The Divide

by Nicholas Evans

  He smiled. “Mind you, if you see photographs of me as a little kid, you can understand why he might have found it hard.”

  “Ugly, right?”

  “More like obnoxious.”

  “Mine are ugly and obnoxious. Kind of Missy Prissy meets Barney the Bullfrog.”

  “Somehow I find that hard to believe.”

  “You mean because now I’m so drop-dead gorgeous.” It was a dumb thing to say and it came out all wrong, as if she were putting him down for making a pass, which wasn’t how she had taken it. He looked embarrassed and smiled and took a sip of wine. The couple at the next table were spoon-feeding each other chocolate mousse.

  “You know something?” she said, trying to put things right again. “If he was alive today, you two would probably be friends.”

  “You’re right. I think we would.”

  She asked about his mother and he told her how he’d always been her favorite, how in her eyes he could never do anything wrong, how he could probably tell her he was a serial killer and she would still find a way of rationalizing it and admiring him for it. Her adoration, he said, had become something of a family joke.

  “Not so long ago she came to stay and we were driving into town. She was sitting up front and Abbie and Josh and Sarah were in the back. And when I managed to park in what I have to say wasn’t too challenging a space, she said, Ben, you are such a fanastic parker. Really. And I could see Sarah and the kids in the mirror, just cracking up. They still say it every time I park the damn car.”

  Eve laughed and he shook his head and smiled and took another sip of wine.

  “It’s fine,” she said. “She loves you, that’s all. And they say a boy can never be loved too much by his mother. It’s empowering.”

  “Well, they’re wrong. I did therapy for a few months after my dad died. And the guy told me that if you feel you are being loved for something that you know to be unjustified or false, in other words, if you know you are actually not the superhero the other person thinks you are, then it doesn’t count. That kind of love doesn’t empower you, it just makes you feel like an impostor. So just you watch out with that son of yours.”

  “He parks his tricycle better than any kid I know.”

  “Well, there you go.”

  He had already refused to let her pay for the theater so she sneakily paid the check on her way back from the restroom. It annoyed him a little but not for long. Outside the rain had stopped. The streets and sidewalks glistened and the air was washed and cool and smelled for the first time of autumn. They walked a couple of blocks and then he suddenly realized how late it was and that he was in danger of missing the last train home. They waved down a cab and Ben asked the driver to hurry to Penn Station. When they got there he stuffed a twenty-dollar bill through the screen and made sure the driver knew where to take her.

  “I’ve had such a great time,” Eve said. “Thank you.”

  “Me too.”

  They kissed each other on the cheek and this time got it right.

  “Listen, I’ve got to run,” he said, climbing out. “I’ll call you—I mean, we’ll call you, okay?”

  “Okay. Go see William’s show if you have a chance.”

  “I’ll try. Bye now.”

  “Bye. Say hi to Sarah and the kids!”

  But he was shutting the door as she spoke and seemed not to hear. Eve watched him jogging off into the station as the cab pulled away and when he had disappeared she leaned her head back against the seat and stared at the stained lining of the roof. As Lori always said, it was one of life’s bummers: how the only nice guys she ever got to meet these days were either married or gay.

  Eve called the following morning and was both relieved and a little disappointed when it was Sarah who answered. They agreed how sorry they were not to have seen each other. Sarah had found a less-well-known stand-in for her pain-in-the-ass author but was still anxious about breaking the news to her customers when they arrived. Eve was flying back to New Mexico that afternoon but she said she came to New York two or three times a year and on her next visit they would definitely get together.

  “Definitely,” Sarah said.

  “And you and Ben should come out to Santa Fe sometime. Bring the kids, too.”

  “You know, I’d love that. I’ve never been.”

  On the flight home and over the days that followed she occasionally found herself thinking about Ben and about how much she liked him. Yet it wasn’t with anything remotely like yearning or regret. The notion of their shared destiny had yet to take shape. Over the years she had taught herself that to look with longing down roads that were blocked brought only pain. And she thus simply accepted that this was how things were and that they could not be otherwise.

  Nor, even if Ben had been single, would her attitude necessarily have been different. There was an intensity about him that interested her but daunted her too. And she didn’t feel the need for that in her life right now. She had always, even as a child, been self-sufficient. Her parents had been caring but slightly remote, nurturing in all three of their children an independence that only later did Eve appreciate as their greatest gift.

  It was a quality that others, men especially, often misinterpreted as lack of commitment, assuming that a love without need was somehow deficient. The only one who had ever fully understood was Raoul, who had clearly been carved from the same grain. Even during the two years that they lived together, it had been as two separate souls, each alone and content to be so. Like travelers whose different journeys had coincided along a stretch of the same trail.

  Before Raoul, for virtually all her adult life, she had lived alone. But although she had known several sorts of pain, she had never once known loneliness as more than an idea or as a condition that affected others. She had always had her work and her friends and, sometimes, when it seemed right and uncomplicated and there was mutual desire, but desire for nothing more, there had been lovers.

  One night, some ten days after she came back from New York, when Ben Cooper had faded from her thoughts and she felt fully reconnected with her life in Santa Fe, she dreamed about him. She was in a theater, not as gilded or grand as the one they had been to, and the production felt more junior-high than Broadway. And Eve wasn’t in the audience, she was onstage. It was her turn to speak but she hadn’t had time to learn her lines. Then she caught sight of Ben in the front row beside an old woman she didn’t recognize. He was mouthing something, trying to tell Eve the line, but she couldn’t make it out and was getting more and more anxious. Then she woke up.

  That same morning, on her way home from dropping Pablo at the nursery, she stopped for a newspaper at the Downtown Subscription on Garcia Street and there bumped into Lori. Sipping green mint tea in the sunlit yard, she recounted the dream. During their week in Montana they had agreed that Ben Cooper was one of the more attractive men on the ranch and Lori, with faked envy, had already elicited a detailed account of their evening in New York. After twelve years of Jungian analysis, she considered herself something of an expert when it came to the deciphering of dreams. This one, she declared, was as clear as Evian.

  “The old woman sitting next to him,” she said. “What was her demeanor?”

  “Her demeanor?”

  “Her attitude. Was she smiling, frowning or what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Eve, it’s important. That was his mother. You obviously want to know if she approves.”

  “I don’t.”

  “You do. That’s why she was there.”

  “I didn’t bring her. He did.”

  “You’re not taking this seriously.”

  “I know. Anyway, approve of what?”

  “You. You and Ben.”

  “Lori, give me a break. There is no me and Ben.”

  But even as she said it, a voice within her said there would be.

  He checked in at the hotel just off the Plaza, a dark, folksy place that looked as if it had known better times. He ha
d picked it without further research from a travel guide that claimed both JFK and Errol Flynn had once stayed there. As he dumped his bag in the cramped and overheated room, it occurred to Ben that given the true motive for this trip, his choice of lodging might well have been influenced by a subconscious urge to associate himself with two such epic lotharios.

  He had time to kill and nearly called to see if Eve could meet earlier but then decided it would look too eager. The flight from Kansas had gotten in early and despite the snow and the airport crowds of early holidaymakers and skiers, he had driven up from Albuquerque in little more than an hour. The interstate was clear, and the only hazard was that his eyes kept straying west across the ghost-white landscape to a mountain sunset of purple and vermilion.

  The snow had given him the pretext to rent an SUV, a metallic red Ford Explorer, which made him feel rugged and Western, as did the red-and-black plaid woolen jacket and hiking boots and black Polartec beanie, all of which he had bought in Missoula last month when they had taken Abbie to check out the University of Montana. Ben had almost packed his Stetson but figured he wouldn’t have the guts to wear it. The beanie, he believed, made him look hip and streetwise, though Abbie said it merely gave him the air of a geriatric mugger.

  Whatever, he was glad he had come properly equipped. It was starting to snow again and when he climbed back into the truck it informed him that the temperature was eleven degrees below freezing. Without checking the map he nosed his way out through the evening traffic on to Paseo de Peralta.

  It was nearly twelve years since he had been in Santa Fe but even in the dark with everywhere decorated for the holidays he found he could still remember the basic layout of the place and soon he saw the sign he was looking for. He turned off and drove slowly up the hill, then found a place to park and went on foot. The snowflakes were feathery and their fall through the windless air seemed hesitant, as if both time and gravity had somehow been suspended. The snow squashed pleasingly under his boots. It seemed to make his mission all the more intrepid.

  Canyon Road was a Christmas movie set. There were lights in the trees and along the adobe façades of the stores and galleries. The windows bristled with greenery and tinsel and everywhere you looked there were strings of illuminated red peppers and little candles in paper bags weighted with sand. On one street corner there was even a huddle of people singing obscure carols around a little bonfire. Ben expected any moment to hear someone shout Cut.

  He remembered the art galleries but they seemed to have spawned many more and most were still open, Aladdin’s caves of warmth and color, their windows spilling quadrangles of yellow light on the snow of the sidewalk. The last time, the only other time, he had been here, Ben had vowed that if he was ever to take up painting for a living, this was where he would live. Some of the pictures on show were good, but many more weren’t. And yet tourists flocked from all over the world and paid premium prices. As long as it was big and bright and lavishly framed, it seemed you could sell just about anything.

  He still couldn’t fully believe he was here. It was like watching some other man’s boots walking him up the winding hill, some bolder or more reckless double. The same one who had made the phone calls, found the appropriately casual tone of voice, told her he was coming to Kansas anyway to visit his mother, who had been unwell, and that it was only a small plane hop farther. And, if she was interested, it might be an opportunity for them to talk about her doing some murals for the lobby of the exciting new project he and Martin had going in Cold Spring Harbor. Perhaps she could FedEx some photographs of her recent work? He had shocked himself. Who was this man? And did he truly know what he wanted?

  It wasn’t, of course, his first foray into infidelity. And he could remember the rejuvenating shiver of anticipation, that initial aliveness that nullified all prospect of guilt. For what, as yet, was there to feel guilty about? Twice, only twice, in all the years of their marriage had he cheated on Sarah, and he had managed to rationalize this fact to the point where the rarity of his transgression had become evidence of an almost virtuous restraint.

  He knew many men, Martin for one, who were serial cheats, who never turned down any opportunity, who actively sought them out. Ben had witnessed him at work when they were away together at conferences, seen him target some likely young woman at a party or in a hotel bar. Martin claimed he could spot them from a hundred yards. Ben had watched him move in. Watched, not in awe but certainly impressed, how he introduced himself, how straightaway he made them laugh, how he listened, confided, and focused, creating an intimacy like a gardener tending a much-loved flower. And nine out of ten times—well, maybe not nine, maybe six, maybe four—he would succeed.

  “The trick is not caring if you get turned down,” Martin once told him. “Even the ones who say no are usually flattered to be asked.”

  Ben envied the ease of it, the absence of worry and commitment. To Martin it was just sex. He and Beth, who either deserved an Oscar or was genuinely the only person in Nassau County who didn’t know about her husband’s transgressions, would probably be married forever. But on the two occasions on which Ben had strayed—once with a young lawyer from Queens who at the time was doing some conveyancing work for him, the other with an older, married woman he had met at the tennis club—he had ended up falling in love. And mainly because he had no intention of leaving Sarah (and, more to the point, of leaving the kids, who were then still very young), neither affair had lasted long and both had ended in acrimony. It was a miracle nobody ever found out. The only person Ben had ever talked to about it was Martin.

  “You know what my problem is?” he confided in a moment of rash self-pity after his tennis affair had come unstrung. “I don’t seem to be able to separate love and sex.”

  Martin laughed.

  “My problem is I’ve never been able to connect them.”

  So here he was again. In his heart, at least, a reborn adulterer. Not yet completely sure he was in love, but well on the way. And it was ridiculous, on several levels. He hardly knew the woman. And although he could tell, even at The Divide, and certainly that evening in New York, that she liked him and that there was even a little frisson of something more between them, it didn’t mean a thing. Maybe he should just forget it. Be nice but businesslike. Have a drink, talk about the murals. Fly home.

  But he knew, as soon as he saw her, that wasn’t how it was going to be. Tired and almost color-blind from his tour of the galleries, he was sitting over a straight-up margarita in the rear corner of the bar where they had arranged to meet. It was one long room, dark and narrow, with polished wood floors and paintings on every inch of wall (there was no escape in Santa Fe, it seemed). He saw the door open and a sudden flurry of snowflakes and when they had gone, there she was. She was wearing a battered and stained old cowboy hat and a big and belted blanket of a coat in deep red and green. She took off the hat and shook her hair and knocked the snow from the brim and one of the men sitting at the bar, someone she clearly knew, said something Ben couldn’t hear and she laughed and went over to the guy who put an arm around her and kissed her and she propped her arm on his shoulder and stood for a few moments talking and laughing with them all.

  Then one of them swiveled on his stool and pointed at Ben, and she looked his way and smiled and headed toward him. And he watched her walk the length of the room, the lamplight glinting in her eyes that stayed on him all the way, the smile shifting a little, fading as if some qualifying thought or warning had crossed her mind, then reasserting itself, still warm, just more composed.

  He stood and said hi and she didn’t reply, just leaned across the table and put her hand on his arm and pressed her cold, cold cheek to his and the smell of her almost made him moan. Lori’s gallery, she said, was directly opposite and about to close. So he left his margarita, grabbed his coat, and followed her out and across the street. Lori was away but had left a message for Ben saying all fellow dudes from The Divide qualified for a ten percent discount.
/>   Eve’s paintings, two enormous triptychs in oil, hung eerily lit in a long stone-walled room at the back of the gallery. They were much more powerful than they had looked in the photographs she had sent. The larger of the two was called The Visitation. It looked almost biblical, its colors rich and dark, purple and indigo and deep carmine. In the outer two pictures, animals of many kinds, in paler shades of bone and stone, writhed and tangled among roots, as if swirled in a great wind. In the center panel, in a pool of light, reared a huge winged figure, part horse, part human, part reptile, almighty yet benign. Ben was shocked and moved but didn’t know quite what to say except that it was wonderful, extraordinary, that it had astonishing power. He thought, but thought it better not to say, that the atrium of a Long Island insurance company office perhaps needed something a little tamer.

  They went back to the bar and settled at the same table. He ordered her a glass of red wine and another margarita for himself and they talked for an hour without a pause. About the weather, about Pablo, about what they had done at Thanksgiving. About his trip to Missoula last month with Abbie to check out the university and how she was planning to spend the coming summer working for Greenpeace. And, of course, about business, those spurious murals, the pretext for his presence here this snowy and unreal night in Santa Fe. It was all so effortless. They seemed to understand each other, laughed at the same things, remembered little details about each other’s lives. She even teased him, asking him where he had parked and how well he had done it.