Cowboys Are My Weakness

by Pam Houston

  Your good father calls and asks you out to breakfast. It’s an early appointment but you get up even earlier to bathe and dress. It’s breakfast at Howard Johnson’s but you wear what you wore at Moran’s. You even curl your eyelashes. You tell your good father that Evan was everything he said he would be. You run down the weekend with more facts than innuendo. He gets the picture. He is, he says, a lonely man himself.

  You tell him about the leafy thing in your stomach, how you have detached it from Evan, how your desire has become something you own, after all. When you get to that part, tears spring into your eyes. It’s your turn to give the performance, and its authenticity doesn’t make it any less theatrical. It’s honesty you are striving for, and still, you’re a little bigger than life. Your good father’s eyes tell you you’ve succeeded, and yet your motives are too suspect for even you to explore. You choose to boil it down to what’s simple: You perform for your good father because you love him. Anything else is beside the point. Your good father reaches across the table and takes your hand in both of his. “Evan will call you,” he says. “I know him. He will.”

  You wonder what Evan has said to your good father on the phone. You wonder why there’s no word for the opposite of lonely. You wonder if there’s a difference between whatever might be truth and a performance that isn’t a lie. In your life right now, you can’t find one.

  SYMPHONY

  Sometimes life is ridiculously simple. I lost fifteen pounds and the men want me again. I can see it in the way they follow my movements, not just with their eyes but with their whole bodies, the way they lean into me until they almost topple over, the way they always seem to have itches on the back of their necks. And I’ll admit this: I am collecting them like gold-plated sugar spoons, one from every state.

  This is a difficult story to tell because what’s right about what I have to say is only as wide as a tightrope, and what’s wrong about it yawns wide, beckoning, on either side. I have always said I have no narcotic, smiling sadly at stories of ruined lives, safely remote from the twelve-step program and little red leather booklets that say “One Day at a Time.” But there is something so sweet about the first kiss, the first surrender that, like the words “I want you,” can never mean precisely the same thing again. It is delicious and addicting. It is, I’m guessing, the most delicious thing of all.

  There are a few men who matter, and by writing them down in this story I can make them seem like they have an order, or a sequence, or a priority, because those are the kinds of choices that language forces upon us, but language can’t touch the joyful and slightly disconcerting feeling of being very much in love, but not knowing exactly with whom.

  First I will tell you about Phillip, who is vast and dangerous, his desires uncontainable and huge. He is far too talented, a grown-up tragedy of a gifted child, massively in demand. He dances, he weaves, he writes a letter that could wring light from a black hole. He has mined gold in the Yukon, bonefished in Belize. He has crossed Iceland on a dogsled, he is the smartest man that all his friends know. His apartment smells like wheat bread, cooling. His body smells like spice. Sensitive and scared scared scared of never becoming a father, he lives in New York City and is very careful about his space. It is easy to confuse what he has learned to do in bed for love or passion or art, but he is simply a master craftsman, and very proud of his good work.

  Christopher is innocent. Very young and wide-open. He’s had good mothering and no father to make him afraid to talk about his heart. In Nevada he holds hands with middle-aged women while the underground tests explode beneath them. He studies marine biology, acting, and poetry, and is not yet quite aware of his classic good looks. Soon someone will tell him, but it won’t be me. A few years ago he said in a few more years he’d be old enough for me, and in a few more years, it will be true. For now we are friends and I tell him my system, how I have learned to get what I want from many sources, and none. He says this: You are a complicated woman. Even when you say you don’t want anything, you want more than that.

  I have a dream in which a man becomes a wolf. He is sleeping, cocooned, and when he stretches and breaks the parchment there are tufts of hair across his back and shoulders, and on the backs of his hands. It is Christopher, I suspect, though I can’t see his face. When I wake up I am in Phillip’s bed. My back is to his side and yet we are touching at all the pressure points. In the predawn I can see the line of electricity we make, a glow like neon, the curve of a wooden instrument. As I wake, “Symphony” is the first word that forms in my head.

  Jonathan came here from the Okavango Delta in Botswana; he’s tall and hairy and clever and strong. In my living room I watch him reach inside his shirt and scratch his shoulder. It is a savage movement, rangy and impatient, lazy too, and without a bit of self-consciousness. He is not altogether human. He has spent the last three years in the bush. I cook him T-bone steaks because he says he won’t eat complicated food. He is skeptical of the hibachi, of the barely glowing coals. Where he comes from, they cook everything with fire. He says things against my ear, the names of places: Makgadikgadi Pans, Nxamaseri, Mpandamatenga, Gabarone. Say these words out loud and see what happens to you. Mosi-oa-Toenja, “The Smoke That Thunders.” Look at the pictures: a rank of impalas slaking their thirst, giraffes, their necks entwined, a young bull elephant rising from the Chobe River. When I am with Jonathan I have this thought which delights and frightens me: It has been the animals that have attracted me all along. Not the cowboys, but the horses that carried them. Not the hunters, but the caribou and the bighorn. Not Jonathan, in his infinite loveliness, but the hippos, the kudu, and the big African cats. You fall in love with a man’s animal spirit, Jonathan tells me, and then when he speaks like a human being, you don’t know who he is.

  There’s one man I won’t talk about, not because he is married, but because he is sacred. When he writes love letters to me he addresses them “my dear” and signs them with the first letter of his first name and one long black line. We have only made love one time. I will tell you only the one thing that must be told: After the only part of him I will ever hold collapsed inside me he said, “You are so incredibly gentle.” It was the closest I have ever come to touching true love.

  Another dream: I am in the house of my childhood, and I see myself, at age five, at the breakfast table; pancakes and sausage, my father in his tennis whites. The me that is dreaming, the older me, kneels down and holds out her arms waiting for the younger me to come and be embraced. Jonathan’s arms twitch around me and I am suddenly awake inside a body, inside a world where it has become impossible to kneel down and hold out my arms. Still sleeping, Jonathan pulls my hand across his shoulder, and presses it hard against his face.

  I’m afraid of what you might be thinking. That I am a certain kind of person, and that you are the kind of person who knows more about my story than me. But you should know this: I could love any one of them, in an instant and with every piece of my heart, but none of them nor the world will allow it, and so I move between them, on snowy highways and crowded airplanes. I was in New York this morning. I woke up in Phillip’s bed. Come here, he’s in my hair. You can smell him.

  IN MY NEXT LIFE

  This is a love story. Although Abby and I were never lovers. That’s an odd thing for me to have to say about another woman, because I’ve never had a woman lover, and yet with Abby it would have been possible. Of course with Abby anything was possible, and I often wonder if she hadn’t gotten sick if we would have been lovers: one day our holding and touching and hugging slipping quietly into something more. It would have been beside the point and redundant, our lovemaking, but it might have been wonderful all the same.

  That was the summer I was organic gardening for a living, and I had a small but steady clientele who came to me for their produce and kept me financially afloat. I had a trade going with Carver’s Bakery, tomatoes for bread, and another with the farmers’ market in Salt Lake City, fresh herbs for chicken and groceries. I
grew wheat grass for my landlord Thomas and his lover, who both had AIDS. I traded Larry, at the Purina Mill, all the corn his kids could eat for all the grain I needed for my mare. She was half wild and the other half stubborn, and I should have turned her out to pasture like most of my friends said, or shot her like the rest recommended, but I had an idea that she and I could be great together if we ever both felt good on the same day.

  Abby had long black hair she wore in a single braid and eyes the color of polished jade. Her shoulders were rounded like a swimmer’s, although she was afraid of the water, and her hands were quick and graceful and yet seemed to be capable of incredible strength.

  I met her at a horse-handling clinic she was teaching in Salt Lake that I’d gone to with my crazy mare.

  “There are no problem horses,” Abby said. “Someone has taught her to be that way.”

  In the middle of explaining to her that it wasn’t me who taught my horse her bad habits, I realized it could have been. Abby had a way of looking at me, of looking into me, that made everything I said seem like the opposite of the truth.

  “There are three things to remember when working with horses,” Abby said to the women who had gathered for the class. “Ask, Receive, Give.” She said each word slowly, and separated them by breaths. “Now what could be simpler than that?”

  I rode as hard as I knew how that day at the clinic. Abby was calm, certain, full of images. “Your arms and hands are running water,” she said. “Let the water pour over your horse. Let the buttons on your shirt come undone. Let your body melt like ice cream and dribble out the bottom of your bones.”

  My mare responded to the combination of my signals and Abby’s words. She was moving with confidence, bending underneath me, her back rounded, her rhythm steady and strong.

  “Catch the energy as if you were cradling a baby.” Abby said. “Grow your fingers out to the sky. Fly with your horse. Feel that you are dancing.” She turned from one woman to another. “Appeal to the great spirit,” she said. “Become aware, inhibit, allow.”

  At the end of the day while we were walking out the horses Abby said, “You are a lovely, lovely woman. Tell me what else you do.”

  I told her I played the banjo, which was the other thing I was doing at the time, with a group that was only marginally popular with people my age but a big hit with the older folks in the Fallen Arches Square Dance Club.

  Abby told me she had always been intimidated by musicians.

  She told me I had medieval hair.

  On the first day after the clinic that Abby and I spent together I told her that meeting her was going to change my whole life. She seemed neither threatened nor surprised by this information; if anything, she was mildly pleased. “Life gives us what we need when we need it,” she said. “Receiving what it gives us is a whole other thing.”

  We were both involved with unavailable men, one by drugs, one by alcohol, both by nature.

  There were some differences. She lived with her boyfriend, whose name was Roy. I lived alone. Roy was kind, at least, and faithful, and my man, whose name was Hardin, was not.

  I said to Thomas, “I have met a woman who, if she were a man, I would be in love with.” But of course Abby could have never been a man, and I fell in love anyway. It’s not the kind of definition Abby would have gotten mired in, but I think she may also have been a little in love with me.

  Once, on the phone, when we weren’t sure if the conversation was over, when we weren’t sure if we had actually said goodbye, we both held our receivers, breathing silently, till finally she had the guts to say, “Are you still there?

  “We are a couple of silly women,” she said, when we had finally stopped laughing. “A couple of silly women who want so badly to be friends.”

  Although only one-sixteenth Cherokee, and even that undocumented, Abby was a believer in Native American medicine. Shamanic healing, specifically, is what she practiced. The healing involved in shamanic work happens in mind journeys a patient takes with the aid of a continuous drumbeat, into the lower or upper world, accompanied by his or her power animal. The power animal serves as the patient’s interpreter, guardian, and all number of other things. The animals take pity on us, it is believed, because of the confusion with which we surround ourselves. The learning takes place in the energy field where the animal and the human being meet.

  A guided tour into the lower world with a buffalo is not the kind of thing a white girl from New Jersey would discover on her own, but for me, everything that came from Abby’s mouth was magic. If she had told me the world was flat, I’d have found a way to make it true.

  When Abby taught me the methods of shamanic healing I started to try to journey too. Abby played the drum for me. She shook the rattle around my body and blew power into my breastbone and into the top of my skull. The drumming altered my mental state, that was for certain, but I couldn’t make myself see anything I could define. If I pressed my arm hard enough against my eyeballs I could start to see light swirling. But a tunnel? another world? Animals and spirits I couldn’t muster.

  “People have different amounts of spiritual potential,” she said, “and for some people it takes a while. Don’t be discouraged by a slow start.”

  So I would try again and again to make forms out of the shapes inside my eyelids, and I’d stretch the truth of what I saw in the reporting. I wanted to go all of the places that Abby could go. I was afraid she might find another friend with more spiritual potential than me.

  “You’re seeing in a way you’ve never seen before,” Abby said. “You just don’t know how to recognize it. It isn’t like cartoons on your eyelids. It’s not like a big-screen TV.”

  Finally, my mind would make logical connections out of the things I was seeing. “It was a bear,” I would say, “running away and then returning.” Abby’s green eyes never let mine falter. “A big white bear that could run on two legs.” As I said the words, it seemed, I made it so. “It was turning somersaults, too, and rolling in the blueberries.” It didn’t feel like I was lying, but it also didn’t feel like the truth.

  One thing was certain. I believed what Abby saw. If she said she rose into the stars and followed them to South Africa, if she danced on the rooftops of Paris with her ancestors, if she and her power animal made love in the Siberian snow, I believed her. I still believe her. Abby didn’t lie.

  But it wasn’t only the magic. Abby was gentle and funny and talked mostly with her hands. She made great mashed potatoes. She had advanced degrees in botany, biology, and art history. And the horses, Abby loved her horses more than any power animal her imagination could conjure up.

  “The Indians don’t believe in imagination,” she told me. “They don’t even have a word for it. Once you understand that fully this all becomes much easier.”

  We had climbed the mountain behind my house, way above the silver mine, and were lying in a meadow the moon made bright. Abby threw handfuls of cornmeal on the ground. “I’m feeding my power animal,” she said. “When I do this he knows that I need him around.”

  I made Abby batches of fresh salsa, pesto, and spaghetti sauce. I brought her squash blossoms, red peppers, and Indian corn to make a necklace her power animal told her to wear.

  She told me about her college roommate, Tracy, her best friend, she said, before me. Tracy’s marriage had broken up, she said, because Tracy had been having an affair with a woman, and her husband, Steve, couldn’t handle it. They had tried going to therapy together, but Tracy eventually chose the woman over Steve.

  “She said she never expected to have an affair with a woman,” Abby said, “but then they just fell in love.”

  I thought about my friend Thomas, about how he gets so angry whenever anybody says that they respect his sexual choice. “Choice has nothing to do with it,” I can hear him saying. “Why would I ever have done this if I had had a choice?”

  But I wonder if it’s not a question of choice for a woman. Aren’t there women who wake up tired of try
ing to bridge the unbridgeable gap, who wake up ready to hold and be held by somebody who knows what it means?

  “In my next life,” Thomas was famous for saying, “I’m coming back as a lesbian.”

  “That’s what I did,” my friend of five years, Joanne, said, when I asked her opinion, as if her lesbian affair was something I’d known about all along, “with Isabelle. And it was wonderful, for a while. But what happens too often is that somewhere down the line you are attracted to a man and want to go back, and then it’s a whole new kind of guilt to deal with. You’re hurting somebody who’s on your team, who really knows you, who really is you, I suppose, if you stop and think.”

  “There are so many more interesting things to do than fall in love,” Abby said. “If Roy and I split up, I want to live in a house full of women, old women and young women, teenagers and babies. Doesn’t falling in love sound boring, compared to that?”

  I had to admit, it didn’t. We were both fighting our way out of codependency. I wasn’t as far as she was yet.

  “The problem with codependency,” Abby said, “is that what you have to do to be codependent, and what you have to do to not be codependent, turn out so often to be the same thing.”

  “So what would you do about sex, in this house full of women?” I said. We were sitting sideways on her sofa like kids on a Flexible Flyer. She was braiding and unbraiding my medieval hair.