The Divide (20 page)

It was a quality that others, men especially, often misinterpreted as lack of commitment, assuming that a love without need was somehow deficient. The only one who had ever fully understood was Raoul, who had clearly been carved from the same grain. Even during the two years that they lived together, it had been as two separate souls, each alone and content to be so. Like travelers whose different journeys had coincided along a stretch of the same trail.

Before Raoul, for virtually all her adult life, she had lived alone. But although she had known several sorts of pain, she had never once known loneliness as more than an idea or as a condition that affected others. She had always had her work and her friends and, sometimes, when it seemed right and uncomplicated and there was mutual desire, but desire for nothing more, there had been lovers.

One night, some ten days after she came back from New York, when Ben Cooper had faded from her thoughts and she felt fully reconnected with her life in Santa Fe, she dreamed about him. She was in a theater, not as gilded or grand as the one they had been to, and the production felt more junior-high than Broadway. And Eve wasn’t in the audience, she was onstage. It was her turn to speak but she hadn’t had time to learn her lines. Then she caught sight of Ben in the front row beside an old woman she didn’t recognize. He was mouthing something, trying to tell Eve the line, but she couldn’t make it out and was getting more and more anxious. Then she woke up.

That same morning, on her way home from dropping Pablo at the nursery, she stopped for a newspaper at the Downtown Subscription on Garcia Street and there bumped into Lori. Sipping green mint tea in the sunlit yard, she recounted the dream. During their week in Montana they had agreed that Ben Cooper was one of the more attractive men on the ranch and Lori, with faked envy, had already elicited a detailed account of their evening in New York. After twelve years of Jungian analysis, she considered herself something of an expert when it came to the deciphering of dreams. This one, she declared, was as clear as Evian.

“The old woman sitting next to him,” she said. “What was her demeanor?”

“Her demeanor?”

“Her attitude. Was she smiling, frowning or what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Eve, it’s important. That was his mother. You obviously want to know if she approves.”

“I don’t.”

“You do. That’s why she was there.”

“I didn’t bring her. He did.”

“You’re not taking this seriously.”

“I know. Anyway, approve of what?”

“You. You and Ben.”

“Lori, give me a break. There is no me and Ben.”

But even as she said it, a voice within her said there would be.

 

 

 

He checked in at the hotel just off the Plaza, a dark, folksy place that looked as if it had known better times. He had picked it without further research from a travel guide that claimed both JFK and Errol Flynn had once stayed there. As he dumped his bag in the cramped and overheated room, it occurred to Ben that given the true motive for this trip, his choice of lodging might well have been influenced by a subconscious urge to associate himself with two such epic lotharios.

He had time to kill and nearly called to see if Eve could meet earlier but then decided it would look too eager. The flight from Kansas had gotten in early and despite the snow and the airport crowds of early holidaymakers and skiers, he had driven up from Albuquerque in little more than an hour. The interstate was clear, and the only hazard was that his eyes kept straying west across the ghost-white landscape to a mountain sunset of purple and vermilion.

The snow had given him the pretext to rent an SUV, a metallic red Ford Explorer, which made him feel rugged and Western, as did the red-and-black plaid woolen jacket and hiking boots and black Polartec beanie, all of which he had bought in Missoula last month when they had taken Abbie to check out the University of Montana. Ben had almost packed his Stetson but figured he wouldn’t have the guts to wear it. The beanie, he believed, made him look hip and streetwise, though Abbie said it merely gave him the air of a geriatric mugger.

Whatever, he was glad he had come properly equipped. It was starting to snow again and when he climbed back into the truck it informed him that the temperature was eleven degrees below freezing. Without checking the map he nosed his way out through the evening traffic on to Paseo de Peralta.

It was nearly twelve years since he had been in Santa Fe but even in the dark with everywhere decorated for the holidays he found he could still remember the basic layout of the place and soon he saw the sign he was looking for. He turned off and drove slowly up the hill, then found a place to park and went on foot. The snowflakes were feathery and their fall through the windless air seemed hesitant, as if both time and gravity had somehow been suspended. The snow squashed pleasingly under his boots. It seemed to make his mission all the more intrepid.

Canyon Road was a Christmas movie set. There were lights in the trees and along the adobe façades of the stores and galleries. The windows bristled with greenery and tinsel and everywhere you looked there were strings of illuminated red peppers and little candles in paper bags weighted with sand. On one street corner there was even a huddle of people singing obscure carols around a little bonfire. Ben expected any moment to hear someone shout
Cut.

He remembered the art galleries but they seemed to have spawned many more and most were still open, Aladdin’s caves of warmth and color, their windows spilling quadrangles of yellow light on the snow of the sidewalk. The last time, the only other time, he had been here, Ben had vowed that if he was ever to take up painting for a living, this was where he would live. Some of the pictures on show were good, but many more weren’t. And yet tourists flocked from all over the world and paid premium prices. As long as it was big and bright and lavishly framed, it seemed you could sell just about anything.

He still couldn’t fully believe he was here. It was like watching some other man’s boots walking him up the winding hill, some bolder or more reckless double. The same one who had made the phone calls, found the appropriately casual tone of voice, told her he was coming to Kansas anyway to visit his mother, who had been unwell, and that it was only a small plane hop farther. And, if she was interested, it might be an opportunity for them to talk about her doing some murals for the lobby of the exciting new project he and Martin had going in Cold Spring Harbor. Perhaps she could FedEx some photographs of her recent work? He had shocked himself. Who was this man? And did he truly know what he wanted?

It wasn’t, of course, his first foray into infidelity. And he could remember the rejuvenating shiver of anticipation, that initial aliveness that nullified all prospect of guilt. For what, as yet, was there to feel guilty about? Twice, only twice, in all the years of their marriage had he cheated on Sarah, and he had managed to rationalize this fact to the point where the rarity of his transgression had become evidence of an almost virtuous restraint.

He knew many men, Martin for one, who were serial cheats, who never turned down any opportunity, who actively sought them out. Ben had witnessed him at work when they were away together at conferences, seen him target some likely young woman at a party or in a hotel bar. Martin claimed he could spot them from a hundred yards. Ben had watched him move in. Watched, not in awe but certainly impressed, how he introduced himself, how straightaway he made them laugh, how he listened, confided, and focused, creating an intimacy like a gardener tending a much-loved flower. And nine out of ten times—well, maybe not nine, maybe six, maybe four—he would succeed.

“The trick is not caring if you get turned down,” Martin once told him. “Even the ones who say no are usually flattered to be asked.”

Ben envied the ease of it, the absence of worry and commitment. To Martin it was just sex. He and Beth, who either deserved an Oscar or was genuinely the only person in Nassau County who didn’t know about her husband’s transgressions, would probably be married forever. But on the two occasions on which Ben had strayed—once with a young lawyer from Queens who at the time was doing some conveyancing work for him, the other with an older, married woman he had met at the tennis club—he had ended up falling in love. And mainly because he had no intention of leaving Sarah (and, more to the point, of leaving the kids, who were then still very young), neither affair had lasted long and both had ended in acrimony. It was a miracle nobody ever found out. The only person Ben had ever talked to about it was Martin.

“You know what my problem is?” he confided in a moment of rash self-pity after his tennis affair had come unstrung. “I don’t seem to be able to separate love and sex.”

Martin laughed.

“My problem is I’ve never been able to connect them.”

So here he was again. In his heart, at least, a reborn adulterer. Not yet completely sure he was in love, but well on the way. And it was ridiculous, on several levels. He hardly knew the woman. And although he could tell, even at The Divide, and certainly that evening in New York, that she liked him and that there was even a little frisson of something more between them, it didn’t mean a thing. Maybe he should just forget it. Be nice but businesslike. Have a drink, talk about the murals. Fly home.

But he knew, as soon as he saw her, that wasn’t how it was going to be. Tired and almost color-blind from his tour of the galleries, he was sitting over a straight-up margarita in the rear corner of the bar where they had arranged to meet. It was one long room, dark and narrow, with polished wood floors and paintings on every inch of wall (there was no escape in Santa Fe, it seemed). He saw the door open and a sudden flurry of snowflakes and when they had gone, there she was. She was wearing a battered and stained old cowboy hat and a big and belted blanket of a coat in deep red and green. She took off the hat and shook her hair and knocked the snow from the brim and one of the men sitting at the bar, someone she clearly knew, said something Ben couldn’t hear and she laughed and went over to the guy who put an arm around her and kissed her and she propped her arm on his shoulder and stood for a few moments talking and laughing with them all.

Then one of them swiveled on his stool and pointed at Ben, and she looked his way and smiled and headed toward him. And he watched her walk the length of the room, the lamplight glinting in her eyes that stayed on him all the way, the smile shifting a little, fading as if some qualifying thought or warning had crossed her mind, then reasserting itself, still warm, just more composed.

He stood and said hi and she didn’t reply, just leaned across the table and put her hand on his arm and pressed her cold, cold cheek to his and the smell of her almost made him moan. Lori’s gallery, she said, was directly opposite and about to close. So he left his margarita, grabbed his coat, and followed her out and across the street. Lori was away but had left a message for Ben saying all fellow dudes from The Divide qualified for a ten percent discount.

Eve’s paintings, two enormous triptychs in oil, hung eerily lit in a long stone-walled room at the back of the gallery. They were much more powerful than they had looked in the photographs she had sent. The larger of the two was called
The Visitation.
It looked almost biblical, its colors rich and dark, purple and indigo and deep carmine. In the outer two pictures, animals of many kinds, in paler shades of bone and stone, writhed and tangled among roots, as if swirled in a great wind. In the center panel, in a pool of light, reared a huge winged figure, part horse, part human, part reptile, almighty yet benign. Ben was shocked and moved but didn’t know quite what to say except that it was wonderful, extraordinary, that it had astonishing power. He thought, but thought it better not to say, that the atrium of a Long Island insurance company office perhaps needed something a little tamer.

They went back to the bar and settled at the same table. He ordered her a glass of red wine and another margarita for himself and they talked for an hour without a pause. About the weather, about Pablo, about what they had done at Thanksgiving. About his trip to Missoula last month with Abbie to check out the university and how she was planning to spend the coming summer working for Greenpeace. And, of course, about business, those spurious murals, the pretext for his presence here this snowy and unreal night in Santa Fe. It was all so effortless. They seemed to understand each other, laughed at the same things, remembered little details about each other’s lives. She even teased him, asking him where he had parked and how well he had done it.

He asked if she had eaten and she said she hadn’t and that she was famished, so they took a table by an open fire in the labyrinth of a restaurant that adjoined the bar and ate shrimp and spicy grilled chicken and beans and kept on talking. She was wearing old blue jeans and a gray-green cashmere cardigan which after a while in the heat of the fire she took off. Underneath she had on a matching sleeveless top, which showed the shape of her breasts. Bare-shouldered in the candlelight, she was so disconcertingly beautiful that Ben found it hard not to gape.

Had she not felt the same, felt as comfortable and open as he did, perhaps she wouldn’t have said it. It was the kind of comment that stopped men in their tracks. And, looking back on it later, Ben thought it a miracle that such a useless seducer as himself hadn’t curled up in a ball and hidden under the table. But when they were through eating and, for the first time all evening, silence had fallen between them and they were just sitting there looking at each other in a way that said in neon letters a foot high
what next?
she took a drink, put down the wineglass, and said:

“So, Ben. Tell me why you’re
really
here.”

She said it gently and with a smile that was neither mocking nor reproachful. And instead of clenching with fear or embarrassment, with only a short pause and no waver of his eyes, he told her, simply, that he had fallen in love with her. He said that ever since the night of his birthday party at The Divide, he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her. That he had never felt so powerfully about any woman before.