Anna laughed with her. Bethy’s sense of humor was woefully undeveloped, and Anna felt duty bound to reward even the smallest glimmer of it. After years around actors, Anna had come to believe that people in general were witty and entertaining. That this was not so had been dawning on her over the past months. In general, people were plodding creatures. Occasionally, she missed the brighter-colored social butterflies, but only occasionally. Lack of repartee was conducive to honesty and solitude. Both of which she was coming to crave.
Bethy beached the Zodiac on a spill of sand on a flat stone outcropping no wider than the boat was long. Anna climbed out of the bow and, line in hand, walked the few feet to the only anchorage, a dead tree wedged tightly between a rock and a hard place.
The sand apron that formed their landing area had been washed down from a slot canyon, a mere crack in the sandstone cliffs, carved and smoothed by the runoff from a million years of rain on the plateau and Fiftymile Mountain. A gold-and-gray pathway beckoned them into the heart of the rock. Straighter and shallower than many slot canyons Anna had seen in previous weeks, it was not dark and did not fill her with the mix of excitement and foreboding she’d grown accustomed to.
While Anna tied off the line, Bethy unloaded the gear. “This one’s not a technical thing. We’re not going to need ropes and stuff. I’m not even going to wear a helmet,” she said as she sorted through the plastic laundry basket that served as her gear chest. “You want one?”
Anna knew she should—safety first and all that—but it was hot and she hated wearing the things. “I guess not.”
“We won’t need ropes either, but I’m going to carry this one. Just in case.”
“Just in case what?” Anna asked, resisting the impulse to offer to carry the coiled line with a carabiner affixed to either end. Once she had eschewed the helmet, the idea of scrambling totally unencumbered took precedence over good manners.
Bethy looked nonplussed. “I don’t know. Just in case, I guess, you know, we need to tie something to something or something.”
“Be prepared,” Anna said and raised her hand in the three-fingered Boy Scout salute.
Bethy wrinkled up her nose and forehead like a little kid trying too hard to think. Finally she gave it up. “You’re so weird,” she said. “Is everybody in New York as weird as you?”
“In New York the people are as gods,” Anna said as she followed Bethy down the yellow sand road. “Spider-Man: a New Yorker. Batman, the same. Gotham was just an alias. King Kong immigrated to New York. In New York I am considered to be the most banal of beings.” There was a quality about Bethy Candor that allowed Anna the peculiar freedom of chatter, or, when feeling wildly audacious, of babble. Only with Zach had she given herself permission to free-associate. With her husband, it was their shared joy of whimsy, wordplay, and language that lowered the inhibitions and opened the mental floodgates.
With Bethy, Anna suspected it was because, cruel as it was to think—let alone put into words—it was rather like talking to the family cocker spaniel. Not being understood, how could one be judged in any meaningful way? Once in a while Bethy surprised her by responding intelligently, but not often enough that Anna worried about it.
Anna paid as little attention to, and understood as little of, Bethy’s monologues as Bethy did hers. Friendships had been built on less camaraderie than that, Anna supposed.
The canyon, half again as wide as Anna’s shoulders, had a flat sandy bottom and the lazy curves of a snake’s trail. Sunset wasn’t for a couple of hours, but it had long since finished its brief visit to the bottom of the forty-foot slot. The air was cooler between the walls, and a pleasant breeze blew down-canyon, as it often did at this time of day. Light was clear but didn’t have the glare it did on the water. For the first time in a closed-in space Anna felt relaxed. She must tell Jenny. Jenny was the kind of girlfriend Anna hadn’t had since she was in grade school and spent most of her free time with Sylvia Gonzales; the kind of girlfriend for whom one saved up successes and failures along with foolish remarks and astute observations, like treasures to carry back and share. Jenny would be pleased Anna had entered this benign bit of Mother Earth with fearlessness.
Jenny. Anna had accepted her with ease, as if such friendships came along every day or sprang fully formed like Venus from the sea. She supposed it was shared trauma. Emotions became accessible in times of stress or high drama. One of the dangers of the theater was that actors could so easily fall in love with one another in the same way people thrown together on a great adventure often did. When the final curtain came down, it was anybody’s guess as to whether the romance would survive the daunting ordinariness of day-to-day life.
The canyon narrowed but didn’t squeeze, and there was no water in which to fall and die of cold. Happily, Anna scrambled along in Bethy’s wake as she climbed upward through crevices and rock chimneys that reminded Anna of the children’s board game Chutes and Ladders.
Bethy chattered breathily as she climbed. “I can’t wait until Regis turns thirty. It’s not even two whole years and then we’re going to go to Europe and see stuff. He promised me. And I’m going to get all new clothes and we’ll cruise. Have you ever been on a cruise? I haven’t, but I’m probably supposed to have a baby pretty soon and cruises are supposed to be, you know, all romantic and everything…”
Anna’s ears pricked up at this. Whether Bethy was telling the truth or spinning a fantasy, Anna couldn’t guess. Either way it was a bit of gossip to share with her housemate. The wicked glee at such a human foible was untarnished by guilt. Needing to catch her breath, Anna stopped for a moment, her butt on a slanting four-inch shelf, feet and hands on the two sides of the triangular chimney they clambered up. Gossip, unless aimed or honed sharp like a weapon, was natural to human beings. It showed interest in one’s fellows, interest in the well-being of the tribe. Gossip was a way to learn taboos, pass on warnings, share the burden of being human among many so the onus of bearing it alone would fall on no one person. At least that’s what Molly always said, and who would know better than she?
“Rock!” Bethy shouted.
Anna pressed her head back against the chimney wall and covered her face with her forearm. A stone the size of a softball grazed her right knee as it fell between her legs to clatter down the chute beneath her.
“You okay?” Bethy called.
“Yeah,” Anna said.
“Sorry about that. My fault. I shoulda poked it before I stepped on it,” Bethy said.
Looking up, Anna could see the other woman about twenty feet above her looking down through her wide-set feet, head and fanny in alignment with the forced perspective.
“No harm done,” Anna said and then checked her knee, locked to keep the pressure that wedged her in the chimney. Her trousers hadn’t torn, and no blood was seeping through. That was all she would know until she tried to bend it. Settling her other limbs and digits more firmly, she put her foot on a nice little outcropping. The joint was in good working order.
“Almost there,” Bethy called. “Don’t be such a slowpoke.” She vanished from Anna’s line of sight. Anna followed. Feet, hands, knees, back, and brain occupied with the business of ascent, she moved quickly. When she reached the point where she’d last seen Bethy, a vertical crack, two feet wide, with a lovely smooth rock bottom led off to the right. Anna levered herself into it and stood upright. After the chimney, the going was as easy as a stroll down a sidewalk in Central Park. Within less than a minute the crack ended. Anna stepped from the sandstone’s embrace onto a natural balcony the size of the stage’s apron in a small theater. Tumbled rock and blown sand created enough earth that a few hardy plants had taken root and were surviving, if just barely. Bethy was sitting on a rectangular boulder, sides so straight and size so perfect it would be easy to believe it was man-made.