Souvenir of Cold Springs (25 page)

Every Saturday around five o'clock, Lee looked at her watch and said, “Oh my God, what am I thinking of, I've got to get going.” She always had a date, with a variety of men that bewildered Caroline. Caroline never met any of them. Lee would say, “Sure you don't want to come? I could fix you up like that,” and snap her fingers. Caroline always said no, feeling like a child—the way she used to feel when she was twelve and Peggy was thirteen, watching Peggy put on forbidden lipstick to sneak out and meet a forbidden boyfriend. Lee would laugh at her, tell her she was missing a good time, and the next morning, there she would be—black-mantillaed and late—in the back row at the eleven o'clock High Mass, rolling her eyes and saying, “Am I exhausted! What a night!” Then going to Communion.

Caroline was grateful for Lee. It took her months to admit to herself that her new life was more difficult than she had expected. Once she got used to the charm of the Spanish names and the food and the warmth and the old adobe convent where she worked, it was a lonely life. Her footsteps in the spare white apartment still echoed. The empty niches in the walls were a constant reproach, but when she tried to fill them—with a vase of flowers, a plant, a cheap carved statue of the Virgin she bought in a shop on Cerrillos Road—they still looked wrong. Everything she did seemed silly and arbitrary and irrelevant. She began to think there was some secret to living in the West that she hadn't divined—some secret, perhaps, of living comfortably in her own skin.

She spoke only to Lee, to the nuns, to people who came to the convent, to waiters, to Mrs. Rivera across the hall. Father Grady, who was originally from Brooklyn, stopped in the office to talk and bring her an occasional
New York Times
because he knew she liked the crossword.

On her way to and from work, men looked at her, men spoke to her, once a man stopped her and begged her to have coffee with him—a nice-looking man dressed in a suit. He walked along beside her down Alameda, told her he saw her every morning, his intentions were purely honorable, if he could only buy her a cup of coffee so they could get to know each other a little. She walked quickly, shaking her head, looking down at the sidewalk, and eventually he stopped and let her go.

“But don't you like being pretty?” Lee asked her.

“I've never really thought about it,” Caroline said, vaguely aware that this was a lie—that in some other life she had thought about it plenty.

“Think about it now,” Lee said. “If you could trade the way you look for the way I look, would you?” Lee grinned at her, showing her missing tooth.

“Oh, Lee, you keep saying you're so ugly, but you're not.”

Lee didn't stop grinning. “That's not the point at issue here.”

Caroline thought about it. Lee waited, sipping her coffee. They were sitting on the floor in Caroline's living room. It was late on a Saturday afternoon. Not much sun came in through the tall windows on this side, only a colorless slice of light that moved across the bare wood floor. Caroline put her hand on it. Even her hand—cool and white and long-fingered—was prettier than Lee's skinny brown one. She didn't really have to think: of course she liked being pretty. She loved her hand. She loved her whole body. She wanted to say to Lee that her body was like her wedding dress, something beautiful and useless, to be treasured but not put into circulation, but it made her sound nutty, like a Faulkner heroine undone by years of inbreeding and degeneracy. And, in fact, it occurred to her that her wedding dress was one of the things her mother had burned in the furnace before she died.

She shrugged and said, “I'm used to the way I look.”

Lee asked, “It's not that you prefer women, is it?”

That was something she used to think about, back in the days when men had begun to touch her and she had shrunk from them. But sex with a woman was not the solution: To imagine being in bed with a man gave her a sick, anxious feeling, but going to bed with some version of herself seemed merely silly and pointless.

She shook her head. “No. My sister Nell does, I think. Not that she's ever done anything. But I suspect she's—you know.”

“You suspect? You don't know?”

“We're not very close.”

“Really? God, my sister and I tell each other everything.”

“I'm not that close to anyone in my family.” Or to anyone anywhere, at least since Mother died. That was something, at least.
I did love my mother
, she thought, and for a moment she had an irrational impulse to tell Lee all about her mother's last days:
she wasn't herself, she burned things, she burned everything that belonged to me
. She wanted to say:
I was there when she died, I leaned over the bed, I held her hand, I said Mother, don't go, what will I do
? She frowned, picked up her coffee and sipped.

Lee said, “Gee, that's too bad, honey—that must make it rough. I don't know what I'd do without my family.”

For a moment, she did wish she were Lee, not for her looks but for her ability to chat, to take life easily, to sympathize with everyone and fit in anywhere—even to impose her personality on her apartment and fill it unself-consciously with the interesting clutter of her life.

“So why don't you want a man?” Lee refused to let the subject be dropped.

“It's complicated.” It was complicated by the fact that sometimes she lay awake, especially on Saturday nights, touching her body, thinking she would die if no one, ever again, loved her. It was only when she tried to match up that feeling with the man in the suit, or Stewart, or anyone she had ever known, that she could dismiss it and go to sleep.

She would have liked to tell these things to Lee, but she suspected that Lee would wink at her and say she knew just the cure. And, in a way, she was tempted to have Lee fix her up; at least, with a date on Saturday nights, she would feel less lonely, she would have something to think about, she might not feel quite so sorry for herself. It seemed to her sometimes that she had felt sorry for herself for twenty years. She had no idea how to stop.

She wrote far too many letters home—to Nell, Jamie, her old friends from work. To Lucy and Teddy she wrote long, regular, guilty letters full of Santa Fe history and descriptions of Lee and the nuns and Father Grady, half of which she didn't even mail and most of which weren't answered. Writing them, she missed her children badly. Sometimes, writing to them, she thought about their childhood, the days when she could hold their lithe little bodies on her lap and kiss them. When they were in Albany with Stewart, her house used to go dead, become full of something like the creepy quiet she came home to now every day in her apartment. In those days the quiet had made her feel both grateful and restless.

Lee flew to Texas to have Thanksgiving dinner with her sister's family, and Tomasita's was closed, so Caroline ate Thanksgiving dinner at home: a piece of leftover chicken and some frozen French fries. She was unable to decide whether she would rather be at Nell's. She thought of what she was missing—not just the long, logy Thanksgiving dinner, but all the rest of it: Jamie being sullen when he wasn't pontificating about politics or art, Mr. Fahey making his lame jokes, probably a couple of Nell's schoolmarm friends grilling Lucy and Teddy about their English courses. Everyone drinking too much of Nell's cheap wine. Stewart would call, of course, and talk about her with Teddy and Lucy. How peculiar Mom was getting, how hostile it was for her to move so far away on a whim—and the whole thing with her going back to the Church. Well, you know you're always welcome at my place, kids. We know, Daddy. Be good. Take care. Don't worry too much about it. She's always been a strange bird. Everything will work out.

When she was sure they would be done with dinner, she telephoned. Lucy and Teddy no longer sounded resentful. Teddy asked her to send him a sombrero. Lucy had a boyfriend and was learning photography. Nell got on the phone and said they were having the house painted in the spring, Mr. Fahey's new secretary was a disaster, Jack and Penny Wentworth were divorcing, the turkey had been a bit too dry. When they asked, Caroline told them she loved Santa Fe, her job was very interesting. She didn't know how long she would stay. The mountains were beautiful, the city was lovely, especially now that the tourists were gone, there had been snow but the sun was so strong it melted fast.

When she hung up, she knew she was right not to go home as she had thought of doing. That wasn't what she wanted—that easy descent into the family routines, the conversation of her children, the old quarrels and jokes. The Caroline who could sink into that and lie there drowning was the Caroline she wanted to be rid of.

But the apartment was very silent, and so was the wet street outside her windows. She turned on the radio and heard Christmas carols. When she sang along, her voice was thin and wobbly, and the songs seemed either ludicrous or impossibly sad.

She thought:
you wanted isolation; this is isolation
. She had never expected it to be so empty and so alien. She had thought she could fill it with herself, that her self would be enough. Someone had told her that in 1598 a Spanish missionary in the area had sent home confused reports locating New Mexico somewhere between Newfoundland and China, and that was exactly how it felt to her—like another continent, an alien world of vast and terrifying spaces, where the person she had been was obliterated but nothing had come to take its place.

She washed the dishes and then wandered around the apartment, straightening things that were already neat. She had emptied the wall niches again, and she dusted them all with the hem of her apron. Once, someone rang her bell—a couple of confused Rivera relatives. When Mrs. Rivera opened her door, there was noisy laughter and the smell of cooking and a radio playing Pérez Prado.

She considered getting dressed and going to someplace like Juanita's and picking up a man and bringing him home with her. She imagined telling Lee what she had done, and Lee's delighted, incredulous laugh. She went so far as to change into stockings and high heels and open her closet looking for a dress before she had to run into the bathroom and throw up. She sat for a while on the cold floor, conscious of a run in one of her stockings slowly, with a soft tearing sound, making its way up her leg. Then she rose, cleaned the toilet, washed her face, and sat on her bed in her bathrobe, wondering if she was sick because the chicken she'd eaten had been around too long, or whether her soul-sickness, or whatever it was, had made itself felt as a physical thing, and then decided she was being fanciful.

After a while, she raised the shade and looked out at the mountains, black masses against an ink-blue sky. She thought of Lee's husband, lost somewhere in that space: a heap of bones or a mad mountain man, he was no more than a speck up there, something small and forgotten in a cave. She sat until dawn, dozing off and on, until the mountains began to light up with the bloody red-orange flush that gave them their name, and then she got dressed and went to early Mass at the cathedral.

The next week
, she saw the man in the suit. He was coming out of a café on Alameda. He looked at her, and she smiled at him.

They had a cup of coffee together. His name was Lloyd Vegara, and he was an anthropologist who worked for the state Conservation Department. It turned out he knew Lee—he collected Pueblo pottery, which she sold in her shop. He asked Caroline if she had seen the cliff dwellings at Bandelier, and offered to take her there—maybe Saturday? But first she had to let him take her out to dinner Friday night.

She agreed. He was really very nice—a big, talkative man with wavy black hair. He was divorced, had three grown children, lived alone in a restored adobe house on the old Santa Fe Trail. It was built in 1765 on the site of a thirteenth-century
rancheria
, and he wanted her to see it. He talked interestingly about his job: his mission in life was to preserve the architecture of the Pueblos. Had she been to Chaco Canyon? He would take her to Chaco Canyon.

“It must be wonderful to have a mission in life,” she said.

He smiled at her. “Now I have another one.”

She called Lee and asked her about him. “Lloyd? He's great,” Lee said. “If I had to pick one guy in Santa Fe for you to go out with, I'd pick him. He's nice and he's loaded and he's not kinky, and I think he's still under fifty.”

They ate dinner at La Cantina, and afterward Lloyd showed her his house. It was a cold, clear, windless night. The sky was full of stars and there was a crescent moon. They walked from the restaurant, their shadows cutting through sidewalks made yellow by the streetlamps. The house was very beautiful. The vigas, he told her, were original. He had rebuilt the walls with adobe bricks he made himself. In the
sala
, he lit a fire in the fireplace, watched it until it caught, then turned to her and began kissing her.

They made love before the fire. Over his shoulder, Caroline watched the small flames dart between the logs and gain strength. Lloyd kept saying her name. She dug her nails into his back and tasted his salty skin. Lloyd held her face between his hands and said he was in love with her, he had known her only a few days and he loved her already, he loved her so much he wanted to weep—and he did weep a little, laughing at himself, kissing her, telling her she was beautiful, he had never expected this to happen to him again.

She watched him get up awkwardly and put his pants back on. He was soft around the middle; his legs were skinny and covered with rough black hairs. He went barefoot over the stone floor to get them some brandy. Caroline lay on the rug, propped up on one elbow, looking into the flames, remembering Stewart crying in her arms over Peggy, and how his sorrow had turned to lust.

She drank the brandy too quickly and, in the middle of one of Lloyd's stories about his restoration of the house, asked him to take her home. She said she was sorry, she wasn't feeling well, maybe she was coming down with something. He was concerned. He helped her into her clothes, buttoning her dress tenderly, kissing her neck. Yes, he said, she seemed feverish. He offered to stay with her, offered to perform any task, get her anything that would help. She said it was probably just a cold, she'd had a headache and a sort of sore throat all day. He drove her home and kissed her gently at the door.