Homeland and Other Stories (9 page)

Peter laughed. “So let's go back to Thanksgiving,” he said, in a laid-on-thick accent like Dr. Freud. “The happiest afternoon of your marriage.” He knew it was not going to be a happy story.

“Okay, we'd had this huge dinner. We were hiking up the arroyo, and we'd stopped for some reason. Oh, I know, Nathan had these new seventy-five-dollar running shoes and they weren't wearing right. He said if they weren't broken in correctly they would be no better than shoes from K-Mart. Believe it or not, there was something on those shoes you could actually adjust. So I was standing there looking up at the rocks. It's that part where it's narrow, like a little canyon. You know where I mean?”

Peter nodded. He'd spent a good deal of time on the land where our house was built. He said he needed a sense of the topography before he could build cabinets that would complement the home's natural setting. I believe that some of his topographical devotion had to do with our kissing and kneading of each other's thigh muscles between the boulders.

I shifted my hips on the kitten leather. “So there it was, I just saw it,” I said, trying to concentrate on the dramatic core of my story. “The petroglyph. It was one of those, I can't think what they're called—the way a child will draw the sun, with the rays sticking out.”

“A sunburst.”

“A sunburst. But a child hadn't drawn it, it was carved there by the Indians hundreds of years ago as an act of worship, or whatever. The personal statement of an Indian, back when it wasn't vandalism to carve on the rocks in Camelback Park.”

Peter said, “In a time when personal statements were more scarce than rocks.”

“Yes,” I said.

It hadn't been our first, by any means—petroglyphs were an avid hobby of Nathan's, along with rocks in general. Prehistoric rock carvings, he said, were the aesthetic bridge between humans and the earth. But this makes him sound metaphysical, whereas the truth was he
collected
petroglyphs, the way birders will fiercely accumulate a life list. We were lost for seven hours once in Arkansas looking for a state park that was established on the basis of one decorated rock. What we finally found was a boulder pathetically cordoned off like the Plymouth Rock, out of its element, and miserably defaced. The teenagers of Arkansas had immortalized their current passions alongside the holy artwork of the Osage. We'd made out lizards with tails like corkscrews, and something that looked like an umbrella, but the carvings were overwritten like a brutally graded essay test, in Nathan's opinion too damaged even to photograph. He blamed the Park Service, and pouted for days, though it wasn't unexpected. We'd had more than one vacation ruined by this form of vandalism.

But Peter had heard that story. “What was so beautiful about finding that petroglyph,” I said, “was that we hadn't even been looking. There it was, perfect, maybe nobody even knew about it, and I could just present it to him like a gift. Peter, you wouldn't have recognized him—you wouldn't believe Nathan could be that joyful. He didn't even run back to get his camera. Because it would always be there, two hundred yards from our living room. For weeks and weeks he made almost this
show
of postponing going back to photograph it. I think it gave him a thrill to be so casual.”

“As if he owned it,” Peter said.

“Exactly.”

Peter was waiting for the rest of the story.

“But then what happened is, he got busy and forgot. He didn't remember until just a couple of weeks ago. They're put
ting in a new split level up there above the arroyo, and the blasting for the foundations split the face right off the rocks. Nathan had a fit.”

“Poor inconsolable Nathan.”

“Poor me! You're not going to believe this, now he's accusing me of having carved it there, and pretending to find it that day. He says I go out of my way to ridicule his avocation.”

“I'll bet you did,” Peter said. “You climbed up there in the dark of night with a cold chisel and carved a petroglyph, to make a mockery of his avocation. That's something you would do.”

I laughed. The whole point of these stories, I knew, was to betray Nathan. I never mentioned his kindnesses or his broad intelligence, it was the unreasonable parts of our marriage I needed to pester and pick at like a scab. It wasn't that Peter wanted that, really. He was a generous human being, unusually self-assured, not requiring constant favorable comparisons with the husband the way some men do. After all, I was there in his Volvo instead of in Waikiki. But Peter understood, I think, that in some way these stories kept my head above water. As if I were really that far removed from my life, that much in command.

“That truly is the essence of Nathan,” I said. “Everything has to revolve around his pursuit of the perfect petroglyph.”

“The rock that will complete his life.”

“That's it,” I said. “The Rock of Ages, there, from whence they flow.”

“From whence what flows?”

“I'm not sure. That's Robert Southey.” Sometimes lines of poems I'd read long ago would flutter up from the air and perch in my brain like sparrows. “From whence poetic things flow, I guess, rocky reveries. Chiseled hopes and stone dreams.”

“
Obsidian
dreams,” said Peter, who had a working knowledge of rocks himself. “Sedimentary obsessions, and obsidian dreams.”

 

Our plan was to go as far as Flagstaff the first day and camp near the Wupatki ruins. We would hike out to Wupatki in the moonlight, and in the shadow of the ancient city carved into the hillside, we would make love. The next day we would continue on to our destination.

I had carried with me from childhood a fascination for the Petrified Forest. I can't imagine how I even knew of its existence, but in sixth grade I wrote a poem about it. It was deemed excellent, and I was required to read it to the entire class. I had in mind that the Petrified Forest was an elaborate affair, comprised of entire, towering trees; I remember a line about “the twisted igneous of their trunks, their glistening granite leaves.” (My mother owned a thesaurus.) I believe I even had their firm branches offering shelter to stone deer and little stone squirrels. I'd had such splendid confusions about the geological world back then, before marrying a man who'd minored in igneous and granite.

But Nathan, it turned out, was unconcerned about formerly living things turned to stone. The fossil fish in our living room were my idea of a representation of his interests, not his. In all our years in Arizona he'd steadfastly refused to take me to see the fossil forest. “It's not a forest at all,” he explained. “The very name makes it sound like something it isn't. No person alive has ever visited the Petrified Forest and not come away disappointed.”

This sort of statement was so typical of Nathan that it didn't dissuade me. I wanted to see it. When it became clear that Peter and I were going to have a clandestine adventure, it seemed fitting that we should go to the stone forest of my dreams. Peter was only too happy to fill the various empty places Nathan left in my life.

But Peter and I, unlike Nathan and me, were a couple without a practical half; vacations do go more smoothly when someone takes an interest in things like museum schedules and motel reservations. It turned out that Peter and I had chosen an utterly moonless night for our moonlight hike, and the drive to Wupatki was hours longer than we thought. We reached Flagstaff after dark and had trouble finding the state park. We ended up in a deserted county fairground. A sign said it was the home of the Rotary Ranglers, and served also, for a few weeks of the year, as a Boy Scout camp.

A man at the entrance waved us in, and we were too tired and lost to resist the motion of his hand.

“It's free, anyway,” Peter said.

“It's late,” I added. It was, and I was hungry. Peter had brought some corn on the cob to roast slowly in the coals, but I had a feeling we'd be content with cold chicken and one another.

I was right. After we'd picked the wishbone clean and found the paper towels to clean our fingers and chins, Peter pulled me along, kissing my neck, to the edge of the fairground and up through a dry stream bed. We'd climbed thousands of feet in elevation since Phoenix, and it was cold. We walked side by side, or single file where the path was narrow, touching each other's palms in the darkness and sometimes slipping our icy hands inside each other's clothes. They practically made steam against our hot bodies. I don't think we'd ever gotten over those early days in the arroyo; we were turned on by uncomfortable outdoor locales.

The night was black. I'd forgotten that the moon sometimes failed to show up at all. From the dim lighting over the fairground we could make out silhouettes of the boulders along the creek bank, but little else, and I did consider rattlesnakes, but not very much. We rolled ourselves down onto a wide, flat boul
der, which I informed him was granite. I'd learned a thing or two in sixteen years of marriage, I said.

“Like what?” asked Peter, who was on the verge of discovering the modern engineering miracle of drive-in pants. We lay in a small clearing, with tall pines standing around the edge like dignified voyeurs.

I unbuttoned my coat and pulled up Peter's sweater and mine so that our abdomens could commune. He was astonishingly soft to the touch, like kitten leather himself. I always forgot this, in between times, or thought I'd imagined it. He said his mother used to tell him that
Gott in Himmel
meant for Peter to be a girl, but at the last minute realized little Werner needed a baby brother. Little Werner got his brother all right but died young of rheumatic fever, so God's last-minute decision went to waste, except insofar as heterosexual womankind was concerned. Peter was another one turned loose too young in the candy store, I suspect.

Peter's kisses were cold on my skin, and my fingers in his hair tingled as though they'd found a pair of fur-lined mittens. Through several layers of clothes I could feel his muscles. It never failed to arouse me, to think my contours were appreciated by one of the city's most excellent builders of cabinets.

He sat up, stroking my hair and looking at me, forming over me a dark man-shape that blotted out the stars. He ran a finger from my jawbone to my ear and said something in German, “
Geliebte Hafen
.” My body lay flat against the rock and was cold enough to be part of it, like a fossil fish, but at that moment I belonged to the living world nearly more than I could bear.

Peter bent over and picked up something from the ground and polished it on his jeans, then touched it to my lips—something cold and surprisingly smooth. It was a pebble. He put it down the neck of my sweater and I shivered as it slid between my breasts and touched my belly.

“What kind of rock is that?” I asked.

“Melted rock,” he said, warming it with his breath and drawing it in a circle around my navel. “Obsidian.”

Obsidian is rare, and fairly precious. Technically it is volcanic glass, cooled suddenly to brilliance when it is pulled from the earth and thrown across miles of sky.

 

I'd worn my old camping coat, a Navy surplus pea jacket, and was glad to have it. With our passions spent and our furnaces running low on fuel, I pulled it over us like a blanket. Even through the wool the brass buttons stood out as individual points of cold. We were lying back on the boulder and on Peter's sweater, looking at the stars. It was nothing like Phoenix; the stars here were crowded. It looked like there was a shortage of space up there for all of them.

“Last time I wore this coat I was stargazing with Julie,” I said. “We went up Camelback Mountain, I think it might have been New Year's Day. I can't remember where Nathan was.”

“I wish I knew the constellations,” Peter said. “Not from a need to be scientific, but for the stories. There is so much poetry up there, and history, and to me it's only stars.”

“That's almost exactly the same thing I told Julie. I said I hated not being able to teach her the constellations, that they stood for all these ancient myths. But she didn't care, she said she wanted to know about idioms.”

“Idioms?” Peter pulled the sweater down, tucking it under our backs. The granite felt cold and grainy, like frozen sand.

“She said they show how the language changes. She wanted to know what funny expressions we used to use when I was a girl in Kentucky. She made it sound like I'd lived in a covered wagon. I told her they didn't seem that funny to us at the time, it was just the way we talked. I couldn't remember any. Just one.”

“Which one?”

“‘My stars.' My mother used to say that, ‘My stars!'”

“What did she mean?”

“Oh, just surprise. Like, ‘My goodness' or ‘My word.' I have no idea where it comes from. But I liked it. I used to think Mother really did have some stars of her own tucked away. That a little section up there was fenced off like a garden, and those were my mother's stars.”

Peter's lips smiled against my neck.

Eventually the cold was too much for us and we got up. Peter buried the fruits of our labors under a rock. A friend of mine, new to extramarital sex, said she loved how condoms kept everything neatly packaged up, but I didn't. I knew I would wake up in the morning missing the stickiness, proof that someone had needed me in the night.

“Latex isn't biodegradable,” I reminded my lover as we zipped and buttoned ourselves for the hike back. I slipped the pebble into my coat pocket, determined to look at this alleged obsidian someday in better light. “I'm sure there's a huge fine for littering a county fairground with prophylactics.”

“But, my love,” he said, “we use sheep gut. It will have disappeared by morning.”

“But the question is, will you?”

This, in its variations, was an old joke.