She was pale, which was odd for a young woman in that climate. She sat near the rail, dabbling at ranch dressing with raw vegetables, drinking some sour cocktail through a straw. A wispy linen dress hung from her shoulders. She held the toy radio, the drawstring loose around her wrist. I asked if there was any way I could help.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “With what?”
“You seem stifled. Are you all right?”
“Me?”
“That radio, for example. It’s such a strange thing. Something a kid would carry.”
“This? It’s nothing,” she said. “Just the news. I like to hear the weather. Though they’re arguing over the school board now.”
“Do you mind?” I asked, scraping over a cast-iron chair to join her.
She extended her hand. “I’m Anna,” she said. She turned off the radio and dropped it into her purse.
Anna told me she was visiting from St. Louis while her house was under reconstruction. Her husband suggested, and she consented, that it would be more enjoyable for her to take a vacation than wait until the house was no longer a disaster area. He would summon her when the work was done.
She asked if I was married and I didn’t lie—I was an apparent tourist, middle-aged, in khaki shorts, wearing my wedding band. I had a walker’s physique: fit in some places, not so much in others. I told Anna that my wife was an artist. Anna’s husband worked in government, she said. He wanted to be elected to high office some day. He worked campaigns for principals in the local party now, as many as he could get in on. In fact, that’s how she met him. She’d been an intern for Kit Bond while an undergrad at SLU.
“Wish I could do more for him,” she said, “career-wise. Besides making a family, I mean. We don’t have babies,” she added, quietly.
When Anna talked about how practically everyone who mattered in St. Louis knew who her husband was and what he wanted, it sounded like she despised him for his ambition. She had a habit of glaring at her hands when she spoke. She confessed that she had no idea what she was doing in Atlanta.
“My neighbor set up the trip, honestly. Rita came over and used our computer to do it. What did she call this place? Hotlanta?” Anna grinned as she said this, hand over her mouth. “She said something about the heat and how it made folks hunger. My neighbor is a lonely woman, I think. I don’t know why I trust her.”
Anna picked at celery stalks as she talked. She somehow managed to not take bites when she put food to her mouth—she bit without biting through—there were teeth marks in the carrots on her plate. She’d only ordered because the waiter kept asking if she wanted something.
We talked about marriage a long time. The good stuff, then the bad, then the qualifications and excuses. Our conversation followed a plot arc. Something happened to Anna, she was emotional, she calmed down, something else happened a few weeks after that, and it wasn’t until later that she remembered the first thing, the original outrage, and by then it was too late for her to do something about it. Her resentment piled up. My stories were the same, structurally. We turned listless and bleak, hearing about each other’s marriage wounds. They lacked finality. We wanted firm endings and closure.
Neither of us had been to Atlanta before. We talked about being there. It was something different to talk about, something universal to our kind, being on vacation.
“I haven’t even left the hotel yet,” Anna confessed. “I took a taxi cab from the airport. I’ve been here ever since.”
I convinced her that we should see some sights together. Jacq would be in Savannah all the next day too.
“We should go to the MLK stuff, at least. I need someone to see it with. You can’t go to things like that alone. People will think you’re up to something.”
Jacq almost married Ampiere, years ago, a few months before she met me. He backed out before they had anything legalized. They’d been together for years, off and on. Jacq adored him. She followed him around and let him introduce her to people. There were blurbs about them in the Village Voice, the Post, elsewhere. Ampiere was prone to grand, meaningless gestures, the kind of sadism women found charming. Jacq let Ampiere have his way with her. He didn’t want to marry her, however. He made this clear, in a hotel room with a half-dozen aspiring male models, then fled to Europe after 9/11 because he was too anxious to stay. To her credit, Jacq didn’t chase him there. She couldn’t hold it against him, I don’t think, his betrayal. She didn’t have it in her to hate Ampiere. If he wanted to fly off to Italy to explore bodies she would let him. Jacq was fine with staying in New York. She had her own occupation, after all.
Even if she let Ampiere go, I don’t think she ever really got over him. That’s why the magazine bugged me so much on the way to Atlanta. There he was, in swimming briefs and black sunglasses, with a woman who was too beautiful for him.
Jacq once went into detail about their sex life, after I dared her to. We were on a hotel balcony in Los Angeles, the night after she met design students at Otis. It was late and we’d drunk enough to say stupid things. “He’s hard all the time, you know. It never goes away. He fucked me till I bled. He came on my tits. I’d be soaked all over, in both his and mine. We fucked in half the public washrooms of New York, I’m sure.” How could I forget these things? “He had me go down on him in theaters, in changing rooms; I took his fingers in cabs, on the subway. In restaurant washrooms he entered from behind and came inside me. Old Ampiere. There’s a man with guts.”
She would deny these things were true, later, like such denials could mean something. They meant nothing. We’d never live down that monologue, I didn’t think. Even if the marriage ended, the declaration she made that night, that anthem she sang bitterly and clear, would live on.
Anna wanted to take a cab to Auburn Avenue, but I convinced her to ride the train with me. We went to Underground Atlanta first to shop for souvenirs. Anna bought a Braves hat for her husband. “I’m sure he won’t wear it,” she said. “He only wears Cards hats and Pujols jerseys. It’s politics.” She bought a tube of M&Ms for no real reason. They were there. After that we bought Coke floats from a vendor and sat on a rubbery green bench to fish globs of soft serve from cups. Anna took the toy radio from her purse and set it between us on the bench. “Just so we don’t get bored,” she said.
I told a story from my childhood about how I picked up walnuts from the lawn before my dad mowed. (I don’t know what brought this up. This was peanut country. Why should I think of Connecticut walnuts?) The shells dulled the blades if they were mowed over, so it was my job to collect them in a grocery sack and throw them away. We had a few walnut trees, all mature and thriving. Every summer we’d end up with hundreds of pounds of nuts. They were thick with green rind when they fell, nearly as big as baseballs sometimes, and they leaked a disgusting-smelling black juice that stained my skin. The juice would kill the grass if left to its purpose.
“I hated it so much,” I told Anna. A voice cackled some grievance from the radio, suddenly loud. “But that was my job, every Saturday. Dad supervised from the patio. He’d notice if I missed any, then have me crisscross the lawn with a point of his finger.”
Anna was very affected by the story. She grimaced. Her face glowed with sweat. “I did that for my dad too,” she said, remembering. “And I still won’t eat a walnut unless somebody makes me.”
I was comfortable with women like Anna. I knew what to say to them and how I was expected to behave. I could listen without interrupting. These were things I learned in my old career, when I was a travel agent. I knew what kinds of courtesy pleased bourgeois women.
We visited Ebenezer Baptist after another train ride. At the back of the pews we stood close and stared ahead, watching tourists photograph each other. I felt guilty being there. The church didn’t mean much to me. It was famous. I’d seen it in movies, on the History Channel. There wasn’t any reason for me to be there, except to be there with Anna. It was different for other people. There were big families alive with sweat and laug
hter, some in tears. This was a pilgrimage to them. They dressed in colorful, stiff dresses, in purple silk shirts and black slacks. There was an old man with a white mustache who wore a suit and hat. He leaned on a three-pronged aluminum cane. These people hugged and took photos, ones they would show off to folks back home, I imagined.
At the Martin Luther King tomb, Anna and I sat by each other on the edge of the fountain that surrounds it, sharing a bottle of soda in the sun. Anna sat with her legs crossed, a pleated skirt floating on her thighs. We stared into the mirrored glass across from us and listened to the rippling water. I recognized a few people from Ebenezer who were doing the same self-guided we were, the old man with the cane. Anna talked about her husband again. She was supposed to call him during the day, after lunch, and in the evening after dinner. But she didn’t that day. She wondered if he missed her call, or if he was too busy to notice.
Anna talked about her husband a lot. What food he ate, what clothes he wore, what movies he didn’t care for. She talked about his parents and friends, his sleeping habits. I felt oddly close to Anna when she talked about Jon—and to him too. I didn’t know this man, I’d never met or heard of him, but I was privy to his private details. She told me his shirt size, where he went to high school, the names of his siblings, what he smelled like after wearing a suit all day in the hot summer sun. I wondered if Anna had a pet name for his penis, and if she did, what that pet name was. Did she call it Napoleon, his dick? Mama’s little helper? The long, lazy weekend? The fund-raiser? I don’t know why, but every detail she told about him seemed to offer some clue as to what she might have called his prick. I fed all the information she shared into the game, hand on my chin, deep in thought, as if this was a code I could eventually crack.
I didn’t actually like hearing about him, the game aside. At the tomb I couldn’t help myself. I said, “You talk about him too much.”
“Who? Jon?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry. It’s fine for a woman to talk about her husband.” I put a hand on her back and apologized for saying anything. I’d merely wanted to interrupt her, I think. “I don’t care to hear about men I’ve never met. That’s all.”
She fumbled to adjust her sunglasses, turned the toy radio off. She was shaking.
“What will we do tonight?” I asked. “I’d like to drive somewhere, if we had a car.”
Anna let her eyes flicker behind her sunglasses. She didn’t have anything else to say. I looked at her eyes through the dark lenses, and, holding her arms at her sides, I kissed her. Her mouth opened, although she didn’t press back. I tasted the sugar on her lips, from the Coke, and breathed in the chlorine mist of the fountain.
We looked around as if we expected to be caught when the kiss was over. We looked for anyone who might have seen. It was just the old black man with the mustache who looked, hat tilted back on his skull, leaning on that three-pronged cane.
Jacq returned from Savannah the next afternoon. She wanted to tell me about her time with the collector, but I wouldn’t listen. I told her I’d be staying in Atlanta. She would not be. I told her there was a return ticket booked in her name. She’d fly back to Alliance without me. Jacq didn’t care for the idea. She threw a fit in the cab, and I had to check her bag for her. It wasn’t until she was in line at security that she finally relented. Jacq couldn’t resist a parting shot, not in an airport. She said she was happy to be rid of me for a few days. “Even if the plane crashes and I die,” she said, “I’ll be glad to do it alone.”
I knew Anna would be waiting on the terrace the next morning. She knew I’d come sit with her. We lounged in the patio chairs and killed time and ate hungrily from a plate of melon and avocado slices. The air was heavy with smog and vapor, the sun already high. Plants had shot up all over the place, broad-leafed and waxy. Trees of heaven at the edges of parking lots, along the roadside, on the tops of hills. You couldn’t stop them, it seemed. They grew too fast to get rid of. They sprouted everywhere.
Anna played her radio that morning. We talked some, but didn’t have all that much to say. We’d seen each other again the night before for a movie at a mall theater near the hotel. There were drinks after that. We stayed up late talking. I didn’t mention that Jacq went home. Anna didn’t ask about my wife anymore, she didn’t question where Jacq was. Anna was uncomfortable thinking about it. It was easier to talk about her husband, to talk about Jon, since she couldn’t stop. I didn’t mind talking about him then, not at breakfast anyway, since there were open spaces to stare off into, a busy thoroughfare nearby to watch cars. I’d listen enough to respond now and then, although it wasn’t necessary. Anna just wanted to work her mouth.
I was thinking about pet names for pricks when I saw a Pomeranian wander out into the thoroughfare. I laughed when I saw it come out of the trees, a bouncing white puff of fur.
There was a neighborhood across the road, behind a trees of heaven clutch. The Pomeranian must have escaped from its yard and found its way to the thoroughfare, drawn by the noise. It looked pleased with itself as it approached the road, the way dogs do when they think they’re getting away with something, when they’re doing something stupid.
A woman gasped when she saw the dog, then everyone turned to the road, the traffic. Anna spun in time to see the Pomeranian struck by a car. We all saw. We all heard. The dog caught in the undercarriage of a gray Cadillac and spit out the back to tumble along the pavement. The Cadillac didn’t stop. The cars behind slowed and bowed around the dog once they saw it heaped in the center lane. Anna wondered why no one stopped to help. She asked how the driver could do that.
“Maybe they didn’t notice,” I said. She didn’t buy that.
“How couldn’t they?”
Some hotel workers went out and circled the dog. They helped direct traffic and gave the appearance that things were under control. No one wanted to touch the dog. They surrounded it and talked. We couldn’t hear what they said. “They’re deciding who will pick it up,” I guessed.
Eventually a man in a burgundy-red uniform came out and wrapped the dog in a pillowcase. He lifted it off the road and carried it to the parking garage.
We stayed in Anna’s room after that. She turned on the TV. I took my shoes and socks off.
It was three days like that. Anna curled under the hotel comforter to watch basic cable, the air conditioning on full blast, while I typed on my laptop at the Lucite bureau. I had to catch up on work, but I crawled in next to her when I was bored and hugged her from behind. She wore pajamas, black and furry, that zipped up in the front. Anna and I never slept together. I enjoyed her body like I did comfort food, like too much might make me sick. We napped and dozed. I laid my hand on her tummy and felt how soft it was. I rested my head on her shoulder and smelled her hair. Sometimes she reared into me to spoon, but that was as far as it went.
We hardly even talked. Anna didn’t mention Jon, not after what happened with the Pomeranian. She asked questions like we’d just met—which, I realized, was precisely the case.
“What’s it like there, where you live?” Anna asked. “Are there any people in Nebraska? I couldn’t live like that, out in the middle of nowhere. I get the creeps just thinking of all those cows out there, chewing grass.”
Jacq and I had been married seven years by then. We met in New York and were married there. She’s nine years older than me, from northwest Ohio originally. I grew up in Connecticut, in a banal, middle-class neighborhood, but the tiny travel agency I operated was in Chelsea. That’s where I lived when we met. My parents started the agency in the seventies and it wasn’t a bad business. We were a small outfit with regular clients. Then 9/11 happened. Almost all small agencies went out of business the next couple years. We were no different. My parents started the agency; it was shuttered on my watch. Then I started writing product descriptions for the online novelty mall. Then I married Jacq.
Once we were married Jacq convinced
me to move out to the ranch she’d bought near Alliance. I had nothing else going. The agency was closed. My job with the Internet people was flexible. I felt like I might be getting a little old for New York. The idea of settling on the Ponderosa to grow into middle age sounded romantic. So we moved.
I liked it right away. There was a new house on the ranch—the hunting lodge, I called it—a guest house Jacq turned into her studio, plus lots of open valleys of dirt and rock I hiked in. I bought a pistol and a holster because there were coyotes, and damn if that didn’t excite me. Alliance had a country club where we’d go for drinks sometimes if we wanted to trade stories with locals, and a RadioShack and a pharmacy and a pizza place. Most of our food was shipped to us from an organic market run by a disembodied poet in Boulder, but we frequented the greasy cafes and steakhouses if we felt tolerant of shredded iceberg lettuce and Folgers crystals. There was a swimming pool, a track at the high school. There was more than that, but those were the places we went to. The nearest Wal-Mart was in Scottsbluff, an hour away, so a few of the local stores in Alliance avoided being run out of business. I appreciated that.
There was lots of time on the ranch. I learned how to use it. I answered e-mails, worked on my descriptions. I began expansive, free-form landscape projects I never intended to finish, left mounds of worm castings and hardwood mulch to erode across the prairie. I talked to my parents an hour every Sunday evening, something we did ever since I took over the agency from them. We didn’t really know what to say anymore. Mostly they bitched about the commercials for Priceline and Travelocity they saw on TV. If I was bored, I trawled airfares on my computer, in the old system, a black screen with green characters. It was all prompt commands, no windows, no clicking a mouse. I loved it. It was like traveling back to a time when you had to be an expert to run a computer, the good old days.
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