Tell Me the Truth About Love Page 5

  “Listen, I didn’t put that announcement in the paper. The Bishops did. They didn’t even ask me.”

  “Then tell them to print a retraction - that is, if it’s not true.”

  “Well, that would be a little hard on Bishy, don’t you think? Anyhow, she doesn’t want to get married until she graduates from college and that won’t be until next June. A lot can happen between now and then.”

  “Like what?”

  We were side by side on a banquette, and he put his arm around me. “Don’t worry, I’ll think of something. But for heaven’s sake, quit crying and eat your dinner.”

  Later we went to the East Village flat, and into the breakers that continued crashing so splendidly around our heads.

  Just before Christmas, David gave me a round-trip ticket to Santa Fe, for over New Year’s. It was his Christmas present, and the envelope was tied with a red ribbon and included also a little box containing a pair of pearl earrings from Tiffany. I was delighted with the earrings, but doubtful about the ticket. I wondered - as I still do - what he thought he was doing. Was it to make me stop crying? If so, he clearly hadn’t thought the matter through. Introspection was not only foreign to his nature, he thought it was unmanly. He called it “contemplating your navel.” So it was up to me to do the wondering and pondering, and to this day I am surprised that I accepted that trip to New Mexico when it should have been evident, even to my muddled head, that David and Bishy would sooner or later be married.

  “Will she be there?” I demanded.

  “Honestly, I don’t think so,” he said, “but I can’t absolutely promise. My parents could get into the act and invite the whole Bishop family. But it’s a house party, darling. Lots of people. So, come on, please be there. Be there because I want you!”

  One thing about un-contemplative men like David, they usually say what they mean - or, at least, what they think they mean. Whether, in the toils of David’s unconscious mind, he wanted two women vying for him, or whether he wanted to show his mother that he could pick his own girls without any help from her - or - or. But when he said, “Be there because I want you,” I couldn’t resist that plea.

  I flew to New Mexico on the last day of December. The sun was setting while we were over the plains of western Kansas, prompting the pilot to call our attention to the snowy peaks ahead, part of the southern Rocky Mountains. They were fiery red with the sunset. I felt as though I were entering a different and enchanted world. Later I found out that those words had been appropriated by the State of New Mexico Tourism Office. “Land of Enchantment” was the message on the license plates. Santa Fe was “The City Different.” I wince at those words now. Nevertheless, they still bring to mind that December sunset and those peaks of fire and snow.

  Then the moon rose, and, as we flew on, the terrain below became more hilly and the snowy ground was dotted all over with dark, roughly circular shapes. These were piñon and juniper trees. Later, when I came to know these trees at eye level, I saw how gnarled and sturdy they are, like very old people who are survivors and stayers. They are the essence of this ancient and uncompromising part of the world.

  I looked eagerly for David the minute I got off the plane, but he wasn’t there. Baffled and a little frightened, I waited by the baggage carousels, wondering what I should do after retrieving my suitcase. Then a tall, thin-faced young man came up and asked if I were Alexandra Burrows.

  “How did you know?” I asked, much relieved.

  “David told me to look for a pretty girl, looking dazed,” he said, “in a - uh - fur coat. And, by the way, I’m David’s brother. Oz.”

  Much later, Oz told me that David had said to look for a pretty girl, looking dazed, in a funny-looking fur coat. I was wearing my mother’s twenty-year-old Australian opossum, and funny-looking was too kind a word for it. It was yellowed and shapeless and unrecognizable as any known kind of fur. Hedgehog, maybe.

  “Where’s David?” I asked.

  “Ma needed him at home. Too many guests.” Oz was looking the crowd over. “I’m supposed to pick up two more people I’ve never seen before. Friends of my parents, from Chicago.”

  After a while, we found both my suitcase and the Chicago couple, Mr. and Mrs. Furlong. From the airport, at Albuquerque, to the Gallegos Ranch is about seventy miles, mostly on the highway. I was too disappointed at not being met by David to do any talking. I sat silently beside Oz, and the Furlongs chattered away in the back seat.

  Mr. Furlong said it was good to feel this dry cold air, so different from the humid cold of Lake Forest, where they lived; but just the same they were glad that their next destination was the Caribbean.

  “We had no idea it would be cold here,” Mrs. Furlong put in. “We were packing nothing but resort clothes. After all, we’ve been to Tucson and it’s warm there.”

  Oz explained, “We are seven thousand feet high.”

  “It was certainly lucky for us that we called Lydia to check about what to bring,” Mr. Furlong said. He sounded annoyed, as if he had been deliberately deceived. It’s an attitude I’ve often seen in visitors. They think Santa Fe is in Arizona and should have grapefruit orchards and giant cacti.

  By the time we arrived at Gallegos Ranch it was after midnight and the rest of the house party had gone to bed. Oz found a note from Lydia, saying “Saving our strength for New Year’s Eve. See you at breakfast.” The Furlongs were billeted in the main house and I in the guesthouse (where Oz and I later lived). An aunt of Lydia’s was occupying the big bedroom there, and I had a sliver of a room with Southwest furniture in it. Being ignorant of such things, I mistook it for junk. In fact, the narrow, uncomfortable Taos bed was a good antique, and the crooked chest of drawers had been made in some mountain village a hundred years before. On top of this chest was a hastily scribbled note from David: “Mother asked the Bishops. Thank God you’re here!! Can’t wait to see you. XXXXXXXXX D.”

  I went to bed, wearing my new pearl earrings, which seemed to make me feel less lonely.

  Next morning, I put on a sweater twin-set and a wool skirt. Surely that was correct for a morning in the country? No, it was not. The six or seven other young people I met in the dining room were all in ski pants and heavy hand-knit sweaters.

  “Didn’t you bring your skis?” someone asked me. “Would you like to borrow some?”

  “I don’t ski.”

  “Don’t ski?” The girl looked at me curiously. “I thought maybe you’d hurt your leg or something.”

  I wished I’d thought of that very good excuse. Another of the girl guests was on crutches and was getting lots of attention and waiting-on.

  Lydia Smithson came into the room. At that time, she was in her fifties, an outstandingly handsome woman. With her quick gestures and long, narrow body, she might have been thought younger had it not been for her weather-beaten complexion. New Mexico is unkind to the faces of women, especially of those who ski, ride, and spend a lot of time outdoors. The deep furrows that now riddle Lydia’s face had already started. They remind me of the furrows left by flash floods in this dry land.

  She extended her long, thin hand to me. “Miss Burrows? How nice you could join us. But you don’t ski, I understand. Never mind. We have horses. And a skating pond.”

  My heart sank. I had never learned to do anything well in the way of sports.

  “I like walking,” I dishonestly said. “I really love to walk.”

  “Splendid. We’ll send you out to exercise the dogs.”

  This was my first encounter with Lydia Smithson and it was remarkably predictive of how our relationship would develop. I knew she was forming an unfavorable opinion of my degree of self-possession. On my part, I was sizing her up as malevolent.

  “David and his fiancée left early,” she went on, “to get a full day of skiing at Taos. David’s asked Osgood to look after you today, but he is not up yet.”

  “Osgood?”

  “Our older son.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I thought you calle
d him Oz.”

  “We do,” she said.

  I thought, she is going out of her way to leave me out of the “we.” She wants to tell me that there are insiders and outsiders. And yet how could she possibly do anything that silly? Over the years I found out: she could.

  The rest of the skiers left the house soon after. Osgood Decatur Smithson IV appeared about half an hour later, and we seemed to be the only ones left in the house,

  “I’m afraid I’m keeping you from skiing,” I said. “Please don’t stay home on my account. Your mother told me to walk the dogs.” Actually, I was afraid I was going to cry, and for that reason wouldn’t have minded being alone. I was only half aware of what I was saying to Oz, making idiot pleasantries just as I had often seen my parents do over the years. I wasn’t bad at that.

  Oz didn’t have much small talk, but he had the grace to appear interested in my chatter. He said, “I really would like to show you around. Do you want to see some Indian ruins? Los Alamos? Eat some chili?”

  “All of it,” I said, and my mother would have been proud of my enthusiasm and warmth.

  All morning, Oz drove me along winding two-lane roads in the brilliant sunshine and the cold clear air. The sky was as blue as a sky can get - bluer than it ever gets over Santa Fe nowadays, because of automobile exhausts and jet trails. The barren landscape offered subdued colors: pink rocks, gray cottonwood trunks, dark red branches of salt cedar, pale yellow dirt of dry arroyos. Here in the valley, no snow was on the ground. For snow, you had to raise your eyes to the slopes of the mountains. Houses were few. You could look in many directions and see none, or one. Terrain like this seemed to me overwhelming - more like the bottom of the ocean, minus the water, than a place to live. And I was already overwhelmed in another way - by David’s carelessness. Why had he brought me all this way, knowing that I couldn’t ski or ride or fit in at all? Or had he not been listening when I had tried to make this clear? And I had tried, more than once. I had told him about beginning to ski when we were stationed in Germany, and then, just as I was catching on, finding myself in Bangkok, fourteen degrees from the equator. The idea occurred to me that my feelings and concerns were of less than urgent interest to him.

  Had it not been for David forsaking me, I would have enjoyed this day with his brother. We stopped for lunch at the Rio Grande Cafe, in Espanola, where I ate my first enchilada and did not blink or choke over the hot green chili.

  Oz expressed surprise and I explained, “It’s because I used to live in Bangkok-” which surprised him even more. When I recited the other places where I’d lived, he asked me where home was (not “what place did you like best?”, which most people asked). I said, “Nowhere.” But then he looked so concerned and sorry for me that I added, “I don’t mind.”

  “Maybe I envy you,” he said after a pause. “New Mexico is my home, but, you know, none of us Anglos can ever feel completely natural here. There’s always something a little exotic about it, a little bit stagey. It really belongs to the Indians and the Spanish.”

  Then he started telling me about his horse. I could see that fear of introspection must be a Smithson family trait. He was voluble on the subject of his horse, of which he was very fond, and his short-haired German pointers. He said he did a lot of hunting. I tried to find out from him just what it was he liked about depriving wild things of their lives, but one seldom gets answers from hunters. Since then it has occurred to me that one reason he hunts is because his mother is so violently opposed to it. This is one way he can assert himself against her. But if that’s so, I am sure he is unaware of it.

  Oz and I spent the afternoon making farolitos for the party. A farolito is a new brown paper bag, filled with enough sand to hold a candle upright in it. Eighty or more, spaced evenly along the driveway and by the front door and on the roof give a festive, glowing light to welcome the party guests.

  I found 1 was enjoying myself - or, at least, more than I would have thought possible. Oz was nice. Not as handsome as David, not as bright, not as funny. But, I thought, better endowed with common sense.

  When I got back to the guesthouse, Lydia’s aunt, my housemate, was looking for me. She wanted to propose that I bathe and dress for the party first as she’d like to take her time and was in no hurry. She was a woman in her seventies, pretty and chatty. She sat down on a corner of my bed and told me several things that depressed me, such as that Bishy was a lovely girl and the Bishops were just about the dearest people in the world; that they were so happy to be getting David as a son-in-law because he was such a steady young man and they knew he would take good care of their darling. And David had started a wonderful magazine that everyone in the East expected would put The New Yorker out of business. And how nice it was that I had been able to come, and where had I known Oz before? Oz was - well - different from David, but he was very nice, too. Quiet. Not so ambitious. Not such a live wire. But awfully nice.

  I put on my evening dress. It was very conventional - dark blue velvet, strapless, with a full skirt. With David’s pearl earrings and a pearl necklace borrowed from my mother, I thought I looked appropriate. My mother would have said so. But when I went to the main house, I found that the other girls were wearing Mexican or Indian clothes: bright, swirling skirts, off-the-shoulder blouses, concho belts, long clanky earrings, and armloads of silver bracelets.

  Girls can be merciless when it comes to judging the clothes of other girls. I felt their glances, which said, “Who in the world can this be?” But the situation was alleviated by the arrival of David, who ran to me with a cowboy whoop and seized me in his arms.

  “Queen Alexandra, sweetheart, am I glad to see you!”

  I smiled as best I could, but he saw that I was at the point of weeping. He shepherded me into the library and closed the door.

  “Alex, come on, don’t be mad at me. I can’t help it that the Bishops are here. Ma did it. Did Oz treat you right today?”

  “Of course. He’s very nice. But did you ask me here so Oz could show me around?”

  “Don’t be silly. Things just got screwed up. Listen, you look terrific. Never saw a prettier girl.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that I was supposed to look Mexican? I feel really dumb.”

  He let go of me and began pacing the room. I could see that I’d better stop complaining; it would get me nowhere, except lower in his estimation. I found a mirror to peer into and wiped away the tears. Then I smiled at David.

  He said, “Sorry, sorry, sorry. I really am, baby. I wanted you to have a good time here.”

  “I will,” I said. “I am already.” I was always afraid, when he was anything but his most cheerful self, that he might stop loving me, or that he had already. I added, “When does the music start?”

  “When you and I start it.” He looked happy again.

  A mariachi band would begin later, but right now there was plenty of recorded music, at a deafening pitch, and colored lights flashing on the dance floor (which was the sala with all the furniture removed). David and I were first. I saw Bishy on the sidelines, scowling, but David seemed not to notice her. There was no doubt that we two danced well, and after that I got a succession of partners. One of them was Oz, with a smooth, respectable, coming-out-party style of the Fifties, which was when he had learned to dance. Later on, Mr. Smithson cut in and turned out to dance better than anyone there. Both he and Oz foundered when rock-and-roll was played, but I acquired other partners, whose names I never discovered. I had to admit to myself that I was having a good time.

  As midnight approached, I looked around for David, but he was nowhere in sight. Neither was Bishy. Some of the guests had gone out to skate on the little pond, and I supposed that was where the two of them were. So, I thought, he can’t be bothered, even at midnight - . But the sentence wouldn’t finish itself. Clearly there was no way to deal with David except on his own terms.

  I decided to go back to the guesthouse, perhaps to freshen up and then return, perhaps to go to bed and b
e miserable. I hadn’t decided. On the way, I saw a man and a girl running on the frozen, moonlit lawn, laughing and falling down. I recognized David’s enthusiastic laughter. Then he picked up the girl in his arms - she was Bishy, of course - and spun her around and around.

  “Happy New Year, Happy New Year,” he kept shouting. I could tell that he was half drunk; maybe two thirds. “Happy, happy, happy-”

  Bishy said, much more calmly, “David, this time next year, we’ll be married.”

  He set her down and began waltzing with her, singing inexplicably, “Boys and girls together/ Me and Mamie O’Rourke/ We’ll trip the light fantastic/ On the sidewalks of New York.”

  I wondered whether Bishy found him as hard to understand as I did. If I had continued walking across the lawn, they would have seen me, so I went back to where the music was and danced some more. I felt like someone in a Hieronymus Bosch painting, dancing crazily while the Plague, or Death, or Devils struck down other dancers and hauled them away to a realm of skeletons and bat-faced monsters. It would be only a matter of time before they got to me.

  In a little while, David came to find me. I was dancing with his father, and he cut in.

  “Come here,” he said, whirling me into a corner, where he gave me a long, slow kiss. “Damn, where have you been? I’ve been looking for you.”

  Although I knew that wasn’t true, I couldn’t help putting my arms around his neck and kissing him back.

  “I wish we were alone,” he said in my ear. “Sweetheart, my darling, I really feel terrible - that I can’t be with you every minute.”

  I could lie, too. “I’m having a terrific time,” I said, just then his father came and reclaimed me, and somehow I didn’t see David again for the rest of the night.

  Since I had to be in Albuquerque before noon on New Year’s Day to catch my plane back to New York, I set the alarm for seven. But I was awake before it went off, and then, trained as I was never to miss transportation, I dressed and was ready to leave within fifteen minutes. A wintry sunrise was just taking place behind the eastern mountains, and when I looked out of the window I saw no life except for a jackrabbit, as big as a dachshund, loping over the frozen lawn. Snores came from Lydia’s relative in the next room. I decided that I might venture into the main-house kitchen and perhaps find some instant coffee and a bite to eat, without fear of having to make conversation with anyone.