So I must inform you that I don’t intend to have further communication with you. The fact is that people don’t go to prison for their entire lives if they are really good but misunderstood people. That is an important thing to remember and I regret that it’s something I temporarily forgot.
I set the letter down with shaking hands and press my fist to my mouth. Well, I think, hearing my mother’s voice hastening into my mind, rushing in through its doorway to calm a scream. No, now sit down, take a breath. Take a deep breath now. She’s angry at me, Annemarie is, and hurt. She has a right to be, and a right to see it the way she does. But she’s wrong about my intentions, and there must be a way to convince her of that.
I breathe a shaky sigh. I fold her letter and slip it back into its envelope, then take out my handwritten copy of the one I’ve just sent to her and re-read it. I hope it will calm my nerves and give me a feeling of hope and momentum, because the stone wall that Annemarie’s letter hopes to build is a thing I can’t bear.
Dear Annemarie,
I have spent most of the past week returning again and again in my mind to our last conversation. I feel I did you a cruel disservice by giving you the impressions that I did about how your life began. I would like to take a big step back and share with you another story about your origins, which I dearly hope will stand in the place of those that trouble you, and give you a clearer picture of the truth. Because, as we discussed earlier, there is always more than one angle by which to view a story. Some are more true than others, but most, I am learning, are true in their own particular way.
In May of 1984—after Ricky and I had been together for a couple of months shy of three years—he was let go from his job at the art supply store, and that drove our relationship to a crisis point. I was nearly twenty-three years old, and most of my former classmates were engaged and planning their weddings; a few already had children. My own boyfriend, meanwhile, thought weddings were worthwhile to no one except medieval peasants and religious fanatics, and now he was unemployed as well. This wasn’t what I wanted out of life, and I was moving toward breaking up with him—bringing more and more of my possessions home from his house, coming by less frequently, and the like. He knew I was unhappy, and it made him nervous.
And so one weekend he declared that we were going on a surprise trip. Contrary to my stepbrother’s testimony, I did stay overnight at the Cathouse sometimes, and Ricky and I went on trips occasionally, as well. I merely lied to my parents and told them we were visiting Ricky’s grandmother, or that I was spending the night at the house of an understanding friend from the dentist’s office who had agreed to cover for me.
I left the cats in the care of Chris and Liz, and we got in Ricky’s little car and drove straight across California and Nevada, camping one night at Angel Lake. The mountains were spectacular, and the glacial lake cold but gloriously fun. He waded into the water in his shorts, deeper and deeper, until he was soaked to the waist. His shoulders got sunburned, but it was clear he was enjoying being a wildman out there in nature, eating what we could warm over a campfire and opting not to wear shoes or a shirt for as long as we stayed. But the next morning we were on the road to Utah, and I was only a little worried about what would happen if my mother needed to get in touch with me but couldn’t. I was having too good of a time to be really anxious.
Once we were in Utah, the road grew more and more remote. I couldn’t imagine where we were headed until I started seeing signs for the Spiral Jetty. I had been there once before with my mother, but that was not long after it was built, before the snowmelts came and covered it. Once I realized this I pointed out to Ricky that this was going to be a long drive to end up seeing nothing, and he simply said, “The drive is part of the art.”
Well, we got there, and sure enough it was just a shoreline on the Great Salt Lake. The lake itself was a gorgeous, stony blue, hazy as though covered by a white cataract, and the sky was the awe-inspiring, vivid dome I remembered—but the Jetty was gone. I turned to Ricky and gestured to the water. “See,” I said, “you already told me it was buried. You didn’t have to drive us out here to prove it.”
“But it being buried is part of the art,” he insisted. He was pulling our tent out of the trunk. “Besides, don’t you want to go home and say you went camping on the shore of Atlantis?”
I laughed. I looked out at the lake. He and I were both well-trained in art, but his understanding of modern and postmodern art was certainly superior to mine. I liked classical and pretty things, the Degas ballerinas and Greek Revival paintings. I could appreciate edgy if it went no farther than the symbolism in a Kahlo or an O’Keeffe. Ricky liked the avant-garde or perplexing or grotesque. I wouldn’t have looked out at a featureless lake and thought, ah, how clever of the artist to put his work in a place where it will be devoured by nature. But once Ricky explained it, I could appreciate it in a certain way.
After the sun went down we built a fire, and he took out a packet of henna he had picked up at the art supply store just before he was cut from the staff. “It’s something Indian women use to decorate their hands before a wedding,” he explained. “It’s really cool. We just got it in.” He set up the boom box and put in the tape he had made for me for Valentine’s Day. He asked me to show him my palms. The idea of getting my palms decorated was very strange and foreign, but I sat still by the fire, leaning in toward him, as he illuminated my palms and then the backs of my hands with the most intricate, elaborate patterns, winding around each finger and covering every revealing line. Then he put lemon juice on it as a fixative, and once my hands were dry I asked to do the insides of his arms, where the hair wouldn’t get in the way. He smiled as I worked the designs onto his skin, acting as if I were a tattoo artist—and you must remember, respectable people did not get tattoos back then—covering his arms with mermaids and playing cards and hearts pierced by arrows. In the end we both looked very festive, quite prepared for an Indian wedding, except for the fact that we were at a lakeside in Utah.
By now the tape had played on both sides, and Ricky flipped it over again before he stood and offered me his hand. I grasped it with my henna-covered one and let him pull me up. He set his palm against the small of my back and brought my hips to his; he rested his forehead against mine, so our noses were touching. Ricky was a good slow dancer. His parents had made him attend cotillion classes as a young teenager, so he wasn’t shy about it. The song—I remember this part well—was called Time After Time, by a woman named Cyndi Lauper. Slowly, there on the shore of the Great Salt Lake—or perhaps, you might say, the shore of Atlantis—we danced to that song, alone. If by all of this sweetness he meant to stop me from breaking up with him, it worked. I had to admit to myself, as we got in the car the next morning and began the long drive back to San Jose, that although he could be infuriating and childish and indifferent to rules, I loved him too much to give up on him. Some men simply need more time.