Cowboys Are My Weakness Read online

  SOMETIMES YOU TALK ABOUT IDAHO

  You’ve come, finally, to a safe place. It could be labeled safe place, marquee-style in bright glittering letters. You’ve put the time in to get there. You’ve read all the books. You have cooked yourself elaborate gourmet meals. You have brought home fresh-cut flowers. You love your work. You love your friends. It’s the single life in the high desert. No booze, no drugs. It isn’t just something you tell yourself. It’s something you believe.

  The man you admire most in the world calls you and asks you out to lunch. He is your good father, the one you trust, the one you depend on. The only one, besides your agent and the editors, who still sees your work.

  You have lunch with him often because he is honest and rare, and because he brings a certain manic energy to your life. He is the meter of your own authenticity, the way his eyes drop when you say even the most marginally ingenuous thing. He lives in a space you can only pretend to imagine. When he talks about his own life there seem to be no participants and no events, just a lot of energy moving and spinning and changing hands. It’s dizzying, really; sex becomes religion, and religion becomes art.

  Sometimes you talk about Idaho: the smell of spruce trees, the snap of a campfire, the arc of a dry fly before it breaks the surface of the water. Idaho is something he can speak about concretely.

  He always asks about your love life. No, you say, there’s no one at all.

  “The problem,” he says, “with living alone is that you have to go so far away to the place you can do your work, and when you’re finished there’s no one there to tell you whether or not you’ve gotten back.”

  Your good father smiles a smile of slight embarrassment which is as uncomfortable as new shoes on his soft face. He has a friend, he says, that he’d like you to meet.

  “He is both smart and very masculine,” your good father says, something in his voice acknowledging that this is a rare combination because he wants you to know he’s on your side here. “Our friendship,” he says, “is ever new.

  “Imagine a first date,” your good father says, “where you don’t have to watch your vocabulary. Imagine a man,” he says, “who might be as intense as you.”

  Your good father’s friend lives in Manhattan, twenty-two hundred miles from the place you’ve learned to call home. He’s a poet, a concert pianist, a soap opera star. He’s translated plays from five different Native American languages. He’s an environmentalist, a humanist, he’s hard to the left.

  “He’s been through a lot of self-evaluation. He wants a relationship,” your good father says, “and he’s a dog person. Now that you fly back to New York so often, it could be just the right thing.”

  You watch him wait for your reaction. You look at the lines that pain has made on his face and realize that you love your good father more than anyone you have slept with in the last five years. You would do anything he told you to do.

  “Sounds like fun,” you say, without blinking. You are pure nonchalance. A relationship, you’ve decided, is not something you need like a drug, but a journey, a circumstance, a choice you might make on a particular day.

  “My friend loves the mountains, and the desert,” your good father says. “He comes out here as often as he can. His real name is Evan, but he’s played the same part on the soap for so many years now, everyone we know just calls him Tex.”

  “Tex?” you say.

  “I didn’t tell you,” he says. “My friend plays a cowboy.” Your good father smiles his embarrassed smile. “That’s the best part.”

  You fly to the East Coast on an enormous plane that is mostly empty. You watch the contours of the land get steadily greener, badlands to prairies to cornfields, till the clouds close your view and water runs off the wing.

  Somehow you have lived to be twenty-nine years old without ever having gone on a blind date. You don’t let yourself admit it, but you are excited beyond words.

  You let your mother dress you. She lives in New Jersey and is an actress and you think it’s her privilege. She makes you do the following things you are not accustomed to doing: wear foundation, curl your eyelashes, part your hair on the side. Even the Mona Lisa, she says, doesn’t look pretty with her hair parted in the middle. She gives you her car so you don’t have to take the bus into New York, and in exchange you leave her a phone number where she can reach you. She promises not to call.

  It’s a little dislocating in New Jersey, where there are cars on the road at all hours and it never really gets dark at night. On the freeway, four miles outside of Newark, you see a deer walking across a cement overpass that’s been planted with trees. This seems more amazing to you than it probably is. A sign from your homeland, safe passage, good luck.

  It works. You make it through the improbable fact of the Lincoln Tunnel and it doesn’t cave in. You find a twenty-four-hour garage four blocks from Moran’s Seafood, the meeting place for your date. On the way there you see a woman who looks very happy carrying a starfish in a translucent Tupper-ware bowl. You only have to walk down one street that scares you a little bit. You get to the restaurant first, and your wide-eyed reflection in the glass behind the bar startles you a little. You resist the urge to tell the bartender that you have a blind date.

  When he walks in the door there’s no mistaking him. He’s the soap opera star with the umbrella, the strong back and shoulders, the laugh lines America loves. As he scans the bar it occurs to you for the first time to wonder what kind of a sales job your good father has done on him about you. Then you are shaking hands, then he is picking up your umbrella, one arm hooked in yours guiding you to the table for two.

  It is only awkward for the first ten minutes. He is a great mass of charisma moving forward to ever more entertaining subjects. You are both so conscious of keeping the conversation going that you don’t look at the menu till the waiter has come back for the fifth time.

  Of all the things on the menu, you pick the only one that’s difficult to pronounce. You have just passed a fluency exam in French that is one of the requirements of your Ph.D., but saying en papillote to the waiter is something that is beyond your power to do. So you describe the dish in English and when the waiter has watched you suffer to his satisfaction, he moves his pen and nods his head.

  During dinner, you cover all the required topics for first dates in the nineties: substance abuse, failed marriage, hopes, dreams, and aspirations. You talk about your dogs so much he gets confused and thinks they are your children. He uses emotion words when he talks, sometimes more than one in a sentence: ache, frightened, rapture. And something else: He is listening, not only to the words you are saying, but to your rhythms, your reverberations, he picks them up like a machine. Something in his manner is so much like your good father that a confusion which is not altogether unpleasant settles in behind your heart.

  Between the herbal tea and the triple fudge decadence he’s ordered so that you can have one bite, he reaches across the table and takes your hand in both of his. Then he calls you a swell critter.

  You feel a hairline fracture easing through your structure the way snow separates before an avalanche on a too-warm winter day. Something in the air smells a little like salvation, and you breathe deeper every minute but you can’t fill your lungs. When all the tables are empty and every restaurant employee is staring at you in disgust, you finally let go of his hand.

  Then you go walking. One end of Chelsea to the other, all the time circumventing the block with your garage. He knows about the architecture. He reads from the historic plaques. He shows you nooks and crannies, hidden doorways, remnants of the Latinate style.

  It’s been raining softly for the hours since dinner and you can feel your hair creeping back over to its comfortable middle part. You smile at him like the Mona Lisa, and he looks as though he’s going to kiss you, but doesn’t. Then the sky opens up and you duck into a café for more herbal tea.

  The café is crowded and the streets are full of people and it makes no sense to
you when he tells you it’s three o’clock in the morning. You can’t possibly, he says, drive all the way back to New Jersey tonight. It’s your first real chance to size him up and you do. From the empty next table your good father gives you a wink. “It would be foolish,” you say, “to drive in the middle of the night.”

  When you look back on this date it’s the cab ride you’ll remember. Broadway going by in a wild blur of green lights, the tallest buildings all lit up like daytime. Your driver and another in a cab next to yours hang heads out their windows and converse at fifty miles an hour in a tongue that sounds a little like Portuguese, a little like music. It’s pure unburdened anticipation: you both know sex is imminent, but you don’t yet hold the fact of it in your hand. You are laughing and leaning against him. You are watching yourself on the giant screen, western woman finds daytime cowboy in the big city, where even if it wasn’t raining, you couldn’t see a single star.

  His building is a West Side co-op, a name that sounds happy to you, like a place where everyone should get along. In his apartment there are the black-and-white photos you expected, the vertical blinds, the tiny kitchen and immense workplace, the antique rolltop desk.

  Some tea without caffeine? he says. And you nod. You count. This is your eleventh cup of herbal tea today. You have never done a first date without alcohol. Now you know why.

  You watch him move around the room like a soap opera star. Take one: western woman’s seduction: a smile, a touch, a glance. You’re still waiting for the big one-liner when he starts kissing you, his hand cupped around your chin, one on the back of your head. Procter and Gamble Industries has taught him how to do this. “Slowly now,” the director says, “a little softer. Turn the chin, turn the chin, we can’t see her face.” You aren’t fooling anybody. It’s way better than TV.

  “Let’s forget the herbal tea,” he says, which is a disappointment. You want to see the script. You want to make a big red X over that line and write in another, but he has your hand and is leading you to the bedroom with the queen-size bed and the wrought-iron headboard with the sunset over the mountains and there are so many things to think about. Like how many days since your last period and the percentage of people in New York with AIDS, and what you can say to make him realize, if it matters anymore, that going to bed on first dates is not something you do with great regularity. Something needs to be said here, not exactly to defend your virtue, but to make it clear that the act needs to be meaningful, to make it matter, not for all time or forever but for right now, because that’s what you’ve decided it needs to be with sex—after discarding all those other requirements over the years—something that matters right now.

  “I’m feeling a little strange,” you begin, and you realize this isn’t just about you but you’re testing him to see if he’ll let you talk. “I seem to be violating my own code of dating,” you say. “If I have one, that is. I mean, I wanted to come here with you, I didn’t want this to end just now, and then we have this other person in common, and because we both love him, there’s this closeness between us, this trust which may be totally inappropriate, and so,” you wind up, “I’m just feeling a little strange.”

  This is what happens, you realize, when you begin to get mentally healthy. Instead of letting yourself be whisked silently off to bed you feel compelled to say a lot of mostly incoherent things in run-on sentences.

  “I know how you feel,” he says. “Me too. But I want this closeness. I don’t want you to go back home without us having had it.”

  It’s not exactly a declaration, but it’s good enough for you. You fall into the ocean that banks the sunset over mountains. It’s a thunderstorm in the desert. It’s warm wind on snow. You lose count of orgasms under the smoky city lighting, first streetlight and then daylight, the contours always changing.

  “Having fun?” he says, at one point or another. And you nod because fun is one of the things you are having.

  He does something to the back of your neck that is closer, more intimate, somehow, even than having him inside you. You read an article once on craniosacral massage, where the body’s task of pumping blood to the brain is performed by another person, giving the patient’s body the closest thing it’s ever had to total rest.

  At eight-thirty your mother calls and you take a break long enough to mumble a few words into the phone. “I’m perfectly safe,” you tell her, and laugh all the way back to the bedroom at the absurdity of your lie.

  It is noon before you emerge, still not having slept, your body feeling numb and tingling and drenched, weightless, rain-soaked, rejuvenated.

  But like it or not, it’s the next day. You both have appointments. He kisses you twice. “Dinner?” he says. “It’ll be late,” you say. “That’s okay,” he says, “call me.”

  You go to meeting after meeting, and finally to a party with people who mean everything to your career. You are wearing the same clothes as yesterday, walking a little tender, and bowlegged as a bear. Your editor, by some miracle of perception, takes your hand and doesn’t let it go all night, even when you are involved in two separate conversations.

  Later, you call the soap opera star. He tries to give you directions. “You,” he says, “are on the East Side. I am on the West Side.”

  You tell him you’ve been to New York before. You hang up.

  On the way to his house you get lost. It is raining the kind of rain it never rains in the high desert. A saturating rain where the air spaces between the raindrops contain almost as much moisture as the raindrops themselves. You drive your mother’s car through running canals deeper than your wheel wells. You have never been to this part of Manhattan before. Street after street bears a name you don’t recognize. Dark figures loom in dark doorways, and the same series of parks seems to have you boxed in. Your defroster can’t keep up with your anxiety. Then suddenly you are back on Broadway. You find his house.

  “I had a learning experience,” you say. What should have taken fifteen minutes has taken an hour and a half. He isn’t angry, but he takes the keys from your hand. Together you look for an open garage.

  “Dinner?” he says. You shake your head either no you haven’t had it or no you don’t want it.

  “If you’re not sleeping,” he says, “you need to eat.” The two of you look like war-zone survivors. You both try to be charming and fail. Even the simplest conversation is beyond your power. Finally you eat in silence. You fall into bed. It’s sleep you both need, but there’s the fact of what’s insatiable between you. All night you keep reaching, tumbling, waiting for the bell to ring to let you know you’ve found each other, to let you know it’s okay to sleep.

  In what seems like minutes, it’s time to say goodbye, way too early, not even light out, dusky gray New York morning, clear or cloudy, who can tell without the stars? He has to go to the studio and put on his cowboy boots and court somebody named Hannah, so that all of America can sigh.

  “So is Tex nice?” you say, sleepy-eyed as he kisses you goodbye.

  “Darlin’,” he says, “they don’t come any nicer than Tex. Drop the keys in the mail slot. Take care.”

  When he’s gone the phone rings and the machine gets it. Past experience has taught you to expect a woman’s voice, but it’s your good father, wanting Evan to tell him how everything went. You imagine your good father in the desert, bright sunshine, sage and warm wind. When you hear his laugh crackle over the answering machine your dislocation is complete.

  You wander around New York until your lunch date. One of the polished magazines you have written a few short pieces for wants to send you to Yugoslavia. This is not something you can immediately comprehend. They keep talking about it, airfare and train passes and what time of year is the most beautiful, and even though they have said they want you to go you keep thinking, But why are they saying this to me?

  It’s Wednesday, a matinee day, so you stand in line to get half-priced tickets to a musical, even though you prefer drama, but you know you aren’t up for any
thing that requires you to think. You pick the wrong musical anyway. The first words delivered onstage are “Love changes everything,” and it’s downhill from there. You leave feeling like you’ve been through three and a half hours of breath work. On the way up Fifty-seventh Street you realize a valuable and frightening thing: Today you want to be in love more than you want anything; the National Book Award, say, or a Pulitzer Prize.

  You’ve left something at the soap opera star’s apartment; a contact lens, a computer disk, your forty-dollar Oscar de la Renta underwear. It takes several phone calls to determine a time to retrieve them. He is short on the phone, on the other line to a director in London, and you realize you’ve stepped across some kind of a boundary into his space. You have forgotten how New Yorkers can be about their space. You are overly hard on yourself. Where you live, there is plenty of space. There is so much goddam space you can hardly believe it. Finally, it’s the doorman who lets you into his empty apartment.

  And then you go home, on another enormous airplane, and sit next to a fat woman who is reading a book called Why Women Confuse Love with Sex. It’s not her you’re mad at, but you glare at her so she won’t speak to you because you know that anything—anything—anybody says to you will make you cry and cry.

  For two days you catch up on sleep and expect him to call. On the third day you come to your senses enough to go hiking, to get out into the landscape that heals you. There is a dynamic in the desert that you understand perfectly: the dry, dry earth and the plants designed to live almost forever without the simple and basic ingredients they need the most. After five days you know he isn’t going to call, which is okay, because out of the rubble you carried back from the city you have resurrected your independence. Your work surrounds you like a featherbed and things almost go back to how they were before. But now desire grows inside you like a plant, a big green leafy thing that has been fed only once, but now that it’s growing, it won’t be still. You sit in your own house and talk to your dogs. More often than not, you answer back.