Hotel of the Saints (13 page)

At noon, I drive to Spokane for a rehearsal. The concert is only three days away, and while we practice, I'm totally immersed in the music, but as soon as we finish, I'm back to worrying that I said all the wrong things to my daughter. I lock my cello inside my car, walk up the steps to the skywalks, a maze of glass tunnels that span the downtown streets between the second floors of stores. I buy a scarf for Zoe at The Bon, gloves for myself at Nordstrom's.

As I head back out to the skywalks, the clouds are darkening, and the only bursts of color come from the pavement below me, where the juggler is flinging about two swords and a tin washbasin. His baggy pants are tucked into yellow rain boots, and he's wearing his jester's hat again, each tassel a different color. While most people rush past him, a few stop. I stand transfixed, my palms against the glass wall. Whenever he drops something, he smiles and reaches down and juggles once again, pulling items from his mess of other stuff—always two of one kind and one of another: two bowling pegs and one picture frame; or two lampshades and one iron skillet—an uneven swirl without grace. And without fear. Fear of being ridiculed, for one. Of being wounded. If I could describe him to Michael, I would start with the lightness the juggler evokes in me, and I would tell Zoe that I want to believe in faith and risk and a world where you can stand beneath the gray October sky and flash your own colors through the air like a magician.

That second winter
without his wife, Sam Fulton returned to the Mexican village at the tip of the Baja, where rock formations continued to throw themselves into the ocean as if the land refused to end.

“I'll go crazy if you ever leave me,” Liz had told him there on the beach next to the amber cliffs the day they had arrived. High above them in the bright-blue sky three vultures had floated as if attached to kite strings, their V-shaped wings without motion, waiting in this isolation with unending patience—beauty, even—as they tricked the hot white sun into their wings and snagged it in their feathers until they glowed blood-red.

“I love you so much, I'll go crazy if you ever leave me.”

It wasn't the only time she'd made him promise he'd always be with her, but it was the time Sam kept coming back to whenever he tried to figure out why—after all her fears of losing him —she'd been the one to leave, after eleven years of marriage. The last thing they'd done together was the trip to Cabo San Lucas. It had been her idea to charter a fishing boat the day before they returned to Chicago, and when she hooked a marlin,
the fishing pole left bruises on the insides of her thighs.

She would have lost the huge fish if he hadn't taken it for her and guided it through its last thrashings. In the water close to the boat, it looked iridescent and shining. It was different from any other fishing he'd done, far more exciting—like becoming a woman's first lover. When he'd met Liz, it had taken her so long to give in to him: she'd kept slowing him down, and he'd had to start all over again as if advancing in loops, though always a little further ahead and more certain of her.

As he hauled the marlin from the water, its color drained until it looked almost black. With the help of the mate, he tied the huge fish to the back of the boat, where it hung, dark and slack, its long spike harmless. That night he had their catch fried at the
palapa
restaurant across from the harbor, but Liz ate only the beans and rice and spoonfuls of fresh salsa. They drank margaritas until their lips burned from the coarse salt on the rims of their glasses, and when he made love to her on the mattress he'd carried out onto the terrace of their room, she kept her eyes shut. Her entire body tasted of salt. Her skin felt hot from the sun, and though he touched her cautiously, his fingers left long, white traces that vanished after he raised his hands from her.

The rest of the marlin he had frozen and shipped back to Chicago, but they never broiled the fillets with slices of lime and cilantro leaves as he'd planned. The wrapped packages were still in their freezer when Liz told him she wanted to live alone.

“I'll go crazy if I stay with you.”

He held up one hand to block those words that, ironically, had reversed upon themselves. “Not like this—you can't say it like this.”

“I don't know,” she said when he insisted on knowing why. “I don't know, Sam.”

They used to do everything together: travel, hike, swim, take care of the garden and their two dogs. After they'd cooked gourmet dinners and gone for long walks, they'd often read aloud to one another—passages from biographies and travel journals—content in the house they'd designed and built on the side of a hill with a view of Lake Michigan. At times they congratulated themselves on their wise decision not to have children. “I'm glad we live in a time period,” he would say, “where this is an accepted choice for women.”

Without Liz, his days felt too open. During all the years of their marriage, she had never mentioned anything to brace him for her leaving. At first he thought of her almost constantly, anticipating her voice when he came home from work, expecting her sleep-warmed body next to him in the morning. Each time he had to remind himself that she was no longer there, it was as though he lost her all over again. The house felt unfamiliar, and he kept bumping into door frames and cabinets, misjudging distances.

Eating alone in the kitchen they had wallpapered together, he'd wonder what she was doing. He forced himself to wait for her return with confidence and declined dinner invitations from two teachers at the school where he was the principal. After work he shopped for food, mowed the lawn or cleaned the house, cooked a late meal, and walked the dogs until he was too tired to do anything but sleep.

From the library he borrowed books on the psychology of
women, trying to understand why Liz had left him. He found her type in most of the books: the woman who thought little of her abilities, who was afraid of success. When he'd first met her, she'd reminded him of the recruits he'd shaped in the late sixties, when he was a drill instructor for the army. During the few weeks in which he had them, he needed to break them down for their own survival—physically and mentally—taking away their essence before he could build them up as soldiers who would act identically in combat, who would trust the reflexes he'd instilled in them instead of relying on individual decisions. Not only were they equipped to kill, but they also knew how to die. Unquestioningly. He infused them with the kind of bravery that made them risk their lives for their buddies.

Though he didn't approve of the war, he did his best to prepare them for Vietnam. When it became too painful to send them off and read the lists of those who had been killed, he begged to be transferred to Vietnam, but he was so effective as a drill instructor that the army refused his request. Aching with the premonition of the recruits' deaths, he discovered their hidden cores, stripped them of their dignity, pushed their bodies beyond their limit of exertion. Very few of them understood that it was out of love when he took them down to where they were nothing, made them terrified of failing, and then rebuilt them. To do any less for them would have meant sending them off unprepared.

Liz had certainly been prepared when she had left him. She'd come into the marriage a shy, worried woman, a failed painter, and he'd scraped off her fears, her doubts, with infinite kindness and patience, until she no longer knew who she was. Only then, when she had become a blank canvas in his hands,
could he draw a woman who was confident and poised, bold and successful. A few times he misjudged his timing, and she slipped from him.

“Stop pushing me,” she'd cry. “Stop persuading me that I'm someone I know I'm not.”

But gradually Liz came to embody this woman they both could be proud of. She returned to school, went to work for an advertising agency, and, the year before she moved out, opened her own firm. Sometimes, when she couldn't sleep late at night and asked him to hold her, she'd whisper to him of the wonderful changes he'd brought about in her, and they'd laugh fondly and reminisce about the woman he'd married as though she were a distant and embarrassing relative.

He spoke with Liz whenever she called, but he tried not to contact her, and it became easier because he could count on her need to talk with him at least once or twice a week. He'd agree to meet her for coffee at the Skylight Café, where they had often eaten brunch after a lazy Sunday morning in bed.

“I'm here for you,” he would promise her. “Any time.” He told her he wished she'd come home, but he followed the advice he found in the books: he never pressured her, and tried to ready himself for a life without her.

Though he determined it would be best for their marriage if he remained celibate, he went out to dinner with the science teacher, Sherrie Donalds, and invited his newly divorced neighbor, Ann Polk, to a concert. He bought a ticket to fly to New York for his college reunion, but the day before his departure, it
struck him as absurd to travel anywhere until he had returned to Mexico and resolved what had happened there.

On his way to meet Liz for coffee, he traded in his New York ticket for a flight to Cabo San Lucas. She sat waiting for him at a table next to the salad bar, where a nativity scene had been set up below the plastic sneeze-guard—gaudy plaster figures surrounded by miniature churches with flickering lights. Someone had sprayed snowflakes on the sneeze guard and placed poinsettia plants at either end of the salad bar. Strings of red bulbs decorated the skylights and made Liz's hair look pink, synthetic.

“Call me,” she said, “when you get back from your reunion.”

He didn't tell her he was flying to Mexico instead. Exhilarated and afraid that she wouldn't know where he would be, he sat across from her, close enough to touch.

He stayed at the last hotel on the Pacific side of the Baja, a low sequence of white buildings that respected the stark beauty of the land. The cats were still there, dozens of them, the color of the cliffs, dozing in the sand beneath the bushes, invisible until they stirred or darted away. Waves came in high and crashed down like shelves overcrowded with books—abrupt and massive.

Though he wasn't able to get the room he'd had with Liz two years earlier, his was identical, with wrought-iron chairs, a woven bedspread, three wood-framed mirrors, and a terrace that faced the ocean. Red-tiled paths bled into his room—cool and smooth beneath his bare feet. In the narrow gap between the back of the hotel and the cliffs lay a garden of hibiscus bushes, palm trees, and cacti.

After he unpacked, he hiked south along the Pacific beach toward the two rock formations that stood between him and Playa de Amor, lovers' beach, the only strip of sand open to both the Pacific and the Sea of Cortés, where he and Liz had snorkeled. A boat from the harbor had dropped them off one morning and picked them up at four, several hours later than expected. When the sun became unbearable, they'd retreated into a cave formed by huge yellow boulders that made them feel as though they were inside a cathedral.

This time he would approach the lovers' beach on foot, arriving and leaving when he chose to. But when he reached the cliffs, they seemed impossible to cross. He discovered a scant trail of sand grains where people had climbed before him, and he used each crevice for leverage to push himself off. As he stood on the ridge where the tip of the peninsula met the ocean and the bay, swift winds stroked the surface of the water. He used to like this definite sense of geography, knowing exactly where he was in relationship to the rest of the earth. He had felt that certainty in his marriage too —being able to point to where he was —but now that had vanished, and this mass of land no longer felt secure to him either. A huge wave could wash over it at any moment, erode the sands and cliffs, the hotel.

He kept having dreams of his house sliding down the hill and folding upon itself at the bottom of the driveway. One night he dreamed of it filled with gaudy flames that unfurled like paper poppies; another night his assistant principal, who was far too lenient with the students, broke into his house and gave a party for the teachers and administrators. He'd wake up disoriented,
depleted by sleep instead of restored, as if the place had chafed away at him during the night. Papaya juice would burn his throat, and the sun would make his eyes ache.

He bought sunglasses and a straw hat. Sometimes he talked to the old woman from Germany who had the room where he'd stayed with Liz. She'd sit in the sand for many hours, watching the waves, her gray hair loose on her shoulders. Her name was Frau Dönstetter, and the waiter who silently poured his coffee from an arm length's distance—dignified and focused, as if he were performing surgery—liked to laugh and talk with the old woman when she ate her meals on the restaurant patio, feeding scraps to the cats that were all around her, swift shadows of the sand.

Early one morning Sam walked to the harbor and tried to locate the boat he'd chartered with Liz. When he couldn't find it, he settled on a smaller fishing craft and rode the calm waters of the bay past Playa de Amor and around the arch into the churning Pacific. The boat passed the beach where his hotel stood, its contours low and rounded like boulders worn smooth by the waters, and headed parallel to the shore toward the old lighthouse—
el faro viejo.
He caught only sailfish, bonitos, and cabrillas, and told the captain to keep the catch. That evening he walked the long, empty beach from his hotel to the northern outcropping of rocks, where a crumbling set of stone steps led up to the town that curved itself around the harbor and spilled across the hill until it was blocked by the Sea of Cortés.

In one of the bars he sat with a bottle of
cerveza
in front of him, a man alone—an oddity in this town that was crowded by men in groups of three or four who'd come from Europe and America to the end of the Baja for some of the best marlin-fishing in the world. They abandoned the town early in the
mornings on chartered boats, but at night, in the bars, they traded fishing stories and invented their lives. “I'm in the film industry,” one man announced, keeping it vague whether he was a clerk or a producer. Another man bragged about renting a house on the Pedregal, the wealthy part of town, where tile-roofed villas clung to the stone cliffs like garnets. Sam drank quietly, and he pitied the men as they tried to impress one another: size of fish, size of boat, size of house.