A Brief History of Male Nudes in America (13 page)

Frustration runs high in this weather. Our friend Noah Raye, for instance, found a tire iron in his hands and his windshield splintered into oblivion. He did the job himself when his Jeep stalled and left him stranded down on Highway 160 while Jim Littlefoot's bachelor party went right on without him—two kegs, a cake, and the dancing Ramos twins.

In the midst of November and cold and all this tension, however, I found the smell of paint calming—deep and ethery, the smell of sex chemicalized. I opened our bedroom windows and cranked up the heat. I threw an old blanket over the bedroom floor as a drop cloth, and I already had one wall painted—cool blue and misty, as if there was no wall there, but only our bed and dresser and then the sky veering upward—and I had started on the ceiling when I heard Bruce calling me from downstairs. I had a bandana tied over my hair and a swipe of blue paint under my nostrils. I was wearing the mechanic's jump suit that Bruce uses when he works on the truck—actually
fiddles with it and cusses and then throws his hands up and finally takes it to the Chevron station. I waited, and when he called me again I plodded down the stairs, holding the paint roller like a flag and wanting to know what was so damn important.

Lorna was standing there; I guess you could say my stepdaughter, since I am Bruce's wife now and my life seems to be quickly moving outward from me like rings of water: woman, wife, stepmother. I'd never met Lorna before; Bruce hadn't seen her in over two years. We stood in the entryway and offered simple introductions, and in minutes it felt as if we had used up all the air and were teetering on the dangerous edge of nothing left to say. Bruce coughed, thank God, and took several steps back and invited Lorna into the living room, where she began to unlayer herself.

She took off a large black denim jacket, an aged wool muffler, and two khaki military sweaters, and beneath all the Army-Navy Surplus attire Lorna turned out to be pale and shopworn and incredibly beyond her twenty-two years. Too many lines in her forehead already. The rough lamenting cough of an old woman. What stabbed me deeply, though, in a place I didn't even know I had, was how much she was Bruce's daughter—the same deep-set brown eyes, the way she cocked her head when she was listening.

“Now don't get any ideas,” she warned Bruce within the first five minutes of her arrival. “I'm just here visiting—that is, if you all are up to having a visitor.”

“Of course, honey. Any time. You know that,” Bruce told her.

It was true—her luggage did appear to suggest only a short visit. She had a small Nike duffel bag, a green backpack, and a ragged blue canvas tote that said
Read: Get Carried
Away with
a Book
.

“Still traveling light, huh?” Bruce asked her, and all of us knew that he was commenting on more than her luggage.

“Well, you know me,” she said, “pack small, think big,” then took off her shoes and went upstairs to use the bathroom.

When she was safely out of range, Bruce looked at me, sighed, ran his hand through his hair which is grazed with silver but still as thick as a teenager's, and said, “Here we go, Eileen. Hold on.”

Naturally, I thought that we was just a manner of speaking, because Lorna, it seemed to me, was Bruce's unfinished business, but that's what is oftentimes so surprising. What at first seems to be someone else's story can suddenly twist and become your own.

This rocky, ponderosa stretch of the West is actually my third home. First there was Santa Barbara, then Tucson, and after I met Bruce and the flame we created wouldn't die, he moved me here to Colorado with him—long story made short. Instantly, these mountains got all of my respect, but it was the winter—the snow—that thrilled me. I remember my first year here, walking out of Food Warehouse into the first good snow of the season, and after I'd put the groceries in my trunk I sat out on the hood of the car like a crazy woman and let the huge flakes drop softly around me. For years my mother had tried to make me a Catholic, and if Catholics had prayed to snow, in that moment she might have succeeded.

When I arrived home, my hair was in long wet strands and I was shivering, and Bruce asked me if I didn't know when to come in out of the cold. “This might be something you don't understand yet,” he said, “but this weather looks just the same watching it from inside.” He took a clean towel and wrapped my head. In simple ways, Bruce and I took care of each other, which sounds old-fashioned, but it is the truest form of love that I have ever shared with a man. He bent over and rubbed my feet hard, finally working his way up past my ankles, wandering toward my knees. We stretched out on the living room floor, and with me on top we crashed our way to happiness and exhaustion.

Afterwards Bruce fell asleep as he always does, his foot on top of mine so that we were still two leaves connected, his lips parted as if there was a word there about to be spoken. I lay on my side and watched the snow drifting, piling up around the fenceposts, covering the pines with a dreamy blanket that in a day or two would snap the weaker limbs.

Lorna's favorite color was black. Black worn loosely: an extra-large sweater over black pajama bottoms. Sometimes, black worn skintight: a one-piece ebony bodysuit revealing her every shallow breath. Looking at Lorna in an outfit like that was painful—her chest thin and hollow as a bird cage, but it was her hair that Bruce couldn't get used to.

“It's not shaved, Dad. It's crewed. A friend of mine in El Paso did it. Barber clippers and a pair of manicure scissors. You wouldn't believe how heavy hair really is.” She bounced her head from side to side, demonstrating the lighter, less burdened Lorna to us.

After she arrived, food was the theme at our house, at least as far as Bruce was concerned. He knows that he's at his best slouched up against our old pine table with a bratwurst or grilled cheese sandwich in his hand, listening intently and shaking his head, every once in a while leaning back in his chair to get a better perspective.

Bruce and Lorna were polite with each other, friendly and talkative, and they were agile, too, quickly skating around the serious talk—Lorna's personal life, her health, her plans for what was out ahead. I stayed out of their way, relaxed in the demilitarized zone of the kitchen, made tuna salad and poured chips into a bowl, opened beers for us and a Coke for Lorna. She didn't want beer or anything that could cloud her mind, she said. She walked over to the window. “It's so gorgeous out there. I want to see it all.”

Dorsey Newquist, our neighbor who lives about a mile down the road, would have spit teeth if he'd heard her call this place gorgeous in late November. He had to work it, throwing hay to his cattle early mornings, opening the creek, repairing downed fencelines. Just before lunch not long ago he arrived at the front door, told me to turn my stove off and to grab my gloves and jacket and camera. In his old green International, he drove me out to the far side of Shepherd's Hill, parked at the gate, and then walked me out to the pond.

“There she is,” he said. “Eight hundred dollars of drowned prime.” He took two butterscotch candies from his pocket and we unwrapped them and put them in our mouths. Dorsey sucked so hard that I could hear the candy clicking against his teeth.

At first, beneath the mirror of ice on the pond, it looked as if a big brown-red blanket had been frozen, but as I stood there and studied it, an ear took shape, a huge marble eye, and then the sorry unsophisticated face of a Hereford. Later I brought Bruce back and showed him, although the water level or some condition had changed and the cow had drifted a little farther out and was harder to see. The next time, when we took Bruce's cousin, Paul, the cow was back near the bank and turned the opposite direction. Jokingly, I hummed the theme to
The Twilight Zone
.

Bruce and I drove out several times in the following weeks and watched the strange migration of Dorsey's cow under the ice—it was one of those oddities of winter which we came to look forward to, like pizza every other Friday night. A couple of times we met Dorsey on the road when we were driving out there. He'd stop and stand at the side of his truck and with his eyes watering from the cold he'd laugh and threaten to get an ice pick and a barbecue and to come with us.

Bruce always said the same thing to him: “We're ready for a party whenever you are.”

Lorna didn't want to see Dorsey's cow, though we told her it was
a once-in-a-lifetime. “It moves,” Bruce told her, “it dances under ice,” but we couldn't convince her to take the ride to Shepherd's Hill.

She wrinkled her nose and looked sideways at us. “I'm worried about you two,” she said.

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” I told Lorna. “I've been worried about your dad for a while,” I said, tapping the side of my head, crossing my eyes.

“Huh,” Bruce said and danced me backwards to the couch where he pulled me down, tickled and wrestled me until I took back my comment.

When we suggested going to a movie, Lorna didn't want to see that either. “I'm tired of Hollywood. Know what I mean?”

The one thing she did want to do was sleep. We put her in the upstairs bedroom at the end of the hall where she fell unconscious for ten or twelve hours each night, arose cheerily, then fixed breakfast for herself.

“A coma,” Bruce said when I mentioned it to him. “A blackout. I've seen it before. Don't worry. She's just had a hard time and has to get caught up with the world again.”

Even when she sat on our sofa after ten hours of sleep, though, she was squint-eyed and drowsy, her thin legs drawn up under her, her arms always wrapped around herself—as if she was keeping something in. Or out.

I couldn't imagine what kind of life in El Paso had exhausted her to that point, but there was no way I wanted to ask about it either. Privacy, I told myself, is sometimes the best comfort we can be given.

Midday, she returned to bed. Several times I knocked and then quietly opened the door to check on her. She would be spread over the top of the blankets as if she fainted there, and she seemed so sound asleep that I could easily open and close dresser drawers and the closet without disturbing her.

That's how I found the gun. I was putting a couple of Lorna's clean
T-shirts in the drawer—trying to be helpful—and the gun was right there on top, in clear sight, though it took several seconds for the idea to register. I stood in my tracks, not moving, not really believing what I saw, but my heart was pounding anyway. I watched my hand reach out and then down into the drawer, and when I finally touched it and felt the cold sorrow of that metal and saw the realistic detail of the snub nose, I knew it was no cigarette lighter. Slowly, quietly, as though the gun itself was sleeping, I withdrew my hand, then turned to look at Lorna before I slid the drawer shut.

Out of the corner of my eye, before I had fully turned toward her—I would almost bet my life on it—there was a small quick movement: Lorna's eyes closing. When I looked directly at her, though, some instantaneous wave had passed over her and she was totally still, eyes closed, her head tilted as in loose sleep.

For a second, standing there, I doubted myself, thought I was imagining things, but after I had closed the drawer and quietly left the room and had time to replay the whole scene several times I felt sure about that brief tremor in Lorna.

That night I called Bruce downstairs to the laundry room, and as we pretended to fold clothes I told him what I'd seen. He picked lint from a towel and listened.

“Maybe she needs it, traveling alone the way she does,” I said. He nodded his head.

“Maybe she's just used to living in rough places,” I told him.

“Not much doubt about that,” Bruce answered.

What we couldn't say underneath the bare light bulb that hangs over the washer were the darker possibilities. I could see that Bruce clearly didn't know what to do.

After that I watched Bruce drink double scotches before dinner, pouring the Dewar's with the easy wrist of the bartender that he used to be long before I knew him. There were times when he'd stand at the opened refrigerator and bend down into the milky light, and if I asked what he was looking for, he wouldn't know, there was just something
he was craving, and in minutes, he'd walk away empty-handed, frustrated, and shaking his head.