Gauguin and I let go of each other. The light of the kitchen was between us. This summer, I thought, this summer I’ll go.
39
DEAR ANNA,
I’m sitting in a small café in Gothenburg, Neb., on my way back from N.M. Went there by myself for 2 wks. No, I can’t stop to see you—there isn’t time—but I feel you, so I’m writing this. I’m painting a lot in Minn. The funny thing is I went down to Taos on purpose to paint + I didn’t do even one while I was there. Instead I hung out on the mesa—your favorite place—with Blue + Sam (I like him a lot now, but he’s still weird). Lightning’s away at camp in Colorado, but wouldn’t you know it, while I was there he ran away and came home. B. + I hiked up Wheeler + almost made it to the top + then quit; we said we didn’t want to be too ambitious. I missed you while I was there. Maybe we should have a homecoming + meet on the rim or in Talpa or at Steven’s Kitchen.
The thing is: Who cd paint that place? It’s so gorgeous, more than my imagination could hold. It was more beautiful than anything I remembered. It is the place on earth—and we lived there! Do you miss it? Me, too.
Anyway, it’s been kind of hard being married. G. + I decided that while we were away from each other if it felt right we cd sleep with someone, just as long as we quit after the 2 wks. Then driving out it felt funny. Like, hey, I’m married now. I don’t want to do that. I thought of checking out Neon in Boulder but I heard he’s on a six-month meditation retreat—yikes! But I slept with Tiny for old time’s sake. Just once. I kind of hated it. It made me feel crazy, but I was afraid G. was going to do it + I wanted to be even with him.
I start teaching again at the end of Aug. + it’ll probably start snowing in Minn. on Sept. 1st.
How’s yr writing going? I haven’t heard from you lately. What’s up? Yr still my best friend.
Love,
Nell
P.S. The salad bar in this place is full of marshmallows and canned pineapple. Yum.
40
I STOOD IN OUR living room, my arms full of bags I had carried in from the car. I flopped on the couch. “Whew, is that a long trip from New Mexico. I thought I’d never make it. Hey, the apartment looks real clean.” I looked around. “Well, what’d you do while I was gone?” We’d only talked once on the phone in the two weeks.
“I slept with Sherry,” Gauguin blurted out.
“You what? When?” I sat up.
“I can’t remember.” He paced the floor in front of the couch. “Monday night was the first time. I just thought we should tell each other right away.”
It felt as though my stomach had just fallen down to my knees.
“Oh, so you slept with Sherry!” I barked.
“What about you?” Gauguin was alarmed. He hadn’t expected such a strong reaction from me. I got up, ran to the bathroom, and slammed the door. I sat on the toilet, trying to figure out what I was feeling.
Gauguin yelled through the door. “Hey, Nell, I thought we had a pact.
He said something else, but I couldn’t hear him. I was imagining the open windows in Sherry’s apartment near Powderhorn Park, yellow curtains blowing in and out, scraping against the dirt on the sills, how the voices of kids riding their bikes around the lake wafted into Sherry’s bedroom. But Gauguin didn’t hear them, because he was busy feeling her soft white thighs against his back. I knew the way unattached lovemaking could be. He could be free to feel only her body. But it wasn’t so unattached—Sherry and he had a history, and they saw each other every day at work.
When I came out of the bathroom, I punched Gauguin in the chest as hard as I could with my fist. Then I started to laugh loud and crazily. Gauguin was so pale, I think his freckles disappeared.
I stormed into the kitchen like a raging bull and began hammering nails into the white wall above the kitchen table. Gauguin stood in the doorway and said quietly, “Nell, what are you doing?”
“I thought I’d hang up some pictures of New Mexico.” There were now six large black nails in the plaster with no apparent pictures.
“Nell, can’t you wait?” he asked nervously. “We haven’t even taken all your stuff from the trip out of the car.”
Just then I broke. I threw myself into a chair and cried with my head on the red table. Gauguin came quickly over to me and stroked my hair. He bent close. “Nell, what’s wrong? We said we could sleep with other people, if we wanted, when one of us was away.”
I just sat there crying. We were both so naive, so stupid.
When I finally lifted my head, I said, “I can’t handle it. We’re married.”
“C’mon, let’s unpack your car,” he whispered.
I looked at him. “You don’t get it, do you?”
His face looked like a prune. All the life was drained out of it. “C’mon,” he said.
“You’re crazy. You just told me you fucked someone else—not anyone, but Sherry—and you want me to unpack the car?” I wanted to claw his face with my nails.
“Well, I’ll unpack it,” he said.
Suddenly, I didn’t know what else to do, and I followed him out the front door.
After I carried in one box and a bag full of sage I’d picked on the mesa, I turned on Gauguin, who was walking in the front door with my backpack, and began to scream, “I hate you, you fucking bastard! I’m going to fuck the first person I see on the streets. I’m just going to grab him and fuck him!”
“Nell! Shhh, the whole neighborhood will hear you.” He slammed the door behind him. “Please—”
“That’s all you have to say?” My eyes were popping out of my head. This was the man I married? The more controlled he got, the wilder I felt.
He laid the pack down on the sofa, turned to me to say something, and then melted. “Nell, I didn’t know,” he sobbed. “I thought it would be okay.”
“You’re an idiot!” I screeched. “You’re just like your dad.”
“Don’t you ever say that!” He surged forward.
“Why not? It’s true.”
Gauguin narrowed his eyes and gritted his teeth. His right hand was clenched in a fist and he came up real close to me. I wanted to say how Rip two-timed his mother, just as he’d done to me, but I got scared. I’d never seen Gauguin look like that before.
But as I stepped back, rage overtook fear. I screamed, “I hate you!” turned on my heel, and headed for the bedroom.
I flopped on the mattress and burrowed my face in the quilt. A crystal hung from the window and I could feel the sun’s reflection on my bare legs.
I heard Gauguin’s voice behind me in the room. “Nell, please, let’s talk.” I suddenly realized that he was frightened.
I sat up. I felt like I had crossed over the River Jordan into a realm of Hell. I looked at him. Yes, he’d lost all his freckles.
“Can we talk?” he asked again.
“Yes.” I sighed. “You might as well tell me the whole thing.”
“Sure you want to hear it?” He sat down on the bed.
“Might as well.” I looked straight ahead at a poster of a rose on the wall and traced the flower with my eyes.
He spoke quickly and nervously. He’d gone out with her four times and slept with her three. I felt like a priest at confession. I didn’t look at him once while he spoke.
He told me how they had talked about not wanting to hurt me; Gauguin assured Sherry that he was in love with me and nothing could come of it. He said Rip knew nothing about it.
I kept staring straight ahead.
He had finished. “Nell?” He didn’t dare reach out and touch me. “Nell.”
I thought maybe I would kill myself. At least my mother would miss me. I’d have my ashes thrown off Taos Mountain.
“Nell,” he said my name again.
Maybe I should kill him. Maybe Sherry.
He stood up. “If you’re not going to talk”—he hesitated—“I’m going in the back room.”
I turned to him with cold eyes. “I hate you.”
His lips twit
ched. He started to say something else and then stopped himself. He got up and left.
I felt frozen. I cried for a while, then couldn’t anymore. I stood up and went back to where Gauguin was.
He was pounding out boogie-woogie on the piano.
“Gauguin?” I opened the door. “Do you still love me?”
He stopped playing. “Of course I do. You’re talking to me again?” He turned on the piano bench and opened his arms. I entered them.
“Do you promise you do?” I softened.
“Yes, Nell. I had no idea it would hurt you so much.” He kissed my neck. We hadn’t seen each other in fourteen days.
Suddenly I snapped shut again. I couldn’t help it. I pushed him arm’s length away. “I can’t believe you did it. How could you do that to me? We’re married!” I got up, went out of the room, and slammed the door behind me. Gauguin pounded on his piano again, screaming something about the pines where the sun never shines as I ran out the front door.
The afternoon light shocked my eyes and I was momentarily stunned. There were Mr. Steak and the Mobil gas station, but they were different now. Everything was. This street we lived on, that tree on the curb—they were all unfamiliar. I ran into the back alley. As I passed the side of the house, I could hear Gauguin still banging on the piano.
I threw up the garage door and grabbed my bike from against the wall. I pedaled hard, streaming down Riverside Avenue on the wrong side of the street. I looked at my wrists. They were tanned from the New Mexico sun. I pedaled harder and harder, shifting the bike into tenth speed. I turned onto Cedar. I pedaled all the way to Thirty-sixth and made a right. I wanted to get on Highway 35 and pedal back to New Mexico. Instead, I rode over to Thirty-fifth near Hennepin and stopped in front of Polson’s Poultry Supplies. A big orange sign hung outside. In bold black letters it read, “Sale Today on Capons. Two for the Price of One.” I took out the five-dollar bill I always kept rolled in my shorts’ pocket and entered Polson’s.
The black-and-white-checkered linoleum floor was covered with sawdust. The man behind the counter must have had cancer of the nose. It was big and red, and you could see all his pores as if it had been blown up.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
“Yes, I’d like a chicken. Cut in eighths, please.” I sounded like a normal person.
He weighed my chicken on the scale, then stretched the wing from the pale yellow body so he could cut it off. He wrapped my eight pieces in white paper and wrote $2.98 with a black wax pen on the wrapping. I handed over my five-dollar bill. He gave me my change, which I put in my shorts’ pocket, and I picked up the package. I walked through the sawdust to the front door, opened it, and walked outside. There was a garbage pail on the corner two stores away. I walked over to the corner, flung the chicken in the garbage, got back on my bike, and rode madly down Thirty-sixth toward home.
In the kitchen, Gauguin was making a tuna sandwich. “Do you want one?” he asked. I could see his eyes were swollen. He’d been crying. “Where’d you go so long? I was worried about you.”
“No.” I stood by the stove. I was a mad dog. “I don’t want tuna. I want chicken.”
“We don’t have any,” he said logically.
“Well, get me some.” I wanted him to prove he cared.
“No!” He was indignant.
“Fuck you!” I yelled, “I bought some chicken and threw it out!”
Gauguin seemed exhausted. He sighed deeply. He didn’t ask why I threw the chicken out. If he had, I wouldn’t have known why either. I bought a chicken and threw it out? I felt crazier in that moment about the chicken than the fact that Gauguin had slept with Sherry. He’d slept with Sherry! I looked over at him. He had the second half of his tuna sandwich left to eat. I wanted to sit at the table and say, “Help me,” but I couldn’t. I grabbed the half of the tuna sandwich off Gauguin’s plate and threw it against the wall.
That night, Gauguin and I lay on our backs in bed next to each other like two cadavers. Gauguin addressed the ceiling.
“Nell, I promise never to sleep with anyone again. Sherry doesn’t come close to how I feel about you.” Then he began to turn toward me.
“Don’t you dare touch me,” I commanded.
He settled back on his back. “Nell, we can work this out. Didn’t we work out moving from Taos?”
“No,” I said sharply. “We didn’t work out anything.” I was debating whether I should tell him I had slept with Tiny. It wasn’t the same thing, but Gauguin probably wouldn’t understand. I didn’t enjoy it with Tiny. “It doesn’t matter anymore. Nothing does. I’ll never be able to open to you again. And don’t tell me Rip doesn’t know. That man could find sex in a paper bag. I feel humiliated.” I turned toward him, not out of affection but for emphasis. “How could you do this? You’ve ruined everything.”
I decided not to tell him about Tiny. He could just use it to justify himself. Tiny was a thousand miles away. Sherry was in my face.
Neither of us could sleep. It felt as though we were lying on an iceberg in the Arctic Ocean. We both tossed and turned but were careful not to touch each other.
Finally, Gauguin bolted up. “I’m sleeping on the couch.”
“Good riddance,” I said.
He got a sleeping bag out of the closet and grabbed a pillow off the bed.
The next morning, Gauguin left for work. I heard the front door shut and I turned over. I had all day alone. I was sure his father knew. Everyone knew. My heart physically hurt. All those years before with other men, I didn’t care if any of them had slept with other women. But I cared about Gauguin. We had said we could sleep around, but I had no idea how much it would hurt. I wanted to get back at him for all this pain.
I looked out the window. Just then, in my mind’s eye I saw the cottonwood leaves next to the bare rock of the Rio Grande gorge. I put my head in the pillow and started to sob.
For four days, Gauguin and I hardly spoke to each other. He left for work; he came home; he slept on the couch at night. I walked around the house in a daze. I took things out of my suitcases as I needed them—a toothbrush, underpants, a pair of shorts—but I couldn’t unpack. I left the bags exactly where they were on the first day. Sometimes I felt like a wound slashed open with a butcher knife; at others, like a razor blade ready to cut at Gauguin’s heart.
On the second day I thought of ringing up Marian. The phone rang twice and then I hung up. I didn’t want to talk to her. Besides, she’d probably heard us arguing through the floor. I wanted to talk to Anna or Blue. But I didn’t call them; I was too ashamed to tell anyone what Gauguin had done. I tried painting, but my arm felt listless and all the colors looked the same.
On the third morning my mother phoned. “Nell, how are you?
Why haven’t you called? You know you should after a trip—what if you got in an accident?”
“Fine,” I said.
“Well, it’s not fine. Tell me, how was it?”
“Fine,” I said.
“Was Gauguin okay while you were gone? Personally, I wouldn’t have left. How could he possibly manage without you?”
“Fine,” I said again. I knew no other word.
She went on to tell me about the new way she’d read to make pot roast. “You add onions, not at the beginning, but in the middle of the cooking. Isn’t that clever? It saves the flavor.”
“Fine,” I said for the fourth time.
I stared across the living room out the window at the green siding of the duplex next door. I just wanted to get off the phone.
“Nell, is something wrong? Don’t tell me you and Gauguin had a fight.”
“Fine.”
“For heaven’s sake, what’s fine?” she shrieked.
“Everything, Mom. I have to go. The water’s boiling.” I hung up the phone.
I certainly didn’t want her to know what happened. She would die.
On the fourth night, when Gauguin came home from work he left a note on the kitchen table and then went in
to the bathroom.
I stepped up to the table and read it: “Nell, can I take you out for dinner tonight? How about that Italian place on Riverside? We could try it.”
He stepped out of the bathroom.
“Okay,” I said.
“Great. Let’s go in ten minutes. I’m starving.”
Caruso’s had wrought-iron chairs and tables with glass tops. It was still early and only three other tables were filled.
“You want wine?” Gauguin asked.
Yes, I nodded.
“Red or white?”
“I’m not sure.” I looked at the menu. “Red. I’ll have eggplant parmigiana.”
“Good choice. I’ll have that, too,” Gauguin said.
It felt like I was on a blind date with someone I hated. Neither of us could think of anything real to say.
“This seems like a nice place,” Gauguin offered, looking around.
I nodded. “Yeah.”
They served us our salads. There was too much dressing. My lettuce sat in a pool of vinaigrette. I speared a tomato with my fork and held it over the plate. The oil dripped off. “Umm,” I said, and put it in my mouth.
The whole meal was like that. The eggplant was lost in the dish of tomato sauce. The garlic bread left my hands greasy.
Gauguin and I hardly said a word to each other, but we kept drinking wine.
By the time the dessert menu came, I was tipsy. “I bet they fry the ice cream in Mazola.”
We both began to laugh. “This is awful, isn’t it?” Gauguin said.
Finally we had something to talk about. “Yeah, they mistook a rock for eggplant and then drowned it in sauce,” I said.
I downed the wine in my glass and poured some more. I leaned forward, putting my elbows on the table.
“You’re cute,” I said as though I had just met him.
“So are you.” Gauguin reached out his hand and stroked my arm.
I flinched for a moment and then settled into letting it feel good.
“Wanna go back to my place?” he joked.
“Maybe, but first I want to try some chocolate ice cream.”