“I’m sorry.”
“No. I have something to tell you, too.” And I told him about Adam – everything, every memory I had of the boy, every memory I had of that summer. I was shaken to realize that telling it all took only minutes. Was it so small a thing, what had driven me all these years?
When I had spilled the entire story X shook his head. “We’re a hell of a pair, aren’t we?”
I paged through the sketch book again, staring at Rebecca as if I could memorize every small difference between her features and mine. X’s ex. Were we real to each other at all, he and I? Or were we only proxies? A nauseating pressure was growing inside me, a certainty that what was once lost would never be regained. X and I were both chasing phantoms, running down fading tracks through the sagebrush. I remembered the day of my temple endowment, my wistful hope for some woman somewhere to wash me clean and set me free. I wondered how, by my mere presence, I was freeing X from the loss that haunted him, if I was freeing him at all.
All at once the car vibrated, a tinny clatter. Outside hailstones bounced on the dirt road. The clatter rose to a roar.
“Hell,” X said. The storm caught up to us. He reversed onto the empty highway and sped westward, trying to outrun the weather. I put the sketch pad back into the glove box. The hinge whispered. It sounded like a woman’s sigh.
**
We did manage to outrun that storm. After ten silent minutes of driving the large, violent hail stones reduced in size and finally sputtered out altogether, and we drove fast toward a warm sunset. Neither of us spoke. The revelation of our dual proxyism left me feeling embarrassed, and although I couldn’t say how X felt, he was chewing his lip and concentrating very hard on the road, his fingers tight and angular on the steering wheel.
Once the hail was well past us I felt compelled to break the silence.
“Well,” I said. “I suppose this is a sign, isn’t it?”
“A sign?”
“You look like my old boyfriend. I look like your old fiance. Don’t you think this means something?”
X smiled. “It’s quite a coincidence, I’ll give you that.”
“Really, though. This has to mean something.”
We blew past a truck laden with hay bales. Bits of golden chaff twinkled in its wake and pattered against our windshield. X said nothing.
“You don’t believe in signs?”
He shook his head. “Not really. But coincidences are amusing.”
Amusing? The suggestion that I should find this amusing rubbed me the wrong way. I found it discomfiting that I should be the spitting image of Rebecca, that my resemblance to a lost partner should have been the thing that drew X to me. And I felt ashamed of that feeling, aware as I was that it was unfair to dislike X’s motive when it was exactly the same as my own.
“Yeah,” said X. “Don’t you think this is kind of funny?”
I didn’t know how to respond to that. I did feel like laughing, but there was such a flutter of hysteria in my chest that I didn’t allow myself even to smile. “If you don’t believe in signs, then what do you believe in?”
“You don’t believe in signs, either.”
“Of course I do.”
“But you don’t believe in God. Where do signs come from if they’re not from God?”
He had me there. “Well, I don’t know. The universe?”
“Want some ice cream?”
“Stop trying to change the subject.” A little town gathered in clumps of dark trees off the highway. The stilt-legged signs of gas stations flickered alight, towering over homes built low against the Nebraska wind. It would soon be evening, warm and soft and wheat-scented. I thought of sitting on a sidewalk curb with Adam in the gathering night, drinking Slush Puppies so cold they hurt. “Yeah. Ice cream sounds good.”
We parked on the edge of a deli’s lot, where the pavement gave way to weeds. The crown of a pyramid of old tires peeked above the tops of waist-high grasses. The storm had turned and ran parallel to the highway now, a great body of purple cloud. We could smell it, a whiff of ice against the warmth of farmland. In a nearby field a flock of sheep bleated in fear and milled around a wooden shelter. The light was lowering. X bought ice cream bars and turkey sandwiches. We stood as we ate them, kicking at the fringe of weeds spilling onto the pavement.
I licked the last of the ice cream from my fingers. Food had steadied me. This was X, after all. Whatever his motives, he had been good to me. He was safe enough, I was sure of that.
“So tell me what you believe in,” I said.
“I believe that this is the best turkey sandwich I’ve ever had.”
I laughed. “Okay. And what else?”
“If you’re asking what I think of God, he said, I’m an atheist.”
That word felt terrible to me, hollow and cold, rattling like hailstones. I didn’t know what to make of a person who used such a stark, bleak word to describe himself – his own self, living and warm and beautiful. He saw the look on my face.
“What are you worried about? You’re an atheist, too.”
“I am not!”
“You don’t believe in God. You said so.”
“I don’t like that word.”
He put his arm around my shoulders. “It’s just a word. I’m still me. You know me.” “You have to believe in signs,” I said. I was anxious to attach some significance to our relationship. If this all meant something, then it was all right that I’d left town with a virtual stranger, it was all right that I looked like the woman he had lost. It was all right that he labeled himself with that frightening word. It would all make sense in the end. “What am I if I’m not a sign?”
“You are more than a sign,” he said. “You are you. I want you, not Rebecca.” He kissed me. I kissed him back under the flickering light of the deli’s sign, while the storm shouldered past us into the night.
The Nail in the Sure Place
1.
Almost two weeks after leaving Idaho we abandoned Nebraska and looped back into Wyoming. Between my fears over James and my discomfort with or respective proxyism, I had become a miserable traveling companion, too quiet and long-faced. And the gravity of belief had finally struck me with its full, open-eyed, gasping force. I had never considered what it meant to not believe in God. Preoccupied as I had been with blending in, with preserving the one life I knew how to live, I hadn’t examined the consequences of non-belief. I had just not believed. Only when Brian had said his awful words to me did I realize that I no longer had any concept of James or me or anyone existing in an eternity of well-earned peace. There was no heaven, no judgment, no reward, nothing to make any of this worthwhile or all right in the end. There was no cosmic amelioration, no sense even to signs, no significance in Adam-X or ex-me. The fact of it rendered me blunt-edged and speechless.
X noticed the pall that had settled over me, of course. He was smarter than to tell me I shouldn’t call James anymore. I really shouldn’t have been calling James – not every day, at least – but the trauma I had inflicted on us was too spectacular. I couldn’t make myself leave it alone. I was compelled to talk to him as often as possible, to make sure he was still there, to do my miserable penance, and to spend the hours of driving in a fog of horrible pressing anxiety. It was stupid to call. I should have left him to Brian’s care, to his own thoughts and the relief of my absence. I knew all this. X knew it, too. And he knew that what I needed was not a lecture or reassurance or quotes on the probability of follow-through on suicide threats. I needed a distraction. And so he took me to Cheyenne to show me a good time.
Now that I have visited far more interesting places, the idea of pursuing a good time in southeast Wyoming seems more than a little sad. But out in the wide-sky desolation of the prairies Cheyenne was our best option. It offered everything X needed to perk up my mood. Back then if you’d asked me how to show a friend a good time, I might have suggested home-baked cookies and a nice civil game of Uno. X had a more daring evening in mind.
<
br /> “The first time I met you,” he said, careful, testing, “you noticed I was drinking beer.”
I waited. We had just dropped our travel bags onto a chair and luggage rack – a nicer hotel than we’d grown used to, with a luxury mattress, a flat-screen television inside a wooden hutch, and a halfdozen pillows on the extra-wide bed.
X went on cautiously, his voice belly-crawling, snake-low, “So how dead-set are you against alcohol?”
I thought for a moment, and then answered with a forced laugh that I’d left my husband and started an affair with a total stranger, some artist wandering through town. So I might as well go on as I’d started. “Oh, and there was caffeine in that iced tea you gave me the first night we met. I’m sure there was.” My anxiety left in a welcome rush, and suddenly my laugh was real. The relief of honestto-God happiness made my skin prickle, it was so foreign. Had it been so long since I’d had fun? And really, what would it hurt after all? For God’s sake, I’d broken every rule but the one about alcohol, and X was standing with his hands in his pockets, grinning his big broad-mouthed grin. I was worn down and hollowed out. Something momentous and new felt like just the thing to scrub the memory of Brian’s phone call from my mind. I wanted something to make me believe I had never heard those words. I was ready to try anything.
“I’ll take you out to a real cowboy bar,” X said.
“If I puke you have to clean it up.”
“I guarantee you that won’t happen. I’ll cut you off before you disgrace yourself.”
I made myself as presentable as I could with what I had in my travel bags, fixing my hair with a focus that kept me from examining too closely the knot of nerves in my stomach. Alcohol was an absolute no-no back in town – back in the Church. But I was ready to give pious Rexburg a sock in the jaw. I couldn’t think of a better place to stage a rebellion than a cowboy bar. I fussed over my hair and watched in the mirror as X got rid of his travel-worn t-shirt in that particular way he had, crossed arms, ducked head, glasses still on, pulling on a sleeveless white undershirt that made him look somehow thinner and more wiry, yet stronger – a dun musky animal – intensely desirable, more impossible to resist than ever before. Was I allowing him to take me someplace I was not ready to go, and only because he was so fascinating? Probable answers to that question made me embarrassed for myself, so I preferred not to think about it. I had called up the troops. I was committed to the rebellion. X led the charge.
“Giddyup,” he said, that voice like a rip in velvet.
The moment we set foot outside the lobby of our fancy hotel all my effort in front of the mirror was wasted. Cheyenne’s most outstanding feature is its wind. It pulled my hair from its bobby pins with a whack to my face and a roar in my ears. Ha, I said, shaking my head until my hair was as wild and tangled as sage brush. X smiled.
Even with the constant breeze, even though the sun had almost set, the evening was still warm, and downtown Cheyenne graded around the edges toward a violet dusk. The oncoming darkness was deep-water blue. The wind kicked a torn brightly-colored bit of newspaper down the sidewalk, and X followed it past traffic lights and mats of littered ground cover flanking empty parking lots. Slinking between purple shadows, he chased some dark instinct that led him directly to a source of alcohol. Dangerous X with his lanky arms and his sharp nose in silhouette against the sky. X with his hidden history, X who didn’t believe in signs but followed them all the same. I watched him from the corner of my eye, half afraid but excited, keeping pace with his easy gait as if this were nothing at all, as if I was accustomed to going out drinking every night. If I allowed myself to think too hard about whether I really wanted to do this, I might call the whole thing off – the bar and Cheyenne, the road trip and X and Adam and all.
We passed a Dairy Queen, brightly lit. There was an old pickup truck in the lot, shining on one side with the artificial crimson glow of the shop’s sign. A group of teenage boys rough-housed in the truck bed. They were all barked shouts and neon luminosity, tense with a tight feral energy I had never seen in boys before. The righteous sons of Rexburg do not wrestle in parking lots on windy nights. X grinned at the boys; his eye teeth glimmered. There was a hint of the same wildness in him tonight. Was it the wind that sharpened him, or the prospect of a little fun? Or did that blue prairie gale sharpen me, blow the dust from my eyes so that now I saw X more clearly, a lean hunting cat of a man who could wait in unsuspecting dull Rexburg until his prey stumbled by? The incident with the secret sketch pad proved how little I knew him, what a fool I had been to leave with him. He seemed menacing and strange, and yet I was not frightened. I wanted him more, and the escape he promised, the distraction.
Before long he found what he was looking for: a wood-fronted bar called the Crooked Leg. Its single dark window like a punched eye looked out at us, squinted at us where we stood on the sidewalk.
“You ready?” X said. His hair moved constantly in the wind, a dark tangle. He was savage and compelling. In answer I pushed open the door myself and led him inside.
**
There was a tavern in Rexburg. Just one. It was stuck self-consciously beside a tax accountant’s office in a dingy half-dead strip mall out on the edge of town. No one ever recognized the few cars parked outside. Whoever ran the tavern and whoever frequented it must have been strangers to Rexburg – the blur on the social periphery, Catholic immigrant farm workers, stranded businessmen, wayward depressives. Whenever we passed it on our shopping outings my girlfriends would roll their eyes or tut in disapproval and the car would fill with a momentary sensation of wariness. Drinkers were dangerous. Everybody knew that.
I couldn’t help thinking about the tavern-goers, who they were, what they did inside. Drink, of course – but was there some fellowship behind its painted glass door that I deserved to be a part of, some secret handshake of the nonbelievers which I needed to learn? I was often tempted to slip inside. What deterred me was the ever-present police car in the strip mall’s parking lot. The professor’s wife could not be seen in a place like that, surrounded by drunks, giving the Sure Sign of the Apostate, the raised glass clinking.
Sometimes I imagined the tavern in Rexburg concealed some kind of dark dread, that its dense atmosphere of bleakness might suck me in if I gave into temptation and wandered too near, a black hole capturing Jesus’s sunbeam. In that sense it had the same gravitational pull on me as Adam had, although for James’s sake I never got close enough to the tavern to allow its claws into my skin. Still, I would spend some lonely Thursday and Friday nights parked in my car across the highway from that strip mall, watching the despondent flybuzz shiver of the bar’s lit red sign on the verge of burnout. I never recognized the people who came and went. There weren’t many of them. They were nobodies.
**
The Crooked Leg was nothing like I’d thought Rexburg’s solitary bar to be. It looked quietly menacing from the street, but once we were inside my anxiety began to abate. Slowly. My heart no longer raced, but my senses were still on high alert. I was a small frail animal emerging from its burrow. There was a good-sized crowd here, all of them smiling. The place was dim and the room decidedly dark-colored, old wood paneling and sepia light, but the prevailing mood was not one of despair. You can loosen up, I told myself sensibly. Everybody is having a good time. Country music jangled like my tender nerves, just loud enough that X had to lean toward my ear to be heard: “I’ll order something for you.” And his voice undercut the cacophony with a force that made me hold my breath as I nodded my head, mute and helpless.
He sat me down at the low table for two against a dark wall and excused himself to the bar. Pictures of old Cheyenne tilted a little in their frames. A girl wearing a black half-apron, with a heart tattooed on her wrist, deposited a wooden bowl of pretzels on my table. I ate so many, just for something to do, that by the time X returned with two glasses of beer my mouth was uncomfortably, almost painfully, dry.
“Pale ale,” he announced.
The gl
ass bumped down in front of me. It sweated a little, twinkling dully in the subdued brown light. I sweated a little.
X raised his glass toward me. “Cheers,” he said.
I knew from movies and from some dim instinct of social convention that I was expected to respond in kind. The glass was heavier than it should have been. When I lifted it a little beer spilled over the rim and onto my cold wet fingers. Our glasses clanked together. I returned mine to the tabletop and licked my knuckles; the flavor was earthy and overwhelmingly bitter, not at all pleasant, and my agitated imagination drew up my first taste of beer as a rough sketch of me standing in the middle of a beautiful sunlit wheat field, being punched in the stomach by an unseen fist.
X saw the look on my face. “It’s an acquired taste.”
“Then why does anybody drink it?”
“You acquire the taste quickly. Have a sip.”
“I don’t know about this.”
“Everything that’s good should taste a little bad at first, don’t you think?”
“No, I do not think, and that sounds like an awful cliché besides.” But he had a point. X was the only thing keeping me sane and distracted while I pulled further and further from Rexburg, stretching whatever tethered me there until it was thin enough to snap. And he tasted bitter now, with his sketch pads hidden in secret compartments, with his penchant for proxies.
I sipped my beer. I felt the sharp impact of the bitterness on my tongue and in my gut. I kept my eyes on X, who watched me soberly as I drank swallow after swallow. And soon the taste in my mouth was not bitter, but golden and homey and soft, bread baking, chewing raw kernels of wheat in the summer sun. The memory of X drawing in his hotel room came back to me powerfully, the sketch pad resting on his knee, the easy unfocusing of my eyes, the smell of linseed oil warming between us.
“It is good,” I said, surprised.
“I think she’s acquired a taste.”
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