I said, “Gesundheit.” She smiled.
7
Because we are the same height, neither Sharice nor I have to crane our neck to kiss.
We were engaged in that pleasant activity at her door. Benz looked bored. He had seen a lot of it the past few months. Geronimo looked nervous.
Benz is Sharice’s savannah cat, an exotic cross between an African wild serval and a domestic cat. He looks like a cheetah and fetches like a dog.
Sharice is equally exotic, her sepia skin proof that she shares Benz’s African roots, and her green eyes evidence of European interlopers during her family’s diaspora in Jamaica. She was born in Montreal and ended up in the United States because she wanted reconstructive breast surgery after her mastectomy, and the wait time in Canada was too long.
We dated quite a while before finally having sex. She had a list of things she needed to tell me about herself, one of which was that she’d had the mastectomy. Before I moved in, I asked if there were any other revelations I should be alert for. She replied there was one more thing she had to tell me, but it was not about her. It was about her father.
I didn’t see how anything about her father could affect how I feel about her, so I wasn’t bothered when she said she would tell me in due time. What’s the worst-case scenario? Her dad is a serial killer? Maybe that’s why she has a picture of her mother on her desk, a beautiful woman with Sharice’s fine features but much darker skin, but no picture of her father.
Oh well, being a serial killer isn’t hereditary. And I doubted it could be that serious, since she told me she had a typical if somewhat straight-laced upbringing.
Because of her lithe muscles, Sharice somewhat resembles her cat. And like Benz, she has been known to fetch. In her case, a glass of Gruet, New Mexico’s contribution to the world of champagne.
Even though he is only a mutt, Geronimo is also exotic in his own way. My best guess is a mix of collie, chow and anteater.
Sharice likes the old joke that Canada should be a perfect country because it could combine British government, French food and American know-how. But unfortunately, it ended up with British food, French know-how and American government.
Geronimo suffered an analogous fate. He could have inherited the graceful neck of a collie, the bear snout of a chow and the thick coat of an anteater. Instead, he has the auburn fur of a chow, the wispy tail of a collie and the neck of an anteater. Like the camel, Geronimo looks like an animal designed by a committee. But he’s good company.
After Sharice and I finally unlocked our lips, I tossed a piece of chicken jerky toward Benz. He batted it in midair and it flew across the room. Geronimo retrieved it and dropped it in front of Benz, who began chewing on it.
I rewarded Geronimo with a Milk-Bone Brushing Chew.
“How embarrassing is it that my dog fetches things for your cat?”
“Benz is the alpha male, Hubie.”
“What about me?”
“You’re my alpha male.”
“And Geronimo?”
“Well … he’s cute. In an odd way.”
We moved from her doorway to her dining table. You can see the polished concrete floor through the glass top of the table and the Sandia Mountains through the floor-to-ceiling glass wall.
I told her about Helga Ólafsdóttir recognizing me as the person who, in her words, “sent Freddie Blass to prison.”
“Did it bother you that she knew?”
“Yes. I was hoping no one remembered.”
“I love your naïveté, but having their department head sent to prison is hardly something they’d forget.”
“I guess. But couldn’t they at least forget I was involved?”
I looked at the table. Two Champagne flutes and a bottle of Gruet Blanc de Noir shared a Nambé ice bucket. A cutting board was arrayed with sliced cheeses, smoked salmon, olives, roasted artichoke hearts and fennel wedges.
“Let’s change the subject,” I said.
“Okay. What do you want to talk about?”
“This,” I said, pointing at the spread.
“Hope you don’t mind a snicky-snacky meal. It was so hot walking home that I didn’t want to use the cooktop.”
The cooktop is stainless steel. As is the refrigerator, the door handles, the spigots and the railing around the balcony. If there were a bathtub, it would probably be stainless steel. But there is only a shower. The showerhead is stainless.
The place is so sleek, it’s almost clinical.
Spirits in Clay, on the other hand, has no stainless steel. It doesn’t even have steel that can be stained. It occupies the east third of an adobe built by Don Fernando Maria Arajuez Aragon in 1683 and is mostly adobe and pine.
When the middle part of the building came on the market, I had only a few years left on my mortgage, so I leased the middle third with an option to buy. I was thinking I could exercise that option after my mortgage was paid off.
I initially expanded my shop into the new space, but the additional space was more of a hassle than a benefit. It sat empty until a couple of years ago when I leased it to an Englishman named Gladwyn Farthing. He goes by Glad, and I chuckle when I say that because when I told Susannah about him, she quipped that it was a good thing he didn’t also shorten his last name to its first four letters.
Glad bargained a reduction in his lease payments in exchange for his minding my shop when I’m not there. Now that I’m a full-time resident of the glass-and-steel condo, the reduction is larger because I frequently stay in the condo rather than walking to Old Town to mind a shop that has little traffic.
I admire Sharice’s loft-style condo with its hard-edged industrial look and spare, clean feel. But a life spent between adobe walls didn’t prepare me for concrete floors and steel-beamed ceilings.
Nor did enchiladas and tacos prep my tummy for a meatless diet.
Being in Sharice’s condo is like being on vacation. It’s fun, but it doesn’t feel like home.
Lately, I’d been thinking home is overrated. Why not a life spent on vacation?
I’d proposed to her twice, both times in the spirit of banter, and she had responded in kind. When I finally asked her in earnest what she thought about the proposals, she said this was her first courtship and she wanted to prolong it.
Evidently, her mastectomy chased away other suitors. Those shallow twits unwittingly did me a great favor.
I’d told her about my new colleagues, my new office and how I felt I couldn’t quite settle in there.
“I hope you eventually settle in here.”
“I already have.”
“You have exactly three shirts and two pair of pants in the closet. That’s hardly settling in.”
“You forgot I also have a pair of boots in there. The only things left in Old Town are a jacket and a sweatshirt I won’t need for a few months. We just happen to be different when it comes to clothes.”
“Yeah, that’s an even bigger difference than black and white.”
“Which reminds me that the new-faculty orientation last spring included a workshop on diversity.”
She shook her head slowly as I told her about the event.
“I don’t get this country,” she said after I finished telling her about the orientation session. “Martin Luther King is a hero. You have a national holiday named after him. A major street in every city. Just last week you took me to see Selma, and the theater was packed. But none of you remember what he stood for. His most famous line is ‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.’ But Americans are obsessed with judging everyone by color.”
“We are?”
“Yes. At last fall’s annual meeting of the Association of Southwestern Dental Hygienists, a speaker at the session
on diversity claimed you need to adjust your approach for each patient based on their ethnicity.”
“That’s bad?”
“I don’t want my dental hygienist treating me as a black patient. My teeth are just like yours.” She took a pause from her serious self and gave me the smile she reserves for ethnic humor. “They just look brighter because of my skin color.”
“And also because of your great smile,” I added.
“I also don’t want my manicurist typecasting me. The first one I went to spent the whole session talking about how black women have special nails. Rubbish. Nails don’t have ethnicity. They’re just keratin. I changed manicurists. The new one was white like the first one, but the only people she talked to me about were Oprah Winfrey, Gabby Douglas and Kerry Washington, like I’m too provincial to be interested in anyone who’s not a black woman. I didn’t even know who Gabby Douglas and Kerry Washington were. Then she asked me if I like the songwriter Ne-Yo.”
“Ne-Yo?”
“I’d never heard of him either. I told her the songwriter I like is Giacomo Puccini. Then I canceled the next appointment.”
“How many manicurists have you gone though?”
She giggled. “Just the two. I do my own nails, now. I’ve felt pigeonholed and profiled ever since I came to this country. If I join a group of men talking about sports, they change the subject because they assume I’m not interested because I’m a woman. You can’t believe some of the dumb things American men say about hockey. Two minutes after I meet people, they steer the conversation to race because they want to make me feel comfortable. It doesn’t make me feel comfortable. It makes me feel like I’m not wholly human, like I’m fenced off from anything that isn’t feminine or black. All these workshops and sensitivity sessions just make it worse. Americans are so sensitized that they don’t see individuals as humans.”
She exhaled and shook her head. Then she smiled at me and said, “One of the many things I love about you is that you never pigeonhole me.”
“Well,” I said, “maybe a little.”
“Like what?”
“I admit to thinking that your love of clothes is sort of a woman thing.”
“Okay, I’m guilty too. I see your lack of interest in clothes as a man thing.”
“I may not be interested in my clothes, but I’m interested in yours.”
“Yeah, getting me out of them.”
“True.”
“Glad you like it.” She poured us some Gruet. “Enough social criticism. Tell me about your class.”
“The students talk incessantly.”
She shrugged. “It’s a studio class. You won’t be lecturing. So if they want to chatter while they work, why not.”
“They chatter while I’m talking.”
She laughed. “Stop talking.”
“Okay. But tomorrow we’re going on a field trip to dig clay. I’ll be stuck in the Bronco with most of them, and I’ll have to listen to their chattering.”
“Tune them out.”
“How?”
She brushed her lips across my left ear and whispered. “Just think back on the evening we’re about to have.”
Sharice never got the reconstructive breast surgery. She saved money for it but decided to spend it on those designer dresses instead.
She looks spectacular in those dresses. And even better out of them. No surgery could increase her sex appeal.
I looked at her and thought of a quatrain from Byron:
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!
8
I don’t mind sitting behind the backseat,” said Nathan. “I’m moderately autistic. Small spaces keep me calm.”
“I’m an ACOA,” said Mia.
When I frowned, she said, “Adult child of an alcoholic.”
I doubted the adult part.
“I’m sort of bipolar,” said Apache.
Bruce said, “I’m double-jointed in my wrists, but it’s a good thing. Helps me work on my hog.”
Raúl said he had attention-deficit disorder, and Alfred volunteered that he was lactose intolerant.
We had gathered in front of the Art Building at two on Thursday. I waited for a few seconds. When no one else volunteered information about their psychological, physical or nutritional condition, I said, “Okay, now that the public-service-announcement portion of today’s program has ended, let’s talk about the plan. Two of you will have to ride behind the backseat. Nathan has volunteered, so I’ll assign one more person to that area. And two in the front and four in the second row.”
“That’s only eight,” said Aleesha. “There are ten of us.”
“Bruce is taking his motorcycle. Someone can ride on the back of it.”
“I’ll ride with him,” said Mia.
“I figured you’d volunteer,” said Aleesha.
Mia made a face at Aleesha but said nothing.
Bruce handed a helmet to Mia. “Hop on.”
She did. And wrapped her arms around him as they sped off.
“I’m too big to fit in back,” said Marlon.
“Okay,” I said, “you get shotgun. Apache, you sit between me and Marlon.”
“There’s no seat belt. There isn’t even a seat.”
“You can sit on the console. I can’t put Marlon there. He would crush it.”
“You’re trying to give me a substandard seat because I complained about you disrespecting Native Americans.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake. Anyone want to volunteer?”
“I’ll ride on the console,” said Alfred. “But if it gets scary, I may shriek like a girl.”
They all laughed.
I assigned Aleesha, Raúl, Apache and Ximena to the middle seat and told Carly to ride in back with Nathan. She was mature enough to handle a troubled child.
We drove to the Rio Grande Nature Center State Park, a preserve on the east side of the Rio Grande less than a mile southwest of Bookworks, a high-traffic indie bookstore. Unlike the nature preserve, which gets little traffic at all.
Unless you count roadrunners, sandhill cranes, great horned owls, ring-necked pheasants, bull snakes, long-tailed weasels, beavers and pocket gophers. All of whom fondly remember Edward Abbey.
No critters eat roadrunners, because nothing can catch them. Everything else is likely to become a meal. Beavers are slow, but that’s not a problem because their prey can’t run. Gophers are fast, but not as fast as the bull snakes that eat them. Owls speed out of the air to eat the snakes. The snakes get revenge by eating bird eggs. One big happy family.
Bruce was still astride his Harley when we arrived. Mia was still clinging tightly to him even though they were parked. He didn’t seem to mind.
I opened the console after Alfred dismounted. “All cell phones in here.”
“Uh-uh,” said Aleesha. “I’m not going out in the wilderness without my phone.”
“It’s not the wilderness. We’re in the middle of Albuquerque. There are joggers passing behind us right now on the Paseo del Bosque. One of them is even pushing a stroller.”
“I’m from Chicago, and I’m telling you it looks like wilderness to me.”
So she is from Chicago. I knew she was from the Midwest, but I didn’t realize I had pegged the city.
“No phones,” I said.
“I’ll wait here.”
“Okay, but that counts as an absence, which is five points off your grade.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Come on, Aleesha,” said Bruce. “Forget Chicago and just go with the flow. I promise to fight off any bears we run into.”
“There are bears out there?”
“No. Can’t yo
u tell when I’m kidding?”
She glared at me and tossed her phone in with the others.
We didn’t actually enter the Nature Center. We just used their parking lot and followed the fenced path that extends west from Candelaria Road to the Paseo. We crossed over that, over the irrigation canal that parallels the river, through the low-lying bosque and finally descended to the water’s edge.
I suspect it is forbidden to traverse the path for the purpose of digging clay from the Rio Grande. I don’t know that for sure, because I employ the philosophy that if you suspect you won’t like the answer, don’t ask the question.
I gave each student a bucket and a shovel. I took off my shoes, rolled up my pant legs and waded into the river. I plunged my left hand deep into the riverbed and came up with a fistful of clay.
“Even though this is a studio class, you’ll have to endure a few lectures. This is the first one. Pay attention. The earth’s crust is mostly stuff spewed out by volcanic activity. After it cooled and hardened into rock, it got cracked by frost, worn down by erosion and trampled on by mastodons. After a few million years, two of its major components—alumina and silica—ended up as clay.”
Raúl stared at me. “Stuff spewed out? Trampled on by mastodons? Are you serious?”
“Completely. I’m not a geologist, so don’t look for technical terms, because I don’t know them. I know clay. When clay is moved along by water flows, it can pick up other minerals, like iron and mica.”
I removed a shard from my pocket and moved it slightly from side to side. “What do you notice about this piece of an old pot?”
“It glints in the sun,” said Carly.
“Right. It’s from Taos, where they use clay with mica in it. Mica reflects light. There are many variations in clay. What it all has in common is particles so small that they adhere to each other and can be shaped. Open your hands.”
I gave each of them a bit of the clay I had scooped from the river. “Squeeze it between your fingers, get the feel of it.”
The Pot Thief Who Studied Edward Abbey Page 5
