The Atomic Weight of Love (27 page)

MOTHER ONCE
GAVE ME
a tapestry valise shaped like an oversized bowling ball bag. Within an hour of Alden’s departure for the airport, I filled it with toiletries, underwear, extra socks, sandals, a thin cotton robe, the book I was reading, and a spare pair of jeans. I packed a picnic of simple cheese sandwiches and fruit—what I could easily fit in my knapsack—and then I remembered I had a frozen Pepperidge Farm cake that I could set to thaw on the seat between us while Clay drove.

While I sat on the couch waiting for Clay and watching the sun filter through the venetian blinds, I thought about Marilyn Monroe on the edge of Niagara Falls, the way she glowed in every scene, how I would forget to listen to the film’s dialogue or notice anyone else, so riveted was I by her presence. Her red dress, her slow, seductive dance in the motel courtyard, Joseph Cotten grabbing her record from the turntable and smashing it.

I wanted to be near that massive, voluminous torrent rushing headlong to a death-certain plummet. I wanted to feel the cool spray of the water, to become dizzy while standing close to the edge.

When Clay pulled up in front of the house, I rushed out to meet him. He opened the truck door for me.

“After this, let me do it myself,” I said. My hand no longer hurt—I just had a jagged red scar, a talisman that would remain with me for the rest of my life.

“Sure,” he grinned. His teeth were so white, beautifully squared and even, like the meticulously placed stones of Incan builders. It made me wonder if some of them were false, if he’d lost his teeth in Vietnam. They were too beautiful.

He turned up the volume on the radio. “This is just out. You need to hear it. It’s Neil Young. The Kent State massacre.”

Massacre?
It was awful, what had happened—I wouldn’t argue for a moment about the incalculable shock of the National Guard killing unarmed students—but my context for “massacre” was vastly different. World War II had featured so many massacres, of proportions entirely incomparable to what had happened in Ohio. I kept my thoughts to myself and instead said: “Neil Young?”

“Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. A group.”

“Oh,” I sighed.

“Don’t, Meridian. Don’t focus on the age thing again.”

I laughed. “Are you a mind reader?”

“All I have to do is look at your face. Look,” he said, checking the rearview mirror, “this is our week.
Our week
. Do not screw it up.”

I saluted. “Yes, sir!”

“At ease, soldier,” he said automatically, and I looked at his profile, pictured him with a short haircut, the Marines dress uniform of brass-buttoned jacket, pants with red piping running down the leg.

“Your parents must have loved you in uniform.”

“Probably my father’s proudest moment—me in costume.”

“It’s a lot more than that. Aren’t you proud?” I asked.

“Of what?”

“The legacy of the Marines, being a part of that.”

“That I’m proud of. The discipline. But don’t ask me to be proud of what I was ordered to do.”

He drove on in silence, and I was afraid to take the conversation any further.

After nearly three hours, we reached the Malpaís—bad country—outside of Grants. It was the most forbidding landscape I’d ever seen. Conquistadors searching for gold were unable to traverse it because their horses’ hooves would have been lacerated on the sharp, unforgiving chunks of black lava.

“It’s part of the Mount Taylor volcanic area,” Clay said animatedly. “You know that’s one of the biggest volcanic regions in the U.S., right?”

I saw the little boy in him—the part not lost to the war—whose early passions had framed who he would be, how he would be in the world. He was an only child like me, a loner playing in solitude in the high grasses of his parents’ ranch, turning rocks in his grubby, scabbed hands, puzzling over remnants of stars embedded in mundane rock.

He stopped the truck several times so that we could get out and walk across some of the frozen, other-worldly rock formations. Hardy, adaptive plant life managed to wedge itself into dust-filled cracks in the lava, and there were bluffs where rainwater collected in shallow pools. In some of those pools, tiny fish darted about the surprisingly clear water. Darwin was omnipresent in my thoughts, the miracle of fish eggs hovering in suspended animation until merciful rainwater opened the way to a full, swimming life.

Finally, in the distance we could see an enormous sandstone bluff rising two hundred feet above the valley floor.

“El Morro. Also called Inscription Rock.” Strands of his loosened hair were whipped into arabesques by the currents from our open windows. “You are going to love the calligraphy,” he nearly shouted. I reached across the cab, tucked his hair behind his ear, where it rested for less than a minute before again taking flight. He grabbed my hand and bit my index finger in his enthusiasm.

“There’s a deep basin at the foot of the cliff. It fills with rainwater, which is really why the rock was so popular. Beale, who was with the U.S. Army, watered camels there.”

I hooted. “Camels?”

“He was testing them for the army. Is that cool?”

“Very,” I said.

We picnicked beneath alligator-skinned junipers, bathed in the warm scent of decaying needles. I listened to the tiny, tinny castanet sounds of beetles, but Clay insisted he couldn’t hear them. “Too many close-by explosions.”

I unwrapped the sandwiches, white bread slathered with plenty of butter and heaped with thick slices of Colby cheese.

“Clearly, you are not a health nut.”

“What’s wrong with a cheese sandwich?”

“White bread? It’s like eating cake, pure sugar.”

“Oh, no it is not,” I said dismissively. How could anyone compare bread with cake? I’d take cake over bread any day.

“Whole grains—that’s what’s healthiest for your digestive tract, for decent blood sugar levels.”

“Mmm hmm.” I’d been eating like this for nearly fifty years, and I was neither fat nor decrepit. “There’s fruit cocktail, unless you consider that unacceptable too.”

“As in Libby’s? Eh gods, Meridian. That shit’s packed in syrup.”

“How can you have a problem with fruit?”

“It’s pallid, diced, fiberless fruit. It’s disgusting.”

“Then don’t eat it.” I was picnicking with a finicky child. I tossed a crust of bread into the grass and wildflowers. A crow landed in the lower branches of a juniper a few feet away.
He knows good food when he sees it
, I thought. To Clay, I said: “Are you going to have a problem with cake, too?”

“Cake?”

“It’s in the bag on the seat in the truck. Probably thawed by now,” I said, my mouth full of bread.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Meridian.”

I ate my fruit cocktail in silence. In some ways I had to admit that he was right—the grapes looked pallid and slimy. Now he’d ruined fruit cocktail for me, but I wasn’t going to let him know that. I choked it down, snapped the lid back onto the plastic container.

“Meridian?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s OK.”

“No, it’s not. It’s not OK for me to make you feel bad about yourself.”

“I don’t feel bad about myself. I just am bone-tired of having men
pronounce and presume
.”

“Again, I’m sorry,” he said, reaching for my hand.

“Bygones,” I said and actually meant it. I knew I had a hair trigger when it came to feeling insulted, criticized. Finally, I said “So, who wants cake?” and then dissolved into laughter.

We walked toward the base of the bluff. Three crows arced through the warm air that flowed up the face of the cliffs, their echoing voices rasping and loud. We stood there, squeezing our hands together, feeling the otherworldliness of the crows as their shadows raced across the canyon walls.

WE GOT BACK
TO
Clay’s apartment late that afternoon. Jasper gave his usual frenetic greeting, and I took him on a quick loop of the apartment grounds. When I returned, Clay was pouring tea. He touched the tip of my nose.

“Red,” he said.

I put my hand over my nose. “Aw, hell,” I said. “Sunburn, peeling, a couple of my more attractive traits.”

“I unpacked for you.” He motioned for me to have a seat on the cushion-laden floor alongside Jasper. “Are you going to tell me why you’re reading
The Naked Ape
?”

“Oh,” I said, suddenly embarrassed. “I thought maybe I could learn something.”

“What?”

“Well, he’s looking at human behavior in the evolutionary context.” It was a decent dodge.

“Mmm hmmm,” he said.

“Oh, all right then. I checked it out of the library so that I could read the chapter on sex.”

“Jesus, no,” he said, laughing and nearly spurting tea from his nose. He coughed.

“Don’t make fun of me.”

“I’m not.” He tried to regain his composure. “But, Meridian, honestly. You’re going to
The Naked Ape
for sex advice?” He wiped tears from his eyes. “I’m not laughing at you. It’s just so insane, what lengths people have to go to, to learn about sex. Why not just talk about it?” When I chose to stand mute he continued, “What do you want to know? We can teach each other, help each other.”

A man who wanted to talk about sex? I was mortified. But, this was Clay. After everything we’d already done together, it seemed silly that a simple conversation would be so daunting.

“I wanted to learn about oral sex. How to do it for you.”

“Fellatio.”

“Well, the book told me what to call it, but nothing else. Just that the human animal does it—nothing about how to do it.”

“And you can’t talk to your friends?”

“Women of my generation don’t talk about these things.” I had a fleeting vision of Belle, the exception to the rule. Then I tried to imagine inviting June Jacobsen over for coffee so that we could trade sex tips.

He finished his tea and stood. “I already had something in mind for tonight, and now that I see what you’re thinking, it might help. Are you game?”

“I need more information than that.”

“That’s fair,” he said, opening the refrigerator and holding up the pitcher to see if I wanted more tea. I shook my head.

He returned to sit by me, patting Jasper on the head. “I make a great spaghetti sauce.”

I waited, wondering what on earth spaghetti had to do with fellatio techniques. Was it the sucking in of strands of pasta?

“I made two versions. One has pot, one just has oregano.”

There it was—the drug thing.

“You’ve never tried it, right?” He wiped the condensation from his glass onto his jeans.

I looked around the room, mimicking nervousness. “Assuming the Lab does not have your apartment bugged, I can tell you this: Alden and I smoke marijuana every night. Usually during
The Johnny Carson Show
.” I giggled. It really was a fun scene to imagine.

“Didn’t know Alden stayed up that late.”

“Hah! But what does this have to do with oral sex?”

“It will loosen you up, let you feel more. Well, more accurately, I think, it will make you aware of the things you ignore, the sensations—all of them—that you bypass every minute of every day.”

“I thought it just made people stupid.”

“Depends on the person,” he said. “And, Meridian, you can never be made stupid. Never.”

“All right then. Let’s have the super-oregano spaghetti.”

“Bravo, baby. Bravo.” He squeezed my shoulders, and then he adopted a serious countenance: “But do this one thing for me.”

“What?”

“Return Desmond Morris to the library.”

THE SPAGHETTI SAUCE WAS
good, although I could still taste something slightly off. Clay told me that as far as disguising the taste of marijuana went, his sauce was as good as anything else he’d discovered. I took his word for it—it seemed to be a topic he knew thoroughly.

After we ate, he took me on a musical tour of his albums: The Doors, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan. I liked Janis Joplin best; I had not ever before heard a woman’s voice so freely express heartbreak and keen devotion.

I kept waiting to feel different. Maybe I was immune to the drug’s effects.

“Just be patient,” he said, and when the sun was nearly down he led me onto his meager front stoop to sit beside him in the cool air. Robins in the treetops bid each other goodnight while Clay swatted at invisible mosquitoes and Jasper chased grasshoppers that ricocheted away from him across the lawn.

A few minutes later, I felt my face grow slack, as though my jaw muscles just let go. I leaned back on my elbows, felt an ache in my lower back and an overwhelming desire to stretch every portion of my body, to release each joint. I was smiling—an unbidden, easy, summertime smile. I thought of Joplin’s rendition of “Summertime,” the yearning in it, how her voice itself took flight when she sang about spreading wings, taking to the sky.

And then I felt my mind shift, lift. I closed my eyes, rose above the ground, left behind the robins, the treetops. I could feel a wind in my face, my hair blown back, and I drifted slowly over rooftops, headed for a canyon edge, where I thought I might find a thermal to ride.

“Not at this time of night, you won’t.”

It was Clay’s voice. Was he responding to my thoughts? I’d not spoken out loud, had I? I opened my eyes and turned to the indistinct, twilight Clay who sat beside me.

“I was talking out loud?”

“You were.” He traced my lips with the tip of his tongue. “The grass hit you.”

Jasper gave a great sigh and lay at my feet. His tranquility passed into me by osmosis, from his skin and fur across and through the membrane of my skin. I wanted to curl up beside him, to sleep beneath the stars, awaken beneath the canopy of a tree, to feel dew slide from my brow.

Clay was massaging my neck. I leaned into his hand, moaned. So this was what being stoned felt like. Long strings of thoughts. Had I been thinking for a long time or a short time? Did time grow under the influence of marijuana?

“Meridian,” Clay whispered, so close that I could feel his voice cause the tiny hairs in my inner ears to vibrate. I tried to remember how sound made its way into the human ear, how it was translated by the brain.