“A bottle of Cakebread,” Jenny said. “Great.”
The waiter returned and put wineglasses in front of them. The busboy stood still until the waiter moved away, then poured water from a silver pitcher tied with a linen napkin into the tall, thin water glasses.
“We’ve all missed you since you left the book discussion group,” Sonja said. “Not only do I miss you, but I always feel slightly guilty that while we’re sitting around talking, you’re still in the lab.” She took a sip of water. “Not that we weren’t all happy your project got funded.”
“But I’ve been overdoing it.” Jenny sighed. “I finally realized that part of it was a retreat from my ex-husband. I knew if I was home, he’d be phoning me. We finally had a long talk, and I told him things had to change. I made him understand that from my perspective, it was over.”
The waiter showed Jenny the wine bottle, although Sonja had ordered. When Jenny pointed to Sonja, the waiter turned the bottle toward her.
“It’s good to take a hard line,” Sonja said. She said it emphatically, because she wanted to know not only what it would be like to speak so bluntly to someone who loved you, but to see if she could convince herself that such a confrontation might be good. She continued to think that she might tell Marshall about Tony. Though she wavered, thinking one day about breaking it off with Tony, thinking the next day that she’d continue, but quit her job. Or that she would tell Marshall and he would insist she leave her job.
“I was glad you called,” Jenny said. “After I exerted all my authority on my husband, my ex-husband, I was lying low. It’s a mistake to withdraw from your friends, though. Just like it was a mistake to get so involved in things at the clinic. Because I wanted to tell you”—she looked up, her blue eyes outlined with brown pencil, the lashes carefully brushed with mascara—“I’m going to be moving to Santa Fe. I know that’s the last thing you expected to hear, because it’s almost the last thing I expected to do, but I went there for a long weekend and I fell in love with the place. I wanted to talk to you about putting my house in Dover on the market. Sonja, you look so surprised. You look like one big exclamation point.”
“You’re moving?”
“I went for Halloween. It was quite the celebration out there. Blue margaritas and pumpkin burritos. When the hot-air balloon we were in inflated, a huge orange balloon shot up over our heads, with black eyes and a black mouth, and there we were: amazed little people flying over that endless expanse of land, riding in the bucket of a big billowy jack-o’-lantern. I know this seems impulsive. It was impulsive to go there, so this is just the rest of my impulsiveness.”
“Really?” Sonja said. “What are you going to do in Santa Fe?”
“I majored in art in undergraduate school, not psychology, and I don’t know why I gave it up, because it’s so challenging, it’s so fascinating to see how forms play off against one another, which you really do sense out there because you have to strain for perspective; everything’s so far in the distance, you have no idea of actual size. I don’t want to paint landscapes exactly, I want the landscape to inspire abstract paintings. I was a figurative painter in school, but the place doesn’t make you want to paint people; they seem unimportant in all that natural beauty.”
“I’ve never picked up and gone anywhere,” Sonja said. “I think it’s very courageous of you. But I guess if a place strikes you that way, you respond to it intensely.”
“That’s it, exactly. The only other place I was ever in awe of in the United States was the Northeast Kingdom, that really rugged part of Vermont near the border.”
“When are you going?” Sonja said.
“I’ll actually be living with a few other people, in a tiny dot on the map outside Santa Fe called Ojo Caliente. There’s a big place under restoration now, and one of my friends is living in a wing of the house supervising the work. I’ve already kicked in my share for the rebuilding. I’m going to have a fireplace in my bedroom. Does this sound like bragging? Or madness?”
“No,” Sonja said halfheartedly. “It sounds terrific.”
“So terrific that you’ll visit?”
She looked at the spotlit lawn, the shadowy sculpture near a fieldstone wall casting a dark shadow within pale shadows. She had sat on the wall and dangled her feet, Marshall jumping up beside her on their anniversary. They hardly went anywhere. Certainly, she never went anywhere alone. It was rare enough that she even had dinner with someone other than Marshall. It was an exciting and slightly startling prospect — that she might have a life separate from his. Though she had certainly moved in that direction by having an affair with Tony.
“The place was a peach farm,” Jenny said, finishing her glass of wine. “The Rio Grande is right there, just across a field. At night there are more stars than you can imagine. I thought New Hampshire was starry until I went there.”
Sonja nodded. “You know, tonight I was going to ask you if you thought I might be cracking up,” she said. “I was going to give you some information first, of course. But hearing this makes me think what people should do is think about themselves in relationship to something else, instead of thinking of everything else as things that attach themselves to you. Does that make any sense?”
“What exactly are you talking about?” Jenny said, pouring wine into her glass and Sonja’s. Before Sonja could answer, Jenny said, “Don’t think of me as a shrink. Don’t be analytical to get the jump on the doctor. Just tell me as your friend.”
The waiter pretended not to hear this. He came to the table as if he were gliding in on ice, hands clasped behind him. He recited the night’s specials and asked if there were any questions.
“Bruschetta,” Jenny said. “We’ll eat that while we read the menu.”
“Excellent,” the waiter said. “Brushed with the finest extra-virgin olive oil,” he said to the air, as he walked away.
“No, no,” Sonja said, slightly embarrassed. “I want to hear more. You’re going to be living with other people on what used to be a peach farm?”
“There’s a flagstone patio connecting the main house with the new addition. They’ve transplanted lots of old rosebushes that were here and there so that now they line the patio.”
“And you have the money to just … do this?” Sonja said.
“Pretty much,” Jenny said. “I also took out a personal loan, just in case, while I’m still gainfully employed and a good credit risk.”
“I envy you,” Sonja said. “Evie — my mother-in-law, who’s so sick. She always wanted to move back to Canada, but it got more and more built up, and she got older, and it never happened. I guess I’m thinking of that because — why am I thinking of it? Because I suppose it’s good to act when you first know you should, to go someplace at the exact moment the place calls to you.”
“You’ve talked about Evie a lot,” Jenny said. “I’m sorry I never met her.”
“I’m sorry, too. I hope she gets through this, somehow. I hope you can meet her.”
“Ladies,” the waiter said, “any questions about the menu?” There were no questions. Jenny ordered veal. Sonja ordered chicken.
“I’m glad you’re enthusiastic about Santa Fe,” Jenny said. “I was worried about your reaction.”
“I think it’s great,” Sonja said. “I can’t wait to visit and float over the desert in a pumpkin balloon. Santa balloon. Whatever.”
“My son’s going out with me. He’s trying to get me to agree that if he stays, I’ll buy him a highrider. He’s crazy about lowriders and highriders — anything but Dad’s geeky car. Of course, Dad’s not such a geek that living with him and his new wife and the babies isn’t preferable to living with a bunch of pond scum lesbo dykes. He’s just checking out Santa Fe, according to him, to eat some good food, see Los Alamos, and figure out whether he could hack the place even if he had a highrider. ‘It would have to be way cool for me to stay,’ he told me. Completely skeptical that his mother would ever discover anything cool.” Jenny bit into the last small bruschetta toast.