The Crossings

by Deborah Larsen

  “They do. They can grind up the cactus spines with their jaws.”

  Sophie imagined that, and then winced; but in the next moment she was seized by awe at the thought of the sheer power of such jaws. “Can you—deter them?”

  “Perhaps with a blowtorch, if I had one and was willing to use it. Which I am not.”

  His garage door opened and a car backed onto the driveway. “This will be my spouse, Michelle,” Jesús said. The car window came down.

  “Hi there. I am Michelle.”

  “I am Sophie. By the way, I loved the jelly. Thank you.”

  Michelle nodded. “We eat only this jelly at our house. Of course, I have nothing at all to do with it. It is all the work of Jesús’ hands. Pardon me, but I’m off to a fundraiser. For Gabrielle Giffords. Our congresswoman. We think she’s going to be the next president of the United States. See you later.” She waved and smiled and was gone.

  “How well do you know Santos?” Jesús avoided her eyes after she told him that she was on her way to a dinner party at another neighbor’s—Santos Quinn’s.

  “Not well. I met him at the homeowners’ meeting. I know he’s a doctor.”

  “He told you that?”

  “No—his beeper went off while we were talking. He had to excuse himself to call the hospital in Tucson.”

  “I see.”

  When Sophie walked on, Jesús called after her. “Do not expect it will be fancy, this dinner—what you are used to on the East Coast.”

  She stopped and turned to hear him out.

  “No vertical presentations. No chicken feet in the air six inches from your nose.”

  “Good.”

  “Speaking of feathered creatures or las aves.” he said. “Consider them—the birds of the air.” He gestured toward two White-winged Doves on his adobe wall. “They talk neither politics nor religion, yet their heavenly Father feeds them.”

  “Sometimes, Jesús,” Sophie said. “And sometimes, now, the birds go hungry. Because of what we are doing to the land.”

  “Let me give that some thought.”

  Tintin in America

  Sophie entered Santos’s courtyard through an iron gate. The outside awnings dressed the windows there with a blue that was distinctly not a desert color. Then she looked up and realized it was a desert color, a blue torn from the desert sky and measured, hemmed. With these blues, with this full sun, she thought: Embrace hope, all ye who enter here.

  No doorbell. The double mesquite doors were at least twice as tall as she was. She knocked.

  The guests included Lily, with spiky auburn hair, and her graying husband—Michael. When they were introduced, Lily said “Nordlund. Are you also from Minnesota?”

  “I grew up there. But Nordlund was my husband’s name.”

  Lily lifted her right shoulder as if she were having a muscle spasm. “Oh but you are Scandinavian, though? What was your maiden name?”

  “Jacobs.”

  “Oh but isn’t that Jewish?”

  Michael closed his eyes for a moment. Then he walked over to look at Santos’s bookshelves.

  Sophie said, “Some of my ancestors were Czech, some German, some English and French. My father always said that we might also be Jewish, on his side. And he was right. My recent DNA analysis showed a small amount of European Jewish ethnicity. To my delight.”

  Lily regarded her. “You know who you remind me of? You remind me of Dianne Wiest. It’s uncanny. Even your gestures are just like hers.” She raised her voice. “Michael!”

  He turned from the bookcase. Sophie could see that he had pulled a book from the shelf. She would have recognized the dust jacket anywhere. It was the Library of America’s William James: Writings 1878-1899.

  “Who does this Sophie Nordlund remind you of?”

  Michael blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Who does Sophie remind you of?” Lily raised her eyebrows.

  Michael lifted his free hand and opened it in the manner of the humble clueless.

  “Dianne Wiest!”

  Just then Sophie’s neighbor Jack, the Impaler of oranges, arrived with a woman whose silver wedding-band bore a bas-relief of an armadillo. She was blond and wore a short denim skirt, a concho belt, and a white linen blouse. Santos introduced her to Sophie as “Stella.”

  The other guests were Kurt, Alain, Serena, Alyssa, and someone from Tucson whose name she could not quite catch. Sophie’s hearing was beginning to fail, but there it was—another of the diminishments of aging. Just the other day, her new dentist had said, “Your front teeth are looking a little worn down.” Worn down? Sophie sometimes had to laugh. What else was there to do? No wonder death was on her mind so much.

  She saw that Jack was standing by himself and she approached him. “You are the person who is hanging oranges on the mesquite tree.”

  “I am. Cut oranges. Orange-halves.”

  “For the birds?”

  Jack hesitated and then said, “Yes.”

  “I think that’s my mesquite.”

  “Ah. Do you mind?”

  “I guess not. When I first saw them, I couldn’t make them out. They were so unexpected; a little menacing—strange. Perhaps, I thought, they had to do with immigrants.”

  “Quite right,” Jack said. “Migrants. The other ones: the ones with feathers.”

  Sophie smiled. “I should have known. But in that—my—tree, they baffled me as being not quite in the normal order of things.”

  “Normal,” someone said. “Normal?” Stella had walked up to them. She looked first at Jack and then right into Sophie’s eyes as if to warn her not to talk to Jack too long. “Normal. Don’t you know?” Stella had a slightly exaggerated twang. Or maybe not exaggerated—Sophie couldn’t decide. “Don’t you know?” she said again. “Why, normal’s just a cycle on the washin’ machine.”

  When Santos brought Sophie a glass of red wine, she thanked him and then looked toward the bookcase. “I see you have William James. Michael had it in his hand.”

  “I go back and back to James, ah—to understand and try to help those whose lives are marked. As an oncologist, I seem to be always among the walking doomed—although some of my terminal patients find they have discovered real life for the first time in their lives.”

  The front door had been left ajar and now Jesús walked in. He wore a chambray shirt and khaki pants. “I am sorry I am late,” he said. He bowed. “Mea culpa. Through my fault.” And then as if by way of explanation, he said, “Long ago I was a Catholic.”

  Santos smiled. “Come in. And you all know Jesús, except perhaps for Sophie?”

  “We have met,” said Jesús. “She is our new neighbor.” Then he said, “And who is my neighbor?”

  After an hour, Santos said, “Please,” and nodded toward the dining table.

  He said that since his partner was out of town, he had prepared the dinner himself. Now he was serving it, bringing them avocado soup in heavy white bowls. Sophie said, “May I help?”

  “Thank you, no.” Santos smiled.

  Sophie was seated next to the woman whose name she had missed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t quite catch your name.”

  “Han.”

  “Ann?”

  “Han. Spelled H-A-N.”

  Jesús was studying his fingernails as if he thought they might need cutting or scrubbing with a brush. But Sophie saw that his nails were short. And immaculate.

  Alain sat at Sophie’s right. He lived in Tucson; now he spoke a little of his life in France.

  Lily bent forward from across the table. “Oh but how did you end up in a place like Tucson?”

  “Because.” He smiled. “‘Cowboys and Indians.’”

  “In Montepellier in France, I saw my first drawings of saguaros. My first drawings of a tomahawk, a hache de guerre. These were in a c
omic strip and then a book by the Belgian, Hergé—the pen name for Georges Remi. Tintin in America: Tintin en Amérique. First published by Hergé around 1931. The main character, Tintin, was a reporter and had a companion—a dog, a white terrier named Snowy. On his way west in America, he encountered Chicago gangsters: corruption, indeed. But then! The American West: a different landscape. Native Americans. Smoke signals.

  “Hergé wrote a whole Tintin series. Comic books: bandes dessinées. All of Europe loved what he created. Some other titles: Tintin in Tibet, Cigars of the Pharaohs, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets. Tintin went to The Land of the Black Gold. He even went to the moon. His pioneered the style called the ligne claire—the ‘clear line.’”

  “Oh but,” Lily said, “Tintin sounds familiar somehow.”

  Jesús said, “What—” He looked right at Lily and put his fork on his plate. “What, please tell me, is an ‘oh but’?” The table fell silent. Lily blinked.

  Jesús said, “What—” He looked right at Lily and put his fork on his plate. “What, please tell me, is an ‘oh but’?” The table fell silent. Lily blinked.

  “It is interesting.” Jesús continued: “Imagine an ‘oh but.’ Is it like—what do you call it—a watchbird? ‘This is an ohbut ohbutting you.’”

  Lily said, “Oh but—. Why, that’s funny.” And then she said, “Is that a criticism, Jesús?”

  “I believe it is a watchbird, your constant watchword. ‘Ohbut.’”

  Lily turned her back on Jesús and spoke to Alain. “As I was saying: that name, Tintin, sounds familiar.”

  “Yes. Because Mr. Spielberg co-opted Tintin in a film called The Adventures of Tintin. Perhaps you saw Snowy, Milou, sitting, apparently, in a theatre seat at the Academy Awards? But Tintin’s American adventures enthralled me. I am assuming that Mr. Spielberg did not want to tackle that particular subject matter. It would bring up the complex matter of treatment of Native Americans.” He opened his hands, cupped them, and examined them.

  Jack leaned forward. “Spielberg takes risks, Alain. Maybe he will produce Tintin in America. You are not alone in being fascinated with the American West, but—to move here because of cowboys and Indians. Surprising.”

  “There was something else. I mentioned the moon: Tintin went there in a book called Destination Moon or, in French, Objectif Lune.”

  Santos said, “Alain is an astronomer.”

  “Yes, and Objectif Lune was the book that set me on that path. An eccentric character in that book, a rather deaf Professor Calculus, built the rocket that went to the moon. I became fascinated with heavenly bodies. And where do you find superb, dark night-skies for clearer views of their movements?” He smiled and opened his hands, palms upward. “This is the end of my story; this is why I now dwell under the Southwest skies on paths where ancient Americans dwelt and dwell. I should add that Professor Calculus would not use his ear trumpet and he also discarded a hearing aid. Now that I have become a little deaf I am happy to say that I do not emulate him: I always wear my hearing aids. Science tells me that doing that will help protect me from cognitive decline.”

  Alyssa said, “I have seen many mesquite tables but this one is exquisite.” She ran her hand over the embedded, crushed turquoise that filled one of the knotholes.

  Kurt described a mesquite table-top he had seen that seemed to have some symmetry in it. “It looked like the blurry head of a long-horned bull.”

  “A bull head, perhaps; but surely not,” Jesús said, “a longhorn.”

  “I know mesquite,” Serena said. “Mesquite is mesquite. The only being I have found in mesquite is the live, flat-headed wood borer. And that ugly, larval creature—it looks just like a tiny, sawed-off pene—is responsible for some of these knotholes.”

  Han Suyin

  On the way home, Sophie thought that she had never been to a dinner party quite like this. No gossip about small-town doings as there had been at Glynn.

  The East Coast of the United States was often preoccupied with a quickened pace, with income, as well as with why French women don’t get fat. The book on this subject to the contrary, Sophie thought it was because French women smoked. Those same easterners—and she had been guilty as well—had not learned the French lesson about there being a certain rudeness in asking people what people they “did.”

  Here it was as if status mostly melted away in the summer heat or became beside the point in the face of the power of monsoon lightning. Or of age. Sophie was reminded of the Coen brothers: A Serious Man. When you’re watching the approach of an equivalent of a tornado you don’t turn and ask people where they are, effectively, on the pay scale.

  Sophie had overheard Serena telling Santos that she would stay afterwards to help clean up. “Thank you but, no, you won’t,” he said.

  “Why not? I work on keeping this kitchen clean every other week and I can bring it back to order in a flash. I’m a living flash-drive.”

  “You are not working in this kitchen this evening. You are not lifting a finger.”

  So Serena cleaned for him. Vacuumed. Scrubbed toilets. Spread lemon oil on the mesquite table. She had never been at a dinner party where the person who cleaned for the host sat at his right hand at the table as a guest. Another thing that startled Sophie was that Han’s mother had named her Han Suyin after seeing a movie in the 1950’s.

  Sophie thought again about the chef, Nawal Nasrall—the native of Iraq—and her quotation from al-Hasan bin Abi-Talib. You did want to continue sitting at dinner tables like these for as long as you could. When she moved here, she had thought she would do well without people.

  Eating dinner alone was sometimes an ordeal. Reading or watching the news helped but she did rue the fact that a News Anchor was often The Male in her life. She could hardly wait for whomever to appear in the evenings. She studied his ties. True, she didn’t want to get into bed with him. Bed had aftermaths: what she had given up for deciding to be on her own. Her lost husband had been the enduring, surprising romantic in bed. No one could match him.

  Once The Male was Tom Brokaw. And there had been Ed Bradley who, to her dismay, had eventually gone and married Patricia Blanchet; then he had died. How could Ed have done those things without telling Sophie, without explaining himself.

  Well. You are alone by choice. Perhaps it will be enough to be invited back occasionally to dine at Santos’s mysterious table.

  “Han Suyin” haunted her. Why did the name sound so familiar? Later that night, she googled it and a whole segment of her childhood bloomed once more. How could she have forgotten? Jennifer Jones. William Holden. Love is a Many Splendored Thing. The young girl that was Sophie wanted nothing so much as to grow up to be Han Suyin. A woman who was a physician. And who was Eurasian. And who loved an American journalist.

  Remember Chippewa Falls… ?

  It appears that Charles Darwin thought of himself as somewhat ordinary. Sophie had taken a detour to read his autobiography; he seemed to her unassuming. How then had he become Charles Darwin?

  All she knew was that this “ordinary” person was now an occasion of distress for millions of ordinary people, whether they thought much about it or not. What they thought his theory was may have been on a par with the old notion of hell: it insensibly frightened them, gnawed at them, made them edgy.

  Stephen Hawking had once elbowed Jonathan Franzen off the top of the Amazon bestseller list. Charles Darwin was now crowding out the mystery writers stacked up on Sophie’s study floor.

  She would just sit in her glassy study, a cabin like his, and read. Would that focus turn her cabin into some sort of cell? She might indeed become an anchorite, if not a prisoner. She could be St. Jerome in the desert reading and making notes.

  What would St. Jerome think of her reading project? Her Darwin?

  Her Darwin? Where had that come from?

  Probably Jerome would not be impressed. Wou
ld he have been embarrassed? Did Doctors of the Church even get embarrassed? Well—too bad.

  She thought anchorites must be pale. Ghostly. She hadn’t come here to grow pale.

  Sophie went and looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. If her face was not exactly rosy, she was at least gaining a little color.

  Pale did not appeal to her. She had practically withered away when she went to the mid-Atlantic, to the bronchitis corridor of the United States. Adult-onset asthma overtook her and, yes, bronchitis; her daughter grew feverish, listless with monthly ear infections. Sophie’s spirits drooped way, way down. After all, it was Poe country: miasmas rose from the river valleys.

  But here. She woke almost every blessed day with broad strokes of sunlight on her bedroom wall.

  Take today, an ordinary February morning. The paper had said it all: a high of 73 degrees. Fair. Pleasant. On Monday it would be sunny and pleasant; on Tuesday, a full day of sun; Wednesday—sunny and beautiful; Thursday—brilliant sunshine.

  The TV meteorologists must be tearing their hair looking for varying descriptions of sunshine to avoid saying “same as yesterday” or same old, same old. Maybe they sat together over a beer and muttered amongst themselves. “What if we said, ‘That stunning orb is back again today.’ Or ‘Remember Chippewa Falls or Seattle in the winter, folks?’”

  She loved gaining a little color, so she thought she might go to the back patio to read. Which she concluded to do. Which she did.

  With coffee, with the biography she now had in soft cover; with a fine-point pen and a notebook she had labelled “Darwin,” she settled herself outside in a conservatory-style wicker chair. Isabelle had told her there was a dating website called, “OkCupid.” Sophie said to herself, OkDarwin. You are my date.

  Then she felt a twinge of distress. What was it?

  The pecked, the blasted orange-globes were stuck on the trees again but that wasn’t the cause of her discomfort. She had heard from her friend, Ted, the night before. He had reminded her of what was happening in the winter, east of Eden. That world was preoccupied with the first slants of snow.