I don’t like pink champagne, but I accepted it gracefully, took the phone off the hook, and invited Maria out to the patio to sip the sparkling rosé.
She was delighted to see my animal. “What’s his name?”
“Geronimo,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t be offended that he was named after an Apache. But she just laughed and said I have a great sense of humor, because the last thing in the world my dog looked like was a warrior, and she gave me another brief kiss.
The taste was of strawberries, sour cherries, pomegranates and raspberries. That was the Gruet. Maria tasted like lemon and lavender. The Gruet was drier than expected but still had a hint of sweetness. So did Maria. And she knew her sparkling wines. I was beginning to change my mind about rosé.
It was a clear desert night with a warm breeze rustling the chamisa bushes softly against the adobe wall. A shooting star arced across the southern sky, and I thought of Ella Fitzgerald singing Stars fell on Albuquerque:
I can't forget the glamour
Your eyes held a tender light
And stars fell on Albuquerque
That night
I never planned in my imagination
A situation so heavenly
A fairy land where no one else could enter
And in the center just you and me
O.K., the original version has the stars falling on Alabama, but what’s romantic about that? And besides that, Carla Glain was in Alabama in my memory drive.
Maria and I, on the other hand, were enclosed in my patio, truly “A fairy land where no one else could enter,” and it was a perfect night for romance.
She asked, “What’s the other Apache word you know?”
“Hactcin.”
“If you only know two words, ‘hello’ and ‘spirit’ are good ones to know.”
“Maybe you could teach me some more.”
“I’ve forgotten a lot of it. My mother and I moved to Taos when I was eight.”
I was thinking as an anthropologist about a story I read about Korean adoptees. One who had been brought to the United States at the age of 8 had kept a diary in Korean for the first few months, but by the time she was twenty, she could remember only three Korean words. I thought the story must be false. Maybe the Korean girl was in an orphanage where she wasn’t spoken to often and had delayed language development. I just couldn’t believe that you could lose a language you spoke for the first eight years of your life.
“Did you speak Apache growing up?”
“Not much. Like I told you at the Ranch, my mother was Navajo, so she and my father spoke in English.”
“Did you ever ask them why?”
She smiled. “Apache children are not allowed to ask why. The elders will tell you things when it is time for you to know them. But it was easy to figure out. My father didn’t speak Navajo and my mother didn’t speak Apache, so English was the only option. But at least she tried to learn some Apache because we were living in Dulce.”
“Why did she move to Taos?”
She smiled again.
“I know,” I said, “you didn’t ask.”
“I didn’t have to. She told me she and my father were getting a divorce. My father and I were never close, so it didn’t bother me. But his father – my grandfather – was my favorite person. He’s the one who taught me what Apache I learned. He used to say the children were the future of the tribe, and I needed to learn to talk. That was the phrase he used, ‘learn to talk’ – like English wasn’t talking. He made me feel important. He came to see me in Taos every weekend. When he met the man I was going to marry, he asked me if I was sure. I said yes, and he nodded. I should have read him better. The marriage lasted about three months. My father didn’t come to the wedding, but my grandfather did. I still miss him.”
I thought of Cyril Duran. “Does his spirit talk to you?”
“Yes, in my dreams.”
I excused myself to take the chicken out to rest. I switched the oven to broil, slid the potatoes onto a cookie sheet and under the flame, and chopped some fresh cilantro to go over the chicken. When the potatoes were done, I cut the chicken into two halves and placed each one on a plate with the potatoes.
I offered her a choice of dining at my table or outside, and she chose a romantic meal under the stars. The rosé was gone so I opened a bottle of Blanc de Noir. I sipped slowly, mindful of what wine can do to an old rooster. Geronimo nuzzled up to Maria and was rewarded with several pieces of chicken and a few potatoes. He’s an omnivore.
I was all out of chocolate, so after dinner I told her I didn’t know what we could do about dessert, and she said, “We’ll think of something” and ran her tongue across her small perfect mouth and kissed me with enthusiasm.
I put my arms around her and slid my hands under her blouse. Her back felt warm and firm. We kissed for a very long time. Ella ran through a couple more stanzas during that kiss. Then Maria led me inside being careful to make Geronimo stay in the patio. I started to kiss her again, but she pushed me away, stepped back and took off her blouse. Then her bra. Then her... well, you see where this is leading. She took off everything down to and including little footlets off her cute little feet while I stood there mesmerized.
I thought about my belief that you really should get to know a woman before jumping into bed with her, but with each piece of clothing that hit the floor, I felt I knew her better. What the hell, we’d spent a weekend together at the Ranch and an entire evening in my patio. That should qualify as knowing her well enough.
It finally dawned on me that the operation she had in mind would go more smoothly if I too disrobed, and I was lifting a hand to the top button of my shirt when Susannah barged in.
46
“Hubie, thank God you’re here. Something’s happened to Srini.”
Susannah is strong and steady, and although there was terror in her big brown eyes, she was keeping it under control. She looked over at Maria and said, “Hi Maria. Sorry to interrupt.”
Maria pulled a sheet off my bed and wrapped it around herself. I asked Susannah what had happened.
“We went back to his apartment after dinner, but after we got inside, he remembered something in his car and went outside. When he didn’t come back, I went out to see what happened, and he was gone.”
“Was his car still there?”
“Yes.” She started trembling. “But there was blood on the trunk lid. I called you from Srini’s phone, but I kept getting a busy signal.”
“It’s off the hook.”
She looked at Maria. “I guess I know why.”
“How did you get here?”
“I drove my car to Srini’s place, and we took his to the restaurant. When you didn’t answer your phone, I came over in my car.”
I turned to Maria.
“I’ll watch Geronimo until you get back,” she said.
I gave her a brief kiss. Susannah and I ran out to the Bronco. She gave me directions to the apartment and showed me the blood when we got there. I was trying to figure out what to do when Srini walked out of his apartment with a bloody towel on his head. The way he had it wound around his head made him look like a Sikh except without the beard.
“Srini!” Susannah cried and ran to him. “Are you alright? What happened?”
“I bent over to open the boot and someone hit me on the head. Thank God I have a thick skull! I turned to see someone running into the darkness, and I followed.”
“Why would you do that?” asked Susannah.
“To apprehend my assailant,” he said as if everyone runs after attackers. “I chased the blackguard for several blocks, but lost him.”
“Are you badly hurt?”
“I don’t know.”
I asked him to move the towel and Susannah and I looked at the wound. There was a lot of blood and the area seemed dented. I was afraid he had a cracked skull and suggested we call an ambulance. He tried to resist but Susannah placed the call.
I asked Patel some questions
about his work with the State, specifically which agency he was working for and what it had to do with his specialty in probability.
After Susannah finished the 911 call, she objected to my questioning Patel. I reminded her it’s standard procedure to keep people with people head injuries talking to prevent them lapsing into a coma. But that wasn’t my only motive for questioning him.
The ambulance crew let Susannah ride inside with Srini. I stood there watching the flashing red lights disappear around the corner.
Then I remembered Maria. I drove back home to find a note saying Geronimo had gone to sleep and she was on her way back to Taos to do the same.
C’est Amour.
47
What with the excitement of Maria shedding her clothes and Srini being attacked, I was too revved up to sleep. I figured reading Lawrence would make me drowsy, so I started The Man Who Died.
I estimate I’ve read around ten thousand books, but The Man Who Died had to rank as one of the weirdest. It begins with the title character waking up in the tomb. He then “slowly followed the road away from the town, past the olives, under which purple anemones were drooping in the chill of dawn, and rich-green herbage was pressing thick. The world, the same as ever, the natural world, thronging with greenness, a nightingale winsomely, wistfully, coaxingly calling from the brushes beside a runnel of water, in the world, the natural world of morning and evening, forever undying, from which he had died.”
I figured with turgid rose like that, I’d be nodding off after a few pages, but something about the story kept me reading. I’ll spare you most of the details, the majority of which involve convoluted descriptions of the sort quoted above. The man ends up in Lebanon where he meets a virgin of twenty-seven who has been lusted after by all manner of men including Caesar and Anthony. She has built a temple to Isis and devoted herself to tending the temple and engaging in worship. She has asked a philosopher, “Are all women born to be given to men?”
The philosopher answers, “Rare women wait for the re-born man.” It’s a moment of lucidity in Lawrence’s prose, a simple declarative sentence whose meaning is clear without being heavy-handed. The woman in the temple is the “rare woman” and the man who died is the “re-born man.”
But he couldn’t let it alone, because he has the philosopher continue: “For the lotus, as you know, will not answer to all the bright heat of the sun. But she curves her dark, hidden head in the depths, and stirs not. Till, in the night, one of these rare invisible suns that have been killed and shine no more, rises among the stars in unseen purple, and like the violet, sends its rare, purple rays out into the night.”
I’m just a humble potter, but I’m not so naïve as to believe that Lawrence was really talking about lotuses and violets. His descriptions are like Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings. One is describing flowers and the other is painting them, but their works are not about flowers. They are about sex.
But so what? It’s not erotic. It’s not even titillating. It’s just boring. Lawrence took all the fun out of sex by philosophizing it in murky prose. At least O’Keeffe’s paintings are beautiful to look at. But I’m neither a literary critic nor an art critic, just a humble artisan who works in clay.
As you have no doubt already guessed, the man who died makes love to the woman of the temple.
I thought about O’Keeffe’s painting of the tree I had seen in front of the Lawrence cabin. She came to New Mexico five years after Lawrence left and spent several weeks at the Ranch where she painted the giant pine. O'Keeffe wrote that she would lie under the tree and stare into the branches. The tree in her painting, The Lawrence Tree, doesn’t look much like the one I saw, but I wasn’t lying down when I saw it, and I was on the verge of frostbite, so it’s little wonder that she saw it differently. Indeed, she saw everything differently. When she taught at West Texas State Normal College in Canyon, she used to walk out to Palo Duro Canyon and paint landscapes.
When she showed one to a local resident, he said, “That doesn’t look like the canyon.”
“I painted it the way I felt,” she replied.
“You must have had a stomach ache,” he said.
48
“It’s called The Man Who Died, and it’s about a guy back in Roman times leaving his tomb and wandering around until he ends up in Lebanon where he has sex with a woman who tends a temple devoted to Isis.”
Susannah took a sip of her margarita and said, “That makes sense.”
“It does?”
“Sure. She must have taken the risen guy to be Osiris.”
“How did you know that?”
“We study all that in art history. I must have seen dozens of paintings and statues of Isis and Osiris. And we have to know the stories behind the images. See, Osiris was a pharaoh loved by his people and Isis was his sister and his wife.”
I frowned.
“The Egyptian royalty were even more inbred than the European royalty,” she explained. “Anyway, his brother was jealous, so he took Osiris’ measurements while he was asleep and had a jeweled casket made exactly to those measurements. Then the brother threw a big party where he brought out the casket and announced he would give it to anyone for whom it was an exact fit, sort of like Cinderella except I like the glass slipper better than a coffin. Anyway, all the guests tried it on for size, but none of them fit. Then Osiris got in and it was perfect for him. But the evil brother slammed the lid shut, sealed it with molten lead, and tossed it into the Nile.”
“Sort of like Cain and Abel,” I mused. “I think brother stories like that are found in every society.”
“But this one has a romantic ending, Hubie. Isis loved Osiris madly, so she searched for his casket everywhere. She finally found it and brought it back for a decent burial. But the evil brother discovered it and chopped the body into pieces which he scattered throughout Egypt. But Isis didn’t give up. She started searching for the parts of her husband. Eventually she found all the parts except one and reassembled Osiris and wrapped him in bandages. Was the guy from the tomb wrapped in bandages?”
“He was.”
“See? It had to be Osiris. Now here’s the strange part. After Isis puts Osiris back together again, she breathed life back into him and Osiris made love to her.”
“What’s so strange about that? The guy obviously hadn’t had sex in quite a while, being sealed up in a casket.”
She gave me that enigmatic smile she does so well. “Remember I said Isis didn’t find all of his parts? There was one missing.”
She sat there smiling at me.
“His...” I started but hesitated about what word to use.
“Uh huh,” she said.
“Then how could they make love?”
“That’s the romantic part, Hubie. I guess they loved each other so much that it didn’t matter. She even got pregnant and gave birth to Horus who eventually killed the evil brother. But in that fight, Horus lost an eye, and his one eye became a famous Egyptian symbol called the ‘all-seeing eye’. That’s the eye in the pyramid on our dollar bills.”
“You made that up.”
“I didn’t. You can look it up. Now, did Lawrence ever say who the man who died actually was?”
“He never gave him a name. At first I thought it was Jesus because it was during Roman times, he was in a tomb and he came out alive.”
“It was Jesus, Hubie. It’s like an allegory. Horus was an immaculate conception. So was Jesus. The man who died arose from a tomb. So did Jesus. And when the Jesus character in the story has sex with the woman in the temple, it’s an analogy with Isis and Osiris. In both cases, they didn’t have real physical sex.”
I thought back on Lawrence’s words. “No Suze, I don’t think it was an analogy.” I pulled the book out of my pocket, found the passage I wanted, and read, “He crouched to her, and he felt the blaze of his manhood and his power rise up in his loins.”
“Then guess what he says,” I asked her.
She looked slightly flustered. �
��I have no idea,” she said.
“Lawrence has the man who died say at that moment, ‘I am risen!’.”
“Wow! No wonder they banned his books!”
49
The next morning over coffee, the solution to the murders came to me as I was thinking about And Then There Were None and The Man Who Died.
Isn’t literature great?
I made some phone calls then visited a costume shop where I was amazed by the merchandise and assisted by the owner.
Then I explained my theory to Whit and went to the University with him to meet with some of the staff from the fund raising office where his badge helped expedite getting the information I needed.
I asked him if he could round up all the people we needed for a meeting the next evening and he said with the cooperation of the State Police, he could round up anybody I named, and that proved to be almost true. Only one person on my list declined to show, and when Whit asked me if he should force the issue, I said no.
Cyril Duran came to my shop that afternoon. I placed his great-grandfather’s pot on the counter. He cupped it in his hands and closed his eyes. He said a few words in Tewa, but I didn’t catch enough of it to make sense.
“Thank you,” he said when he had finished his recitation.
I put a cardboard box on the counter, wrapped the pot in bubblewrap, placed it in the box and filled the box with Styrofoam peanuts. Cyril walked out with it.
I assumed he would be back, but I didn’t know if it would be that day, next month, or next year. I found my place in the book about zero, which sounds better than calling it a book about nothing, and started reading.
He returned about an hour later with a box of his own from which he extracted three beautiful Taos pots from the early 20th Century.
The Pot Thief Who Studied D. H. Lawrence Page 16
