PART
II
23
HOUSES WERE HARD to find in Boulder, and they were expensive. We slept on an old friend’s living-room floor for a week and a half and finally, out of desperation, rented a room in a house with two biology students, Dell and Eddie, who were in their junior year at the University of Colorado. We slept in the back room, which was originally the den and had a door that opened onto the back yard.
At 6:30 our first morning there, Dell ran through our room with his spotted police dog, Dilbert. He wanted to let him out in the yard.
Gauguin, half asleep, raised himself on his elbow. “Uh, Dell, couldn’t you use the front door? We’re sleeping.”
Dell turned to Gauguin as he held the screen door open for Dilbert. “Oh, sorry, guys. Dilbert had to go real bad. I didn’t know you were sleeping.”
“We were,” Gauguin confirmed it.
“I’ll be quieter next time,” Dell assured us.
“Next time don’t come through. Use the front door, and go around,” Gauguin said. This time his voice was just below the level of a threat.
It didn’t matter. Dell ran through every morning, and it was always early, between 6:30 and 7 A.M. Each time we screamed at him. Then I laid my head back on the pillow. At that moment each morning, I experienced memory: I’d left Taos. I was living with two college students. I was in a town without adobe, without the pueblo. Suddenly Taos Pueblo mattered. While I was in Taos, it had just been a part of everything. Now that I was away, I realized it was the essential sacred gem of the place. There was no core like that in Boulder.
Five days after we moved in, I was sitting at the kitchen table when Dell and Eddie brought in three brown bags full of groceries. They unloaded sugarless Graham crackers, brown rice in a box, whole-wheat spaghetti, kidney beans, cold-pressed safflower oil and sesame oil, peach kefir, orange-sweetened buckwheat cookies, sprouted wheat bread, raw peanuts and cashews, organic carrots, avocadoes, lemons, tea with fourteen herbal flavors, and soy milk.
“Hey, guys”—I had picked up the salutation from Dell—“did you go shopping at the co-op?”
“Nope. At Safeway,” Eddie explained as he threw the carrots into the vegetable bin of the refrigerator.
“Huh? You’re kidding. They sell this stuff at the supermarket?” I held up the soy milk.
“Sure,” Dell chimed in, and nodded.
I scratched my cheek and read the label on the tea: “Jubilation.” Then under the tea’s name the box read, “Bless you, you are good.” The tea was blessing me. I scrunched up my face. There was so much talk about the New Age up in Boulder. This must be part of it, I thought. It was then that I promised never to drink anything but Lipton’s. Lipton’s didn’t ask anything of me. With Jubilation, I had to consider the state of my soul.
As I sat at the kitchen table, Dell and Eddie went to their rooms and changed into shorts and running shoes. They were going to jog down the street, but before they left they tore open the cellophane on the buckwheat cookies and each took two. “For energy,” Eddie said, holding up his cookies. He saluted, then he and Dell dribbled out the door.
I leaned my elbow on the gray Formica tabletop and stared at the package of cookies. I reached out and took one. I bit into it. It tasted like cardboard. No, worse—like eating a windowsill, and it was as tough as an old Buster Brown leather shoe. I spat it out into my hand and grimaced.
That night, to be hospitable, Dell and Eddie invited Gauguin and me to have soup with them. They made it themselves. Gauguin said he had to go to the library. I told him that was a pathetic excuse. I walked into the kitchen alone to face what America had come to.
“Hey, guys,” I said. “What’s for dinner?”
“We made seven-bean soup and a side dish of brown rice.” Dell flashed me a big smile. The refrigerator hummed loudly, the fluorescent light above the sink was on the blink, and their two ten-speed bikes were jammed against the wall next to the kitchen table.
The three of us held hands before we ate. I waited for them to say something. They didn’t. Their eyes were closed. I waited a little longer. Then even longer. Our hands began to sweat. I said, “Thanks,” and we let go of each other’s hands. They stood grinning. I sat down. Eddie placed a bowl of soup in front of me and a huge white plate of brown rice.
I picked up my spoon and noticed the soup had no aroma. I scooped some soup into my mouth, and my teeth almost stopped dead on the surface of the kidney, pinto, and aduki beans. They were hard.
“Hey, guys,” I said casually, “how long did you cook these beans?”
“Oh, for a while,” Dell said as he crunched into his and swallowed.
I grimaced. It was supposed to be a smile. “I suppose you cooked the brown rice that long, too?”
Yes, they both nodded, their mouths full.
After they finished eating, they cleared their dishes. “Hey, Nell, you’re a slow eater,” Dell remarked. No one in Boulder knew me as Banana Rose.
Yes, I nodded, and added, “I like to digest my food.”
I watched them wash their dishes. “Where are you going now, guys?”
Eddie paused in front of me. “We thought we’d go see Rocky.” They waved and half-jogged out the door.
“Have a good time,” I called after them. As soon as they were gone, I dumped my soup and brown rice down the garbage disposal. Then I walked out into the twilight of our front yard. The streetlights had just come on. I lay down on the dried lawn. Dell and Eddie thought it was unecological to waste water on such things. The lawn had burned, and the landlord had charged them their security deposit.
Lying there on the bleached Boulder lawn, I thought of New Mexico. I turned over and buried my face in the burnt grass.
Gauguin found a job house painting. He climbed ladders and turned walls from green to decorator white. He came home each night with his jeans and face speckled with paint. I found a job in a halfway house helping troubled kids with their schoolwork. The counselors at the house confiscated the kids’ dope and then smoked it themselves in an upstairs bedroom.
At night, Gauguin and I walked down to the local jazz club on Pearl Street, sipped white wine, and listened to musicians draw out notes that came directly from their bodies. Gauguin took to smoking bedes, narrow cigarettes from India. I watched him watch every move the clarinet player made one night in early October, and as he listened, he smashed bede after smoked bede into the glass ashtray. As we walked home he stepped hard on the dried fallen leaves that covered the sidewalk.
“Nell, what have I been doing all these years? All that time I blew the trumpet in the Talpa hills, I was wasting my life. I can’t even earn a living. I’ve got to grow up,” he said as we passed a streetlight.
I spun around. “You’re wasting your life? I fucking moved here because of you! Why don’t you become a rock star already, so leaving Taos will make sense?” I stormed down the street. I turned my head and yelled back at him, “And I haven’t painted a picture since we’ve been here!”
Gauguin caught up to me and grabbed my shoulder. “Nell! What about me? You think I’m happy?”
We were both breathing heavily. I shoved his hand away. “I hate you,” I said. I was crying now. “I can’t stand living with Dell and Eddie and their damn dog Dilbert.” My face was in my hands. “This place is making me crazy—I can’t take it anymore!”
I lay in bed awake that whole night. The next morning, I told Gauguin I was moving out, and that afternoon I found a small room to rent in an old woman’s house, far away from the university. It took only two hours to pack up my stuff. Before we left Taos, we had thinned our possessions. Gauguin was stunned. He helped me load up Betsy Boop and drove me to the other side of town.
The first night I was there, I couldn’t believe what I had done. On the second night Gauguin slept over. On the third night we talked about living together again when we saved some money, so we could get a better place. I began to make my little white room livable. After a mont
h, Gauguin also found a room in someone’s house. It was a block away from mine. When we saw each other, we either made love and cried or we fought.
One Sunday, he spoke to his father long-distance in Minneapolis. Rip offered to train him as an architectural draftsman for seven dollars an hour. He got off the phone and didn’t say anything. I had slept over at his place that night. He mused all afternoon. We took a long hike in the hills.
“Nell, I have to go,” he finally said. “You think I’m a failure anyway, and you hate me for pulling you out of Taos. I’ll make money, and you’ll come visit. Maybe you could move there.” He paused. “I can’t ask you now. Not after moving you once.”
I was numb. I just listened. Gauguin was moving to Minneapolis; he was going to leave in a month.
It was at 5 A.M. on a Monday in November that Gauguin loaded the final carton into the back of Betsy Boop. We stood by the curb to say good-bye.
“Nell, I love you so much—I can’t believe all this is happening.” Gauguin wiped his nose with the sleeve of his flannel shirt. “You’ll come visit soon, won’t you?” He half-asked and half-begged.
I nodded. “Good luck.” I held him by the collar. “Drive care-fully.” I felt too choked up to say anything else.
He positioned himself behind the wheel and slammed the door shut. He leaned out the open window and we kissed. I watched the red taillights of Betsy Boop disappear into the predawn fog that engulfed the residential street.
I walked back down the block to my place. Since it was so early, I went back to bed and fell asleep. I dreamed I was back at Dell and Eddie’s. I was alone. It was early morning. I was sitting up in bed, remembering that Gauguin had moved. In the dream, he had moved to New York City. Suddenly, Dell came bounding in with Dilbert. But Dilbert was a cocker spaniel.
Dell said, “Hi, sorry I woke you.”
“Oh, you didn’t wake me,” I replied. It was the first time in six years that I hadn’t yelled, “Dammit, Dell, use the front door!” Without that, he didn’t know what to do next, so he did the most surprising thing: He called Dilbert back into the house and walked him through the front door and out into the yard. Then the phone rang. It was a black phone. I picked it up. I didn’t know who it was, but I told the person the story about Dell and Dilbert. As I spoke, a rosebush full of thorns began to grow across the window. Then I heard Gauguin’s voice in the phone. “See? It was worth me leaving.”
24
WITH GAUGUIN GONE, I went to work and then came home. I sat in my back bedroom and just stared at the walls. The old woman sat in her rocker in the living room all day with her three cats. She was hard of hearing. In exchange for cheap rent all I had to do was shop for groceries once a week, vacuum the carpets, and change the kitty litter. The cats never went outside. They were old and as still as doorknobs. The woman’s name was Clara. Her cats’ names were Crackers, Cheese, and Wine. They were yellow, white, and black. Sometimes I would come out of my room at night and sit with them.
“You’re sad,” the old woman screamed one evening.
I nodded.
“Well, what do you do?” she asked.
I screamed back and was surprised at what came out. “I paint,” I said.
“Well, go and get ’em.” She used her hand to shoo me away.
“Get what?” I asked.
“Your coloring stuff,” she said.
I obeyed. I found my pastels and a white drawing pad at the bottom of a box in the closet. I never even unpacked them. I walked back into the living room, sat on a cushion on the floor, my legs splayed out on either side of the paper, and began to draw the old woman and her cats. Clara seemed pleased by the attention, and the cats purred wildly, hunched in balls around her feet.
I did three sketches in a row. Clara didn’t ask to see them. She just sat with her eyes closed, rocking softly, her head leaning on a plaid blanket folded over the back of the chair. I didn’t offer to show them to her either. This gave me a tremendous sense of freedom. I could draw what I wanted, almost in secret, in a place far away from all the painful things in my life.
I drew the next night and the next. By Thursday, I had moved my pad from the living room into the kitchen. I got out my watercolors. I did a painting of the cupboards, the high ceiling, the red-and-white-enamel kitchen table. My sadness brought me down to the level of concrete things. How could I explain my life? One day in love with Taos and Gauguin, another day busted up in an old woman’s house in Boulder. I studied what was in front of me: the black linoleum floor with ticks of yellow, the philodendron plant on the counter in a brown clay pot, the yellowing Venetian blinds, always drawn tight across the window.
I was surprised how much I was enjoying painting. I was surprised I could do it while my whole world collapsed. The phone never rang in Clara’s house, and I knew it was too early to expect a letter from Minnesota.
Then on a Friday after work, two weeks after Gauguin had left, I ran into Neon at the Manhattan Deli on the Boulder mall. We didn’t quite recognize each other. As he reached across the white counter to get his plate of strawberry strudel and cup of steaming coffee, I tentatively asked, “Neon?” His hair was short. He wore a button-down shirt and new jeans.
He turned, smiling, and said, “No, Eugene,” and a whole window opened around his face. I knew Eugene in that moment better than I had ever known Neon and we smiled at each other.
“I’m Nell now,” I said. I ordered some chocolate bobka and a cream soda. We sat together in a booth.
Eugene told me he had taken up Buddhism. “My teacher said it’s a very generous act to honor my heritage, my father and mother. So I reclaimed my old name, Eugene. It took a while to get used to it. Actually, it was a relief. Neon? I was a clown in Taos.” Eugene finished his coffee and ordered a ginger ale.
“I didn’t think you were a clown. I liked you,” I said.
Eugene now worked as a carpenter and took waltzing lessons. “I love swirling around ballrooms,” he said. “You couldn’t do that in Taos.”
“Why not?” I asked, always quick to defend Taos.
“Because there wasn’t any room big enough.” He smiled at me.
“There was old Martinez Hall,” I interjected.
“Yeah, but it wasn’t exactly waxed,” he said, and we both laughed.
“Come to think of it,” I said, “I don’t think I ever saw the floor. The lights were dim and it was always full of people dancing their asses off to loud electric music.”
After that meeting at the Manhattan Deli, Eugene and I spent time together. It was as natural as sap rising in maple trees. If I didn’t hear from him for a week after a date, I never worried. There was a trust between us from knowing each other in Taos. He even helped me pick out a great secondhand Plymouth. And when he tried to kiss me now, his lips didn’t miss mine the way they had in his pink jeep long ago.
Often I met him at the Record Shoppe on the mall, where he was working building shelves. He sang as he worked and sometimes banged his foot on the linoleum floor in rhythm with his voice. We didn’t talk about Gauguin much, but each night Eugene and I slept together, Gauguin slept with us. We could feel his presence, a largeness about everything we did. As though we weren’t just embracing each other but a third person, too.
One morning he woke and turned to me. “Nell, last night a whale visited me. I sat on the plains of North Dakota in a small hut, and the whale—like a great gray god—came out of the plains, as though it were the ocean.” He lifted his right hand to show me the rising motion of the whale. “The whale bared his belly to me and handed me a spear. He said, ‘Use this spear, eat me, and you will be nourished.’ ”
Eugene lifted his big head off the pillow. “Have you ever been to North Dakota?” he asked me.
I shook my head.
“Me either,” said Eugene. His head fell back on the pillow and he looked up at the ceiling.
Then I remembered my dream about meeting my grandfather in North Dakota. I told it to him. We dec
ided that North Dakota had some kind of magic.
A week later, Eugene dreamed that an eagle came to him in the same place in North Dakota. Holding out his great talon as if it were a hand, the eagle demanded, “Give me your heart.” Eugene didn’t hesitate. Eugene handed over his heart. The next day, in dream time, the eagle returned.
“You have given me your heart. Now I will give you my heart and I’ll travel on your left branch for as far as North Dakota reaches to Wyoming.” In the dream Eugene then became a beautiful tree, “the kind they have in Africa.”
“Acacia?” I asked.
“Acacia,” he said, and nodded.
I was happy to be with Eugene. Even though he wasn’t Neon anymore, he still had magic. I could go to bed with him, close my eyes, and feel open land, sage, the edge of Taos Mountain where it touched the sky.
Sometimes he came home with me in the evening and we’d sit with the old lady. I’d draw; he’d play with the cats.
“Her name’s Clara,” he said, after he first met her. “Why do you call her ‘the old lady’?”
“I don’t know. I think it’s affectionate, like Neon or Banana Rose. I want her to be a hippie,” I explained.
He nodded. He understood, but he always called her Clara.
He talked to me a lot about Buddhism, and soon I began sitting with him at the meditation hall.
“Life is suffering,” he’d repeat to me when I had a faraway look in my eye, and we both knew what I was thinking about.
In that first month, I did twenty paintings and I liked eight of them. After a while I stopped painting interiors of Clara’s house. I could sit in front of her and paint something far away. I did one of Minnesota. I’d never been there, but I tried to imagine what it was like. Gauguin had told me Minneapolis had twenty-five lakes—I couldn’t fit in twenty-five—I drew an aerial view, with eighteen lakes separated by clumps of trees and tulips. There were tall brick buildings and a river running through the center. I tried to do an aerial view of Taos, too, but my hand shook when I drew the mountain. I put the painting away for another time.