Gryphon: New and Selected Stories (13 page)

“How’s the sky?” he asked. He turned around. “The black box is just
fine. I move around it, but it’s always there, right in front of me. It’s hard to move with that damn thing in your head. I could write a book about it: how to live with a box and be a zombie.” He reached for a beer and carried it to the basement. She could hear the television set being clicked on and the exhalation of the beer bottle when he opened it.

2

The flight to Albuquerque took four hours. Lunch was served halfway through: chicken in sauce. The flight attendants seemed proud of the meal and handed out the plastic trays with smug smiles. Jeremy had a copy of
BusinessWeek
in his lap, which he dropped to the floor when the food arrived. For much of the four hours he sat back and dozed. Harriet was closer to the window and dutifully looked out whenever the captain announced that they were flying over a landmark.

In Albuquerque they rented a car and drove north toward Taos, the destination Harriet had decided upon, following the advice of the travel agent. They stopped at a motel in Santa Fe for dinner. Appalled by the congestion and traffic, they set out after breakfast the next morning. As they approached the mountains, Jeremy, who was driving, said, “So this is the broom that sweeps the cobwebs away.” He said it softly and with enough irony to make Harriet wince and pull at her eyebrow, a recent nervous tic. The trip, it was now understood, had been her idea. She was responsible. She offered him a stick of gum and turned on the radio. They listened to country-western until the mountains began to interfere with the reception.

In Taos they drove through the city until they found the Best Western motel, pale yellow and built in quasi-adobe style. They took showers and then strolled toward the center of town, holding hands. The light was brilliant and the air seemingly without the humidity and torpor of the Midwest, but this atmosphere also had a kind of emptiness that Jeremy said he wasn’t used to. In the vertical sun they could both feel their hair heating up. Harriet said she wanted a hat, and Jeremy nodded. He
sniffed the air. They passed the Kit Carson museum, and Jeremy laughed to himself. “What is it?” Harriet asked, but he only shook his head. At the central square, the streets narrowed and the traffic backed up with motoring tourists. “Lots of art stores here,” Harriet said, in a tone that suggested that Jeremy ought to be interested. She was gazing into a display window at a painting of what appeared to be a stick-figure man with a skull face dancing in a metallic, vulcanized landscape. She saw Jeremy’s reflection in the window. He was peering at the stones on the sidewalk. Then she looked at herself: she was standing halfway in front of Jeremy, partially blocking his view.

They walked through the plaza, and Harriet went into a dime store to buy a hat. Jeremy sat outside on a bench in the square, opposite a hotel that advertised a display of the paintings of D. H. Lawrence, banned in England, so it was claimed. He turned away. An old man, an Indian with shoulder-length gray hair, was crossing the plaza in front of him, murmuring an atonal chant. The tourists stepped aside to let the man pass. Jeremy glanced at the tree overhead, in whose shade he was sitting. He could not identify it. He exhaled and examined his watch angrily. He gazed down at the second hand circling the dial face once, then twice. He knew Harriet was approaching when he saw out of the corner of his eye her white cotton pants and her feet in their sandals.

“Do you like it?” she asked. He looked up. She had bought a yellow cap with a visor and the word “Taos” sewn into it. She was smiling, modeling for him.

“Very nice,” he said. She sat down next to him and squeezed his arm. “What do people do in this town?” he asked. “Look at vapor trails all day?”

“They walk around,” she said. “They buy things.” She saw a couple dragging a protesting child into an art gallery. “They bully their kids.” She paused, then went on, “They eat.” She pointed to a restaurant on the east side of the square with a balcony that looked down at the commerce below. “Hungry?” He shrugged. “I sure am,” she said. She took his hand and led him across the square into the archway underneath the restaurant. There she stopped, turned, and put her arms around him, leaning against him. She felt the sweat of his back against her palms. “I’m so sorry,” she said. Then they went up the stairs and had lunch, two margaritas each and enchiladas in hot sauce. Sweating and drowsy, they strolled back to the motel, not speaking.

They left the curtains of the front window open an inch or so when they made love that afternoon. From the bed they could see occasionally a thin strip of someone walking past. They made love to fill time, with an air of detachment, while the television set stayed on, showing a Lana Turner movie in which everyone’s face was green at the edges and pink at the center. Jeremy and Harriet touched with the pleasure of being close to one familiar object in a setting crowded with strangers. Harriet reached her orgasm with her usual spasms of trembling, and when she cried out he lowered his head to the pillow on her right side, where he wouldn’t see her face.

Thus began the pattern of the next three days: desultory shopping for knickknacks in the morning, followed by lunch, lovemaking, and naps through the afternoon, during which time it usually rained for an hour or so. During their shopping trips they didn’t buy very much: Jeremy said the art was mythic and lugubrious, and Harriet didn’t like pottery. Jeremy bought a flashlight, in case, he said, the power went out, and Harriet purchased a key chain. All three days they went into the same restaurant at the same time and ordered the same meal, explaining to themselves that they didn’t care to experiment with exotic regional food. On the third afternoon of this they woke up from their naps at about the same time with the totally clear unspoken understanding that they could not spend another day—or perhaps even another hour—in this manner.

Jeremy announced the problem by asking, “What do we do tomorrow?”

Harriet kicked her way out of bed and walked over to the television, on top of which she had placed a guide to the Southwest. “Well,” she said, opening it up, “there
are
sights around here. We haven’t been into the mountains north of here. There’s a Kiowa Indian pueblo just a mile away. There’s a place called Arroyo Seco near here and—”

“What’s that?”

“It means Dry Gulch.” She waited. “There’s the Taos Gorge Bridge.” Jeremy shook his head quickly. “The D. H. Lawrence shrine is thirty minutes from here, and so is the Millicent A. Rogers Memorial Museum. There are, it says here, some trout streams. If it were winter, we could go skiing.”

“It’s summer,” Jeremy said, closing his eyes and pulling the sheet up. “We can’t ski. What about this shrine?”

She put the book on the bed near Jeremy and read the entry. “It says that Lawrence lived for eighteen months up there, and they’ve preserved his ranch. When he died, they brought his ashes back and there’s a shrine or something. They
call
it a shrine. I’m only telling you what the book says.”

“D. H. Lawrence?” Jeremy asked sleepily.

“You know,” Harriet said. “
Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
”

“Yes, I know.” He smiled. “It wasn’t the books I was asking about, it was the
quality
of the books, and therefore the necessity of making the trip.”

“All I know is that it’s visitable,” she said, “and it’s off State Highway Three, and it’s something to do.”

“Okay. I don’t care what damn highway it’s on,” Jeremy said, reaching for the book and throwing it across the room. “Let’s at least get into the car and go somewhere.”

After breakfast they drove in the rental car out of town toward the Taos ski valley. They reached it after driving up fifteen miles of winding road through the mountains, following a stream of snow runoff, along which they counted a dozen fishermen. When they reached the valley, they admired the Sangre de Cristo Mountains but agreed it was summer and there was nothing to do in such a place. Neither blamed the other for acting upon an unproductive idea. They returned to the car and retraced their steps to the highway, which they followed for another fifteen miles until they reached the turn for the D. H. Lawrence shrine on Kiowa Ranch Road. Jeremy stopped the car on the shoulder. “Well?” he asked.

“Why do we have to
decide
about everything?” Harriet said, looking straight ahead. “Why can’t we just
do
it?”

He accelerated up the unpaved road, which climbed toward a plateau hidden in the mountains. They passed several farms where cattle were grazing on the thin grasses. The light made the land look varnished; even with sunglasses, Harriet squinted at the shimmering heat waves rising from the gravel.

Jeremy said, “What’s here?”

“I told you. Anyhow, the description isn’t much good. We’ll find out. Maybe they’ll have a tour of his inner sanctum or have his Nobel Prize up in a frame. The book says they have his actual typewriter.”

Jeremy coughed. “He never won the Nobel Prize.” Harriet looked over at him and noticed that his face was losing its internal structure and becoming puffy. Grief had added five years to his appearance. She saw, with disbelief, a new crease on his neck. Turning away, she glanced up at the sky: a hawk, cirrus clouds. The air conditioner was blowing a stream of cool air on her knees. Her gums ached.

“Only two more miles,” Jeremy said, beginning now to hunch over the wheel slightly.

“I don’t like this draft,” she said, reaching over to snap off the air conditioner. She cranked down the window and let the breeze tangle her hair. They were still going uphill and had reached, a sign said, an elevation of nine thousand feet. Jeremy hummed Martian jazz as he drove, tapping the steering wheel. The little dirt road went past an open gate, then cut in two, one fork going toward a conference center indicated by a road marker, the other toward the house and shrine. They came to a clearing. In front of them stood a two-story house looking a bit like an English country cottage, surrounded by a white picket fence, with a tire swing in the backyard, beyond which two horses were grazing. They were alone: there were no other cars in sight. Jeremy went up to the door of the house and knocked. A dog began barking angrily from inside, as if the knocks had interrupted its nap. “Look at this,” Harriet said.

She had walked a few steps and was looking in the direction they had come from; in the clear air they could see down the mountain and across the valley for a distance of fifty miles or so. “It’s beautiful,” she said. Jeremy appeared from behind her, shielding his eyes although the sun was behind him. “What’re you doing that for?” she asked.

“You have dark glasses. I don’t.”

“Where’s the shrine?” she asked. “I don’t see it anywhere.”

“You have to turn around. Look.” He pointed to the picket fence. At its north corner there was a sign that Harriet had missed.

SHRINE

“That’s very quaint,” she said. “And what’s this?” She walked toward the fence and picked a child’s mitten off one of the posts. Mickey
Mouse’s face was printed on the front of the mitten, and one of his arms reached up over the thumb. She began laughing. “It doesn’t say anything about Mickey Mouse in
Fodor’s
. Do you think he’s part of the shrine?”

Jeremy didn’t answer. He had already started out ahead of her on a path indicated by the black pointing finger. Harriet followed him, panting from the altitude and the blistering heat, feeling her back begin to sweat as the light rained down on it. She felt the light on her legs and inside her head, on her eardrums. The path turned to the right and began a series of narrowing zigzags going up the side of a hill at the top of which stood the shrine, a small white boxlike building that, as they approached it, resembled a chapel, a mausoleum, or both. A granite phoenix glowered at the apex of the roof.

“The door’s open,” Jeremy said, twenty feet ahead of her, “and nobody’s here.” He was wearing heavy jeans, and his blue shirt was soaked with two wings of sweat. Harriet could hear the rhythmic pant of his breathing.

“Are there snakes out here?” she asked. “I hate snakes.”