Tell Me the Truth About Love Read online

  “Tell us about your life, Vincent,” commanded Lydia, as we began to eat one of Mrs. Martinez’s especially good dinners: rib roast, Yorkshire pudding, and creamed spinach, followed by a creamy Mexican flan.

  Vincent put down an overladen fork and looked wary.

  “What about it?” he asked.

  “Your life,” repeated Lydia. “What do you do every day?”

  “Get up. Eat breakfast. Jog to school. Go to classes. Come home.”

  “Perhaps I should have said - what do you like to do? What have you done lately that you enjoyed most?”

  He threw me a desperate look, hesitated, then said, “Hunting. My dad took me hunting last fall. We got three deer.”

  “Three deer?” Lydia said ominously. “Three? How many do the game people allow? Surely not three?”

  “Well, not exactly. It’s one per license. But, well, you know.”

  “No, I don’t know.”

  “I mean, you can go out at night and hunt with you know lights? That way, they don’t catch you, if you get home before dawn.”

  “You flash bright lights in the animals’ eyes and that blinds them, is that how it goes?”

  “You got it,” Vincent said.

  I broke in at this point and asked him what he liked best of the subjects he was studying.

  “Accounting.”

  I could say little about that, but Decatur suddenly stopped gazing out the window at the birds, and spoke. “Bankers in the family. Going way back. Talent for money, good thing to have.”

  “And what do you intend doing when you graduate?” Lydia pressed on.

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” Vincent said, indistinctly, because his mouth was full. “My dad does wholesale fish. I’d like helping him.”

  A silence pervaded the pretty dining room. A soft breeze lifted the lace curtains at the windows, which looked out toward the tallest Sangre de Cristo peaks. I wished I were up there, hiking, all by myself.

  “Well, I must let you eat your dinner,” Lydia said. “I’ll take some more wine, Deck, if you please.”

  Vincent dug in. He ate rapidly and not entirely silently, while the rest of us talked about the weather forecast for the weekend, the evening news from Washington, and what to do about a new contingent of gophers in the lawn. Decatur asked where David was. Although he had been thoroughly briefed about this whole enterprise, he tended to forget parts of it.

  “When’s he coming home?” he persisted.

  “Deck, shut up,” Lydia said. “Vincent, will you have another glass of wine?”

  “No thanks, ma’am,” he said. “I don’t like wine. I like beer.”

  “Oh, I see,” Lydia said. She never kept beer in the house, considering it vulgar.

  I began to wonder how the five of us were going to survive the long weekend. I knew that Lydia had a schedule for Vincent - a complicated one, designed to keep him away from the general public, so that he wouldn’t tell his story, but also to exhibit him to a few friends whose opinion she would later ask for. This was tricky, and in fact it proved unworkable.

  Next day we took Vincent to an Indian dance, and he got talking to a girl who eventually carried him off to a barbecue party. Someone brought him home in the middle of the night, and he was discovered next morning by Filomena, asleep in the hammock, and the worse for beer. I immediately diagnosed hereditary alcoholism. Lydia had better not blame this one on me.

  But I was forgetting that in Lydia’s view - and the view of her class and generation - drinking was a frivolity, a kind of joke; a failing, perhaps, but not a serious one. She was a conventional person, and she saw hard drinking as just another convention. If Vincent came home dead drunk, she did not find it blameworthy, although she would have preferred, no doubt, that he had reached that point on martinis or Scotch highballs rather than on the blue-collar drink. Stories of drunken antics had always amused her. Her code drew the line at well-bred women who lost their dignity, but nevertheless she gladly told drinking stories about women she didn’t like, and even, once in a while, a story about herself when “a wee bit tiddly.”

  I was confident, therefore, that Vincent had not gone too far. But - who was that girl he had left the Indian dance with?

  “Her name is Cherry,” he told Lydia.

  “Cherry? Good God. I don’t believe I’ve ever heard that name before. Cherry Who?”

  “I didn’t ask her.”

  “Cherry. Well, Vincent, you have to watch your step a little bit here. It didn’t used to be so when we first came to live in Santa Fe. Everybody knew everybody. But lately there are so many that are new.”

  “But so am I new. Everybody last night was real friendly. This seems like a real nice place.”

  Lydia decided to reminisce. “It was quite different in the Thirties. And much nicer. Your grandfather and I were the first Anglos to buy in this valley. And the Spanish people were so sweet in those days. So honest, so polite. They were all like Mrs. Martinez. But now we’re seeing a flood of very peculiar newcomers - movie stars, and nouveau riche types, from places like California and Texas and God knows where. They wear two-hundred-dollar cowboy hats. And even the locals, even the Indians, have changed. That field right by our entrance used to be a beautiful chili field, but now you just see auto parts strewn all around. Somebody’s junk business. And they say the local drug dealers congregate there.”

  “Sounds like New Haven,” Vincent said.

  “But let’s talk about something pleasanter,” Lydia went on. “Vincent, I want you to know that I furnished this house mostly with finds from the countryside here. That chest over there was brought up from Mexico by the Gallegos family in the eighteenth century, and I bought it from their descendants. Well, of course, the ones that sold it had no idea of its value.”

  Vincent looked at the chest. “Real old,” he pronounced, nodding wisely. He then noticed a carved Madonna. “Are you guys Catholic?” he asked.

  “No,” Lydia replied. “We guys are not. But this old Spanish-Colonial art is absolutely charming and it’s worth a lot now, too, because you can’t get it anymore.”

  But Vincent’s mind had skipped to his own interests.

  “Are there any ice hockey teams here?”

  Lydia did not deign to reply. She was growing weary.

  “Take him to an Indian dance, Alexandra,” she said. “They’re dancing today at San Ildefonso. And it’s time for my nap.”

  I thought, when will I learn to manipulate people the way she does? And why do I let her get away with it?

  “We saw a dance yesterday,” objected Vincent. “I tried to take pictures, so I could show my mom and dad, but this Indian guy wanted to charge me. Seriously, what do you see in those dances? They don’t even dance.”

  “Well, Vincent, you see-” I wasn’t sure how to explain this, or whether to try. “Their dancing is a very ancient form of ceremony. It’s primeval. Archetypal. When we see it, we might as well be way back in time, watching our earliest ancestors.”

  Vincent reflected on this and then said, “Maybe I’d like the dancing if I were in there with them. But just standing around in a crowd and, like, eyeballing it, I don’t think that’s so - so-”

  “Primeval? You’re right. The tourists and cars don’t fit in.”

  “Can you imagine a primeval tourist?” he said, and chuckled. I was glad to see a sense of humor in him. After all, he’d been under a lot of pressure since we’d met.

  Late in the day, Lydia came over to our house, leaving Vincent playing gin rummy with Deck.

  “They are getting on quite well,” she told us. “There seems to be a kindred spirit there.”

  “Don’t be silly, Mother,” Oz said irritably. “This kid and Pa have zilch in common. Nada.”

  “The boy has promise. Don’t you agree?”

  “I haven’t seen a sign of it.”

  “What do you think, Alex?”

  I wanted to stay out of it. “This is your project, Lydia,” I said.
/>   “I get very tired of always being the one to make decisions,” she said, glaring at both of us. “Of course, he’s frightfully common, but certain things can be changed. He’s young enough to learn manners and to stop taking such enormous helpings. If we lived in Providence it would be hopeless, but here there’s plenty of room for rough diamonds, don’t you think? Most people here don’t recognize a wrong-side-of-the-tracks New England accent. This afternoon Deck took him to the wine cellar and gave him a lesson. He’ll be knowing wine in no time.”

  I had certainly expected that Lydia would have sent Vincent away by this time, and I found it amazing that she was sticking to her dream. Could Vincent be imagined taking over his grandfather’s upper-class ways, tasting wine, wearing velvet slippers embroidered with unicorns, and speaking as if he had been to Groton and Harvard? How many years did she think it would take to turn this sow’s ear into the silk purse she was looking for?

  After Lydia left, I asked Oz what he thought.

  “What do I think? I think this is one for David’s side. Our mother is totally out to lunch. The whole idea of finding this wretched kid and dragging him out here is hare-brained.”

  To my surprise, I flashed back, “Wretched? I don’t think so at all. He’s a nice, decent boy and I like him.”

  Oz looked at me with some annoyance. He got up and paced the room. “Do you really want someone like that taking over here?”

  “Worse things could happen,” I said. “I like him.”

  “I don’t,” Oz said. “You might as well go out and collar the first overweight adolescent you find on the street. Nothing special about him - just ordinary. Maybe the Glorious Light crowd are a better idea, after all.”

  “Oh, sure,” I said, finding myself quite angry. “You’d rather have kooky strangers than David’s child.”

  Oz threw himself down in his big chair, ignoring what I’d said, and went on, “Poor Bishy, what a rotten deal she’s had. First. she lost a beautiful little son, and now the only heir to carry on the Smithsons is this dumb bastard. God knows who his mother was.”

  “But this is all Bishy’s idea,” I pointed out.

  “Yes, and it was a bad one, but - poor girl - she’s unhappy. It’s about time she left David.”

  “Bishy leave David? Never. It’s not in her character.”

  “Don’t be too sure. She stops in at the bank sometimes and talks to me. I can tell there’s trouble going on.”

  I would have liked to hear more about that, but Oz changed the subject. “By the way, David called me at the bank this morning. Wanted to know what this boy is like. I think he was relieved when I told him the pits.”

  “Was he calling from California or New York?”

  “Neither. That’s the funny thing. He said he was in L.A., but halfway through the conversation someone came into the room where he was, to ask him something, and I heard a voice I recognized. It was Rudy - his head cowhand. Rudy’s got a speech defect, a sort of lisp. You can’t miss it. I know, because I’ve talked to him on the phone several times. It was Rudy, all right, so David must have been home at the ranch.”

  So, I thought. David is hiding. And some part of him really cares about his son, or he wouldn’t have telephoned.

  On the Tuesday after Memorial Day weekend, I was the one to take Vincent to the airport. I could tell that things had not gone well with Lydia, because she did not come out of the house to see him off. Decatur came shambling along, offered his hand, grinned, clapped Vincent on the back. But I’m not sure that he knew to whom he was saying goodbye. In a stylish old man like Decatur, manners are the last component to disintegrate. On the last day of his life he will stand up if a lady enters the room.

  “Goodbye, my boy. It’s been a great pleasure to have you with us.”

  “Bye,” said Vincent, and hopped into the car. Manners were as easy for him as for Decatur, though in an opposite way: he simply omitted them entirely.

  For about twenty miles on 1-25, Vincent had nothing to say at all. He sat beside me like a large stuffed animal.

  Finally, he said, “I need your advice.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  He peered around at me with his wide, earnest eyes. “How can I get out of this?”

  I felt like laughing, but of course nothing was funny. “Do you mean, out of inheriting a million-dollar property?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You can just say you don’t want it.”

  “I did. I told the old lady that. But she got sort of, like, mad.”

  “Never mind if she got mad. It’s your right to decide your own life. But are you sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure. I don’t like it here. I asked if my mom and dad could move out here with me if I accepted and she said no.”

  “Hmm.”

  Vincent sighed. Then he looked at me imploringly and said, “Alex, I was hoping I’d at least see my father.”

  “Well, you know, Vincent, I told you-”

  “But why doesn’t he want to see me?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he would find it too painful. I doubt that he just doesn’t give a damn.”

  “Where is he?”

  “At his ranch, I guess.”

  “Do you like him?”

  “Yes,” I said, and felt rather surprised to hear that.

  We continued to drive toward Albuquerque in silence. I noticed that Vincent was sweating, and I said, “It’s getting hotter. When we leave Santa Fe and start going downhill the temperature rises. Albuquerque is two thousand feet lower.”

  But he didn’t seem to have been listening to me. He was looking miserable.

  “Listen, Alex,” he said. “Are you my friend? Then take me to see my father.”

  “Oh, Vincent-”

  “No, look, I mean it. I’ll never be back here again, and I just want to have seen him. I mean, don’t you think he owes me something? After all, he HAD me.”

  “It was your mother who had you, Vincent,” I pointed out gently.

  “But he sure had a lot to do with it. Alex, I’m asking you. I think I’ll hate him, but I just want to meet him.”

  “It’s about a two-hour drive. You’ll miss your plane.”

  “We’ll call up and cancel.”

  “It won’t be easy to get another seat today - right after the long weekend.”

  “I don’t care how long it takes.” He looked at me beseechingly. “Don’t say no,” he said.

  So that was how it happened. When we reached the intersection of Route 1-40, I turned east. Common sense suggested to me that David might not be there; that instead I’d find Bishy; or both of them. But now I knew I had to do this and that it would be a mistake to phone and say we were coming because then David would surely disappear. And suddenly, I also knew something else: I, too, wanted to see David.

  When we reached the first small town, Vincent asked me to turn off the highway. He wanted, he said, to buy something: a souvenir. At his request, we found a hardware store, and Vincent went in alone, returning with a large paper bag. He did not volunteer any comments, nor did I make any. About an hour later, we stopped for gas, and Vincent treated me to a Coke. I told him that was kind of him and he smiled for the first time on this journey.

  “I’m real nervous,” he said,

  “Of course, you are. So am I.”

  “You? Why should you be nervous?”

  Although I couldn’t explain, I told him what was certainly true: “Because I don’t know what’s ahead of us here and I want the best for you.”

  To my surprise, he leaned over and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “You’re nice,” he said.

  After that we talked but little. We were now on a two-lane road that ran straight across grazing country. On either side of the road we passed herds of cattle, always congregated around one of the scarce shade trees. Typical New Mexico clouds, like small, uniform puffs of very white smoke, gave some definition to the otherwise limitless blue sky. In the rear-view mirror I could see the eastern
slopes of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains near Santa Fe, colored green, gray, and misty blue.

  “Look behind you, Vincent,” I said. “Beautiful New Mexico.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But, like, empty, I never saw anything so empty. I could never live here.”

  “Lucky for you, you don’t have to,” I said.

  I had never been to David’s ranch, but, more than once over the years, I had studied the road map to find the little town it was near. When we reached that town, I inquired at a gas station if anyone knew where the Smithson Ranch was, and someone did: five miles farther, on the right. “Look for the blue gate.”

  Here on the high plains, the wind was much rowdier than in Santa Fe. During the twenty minutes it took to reach the blue gate, gusts began to sweep across the range, so that tiny volleys of dust struck the windshield and our faces. I thought, Bishy would have to love either ranching or David very much to put up with this. Does she? And which one?

  The blue gate, which Vincent got out of the car to open and close, led onto a dirt road that continued for several miles. Finally, we saw the ranch house in the distance, set among cottonwoods. Not far from it we passed a corral where cowhands were breaking a young horse.

  “It’s a cattle ranch, Vincent,” I said. “Not like Gallegos Ranch.”

  “Why don’t the Smithsons have animals?”

  “Too much trouble. They lease some acreage to farmers, but that’s about it.”

  “Then why have all that land?”

  I thought for a minute. “Prestige, maybe.”

  “Why do they need prestige?”

  “You ask good questions, Vincent. I hope you’ll take a course in sociology.”

  We passed an old, windowless adobe barn with doors that were closed and barred.

  “What’s that for?”

  “I don’t know. Storage, maybe.”

  “That big old blank wall makes me think of a clean blackboard. All ready to write on.”