The Last Woman Standing (23 page)

CHAPTER 27

JANUARY 1882

Wyatt and I lay in a knot of sheets, entangled, loose-limbed like big cats. My cheek rested on his chest. I like a man with chest hair. I attended his heartbeat, calm now and rhythmic while my own quickened, ascending again as my free hand flattened on his navel, feeling the warmth, the rise and fall of him. He lay with his arms splayed out, legs heavy, naked feet oddly vulnerable with their gnarled toes, the smallest ones curved under, half-hidden.

We’d become acquainted with each other’s bodies, the quirks and quiet spots. Our knowledge was just the beginning of a long journey we would take to please each other. This peace at dawn was something that we’d taught ourselves: spend the night together as if there was no day, no tomorrow, no eddies of enmity swirling around the town. No Johnny Behan. No Mattie. As if we were absolutely alone, no armed guard in the alley, another in the lot, where three men died and reputations soured. A third posted on Fremont Street, one knee bent and boot propped on the facade of Fly’s Boardinghouse, leaning casually with a hat tipped over his forehead, but every nerve awake.

That frigid, fragile month, we hoarded our time together. I sensed this night would be our last. At first light, Wyatt was leading a posse with a warrant for the arrest of the remaining Clanton brothers. He would ride as a deputy US Marshal, having requested and received Virgil’s appointment following his shooting. The badge was no use to his older brother. Bedridden, Virgil fought daily for his life, at the very least his arm, up in the Cosmopolitan Hotel with Allie as nurse and jailer. Across Allen Street, the cowboys had assembled in the Grand Hotel, shooting distance from the Cosmopolitan, capable of firing at any moment. If Virgil could be attacked on Allen Street, it was open season on the Earps in town and in the vast surrounding wilderness.

A dusty light had begun to seep beneath the shutters on January 23. I glanced at the bedside table, observing an oval portrait of two plump young boys in a silver frame. The smaller, cherubic child in christening white was Doc. His cousin Robert, the slightly older, darker-haired boy, sulked beside him, shooting baby daggers at the photographer. Behind that was a dark picture of Doc and his mother. He was slightly older than in the other photograph, scowling over Alice Holliday’s lap as the bonneted woman looked up and away from her ghostly son with his tiny clutched fist. I had asked Wyatt where Mrs. Holliday was now. He said, “In the ground.” She had passed her consumption on to her sensitive son, born with a cleft palate and lip, before she died. He had loved her very much. His father remarried three months later.

Doc had ridden to Contention to gamble and lent us his room at Fly’s. It was a small cabinet of oddities: a dental cast of teeth, a skull, piles of letters in brown ink—some unsent, others captured in grosgrain ribbons of red, mauve, and black. There were books in towers in the corners of the room, the stoutest at the bottom, Latin and Greek, philosophy and art. Pages from some had been pulled and tacked to the walls, marked with his calligraphic penmanship: notes to remember, truths to retell.

Wyatt shifted under me and said, “The light.”

“Shut your eyes, then,” I said. But he wouldn’t. I felt his muscles tense beneath me as he retook his arms and legs from us. The mattress complained as he planted his feet on the floor. He reached to the foot post to grab his long johns. I was a harsh taskmaster and would not let him love me separated by cotton despite the chill.

I kneeled on the bed behind Wyatt, encircling his chest, finding the sweet spot at the bend of his neck with my mouth and kissing him there until he softened. I felt his shoulders release beneath my breasts, and I waited for him to fall back. But he didn’t. He leaned forward, putting on his drawers, reaching for his shirt, his socks, his pants, his suspenders, his vest, his coat, until the man who rose beside the bed was the stranger Wyatt, the cardboard cutout, still handsome but without the warmth I knew so intimately. He pinned on the badge. He strapped on his holsters.

“Let’s not make a fuss,” he said. “I’ll be back when I’m back.”

“You’re the one who fusses,” I said. Still kneeling on the bed, I stretched my back muscles with my hands splayed on my hips, shaking my loose hair until it tickled the top of my buttocks.

“Don’t send me away like this,” Wyatt said, looking down.

“Then go, now, because if I kiss you the way I want to, it will be broad daylight before you leave this room.”

Wyatt leaned over and pecked my forehead. I raised my lips and our mouths met, closed and soft, a good-bye kiss. He smelled of me. He would carry that on the trail with him. Wyatt turned, grasped the doorknob without looking back, and disappeared. I heard a stranger’s deep voice in the hallway say, “Wyatt.”

“Let’s ride,” Wyatt said. Their boots echoed in the hallway. The boardinghouse door opened and shut. I could hear the sound of water splashing and Marietta scolding someone in Spanish. The day began for working folk.

It was getting lighter as I lay crumpled in the middle of the bed, surrounded by books and photographs and sepia-toned secrets. I didn’t want to be alone. The clopping sound of horses became more frequent on Fremont Street. The traffic increased on the alley to the O.K. Corral. Somewhere deep in the house, I heard Mollie calling cheerily, “Marietta,
venga
.” I smelled coffee. The day began. Wyatt was already in the saddle. He could have been a mile away or ten or two hundred. If he wasn’t in bed with me, I felt I would weep for loneliness. But I stopped myself: falling into a farewell funk, I would not rise until dark when the sadness would be there to meet me, an unwanted guest that refused to leave.

I slid off the bed. Reluctant to shed the night’s languor, I decided to seek Mollie’s company, comfort, and coffee in the studio. Buck was off on one of his photographic adventures, and we would have the place to ourselves to play. It was still too early for customers. I reached behind the door for Kate’s kimono. I gave a little hop to release the heavy silk damask from the hook. It was peach-colored, stitched with peonies and cherry blossoms and golden phoenix birds in flight. The lining was cream silk satin. The robe swam around me, so I wrapped it and tied it closed with a cerise sash I found on the floor. Pushing my cold toes into Kate’s red embroidered mules, I snooped absentmindedly at the papers tacked to the walls until I saw a photograph of Doc reclining in Fly’s studio, naked except for a handkerchief across his lap. He looked at the book he held open in one hand, his other propping up his head to reveal ropy biceps, a pointy elbow, and visible demarcated ribs.

It was a rare oddity, a photograph of a naked man, and I found that while I wanted to look away, disturbed, instead I moved closer and stared, intrigued. I was flushed and ashamed, but knew that if Doc had wanted to keep this secret from me, it would not have been there on the wall of his private room. In the photo, his skin resembled marble. He was more muscled than I imagined, since his suits often hung off his shoulders, too large as he slowly disappeared from his life on earth, consumed one cough at a time. He had long since abandoned keeping up the appearances that his good Georgia breeding had once demanded.

Rather than hiding my discovery, I took the photograph and pinned it upside down so that Doc would know I saw it.

I opened the bedroom door, leaving my day clothes scattered around the room and shuffling the hallway to the studio in Kate’s big slippers. It was then, when I saw Mollie waiting at the table with coffee poured and Mexican pastries piled on a silver tray, that the tears began to press against my eyes.

“Don’t.”
Mollie leapt from the lady chair.

“What have I done? Should I not be wearing Kate’s things?”

“No,” she said. “Kate’s kimono suits you. I don’t want you to cry. I’m no meteorologist, but I can see the flood coming. Look at my finger. This is the dike. We are going to plug up those tears and let the melancholy emerge in every other way, like sweat from your skin. Just whatever you do, Josephine Marcus, don’t weep. It will ruin our pictures. Hold it all in and release the sorrow through your body.”

“I just want to cry on your shoulder.”

“I empathize, yet I have a scheme that might distract you. Trust me?”

“Always—we survived gunfire together.”

“The bullet holes in the walls prove how close we came to our—what do they call them? Dirt baths? What an awful term, yet it is so descriptive.”

Mollie removed her apron and folded it, flaglike, in triangles. Inspiration flared in the small woman’s eyes. “Goodie,” she said, as much to herself as me. “I’m so glad you’re here today—and Buck’s not. He’s off in search of the next big death or disaster—even if it’s his own. Men need to risk their necks. I have no desire. We have life overflowing right in this room that Buck cannot be bothered to capture. Come, Josie, sit down and have a coffee and a sweet roll.”

After making me comfortable in the lady chair that she’d warmed, Mollie bustled to the studio’s center and her camera tripod. She placed the back of her Scovill in the landscape position, the prepared glass plates already stacked on the long worktable. She glanced at me over her shoulder and wagged a finger. “No kisses and coddling this morning. Suck those salty tears in and have another pastry. Concentrate on the sugary sweetness. Marietta doesn’t have a light touch with it, and she makes the best coffee. You’ll have time to milk that sadness soon enough.”

I obeyed. I shut my eyelids, the crying urge pressing behind, a single drop or two still clinging to my lashes. Savoring the sweet bun comforted me. And then there was the awakening fire of cinnamon. I opened my lids, reached for another roll, and doused my dark coffee in thick cream until it was the color of a dun pony.

The camera viewed a new setup. Heavy tasseled drapes formed a backdrop behind a narrow stage. A long, low upholstered chaise with bun feet stretched across the platform, arousing my curiosity. I recognized the furniture from the picture of Doc.

Mollie rose. “Josie, leave your coffee for now. You’ll have time for more between setups. Would you do me the favor of lying on the chaise with your back to me?”

While it seemed odd to pose for a photograph facing away from the camera, I acquiesced. I felt so much like my new self and unlike my old self, draped in silk with nothing underneath but my own limbs and bumps. I longed for Wyatt between my legs and in my heart, but concentrated instead on the aftertaste of sugar and cinnamon, the coffee’s homey aroma, and steady Mollie’s instructions. I climbed the platform, which was covered in a Persian carpet. Scuffing off the red mules with their feathery pompoms, I reclined on the chaise, arranging the pools of fabric around me, propping my head up with my left hand as I studied the swags of the curtains, a view of next to nothing.

“I want you to be comfortable in everything we do today,” said Mollie. “Do you feel comfortable?”

“I’m twisted up in this kimono,” I said, tugging at the silk here and sliding it there, and looking over my shoulder at Mollie.

“Don’t look at me—yet,” Mollie said. “I’ll tell you when. For now, I don’t know who you are. You are a beauty in a kimono. You could be Japanese, your hair is so dark, your skin so pale. Imagine that. You are Japanese. You are a foreigner. You are lying in a garden surrounded by peonies and cherry blossoms. A phoenix wanders nearby. Consider how the silk feels against your skin, the chill against your naked toes, and the sugar on your tongue.”

“How will you get that in a picture, with my big behind facing you?”

“That’s my concern, Josephine,” Mollie said with studied patience. “Just follow my voice. Listen to me. Relax your shoulders, let your head fall into the crook of your elbow, feel the silk. Try to notice wherever the silk touches your skin as if it were a man’s hand, Wyatt’s hand.”

I felt my body relax. My shoulders dropped. I released my neck, stretched the fingers, and then let my free hand fall heavily where my legs intersected. I bent my knees and curved my feet around each other. I heard Mollie behind me, exposing film, changing glass plates, moving the camera closer, changing lenses. As she did this, I relaxed more deeply—not dozing, not forgetting my pain, but suspended in the camera’s eye.

“Now, shrug off the silk,” Mollie said. “Start with your shoulders. Don’t worry where the robe falls. We want random folds. Kick back the material with your top leg. There. Now you’ve shed your second skin to reveal a new, lush layer of silk.”

The air chilled me. Excitement stirred. My nipples hardened. Goosebumps formed, raising the hair on my forearms. I had been on the verge of arousal when Wyatt left. Now it returned, and I felt my thighs tighten and my pelvis rise. True, I had in my mind the photographic image of Doc, reclined, so much himself before the lens, but also the reality of Wyatt, his long legs over mine until I didn’t know where he began and I ended. I held myself between two beats, relaxed in my body and aloft in Mollie’s gaze. I again heard the glass plates slide into the camera, the shutter close, and then the sound of Mollie’s deliberate footsteps as she approached.