Germaine was looking drawn and pale. On one of our Thursdays at lunch in the Greek restaurant (she was beginning to speak a little Greek to the owners) we decided to go away together for the Thanksgiving break.
I said, “You really need a rest. If we go anywhere, it must be to a place where you can rest properly.”
Her eyes large, she looked at me as if to say: Do you imagine that I don’t know that?
With Germaine, there was always the fear of stating the obvious.
We planned on going to Santa Fé, New Mexico, where neither of us had been.
We left directly after Germaine’s last class before the holiday break. It was a cold, grey afternoon. We were told it would snow and we might not be able to make it across the Texas panhandle. One of our students gave us votive candles in case we got stuck in the snow, though I wasn’t quite sure what we were supposed to do with them; another gave us a flashlight. Packing Germaine’s car with our bags, a huge electric typewriter, piles of books about gardens, I had a sense that we were going very far. A few of our students waved us off from the little brick house.
Germaine insisted on driving because, she said, I drove too slowly.
On the back seat of the car was a Styrofoam cooler, without ice, and in it three bottles of champagne. Before we got out of Tulsa, we stopped at a grocery store to buy a big bag of ice for the cooler. Germaine also bought four or five clear plastic bags of liquorice.
As soon as we got back into the car she said, “Open a bag of liquorice, will you, and give me three sticks together.” Her eyes narrowed on the highway, she held out her hand and I placed the liquorice in it. She ate the three sticks together. “More,” she said, and again she held out her hand.
“You really like liquorice,” I said.
“It’s good for my hernia,” she said.
I wondered where she had heard that liquorice is good for hernia. Then I thought: Germaine wouldn’t have heard it from anyone, but would always have known that liquorice is good for hernia.
I kept giving her liquorice sticks whenever she held out her hand. Her eyes were always on the road, as she was driving fast. She read out loud all the highway signs. And she was on the lookout for police cars. She said she was lucky with the police; they only appeared when she happened to be going slowly. As we slowed down to turn off one highway on to another, a police car approached us from the opposite lane. “You see?” she said. She held out her hand for more liquorice.
When we crossed over into the Texas panhandle she shouted out, “Whoopee,” and hit her thigh. “Open a bottle of champagne,” she said.
The champagne foamed in and spilled over our plastic cups. The sky was low over the low, snow-covered land, in which, at great distances, were oil pumps and drilling derricks. As we drank the champagne the sky darkened.
Our first stop in Texas was at Shamrock, where we pulled up at the Blarney Stone Inn, just off the highway. To have a beer, because we were in a dry county, I had to join a club. We ordered T-bone steaks and baked potatoes; the steaks had to mushy excess the one quality which Germaine said Americans demand in their meat: that you should be able to gum them. The Blarney Stone Inn appeared, as all buildings in that part of America seemed to me, to have been put up temporarily; I was aware that beyond the walls of the dining room was the vast outside. Inside it was empty except for Germaine and me, a fat waitress at a table next to the kitchen smoking a cigarette, and, at the other side of the room from us, an old, skeletal couple, also eating soft steaks and baked potatoes.
The woman had short, dyed red hair. He was in a check jacket and differently checked trousers. She called to the waitress for a doggie bag; when she took the bag the fat waitress handed her, she said, “This isn’t a doggie bag. A doggie bag is lined with plastic so it won’t drip. This is just an ordinary old paper bag.” The waitress didn’t answer, but slumped off. The old woman said to the old man, “But this isn’t a doggie bag.”
As we ate, Germaine and I studied the couple as if we were trying, through them, to understand a little the place we were in. Sometimes Germaine stopped eating to look at them.
Beyond them was the bar; through an open double doorway we saw men in brim-rolled stetsons and boots drinking and smoking. In the bar was a juke box and a small dance floor, which the old couple, he pulling her chair out from the table and taking her arm to lead her, went to; the old lady put a coin in the juke box and chose some records, loud rock music, and she and the man, stiffly swinging their arms and barely lifting their feet, danced. Sometimes she stepped back from him and clapped her hands and said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” while he, alone, shuffled his feet back and forth and moved his arms in startling jerks.
As we left, by way of the smoky bar, I heard the old woman say to the old man, over the music, “If this place can’t give you a real doggie bag, it must be a dump.”
We went on to Amarillo. The snow on the ground deepened as we went west, and the roads became icy. Germaine drove with great care, slowing down when she saw ahead parts of the highway where there was bound to be ice: under an overpass, at a banked curve. Our headlights illuminated a round vague space before us in the immense dark space about us, and in that round vague space appeared, suddenly, the bright lights of an oncoming car. It was in the wrong lane. I had a momentary hallucination: that we were not on a highway at all, but had somehow got off, and, wherever it was we were, the space was not defined in any way. We went silent. I saw Germaine’s hands tense about the steering wheel; she didn’t brake, but, on ice, guided her car round the oncoming car, as if in outer space. Once past the car, she said, “He must have skidded right round on the ice.” She had got us through by careful driving. She laughed.
“Open another bottle of champagne,” she said.
From time to time she rolled down her window on to the freezing night air because, she said, she was making smelly liquorice farts.
We turned off the highway at a sign for Amarillo on to more broad highways, deserted; there were no buildings on the flat, snow-covered land, illuminated by the lights along the highways. Then, in the far distance, was a group of square buildings lit up green, and about the buildings vast empty parking lots, also lit green. Billowing about the buildings and lots were great clouds of steam.
“What’s that?” Germaine asked.
She had asked that about many strange sights; she wanted to know what everything was.
“God knows,” I said.
We came to a railway alongside the highway, and a railway yard with open flat cars; the tracks went up to the green-lit buildings.
“I don’t understand what it could be,” she said.
We saw a sign in green light: BEEF PACKING.
“I should have known,” Germaine said.
She drove on, over the icy, empty Amarillo Boulevard, along which were motels with signs shining high above them; some of the signs were not working, and the motels appeared to be falling apart.
Germaine said, “We’re not going to stay in a motel with a sign that doesn’t work properly.”
Slowly, we drove down and then up the wide Boulevard. Amarillo seemed to have no centre, but to spread out over the flat, empty land. We stopped at a large motel which looked like a Swiss chalet.
It was about midnight. Germaine went directly to her room, I to mine. The motel was silent as if empty. I had a hot shower, then got into bed. I lay awake for a while, feeling that I was in a foreign country.
I was glad I was with Germaine.
She woke me at 6.30 by phone from her room. I got up, a bit lost in the large darkness, and, naked, went to the curtains closed across a window as wide as the wall; I pulled the cord to the curtains, which, in little jerks, opened on to an expansive view, in dawn light, of the motel pool, the ground, shrubs, furniture about the pool covered in snow, and, beyond low banks of snow, the highway, where cars with lit parking lights were creeping. I saw no people, only cars, moving.
I met Germaine in the dining room. We were the only people there. She was spirited as we looked at maps and marked out the route. When the waitress came with our eggs, over easy, and bacon, Germaine had a long talk with her about the conditions of the roads in New Mexico.
Sometimes, Germaine would be friendly with waiters and waitresses, and have intimate conversations with them; and sometimes she would be curt with them, and I saw they served her grudgingly. I didn’t understand why she would be one way one time, and at another time another way. She seemed to be unaware of the difference.
This morning she asked the waitress about her work. The questions might have been those of a researcher trying to compile statistics on waitresses; and yet I saw the waitress respond as to someone who took an interest in a job which she herself considered just a dumb way to make money.
When we crossed over into New Mexico, Germaine shouted out, “Yip, yip, yip, yayee,” and leaned forward as she gave the car more gas.
In the bright mid-morning we drank the remaining bottle of champagne.
We were to turn off the highway at Clines Corners; signs appeared, each larger than the one before, announcing Clines Corners where, the signs told us, we should stop to buy Cactus Candy and Cactus Jelly. Clines Corners consisted of one large, windowless, prefabricated building and a gasoline station. We didn’t stop for Cactus Candy and Jelly.
Over a narrow road, we drove up into the mountains towards Santa Fé. The country was covered with snow, the surface brilliantly crystallized, and through the snow were visible great swaths of gold plains grass. Beyond the shining white and gold mountains the sky was clear blue.
We went silent driving through the mountains.
Then, rising over a mountain to a view of a valley, Germaine said, “Look at that.”
I was enthusiastic for what we saw; and I knew that I could express my enthusiasm because she did hers.
“And look at that,” I said.
It was as though—how can I understand this without having recourse to “as though”?—Germaine were educating me to views I had never seen before, and I was, and wanted her to know I was, an enthusiastic pupil.
Looking in all directions not to miss anything, we drove into the small, compact, brown adobe town of Santa Fé.
•
Our hotel rooms were adjoining, with a locked door between. The high headboards of the beds were painted red with green and yellow Mexican flowers, and at the foot of each bed was a wooden chest painted like the bedsteads.
Germaine said, “Your room is better than mine.”
“They look the same to me.”
We were in my room. She tried the door between our rooms and said, “We should have this opened.”
I became vividly aware of myself standing next to her.
“That’s a terrific idea,” I said.
On our way to lunch, I stopped at reception and asked the receptionist please to have the door between Dr. Greer’s and my room opened.
She said, “We can’t. We’ve lost the keys, I’m sure. And the doors between the rooms are painted shut.”
I made a face of disappointment at Germaine.
In a Mexican restaurant we had, each of us for the first time, blue tortillas with our chili. Germaine said they were tasteless, and the chili was hot without having any flavour.
Then we went out to look. She had to see everything. We went in and out of every shop along the street the hotel was on, and around the Plaza. Indians were sitting on the edges of blankets spread out under the arcade on one side of the Plaza, and on the blankets were black pots, silver and turquoise jewellery, and large round loaves in transparent plastic bags. Though Germaine said, “What a lot of tat,” she examined the tat closely. When she saw an object she thought special, she pointed it out to me.
In a shop, she bought a little turquoise and silver fly, a pin, which she said was too beautiful not to have. She pinned it to the lapel of my jacket to stand back and examine it, and as she did she clasped her hands under her chin and squealed. “It is beautiful,” she said, then, “Do you want it?” “No, no,” I said.
In another shop, she examined closely a San Ildefonso black bowl held aloft by an elderly woman with blue hair. She said, “All right, I’ll have it.” Again, she squealed and clapped her hands when the bowl, packed in a cardboard box, was handed to us; I took it to carry. “Do you want to keep it?” she asked. I knew that if I had said, Yes, thank you, it would have been freely mine. “No,” I said, “thanks.”
She said, “I have it, have money, because I’m famous, and I can earn a lot simply by being famous. Don’t worry about it. I’ll pay the big bills. And if you see something you can’t afford, tell me, and I’ll buy it for you.”
She bought a small hand-made cedar box. She bought a rough black bowl from an Indian woman under the arcade. She bought a weathervane for her house in Italy.
Everything we looked at appeared edged with the clear sharp winter light of New Mexico.
In the shops, people smiled at us. I smiled back. Germaine said, “You smile, and I find I smile, too. You’re going to get me into the awful American habit of smiling at people when they look at you. You’re going to make me as nice as you are.”
“I’m not nice,” I said.
“So you’ve told me.”
I asked, “And what are you going to do to me?”
Along the narrow street, shop after shop was filled with antiques and paintings and rugs and weaving and pots and specially designed clothes. In the whole of Santa Fé, there seemed to be only one drugstore, one grocery, one Woolworth’s; all the other shops were galleries.
Germaine said, “This is Poofterville.”
I carried all the packages back to the hotel, and in my room I lay on my bed and fell asleep. From time to time I woke and saw, out of the window, different stages of sunset over the snow-covered adobe town; then I woke to a view of the town outlined along flat roof edges and windowsills with lights flickering in brown paper bags and the night sky dark blue.
At seven I knocked on Germaine’s door. She had been typing one of a series of articles she was writing on gardens, under the name of Rose Blight. Gardening books were open on the bed and floor, and papers were everywhere around the little table by the window where she had put her typewriter. She was wearing the red and black check flannel shirt and blue bib overalls she’d been wearing, and she said, “I’ll have to wear what I’ve got on to go to dinner. I forgot my pantihose, so I can’t wear my dress.” I didn’t say, “But I thought you didn’t wear underclothes.” Perhaps it was too cold. I said, “You give the flannel shirt and jeans real style.” She laughed. “Cut the shit,” she said; “I look like a fucking mess.” At the long mirror on her bathroom door, she took various poses, examining herself. She sighed. “Anyway, let’s go eat.”
We walked to the restaurant. The night cold was sharp, bright, dry. I kept breathing it in deeply; it burned throughout my sinuses and lungs. Hunched over, Germaine said her ears were freezing. I offered to give her my scarf to tie round her head. “No,” she said. I thought that Germaine, when she said no, would mean no. But I offered again, and she said all right. From time to time I grabbed her and rubbed my hands, hard, all over her.
The air smelled of the smoke of piñon fires.
At a corner table in the restaurant, Germaine said, “I’m going to pay for this meal.”
The fancy restaurant had a sommelier who came with the wine list, which he held out to me. I said, pointing to Germaine, “She’ll choose,” and he stepped back to look at me and look at Germaine, and, frowning a little, said, “Very well.” Germaine ordered a bottle of French wine. After the sommelier came back with it and opened it, he began to pour wine into my glass for me to taste it, and I said, “No, she’ll try it first,” and again he frowned as he poured a little of the wine into Germaine’s glass. She said, “It isn’t premier cru, as it’s supposed to be.” “It is,” he said. “No,” she said, “it isn’t.” He said nothing, staring at her. “However,” she said, “it will do, thank you.” He poured out a glass for me, then for Germaine.
She said to me, “I know when you’re annoyed.”
“Do you? What do I do when I’m annoyed?”
“You say, ‘No, no, I’m perfectly happy to do anything you want,’ and I can tell by the tone of your voice that what you really want to say is, ‘Let’s stop fucking around, I’m bored going through these fucking shops.’”
I laughed.
“I could tell,” she said, “that in the car you felt you couldn’t go silent, couldn’t withdraw into yourself, but had to keep up a conversation with me, which was a strain on you, and you wished you didn’t have to do it.”
“Yes,” I said. “But I believe in politeness.”
“What does that mean?”
“Oh, I take it to mean that the person you’re with is more important than you are, and you must go out to him and treat him with the deference he deserves.”
“Even if you don’t want to? Even if it means being nice when you’re not nice?”
“Yep,” I said.
She stuck out her lower lip.
With our food, though I can’t imagine it was the food which started her off, she talked about her marriage. She described the ceremony and the dinner afterward in a restaurant. She left the party, went to the ladies’ room, looked at herself in a mirror and realized she had made a great mistake.
Living with her husband, when she came in from a day out, he would ask, “Where’ve you been?” and she wouldn’t tell him simply because she didn’t want to be asked where she’d been or what she’d been doing; she didn’t want to feel she had to account to him, and she didn’t want to feel guilty for not accounting to him. She hadn’t felt, she’d made quite sure she wouldn’t feel, guilty towards others since she’d left her mother in Australia.
Then, for most of the meal, she told me about her mother.
I asked her questions. I don’t know if I asked her a question she thought offensive—I don’t recall if I did—but I recall her all at once looking at me, her face hard, her jaw long, her eyes narrow. Perhaps I had said something which she disapproved of. I certainly felt she disapproved of me, suddenly, entirely. I didn’t know what had happened.
We ate in silence for a while. The waiter kept filling our glasses. Later, with dessert, she told me that she had argued terribly with all her friends, especially her women friends. She raised her head up, so her long neck curved, and she sighed as with relief. She said it always happened that her friends decided, at some point of intimacy, to tell her just what they thought of her: that she was self-involved, and if she considered other people at all it was only as an audience to whom she gave lectures.
She put her fingers over her lips. “They think I can’t be hurt. I suppose they imagine I don’t know the way I am, and they feel impelled, for some reason which they call friendship but which is their convoluted idea of friendship, to tell me. They don’t at all know the way I am.”
I wondered if I had said something about her which had hurt her for being so misunderstanding of her.
I said, “But you do give the impression that you don’t hear, or ever see, the person you’re talking to. Whatever I say, for example, seems to produce no reaction in you; and the more important what I have to say is to me, the less you react. Your face becomes stark.”
“Does it?”
“I’ll tell you, though, that hours, days, sometimes weeks after I might have said something I thought brilliant enough to impress you, and which I imagined didn’t, it happens that you’ll publicly comment on what I said, and I’ll suddenly see you’d been listening closely.” I said, “Do you remember the time I made the Anatolian dish with aubergines in Italy? I thought you hadn’t taken it in, really, but years later you mentioned that I had taught you to make it, and that you made it often.”
She smiled a little with the corners of her mouth.
I still felt I had said something wrong, and I didn’t know what it was.
Maybe it had to do with her mother.
We went back to the hotel. In my bed, I couldn’t sleep, and I lay wondering why. I knew I felt guilt towards, not all women, but difficult women, and I felt guilt because, somewhere in my life which I could not recall, I had done something, perhaps simply said something, which was wrong, which had hurt them, and the only reaction possible for them to what I had done or said was to be difficult. I had made them difficult.
Yet they gave me something, these women, or at least promised me something, for which I wanted to be close to them. They could justify me in my body and soul.
•
Germaine rang me in the morning, her voice bright. I ordered breakfast for us both, which we ate, she in her nightgown, by the sunny window in my room.
While she worked on her gardening articles, I went out for a walk. It was Thanksgiving Day. People were gathered about the cathedral; I entered and stood at the back and listened, beyond the congregation, to singers and guitarists at the front of the church singing and playing Mexican songs, and suddenly the double doors by me opened and a procession of Indian women wearing soft leather shoes and embroidered shawls came in, followed by altar boys, then a bishop with a crook. I left, and walked up into the foothills above Santa Fé. The snow on the ground and piñon trees had crystallized, and the dry crystals blew up in small cold bursts of wind, and flashed in the clear sunlight. I walked off the road, into a piñon woods where there were no footmarks but my own. Then I returned to the road, where a one-eyed old Indian in a battered pickup truck stopped to give me a lift, but I told him I was taking a walk, and wished him a happy Thanksgiving.
When I got back to the hotel room I found the door to Germaine’s room wide open, and I looked in. She was still in her long nightgown, barefoot, watching a maintenance man try different large keys on a ring in the lock of the door between our rooms. One opened the door and Germaine jumped up, clapped her hands, and squealed.
She said to me, “I got him to do it.”
The maintenance man smiled.
A thrill of fear passed through me.
We left the door open.
It was as if I were naked, and, self-consciously naked, I sat on her bed while she sat in an armchair, and I told her about my morning.
She got up from her chair. “I guess I’d better get ready to go out,” she said. “I’ll have to wear what I wore yesterday.”
A student of ours had, from Tulsa, rung up a friend of hers in Santa Fé, an elderly woman, who through our student had invited Germaine and me to Thanksgiving lunch. At first Germaine said, “I’ve spoken to too many people, and I don’t want to speak to anyone now. You can do it. You can be among people who even bore you and put on an act that they’re the most interesting people you’ve ever met. I can’t.” She shrugged. “Well, let’s go. No doubt we’ll have turkey. I hate turkey, a tasteless bird which has all the tasteless qualities of this country.” I said, “We’ll only do what you want to do. Honestly. I’d rather. I want to do what’s most restful for you, and if, after your weeks of lecture tours and thousands of people to talk to, you’d prefer to have a sandwich here in our rooms, I’d like that.” “No,” she said, “we’ll go.”
On a map of Santa Fé I found the street where we were to go. It did not appear far, and I suggested to Germaine that we walk. Outside the hotel she asked, “Which way?” It occurred to me that every time we left the hotel Germaine asked, “Which way?” and did not know her way back to the hotel. I was surprised that she should be so disorientated (to stick to my guns), and I was surprised, too, that she was amused and not annoyed when I, turning the map in all directions, got lost. I stopped a big car to ask directions; the driver, a young Indian, took us to the street. Germaine kept laughing.
Our hostess was short, plump, in a long black dress, her white hair tied up at the side of her head in Hopi fashion. She introduced us to other guests, two women, one with a little boy, and a male high-school teacher. From the living-room window of the cottage was a wide view of a snow-covered mountain crossed by thirty-six (Germaine counted them out loud) electricity cables.
We sat. Our hostess gave us wine. We were silent.
Germaine said, “Do I smell turkey? How wonderful! We’re having turkey!”
I smiled.
When our hostess and the high-school teacher and the little boy went into the kitchen, I followed them to help.
From the living room I heard Germaine talking to the other women as if giving a lecture.
At table, the hostess asked Germaine, “What is it like to be a cult figure?”
“I’ll tell you what it means,” she said. “It means that people who don’t know your work at all, so have no idea what you stand for, presume that they do, and insist on discussing your work with you. What I really want, and don’t have, is the respect of my peers. For whatever reason, and it could be jealousy, my peers are suspicious of me, and don’t respect me.”
We sat in the living room afterwards, Germaine and I together on the sofa. The sun set. Two middle-aged men with moustaches came in; they were interior decorators and lived together. Germaine and I often touched one another as they watched us. While we talked, she held one of my hands in hers and with her other rubbed my arm for a long time as with a great warm affection and familiarity.
One of the men asked me if I knew a certain young British painter.
I thought a moment. “Yes,” I said, “I do.”
“He comes to Santa Fé often,” the other man said.
“I knew that,” I said.
“He had an exhibition here last year,” the first said, “with a drawing of you in it.”
“Really?”
I was very attentive to Germaine. After three hours there I saw she was tired. I put an arm round her and said we should go. She nodded and sighed.
She sighed a great deal.
The high-school teacher gave us a lift back to the hotel.
That evening in my room we watched television, one stupid programme after another. In her nightgown, Germaine sat in an armchair and knitted; I lay on my bed, my feet at the top, my head at the bottom, pillows under my elbows. Germaine kept getting up to change the channels, saying, “What shit American television is.” She came to the musical The Sound of Music, and we watched a bit of it, both saying, “This is awful, awful, awful,” and Germaine changed to other channels, but more awful programmes appeared, and we always came round to The Sound of Music, which, after all, we watched. The governess to a family of unhappy Austrian children wants to make them happy, and she does this by contriving clothes for all of them out of the flowered curtains of her bedroom; happy in their new clothes, they go out into the whole of Switzerland, singing. I saw Germaine lower her knitting to her lap as she watched the governess lead the children up into the green mountains, all of them singing to the sky. Then she turned to me, her lower lip stuck out; tears were dripping down her face, and she wiped them away with the back of her hand. She said, “This is shit,” and got up and changed the channel.
We slept with the door open between our rooms.
•
In the morning, out of the bath and wrapped in a towel, I passed the open door and saw Germaine, dressing. She grabbed the fat round her waist and squeezed it into a roll. “Look at that,” she said. Then she slapped her behind. “I’ve gone slack-assed.” She pulled up the skin on her thigh and said, “That’s gone crêpey.”
While she worked on her gardening articles, I went out to bookshops. I looked for and found her books in the shops.
After lunch in a Mexican restaurant, where Germaine said only the guacamole was good, we drove off in the car to tour the country round Santa Fé.
We stopped at the Pueblo San Ildefonso, a low ring of adobe houses about a vast sandy plaza in which, off-centre, was a round stone platform. Nailed to a tree at the entrance to the pueblo was a sign: KEEP OFF THE KIVA. “What’s a kiva?” Germaine asked. “I don’t know,” I said. The pueblo appeared deserted. We went into a part adobe, part corrugated-iron shed, a gift shop, where an Indian, behind a counter with a few ugly bowls, simply looked at us. In a whisper, I said to Germaine, “I’ll ask him what a kiva is.” She frowned. “No,” she said. “I’d better,” I said, “or we won’t know what to keep off.” There was a flash of anger in her eyes, and I wondered why. I asked the man, who said in a low, slack voice that the kiva was the stone platform in the plaza, and that it was used for ceremonies. Germaine pointed to the bowls and said they were lovely, when I knew she knew they were ugly. I realized she said it because she was embarrassed, and when we got out of the shop it came to me that she was perhaps embarrassed because she hadn’t wanted the man to know she was ignorant of what a kiva was, and she’d been angry at me for a moment because, by asking, I revealed to the man that she was ignorant. We walked across the empty plaza, over which sand blew up, past the kiva and to a large, twisted, bare tree which Germaine said must be the Council Oak. In front of some of the houses, which had porches with carved pillars and cross-beams, were beehive ovens, and as we went by them I felt heat come off them. But we still saw no one. Dogs barked.
We were to meet the elderly woman who’d given us Thanksgiving lunch, and two of her friends, at a restaurant in Chimayo for dinner, but we got lost. At a gasoline station, I asked directions to Chimayo, and, again, I saw Germaine get angry.
Early after all, we sat in the bar of the restaurant and ordered tequila. Germaine said, referring to the woman we were to meet, “I hope her two friends are poofs. I wouldn’t be able to take two heavy ladies.” We ordered more tequila. We were sitting by a fireplace in which piñon logs were burning. A moment of intimacy seemed to encircle us. From time to time I’d reach out and touch her, or lean towards her and kiss her.
The elderly woman came with an academic husband and wife.
In Santa Fé, before we went to our rooms, we walked around the Plaza, under the arcades, to fart out, Germaine said, the gas from the beans of all the bad Mexican food we’d eaten. She stopped, or I stopped, to fart, then, laughing, we continued.
I was drunk, and threw off my clothes and got into bed.
•
Saturday morning, our last full day, we went out to look through the shops we hadn’t been into.
The first shop was filled with fur coats. As Germaine was looking at them, an old thin man wearing a toupee approached as if to take from Germaine’s hands the coat she was examining. She still wore her check flannel shirt and bib overalls and jogging shoes. She asked the man, “How much is this?” He said something like, “Forty-three thousand dollars.” “I want to try it on,” she said. He helped her on with it, and Germaine strode about the shop, swinging the coat, and pausing at mirrors to look at it on her. I said, “That’s beautiful, Germaine,” and I found myself emphasizing her name so the man in the toupee might twig who was in his shop. She said, “I’m not sure.” She tried on other furs, all expensive, which the man helped her with. Again and again, I’d say, “Germaine—,” because I wanted the old man to know I was with someone on whom, if he knew, he would have waited with deferential attention. She said to the man, “I don’t think any will do, really.” “Very well,” he said. We left.
In the sunlight, the snow was melting and dripping from the adobe roofs.
I asked, “Would you really have bought a fur coat if you’d found one you liked?”
“I was just playing,” she said. She sprinted a little ahead of me, along a street. When I got to her she clapped her hands and said, “We’re going to do a lot of playing in the shops.”
We went into shop after shop up and down Canyon Road, and Germaine, it seemed to me, looked at every single item, even every bad painting. Often she’d point out a bit of weaving or pottery, Indian and old, and say, “Look.” About turquoise, she said she was pretty tired of it (and she had by now learned the names of all the different kinds and where each was from), but when, in one shop, she saw in a glass case a bracelet of silver and mellow greenish turquoise, she said to me, “Look at that. It’s very moving.”
I laughed.
She said, “You see, I am becoming like you.”
In another shop she tried on Ecuadorean ponchos. The saleslady, who wore many silver and turquoise bracelets, recognized Germaine, and said, “We’re very impressed.” A lot of attention was given to her also by other salespeople in the shop. Germaine often hugged me and kissed me. With each poncho, she asked me, “What do you think of this one?” The sales people looked at me, and I could see in their eyes the wonder: Is this Germaine Greer’s lover? She bought the poncho I specially liked, one woven in delicate stripes of white, pale blue and pale pink. She went out wearing it.
We were on Canyon Road till, at sunset, the dripping snow began to freeze into icicles.
She bought yards of Guatemalan fabric and a Rio Grande rug.
I had to pee, and went behind an adobe house and peed into a bank of snow.
Germaine called, “Can I watch?”
As I was coming out of my bathroom to go to bed, I passed the open door and saw Germaine in bed, the blankets pulled up to her chin. I stopped at the doorway.
In a moment of intense self-consciousness, so great I was not sure who I was, I said, “Good night.”
“Good night,” she said.
I got into bed.
Whenever I woke, I heard her breathing in the next room.
•
Germaine insisted on paying the hotel bill. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I have the money.”
We left in the bright cold morning while Santa Fé was sleeping to drive up through the mountains to Taos. The red-pink earth showed where the snow was melting.
She asked me, “Do you think you would ever kill yourself?”
“No. Never.”
“Did you ever try?”
“I’ve often thought about it, but, no, I’ve never tried.”
“I once did,” she said, “when I was a teenager. I was wearing my father’s greatcoat, which I loved, and which was much too big for me, so I had to clutch it about my body. I was very depressed. I was depressed, deeply, deeply depressed, because I had thought out that there was no God. I thought, though, that I’d give God a chance to prove Himself, and, in my father’s greatcoat, I walked along the edge of a cliff, allowing myself to teeter, and I thought, if there were a God, He would save me, and if there weren’t I’d fall over and die, which was what I wanted, anyway, if there were no God. I fell. I fell and rolled down a steep bank, and I tried to keep myself from rolling further by clutching at branches. Finally, I stopped rolling, a long way down. And I was very upset because I had torn my father’s great-coat.”
I tried to see her at that age. I tried to see her at any age younger than the age of her public image, and I couldn’t. That the present large Germaine might contain a past small Germaine who wanted to die did not seem possible to me. Whatever had happened to change her from a small girl into a large women, the change had been essential; she did not think inwardly about herself, but outwardly about the world.
We passed through the high strange mountain towns of Truchas and Trampas. In all directions, the mountains rose and rose.
I risked asking her, “Don’t you want a long lasting relationship with someone?”
“There’s nothing I’d like more,” she said, “but I get bored by people after a very short time.”
“Are you getting bored with me?”
“Yes, I am.”
I laughed.
“So you’ll never commit yourself to a relationship?”
She glanced to the side at me, but said nothing.
At dusk, we stopped in the Oklahoma panhandle for gasoline. A little blond boy came out of the station to put the nozzle of the hose into the car tank; the pump looked broken down, and the numbers rolled quickly, and soon the price was up to twenty-five dollars. I said to Germaine, “The last time we got gas, we filled it up, and I paid, and I know I didn’t pay more than fifteen dollars.” Her eyes snapped open on me. “Don’t make a federal case out of it,” she said. I stepped back. The price went up to thirty-five dollars. The little boy kept his hand on the nozzle; I heard not gasoline but air pumped out. I dared myself to say, “There’s something wrong.” Germaine said sharply to me, “Cut it out, will you? Just cut it out.” I turned and walked away and wandered about the old gasoline station. I saw her go into the illuminated station and, through a wide window, I saw her talk to a man in greasy overalls. When she came out she laughed a little and said, “You were right.”
I was silent in the car.
At Woodward, just off the Oklahoma panhandle, we stopped again for gasoline, and from there Germaine, taking swigs from a bottle of Jack Daniels, drove on to Tulsa, normally a six-hour drive, in three hours. I did not look at the speedometer. I was frightened, and held myself still.
•
A week or so after we got back, Germaine gave a lecture at the Unitarian Church in Tulsa on abortion and contraception. The long church hall was filled. In front of me was a mother with her two teenage girls. Powerful lights illuminated the stage so TV cameras could film the lecture; in the intense light, Germaine appeared to have a burning silver sheen about her. As she talked, she moved her arms in loose, soft gestures, and I found myself being drawn in, not to a public argument in support of abortion as she defined it, but a private revelation about love. It was as if, moving her arms, Germaine had begun to sing, and the aria, about deeply private passions and regrets, happiness and pain, rose up and up and out. I thought: She’s talking about herself. And yet she wasn’t talking about herself. She was talking about the outside world, and in her large awareness of it, she knew it as I did not; it was as if she had a secret knowledge of it, and to learn that secret from her would make me a different person. I wanted to be a different person. I had never heard Germaine give a public lecture; I had never seen her so personal. I thought: I love her.
At our Thursday luncheon in the Greek restaurant Germaine said to me, “You like difficult women, don’t you?”
I said in a Tulsan accent, “I guess I do.”
“Well then,” she said, “I’ll introduce you to my mother.”