Growing up, I’d gone to the art museum in Albuquerque all the time. I’d take the bus there after school and spend the late afternoon wandering through its deserted exhibits and historical dioramas, its paintings of local scenes by local artists. The art wasn’t very good, but I didn’t care. The lights were always dim and the air conditioning pumped on and off, regular and rhythmic. It was peaceful, the hush and stillness of it, the suspension of life outside. Sometimes it seemed that the main reason I decided to study art history was to gain the license to wander quietly through rooms, looking at pictures on the walls. Maybe not the best reason, but there it is.
It was Michael who made me think that this impulse was significant. Who wouldn’t want a person like that to fasten his eyes on you, to compliment your work, to tell you your ideas were interesting and your eye for art acute? Which is exactly what happened, and how all the flirting began. Then, in a swell of urgency after my father died, I threw myself at Michael, and he caught me; we went from flirting to fixture. Out on the town on his arm, I was recognized as his current “companion” and knew it. Can an experience feel degrading and like an honor at the same time? Yes, of course it can. And the fact that I suspected I would be discarded eventually, that perhaps I’d even chosen him for this very reason, didn’t make me feel better when it came to pass.
A latch clicked and my mother stepped through the door, dropping an enormous tote bag on the table in the front hall.
“Any word from your brother?”
I shook my head and she nodded, her shoulders sagging a little. Before I could say anything else she went into the kitchen and almost immediately set to work fixing dinner. I put my drink down and joined her, and before long she was giving me intricate details of a trip she was planning for a client, who for some reason wanted to visit every single country in South America.
“You wouldn’t believe how long this takes. These places don’t have faxes. They don’t even have phones. I’m making reservations by letter, and they send back some dog-eared piece of paper that says, ‘Everything okay, come now, pay later.’ They must attach the note to a mule or something, then the mule trots down a dirt road that eventually leads by the post office. I do believe that mules are involved in these places, Lynn. I’ll just be pleased if Dr. Trujillo comes back alive.”
She kept this up all through dinner preparations. I thought about how people say travel broadens the mind, and what this meant for my mother, who was expert at organizing its every feature but never, ever went anywhere herself. She’d barely been out of town since I was in high school. There was something either heroic or insane about it. I set the table for our tidy, well-balanced meaclass="underline" baked chicken, green beans, and rice. When my mother offered me a glass of milk, I laughed and shook my head.
“What?” she said.
I shrugged. “This is nice,” I told her. I never cooked in Brooklyn and had almost forgotten people still did. I assumed the world had completely gone over to takeout. My mother sat down opposite me and smiled.
“So, how long have you and David been going out?”
She set her fork and knife down without touching her food. “Well, I wouldn’t call it that, Lynn.”
“What would you call it?”
“We enjoy each other’s company.”
“So, how long have you and David been enjoying each other’s company?”
She cut her chicken into neat geometric pieces, took a dainty sip of milk, and carefully wiped her mouth with her napkin, an act of stalling so obvious as to be almost a parody of stalling. “A while,” she finally said.
“I see. Where does he live, anyway?”
“Still in the same place, next to our old house.”
“Oh.” I looked at her, but she was intently focused on the task of spearing a green bean evenly on the tines of her fork. “What happened to his family?”
“Nothing happened to them,” she said piously, then ate her bean and moved on to the next one. “Donny’s still in high school, and Darren got a hockey scholarship to a college in Connecticut. They’re both lovely boys, and David is justly proud. They both talk to him regularly. Darren calls home every Sunday evening at seven o’clock sharp.”
“Yeah, well,” I said, “that sounds great. So, excuse me for asking, but what’s the deal with his wife? They got divorced?”
“No, they didn’t.” Her voice was tight and even.
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not kidding.” She kept on eating, one green bean at a time, the chicken in its orderly pieces.
“You’re kidding,” I said again.
“What did I just say?”
“You’re having an affair with a married man.”
“David’s wife is very ill. She’s confined to the house. We enjoy each other’s company, and accept the situation, and I expect you to accept it too.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Stop saying that.”
“Mom,” I said. She raised her eyebrows at me, and I opened my mouth but said nothing. Fortunately, I had chicken to fill the void. We sat in confused silence, cleaning our plates as if our lives depended on it.
When we finished, she cleared the table and took everything into the kitchen. “Lynnie, you do the dishes,” she said. “I’m going out.”
“It’s eight o’clock.”
“I know what time it is.”
“Where are you going? To see David?”
At this she turned, her eyes narrow, and the look she gave me was frightening but familiar. It was the same look she’d given me in high school when I came home with my hair dyed green, and closely related to those she’d offered when I was in college in Pennsylvania, talking about feminist art all the time, hatching plans to move to New York and referring to Albuquerque as a cultural backwater.
“You’ve been here exactly one day,” she said. “Don’t start telling me what to do.”
“You tell me what to do all the time.”
“That’s completely, one-hundred-percent different,” she said. I did the dishes, feeling irritable and put-upon. Afterwards, I went out into the suburban night. The air was warm, and the moon rose pale and low and clear above a gray bank of clouds. The enormous cockroaches that terrified me as a child scrambled scratchily across the sidewalks, great hordes of them glistening in the streetlights. For the second time that day I drove my brother’s car to his apartment, though now the streets were neon-lit. The same cars as before were parked outside his building, amid a jumble of bicycles and skateboards. Wylie’s door stood ajar, held open by a brick, and yellow light fell onto the landing. That’s where the smell hit me: dried sweat, old clothes, and a crush of bodies, the smellable ideology of water conservationists. I held my breath and walked inside, straight into Angus Beam.
“Hello, Wylie’s sister,” he said, his smile as wide as ever. “I’m glad you joined us.”
“I told you before, my name’s Lynn.”
“Lynn.” He shook my hand and held on to it. He was wearing a faded T-shirt with a million tiny holes in it, as if he’d been attacked by kittens. Up close, his skin was covered with light freckles that disappeared from view when you were farther away — pointillist pigmentation. There were even freckles on his eyelids.
“Angus Beam,” I said without thinking, “you should stay out of the sun.”