The Book of Illusions (36 page)

I got her into the bath, and for the next half hour I sat beside her on the floor, washing her back, her arms and legs, her breasts and face and hands, her hair. It took a while before she stopped crying, but little by little the treatment seemed to produce the desired effect. Close your eyes, I said to her, don’t move, don’t say a word, just melt into the water and let yourself drift away. I was impressed by how willingly she gave in to my commands, by how unembarrassed she was by her own nakedness. It was the first time I had seen her body in the light, but Alma acted as though it already belonged to me, as though we had already passed beyond the stage where such things needed to be questioned anymore. She went limp in my arms, surrendered to the warmth of the water, surrendered unconditionally to the idea that I was the one who was taking care of her. There was no one else. She had been living alone in this cottage for the past seven years, and we both knew that it was time for her to move on. You’ll come to Vermont, I said. You’ll live there with me until you finish your book, and every day I’ll give you another bath. I’ll work on my Chateaubriand, you’ll work on your biography, and when we aren’t working, we’ll fuck. We’ll fuck in every corner of the house. We’ll hold three-day fuckfests in the backyard and the woods. We’ll fuck until we can’t stand up anymore, and then we’ll go back to work, and when our work is finished, we’ll leave Vermont and go somewhere else. Anywhere you say, Alma. I’m willing to entertain all possibilities. Nothing is out of the question.

It was a rash thing to say under the circumstances, a supremely vulgar and outrageous proposition, but time was short, and I didn’t want to leave New Mexico without knowing where we stood. So I took a risk and decided to force the issue, presenting my case in the crudest, most graphic terms I could think of. To Alma’s credit, she didn’t flinch. Her eyes were closed when I began, and she kept them closed until the end of the speech, but at a certain point I noticed that a smile was tugging at the corners of her mouth (I believe it started when I used the word
fuck
for the first time), and the longer I went on talking to her, the bigger that smile seemed to become. When I was finished, however, she didn’t say anything, and her eyes remained closed. Well? I said. What do you think? What I think, she answered slowly, is that if I opened my eyes now, you might not be there.

Yes, I said, I see what you mean. On the other hand, if you don’t open them, you’ll never know if I am or not, will you?

I don’t think I’m brave enough.

Of course you are. And besides, you’re forgetting that my hands are in the tub. I’m touching your spine and the small of your back. If I wasn’t there, I wouldn’t be able to do that, would I?

Anything is possible. You could be someone else, someone who’s only pretending to be David. An impostor.

And what would an impostor be doing with you here in this bathroom?

Filling my head with wicked fantasies, making me believe I can have what I want. It isn’t often that someone says exactly what you want them to say. Maybe I said those words myself.

Maybe. Or maybe someone said them because the thing he wants is the same thing you want.

But not exactly. It’s never
exactly
, is it? How could he say the
exact
words that were in my mind?

With his mouth. That’s where words come from. From someone’s mouth.

Where is that mouth, then? Let me feel it. Press that mouth against mine, mister. If it feels the way it’s supposed to feel, then I’ll know it’s your mouth and not my mouth. Then maybe I’ll start to believe you.

With her eyes still closed, Alma lifted her arms into the air, reaching up in the way small children do—asking to be hugged, asking to be carried—and I leaned over and kissed her, crushing my mouth against her mouth and parting her lips with my tongue. I was on my knees—arms in the water, hands resting on her back, elbows pinned against the side of the tub—and as Alma grabbed the back of my neck and pulled me toward her, I lost my balance and splashed down on top of her. Our heads went under the water for a moment, and when we came up again, Alma’s eyes were open. Water was sloshing over the rim of the tub, we were both gasping, and yet without pausing to take in more than a gulp of air, we repositioned ourselves and started kissing in earnest. That was the first of several kisses, the first of many kisses. I can’t account for the manipulations that followed, the complex maneuvers that enabled me to pull Alma out of the bath while keeping my lips planted on her lips, while managing not to lose contact with her tongue, but a moment came when she was out of the water and I was rubbing down her body with a towel. I remember that. I also remember that after she was dry, she peeled off my wet shirt and unbuckled the belt that was holding up my pants. I can see her doing that, and I can also see myself kissing her again, can see the two of us lowering ourselves onto a pile of towels and making love on the floor.

It was dark in the house when we left the bathroom. A few glimmers of light in the front windows, a thin burnished cloud stretching along the horizon, residues of dusk. We put on our clothes, drank a couple of shots of tequila in the living room, and then went into the kitchen to rustle up some dinner. Frozen tacos, frozen peas, mashed potatoes—another ad hoc assemblage, making do with what there was. It didn’t matter. The food disappeared in nine minutes, and then we returned to the living room and poured ourselves another round of drinks. From that point on, Alma and I talked only about the future, and when we crawled into bed at ten o’clock, we were still making plans, still discussing what life would be like for us when she joined me on my little hill in Vermont. We didn’t know when she would be able to get there, but we figured it wouldn’t take longer than a week or two to wrap things up at the ranch, three at the outside limit. In the meantime, we would talk on the phone, and whenever it was too late or too early to call, we would send each other faxes. Come hell or high water, we said, we would be in touch every day.

I
left New Mexico without seeing Frieda again. Alma had been hoping she would walk down to the cottage to say good-bye to me, but I wasn’t expecting it. She had already crossed me off her list, and given the early hour of my departure (the van was scheduled to come at five-thirty), it seemed unlikely that she would go to the trouble of losing any sleep on my account. When she failed to show up, Alma blamed it on the pill she had taken before going to bed. That felt rather optimistic to me. According to my reading of the situation, Frieda wouldn’t have been there under any circumstances—not even if the van had left at noon.

At the time, none of this seemed terribly important. The alarm went off at five, and with only half an hour to get myself ready and out the door, I wouldn’t have given Frieda a single thought if her name hadn’t been mentioned. What mattered to me that morning was waking up with Alma, drinking coffee with her on the front steps of the house, being able to touch her again. All groggy and tousled, all stupid with happiness, all bleary with sex and skin and thoughts about my new life. If I had been more alert, I would have understood what I was walking away from, but I was too tired and too rushed for anything but the simplest gestures: a last hug, a last kiss, and then the van pulled up in front of the cottage, and it was time for me to go. We went back into the house to retrieve my bag, and as we were walking out again, Alma plucked a book from the table near the door and handed it to me (To look at on the plane, she said), and then there was a last last hug, a last last kiss, and I was off to the airport. It wasn’t until I was halfway there that I realized that Alma had forgotten to give me the Xanax.

On any other day, I would have told the driver to turn around and go back to the ranch. I almost did it then, but after thinking through the humiliations that would follow from that decision—missing the plane, exposing myself as a coward, reaffirming my status as neurotic weakling—I managed to curb my panic. I had already made one drugless flight with Alma. Now the trick was to see if I could do it alone. To the extent that distractions were necessary, the book she had given me proved to be an enormous help. It was over six hundred pages long, weighed almost three pounds, and kept me company the whole time I was in the air. A compendium of wildflowers with the blunt, no-nonsense title
Weeds of the West
, it had been put together by a team of seven authors (six of whom were described as Extension Weed Specialists; the seventh was a Wyoming-based Herbarium Manager) and published, aptly enough, by something called the Western Society of Weed Science, in association with the Western United States Land Grant Universities Cooperative Extension Services. In general, I didn’t take much interest in botany. I couldn’t have named more than a few dozen plants and trees, but this reference book, with its nine hundred color photographs and precise prose descriptions of the habitats and characteristics of over four hundred species, held my attention for several hours. I don’t know why I found it so absorbing, but perhaps it was because I had just come from that land of prickly, water-starved vegetation and wanted to see more of it, had not quite had my fill. Most of the photographs had been shot in extreme close-up, with nothing in the background but blank sky. Occasionally, the picture would include some surrounding grass, a patch of dirt, or, even more rarely, a distant rock or mountain. Noticeably absent were people, the smallest reference to human activity. New Mexico had been inhabited for thousands of years, but to look at the photos in that book was to feel that nothing had ever happened there, that its entire history had been erased. No more ancient cliff dwellers, no more archaeological ruins, no more Spanish conquerors, no more Jesuit priests, no more Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, no more Indian pueblos, no more builders of the atomic bomb. There was only the land and what covered the land, the meager growths of stems and stalks and spiny little flowers that sprang up from the parched soil: a civilization reduced to a smattering of weeds. In themselves, the plants weren’t much to look at, but their names had an impressive music, and after I had studied the pictures and read the words that accompanied them (
Leaf blade ovate to lanceolate in outline
… .
Achenes are flattened, ribbed and rugose, with pappus
of capillary bristles
), I took a brief pause to write down some of those names in my notebook. I started on a fresh verso, immediately after the pages I had used to record the extracts from Hector’s journal, which in turn had followed the description of
The Inner Life of Martin Frost
. The words had a chewy Saxon thickness to them, and I took pleasure in sounding them out to myself, in feeling their stolid, clanging resonances on my tongue. As I look at the list now, it strikes me as near gibberish, a random collection of syllables from a dead language—perhaps from the language once spoken on Mars.

Bur chervil. Spreading dogbane. Labriform milkweed. Skeletonleaf bursage. Common sagewort. Nodding beggar-sticks. Plumeless thistle. Squarerrose knapweed. Hairy fleabane. Bristly hawksbeard. Curlycup gunweed. Spotted catsear. Tansy ragwort. Riddell groundsel. Blessed milkthistle. Poverty sumpweed. Spineless horsebrush. Spiny cocklebur. Western sticktight. Smallseed falseflax. Flixwood tansymustard. Dyer’s woad. Clasping pepperweed. Bladder campion. Nettleleaf goosefoot. Dodder. Prostrate spurge. Twogrooved milkvetch. Everlasting peavine. Silky crazyweed. Toad rush. Henbit. Purple deadnettle. Spurred anoda. Panicle willowweed. Velvety gaura. Ripgut brome. Mexican sprangletop. Fall panicum. Rattail fescue. Sharppoint fluvellin. Dalmatian toadflax. Bilobed speedwell. Sacred datura.

V
ermont looked different to me after I returned. I had been gone for only three days and two nights, but everything had become smaller in my absence: closed in on itself, dark, clammy. The greenness of the woods around my house felt unnatural, impossibly lush in comparison to the tans and browns of the desert. The air was thick with moisture, the ground was soft underfoot, and everywhere I turned I saw wild proliferations of plant life, startling instances of decay: the over-saturated twigs and bark fragments moldering on the trails, the ladders of fungus on the trees, the mildew stains on the walls of the house. After a while, I understood that I was looking at these things through Alma’s eyes, trying to see them with a new clarity in order to prepare myself for the day when she moved in with me. The flight to Boston had gone well, much better than I had dared to hope it would, and I had walked off the plane feeling that I had accomplished something important. In the big scheme of things, it probably wasn’t much, but in the small scheme of things, in the microscopic place where private battles are won and lost, it counted as a singular victory. I felt stronger than I had felt at any time in the past three years. Almost whole, I said to myself, almost ready to become real again.

For the next several days, I kept as busy as I could, tackling chores on several fronts at once. I worked on the Chateaubriand translation, took my banged-up truck to the body shop for repairs, and cleaned the house to within an inch of its life—scrubbing floors, waxing furniture, dusting books. I knew that nothing could hide the essential ugliness of the architecture, but at least I could make the rooms presentable, give them a sheen they hadn’t had before. The only difficulty was deciding what to do with the boxes in the spare bedroom—which I intended to convert into a study for Alma. She would need to have a place to finish her book, a place to go to when she needed to be alone, and that room was the only one available. Storage space in the rest of the house was limited, however, and with no attic and no garage at my disposal, the only area I could think of was the cellar. The problem with that solution was the dirt floor. Every time it rained, the cellar would fill up with water, and any cardboard box left down there was certain to be drenched. To avoid that calamity, I bought ninety-six cinder blocks and eight large rectangles of plywood. By stacking the cinder blocks three high, I managed to construct a platform that was well above the waterline of the worst flood that had visited me. For extra security against the effects of dampness, I wrapped each box in a thick plastic garbage bag and sealed up the opening with tape. That should have been satisfactory, but it took another two days for me to build up the courage to carry them downstairs. Everything that remained of my family was in those boxes. Helen’s dresses and skirts. Her hairbrush and stockings. Her big winter coat with the fur hood. Todd’s baseball glove and comic books. Marco’s jigsaw puzzles and plastic men. The gold compact with the cracked mirror. Hooty Tooty the stuffed bear. The Walter Mondale campaign button. I had no use for these things anymore, but I had never been able to throw them away, had never even considered giving them to charity. I didn’t want Helen’s clothes to be worn by another woman, and I didn’t want the boys’ Red Sox caps to sit on the heads of other boys. Taking those things down to the cellar was like burying them in the ground. It wasn’t the end, perhaps, but it was the beginning of the end, the first milestone on the road to forgetfulness. Hard to do, but not half as hard as getting on that plane to Boston had been. After I finished emptying the room, I went to Brattleboro and picked out furniture for Alma. I bought her a mahogany desk, a leather chair that rocked back and forth when you pushed a button under the seat, an oak filing cabinet, and a nifty, multicolored throw rug. It was the best stuff in the store, top-of-the-line office equipment. The bill came to more than three thousand dollars, and I paid in cash.