C O M E   T O   S A N T A   F E

By Jean Nicolazzo

he view from my front window never changes much. The sun makes its daily arc from east to west, and the gables on the house across the street glow coppery for an instant in the late afternoon, then retreat into shadow again. That's just about all the drama I can take now.

There is enough drama inside my quiet house, with Mason slinking around making cups of tea and sliding them toward me without a word. I wonder what it costs him to look at me, still swollen, bruised and bandaged after a month, still silent about what happened out there in the high desert. I never asked him what he'd felt when I opened my eyes at St. Vincent Hospital and cried out in anguish to see him at my bedside, and not Paul. In the quiet house, the silence between us falls like a crystalline curtain. I know I could shatter it in an instant if I begin to speak about Santa Fe.

I spend my days in the front room watching the sun move, tracing the river of pain as it flows through my body. It starts at my head, in a dull throb behind the eyes that radiates outward along the cheekbones and down to the jaw. My face feels as if it is knitting itself back together, cell by cell. Four broken ribs make crying an excruciating luxury, so I've learned to suppress the sobs before they break. My left arm, which they told me had somehow been wedged under and then through the twisted steering wheel, suffered several breaks. The right arm is intact, although as luridly bruised as the rest of my body. I look like I've been tie-dyed, dipped in deep blues, purples and garish yellows. I'd spent hours in front of a mirror when I first got home, exploring every inch of my traumatized surface. Now I feel a nostalgic sadness for the bruises as they begin to fade. I'm glad to still have the pain, and throw away the Percodan Mason carefully sets down before me. As long as my pain continues, so does Paul.

I met Paul when we both worked for the newspaper. He'd arrived with a reputation as a prima donna, a fallen star who was humbled to leave New York and work with the bumpkins in the hinterlands; that's how the legend went, anyway. I hadn't had much occasion to talk with him, but I had taken note of him, as everyone had. He was impossible to ignore. He looked to me like someone who didn't fit into the space he'd been given in the world, that if he raised his voice or flung out his arms, walls would tumble. He told me later, in what was meant as a self-deprecating remark, that he was always too big for the room. When I look back on it now, I see that it was the air of imminent tragedy that drew me to him, the sense that his was a high, hot flame that could burn out quickly if it wasn't fed continuously. It was clear that our provincial newspaper just wouldn't supply enough fuel.

I finally spoke with him at a dinner party given by the publisher. Our hostess thought we'd satisfy some mutual social need - he was garrulous, I was curious - so we'd been seated next to each other. I do remember being anxious about this, but not understanding why I might be.

"I was huge," he said to me more than once that night, resting his head heavily in the cradle of his hands. He said that with a rueful smile, and I wasn't sure how to respond each time he repeated it. He poured wine in my glass and his, a continuous stream of chardonnay that bolstered his charm and my receptiveness as the night went on. He'd been talking about his days before coming to the newspaper, the days when he was a star in New York.

"Well, I was always small," I finally said in reply. "How does it feel to be among the Lilliputians now?"

"I don't think there's anything small about you, Anna. " He made a dismissive gesture around the room. "You're much bigger than this place. You're receiving signals on lots of frequencies. Most people only have one channel open, and the infinite noise of the universe just passes them by. But not you." I opened my mouth to answer and caught a glimpse of his wife, watching us tight-lipped from another table. I quickly looked away and back to Paul.

"You think no one notices you, burning like a candle in your little office, but I do," he said again, dropping his voice low so I had to lean in to hear. His eyes locked with mine. "I do notice, you know. And what I already know about you, Anna, is this: you're someone who needs a larger life. I know this about you as well as I know it about myself."

I moved back in the chair and glanced around the room, looking for a lifeboat. I felt I might be in danger of drowning.

"Paul, I think you're drunk."

He nodded, pushing out his lower lip. "Yes, I am. But you'll learn that I'm brilliant when I'm drunk. I see things ordinary people don't see. And I see that you need more in your life than this job and...," he paused and craned his neck, "...Mr. Anna. Which one is he, anyway?"

I pointed out Mason, who was absorbed in conversation with my boss. Paul squinted at him for a long time. "So that's him. What's he do?"

" He's a lawyer."

"I thought he might be a lawyer. Before you showed me who he was, I thought he might be a lawyer. Believe it or not, I've given a lot of thought to the kind of man you might be married to." He raised his glass to his lips and lifted his eyes to see my reaction.

Paul took a long time to sip his wine. In the interval between his lifting his glass and setting it down again, the whole treacherous path unrolled before me, and I saw myself rushing headlong toward the vanishing point. Across the room Mason looked so earnest, so self-contained and innocent. Paul's eyes, when I looked back again, were two open windows, and without hesitation I climbed inside.

If a single act can be weighted with both faith and perfidy, unbounded optimism and dour cynicism, belief and unbelief, goodness and evil all at once, then it was that act. I looked back at Paul, and made a new covenant. I consider that moment often, the moment that marked a clear distinction between before and after. Before I looked back at Paul, my boundaries were impenetrable. I moved in my own private space, alone in my marriage to Mason, a marriage of two separate people. I believed it suited me, this aloneness. But by looking back at Paul, I abandoned my vigil at the border, and waved him in.

In the car on the way home, Mason asked, "Who was that man leaning on you all night?

I shrugged and stared out the window. "Paul Greer. The new columnist."

"He really seemed to like you."

"Oh, he was really drunk," I said, " And I think he likes all women."

"Especially you, I'd say." Mason continued looking straight ahead, and I was grateful for that.

"Well, to a drunk man, I can be quite fetching, I guess." I laughed then, a thin twitter of a laugh laced with nervousness. It would have fooled no one who was paying attention.

The rumors about us started not long after that night. Paul resigned abruptly, partly out of boredom with the job, but partly because of the rumors.

"I refuse to be entertainment for them," he told me. "I don't want to be a spectacle, and I won't make you one, either."

"Don't worry about me," I said. "I don't care what they're saying. It means nothing to me."

In fact, that was not true. I cared a great deal about what they were saying. I savored every word. Through the rumors I lived it twice, first in the hazy afternoons with Paul, then through my coworkers' cautious questions. I always laughed them off, and returned to my computer screen.

" People must be really bored to be looking for intrigue in my life. Look at me. I do spreadsheets!" I'd point at the printouts as irrefutable evidence of my steadfastness, a true indicator of my failure of imagination.

Paul drifted dangerously without a job, another fugitive satellite wandering through space, its mission abandoned, unable to land. He didn't need a job for the money; the connection between his income and his productivity had long ago been severed, through some charmed arrangement he'd made when he was "huge". Without employment, he developed a new routine. He'd arrive alone just before noon at a tavern several blocks from the newspaper offices, with his New York Times and his cell-phone. He'd order a glass of wine, read the paper and begin his series of telephone calls to me. I'd hold the phone in the crook of my neck and try to work while he read to me from the Times, odd snippets from the Science pages about dolphin behavior, or a review about some book that we'd both read and hated. I pictured him perched at the bar, his reading glasses slipping down his nose, his wine glass emptying and magically refilling. The second call was more somber.

"What are we going to do about this?" he'd ask, after long silences. "This", of course, was us. I never had an answer to that. I knew at that point that it was beyond answers, that there was no course of action we could decide on and follow without leaving bodies in our wake.

After the third call I was compelled to join him, slipping out the back door, hoping that no one would notice what time I'd left my desk. I'd take my place at the bar next to him, pulling the barstool up close, inching into the space between his parted knees. We would reach for each other and hold tight, as though we'd both fly into pieces if we weren't holding on. Some days I didn't go back to work. We'd stay there all afternoon, ordering food but not eating, and I'd watch the small windows along the bar change from pale blue to lavender to black. Our conversation, desultory but intensely focused at once, wandered through the entire catalogue of our consciousness, and we marveled at the many points of intersection. Paul became more lugubrious with each passing hour. His glasses of wine gave way to small tumblers of ice and vodka by the time the room lights came on, and when we finally left he'd be staggering. Sometimes I'd follow him home so I could will him to steer clear of bridge abutments. Then I'd watch him stumble into his house, where all the lights were on but no one ever met him at the door.

This was our routine, for the most part, for several months. The incandescent spark between us had quickly taken on some darker, smoldering undertone that threatened to burn us up, turn us to ashes. I watched Paul walk toward his car, worshipping the shape of his head, the slope of his shoulders. I had split in two. There was still one version of me that went to work, ran the numbers on the costs of paper and distribution, went home to Mason in the evening and watched the news, sitting on the sofa we'd bought together. The other version of me was the one that had been poured into Paul, pumped through his veins, breathed through his lungs. In the same way, he inhabited me. I thought sometimes that when people looked at me, they'd see his face shining through mine.

We decided then to start leaving the city to meet somewhere else. It was his idea to take separate flights out of town and meet at a hotel, where we could luxuriate in large soft beds. Paul needed the best hotels; the king-size beds with duvets, deep armchairs, room service around the clock, marble baths, and mini-bars. He especially needed the mini-bars. His morning routine in the hotel never varied. He'd start with a thin clear stream from a tiny bottle of Absolut into his coffee cup. He'd top that off with the darkest French Roast, delivered in gleaming silver pots to our door. No cream, no sugar. Until he'd finished the first cup, he wouldn't say a word. I don't know what he did at home. His life at home was a dark terrain where I never ventured. He rarely spoke of it, and I never asked.

Paul seemed to be approaching an abyss. He stood at a place where he could peer down at the river snaking below. I was willing to match him step for step, to inch toward oblivion with him in a somnolent shuffle. He urged me along; he tested my vertigo at every turn.

"Let's see if we can spend twenty-four hours completely naked," he suggested once in San Francisco, spurred on by a dose of Absolut bravado. We lounged nude on damask-covered sofas while room service waiters opened our chilled wine and pretended not to see. But that wasn't enough. He needed to walk through the halls naked, stand at the elevator holding hands to confront the other guests when the doors slid open. I burned with embarrassment, but didn't let on. He seemed unaware, like Adam before the fall.

Another time, in New Orleans, he said, "Wear nothing but my jacket when we go out to dinner." In the dark corner of the banquette in a restaurant I let the jacket fall open while we ate our etouffe. In the hotel elevator we fell upon each other, and he carried me to our room. Let loose from the modulating influences of home, we were free to fall from whatever dizzying heights we could construct together. I knew even then it was a form of insanity, but it was like oxygen to me.

When we returned home after these trips, we were forced to face the loose ends unraveling in our absence. Then the despair would settle on us again like a familiar blanket, and we'd pull it close around us. His wife was asking questions. He'd never tell me how he deflected them, only that she was asking and it wasn't good.

"I can't get thrown out of the house now," he said, and my unspoken reply was, Why not? Come to me. But I didn't say that; it would have been an empty suggestion anyway, as he would have pointed out. I still had a husband, although Mason never asked questions, never asked why my business trips were suddenly so frequent.

I wondered sometimes what it would take for Mason to notice that I wasn't really there anymore. Our lives had run a parallel course over the fourteen years we'd been together, but they had been, I believed, quiet and harmonious. We'd had a rift a few years ago; I'd wanted children and Mason had insisted on an abortion after an unexpected pregnancy, but the wound had closed, quietly and surely, and I never thought about it after that.

Then Paul asked why I had no children.

"Mason had been very clear about that from the beginning. He didn't want them, and I thought I didn't care. Until I got pregnant, then I seemed to care very much. It really wasn't fair to him."

"To you," Paul said. "It wasn't fair to you."

I told him about the abortion, and for the first time since it happened, I cried. It was as though Paul knew me better than I knew myself; he knew where the scar tissue was hidden and he held my hand as we traced the bumps together. After I told Paul the story of the interrupted pregnancy, I went home and peered at Mason over the dinner table, wondering if he ever thought about it. Mason had always impressed me with his ability to close out the ledger on each day and move on to the next. He held no grudges, sheltered no underground streams of resentment. His conscience was not troubled by things left undone or unsaid. I had always admired that. Now I heard Paul's words: How can he look at you after that? I had never considered that before, but now it seemed so reasonable. Where was Mason's remorse? Where was his conscience?

That night, in a fitful state of agitation, I asked him. We'd eaten dinner in a thick silence; at least to me it had a viscous quality, a stickiness that trapped every thought. Mason seemed oblivious, eating and thumbing through Lawyer's Weekly, so I'm sure I startled him when I cleared my throat and asked, "Do you ever think about the abortion?"

He took a moment to look up from his paper, then regarded me with his mouth open. I thought for a second he was going to say, "What abortion?" But finally he said, "No, I don't. Why? Do you?"

I nodded slowly and he watched me, looking for cues.

"Even now, Anna? You still think about it?"

"I've never stopped thinking about it." I realized only after I said it that I wasn't lying.

Mason raked his fingers through his hair. "Well, you've never said anything to me before. At least not since we resolved it."

"We never resolved it. I got an abortion because I didn't want to be a single mother, which I knew I would be if I'd had the baby. That was the only resolution. Then it was over, as far as you were concerned. But not for me. I've lived with it for six years, and I still live with it."

"Live with what, though? I don't know what you're talking about, honestly I don't."

"Every time I see a child of the right age, I think, he'd be five now. He'd be in kindergarten now. It never stops." My eyes brimmed with tears. All of this was bubbling up without my consent, surprising me almost as much as it was surprising Mason. He continued to stare at me, confounded.

"What do you want me to do, Anna?" He said this not unkindly, not harshly, but it stung me like a slap.

"It's too late," I said, standing up. "You can't do anything now. It's done, isn't it?"

I turned and left the room, trembling and sick. Mason stayed at the table; I don't know whether he finished his dinner, but it wasn't until an hour later that he came after me. I was lying on the bed, still and mute, when he came into the bedroom. I didn't know why I was stirring things up between Mason and me; didn't we both value the unruffled surface of our marriage beyond any other quality? We had commented on it many times, how effortless our life together seemed. But it was exactly that smoothness that I found so infuriating now. There were few complicating bumps and fissures to engage us, and when we did encounter one, we skated elegantly around it as though it wasn't there.

Mason came into the room and avoided this bump by stretching himself out on the bed next to me, propping his head up on several pillows, and opening his book. I knew it was a signal to me that he was there if I wanted to say more. He read his book, apparently untroubled, probably well beyond the time I rolled off the bed and crept into the guest room, where I spent the night.

A deeper chill seemed to settle over Mason and me after that, which neither of us mentioned to the other. I did tell Paul, who reacted with alarm.

"Don't do that, Anna," he said to me, shaking his head. "Don't destroy your marriage. Why would you want to do that?"

"Don't you think I've all ready done that?" We were sitting in the tavern, leaning on the bar. Paul swirled the ice in his glass and took a long drink. He looked away.

"No, I don't think you have, yet. I've destroyed mine. But I did that long before I met you." He turned and flashed a quick, bitter smile, and looked away again.

"So why are you still married?"

He smiled again. "You'll have to ask my wife."

"Come on, Paul. Don't joke. Why are you still married?"

"It's complicated. Three kids, twenty years. I don't know."

I felt a shiver ripple through my body. "Have you done this before?" I asked him suddenly.

"Not this, exactly," he said, smiling still.

"What, then? Something like this?"

He lowered his head and looked up at me, his eyes moist.

I pushed on. "You have, haven't you?"

He still didn't answer. He drained his glass and signaled for another drink, then turned back to me.

"Anna, I never claimed to be a good person. I'm not like you. That's what I liked about you from the beginning -- you seemed so serene, at peace with yourself and the world. So good. Everything I wasn't."

"Fuck you." I was trembling. I hated that inarticulate, guttural curse, but it's all that would come out. "Fuck you, Paul. My whole life is upside-down, and to you this is just sport."

I stood up to go and he reached out and pinched the edge of my sleeve.

"No, Anna. Don't go."

He pulled me into the circle of his arms and legs and held tight. "I've never done anything like this. Not like this." He buried his face in my hair. "I don't think I've ever been this lost. I'm such a mess, Anna, and I'm making a mess of your life, too. I ruin everything I get near."

"Not true, Paul." I pulled back to look at him. " I'm ruining my own life, if you don't mind. You can't take all the credit for that."

He didn't react. He held on tightly while we waited for the intensity to fade. It seemed to me like just another afternoon disintegrating, as so many of them seemed to now, into drunken self-flagellation. Although I sometimes drank with Paul, I usually stopped after one glass of wine. My mind was clear on this day.

"You can fix things, too, Paul."

He looked up at me, still clutching the sleeve of my sweater.

"I don't know what you've made a mess of, really, but I believe in forgiveness and redemption. Don't you?"

He turned his palms up, and stared down at the floor.

"Even for the worst kind of criminals, there's forgiveness. Redemption follows. You only have to ask."

"Anna, you don't know what I've done in my life, the people I've hurt."

"I don't have to know the details. I know that even for you, there's another chance."

He stared at me mutely, then shrugged on his jacket. Suddenly exhausted and numb, I watched him as he moved toward the door. I moved to follow and he put up his hand.

"Don't. Stay here. I need to be alone for a little while."

I watched him walk out the door of the tavern into the waning light of the late afternoon, and had the first shiver of awareness then that he might not be coming back.

For six weeks, I heard nothing. Desperate, I called his cell phone and left messages. I sent emails into the void. Some nights I'd drive by his house, peering into the brightly lit windows looking for clues. Once I saw his teen-aged son, tall and loose-limbed like his father, ambling down the long driveway, and I stopped breathing until I realized who it was. I moved through my life as though I'd been drugged. Mason and I avoided each other. If he noticed how stunned I appeared, he never mentioned it. At work, my boss confided that it was a good thing I wasn't taking those long lunches anymore.

"I didn't want to lose you, Anna," he said. "But I was starting to get pressure. People were asking questions."

I offered him no explanation for my renewed commitment to work. I came in early, left late, ate a sandwich at my desk in the middle of the day, and waited desperately for a word.

It came, finally, in an email. It was a Friday morning. I'd arrived early, before eight a.m. Alone in the office, I booted up my computer and checked for mail. When I saw his screen name my heart stopped; I double clicked.

"come to santa fe"

Santa Fe? I checked my voicemail. There was a message from Paul.

"Well, hello there. I've come to the desert to straighten out my life. I'm watching the sunrise over Santa Fe. It's amazing. I miss you. Give me a call." He sounded strangely calm and whole. With my heart thumping, I dialed the number he left for me. When he answered, I could barely speak.

"Oh my God," I said, again and again, and he laughed.

"Will you come?" he asked, as though no time had passed, no explanations were necessary. I pushed away from my desk and slipped out.

At the airport, I slid my credit card across the counter, my stomach churning. This would mean, I realized, that I would probably have no job when I came back, perhaps no husband. Nothing mattered except getting on the next flight out to Paul.

The flight out to New Mexico was one of those rare, cloudless journeys where the geometry of the countryside was laid bare, the sheltering, gentle bumps of the northeast flattening out to become vast fertile checkerboards of golds and greens and yellows. I followed the rivers as I could identify them, the Connecticut, the Hudson, the Ohio, the Mississippi. A stopover in St. Louis went on for an excruciating hour, and I paced the busy corridors of the airport in a haze of anxiety. At last, on the plane again, we were headed southwest and I felt myself expand with the landscape. I stretched my legs out and waited, and somewhere over Texas I felt the cord that tethered me to my daily life finally reach its breaking point and snap. I was free.

Paul was to meet me at the airport in Albuquerque, a fact that both comforted and terrified me. The slow shuffle through the plane after it landed was torture, and when I finally squirmed past the knot of baggage-burdened couples I rushed through the door, looking for his face.

He wasn't there. One after the other I searched the expectant faces of the crowd gathered around the doorway, and none of them was Paul's. I stood alone in the middle of the corridor while the throngs rushed past me, dragging luggage, carrying children, rushing off into the evening. I had no bags to fiddle with, nothing to distract me, and I was beginning to feel dizzy, when I heard my name.

"Anna!"

I whirled around to see him, sitting in a far corner at the opposite gate. His legs were outstretched, his arms bundled in front of his chest. He was smiling, and his face looked as though he'd been in the sun for a long time. I rushed over and sank down in the seat next to him, and drew my hands up to my face, unable to speak.

"I can't believe you came," he said, and reached out to me. We held each other without speaking while the airport emptied around us, and when he kissed me I noticed right away he tasted like coffee. Only coffee, with no sharp alcoholic tang at the edge. I pulled back finally and pushed his sun-streaked hair off his forehead.

"Where have you been?" I shook my head, and held his face with my hands.

"To hell and back," he laughed. "Especially back."

He led me to his rented car, a shiny red missile with a convertible top, and for the first time since we'd known each other, we rode in a car together. He drove and fiddled with the CD player, glancing at me occasionally and shaking his head in wonder. We spoke little. We were both nervous, and I was tired and exhilarated, overwhelmed with what I'd done.

Paul had called at sunrise, and now an astonishing sunset spread across the twinkling sprawl of Albuquerque. In the short span in between, I'd crossed the country and shed my life. I didn't know if Paul saw it that way, but to me my flight out there was nothing less than a refutation of everything that bound me to the earth. We sped through the landscape, so foreign to me in its immense openness, the sky more vast and clear than any that had ever hung over me before, and I bowed in submission. I felt in some ineffable way that I'd come home.

It was fully dark by the time we reached Santa Fe, and Paul navigated the mysterious, adobe-lined streets like they were his own. The inn where he'd been staying was near the Plaza, a lively, tourist-clogged square of shops and museums. He pointed it out to me, like a tour-guide, and led me inside.

"Do you want a drink?" he asked, walking into the narrow bar adjoining the lobby. I hesitated. I did want a drink, but what about him? I sat down warily at a round table while Paul spoke to the bartender, and he returned with a glass of wine and a bottle of mineral water, which he poured with a flourish into a lemon-bedecked glass. He put the wine in front of me.

"To redemption," he said, lifting the glass of water.

I tentatively lifted the wine to my lips and asked, "Do you mind?"

He laughed. His laugh was sure and strong, without the sharp edge of cynicism it had at home. "I wish I could say that doesn't look good to me. But I can enjoy it vicariously. Drink up."

I took a few sips and felt my limbs loosen, and sank back into the seat to gaze at him. He looked different. His hair had grown shaggy around the ears, and he'd let a shadow of a beard overtake his chin. His eyes were clear and bright, and though still hidden behind the creases of middle age, I felt they were looking right through me now.

"Tell me where you've been, Paul. I want to know everything. I can't believe I'm here with you now."

"Oh God, Anna, how do I tell you where I've been? I feel, in some ways, that I don't have to tell you. It was like you were there with me all along. I kept seeing you walking up the road, and I'd die every time it turned out to be someone else."

"Why didn't you call me?"

"I had to do this alone. I was very sick, you know. I could have died." He sipped his water, pushing the lemon wedge down into the glass with his finger. "I was drowning."

"But where have you been, Paul? Were you here?"

"No. I was in a hospital. I checked into a hospital and detoxed, and they told later that I was almost dead when I got there. My blood pressure was so high I nearly had a stroke. My systems were ready to shut down from all the poisons running through my veins. I really don't remember the first five days or so, I was so full of drugs." He shook his head. "After that was over, the real fun started." He took my hand and rubbed it absently. " Endless rounds of therapy. Individual therapy. Group Therapy. I told them all about you, how you saved my life."

"How did I save your life?" I wanted him to tell me everything he'd said. I wanted to hear his testimony about who I was to him. But he just smiled and narrowed his eyes at me.

"You had lunch with me."

"That's it?"

"That's it for now." He took another drink from his glass and put it down decisively. "Are you hungry? Do you want some dinner?"

I was not satisfied, but I knew Paul enjoyed the drama of telling the story slowly, parceling out in small bits the parts I'd want to hear. I could wait, but I was not hungry.

"Can we go up to the room? I think I'd like to rest first."

He led me through the lobby, looking over his shoulder at me and grinning as I followed, as though he'd constructed this place himself, just for me. The inn was quiet and intimate. His room had an adobe fireplace, wrought iron sconces holding candles, a balcony overlooking the Palace of the Governors, and an immense four-poster bed that I couldn't reach without the stepstool. He lit the candles while I stretched out on the bed, then he lay down beside me. For the first time, we made love while he was sober. The tension that had been building all day rolled up and over me and I finally burst, crying from the pain and frustration of the past six weeks and the aching joy of being there with him. I drifted off to sleep, under the comforting weight of his arms and legs.

I didn't wake up until sunlight slanted through the curtained window. Paul was sitting in a chair by the balcony, a coffee cup in his hand. He lifted it up in greeting.

"Another perfect day in Santa Fe," he said, taking a sip. Then, as if he knew I what I was thinking, he said, "Coffee. Just coffee. Want some?"

I sat up in bed and watched him while he moved around the room, and he brought me my coffee and sat on the bed.

"You'll need to buy some clothes, I guess," he said, stroking my hair. "We can go shopping after breakfast."

"I'm in no hurry." I looked around the room, at the heavy cottonwood beams along the ceiling, the fleshy curve of the fireplace. "This room is so comfortable."

"My wife didn't think so," he said with a laugh.

I shivered slightly . "Your wife?"

"Sure. Well, she had to come out here. It was part of the therapy. She was here for about a week, but all she did was complain about the hotel. The room was too small. The plaza was too noisy. She acted like it was all a big inconvenience for her."

"But I thought you said you needed to do this alone." I felt the knot tightening in my stomach again. "That's why you didn't call me."

"Anna." He put down his coffee cup and reached out to me. " I'm still married. I had to do this family therapy. My son came out for a couple of days, too."

I stiffened and pulled away from him.

"Anna, please. Isn't it good to be here now? Isn't it good to be together for another perfect Santa Fe day?" He was in bed with me again, and I couldn't resist him, or the logic of his argument.

When I stepped out of the shower later, I heard his voice through the bathroom door. I thought he must be talking to someone at the hotel, but then his tone hardened. "Knock it off!" I heard him say. Then: "Laura, that's enough! I'm not listening to this!" He slammed the phone down, and I dressed quickly and went back into the room. He was pacing and sucking hard on a cigarette.

"What's going on with your wife?" I asked him.

"She thinks I'm with someone." He continued pacing. He wouldn't look at me.

"Well you are," I pointed out. I sat on the bed and watched him pace.

"Well, if she wants war, she can have it. She should know by now who she's dealing with." He reached for the phone again.

"Wait until I'm out of here, please," I said. "I don't want to hear this."

I left the room and rushed down to the lobby, and out into the dizzying sunlight. Stalking blindly past the Indian jewelry vendors on the floor of the Palace of the Governors, past the festival of dancers in the park, past the lineup of costly things in the shops, I could see nothing but Paul, pacing in the hotel room. I passed a fitful hour sitting on a bench in the plaza, then went back to the hotel, expecting to find a silent and empty room. But he was there, still on the phone with his wife. I slipped into the bathroom and shut the door, turning on the faucet to drown out his voice. It didn't help, so I shut off the water and sank to the cold floor. Through the bathroom walls, he didn't sound angry anymore. He seemed to be crying. I crept across the bathroom and, in spite of my strong desire not to, pressed my ear to the door.

"Laura," he sobbed. "I'd be so lonely without you. Please don't leave. Please."

I spread my body out on the cold, hard marble and buried my face in my arms. I stayed that way for a long time, numb, unable to move, long past the time I heard him hang up the phone. Finally I peeled myself up off the floor and opened the bathroom door.

Paul was sitting at the desk, smoking a cigarette. In front of him was a glass with three melting ice cubes, and next to that, two empty shot bottles of Absolut. He seemed surprised to see me.

"Were you in there all that time?" he asked.

I just nodded and climbed up on the bed.

"I guess I was on the phone for a long time. Didn't you take a walk?"

"What's that?" I said, pointing to the bottles.

He glanced over at them and snorted. "Armor. I was talking to Laura."

"I know that. But do you need that to talk to her?"

He bit on his thumb. "I guess I do."

"I'm going back, Paul."

He expression didn't change. "Why? You just got here. Stay with me."

"I don't belong here."

"Anna, don't get melodramatic. Let's take a ride. Let's see New Mexico."

"What about Laura? Didn't you say you'd be lonely without her? What about the vodka?"

"What do you expect me to say to her, Anna? She says she'll take my kids away. She could do that, and I'd have nothing. She knows exactly what buttons to push. I knew she'd do that; that's why I needed a drink. Why do you think I'm still here, spending a fortune on this hotel? I can't go home yet. I can't face her yet. Come on, let's get out of here. Let's take a ride."

I drove the red convertible, because Paul was drunk again. We left Santa Fe and headed north, toward Taos. I didn't know where I was going, or why I was still there, but driving seemed like the best thing for the moment. Paul drifted off right away, twitching and moaning from some dark place in his sleep. With him slouched in the seat next to me, I suddenly felt more alone than I'd ever been.

The landscape outside Santa Fe undulated before me, stark tawny hills dotted with mean brush, miles of stirring emptiness. Outcrops of startling orange rock walls burst through the ground, alive with tiny lizards darting in and out of crevices. I pushed down hard on the gas pedal, exhilarated by speed. That car had been designed for empty highways. The strangeness of the terrain was heightened by the acute blue sky, and I sped past it all, getting far away from the chill that lingered from the cold bathroom floor.

I looked at Paul sleeping, still beholden to his face in a way that defied my understanding. I loved it, every angle and plane, every curve. I loved his mouth, even while it opened to lie to me. There was no going back, not to any of it, not to silent dinners with Mason and the spreadsheets at the newspaper, and certainly not to the eternal afternoons at the tavern with Paul. There was no going back to anything. I could only keep driving forward, faster than I'd ever driven before.

When I close my eyes now, I can still see it, a strange white apparition like a fugitive sail from a deathship, a ghost, a harbinger of annihilation. I saw it then, dancing specter-like in a powerful wind, about a quarter mile in front of us, moving across the highway from the opposite lane. I do remember wondering, without any sense of alarm, what it was. I don't remember much else, though. They tell me now it was a tarpaulin, just a big piece of white plastic that flew off a truck coming the other way. I don't remember, but I like to think that I turned to Paul and took his hand, and he woke up and smiled at me, just before the dancing thing slapped onto our speeding car and wrapped around it like a shroud. The windshield filled with a stark white glare, and I kept driving. I lost control, I guess. That's what they tell me, now.

While I was still in St. Vincent Hospital, Paul was buried in a family plot in Connecticut. Mason had told me only that Paul's wife had come to Santa Fe to claim his body and take him home, and that yes, Mason spoke to her briefly, but no, he didn't think he should tell me what they said to each other. He said that someday the time might be right for that, but not now.

I watch Mason closely these days as he steps gingerly around me, still asking no questions, waiting for me to heal. I thought I knew something about love until those cups of tea started appearing at precisely the moment I wanted them, each a finely wrought offering of forgiveness and redemption. I wonder if he knows that when I close my eyes I see Paul smiling at me, his eyes clear and sober. I wonder if he knows that I smile back at Paul and say, "I forgive you." Maybe someday I can tell him about that. But not now. Now it is enough for Mason and me to occupy the quiet house together, fragile as teacups, convalescing separately, sheltering our two flammable briquettes of grief.

Copyright © 2000 Jean Nicolazzo