“Is that what we are?” she said.
They drank silently. She liked the way that he sipped his, first worrying the liquid with his lips, then slurping it loudly, his brows gathered. It was a child’s way of doing something, unself-conscious and very serious all at once.
“Max is wild,” she said.
He looked over at her. “He looked normal to me,” he said.
“Here he’s normal,” she said. “I would say I cured him by bringing him back to where he was born, but I doubt that’s true. I don’t know what it is; I’m at the end of my understanding. At home, he’s wild. He runs away. Turns blue sitting in rivers. Eats grass. And then goes back to being a normal boy. Who can’t tell you a word about why he did what he did.”
“You don’t think it’s a phase?”
“That’s what my husband says.”
“I guess all men are alike.”
“Is that what Clarissa said?” Maya thought that she could corner the woman by speaking her name out loud, but the opposite happened. It killed the possibility that she was a marginal person in Marion’s life. “‘Don’t let my baby do rodeo,’ his mother said when she gave him to me,” Maya said. “What does that mean? I’d never heard of rodeo. I looked it up. You have to stay on the bull for eight seconds. But why?”
Marion smiled. “You have to think as a person from here, not there. What is there to do around here? The world looks everywhere but here. There’s money in rodeo. Glory. Your heart beats fast for a change.”
“You don’t seem like that.”
He shrugged.
Maya took Marion’s new cigarette out of his mouth and stuck it in her own. She took a long drag. “His dad — his original dad, I mean. . I really don’t know what words to use.” She took her head in her hands. “Max doesn’t know he’s adopted — we call them ‘cowboys’ when Max is around, when the ‘cowboys’ brought the ‘little fish’. .”
“Easy now,” he said, and put a hand on her shoulder.
“Tell me about something else,” she said. “Tell me about Clarissa.”
Marion made a little noise of recollection. “Clarissa,” he said, and beat the thermos with his fingers. “It got to be we had nothing to say to each other. At first, we couldn’t get enough words in, always interrupting each other—‘Let me finish, let me finish.’ And then, little by little, it went to we had nothing to say. There’s a surreal aspect to when you realize that’s happening. Like swimming in a fishbowl. You’re moving, but slowly, you’re tired, and everything looks a little dead.”
“But why, Marion?” Maya said. “I don’t understand why.”
He kinked out the tips of his boots and laid his hands on his knees. “You’re talking like her now. That’s all the why there is. I wish I had more — it would certainly make people understand better. She kept rising in her workplace. They started flying her here and there. She liked it — she wasn’t planning on it, but she liked it. Taking meetings in Washington, D.C., and the like. Getting a tour of the Capitol — she’s a lobbyist for the cattlemen. At first it just seemed like less time to talk — if the time was there, it’d be fine. But then we started to get a kick out of different things. And if you want to know the truth, we stopped going to bed in the same way. She got perfunctory with it — so much so I started thinking were all these business trips just a name for a man, holed up somewhere like Chicago; she was always flying through Chicago. One night I went for her credit card bills — and I stopped myself. I didn’t want to live that way. We talked. She said there was no one. I told her my problem — again. Again, she said we would fix it; she’d gotten real good at listening to problems and promising fixes. And again nothing changed. And I left. Staying together despite all that seemed like the wrong thing to do. Just the principle of it. I want my daughters to live by principle. Of course, Clarissa thinks there was a woman. She calls up and says, ‘How’s the whore?’ But there wasn’t — that’s not it at all. People like principle on a man, but not too much.”
“And on a woman?” Maya said.
“A woman lives a life of contradictions wrapped inside paradoxes wrapped inside a big candy wrapper.”
“You took vows,” Maya said. “You made promises.”
“I thought about that,” he said, giving her a hard look. “But kids are smart. They got the smell of a wolf. Alma said, ‘High time, Daddy.’ I gained respect with them.”
“When people say I did it for the children, they usually mean staying.”
He gave her another hard look, and for a second she could see what he looked like in an argument. “My mood changed and stayed changed,” he said. “For ten years it stayed that way before I let myself go. I waited until the girls were in college. For ten years I waited.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, wrapping herself up. “I shouldn’t be allowed to speak. Everything coming out of my mouth is wrong.”
“No, I’m grateful,” Marion said. “Most people don’t ask anything. They’ve got answers without needing to ask me the questions.”
“How long ago was it?” Maya said.
“A very long year. There’s been five years in this year. That part I underestimated. Even after ten years alone in a marriage, it’s still nothing like a year alone, period.”
“You’ve been leading a monk’s existence?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“The waitress at the diner,” she said.
Marion chuckled. “Just fooling around,” he said.
“What are you looking for?” Maya said. “Can it really be better than what you had with your wife?”
He didn’t answer. Maya watched him with the hanging desperation of someone who wanted one. Feeling her gaze, he turned to her.
“I want to talk like Clarissa and I used to talk. To roll around like we used to roll around. I want to be an old man and have that. I made my wager maybe I can find it again. I wasn’t going to be one of those people who looks while keeping one foot safely inside the house. No, that’s not true — you think I didn’t look with one eye those ten years? I looked. I’m no saint. But then I thought — it won’t come while you’re in this. You’ve got to go all the way.”
Maya nodded. “I am emotional, and my husband is stoic,” she said, as if to give him company in his history of divergence. “We live in a house in the suburbs. The only thing about our lives that isn’t a cliché is our son, who eats grass.”
“And who is that, speaking now?” he said.
“Clarissa,” she said, and they laughed. The tea-whiskey was making things easier; there was padding around what she was feeling. Momentarily, she did not actually feel the despair she was describing. Because she was speaking to this man? She might feel the despair again soon, but until then she was out on a bail whose guarantor was neither clear nor important. Jeremiah the black Buddhist was always telling her to live in the moment. She never understood him — in what other moment was it possible to live? She understood a little now, however. She wondered fiercely after Jeremiah. In her recollection, he remained twenty, but he was also forty-two now, and where? She wished for news of him, for he knew her even before Alex did. In her heart, she sent him a powerful wish for well-being. Jeremiah, Dima, Anton, Soraya — where were they? Why had she allowed all these people to vanish?