Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [70]
That was when he said, “Franny, let’s do it, move in with me at Nambé.”
“You’re such a wonderful man, Marcos,” was her answer.
She sat facing him in the shadowy room and combed his hair with her fingers.
“Franny?”
Running her hand down his stubbly cheek, over his shoulder, as he lay there propped on one elbow, she said, “I do love you. But I’m not sure about moving in together.”
Plain words plainly said though not plainly explained. Marcos put on his clothes and went home. Afterward, the trucks that passed along Saint Francis sounded to her not like the flow of a beautiful river but rather like what they were—filthy eighteen-wheelers, moving metal junkyards driven by undreaming men on stimulants who transported goods from one place to another. Nothing like a nightmare to wake you up to reality.
Franny drank her tea as she got dressed. She didn’t know where she was headed, but knew she wasn’t going back to sleep. Something essential in her waking dreams had cracked. Albuquerque had not led to any movie studio or screen. Santa Fe, by the same token, was drawing her on to Nambé, farther than ever from the dream in those photographs on the walls of El Rancho. She was being pulled into a lasting relationship, a mooning girl destined to become some ranch wife instead of a celebrated actress. Go figure. She now walked vaguely toward the plaza, trying her best to think, alone under a blithe ceiling of stars, a charlatan in love with Marcos Montoya despite her own wary distancing. The weight of her falsehoods, lies lying on more lies, freighted each step she took. She’d arrived at this crossroads because at so many earlier crossroads she’d made choices. Good ones, bad ones. Did the word coincidence rightfully belong in the language?
Well, Kip was coincidence. Accepting Marcos’s invitation to visit Rancho Pajarito, in a moment of unguarded enthusiasm, didn’t mean she’d signed on to meet Kip Calder who seemed to see through her as if she were a pane of glass. Kip, who not only appeared to understand her mess but was caught in his own. And it was just that, a fucking mess, she freely conceded, seated on a bench in the plaza, shivering some. Just as hypochondriacs do get sick sometimes, and paranoiacs do have enemies, some coincidences are simply in the cards. How absurd was it, for instance, that her drama class had staged a closed reading of The Tempest, with her in the role of Miranda, only a few weeks before Kip told her he had a daughter named Ariel? Not very. Not at the end of the day. What was crazy was that the young guy who’d played Ariel was a truly gifted actor who would never go to Hollywood in a thousand years for a million bucks. She admired him but found his unjaded purity, in a backwater night-class acting school in Santa Fe, a bit sublime. Sublime as in loony.
Several people passed her. A couple, probably a little drunk, spiraled by, their laughing voices punctuating the echoing quiet along the Governors’ Palace arcade. None noticed this lone figure across the street facing them, hands nestled under opposite arms. They had, however, broken across the meander of her thoughts and—again, chance provoking fate—brought her to a decision. As if in a more benign dream, Mary walked back home. For one who had risen after a nightmare, dressed, and fled, she hadn’t gone very far. But in another sense she had traveled light-years. During what remained of the night she slept more peacefully than she had in months.
Come morning, she phoned in sick to work. Small white lie. Then she drove out to Pajarito and found Marcos. The chronological ordering of truths might not have come out quite as Mary would have wished, but her doppelgänger was doing the best she could, given the knot she’d tied them both up in.
“I didn’t give you a straightforward answer to your question last night,” she began.
“No, you didn’t.”
“If you’re still willing to consider me living with you, I’d like to accept.”
“You would?”
“Yes,” and they embraced