“Yeah, I heard. What a shame.”
“Rose was mad at me, so I didn’t get to go to the funeral. I planned to crash it until Pop ordered me to stay home. It was probably just as well. I would have told her to save her tears.”
“Why?”
Lily shivered, and Tres rubbed her bare arms.
“Because he cheated on her.” Lily sat up in bed, pulling the sheet over her shoulders. “I regret not getting to throw a rock at his coffin.”
“Poor Rose. Did you know who he was sleeping with?”
“Not for a long time. I think Rose is falling in love again. That’s more important than anything that happened in the past, right? The only problem is Austin Donavan seems to still be hung up on his ex, Leah the unforgettable.”
Tres smiled. “I know Leah Donavan.”
His smile was far too revealing for their acquaintance to be friendly. “Really. How well?”
“Well enough, a few years back. Seemed like a good idea at the time.”
She smacked him with the pillow. “You bird dog!”
Tres took the pillow from her. “Hey, don’t blame me. One night I bought her a drink in El Farol and she was all over me. It was pretty obvious it didn’t matter who I was so long as I had a penis.”
“Why, that little succubus!” Lily felt sick to her stomach. Someone—even Rose—could say the same of Lily’s sex life. “Was she any good?”
“She cried a lot. That usually doesn’t sent men into fits of passion. She seemed confused and lonely. Lots of people believe sex will re- pair those rips. Doesn’t usually work, however.”
Lily chewed on that thought for awhile, nervous that his words hit so close to home. “Now you have to tell me about your family,” she said. “Unless you worked for them, which would make the topic taboo, and in which case I withdraw the question.”
Tres reached for his pants, taking out his wallet. “Well, I have my stepdaughter, Leah.”
Lily stared at the girl’s senior picture. Premed, valedictorian, she looked like one of Pop’s really good horses, beautiful, and possessing bloodlines to die for. Leah wasn’t even his biological child, but for the twelve years his marriage had lasted, Tres had been a real father to her, teaching her to ride a bike, helping her with her math, meeting the boys she dated, all that good dad stuff a girl needs to grow up halfway
normal. Since the divorce they no longer lived in the same house, but remained close enough that they talked on the phone once a week. Leah, Leah, Leah. Hearing how much he loved her made Lily crazy-jealous. Any baby she might produce now would have a fifty- fifty chance of ending in miscarriage, and then there was Down’s syndrome, or it might come out looking like a lab rat since Lily had been on the pill for twenty years, and who knew what that did to a woman’s eggs?
“Let’s put our clothes back on, go for a walk, enjoy the sunset,” Tres suggested. “I think we’ve told each other enough secrets for one day.”
The path they took wound behind the one-room log cabin that had once belonged to his parents. They’d had Tres late in life and were dead now. Lily couldn’t imagine having no blood family, none of that eternal extended drama she was constantly plugged in to. Without Mami and Pop, her niece and nephew, the threat of the Martínezes’ disapproval, everything would seem so tame. The pines on either side of the cabin made a swishing noise in the wind. It sounded to her ears for all the world like God whispering over and over, “You’re nuts, you’re nuts.” Her stomach cramped. It had been so long since she’d had any pesto or Krisprolls that whenever she thought of them she trembled like a junkie.
They climbed up the mountainside until they found an outcrop- ping of rock flat enough to sit on. Tres put his arms around her. She nestled into the front of his body and he rested his chin on top of her head. He kissed her hair and pulled it behind her ears. They watched the sun blaze out, the sky turn dusky blue and the first stars begin to wink overhead. Under Lily’s jacket, the chill raised gooseflesh. She had put herself into an extremely vulnerable position, and just like Pop said, that was where she wanted to be.
She tore another condom off its perforation, took the last turkey sandwich out of the fridge, and went to the old double bed where Tres was asleep in the funky sheets and unzipped sleeping bags. She took off the flannel shirt, dropped it to the floor and got into bed. When he didn’t rouse, she gently nipped his shoulder. Then she sat back, holding a sandwich in one hand, the condom in the other.
He opened his eyes and she said, “There are two choices on the menu, sir. Food or flesh. You are the most double-jointed lover I’ve
ever pleasured into unconsciousness, but not even you can eat and make love at the same time.”
When Tres smiled, Lily thought he looked like a satyr. His quirky grin caused her to go stupid inside, made her want to reveal to him all her dangerous secrets. He lazily reached out for the sandwich and took a bite, chewed and swallowed. “Good sandwich.”
Her mouth formed a little O of disappointment.
“Now, now.” He set the sandwich down on the windowsill, grabbed the condom, and tore the wrapper open with his teeth. He slid the rubber onto his erection and wrestled Lily down on the bed. “Did you really think I’d choose food over you,
Cholula
?”
“Maybe.”
He began to make love to her again, moving inside her for the second time that day. “You really thought that?”
“Yes. No. Tres, how can I can think straight when you’re doing that?”
“I don’t want you to think at all except of this.” He pressed his hand to the small of her back, lifting her off the mattress, tucking her into him. He held her there firmly, still moving inside her, so artfully positioned that when Lily shut her eyes she felt everything twice as intensely. In a far-off corner of her mind, she imagined herself brick by sandy brick building the astonishing structure of orgasm. No blue-prints, no angles, no mortar, just one long im- possible arc that spanned years and stacked up higher than she could ever scale. But that was all right; this edifice demanded to be taken apart. To serve its purpose it had to fall to pieces. Who knew what finally tipped her over? The combination of nostalgia and experience present in the boy who was now a man, the first person she’d loved all those years ago who’d learned all this hair-raising technique somewhere else, with other women, but had brought it back to her, his first lover? Pressing up against him, she came once, then after a brief rest, again, and Tres went so high on male pride that now he was coming, too. Lily didn’t care. All this good luck made her holler loud enough to rattle the windows. In great gasps that ended in yawns, each tried to catch his or her breath.
After the daze cleared they sat up in bed, taking turns drinking from the nearly empty gallon jug of cider. Tres’s back was to the window. The wintry sunlight lit up his brown shoulders. Lily ran her fingers over his chest. Skinny men’s bodies stayed hard and muscular with
so much less effort. She watched him fold his empty sandwich wrapper into precise, defined lines before setting it aside.
“I could be happy if I got to watch the sun set every day in these mountains. Life without designer clothes wouldn’t exactly kill me.” “Temporarily,” Tres said. “The older we get, the harder it seems
to change what we’ve become accustomed to.” She turned over on her belly. “Oh, boy.” “Oh, boy, what?”
“Sounds like the build-up to a kiss-off line. You find me too in- tense, don’t you? I was good enough to screw blind for a solid week but not refined enough to take out in public. Break it to me gently, Tres, technically I’m still enjoying my afterglow.”
“Afterglows. Plural. Men notice these things.” “Well, if they do, you’re the first.”
He took hold of her chin, looked deep into her eyes, and she could see he was speaking the truth. “Yes, you scare me. You always have. Back in high school whenever you got mad at me you just about stopped my heart.”
“Who cares about high school? I want to know about right now.” “Sugarbush, making love with you feels like riding a freight train full speed through a very tight tunnel. Three orgasms in fifteen
minutes? You could say I find it a little overwhelming.”
She tried to remember each one, to separate them out, but everything blended together. She placed a hand on his forearm and raked her fingers through the sparse hair that grew there. “I guess I could try to narrow it down to one, if that would make you happy.”
“Don’t you dare.”
“Then what in hell are you getting at, Tres? All of a sudden things are capital S serious. Knock it off.”
He scratched his stubbly beard. “Lily, I came here with a plan to take a break from a job I know I don’t belong in. To think. Get a little writing done. Carve
santos
. Live on my savings with a woodstove for heat, and make it through the winter subsisting on beans and rice. I have exactly that much money and no more. I can’t even afford to buy the condoms unless there’s someplace that sells them dis- count.”
What did that have to do with anything? She made a hundred fifty grand a year, give or take a few bonuses. “I’m not asking you to support
me, Tres. I just want to keep on doing whatever it is we’re doing here. I’ll buy the condoms. I’ll pay for the blood tests, and then we won’t need the stupid condoms.”
“Debbie cleaned my clock in the divorce.”
“Debbie! I swear, Tres, the name alone should have been your first clue. So start over. Lesser individuals have done that and suc- ceeded.” She tipped the jug of cider up and took a drink.
“I’m ass-deep in student loans. Medical school cost a great deal.” He gestured around the cabin, frowning. “You’re sitting in the only house I’ll probably ever own.”
In her mind Lily was all set to say,
We could live in a teepee and I’d still want you five times a day
, but instead she choked, spraying cider down her chin, onto her bare breasts, and what came out was, “Medical school? Holy Mother of God. You said you had taken a leave of absence from your
job
. Job means an engineer or a professor of physics or a guy who sells carpet or something. You can’t be a doctor.”
He put his mouth to the cider creek running down her breast and stopped it with his tongue. “Why not?”
Lily shuddered. “Be a car mechanic, Tres, be a hobo. Just don’t put on a white coat and think you run the world, okay?”
She flopped down on the bed, hating herself.
You could cut him some slack, Lily. Maybe he’s a pediatrician who worked for an HMO; they have regular hours, make less
dinero,
but in the long run, that’s a doable life, except maybe for those annoying Christmas parties
. She turned her head slightly and studied his dark, smooth chest, bare of tattoos, nearly hairless owing to the diluted Indian blood that ran through his veins. She could use a Spanish phrase, and he wouldn’t have to run for a dictionary. He’d never call her
Señorita
in a pejorative way. He was so attentive to her needs that it crossed her mind he could be a gynecologist. He ticked all the checks of desirable qualities off the Lily list: When he coughed he covered his mouth, and he did not engage in her single most unbearable male habit, picking his teeth in public. He kept his nails trimmed—surgeon? Not a surgeon, please—and kissed her so hard he bruised her mouth, leaving behind a marvelous soreness that made her remember everything that had led up to it, starting with the coffee and their legs bumping under that café table.
“Please accept my apology,” she said softly. “That was a really awful thing for me to say. You’re probably a wonderful doctor. I’ve been on my job too long to be anything but jaded. I promise I’ll go into therapy.”
“That will be handy.” “Why, Tres?”
“Because I was—still am, I guess, until they revoke my license—a psychiatrist.”
Lily covered her face with the sheet. If only it were a little more substantial than one-hundred-thread count, something like a lead apron, something she could hide beneath forever. Through the cloth she said, “Does that mean you’ve been cataloging every little thing I’ve done in bed? I’ve tried very hard to hide all my neuroses and craziness factors. I’m utterly transparent, aren’t I? The worst head case you’ve ever bedded. Admit it.”
He pulled the sheet down, palmed her face, and smoothed the dark hair away from her forehead before he kissed her. “There’s no hope for you whatsoever. No meds I can think of to bolster your deficiency, no analysis to unknot those convoluted thought processes. I think probably the only avenue open is for you to stay in therapy until the day you die.”
She turned onto her side, resting her chin on her outstretched arms, and looked up at him. “That’s probably the nicest thing any man’s ever said to me.”
“Well, that’s a shame. You deserve nice things. Every time I make love to you it feels like we’ve reinvented the wheel.”
No man had ever asked Lily to marry him. Maybe no one ever would. But she would treasure Tres’s words until she was a wrinkled old lady, senile, good for nothing but shelling peas into a
colador
on the porch. Even if all this ended tomorrow, and—twenty-four pack, there was every chance it would—she could carry what had happened around with her forever.
I had one week of bliss
, she thought.
More than most people get in a lifetime of ordinary lovemaking. More than Rose got, for sure
. She understood her parents’ relationship for the first time in her life, Pop allowing Mami her separateness, her air- plane, the greyhounds, the artists. Maybe that affair of hers had made them realize how important they were to each other. Just look at the love that had come rocketing back to them. Probably the only way to see if such magic could happen to you was to step out onto the ledge yourself.
She stuck a toe out from under the sheet. The room was chilly. “Will you be my therapist, Tres? Or does sleeping with your patient violate some physician code?”
“Oh, baby,” he said. “I wasn’t even a very good psychiatrist to strangers.”
Lily’s heart slipped inside her ribs. She sat up and put her arms around him in an effort to get closer. “I was kidding.”
“I wasn’t. I couldn’t make any money if I set up a practice here,” he said into her hair. “New Mexico is full up with shrinks, coun- selors,
curanderas
, and witches.”