A Brief History of Male Nudes in America (14 page)

Upstairs, in a corner of our bedroom where Bruce has claimed an old rolltop desk as his headquarters, I started finding pages from a yellow legal pad—Bruce trying to find a place to start with Lorna. Like a nervous freshman about to deliver a speech, he jotted down the words he might use with her.
Lorna, you're my only daughter and I have to tell you that I'm worried
. That would be crossed out, and then, below it:
Honey, I've been through my own rough times and there's not a thing you have to hide from me
. In the corners of these pages were the sad scribbles and aimless marks of someone sifting through what to say to his own daughter.

I'm not a mother. The fact is, motherhood is a romantic notion that my ovaries could not live up to. There's a scientific term for my specific infertility, but I've always just told the men in my life that, internally speaking, I was tied up in knots.

You didn't have to be a mother, though, to sense the awkward vacuum that existed between Bruce and Lorna. They would be together in the kitchen and no matter how close they stood or how relaxed they seemed they were continually on guard. Tiptoeing. Straining. There was no anger, but something worse, because anger is just sparks and fire and in a while it blows itself out. What separated them was cool and more threatening—the product of years of trouble and late night calls and I don't know what else. A bitter divorce with Lorna's mother. Dreams that unraveled. Hormones and bad summer vacations. Bruce had told me long before that he constantly wavered between feeling he had somehow failed Lorna and, at other times, that she had cruelly failed him, oftentimes with enthusiasm—calling him to say she was living in a Jeep or had sold her amethyst so she could go water-skiing in Mazatlan, then spend a month zigzagging across Mexico with her boyfriend.

During Lorna's visit I became expert at tucking myself away, at burying myself in a good book or becoming totally involved with
fixing a leaky faucet. I told myself that I was giving Bruce and his daughter the time and space to patch things up, but I could hear them in the next room artfully dodging each other, and sooner or later the TV would come on, the monotone six o'clock news winding its way between them.

The first night that Bruce and I slept in the new blue bedroom we could still smell the paint. I told Bruce to breathe through his mouth and also to get his arms around me fast. I wouldn't say that blue is my favorite color, but given the purposes of a bedroom, there's a reason for blue. Try howling. Try two bodies writhing on a Beauty Rest mattress in the rhythmic darkness just before midnight.

Bruce had to remind me, however, that Lorna was just down the hall. “Quiet,” he said, and it was the first time in our whole short, wonderful life together that our love had become noise.

Hungry elk wandered down from the mountains and gathered in groups of two's and three's in our yard. They discovered the dryer vent on the back wall of our house and stood there to get warm, basking in the sweet, foreign breeze of fabric softener. Curious at dusk, they stood at the dining room window and peered in at electric lights and the quiet chaos of our lives.

Lorna did not believe in God, she told us. She believed in electricity or some such force that held the universe together.

And guns, I
wanted to add.
Something small and deadly enough to fit in an evening bag
.

She talked to us while she did a crossword puzzle. “What's a six-letter word that means to join?” she asked.

We ran through possible answers until Bruce finally came up with
it.
“Solder”
he said, and cut into a piece of steaming lasagna I had just served. In our household, though,
to join
was not that easy.

At the seventh-grade dance in Grover City, California, my math teacher, Mrs. Wigenstein, made it look so easy. She simply put her hand on the shoulder of some shy boy and her other hand on some girl pressed up hard against the wall and then gently pushed them together, and soon, miraculously, all the seventh graders were waltzing or twisting, some of the less creative falling back on a version of the Virginia Reel we had been taught in PE, but everyone was dancing. We called her “The Matchmaker” and we relied on her back then, but, in fact, Mrs. Wigenstein was just a gray-haired intermediary, something which I evidently lacked the skills for.

Bruce and I turned on the radio, blasted a few of the songs we liked, danced, and tried to get Lorna to join us. She watched us and shrugged, said she was tired. I don't know if it's just that I have especially good ears or if some part of me is curious about other people's business, but two or three times I heard Lorna's muffled crying from upstairs. I guess it was crying—small sobs collapsing into a long low whine. I'd run the dishwasher or turn the TV on, and in a while, halfway up the stairs, I'd listen closely. No noise from her room. Lorna fallen into her hundred-year sleep.

A month passes quickly for someone who is sleeping most of that time, but for those wide and painfully awake it is viciously long and annoying as static.

Bruce, naked as the glorious day he was born, rolled in the snow and groaned with the pleasure of seals and Eskimos. Then he lay still—played dead—and let the cold work up through him.

Ask anybody here and they'll tell you we have a dry cold in winter, which doesn't mean much to me. You still need to stuff newspapers in the sills of the windows that don't shut tight. You still need a hot-water
bottle some mornings to thaw the handle of a car door which has turned to stone overnight.

Bruce, however, had a high tolerance for that dry cold. First, he was in the hot tub on our back deck, the steam rising up off the water like vapor from a lost world, every once in a while his foot or arm making a giant splash. Then, it was as if some alarm went off in him. He sat on the top step of the tub for a minute, gained some kind of balance which I can only guess at, and rolled off into the snow, groaning, flashing me the white half-moons of his butt.

Lorna had driven our Jeep into town, and for a few precious hours we were alone.

I knocked on the window, put my hands together like I was praying, and asked for more, but Bruce couldn't hear me.

Dense cold and wet heat—it's a Colorado ritual.

“No,” Bruce told me later. “It was just to keep me from going crazy.” By that time he was wrapped in a red and black beach towel and was standing in the dining room. He had quit dripping by then. I had taken a kitchen towel and turbanned it over his wet hair and kissed him on the nose, and as I backed away I could see the puzzled look on his face. “Who is she, Eileen? I don't even know who that girl is.”

Each morning the snow revealed to me the incidents of the night before. I saw where Rainbow, a neighborhood cat, had crossed our deck and, at the edge, left its yellow spray. On a nearby hillside I saw the big, bald lines where neighborhood kids had been sledding days before on plastic garbage bags. A few of the bags were threaded on a bare pine bough at the bottom of the hill, waving in the wind, waiting for when the kids came back for their next run.

Early one morning, though, before I'd had a chance to see anything in the snow, I saw Lorna near the front door quietly putting on her jacket. The skimpy luggage at her feet made her plans clear. Directly up and to the left, I stood unseen on the stairway.

I watched Lorna pull on a pair of gray insulated boots we had bought her. Carefully, as if she were dressing for more than the cold, she wound a muffler around her neck and tucked its fringed ends into her jacket. She pulled an envelope out of her tote bag and walked it to the bookshelves and left it there for us to read—just
thanks
and so
long
and
don't worry
. She pulled on a pair of gloves and opened the door. Even where I stood—safe, distant, a flannel robe around me—I felt the cutting air blow in.

Long story made short: I didn't stop her, didn't say good-bye, didn't wake Bruce so that maybe . . . I don't know. I guess maybe covers a lot of territory. I turned and went back to bed, slipped under the covers where I found Bruce's warm lanky legs, and I fell into the same murky sleep as that little bear under our deck, the one who must have been dreaming of summer and sunshine and something better than pizza to eat.

Later that day, after errands and a long wait at the pharmacy, I drove home, then hurried from the car to the house with my arms loaded—sacks and dry cleaning. I didn't even manage to get the car door shut. When I had unlocked the front door of the house and set down my load, I turned around and started back to the driveway to close the car. There were my purple gloves and scarf that I had dropped onto the snow-covered ground in my hurry from the car. Like a woman who identifies herself with a string of pearls or her ragged kitchen broom, I saw myself in an instant out there—just three small dabs of color on an otherwise endless, frozen plain. Besides its hundred other tricks, snow can do that, can show you in a lightning flash just who you are.

I stood there looking for I don't know how long. Looking and thinking. Thinking and burning.

At first I thought the far-off throttled roar I heard was my pulse pounding in my ears, but the sound slowed and then gathered momentum and then finally crested over on the east ridge. I looked up at a black spot coming closer, weaving, rearranging itself into a twoheaded form, the dark green rounded nose of a snowmobile finally
visible. I could smell gas and oil and see its foggy gray trail drifting up into pines. It barreled toward me and the two shapes on the snowmobile became people, neighbors—closer and closer—until I could see that it was some snow-masked man driving, and holding on behind him, blonde hair streaming, one of the Ramos twins throwing confetti. They waved at me when they drove by, but I didn't even have time to get my hand up.

I
t was a Tuesday night when Maize and I ran out of money in Santa Fe—a place dusty and old and, if you aren't careful, the last place you might visit. We knew that we didn't have much cash left, but it was a surprise anyway to dig to the bottom of my purse and find only a Revlon eyebrow pencil tucked in the bottom folds. Like someone who suddenly finds herself in deep, dark water, I woke up fast. I dumped my purse out on the queen-sized bed and rummaged through the collection of cosmetics and Kleenexes, pens and maps, car keys, paper clips, sunglasses, and lotion. Nothing. Not a dollar bill. Not a quarter. I stood up with just a towel around me and I looked at Maize for what would come next.