I began to cry. Ben touched my throat. Right where that tight sore spot is. He took my arms in his hands. He stirred my hair with his fingers. I could smell the heat and sorrow rise up from me, and the sweet oil he’d rubbed into my skin the night before and the rosemary soap I’d washed my hands with that morning. Tessa raised her wet face and kissed Duane. She tasted him. She licked the salt from his cheeks and told him someday she would be free. He held her tight and promised her olives for their first supper in their own home, olives put up in oil from the first pressing. He asked her to love him for his whole self, not just because he was a little wild, not just because he was forbidden, not just because he was part-time and beautiful and broken.
Ben made the olives and took them to Felice. She was mad for them. Stu finagled Ben a raise and he started to save money. He paid all the rent for us. He bought a new shirt, a brand new shirt from a shop on Fourth Avenue. He started making trips to Nogales and parts south and he brought me presents. There was a peyote cactus in a donkey planter and a clay grandma skeleton in a black dress and shawl. She held a spray of cloth flowers in her arms. When I picked her up, her head bobbed back and forth.
“She’s your duenna,” Ben said. “You know what that means. She keeps you safe. And she keeps you honest.”
I held her gently. She nodded yes. I didn’t bother to think what kept Ben honest. We had gotten so good. We could tell the truth. We could get through what sometimes follows after truth is told. We kept saying how good it was, as though our words were a charm.
“This is so good,” he might say, “sitting here before the day gets hot, just drinking coffee, listening to those doves, just the two of us, quiet like this.”
“It is, Ben,” I’d say. I loved saying his name. “It’s gorgeous.”
There we’d be, just those few words between us, maybe his hand on my wrist, my ankle crossed over his. Tessa and Duane had drifted away as friends do, or maybe as helpers must. Ben and I both knew they were gone and we believed they had given us their blessing.
How it happens with people like Ben and me, how the changes can be almost invisible, how the dream can stop as if you were awakened by an unknown sound—I knew all of that. Still, the end snuck up on me. Ben upped the Nogales trips to once a week. He started to lose weight. I noticed he was leaving the binoculars behind and the presents were becoming more expensive—vanilla beans in good rum packed in a hand-blown glass jar, a dress embroidered shoulders to hem with real silver thread, pre-Columbian statues that scared me. I wasn’t too surprised when he quit Coyote nor when the boss invited us for dinner. I was surprised that we went.
There were Ben and me, Felice and the boss, Stu and Squeeze at a big glass table set up next to the lit-up pool. The boss’ cook had created a feast: barbecued quail, blue corn tamales, pomegranates, their juice glowing on our lips and hands, on the front of my Mexican dress. I remember looking down at the blotch a long time, the stain so dark on the fine pale cotton, on the delicate silver birds. I think Ben leaned over and kissed me there, but I’m not sure. Everything got busy and loud, people going here, going there, Felice swinging her pale legs in the pool, Stu up to his neck in front of her, Squeeze rubbing my shoulders. Ben went off somewhere and returned, his face gray, his eyes like mica.
The boss play a tape of Navajo flute music over and over. If you’d looked over the fence at us, over the green leafy posts and red blossoms trembling in the light, you would have seen a magical picture. You would have heard the music trembling too, the way a howl can in the summer air.
When I wanted Tessa with us, when I wanted good old solid Duane watching our backs, I couldn’t find them. I was alone with it: with how Ben’s face began to scare me, skin stretched tight over the bones, the way the green shirt he’d started wearing to bed, cuffs buttoned, hung on him like a robe, how I was seeing so little of him, of my phantom lover, that I was glad to see him at all. I knew what it was. I knew that he was being eaten alive and he had offered himself up for the feast.
I called to Tessa and Duane in the long hours I spent alone in the cool dark of early morning, the duenna nodding at me, a Virgen de Guadalupe candle burning next to her, its warm light flickering on the bone-white face. I hadn’t prayed in years. I wasn’t sure I knew how.
“Mother,” I whispered, “whoever the patron saints of sad lovers are, please let me see Tessa and Duane again. I need their heat, their laughter and the scent of oil on their twined bodies.” I’d try to see their faces in the candle shadows, how their eyes were no less shining and soft than Tessa’s kids’. I’d try to catch what they might be saying—all that hope and reassurance and promises kept. I couldn’t do it.
I couldn’t do anything. People like me and Ben, like Felice and Stu, we don’t even dare dream that you can cure somebody else. We know the truth, maybe because we can smell hopelessness right away or because we can taste surrender and surely because we’ve stewed up messes ourselves. We know. And I knew that Ben was gone—even as he lay next to me, even as he moved in me, first tentative, then frantic, then gone from me into a cold desperation that ground his sharp hip bones against mine and left me dry and aching.
The duenna watched over our last night together. The Virgen candle had burned down to a moon-white puddle. Ben stood in front of me in the blue light of the huge TV, his most recent gift. He was so handsome it cut my heart. He couldn’t look at me.
“Mollie,” he said. “Can you do me a favor? Can I borrow a couple hundred bucks? I ran out, must have miscalculated something. I’ll pay you back in the morning.”
“No more,” I said. “And I want you to leave. Please. Now.”
Ben picked up the duenna. I took it from his shaking hand.
“Honest,” I said. “I want you to go away.”
He began to move toward our bedroom. As he stepped full in the television’s glow, I saw the shining curve of the Great Blues. I saw the stillness, the careful way Ben set his feet. I saw the concentration and in him, it was terrible.
Ben took a half hour to pack his things. I heard him moving in our bedroom, then the kitchen, then his steps fading away on the front walk. I couldn’t move from the couch. I knew if I did, I would go to him, put my arms around him and beg him to stay.
I sat quietly for a few minutes, then went into the bedroom. He’d left almost all his clothes, except for the green shirt and the black bandito shirt. His binoculars were gone from the dresser, his duffle bag from the closet. I walked out and closed the door. The black shirt, clean and ironed, was on the kitchen table along with a jar of olives. I pulled on the shirt and wished he’d left it smelling of him. I opened the jar, took out an olive and bit into it.
It was sweet. I remembered him reading the recipe. I could see his face, the way his lips moved and I remembered how I’d taken in the sight the way you take in a song you think you may never hear again. Then the pepper hit and my throat warmed. There was the taste of garlic and my tears and the spices he’d mixed with his naked hands.
I chewed every bit of fruit off the stone and put it to dry on the window sill between the cactus and the little Nogales duenna. The truck roared to a start. I wrapped my arms around myself and waited till Ben had driven away. Then I took a white candle out of the cupboard and set it in front of the Virgen.
I lit it. The candle flame shimmered on the Virgen’s downcast eyes and on her hands held out for mercy. “If I knew how to pray,” I said, “I would ask you only for a way to make it through what comes next. Only that.”
Even with the divorce and all, even with his kid Jacob living on the other side of town most of the time, even with losing his latest job and not finding the new one for five months, Davy was starting to have a few decent moments. Being a night shift Security Engineer wasn’t all that bad. The building was peaceful, the other engineer quiet and friendly. Sophieann didn’t come on till eight, so for three hours he had the place to himself. All he had to do was cruise