Sex and Death in the American Novel

by Martinez, Sarah

  A sound on the shore behind me made me turn. The first thing I saw were the heavy work boots, next the soft denim fabric of his jeans, and in the moonlight, his hair, long like the braves wore when women still ruled the world. He took me in his thick thermal-clad arms and dragged me the rest of the way out.

  He laughed softly and the light from inside the cabin revealed clean silky skin and generous dark eyes. “What the fuck are you doing, Slug?”

  I woke the next morning wrapped in the beach towel several yards from the cabin. I could make out the jutting beams of the porch and the lighter wood of the rocker out front. I was afraid to move. I had never been so stiff; my limbs were like stone and tingled when I shifted even an inch. I pulled the towel around me tighter, shivering with the damp wetness against my neck. I could see the canoe floating a few yards from shore, the red paint contrasting with the deep green of the water, so dark out there it was basically black. I forced my hand to move and confirmed that I held the rope against my body.

  The next memory was of Tristan, holding me, talking to me, listening in that way I missed so much. I wondered if it had been a hallucination. I didn't care. It was real enough for me. His presence had changed from one of guilt and longing and hollowness to one of amicable comfort. As I cast my eyes around I still felt his presence, and I knew that I would always feel this way where he was concerned.

  The sun warmed me by degrees until I could stand and eventually walk with bare feet over sharp stones and sticky pine needles to the cool wooden steps of my cabin. My ankle was red and raw from where I'd banged it against a rock. I pulled the canoe in and dropped the rope and it landed with a soft sound among the dry needles. It was grey and bloated and slimy like a dead snake in the grass.

  Once inside I closed and locked the door and turned toward the inside of the cabin, warming with the day's sun. The interior smelled dustier when the sun was out than when it was raining, almost as if the wood and structure itself changed inside to reflect the atmosphere outside. I dropped my wet jacket, clothes, soggy cigarettes and towel in a heap by the door and moved up the stairs to curl inside the warmth of my bed.

  I woke sometime in the evening to a knock on the door. I sat up and looked out the window to find a coral-colored, two-door sedan parked under the cabin's floodlights. When I moved, my arms shot through with heavy soreness and my head felt wobbly on my neck.

  I worked my way out of the bed, my feet hitting the cold dusty floor until I located my slippers. After a moment the knocking started up again, only this time more insistent. I called out in the strongest voice I could, realizing there was no way anyone could hear me from this far away. I slipped into my robe and moved down the stairs as quickly as I could. I moved out a ways from the door, looked out the living room window, and there was Jasper—standing expectantly at the door, his features pinched up, glancing at his watch and lifting his hand to pound further on the already abused wood.

  “Wait,” I spoke through the window and his face dissolved in relief.

  When I opened the door he rushed in. “Are you alright?”

  I backed up several paces and he stayed where he was, letting the door close behind him.

  “I think so.” I took stock. Apart from the heaviness in my limbs, the day's sleep had worked wonders and the night's activities had done much to ease the heaviness in my heart. “I didn't think you would get here so fast. I thought I would have more time to get ready for you.”

  He smiled and said with a laugh, “Sure you did.”

  I stretched my arm out and took his cool hand. He pulled me to him and we stood like that for several minutes. “You got here so fast,” I said into his coat which still smelled like leather and smoke. Familiar. “I thought you might change your mind. You weren't by yourself.”

  “Yeah, thanks for that.” His voice was full of regret, and a weird sadness. He was not a cruel person.

  “That must have been hard for you. I am so sorry. You must think I am pathetic.”

  “A little.” He led me to the coffee table and while he settled me on the sofa, he sat across from me on the table and took my hands. After a few minutes of stroking my hair, pinching my earlobe, smiling, and generally mooning he said, “You smell like a fermentation project gone awry.”

  “Is it that bad?”

  He wrinkled his forehead and took my head in his hand and pulled me to his shoulder, plopping down on the couch beside me.

  “Mmm,” he said, breathing into my hair. “Smells like lake water: brackish, bleary. If blue had a scent, it would be like this.”

  I wanted to make a comment about his silly words, but was too tired. Instead I ran my fingers over my face. “I fell in the lake.”

  He pulled back and eyed me.

  “I took the canoe out.”

  “Drunken boating? By yourself?”

  I moved away. “Probably.”

  His eyes raked over my robe; he pushed his lips together and didn't say anything further.

  “I'm still sore. I slept all day. I am glad you're here,” I said and put both hands on either side of his face. My hands were still cold; he shivered.

  “I wasn't sure what I was going to find here, or if you would even remember you called me.”

  His hands went to my hair again, reassuring, tugging gently on the tangles.

  We sat like that for a while longer, letting the weirdness wear off, the air charged with anticipatory energy, and me taking stock every few minutes of the rolling in my stomach. I was hungry and the itch on my skin reminded me that I needed a shower. I studied his face and remembered where my head had been when I'd called him.

  As I moved back into the kitchen, he stared first at me then at the pile on the floor, still wet. I could almost smell the brackish wetness from across the room. I turned my back and rooted around in the cupboard for a box of Goldfish crackers from the last time we were up here. I munched on them, watching him, loving the way his face beamed and his eyes lit over the place, and me. My stomach gurgled in gratitude as I filled it for the first time since the afternoon before. His eyes landed on the piles of DVDs on the coffee table, the pile again in the corner, the empty wine bottle laying on its side beside the door.

  “How about I leave you with those while I take a shower?” I pointed to the DVDs and he furrowed his brow as if he didn't know if I were kidding.

  I started the water, and when I felt the spray hit my face and wash away the minerals from the lake water and the rest bits of the groggy day's sleep, I felt the peace that comes with having fought a hard battle and managed to crawl out the other side.

  Moments later the door opened. Jasper approached through the foggy room. His eyes were red and his face was drawn, but when he came toward me bringing the scents of road dust and faint pine tar from the air outside, I was happy. These scents to me were always about happy memories. This place was too, and I was about to make more.

  “What's wrong?” I asked.

  “You called me. You trusted me. Something really bad could have happened to you, Vivi, and I wouldn't have been here to help you. No one would have.”

  “I needed to do this. Be here. Be alone.”

  He shook his head, disapproval and resignation. I opened the curtain and waited for him to step in.

  We drove into Missoula once to return his rental and pick up more supplies, including two copies of the new translation of War and Peace that I still hadn't read, so I could discuss it with him. When I'd offered this on the car ride in, he'd gotten the goofiest grin on his face and said, “Really?” in the same way he might have acted when I'd offered to do something in bed.

  We repeated another week like before; canoeing, resting, listening to music, listening to nothing at all except the calls of robins and meadow lark, croaking of frogs, the splashing of a fish jumping for its dinner in the evening and the occasional truck barreling down the main road.

  “Traffic is going to pick up soon. You going to be able to handle that?” I asked one afternoon when we'd
rowed around the lake. The sun warmed us and the wind cooled us, manic weather, but it focused my attention on where we were right then.

  He looked around, his hair flipping around on the top of his head, ran his hand through the water, and made a face that suggested he could do anything.

  “I'm going to be on TV,” he said squinting into the sun above my head.

  “When? Why?”

  He pulled his lower lip below his teeth and brought out a folded copy of the New Yorker from behind his back. He'd had the pages tucked under his t-shirt and into the waistband of his jeans, and they were warm from his skin.

  He nodded encouragement when I opened it up. The title: And God Made Man, his name below that.

  The first line read:

  My first time was with a man; I was nineteen years old.

  I lifted my head.

  “The first line is the most important, right?”

  I rolled my eyes and gave him the longest look I dared before continuing my read. The water dripping off the wooden oars had almost stopped, but a few drops disturbed the silence around us, to remind me we were floating.

  “You published this?”

  He nodded.

  “Fiction?”

  He pointed my attention back to the page. I obediently read on. It took me until we'd drifted almost as far as the farthest shore to finish.

  When I was done I said, “You do love him! Holy shit. This is so honest.”

  “Yeah,” he said, his legs stretched out so that his feet were under my seat, his arms crossed protectively over his chest. The uncertainty on his face made my heart feel a hundred times larger than it could have been just days before.

  I'd let go of so much to make room for this.

  “Does Alejandro know?”

  “I ran it by him before I sent it off.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He was all for it. I was pretty sure he wouldn't care. I still didn't want to drag him into anything…you know, he has a job, a reputation. He'd probably like to save that. He said the most important thing was to be honest.”

  I smiled. “Sounds like him. You can't really tell anyway…someone would have to remember…wow though. Pretty brave. You're my new hero.”

  He stretched his arms in front of him and seemed to push inward, bending in half and groaning. “Nothing else seemed real at all, or important enough to work on besides what was really going on. I gave back the advance money for the book I was working on.” He squinted at me again.

  “I'm impressed.”

  “I thought you might have heard…a couple times I was sure you would call me just to yell at me or something.”

  “You thought I cared that much?” I said to tease him.

  He took a position sitting between my legs with his face pressed to my chest.

  “I was really glad when you called me, Vivi. I didn't know if I could do all this by myself.”

  “But you were willing to do it…obviously.”

  “I was,” he said drawing in a long breath and squeezing me tighter.

  “So how come you could announce this to the whole world, this… love,” I let that hang for a moment, “but we never talked about Alejandro after that one time you told me about the two of you in college? It was like this big secret everyone knew, but you still wouldn't talk about it.”

  “You're the one who is good at naming things, Vivi. I can describe life, emotions, all of that, but I couldn't where Alejandro was concerned. A part of me was afraid that trying to be with the two of you would be too much, asking for too much. And then we went sideways and I used that as an easy excuse to avoid the topic altogether.”

  “Even when you were talking to him.”

  “Yes.”

  He stroked my face, the pressure of his hand and the warm sunlight on my skin made me melt. His face was so open again, so trusting. “We all have something we're avoiding. Yours was just more obvious to the rest of us. I was afraid. I was afraid to name what I wanted, I was afraid to believe a life like what I wanted was possible.”

  I shook his head back and forth with both of my hands. “If you only knew…that was what got in my way, part of it. Rather than deal with that, I had to take my fear out on you. Call it something else. Blame you. And you took it.” I kissed his lips and pulled away. “So what did the two of you decide about me?”

  “That you're wonderful. Beautiful. Talented. Neurotic. Scary. Undeniable.”

  I tossed my hair over my shoulder and straightened up. “You think I'm talented?”

  He sat back on the bench. “I never said I didn't think that. You did. Yes we're different, in the way we think, act, work, but you are honest, Vivi. You can write however you want, read whatever you want, but if you're honest, that's what makes what you do real. You know that.”

  I didn't know what to say.

  “I wasn't being honest. That was why I wrote this.” He nudged the magazine with his foot. “I had to prove to myself I could be as honest as I was expecting you to be. With you it was your father, why you had to nurse all that anger, and with me it was,” here he made quotation marks in the air, “the big secret everyone knew. Alejandro was never something I regretted, but I never went into what I thought or felt about it. I thought I was silly to even revisit it. Once I met you, I began to question that. You're so free. I wanted that. Badly. I didn't want to be so afraid of disappointing people, of absorbing too much noise and garbage, of losing my safe, controlled life.” He leaned back, bracing his hands on the wooden bench.

  My heart expanded. He looked so good; peaceful, satisfied, and once again he was mine. I went to my knees and gave thanks for this man, his words and his presence in my life.

  We spent an extra day in Glacier Park on the way back. At one point I pulled off the side of the narrow road. Jasper came behind me and rested his chin on my shoulder. I looked out over the valley with its never-ending view of the snow-capped mountains, gorges filled with pine and fir trees, and farther below, the river reflecting the sunlight toward us in a glittering ribbon that ambled into forever.

  I spoke toward the wide open space, “When I was younger my father would stand with me on spots like this one and tell me stories about the Native Americans and the life they made under this sky, going on spirit quests, making families, making war. The picture he painted for me never left my mind. I have never been able to take in a scene like this since without imagining a tall black-haired brave on horseback bounding toward the mountains, or down there,” I pointed to the river far below, “stopping to spear a fish from the cold river. He told me stories, read to me sometimes from Norman Maclean, Richard Hugo, Wallace Stegner. I was lucky to get that part of him, when he was in the mood to give it.”

  “I think you got a lot more from him,” Jasper spoke in my ear.

  “I think I did too. Now I see that. Remember how I hung on to the fact that I didn't get to go hunting like Tristan did? In one of the letters he said my mother told him it was unseemly and inappropriate for him to take me in the woods.”

  He pressed his lips to my temple.

  “When I read that, I wanted to call her up and scream at her. To think about what I lost because of some image of ‘appropriate behavior’. Because I was a girl I couldn't handle a gun, spend cold mornings drinking coffee out of a thermos up in a tree, or pee in the woods. And I always blamed my father for this.”

  “Did she ever correct you?”

  “Nope. Not once.”

  He held me tighter. “So you are going to have a talk with her. Right?”

  I nodded my head, rubbing it against his. “I love my mother. She loves me. I know that. She was proud of me and encouraged me where she could. What makes me crazy is thinking how my father did his best and I always blamed him for making me feel inferior. Someone said no one can make us feel inferior without our permission.”

  “That was Eleanor Roosevelt.” Jasper took my hand and led me to sit under a pine branch. He sat beside me with his knees up and his arms ar
ound his legs. “Funny how that works. Most of the things we assume about the world, the things that hold us back are in our own minds.”

  “Neither one of us actually like killing things. The appeal was spending time with our father, and I was jealous. Then there was that gun. A gift that Tristan got that I didn't, the antique Smith & Wesson he got on his fifteenth birthday. He was so proud of that thing. I loved my brother so much, and I loved my father. For so long it was too hard to try and sort out being angry at the both of them, and loving them at the same time.”

  “Easier just to put it all toward your father. I get that. I remember spending a few months pissed at my mother for leaving me. I had all this guilt for that, for being angry with her. As an adult though I am glad I let myself feel it, otherwise I never would have gotten through it.”

  “You're more evolved than me. I didn't want to think about any of it.”

  “Vivi—”

  I reached around and ran my fingertips over his scratchy jaw line. “Don't worry, I'm not getting morose, or not meaning to. See,” I turned to him and smiled, a genuine smile, “because of you I can start to think about my father and it doesn't make me ill. Once I was here at the spot he was still alive. Only now it feels like I can look at all the ways he still is. Does that make sense?”

  “Sure.” He kissed me on the back of the head.

  I wrapped my hands around his forearm and kissed him there, wrinkling my nose at the way the hairs on his arm tickled my nose. “Thank you for being brave enough to be honest with me. I must have been pretty scary.”

  “What else could I do?”

  “Hit me. Change your number.”

  “I'll remember next time.”

  “Still, you did it. You didn't compromise anything even when I was so mad at you. Don't ever change that okay?”

  “Always.”

  We sat for a time until the only warmth I felt was where he held me, the light had faded and it was no longer comfortable to be sitting out there so exposed.

  He spoke from behind me, “You did the same for me.”