his sash, Manny heaved open the sliding glass door and closed it behind him. The din had stopped. Cold bit his cheeks and neck. Baca Field’s floodlights had darkened. He stared at the moon, at Santa Fe’s lights aproned below, and the glow rising over the Sandias from Albuquerque. Few SUVs or workers’ trucks raced this late along Bishop’s Lodge Road.
Manny rubbed his belly to quell its gurgling. Oh God, he begged, give me something meaningful to do. That little silver ring high up in Alexis’s ear; me hoping she’s bi. Why am I flirting again? Didn’t losing my savings to three abortions cure me before I met Joyce? I have my life partner, don’t I? “Praying to a God I don’t believe cares—I must feel desperate,” he muttered.
Shivering, he pulled open the slider. “Nothing to see except lights.”
“It sounded worse than the racket the hot tub makes.” She clicked off the floor lamp, then moved toward the bed and twisted the knob of her table lamp.
“That hot tub’s a pain,” Manny said in the moonlit dark. “Maintenance and chemicals run five hundred bucks a year and it leaks. Stu thinks the grinding means a blockage. Let’s dump the whole system, Boodie—it’s a capitalistic frill. No more stains, no more rats.”
Kicking off his moccasins, he tossed his robe on the seat of the ladderback chair in the corner. He peeled off his sweats and Jockey shorts, stretched under the blanket, and threw a forearm over his eyes. “Everything’s going to be fine,” he murmured, worrying that tomorrow, after picking up a peace placard from Alexis at Chuck’s office, he and Joyce must grind out April’s CEO Briefing.
Joyce brought her knees up and faced him. “Hey, bud?”
“What?”
“I love our hot tub. I love to sit on the bench and soak when the plum branches above it wave. I like us to touch; I like you to touch me between my legs.”
Her palm slid across his pelvis and settled on his testicles. Her thumb pressed his penis.
“I like it when we wrap each other in towels and come dripping up here to make love, Manny. Don’t you? But we can’t do it when you’re overwrought and can’t get hard.”
“Tomorrow, Boodie. It’s ten o’clock, I’m tired.”
She retrieved her hand and flipped to her other side. He snuggled in close, genitals and belly pressing her buttocks. He hooked his arm around her waist to cup a breast, but her hair tickled his nose and he pulled away. He winced at the cramp of intestinal gas building—what a joke that he could leave stomach problems in California.
DRESS UP
“DEAR SANTA FE CLOUDSCAPE THAT KNOWS NOTHING OF war,” Chuck Ridley whispered to no one.
Lying in bed in a violet silk pajama top, he shifted his eyes from the sky to the lawn glittering with frost. Ice warming to mush still gripped the tips of the weeping willow that shaded the pond whose installation Chuck’s wife, Helen, had overseen last August.
Early this morning, schoolmates from Desert Prep had picked up Mark and Melodie—Chuck’s and Helen’s children—for a Saturday of skiing. Now the twins’ pet llamas lay with forelegs folded near a scattering of hay in front of the stucco three-car garage. A breeze fluttered the wool on their harlequin flanks.
Feeling his penis stir, he twisted to face his wife of twenty years. Though she was one of five sisters, Chuck—the only child of a Santa Fe gynecologist—believed that population growth had become the world’s primary sin and wanted no more children. The twins’ birth in Greenwich Village through a cesarean section that took eight months to heal helped plead his case. Helen had had her tubes tied.
He had never reconciled himself to her decision, following the tubal, to crop her waterfall of hair into two-inch spikes. But now, curled under goose down with its embroidered jack-in-the-pulpit cover, she smelled like pancakes steaming. He gazed at the brown wisps spiraling down the back of her neck and pushed his lips against her bare shoulder.
“Ummm,” she murmured. She shifted wide hips clad in the Indian-maiden loincloth which matched the fringed bra he’d bought her last summer at Indian Market.
“Guess what,” he said, rising to his elbow. “We’re alone.” He thrust his genitals against the soft leather of her loincloth and bent to peck an earlobe.
She continued to gaze at the huge color photo on the wall, framed in birch, of their summer chalet outside Montpelier that they’d bought years before moving to Santa Fe. Three canoes floated beside the dock; the pond was ringed in beech and white pine. “Don’t you have a business breakfast?”
“I do—renegade CPA, newborn investment advisor to the rich. First I’m meeting Alexis to see what figures she’s come up with. Then Manny Barnes drops by to pick up a sign for tomorrow’s march. Helen? Let’s remember our anniversary early. Where’d you put those good-old-days clothes?”
“Give me a moment.” She hoisted herself away from him, throwing her feet to the Navajo rug and pressing her eyelids. She rubbed fingertips across the washboard her forehead had become. “I want to go back full time, Charles. I don’t mean New York City, I mean to Montpelier. Us four. Not just summers. Peonies in June and mosquitoes in July, leaves in October and for Christmas a yard full of carrot-nosed snowmen. I’ve tried to make this palace here home. But we live thirty-five miles from five hundred drums of nuclear waste. We came four years ago to care for your mother and now she’s dead. My own parents are aging back in Hanover. I’d like to live less than two thousand miles away.”
“It’s a bad time for good ideas, Helen. My five stock-and-bond clients’ portfolios fell eight percent the quarter ending in December; agreed, I’m just learning. But two major tax clients have left. They don’t know what to make of my antiwar goings-on.”
His eyes swept the vast bedroom, the Kurdistan rugs soaking up heat from the neoprene loops embedded in the concrete slab, the black spirals and sawtooths of a Dan Namingha acrylic that dominated the east wall, the trumpet-vine pot fountaining ricegrass which Helen had fired in the garage last month. In the corner sat the sofa of pleated calfskin they never used. Streaked and smudged because she couldn’t find a workman with a ladder long enough for the slope outside, a picture window over the sofa showed the opera house and the piñon-green hills overlooking I-25.
“Too much violence in Santa Fe, Charles. That stabbing at Desert Prep last month felt like a final blow for me.”
“It’s no longer the town I grew up in, true. I’m also weary of this double life—” triple? he wondered, recalling how leafing though Alexis’s gay-and-lesbian newsweekly yesterday triggered a surprise erection. “Let’s talk later. Where are those new dress-ups you bought?”
“With the rest, of course.”
Flinging back the comforter, he squinted against the seven-thirty sun sparkling off the screen of his laptop on the credenza. Embedded heat warmed his bare feet as he padded to the south wall across the long crack—jagged as Namingha’s painted black lightning—that had separated the concrete slab.
The chest’s scent of cedar greeted him. He peeled off his pajama top and tossed it onto the ottoman, then bent toward the paper-doll-like kachinas chiseled in the arched lid. He fumbled with the tumblers until he could pull the lock apart.
Bleach prickled his nose as he hoisted the lid and hauled out purchases from
