A Multitude of Sins (35 page)

“Me not know,” he said, but didn’t sound Japanese. It was more like Indian, and sounded stupid.

She smiled painfully as she turned the camera upside down and read something on the bottom. “Well, you will.”
She shook her head and stuck the camera in her purse and started around the car to go. “Then you’ll want these pictures. You’ll pay me for them. You’ll have been exposed to something the likes of which you’ll never have seen or expected. And you’ll thank me all the way back to Phoenix.”

She loved it that the air grew cooler, and that the plant life changed, that there were little pine trees growing right out of the dry, rocky mountain turf. She loved it that the scrub desert floor looked, from high above, like a sand painting an Indian might do—reds and pinks and blues and blacks in layers you’d never see when you were in the middle of it. This was the lesson of the outdoors, she thought: how much that actually existed was hidden in the things you saw; and, that all the things you felt so sure about, you shouldn’t. It was hopeful. She would have to go outdoors more. Selling real estate wasn’t really being outdoors.

She still hated it, and couldn’t quit thinking about it, nearly three weeks later, that he’d said she was good in bed—like she was some carnival act he could give a score to and maybe clap for. Howard was her mistake, no matter that she’d tried to see it different, tried to make him happy. It was one thing, she thought, and maybe okay, to fuck Howard in a HoJo’s by the Interstate. But it was quite another thing—much less good—to move it all out to Phoenix, get to know him a lot better, risk being caught and fired, and still think it could turn out good. And it was
stupid, stupid
to take him to the Grand Canyon, given his little withholding, stand-on-the-sidelines, complaining self. Ed would’ve been better. Ed would be better because even though sex was out, Ed at least had
once
been a good sport. As a human being, Howard Cameron had been subpar from the beginning. She hadn’t read the fine print.

She glanced at him, musing away on his side about absolutely nothing, his long hairless white legs planked out in front of him like stilts, his pale knees too far below his shorts,
his enormous feet with their giant gray toenails hard as tungsten, and his soft, characterless face, and his bushy unkempt eyebrows. And his basketball haircut. What had been wrong with her? He wasn’t interesting or witty or nice or deep or pretty. He was a pogo stick. And up here, where everything was natural and clean and pristine, you saw it. And that it was wrong. True nature revealed true nature.

But steering the big fire chief’s car up the winding, steepening road with the sheer drop to the desert twenty feet away, she understood she wasn’t going to let him ruin another day with his poor-mouth, sad-sack, nothing’s-perfect, pissy bad attitude. Today she felt exhilarated—it was dizzying. The feeling went right down into her middle, and set loose something else, a spirit she’d never realized was there, much less locked up and trapped. And, they were still on the road, not even to the canyon yet! How would it feel when she could get out, walk ten paces and there would be the great space stretching miles and miles and miles? She couldn’t imagine it. The profound opening of the earth. Great wonders all had powers to set free in you what wasn’t free. Poets wrote about it. Only the dragging, grinding minutiae of every day—cooking, driving, talking on the phone, explaining yourself to strangers and loved ones, selling houses, balancing checkbooks, stopping at the video store—all that made you forget what was possible in life.

Probably she’d faint. Certainly she would be speechless, then cry. Conceivably she’d want to move out here right away, realize she’d been living her life wrong, and begin to fix it. That’s why the people she sold houses to moved—to go where they could live better. They made up their minds—at least the ones who weren’t forced into it by horrible luck— that they and not somebody else ran their lives.

“Those were Navajos,” Howard said, staring out at the drop-off beyond the right road shoulder. He’d been nursing his thoughts. “Not Hopis, okay? I read it in your Grand Canyon book while you were asleep this morning.”

“Whatever,” she said.

“Do I scare you?” Howard said.

Frances braked as traffic on the two-lane road slowed ahead of them. “Do you scare me?” she said. “Are you supposedly threatening or something?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“I really can’t think of a way right at this moment that you scare me.” They were already entering the village of South Rim, Arizona, which seemed to be an entirely separate town. A thousand citizens living on the edge of the Grand Canyon—going to the grocery, the dentist, watching TV, car-pooling … all here! Maybe it would seem like Connecticut after a month, but she couldn’t see how.

“Do you think you could ever be married to me?” Howard glanced at her strangely.

“I don’t think so.” She was inching forward, watching traffic. “It’s about the fact that I’m already married. And you’re already married. And we’re married to other people.”

“So it’s just barb-less fucking. Fuck-and-release.” He wasn’t paying attention, just blabbing. Bored.

“Like Etch-a-Sketch. You know?” She stared at the license plate of the Explorer ahead of them. Maine. A Natural Treasure. What was there?

“And so, do you feel guilty about it?”

“I feel …” She stopped. Whatever she was about to say could definitely jeopardize her first look at the Grand Canyon, simply because of whatever brainless thing he would then say back. And precious little happened for the first time anymore, so she didn’t intend to fuck this one up with a lot of idiot blabbing. Why wasn’t Meredith, her roommate who’d died of brain cancer, here now, instead of this guy? Meredith would’ve enjoyed this. “Communications are suspended for a period, okay?” She smiled over at him inhospitably. “I want to, you know, look at the Grand Canyon.
No mas preguntas este mañana
.”

“That’ll work. Whatever,” Howard said, reaching down where he’d removed his shoe to pick at his raised, big toenail as if he was thinking of pulling it off.

She might even be harming herself by associating with this man. Possibly he posed a threat, staring at his huge toenail. What could he be thinking? Something sinister. She’d excuse herself to use the rest room the minute they were out of the car, then get away from him. Call the police and say he was stalking her. Let him find his pitiful way back to Phoenix alone. She thought of his wife’s pained expression, seen like a wraith out in the night sky of Phoenix two nights ago. She could have him back.

“Do you like things complicated or simple?” Howard said, still worrying his toenail.

“Simple,” she said.

“Hm. I guessed so,” he said idly. “Me, too.”

“I’ve realized that.”

“Yeah,” he said, straightening up to stare at the traffic. “Right.”

Entering South Rim Village was also entering the National Park. Cars were required to follow designated paved roads you couldn’t deviate from and that wound one-way-only through pretty pine groves where traffic quickly piled up. All the drivers were patient, though, and didn’t honk or try to turn around. This was the only answer to the numbers problem: orderly flow, ingress/egress, organized parking, stay in your vehicle. Otherwise people would drive straight to the rim, get out and leave their vehicles for hours, just like at the mall. When she’d imagined it, there’d been no traffic, and she’d ridden up on a palomino, stopped at the rim and stared for hours, alone with her thoughts.

“Everything’s just about moving people through,” Howard said. He’d run his seat forward, pushed his knees up and was watching the traffic, engrossed. “What you or I see or do is beside the point. People have to be moved or the system breaks down.” He scratched his hand over the top of his bristly hair, then pulled at his ear. “Real estate’s exactly the same thing. People move somewhere, and we find ’em a place. Then they move someplace else, and we find them another place. It doesn’t matter where they finally
are
—
which is not what we were taught to understand in school, of course. We’re supposed to think where we are
does
matter. But it’s like a shark’s life. Dedicated to constant moving.” He nodded at this conception.

“I think they come here for very good reasons,” Frances said. The campers and land yachts took up
too much
space was what she was thinking. The problem was
cramped
space, not movement. The Grand Canyon was
open
space. “People don’t just move to be moving. I wasn’t dying to drive and somebody dreamed up a Grand Canyon for me. That’s stupid.”

“Civilization,” Howard said dully, paying no attention, “coming up here, working up here, living up here—all these thousands of people. It’s like an airport, not a real place. If we ever get to see the fucking Grand Canyon, if it’s not just a myth, it’ll be like being in an airport. Looking at it will be like looking at a runway where the planes are all lined up. That’s why I’d rather stay home instead of getting herded here and herded there.” He sniffed through his wide nostrils.

And now he
was
beginning to ruin things, just the way she’d feared but had promised herself not to let him. She looked at him and felt herself actually grimace. She needed to get away from this man. She felt willing to push him right out the door onto the road, using her foot. Though that would be hysterical, and scare him to death. She would have to try to ignore him a little longer, until they were out of the car. She produced a displeasing mental picture of Howard whamming away on her in the grubby, awful little teepee with beetles all over the floor and no TV. What had
that
been about? All those thoughts she’d thought. What was her brain doing? How desperate was she?

“There’s that Indian from the motel.” Howard pointed at a young man with a long black ponytail, wearing jeans and a green T-shirt. He was walking across the sunny parking lot into which a park ranger in a pointed hat, and standing beside a little hut, was flagging traffic. The Indian was in with the tourists hiking out of the lot up a paved path Frances knew had to lead to the canyon rim. This would be fine, she
thought. It was too late to ruin it now. “Maybe he’s one of the ancient spirit people.” Howard smirked. “Maybe he’s our spiritual guide to the Grand Canyon.”

“Shut up,” Frances said, swerving into a slot among other parked cars and campers. Families were leaving vehicles and legging it in the direction the Indian had gone. Some were hurrying as if they couldn’t wait another minute. She felt that way. “Maybe you can go buy us a sandwich. I’ll come find you in a while.” She was looping her camera around her neck, eager to get out.

“I guess not.” Howard pushed open his door with his sneaker and began unfolding his long legs. “I couldn’t miss this. Haven’t you ever stood beside a construction site and looked in the hole. That’s what this’ll be. It’ll be a blast.”

She looked at him coldly. A chill, pine-freshened breeze passed softly through the opened car doors. There were plenty of other people come to admire the great vista, the spiritual grandeur and the natural splendor. It was with them that she would experience the canyon. Not this loser. When it was all over, he could decide it was his idea. But in an hour he’d be history, and she could enjoy the ride back to Phoenix alone. None of this would take long.

Down the hill from the parking lot and through the pine trees, set away from where the tourists went, Howard could see what looked like barracks buildings with long screened windows, painted beige to blend with the landscape. These were dormitories. Like going to basketball camp in the Catskills. A boy and a girl—teenagers—were toting a mattress from one barracks building to another, and giggling. You got used to it, he imagined. Days went by probably, and you never even saw the Grand Canyon or thought a thing about it. It was
exactly
like working in an airport.

Frances was hurrying up the path, paying no attention to him. There had to be Weiboldt people up here, he thought, folks who’d recognize them and get the whole picture in a heartbeat. They stood out like Mutt and Jeff. No way to get
away with anything. His father always said it didn’t matter who knew what you did, only
what
you did. And what they’d been doing was fucking and riding around in a rental car on company time—which was probably a federal crime anymore. Plus, Frances seemed not to like him much now, though he didn’t see how he’d done anything particularly wrong, except go to sleep too fast in the motel. He was perfectly happy to be up here with her, happy to take part if they didn’t stay all day. He realized he was hungry.

Coming up the path, you couldn’t actually tell that there was something to see up ahead, just a low rock wall where people had stopped, and a lot of blue sky behind it. An airplane, a little single-engine, puttered along through that sky.

And then, all at once, just very suddenly, he was there; at the Grand Canyon, beside Frances who had her camera up to her face. And there was no way really not to be surprised by it—the whole Grand Canyon just all right there at once, opened out and down and wide in front of you, enormous and bottomless, with a great invisible silence inhabiting it and a column of cool air pushing up out of it like a giant well. It was a shock.

“I don’t want you to say one single thing,” Frances said. She wasn’t looking through her camera now, but had begun to stare right into the canyon itself, like she was inhaling it. Sunlight was on her face. She seemed blissed.

He did, however, expect to say
something
. It was just natural to want to put some words of your own to the whole thing. Except he instantly had the feeling, standing beside Frances, that he was already doing something wrong, had somehow approached this wrong, or was standing wrong, even looking at the goddamned canyon wrong. And there
was
something about how you couldn’t see it at all, and then you completely did see it, something that seemed to suggest you could actually miss it. Miss the whole Grand Canyon!