American Masculine (12 page)

“City?” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

She loved his look, a trace of sweat from the eyes back, skin drawn at the temples, face smooth in the hollow of his cheeks, hard on the line of his jaw. Eyes like a child’s, blue and pale and serene.

“Country?” Tori asked.

“Not really,” he said. “Have a seat.”

“No thanks.” “Why not?”

“I don’t know your name,” she lied. She’d heard it called three or four times that day: S. Secrest.

“You deaf?” he asked. “Your full name.”

“Not a name you’d care for,” he said. “Not for you to decide,” she said. “Give me yours.”

“No thanks.”

She felt like standing all day, and she would, she knew herself.

He went silent, staring at her. Fine face, if stubborn. His mother’s face had been that pretty, though more resigned; she’d died of a brain tumor before he was ten. His father, a rancher and local preacher, was a plain man with a massive build, and humble; he never remarried. Tori leaned on the car and looked out at the broad flat plains, to the line of white at the horizon and the white-blue spread of sky that darkened to azure at the zenith. Endless sky. She checked her watch. She wasn’t going to talk. She didn’t care if he did. She liked the game. After a while she turned and looked through the glare of the windshield to the faint silhouette of him. He was still looking at her.

“Shannon,” he said quietly. His lips moved, a movement of face and voice, and something inside him that was the spirit of a man, and it took her by surprise. She smiled to herself at the joy that accompanied her small triumph. He’s definitely country. But studying him laid back in the Pontiac she had a feeling she underestimated him. She was satisfied with this too, some things not easily held down. As it should be.

Tori was from Billings, daughter of a banker and a voice teacher who’d married young, and now in their later years rarely touched and never laughed. Her mother wore diamonds. Her father was notoriously giddy around other women. Specifically, he liked waitresses. You sure are pretty, he’d say, or, You keep a fine figure, his face the smooth surface of the undertow; Tori knew of the women he’d kept. Yet her mom and dad had come out on the other side of it somehow. Tori was twenty-four, a CPA for the firm that serviced many of her father’s clients. She took in a rodeo most weekends, something different, something alive. This one was in Roundup, some miles north of Billings, the small kind, dust in a gray oval over the grounds, trucks and horse trailers at skewed angles, kids running in straw hats, worn boots.

“So Shannon,” she said and looked in on him through the angle of the door.

“Yes,” he said. “And you?”

“Why?” she said. “What’s in a name?”

“Power,” he replied.

And without wanting to she said, “Victoria,” her full name, the name her grandfather had used. “Call me Tori.”

LOVE WAS DELICATE, new and bright winged, fragile, and they observed it as an artist might, in minute detail: veins like ropes on his forearms, thick wrists, big knuckles, a network of scars on the back of his hands; her vivid and searching eyes, the slant of her hipbones, the brazen gait, her body a symmetry he was happy to hold.

They were married by a silver creek a few miles north of Miles City. Small wedding among cottonwoods, it was early September, his father presided. A woman worth marrying, Shannon thought, someone to respect: a woman to reckon with. He had driven her to the creek bed in a horse-drawn carriage, speaking softly to two chocolate-brown quarter horses with jet manes and bodies that glistened. He wore a white Stetson, white tux, white patent leather boots. They were big men, he and his father, his father with kind eyes and well-dressed in a gray western suit and bolo tie. On her side, her mother and father attended and Tori wore a dress of white satin inlaid with twenty-one yards of lace. From beneath the veil she watched Shannon’s face, his look manly and boyish all at once as he lifted her in his arms and took her back to the carriage. He was crisp and angular, not rounded. His hair was too short, the white line showing on the back of his neck. There was hope in him. She whispered in his ear. He laughed as he carried her.

BUT DESPITE THEIR BEST intentions love grew obscure, the arc of the loss gradual not sharp, almost unnoticeable until, nine years in, and with a child, it was unsettling how much had changed. In the beginning, Tori felt she and Shannon lived only in daylight, now with wounded eyes they encountered entire landscapes of darkness, their good intentions as elusive as the flight of a hummingbird. From her side of the bed she watched him fold clothes. He stood over her with his shoulders soft like two loaves of bread and kept her awake when all she wanted was sleep. She needed sleep.

“Mind if I keep the TV on?” he asked.

Yes, I mind, she thought, I work six days a week, we have a two-year old, I haven’t slept for months. Jessica was in the other room. “Go ahead,” she said, and she turned herself from him so that she faced the window, and the slender line of her spine, the curved forks of her ribcage, the back of her legs, her heels and the pads of her feet, became the sheer embankments of cliffs that she had made unscalable. She believed on the other side of her body—a body that seemed to her like a wild, remote country—he was unknowing.

He looked at the shape of her back, turned to him. Typical, he thought, pitiful. He felt untoward and awkward. He doubted her, and himself. He held contempt.

Gathering the clothes in his arms he receded from the bed, and pulled on the overstuffed drawers and pressed new piles in over the old.

“Shove stuff in like you do everything else,” she mumbled.

He didn’t hear. He walked to their bed in the dark, his footsteps like the dull thud of a big-boned creature.

He’s not an elegant man, she thought. Not smart, but knew she was lying to herself. He’d worked to get where he was, BA in political science on a rodeo scholarship in Bozeman, doctorate in American studies the first five years of the marriage before he was hired to teach at Eastern Montana. Philosopher-poet she called him early on and he had opened doors, even convinced her of her own beauty so that she no longer criticized herself when she stood naked in front of the mirror. Still, he doesn’t know me, she countered, and pulled the bedspread tight to her neck.

“You’re a sharp woman.” He slid in next to her. “Smarter than most, twice as warm.” He thought her weak minded. The physicality and the urgency of his yearning were nearly gone, he’d pressed them on her before, but not anymore. Now he’d say things like, Welcome to the icehouse, or, A good woman is hard to find, letting her know she couldn’t get to him. Yet despite his fortifications most nights he still longed to touch his fingers to her cheekbone in the silence, and usually even if she was cold he’d go ahead and touch her, feeling for what lay inside, the lovely form of her bones, her distance, her closeness. He’d fall asleep, his hand gripping her hipbone.

Tonight he didn’t touch her face and she was glad for it, but when he called her “warm” it made her ill. She knew what was next, his feet entering her space like steel ships, the icy feel of them emanating a tangible sphere as he slid them toward her and tried to touch the backs of her calves with the clammy, cold surface of his toes. She kicked her heel hard into his shinbone. “Get away from me,” she whispered.

“What did you say?”

She felt the pause of his breathing.

“Nothing,” she said. “Sorry.” The belief she held about all men, the disloyalty, she had no evidence of in him. He’d been straight and strong, but it would come, she felt sure. “Didn’t want your feet on me,” she said.

He drew his head and chest over her body before he lay back again with his head on his pillow, his face toward the ceiling. He put aside his dislike. She’s worthy of adoration, he knew that much from his father. “You’re my wife …” His voice trailed. She turned toward him but he was asleep.

When she lay still the thoughts came. Her pregnancy, an awful unshaping, lingered like a sickness in her mind. She’d been ill from the start. A cyst on one of her ovaries had burst and it was a month before she believed the baby hadn’t miscarried, was still alive. Then daily life, despondency a robe she wore, and bitterness, her body blown out, and bed rest, her bones like stones in an excess of earth. But when they placed Jessica, six pounds eleven ounces, screaming, on her chest, and later sleeping in the night like a lost found thing, small and of Tori’s own making, the miracle was more devastating than she imagined. Shannon was in the chair beside her, staring. She had reached for his hand and wept.

She believed she had loved Shannon. A part of her still believed.

She peered out the high-arched window of their bedroom at the immense darkness, flared with points of light. She put her hand on her sternum. She was blond in high school but her hair had gone dirty. She foiled it now. Thirty-three years old. The year of death, Shannon’s father would say, the year of resurrection. Her belief was not so simple. Pressures existed. People moved apart. Still, it troubled her, the depths she’d given of herself, and how far they’d fallen from each other. He’d been such a light. She remembered what his father had said at the wedding, so graceful and soft spoken: that light does not alter. She didn’t want to wrong Shannon but layers of complexity had developed. Things had surfaced she did not imagine for herself, and did not, initially, desire.

She’d been considering it in her mind for nearly two years, the idea that John, the head of her department, wanted to have sex with her. She didn’t think of herself as a predator, she knew women who played that role, hard faced, sweet tongued, the enemies of other women; she wasn’t one of those. But the comparisons were almost too easy, Shannon’s roughened fingernails that she’d loved when he rodeod but disliked now, John’s slender fingers, soft and dexterous, and the fine arc of his cuticles. Shannon’s pearl button shirts, John’s crisp suit and tie. John’s good humor at her expense, his step in the conference room, his manner of holding a pen, a silver pen, the clean surface of his desk, the picture of his wife, his two young boys, the challenge of it, how it took her somewhere.

In the beginning he had played her off, joking with her as far as she dared but never touching her, and in the busy season from January to April 15, he flat ignored her. But busy was behind them now; it was September; and he’d been linked to an auditing project of hers. She didn’t want to take things farther, but couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was the Brace-Tolbert case, a labyrinth of influx and outflow, a large family-owned operation worth more than five million. She’d asked John to help with the VP expense accounts, five portfolios with entangled budget lines given to her in boxes by the company’s office manager, Iris. It was Tori’s job to justify expenditures. She needed John’s expertise.

“HOW ABOUT YOU and Shannon come over this Thursday,” John said. He was keeping things even, family first. “Katherine and I will barbecue some steaks.” His suit coat was draped over his arm, and he was leaning over the drinking fountain as he held back a tie with a nice sheen to it, broad stripes of blue and gold, his face turned to the side as he looked at her. He’d been thinking of her more lately. Today she was stunning. He took another sip, then stood upright and said, “We’ll start at five. The kids can play. Then we can go over the account analysis and get a preliminary report done for the Friday meeting.”

He has a nice face, she thought, an unworried face. He thinks I’m pretty. She was wearing the flared sundress Shannon liked, a sheer lavender flower pattern over a cream silk slip, fitted in the bust and flowing elsewhere, a playful slit at the knee. She had taken her time this morning, worn her cream bra and matching cream panties, the cream stockings she’d bought last weekend at Herberger’s when Shannon had given her an hour’s break from Jessica. Looking at John in the narrow hallway in the gold light of the afternoon, she felt sleek and high in the rear like the young fillies prized at rodeos, the way men eyed them from a distance, the two-year-olds with reddish coats or brown, the high-legged, heady animals that carried themselves like they could run for days. She was five foot five; she felt six feet tall.

She took the moment, and pushed it. “Why not, John?” she said. “You don’t live forever.” She walked past him on her way to the drinking fountain, purposely bumping her hip into him.

“Oh.” He smiled. “I see how it is.”

She laughed, then took a drink as she spoke into the chrome tray of the machine, “Not worth packing up the files though, too unruly. How about we do the barbecue, then come back here and work for an hour or so.” She kept her head down and took another drink, waiting.

“An hour?” he said.

“Maybe two,” she said softly. She was awed by the half reasons and intentions that made her dead with Shannon but light as a butterfly with John.

“Maybe.” He held his hand out, a playful gesture, and inviting. He smiled. “I guess that will work.”

“Okay.” She laughed and put her hand in his. “Your place on Thursday, then back here.” She liked touching him. She liked how his hand conformed to her fingers.

They parted, and she worked late. Shannon had to call her twice before she could give him a time she’d be home. He was reminding her of a dessert party they were to attend at the college president’s house, up on the edge of the rimrock that lined the northern limit of the city. A beautiful home, she remembered, tall windows facing a field of lights, the city, the dark band of the faraway river, and the southerly plains black in the distance.

“Eight o’clock,” she promised about dinner.

“It starts at seven,” he said. “We’ll come in late enough to be laughed at.”

“Seven-thirty,” she said. “Push me and I’m not going.”

His voice annoyed her. The tone reminded her of his anger some months back when she’d had to leave him with Jessica. She was attending a three-day conference in Boise and when she’d come home after dark at the end of the week he was there in the kitchen, big as a bull while he fed their daughter by hand. He stuffed rice in her mouth as she sat on his knee. It was 9:27 p.m. Jessica was still in a T-shirt and dirty pink pants. There was rice all over the floor, smashed peas, small triangles of carrot. The sink was piled with dishes. Near Shannon’s right foot the hardwood was gouged, like he’d used a hacksaw. Her chest tightened and she wanted to hurt him.