Sherman Alexie - The Toughest Indian in the World

“One day, many years ago,” she said, “my heart walked into the snow and vanished. But then you found it and gave it heat.”

“Is that a simile or a metaphor?” I asked.

“It might be an analogy,” she said.

Our vows were witnessed by three dozen of Susan’s best friends, along with most of her coworkers at the architecture firm, but Susan’s handsome brother and parents stayed away as a protest against my pigmentation.

“I can understand fucking him,” her brother had said upon hearing the news of our engagement. “But why do you want to share a checking account?”

He was so practical.

Half of the partners and all of my fellow associates from the law firm showed up to watch me tie the knot.

Velma, my dark-skinned mother, was overjoyed by my choice of mate. She’d always wanted me to marry a white woman and beget half-breed children who would marry white people who would beget quarter-bloods, and so on and so on, until simple mathematics killed the Indian in us.

When asked, my mother told white people she was Spanish, not Mexican, not Hispanic, not Chicana, and certainly not Spokane Indian with a little bit of Aztec thrown in for spice, even though she was all of these things.

As for me, I’d told any number of white women that I was part Aztec and I’d told a few that I was completely Aztec. That gave me some mystery, some ethnic weight, a history of glorious color and mass executions. Strangely enough, there were aphrodisiacal benefits to claiming to be descended from ritual cannibals. In any event, pretending to be an Aztec warrior was a lot more impressive than revealing I was just some bright kid who’d fought his way off the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington State and was now a corporate lawyer in Seattle who pretended to have a lot more money that he did.

I’d emptied my meager savings account to pay for the wedding and reception, refusing to allow Susan to help, though she made twice what I did. I was living paycheck to paycheck, a bizarre circumstance for a man whose monthly wage exceeded his mother’s yearly income as a social worker in the small city of Spokane, Washington.

My mother was an Indian woman who taught drunk white people not to drink, stoned whites not to smoke, and abusive whites not to throw the punch. A simple and honorable job. She was very good at it and I loved her. She wore a black dress to the wedding, nearly funeral wear, but brightened it with a salmon-colored scarf and matching shoes.

I counted seventeen white women at the wedding. On an average day, Susan would have been the fourth or fifth most attractive. On this, her wedding day, dressed in an ivory gown with plunging neckline, she was easily the most beautiful white woman in the chapel; she was more serene, sexy, and spiritual than the wooden Mary hanging on the west wall or the stained-glassed Mary filling up one of the windows.

Susan’s niece, an eighteen-year-old, served as her maid of honor. She modeled teen wear for Nordstrom’s. I tried not to stare at her. My best man was one of the partners in the law firm where I worked.

“Hey, Runner,” he had said just before the ceremony began. “I love you, man.”

I’d hugged him, feeling guilty. My friendship with him was strictly professional.

During the ceremony, he cried. I couldn’t believe it. I’m not one of those men who believe tears are a sign of weakness. On the contrary, I believe it’s entirely appropriate, even attractive, for a man to cry under certain circumstances, but my wedding was not tear-worthy. In fact, there was a decided lack of emotion during the ceremony, mostly due to the absence of Susan’s immediate family.

My mother was the only member of my family sitting in the pews, but that didn’t bother or surprise me. She was the only one I had invited.

The ceremony itself was short and simple, because Susan believed brevity was always more elegant, and more sexy, than excess. I agreed with her.

“I will,” she said.

“I will,” I said.

We did.

During the first two years of our marriage, we attended thirty-seven cocktail parties, eighteen weddings, one divorce, seven Christmas parties, two New Year’s Eve parties, three New Year’s Day parties, nine birthday parties — only one of them for a child under the age of eighteen — six opera performances, nine literary readings, twelve museum openings, one museum closing, three ballets, including a revival of Swan Lake in New York City, one spouse-swapping party we left before we took off our coats, and thirty-two films, including most of those nominated for Oscars and two or three that had screened at the Sundance Film Festival.

I attended business lunches Monday through Friday, and occasionally on Saturdays, while Susan kept her Friday lunches free so she could carry on an affair with an architect named Harry. She’d begun the affair a few days after our first anniversary and it had gone on for seven months before she’d voluntarily quit him, never having known that I’d known about the tryst, that I’d discovered his love letters hidden in a shoe box at the bottom of her walk-in closet.

I hadn’t been snooping on her when I’d found the letters and I didn’t bother to read any of them past the salutation that began each. “My love, my love, my love,” they’d read, three times, always three times, like a chant, like a prayer. Brokenhearted, betrayed, I’d kept the letters sacred by carefully placing them back, intact and unread, in the shoe box and sliding the box back into its hiding place.

I suppose I could have exacted revenge on her by sleeping with one or more of her friends or coworkers. I’d received any number of subtle offers to do such a thing, but I didn’t want to embarrass her. Personal pain should never be made public. Instead, in quiet retaliation, I patronized prostitutes whenever I traveled out of town. Miami, Los Angeles, Boston. Chicago, Minneapolis, Houston.

In San Francisco for a deposition hearing, I called the first service listed in the Yellow Pages.

“A-1 Escorts,” said the woman. A husky voice, somehow menacing. I’m sure her children hated the sound of it, even as I found myself aroused by its timbre.

“A-1 Escorts,” she said again when I did not speak.

“Oh,” I said. “Hi. Hello. Uh, I’m looking for some company this evening.”

“Where you at?”

“The Prescott.”

“Nice place.”

“Yeah, they have whirlpool bathtubs.”

“Water sports will cost you extra.”

“Oh, no, no, no. I’m, uh, rather traditional.”

“Okay, Mr. Traditional, what are you looking for?”

I’d slept with seventeen prostitutes, all of them blond and blue-eyed. Twelve of them had been busty while the other five had been small-breasted. Eight of them had claimed to be college students; one of them even had a chemistry textbook in her backpack.

“Do you employ any Indian women?” I asked.

“Indian? Like with the dot in the forehead?”

“No, no, that’s East Indian. From India. I’m looking for American Indian. You know, like Tonto.”

“We don’t have any boys.”

“Oh, no, I mean, I want an Indian woman.”

There was a long silence on the other end. Was she looking through some kind of catalogue? Searching her inventory for the perfect woman for me? Was she calling other escort companies, looking for a referral? I wanted to hang up the phone. I’d never had intercourse with an Indian woman.

“Yeah, we got somebody. She’s a pro.”

“What do you mean by pro?”

“She used to work pornos.”

“Pornos?”

“Dirty movies? X-rated? You got them right there on the pay-per-view in your room, buddy.”

“What’s her name?”

“She calls herself Tawny Feather.”