Taos Pueblo, Helmut Naumer, 1935-36 (wikipedia)
Particularly at Taos Pueblo, there’s a grimness in the dancers’ faces that makes even the most assured white person uncomfortable.
I’ve been corrected by an Indian woman who heard me explaining why there are ladders leaning against the pueblo walls; “Is that so?” she asked me, in the most sardonic voice; and I’ve heard their governor, a big man wrapped in a blanket, scold people for getting too close to the kiva, their sacred place.
Writing this makes me uneasy since words like Indian are not used anymore.
Trying to describe my life alone raises the same issue. Solitary or lonely or celibate do not tell what I am, but they are the only words people recognize. Really I feel a kind of suspended ecstasy. Odd, because that’s the word he used—the man who came to Taos Pueblo to sketch.
I noticed him because the governor, the same one who scolded the tourists squinting at the kiva, was speaking to him in the loud voice people generally reserve for children or dogs: “No sketching!”—and he reached out from under his blanket as though he was going to snatch the man’s pad.
He—the sketcher—didn’t flinch; he handed his pad to the governor who took it and then, a little sheepishly, I thought, handed it back.
He wasn’t wearing cowboy boots, this sketcher, or a Stetson or expensive sunglasses; he looked as though he belonged on a street in some city, not in the red mud of the pueblo plaza on the second day of a very cold February.
Later I learned he lived in Albuquerque and taught art at the university, but that didn’t explain him, either, because he had the lithe body I associate with outdoor people and a brightness of expression that didn’t suit a tenured professor in a cow-town college.
I learned his name when I went up to congratulate him on the way he’d handled the governor. I’m not usually so forward, but I’d felt for a minute what he felt—or I thought I had—after the reprimand, when he didn’t know what to do with his pad. It was large and awkward to carry.
Awkwardness, it seems to me, comes from not knowing what to do with something—shoes that don’t match anything in your closet but are too expensive to throw out, or a ring from an early marriage that has sentimental value but can’t be worn for reasons of taste, or a person you’ve held in your arms and can’t bear to let go. I always find myself sympathetic toward awkwardness, my own and other people’s.
The sketcher thanked me and then, quite naturally, asked me to accompany him to his car to put his pad away.
There was a long line parked outside the pueblo gate, most of the cars caked with mud—it had been a hard winter—but what I noticed was not the cars or the mud or slogging through it but the lopsided cross on the ruined church, the one our cannons blew up in the Pueblo Rebellion, and beyond that the bristling markers of the graveyard, decorated with pink plastic flowers. I pointed these out to the sketcher.
“I’m usually so focused on getting through the gate before they close it I don’t see anything else,” he said, and I heard years of smoking in his voice, and noticed his good tweed jacket.
“They don’t want us here but they take our money,” I said, although I wasn’t feeling aggrieved; any sum would have been small to pay for that day.
“They don’t have any reason to want us,” he said, and I thought we both understood the resonance of that verb. I wasn’t wanted by anything except my hungry cat, and I found out later that was true for Tony, as well, except in his case it was his dog.
I didn’t regret the clearing out of my emotional life, which was always roiled by other forces. Once biology has finished its work, true desire, as I call it, makes its appearance.
Tony didn’t regret the place he’d come to, either—we were too old for that—and besides, our lives were full: the New York Times every morning, really good coffee, friends, the desert stars at night—and I even had a hot tub that delivered swirls of water to crucial spots on my body.
I’m getting ahead of myself here but it’s legitimate in a way since we both knew, as we told each other later, that a walk to the car and a few minutes’ chat was all we needed.
Hours and hours of talk during the weeks that followed were delightful, of course, and even instructive, but as soon as I wanted to touch his sleeve and didn’t, I knew all I would ever need to know about Tony Parson.
He had that assurance in bed, too—I’m moving along fast here because the preliminaries are always the same—as though he’d learned his lessons from women’s bodies and was good at putting them into practice. Some men are like maps drawn by all the women they’ve known; this one trained his hands, another taught him how to use his tongue. I’m always grateful for those cartographers.
I’m in good shape for sixty, I work at it, and so I wasn’t ashamed of my body even though the first time we made love it was broad day; we both had a Saturday with nothing particular planned and so we ended up in my bed, books on the night table, reading glasses, journal—all the details that prove I live, finally, for myself.
When he kissed me, I felt that vast unjustifiable admiration for male initiative and daring—are we losing it in this age of equality?—because it feels like courage.
Later we got up and put on robes—I loaned him one of mine, with a lilac pattern—and went in my kitchen and made pasta, and sitting around my table, the two of us were almost a crowd, especially when we began to talk about our children—we have five between us—and our grandchildren, and various jobs and houses and lives we’ve passed through.
Tony is a few years younger than I but our lives have similarities: decades in the East doing what was expected, and then a break for the West that came late but just not too late.
We joked about being pioneers crossing the Continental Divide, but in fact there is something to be admired about middle-aged people cutting lose, although we never quite rid ourselves of our accents or our pasts or the people we love.
For the rest of that winter and the early spring, Tony came over once or twice a week, usually but not always on the weekend, and we talked for hours on the telephone in between. Sometimes we went to a movie or ate out, but usually we spent what precious time we had in bed.
I was busy during the week at the clinic in the mountains I’d come over to supervise, and Tony was teaching and preparing paintings for a spring show, and I think we both knew our time together was limited.
Late in the winter, we drove up to San Ildefonso—another of the Rio Grande pueblos—and watched the sun rise over the horns of their sacred mountain.
When the deer dancers came down from that mountain, people who lived in the pueblo and had the right to do so reached out and touched them; something about passing on luck, or energy.
That morning I forgot all the rules and reached out and touched one of those great shaggy heads.
Then I was terrified, both by the power of what had passed into my hand and because someone might have noticed.
Apparently no one had, and the herd of stamping deer with their stick forelegs passed out of the plaza.
When I looked at Tony, he was frowning. “Why did you touch him?” he asked.
“Because I wanted to—” and I found myself clutching his arm. We’d spent most of the weekend together, and he’d shown me pictures of his grandchildren.
“You’re tempting fate,” he said.
“Isn’t fate on our side?”
“You known your Greeks. Reach for it and it disappears—” and I remembered reaching for his legs the night before and feeling the long thigh bones, the same bones those Greeks used to wrap in fat and sacrifice to their gods.
“I’ll sacrifice to Mars, or maybe Venus, to make it all right,” I said, but I knew what he meant.
As we were leaving the pueblo, an old woman stared at me and I thought, She knows I touched the deer, but maybe what she knew was that one aging white woman had something in common with her, a love of life that didn’t die when the stamping herd passed out of sight; and I remembered the old Sun Dance prayer: “Have mercy on me, Father, I want to live.”
“Don’t snatch at me,” Tony said a few weeks later when he was trying to leave and I reached for his hand.
When his show opened, in March, I went to look at his paintings, and later I took him to visit my clinic. Tony’s paintings are creamy, infused with light, and I didn’t dare to ask him where the darkness was. Of course pink paintings of adobe walls sell better than shadows, which I think would have to be abstract.
He appreciated my clinic about as much as I’d appreciated his paintings, and also hid his reservations. It’s a shabby place where people accept what little we have to offer—inoculations, a word of advice, thank God birth control, and some printed federal health service pamphlets. It doesn’t seem much compared with the problems people are facing.
Tony isn’t a cruel man but as soon as he noticed I expected more—and I did; he called it owning but I called it comfort, sitting around my kitchen in old robes with bowls of pasta—he knew he couldn’t do it, and told me so. Two marriages had broken up on those rocks, and recently his eldest son had made him promise he wouldn’t marry again, not that there was much money but there was an old house crammed with memories in Connecticut.
I didn’t want an old house in Connecticut, I had an old house in Georgia I couldn’t quite bring myself to sell, but I could see why Tony didn’t want to ruffle his children. They’d been ruffled enough over the years.
I told him I wasn’t looking for anything permanent—my daughters would have kicked up a fuss—but I was lying and we both knew it. When you have comfort once or twice a week you want it to go on, or at least I do. The good life I’d constructed for myself paled as soon as Tony came along with his hands and legs, his tweed jacket, his little black shoes, not because of anything he said or did but because I had to remember every time he left me that I’m going to die.
Before he left for the last time, I insisted on talking about our first day at the Indian dances, and I asked him why our love and our work weren’t equal to what we’d seen there: the sternness, the rigor, the light.
He didn’t know the answer or find the question interesting; he was intent on getting out the door. But I remembered the creamy light in his paintings, and my soothing advice to a mother who’d come into the clinic that day with a brain-damaged child.
I’m not trying to discount what we’ve been able to do, leaving our pasts and getting on with it, but to me our failure as lovers is the same failure that limits his vision as a painter and mine as a doctor. He can’t see the steely edge of southwestern light, and I can’t bear the iron despair of my patients. We both lack rigor.
Perhaps we will both learn to endure—which boils down to a lot of time spent alone when Tony putters with his paints and looks at old sketches, and I read by the last light on in the house and write another page in my journal.
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