by Brady Udall
“Your boss called this morning. He says your vacation and sick leave are finished day after tomorrow. He says he understands what you’re going through but he wanted to know if he should start looking for a replacement.”
I wanted Juan to react, to address his troubles or make excuses, anything, but he just smiled, his eyes sad, and leaned back in the tub as if he was floating in a cloud of Mr. Bubble. He wouldn’t talk to me for the rest of the day.
None of this, though—the not speaking, the not sleeping, the hat—bothered me as much as when he tried to hurt himself. The time I caught him chewing on tin foil I asked him what he was doing and he told me, “I want to hurt.”
“No you don’t,” I said.
“Yes I do. It’s the only thing that makes me feel better.”
“You hurt enough already.”
“No, no—hah!—no.” He shook his head. “Not near enough.”
He would do the dishes with the water scalding. Some mornings he would sit at the kitchen table with his old Algebra II book, the same one he was never able to decipher in high school, and attempt to find the solutions, the answers to all the problems, gnashing his teeth, sometimes crying in frustration. “This is not right,” he’d weep. “The answers in the back of the book are all screwed up. Somebody should definitely do something about this.”
He rubbed bacon on his arm and tried to get Louise, my retriever, to bite him. Sometimes he would run out into the desert at night, barefoot, over the rocks and bullheads and clumps of sagebrush, trying to sneak up on coyotes. I remember him once or twice calling the police, asking them to come over and arrest him.
He began to wear that damn hat everywhere. It seemed to give him the kind of comfort that I couldn’t.
Juan and I met in the Green River, a year and a half before the accident. He was ankle deep in the water, serenely peeing into the current, and I was about twenty yards upstream, soaking my legs after a long day of hiking, partly hidden by some cattails. When he noticed me, he just finished his business, stuffed his thing back in his spandex biking shorts and waded over to introduce himself. Here was this blond, tiger-eyed man standing above me, shirtless and dripping sweat, the sun like a corona behind his head. I think it was when he told me his name was Juan that I began to truly love him.
I had just spent two years in eastern Wyoming doing grasslands research, and my social skills, never my strong point anyway, had devolved into a limited repertoire of grunts and head movements that I utilized mostly in refusing offers to dance from cowboys and truck drivers. I told Juan my name but couldn’t come up with anything else. I felt ridiculous, but there was nothing left to do but tell him exactly what I was thinking: “You are one beautiful man.”
He looked over his shoulder and back at me. “I hope that has nothing to do with what you just saw me doing over there,” he said.
I asked him about his name and he told me he was named after Juan María Batista, a Mexican revolutionary around the turn of the century who fought against the aristocracy, a liberator of the oppressed and champion of the poor. He squatted down in the water next to me to explain all this, his knee touching my elbow, and I have never been so turned on in all my life.
We started going out and six months later we moved in together. Originally, I had come to Cedar City to finish up my graduate work in Land Management, but meeting Juan made me lose my concentration, my devotion to scientific analysis. We ripped up the front lawn and planted a pumpkin garden, we drove out to Shipwreck Rock and made love on building-sized slabs of sandstone, we brewed dandelion wine that tasted like bleach. I knew we were acting like hormone-driven teenagers, but I didn’t care; I was so happy, so full. Even though I’d grown up dreaming about delirious, headlong romance, I’d never even had a boyfriend, not even in high school, and I had eventually resigned myself to a solitary existence. But now, here was Juan, like a last-minute miracle, a gift of God fallen from the sky; I had found someone to love.
I got a job showing sun-drunk tourists around rock formations and Indian ruins. Juan, who was born and raised in Cedar City, already had a good job at the biggest insurance company in town, but drove around in a rusty Maverick and was always borrowing money from Bart. It took him two or three weeks after we’d moved in together to tell me why.
It happened on a Saturday morning when we were out biking, coasting down a narrow canyon trail. I started yammering about marriage, asking his opinions on the role of husband and wife in this day and age, etc. It was not something that had ever come up between us, and I was curious to know what he thought. I did not mean anything by it, so far as I know, had absolutely no hidden intentions, but Juan suddenly stopped his bike, actually stuck out his heels and skidded to a stop instead of applying the hand brake.
“Whoa,” he said. “Hold on just a second here.”
I sped a good ten yards past him and had to turn around and go back. He was gripping the handle bars. His ears were suddenly red. He stared at one spot in the middle of his chest—something he does when he’s thinking, gathering words, preparing to speak. He unstraddled his bike and tossed it aside as if it was hindering his thought processes. He walked to the other side of the trail, kicked at a dead yucca plant and came back talking: “I’ve got something to tell you and it’s not a secret or anything like that, just something I haven’t said anything about until now. I don’t believe in secrets.”
He looked up for the first time and I tried to affect an expression of openness, acceptance, an expression that said, Tell me what you must.
“I have an ex-wife,” he said.
“What?”
“And a kid.”
My bike tipped over and slid down a shallow embankment, hitting a boulder.
“All right,” he said, putting his hands out in front of him as if clearing the air. “I’m just going to get all this out right now and then we won’t have to talk about it again. Okay?”
Unable to speak at all, I nodded.
“Seven years,” he said, stopped, sighed, put his hands over his eyes and started again: “Seven years ago I got married. I saw this girl in her tight jeans and cowboy boots and I thought we had a date with destiny. And then, ka-pow”—he punched himself fairly hard on the side of the head—” here comes a baby before I can even get my legs under me. I was a freshman in college for godssakes, weak in the knees to begin with. I was afraid of the baby. Of what it might grow up to be under the care of a moron like me. I was afraid of the way Carolyn was always looking at me, begging me to take charge. It was pure hell, every day of it. Torture. It took her two years to get up enough sense to leave, take the baby and clear out. She moved to Virginia Beach and started a T-shirt shop. She’s happy, far as I know. My alimony and child support don’t hurt, either.”
“You have a child,” I said.
“Gordon. He’s not a bad soccer player, from what I hear. I’m supposed to have visitation rights, but she moved as far away from me as she could get. It’s better this way. Except for those checks I send out every month, it’s like something that never happened.” He rubbed the sweat off his neck and smoothed his long hair back with it. “I don’t know what else to say.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“About what?”
“I don’t know, all this,” I said. I felt terribly strange right then; in a matter of seconds Juan had become someone completely different to me, a whole different person. He suddenly seemed older and more vulnerable, which, for some reason, made me love him even more.
“Look,” he said. “This isn’t a confession or anything terrible like that. You started talking about marriage and everything—it’s just I want you to know how I feel about it, the whys and the wherefores. Marriage, in my opinion, is the worst damn idea anybody ever came up with. If we stopped and thought logically about it, we’d ban the whole thing. What’s the purpose in it? Shouldn’t we be free to love each other and not be obligated?”
Juan—quiet, untalkative Juan—was running at the mouth and h
e knew it. He gathered me into his arms and hugged me as if to stop himself from going on.
“I’m happy, the way we are,” he said into my hair.
I squeezed him as hard as I could, until I heard his ribs creak.
“Exactly,” he said, as if I had just agreed with him.
I found out during those months after the accident—months of sick worry and heartache and crying alone in bed—that there is nothing more cruel than hope. I believed that if I simply loved Juan enough—no matter that he had become a whole different person, a shabby refugee from some unnamable place—he would come out of it, suddenly or gradually, and we would be able to start our perfect life all over again. I believed in this, clung to this hope, even while I held Juan down in the bath tub and scrubbed the grit off him, like a dog, even when I’d have to wake up every hour or two in the middle of the night to check in on him, to make sure he wasn’t hurting himself in any permanent way, even during the long days of telephone calls from newspaper and TV people, wanting to do interviews, wanting to know about this wacky misadventure with a ball and chain that had ended in watery death.
I think I held up well, all things considered, until one morning, just under six months after the accident, when I got out of bed and found that Juan had disappeared. I tore through the house in a red-eyed panic, checked the garage, the attic, the backyard, shouting Juan’s name. Before, I had convinced myself that I shouldn’t worry about suicide, that Juan wasn’t capable of such a thing, but now it was the only thing in my head; my mind was a huge movie screen full of all the gory, self-inflicted possibilities.
In nothing more than a long T-shirt I got in my car and searched every street in town, the park, I even went out to the reservoir, thinking that might be the place Juan might choose to do something drastic. Once I had scoured the entire area I sped home to call the sheriff to start a manhunt. I came screeching into the driveway and when I got out of the car I looked up and there was Juan sitting on the roof. I stood there for a moment, half-naked, my breath coming in jerks, staring up at him. He was sitting with his back against the chimney, eyes closed, wearing a pair of flowery swim trunks and his hat. The sun made a halo around his head, just as it had the first day we met.
“Have you been up there this whole time?” I yelled at him. Juan didn’t acknowledge my presence; I knew he had been perched up there while I shouted his name and ripped the house apart looking for him. He must have just sat and watched while I tore out of the driveway, hysterical and nauseous with dread.
“What are you doing up there?” I said.
He said, “Getting sunburned.”
“Will you come down? Please.”
Without even looking my way he said, “Don’t you have work today?”
Something broke inside me right then; the tide of panic that had overtaken me turned, almost instantly, into an anger so deep and complete that I could feel my entire body begin to shake. The relief I’d felt at finding him safe and sound was completely washed away. I wanted to throw rocks at Juan, I wanted to hurt him, I wanted to give him some of that pain he was searching for.
“You son of a BITCH!” I shrieked.
Juan didn’t say anything, but I thought I could see him smile ever so slightly.
I went inside and tried to calm myself, standing just inside the door, taking deep breaths, my face pressed against the wall. I found my way to the kitchen and called the tourist office to tell them I wouldn’t be able to make the Red Canyon tour because I had the flu. Julie, my supervisor, swore and hung up on me. I didn’t hang up the phone, just disconnected and dialed again—9-1-1.
“Emergency services,” the man on the other end said. He sounded much too cheerful to be doing the job he was doing.
“I need help,” I said.
“What’s your address, please, ma’am.”
I told him and then explained that there was somebody on my roof.
“What is this person doing there?”
“Just sitting.”
“Is this person an acquaintance or family member?”
“No—sort of.”
“You can tell me.”
“He’s just someone I know and I don’t want him to fall and hurt himself. Maybe you could send someone over to talk to him. Nothing I do seems to work.”
“Has he been taking drugs or alcohol?
“No, no.”
“Does he have a history of mental illness?”
“Not really.”
“Is he in possession of any kind of weapon or firearm?”
“No, look, it’s no big deal. I just wanted to talk to somebody, I’m sorry to bother you.”
“Please stay on the line, ma’am, I can’t help you if you hang up.”
“Thanks, really, but—”
Just then there was a loud scraping noise and a series of thumps right above my head. Through the sliding glass door I saw Juan come hurtling off the roof, like a piece of space debris falling out of the sky, landing without a sound on the grass of the backyard.
“I heard that,” the man on the phone said.
I hung up and went to the back door. Juan slowly picked himself up off the lawn. Dazed, he stumbled in a circle, clutching the air for something to steady himself with. He looked around until he found his hat in a bush and clapped it on his head. He had at least three nasty scrapes on his shoulder and back.
I slid open the door and he looked at me. I could now see that his left hand was sticking out from his wrist at a sickeningly unnatural angle. He suddenly grabbed his arm and winced. “I think I fell asleep up there,” he said.
I went to him, but he held out his good hand, stopping me. “I’m okay,” he said, unable to stop flinching as he tried to move his arm. “I’m not feeling too bad at all.”
We were back from the hospital only a few minutes when Kitty Logan, Bart’s ex-fiancee, called. I was sitting at the kitchen table, feeling so exhausted that it took everything I had just to get up and answer the phone, and Juan was curled up under the sink, snoring lightly while Louise licked his toes. The hospital had been an ordeal: Juan fought the paramedics the whole way there, fought the nurses and doctors in the hallway of the emergency room, shouting defiantly, like a wild-eyed political dissident, that he didn’t have a broken bone, he didn’t want any help from anybody, and finally it took a three-hundred pound janitor to hold Juan down long enough so they could give him a sedative and work on his broken wrist.
When I finally made it to the phone, Kitty, in her polished radio voice, told me that she was on her way to Phoenix and she wanted to drop by if that was all right with us. She’d heard through the grapevine that Juan wasn’t taking the whole thing so well and she wanted to stop by and assure him that she had no hard feelings, that it had just been one of those freak things that no one could be blamed for. I left her on the line to ask Juan what he thought. When I told him Kitty was on the phone, he sat up and hit his head on the drain pipe—a reverberating kronk that made Louise whine. He crawled out from under the sink and when I told him Kitty wanted to visit he swayed sideways as if caught by a sudden wind.
“Is it all right?” I said. “Do you want to see her?”
Juan grabbed the kitchen table for balance and held on. He didn’t seem to notice the bone-white cast he was now wearing.
“Juan?” I said.
“Kitty,” Juan said.
“He’d love to see you,” I said into the phone. “We both would.”
Two hours later, at exactly seven o’clock, Kitty showed up at the front door, just as she said she would. Juan was still in the bathroom doing Lord-knows-what—rifling through drawers, running the water, banging the toilet seat up and down.
I let Kitty in and offered her something to drink. She was a pretty woman, the kind of woman that can wear purple lipstick and hoop earrings and not look like a slut. She and I had met only once before, up in Salt Lake, a few weeks before the planned wedding. We all went to a movie and she and I might have become better acquainted that nig
ht had she and Bart been able to extricate their hands and faces from one another for a few minutes.
I got her some cranberry juice and asked her how she was holding up.
She shrugged and smiled at me—a smile without a trace of grief or bitterness in it. “Pretty good, really. I cried a lot those first few days, but I’ve pretty much accepted that this is the way things were supposed to happen.”
I nodded, doing my best to keep my smile as genuine as hers.
“Hmm,” she said, looking down at her drink.
“Juan, Kitty’s here,” I called over my shoulder.
Juan came out of the bathroom wearing his hat and an old plaid blazer I’d never seen before. With his hair slicked back over his ears and his puffy, sunburned face, he looked like a homeless man going to interview for a fast-food job. He shuffled into the room staring at his shoes.
“Juan?” Kitty said, then glanced over at me to verify that this really was not some heat-weary vagrant off the street.
“He’s had a tough time,” I said.
Juan raised his head, holding out his hands as if he had given up searching for something he’d lost. “Kitty,” he said. “Holy shit.” The look in his eyes was enough to break my heart.
Kitty got up and put her hand on Juan’s shoulder. “Let’s just talk about this. Will you sit next to me here?” She tried to lead him over to the couch but he tilted his head apologetically, resisting her, staying where he was.
“Juan,” she said. “You have to get over this. Life goes on. It’s nobody’s fault.”
“Yes,” Juan said. “C’est la vie.”
“It just takes time.”
Juan said, “I’m sorry I didn’t go to the funeral. I’m a serious piece of shit.”
I cut in. “The doctors gave him tranquilizers that made him sick. I made him stay home.”
“No, no,” Kitty said, holding her hands in front of her. “I understand completely.”
After a moment he said to Kitty, “Can you do me a favor?”
“Name it,” she said.
Juan turned around and went to the hall closet. He came back with an aluminum baseball bat. He held it out to her and said, “I heard you’re quite a softball player. Bart used to tell me that you had a hell of a major league swing. He said with genes like that he was sure you two could raise up the next Mickey Mantle.”