That night I wrote Anna a postcard. “I miss you. I love Gauguin. I’m painting. It’s good to have that even here in the middle of dark canyons. I’m dating Neon. Don’t ask. What’s Nebraska like? Maybe I’ll visit sometime. Love, your best friend, Nell.”
I slipped it into the mailbox early next morning, while there were few cars yet out on the streets and tree shadows were long. I tried to imagine that little slip of my life traveling to Anna, and I wondered what her mailbox looked like.
25
ON A SATURDAY IN late January, when the days were the shortest, I decided to treat myself to matzo ball soup at the Manhattan Deli. The sky was a dark blue and the air was bitter. The mountains surrounding Boulder looked cruel to me.
I sat down in a black vinyl booth, and when the soup came, I spooned the soft matzo ball into my mouth. The warm chicken broth felt comforting; I was lonely.
After I finished the soup, I paid the bill at the counter, popped a white mint into my mouth, and headed home. Halfway there, I turned around suddenly and walked straight to the meditation hall Eugene had brought me to, climbed the long stairs, and picked up the application to take refuge vows. As I wrote “Nell Schwartz” across the top lines, “Banana Rose” blinked in hot pink lights in front of my eyes. “How long have you been meditating?” the application asked. I wrote, “Forever.” The form completed, I slipped it into the top slot of a wooden box, then walked downstairs and out into the glaring sunlight.
Eugene became excited when, that night, I told him what I had done. “Why don’t I do it, too?” he said, and the next day he signed up. We both were officially becoming Buddhists.
The ceremony was set for the following Wednesday night. I was to meet Eugene at eight o’clock and he would save me a sitting cushion.
That Wednesday at lunch I knew I couldn’t go through with it. I took a half day off from work and drove out to Gold Hill and through the woods.
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. Rachel, Esther, Sara, Rebekah. The trees were empty of leaves. I looked up and saw Stars of David twinkling from the branches. King Saul, King Solomon, Grandpa Samuel, Uncle Morris, Cousin Sarah. I wasn’t a Buddhist. I was lonely.
I arrived back at the old lady’s at 7:30 in the evening. Changing slowly, I knew I’d be late. I wanted to miss the ceremony.
As the last bells were being rung, I slipped into a back seat in the audience.
At the reception that followed, I found Eugene and tapped him on the shoulder. He was wearing a navy suit from the Salvation Army.
He swirled around. “Where were you? I saved a place and everything.”
“Congratulations.” I paused. I looked down at my hands. “Neon—I mean, Eugene—I couldn’t do it.” I looked up. “I’m a Jew. I’m not sure what that means, but that’s what I am.”
He was quiet for a moment. I could see he was thinking, So what? I am too. Then his face changed and he smiled. “Look at my new name.” He unrolled a small scroll. “Great Heart Bird,” it read.
I was delighted. “Your dream told you this.”
“Yeah.” It dawned on him. He had forgotten his dream.
That night, I walked home alone. Eugene went out with other initiates to celebrate. I lay in bed for a long time. Then I turned over and reached for the phone. I dialed 612-555-4063 and waited for someone to answer. It was past midnight.
“Hello?” I heard after the fifth ring.
“Hi, did I wake you?” I wondered if anyone was sleeping next to him.
“Nell?” Gauguin was surprised. I had woken him from a deep sleep. I started to cry. “Nell! I miss you. Come. Come and lie next to me.”
26
IN LATE MARCH, Eugene drove me to the airport in Denver. It had taken two months for Gauguin and me to save enough money for me to fly north. In Colorado it was spring, and I had already gotten tanned lying out in the hills. For Minnesota, Gauguin said I should bring my winter coat, “just in case.”
When he met me at the Delta terminal, I felt water all over again, like I had the first time I glimpsed him at that Shabbos in Taos. It reminded me of what I’d seen on the runway when the plane was taking off. It looked like water, but it wasn’t water at all—it was radiating heat. We kissed a nervous hello and I felt my knees tremble. He took my hand and we walked down the long airport corridor.
As we drove through Minneapolis, I looked out at sturdy homes, proper square blocks, shrubs, and curbs. There were no buds yet on the trees. Branches seemed relieved just to be alive. I could feel a bitterness in the Minnesota air, unlike anything I had experienced before. I understood then that I was in the deep north.
We arrived at Gauguin’s place. He lived in the bottom half of a green clapboard two-story house. The front door opened directly into the living room. Gauguin had made the adjoining dining room into his bedroom so the back bedroom could be his music studio.
“Well, here we are,” he said, putting my suitcase down on the wood floor.
The living room was empty except for a red Salvation Army couch and a flowered rug. I stepped onto the carpet. “My mom gave me that as a welcome home present.”
I could see a mattress with a quilt thrown over it on the floor in the next room. That was it. No curtains, no chair, no bureau.
The rooms were large, the walls were white, and the floors were wood. “I like it here,” I said. “Things seem so crowded in Boulder. I like the feeling of space this place has.” I was nervous. Under the polite conversation, my body screamed for Gauguin.
We stood at opposite ends of his mother’s rug. Neither dared take a step toward the other. We could both feel the electricity between us. My spine was undulating.
“Banana Rose.” Gauguin broke the trance.
We ran to each other. We were together again. The world felt golden.
I couldn’t get enough of his lips. My tongue ran along his teeth, his face grasped in my two hands. “Sweetheart, sweetheart,” I whispered urgently.
“Yes, yes,” Gauguin repeated over and over. He took my hand and put it on his pants. I knelt down and unzipped his fly.
Dusk became darkness. A velvet night surrounded us. We rolled around on the flowered rug, half dressed, half naked. My eyes lost sight. My body raced across three and a half months of wanting him. My finger was in his mouth, my tongue in his ear.
“Gauguin, I love you so.” I ran my palm across his face. He was crying. I bit his shoulder, his neck.
“I want you, I want you.” Gauguin pounded his body inside me.
Now my body could admit how much I had missed him. I split open and screamed in ecstasy.
He clamped his hand over my mouth. “Nell, there are neighbors upstairs!”
“So what?” I grabbed his wrist and kissed him. “Nell, we’re not in Taos.”
I moved my face away from his. “So?” I was confused. “What do you mean? Do you know them?”
He nodded. “They’re straight. Nice, but real middle class.”
The headlights of a passing car moved across the back wall.
Just then I noticed that his hair was real short. My mind reeled back to the airport. He’d had on a white button-down shirt. I touched his head.
“Do you like it?” he asked.
“It’s kind of straight looking. I have to get used to it,” I said. “You know, I must have been so nervous, I didn’t see it at the airport. You got new glasses, too?” I reached across the rug for them. They had round lenses.
“My father got them for me. He said I couldn’t come to work with taped ones.” We both started to laugh.
The next morning I woke early. Gauguin was sleeping next to me in bed. It was good to see him in the morning. There were his arms, his long thin legs, those thick lips in the dim early light of the apartment. With a wild flood of warmth, I wanted him all over again. Maybe some things did last, I thought.
Gauguin awoke and kissed me on the lips. “Wait until you see what I have,” he said, reaching behind the mattress.
He pulled out a jar f
rom against the wall. “Let’s eat some psychedelic mushrooms as a celebration.”
I agreed. We hadn’t eaten the night before, so our stomachs were empty. Gauguin unfolded the aluminum foil in which he kept the mushrooms and placed a small dried one in my mouth. I hardly had to chew. It crumbled on my tongue and I swallowed. Gauguin did the same.
“Let’s go out,” he said.
I wanted to stay in bed with him but said, “Okay.”
We put on some clothes, zipped up our jackets, and walked across the bare living room to the front door. The morning was brisk and the sky was gray. As we crossed the street at Riverside and Eighth, I began to feel the effect of the mushroom. It was as though all the blood in my body had become a river and the water were rushing downstream. I clutched Gauguin’s hand.
“Nell, are you okay? Could you not grip my hand so tightly?” He turned to me. “Put one foot after the other, and we’ll get to the curb.” He blinked a lot. His eyes looked like two Ferris wheels.
We got away from the traffic and neared Riverside Park. Gauguin steered us toward the Mississippi. My body settled into the trip. My eyes were windmills. I turned to Gauguin.
“We are by the Mississippi together, Gauguin. You and me. The river of Huck Finn,” I exclaimed. I stood on a rock and opened my arms to the gray sky and told America how I loved it. The Midwest made me very patriotic. I enumerated what I loved about my country. “I love the stars on your flag, your rock ‘n’ roll music, your fuzzy TV stations that I never watch. I love the freckles on Gauguin’s arms.”
I smiled and looked tenderly out at that great, dirty, wide, and lovely river. My head bent toward my right shoulder, and I sighed. Gauguin looked up from where he was digging with a stick in the dirt.
“What?” he asked.
Then he said, “Come here, Nell.” I got down from my rock and crouched next to him. “Look at what I drew.” He’d drawn an elephant. “This elephant is purple,” he said.
“I can see that,” I said, and we smiled tremendous smiles at each other. It was miraculous. Gauguin and Banana Rose had survived and were together again. Gauguin’s hand was trembling as he touched my cheek. His veins stood out and his arm looked deathly pale after a Minnesota winter.
We got up and walked along the riverbank for a while. I was thinking hard, but because of the mushrooms, no thought held. I tried to make sense of love and Taos and this river.
We neared the Franklin Avenue bridge. Gauguin took my hand, and we walked a little farther toward a tree that hung out over the river. He stopped me. “Nell?” I turned to him. His face looked screwed up. “Nell, I love you and I don’t know what happened. I’ve missed you like crazy. Let’s get married.”
For a long time I stared at his mouth and noticed how many wrinkles it had. Then I looked at his eyes for one moment only. We both became very shy. He’d asked me to marry him. Had I heard that right?
We walked side by side for a while longer. I stooped down by the bank and picked up a stick. I drew hearts in the wet dirt, but I couldn’t say anything. I watched two brown ducks swim in circles around each other under the bridge. I thought to myself, I could marry Gauguin. Our children would be real Americans, half-breeds, and they would walk with their sunflower hearts by the Mississippi.
Gauguin touched my shoulder. I stood up, smiling, but still I felt shy. “Let’s walk over to the Riverside Café. I’m getting cold.” Gauguin bent his head in the direction we should go.
The café’s windows were steamed, and there were university and underground newspapers strewn about on wooden chairs and empty tables. I sat down in a red vinyl booth while Gauguin went to the counter and got us some winterberry tea. They gave him the tea in a stainless steel teapot. I poured the yellow liquid through the strainer and into one of the thick white cups. The tea leaves caught in the strainer. The trip was wearing off. We had only eaten one mushroom each. I handed Gauguin his cup of tea, then looked him in the face. “Did you mean what you asked before by the river?”
“Yes,” he nodded.
“I’d love to marry you,” I said.
I poured myself some tea and we clicked cups together. I could leave Boulder. I could reclaim a part of my life, the part with Gauguin. The tea felt good after the bitterness outside and the cups warmed our hands.
When we got back to Gauguin’s apartment, I called my parents in Brooklyn to tell them about our plans. My mother shrieked, “There’s not our kind out there! What will you do?”
Gauguin sat on the opposite side of the kitchen table. I wrinkled up my nose, put my hand over the mouthpiece, and whispered to him, “She’s in shock. She’s delighted.”
“I bet.” He laughed.
The four months Gauguin had been in Minnesota, he had worked for his father in downtown Minneapolis. He played music two nights a week with a couple of old friends from high school and had dated a woman named Sherry, who worked down the hall from him. She was Irish with green eyes and auburn hair and very white skin with a spray of freckles.
He went to his mother’s for breakfast every Sunday and then spent Sunday afternoons writing songs. He was writing beautiful songs, all sad, about waitresses, brick buildings, 1940s radio shows, and Chippewa Indians in housing projects in downtown Minneapolis. He played them for me on the fourth night I was there. I sat next to him on the bench in front of the old black upright piano.
After he sang “Black April,” a song about a nuclear holocaust, Gauguin turned to me. “You know, Nell, I feel as though I threw my life away those years in Taos. What was I doing then? I came back here so broke, my father had to lend me money for boots and wool socks. I was the prodigal son returning home a failure.”
My eyes burned. “Gauguin”—I looked at him—“those were the most important years of my life. It was home. I felt lost in Boulder.”
“You sure you want to move up here, then?” he asked.
“Yes, I want to be with you,” I answered. We grabbed each other and kissed for a long time. A flood of feelings washed over me. “You know, every time I smell rain, it brings me back to the smell of sage. Sometimes I feel bewitched by New Mexico. I’ve felt so torn living alone in Boulder, stranded in the middle between the two of you.”
“You talk as if New Mexico is a person.”
“It almost is. It calls me—” I paused. “The way you do.”
Gauguin studied the backs of his hands. “I guess Taos was never like that for me. I don’t miss it much; I’ve just missed you. Now that I’m back in the city, I can’t believe that we lived that way for so long—dirt floors, no running water. Meanwhile, everyone else was growing up, learning how to make a living. Here I am now, working for my father. It feels weird.”
That Sunday we went to breakfast at Gauguin’s mother’s. Alice lived in a brick apartment house on the north side of town. The elevator was broken, so we had to walk up two long flights of stairs.
When we got to the third floor, Alice was standing in the hall with the apartment door wide open. “Honey!” she cried as she took Gauguin’s face in her hands and gave him a big kiss on the lips.
Surprised by such a blatant show of affection, I awkwardly moved from one foot to the other.
“Oh, Mom, I want you to meet Nell.” Gauguin stepped back and presented me.
“Hello, Nell.” Alice reached out her hand.
Now I could see her close up. She had high cheekbones and dyed black hair in a short permanent. Her skin was pale, her lips were thick like Gauguin’s, and she wore bright red lipstick. Her eyes were dark blue and sparkled when she looked at Gauguin. The spark went out when she turned to me.
The living room was dominated by a flowered couch and matching flowered curtains that hung on either side of a big window. A white wicker end table held a pile of National Geographic magazines, and there was an afghan thrown over a red chair. Above a wooden bureau hung a group of framed photos. I stepped over to see them better. “Is this you, Gauguin?”
“No, that’s his uncle, my broth
er, when he was a boy,” Alice explained while lighting a cigarette.
“How about this?” I pointed to a young boy by a boat, holding up a fish.
“No, that’s not him either.” Alice blew out a puff of smoke.
“Hey, girl, why don’t you help her?” Gauguin flirted with his mother. “Here I am.” He stepped over and pointed to a young boy on a horse, wearing shorts, a white T-shirt, and a bandanna tied around his neck.
“Oh, is that Dixie Sue?” I asked.
Alice snickered. “You told her about that?”
I watched Gauguin turn slowly and face his mother. “Yeah, you know I loved that horse.”
Alice waved her hand. “Let’s have some food. Gauguin, you must be starving.” She walked into the kitchen.
Gauguin and I continued to look at photos. “There I am,” he pointed. I felt the weight of his hand on my shoulder. “That’s me and Alice’s dad at Christmas one year. There’s none of Rip,” he whispered.
“Food’s on,” Alice called from the dining room.
We turned and joined her. From across the room, I noticed how skinny she was in her royal blue slacks. My mother would be jealous.
We sat down and she handed me a plate of scrambled eggs. “These are delicious,” I said after tasting them. “There’s fresh basil in them, isn’t there?”
She nodded and turned to Gauguin. “Want some coffee, sweetheart?”
He reached out his cup.
“Where can you get fresh herbs around here?” I asked.
“We have Lund’s. They sell everything, from all over the country,” she snapped at me.
I was confused. I thought I had asked a reasonable question. Why was she so defensive?
Gauguin quickly held up one of her biscuits. “You can’t get these in Lund’s. Only Alice makes them like this.”
“Mmm.” I nodded and slabbed on some more honey and butter. “They are good.”
“Don’t they have them in New York?” she asked. She was half curious this time, but cautious. Now I got it. She was afraid I was a New York snob, that I would think Midwesterners were hicks.