Mary Ann in Autumn (15 page)

Chapter 21
An Old Familiar Impatience

“
Why is the water yellow?” Mary Ann asked, wrinkling her nose.

It was barely nine a.m., and the three of them were standing on the edge of the hot springs that Ben had been raving about since breakfast. It was not what she’d imagined. It looked like a smallish suburban swimming pool, complete with a blue-painted bottom. Only it didn’t look blue in the least, it looked green, because of that disgusting water.

“It’s not really yellow,” Michael asserted.

“Right.”

“Seriously. That’s just the light refracting off the minerals.” He sat down on the edge of the pool and dangled his feet in the steaming saffron broth. He was wearing baggy surfer shorts with washed-out purple swirls that worked nicely with his white hair. Ben was wearing a dark blue Speedo that worked nicely with pretty much everything. She did her best not to stare as he eased himself into the water.

“C’mon, Esther,” said Michael. “You’ll love it once you’re in.”

This was a reference to her own swimsuit, a modest granny model with overlapping ruffles of brown polyester that looked, in fact, much worse than anything Esther Williams ever wore. The guys had found it that morning, all by itself on a rack at the general store, and brought it back to her bedroom with great merriment. Once she hit that water, of course, her suit took on a sickly orange hue, and its ruffles began quivering like the diaphanous folds of a jellyfish.

“Eat shit,” she said, seeing the grin on Michael’s face.

“I have to have a picture of this.”

“Only if you wanna lose the camera.”

“At least there aren’t that many witnesses,” said Ben.

There were half a dozen other people steeping solemnly at the other side of the pool. They seemed to be Eastern Europeans, communally bathing the way they would in their homeland. Mary Ann had already overheard two of the women, both of them large and fish-belly white, chattering away in the changing room. Their grim, guttural tongue had been as foreign to her as Brazilian waxing obviously was to them.

“This is nice,” she told the guys, trying to be a good sport.

“You’re looking the wrong way.” Ben took her head in his hands and turned her gaze to the right, then upward, above the redwood perimeter fence. Half a mile away was a canyon wall roofed with unrelenting blue and flanked by a meadow so white it was almost blinding. Wisps of steam were wriggling from its surface like frisky phantoms.

“My God,” she said.

Ben smiled and, without fanfare, began to massage her shoulders. “This is why there’s a Pinyon City. People have been coming here a hundred and fifty years. White people, that is. The natives have been here for eons, of course.”

“They would migrate from Tahoe in the winter,” Michael added. “It’s warmer on this side of the mountains, and the pinyons provided pine nuts for them to eat.”

This National Geographic Special was not typical of Michael, so Mary Ann figured he was aping Ben, playing faithful assistant tour guide. She might have ribbed him about it, considering his glee over the swimsuit, but she was too blissed out to bother. Ben was working her flesh like a wizard, seemingly unafraid of her aging body, somehow making her at one with the earth in a pool of pee-colored water.

Then self-consciousness took over. Those gloomy Borat people across the way were deadpan as ever, but it wasn’t hard to imagine what they were thinking. Who were these weird Americans anyway? This silver-haired old couple traveling with their grown son? Why was the son touching his mother’s body with such intimacy? And why was her husband watching them? And what was up with that swimsuit, anyway?

“That was heaven,” she said, straightening her neck, discreetly signaling an end to the massage. “Thank you so much, Ben.”

“You want me to stop?”

“Let him do it,” Michael told her. “He enjoys it.”

She glanced briefly toward the other bathers, prompting Michael to roll his eyes skyward with an old familiar impatience.
Get over it,
he was telling her, as he so often had when they were young.
Why do you care what
anyone
thinks, when you could be dead or dying in six months? Nobody’s watching but you.

“Okay. Fine. Thank you. Have at it.”

So Ben dug into her neck while Michael leaned on his elbows at the edge of the pool, reminding her very much of a self-satisfied old walrus.

“You’re lucky we didn’t take you to Harbin,” he said.

“What’s Harbin?”

“Another hot springs.” Ben was moving on to her shoulders now. “North of the city. Clothing optional.”

“No thanks.”

“She’s a priss,” said Michael.

“I’m not a priss. I’ve been to clothing-optional places.”

“Yeah. The ladies’ spa at Canyon Ranch.”

She shot him a withering look. “No . . . smart-ass . . . I went to Lands End with you and Brian once.” She flashed briefly on her now-nomadic first husband, wondering, as she sometimes did, where on this continent his beloved Winnebago had landed.

“You went,” said Michael, “but you didn’t get naked.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Trust me. I would’ve remembered.”

What was
that
supposed to mean? “I just don’t think,” she added as pleasantly as possible, “that people my age should be inflicting their naked selves on the landscape. It’s not generally appreciated. It’s the same reason I don’t litter.”

Ben chuckled but didn’t comment.

“Lots of people at Harbin are older than us,” Michael said.

“Oh, well . . . yum! Why didn’t you tell me? Can’t wait.”

Michael chortled. “Hopeless.”

“It’s all good,” Ben offered noncommittally, ending the discussion as he finished off her shoulders with an amiable whack. “Wanna see our property now? It’s on the way back to town. I’d like to try to get to the slopes by noon.”

She wondered if she and Michael were starting to get on Ben’s nerves.

T
HEIR LAND WAS ONLY A
mile or two down the road, but, just before they reached the turn-off, the guys decided they shouldn’t go there without the dog.

“Why?” she asked. “Are there wild animals or something?”

Michael chortled. “Lotta help the doodle would be. It’s the critters that eat the dogs around here. We just take him with us for ceremonial purposes. It feels more like home every time he pees on the property. For that matter, every time
we
do.”

“You don’t plan on
living
here, do you?”

“Just for a few weeks at a time,” said Ben, looking over the seat at her. “A month or two at the most, maybe. It’ll be our getaway.”

“It’s already your getaway. That’s the wonderful part.” She knew they were nowhere near being able to afford to build something.

The dog went berserk when he saw them again, though they’d been gone only for a couple of hours. They loaded him into the car and headed back to the turn-off. The road, which had recently been plowed, ascended in a leisurely switchback fashion that didn’t bother Mary Ann in the slightest until Michael ordered her not to look back.

“Oh, fuck,” she said. “Not another cliff.”

“No. I just wanna save it until we get there.”

What he was saving she finally saw after trudging up a roadside bank to the promontory where their land lay. There was nothing precipitous here to work her nerves, just the gentle falling away of the pines to the long, narrow valley that contained Pinyon City. She couldn’t see the town, though, or even a single house. There was a range of saw-toothed mountains in the distance, but no evidence of the highway that had brought them here. The hum she had mistaken for traffic had turned out to be wind in the trees.

“The living room will go here,” Michael told her, pointing to a flagged stake in the snow. “The big window will face that way, so we can look directly at Pinyon Peak.”

She asked, perhaps indelicately, how they planned to get up here from the road, and what they would do about water and sewage.

“We’ll have to dig a well,” said Ben. “And put in a septic tank and a driveway. It’s no biggie.”

It seemed like a huge biggie to her, but she didn’t say so. Michael now had his arm around Ben, who’d just thrown a pinecone for Roman, and the two of them were watching the dog bound through the snow like a four-legged Muppet. She had the sense that it wouldn’t matter to either of them if they were never able to build here. This was just the canvas on which they could paint their modest dreams, and, as such, it could always be the beginning of something, not the imperfect, inevitable end.

O
NCE
B
EN HAD LEFT FOR
the slopes at Kirkwood, Mary Ann and Michael camped out on opposing sofas in the living room. Michael had told her that he was “jonesing” for hot chocolate, so he’d already made a run to the general store for the necessary ingredients, including a bag of mini-marshmallows so ancient and crusty they might have been geological specimens.

“They’re okay,” he said, after sipping from his mug. “They soften up a lot once they get hot.”

She half-expected him to make a bawdy joke about that, but, for once, he didn’t strain for a double entendre. He did worse; he asked her about Bob.

“Do we have to talk about him?”

He shrugged. “Just wondering if you’ve heard anything.”

“He left a message on my cell.”

“And?”

“I deleted it.”

“Well, fine, but—”

“I’m divorcing him, Mouse. I have nothing to talk to him about.”

“Then . . . how will he know you want one?”

Why was he doing this? Couldn’t he see that she might not want to talk to Bob about
anything
—especially the smoking wreckage of the marriage—when she was on the verge of having her womanhood extracted? She wouldn’t have put it that way to Mouse, of course, since she didn’t want to be smothered with platitudes about femininity not being an organ but something in the heart and the mind, and blah, blah, blah . . .

“He’ll find out soon enough,” she told him. “I texted Robbie.”

Michael’s forehead furrowed in bald-faced disapproval. “You really think he should hear that from his son?”

“Why not?”

“It’s not fair to Robbie, for one thing. He shouldn’t have to deal with that. He’s just barely got his toes into college.”

“You don’t know what’s fair to Robbie. You’ve never even met him. He and I are very close. We talk about a lot of things.”

“Did you talk to him about the tennis pro?”

“What tennis pro?”

“At the country club. Last year.”

“He was a scuba diver, Mouse. I was getting certified.”

“You certainly were.” If he’d had a big cigar in his hand, he would have waggled it at her, Groucho-style. “So, did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Tell your stepson about the redheaded scuba diver. With the crooked dick.”

Mary Ann sighed. Interesting, the details Michael chose to remember. “I love Robbie too much to tell him about something like that.”

“But not enough to keep quiet about his father screwing your life coach.”

“It’s not the same thing, Mouse. It’s entirely different.”

“How?”

“Why are you picking on me?”

“I’m not. I just wanna know how it’s different.”

“Okay, then, think about it for a while . . . these were my two closest confidantes. Well,
she
was, anyway. I told her
everything
, Mouse.”

Michael’s mouth slowly went slack. “You told her about Crooked Dick.”

It wasn’t a question, exactly, so she didn’t reply.

“Tell me you didn’t tell her about Crooked Dick.”

“Stop calling him that. Of course I told her. That’s what you do with a life coach.”

“No. That’s what you do with a shrink. A life coach teaches you how to keep a gratitude journal and sleep with potpourri under your pillow.”

She almost smiled, but repressed it. “This
hurts
, Mouse. You don’t seem to be getting that at all. I told Calliope the most intimate details of my . . . issues with Bob, and she just took them and ran with them. She used them to lure him.”

“What sort of issues?”

“Oh, no. Not on cocoa.”

“You’ll tell Calliope but you won’t tell me?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, thanks a whole heap. That’s nice to know.”

“It’s not that big a deal. You’re making too much of it.” She leaned forward and set her mug on the coffee table in slow motion, buying time so she could compose her thoughts. “I just got tired of doing certain things, that’s all.”

“Like . . . ?”

“Like blowing his wrinkly old cock.”

Michael’s expression betrayed nothing, so she went on:

“Calliope agreed with me, too. That’s what pisses me off. She’d just gotten a divorce and we had a big laugh over it. It was a real bonding moment for us.”

Michael was frowning now. “Cocks don’t wrinkle, for the record. They’re pretty much the only thing that doesn’t, thank God. If you mean plain ol’ bed death—”

“No, Mouse. I didn’t want it in my mouth anymore. It’s no more complicated than that. It was okay for a while, but I got tired of it. I wanted to sit by the fire and go on trips with my husband and look at sunsets. I didn’t want Cirque du Fellatio!”

“And you told Calliope this?”

“Lots of women are like this, Mouse, especially when they get to my age. You don’t know. Viagra is
not
our friend.” She curled her feet under her butt, turning defensive in the face of this interrogation. “Yes, I told Calliope.”

“Shit.”

“I
know
. I should’ve guessed she’d do anything for money.”

Michael nodded. Mary Ann thought he was finally grasping the heinousness of what had happened, but, typically, he had drifted in a different direction entirely.

“You know,” he said, leaning back, as if sweetly ruminating on the shape of a cloud. “I’ve never heard a man complain about having to suck dick . . . a
gay
man, I mean. I’ve heard women complain about it a fair amount, but never men. Men don’t say: ‘Damn, do I have to do
that
again?’ It just doesn’t happen.”

She could hardly believe what she was hearing. “Am I on trial here, Mouse? Are you telling me this is
my
fault?”