The Rope: An Anna Pigeon Novel (36 page)

Jenny. Anna had accepted her with ease, as if such friendships came along every day or sprang fully formed like Venus from the sea. She supposed it was shared trauma. Emotions became accessible in times of stress or high drama. One of the dangers of the theater was that actors could so easily fall in love with one another in the same way people thrown together on a great adventure often did. When the final curtain came down, it was anybody’s guess as to whether the romance would survive the daunting ordinariness of day-to-day life.

The canyon narrowed but didn’t squeeze, and there was no water in which to fall and die of cold. Happily, Anna scrambled along in Bethy’s wake as she climbed upward through crevices and rock chimneys that reminded Anna of the children’s board game Chutes and Ladders.

Bethy chattered breathily as she climbed. “I can’t wait until Regis turns thirty. It’s not even two whole years and then we’re going to go to Europe and see stuff. He promised me. And I’m going to get all new clothes and we’ll cruise. Have you ever been on a cruise? I haven’t, but I’m probably supposed to have a baby pretty soon and cruises are supposed to be, you know, all romantic and everything…”

Anna’s ears pricked up at this. Whether Bethy was telling the truth or spinning a fantasy, Anna couldn’t guess. Either way it was a bit of gossip to share with her housemate. The wicked glee at such a human foible was untarnished by guilt. Needing to catch her breath, Anna stopped for a moment, her butt on a slanting four-inch shelf, feet and hands on the two sides of the triangular chimney they clambered up. Gossip, unless aimed or honed sharp like a weapon, was natural to human beings. It showed interest in one’s fellows, interest in the well-being of the tribe. Gossip was a way to learn taboos, pass on warnings, share the burden of being human among many so the onus of bearing it alone would fall on no one person. At least that’s what Molly always said, and who would know better than she?

“Rock!” Bethy shouted.

Anna pressed her head back against the chimney wall and covered her face with her forearm. A stone the size of a softball grazed her right knee as it fell between her legs to clatter down the chute beneath her.

“You okay?” Bethy called.

“Yeah,” Anna said.

“Sorry about that. My fault. I shoulda poked it before I stepped on it,” Bethy said.

Looking up, Anna could see the other woman about twenty feet above her looking down through her wide-set feet, head and fanny in alignment with the forced perspective.

“No harm done,” Anna said and then checked her knee, locked to keep the pressure that wedged her in the chimney. Her trousers hadn’t torn, and no blood was seeping through. That was all she would know until she tried to bend it. Settling her other limbs and digits more firmly, she put her foot on a nice little outcropping. The joint was in good working order.

“Almost there,” Bethy called. “Don’t be such a slowpoke.” She vanished from Anna’s line of sight. Anna followed. Feet, hands, knees, back, and brain occupied with the business of ascent, she moved quickly. When she reached the point where she’d last seen Bethy, a vertical crack, two feet wide, with a lovely smooth rock bottom led off to the right. Anna levered herself into it and stood upright. After the chimney, the going was as easy as a stroll down a sidewalk in Central Park. Within less than a minute the crack ended. Anna stepped from the sandstone’s embrace onto a natural balcony the size of the stage’s apron in a small theater. Tumbled rock and blown sand created enough earth that a few hardy plants had taken root and were surviving, if just barely. Bethy was sitting on a rectangular boulder, sides so straight and size so perfect it would be easy to believe it was man-made.

“Cool, huh?” Bethy said, as Anna took in the vista.

The balcony was sixty or more feet above a finger of the lake, as close to an aerie as anything without wings was likely to get.

“This is amazing,” Anna said and laughed because, in this place, language failed her. The depth and beauty of evening’s muted palette on a canvas too immense for man’s imagining was enough to strike a poet dumb and a painter blind.

“Cool, huh?” Bethy repeated.

“Exceedingly cool,” Anna replied. Crossing to the stone, she sat down next to Bethy and let her soul drink in the intricacy of the view. The climb had taken less than an hour, and, though in the morning there would be new aches in heretofore unchallenged muscles, for the moment she felt pleasantly tired and inexplicably moved by this gift Bethy Candor had given her.

She doubted they were the first white women ever to set foot in this tiny Eden, a suspicion borne out by the dull round of a beer bottle cap pocking the dirt at the base of a small but dedicated cactus. Yet it was new and fresh for Anna, and she was grateful for having been led there.

“Thanks, Bethy,” she said earnestly. “This is a real treat.” She turned to smile at her companion just as Bethy Candor lunged for her.

FORTY-THREE

Regis was in a foul mood. Jenny was half sorry she’d bummed a ride with him back from her shopping trip in Wahweap. For the first time in years shopping was a pleasure. Commuting to town once a week to hit the grocery store for peanut butter and booze, and the Walmart for paper and plastic items that had become necessities for a modern household, was usually a tedious waste of a perfectly good lieu day.

Shopping for treats to share with Anna filled Jenny’s head with delicious plots and plans for camp suppers and lunch picnics. Now that Anna had taken on the task of turning herself into Superwoman, she was a most appreciative audience for Jenny’s culinary surprises.

“Bethy’s sure looking good,” Jenny said, thoughts of Anna reminding her of Regis’s wife.

Regis grunted. Rather than enjoying the lush bucket seats, he was standing behind the wheel of his sexy red boat as if by so doing he could urge greater speed from it. Lounging in the left-hand seat, Jenny had to admit he was visually compelling: good jaw, good chin and nose, hair wild in the wind, dark and wavy. Such a good-looking man, yet he’d always struck her as a nonevent, a bit of a cipher. Not that she didn’t like him, he just didn’t seem vital enough to waste much attention on. This season that had changed. Somebody or something had turned the lights on in his haunted house.

Rescuing her and Anna from drowning had been positively heroic. Even when they’d been wearing the tights and cape and rescuing him from the jar, he’d been more engaged than she’d ever seen him. Sniping at his wife, once done in an offhand desultory manner, was now done with a keen edge and an eye to her weak points. Regis Candor’s wattage had definitely been amped up. The anger he radiated as he pushed the cigarette boat to its limit was almost as tangible as the late afternoon sun on her skin.

Was it possible the someone who lit all her candles this season was the same one who turned on the lights for Regis? Jenny pondered that for a moment. Love of—or lust for—Anna Pigeon was not an area where she could be objective. Her heart insisted that, of course, every sighted intelligent creature on the planet must be head over heels for the little redhead. Intellectually, she knew that was nonsense. The rose-colored glasses had been given to her alone. Like Joseph Smith’s God-given golden spectacles, her glasses for translating the tablets of Anna Pigeon were not shared by the hoi polloi.

But Regis? It was possible. Clearly he admired Anna. From admiration it was but a small step to the desire for acquisition.

Jenny waited for jealousy to raise its little green head. It didn’t. It was Regis’s wife Jenny was jealous of: jealous of the time she spent with Anna on their shared lieu days, jealous of the mornings and evenings she stole for runs and working out on weights, jealous of the places she showed Anna and the knowledge of canyoneering she gave away, jealous of the temptations of the Zodiac and borrowed gear.

“Why are you staring at me?” Regis demanded.

Caught out, Jenny said the first thing that came to mind. “Didn’t you and Bethy used to stay in town on your days off?”

“We did. Why?” Her conversation distracted him from whatever was ruining his day. The white left his knuckles as he loosened his grip on the wheel.

“You seem to be more at the Rope this summer.”

Regis’s eyes darted to her face, to the windscreen, and back to her face. Not the double take of a comedian; the frightened look of a rabbit that can’t decide which way to run.

“Not complaining, mind you. I appreciate the ride and the company.” The last wasn’t entirely true. Jenny felt it was best to work and play well with others whenever possible.

Regis returned his gaze to the bow cutting through the waves, the boat’s steady pounding against the rough water echoing in the slight spring of his knees.

“We are spending more weekends at the Rope, I guess,” he said in an oddly confessional tone. “Used to be we’d go in every week to spend time with Kippa.”

Kippa, Jenny knew, was a French bulldog, a caramel-colored bowling ball eight parts energy and two parts unadulterated joy. Meeting Kippa was akin to wrestling with a manic dwarf Santa.

“She a year old now?” Jenny asked to be saying something.

“Died this winter,” he said and smiled at her, more a baring of teeth than a show of camaraderie. Jenny didn’t know whether he hid deep emotion or a heart of obsidian.

Either was too much to delve into. She let the conversation drop. Judging by the set of his mouth, she doubted Regis wanted to pursue the subject any more than she did.

Lost in their own thoughts, Jenny’s mostly pleasant, Regis’s, she guessed, not so much so, they rode with nothing but the whine of the engine for company until they rounded Gooseneck Point, a long knuckly finger of land poking into the main body of the lake.

“Isn’t it wonderful that Bethy and Anna are becoming best friends?” Regis asked, looking at her from the corner of his eye, a slight curl to his lips, virtually a smirk.

This was not an innocent question. That unmistakable fishhook-in-the-sternum bite and pull let Jenny know it was on a par with asking Barbie if it wasn’t wonderful that Ken was all over Skipper.

“They sure are getting in shape,” Jenny said carefully, more or less the same remark she’d made an hour earlier that had elicited nothing but a grunt.

“You and I are gym widows. They seem totally engrossed in life without us.” He shot her a smile that she didn’t like one bit. Regis was fishing. For what? Secrets of the lesbian sisterhood? Regis had figured out her sexual orientation years ago, Jenny knew that. Straight men who also happened to be idiots thought woman-on-woman was the bee’s knees. As if the lesbian couple was going to spot them lurking in the hall and yell, “Come on in, the sex is fine!” According to Jenny’s totally unscientific research, that had happened exactly never. Besides, Regis wasn’t an idiot and he’d never come across as lascivious.

“I do miss the hash brown casseroles,” Jenny said neutrally. “Green salads with lo-cal dressing just aren’t the same. Why? Does their friendship bother you?”

He seemed to give the question serious thought. “I guess it does,” he said after a few seconds. “Don’t get me wrong, I like Anna well enough, but I think she’s a bad influence on Bethy. Since Anna’s been hanging around, Bethy is … it’s hard to put into words.”

Jenny crimped her lips together as if she held straight pins in her mouth. Had Regis been trying, she doubted he could have been more insulting. Anna was not “hanging around” Bethy. If anything, the opposite was true. As for his “liking Anna well enough,” the way he fawned over her put the lie to that. Jenny suspected the “bad influence” Anna exerted was the self-confidence Bethy had begun to exhibit on rare occasions.

Not trusting herself to speak, she said nothing. Flying to Anna’s defense would expose more about her than she cared to make public.

*   *   *

Jenny wasn’t rising
to the bait. Regis could tell his disparagement of Anna upset her, yet she’d chosen to shut him out rather than side with him. Fear coiled through his insides, loosening everything in its path. What had started out as a fine adventure was now officially a horror show.

Ecru, he thought to himself and smiled sourly. His mother’s favorite color. After all these years he finally saw its charm. A period of bland nothing would be restful. Having discovered the darkness he’d long suspected all people carried within, he doubted he could go back to ecru anytime soon.

“I don’t like them spending so much time together,” he said, trying another tack.

“So you’ve said,” Jenny replied.

No softening there. Tough bitch.

“I don’t think it’s fair to you.” Regis pitched his voice to the tune of concerned empathy, no mean feat over the engine racket.

Jenny glanced at him sharply. He held her gaze until he was sure she knew he knew she was gay and infatuated with the woman from New York. That no one else noticed Jenny Gorman was gay and in love he put down to mass hypnosis. People believed what they wanted to believe and saw—or didn’t see—whatever they needed to in order to ratify their beliefs: angels, aliens, ghosts, the Virgin Mary, demons, the Loch Ness Monster, Big Foot, leprechauns, or Jesus’s face on a grilled cheese sandwich. Those who wanted to believe the earth was only six thousand years old did not see history, archaeology, paleontology, geology, or astronomy.

The Park Service did not see lesbians. The fact that Jenny was wearing her hair down more often, buying more expensive wine, shaving her legs with regularity, and sparkling every time her housemate appeared went unnoticed.

“What do you mean it’s not fair to me?” Jenny asked after a minute or so.

“Don’t play games,” Regis said coolly, keeping the smile from his lips. The hook was set. With luck it would prod her into a territorial mood and she’d insert herself between Anna and Bethy, keep them from spending their lieu days together.

A woman alone was easier to kill.

FORTY-FOUR

Despite mental gymnastics, Jenny couldn’t eradicate the seeds of uncertainty—jealousy—that Regis planted. For the remainder of the trip she didn’t see desert varnish or intricate sculptures of stone; she saw Anna and Bethy enacting all the boisterous joyous fantasy scenes in which Jenny would have liked to star.