by Bair, Julene
“Don’t have to. I wear a hat. Don’t take my clothes off except at night.”
I glanced meaningfully at the dark window, then looked right into the green fire.
“C’mere,” he said.
We dropped our shirts in the kitchen, my bra on the stairs, our boots in the den, and peeled off our jeans in the bedroom. When he didn’t make a move to turn on a dim light of some kind, I was afraid this was going to be another, wham-bam “get this over with cause it’s only for me and women aren’t really interested in sex” encounter.
“Uh, do you have a candle?”
He found one, no problem, but didn’t have a match in the house. He had to go down to the cold basement in his boxers and light the wick in the furnace pilot, then carefully nurture the flame all the way back up to me.
“Much better,” I said. “Now let’s take this slow, like you promised, Coyote.”
10
ON THE SECOND STORY OF WARD’S HOUSE, IN THAT HIGH ATTIC ROOM, HE HAD THIS BIG OVERSTUFFED CHAIR THAT WE WOULD SIT IN TOGETHER ON THE NIGHTS OF MY VISITS. Upholstered in nubby fabric the pale-green color of Russian olive leaves, the chair reminded me of a couch and chair we had in my childhood, before Mom bought that awful shitmuckle-brown set that had refused to wear out.
I would squeeze in beside him, facing the back of the chair. On those nights, Ward talked freely about himself. He told me about the many men he felt beholden to. Not just his father and uncles but also neighbor men who’d taken time to instruct a young boy because they “cared about something other than their own skin.” They believed in “a right way and a wrong way” and demonstrated it by their actions more than their words. Most of what they demonstrated had been about horses.
“I don’t claim to be that good a trainer, but I aspire to be,” he said. He’d been to clinics with masters and knew that to get a horse to do what you wanted, you had to align your will with the animal’s will, unifying the two spirits. “You can’t force a horse. You can’t subdue it. Oh well, you can, but you’ll only get what you deserve. You have to put yourself on the horse’s wavelength.”
Of all the western art Ward had collected, the brass base on the lamp beside that chair was the only horse in the house without a man astride it or being tossed from its back or squatting near its feet at a campfire. “Horses,” he explained, “were intended to be ridden.” His tastes in art reflected the arcane code of the cowboy, which had to be obscure in order to winnow the real ones from the pretenders. That was okay. It meant he belonged to a semi-intact culture and I couldn’t deny that this was part of his appeal. Because that culture was based in the same land I came from, I had never shared so much basic understanding with a lover, so much place sense.
Overlaid on those fundamentals were, I had to admit, some silly customs and strictures about how to dress and what to think. These put me in mind of my cowboy students in Laramie who had worn their stiff denim jeans, long-sleeved shirts, and felt hats into the classroom even during summer sessions. They looked trussed up, in uniform. Their code was a shield. Trying to get them to accept a new idea or read an unconventional text had been like trying to toss a nickel into one of those glass dishes that rested atop big stuffed teddy bears at carnivals. The ideas just bounced out of them. Those poor kids were growing up in a world that took advantage of their western identity, linking it to a particular set of political ideas.
I didn’t remember much partisan division in Kansas when I was growing up. People here had been more mainstream then. A strong current of practical common sense and reasonableness had run through both Ward’s and my childhoods. We recognized it in each other. That’s what made our political disagreements minor distractions, at least at first. Unlike most of those kids in my classroom, Ward’s eyes lit up at new ideas. He wanted to travel more. He wanted to learn. He entertained just enough cracks in the code to be open to me.
Maybe this was because he’d gone to college, then spent those years in Denver.
“My wild oats years,” Ward called them. “I skied, wheeled and dealed real estate, chased women, ran with the high rollers. Quite the desperado, you would have thought had you known me then. ”
I don’t know when this particular conversation took place. They all bleed together in the eternal present of iconic memory. That chair, the dim light cast by the horse lamp. He usually wore a black sweatshirt and pants. I wore green silk pajamas that I bought to look sexy in, for him. “We were all full of it then,” I said. “So you had a good time?”
“Oh I was flying. But you know, you talk about being lonely? I think I was, but I didn’t know it. I haven’t been lonely once since I came home.”
“How is that? When Jake was a baby, and I lived back here, I hardly had any friends at all. That was one reason I left again.”
“You can have a thousand so-called friends and still be lonely,” Ward said. “I could go all year here and not see a soul, and be happier than I was in Denver.” But he didn’t have to go a day without seeing a friend if he didn’t want to. “They might all be codgers and misfits,” he said, “but we do have fun together.” Most of his friendships centered on horse sales, roping, and poker, he explained, then suggested that my reading, writing, and wilderness passions had not been as widely shared.
Gradually it dawned on me that I was dating a favorite son. Whenever I visited Plum Springs with Ward, I felt as if I’d stumbled into Brigadoon, that hyperfriendly Scottish utopia made famous in a 1950s musical that, it turned out, both of our high schools had staged when we were students. Ward had not only been a budding actor then but also a good singer, and had starred in his school’s production, while I hadn’t even dared to try out. Men backslapped him when we went to gas stations or restaurants, and on one visit to town near Christmas, he ran into at least five ex-girlfriends, home for the holidays.
“It was only three or four,” he insisted.
His last girlfriend had been a Baptist. She took him to church, which he didn’t mind. “It made her happy, and I don’t pretend to have the answers in that department.” But then one day he woke up and knew he couldn’t make her happy and make himself happy too. When he told her this, he said she turned white as a sheet and didn’t say a word. This haunted him.
It troubled me too. “I never want to be in her shoes,” I said.
“You don’t have to worry. You won’t be.”
“Why not?” I wanted to know.
“She wasn’t you, Julene.”
I took him at face value on this because of how he enthused about me. “You don’t know how much I love being with someone like you,” he would say. “We can talk about everything and anything, not just about what’s for dinner.”
I suggested that maybe his being a man in such a male-dominated place allowed him to realize his potential without having to leave, but that’s not how he saw it. “I haven’t reached my potential, not nearly. Coming back was the only way I could do what I love. I know there’s a bigger world out there. I’m not tied to here.”
No falser words were ever spoken, I suspected. “But that’s what intrigues me about you,” I said. “You stayed.”
“And that’s what intrigues me about you. You didn’t.”
He came from a functional family in which everyone hugged and expressed affection openly. His two brothers, who were both married, made a point of charming me. “Why’d you ever consent to go out with this cuss? We can’t shut him up about you. It’s Ju-lene this, Ju-lene that.” While I wouldn’t have traded my iconoclastic brother’s sideways love for the forthright affection between Ward and his sibs, it was nice being warmly received. One of his sisters-in-law dashed out and bought me a present when she heard I would be visiting during the Christmas holiday, a large candle that we always lit when we were making love.
I shared in his fondness for his father, a balding man who looked like so many old farmers, still strong in the shoulders
, barrel-chested, his face pocked by the removal of cancerous sores. He reminded me in some ways of my own father, although Ward’s dad was a humbler and less accomplished man. There were apparently advantages to this.
“He didn’t work me the way your dad did your brothers. Oh, he had me on plenty of tractors, but I wasn’t his tractor dog like Bruce says he was. It would be a week here, a week there, not all summer. He gave me plenty of time off to have fun.”
His mother looked at me hopefully, as if I might be the one to finally capture and domesticate her eldest son. She was the fawning type, obviously in thrall of all her sons, but I sensed tension between Ward and her. He said she’d guilt tripped him and his brothers when they were growing up by complaining that she had to quit her job for the county’s biggest grain merchant in order to raise them.
How dare she! I thought. Who needed a bustling office, an appreciative boss, and the world’s important business to be proficient in when you could work alone at home for no pay? “Try to imagine it the other way around,” I said. “A father having to give up his career to raise kids. But it doesn’t work that way, does it? Or it didn’t then. Dads made the money, while moms were supposed to stay at home and be happy about it.”
“No matter how it worked, or should have worked, I couldn’t do anything about it,” Ward said.
There was clearly more hurt here than I had originally thought. “Other than take the blame?” I asked.
His lips set together so tightly that they disappeared below his mustache. He shrugged.
Sometimes the onus of motherhood terrified me. How much had I traumatized my son? “I was luckier than your mom,” I said. “I had no choice but to work. So I never had to feel deprived in that way. When I was teaching and Jake would get sick and I had to stay home to take care of him, I was actually grateful.” I told Ward about the chronic earaches Jake used to get. “We’d sit together for hours, like you and I do here, except it was a rocking chair. ‘The rack,’ I called it.”
“Sounds like torture,” Ward said. He gave me a warm, approving grin.
I flashed on an image of Jake as a four-year-old in his blue jammies with the feet in them. He would lie across my lap with his long legs twisted around the chair’s wooden arm, and his chin would be stained with the red antibiotic syrup I’d given him. My back would strain as I held him up so the other chair arm wouldn’t press into him.
“But when he finally went to sleep,” I said to Ward, “his relief was my relief.” I paused for a moment. “It works the other way around too, though. His pain is my pain.”
“I can understand that,” Ward said. “But not his failures. Those should be his alone. Don’t take those on yourself.”
“A parent has no choice,” I said, “especially when a kid doesn’t seem to care that much himself.” How could that be? I wanted to know. Jake had never been a striver when it came to school or learning. The only diagnosis any of his therapists had come up with had been ADD, the blanket explanation for every childhood motivational or behavioral problem, it seemed. I’d refused to drug Jake into submission, and now that I’d caught him smoking pot more than once, it didn’t seem the time to give him speed.
Ward said, “Kids need consistency. You’ve got to lay down the law and make it firm.”
“That’s easy for someone who has no kids to say,” I shot back. “Believe me, I’ve done everything I can to be ‘consistent and lay down the law.’”
“Do you think I’m judging you, Julene? Because I’m not. I know you’re a great parent. I could tell that the first time I met Jake. He’s a sweet kid.”
“Judging.” It was that word that got to me. I forced a smile, then dropped my head to hide what was happening to my face.
Ward changed the subject. “You’ve never said much about Jake’s dad, or how you met him.”
“Marrying Jake’s dad was the stupidest decision I ever made, but I was riding high before that, living alone in this remote cabin in the middle of the Mojave Desert. I feel kind of like we’re in the desert now.” It was true. Cozy in the quiet house, with the brass horse lamp turned low and knowing that the corrals outside were full of real horses, reminded me of my Mojave rock house at night, where my two horses had grazed right outside my front door. “I always closed the curtains at night. But if I hadn’t, no one was going to look in. That house was surrounded by more than a million acres of wilderness.”
Ward shook his head at the wonder of it.
“I hated giving up the desert when I was pregnant with Jake and had to come back here. It was humiliating. It was mortifying, in fact, but good for me in the long run. I don’t think I would know half as much about who I am if I hadn’t been forced to return. I wouldn’t write the things I write or care about the things I care about.” I looked at the clock. It was getting late. I’d been waiting to tell Ward all of this, but starting this late, I wouldn’t be able to do the story justice.
Ward patted his thigh. “C’mere.”
I muttered something unspellable, a cross between a moan and a sigh.
“What?” he said.
I smiled slightly, shook my head.
He laughed. “Wha-at?”
“I love it when you say, ‘C’mere,’” I confessed, climbing astraddle.
He lifted almost imperceptibly, from the hips.
A shiver ran through me and I fell on his chest. “God! What you do to me.”
“Oh darlin’.”
• • •
WARD’S BED WAS DIFFERENT FROM HIS CHAIR. He insisted that I think of it as our bed, not his. The same with my bed in Laramie. It was ours. Our beds felt almost sacred to him, he said, although he realized that “you have to be careful mixing religious language with sex. Tends to put a damper on things.”
Our Kansas bed was the same one his aunt and uncle had slept in, part of the suite of dark furniture that caused me to imagine we were on the set of an old Western movie. Even though I’d succeeded in slowing him down, the love we made was bumbling at first. I hoped that his aunt and uncle had done better. But it took me years to become uninhibited enough to talk about sex, and—call it my prejudice—I didn’t think those conversations took place often in Kansas.
“I need to tell you something about me,” I murmured.
“I had a feeling we were going to have this talk.”
“So you probably know what I’m going to say?”
“I think so.” Ward gave me a reassuring kiss on the forehead. “But tell me anyway. You can tell me anything.”
I guided his hand to the spot.
“What do you want me to do?”
Ward’s other lovers all had hair triggers, he guessed. “Lucky them,” I quipped. I had little doubt they’d been faking, as I had done when I was younger.
Ward reassured me that he loved me all the more because I was special in this, as in every other way. On hearing the word “special,” I literally bit my tongue. I held it between my teeth until the urge to spill anger all over him subsided. But once I’d coached him, he was so responsive to my needs that the umbrage I took at that word faded, then disappeared.
In our beds, images were born in both our minds that sustained us during our long separations. One foggy March morning he awoke from a dream in which I hovered over him, wearing only the red satin jacket I’d worn when we went dancing together on New Year’s Eve in Laramie.
He told me that he spent the remainder of the day in a state of grace. As he mended barbed wire in one of his far-flung pastures, the vision reappeared, warming him even as the cold mist thickened to rain and wet his clothes through to his skin. We were able to see each other only about once every month, and he had been feeling down about the seeming impossibility of our ever being together permanently. The dream buoyed him up.
I loved the stillness of his room at night, the stars out his window. His metabolism was slower than m
ine, calmer. When I lay on his shoulder, that calm emanated from him and into me. It brought to mind the cottonwood tree beside the spring where we’d met. He seemed as solid as that tree.
And when I pulled out of his yard, beginning the three-hundred-mile drive back to Laramie, he would stand as still as that tree, watching me go. Standing there all woebegone in his thick Carhartt jacket, he reminded me of my father in his wool-lined denim jacket, although my father never would have found himself alone at age fifty, unless Mom had died. Even then, I couldn’t imagine Dad looking romantically forlorn. He was not a romantic man. The two men were very different. Yet they were formed by the same soil.
II
A BODY IN A PLACE
Emancipation from the bondage of the soil
is no freedom for the tree.
— RABINDRANATH TAGORE, “Fireflies”
1
CALIFORNIA, 1976. The Sierra Nevada Mountains. I am twenty-six, and my boyfriend is leading the way up a trail into the Desolation Wilderness. On my back is the olive-green pack he helped me pick out at the REI store in Berkeley. It contains my share of everything we will need over the next two days and nights—the sleeping bag and pad he also helped me choose, the set of tin dinnerware his ex-wife used when they camped together, two boxes of macaroni and cheese, one can of tuna and one of condensed milk, a round of smoked Gouda, six bagels, fuel for the stove, matches, my Swiss army knife, a comb, lip moisturizer, and a smattering of clothes. Somehow these few items add up to a shoulder-straining, back-breaking weight that I bear resentfully and in shock.
Although I moved to San Francisco in 1968 at the age of eighteen, and San Francisco is a city of many hills, I’ve only recently begun getting used to walking up them. On our weekends together my boyfriend and I often trundle up and down between his Telegraph Hill apartment and the North Beach coffeehouses, restaurants, and jazz clubs. But this isn’t a hill. It’s a mountain. Other than the windmills on our farm when I was a kid, it’s the steepest thing I’ve climbed in my entire life. It doesn’t help that my boyfriend carries a larger pack and strides ahead of me—up and over rocks and tree roots, across streams, always up, up, and up—faster than I can manage and as if it costs him no effort at all. I stare maliciously into the back of his head and his narrow shoulders, which he holds in his usual thrown-back straight manner despite the weight they carry. I wish I could focus hatred like a magnifying glass focuses the sun, causing a fire to light in his curly brown hair.
