The Pot Thief Who Studied Georgia O'Keeffe (7 page)

18

H
ow
did
you answer it?” Susannah asked that evening.

We were at our usual table, margaritas in hand, salsa in the metate, chips at the ready. I'd related my conversation with Glad and told her she was in for 20 percent of the Tompiro money. One sale didn't prove she was right about his minding the store increasing my revenue, but the fact that he made a sale on the first day was a good excuse to give her what she deserved.

If I could get anything to give.

“I told him I couldn't answer that. Then he said, ‘Excellent,' and gave me a conspiratorial smile. What do you suppose that means?”

“
Kip
,
sorted out
,
spit baths
or the smile?”

“All of the above.”

“
Kip
is a nap or sometimes the place where you take it, like crashing on someone's sofa.
Sorted out
means getting organized. So he was asking to sleep in the store you're renting to him until he gets himself organized.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I watch a lot of British sitcoms.”

“What about the smile?”

“Easy. When you said you couldn't answer his question, he took that to mean it wasn't proper for him to live there, but you were willing to look the other way.”

“He was right. It's not a proper place to live. There's a sink and toilet, but no shower or bath.”

“That explains the
spit bath
part.” She laughed. “I remember during lambing season when we spent days and nights out in the fields. My mother told me to take spit baths. When I asked what that was, she said, ‘Take a wet cloth, start at your head and wash down as far as possible. Then start at your feet and wash up as far as possible. Then wait until everyone is out of sight and wash ‘possible.'”

“Did you sleep on the ground around a campfire and eat beans and bacon for every meal?”

“We did sleep on the ground, but our chuck wagon had a lot more than beans and bacon.”

I was trying to decide if she was kidding about the chuck wagon when Martin Seepu joined us and waved for Angie.

“I came to celebrate your sale of the Acoma
olla
,” he said to me. Then he said to Angie, “Bring me a Tecate and a bowl of guacamole, and put it on his tab.”

“How did you know I sold that
olla
?”

“It was gone when I dropped in for a powwow.”

“
Powwow
is a Narragansett word.”

“Yeah, but I like the sound of it. Like the beer too, but not as much as Tecate.”

I thought I saw a hint of a smile.

Susannah said, “I'm surprised a man would notice one little pot missing.”

“Native American man,” he added. “We are more attuned to our surroundings.”

“That's because there is so little in your surroundings to be attuned to,” I said. The land the federal government allowed Martin's tribe to retain is acreage no one wanted, mostly devoid of fertile soil.

“You're right. That is why our tribe invented the saying ‘Less is more.'”

“Really?” asked Susannah.

“Yes. It helps us feel good about you whites taking most of our land.”

After Angie brought his Tecate and guacamole, Martin looked me over and said, “You took a long walk yesterday searching for pots, and you also worked with clay mortar.”

I plopped down my margarita and turned to Susannah. “You told him, right?”

Martin said, “She was with you during the adventure.”

Now it was Susannah's turn to plunk down her drink. “What are you—some kind of skin-walking Sherlock?”

“Elementary, my dear paleface. Your skin is tinged pink from too much sun. I saw Carl Wilkes come out of your store, so I figure he has a buyer and wants you to get the pot.”

“And my working with clay mortar?”

“Your fingers are dyed from clay.”

“That could be from my potting clay.”

“Wrong color clay.”

“I'm amazed,” said Susannah, “and impressed.”

“Don't get carried away,” I said. “He may know dirt, but he wouldn't last a day in a food court.”

“Neither would you,” she said, and we all laughed.

I met Martin Seepu when an uncharacteristic impulse to be a do-gooder stirred me to volunteer for a program run by the university that matched college students with reservation adolescents in need of tutoring and maybe a little mentoring. Sort of Big Brothers meets Teach for America.

Martin was a fourteen-year-old dropout. I quickly discovered he had dropped out from boredom rather than lack of academic ability. I was an undergraduate math major at the time, so I tutored him in math even though he wasn't in school and had no intention of returning. When I warned him that number theory has no practical application, I had to explain to him what that meant. It was the only lesson he ever struggled with. Neither his tribe's language nor their metaphysics contains a distinction between practical and theoretical. Knowledge is simply knowledge.

When I got arbitrarily and unjustly kicked out of graduate school for taking pots that it was absolutely and totally legal to take at the time (not that it bothers me anymore), I decided to become a pottery merchant. Martin was a nineteen-year-old five-foot-six-inch stump of muscle by that time. He helped me turn my derelict building into a shop and residence. I asked him if he was interested in doing the same for Glad.

“What does he need done?”

“He said he wanted the place
kitted out
. Glad's a nice guy, but he really needs to learn how to speak English.”

“He
is
English,” said Susannah. “It's
his
language. We're the ones who don't speak it properly.”

I shook my head. “We booted them out two hundred years ago. If he's going to live here, he needs to speak
our
language.”

“That's what we should have told the Pilgrims,” said Martin. “But we learned English instead and look where that got us.”

“Kitted out means fixed up, fully equipped,” said Susannah.

“Sure,” said Martin, “I can do that. How much is he paying?”

“He said he wanted someone who would do it at a reasonable price.”

“Sounds like another case of working for beads, but I'll talk to him.”

I saw Glad approaching our table from over Martin's shoulder. Actually, he was approaching from the door—it was just my vision that was over Martin's shoulder.

“You can do it now,” I said to Martin, and to Glad, “Please join us. I'll stand you a drink.”

Martin said, “‘Stand you a drink'?”

“It's real English for ‘buy you one.'”

Glad took a seat and said, “As Oscar Wilde said, ‘We are two nations divided by a common language.'”

“I thought that was Churchill.”

“I thought it was George Bernard Shaw,” Susannah said.

Glad shook his head. “Definitely Wilde. Wrote something like it in
The Canterville Ghost
in 1887, but I don't doubt that both Shaw and Churchill said something similar. A long list of people have paraphrased it.”

“I'll add to that list,” said Martin. “We are one people resisting a common language.”

“I say we haven't been properly introduced. I'm Gladwyn Farthing, but people call me Glad.”

“My English name is Martin.”

They shook hands awkwardly.

“English name. So you have another one in your native tongue?”

Martin nodded and took a sip of Tecate.

After an awkward moment of silence, Glad said, “Did I say something cheeky?”

Before anyone could respond, Angie arrived to take Glad's order.

“I'll have a pink gin,” he said.

“I don't think we have that brand.”

“It's not a brand—it's a color,” he said.

“All our gin is clear except for the Hendricks, which has a green tint because of the cucumbers.”

“Sorry. I seem to have made a complete bollocks of my order. What I want is a few ounces of gin with a splash of bitters, no ice and by all means no cucumbers.”

Angie smiled and said, “You're actually going to drink that?”

Susannah ordered a second margarita, Martin stopped with the one Tecate as he usually does, and we all laughed as we talked about drink names and English phrases.

The next day was Saturday, and one of my informal scouts had told me there might be some special Indian pottery on the tables at the big flea market at the State Fairgrounds. I pulled Glad aside as we were all leaving and told him I would probably require his shop minding three or four times a month. But for this month, the three days would be consecutive since I wanted to go to the flea market.

19

T
he second reason I didn't want to mind the shop on Saturday was I had a date with Sharice.

“Adam Lippes,” she said, anticipating my question as I stared at the silk blouse with cut-in shoulders.

“Sounds English.”

“American. He got his start with Oscar de la Renta.”

“Finally a designer I've actually heard of. And the jeans?”

“Another designer you've probably heard of—Levi Strauss.”

She uncorked a bottle of Gruet Blanc de Noir and slid it into an ice bucket, a phrase that hardly does justice to the shimmering Nambé cylinder on her table. Benz leapt onto the table and sniffed at the Gruet. Then he rubbed his nose with a paw. The bubbles probably tickled.

“Tonight we're having arctic char.”

“Which is what—burned polar bear?”

She giggled. “It's fish. I'm going to sauté it in blood orange
suprêmes
and cognac.”

“You sound so sexy speaking French.”

“You'd say the same thing if I spoke Míkmaq.”

“Or paddywhack, whatever that is.”

“It's a nuchal ligament in the neck of a sheep.”

“Probably not as tasty as arctic char. And you know about this knuckle ligament how?”

“Not knuckle—
nuchal
. We dissected sheep necks in dental school. Easier to get than human necks.”

“Can we change the subject?”

“Sure—kiss me.”

I did. Enthusiastically. Images of sheep necks vanished.

Suprêmes
turned out to be sections of the orange with the membranes removed. I asked her if blood orange membranes taste bad.

“No, but they're a bit tough.”

Probably not as tough as nuchal ligaments, I thought.

The arctic char was spectacular, similar to the coho salmon from New Mexico's El Vado Lake. Yes, there are salmon in New Mexico, and the ones stocked in El Vado flourish because of the cool deep water. Which makes no sense because
vado
means ford, and I don't think you can ford something 150 feet deep.

The only dish other than the char was a slaw of thinly sliced apples and matchstick carrots in a vinaigrette of blood orange juice, grainy mustard and avocado oil.

Eating Sharice's cooking is like dining on another planet. Consuela raised me on chiles rellenos, posole, frijoles and enchiladas both red and green. The only fish we had was on Fridays.

Just a few years before Consuela was hired to be my nanny and my family's cook and housekeeper, Vatican II released Catholics from meatless Fridays. Consuela evidently believed the new policy was heresy.

And who could blame her?

It was 1962. The Supreme Court ruled that mandatory prayer in public schools is unconstitutional. Yet another nuclear bomb was detonated in the atmosphere, this time in Nevada rather than New Mexico. Yet the only issue Vatican II seemed interested in was eating meat on Friday. No wonder Consuela chose to ignore them.

Although I'm not Catholic, I also abstain from meat on Fridays. When I was in high school, the cafeteria served bean burritos for lunch every Friday even though that was long after Vatican II. I like to honor that tradition.

I like trout because it's fresh and local, but Sharice's arctic char was the first thing I'd eaten from the ocean since an unfortunate incident with some mussels about ten years ago. I should have known better than to order moules marinières at a place named Chuy's Mexican Mariscos.

We had blackberries for dessert. When Benz saw us selecting Scrabble tiles and putting them on our stands, he evidently thought the object of the game was to see who could collect the most tiles. He tried to help Sharice win by knocking my tiles off the stand.

After the third time, we switched to the autological word game. Sharice chose
w
as the letter.

“Wee,” I said after a couple of minutes.

“Word,” she said immediately.

“I can't believe I didn't think of that one.” After a few moments, I said, “Whole.”

“Wussy,” she said without hesitation.

“Showoff.”

“Not really. I just have a lot of time to think of my next one because it takes you so long.”

“Oh yeah? How about this—wide.”

She imitated the sound of a buzzer. “
Wide
is not wide.”

“Sure it is—
w
is a very wide letter.”

“Nice try, but there is no way I'm ruling a four-letter word to be wide.”

“Okay, I'll find another.”

I thought about
wing
, but the word itself has no wings. Then inspiration struck. All I had to do was negate the word.

“Wingless.”

“Writable.”

“Witless.”

“Which describes your new strategy. You're just going to append -
less
to everything. Okay, two can play at that game. Weaponless.”

“Wartless.”

“Yuk. Wageless.”

“Wakeless.”

“Waveless.”

“Weedless.”

“Wishless.”

“Womanless,” I said.

She smiled. “I'll bet you've never been womanless.”

“I have. Most of my life, in fact. But being with you now more than compensates.”

While I smiled at her like a witless teenager, she seemed absorbed in thought. She asked me if I remembered the scene in
Four Weddings and a Funeral
where Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell tell each other about their sexual histories.

A warning bell clanged in my mind. “Not in detail.”

“I think we should do that.”

“Uh … I'm not sure that's a good idea. Why bring up stuff from the past? Actually, I don't have much of a past. And nothing from your past would change how I feel about you, so—”

“It's one of those things I have to do, Hubie.”

“Your one-at-a-time list?”

She nodded. “You go first.”

I swallowed. It was so loud, people in the next apartment probably heard it.

“The last woman I had a relationship with was Dolly Aguirre. She was the daughter of my history teacher at Albuquerque High School.”

“Wow. You knew her from high school? Sounds serious.”

“I didn't know her in high school. She was a freshman when I was a senior. We didn't meet until a couple of years ago.” A possible exit from this conversation occurred to me. “It turns out she had been divorced three times. When she told me that, it didn't bother me at all. So that sort of makes my point that there really is no purpose in us telling each other about—”

She was shaking her head. “We have to do this.
I
have to do this.”

So I did. It was perhaps the most uncomfortable three minutes of my life.

Yes—three minutes. Well, what did you expect? I already admitted I've been womanless most of my life. Plus, I kept details to a minimum.

“So I guess it's my turn,” she said.

“You don't have to—”

“Yes, I do.”

We looked at each other in silence for perhaps thirty seconds.

“Okay,” she said, “I'm finished.”

“You didn't say anything.”

“I said everything there was to say on the topic.”

Another few seconds passed in silence.

“So you have nothing to tell me?”

She nodded.

“So does that mean … ?” I let the question hang in the air.

“It does.”

“You're a …”

“I am.”

The next five seconds took five minutes to elapse.

“Surprised?”

“Yes. You're impossibly attractive and fun to be around. And I know from sleeping with you on our last date that you are obviously not frigid.”

She laughed.

“What's so funny?”

“That may be the first time any man ever said ‘sleeping with' to actually mean sleeping with. The fact is I'm as surprised about my virginity as you are. It's not like I planned it. I was admitted to dental school when I was nineteen. You can start in Canada before you have a baccalaureate. I figured my first experience would be with some handsome and charming dentist in training. I had no idea what dental school was like. The only way a guy would take time out from studying to court me was if he thought it would distract me enough to lower my grades. I couldn't believe how competitive they were. And conceited.”

She paused to sip some Gruet. I thought that was an excellent idea and did the same.

Benz jumped onto my lap. He weighs as much as Geronimo, but he's lighter on his feet. “I guess he
does
like me.”

“He sees me talking to you, so he jumped up there to be in my line of sight.”

“Oh.”

She swallowed. “Then I found the lump.”

I rubbed Benz behind the ears. He started purring.

“Fast-forward to the new me living in a dark apartment on San Mateo with no furniture, no friends, no designer dresses and no left breast. I worked all day and saved my money for the operation. But every penny I dropped in the piggy bank made me sadder. One day closer to another operation. Never mind that it was giving me something rather than taking something away. It still involved hospital, surgery, pain and fear.”

She bit her lip. A teardrop teetered. “I need to tell you something scary.”

“Another thing on the list?”

“Yes. And another one we are never to speak of again.” She took a deep breath. “In addition to saving pennies, I started saving midazolam.”

“That's a semiprecious stone like agate, right?”

She didn't laugh at my lame joke.

“Dentists use it for sedation. Florida used it to execute William Happ.”

“Oh.” Something twitched in my stomach.

“A woman named Angie Crowley stopped at a convenience store to use a pay phone. Happ smashed her car window and kidnapped her. After raping her, he strangled her with her stretch pants and threw her body in a canal.”

I swallowed hard. “Sounds like Florida put the drug to good use.”

“I had enough for another execution.”

I stared into those green eyes. “I'm glad you didn't use it.”

“I almost did. Then I thought about my parents. I couldn't do that to them. I decided a happy life is a lot more important than a breast.” She paused and smiled. “Especially one made from butt tissue.”

After we stopped laughing, she said, “I flushed the midazolam. I used my operation money for a down payment on this condo. I traded shag carpet, Formica and harvest gold for polished concrete, granite and stainless steel. I gave my clothes to Goodwill. I bought designer dresses and expensive perfumes. I made myself beautiful again. Then I started dating.”

“And men from the four corners of the Earth celebrated.”

“Right. Until I told them I don't have—”

“I thought we were never to talk about that.”

She cried for a few moments—smiling while doing so—then regained her composure. “If it got to the stage where I liked them enough, I told them. They all said it didn't matter. Then they stopped calling.”

“Glad they did. Otherwise you might not have been available for me.”

“I suspected right from the start that you were the one. The man who would like me despite—”

“There is no
despite
. There is nothing to get over or learn to deal with. It's not like you keep a glass eye in a jar of water on your nightstand.”

“I think maybe your sense of humor is what made me think you wouldn't run away. When you made light of my dramatic moment by hoisting your ankle onto my bed, it was the happiest moment of my life.”

“It was the
second
happiest moment of my life.”

“What was the happiest one?”

“It hasn't happened yet.”

She blushed. Which was interesting to watch, given her complexion.

“And it won't happen tonight,” she said.

First the neighbors heard me swallow. Now they heard me sigh. “Why not?” I asked, trying not to sound petulant.

“It's too soon after the bombshell I just dropped on you. You need some time to think about it. But you can sleep over if you still want to.”

We had been asleep only an hour or so when Susannah called to tell me her car had died on the way back from La Reina.

Sharice said, “You can't leave her stranded all night.”

“You're right, but this is only the second night we've slept together.”

Her giggle is childlike and charming. “That's the second time you've used that phrasing literally. It won't be long until you'll use it metaphorically like everyone else.” She kissed me. “Go rescue Susannah.”