Bewitching Earth

So we walked around that cactus garden together outside the Anthropology Department on the sunny afternoon in November, and you cleverly found out the things about me, my insecurites, and ways that you could seem to be furnishing whatever I needed.

  That was the first of many nights I spent in a sort of heaven on earth. Where we parked, San Xavier Mission was sculpted nacre, lopsided with its unfinished tower shining against a sky of variegated purple and gray, a sky like a great draped serape.

  Halfway up the nearby penitent hill, your hand traveled up my blouse. And the mission bells announced the night’s regular divisions. It was a while before I discovered that the house we’d stayed in later wasn’t yours. You used the homes of your clients for your casual affairs. You kissed me as you left me the next morning at the door to the dormitory under the football stadium (you were amused that I lived there) with my Christmas gifts, the guitar and the alpaca shawl.

  Despite any misgivings, clearly sensing how precarious things were, whenever I was with you my world became magnificent. During our picnic in the canyon, tawny leaves, tiny and oval, showered from the black branches of a mesquite tree onto our upturned faces, landing there, and there, and in the hollow of your ear. I watched those leaves scatter on the surface of the canyon stream and meander around boulders, past cacti, and tumble toward the desert floor of our valley, miles below, and our town was all a dusty blur that day.

  On the evening of the opera (you were so kind to take me to that), some gargantuan tossed a tortilla squarely into the sky, no, it only resembled a cloud, and tore it to shreds as though he, too, were in a mad passion. I was looking up at the sky. You were busy visiting with some important New York clients.

  How naïve I was, how starry-eyed and fanciful. I suppose you sensed immediately a tinge too much adoration. I should have played it cooler, I should have managed myself better, but every moment with you excited my senses. I saw and felt extraordinary things and tried to tell you about them. Not that you heard me.

  In the end, when my ardor had peaked, your cell phone began malfunctioning. Subsequently, within a week, I arranged to meet you at your actual home in the foothills. With its thick Persian rugs, and its even thicker adobe walls, it was a fortress, a bulwark with a black basalt foundation and a surrounding army of saguaro cacti. Arriving there in my old car, I realized I wasn’t astute about irregular Navajo weaves, about the pillars of the Raj, about the chandeliers one could expect to find in ruined Sonoran haciendas. I realized I wasn’t astute.

  Before we could talk, your shop lady arrived to pick up some keys. Impeccably dressed and coifed, on one pale arm she wore three Huichol bracelets of bright-colored beads, depicting lissome scorpions and corn blossoms. Her black high heels clicked endless ellipses around your kitchen island as she drank her wine and eventually made herself lunch, and I knew she was laughing under the impassive mask she kept on her beautiful face.

  When she’d gone, I begged you to explain. “You’re imagining a distance that doesn’t exist,” you said, smoking your pipe a little angrily, quirking one auburn brow. And I, wanting—oh, wanting more than you can imagine—to believe you, buried my face in your chest with tremulous sighs. Buried my face, buried myself.