The Measures Between Us (27 page)

Janet had called Lucinda nightly during this period of her life. Lucinda had never heard her voice like that before, aching and despondent, so small and remote. It was hard to connect the voice shrunk so tiny to those sweeping paintings.

“Do you think he already met another woman?” Lucinda had asked.

“No. He wouldn't do that. I believe him when he says he wanted to bolt before it came to that. I almost wish he did, so I could stop missing him and start hating him. It'd be easier if he was suddenly an asshole.”

“But he is. He is suddenly an asshole.”

“I know. Then why do I want him back?”

Eventually Janet emerged from her sadness. She moved from El Paso to the house where she lived now. She started dating other men, began a new series of paintings. Lucinda was surprised she chose to remain in Texas, and when she said as much, Janet told her, “I don't think a busted relationship should make you leave a state. You can't give it that much power over you.” True, Lucinda thought, but how do you control it?

At the restaurant, Janet ordered for the two of them in Spanish.

“I'm so impressed,” Lucinda said.

Janet waved off the compliment. “Don't be. You pick it up without even trying,” she said. “You have to be the most determined kind of bigot to not learn it. In fact, even the racists speak
it—without any irony.” She took a long sip of water. “I ordered some of everything, so you can try whatever you want.”

“Oh, good,” said Lucinda. “Just warn me about the spicy stuff. My stomach's been a little iffy lately.”

Janet nodded. The waitress returned with chips and fresh salsa.

Lucinda stared at Janet popping a chip into her mouth and said, “I can't get over how much the same you look. It's amazing. You could be right back in Parrish Hall, prancing around your studio, blasting the music.”

Janet smiled. “You haven't changed, either. I mean, except …”

“Yeah,” Lucinda said, “except for the fact that I'm currently a whale.”

“You should enjoy it. A friend of mine who has kids says there are two good parts of being pregnant: one, you can't get pregnant, and two, it's the only time it's socially acceptable to be fat. She loved it. She was like, ‘Awesome, no more gym for nine months, and all the cake I want. Bring it on.' ”

The table was soon covered with dishes. Rice, beans, chicken, baskets of steaming tortillas and tacos. Slices of avocado and a bowl of glistening diced tomatoes; sauces Janet thoughtfully lined up from mild to spiciest. They ate mostly in silence, and Lucinda found the food hearty and satisfying, sustenance she didn't even know she was craving. Every few minutes a jukebox in the corner spit out a song, something raucous and Spanish, and the busboys sharing their own quiet meal at a back table tapped their feet to the melodies.

It felt almost dreamlike to Lucinda to be sitting here in this tiny west Texas town, so close to Mexico. She understood in a way she hadn't from a distance how Janet could live here. There
was something liberating in the isolation, there was none of the pressure of high-rises and downtowns and suburban creep. The heat was leaden sometimes, but even then the expansive sky, the skeletal trees and worn foothills, must be sustaining, persistent and dependable as daybreak. It was a trade-off: You were lonely, but maybe you never felt like you had to flee.

A signed, framed photograph of John Madden standing outside a massive bus hung on the wall. Lucinda pointed at it and said, “This restaurant's a celebrity hangout, too.”

Janet nodded. “He comes every year, apparently, on his way to broadcast a football game. He has a fear of flying, so he travels everywhere in that bus. People come and get his autograph. They call him ‘Mr. Juan Maddén.' ”

Lucinda wanted to trade lives with Janet, send her back to the East Coast confused, and Lucinda could take over the narrow little house and the dog and come eat at this restaurant several times a week. Pick up Spanish and flirt with the shy busboys with painful-looking tattoos on the fleshy parts of their hands. She could sleep in, let the sunlight streaming through the windows paint and warm the bed, nudge her into getting up. It would be just her, no Henry, no one else to answer to, apologize to. Maybe she would even keep the baby, and the acres of uninhabited land, the wandering herds of elk, and the sprawling Mexican cities to the south would coalesce and shape her into a perfect mother. Dredge all the bad impulses. It was such an imperfect, unlikely-looking place, and maybe that was why it would work.

She leaned back in her chair, sighed deeply, and said, “I don't want to leave.”

Janet said, “It's great, isn't it? Lucky for me, since there's not all that much choice around.”

“Aside from the sushi bar,” Lucinda said.

“Right. Except for that.”

Lucinda licked her fork clean. “Everything was delicious.”

“You'll have to come back here when you can tolerate the spicy stuff,” Janet said.

That evening, after Lucinda napped, they sat on the back porch. Callie lay at Janet's feet, and every so often Janet scratched the dog's neck with her stocking toe. Janet was drinking beer with lime quarters wedged into the bottle. The calls of insects, regular as a metronome, were drowned out every so often by louder, more haunting sounds seeping from the foothills.

“Coyotes,” Janet said she when she noticed Lucinda startled by the noises.

“Are they dangerous?” Lucinda asked.

“Not really. I mean, I suppose you wouldn't want to be wandering out there alone and run into one. But it's not like they'll come into the house and attack you unprovoked. You'll be safe here.”

“Do you just sleep through it?”

“You never get used to it,” said Janet. “It'd be like getting used to someone weeping, someone moaning. You'll sleep through it, mostly.” She bent down to shoo away a spider that was edging close to the dozing dog. “Callie used to freak out when she was a puppy. She tried to get under the covers with me. I was like, What the fuck, you're supposed to protect me!”

Lucinda smiled. She took a long swallow of club soda.

“Why are you here, Lucy?”

Lucinda clenched her jaw, stiffened her shoulders. She put her
seltzer glass on the arm of her chair, picked at a piece of paint flaking off the wood. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“I don't know,” Janet said. “It's strange. We haven't seen each other in years, and you call me one day out of the blue and hop on a plane, and here you are. And you're pregnant, and your husband—whom I've never met or even seen a picture of—isn't with you. It's kind of weird.”

Lucinda should have expected the question, especially since she had asked herself the same thing so many times. Still, it was a shock to hear Janet say it, and she felt the energy between them shift from easy and aimless to brittle and tight.

Janet had never seen a photograph of Henry? Was that possible? She had graduated a year before Lucinda; maybe that was why they had never met. And Lucinda remembered that their wedding had been in the midst of Janet's breakup, so she hadn't come. (She had sent a congratulatory telegram, which Lucinda was amazed by—who knew you could even still send a telegram?) The thought sent Lucinda digging in her purse for a snapshot, and luckily she had one. It was from several years ago, when they had hiked up Mount Washington. Henry had looped one arm around her shoulder and extended his other to take a self-portrait of the two of them. They were uncentered, and the light was misty and imprecise, but they were smiling, inarguably happy. The questions hadn't set in yet. She handed the photo to Janet, who held it next to a candle to see better.

“He's handsome,” Janet said. “He looks a little like Brad Abrams.”

“Who's Brad Abrams?” Lucinda asked.

“Oh, you remember: lacrosse-team Brad. We all had a big
crush on him, and then he got kicked out senior year for breaking into one of the maintenance sheds and joyriding a backhoe. He was tripping.”

“Now I remember,” Lucinda said, nodding. “His father was a big donor and everything, so it was kind of scandalous. Henry's not a real tripping kind of guy.”

“Really?” said Janet. “How sad for you that your husband and the father of your baby isn't into dropping acid. How'd you end up with such a loser?”

They both laughed and Callie jerked her head up, snapped out of her slumber by the giggling.

“Did you ever do that, LSD?” Lucinda asked.

Janet shook her head. “Nope. A bunch of people in grad school were into it, but not me. Just never had the urge.”

“Were they the ones who made the weirdest art?”

“Actually, no. It was like the most normal, straitlaced people who were into it. I think they started with Ecstasy and then kind of fell into acid. They weren't like Timothy Leary types or anything, believing in some holy church of the hallucinogen. They're probably all married and driving minivans now.”

Callie had gone back to sleep, and Janet was finishing her beer. She swallowed the last mouthful and stood up, careful to avoid waking up the dog again. “I'm going to get another. Do you need anything?”

“Will you get me one?” Lucinda said.

Janet looked at her belly. “Are you allowed to do that?”

“Every now and then, one drink is okay. My obstetrician told me.”

“Doctor's orders, good enough for me,” Janet said, disappearing into the house. Lucinda hoped Callie might use her absence
as an excuse to come lie at her feet, yet the dog stayed where she was. Janet returned with two Coronas with limes stuffed in the necks. She handed one to Lucinda, said, “Cheers,” and they clinked bottles. After she took a long pull, she said, “Seriously, Lucy, why are you here?”

Lucinda considered the beer bottle in her hand. She turned it all the way around, picked a piece of lime pulp from her teeth. She waited for a coyote to break the silence, or cicadas and their maddening buzz, Callie, anything. A thunderstorm, a meteor falling to earth and cratering a nearby mountain, an earthquake, a tidal wave, anything to melt away this insistent question. They could be the last two people in Texas, wandering the smoldering cities and towns with their faithful guide dog.

The natural world, though, wasn't complying, as if it too were awaiting an answer. Tonight there were no generous disasters. Tonight everyone wanted an explanation.

“I don't know,” Lucinda finally said.

And she didn't. She really didn't.

Janet worked several days a week in El Paso for a graphic design firm, and while she was there Lucinda idled away the hours in San Elizario. She woke up late, lazily tapping the snooze button several times, and after she had finished her morning coffee she would go to the backyard and play with Callie. She threw a tennis ball for the dog to retrieve, and a minute later Callie would drop the ball at her feet, her whole body thrumming with expectation. Callie never got tired, and it was hard for Lucinda to end the game.

One day she walked the half mile to Janet's studio, an old auto-body garage in the meager downtown. The awning, fading
and rust chewed, still announced the name of the place: SHOW-TIME. The floors were concrete, splashed with random paint spills, both Janet's and the previous tenant's. A bridge table hugged one corner, its surface busy with brushes, knives, and empty coffee cans. Massive canvases leaned against the walls. Janet's work was much the same as it had been in college, only it had grown even larger. There were the familiar color fields, but the surfaces were more complex. When Lucinda looked closely, she could see subtle, round forms and softer, more inexact lines embedded in the austere geometry. Janet was using brighter colors too. In college she relied solely on blacks and grays and browns. Now there were infusions of red, blue, even lavender. There were hints of happiness.

A stack of dented and dinged car hoods, castoffs from the past owner, stood in another corner. Janet said she liked having the car parts around because they gave her a sense she was a laborer, engaged in something tangible, not just a rarefied artist playing with paint while others were making useful things. They weren't so unlike the paintings, Lucinda thought, fingering the shiny veneer of one. JAVIER, it read, scripted in taxicab yellow.

After visiting the studio, Lucinda went back to the same restaurant where she and Janet had eaten the first day. The waitress who seated her glanced at her belly for a moment but didn't say anything. Lucinda was grateful for her shyness, or her lack of English, or both. She poured a tall glass of ice water and left a menu for Lucinda to read.

Lucinda couldn't remember the names of the dishes Janet had ordered, so she relied mostly on the pictures. Many of them, when she looked closely, were virtually indistinguishable. It won't matter, she thought, I'm sure everything is good. When
the waitress returned, Lucinda stammered her way through the Spanish words, no doubt butchering them, and she missed Janet and her flawless pronunciation. The waitress stared at her like she would linger all day if Lucinda needed it. Maybe she would sit down and tutor her.

As before, the food was perfect. She nearly had to force herself to stop eating, the rice especially, which she packed into the soft tortillas with tomatoes and cheese. She herself had always been a terrible cook. Henry didn't mind. He had said, a few times, that it was something he loved about her, that he liked watching her amble cluelessly around the kitchen, baffled by the most rudimentary dishes. Basics like pasta would send her to cookbooks. “You like watching me fail?” she said once.

“No, I like watching you be bad at something, I like watching you be vulnerable,” he said. “That's different than failure.”

Occasionally she attempted an elaborate dish, wanting to surprise Henry with a dinner as good as one at a restaurant. She got family recipes from her mother, handed down on yellowing index cards. She scoured the Web for culinary sites. One week she even tuned in to a cooking show on TV, watching it daily. It was strangely addictive, seeing the chef transform humble ingredients separated in glass finger bowls into something new and no doubt delicious.