“Of course it’s Alice,” I said. “Go inside.”
He came and stood next to me. “Alice?” he said, as if he didn’t recognize her.
I put my hands on her shoulders. I didn’t try to embrace her. I just held on to her, so she wouldn’t feel like she was dropping away from everything.
“Oh, Alice, I’m sorry,” he said. “Oh God, I’m so, so sorry.”
“You didn’t do—” was all Alice could get out.
Bobby drew a noisy breath and started to cry, too. I wanted to punch him. How dare he be anything but strong at a moment like this? I actually lifted one hand to do it, to slap him out of himself. I had always wanted to make a gesture like that. But my hand stopped halfway and, following the line of least resistance, settled comfortingly on his back instead. What else could I do with my hand? I wasn’t the heroic type. I had no plan of action. Bobby trembled, and as I touched him his trembling went through me like an electric shock. My father popped into my mind. Suddenly he was there, solid as a photograph, handsome and arrogant in his winter coat. I kept one hand on Alice and one on Bobby. I could see my father so clearly, and my mother: outraged, efficient, aging in a square-shouldered red jacket. I saw Ned distinctly as if I had known him, turned away by his discontented wife, watching movies among his dwindling audience, dreaming of Faye Dunaway or Elizabeth Taylor.
I held on to Bobby and Alice. Obeying no one but myself I put my head back and laughed. Not that anything was funny. But I laughed anyway. I knew I ought to feel embarrassed, for laughing at a time like that, but things had gone too far. I decided not to be embarrassed, and wasn’t. I kept laughing. The fact that nothing was funny only seemed to make me laugh harder.
Soon a light, questioning touch landed on my shoulder. It was Jonathan, looking timid and hungry, asking by his touch to be let into the circle. I made room for him between myself and Bobby, and laid my arm across his shoulders so I could keep my hold on Bobby, too. I let myself go on laughing. I felt a weight beginning to rise inside me, something big and sodden, like a lump of dough I’d swallowed so long ago I’d forgotten it was lodged in my gut. I laughed on. I laughed at my father, a drunken boy tortured by his own devotion to sleaze and disorder, and at my tough, vengeful mother. I laughed at Ned, a dreamer reduced to ash and bone; at wimpy Jonathan; at Bobby and at myself, knocked up three months after my fortieth birthday by a man I wasn’t sure I liked. I laughed at Alice, stuck in a fake house in the desert because she couldn’t imagine a life without a corner cupboard. At every lousy little thing.
JONATHAN
CLARE got sick in seven different states. She was nauseated first at the Grand Canyon, standing wan and erect beside an unused telescope on the South Rim, looking in the direction of the view from behind dark glasses. As Bobby strained against the railing, exclaiming over the profound distances, Clare touched my elbow and said in a low voice, “Sweetheart, I don’t think I can manage it.”
“Manage what?” I asked.
“This,” she said, waving in the direction of the abyss. “All this grandeur and beauty. A great moment like this. It’s too much for me.”
I stood close to her. Although the morning was calm, I had some idea of shielding her from whatever winds might be stirred up by the canyon’s vastness. The sun had just risen. It threw a hammered, golden light onto the cliff faces, which tumbled down into an unsteady, shimmering lake of translucent purple darkness that appeared to be bottomless. Bobby danced ecstatically at the rim, hugging himself and emitting surprised little groans.
“There’s nothing to it,” I told Clare. “Just stand here and look, and when we’re through looking, we’ll go have breakfast.”
The word “breakfast” made her retch. She caught the telescope for support. It swung creakily up toward a vivid pink gash of cloud. She crouched, gagging, but did not vomit. A thread of saliva dangled from her mouth, shining in the light.
I held her shoulders. “Honey, you’re sick,” I said.
“Too goddamn beautiful,” she said. “Better put me back in that Chevy Nova.”
“Wait a minute, I’ll go get Bobby.”
“Leave him,” she said. “Don’t interrupt, he’s in a trance or something.”
She may have been right. Bobby had ceased his hopping, wound-up little dance and was now standing with both hands on the rail, like a captain commanding his ship in a storm. He was more available than Clare or I to outright fits of sentiment—he had no sense of going too far.
I helped Clare into our rented Chevrolet. She and I had agreed, with mingled feelings of irony and plain interest, to drive back to New York from Arizona. This was our first morning—we’d set out at 3 a.m. from my mother’s house to make the Grand Canyon by sunrise. In the next five days we would cross the Rockies and the Plains, pay our respects to the Ohio dead, buy Shaker boxes in Pennsylvania. It was Bobby’s trip at heart. He would drive most of the time, and insist on stopping in stores that advertised “Homemade Jam” or “Local Handicrafts,” which, three times out of four, had been made somewhere in Asia. He would, with my credit card, buy over a hundred dollars’ worth of cassette tapes: the Stones, David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen. He would play “Born to Run” over and over, until Clare finally threw it out the window on the road approaching Sandusky.
I settled her into the front seat. The car had an immaculate, rubberized smell and she inhaled deeply, as if the disinfected air could revive her. “Thanks, honey,” she said. “Now go. Look at the view.”
“No, I’ll stay here with you.”
“Do you think I want to be the one who made you sit in a subcompact instead of seeing the Grand Canyon? Go. For Christ’s sake.”
I went. I stood beside Bobby at the railing. At this hour, in the off-season, the observation area was empty. One crushed paper cup sat luminous on the thin lip of red earth beyond the rail. The morning light, brilliant but without warmth, washed our faces and clothes.
“Amazing,” I said.
Bobby turned to me. He couldn’t speak, and probably wished I wouldn’t either. But his politeness never failed him.
“Uh-huh,” he said.
“You don’t expect this,” I said. “I mean, you’ve seen it so many times on coasters and dish towels and I don’t know what-all. I thought maybe it was going to be sort of kitschy.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It actually knocked Clare out. I had to put her back in the car.”
“Hmm.” He put his arm over my shoulder, because he loved me and because he ardently wished I would shut up. I slipped my arm around his waist. Here was his smell and his solid, familiar flesh. We watched the sun come up. Bobby was warm and substantial, his brain crawling with thoughts that were at once familiar and utterly strange to me. His wrist still bore the liver-colored mole. Clare waited for us in the car, defeated by the view. I believed, at that moment, that I had never loved anyone but my parents and these two people. Perhaps we don’t fully recover from our first loves. Perhaps, in the extravagance of youth, we give away our devotions easily and all but arbitrarily, on the mistaken assumption that we’ll always have more to give.
Clare was sick again the following morning, at Pikes Peak. “Maybe I’m allergic to national monuments,” she said. We got her to the women’s room in a Shell station, and waited for nearly half an hour. She emerged pallid and straight-backed, with her sunglasses on and dark red lipstick newly applied. She might have been an ancient movie star. Behind her, granite peaks stood dusted with snow.
“Honey,” I said, “should we drive straight to Denver and put you on a plane?”
“No,” she said. “I think I’m all right. I got over it yesterday, didn’t I? It’s probably just some little bug.”
She had, in fact, recovered by ten o’clock. The color returned to her face, and her body gave up its clenched, formal posture. We drove among meadows that were taking on their first green, backed by mountains covered with pine and bare white aspens. It was a verdant, uncomplicated landscape—wide open, with no underlayer of menace. Farther north, I suspected, the terrain was rougher, the peaks more jagged, and if you strayed too far from the road you could be swallowed up by the sheer fathomless distance of the land and sky. Here, in the heart of Colorado, we
