The End of Eve Page 6

  I studied my map. Lake Mead wasn’t so far. Surely this blue hawk-shaped thing on the map just outside Vegas would be swimmable.

  AS SOL AND Maxito splashed in Lake Mead, I collected garbage on the shore and dialed Maia’s number.

  “Hey, Mama,” she breathed into the phone.

  “Hey, Mai Mai. So, I got this email from Nonna?”

  Maia sighed. “Yeah. We were staying at this hotel in Santa Fe, but we got kicked out. I don’t know what Nonna did to them, but the cops came and kicked us out.”

  In the lake, kids threw their plastic balls and squealed and splashed while their parents drank beer and yelled at them from their beach chairs on the shore.

  “What’s wrong with the duplex, Mai Mai?”

  “Well, Nonna kind of had the house, like, gutted. See, she doesn’t want it to be a duplex, so – and, well, she didn’t get a building permit or anything, right? So she doesn’t want the trailer on the land. Because it might draw attention. Then she’ll get fined ten thousand dollars which she doesn’t have because, you know, she gave the rest of her money to the contractor and, should I go get her?”

  “Yeah, put her on the phone.”

  I looked across the lake’s surface, out past the kids and all the motorboats and water skiers, the brown-red rocks and mountains beyond.

  A cool two billion years ago, this was the Western coastline of North America. California and Oregon hadn’t yet come crashing in. I thought about continental collisions and inland sea floods, volcanic eruptions and the ash and lava flow that would seal this rock and land together for a while. Now the earth’s rift crust stretched to pull itself back apart here, separate continents still desperate to diverge.

  “Finally,” my mother said by way of hello.

  “Where I am I supposed to go, Mom? I sold my house. I’m traveling with a toddler here. I can’t just not come to Santa Fe.”

  My mother kind of groaned an exhale into the phone. “Ariel, don’t get hysterical. I’m going to build us a beautiful home. In the meantime I’m going to rent us a beautiful little guest house. I’ve just found something on Craigslist. It’s small. One room. It sleeps five. The migrant workers of the world would certainly consider it quite luxurious. But, honestly, Ariel, if it’s not good enough for you, get your own place. I can’t take care of everyone. I have cancer.”

  I didn’t know what to say. “Mom, this is insane. That duplex was partly mine. You just ... gutted it?”

  My mother hummed. “All right, I’ll tell you this, but only because I want you to understand. The contractor and the worker I’ve hired didn’t want this job. The worker is suicidally depressed. He’s been through something no one should have to go through. The contractor is bankrupt at nearly age seventy. He’s wonderful. He has a Ph.D. in Anaïs Nin.”

  “You’re serious, Mom? Anaïs Nin? This qualifies him to take a wrecking ball to the house?”

  “Don’t be dramatic, Ariel. I hired them both out of self-imposed early retirement. I had to plead with them. These men need this project. I may be dying, but I can give these men their lives back. Just try to think about somebody other than yourself, Ariel.”

  I felt like throwing up, but I just closed my eyes. “All right,” I said. “I’ll do that.”

  Maybe it wasn’t Nevada’s fault, but right then I hated Nevada. I stared at it for a long time, Nevada. A few tears fell, but the hot desert air just baked them into my cheeks. There’s a color called blue and that’s what the sky was. Maxito came bounding out of the water, at first a silhouette against that blue, then into full color with his red swim trunks and green bug-eye goggles. “It’s cold water, Mama.”

  Sol stepped up behind him, took one look at me. “What’s wrong?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing.”

  THAT NIGHT AT a dark campground picnic table after Maxito had gone to sleep in the trailer, I spelled it out for Sol.

  She quietly filled her glass pipe with weed, lit the bowl and breathed it all in. “So the contractor knows a lot about erotica?”

  I sipped my whiskey. “Anaïs Nin just wrote erotica to make money. Her major works are – you know – modernist surrealist – like – Cities of the Interior. About architectural spaces that don’t actually exist.”

  “Oh.” Sol took another hit of weed and nodded. “That don’t exist.”

  JUST A FEW miles in the morning to the Hoover dam and across the Arizona border where they asked Sol for proof of her naturalized citizenship and searched our trailer for human cargo as if Arizona was an independent country and this was an international border.

  At a café in Kingman, I put in a few hours teaching my online writing class while Sol and Maxito killed time at a park. I checked Santa Fe Craigslist for housing, found a listing for a quaint little adobe on Canyon Road and called the landlord.

  He said, “Sure, come and look.”

  A couple hundred miles then and a night in a rented teepee. I watched the quarter moon through the smoke hole and I prayed for nothing in particular, prayed that I wasn’t right here and now irrevocably ruining Maxito’s life, that I wasn’t ruining my own.

  Just a few months earlier, in Portland, I’d had what I always imagined I wanted: A partner and a home of my own, work in my chosen field, Maia making her way to an undergraduate degree. Some kind of an all in the list of checkmarked boxes I called life. I thought of my Gammie, and the way she’d pour herself a nice, tall vodka tonic whenever she saw my mother enter a room and sip her drink and whisper under her breath, “If there isn’t chaos, there soon will be.”

  Weak morning coffee and a couple hundred miles and the highway sign read Welcome to the Land of Enchantment. Casinos, desert, heat. A mid-spring dust storm held the highway in a terracotta haze.

  Do not come to Santa Fe. When we got there, I didn’t want to stop at the gutted house, didn’t want to tell Maia or my mother we’d arrived. So we just sped past the duplex that maybe wasn’t a duplex anymore. It didn’t look any different than it had back in November when I flew down and made the offer on it. Flat roof, faux-adobe stucco walls. A long rectangle of a place set on the property at an odd angle, as if it had landed there accidentally. A few dented pickup trucks were parked in the driveway, but no other evidence hinted at demolition or construction.

  We drove down Old Santa Fe Trail and up the hill to Canyon Road to look at that quaint adobe. The landlord had said “sure, come and look,” but when we pulled up with that turquoise trailer, two road-tired and tattooed queers and their sugar-faced kid, well, that landlord came running out and yelling into the street. “Do you know where you are?”

  I didn’t know.

  “It’s Canyon Road,” Sol whispered.

  “So?” I was confused.

  “This is the center of the art trade in all of America,” the landlord screamed. “This is the Wall Street of Santa Fe!”

  I didn’t quite know what he meant by all that, except that we wouldn’t be renting any quaint little adobe.

  The landlord was white like me but he called after us: “I am one of the premiere Native art dealers in the world!” And he shook this creepy wooden doll at us like a warning.

  I squinted at Sol as we drove away. “This is the Land of Enchantment?”

  We checked into the Econo Lodge, into a room next to the indoor pool.

  “Swimming,” I whispered to Maxito.

  And his tired face lit up.

  “Come on.” I took his sweaty hand.

  Outside the picture windows, the Santa Fe sunset painted things orange and we all sank into the chlorinated blue. Just three travelers. Submarine training in the desert.

  9.

  What If I Lived Here?

  DO YOU EVER PLAY THAT GAME “WHAT IF I LIVED HERE?” You’re just driving through some bright city or rain-washed town. What if I lived here? What if I lived in that pink trailer off the interstate? Or in that little brick house near the university? What if I lived in that giant glass spaceship of a building that clings to the
Pacific sea cliff? In that apartment with the picture window and the fire escape? In that ugly development at the state border? In that purple houseboat? Or here?

  I OPENED MY eyes and stared up at the cottage cheese ceiling. Where was I? It took me a long minute to put it together. Econo Lodge, Santa Fe. What if I lived in Santa Fe?

  I’d always played “What if I lived here?” but I’d always kept on driving.

  What would be the next step in the game? Geographical roulette. What if I gave myself 24 hours to build a life in this town where I knew almost no one? Then I’d call Maia and my mom and admit that we’d arrived.

  I left Sol and Maxito sleeping and headed down to the motel lobby for my promised “deluxe continental breakfast,” a stale bagel. I sat at a round table, clicking around on Craigslist looking for a life. There were houses and apartments that required full year leases, overpriced vacation sublets, and “ideal for one or two adults.” People who wanted to discriminate against kids were always so blatant about it.

  I clicked on commercial rentals. Sol and I had been self-employed in Portland, would be self-employed in Santa Fe. Maybe I’d find a place where I could teach writing workshops and Sol could run a little veterinary practice. We’d talked about opening a candle shop, too. And here was this: Santa Fe’s pioneering live/work rental community now leasing. I clicked on the floor plan. We’d get a 400-square-foot studio apartment, a storefront downstairs, and a back room – all for less than our mortgage back in Portland. This could be our life.

  I woke Sol to tell her where I was going.

  Maxito slept clutching a big pink hippo from Ikea.

  “Sound reasonable?” I whispered.

  Sol nodded sleepy. “Reasonable as anything.”

  Out in the parking lot behind the Econo Lodge, I unhitched the turquoise trailer. I stopped at the Goodwill a mile down to buy clothes that would hide my tattoos, but the hiding was hardly necessary. The landlord stood up to shake my hand, sat back down behind his glass desk. A white-haired Midwestern-type with a turquoise belt buckle, he had that mellow out-West vibe.

  I scribbled the rental application.

  He glanced over it. “Where you from, Ariel?”

  “California,” I said. “Originally.”

  He nodded without looking up. “What part?”

  “Bay Area. Born on the Monterey Peninsula.”

  He nodded again, leaned back in his desk chair and thought about that. “You know, it’s funny,” he said. “I used to know a Gore down on the Monterey Peninsula. I did. In the sixties. You ever know a Jim Gore?”

  I didn’t know if it would help or hurt my chance at the rental, but I blurted the truth. “Sure. He’s my biological father.” It wasn’t every day I met someone who’d ever known my schizy dad. He lived in Thailand now, collected butterflies and disability.

  “Far out,” the landlord said. He gazed out his sliding glass doors at the lavender and sage that exploded from the planter boxes outside. He didn’t ask if my biological father was still alive or how he was doing, just mumbled “I dropped a lot of acid with Jim Gore.” He pushed a lease across the desk for me to sign, shook his head. “Far, far out.”

  IN SANTA FE there were no tall buildings, just the flat-roofed adobes and fake adobes, the low mountains of the Sangre de Cristo range always in view. Every strip mall consisted of exactly one nail salon, one burrito shop, and one store featuring some very specific item made from organic cotton. Downtown add turquoise and silver, green chile and arugula, galleries of sunsets, and “contemporary tribal.”

  I DIDN’T WANT to go see my mother in her rented casita, didn’t want to tell her we’d arrived or that we wouldn’t be moving into any single room with her. I just wanted to think about the random new life I was building as if it were a driving game. I wanted to imagine a world in which my acid-dropping father and my mirror-gazing mother had never decided it was a good idea to get together and breed. Would the universe have given me different parents? Or would I still be an unrealized notion in the firmament? I just wanted to sit in my car next to my trailer in the Econo Lodge parking lot and watch the day’s dust storm roll in from the north.

  My phone buzzed. A message from my mother. Just the address of her casita and you might as well stop by and say hello. She already knew we were here.

  Of course she knew.

  A FEW HOURS later, Sol and Maxito and I stepped into the one-room casita that smelled of Paloma Picasso perfume. My mother didn’t look up from the little wooden table. She just fawned over blueprints and fed cucumber sandwiches to an older man I figured was the Anaïs Nin contractor. They sipped red wine in the dusty afternoon and threw their heads back and laughed.

  “I’ll need a chef’s kitchen,” my mother was saying.

  The man doodled something onto his plans. “You’ll need the best stonemason in New Mexico to redo that fireplace,” he said. He was good looking in that aging scholar who never landed a professorship kind of away; he wore a wedding band.

  “I’ll need a complete water purification system,” my mother said. “Not to mention an air purification system.”

  The man kept adding marks to his plans. “You’ll need the best cabinet maker in the Southwest.”

  My mother swooned and refilled his wine glass. “Well, hello.” She glanced up like she’d just noticed the three of us standing there inside the doorway. “Look at what the cat dragged in.” And then, “Oh, Ariel, don’t make that pitiful face. I’m joking, obviously. This is Ronaldo. Isn’t he marvelous?”

  The Anaïs Nin contractor crossed his arms over his chest. Did he just wink at us? “Ronald,” he said. “And your mother is the one who’s marvelous.”

  I nodded. “She’s something, isn’t she?”

  My mother had only been living in the casita for a couple of days, but the watercolor Henry Miller painted for her in the ’60s hung on the wall. She sighed, placed her hand on her contractor’s shoulder. “Ronaldo never actually met Anaïs Nin.”

  Ronald smiled a too-wide smile and raised his little eyebrows. “You know, Anais was a sexual revolutionary, so some people refer to her as the first hippie,” he explained without being asked. “Nothing could be further from the truth. She was, in fact, the last modernist. The hippies didn’t understand her.”

  “The last modernist,” my mother hummed.

  It made my skin crawl to imagine what this creep was thinking. My terminal mother pretending to be wealthy. Anyone could see that she was beautiful, but Ronald had to be star-struck, too. If my mother was an old lover of Henry Miller’s, well, that made her just one lover removed from Anaïs Nin. It practically made her Anaïs Nin. He’d found the very last modernist. And maybe she was loaded.

  I glanced over at Sol. She just shook her head and whispered, “We’re fucked.”

  I looked down at Maxito. Two years old and all love and acceptance, but he stared at his grandmother and this new man now like even he was starting to feel confused and desperate. “Hungry,” is all he said.

  “Well, anyway, my little urchin progeny,” my mother sighed, waving her hand toward the contractor’s plans and then toward us. “The house is going to be beautiful. I’ll make any deal I have to with God or the Devil to let me finish it before I die.”

  The afternoon sun angled in, giving my mother a sudden otherworldly glow.

  It kind of blew my mind how she could be so bizarre and so textbook at the same time. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ third emotional stage after a terminal diagnosis: Bargaining. You fill your calendar, you start a major project, you extend your deadlines, you make your deal, you buy time.

  AS WE WALKED back out to the car, my phone rang. My sister. I handed the keys to Sol, buckled Maxito into his seat. “Hey, Leslie.”

  “Hey, dude. Mom emailed that her contractor has a Ph.D. in Anaïs Nin.”

  “We just met him. Total creep. And it’s a Winchester Mystery House moment over here.” That old California Victorian had been under constant construction for almost four de
cades because the widow who lived there thought if she finished it, she’d die. Finally it was a hundred and sixty rooms and a mess of stairs that led nowhere and doors that opened to blank walls. She ended the construction. And died.

  I heard the flick of Leslie’s lighter and her quick inhale. “Winchester Mystery House meets Henry and June,” she laughed. “Whatever. Listen. Tell Mom that I hate Santa Fe with a passion and I wouldn’t come visit her there even if she was the last mother on earth. Not even if she builds a giant haunted house.”

  I kind of wanted to slap Leslie through the phone, but I just said, “All right. I’ll make sure and tell her that as soon as possible.”

  Leslie cackled just the way my mother did. “Is there anything I can help you with from here?”

  “Not really. Thanks for asking.” I clicked the phone off, glanced out the car window. Another strip mall: Nail salon, burrito shop, organic cotton dog clothes.

  Santa Fe. I lived here now.

  10.

  Conquest

  THE SOUND OF DRILLS AND THE SMELL OF FRESH PAINT. We were turning that gray live/work space into a bright candle shop/veterinary clinic/writing studio at trainspeed. With a little bit of profit from selling your beiged-up house by the train tracks and a Home Depot credit card, it turns out you can build a quick life anywhere you like.

  We moved what was left of our belongings – carloads of clothes and the furniture my mother hadn’t burned – into the studio apartment and a storage unit down the street.

  I bought New Mexican cookbooks from Collected Works Bookstore and shopped for the ingredients at Sunflower Market. Blue corn flour, pinto beans, and red and green chile – I could feed my little family on the cheap here.

  Everything was sunshine and transience.

  Maia had found a job at a shoe store at the mall, was saving up to get herself back to Los Angeles and college in time for summer session. She showed up at the half-finished live/work space her first day off wearing baggy jeans and high-heeled boots and we put Maxito’s car seat in the back of the Oldsmobile and left Sol to paint things blue and the three of us drove off over a speed bump to pretend this new life was something normal.