She purposefully didn’t look down to examine the cut when she was peeing. What was done was done and she wanted this day to feel healthy and real. She finished and pulled and zippered and snapped various layers, and then stood apart from him, staring at the mountain, until Ruben came walking up to them. “Yup, she’s in there. Beautiful. Never would’ve found this place had it not been for the GPS. You know, I think Ollie’s theory is right, that this is the mother to the bear that hangs around town, the one that Gretchen had to chase away from Anya’s kids. Ollie told me to look for a missing claw on the back paw. It was always leaving tracks like that around his chicken yard. Sure enough, she’s missing one. And not from a trap, either. Just born that way, looks like to me. Like a human missing a finger. Anyway, she’s a beauty. Tiny, tiny cozy place, not visible at all. The tranquilizer dart is in.” He took a handful from the baggie of almonds she held out. “Now we need to wait a bit. Sergio and I will pull her out from the den. Then we’ll see who she’s got back there—if her two yearlings made it through the year, and we’ll give them a tranquilizer too—then you two can come up closer. I’ll give you a wave. Keep moving, meanwhile. All that sweat is going to freeze.”
“And so, Hemingway? You were going to explain?” Kevin prompted when Sergio left.
She kept her eyes on the mountain. “I’ve hibernated.” He didn’t respond, so she added, “I suppose I planned on falling in love, having children, the whole catastrophe. The last grizzly in Colorado was killed in the late seventies. That was in the southern part of the state. They lasted longer down there. Things used to be wilder. I thought I’d have more time.”
“You think you’re out? Of time, that is?”
“For certain things, yes. So I decided to go to Paris, and then I broke my wrist. I was helping a friend move flagstones for her patio. Simple and stupid as that.” She held out her left arm now, as if for inspection. “Anyway, the medical bills.” She didn’t say how surprising this was. She’d been careful with money all her life, socking it away and living humbly in an inherited trailer right near the restaurant, and always assumed it would be there. To have the money so suddenly gone; the surprise of it still made her queasy.
“So you wanted to go to Paris to feel the vibe of the old gang, but a broken wrist sent you to a bear den instead.” His voice was kind. Now that he was less bundled, and she was less desperate, she could see him. He was young, in his twenties, probably of Irish descent, freckled and a tinge of red in his hair.
“Isn’t love a beautiful goddamn liar?” she said. “But you know what I respect about them? All that group? At least they gave it a shot. I wonder if we’ve lost it, somehow. This safe and rational approach to love. All this caution. I’ll speak for myself. I was always talking myself out of love, listing reasons why some particular man wasn’t right for me. And maybe they weren’t. Now I find myself alone. I’m nearly fifty and have never been in love.”
He looked at her, rotated his jaw as he worked some almonds out of his teeth. “Well, it’s true. My dad used to say, ‘Son, wasted time and unrealized human potential are perhaps the most unfortunate occurrences in the universe. Never settle for a life of mediocrity.’ He said it in a low full voice, and then went back to his natural pitch. “And when he died last year, he looked up at me and said, ‘The more you participate in life, the less you will regret death. I don’t regret death.’ So I hear you. But also, of course, if I remember right, Pound was screwing everyone, and he abandoned his baby in a hospital. So don’t be going too far with that line of thought. There are different ways of realizing a life.”
“I know. I’m not romanticizing.”
“Hemingway was an ass. And I’m sure they all did their own tallies and pro-con lists of their various lovers. How many of them ended up alone?”
“I know, I know.” She chewed her almonds and looked toward the town of Blue Moon. “But really, there was some brilliance, some attempt at something grand. No denying that. I am simply wishing, on my birthday, that I had made a little better attempt to be brilliant and to be grand.”
The bear den was a simple indentation, filled with the decay of dried aspen leaves and pine needles. When she approached the bear, she could see that they’d covered the bear’s head in a ski mask, so as not to scratch up her face as they gently pulled her from the den, onto a blue tarp, which helped them pull her out a little farther. They’d covered part of her with a space blanket, and that fact surprised tears into Wyn’s eyes. She loved these men in that instant: That they would care this much for a bear.
She got on her hands and knees, as Ruben was indicating she do, and inched forward, toward the bear. The sow’s front end was pulled out, her hind legs still in the den, and when Wyn leaned forward, she could see another figure, the one yearling that had survived. It was bigger than she thought it would be, nearly full-grown, it seemed, and much darker than its mama. Nearly black. But the best was the noise, the huffing of the two bears, the steady breath of sleep. She had not considered what bears would sound like.
“I want you two to have these avalanche shovels in your hands at all times,” Sergio murmured. “This is no joke. Bears respond to tranquilizer differently. They can become alert quickly.”
He nodded to her, giving her the go-ahead, and she moved closer, leaning to one side so as to alleviate the pain in her hip. She paused, on all fours, looking at the bear, then putting her nose into her fur. Behind her, Kevin was busy with various recording gear. How odd, she suddenly realized, to have a radio guy come—wasn’t it the visuals of aspen and blue sky and sparkling snow and the bear that were so effective? Why not a TV guy? But now he had his mike in front of the bear’s nose and was recording the huffing, as well as the banter between Ruben and Sergio as they murmured about ccs and hair samples, and she could see why. This was a story told well in sound.
She raised her head and looked at Sergio, his eyes closed in concentration as he felt for a vein. Ruben was helping him, and they drew vials of blood, administered eye drops and ointments, took measurements. Kevin recorded it all, the little bits of conversation that floated around the bear’s head—considering the girth, I’m guessing one hundred seventy-seven pounds, and seven years old, and two cubs last year, and dart in at one fifteen—and then looked over at her and said, “Hemingway would not have been so gentle.”
Wyn wanted to say something to these young men, something about how they should knock, knock loud, for what they wanted. But they were busy and it was not her place.
She leaned forward to better see the bear. She was starting to shake. Her socks were wet, even though she’d been so careful picking out the best wool, and now that they weren’t moving, and in the shade, she could feel the bite of cold. Of a body that could not warm. A fear rose up. She didn’t care, she deserved to die, she was killing herself anyway, and she kept her eye on the bear, the wild creature; the feet pads looked surprisingly soft. She touched one gently, then pushed harder, her finger between the pads. Sergio lifted the skin of the bear’s mouth to show her the yellow teeth; the claws were the same color. Then he handed her the GPS collar, and it was heavier and larger than she would have thought; she was delighted that it was off the bear; how annoying it must have been for her.
“Crawl on in,” Sergio said, taking it from her. “If that’s what you still want. We did what we came to do, now go enjoy your Paris.” He went to the effort of getting down on his hands and knees, difficult because he was a bit tired and because of all the outerwear. Clearly, he wanted to be eye level to her, tell her something. When he put his face near hers, she could see his lips were blueish, his skin oddly lacking in color, and he looked not only cold but exhausted, the way an animal can.
She nodded. “I do. Still want to go in.”
She really looked at him, then. Two wild animals, taking stock. They held each other’s eyes, and she understood, suddenly, why he had invited her on this trip. A simple shared fear, but surely a great binding one. An understan
ding of what the other was suffering because of smoke’s way. She knew he slept around—had slept around with her, in fact—and so had she—but now understood that he was looking for something great and grand, something different, and he saw it in her too. He was in his early forties and was just realizing he needed to knock, and Sy’s death had clarified that for him, and he saw the same impulse in her. They recognized in each other the journey.
The others were busy, so he leaned forward and whispered to her. “I was thinking about this on the snowshoe up here. Even married people, even married people in Paris of all places—well, you better believe they doubt and suffer. That they don’t know what it is they want, and how best to get there. Whether they’ve given their life enough thought, which requires time, or if they’ve made the right decisions, which requires courage. They know as well as we do, Wyn, that life keeps an account of both the decisions we don’t make and those we do. Don’t beat yourself up about it anymore. Look forward. Be here. Be with the bear.”
She nodded, to him and herself—you can do this, you will do this—and broke his gaze and looked in at the den. She patted his gloved hand with her own, and then inched toward the bear, then past the mama bear, first on hands and knees, made difficult because of her avalanche shovel in one hand, and then on stomach as the cavern got even smaller. It was hard to make out how the body of the yearling was positioned, given the lack of light and the amount of fur, but she felt around until she knew she was touching his head. She couldn’t raise her head to get a full view; she was smashed on her stomach, but she let go of the shovel—caution be damned—and put her other arm out. In this way, she was touching the mama bear’s hind leg with her right hand, the yearling’s shoulder with her left, and she lay, gently digging her fingers into fur. They did not smell as bad as she thought they would—not the rank odor she’d smelled when they were near dumpsters, of wild and urine and rot. This smelled of pine needles and cold and something pure. She closed her eyes so she could breathe it in, feel the oily coarse fur, and rested her face down, right on the duff, the pine needles jabbing at her cheekbone.
She heard Sergio saying something to her, probably beckoning her out, but she ignored him. This is the best moment you are ever going to have, she told herself. Please remember it so you can use it. Please find a way to hang on. Behind her, the sky was starting its turn toward the evening hour, and surrounding her was rock. In the past were the times she’d forgotten to knock louder, and in front of her was the descent down the mountain, in which they’d have to ride their avalanche shovels like sleds in an effort to make it to the trucks before dark. Below her ran the waters of the world, above her was the arc of sky, and she stayed this way, although she knew she wouldn’t have much longer now, that sedation was never a full guarantee, and almost all creatures would eventually resist the pull of sleep and awaken.
Chapter Fourteen
Painting the Constellations
Anya had been faking orgasms for the last ten years with her husband, and then she’d decided to take a lover, basically to eradicate the heart-sick that came with pretend moans and clenching of vaginal walls. Not to mention pretend love. Or at least, dissipated bored love. But she had kids—what was she supposed to do?—and so she’d launched forth bravely, to still feel like the woman, the sexy and sex-loving woman that she had always been. But now, at this odd but critical moment, she found herself suddenly shy, incapable of doing what she’d set out to do. Perhaps this was a horrible idea. Sick, even. Her husband dead just a little more than a month. And yet, she was so off-kilter she had no other idea of how to spend her evening without literally going mad. She had said this to her lover, Sergio, who had said: “I hear you. We are all just trying to survive right now, darling.”
They were in the hot tub together, she and Sergio, and Thayne and Celeste. Naked and high. Anya hadn’t been naked in a hot tub, ever, and the high was new too, and legal, she joyful, and was not sad her husband was gone—maybe that would come later?—and she was glad for the buzz of red wine, glad for the float of pot, glad that Sergio’s foot was touching her own.
The mountains settled her, too. She was the lucky one who had the direct view of twilight sky and the dark waves of the Rocky Mountains, the Never-Summer Range, with Blue Moon towering above the rest. Sergio, on the other hand, was facing Thayne and Celeste and their small log house behind them, and if he turned toward her, he got the twinkling skyline of the Front Range. It was only if he looked west, away from her, that he could see the deep blue of sundown and shadowed mountains—which was, of course, where he was looking.
She ran her foot along Sergio’s leg. Why, she wondered, was it always up to the woman? It was Anya’s theory that men had, in the generation preceding hers, lost their ability to move sexual matters forward—one aggressive act and they could be sued or accused or slapped. And so women were in charge of any overt first moves. It was she who had, for instance, invited Sergio into her bedroom two years ago (he had been over, building her a bookcase out of beetlekill, her kids at preschool), after clarifying with herself that she was sure that her love for her husband was over, and that while she still needed to care for him in his illness, she also deserved love. Or at least, some touch.
At that time, she hadn’t orgasmed in so long she forgot how good they were, but after taking Sergio as her lover she was sparked alive. But then her husband died, and the guilt and relief did not send her crying, as one might expect, but rather outward. She was only trying to continue on, wasn’t she? It was so fucked up, she realized. And yet. And here were three people who didn’t judge her for it. Amen to that.
So, it was up to her. It was true that men were capable of mild, first hints, though, and that’s exactly how this had all started: Months ago, at the beginning of the school year, at a parent-teacher conference for her child, Thayne had purposefully held her gaze as he spoke about her oldest child, Zoë, a girl in his first-grade class, and it was his kindness, his obvious affection for her daughter that had made Anya, oddly enough, become aroused. Plus she’d heard, through the grapevine, that he’d given up a high-paying job at some tech company to become a teacher and move up to this mountain and buy a horse, and she was a sucker for people who bucked the system. So she stared back, despite the fact she was already married, and despite the fact she was already having an affair. As she sat at her daughter’s tiny desk, it was Thayne who then suggested that she should come over to sit in their new hot tub—and then, he added, more haltingly, she and Sergio, or she and Sy, could come over for dinner and then go outside for some hot-tubbing. At that time, he threw out his arms with a warm confused smile, which said everything. It said, I know we accidentally came upon you and Sergio kissing, I know that your husband is our vet, I know that given the state of your life and the world in general I am in no position to judge you, and that you are welcome to come to my house regardless of who you would like to bring, lover or husband. Which she had not been able to respond to, not till now, when she called and asked, haltingly, if she and Sergio could come over, that Sy’s actions had made her want to connect with others on the mountain, if, strange though the timing was, if now she could come? If they could have one evening together, without mention of Sy—a pretend story, a pause of sorts, in the painful universe of this winter?
Thayne was looking at her now, in the hot tub, with that same intense, interested expression he had on his face when he first suggested this scenario. He had curly dark hair and a nose that was a bit too big and a skinny lankiness. He smiled at her, warmly, and said, “I suppose you hear a lot about sex. I know there’s client privacy issues, but can you give me generals? Like, what percentage of adults need to talk about it, in one form or another?”
“A hundred percent,” she said. “Eventually.”
“This is a nice hot tub,” Sergio said. “Perfect for a winter night.”
“God and love,” Thayne persisted, running his hand through his damp hair, then touching his jawline to wipe off th
e excess water. “Probably the only two things worth obsessing over. I bet you hear a lot about those two.”
“Well, honey, but love and sex aren’t the same thing, and first you asked her about sex,” said Celeste, who had been sipping her wine from a plastic wineglass. She was a blond, too, and the tips of her wet hair reminded Anya of fall grasslands. “Of course you can have sex without love, without messing things up.”
Anya breathed out loudly, which was her way of saying she wondered. It was, perhaps, possible to become sexually engaged without any residual waves. But who’d want it? The erotic was a life force, pushed people to live deeply and truly.
She wondered, briefly, if her husband had known about her affair with Sergio. Or, for that matter, if her best girlfriend, Gretchen, had ever found out. She doubted it. She had decided long ago not to feel guilty for loving, but to also try to contain the gossip and pain. It was a small town, after all. It worried her sometimes, though, what ripples might be caused if the truth were known.
She tapped her foot against Sergio’s, to send him a signal. On the way to dinner tonight, as they drove down the mountain, she’d told him, “I wonder about this, you know, not everyone invites you over to their hot tub, and then mentions they sit in it naked. I wonder if they’re, you know—”
“Swingers?”
“Yes, swingers.”
“I don’t know,” he’d said.
“But what should we do if they are?”
He’d taken a curve fast enough to cause a squeal, which caused him to slow down. “This situation is already so weird, I think we should just let it get weirder. Play it by ear, I guess.”
The Blue Hour Page 15