The Divide (10 page)

“Looks like our girl won the contest,” he said.

“Ever known her to lose?”

“He seems like a nice enough guy.”

They stood watching, neither of them saying anything more, until all that remained in the meadow was a fan of footprints in the dew, the chime of the girls’ voices fading on the windless air of the morning.

In the cabin’s cramped, log-walled bathroom, while Sarah showered, Ben stood and shaved before the basin mirror wearing nothing but his new hat and a resolve that today things were going to be different between them. Be nice to her, he told himself. Stop being such a grouch and giving her—and yourself—such a hard time. Forget how it’s been for the past week and start over.

“I can’t get over Joshie,” Sarah said from behind the glass.

“What do you mean?”

“The way he is this year. How he’s blossomed.”

“Yep. Amazing what getting laid can do for a fellow.”

“You don’t mean it?”

He didn’t. He was just being mischievous.

“Why not?”

“Benjamin, the boy’s only fifteen years old, for heaven’s sake.”

“I know, some guys have all the luck.”

He said it without thinking, without any conscious attempt to needle her. But judging by her silence, that was precisely how she had taken it. He tried to change the subject and didn’t quite succeed.

“How serious is Abbie about this young cowboy?”

“I don’t know, but she’d better be careful she doesn’t get him fired. They’re pretty strict about that kind of thing here by all accounts.”

“What kind of thing?”

“You know, consorting with the guests.”

“You know what I mean.”

She normally laughed when he teased her about her euphemisms, but not today. The rush of water stopped and the shower door opened. He watched her in the mirror step out and reach for a towel, studiously avoiding any eye contact.

At forty-two, she was still slim and firm-breasted and even after twenty years of marriage the sight of her naked body rarely failed to stir him. Perhaps this was because his access to it had always been so much less than his desire. Things had long been thus between them and her evasions of his lust had grown deft and mechanical. As now, when he turned and stepped toward her and she briskly wrapped the towel around her so that by the time he reached her she was covered. He held her by the shoulders and she smiled defusingly and pecked him chastely on the lips.

“That’s a really great hat.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“Do you honestly think Josh and Katie are . . .”

“Consorting? Of course.”

“Shouldn’t we talk with him about it?”

“Sure, if we really want to embarrass him.”

He was still holding her and tried to stem her defensive talk with a kiss.

“Benjamin, I’m serious.”

“Can we talk about this later? There’s another male member of the Cooper family that needs a little attention.”

He was aroused now and pressing himself against her. She glanced down and arched an eyebrow.

“Precisely which member are we talking about here?”

“Him. Forget about me. This is entirely altruistic.”

“Later. I want to give you your present.”

“You’re the only present I want.”

He held her closer and kissed her neck and she let him but stopped his hand when he tried to unhitch her towel.

“Later.”

He kissed her mouth. But she wasn’t going to relent. She put her hands on his chest and gently fended him off.

“Benjamin, we’ll be late for breakfast.”

He let go of her and turned away and saw himself in the mirror, sullen and tumescent and suddenly fatuous in the hat. He took it off and spun it onto a chair.

It was the same old thing. The same predictable cycle of slight and sulk, of sexual rejection and injured pride that had dogged their marriage for almost as long as he could remember. Despite knowing how things stood, he still concocted these foolish, romantic notions about how it might be different once they were on vacation together. It was as if he actually wanted to be disappointed.

Sarah had disappeared into the bedroom and a few moments later, protectively robed, her hair wrapped in a towel, she came back with the gift, prettily wrapped and tied with a red ribbon. He was drying his face and pretended not to see her. She had probably bought him a shirt and would probably apologize for it and predict that he wouldn’t like it. He probably wouldn’t but would pretend, unconvincingly, that he did.

“If you don’t like it, they’re happy to change it.”

“Oh, thank you.”

He took it from her and put it down on the chair.

“I’ll open it later. We’ll be late for breakfast.”

And with a sideways glance to gauge the impact of his spite, he stepped into the shower and shut the door behind him.

They rode that morning to The Outlook. It was one of their favorite places, a high buttress of red rock that reared above the forest like the brow of some vast and noble warrior surveying his domain. It was a long ride and steep in its first twisting miles up through the canyon. But after an hour the land leveled into high pasture and that was where they were now, crossing a wide and shallow valley where the horses liked to run before they stopped to rest and take water.

The grass this year had grown long and lush with copious spring rain and the horses had to hoist their heads as they loped through it, parting it with their chests like warm-blooded boats through an ocean of green. Including Sarah, there were nine riders and, as usual, she was last in line. Apart from Jesse, the ranch hand who was guiding them up front, she was by far the best rider, but she liked to go last so that she could stop whenever she liked without bothering anyone. And that was what she was about to do now. Spangled in the grass she had noticed some white and yellow flowers that she didn’t recognize. She wanted to pick a couple so that she could take them back to the ranch and check them in her new edition of
Plants of the Rocky Mountains.

She mentally stored the names of plants—both their common and Latin names—in much the same way that she stored the names of books and writers. But this summer at the Divide, there was such hectic abundance, she couldn’t locate them all. Riding up through the canyon, she had identified arrow-leaved balsamroot, paintbrush, and shooting star. But these she had just spotted were new to her. She let the others lope ahead, slowed to a walk, and circled back.

She and Benjamin were riding with the Delstock parents and two women from Santa Fe who had arrived the previous evening. Abbie and Josh and all the kids were riding with Ty, making their way to The Outlook by a different route. The Delstocks was Abbie’s collective name for the Bradstocks and the Delroys, the two families they had met here three years ago on what was for all of them a first visit. Their children—in every case, a boy and a girl of roughly matching ages—had formed an immediate bond and so had the parents. They had reconvened every year since. The fact that for the other fifty weeks of the year, except for the occasional phone call at Christmas or Thanksgiving, they might as well have lived on different planets only seemed to intensify the friendship.

Tom and Karen Bradstock were from Chicago and were both lawyers in private practice, though of very different kinds. Karen represented the poor and oppressed, Tom their rich oppressors or, as Karen put it, “assorted corporate gangsters.” He had the salary and she the social conscience and this was the subject of a perpetual war between them, waged in public with wit and mock outrage and the support of anyone either could enlist. In almost every other way, inasmuch as one could ever judge these things, they seemed well matched. Both were big and loud and zestful, with a kind of mutual, almost brazen sensuality that Sarah sometimes found embarrassing.

The Delroys, from Florida, were hipper, skinnier, and altogether more mysterious. Phil (whom everyone, even his wife, called Delroy) ran his own software company whose precise purpose nobody seemed able to establish, except that it was “entertainment-oriented.” Tom Bradstock often taunted him by saying this was a euphemism for porn, but Delroy would just give one of his inscrutable, black-eyed smiles and let the mystery hang. He was tanned like a beach bum and tied his graying black hair in a ponytail. On his right shoulder he had a tattoo of a Chinese symbol whose meaning, again, he would never disclose. He had that laconic, laid-back sense of humor that some women seemed to find attractive, though not Sarah, who found it all a little too contrived.

Maya Delroy was an alternative healer. It had something to do with “kinetic focus” but when she tried to explain what that meant, Sarah’s attention always seemed to wander, which probably indicated that she was in need of a session herself. Maya was airy and lithe and wore a lot of red and amber and yellow and early every morning laid a little rush mat on the grass outside her cabin and did yoga. Most of this qualified her to be the kind of woman that Sarah would normally pay good money to avoid. But there was an undermining edge to Maya’s alternativeness, a sort of scurrilous, self-mocking wit that redeemed her, almost as though the whole spiritual image was one big put-on.

Benjamin’s theory was that the Bradstocks and the Delroys were so unalike that they probably wouldn’t have bothered to get to know each other if it hadn’t been for him and Sarah bridging the divide between them. The fact was that none of the three couples had more than a few trifling things in common and it was probably this very disparity, along with their children’s complementary ages, that made their annual two-week friendship work.

They had all ridden far ahead now and out of sight. The sun was high and hot and there was barely a breeze to ruffle the grass or shift the few floating cotton clouds from the mountains. In search of perfect specimens, Sarah had dismounted. She took off her straw hat and tilted her face at the sun and, shutting her eyes, tried to let the peace of the place seep into her. All she could hear was the hum of insects and the swish of the horse’s tail and the chomp of his teeth on the sweet-stemmed fescue. Like all the others, he was a quarter horse, a sturdy fourteen-year-old bay, named Rusty for his color. He wasn’t the best ride on the ranch and because the head wrangler knew how well she rode, each year she was offered better. But the horse was brave and big-hearted and she would have no other.

She opened her eyes and rubbed the sweat from his neck. It was time to move on. She picked her flowers, one yellow, one white, and stowed them safely in the little tin she kept for this purpose in the breast pocket of her white cotton shirt. She knew the place where the others would be resting the horses before they started the last leg of their ascent to The Outlook so she didn’t need to hurry. She swung herself into the saddle and nudged Rusty into a gentle walk, filling her lungs with the hot green scent of the grass and thinking, as she had been all morning, about Benjamin.

The power of human habit never failed to astonish her. How was it that two intelligent, decent people who basically loved each other could get so locked into a pattern of behavior that neither of them—or so she presumed—enjoyed? It was as if each knew the role he or she was expected to take and had no choice but to play it. Sarah had often wondered if Benjamin felt as miserably miscast in their drama as she did. She ever the frigid bitch and he the libidinous brute. As the years had gone by, like actors in some tired TV soap, they had become caricatures, marooned in their own sad clichés, unable to contemplate any other way of being with each other. God, how tired of it she was.

For more than a week he had virtually ignored her. Simply because on their first night here, after all the hours of traveling and then staying up too late partying with the Delstocks, she had felt too tired to make love. Could he not have waited until morning? Could he not have just given her a cuddle? If he had, without forcing the issue, she might, despite her tiredness, have been coaxed into what he wanted. But with Benjamin, nowadays, there was no such thing as just a cuddle. It always had to lead to sex. And women didn’t work that way. At least, she didn’t.

He hadn’t always been like this, though the change had been too gradual to pinpoint. For sure, he had always wanted more sex than she felt able to give him. But wasn’t that the way things were with most couples? Sarah had never been the kind of woman (though she’d often wished she were) who talked candidly about these things to friends, but she had the impression that most women felt the same—at least, after those first heady eighteen months or so when you couldn’t get enough of each other. Once passion had given way to familiarity and then kids and the plain old routine of living, things changed. Sex became more of a comfort.

That didn’t mean she found it boring or that she couldn’t be stirred. There had been times, particularly in the old days if they were away on their own somewhere, when their lovemaking had been thrilling. But back then, when the kids were much younger, he had been more patient, gentler, more understanding. Now, if she didn’t switch on immediately, she was made to feel cruel and cold and sexless.