“Hear it?” She pointed above the water stain that darkened the wall between her poems. In the brown wool socks she slept in, she bounded from the bed and stood beside the night table, where her book of Sanskrit meditations lay.
“Seems the beast can’t decide which poem to settle down over.”
She mussed her blonde hair, laughing.
What a doll—why her patent-lawyer husband left her for a legal aide with two sons he couldn’t imagine. Except that Joyce couldn’t get pregnant by him. “If Stu decides not to march Sunday, maybe he’ll come help find where the beast’s wriggling through the tarpaper. I wonder what eye patch he’ll wear this time?”
“Who knows—how can we sleep with that noise?”
“We can’t. I want to show you something.” He moved to the bookcase near the stairs, reached below her volumes on nutrition to where he kept his jazz CDs, and yanked out a three-ring binder. He padded to the tattered armchair that had been her father’s near the sliding glass door that led to the lower roof, and flicked on the floor lamp.
“Come here.” He patted the red wool plaid covering his thigh.
“I don’t like this alpha-male habit you’ve developed since leaving the Valley.”
“What habit?”
“Giving me orders.”
“Sorry; you’re right.”
Her buttocks warmed his lap. “What happened to your cheek?” she asked, touching the rawness with two fingers.
“Hey, don’t! I scraped it trying to scramble out of Maxine’s high beams. Forget that. See this?” He flattened his hand against the binder’s cover. “Chuck downloaded it: Rebuilding America’s Defenses. Published in two thousand by a think tank called The Project for the New American Century. Paul Wolfowitz is a member.
“Seventy-six pages laying out why nothing is going to stop us from manhandling the Middle East. Does Bush believe Saddam has weapons of mass destruction? He knows Scott Ritter’s UN team got rid of them in the mid-nineties. Rebuilding America’s Defenses says we’re going to force peace through economic globalization, backed by expanding military beachheads in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Use designer weapons like nuclear bunker busters and mini bombs.”
“Christ, Manny!”
“The Bush bunch wants to pummel the Axis of Evil, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan into cobbling up American-style democracies. All it takes is persuading two billion followers of Islam to change their faith. Is that crazy? You and I have to do something.”
“Like letting air from Ron’s tire?”
“We ought to let air from the tires of all the American-flag gas-guzzlers in Santa Fe, cop us a slot on TV.”
She jumped off his lap, clamping the light-blue flannel to her chest. “Who’s crazy here? We left your stomach cramps from too much cranial mania back in Palo Alto. Didn’t we? Count me out of your activist dreams, Manny.”
He stiffened and shifted his eyes toward the glass door.
“What in the world?” Joyce whispered.
They listened to a loud snap, followed by a rattling and banging—rocks careening down the hill?
Throwing the binder to the carpet and tightening his sash, Manny heaved open the sliding glass door and closed it behind him. The din had stopped. Cold bit his cheeks and neck. Baca Field’s floodlights had darkened. He stared at the moon, at Santa Fe’s lights aproned below, and the glow rising over the Sandias from Albuquerque. Few SUVs or workers’ trucks raced this late along Bishop’s Lodge Road.
Manny rubbed his belly to quell its gurgling. Oh God, he begged, give me something meaningful to do. That little silver ring high up in Alexis’s ear; me hoping she’s bi. Why am I flirting again? Didn’t losing my savings to three abortions cure me before I met Joyce? I have my life partner, don’t I? “Praying to a God I don’t believe cares—I must feel desperate,” he muttered.
Shivering, he pulled open the slider. “Nothing to see except lights.”
“It sounded worse than the racket the hot tub makes.” She clicked off the floor lamp, then moved toward the bed and twisted the knob of her table lamp.
“That hot tub’s a pain,” Manny said in the moonlit dark. “Maintenance and chemicals run five hundred bucks a year and it leaks. Stu thinks the grinding means a blockage. Let’s dump the whole system, Boodie—it’s a capitalistic frill. No more stains, no more rats.”
Kicking off his moccasins, he tossed his robe on the seat of the ladderback chair in the corner. He peeled off his sweats and Jockey shorts, stretched under the blanket, and threw a forearm over his eyes. “Everything’s going to be fine,” he murmured, worrying that tomorrow, after picking up a peace placard from Alexis at Chuck’s office, he and Joyce must grind out April’s CEO Briefing.
Joyce brought her knees up and faced him. “Hey, bud?”
“What?”
“I love our hot tub. I love to sit on the bench and soak when the plum branches above it wave. I like us to touch; I like you to touch me between my legs.”
Her palm slid across his pelvis and settled on his testicles. Her thumb pressed his penis.
“I like it when we wrap each other in towels and come dripping up here to make love, Manny. Don’t you? But we can’t do it when you’re overwrought and can’t get hard.”
“Tomorrow, Boodie. It’s ten o’clock, I’m tired.”
She retrieved her hand and flipped to her other side. He snuggled in close, genitals and belly pressing her buttocks. He hooked his arm around her waist to cup a breast, but her hair tickled his nose and he pulled away. He winced at the cramp of intestinal gas building—what a joke that he could leave stomach problems in California.
DRESS UP
“DEAR SANTA FE CLOUDSCAPE THAT KNOWS NOTHING OF war,” Chuck Ridley whispered to no one.
Lying in bed in a violet silk pajama top, he shifted his eyes from the sky to the lawn glittering with frost. Ice warming to mush still gripped the tips of the weeping willow that shaded the pond whose installation Chuck’s wife, Helen, had overseen last August.
Early this morning, schoolmates from Desert Prep had picked up Mark and Melodie—Chuck’s and Helen’s children—for a Saturday of skiing. Now the twins’ pet llamas lay with forelegs folded near a scattering of hay in front of the stucco three-car garage. A breeze fluttered the wool on their harlequin flanks.
Feeling his penis stir, he twisted to face his wife of twenty years. Though she was one of five sisters, Chuck—the only child of a Santa Fe gynecologist—believed that population growth had become the world’s primary sin and wanted no more children. The twins’ birth in Greenwich Village through a cesarean section that took eight months to heal helped plead his case. Helen had had her tubes tied.
He had never reconciled himself to her decision, following the tubal, to crop her waterfall of hair into two-inch spikes. But now, curled under goose down with its embroidered jack-in-the-pulpit cover, she smelled like pancakes steaming. He gazed at the brown wisps spiraling down the back of her neck and pushed his lips against her bare shoulder.
“Ummm,” she murmured. She shifted wide hips clad in the Indian-maiden loincloth which matched the fringed bra he’d bought her last summer at Indian Market.
“Guess what,” he said, rising to his elbow. “We’re alone.” He thrust his genitals against the soft leather of her loincloth and bent to peck an earlobe.
She continued