Ariel's Crossing (49 page)

During that aberrant September and into early fall, she seemed to live for word of Kip, of Sarah and Delfino. Above all of Marcos, who called most every night after she returned to New York, to hear about her day and tell her about his.

“Is the criminal of the household in?” he would begin.

“Speaking.”

Or else, “Is there a con around?”

“Who’s asking?”

“A pro.”

“Pro con?”

“Not very.”

Shuck and jive, meant perhaps to disburden the darker story behind their having met, not as any mockery of Delfino or Kip, rather as a language of bonding.

He called from the kitchen. It wasn’t hard to imagine him beside the refrigerator decorated with Polaroids and postcards, sitting on the hardwood counter—Sarah wished he would kick that habit—smoking a cigarette (that one, too) after everyone else at Rancho Pajarito had gone to bed. He asked her how she was feeling, whether the morning sickness had abated now that she’d entered her second trimester.

“Seems I’m over that part of the pregnancy.”

“Great.”

“I’m glad I went through it for a while, though.”

“Why? You some kind of masochist?”

“No, listen. If I hadn’t gotten sick that night out at Dripping Spring, I wouldn’t have told you I was pregnant, and it was a good thing I did.”

“Not that I was much help.”

“You were, believe me.”

“I’m not sure how.”

She said, “Trust me. Telling you, knowing you knew, was unbelievably helpful.”

“So, Ariel?”

“Yeah?”

“You fat yet?”

Mocked them away from sweet talk, though as more weeks passed they found themselves speaking often about what they loved, why they cherished what they cherished—all the things that had brought them to these affections and affinities. Ariel read him passages from the Calder ledger, surprising both of them one evening when she shared Kip’s letter. Marcos told her about Franny Johnson, who’d turned out to be Mary Carpenter, and Ariel filled him in about David Moore and why she was about to become a single mother.

“Aren’t you obligated legally to tell him he’s going to be a father?” Marcos asked, noting as he did how the question made his stomach churn.

“In fact, no. But more than legally, sometimes I still think I owe him the moral courtesy—except then I remember I already did that. When he left, the issue was dead, literally dead, done with. He mailed me a check for the procedure—“

“Abortion?”

“—abortion. I found it in the mailbox when I got back and I threw it out. I’ve tried to reach him, but nothing doing. He’s known all along how to get in touch with me if he had any interest in the matter. He doesn’t. There’s nothing to talk with him about. Does that sound cold?”

“More sad than cold.”

Ariel agreed with Marcos. It was sad. But there was no changing what happened. You wove with the length of thread fate spun out, did your best to weave well. If others laid scissors to the fabric, you patched the damage and hoped it wouldn’t happen again. If it did, you patched the damage once more.

In November, just before Kip was diagnosed as terminal, Marcos visited him in the fieldhouse where he’d taken up residence again in the wake of Tularosa. He wanted to tell Kip about Ariel, about his feelings for this woman whom he now knew more as a voice than a flesh-and-blood person.

Kip welcomed him, exchanged small talk about this new horse or that, then asked what was up.

“I’m going to New York. To visit Ariel,” Marcos said.

“Sounds good,” said Kip.

“You don’t mind?”

“Mind what?”

“You’re right, never mind.”

Kip wasn’t going to be very helpful, so Marcos shifted subjects.

“Do you miss Mary?”

“I miss everybody, Marcos. It’s a sign of getting old.”

“Come on, I’m serious.”

“I miss Ariel.”

“So do I,” Marcos said—out of his mouth before he knew it.

“I’ve noticed.”

“You don’t mind?”

“That’s the second time you’ve asked. Mind what?”

“Something’s going on between me and Ariel.”

“No reason it shouldn’t.”

“We’re completely different, though. She’s a city person. I’m a pueblo valley horse breeder.”

“The only woman I ever fell in love with was a city person, and when we met I’d come from these same sticks as you. You know it doesn’t matter.”

When Marcos flew east to see her in Manhattan, Kip’s words would carry resonance. His room at the Gramercy Park sat empty throughout his stay, while he and Ariel spent long nights talking about all and everything, holding hands, crashing side by side atop the coverlet on her bed. Faces close, they breathed each other’s breath until they half fainted from intoxication.

Accompanying her to an obstetrician’s appointment the morning of his last day in town, he was asked by the receptionist, “You’re the father-to-be?”

“No,” he said, at the same instant Ariel said, “Yes.”

“Yes,” at the same time Ariel said, “No.”

Which was the moment, the intimation, that led them beyond talk and handholding, so that after walking slowly, enveloping each other as they returned to the East Village and up the creaky stairs to her aerie, then closing the door behind them, they undressed one another and, kissing, kneeling, embracing on the braided rug, collapsed gently together into a wraith of passion. Marcos asked, running his large, tender, work-rough hand over the mild swell of her belly, if this was a wise idea. Lying on her back, dark hair framing her serious face, she turned her head toward him, ran her hand down his cheek, and whispered there’d never been a wiser idea. They made love with an innocent ease that proposed it would happen again, a hundred times, a thousand times, over the years.

She rode with him to LaGuardia the next morning and they walked together to the gate, hugging so closely that they half-stumbled sideways, and with every step kissing. When he asked her if she had a photo of herself, she gave him her driver’s license and they kissed in such a delirium he nearly missed his flight.

“How’d you get that?” she asked him before he boarded. She nodded toward the scar on his forearm.

“I was really young, first learning to ride. Got on a horse way beyond my abilities. It’s ugly, but I kind of see it as a badge of honor.”

She ran her fingertips over the distressed skin, as if stroking silk. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “Safe journey home.”

Everything moved quickly after Marcos left. She invited herself over to Chelsea that evening and, as she’d done so many times in the past, made dinner with Jessica. She announced her plans, savored her parents’ words of support. Within the week she gave notice on her apartment, put her belongings in storage, and moved west to Pear Street. At Christmas her parents joined her in New Mexico, passing some time themselves with their friend Kip as the first snow fell over the finger mesas. The childhood pals celebrated their shared birthday together surrounded by family, and by friends who’d become family.

As winter progressed, Ariel marveled at how Kip, readmitted to the convalescent center as a Los Alamos Hospital outpatient, became infatuated by books. Bedridden for most of the day, he couldn’t sit as before with others watching television. Instead, in January he traveled with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, in February with Ishmael and Ahab. Ariel brought some of Granna’s books from Pear Street, and he devoured them, a famished man at a feast, liking some better than others. His daughter could never predict his responses.

He had his own take on everything, unswayed by any canon or decorum. Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” provoked wicked laughter from the frail man as he read aloud to Ariel,

“Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
Forever piping songs forever new …

“God in heaven, what a load of slobber,” continuing,

“More happy love! more happy, happy love!
Forever warm and still to be enjoyed,
Forever panting, and forever young.

“Listen, Ariel, take it from one who knows. Nobody in their right mind wants to be forever panting. Let alone forever young.”

“But that’s one of the most famous poems ever written,” she argued.

He was being harsh, but she couldn’t dispute the underlying logic—horse sense, Marcos later said—and so did not. No one could say Kip Calder wasn’t wildly spirited in those last months before he finally succumbed to cancer. The way a flame sometimes surges into abrupt brilliance just before it gutters and goes out.

Kip survived to see his granddaughter born. Both he and Ariel were in the same hospital. The waiting room was a wonderful havoc. Jessica, Brice, Bonnie Jean, Sarah, Carl, Delfino. The patient and impatient. Marcos was there beside her holding her hand as she went into labor. Miranda was about to be a March baby, just like her mother.

Ariel could have sworn she heard one of the delivery doctors whisper,
Stock the pond with mermaids.
Well, maybe not. Dilating, swirling, spinning, she lay back against the wet sheets and pressed her knees away from one another and thought of the pond upstate yielding to an early spring thaw, its deep quilt of ice melting, snapping and crackling in barrages of succinct commentary about what it was like to be water once warm and supple, and then frozen, frosted, hardened to the point where any animal or any boy on his snowmobile could cross it without fear of drowning, then to be liquefied again by the warm equinox. And she thought how crazy it had been for her even to consider forgoing this melting moment of her own, this melting away from self toward selves. Marcos was saying something to her, that he loved her, that she was doing great. And the doctor was speaking, too, but she didn’t really want to listen. She wanted to think of how the peepers would soon be multiplying along the shallow shore of the pond, and how during the night a clumsy skunk, hobbly and hankhaired, might drop by for a sip of water. Bluebird, phoebe, tree swallow—they all will be nesting soon, and the grass will be spongy, marvelously cold under bare feet. Windows will need washing, and the peeling paint she’d thought to scrape the year before will lie like white potato chips along the walls, even as cracks and pennynail rust stains present themselves. She recalled again that moment when she’d seen herself reflected in the pool of water on the kitchen floor and started and pushed and clenched her fists as the birthing began, and she forgave everyone who’d ever done her the least harm, because none of it amounted to anything compared to this good, living present.

And the room continued to make itself known to Ariel, its heavy lights, its voices of urgent encouragement. She never felt so much like a universe, a spring overflow pond herself. Everything was so utterly stretched beyond the boundaries of probability, and the pain was beautifully everywhere running through her.

So this was what it was like to give birth. No, what it
was
to give birth. One breathing in, slowly, slowly. Two out, slowly, slowly. The nurse said the child was crowning. She never felt so euphoric in her life, looped on all this air, buzzed by breathing in and out. She wanted to remember everything and told Marcos she wanted never to forget this day and he said she wouldn’t as he held her hand and told her the baby was a girl, a beautiful little girl, and before Ariel could think of another thing Miranda was gently laid on her mother’s chest and Ariel took the first look at her daughter who seemed to look at her right back.

La Cienaga was moving, but the traffic was slow for such an early hour. Going to be a hot one. The hazy sky above the palm trees was already florid, though the sun had only just risen. They said the Santa Anas would be blowing again today. Yeahboy, a scorcher was in the cards, and wind to drive the heat right through your mind, but it wouldn’t matter. The eucalyptus scent in the air this morning was perfume from some fine heaven, balm for the soul. And besides, she’d be in air conditioning until long after that same red sun had flown away over the wide Pacific.

Had no idea what was on the docket. The acting agent had left a message like always, nobody ever quite connecting person to person. Messages on machines got the job done, so why personalize when the system worked fine. She had a location address and contact name and all was well with the world. This was not going to be Jane Austen on the silver screen or a sitcom or anything more than a commercial shoot, so no need for major apprehension. The agency had asked if she had any cuts or bruises on her hands, so she surmised it might have something to do with soap. Detergents, or else moisturizer. Possibly just a matter of holding up some product. Paid the mortgage between real gigs, and it was a mortgage now, on an apartment in Santa Monica, not some frittering West Hollywood rental. Covered private coaching, too, which she worked at with dedication.

Every so often she wondered if she and Marcos mightn’t have made a go of it if she’d simply met him over the counter of that restaurant as forthright Mary Carpenter from Gallup, New Mexico. In the honest hours, awake in bed at night, listening to the mockingbird sing its countless songs outside her window, she knew it wasn’t so. He’d hate it here. Hate the blatant billboards, the cars, the commerce. Hate the parties and having to be on when other people were also being on, watching you be on. Whereas she lived for the marvelous game of quarry and chase.

While she’d dated a few men after moving out here, nothing had gotten serious. It would happen, she was sure. The whos and whens were unknown, but the right man would eventually cross her path—end of story, run the credits, lower the curtain. She couldn’t swear it might not befall her this very day.

That’s how it happened for Marcos. She knew, absolutely knew, the first she laid eyes on Ariel, what was going to develop. These things you feel in your bones, no explaining otherwise. Was she happy for him? Probably yes, definitely yes. But her pleasure or suffering regarding Marcos and his family was peripheral now, had to be. Sometimes when Sarah phoned her—funny, she was one of the few who seemed to call when Franny was actually home—and filled her in on Pajarito doings, it all seemed a million miles away. Other times, she couldn’t get enough scuttlebutt. Sarah continued to refer to her as Mary, though she went by Franny Johnson out here—a good name, like Kip once said, different from anybody else’s, distinctive. She didn’t mind Sarah calling her Mary, though. Nostalgic to hear it. Franny wondered if Sarah made the calls on the sly. Not that she was devious, didn’t have a deceitful leaf in her tree. Her purpose was without doubt admirable. Sarah considered Mary a commitment and wanted to follow her progress, was all. She’d never forget that time Sarah urged her to push forward with her aspirations, though in darker moments she questioned whether, even subconsciously, Marcos’s mother hadn’t wanted her to move on. But, well, never mind. Move on she had, and that was that.