The Divide (28 page)

The music was strictly new age, a lot of breaking waves and whale calls. Ben had always wondered why whale talk was always assumed to be soothing and blissful when nobody knew what the hell the creatures were saying to one another. Surely whales had fights like everybody else? Maybe they were actually yelling at each other.
You miserable humpback bastard, that’s the last plankton you’re ever gonna get from me. Oh, get a life, go blow some air.

At this moment, Lori was over on the other side of the room, expressing her humanness, and perhaps a little more, with an irritatingly good-looking young guy with a ponytail. He had taken his top off, which men apparently were allowed to do but women weren’t, at least not for several weeks now, since a voluptuous Swede called Ulrika displayed her assets and a poor guy who’d had a triple bypass collapsed and had to be carried outside. Even in Santa Fe, self-expression apparently had its limits.

Another rule was that the dancing was supposed to be noncontact. But some seemed either not to know this or not to care. Several couples were writhing on the floor, so intricately entwined that it was hard to figure out which limbs belonged to whom. Ben feared for their disentanglement. They were going to end up like a knot nobody could untie. Someone would have to call the fire department.

Most people, however, like Ben, were dancing on their own. Now and then someone would sidle up and smile and dance with him for a while and then sidle off somewhere else. Eve was about ten yards away at this moment, dancing sinuously with her eyes closed and a little half-smile on her face. She was wearing a cropped white linen top and some tight red breeches that showed her hips and tummy and she looked so damn sexy, Ben’s humanness was longing to express itself in a way that would have to wait.

She had been worried about bringing him along here today, saying she didn’t know if it was really his kind of scene. Maybe she thought he might mock it or would be too uptight and self-conscious to take part. She kidded him that he would have to wear a leotard or at least some spandex shorts. As it turned out, he wasn’t, by a long way, the oldest or straightest-looking person there and, in his gray T-shirt and faded blue jeans, he didn’t feel too out of place.

For the first ten or fifteen minutes, after they all started dancing, Eve had stayed close and kept glancing at him to gauge his reaction. He wasn’t the world’s greatest dancer and the whole thing was, he had to admit, pretty hilarious. But he was trying to enter into the spirit of it and was almost enjoying himself. He just wished he could relax more, go with the flow, clear his head a little.

This was his third visit to Santa Fe since leaving Sarah and the longest so far. Outside, the snow had gone. There was almost a hint of spring. He had been here two whole weeks now and, though he didn’t quite know why—for it would be so easy to stay—he felt it was time to be going back to Kansas. They were lovers now, and at last it was okay between them. More than okay. They were in that heady, breathless state when they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. He had never dared dream it might happen so quickly.

Two months ago, back in December, he had called her from his mother’s in Abilene and told her in a shaky voice that he had done it, he’d left. And there was this long pause, several momentous seconds, and then she said, quietly, “Come.”

And he drove down that very night, five hundred miles, through the fog and the snow, across the plains and icy slivers of Oklahoma and western Texas, and arrived just after dawn and found her house and tapped on the door. She was wearing a black woolen wrap over a white night-dress and her face was all worried and pale as the dawn. But she took him inside and stood there and held him. And he didn’t want to, he’d promised himself not to—because how could she, how could any woman, want a man so raw and weak and wretched—but he couldn’t help himself and began to weep. And she held him. For a long time, just stood and held him.

Then she sat him down at the kitchen table and made coffee and some poached eggs and wheat toast and sat watching him eat with her elbows on the table and her chin cupped in her hands, staring at him and gently smiling. It was as though neither of them could quite believe he was there. Then little Pablo, three and a half years old, whom Ben had never yet met, emerged from his room in his pajamas and sat at the table too and started talking to him as if it were the most natural thing in the world to find him there.

But then, when big things happened, people rarely behaved the way you’d expected. Ben’s mother and sister to name but two. Right or—more probably—wrong, he had felt he couldn’t tell either of them over the phone that he had left Sarah. He had to tell them in person. He called his mother from New York to say he was coming to stay and, of course, she was thrilled. The night he arrived she cooked his favorite pot roast dinner, just for the two of them.

Naturally, Ben knew she would be upset at what he had to tell her. Any mother would be. But she had always so adored him and believed in him, affirming his every action and decision, even those he knew himself to be wrong, that her reaction that night, when finally after supper he broke the news, took him completely by surprise. She was distraught, furious, excoriating. She even struck him on the arm. How could he leave his wife and children? How
could
he?

“You made a promise!” she wailed through her tears, which seemed shed as much in anger as in grief. “A promise! You go back, Benjamin. Do you hear me? You go back! You made a promise!”

Eventually she calmed down and wept as he tried gently to explain why he had left. Not that it was possible, without telling her things he had no wish to hear himself say or, for that matter, share with anyone, least of all his mother. He spoke instead in coded clichés, saying that
for many years now,
although they had put a
brave face
on it, he and Sarah had not been
happy together,
that things hadn’t been
good between them,
that they had both
changed
and
grown apart.
And at last these homilies seemed, if not to convince her, at least to soften her to a kind of sad acceptance that the deed was done and that no amount of chiding would undo it. All she wanted, she said through her tears, all she had ever wanted, was for him to be happy.

If his mother’s reaction surprised him, his sister’s nearly blew him off his feet. He drove to Topeka to have lunch with her the following day. Sally was five years his senior, enough to ensure that as children they had never really gotten to know each other. Aware he was the object of his mother’s blatant favoritism, he had always treated his sister a little delicately, as if she might, justifiably, resent him. He was relieved, on those rare occasions when he saw her, that she didn’t seem to. Not yet, anyhow.

Sally was what used to be called a handsome, rather than a pretty or beautiful, woman. She had their father’s intense brown eyes and heavy brows. She was taller than she seemed to want to be and stooped a little, as if she were carrying some invisible load on her shoulders. She had married an accountant named Steven, a man so momentously boring that Abbie had even christened a verb for him. To be
Stevened
by someone or something or to feel
Steved out
or
totally Steved
had long been absorbed into their lexicon of family slang. Sally and Steve had two children who sadly seemed to have scooped most of their genes from their father’s end of the pool. Both had become accountants.

Ben had expected to take her out to a restaurant but instead Sally had prepared lunch for them in her trim kitchen, with its lace curtains and collection of ceramic frogs on the windowsill. Steve was at work, so it was just them and the frogs. Again, Benjamin waited until the meal—grilled pork chops followed by lemon meringue pie—was over before telling her his news. He knew as he spoke, from the way her eyes were narrowing, that he wasn’t going to get away lightly. When he finished, there was an ominous, quivering silence.

“What gives
you
the right?” she hissed.

“How do you mean?”

“What gives you the right! To leave.”

“Well—”

“I mean, we’re
all
unhappy! Every couple I know. I don’t know of a single goddamn marriage that I could put my hand on my heart and say was happy.”

Ben shrugged and shifted a little on his chair.

“Do
you
know of any?”

“Well—”

“Do you? I mean, really happy? I don’t. It’s part of the package, Benjamin, you idiot! Get real! Do you think Mom and Dad were
happy
? Do you?”

“Well—”

“Of course they weren’t! Nobody is. But that doesn’t mean you just up and leave. Oh my, I’m
so
unhappy, boohoo, so hey, I’ll just walk out on my wife and my kids. For Christ’s sake, Ben, get real!”

Ben felt paralyzed with shock. But she hadn’t finished. In fact, she’d barely started. She went on to give him a scorching lecture about how he was a victim of this ridiculous, upside-down consumer culture in which everyone was constantly being bombarded with the pernicious promise of happiness and, even worse, being told at every turn that they had the goddamn
right
to be happy. And if they weren’t, they could be, if they just got themselves a new car or a new dishwasher or a new outfit or a new lover. The messages were everywhere, Sally said, in every magazine you picked up, on every dumb TV show, fueling greed and envy, making people dissatisfied with what they had, persuading them they could change it and be
happy
and successful and beautiful, if only they had some gorgeous new
thing
or a new girlfriend or a new face or a new pair of silicone tits. . . .

If he hadn’t been so amazed or so starkly implicated in the diatribe, Ben might have given her a standing ovation. As it was, he lowered his eyes and nodded and tried to look suitably admonished. And half an hour later, having twice denied that there was somebody else, somebody
new,
for by now he was too scared to admit it, he kissed her good-bye and walked to the front gate with a stoop in his shoulders that almost matched hers. Not
Steved
but thoroughly and ignominiously
Sallied.

The dancing was over now and the Body Choristers were all in a circle again, only this time they were sitting on the floor with their eyes closed, silently holding hands. Ben was holding hands with the whirling Taliban who seemed to have taken something of a shine to him. He was wondering where the guy had put his pepper.

After another twenty minutes or so, during which anybody who wanted to could share thoughts about how it had been for him or for her, the session broke up. Everybody put their shoes back on and Lori came over and gave Ben a hug and then Eve arrived and they both gave her a hug.

“Was that good?” she asked him nervously.

“Terrific.”

She gave him a skeptical look.

“No, honestly. I really enjoyed myself.”

He put an arm around her shoulders and she put hers around his waist. She smelled all warm and sweaty and delicious. Lori was standing there, assessing them, beaming at them.

“You know something?” she said. “You guys look so great together. You even look like each other.”

“Is that a compliment?” Ben and Eve said at the same time.

“Yes.”

Pablo had gone to stay with his father for the weekend, so they had the house to themselves. Ben lit a fire in the arched stone fireplace in the bedroom while Eve made them some green tea whose taste he was at last beginning to like. The late winter sun was angling onto the white quilt of the bed through the window and filling the room with a soft amber glow. They slowly undressed each other, nuzzling each other’s necks like cats as they did so, then lowered themselves onto the wedge of light that lay athwart the bed. Her skin tasted of salt and he kissed her shoulders and her breasts and beneath her arms and traveled the long hollowed curve of her belly with his hand and found her warm and open.

The fear that had blighted their first couplings was banished now, confined to a shadowed recess of his mind. There were times, still, when it would try to summon him, with whispers of inadequacy and plangent taunts of guilt and betrayal. But whereas once he would have paid heed and answered and wiltingly gone, now he could usually block the sound from his ears. Had Eve not been so patient with him, so forgiving and apparently unfazed by his early failures as a lover, he would long ago have crawled away in shame. But she seemed to understand and hushed the faltering self-pity of his efforts to explain.

Inside her now, a stranger still to her shape and feel, he watched the pale tilt of her chin, her parted lips, the shuttered lashes of her eyes beyond, her hair thrown like a spill of ink across the pillow and the shadow of their conjoined selves moving slowly, slowly, on the roseate rough plaster of the wall. He was here now, with her. He was here.

I
t was less than a year since she had last been here. But like so much else in Abbie’s life, during those months the place had been utterly transformed. She and Ty were standing their horses on the crest of the same bluff where they had ridden with his father two summers before and watched the golden eagle soaring above the river. They had ridden here by the same route, loping through the sage on the same two horses. But that was where any similarity ended. The landscape over which they now looked out belonged to a bleaker planet.

“My God,” she murmured.

“I said you wouldn’t know the place.”

Even the mountains, on this close, gray May morning, seemed altered, darker, more broodingly distant. The river was low and ashen and its banks looked as if they had been sluiced with whitewash. Downstream, where the breaks had once babbled and sparkled among the willow scrub, there was now a desert of shingle and baked mud, all patched with white where the salt water had dried. The water that had killed the Hawkinses’ colts and the cattle.