Crystal Clear

by Jane Heller

  When I got to my hotel room, I saw that the message light on my phone was blinking again. It was Crystal, the concierge, calling to tell me that, yes indeedie, the bigger Jeep was being pressed into service in the morning, which meant that there would be a space for me after all.

  Wow! My first-ever Sacred Earth Tour, I thought jubilantly, picturing myself hiking up those red rocks, arm in arm with my fellow vortex seekers, an authentic Native American Indian guiding us on our journey.

  The very idea of the next day’s adventure made me ravenously hungry, so I trundled off to Tranquility’s fancy restaurant, Le Coyoté, ordered myself a fine rack of lamb and an even finer bottle of wine, and felt the memory of those Ensure dinners fade into oblivion.

  Everything happens for a reason, I mumbled as I sank onto the extremely comfortable bed in my room and drifted off to my first untroubled sleep in months.

  Chapter Eight

  I awoke to a sparkling, clear morning, the cloudless blue sky a stunning backdrop for the red rocks. After a hearty breakfast served on my patio, I chose my wardrobe for the first day of the Sacred Earth Jeep Tour: blue jeans, sneakers, and the Tranquility T-shirt I’d purchased in the hotel’s gift shop the night before. I skipped the makeup, simply running a comb through my hair, applying a little sunscreen, and “letting it all go.” I was feeling pretty laid back, for me—so laid back that I didn’t jump when the phone rang, even though I knew it could be Steven, newly arrived in Sedona and ready and waiting to pop the question in person. As it turned out, the caller was someone from room service, asking if I had enjoyed my breakfast and whether he could come and retrieve my tray. After I had answered “yes” to both, he told me to have a beautiful day. I wished him the same.

  Our tour group was supposed to assemble in the courtyard outside the lobby at nine o’clock sharp. I arrived at 8:30, a little over-eager, I guess. I sat down on one of the benches there, picked up the abandoned copy of the Red Rock News, Sedona’s twice-weekly newspaper, and read while I waited for the others to show up.

  The newspaper didn’t provide much in the way of hard news—there wasn’t a single article on the national or international scene—but there were a few columns devoted to life on Mars, as well as an editorial extolling the virtues of peyote. When I flipped to the back page, I noticed a sizable ad promoting the Sacred Earth Jeep Tour. I smiled proudly as I envisioned myself climbing canyons, forging streams, negotiating trails. A Jewish Sacajawea.

  The other six people in our party finally appeared at about five minutes to nine, and when I saw who was in the group, the word “party” took on a whole new meaning. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not a celebrity groupie or anything—but when I saw that Amanda Wells Reid, famous partygoer, famous socialite, famous rich person, would be going vortexing with me, I just couldn’t believe it! To think that I would be riding in the same Jeep as the woman the tabloids referred to as “the millionaire heiress!”

  I tried to act nonchalant as she stepped out onto the courtyard with her entourage, but I did stare at her, naturally. And as I did, I silently ticked off whatever tidbits of trivia I could remember about her.

  She was born and raised in Texas, the debutante daughter of oil tycoon Chester “Chet” Wells. She was said to be in her fifties, although she would never divulge her age. She was married the first time to Pat Gandy, the organ transplant specialist who left medicine to become a race car driver. She was married the second time to Richard Lewiston, the British stage actor who sold out to Hollywood by starring in R-rated action films. And she was married the third time—and was still married, as far as I knew—to Harrison Reid, the legendary novelist who spent more time drinking and philandering than he did writing. As a result of these and other tawdry liaisons—and the fact that she was impossibly wealthy, of course—Amanda Reid was constantly being written up in the columns, photographed on the society pages, seated in the front row of fashion shows, invited to balls and galas of the type that were chronicled in Town & Country. She was also regularly joked about, parodied, and sniped at for speaking in that treacly southern accent; and for being ditzy as well as nasty and totally unaware that she was either. Mostly, though, when people gossiped about Amanda Reid, they gossiped about what a trendsetter she wasn’t. Even with all that money, she was a trend sheep, someone who waited for her more daring friends to determine what was “in” and then followed along. If they wore it, she wore it; if they lunched there, she lunched there; if they donated money to it, she donated money to it. She was always a step behind the Blaine Trumps of the world, forever scrambling to play catch-up. She would latch onto the person who did their streaks long after they had already moved on to another colorist. She would rush to the plastic surgeon she thought was doing their face lifts, only to discover that they had already moved on to another flesh carver. You get the point.

  “Poor woman,” the media would titter. “She may have bigger bucks than most small countries, but she’s so yesterday.”

  In a weird way, I felt I had something in common with Amanda Reid; I was pretty yesterday myself. After all, only twenty-four hours earlier, I had never even heard of ear coning.

  “Is this the pickup location for the Jeep Tour, do you know?” Amanda asked me, the southern belle accent turning “tour” into “too-ah.”

  “Uh, yes. I think so,” I said, momentarily taken aback that she had spoken to me.

  “Well! You’d think they’d have some sort of a sign.”

  I studied her as she stood there with her hands on her hips, looking thinner and more brittle than she did in photographs. She was a beautiful woman—or had been once, before the skin on her face had been pulled and stretched and tucked behind her ears so tightly that her mouth had the wingspan of a 747. Cosmetic surgeries aside, she still had the luminous brown eyes, the patrician nose, the well-defined cheekbones, the Miss America posture. She was wearing her golden blonde hair in a style that had, a year or two ago, gone out of style (surprise)—the layered “Rachel” cut, named for the character in the TV show “Friends.”

  She was heavier on the makeup than was currently fashionable. And her outfit for the Sacred Earth Jeep Tour was something off an old Tammy Wynette album cover—slim-fitting jeans, a denim shirt with pearl buttons and fringes along the arms, and (get this) a cowboy hat and cowboy boots. I was sort of expecting her to belt out the chorus of “Stand By Your Man.” Instead, she belted out commands to her five traveling companions. “Over here,” she said, waving them toward the bench where I was sitting.

  I rose then, and introduced myself. “I’m Crystal Goldstein,” I said. “I’m signed up for the Jeep tour, too, so we’ll be spending the next five days together.”

  “Oh?” She gave me the once-over, inspecting me from head to toe in a way that suggested she thought I might be crawling with lice. Deciding I wasn’t, I guess, she deigned to shake the hand I’d extended to her—limply, with the grip of a raw salmon fillet.

  Her cohorts ambled over to check out the interloper.

  “Crystal Goldstein,” I smiled. “I’ll be on the Jeep with all of you.”

  “If it ever gets here,” said Amanda, glancing at her watch and pouting.

  “I’m Tina Barton,” said a tall, thin, dour woman in her forties. She had shoulder-length, stick-straight dark hair, parted down the middle, and a sallow, sickly complexion. She was dressed entirely in black—black jeans, black shirt, black Nikes. Not exactly the color you want to wear if you’re spending the day in the broiling Arizona sun, I thought. She smoked cigarettes, too—the skinny brown kind—and had a persistent, hacking, phlegmy cough. She clearly wasn’t in the best of health, and I wondered why she would subject herself to the strenuous hiking we would be doing over the next five days. And then she told me that she was Amanda Reid’s personal assistant and that accompanying Amanda on all of her trips was part of the job.

  “My name’s Billy Braddick,” said a very muscular twenty-something with closely-cropped, reddish-brown hair and a matching goat
ee. He was wearing jeans, sneakers, and a turquoise tank top, his biceps crisping in tanning oil and bulging ostentatiously, like Popeye after a can of spinach. “How’re ya doing?” he asked in that sort of swaggering, construction worker-ish way some men have when what they really mean is: “Want to fuck?” After I said I was just fine, thank you, he told me that he was Amanda Reid’s personal trainer and that Mrs. Reid liked to have him around wherever she went. “In case she pulls a groin muscle or something,” he winked.

  “I am Marie Poussant,” said a plump, disheveled Frenchwoman in her fifties. She wore her short brown hair in a mess of tangled curls, her mascara was badly smudged, and her lipstick had been applied in such a haphazard manner that it only covered three-quarters of her mouth. As for her hiking attire, it consisted, not of Nikes and jeans, but of Keds and a shmatte—a sleeveless print dress that exposed her pale, heavy arms and made them look like two loaves of unbaked bread. She told me that she was Amanda Reid’s personal chef and that, Mon Dieu, Madame Reid would never travel without her. She would if she knew you’d been hitting the cooking sherry, I thought, after detecting a hint of the stuff on her breath.

  “Jennifer Sibley! Great to meet you!” said an extremely perky woman with a long, blonde ponytail, a trim, athletic figure, and the perfectly aligned white teeth of an anchorwoman. I figured her for about thirty. She was wearing an outfit identical to mine, complete with the Tranquility T-shirt, and she had a cell phone protruding from one pocket of her jeans and a beeper clipped onto the back of another. “I’m Amanda Reid’s personal publicist and I’m always on hand when there’s a media situation to be dealt with,” she explained, pumping my hand with tremendous enthusiasm.

  I was about to ask what possible “media situation” would need to be dealt with in the middle of nowhere when the final member of Amanda Reid’s party-of-six stepped forward.

  “It’s Crystal, right?” said a man of approximately my age as he scribbled notes in a spiral-bound pad. He was short, stocky, and balding, and he had a sort of world-weary expression on his face, which was, unfortunately for him, covered with childhood acne scars.

  “Yes, it’s Crystal,” I said. “Crystal Goldstein.”

  “From?” he asked.

  “From?”

  “Where do you live?” he said, his pen poised to record the answer in his notepad.

  “New York. Why?”

  “Oh. Sorry. I’m Michael Mandell, a contributing editor of Personal Life,” he said. “I’m doing a piece on Amanda Reid for the magazine, so I’m tagging along on this Jeep thing.” He glanced first to his right, then to his left, and when he was sure that the others had moved away and were no longer within earshot, he whispered, “The story is really about Harrison Reid. He finally has a new book coming out after fifteen years. I’m covering ‘the Mrs.’ as sort of a sidebar. You know, a puff piece.”

  A puff piece. Still, I was thrilled. For all I knew, my name could land in Personal Life, which didn’t quite have the cachet of Vanity Fair but so what?

  “Harrison Reid has written a new novel?” I asked Michael. I’d spent most of my adult life reading tax returns, not fiction, but even I knew that Harrison Reid hadn’t published a book since the mid-eighties and that he hadn’t produced a real body of work since the seventies. Back then, his thousand-plus-page novels concerning such weighty themes as religion, race, and politics in America were widely acclaimed, staples of the bestseller lists, nominated for literary prizes, snapped up for television mini-series. But a long dry spell set in after the ’84 novel and Reid was said to have descended into a life of debauchery—boozing and womanizing and appearing only occasionally with his wife, who attended most of her society soirées with a series of walkers.

  “It’s not a novel,” said Michael. “It’s a collection of humorous essays about death.”

  “Sounds like a scream,” I said. “What’s it called?”

  “The Right Stiff,”he smirked. “Ordinarily, the magazine wouldn’t touch the book, but it’s got Harrison Reid’s name on it, he’s agreed to let me interview him at length, and she”—he nodded at Amanda—“said she would be absolutely delighted to cooperate. Between you and me, I think she turned several shades of green when we did that valentine to Brooke Astor in the July issue. She’s been dying for us to shine the spotlight on her—and on her genius husband, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  I listened intently as Michael dished the dirt with me, dropped names, and bragged about his ability to take shorthand in an age when most celebrity interviewers relied on tape recorders.

  “You know,” he said, “you’re lucky there was room for you on this Jeep tour. Amanda’s nutritionist, hairdresser, and masseuse were supposed to come, too, but I hear they all quit a week or so before the trip.”

  “Quit? Why? Is Amanda Reid difficult to work for?” I asked.

  Michael rolled his eyes. “Take a look at Tina, the one in black.”

  “The assistant?”

  He nodded. “She’s been with Amanda the longest of these folks. Does she strike you as a relaxed, happy person?”

  I regarded Tina. She was dragging on her cigarette, then sucking on a strand of hair, then biting a fingernail, then tearing at a cuticle. She was a nervous wreck and she reminded me of myself, minus the cigarette, pre-Sedona. No wonder Rona was so worried about me, I thought with a shudder.

  “The others don’t seem to mind being here,” I said, motioning toward Billy, Marie, and Jennifer.

  “‘Seem’ is the operative word. I betcha they’ll start showing a little wear and tear as this five-day tour gets going,” he said.

  “Tina! Didn’t the hotel person say the Jeep was picking us up at nine o’clock?” Amanda demanded of her assistant.

  “It’s only five after nine,” Tina replied sullenly, tossing her cigarette onto the ground and mashing it with her sneaker. After what Michael had said, I had a feeling she was fantasizing that it was her boss’s head she was mashing.

  “You should go inside and see if there’s a problem,” Amanda directed Tina.

  “Aw, come on, Mrs. Reid. The car will be here any minute now,” Billy soothed as he moved closer to Amanda and began to administer a neck rub. She moaned with pleasure while Marie said “Mon Dieu” and Jennifer made a call from her cell phone.

  “It is possible that the driver got lost, no?” Marie suggested.

  “Of course not,” Amanda answered sharply, as if her chef were a fool. “He comes here to pick up passengers every day of the week. Besides, he’s probably an Indian, and Indians never get lost. That’s why they were able to discover this land before we were, isn’t that right, Billy?”

  Billy shrugged and continued to knead Amanda’s neck and shoulder muscles.

  Michael was about to make a snide remark to me when we all saw a car speeding toward us—and I do mean speeding. It was a large red Jeep—an open-air, four-wheel-drive vehicle with an awning for a top and the words “Sacred Earth Jeep Tour” printed in navy blue along both sides. After doing a near spin-out, it came to an abrupt, screeching stop in front of the courtyard, kicking up dust and spraying us with it.

  “Good Lord!” said Amanda, spitting microscopic pieces of sediment out of her mouth. “I’m not ready to put my life in the hands of this driver!”

  I wasn’t so sure about the guy myself: I was the one who was going to have to sit up front next to him for five whole days.

  Amanda was still grumbling about the driver when he emerged from the Jeep.

  The sun was nearly blinding me, so I shielded my eyes in order to get a better look at the man. I could make out that he was of medium height and on the lean, rangy side—broad shouldered but long limbed. He was wearing well-worn blue jeans, a blue-and-white-striped shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, red, earth-stained hiking boots, and a black, wide-brimmed hat that obscured most of his face but revealed a mane of brown hair that reached just below his shoulders and was tied back with an elastic band decorate
d with feathers.

  “Well, I guess Tonto finally showed up,” Michael muttered as the man drew closer to us.

  I cringed at the reference and hoped that the driver hadn’t heard it. If he had, he certainly didn’t let on.

  “Good morning, everybody,” he said cheerfully. “I’m sorry I’m late, but…Well, I’ll spare you the gory details about why I’m late. The important thing is, I’m going to be your guide today, so why don’t we just get started, okay?”

  Gee, the voice is vaguely familiar, I thought, wondering whose it reminded me of.

  “What tribe are you from?” Amanda asked the driver. “I hear Indians practically own this state.”

  The driver laughed. “I wouldn’t say that,” he said. “But there are fourteen different tribes that call Arizona home—that’s about 150,000 people living on twenty reservations. As for me, I’m not Apache or Navajo or any of them. I’m a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant boy who happens to like living here in Sedona.” He turned to Michael Mandell then, directing his words to the journalist. “And, in case you were wondering, sir, my name’s not Tonto. It’s Terry. Terry Hollenbeck.”

  I heard myself gasp as he removed the black hat. He was twenty years older and ten pounds lighter, but the smile was the same and so was the attitude. I didn’t know what I was going to do about it or even how I felt about it, but, sure enough, it was my former husband who was standing before me.

  Part Two

  Chapter Nine

  He didn’t recognize me at first. He was too busy explaining to our little group how he had rushed out of the tour office in such a hurry that he had completely forgotten to grab the passenger list the hotel had faxed there the night before; how he hadn’t had even a second to check our names; how the office would straighten everything out the next day. Blah blah blah.