The Wood Wife

by Terri Windling

  Fox came over to their table, an electric cable looped over his arm. “Howdy. Where’s Juan?” he said to Dora, his eyes flickering pointedly to Maggie and back.

  “Painting,” Dora answered flatly.

  Fox looked at her closely, his eyes narrowed. Then he turned to the others at the table. “Hi, Maggie. Hey, Pepe,” Fox said, and he gave each of his sisters a kiss on the cheek. “We’re starting here in just a few minutes. We’ve been waiting for Angel, as usual.” He nodded at the notoriously spacey drummer, who was still unpacking his gear. “I’d better go help or we’ll be here all night. And the natives are getting restless.”

  The crowd was indeed a rowdy one, which boded well for the dancing. Dora poured herself another beer, amazed at how the first had disappeared. Maggie touched her arm. “Why are some of the band members wearing masks?” she said.

  Dora followed her gaze. Two tall black men with long rasta hair had half-masks on with beaky noses; the punky bass player had a mask of rhinestones pushed to the top of her head. “It’s Halloween in a couple of days,” Dora said. “Guess they’re celebrating early.”

  “Halloween already? Boy, this month passed fast. It doesn’t feel like October here in the desert, when it’s still so warm.”

  “Is this your first night out since you got here?” Dora asked.

  “I hate to admit it, but it is.” Maggie smiled a guilty smile, rolling up the sleeves of her Armani jacket. Dora thought she looked very glamorous tonight, and she’d bet good money Fox thought so too. “I’m turning into a hermit up there in the canyon, just like Cooper.”

  “Cut yourself some slack. It’s only been a month, and you don’t even know the town yet.”

  “I’m not going to get to know it if I shut myself away in Cooper’s house. But you know, it helps me to understand why Cooper was the way he was. I’ve been in the mountains such a short time, and already it’s a shock whenever I come back down. It takes a definite mental adjustment to get used to being around the traffic and the noise.”

  “Now you sound like One of Us,” Dora said with satisfaction, sitting back in her chair with her feet propped up on the edge of Pepe’s. “But it was different down here for most of Cooper’s life. The city didn’t gobble up the whole valley until, oh, maybe twenty years ago. I wish that we could go back in time and live in the town he and Anna knew, when more of it was like this neighborhood—a homegrown, desert kind of place. And less of it full of shopping malls like Anywhere, America.”

  “Didn’t you live near here?” Maggie asked her.

  “Yeah, when we first moved down from Vermont. I was too homesick to appreciate it though. Which was the last thing I ever expected to be—after encouraging Juan to move back near his family just so I could get away from mine.”

  Maggie smiled. “Was yours so awful then? I thought you liked your family.”

  “I do. Particularly with a continent between us. I’m serious! They’re sweet people, my parents, I love ’em to death. But they’re completely hopeless. They’re still flower children and they’re pushing fifty now. Did I tell you I was raised on a commune?”

  “For real?”

  “For real. Until I was twelve, anyway. Then they built their own place—a log cabin with a woodstove that always smoked and a wretched freezing outhouse in the back. All terribly PC and organic, of course.” Dora rolled her eyes.

  “There were other kids, right? You said it was a big family. All boys but you, do I have that right?”

  “Yep. I’m the oldest. Can’t you tell? The practical, responsible type—that’s me. I pretty much raised the other five kids. Seven if you include my parents.” Dora sighed. “I’ll tell you, I’m getting tired of it. Of being sensible. Paying the bills. Wearing fruit on my head in a stupid hotel bar.” She poured more beer, took another hit, and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. “If I stop being the practical one, what do you suppose will happen then? We can all sit around and paint while they turn off the lights and the water, and the bank takes the house.”

  Maggie looked at her closely. “I thought you seemed a little tense tonight. Is that what this is about? Did you and Juan have a fight?”

  “A fight? It takes two to fight. And that would take too much time away from Juan’s precious paintings.” Dora flushed. She had meant to say the words lightly, as a joke, not in a burst of temper.

  Maggie leaned forward and touched her hand. “Do you know that you are repeating one of Cooper’s letters, practically word for word?”

  “Cooper?” Dora said, surprised.

  “That’s right. Complaining about Anna. When she painted, she didn’t care about anything else—not Cooper, not their friends, not the house, not anything.”

  “That’s interesting.” She was embarrassed by her outburst and glad to share the problem with Cooper. “I thought this was an exclusively female dilemma I was having. I thought I was turning into one of those horrible women whining: ‘Honey, pay attention to me.’ ”

  “Well, it usually is a female problem,” said Maggie; “and not a unique one either, so don’t be so hard on yourself. How many men do you know who wear fruit on their heads so their wives can paint? I don’t mean the ones who already have a good living and can afford to be magnanimous,” she added quickly. “But someone who’s working hard, scrimping, saving, making sacrifices for a woman’s art.”

  Dora shook her head. She couldn’t think of anyone who fit Maggie’s description. And like Maggie, she could think of half a dozen of her girlfriends in that position.

  “Now Anna,” said Maggie, in between munching on hot salsa and tortilla chips, “she lived a fairly privileged life. She grew up in a time and place where it was expected that a man would support her. Cooper had an inheritance, so it wasn’t a financial sacrifice for him—but he went to the mountains for the sake of Anna’s work, even when he’d have rather gone back to New York. He always took Anna seriously, as an artist of equal calibre. There weren’t many women of her time—or even of ours—who could say as much.”

  “But his support wasn’t enough, was it? Look at what happened to Anna in the end. She was only my age when she killed herself.”

  Maggie shook her head. “No, it wasn’t enough. Cooper couldn’t stand against the entire weight of her family, her culture, her religious upbringing. Or of all the critics,” she added drily, “who dismissed her work as derivative of any male painter within five hundred miles.”

  “Well then, you’ve got to give old Cooper credit. He really believed in Anna.” Dora frowned again. “And I believe in Juan. It’s just… I don’t know. I’m just tired, I guess. I get tired of being a wife sometimes. I want someone to be a wife for me.”

  “Don’t we all,” said Maggie with a rueful smile.

  On stage, the music was starting up, amplified and cutting short any possibility of conversation. Dora didn’t know whether to feel sorry or grateful for the interruption. It might be helpful to talk to Maggie about Juan, and yet she was hesitant, and not only because Isabella, Angela and Pepe were sharing the small outdoor table. She hesitated to talk to Maggie because she didn’t quite know what the problem was, or even where her loyalties should lie; she only knew that something had happened out in the desert, the night that Cooper died. Since then, Juan had been a different man. And Dora was going to have to find out why.

  She topped up her glass, emptying the pitcher, sending Pepe to the bar for another one. Dangblast it, girl, she scolded herself, you’re not supposed to be thinking about Juan. She lifted her glass as the music began, knowing she was well on her way to getting thoroughly soused tonight.

  The band started out with a Celtic reel, electrified and bone-shaking. Angel, the drummer, was hot tonight, moving smoothly between a bodhran, a dubek, a water drum and a congo set. Fox was on accordion, a man from Bayou Brew on fiddle. The spikey-haired girl from Big Bad Wolf belted out rude Irish lyrics. They slid from one reel into another, the second as raucous as the first. Then the addition of a bass and a
Reggae beat turned the reel into something rather different. One of the tall Jamaican men took over the vocals, backed up by the other. Dancers were spilling onto the dance floor, and Dora felt the music’s pull.

  “Can I borrow your boyfriend, Angela?” she shouted over the bass. Angela smiled. Dora knew from past experience that she would not dance in a place like this, not even before the injury that had crippled her right leg. Fox’s sisters came for the music, and were content to sit and quietly listen. But Pepe was a different matter. Get a single beer into Pepe and the boy started howling at the moon.

  She took Pepe’s hand and pulled him into the crowd. Then she lost herself for a good long while, existing only in the beat of the drum, the quicksilver fiddle, the throb of the bass. She was sweating when the set came to a stop, her face flushed hot and strands of hair escaping from her velvet hairband, but Pepe was not even breathing hard. He gave Dora a grin turned rakish by the eyepatch over one eye.

  They returned to the table and she gulped down some beer, wiping her brow with the back of her hand. “Aren’t you going to dance?” she said to Maggie as she stood, panting, catching her breath.

  “Might do,” Maggie said.

  Dora took her by the arm. “Atta girl. Come on. You too, Pepe?”

  Pepe shook his head, looking at the dance floor longingly, but hovering close to the sisters.

  The next set had a salsa beat, with didjeridoo thrown in for good measure. Halfway through Maggie took off her black suit jacket and threw it back to the table. Underneath she wore a man’s sleeveless undershirt—cooler, and rather sexy, Dora thought. Then Dora closed her eyes again, and gave herself to the music.

  They sat out the next set. Dora re-tied her damp hair back from her neck, then poured another beer. She put her head close to Maggie’s ear and said, “So what do you think of the band?”

  Maggie gave Dora a thumbs-up sign. Her cheeks were flushed, her sleek European haircut tousled and spikey with sweat. Dora sat back and followed Maggie’s gaze. The other woman was watching Fox. He stood beating out the time with his boot heels, fingers flying across the accordion keys, and it seemed remarkable to Dora that he could make even that maligned instrument sexy. Though he’d only dressed as he always dressed—ripped jeans, flannel shirt, the inevitable cowboy boots—he had a presence on stage that drew more women’s eyes than Maggie’s tonight. If Fox spent his time alone these days, it was by choice, not necessity. For the next tune Fox picked up his flute, leaning close into the microphone. The sound trembled over the wailing guitars, bluesy, throaty and compelling.

  Dora leaned over to Maggie again. “Our Johnny Foxxe is good, isn’t he? I mean, maybe not quite like your ex-husband, but…”

  Maggie shook her head. “So what? You can’t compare them. Nigel is utterly sublime; he’s in another league altogether. But Nige,” she told Dora, “needs to be at the top. He’s more businessman than musician now. When I met him, he’d play for the sheer pleasure of it.” She made a face. “Now it’s only for a crowd.”

  “They can give him a crowd here at the Hole,” Dora teased, “and all the free beer he can drink.”

  Maggie laughed. “You know, it might do him a world of good. I worry about Nige. He’s brilliant, successful—but he never seems to be very happy to me.”

  “Happiness is a talent like any other,” Dora told her. “It’s another artform. Some people are good at it, some people aren’t.”

  Maggie looked at her thoughtfully. “Neither Cooper nor Anna were very good at it. They had a lot of talents between them, but not that one.”

  “Honey,” said Dora with exasperation, “I think you ought to give that book a rest tonight.”

  “Am I sounding as single-minded as Nigel?” Maggie asked her, looking up with a guilty expression.

  Dora decided not to answer that question. She gestured to the stage instead. “Now, look at Fox,” she said to Maggie. “He’s got the talent for happiness in spades.”

  Fox was completely absorbed in the music, the rhythm, the give-and-take of the session, playing with the calm and steady concentration that he gave to everything he did. The band had launched into an old Billie Holiday number, the lyrics sung in Spanish. The combination of instruments was bizarre, but its quirky energy won the crowd. The musicians were skilled, the jam was surprisingly tight and completely infectious.

  The song ended, and Dora drained her beer, looking at the empty pitcher on the table. “It’s a good thing you’re driving,” she said to Maggie. “I think I’m getting a bit drunk.”

  “Slow down, okay? You’re going to get sick.”

  “You’re right,” she replied as the band struck up a fairly straightforward Cajun tune. The accordion player from Bayou Brew took over for the set, giving Fox a break. Dora said, “I think I’ll dance again. Want to come?”

  “I don’t know how to dance to this.”

  “Fox will teach you. He’s the one who taught me and Juan how to two-step. It’s not so hard.”

  “I don’t think—”

  Dora turned to Fox as he came over to their table. “Johnny, teach Maggie to two-step, will you?”

  He blinked at Dora. “All right,” he said, taking Maggie by the hand. She could see Maggie still protesting as he pulled her onto the dance floor.

  Dora smiled to herself as she watched them together, moving across the crowded floor. Maggie was having a good time out there—tripping over her feet, laughing hard, her hazel eyes very bright. Then someone touched Dora on the shoulder. Matt Romero, from her bookmaking class.

  “Do you want to dance, Dora?”

  “You bet I do.” She smiled up at the young Apache man, feeling slightly giddy as he swung her into the crowd.

  She was feeling more than slightly giddy by the late hour when the music stopped. The last remaining dancers stumbled out of the bar to the sidewalk, reeking of beer and smoke. The electric signs in the window switched off. The musicians were hauling equipment to their trucks. The sky was clear in the valley tonight, but the stars seemed distant compared to the canyon’s stars. She’d be glad to get back home to the Rincons now, and gulp down that bracing mountain air.

  She was feeling rather dizzy. She leaned on Matt as she followed the others to the parking lot. “Good night,” she told him. “Great to see you again.”

  He leaned down and kissed her lightly on the lips. “So call me,” he said. “We’ll do it again.”

  She shook her head. “I’m a married woman.”

  “Not so very married tonight,” he pointed out.

  “I know. But this is an exception.”

  “Too bad,” he said softly, looking disappointed. As he walked away, he said over his shoulder, “But call me anyway, Dora, okay?”

  She smiled at him, knowing she wouldn’t, unless it was to talk about bindings and type. She’d had four good years of marriage with Juan; he was her lover, her family, her best friend. She wasn’t going to throw it all over because things had gotten rough these last months. Not without a fight, she wasn’t, she decided as she climbed into the jeep.

  Maggie drove them home, and the ride went fast, for the traffic had thinned on the city streets. In the back seat, Angela and Isabella were singing Billie Holiday songs, in Spanish, the way the band had played them—their lovely voices too soft, too ethereal to do justice to the blues. When they reached the eastern part of town, the roads grew dark and quiet at last. They turned up the dirt road into the mountains. The Foxxe sisters were singing songs now in a language Dora didn’t know—low, haunting songs, like a Navajo flute given voice, or the songs a saguaro might sing; or perhaps it was just that Dora was very drunk. She groaned and closed her eyes.

  Maggie parked the jeep at Dora’s house. “Good night everybody. Good night, Dora. Are you sure you’ll be all right?”

  “Just fine,” Dora reassured her as Isabella, Angela, and Pepe disappeared down the road.

  “All right then. I’ll see you tomorrow,” Maggie said, and she followed after the Foxx
e sisters.

  Dora turned to the house. The lights were still on in the house and the studio; Juan was still up. She went inside through the kitchen door. She could smell smoke as she entered the house. Juan had a roaring fire going; he was standing by the hearth looking red-eyed and haggard. There were pieces of dismantled frames strewn around him. His pictures were gone from the wall.

  “What are you doing?” Dora demanded.

  “I’m burning shit,” he said tightly. “Don’t start on me, Dora. These are my paintings. I can’t stand them any longer.”

  “Those are our paintings. That’s our life you’re burning. Our old life back in Vermont. Goddamn you Juan,” she said, her voice breaking as she crossed the room.

  He looked at her flatly. “You’re drunk.”

  “And you’re a bastard. How dare you burn all that beautiful work?”

  “They’re bad. They’re all wrong. I don’t want them anymore.”

  “Well, I do. I loved those paintings,” she said, furious. She’d worked hard for those paintings, too. She shoved past him and reached into the fire to pull a canvas out.

  He snatched it away and she reached for another. It was their marriage that was going up in the flames. He grabbed her, pulled her away from the fire. She struggled with him, clutching the charred painting. He shook her, struck her, but she wouldn’t let it go.

  “Those are shit, don’t you see that?” he said, wild-eyed. He hit her again, harder this time. She dropped the canvas, stunned by pain, reeling, falling against the couch. “They’re shit, they’re all shit. I’m not that man anymore. Stop making me be that man. I want to be good. I will be good. I won’t let you stop me. All this, this goddamn money-guzzling house, all this stuff, it’s all shit, why can’t you see that?” She huddled on the floor, her arms protecting her face, as he crossed the room grabbing objects, books, art from the walls, tossing them all to the flames. “We think we’re so great,” he railed at her. A book sailed past her, grazing her arm. “These stupid paintings, your little stories, our little lives—we don’t hold a candle to them. They laugh at us. They think we’re pathetic. And we are. They’re the ones who are beautiful. Anna understood. Why can’t you understand?”