1952
Since leaving Newark on that one-way bus ticket all those years ago (one-way left no room for cold feet or instant regret), Louise hadn’t been far out of Los Angeles. San Diego, once. Bakersfield for a shoot. That single trip across the ocean and back during the last war. That one brief, ecstatic weekend when she and Arnie ran off to Palm Springs with a pocketful of cash and a marriage license.
They’d just finished up Betsey Barnes, College Girl. Flush with a big paycheck, Arnie had popped the question. Flush with a renewed contract, she’d kissed him in reply. She borrowed the dress she’d worn in Betsey’s last number, a mauve silk ensemble with a swingable chiffon skirt and matching beaded jacket. It was ridiculously inappropriate for a courthouse wedding, even for California, but Louise didn’t care. She felt like a princess and, besides, she knew no one was going to check the costume room over the weekend.
They stayed in their hotel room, living off room service. When they finally emerged, on their last day at El Mirador, it was to a rare rainstorm. They were the only ones walking barefoot across the puddled lawn, draped on soaked canvas lounge chairs, kissing beneath the dripping archways around the pool.
She wonders why they never went back.
But the Grand Canyon is unlike anything she’s seen. It’s not California beach, Nevada desert, Palm Springs resort. It’s certainly not New Jersey. She’s always had little more than a friendly acquaintance with the Director Up There, but standing on the rim of the canyon, she sees an artistry she never knew existed. She understands the beauty that only eons of patience can bring.
Patience is something she feels short on these days.
The next day, as promised, Duane takes her to see the canyon. While she eats a broiled grapefruit half, beautifully garnished with a maraschino cherry in the center, he arranges for two places on a mule string down Bright Angel Trail.
“They say it’s the best way to see it,” he tells her. “Even in the winter.”
She doesn’t ask who “they” are. They probably had brochures.
He leaves her to finish her grapefruit and goes to change. It seems that Duane, ever the soldier, ever prepared, has a pair of cowboy boots for just this occasion. Louise isn’t sure what she has in the wicker suitcase for a mule ride in December. Everything she packed is light and gauzy, California pastel, desert airy. She finally settles on a slim pair of black pants and a fitted black jersey top. It has a scoop neck, modest enough while still showing a hint of collarbone. Long-sleeved, which she hopes is warm enough.
She considers her white Keds, but they feel too sporty for her spare ensemble, too suburban for her urban chic. Instead she puts on her flats, bright red against the black of her pants. Her hair, she ties up in a ponytail. She hasn’t worn a ponytail in years, at least not since her Betsey Barnes days, but it seems appropriate, somehow. Maybe it’s because she’s still pretending to be Anna. Maybe it’s because she’s far from home. Maybe it’s because here, where the air stretches for miles, she feels light and young and as hopeful as she did when she was eighteen.
She keeps her makeup light. Powder, rouge, pale lipstick. Eyebrows and lashes dark and neat. A dab of Evening in Paris behind each ear. No accessories but her turquoise bracelet. No hat, no gloves, no handbag. She checks her reflection one last time in the bathroom mirror. Not a frill, not a petticoat, not a feather or bead. She looks simple and fresh. She looks as ready as she’ll ever be for a National Park.
When she meets Duane out at the corral, she suddenly sees how wrong she is. The few other women waiting for their tour are wearing riding pants or men’s blue jeans. They have canvas jackets over their blouses and thick-soled shoes. Plaid. Lots of plaid.
With her trim black pants and tortoiseshell sunglasses, Louise probably looks like she’s headed for a jazz club or a poetry reading. She probably looks like what she is—a frivolous movie star unsuccessfully slumming it for the day. A modern Marie Antoinette. She steps back, to the safety outside the corral, and drops a hand on the wooden rail.
And she’s not warm enough. As ugly as they are, she almost envies the plaid flannel and canvas hunting jackets. The back of her neck is cold. The little hint of bare ankle above her flats white and icy. She considers, for half a silly second, going back to the room for her mink.
She doesn’t think anyone’s noticed her—at least she hopes no one has, this girl who doesn’t know how to dress for a mule ride—but Duane spots her from across the corral and waves. He’s sitting on a wooden bench changing into his cowboy boots. They’re magnificently tooled, with silver studs dotting the sides. He even has on a wide-brimmed hat, just like a real dude wrangler. Maybe he bought it at the park’s souvenir shop. Maybe she should’ve bought one too.
He waves again, but she doesn’t move from her spot outside the corral. “Yoo-hoo!” he actually calls.
Some of the others turn at his shout. Maybe, despite the ponytail, they recognize her. Including the guides in their fringed jackets, she counts ten others, men and women. One shields her eyes and peers in Louise’s direction. Louise wants to sink into her red flats. Instead she adjusts her sunglasses, as though they hide her from the stares. Maybe they do.
Duane knots the laces of his oxfords together and slings them over his shoulder. He strolls across the corral toward her. “Mules are stubborn,” he says, leaning on the gate. “They won’t come to you way out here. You have to go to them.”
She manages a thin smile, one that she can’t keep on her face for very long. “I can’t go. I’m sorry.”
“Why not? It’s booked and everything. No refunds, they said.”
“I’ll pay you back the eleven dollars.”
He tosses his shoes over the rail. “What gives?”
It’s funny how, in no time at all, Duane’s talking to her like an old friend. Like a little sister. Like the girl next door. She tries to imagine any of the men at the studio, the directors or gaffers or set dressers, looking her in the eye and asking, “What gives?” As long as she can lipstick on a smile, they don’t give a damn.
But Duane is resting his elbows on the gate. He’s looking her straight in the eyes. He wants to know.
“Well.” She hesitates. “I’m not dressed for it.”
“They’re still saddling up the rest. You have time to change.”
She hesitates again. “I don’t have anything else.”
She waits for him to laugh. It’s a bare admission. Actresses always have the right outfit, whatever the occasion. Church? Light wool suit in a muted pastel, a little curve of a veiled hat, gloves, sensible brown pumps. Premiere? Floor-length gown—Dior or Adrian, please—with just a hint of bare shoulders peeking above a stole. Beach? Pedal pushers, wrap blouse, and canvas flats. Meeting where you hope to convince the studio that you’re a woman with a brain? Lucky yellow scarf.
Duane must know all of this. And yet he doesn’t laugh. “Who forgets to pack their mule-riding duds?” he says with a wink, and she’s the one who laughs.
“They’re in my other suitcase,” she says airily.
“Anyway, you bring a little California to this old corral.”
The ladies are still staring, but surreptitiously, over the tops of their mules’ heads. Two of the men are openly ogling her leg-skimming pants. She arranges herself behind the rail fence.
“Maybe I don’t want to.” She tugs on her pants. They show the curve of her calf, the dip behind her knee. “You know what I wore to my very first audition? An evening dress. Big velvet rosette at the waist and everything.” She gives a short laugh at the memory. “See, I’ve had experience sticking out like a sore thumb.”
Duane doesn’t even think about it. He steps out of his tooled leather boots and hands them over the gate.
She just stares. “I can’t take those from you.”
He’s standing in the dust of the paddock in nothing but his stockinged feet. “They pinch my toes anyhow.”
She’s sure he’s lying, but takes the boots.
They’re huge, coming all the way up her calf; she’s relieved that the men now have less leg for their viewing pleasure. Duane slips off his heavy socks and passes those across too. “Ball them up. Put them in the toes.”
“Really, you don’t have to…”
“How many guys can say they’ve given their socks to Louise Wilde?” He grins. “Take the hat too. Please.” He doesn’t wait for an answer before reaching across and plopping it on her head.
For a moment, she remembers another hat being plopped over another ponytail.
On that very first ride, all those years ago, Mr. Steve had given her his hat. It sank down over her eyes, but, astride that placid pony with her new hat, she’d felt like she belonged.
Louise’s eyes are suddenly stinging, and she blames it on the dust. She ducks her head and hopes no one notices. He’s not giving her the literal shirt off his back, but it’s pretty close. As she adjusts the boots, Duane wipes off his bare feet with a handkerchief and puts his oxfords back on.
Then he isn’t the only one by her side. A bland-faced woman has crossed the corral and untied a shawl from her shoulders. It’s a stiff, plaid affair, something her Oma Wild would have worn. For a moment, Louise is embarrassed. Embarrassed for the shawl, for the plain woman, for the assumption that she needed anything.
But Duane doesn’t let her be embarrassed. He thanks the woman and takes the shawl. He knots it around Louise’s shoulders. It smells faintly like talcum powder. “Better?” he asks.
She always knows her lines, but there’s no script for this. “Yes,” she says, and clears her throat. She touches Duane’s hand, tightening the knot. “Thank you.”
It’s been ages since she’s been in a saddle, but her body remembers the feeling the moment she’s on the back of the soft-eyed mule. Achingly remembers. Before too long, her legs and backside are sore and itchy. Yes, it’s been ages.
She got her first speaking role, after all, because she could ride. It had been a singing Western. Not anything as big as a Gene Autry or Roy Rogers, but that type. Cowboys and guitars around bonfires, ballads sung against a prairie backdrop, lively hoedowns featuring far too much gingham. When they’d asked the crowd of girls outside the studio who could ride, her hand had shot up. She hadn’t ridden since that stay at the Prickly Pear, when she was Anna Louisa, six years old with dark braids, missing teeth, and far too much gumption. She may have lost the braids, but not the gumption. That’s why she elbowed her way to the front of the crowd that day on the lot and swore to the casting director that she could ride like Annie Oakley. It worked. After all, in Hollywood, guts count more than talent.
The plain-faced woman doesn’t look like she’s ever had a bold moment in her life, but she lets her mule drop back until she’s alongside Louise’s.
“Excuse me,” she says, and tugs a button on her brown jacket. “But are you—”
Louise doesn’t wait for her to finish her question. “No,” she says. She doesn’t want to sit and talk to this woman. She doesn’t want to acknowledge the faces turning to stare back at her. She wants to enjoy her thoughts and the sky and the warm saddle beneath her legs.
“But you look just like—”
“I’m sorry,” Louise says. “I’m not who you think I am.”
She feels almost bad as she says it, seeing the woman’s pale face flush as she lowers her eyes. The boldest thing this woman has probably ever done before was use cream of chicken soup in her casserole instead of cream of mushroom. And here she’s just ridden up to a Hollywood star with nothing more to offer than a plaid shawl and a question.
Louise should’ve said yes. Maybe signed an autograph on the corner of the shawl. She used to all the time. Time was she fed off the attention. Lit up like a lightbulb. But here, in this eons-old canyon, she feeds off the peace. For someone used to the bustle of the set, she suddenly craves quiet.
The woman returns to her husband, shaking her head. He says, “I told you so,” and now Louise is the one flushing. Duane looks back at her, but doesn’t say anything.
As she dips farther and farther down the trail, she tries to forget all of that. The braids, the ranch, the casting call ages ago. The fans and autographs. The way her teeth are chattering. She looks out over the canyon, at the clouds stair-stepping from the tree line below into a sky that stretches up forever. No backstory is as big as that sky.
There’s nothing but the jingle of mule bells, the creaking of saddles, the clomp of hooves on the sliding rock. No one talks as they wind their way down the trail. The curious look up at the sky or to where the buildings have disappeared along the rim. The bold look over the edge. The nervous look straight ahead at their mules’ twitching ears.
Louise, she looks at a bird. A hawk, an eagle, she doesn’t know. Something that soars up from the trees below, higher and higher, flexing muscles. Weightless. Effortless. She envies him.
Life hasn’t felt so effortless in a long while. Back when she stood tiptoed at the edge of her future, catching each new role as it was offered, glowing under the lights, things had seemed simple. She had her career stretching before her. She had her marriage. Both as easy as breathing. When had things gotten so hard?
They pass a low branch of a scrubby pine, dusted with old snow. She hasn’t seen snow in a dozen years or so. There’s hardly any around her, just a dusting on the trail that starts to disappear as they wind farther down, but she can smell it. It smells so cold and clean, the way L.A. never does. She reaches up until her fingers brush needles. They come away icy and tingling.
Duane rides in front of her. He looks even taller on a mule, and uncomfortable, his legs stuck out at awkward angles. He’d pulled himself up on the mule with a John Wayne swagger. He’d wanted to impress her. As she watches him now, bouncing with his bare ankles white above his oxfords, she feels a sudden affection.
She runs fingertips across the mule’s stiff mane. Beneath her fingers, the animal quivers. Everything about him—his mane, his neck, his sweaty flanks—is warm. Louise feels it through the backs of her legs. Sweat pools behind her knees.
Duane turns his head and says something to her over his shoulder. The wind cresting down the canyon snatches his words away. Was he asking if she liked the ride? Hated it? Wanted a drink of water? She nods, without knowing what she’s nodding to. She’s too warm and drowsy to care.
It feels like they’ve been riding for hours, for days, for weeks, but the sun hasn’t moved much beyond the rim of the canyon above. She left her gold Longines back up in the room. Here, time seems to move at its own pace.
The trail narrows, curves close to the edge. Ahead, the woman in the brown jacket gives a quick little cry. Louise almost laughs at her—almost—but then her own mule steps a moment too near to the trail’s edge. A stone goes skittering down. She nearly screams. She nearly pulls back on the reins, nearly pushes in her heels, nearly does whatever she can to get the mule to stop.
But she doesn’t. She lets go of the reins with one hand and presses it to her chest. She feels her heartbeat beneath her fingertips. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. When she gets to ten, she lets go with the other hand. She stretches both out, like a ballerina. She balances on the back of the mule and she looks out over the edge.
Because, at that moment, of course, she’s no longer Louise Wilde. She’s little Anna with the braids and the gumption who did the hard things, the brave things, exactly because they terrified her.
It’s steep, right alongside the trail. Almost a sheer drop here. It’s green, so green, a snow-speckled carpet unfolding down one side of the canyon and up the other. Trees, she realizes, finally, belatedly. Trees so far away that they look like bushes. Trees that, from up here, are nothing but a smear of color against the bottom of the canyon.
The trail is a jagged line of brown through all that green, winding like a snake’s track in the sand, meandering like a snail’s silvery path across the windowsill. It zigzags until it disappears into the viridian. She never knew the bottom of anything could be so far away. In a place so vast, her own problems feel so small.
The bird she was watching before soars up again, spiraling on a burst of air. Or maybe it’s a different bird. Maybe that’s all they do, every last one of them. Spend their days floating in the wide space between the canyon walls. It looks so easy. Arms still outstretched, like an eagle, she leans forward in her saddle.
Duane turns around again, but when he sees her, he stops smiling. “Hey!” he cries, twisting in his saddle. “Hold on, will you?”
Automatically, she takes the reins again. She’s not a bird. They have feathers to hold them up. She has nothing but dreams that are quickly losing air.
When the mule train set off, she wondered whether Duane would lead his mule in front of or behind hers. In front, he’d be the one who leads the way, puts down the trail, directs her where to go. Behind, he’d watch to be sure she doesn’t fall off the edge. Arnie always went behind, when they were bike riding or climbing up to the Hollywood Sign. “I’ll always be there to catch you,” he’d say. “Lou, I won’t let you fall.”
She doesn’t have feathers; she never will. But maybe she still has Arnie.
She’s drained when she gets back to the El Tovar. Duane doesn’t notice. He wants a flat iron steak and potatoes.
“Not hungry?” he asks, when she stops at the entrance of the dining room and passes him the cowboy hat. “Not even for a hamburger? My treat.”
She shakes her head, but she’s too tired to even force a smile. More than anything, she wants to be alone.
Duane hesitates for a moment. “Meet for a drink after dinner?” He asks it casually, too casually, and then adds, “Or…”
He leaves the word hanging, and she knows exactly what he means by it. She’s heard too many “ors” in her life. Sure, you could go wait in line with the other girls. Or…Louise, sweetheart, do you really want to stay in the chorus? Or…I can drop you off by your place on my way home. Or…
“I’m heading out in the morning,” she says, fumbling for a polite refusal. “I really should turn in.”
For a second she thinks he’s going to repeat the “or,” maybe adding more after the word, embarrassing them both.
But he doesn’t. “If I didn’t ask, I’d always wonder. You know?” His Adam’s apple bobs.
She doesn’t answer.
“Anyway, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have. I was thinking…Well, who the hell cares what I was thinking. I just shouldn’t have.”
Maybe he shouldn’t have. But he’s the first in a long line of “ors” who had apologized. The first who didn’t seem to expect her to actually say yes.
“I don’t think you would’ve known what to do with a ‘yes’ anyway,” she says lightly.
This draws out that boyish grin. “I’m a man, so of course I’m supposed to say, ‘The hell I wouldn’t,’ but maybe you’re right.”
“Your boots,” she says, and bends to slip them from her feet, but Duane stops her with a gesture.
“Keep them. Consider them my fan letter to you, Louise.”
“I’m going to call Arnie.” She touches Duane on the cheek, just once. “You should think about calling Mavis.”
He smiles, ruefully and maybe even sadly, then nods. She watches while he walks into the dining room.
“I’d like to place a call to Los Angeles,” she says to the desk clerk. “Please have the operator keep ringing back until there’s an answer.” She scribbles down the number and slides it across the desk.
“Something to drink while you’re waiting for the call?” he asks.
She wants to say “Yes, a Manhattan.” She almost does. But “Nothing” is what she says, then adds, “Maybe coffee.”
The plaid shawl comes off. In the corner is sewn a tag from Montgomery Ward. She begs a piece of paper from the clerk and writes: “Thank you for lending your shawl. You are kinder than most. Louise Wilde.” She rolls the note up and tucks it beneath the loop of the tag.
She folds the shawl up and slides it across the counter to the desk clerk. “A guest lent this to me earlier.”
“Of course. What is her name?”
“I don’t know. She looked like Flora Robson.” This elicits a nod of understanding. “Would you see that she gets this?”
“Of course.”
She doesn’t have to wait long for the connection to go through. Amazingly. Before she’s walked the length of the lobby, a uniformed boy comes to her with a phone in hand, trailing the cord behind him. She almost drops the cup of coffee. The boy swiftly takes it before passing over the phone.
“Arn?” she asks, cradling the receiver against her ear. “It’s really you?”
“Who else do you expect to answer the phone in our house?” He sounds peevish. She doesn’t care.
She edges around a massive lighted Christmas tree. She carries the phone over to a chair in the corner and sets it on her lap. “Guess where I am?”
It’s a silly question. She realizes it the moment it leaves her mouth. “The operator said the El Tovar.”
She should’ve asked how he was doing. If he’d eaten today. If he’d changed his pajamas. “I’m at the Grand Canyon. I’ve never been. Have you?”
On the other end of the line, he’s quiet.
“I took a mule ride. Can you believe it? Me, on a mule? I wore boots and everything.” She knows she’s just babbling, but she finally has him on the phone. She doesn’t want to let him go. “The canyon goes on for miles. For forever, maybe. To look across onto the rock and the river below and see nothing but what nature’s built…Well, it’s peaceful to see. It’s like the ocean, but right here on land. Do you know what I mean?”
The line crackles, but then he finally says, “I think I do.”
His voice has lost a bit of its peevishness. She tries to imagine where he is right now. Maybe at his desk. Maybe he’s been reading or just sitting with a drink in hand, the way she had so many evenings. Ice clinking. Or maybe he’s talking on the kitchen phone, while he’s making himself scrambled eggs or a fried bologna sandwich.
“What are you having for supper tonight?”
She swears she hears him sigh. “Saltines.”
“You can’t live on crackers.” She straightens in the chair. “You should make some eggs. Fry up some liver. There should be some in the Coldspot. I might have cheese for a rarebit. You can make toast.” There’s probably not much in the refrigerator. She closes her eyes and tries to picture what she might’ve left in the pantry. “Deviled ham. Fruit cocktail. Or just warm up a can of soup. There should be some on the top shelf of the pantry.”
But as she’s picturing the red Campbell’s cans on the shelf, she’s suddenly picturing Arnie trying to reach them, from his wheelchair, and she realizes why he’s so silent on the other end of the line.
“I’m an idiot,” she says softly. “I’m sorry.”
“I can reach the crackers,” he says.
Even if she’d stocked the lower shelves for him, he can’t reach up to the toaster oven. He can’t fill a pot up from the sink. He can’t cook on the stove without catching his sleeve on the flame.
There, in the lobby of the El Tovar hotel, her eyes fill with tears. She turns toward the wall and wipes at them with the cuff of her shirt. It comes away streaked with buff powder.
“I was in such a hurry to get out the door, I didn’t leave anything for you to eat. I didn’t even think about that.” Tears are soaking through her sleeve and running down her face to her chin. She’d borne the past few days of travel—the empty gas tank, Mr. Steve, the suspension, the nights of loneliness—but this right here, and she’s crying right onto the lobby phone. “I’ll turn around. I’ll start driving back tonight. I’ll probably get there late tomorrow, but I’ll make you meatloaf or hash or spaghetti and meatballs. Piles of them. I’ll make whatever you want.”
He doesn’t say anything and, for a moment, she’s worried he’s hung up.
But then, quietly, he finally asks, “So why aren’t you in Vegas?”
She holds the phone away and sniffs. “Not in Vegas?” Her tears slow. “It’s not important now.”
“But you were going to go. You were all set to do it. And now you’re in Arizona, riding mules?”
Spending the day riding mules and eating a picnic lunch with ten strangers and Duane. While her husband sits at home eating crackers and, probably, drinking days-old coffee.
“It’s not important now.” Her drive across the country, to eat Christmas dinner, to ask Dad if he’d divorced Mom—it all sounds so selfish now. “I was going to go visit my dad—for Christmas, you know—but he won’t miss me. I’ll go to pack up and head back….”
“You should go.”
His voice is so low, she wonders if she heard him correctly.
“You should go,” he says again. “To New Jersey.”
“But I…”
“You haven’t been home in years.”
“Home.” There’s that word again. But this time, she doesn’t think of snow and pine trees and carols at Dad’s piano. She hears “home” and thinks of last Christmas, when she strung lights around the fan palm in the backyard and Arnie cooked two beautifully rare steaks on the barbecue. Just the two of them, lying barefoot on the hammock, singing Christmas carols up to the stars.
Maybe he’s thinking the same thing. Maybe. Because he asks, “You will come back, won’t you?”
She smiles through her tears and wipes her eyes again. “I can’t stay in New Jersey forever.”
Through the crackle of the line, she hears, “Don’t.”
And suddenly, that’s all she needs. “I’ll call Pauline. She’ll bring hot food over. I don’t want you to fade away to nothing.”
“All right.”
“Remember to do your exercises. You know you’re supposed to.”
“Lou…”
“And if the studio calls, tell them to get bent.”
She imagines he’s smiling. “I will.”
“Is that all? Oh, water the African violet in the kitchen.”
“Lou.” He hesitates. “Just come home?”
Arnie, you’re home, she wants to say. “I promise.”