Sex and Death in the American Novel (40 page)

“Traffic is going to pick up soon. You going to be able to handle that?” I asked one afternoon when we'd rowed around the lake. The sun warmed us and the wind cooled us, manic weather, but it focused my attention on where we were right then.

He looked around, his hair flipping around on the top of his head, ran his hand through the water, and made a face that suggested he could do anything.

“I'm going to be on TV,” he said squinting into the sun above my head.

“When? Why?”

He pulled his lower lip below his teeth and brought out a folded copy of the
New Yorker
from behind his back. He'd had the pages tucked under his t-shirt and into the waistband of his jeans, and they were warm from his skin.

He nodded encouragement when I opened it up. The title:
And God Made Man
, his name below that.

The first line read:

My first time was with a man; I was nineteen years old.

I lifted my head.

“The first line is the most important, right?”

I rolled my eyes and gave him the longest look I dared before continuing my read. The water dripping off the wooden oars had almost stopped, but a few drops disturbed the silence around us, to remind me we were floating.

“You published this?”

He nodded.

“Fiction?”

He pointed my attention back to the page. I obediently read on. It took me until we'd drifted almost as far as the farthest shore to finish.

When I was done I said, “You do love him! Holy shit. This is so honest.”

“Yeah,” he said, his legs stretched out so that his feet were under my seat, his arms crossed protectively over his chest. The uncertainty on his face made my heart feel a hundred times larger than it could have been just days before.

I'd let go of so much to make room for this.

“Does Alejandro know?”

“I ran it by him before I sent it off.”

“What did he say?”

“He was all for it. I was pretty sure he wouldn't care. I still didn't want to drag him into anything…you know, he has a job, a reputation. He'd probably like to save that. He said the most important thing was to be honest.”

I smiled. “Sounds like him. You can't really tell anyway…someone would have to remember…wow though. Pretty brave. You're my new hero.”

He stretched his arms in front of him and seemed to push inward, bending in half and groaning. “Nothing else seemed real at all, or important enough to work on besides what was really going on. I gave back the advance money for the book I was working on.” He squinted at me again.

“I'm impressed.”

“I thought you might have heard…a couple times I was sure you would call me just to yell at me or something.”

“You thought I cared that much?” I said to tease him.

He took a position sitting between my legs with his face pressed to my chest.

“I was really glad when you called me, Vivi. I didn't know if I could do all this by myself.”

“But you were willing to do it…obviously.”

“I was,” he said drawing in a long breath and squeezing me tighter.

“So how come you could announce this to the whole world, this… love,” I let that hang for a moment, “but we never talked about Alejandro after that one time you told me about the two of you in college? It was like this big secret everyone knew, but you still wouldn't talk about it.”

“You're the one who is good at naming things, Vivi. I can describe life, emotions, all of that, but I couldn't where Alejandro was concerned. A part
of me was afraid that trying to be with the two of you would be too much, asking for too much. And then we went sideways and I used that as an easy excuse to avoid the topic altogether.”

“Even when you were talking to him.”

“Yes.”

He stroked my face, the pressure of his hand and the warm sunlight on my skin made me melt. His face was so open again, so trusting. “We all have something we're avoiding. Yours was just more obvious to the rest of us. I was afraid. I was afraid to name what I wanted, I was afraid to believe a life like what I wanted was possible.”

I shook his head back and forth with both of my hands. “If you only knew…that was what got in my way, part of it. Rather than deal with that, I had to take my fear out on you. Call it something else. Blame you. And you took it.” I kissed his lips and pulled away. “So what did the two of you decide about me?”

“That you're wonderful. Beautiful. Talented. Neurotic. Scary. Undeniable.”

I tossed my hair over my shoulder and straightened up. “You think I'm talented?”

He sat back on the bench. “I never said I didn't think that. You did. Yes we're different, in the way we think, act, work, but you are honest, Vivi. You can write however you want, read whatever you want, but if you're honest, that's what makes what you do real. You know that.”

I didn't know what to say.

“I wasn't being honest. That was why I wrote this.” He nudged the magazine with his foot. “I had to prove to myself I could be as honest as I was expecting you to be. With you it was your father, why you had to nurse all that anger, and with me it was,” here he made quotation marks in the air, “the big secret everyone knew. Alejandro was never something I regretted, but I never went into what I thought or felt about it. I thought I was silly to even revisit it. Once I met you, I began to question that. You're so free. I wanted that. Badly. I didn't want to be so afraid of disappointing people, of absorbing too much noise and garbage, of losing my safe, controlled life.” He leaned back, bracing his hands on the wooden bench.

My heart expanded. He looked so good; peaceful, satisfied, and once again he was mine. I went to my knees and gave thanks for this man, his words and his presence in my life.

We spent an extra day in Glacier Park on the way back. At one point I pulled off the side of the narrow road. Jasper came behind me and rested his chin on my shoulder. I looked out over the valley with its never-ending view of the snow-capped mountains, gorges filled with pine and fir trees, and farther below, the river reflecting the sunlight toward us in a glittering ribbon that ambled into forever.

I spoke toward the wide open space, “When I was younger my father would stand with me on spots like this one and tell me stories about the Native Americans and the life they made under this sky, going on spirit quests, making families, making war. The picture he painted for me never left my mind. I have never been able to take in a scene like this since without imagining a tall black-haired brave on horseback bounding toward the mountains, or down there,” I pointed to the river far below, “stopping to spear a fish from the cold river. He told me stories, read to me sometimes from Norman Maclean, Richard Hugo, Wallace Stegner. I was lucky to get that part of him, when he was in the mood to give it.”

“I think you got a lot more from him,” Jasper spoke in my ear.

“I think I did too. Now I see that. Remember how I hung on to the fact that I didn't get to go hunting like Tristan did? In one of the letters he said my mother told him it was unseemly and inappropriate for him to take me in the woods.”

He pressed his lips to my temple.

“When I read that, I wanted to call her up and scream at her. To think about what I lost because of some image of ‘appropriate behavior’. Because I was a girl I couldn't handle a gun, spend cold mornings drinking coffee out of a thermos up in a tree, or pee in the woods. And I always blamed my father for this.”

“Did she ever correct you?”

“Nope. Not once.”

He held me tighter. “So you are going to have a talk with her. Right?”

I nodded my head, rubbing it against his. “I love my mother. She loves me. I know that. She was proud of me and encouraged me where she could. What makes me crazy is thinking how my father did his best and I always blamed
him
for making me feel inferior. Someone said no one can make us feel inferior without our permission.”

“That was Eleanor Roosevelt.” Jasper took my hand and led me to sit under a pine branch. He sat beside me with his knees up and his arms around his legs. “Funny how that works. Most of the things we assume about the world, the things that hold us back are in our own minds.”

“Neither one of us actually like killing things. The appeal was spending time with our father, and I was jealous. Then there was that gun. A gift that Tristan got that I didn't, the antique Smith & Wesson he got on his fifteenth birthday. He was so proud of that thing. I loved my brother so much, and I loved my father. For so long it was too hard to try and sort out being angry at the both of them, and loving them at the same time.”

“Easier just to put it all toward your father. I get that. I remember spending a few months pissed at my mother for leaving me. I had all this guilt for
that, for being angry with her. As an adult though I am glad I let myself feel it, otherwise I never would have gotten through it.”

“You're more evolved than me. I didn't want to think about any of it.”

“Vivi—”

I reached around and ran my fingertips over his scratchy jaw line. “Don't worry, I'm not getting morose, or not meaning to. See,” I turned to him and smiled, a genuine smile, “because of you I can start to think about my father and it doesn't make me ill. Once I was here at the spot he was still alive. Only now it feels like I can look at all the ways he still is. Does that make sense?”

“Sure.” He kissed me on the back of the head.

I wrapped my hands around his forearm and kissed him there, wrinkling my nose at the way the hairs on his arm tickled my nose. “Thank you for being brave enough to be honest with me. I must have been pretty scary.”

“What else could I do?”

“Hit me. Change your number.”

“I'll remember next time.”

“Still, you did it. You didn't compromise anything even when I was so mad at you. Don't ever change that okay?”

“Always.”

We sat for a time until the only warmth I felt was where he held me, the light had faded and it was no longer comfortable to be sitting out there so exposed.

He spoke from behind me, “You did the same for me.”

Chapter 17

Jasper hauled the Olivetti, its hard edges wrapped in two layers of protective beach towels, to my study. I carried the books. We went to bed. After a day into our time back at my apartment—our apartment—every word, every glance, every touch was so much lighter.

The next day he gave me the afternoon to set everything up.

I rearranged everything on my desk. My laptop moved to one corner, my father's books, my references, my father's novel
Staccato
, and my latest,
Boy in a Box
, sat side by side. A familiar voice whispered to me,
Not equal
. Now it seemed silly to even believe this, to consider these words as anything but stupid, ignorant thinking. I had learned enough and grown enough to be able to tell where my father's words really shone, and as Jasper encouraged me to do, I was able to see myself in him, and I could see him in me.

I tapped on the keys; this was my machine now. I glanced at my laptop. That was me. I switched the locations of the machines, so my laptop was in the everyday use position and my father's—my Olivetti—was where I could see it.

Later in the afternoon I entered the living room. Jasper looked up and stuck one finger in a thick new book to mark his place and smiled.

“I have something to show you,” I said. All the windows in the apartment were open as wide as they could go to let the air in, the sunlight streamed across the room, bright day easing toward evening. I led him to the bedroom.

“You're going to kill me,” he said with a laugh in his voice.

“You don't have to do anything unless you want to.” I wrapped a blue silk scarf around his eyes. He lifted his hands up and let his fingers move over the fabric until I placed my hand over his and brought it to my lips. He
smiled. In the past he'd liked this game, only this time I would add something extra. “Can you be good for a few minutes?” I asked him and glanced to the clock on the nightstand. The red numbers were hard to see in the reflected sunlight.

He nodded and smiled, lying across the bed.

I shut the bedroom door and made my way through the living room and onto the porch. I closed the front door as slowly as I could so he wouldn't know I'd left. Alejandro drove up on time as requested. He'd let his hair grow out so that he now sported short black curls that I ached to run my hands through.

I pressed my thumb to his lower lip and stroked his smooth chin while he met my eyes.

After a moment he took my hand and turned toward the door.

A few feet from the door he stopped. “You read Jasper's essay didn't you? I'm sorry I didn't tell you. I figured he should do that.”

I pressed my lips together to avoid showing a smile and hoping to look grave.

“I saw it, and it made me miss you.”

He looked at me sideways and stuffed his hands in his pockets as he walked to my front door. At the edge I moved to stand behind him. I wrapped another blue scarf around his eyes. He placed his hands on his hips and turned and started to speak, I put my lips to his to silence him.

When he pulled away I whispered in his ear, “What did you think about when he told you what he was doing?”

“You,” he said, his hands rising to the scarf to try to remove it.

I pressed my fingers to his face and said, “Wait. What else?”

He let out a breath and furrowed his brow. He ran his hand over the top of his head. “What are you doing?”

“Can you just tell me?”

“I wanted to do something for him, to see him again. Okay?”

“Yep. So can you just go with me on something?”

His posture led me to believe he was not going to go with me as easily as I'd hoped. “How do I know you aren't going to try and walk me in front of a car or something?”

“That's kind of funny,” I said in a deadpan voice.

“Not from where I'm standing.”

“Probably not,” I said. “I can see your point. Okay, here it is.” I came up close and breathed in his ear, and held myself there like when we danced. I could feel the smile on his lips across the skin of my cheek. “Does it feel like I am up to something bad?” I ran my fingers over the front of his pants. “I missed you.”