Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [39]
“Are you going on a quiz show? Is that it?”
She stood up, walked around the dining-room table, then sat down on the other side. She had a fountain pen in her hand. “Now this,” she said, pointing with the pen to another brochure, “this one is about New Mexico. I’ve never been to New Mexico. You haven’t, either, right?”
“No,” Jeremy said. “Honey, what’s this all about?”
“This,” she said, “is all about what we’re going to do during your two weeks off. I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit here. Want to go to Santa Fe?”
Jeremy seemed itchy, as if he needed to go downstairs and play a few measures of jazz from Mars. “Sure, sure,” he said. He rubbed his eyes suddenly. “Isn’t it sort of hot that time of year?”
She shook her head. “It says here that the elevation’s too high. You can stay in the mountains, and it’s cool at night.”
“Oh.” Then, as an afterthought, he said, “Good.”
She looked up at him. She stood and put her hand on his face, rubbing her thumb against his cheek. “How’s the black box?” she asked. She had recently started to wear glasses and took them off now.
“How’s the sky?” he asked. He turned around. “The black box is just fine. I move around it, but it’s always there, right in front of me. It’s hard to move with that damn thing in your head. I could write a book about it: how to live with a box and be a zombie.” He reached for a beer and carried it to the basement. She could hear the television set being clicked on and the exhalation of the beer bottle when he opened it.
2
The flight to Albuquerque took four hours. Lunch was served halfway through: chicken in sauce. The flight attendants seemed proud of the meal and handed out the plastic trays with smug smiles. Jeremy had a copy of BusinessWeek in his lap, which he dropped to the floor when the food arrived. For much of the four hours he sat back and dozed. Harriet was closer to the window and dutifully looked out whenever the captain announced that they were flying over a landmark.
In Albuquerque they rented a car and drove north toward Taos, the destination Harriet had decided upon, following the advice of the travel agent. They stopped at a motel in Santa Fe for dinner. Appalled by the congestion and traffic, they set out after breakfast the next morning. As they approached the mountains, Jeremy, who was driving, said, “So this is the broom that sweeps the cobwebs away.” He said it softly and with enough irony to make Harriet wince and pull at her eyebrow, a recent nervous tic. The trip, it was now understood, had been her idea. She was responsible. She offered him a stick of gum and turned on the radio. They listened to country-western until the mountains began to interfere with the reception.
In Taos they drove through the city until they found the Best Western motel, pale yellow and built in quasi-adobe style. They took showers and then strolled toward the center of town, holding hands. The light was brilliant and the air seemingly without the humidity and torpor of the Midwest, but this atmosphere also had a kind of emptiness that Jeremy said he wasn’t used to. In the vertical sun they could both feel their hair heating up. Harriet said she wanted a hat, and Jeremy nodded. He sniffed the air. They passed the Kit Carson museum, and Jeremy laughed to himself. “What is it?” Harriet asked, but he only shook his head. At the central square, the streets narrowed and the traffic backed up with motoring tourists. “Lots of art stores here,” Harriet said, in a tone that suggested that Jeremy ought to be interested. She was gazing into a display window at a painting of what appeared to be a stick-figure man with a skull face dancing in a metallic, vulcanized landscape. She saw Jeremy’s reflection in the window.