Banana Rose (2 page)

I marched myself into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. I didn’t look at anyone. I didn’t want anyone to know I was in love. I wasn’t in love, for goodness’ sake! There were now about eight people milling around. I bent to get the strawberries from the lower shelf.

Carmel yelled out, “Hey, Banana Rose, you have on one red sock and one white. Is that a Shabbos tradition?” Besides Happiness, whose nonhippie name was Jane Berg, I was the only other Jewish authority in the house. Everything I did on Shabbos was considered significant. I looked down, flustered. Nearby, I heard him say, “So that’s her name.” I stood up, shut the refrigerator, and turned with a professorial air. I raised my right hand, my index finger pointed. “Yes, if Shabbos falls on October seventeenth, it is proper for all Jews to have on one red and one white sock. Deuteronomy, chapter twelve, verse eight, line three.”

He laughed with everyone else. I liked him; he appreciated my jokes. But I couldn’t act like I liked him. I acted like he was a wooden frame on the wall. I talked to everyone but him. I thought if I didn’t know his name, he wouldn’t exist. Nevertheless, this man whose name I didn’t know was blurring my heart like a forest of wild roses. I couldn’t see anything else, though I looked everywhere else but where he was.

At six, the sun set and we lit the candles. There must have been thirty-five of us in the big kitchen. Blue came from up Talpa hill. I remember her dog Bonnie pawing at the door. Blue brought posole, a corn dish we all loved, and she had on a babushka. That week she was reading a Russian novel and the peasant woman wore a babushka. She decided “babushka” would fit in with Shabbos. Big Allen was there and brought out his flute. Tiny William took his fiddle out of its case, but it wasn’t yet time for music.

“When I light these candles, we can let go of everything and enter a time of peace,” said Happiness as she flicked the match. There was silence in the room. I snuck a peck at him. He wore a pair of square glasses with the left stem taped on. Happiness then said the prayer over the wine. We passed a goblet around and everyone took a sip.

We took the napkin off the two challahs and thanked God, King and Queen of the Universe, for bringing forth grain from the earth. We passed the braided egg bread around. Each person took a hunk, enough to put a crumb in everyone’s mouth and wish them “Good Shabbos.”

“You can’t miss anyone,” I called out as people hugged and fed each other.

There he was. I’d already fed everyone else. Suddenly, I wasn’t feeling so robust. “Hi, Banana Rose.” He beamed at me. “I’m Gauguin.” He laughed, grabbed me, and gave me a big hug. Flustered, I hugged him back. We stepped away from each other, then he dropped his last piece of bread in my mouth, put his hands together in prayer position, and bowed. I bowed too. I still had the bread in my hand. I put it in his mouth.

Tiny began playing his fiddle. Gauguin went over to a black case in the corner and unsnapped it. He pulled out a trumpet. I wondered, Did he play his horn in Harlem or on the south side of Chicago? Did he shoot up heroin, stay up all night, and wear dark glasses? He joined in the homemade music. Happiness brought out our pots. Some people grabbed the utensils on the table. Paul and Ellen played hand drums. Blue hit a spatula against a wooden chair. A spatula! It was perfect with her babushka. Her eyes looked like she’d eaten chunks of turquoise for lunch—they were that blue. Her hands were so worn, you’d think they belonged to an old woman, but she banged her instrument with the vigor of a young girl.

I felt shy for the rest of the night. No matter where I was—washing dishes, hitting a wooden spoon against a glass to the rhythm of “Amazing Grace,” biting into cheesecake, talking to Lightning about his hurt foot, or listening to Fine Point whisper in my ear, “Banana Rose, I have a new lover. She lives in La Madeira, but anytime you want me you can have me”—all that time, I knew one thing: Gauguin was in the room. He played his gold trumpet, and when he wasn’t blowing, he tapped out the rhythm with his hand against his thigh.

It was 11:30. I was tired from the effort I’d made to appear not to notice him. Without waiting for everyone to leave, I went into my bedroom, threw off my clothes, and fell into a sound, dreamless sleep.

At 3
A.M.
I woke abruptly and had to go to the bathroom. I didn’t want to get up, but I knew I would never get back to sleep if I didn’t go. I trudged through the kitchen in my long white T-shirt. The hall between the kitchen and bathroom was wide enough to hold a mattress, where guests stayed overnight. As I went down the hall, I noticed someone lying there. I didn’t much care. I was tired. People often needed a place to crash after Shabbos. When I came out of the bathroom, the person on the mattress was sitting up in his sleeping bag. It was Gauguin.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” I said, raising my hand and heading for the kitchen.

“Why don’t you sit down and talk a minute?” Gauguin asked.

I sat down on the edge of his bed. In my head a voice thundered, I want to hold him, be with him, and in my body I felt a howling of coyotes. I said to myself, Go ahead, Nell, just ask him to sleep with you.

While my mind was thinking all this, my mouth was making small talk with Gauguin. “Yes, Taos Pueblo has Indian dances several times a year. They’re good. You should go to see them.”

I counted in my head, “One, two, three...” As I opened my lips to speak, Gauguin said, “I know this seems odd, but I’d like to sleep with you.

For a second, I wasn’t sure whose mouth those words had come out of, but then I said, “I’d like that too.” Suddenly shy, we both got up, walked through the kitchen and into my bedroom.

As soon as we sat on the bed, Gauguin called me “honey” and “darling” and “baby.” I thought to myself, Who is this hick? Gauguin told me later that he’d thought to himself, What am I doing with her? She has such a heavy New York accent.

When Gauguin and I finally emerged from the bedroom late the next morning, people in the kitchen teased us. “Hey, Gauguin,” Happiness said, “we were afraid the coyotes carried you off. All we saw on the cot was your crumpled sleeping bag.” She yelled into her bedroom, “Hey, Light, we were right! Coyote Banana carried him off.”

Gauguin smiled and ran his hand through his long red hair. It was the color of beets or maples in the fall.

“Do you want to go rose hipping?” I asked. We were eating yogurt with bananas and granola. He rubbed his bare foot along my calf. I looked at him and then tossed my eyes down to the yogurt.

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll do anything with you.”

I took two plastic bags out of the cupboard, and we headed for the higher Talpa Road. We stopped in at Barela’s candy store. Gauguin bought me a stick of red licorice before I could say, “You don’t buy anything here. You just stop in.” The licorice alone could have given me dentures for the rest of my life, all the candy was so old. But I decided to shut up, and when Gauguin wasn’t looking, I chucked the red candy into a ditch.

A week before, there had been an unusually cold night and the temperature had dropped to freezing for a few hours in the early morning. That was good. Rose hips have the highest vitamin C after first frost. They grew along one side of the dirt path where we walked. Above them hung small wild green plums. Beyond was a field spotted with cows. Nearby two white horses bent their long necks. I showed Gauguin how to select the darker rose hips. He began a little song about Rose’s hips. I smiled and tried to ignore the fact that he was singing about me.

I wore a pair of white pants stained with paint, and as I stood in front of the thornbushes, I felt the sun’s heat through the cotton on the back of my thighs. I also felt the season turning, and I knew when I looked over at Gauguin that he felt it too.

Gauguin told me he came from Minnesota. One night, he’d dreamed that he stood on his head at the top of Machu Picchu. That was the whole dream, and it had lasted for hours: way on the top of the Andes, his feet hanging in the sky and his head full of blood, his crown touching the soil where the Incas lived. It was an obvious sign, he said. He had to go there. He was hitchhiking his way to Peru and had taken a three-week job at the corral where I first saw him to get some extra cash. He planned to stay in Taos another week and then continue south.

He’s headed for Peru—I’ll never see him again! I told myself to calm down, not to panic.

I’ll paint a picture of all this after he leaves. Maybe an abstract picture. I began to see it in my mind. There’d be a moon—a yellow one—in the upper-right corner of the paper and I’d layer paint like an explosion in the middle. I’d keep working the colors until I got the acrylics just right. I saw myself standing in my little studio bedroom at the Elephant House. I couldn’t paint it realistically; no one would believe the sky and the light at this moment—it was too beautiful. Stay in the present, I reminded myself. Forget about painting right now. Forget about where this thing with Gauguin is going. I turned my head.

Gauguin was squatting near a dead skunk. He motioned for me to come over. I stood and looked down. The skunk’s hair was matted and it looked like it had been dead for a long time. My eyes wandered to Gauguin’s hair. It was even redder in the sun.

Gauguin was twenty-five years old and he’d already lived with two women. One had filled the house each week with white roses and said to him, “Count how many there are. I want to make love that many times this week.” Gauguin had counted twenty-nine roses out loud, and then they got to work. It meant making love at least three times a day. He said he’d been eighteen and so hungry for sex, he could have eaten through a refrigerator door. The other woman he lived with had sewn silk banners and ran off with the man who delivered pizzas for his band. It broke his heart.

He had told me a lot about himself in just that one night. He hadn’t gone to college, so he’d had to worry about the draft. Before his physical, he fasted for twelve days and weighed in at 120 pounds. His height was five feet eleven inches. To his amazement, they were still going to take him. He became frantic and demanded to see the army psychiatrist. They kept him waiting on a red plastic chair for three hours. When he was finally led into a tiny gray office down the hall, he was shaking.

“Well, what seems to be the problem?” The psychiatrist coughed twice behind his hand.

Gauguin stood up and came around to the other side of the desk. He put his hand on the doctor’s knee, then bent down and whispered in his ear, “I’m queer. I fuck men in the ass.”

The doctor jerked up, pointed to the seat across the desk, and said, “Get over there, or I’ll have you arrested.” After that, everything became very businesslike as forms were filled out deeming him ineligible for the army.

Lying in bed next to Gauguin, I asked, “But weren’t you afraid it would be on your record?” I had boyfriends in college who were afraid they wouldn’t be able to go to law school if they tried to get out of the draft for dealing drugs.

“Hell, no.” Gauguin laughed. “I’d be a lot more upset if I killed people in Vietnam and that was on my record. The only thing I felt bad about was portraying gay people like that, but I knew the army was freaked out about that stuff, so I used it. I was desperate.” He seemed in a rush to share with me, and at the same time it felt as though we owned time. He ran his hand slowly along my face.

I picked another rose hip and looked up at the clouds. It was fall. Anything I did—turn my head, bend to lift a pebble, tie my shoe, glance at the pale yellow dirt of Talpa—felt as if I had already done it before in another life. The sky was so blue that only imagining the deepest red could give you a sense of that color blue. Smoke rose from a distant chimney, and the two white tipis way down by the Elephant Mountains were still out. Some hippies declared they would live there all winter, but in late November after a snow I hoped they would give in for warmth.

Last night, I told Gauguin that I’d majored in education in college because my family thought it was a good idea. I didn’t know what else to do and my father was paying, so I did what he said. Way down deep, I used to dream of being a painter, but I didn’t know anyone who painted. Everyone in my family owned small businesses: a vacuum store, a grocery, a cleaners. My father had a luncheonette. After I graduated from college, I taught full time for a few years in Ann Arbor, but something was missing. Then I moved to Taos and broke free. I decided to give myself a chance at painting.

“Taos is special to you, isn’t it?” he asked.

“Yes.” I nodded. “When I got here, I felt I could do anything. I teach school part time and try to paint the rest of the day, but it’s not so easy. I get tired after teaching, and then there’s always something happening here at the commune.”

“Show me something you’ve painted,” he said.

I got up from the bed and switched on a light. Naked, I grabbed a white towel and wrapped it around me. I opened the closet door and brought out two paintings.

He sat up in bed and reached out his arms. “Hey, let’s see.” He looked quietly for a while. I was uncomfortable and shifted around, sitting at the edge of the mattress. I bent over and picked at my big toe.

“I like them,” he said, and then he hesitated. “Are they finished?”

“Well, no. That’s sort of my problem. I want to finish them, and then I don’t. I get scared. What if I finish them, and I really didn’t say anything or I don’t like them?”

“What’s there to say?” he asked. “Just do it.” He shrugged. “My father went to art school for two years before he became an architect. I think my father said you just do it.”

I nodded. I dropped my towel and got back in bed. I wanted to ask him more about that, but I also wanted to kiss him.

He laid the paintings down gently and put his arms around me. We brought our lips together—his were thick—and we kissed for a long time, not moving, just feeling our bodies naked against each other. Then I put my leg over his. He moved and was suddenly on top of me and inside me. I opened out like spring rain. I bit his lower lip and we went wild. He cried above me, “Oh, Rose!” He tensed and then relaxed. We were quiet for a time. Then he began moving again, slow and soft. And with the wetness of his sperm inside me, I came, my body shuddering, ripples running down my entire length.