The canvas was an original Mexican Surrealist painting, by Anna Naverra. It showed a pale and white-haired girl holding water cupped in her small hands against a desert night filled with Escher-like towers, white moths, an antique clock. It was titled The Mage and the Midnight Hour, although the clock read 1:15 in the morning. Cooper had given it to them last year, on Dora’s twenty-fifth birthday. It had been a generous, astonishing gift. As if he’d known he’d soon be gone and it would be his last.
Juan stood before the painting now; he never got tired of looking at it. Rendered in the vivid and painstaking style of the Surrealists, its rich colors were luminous; the figure glowed as if with an inner fire against the dark background. He sighed. If he could paint like this … Portray that light, that heart of flame… He’d tried. He’d studied Naverra’s art, and that of the other painters who worked in Mexico after the Second World War. Frida Kahlo. Remedios Varo. Leonora Carrington. He’d never paid much attention to them before he moved next door to Cooper; the art history he’d learned at school was largely French, English, and Italian, despite his own hispanic roots. Now he couldn’t get enough of Mexican painting, Anna Naverra especially. What secrets had Naverra known? What witchery had she conjured here? And had those secrets destroyed her, as they’d destroyed old Cooper in the end? Juan’s eyes traced spiral patterns woven into the canvas, into the paint, into the smoke of the pale girl’s breath, losing himself in a draught of dark desert night brewed from wind and stars.
Bandido barked and the cats looked up as the Bronco pulled into the driveway. Juan roused himself from Naverra’s painting and went back into the kitchen. The chili was fine. He turned off the flame; it was too early to eat dinner now. Dora would want to relax, have a beer. He’d make a salad, and for dessert there was the apple pie that sat on the counter. Why hadn’t they eaten it last night, he wondered, while it was still warm from the oven? He shook his head. He couldn’t remember. He’d probably been locked away working again. And Dora was probably still angry about it. She always seemed angry lately. Well, tonight he’d make it up to her. “Mr. Househusband rises again,” he said, picking up the chopping knife.
Through the window he saw her jump from the truck—a tiny woman, doll-like in her stature but with a will the size of the Rincons. Watching her now as she walked to the door, her face tired, her eyes shadowed, her copper-colored curls escaping from a velvet band, he felt a sudden rush of love for her. The first he’d felt in quite a long while. Not that he loved her any the less, he silently defended himself; but love, like the other habits of daily life, was pushed to the corners of his consciousness. The urgency of the colors, the rhythms, the visions he sought on the mountain’s trails left little room for anything else but the raw desire to paint. Wasn’t this what true artists felt? He’d never felt such compulsion before; it thrilled him, it frightened him, it made him hope that at last he’d do good work.
If only he could explain that to Dora. That it wasn’t the marriage that had changed, but him. His work. And something he couldn’t name, as necessary now as the air he breathed, out there somewhere in the hills. Dora would never understand. His wife was not Anna Naverra, not a witch woman with a heart of flame, she was a woman of earth: granite and quartz. Her love was reserved for human things: her family, her husband, Bandido and the cats, for the simple daily magic of food on the table, friends close by, a warm body in the dark. These were the things that mattered to Dora. They used to matter to him.
Juan looked at his reflection in the dark window glass as Dora came up behind him. A young Chicano man stared back, eyes both dark and bright with visions. He didn’t recognize that man. He had changed. Was changing. Shedding one snake skin and finding another skin beneath. He was turning into someone else. Now he turned, and he embraced his wife. He breathed in Dora’s sharp, sweet scent, holding tightly on to love, remembering, for that moment, that it was precious.
• • •
Dora held the storm lamp that lit their path through the dry wash bed. Juan held her other hand, his calloused fingers warm around hers, as they made their way on foot down the sandy bank to Cooper’s house. Maggie Black’s house, she corrected herself. She could see it through the cottonwood trees, the yellow light over the door of the porch. Maggie herself was sitting outside on the steps as they walked up the drive.
As she introduced Juan to their new neighbor Dora registered the look on the other woman’s face. “Good god, what is it? What’s wrong? You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she said. Then she bit her tongue. What a stupid thing to come out with at a dead man’s house.
“Something has been inside the house,” Maggie said, speaking perfectly calmly in that low and husky voice of hers. But her eyes, dark and wide, and the pallor of her face betrayed the fact that she
