The Atomic Weight of Love (30 page)

Clay was thoughtful too. Eventually, I asked him what he was thinking about as he scanned the length of the gorge.

“I was thinking about the rift, technically a passive rift, that it’s the only active one in the country. I was also thinking about time.” He wound Jasper’s leash tighter around his fist. “Then, I was thinking about flying away with you.”

“So let’s fly,” I said and took off running, headed for the center of the bridge. “Last one there . . .” I shouted.

“. . . is a rotten egg!” he yelled, easily overtaking and passing me, with Jasper barking excitedly. When I caught up to him, I jumped up and wrapped my legs around his waist.

And there he held me, suspended on a cantilevered truss bridge designed to withstand ninety mile-per-hour winds (or so the placard said). We hung there, locked together above the dizzying depth of the world.

WE ATE AT A
sidewalk café in Taos where we could keep Jasper beside us. I slipped chunks of my green chile cheese hamburger to Jasper and said “Who do you love, Jasper? The carnivore or the vegetarian?” He thumped his tail enthusiastically.

I don’t think of myself as a jealous person. I’d never really felt jealousy over Alden or Jerry. But it came on violently, powerfully, when the young redheaded woman did a double-take as she passed our table.

“Clay!” she shouted. I saw him reach unconsciously for his love beads. He pulled them from beneath his shirt and fingered them as she approached our table.

He stood, reached a hand to shake hers. She ignored it and hugged him. “Where’ve you been?” she asked, glancing my way but pointedly ignoring me.

“Around,” he said. He picked up my hand, held it. “This is Meridian. Meridian,” he said, “this is Marion.”

Marion of the Sacred Heart of Embroidery. Marion of the Perpetual Love Beads. Marion of the Holy Love-Ins and Communal Free-for-All. She was beautiful—perfect skin, long limbs, superbly tanned, her teeth unstained by decades of caffeine. I noticed a Chinese character tattooed on the inside of her left wrist. Her breasts beneath a sapphire tank top were perky, brazenly free of Playtex girding.

I let go of Clay’s hand and reached to shake her hand. “Hi,” I managed.

She looked from Clay to me. “You two . . . ?” she said, exaggerating her bewildered state as a gratuitous insult.

“Yeah,” Clay said, smiling.

“Well . . .”

“Very well,” he said, and I smiled.

I watched her hide her disappointment. “Where are you these days?”

“Jemez,” he said, purposefully avoiding the Los Alamos topic. So, Clay wasn’t as bold, as independent as he preached. He wanted to dodge any allegations that he was contributing to nuclear annihilation.

“Cool,” she said. And then she looked at me. “And you?”

“Crows,” I said.

“Wow. Cool. The indigenous people have been so wronged.”

The Crow Indians?
I thought. As far as I knew, the Crow reservation was in Montana.

“Meridian studies crows. She’s an ornithologist,” Clay said, sitting back down. Jasper was sniffing at Marion’s moccasined feet. I wondered what she’d walked in and could only hope it had been something nasty.

“Hunh,” Marion said.
She doesn’t know an ornithologist from an orthodontist
, I thought.

“Well, good to see you.” She looked only at Clay. “Don’t be such a stranger.”

“Yeah,” he said, and reached for Jasper’s ears, pulling them softly.

“And good to meet you,” she added.

I had to give her credit for that. I smiled.

I watched her cross the street, and when I turned to look at Clay, I saw him watching her, too. I felt a flame burn in my gut. His gaze left the back of Marion and returned to his plate of tofu scramble.

“She’s beautiful,” I said, picking up a French fry and feeding it to Jasper.

“She is,” he said.

“Wrong answer.”

“Accurate answer. I’m not going to pretend differently.”

“Not even for the sake of my middle-aged vanity?”

“She doesn’t begin to compare with you.”

“Bullshit, as you would say.”

He shook his head. “I knew this would happen.”

“What? What would happen?”

“You’d start this again. The age thing. On our last day together, you have to do this.”

It was impossible. I knew—had always known—that I’d never hold Clay to me. He would leave me. I tilted my head back, looked at the clouds, and he sighed in frustration.

“I just don’t know why you want me,” I said. “I’ve never understood that. Why would you be with me when you could have Marion? A dozen Marions?”

“My mother would say that the heart wants what the heart wants.”

I found a Kleenex in my purse, blew my nose. I stared across the street to where the ghost of Marion lurked in the shadows of a portal. I imagined how much lighter her spirit was, how much less work it would be to traipse through life with her. “You should be with her. Or someone like her.”

“Fuck this, Meridian.”

Jasper put a paw on Clay’s knee, begging for a little tofu scramble. I dug in my purse for another tissue and then found the Trinitite I’d wrapped in a handkerchief and tossed in my bag when I’d made a quick trip home that morning. I sat for a minute with my hand in my purse, the Trinitite cupped in my palm. And then I took it out and set it on the table in front of Clay. He picked it up, held it up to the sun just as I had so many years ago when Alden brought it to me with such pride.

“It’s Trinitite,” I said. “From the first atomic blast.”

“I’ve heard about this. I’ve heard people have it, that if a helicopter flew over Los Alamos with a radiation detector it would go bananas from all the Trinitite in all the houses.”

“It’s yours,” I said. “A geologist should have one of the rarest rocks on earth.”

“The colors are amazing.” He set it in front of me. “But I can’t keep it.”

“Why on earth not?”

“It’s not what I want from you.”

“But it’s a gift. It’s my gift to you.”

“I can’t keep it.”

“Because of Alden?”

“Right on.”

I hadn’t thought about it from that angle. He could take me—Alden’s wife—but he could not take Alden’s rock, his science, his achievement. I’d been a fool to offer it.

“Baby,” he said, leaning closer to me. “I love the thought of it, the love behind it. But I want for you to find something else to give me. Something that’s purely you.”

I rewrapped the Trinitite. He was right. Whatever I gave Clay had to be of me—of the hopeful, dreaming and driven girl I’d once been. Of the woman I was becoming.

NESTLED AGAINST CLAY’S NAKED
body and drifting off to sleep that night, I thought about what Clay had told me about geologic rifts. That they were the earth pulling apart, like wounds opening. I wondered at the depth and mystery of it, a crack in the earth, in myself. Part of me recognized it as a potentially dangerous breach of my skin; another part of me relished the possibility for change that it posed, the powerful forces at work.

I closed my eyes and imagined the spread of Clay’s war wounds like shards of glass across my kitchen floor. A girl like Marion could never face those. He’d not told anyone but me about the bone shards, the talismans of his friend he’d carry for the rest of his life. I think that’s the closest I ever came to fathoming his love for me—as inexplicable as that love might remain, as mysterious as it still was to me.

An Unkindness of Ravens

1. Smart, dangerous predators, ravens are larger although more slender than the crow, with a thick neck and shaggy throat feathers.

2. Because legend dictates that if the captive ravens at the Tower of London ever leave the Tower the British Empire will crumble, the Tower’s ravens’ wings are clipped.

Alden was due back from Niagara close to dinnertime. I left Clay’s at dawn to return home to a house that seemed oddly unfamiliar. The air was stale, close, and so I stepped outside to have my morning coffee in the backyard. I wanted to sit in the cool air and listen to the hummingbirds’ staccato cries as they disputed territory. A pair of robins chased a sharp-shinned hawk from their nest, berating it and repeatedly dipping within a few inches of the bird’s talons and beak.

I was going to miss Clay, the closeness we’d developed, the luxury of having an expanse of time to be with him, to sleep and dream together. At the same time, I was exhausted, and I wondered how much longer I could have gone at Clay’s speed. Surely, eventually we would not have been so greedy with each other, forever aware of the limited time we had together. And I did believe our time was limited. He would grow tired of me or simply leave to return to school. As for me, I would return to . . . what? I couldn’t go back to my former life; it no longer existed.

I dressed in my scruffiest outfit and began cleaning. I wiped the Trinitite clean of smudges and returned it to the shelf, and I stood before the bookshelves, glancing through the spines with their familiar titles. I could remove them all, blow the dust from the valleys atop each volume, reorganize things. I could get rid of my college textbooks—the majority of them were anachronisms, and how likely was it that I would ever again refer to them?

I retrieved old boxes from the shed and began emptying the bookshelves. It felt like an unburdening. I turned up the volume on the radio, listened to Brook Benton’s rumbling “Rainy Night in Georgia.” Then I began on the closets, loading the bed with teetering mountains of clothing neither of us had worn in ages. In the kitchen, I pulled out pots and pans that had gone ignored for years. I weeded through my recipe books, tossing aside the ones Alden had brought me when he returned from business trips to New Orleans (
Southern Cooking at Its Best
), Boston (
Baked Beans and Other Traditions of New England
), and San Francisco (
Sourdough Delights
).

I’d meant to shower before Alden returned, but when his fellow traveler dropped him off, I was caught covered in dust and sweat, trying to jam more boxes and bags into the backseat of the Morris Minor.

Alden set his suitcase on the front walk. “Are we moving?”

I laughed. “No, I’m cleaning. Debridement.” I gave the backseat stockpile a solid kick and managed to slam the car door. I went to Alden and put my arms about him. “Welcome home,” I said. He kissed my forehead, and while he did so, I unintentionally compared the soft flesh of his back to Clay’s.

“I started dinner.” I followed him up the walk. “Stuffed pork chops baked in milk.”

“Mmm,” he said with the requisite modicum of enthusiasm.

“You’ve always liked those, and Safeway had a sale.”

He opened the front door and stood surveying the disarray generated by my wild day of weeding. “It looks as if a bomb went off in here,” he said, heading for the bedroom to empty his suitcase. He stopped in the doorway, looked at the surface of the bed strewn with clothing, belts, dilapidated shoes. “What on earth possessed you?” he asked.

“It began with the bookshelves, and then it just kept going.”

He looked at the shelves. “Where are all the books?”

“In boxes in my car.”

“Not my books.”

“Just some of your books. Ones you haven’t looked at since Chicago.”

“You got rid of my books? Who told you you could do that?”

I stood there.
Please, not a fight.
Not on his first night back, his first half hour back. Not over some old books.

He set down his suitcase and sighed. “I’m tired, Meri. Really tired, and I don’t feel particularly well. But before I sit down to dinner, I need to know which boxes have my books and where you put them in your car.”

“But isn’t it nice to see the shelves with some openness, some potential for new books, new ideas?”

“You didn’t even ask me,” he said, a slight petulance to his tone.

“I didn’t think I had to. Not about old, unused books.”

“Well, you thought wrong.”

I was tempted to block the door, prevent him from undoing so much of my day’s work, but it wasn’t worth it. “I’ll bring them back in,” I said, running a hand across my forehead, noticing a patina of grime obscuring the scar on my palm. “You sit and relax.”

He gestured toward the cluttered living room furniture. “Where?”

I stopped by the couch, moved the boxes, turned on the television on my way out the door. It was as if I were entertaining a child so that I could get my work accomplished.

In the driveway, I arched my back to take some of the tightness from it, and then I opened the car, took out two boxes of books, piled them on top of each other and stumbled back into the house.

CLAY WAS WAITING FOR
me the next morning at the boulder, the toes of his tanned bare feet splayed across patches of sage-green lichens.

I stood beside him and pulled his head toward me until it touched the outside of my thigh. He leaned into me, much as Jasper would lean into a friendly human.

“I missed you,” he said needlessly. “Happy reunion?”

“Fairly even-keeled.” I sat down, put my knapsack at my feet. White Wing called from a lower branch and was answered from a tree several feet away. On the forest floor, a rufous-sided towhee busily lifted dry leaves, hunting for insects.

“I didn’t sleep,” Clay said. “Couldn’t get it out of my mind.” His voice had quickly taken on a heightened tone.

“Couldn’t get what out of your mind?”

“Did you fuck him? A welcome-home fuck?” White Wing took off, winging away from us.

“No.”

“Will you?”

“I don’t understand.”

“You don’t
understand
?” He stood, took a breath and tried to regain his equilibrium. “The woman I love sleeps with another man. How difficult is that, Meridian?”

“What I don’t understand,” I said, keeping my voice measured, even, “is how you reconcile your days in the commune with what you’re doing right now.”

He stared at me. “OK,” he sighed and let go of some of his outrage. “I’m just going through Meridian withdrawal, and I hate it.”

“What can I do that will help?”

“Do I really have to tell you?”