by Jim Harrison
At the restaurant we didn’t talk about the crucifix though its shadow fell on our dinner. We tried to talk about Shirley’s father who had been an orthopedic surgeon in Detroit and on noting the first small signs of Alzheimer’s had bought a farm close to Reed City near his birthplace. His idea was that as his dementia increased he wanted to be in the area where certain of his memories were likely to survive. We had been there with Shirley last June and though her father showed symptoms of decline he seemed quite happy. Her mother had insisted on keeping her job as a school principal despite her father’s wealth which was partly inherited and in part from his medical practice. She would come up on weekends and for most of the summer. A great big local woman was a live-in cook and maid. Shirley’s father would look at this woman fondly and say, “I can’t boil an egg.” It was a little unnerving when he kept repeating this sentence. Martha and I have always wondered if Shirley wasn’t more engaged and functional in life because her mother worked while our mothers had spent their lifetimes out to lunch, literally.
I was only halfway through my delicious roast pork sandwich and another margarita when to my absolute surprise I began to cry. At first Martha thought it was the habanero salsa bringing on my tears but then I was guilty of a miniature sob. Martha was still smiling but not with her eyes as she reached out her hand.
“What?”
“It’s just the Spanish voices and jukebox laments,” I lied, though I love the non-English sounds in France and Italy. I’m so tired of the banality of what people say.
“Are you sure? You never cry.” Martha was nearly frantic.
“I had this sudden bad memory about my mother,” I lied again. I had the peculiar feeling of being a building that was disintegrating inside but not outside. Floors and ceilings were crumbling and falling toward the bottom. At the same moment I was aware that I must stay solid for my oldest friend, Martha. It was a fine motive but a real struggle. I pushed my margarita aside knowing that number three might lead me into what Martha called “la-la land.”
“You seem a little depressed. You don’t have to come back to Houston with me. I can face the music.” Martha was affecting courage.
“Oh bullshit. It’s not music you’re facing. I was just thinking of the second time Daryl met me which was in San Francisco at the Huntington Hotel. He was pissed that he couldn’t smoke in the bar so we took a bottle of wine to that little park across the street. I suppose that was illegal, too. Anyway, there was a group of tai chi people doing their number in the park. Daryl did a grotesque imitation of them and I chided him. I suspect that you noticed that he couldn’t take any sort of criticism. Anyway, rather than respond he went on the attack. That morning we had been out to the de Young Museum and the attack had actually started there. He had accused me of what he called ‘art envy,’ which meant that inside me I wanted to be a painter or poet and suchlike but had never tried to be either. This left me in what he termed the ‘dead zone’ of envying and criticizing those who had given their lives to the arts. I said, ‘Daryl, I was only critical of your bad behavior making fun of those tai chi people. They’re not hurting anyone.’ So off he marched, of course, returning fairly drunk late in the evening.”
“I always wondered how many more women there were than just us. Pardon my French but there must be a bunch that wanted to cut off his nuts.” Martha actually laughed.
“Once I found a collection of my dad’s dirty pictures. I don’t mean pornography though some were nudes. There were photos of Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth and also someone called Cyd Charisse kicking up a leg in an Arab costume. I was about twelve and my mother was temporarily on the wagon and somewhat sedated. She said, ’Frances, you’ll learn to understand a lot about men but not all of it. You wouldn’t want to know all of it which would be quite unpleasant.’ And that was that.”
I was suddenly so tired my face was slack and I bit my lip. The habanero sauce got in the tiny puncture so I sipped the margarita which only added stinging salt to the wound. At least it was real. There was a small blemish of blood on a shred of pork and like probably everyone else I thought, “So that’s what we’re made of.”
We gave up on the evening and went to bed. Martha was two doors down the hall and I told her to knock if she had problems. Shirley wouldn’t arrive until midmorning so there would be time for a walk in the relative cool of the morning. The moment before the densest sleep possible I had the odd thought that a women’s prison might not be all that bad. Prison would deny choice and my endless choices were driving me crazy. My mother’s father was an English colonel in a German POW camp and said it wasn’t so terrible but he knew that imprisoned officers got a small sausage every day while enlisted prisoners were eating fish-head stew. The eyes floated, or so he said.
We were walking by seven, a fine cool morning with scarcely any traffic because it was Saturday. The desk clerk had given us directions to an area with old “sisal” mansions. After a dozen blocks and passing through a not-so-nifty group of chain hotels and motels we entered a neighborhood of grand ornate, old houses, most in disrepair, that made the biggest homes in Bloomfield Hills look gauche and pathetic. There were so many flowering trees that the air was heavy with the scent of blossoms. We laughed when we admitted that we had forgotten what “sisal” was and Martha said, “We’re supposed to be educated” and I said, “For what?” Finally I remembered that sisal had to do with the making of rope. Looking at virtual blocks of these stupendous and mostly unoccupied houses made us forget why we were in Mérida. The sisal plantations themselves had likely been out in the Yucatán jungle.
“When I get out of prison maybe I could come down here and redo one of these places,” Martha said, breaking the spell of forgetfulness.
“I can’t imagine a Wasp like us living on this street but maybe prison de-Wasps you. I’ll go in on the house with you. We could start an orphanage or a home for dysfunctional Wasps. We’re an ethnic group without a culture.”
“I don’t see how you can live being that pessimistic.” Martha was irritated with me and looked around as if she couldn’t quite locate herself. Meanwhile I was looking straight up into a tree laden with big purple flowers. I could only think “Jacaranda” but doubted it. Up at the top where the purple flowers met the blue sky there was a bright red bird looking down at me from this color combination that didn’t work except in the ravishing confines of nature. I pointed the bird out to Martha while questioning myself. “What has brought us to this place?” We sort of slid into the whole mess, perhaps starting at birth, then friendship, and the capstone of our university life. When Sammy visited me from MIT when we were seniors and before he went to Caltech for graduate school he was such a pure heart about science. It was exciting to be around him and his friends in Pasadena. To me they all seemed like geniuses, mad scientists who were going to somehow make the world a better place or so we all supposed, but then Sammy and most of the others got sidetracked by the technology of the computer revolution, and consequently the money that accompanied it. My wonder boy became a mogul who changes his shirt and socks several times a day.
On the long walk back to the hotel in the gathering heat we admitted a little timidity about Shirley’s imminent arrival. At school she was the shyest and the most unfinished personality of we three but now we wondered if she didn’t get tired trying to carry Martha and me into the present tense. We were startled at our Chicago meeting at the Drake when Shirley said that her motive behind her affair with Daryl was pure lust. Like many ex-college football players her husband, Hal, had become very large and she said it was like sleeping with a hairy walrus. Hal kept talking about getting back to what he called his “playing weight” and had been involved in twenty years’ worth of unsuccessful diets. Shirley had told us that she thought Daryl was particularly captious because the poetry world had become too small for him. He had told Shirley that he wanted to write a novel but would need at least three years of peace and quiet in France, probably Paris, to do so. This struck me
as odd because I never thought of Paris in terms of peace and quiet.
Walking back to the hotel I recalled again the painful evening down in Big Sur when I was silly enough to tell Daryl about my soulful and liberating evening while listening to the Mendelssohn violin concerto. He made light of it saying that profound aesthetic experiences are only felt by their creators or other creators in the arts. They’re similar to metaphysical and spiritual experiences that are denied to all but a few. I asked then why do people read great books or listen to music or study paintings that have reached a sublime level? He flatly said that we were all fooling ourselves except on a basic or lower level of simple appreciation. “Far from your own towering feelings,” I teased, though I was deeply pissed off. He then repeated at length his accusations of art envy until I got another room at the expensive lodge where we were staying. When we checked out in the morning I noted a charge of five hundred dollars for two bottles of wine. Sammy’s accountants go over all of our books carefully but I have humorously told them that I have a close friend and old classmate named Darlene.
I turned away from Martha and stooped to pet a stray mutt so I could wipe away my tears. Counting the evening before, this meant I had cried twice when the closest previous time had been more than a decade before when my mother was having d.t.’s at one of those private alcohol residence clinics.
It was only a little after nine in the morning but already hot so we stopped at a tavern, a workingmen’s joint where we were obviously out of place, and had a chilada, a beer with fresh lime juice in a frozen mug with salt on the lip. Once again the sting of salt on my tiny lip wound brought me to a fuller consciousness. Maybe I should run around barefoot kicking a big stone. While drinking the beer Martha said she hoped Shirley wouldn’t be too hard on us. On occasion Shirley can verge on the bully but good humoredly unlike Martha’s daughter, Dolly, who makes you wince on sight. While finishing our beers I nearly told Martha that in New York I had slept with Daryl and another woman but thought better of it. Our stew didn’t need a fresh ingredient. Martha suddenly said that she had read in the Detroit Times that Clarence had joined an organization called Doctors Without Borders. Clarence was a black track star we knew from Ann Arbor parties. He was in med school and was easily the wittiest man we had ever met. He called us the “Three Rich Bitches” but ever so lightly. Her father had given Martha his old Jaguar sedan and Martha had loaned it to Clarence several times for important dates.
After showering we sat in the lobby waiting for Shirley. It was a beautiful space open to the roof and I tried to imagine Fidel Castro sitting where we sat, studying with a pot of coffee, and perhaps already plotting the overthrow of Batista. We had all grown up reading about the satanic communist threat in Cuba but then it was hard to take seriously compared to the Cold War with Russia. My single beer had worn off and I had an inappropriate urge for a drink. With a mother like mine you have to be a stern monitor of your drinking. We were about talked out for the time being and Martha was looking at a Mérida guidebook while I twiddled my thumbs and tried to determine whether my spirits were rising or lowering. The best of a number of analysts I’ve had told me that there wasn’t much sense in monitoring every one of my moods because they were liable to change with whatever I was doing. My father liked to say, “Idle hands are the devil’s work tool” when I was just sitting around as a girl. Idleness certainly can generate bad moods about yourself. When I’m in Paris or Florence or New York City going to museums and galleries I find that I scarcely ever think about myself.
Martha looked stricken when the desk clerk walked over and handed her a fax. I could see from ten feet away that it was short.
“It’s from Dad. I have to appear voluntarily for prearraignment on Monday morning at ten A.M. That means I’ll have to leave tomorrow.”
“I’ll have Sammy send the plane,” I said timidly.
“No, if I’m going to prison I want to be ordinary.” Martha was still wearing her patented grin.
I glanced out the front window and there was Shirley getting out of a cab dressed in a gray summer suit like a proper businesswoman. She looked at a piece of paper and shook the driver’s hand. He carried in her small bag and she didn’t see us until she reached the desk at which point she ran over and embraced Martha and me. I felt dumb and sullen compared to her radiance. Martha burst into tears as if her savior had arrived.
“We might beat this yet. I’ve been talking to your father. We’re going for the barrage effect. Two of your family lawyers are coming as observers. They can’t practice in Texas but they’ll make impressive decorations. Our trump card is a friend of Hal’s, a lawyer from Dallas, who was a genuine Texas football hero. I talked to Sammy, who’s also sending some big shots. Anyway, I made reservations for us tomorrow afternoon. We’ll all have a Sunday evening meeting in Houston at our hotel. I’d say things are looking better. Daryl is conscious now but won’t talk to any of our people.”
“But I tried to kill him,” Martha snuffled.
“No you didn’t. You were only trying to hurt him. You’re not a pharmacist and that’s not normally a lethal dose of Elavil. I also found out that the prosecutor will be low-level.” Shirley took her first long breath after all of this and I felt a tinge of jealousy for her competence.
“But things can still go wrong,” I said.
“Of course they can, silly. That’s life.” Shirley looked at her piece of paper from the cab driver. “There are nine concerts going on in the city today. I need a break from Michigan.”
“You must be tired from your flight?” Martha offered this but was still obviously trying to figure out the dimensions of what Shirley had said.
“I was just sitting on the plane and reading this. It gave me energy.” Shirley waved a book by an Oriental author. There was a tree on the cover. Shirley is always sending us her latest wisdom titles, none of which I’ve ever managed to finish. Now she lightened the atmosphere by telling us Hal’s reaction to the nude photo of her sent to his auto dealership. First he sat on the issue for a month or so, and then when on her insistence they had gone on a church (Episcopal) retreat to save their waning marriage Hal had flipped her the photo after an evening prayer walk in the woods. He had said, “What’s this, Miss Goody Two-shoes?”
Now Martha and I laughed nervously with Shirley laughing the longest without apparent guilt or dismay. Martha had made so much of our marriages all being ruined and I had said that wasn’t an interesting concept. It was fascinating to me how the shyest member of our group had become so different but then maybe things that happened so gradually are the hardest to understand. Shirley was our deepest study though she acted the withdrawn ditz. A professor tried to flunk her semester paper on Walt Whitman’s religion because he couldn’t believe a sorority girl could produce this high level of work but she brought in all of her sourcebooks and notes and proved her case. Her paper was even published in some sort of newsletter of the Whitman Society. Whitman was always too expansive for my taste, quite embarrassing in fact like a song you can’t respond to because you’ve never had the feelings. Shirley always had the same obsession with books that I’ve had with art. She’d turn a page at random hoping for a clue on how to handle her latest worthless boyfriend.
We only made three of the concerts that afternoon and early evening. It was a reunion, after all, and we had too many cocktails so that when we napped and awoke in the late evening we had to settle for the pork sandwiches at Los Balcones. Martha and I were a little glum after our naps but not Shirley who insisted on reading a few passages to us while we had coffee at the outdoor café next to the hotel.
I admit I was working to remove a lump of sadness from my throat and beneath my breastbone. The day had been an overload and now I was in the process of admitting to myself that my sadness came from jealousy, or maybe “envy” is the better word. With Martha it was simple. Across the zocalo we had watched a couple of dozen boys and girls who were about fourteen do a strenuous hour of Mexican folk dance
s, some four centuries old. Their costumes were lovely and a large band sat in the shade of a portico playing the wonderful music. The three of us were teary when it was over. Martha made her way through the crowd and spoke with a couple we thought were the best dancers. The boy was short and pudgy but marvelous on his feet. The girl was middling height but darkly gorgeous except for her slightly crooked teeth. They showed Martha some intricate steps and she joined in as did a few remaining band members with their instruments. A small crowd encircled them laughing and clapping for the lady gringo who danced so well. It went on for ten minutes until Martha was dripping sweat and wobbly and then there was more applause. Martha and the couple embraced in a tight circle and when Martha reached us she was still totally carried away.
Now in the evening I felt like a grotesquely spoiled and envious bitch for whom no one would ever applaud. My jealousy about Shirley was far more complicated. I watched her closely while we ate our pork sandwiches and was startled when she said that it wasn’t until her affair with Daryl that she realized to what extent she was a “physical woman.” In twenty years of marriage she had never cheated on Hal. She simply hadn’t had time within her social-work career. She said it was unfortunate that she had risen to the level of her so-called competence because now she was an administrator and very much missed the hands-on casework that dealt with the poor who were mentally and physically disabled. She was seriously thinking of quitting her job and moving north to take care of her father. She said she had never given enough time to her love of nature. There was also the idea of returning to work as a simple caseworker and then she could avoid the abstraction of directing others. By living up north for a year with her father she might finally make up her mind on whether or not to divorce Hal.
I think what raised my envy was the sheer busyness of her life while I spent so much of mine in different forms of loitering. Shirley didn’t begin the day with two slow cups of coffee, the New York Times, and then an hour-long bath, followed by a day of not-very-necessary appointments. Not all that much deeper were certain resentments beginning with Shirley’s suggestion by letter several years ago that I take a graduate degree in art history and learn how to be an actual curator. Since I certainly didn’t need money it would be easy to get a job. Gradually my resentment had shifted to Sammy and the idea that there was an element of cruelty to his kindness and generosity. When I mentioned the idea of graduate school and a job, even part-time, Sammy said, “Our family including me is job enough for you and you do it beautifully.” I kept pushing the set of emotions away but I began to feel like an employee. I mean he didn’t intend any cruelty and I was a free woman in most respects but there was a specific sense that I was a possession.