The Atomic Weight of Love (23 page)

And, he was right—we have to
take
flight. It’s not given to us, served up on a pretty, parsley-bordered platter. We have to
take
wing. Was I brave enough to do that? Or would I be content to remain earthbound? I pulled my knees to my chest, laid my forehead on them, wrapped my arms about my legs, breathed in the darkness I’d created, and rocked myself, gently.

I thought about the bird’s progression toward flight. A fledgling’s plumage, the feathers of her wings and tail, are much shorter than the feathers of her parents. Although the fledgling is capable of flying, due to her inexperience she may be reluctant to try. She’ll likely have difficulty with takeoffs, landings, and covering any distance. Gradually, though, her feathers continue to grow, and as she practices, she gains greater skill. Eventually, her plumage will no longer differ from that of any adult bird of her species, and she will venture farther and farther from the nest, become less dependent upon her parents for food. Finally, she rides the canyon thermals, looking down at the treetops, skimming the sharp edges of mesas.

I tore a page from the back of my journal and wrote: YES. Then I reused his plastic wrap to shelter my note and placed it beneath the solidity of Glencoe.

NEXT TO HIM ON
the boulder, he had a bag of trail mix and a Thermos of coffee with nesting cups.

“Are you really that certain of yourself?” I asked.

“I’m that hopeful.” He stood but stopped himself from touching me. “And it was my birthday wish. Yesterday,” he said before I could ask.

“Happy birthday.”

He motioned. “Join me for breakfast?”

I wore a deep, rose-colored cropped sweater that brought out the pink in my cheeks, and I’d bought new button-fly 501 jeans at the men’s store. I hadn’t yet washed them and could feel that they were still stiff with sizing, but I knew I looked good in them. I saw him quickly look away when he realized I’d caught him staring.

“Clay.”

“Yes.”

“Thank you.”

“Trail mix is nothing, Meridian.”

“No, I mean the note. Your words.” I smiled tentatively.

“You’re welcome,” he said.

“I would like to know you,” I said, finally joining him on the rock. “But I won’t pretend that I’m not absurdly nervous about all of this.” I touched the rough surface of the boulder, thought about the Indian thunderbird cut into the rock Belle and I had sat upon so long ago. The truth was, I was scared but elated, shot through with adrenaline. I felt unprecedented need. Wanton. I was guilty—guilty of betrayal I’d never suspected I had in me.

“I don’t usually pursue married women.”

I put my hand to a facsimile of a monarch butterfly that hovered at a flower, just over his right shin. “No, you go for girls who embroider.”

“One girl. She was at New Buffalo when I was there,” he ran a fingertip along the tendons that lifted across the back of my hand like carefully cultivated rows in a farmer’s field.

“New Buffalo?”

“The commune. Up by Taos, at Arroyo Hondo.”

“Oh.”

“Now you’re more scared, aren’t you?”

“Well, free love and all of that. Hippies. I just—we only see hippies once or twice a year here.” I paused. “They come to protest.”

“So I’ve heard. But, Meridian, I left the commune.” He touched the nape of my neck where secret curls tangled. “The communal thing doesn’t work,” he continued. “At least it didn’t work for me.” He withdrew his hand, poured coffee, and brushed hair from his forehead. “Too much time spent talking things to death, not enough doing. An idealistic concept about going back to the land—without ever once thinking that their college educations don’t prepare them for working in, with, and against nature.”

“And you know those things, about working in nature?”

“I spent my childhood on a ranch near Missoula. Some of these people come out of Radcliffe or Columbia or whatever, and they apply for food stamps, take handouts from the same government they reject.” He let out a long sigh. “There’s also always the option of getting your parents to send money, and then talking about how square they are, how obtuse. In the end, I couldn’t take their brand of hypocrisy any more than I can tolerate what comes out of D.C.”

I thought about dashed hopes, burst bubbles. The lure of utopia. “How long were you there?”

“Not quite six months. I got back home, after Asia, and after a few months at my parents’ in Missoula, I headed for New Mexico.”

“And school?”

“Initially, the University of Montana. But then I joined the Marines, made my father proud.” In an instant, he was silent, staring off into the woods.

I sipped my lukewarm coffee and watched his face. All that he chose not to say was there in his eyes.

“You have one hell of a vocabulary for a ranch-fed boy,” I said, trying to lighten things, bring him back.

“Don’t be such an elitist,” he poked my arm. “We have books, too.”

“Touché,” I said, smiling.

“I’m at Berkeley now. I didn’t fit in as a Montana Grizzly. Not anymore.”

“So were you in on those student protests, at Berkeley?”

“No. That’s a hostile crowd for a guy coming back from Nam.”

“Wouldn’t the commune be just as bad?”

“I actually hid my service, didn’t want to be branded a baby-killer.” His eyes were narrowed, his jaw clenched.

“And they never caught on?”

“Nope.” He pulled a necklace made of tiny green and purple seed beads from beneath his blue cotton work shirt and fingered it absentmindedly.

“That’s a pretty necklace. But maybe you don’t call it a necklace, for a man, I mean.”

“They’re love beads. The same girl who made these pants gave them to me.”

“What was her name?”

“Marion.”

“Another Mary.”

“Hardly.” He was quiet. I wondered if she had jilted him, or how that worked in a commune with free love. What did they do with jealousy and competition? Envy? What happened with all of the natural parts of the Darwinian world, of intraspecies battles for genetic propagation?

He tucked the beads back beneath his shirt collar. “Too much about me. Your turn.”

And so I told him. Pennsylvania, Chicago, New Mexico in the 1940s. Crows. More crows. Hiking, horseback rides, skating. Cooking, cleaning. Volunteering. Not Belle, specifically not Belle. Not yet. And finally Alden, meeting him as an idolizing student, morphing into banality. I didn’t complain about Alden or disparage him—I’d promised myself I’d never do that, as if somehow that were a greater sin than betrayal of him with another man. What I said was that relationships die a slow, incremental death of boredom, resentment, and lassitude. When I finished, I thought surely Clay would see how sad my small life was.

“I’m sorry about your father,” he said, frowning. “But I don’t like the ‘wee brown sparrow’ bit. Same thing with calling you ‘Meri’—doesn’t do you justice.”

“No one’s ever said that to me.”

“I can tell.”

“What makes you think you can?”

“See?” He smiled at me.

“No, I don’t see,” I said, growing more defensive by the second. “And I don’t see why you’re mocking me.”

“Because you have a backbone, even though you have convinced yourself of the contrary. You can fight.”

He must have seen something in my face, because it was at that moment that he took my chin in his hand, pulled me toward him, and kissed me with an open, luscious mouth.

“Well,” I said, finally pulling away.

“Well, well,” he said.

“I could do that again,” I laughed and quickly suppressed a vision of Alden’s familiar face in concentration, his hands cupped about his pipe and the pilled gray sweater he wore in the evenings while he read.

I wanted this man. The way he made me feel. I wanted the unprecedented, relentless pull in my gut. I was tired of saying
no
to myself, of feeling forever deprived. I wanted to stop reflexively obeying all of the rules. So very many rules. I could see myself unfurling my wings, easing them open in the bright sun.

THAT EVENING, I SAT
beneath the buckeye tree I’d planted in the backyard when we first moved to our home twenty-three years ago. It was now nearly twenty feet tall, with a generous spread of shadow. This time of year, it bloomed plentifully, with stacked, pinkish-yellow blossoms.

In my hand, I tilted a tumbler with gin and tonic back and forth, back and forth, like a clock’s pendulum. It had been eons since I’d had a drink, eighteen years since Belle’s death, but tonight I needed it. I smelled the juniper in the liquor, and a robin skipped through the branches above me. I wanted Belle’s voice. I wondered if she’d try to talk me in or out of this thing with Clay.

I stayed there, drifting, until I heard Alden’s car in the driveway. When I stood, I felt the impact of the booze. My limbs were loose, my back muscles had unknotted themselves. I was sufficiently numb.

I’d made meatloaf, baked potatoes, and lima beans, one of Alden’s favorite vegetables. I hated lima beans passionately. For me, eating them was like swallowing dollops of paste.

“White Wing has mated,” I said, passing Alden the butter for his potato. He chewed silently. “I think I’m going to name her Beacon.” When he remained unresponsive, I added a fake lilting tone to my voice, “What an unusual name, Meri! Tell me more!”

He looked at me, his face set in a derisive expression.

The gin and tonic—and I was now on my second—told me to keep going. “Well, since you ask,
Beacon
came to me because I am hoping that she and White Wing will be a
beacon
for me, lead me to new insights.”

He set his fork upside down on the edge of his plate, wiped his mouth, and laid his napkin beside his plate of barely touched food. “I’m so glad you’ve taken up drinking again. It brings out the nicest aspects of your personality, your most winning ways.”

“Why thank you,” I said, mimicking the accent of a Southern belle, purposefully using the sound of the ice in my glass for emphasis. “God knows, I try,” I said, feeling that I had been trying to share something with him.

He calmly took his plate and carried it to the kitchen. I pursued him.

“You’re not going to eat?”

He kept his back to me while he scraped his food into the trash can and said “I’m not hungry.”

“Alden.” I wanted for him to turn around, talk to me. I wanted to see the tension leave his back. I wanted for his shoulders to stop their progressive curving inward, like an old woman trying to keep the heat beneath her shawl.

He rinsed his hands, picked up the dish towel to dry them, and turned to face me. “How many is that?”

“Two. Just two.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Don’t pretend stupidity. Why are you drinking?”

“Because it’s spring and it sounded good.”

“And now for the real reason?”

All right, he’d asked for it. “Maybe it’s because otherwise I have to sit through another silent meal. That is, unless I do a song and dance and shoot off fireworks, hire a brass band to march through the room, just to try to get your attention. All I want is for you to
talk
to me, take an interest in me.”

He shook his head, turned and folded the dish towel carefully, setting it on the countertop. “So,” he said as he left the kitchen, “I’m to be treated to a rerun of the ‘Poor Meri’ show?”

I heard him close the bathroom door. Then I heard the click of the lock. We did not lock doors in our house, not against each other. Not in the twenty-six years we’d been married. Not until now.

When I came into the kitchen the following morning, Alden was reading the newspaper, his breakfast plate pushed to the side. He quickly drank two cups of coffee and then lit a cigarette. I poured myself a cup and sat with him, silently nudging the little beanbag ashtray closer to him as the ash on his cigarette grew in length. From the radio parked on top of the refrigerator, Paul Harvey reported the news, signed off with his catch phrase, “Paul Harvey . . . good day!” and then KRSN began playing its morning theme, “The Syncopated Clock.” I yawned and rubbed my eyes.

He folded the paper back so that he could more easily read a story and said: “Ludicrous.”

“What?”

“Princeton. They’ve given an honorary doctorate to that singer.”

“Which singer?”

“Dylan. What’s his name? Bob Dylan, that’s it.”

“Oh.” I’d heard some of his music. While I thought his voice was awful—surprisingly awful—and he mumbled half the time, his words nonetheless drew me in. I rather thought he qualified as a poet, even if I didn’t understand all of the lyrics.

“Tell me how that does not degrade those people who’ve actually earned Princeton degrees. Tell me that.” He lowered the paper and looked at me.

“You’re asking me to defend Princeton? To justify some decision Princeton made?”

“I’m trying to have a conversation with you. It’s what you asked for, isn’t it? So here I am. Talking.”

“I see.”

“Forget it, Meri. Just forget it.”

“I don’t want to argue with you.”

“I’m not arguing. I’m trying to have a coherent conversation, to discuss a topic with you.”

“No, you’re not. You’re arguing.”

He slapped the paper onto the tabletop and stood behind his chair, resting his hands on the back of it as if it were a speaker’s podium. “If you don’t care, then I don’t care enough to try. It’s that simple.” He glared at me.

“All right,” I said, keeping my voice as even as possible.

“Oh, good. The kindergarten teacher’s voice is back.”

“What do you want from me? What?”

He struck the tabletop with his fist, and the plates and cups rattled.

I flinched but kept quiet. Anything I said would be fashioned into a weapon, taken as an insult. He wanted to be insulted.

Daring me with his eyes, he said: “So this is it? Now you’re going to mope, to pout? Give me the silent treatment?”

I carried our coffee cups to the sink. He followed me, said loudly: “Don’t walk away when I’m talking to you!”

I faced him, my hands on my hips. “What’s the fucking point? I don’t want to fight; you do. But I will NOT let you goad me into a fight!”