Soul's Road: A Fiction Collection (2 page)

Mary had grown up in Scottsdale, Arizona. Her family had no money but bequeathed to her a genetic cocktail that left her unreasonably attractive if not classically beautiful. She was not above using this to her advantage during her cooking school years when she wanted to crash the Arizona Biltmore’s pool. The hotel, a semi-Mayan temple to luxury built in 1929 and often wrongly attributed to Frank Lloyd Wright, had played host to the likes of Marilyn Monroe and Martha Raye, but even long-time guests had never in all those years seen anything quite like what they believed they saw in Mary. She was not that kind of a girl, though. The building’s serenity and elegance were the turn-ons. The part of her willing to don the French-cut camouflage so she could bask in the architecture was at war with the part who loathed the attention her red-headed radiance drew.

There was plenty of collateral damage. In a single week, one zillionaire fell into the pool pretending not to notice her; another got pushed in trying too hard to get noticed. When Mary fell, it was for the guy who cleaned the pool. Muscular tanned, manly Jim. It was his hands. Everything he did with them he did with precision and delicacy, like he felt the things he touched were alive and the way he approached them mattered. The idea of being on the receiving end of that kept her up nights.

Jim was a walking oxymoron, a lead guitarist with an aversion to groupies. The way he played made women swoon. He was expected to take advantage of that. Had, for a while. He’d been raised by a homophobic father, though, so as he came to terms with the female presence he carried inside him the rock-god/groupie rituals became increasingly uncomfortable.

With Mary, it was something else altogether. She had a runner’s derriere, a dancer’s perfect posture and a face full of exotic angles Picasso would have loved cubing. None of that was what first moved Jim. He was a synesthete, except instead of letters or tones turning into colors in his mind, motion turned to music that flowed in a torrent down into his fingers and out through his guitar. When Mary moved, he heard her walk as a touch of Clapton mixed with a bit of Dylan’s you-know-it’s-happening-but-you-don’t-know-what-it-is poetry.

Jim had been trained by the hotel management to never make eye contact with the guests. His job was to just do his job and leave. Mary was under no such compunctions, though it took her awhile to work up the nerve to approach him. Her heart pounded when she finally did - from nerves, she thought

“I’m not a guest here,” she told him. “You won’t get into trouble if we talk.”

“God, I hope that’s not true,” he said, surprising both of them.

Mary could have made a fortune getting painted into Guess Jeans or Victoria’s underwear, but she had a passion for pastry and little proclivity to strut, party or travel. She loved the early morning kitchens she learned and then worked in as much for the silence they allowed her as for the confections she manufactured, though she loved neither as much as she loved her pool-sweeping guitarist.

Jim moved his guitars and t-shirts into Mary’s minimalist one bedroom. He spent all of his chlorine-free hours running scales, writing almost-hits about longing and alienation, and having the sex she couldn’t get enough of and enabled for him by her complete lack of expectations. She’d never before been obsessed in that way, but there was something about those hands that erased time.

Their life together might have been made complicated by her having to leave for work about the time he came home from a gig, except his recent inclination to bolt the moment a set was finished meant he didn’t have that many gigs, itself a potential complication while Mary became locally famous. The rivalry was mitigated by their absolute devotion to one another. On the occasions when Jim did perform, Mary would nap so she could be present at the clubs where he could make other women nuts by focusing on her alone. Jim, for his part, made Mary sunrise breakfast and kissed her goodbye every day at the door, no matter how late he’d come in.

Jim proposed marriage wearing his only suit to dinner at the Biltmore. Mary said yes with the inevitability of an airplane touching the runway, but in the morning she woke up with a palpitating heart and a panicked sense that something was trying to escape from her.

“Wedding jitters,” Jim said, and they both went along with that. He needed an antidote to his terror that some instinct had alerted her to the inner torment he was enduring. He needn’t have worried. As far as she was concerned, the only thing she ever said with more certainty than, “Yes,” was when, a few months later, she said, “I do.”

Mary made their wedding cake, of course. It had such a powerful effect on the guests that in a different era she might have been accused of witchcraft. Three people met their future spouses after dessert. Not all of them were single.

Mary only nibbled. Jim assumed it was because she’d tasted her way through baking, frosting and decorating. But for Mary, her pounding literal heart was increasingly at odds with its swooning metaphoric twin. The happier she was, the more it rebelled.

Mary saw anyone who might have a cure. Doctors gave her medications she abandoned when they only proved effective at making her sleepy or nauseous. Shrinks, no matter how hard they tried, could not get her to admit to a realization that her marriage had been an impetuous error in judgment. She went so far as to overpay the most renowned astrologer in Phoenix to create an opening in her famously overbooked calendar. Evelyn told her she was living exactly the life she was born to. It was like Jim was everything she’d ever wanted or needed, except he turned out to be wrapped around a core of Kryptonite.

Outwardly, Jim’s reaction to all this was nothing short of astonishing. He appeared to see her malady as nothing more than a manifestation of something that needed to be fixed, and to carry optimism into all of her various appointments. He’d developed Oscar-caliber technique for hiding his desperation.

And then a customer who’d come to the bakery so she could purchase Mary’s scones to feed her wandering-eyed lover happened to put her magazine down on the counter while she fetched her wallet. Mary, who rarely ventured far enough from the kitchen to have to deal with the public, happened to be out front. She glanced at the photograph of lost African children orphaned by war, famine and AIDS. Her threatening heart stilled for the first time since Jim had proposed.

Mary gave notice at the bakery, which did spectacular business during the announced final weeks of her tenure there. Jim helped her find the right African volunteer opportunity. They discussed whether he should sign up as well. Mary was ambivalent. There was the part of her that never wanted to be separated from him, ever. And there was the part that felt like this needed to be a solo adventure. Jim eventually tipped the balance in favor of the latter, saying he felt like he could use the solitude to get more in touch with what was banging around inside him. Mary thought he was referring to his music, though it was hard for her to imagine that the way he played for her during the last week before her departure could get much better. Whatever else was going on, Jim loved Mary.

***

In Uganda, Mary tried to explain the dead laptop to the beautiful doctor she’d never have slept with but he was busy saving a child from appendicitis. Mary took strange comfort in the knowledge that something as ordinary as a burst appendix could threaten a life there. At least she understood what it was. Promising to replace the computer at the first opportunity, she took the pregnancy test and locked herself in the latrine. She re-read Jim’s letter one final time, dropped it whole down the toilet, then peed on the stick and waited, certain it was the stress of her work that had stolen her periods. Jim, she now realized, had been possessed throughout their marriage by the woman trapped inside the body she so needed. To her addlepated brain, this meant that their frolicking could not possibly have left her pregnant.

The minutes ticked by. Mary picked up the stick. Someone screamed just as she understood the test was positive. It took her a moment to realize the shriek belonged to someone else.

Mary opened the door. Villagers flew around like disturbed bees while distant gunfire lost its distance. Soldiers, many of them pre-pubescent conscriptees, pounced demon-like on anything that moved, killing, kidnapping and hurting, some for the sheer erotic pleasure of knowing that they could, others because they knew they would be shot if they hesitated. Cruel laughter danced with desperate cries to the unpredictable rap of automatic weapons.

Mary slammed the door as something thudded against the latrine and scratched its final spasm like it was trying to dig its way through the wall. She knew rape and death were close behind, not necessarily in that order. Part of her didn’t care, wanted to race out the door to stomp bad guys and protect the innocent and she would have except that the instinct ignited when her urine mixed with the chemicals on the stick left her hand paralyzed on the latch and her heart hurting for the first time in the eight weeks she’d been in Africa.

It was the bullet that punched a hole in the door and bloodied her arm that silenced the voice urging martyrdom. Frantic, she flung up the toilet seat and slid through the opening into the shit, stepping on her husband’s floating letter just as one of the things masquerading as human stormed in and dropped his trousers. His smooth teenage bottom was a cloud that snuffed out most of the light where she hid. She thought for a moment that the gods were adding an earthquake to the rest of the mayhem but then realized that the structure was quaking from the boy’s sobs. Mary was actually contemplating the urge to reach up out of her hell to comfort the child when she heard the door to the latrine door swinging open again.

“You are hiding,” came a deep and deeply calm voice.

“No,” said the boy. “I am sick.”

The man yanked the boy off the toilet and tossed him out the door. The boy’s scream was cut short just as the man’s gigantic ass rendered the darkness in Mary’s refuge complete. A saint might have realized the man was merely the boy grown up, possessed by demons he’d never understand. But even a saint’s compassion can be unhinged by a hailstorm of shit. If she’d had a stake, Mary would happily have skewered and stewed the brute for the children to feast on.

***

The tragically beautiful doctor who would never again be intimate with anyone found Mary naked and retching beside the boy who’d been sick on her, pants still around his ankles and head caved in. The doctor had been spared because the invaders had no interest in healing or healers. These were men who knew too well they were right, and harbored no yearning to undo the consequences of their actions. Watching his impotence take root in the face of their antics was enough fun for them.

The doctor could not have been more gentle as he helped Mary clean herself. Together they reopened the clinic and did what they could for the survivors, which was almost nothing but still more than nothing, before they were both transported out of there forever.

Mary left Uganda with some trepidation. After her husband’s revelation and the unexpected attack, she knew a third surprise awaited her back home. Bad news always came as triplets.

***

Mary realized as soon as she saw her husband in a dress at the airport that she’d have a plethora of astonishments to choose from as the official third surprise. She hadn’t spoken much since flushing herself from the African toilet, avoiding the reporters that wanted to make her the focus of the story they told about the attack on the camp. She wasn’t certain where to start now and so was grateful for the dress as something on which to focus.

“Wow, Jim,” she said when they got into his beat-to-crap Toyota.

“I’m calling myself Jen for now,” he said.

“Why can’t you be like most guys and just have an affair while your wife’s gone?” she asked.

That brought a laugh. “I think sex would be a bit much to handle right now, all things considered,” he said.

“How about parenthood,” she asked. “How do you feel about handling that?”

“What?”

“You’re going to be a father. Jen.” She immediately regretted adding the “Jen.”

Mary stared out the car window for most of the ride home. They passed a familiar plaza where misters atomized water to keep people comfortable in the Sonoran desert. Her revulsion at the waste was surprise number two. She hadn’t been on the ground for an hour.

***

Back in their kitchen, Jim opened a beer. Mary poured herself a glass of wine.

“Should you be...?” Jim asked.

Mary sloshed her wine into the sink. Jim eyed the bandage the lovely, lost doctor had applied before he dropped Mary at the airport, probably a week after Jim had started collecting the articles on the decimated volunteer camp that littered the kitchen counter. “How bad is it?” he asked.

“I was lucky,” said Mary.

Jim looked skeptical. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asked.

“Not yet,” she said.

“I understand,” he said. “I missed you. I’m glad you came home.”

“You are?” she asked. “What are you thinking we’ll do?”

“I thought we’d work it out,” he said.

Mary had to sit down. “How?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t love you any less. But I also know I look in the mirror and I don’t see me. I don’t know how to be the person I see.”

“I fell in love with the person you see,” said Mary. “Was he all a fake?”

“No,” he said.

“You hated being a man? You hated the sex? Oh God,” she said, suddenly horrified by his enthusiasm for going down on her.

“I loved all of it,” he said. “Which was confusing.”

“Confusing?” she asked. “You found our first year of marriage confusing? That’s not supposed to happen ‘til the seventh. The first is supposed to be bliss.”

“Why do you think it was confusing?” he asked.

“So it was terrific except we can’t be together anymore?” she asked.

“That’s not what I said.”

“No? Then what are you saying?”