Just before I met him, he’d been hired to help run a new Santa Fe restaurant that had the culinary world astir. But while he was waiting for the restaurant to open, he ran out of money. People usually stay in a job until the next one starts. But not Wes. That’s when he began living in the woods outside Santa Fe, sleeping in a tent, reading books by flashlight, walking into town to wash his hair in the sink of the public library restroom, and hocking his chef ’s knives for food money. As winter approached and the restaurant and a paycheck were no closer, he’d finally broken down and called his mom for help.
Wes’s mother, Isabel, had divorced his lawyer father long ago. A novelist, she’d moved to New York City to live the literary life she’d pined for. She had twelve novels to her name, though I’d never heard of her when I read the 92nd Street Y’s brochure for her writing workshop. In the two years since I’d graduated from college, all I’d written were beauty product descriptions, the where-to-buy section, and one sidebar on thigh anxiety for the women’s magazine I worked for. I signed up for the workshop to become a real writer.
On the first night, the room was empty when I walked in, except for Isabel sitting on the blackboard side of a large square of desks. Attractive—near sixty, I would find out later, but younger looking—she gazed forward, yogi-like, her folder and books open and ready on the desk. Without speaking, she offered me a bright smile. As the other students arrived, plopping their bags down, scraping their chair legs along the linoleum, Isabel’s beatific smile changed to impatient waiting. But whether it was my punctuality or the look of my tailored slacks and sweater—similar to hers—when my turn came to introduce myself, her little smile returned. Silently, we had already agreed: I was her favorite.
In a way, Wes was there that first night too. During the break, Isabel waved a clipping from The New York Times at those of us still in the room. She said her chef son, who was the protégé of a celebrity chef out in Santa Fe, had been mentioned by the food critic as someone to watch. During the rest of class, the gray newspaper trailed out the top of her folder, hanging over the edge of her desk.
For each class, I wrote to please Isabel, struggling to strip away the protective coating she said my stories were wrapped in. One night, after I’d volunteered to read a scene I’d written about an out-of-work actor father who looked like the Marlboro Man, she said, “Thank heavens for drunk daddies,” with a little laugh as if she’d heard that story before.
I stared straight ahead, tears threatening at her dismissal of my scene as cliché.
A week later, when she returned the finished story to me, she leaned over my shoulder, whispering, “You did it with this one.” I saw that she’d scratched out the title I’d chosen, scrawling Dream Dad above it. “This could be the start of something bigger,” she added.
Walking home that night, bathing myself in thoughts of what that “something bigger” might be, I’d started to cross the street when a taxi honked me back onto the curb. Watching the yellow fender shoot past, I remembered the way Isabel had turned back to me as she stood behind the next student and, with that same strange little smile, said, “I’m glad to see you’re a sucker for a cowboy. Growing up in Texas, I’ve always had that inclination myself.”
A few weeks into the class, I’d just gotten home from work when the phone rang. Though Isabel had never called me at home, I recognized her voice instantly when I heard her saying my name on the other end of the line. For all I knew, her purpose could have been mundane—a cancelled class, a change of location—but those reasons for calling did not occur to me. Instead, my heart beat fast.
She didn’t go so far as to arrange a date between Wes and me. She simply said her son was flying in from Santa Fe to stay with her for a few days. Then she asked if it would be okay if she gave him my number.
If at first I wondered at the appropriateness of her request, the fact that she’d chosen me turned the infraction into an extension of the complimentary comments she’d left on my work. And so, from the beginning, Wes and my potential as a writer mingled incestuously.
When he called, I liked his Southern accent and the honey in his voice. I wondered what she’d told him about me to make him want to dial my number—had she focused on looks or talent or simply that I was a nice girl? Why did she think meeting me should be a priority during his short visit? He suggested going to a trendy SoHo café that I was not above being impressed by. I told him to look for my long red hair and blue coat. He told me to look for his tall frame and glasses. Not much to go on. But as I walked through the door of the restaurant, he stood, lifting his hand to signal me.
Tall indeed, in loose jeans and an expensive burgundy sweater—the white of his T-shirt filled its cashmere V. Hair, eyes, skin—everything brown. The broad, smooth planes of his face were not what I usually fell for, but there was no denying his appeal. The waitress lingered, scanning him an extra moment while she poured our wine.
Wes had a chef ’s relish for ordering, and plates of appetizers began crowding our little table. Good-naturedly, he waved the waitress away, saying we’d wait to order the entrées. “We have plenty of time,” he said. She shot me an envious little smile.
With his long legs stretching into the aisle, he confessed right away that he’d been married and divorced twice even though he was just shy of thirty. “My mother didn’t want me to tell you,” he said. “She didn’t think you’d like it.”
But I did like that he’d told me. He took me in as if my face was the answer to a question he’d been asking for a long time. I already felt important to him.
I called in sick to the magazine, and he stayed with me for the next four days. From my flopped-open futon, as if floating on a raft, I watched him rummaging in my kitchen, a kitchen I used for making coffee and tossing out takeout wrappings. He returned to the stove—jeans hovering at hipbone level, bare chest and feet. Unaware of me, he dipped his little finger into the sauce, tasting and thinking, a gesture that would become familiar. He pushed his glasses into place and turned, aware of me after all, and said with a little grin, “Puttanesca. Whore’s spaghetti.” And because he was never just a cook, but knew things, he said with glee, “Something that could be made in their rooms after sex.”
While most young women would not think of their lover’s mother at a moment like that, I thought of Isabel. As the days stretched on and her visiting son lingered in my bed rather than catching the train back to her house in White Plains, I wondered if she was pleased. Or did she think her matchmaking had taken hold a little too well?
I had my answer when at the end of the week, on his last night in town, we took the train out to see her because she wanted to cook for us. Not quite ready to look my teacher in the eye, embarrassed by her knowing what we’d been up to, I
stood behind Wes on the front step. I focused on the side of his head, the curve of his nice brown ear. Isabel’s face suddenly floated next to the ear as she hugged her son. I wondered if he still smelled of our sex. Then she turned to embrace me and I felt the wings of her small shoulder blades. She stepped back with a beaming smile to draw us into her delicious-smelling, oven-warmed house.
By candlelight we feasted on Wes’s Texas favorites: pot roast, collard greens in bacon, golden potatoes, Parker House rolls, and chess pie for dessert. We clinked our wine glasses to the success of the match she’d made.
I half expected Wes’s interest in me to be a whirlwind fluke. But even before his scent was gone from my pillows, I began receiving long letters urging me not only to visit him in Santa Fe, but to move there, to live with him. Like a soldier writing from the front, he wrote on any paper handy—envelope backs, mismatched stationery, notebook paper with frayed edges. More truths spilled out—about a small trust fund he’d blown, about other universities he’d dropped out of, and always, always about the way he wanted me.
In his mother’s class, sometimes it felt as if we were the two people carrying on a romance. We betrayed my fellow students with our knowing glances,
her hand on my shoulder, me hanging back after class to go for coffee. Given Wes’s history with women, I thought Isabel might have her doubts about the wisdom of me actually considering moving to Santa Fe. But on the last night of the workshop, she indicated I was lucky to have the opportunity at all.
Sliding into our regular booth at the corner coffee shop, she said, “You know, I was going to introduce him to someone else.” She named a pretty writer whose first novel I admired. I’d praised the book a few weeks before, but at the time Isabel hadn’t said she knew her.
The waiter came over with his green notepad.
“Just coffee,” I told him.
“I thought you were having pie?” Isabel seemed genuinely disappointed. But my appetite was gone.
After the waiter left, she said, “This is better, though. You, I mean, not the pie.”
I noticed her pink lipstick had traveled to her front teeth, which then disappeared behind her satisfied, close-lipped smile. I suspected then that she hadn’t actually planned to introduce Wes to that pretty writer—but she knew that saying she had would make her son even more attractive to me. She thought I would enjoy the idea that I had beaten the other writer. She was right.
When I went home for Christmas a month later, my mother made me blush by buying me a negligee. I sat on the edge of her bed to open the box she’d handed me. She leaned forward for a better look while I shyly lifted the silk nightgown out of its tissue paper. It was pale aqua, a color for a mermaid.
“For your trousseau,” she said.
“We’re not getting married.”
“I want you to feel special.”
I’d told her about Wes’s letters and the way he had begun insisting that I live with him. I waited for her to warn me not to trust his urgency. For her to say that it had always been the same with my father.
From my fingertips, the silky peignoir hung like a delicate curtain between my mother and me. “What’s the worst that can happen?” I asked her. But then I answered my own question, because I thought I knew. After my mother had given birth to me, there’d been no turning back. Once she’d had a child, her life changed forever. “Well, I’m not going to have a baby,” I said.
“A baby’s not the only thing that can change you,” she said.
I had no way to know how living with Wes would change me. I also couldn’t know that my being with him would make way for my father to come back into my mother’s life yet again.
All I could think at the time, sitting with my mother on her bed, was that I wanted what that peignoir represented. I wanted what was on the other side of the curtain. I was ready to be someone in love. Someone who’d been chosen.
Years later, I would ask my mother why she didn’t stop me from moving to Santa Fe with Wes, a decision that derailed a good chunk of my twenties.
“How could I have stopped you?” she said. “I knew you’d already made up your mind. You were going to do what you were going to do. I could only hope that it would be okay.”
I wonder now if that is how her parents felt when she first married Nick. When they bought her a beautiful wed-
ding dress and negligees for her trousseau, as if having all the right props would make everything okay.
Four months after Isabel introduced me to Wes, I quit my magazine job, sold my futon to a friend, packed up my clothes and my cat, and boarded a plane to New Mexico. Wes’s chef job had begun by then. He’d rented us a little adobe house with a turquoise door situated at the edge of an arroyo, a dry riverbed alive with desert flora and fauna. If we left our patio door open, animals crept in—mice, lizards, and birds. On my first morning there, I saw the thin end of a snake disappear into the bedroom closet among Wes’s dark shoes.
In one of his long letters, he had described his ideal scene of love: both of us sitting in the same room and doing our own things, together but not together. From the start, we recreated this scene. Sitting lengthwise on the couch, he at one end and I at the other—our outstretched legs making a yin and yang in the middle. While he read about everything from cooking and poetry to higher mathematics, I tried to write.
Back in New York City, it had sounded good to tell my friends I was going to write a novel, but now that I was in New Mexico, I was easily, willingly distracted—most often drawn to the restaurant where Wes worked. In the beginning, it was that beautiful restaurant—and the sex—that helped me ignore the fact that I’d barely worked on my novel since I’d arrived.
Café Zona was airy with high ceilings and wild Mexican folk art: pink-faced masks, their cupid-bow mouths ready for kissing; coiled psychedelic snakes with playful red velvet tongues; howling coyotes; and Mariachi skeletons wearing spangled sombreros. At one end of the sweeping marble bar, voluptuous stargazer lilies trembled in an enormous vase. At the other end stood icy pitchers of fresh watermelon and mango licuados and rows of tall market jars filled with green and red peppers packed in oil.
To go to Zona was like stepping into a dazzling fiesta. Tourists made reservations months in advance, and magazines featured glossy pictures of the food and the art and the gleaming people. The owner was a short, self-important man with a red beard. He wore expensive cowboy boots that clicked with precision on the restaurant’s saltillo tile floors, pausing only when he stopped to taste from turquoise- and melon-colored plates. Then, the empresario had all the time in the world for savoring.
Wes, regal in chef whites, worked the grill. Sitting at the bar and watching him in the exhibition kitchen as he entertained the customers, I anticipated the scent and taste of the smoky mesquite wood lingering on his skin.
After the restaurant closed for the night, the owner would invite Wes and me to sit with him, drinking and trying new dishes, always in one of the big circular pony-skin booths in the back. Watching the two men interact, I always saw an overeagerness in their camaraderie. When one reached to try a smoked duck empanada or a lightly battered squash blossom, the other regarded him carefully, Wes pushing his glasses into place, the owner’s smile fading into the whiskers of his beard.
One night in particular, they talked about the Yucatán and Oaxaca, where the owner said a woman lived who could teach you the secret of how to make true mole negro. I could see Wes bridling under his boss’s reins. As I sat between them, watching them laugh at each other’s jokes, circling, sizing up one another, I could see Wes asking himself why he didn’t already know the secret of mole, and why a restaurant like this wasn’t his.
“It’s you the magazines always want to get a picture of,” I would remind him as we lay in bed after evenings at the owner’s table. Watching the magnificence of the moon through our window, I would assure him of his greatness and then reach for him to show him that we were in this together. But with no warning, he began to turn away from me. At that point I still didn’t understand why things had gone wrong for Wes—the abandoned jobs, the divorces, the college degree left undone—but I knew this was how such problems must have begun.
I was at the restaurant so much that eventually the owner gave me a job. I took reservations and assisted him in his office. I helped him edit his cookbook. I suspected I was also there because Wes and the owner knew I was their peacekeeping ballast.
During the day, as I pretended to write, doodling in my notebook, Wes read more and more. He stacked his books one on top of the other until they toppled into piles by the couch and the bed. When the words didn’t come to me, I
could have become a reader like him, but between the lines of every book I chose, all I could hear was the writer taunting me for not writing my own.
One afternoon after Wes had already left for the restaurant, I sat at my typewriter and stared at the pale blue keys speckled with liquid paper, and then I called Isabel. “What’s the matter with me?” I asked. “In New York it came so much easier. I’m not writing at all anymore.” I waited for her to offer one of the stories she had told us in class about her own fits and starts, and perhaps some jumpstart exercise.
But
instead she said, “Don’t worry about it. This is Wes’s time. Not yours.”
What about all the potential she’d said she’d seen in me? What about Wes telling me that when his mother first mentioned me to him, she’d talked about how talented I was?
As I sat there feeling sorry for myself, I realized I shouldn’t be surprised. She’d conned me all along the way. I was already living in Santa Fe when Wes confessed that his mother had actually sent him a ticket to New York City with the express purpose of introducing him to me. The afternoon before I’d met him, Isabel had taken him to get a haircut. She’d bought him new clothes to spruce him up after his weeks of tent living. She’d given him money to take me out. How many class sessions had it taken for the idea to strike her? That perhaps this neatly dressed young woman with a good job and an affinity for Texas bad boys could save her son.
Had she just gotten tired of rescuing him herself? I’d seen the old prescriptions in the medicine cabinet of our adobe’s bathroom, the antidepressants Wes had stopped taking.
With Wes’s books scattered at our feet, I began to hate his constant reading. Sitting in a room together but not together, our silent yin and yang made space for me to begin to hate him as well. He must have sensed it; maybe the same thing had happened with his ex-wives. One day he flattened the book he was reading and said accusingly, “What are you looking at?”
I’d been staring over the back of the couch out the window. “I’m just thinking,” I said.
“I feel like you’re waiting for me to talk to you.”
I hauled myself off the couch, sending one of his books spinning across the floor. My bare feet felt the thin layer of desert sand that was always blowing in. I turned to him. “I was just wondering is all. Wondering if the reason your mother chose me for you instead of that novelist is because I’m a bad writer. She must not have wanted to waste a good one on you.”
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