Where We Are Now (18 page)

Sometimes we were both rueful about that. Sometimes I thought we should have slept around before we married; at others, especially when I thought of our daughters, I decided it's just as well we didn't. Sally, the youngest, married Max although she refused to live with him. She'd lived—unhappily most of the time—with someone else for two years. She
vowed she preferred the second way although she had to endure the other to find it. Kate, the oldest, still unmarried, works on a newspaper in San Diego and says AIDS changed everything. She also says she knows about condoms and she's careful. That's as far as our conversations go on the subject except for laments for friends of ours who've died. Since Sally is already married, is she out of danger? There seem to be whole new fields that mothers and daughters don't talk about, those certain uncertainties. As for Fergus, what kind of chances did he take? More than I wanted to know, I guessed.

We met Cindy. She was pretty, noticeably so. Any man would have agreed. With her small waist, full breasts, slim hips, she had the kind of figure other women envied on sight. She was slight—Fergus usually chose petite women—and dark-haired, another of his preferences, and apparently at ease, yet she also appeared fragile, in need of protection, a characteristic that would appeal to him. Cindy put her drink down and stood to shake hands. She wore brown suede leather pants and a soft, ruffled blouse. Forty-five, I thought, or more. She'd looked after herself. Seeing her, I thought of a sleek horse that had been groomed and exercised properly.

Fergus took evident pride in her. He wasn't a particularly handsome man, but that seems to make little difference to women. He had a long face, a long nose that ran in the family, plenty of hair still, but he was thick around the middle from too much sitting and sipping, he admitted. On the other hand, Fergus liked to please; he liked to make people feel loved. I suppose he has a certain outrageous charm. How could I know, actually, how he affected other women? I lived too far from him, too far away from his daily life, and if I were nearby, I doubted I'd know either. For all his habitual openness, Fergus also had his secrets.

Marshall and I were introduced as his only cousins in the universe. “And then they live off in New Mexico and can't hardly get here more than once a year.” He winked at me as if to say, “This is between the four of us.”

We went to supper at an Italian restaurant I'd never eaten in before. Fergus, greeted by a maître d' at the top of the entrance stairs, was obviously known and expected. This was true of a lot of places we went to with him. When he'd owned a restaurant, he greeted his guests at the door on arrival or saw them off when they left, stopped to talk to people at their tables now and then, partially because it was good business, but essentially because it was his nature. More convivial than anyone else in the family, he seemed to enjoy being a public character.

Immediately inside the door we were shown to a small room, not necessarily a private dining room, one with only a few tables, which could be combined for a larger party. No one else was seated there while we ate. Marshall and I disagreed about this later. I thought we had the room to ourselves because it was a Tuesday night. Marshall said he saw Fergus slip the maître d' something.

“Why would he? He knows all those people.”

“Yes. The maître d' doesn't necessarily own that place though.”

“But he still knows Fergus.”

“Marianne, sometimes you're slow.” He was grinning.

“Why would Fergus hide from anybody?”

“She's married. Cindy's married.”

I looked at him.

“You know how Fergus just comes out with things. You and Cindy were in the ladies' room—”

I nodded. Fergus was often quite forthright, yet I knew this was but a part of the screen he'd built between himself and the world. He'd also erected panels of evasion and silence.

“I liked her.”

So did I, as if that had anything to do with it. Suddenly I thought of all my single women friends—the divorced, the widowed, some who had never married. They were also capable, bright, attractive women who had no one, and here was Fergus…. Oh, what was the use? I couldn't solve that problem any more than I could divide the world's wealth equally or keep the peace. It wasn't fair for him to take up with a married woman. I had to say that though I was perfectly sure fair had nothing to do with it.

Marshall believed I wasn't truly worried about fairness. “You want him to marry again and have children. I know you. You want more … more Moores. You come back here and get greedy for kinspeople.”

Did I? I hadn't thought about it, not consciously anyway. Was I in the middle of one of those classic reversals that overtake people as they age? When Marshall and I married I'd wanted to leave the Moores, I had to get totally away from the family. My father's people, the Martins, didn't provoke me to flight. I'd never lived with them. Wasn't I just tired of being one of two of the next generation? I'd had my children. I did want Fergus to have at least one even if he had to adopt a child, and now he was in love with a married woman who already had two girls of her own. What was more, I had to admit I liked her.

One of the reasons I liked her was she had opinions. She didn't simply echo Fergus as some of his other women had. More than this, she was ready to listen to other people's. Obviously she cared about houses. We'd talked a little about their travels, her gardening, and she said she and Fergus cooked together, though she was happy for him to do the cooking. Here was a woman with a life of her own, I thought, who might change his wandering ways.
Since the years had piled on him, that wouldn't be so hard now; surely loneliness was a mean future for a convivial man.

I saw him next at the studio. I'd never been in the habit of stopping in there. Marshall was more likely to drop by Fergus's office than I. In the midst of his jumble of memoirs, I felt like an intruder that day. On the other side of the wall I could hear a singer howling about sad memories, one of the repetitive themes of country western music. Falling in and out of love, cheating, divorce, getting even, drinking, dreaming, not giving a damn, and remorse about all of those—that was what these songs were about generally. I'd been hearing them all my life. I grew up in the forties and fifties surrounded by country western music on the radios and jukeboxes. Now that I lived in the country, in the west, I was tired of those simplicities. Fergus made his living by them. Maybe that was why I felt like an intruder.

He had planned for us to meet Cindy. He'd chosen the restaurant, made the reservation, and before we said goodbye that night, had asked me to drop by his office. I shifted a slippery pile of magazines out of a chair and sat down. Fergus was in the studio and would be out soon, I was told, so I waited there staring at Grandpa's gold watch hanging in a glass-domed container amidst Fergus's desktop litter. It said five p.m., and as far as I knew, had been saying the same since I was there two or three years ago. Like everything else in the office, it had gathered dust upon dust.

He pushed a door open, waved, and settled in a revolving desk chair.

“Well?” he asked.

“Well?” I countered.

“Marianne, you could make this easier.”

“I'm sorry. I didn't know—We liked her … liked Cindy.”

“I like her.” He smiled and swiveled the chair slightly reminding me of a little boy exuberantly twisting his whole body on one foot.

They had been together for a while, five or six years. He wasn't sure which. “Let's see—We got that hat there four years ago.” He pointed to the charro hat, its sequins faintly glittering. “But before that, I picked up the geraniums when we were in New Orleans. We went down there and ate and drank our way across The Quarter.” He grinned, then added abruptly, “Mother and Daddy don't know.”

I was already sure of that.

With a pencil he tapped the top of the dome holding Grandpa's watch. “She won't marry me. Not now. Her husband … he's got cancer. I … I wanted youall to meet her.”

For a long time after that trip to Tennessee, I wondered what Fergus wanted me to say when he told me about Cindy. Did he expect outright approval or disapproval? He couldn't have expected that either Marsh or I would be shocked. At times I thought he wanted us to register mild disapproval at least. Somewhere within, somewhere behind the unlit cigar, the bourbon too often in hand, the willingness to laugh, the same willingness to be free and easy, there was moralist, one inclined to judge himself harshly.

The next year when Fergus came to New Mexico, he brought Cindy with him. They stayed in Santa Fe and drove out to see us at our farm. Though we started with thoroughbreds, we now bred, raised, and trained quarter horses. We'd recently begun crossing that breed with
Arabs, which produced tall sturdy animals that carried their tails high and arched their necks as Arabs do, yet had feet stronger than a quarter horse's. There was something of the quarter horse docility about them, something of the Arab's quickness and grace. While Marshall took Fergus off to see an abandoned mining town in the mountains one day, I did what I often do with company. Cindy and I went riding—which amounted to walking usually. She'd ridden a little.

“At school,” she said, “we could take horseback riding. It wasn't rigorous, no jumping. We just worked on the basics; how to saddle, how to sit in a saddle, the commands. We'd do a little work in the ring then take off trail riding.”

Like me she'd boarded at a girls' school in Virginia the first two years in college. Afterward we both went to Vanderbilt in Nashville, a pattern for girls around there; go away a little while, come back and stay. I'd escaped by marrying Marshall and moving West. We were both mothers of daughters, however hers were still in college. My two girls had already graduated. She was interested in books, curious about people, especially interested in gardening. I could answer most of her questions about native plants, though she was way ahead of me when it came to knowledge of Southern landscapes. She'd visited most of the famous gardens in the South like the Bellingrath in Georgia, Callaway in Alabama, Vizcaya in Florida. And she wasn't, she'd admitted to me, fond of country western music. Fergus knew it; in fact they laughed about it. He kept saying she was secretly attracted to rednecks. We never talked about her husband although I knew his name was Wallace. Except for the way women usually referred to their husbands when they were out of sight—mentioning their likes and dislikes and sharing smiles about small foibles—we didn't talk much about Fergus either.

Cindy didn't appear nervous about horses. She'd been looking forward to the ride, she said. Watching her as she saddled, I saw she moved quietly around the horse, got him to take the bit easily and remembered to tighten the girth. Leading him to the mounting block, she slipped into the saddle and adjusted the stirrups without my help. Like many fragile looking women, she was perfectly capable of taking care of herself. She must have been riding since she was in school. When I asked her if she had, she said, “Stable nags, friends' horses ever now and then. It's not the best way, but it's what I can afford.” She'd never spoken about money or the lack of it before. Her husband's long battle with cancer had to be expensive.

By this time we'd become friends of a sort. I'd seen her at Fergus's house on other trips to Nashville. We'd even gone, all four of us, on a picnic once. Out in the open, sitting on a bank of the Cumberland, Fergus didn't seem to fear anyone catching them together. Nor did they seem worried in Santa Fe. Perhaps not many people from Tennessee traveled this way; most I knew went down to Florida for winter sun.

“All the horses I rode as a child were called Molasses or Honey,” she said. “Must have been reassuring to parents. I always wished for one named Lightning.”

“That one's named Pokey.” I laughed. A tall, dappled white half-Arab, we generally chose him for visitors. “He has good gaits, but he's also got a little tendency to shy. Most Arabs do, so watch him.”