All My Relations (20 page)

Recoiling from myself, I recede faster from Annie. Weeks pass without a caress, much less sex.

“O.K.,” Annie says. “I will take the diaphragm out of the drawer. I will put it in.”

I wave her off.

Summer, and women approach DesertScapes uncovered. Triangular cloth bits hold in their breasts. Their cutoffs ride low on the hips, frayed denim crotches scarcely wider than the perineum. Their apricot-gold flesh circulates, liquid, among islands of stark, grotesque desert forms. Today a woman's pinky nail traces for me the color modulations in one prickly pear pad.
Casually her hand loops the needles. My finger wants to follow the line of her crouched thigh and calf. Her fluffy blonde hair is pinned behind her ear. I even half-step toward her, then kneel quickly, tying my shoe. She is maybe nineteen.

Her next visit she asks if I truly sat on the barrel cactus, on TV.

“For reals. No special effects at DesertScapes,” I say.

She winces. “I have to tell you, I find the whole series kind of contemptuous toward the plants,” she says.

“Flippancy is just the surface of despair.”

“For what?”

“I don't know why I said that. It must be your naked ear.”

In the greenhouse where I keep my rarest exotics, I pull her to me by the small of her back. Her arms band around me. I reach inside her cutoffs and flow into her through my hands. I become her dry, compact buttocks, long nipples stabbing my chest, legs pressed against me. A groan reverberates through me.

“I can't be doing this,” I say. “My wife and I are making a baby.”

“All right.” She steps back lightly, shedding the experience. “Good luck.”

But she, Lou, returns. “What a nice sunburned man,” she says when we undress in her apartment. There is nothing we will not do for each other. During what I tell Annie is a procuring trip to Baja California, I don't leave Lou's apartment for seventy-two hours. Finally, after days of coupling, a fantasm of ourselves separates from us. Bluish, it hovers and bumps along the ceiling, pure dim light like those fish at the ocean bottom.

Annie changes her hairstyle, a flip, a perm. She wears peekaboo negligees to bed and brings home X-rated videos. I find a push-up bra in the laundry, though she is full-breasted. She buys a health spa membership.

“What is it?” she says. She is discernible but hard to identify,
as if we're looking at each other through the windows of parallel trains traveling at high speed.

I agree to resume with my therapist, but I don't keep the appointments. Annie summons Mr. Herrera, whose latest hobby, a helicopter, lands in our backyard, blades thundering, winds blasting choking storms of dust.

“It's not so bad, having a child,” he says, as we sip beers against the carport. “They only cut their heads open, break their hearts, kill themselves with drugs and grow up to hate you. Why worry?”

But I'm not smiling. His image suffers from the same opacity as his daughter's.

“Isn't she pretty to you any more?”

“It's not that, Mike.”

Lowering his voice, though Annie is inside, he says, “Distractions can occur.” His eyes shift. We haven't acknowledged his infidelity.

“There's no big deal,” I say. “Some kind of phase. It'll pass.”

Though Annie and I see each other daily, her face is a spent bulb. Daily workouts have given her the kite-shaped torso of a weightlifter. Her back is rows of glowering muscle.

The phone wakes Annie and me late at night. I grope for it, say hello. No one speaks, a half minute, more.

The light flashes on. Annie's face is pale, grim.

Arching my eyebrows, I hand her the receiver, my stomach knotting, heart pounding. But for her it's the same. Silence funnels into the room.

Annie's expression wavers, her mouth relaxing while the frown deepens. Her glance flicks at me, hides.

Over the next days she alternates between flat hostility and remorseful tenderness.

Lou explains the phone call. “I wanted to hear where you live. Another way of making love.”

Lou and I invent Hot Massage, holding our palms over a candle flame until the heat sears, then pressing quickly into each other's flesh. A rubber band around the scrotum, we discover, delays climax for hours. I ejaculate blood spots. When the topic turns to snuff films we fall silent, contemplating the image of our joined bodies, golden in cheap incandescent light, jolted, rising slow motion out of the frame.

Shopping, we guide our cart among customers pinched or rushed or dreamily intent, who give us no particular attention. Parking against the freezer, selecting orange juice, black-eyed peas, we could be a couple like any other, in another supermarket, in another life. Home, we smear each other's bodies into paste.

Edging onto Broadway from Lou's street, I see Annie's Nissan and merge two cars behind. Stopped in a rush-hour jam, she glances compulsively in the rearview mirror, fussing at her eyebrows, and I'm certain she'll notice me in the elevated pickup cab. Her head nods, and I identify the new sound as Top 40, then a Mexican ballad, jazz, classical, country. Nothing fits—I know the feeling. I tense for her. The light changing, she taps her horn repeatedly.

She pulls off at the health club, and I park around the corner, delaying before I enter. Through the steamy partition between sauna and Nautilus I watch her legs scissoring, a delicate winglike bar dipping behind her shoulders. The violent effort compresses her face.

At the convenience mart she buys milk and cartons I can't identify from the lot across the street. It's getting dark.

Her final stop is the drugstore, where I hide from aisle to aisle. She selects only one item, the shaving soap I've needed
but forgotten over a week. On line she goes still, gaze fixed in the distance. She is somewhere else, a beautiful stranger.

Then she tosses, runs a hand through her wet hair, and I'm transported back to the touchingly goony barmaid of the E-Z Lounge feasting on a cigarette.

The sudden weight of the years almost brings me to my knees. The drugstore expands, white posts growing farther apart, until the building is so large I can't walk out.

I have never left Annie's shoebox house, I realize. For me the black still writhes outside, Annie and I fucking against it, tiny bright points like our knees' reflection on the windshield of the car before I drove it off the road.

And all the while, unknown to me, we were building around this house another one, solid, spacious. The materials are Annie's balance and happiness, her barrio kids reading out loud. Even my acres of sensible, water-conserving native plants. Annie's father dancing her around the reception hall. The Herreras circling, wishing and blessing a child for us. The long planks of this Good House, as I immediately call it, arch overhead into firm joints, a spine of beams.

I feel myself gathering weight, density. Cautiously, I allow myself to inhabit this Good House, which surprisingly fits like my own body.

Annie is through the cashier.

Dinner, setting down her fork, Annie says, “I give you credit, bringing me to this life I have. If you're going to destroy it I have to decide which way I'm going to go on.” I embrace her and we fall into a stately lovemaking unlike us, or me. We fuck like two cool mansions.

When I break off, Lou says, “O.K.”

It's time for quiet, for Annie and me to sit side by side on the couch, talking a bit, or to take walks.

Though yet only “trying,” we visit a natural childbirth clinic. Wednesday night class is a room of oval women in colorful, frilly getup, balanced like Easter eggs on cushions. Their minimal, angular males are strokes and serifs, letters of the alphabet on the verge of making sense.

A very young couple stars in the birthing movie. At first I mistrust the boy's open-faced charm—my integrity shot, I suspect everyone—but as the film progresses I understand his grin is a rictus of terror and helplessness. Still he never leaves the girl's side, or lets go of her hand, or forgets to coach her breathing patterns, even when her screams erase him. The pregnant women begin crying. The baby's emerging head tears the vagina. “Oh my God,” I say, but the audience takes this in stride. The baby is out; the boy's smile hasn't changed; tears run down his face. The girl's piping is unearthly—“Where is she? Is everything there? Honey, count her fingers. Honey?”

After a picnic, Annie and I bask in an arroyo. Inches from my nose, a lizard poises against the rock. The animal has the same astringent, arid smell as the stone, the sand, the air, as us, and I begin with Annie. The sand grits against us as we roll. I squeeze flesh and handfuls of sand as if they were the same. Smooth, steady, we build into a hum, the common music of the place.

Driving home, Annie lolls across the front seat, one foot on my thigh, head halfway out the window, reminiscing. Either her father had once borrowed her belt for a tie or she his tie for a belt. “I can't remember which. I know the tie was striped and the belt was pink. How you let me blather,” she says.

“I like your stories.”

Suddenly, though the road bends away from the sun, I can't remove my shades. The harm I've done to Annie would be exposed in my face.

As the pickup scuffs through the desert, banging the washboard road, nauseating emptiness rushes in me. How easily I could say, “Let me tell you about Lou. This is what we did with each other ____________” Annie's face would contort—“shit”—her fist ripping the dashboard, plastic fragments rising. In an instant our union would be gone, we alone in the dark, with only our need for each other. Where I always wanted us.

But this idea, like Lou, is past. Though stuck close to me it is slipping behind like a shadow. I must wait myself out that much longer.

The closest three weeks of the Terrys' marriage had been spent vacationing in China, when their son Marco was an infant. Euphoric new parents, Dominic and Ella were traveling in a land whose strangeness was perpetually revelatory. Trivialities such as intestinal parasites and missed trains were powerless against each routine daily miracle.

In search of an historic temple they had hiked a valley whose river bent through rolling hills, forested ridges intersecting plots of ochre, buff, and emerald. Terraces ascended distant purple mountains, hung with cloud. The trail ended abruptly; above them, cocked on a slope, the temple seemed ready to break into a stately, comical dance. They were still. Marco stopped shifting in Dominic's pack. As Dominic and Ella contemplated the building, it became a Chinese guardian lion, the bristling roof its mane and flaring eyes, the arched portal a roaring mouth. They saw it exactly the same way at the same time.

“We have just been blessed,” Dominic said.

Eight years later, lulled by this memory, Dominic was routing the site for his family's new house, preparatory to laying the foundation, when the tractor blade struck a subterranean boulder. The machine hopped, throwing him clear except for a hand and foot still gripping the seat. Lurching right, the tractor was
sliding down the property's steepest grade, toward the ravine, blade spewing sawed-off prickly pear and cholla. The engine's stuttering roar, the torn roots and glittering mica rushing by his face, were an overturned world in which he was alone, his family beyond reach.

As Ella sprinted downhill, the bare ground tilted up toward her like a smothering hand while the runaway machine shrank to a Dinky toy. Then Dominic's broad back and black smudge of hair were centered over the controls again, the tractor veered up a slope, halted. Marco, eight years old, sobbed behind Ella.

“If I'd thought I was going to die,” Dominic said later, “I'd've jumped off.” He gave what Ella called his “pillaging Tartar” grin, upswept mustache over big white teeth.

Ella grabbed his collar and dug her head into his chest. “I used to like that peppy male talk,” she said. “It gave me a thrill. Now I just think of the big hole in me that you'd leave behind.”

Dominic averted his face sternly from this remark, hiding his pleasure in it.

Ella's dash had brought back to her a night just weeks before, when she'd been in bed with the flu. Dominic had scheduled a critical business meeting. After putting Marco to bed, he kissed her good-bye, waking her from a horrible dream. The door closing behind him panicked her, and in slippers and bathrobe she chased his car down the street. He turned the car around, phoned apologies to his colleagues, and played cards with her all evening. Not once did he complain or tease her.

The boulder was solid granite, twelve feet in diameter. Already $90,000 deep into the house—the lot mortgage plus loans to cover fees, materials, equipment rentals, contractors—the Terrys paid a demolition man $2,000 to blast it.

Dominic had insomnia. Budgets and time lines could not be reconciled, no matter how his calculations chattered on, degenerating into nonsense, arriving at a ruinous panic sale or
foreclosure. “I'm sorry,” he whispered to Ella as she slept. He felt like bursting from the house, never facing her or Marco again. Abruptly he padded into Marco's room and lay beside him. The boy's fingers curled into the sheet as if holding it down against a strong wind. His skin was warm. Cuddling Marco's shoulder, Dominic let the child's regular breathing scatter his thoughts, until the solution came to him, and he dozed.

“Here's what I'm thinking,” Dominic said the next morning, over breakfast. Grandpa Harry would lend them his Airstream. Giving up their rented home and moving onto the lot would save $850 a month, plus putting the work site at their front door. “It would be just a little while. Like camping.”

“Cool,” Marco said. Dominic was touched by his implicit trust.

“We can do scientific explorations in the desert,” Ella told Marco.

The tightness left Dominic's shoulders.

Eighty-thou-a-year Okies, what a stitch, Ella thought, as Dominic and Marco bounded down the hall on all fours, playing dinosaur rodeo. She was contented enough with the rental, its tall shade trees ringing the pool, and the years of accumulated furniture and knickknacks inside. But for Dominic's sake she'd talked up the new house. She decided to consider the Airstream an adventure. Anyway, it probably was inescapable.