insisted we stop next at a
Navajo trading post.

Made
of huge unsplit logs, the trading post was rustic and beautiful. Inside, rows
of squash-blossom necklaces, lined wood-framed cases, Kachina dolls, and
religious icons carved from Cottonwood root and painted as mythological
figures, some of whom looked like Phyllis Diller on a bad-hair day, filled
floor-to-ceiling shelves. Hand-tooled belts coiled snakelike in baskets, and
beautiful handwoven blankets swung from wooden dowel rods attached at one end
to the wall.

Callie
strayed over to a glass case full of fine jewelry and pointed to something. A
dark-haired, heavyset woman behind the counter swooshed over in her native
dress and unlocked the case. Callie said how elegantly crafted the rings were,
then pointed to an unusual pair. "Are these patterned after traditional
Navajo wedding bands?"

I
bobbed my head up from the Kachina dolls and stared at Callie.

The
woman smiled and said they were.

"Come
over here, Teague, and try one of these on." Callie looked up at me and
gave me the most angelic smile, the light dancing in her eyes.

I
couldn't have been more permanently planted to the floor if someone had nailed
me there, the mystical experience by the red river momentarily forgotten.
Commitment in the abstract always played in my head, but commitment in the now
was final, permanent. I panicked.
Callie is looking at wedding bands so the
woman behind the counter will know we’re thinking of—what: weddings,
honeymoons—fucking?

The
woman smiled sweetly at me as if wondering nothing more than my finger size.
"If you will come over here, I will measure you," she said and held
out the ring sizer.

I
glanced at Callie, who hadn't stopped smiling since she'd gone to the jewelry
case, and held out my left hand.

"I
was thinking we should get matching rings," she said quietly, and the
woman looked up, still smiling.

"What
a lovely idea," she said, and for an insane moment I thought she and
Callie were thinking of getting matching rings. That's what always happened to
me when I got freaked—my brain short-circuited and information got jumbled.

"This
pair would look lovely on the two of you," the woman said, seemingly
untroubled by the idea of two women wearing matching rings.

But
hey, it was a sale so maybe money talked louder than prejudice, although this
lady didn't look prejudiced; she looked joyful. Flushed, I could feel heat on
my earlobes and my chest.

"Do
you like this design?" Callie asked me.

"Sure,"
I said as if I were okaying her purchase for someone else.

"Tell
the truth," Callie said.

"I
like whatever you like," I whispered, not meaning to whisper, but I'd lost
my voice.

"I
prefer these with the stones cut at an angle. They say Native American but of
the future." Callie took the larger ring and slipped it on the ring finger
of my left hand.

A
chill raced up my spine and my neck and over my ears as she held her hand there
for a moment, and I felt like at this very instant I stood at an altar in front
of a priest who was a Native American shopkeeper, taking a vow in full view of
whoever else was walking through the store.

"There,"
Callie said, slowly taking her hand off mine. "You belong to me."

Could
she really have said that in public, in front of the priest-shopkeeper, in
front of the shopper-parishioners; but the sound of her voice and the ring
against my finger felt so good. She carefully lifted the smaller matching ring
out of its resting place in the dark blue velvet and slipped it on the
identical finger of her left hand, then leaned over and kissed me on the lips.

I
laid my hand down next to Callie's, letting my eyes rest for the first time on
the two identical rings now side by side. Identical rings. Rings others could
spot and in doing so either accept or reject us without even knowing us.
Risk
rings,
I thought, my riverbed tranquility all but disintegrated.
Am I
mature enough to accept that hind of risk? Why not, life is short. Pleasing
strangers isn't nearly as important as pleasing one another.

"Will
that be cash or charge," the priest-keeper asked as I was about to say
something, and I thought her remark was no different than a priest's sermon on
tithing, directing us to the paper envelope in our pew and offering the ability
to put it on our charge card.

Callie
suddenly took my hand and slipped the rings off my finger and hers, offering
the beautiful gold bands with the dark blue stones and sprinkle of diamonds
back to the woman, who locked them up in the case.

"A
dress rehearsal," Callie said. "We'll think about whether or not we
want to buy them."

I'd
tensed up so much in preparing for this event that, suddenly exhausted, I
thanked the lady and headed for the car, suggesting to Callie that we go up to
the vortex and sit on top of the mountain and watch the sunset at the ceremonial
site. I needed to breathe a lot of fresh air and unwind.

"Did
we almost get married?" I asked, slightly confused now that the magical
feeling of her body near mine was reaching a more sustainable level.

"Let's
say we had an opportunity to buy matching wedding bands."

"But
we—changed our minds?" I was hoping I hadn't offended her by showing no
real support for the idea.

"One
of us did." Callie's voice sounded melancholy.

"Are
there instances where there are matching wedding bands without marriage?"

Callie
laughed. "That would be called two girls who have the same taste in
jewelry."

"Nothing
wrong with that," I said, more comfortable now. "If you saw us on the
street wearing matching rings, what would you think it meant?"

"Anything
you want it to mean," she said. "Now if I was one of those people
wearing one of the matching wedding rings, for me it would mean you would never
fall off a cliff without me, you would never think about another woman but me,
and you would always be in my bed."

Elmo
let out a moan of deep longing, and we both giggled as I gave Callie a quick
kiss. Rounding a bend in the road that would take us to the ceremonial site, I
tried to take the conversation to a more philosophical level.

"I
think that's all happening now, with or without rings," I said and gave it
a few beats. "So tell me more about what wearing matching wedding bands
says to you?"

Callie
apparently couldn't tolerate my squirming any more. "It means nothing,
relax."

Discussion
over. I was sad. How ironic. I had chased Callie Rivers across the western half
of the United States, begged her to live with me forever, and was determined
never to let her go, and now that she'd turned the tables on me, I was
moonwalking like Michael Jackson.

"Speaking
of being pursued and attacked," I teased, "why did I see the wolf and
go over the cliff and you never even saw it. Normally you would look up ten
astrological charts on that question, but you haven't even mentioned it."

"I
guess I've been having such a great day with you, I wanted to forget all the
negatives. They're trying to get to me through you, Teague. He knows I care so
much about you. He feels that energy."

"Callie,
you have to tell me who this guy is."

Callie
looked like a dozen private conversations were taking place in her head. Sometimes
I wished I knew everything she was thinking and sometimes I was grateful I
didn't. Who in the world did she fear so much that she wouldn't even utter his
name?