Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

“Christ. You sound just like my father. We’re sitting having breakfast, the summer before he died. He looks out the window toward the other houses on our block and says, ‘Who put those other fucking houses there?’ And they’d been there all along. Before we were. For about a hundred and forty years.”

“Exactly. No matter how much I sell, how much money I make, I’m never going to be a part of the old Texas, all that Stetson-hat and Sons of the Alamo crap. I didn’t go to school up in Austin. Daddy wasn’t a federal judge, there isn’t a library or post office named after my great-great-great-uncle somewhere. The real Texas is closed to people like me.”

“That’s a little dramatic, don’t you think? You have every advantage I can think of. Every one.”

“Maybe thirty years ago that was true. Nowadays you can’t even buy the idea of Texas. Costs too much, for one. And it’s stupid to think things will be any different in Utah, any better. But I want to try. I want clean air and jolting winds and peace. Peace most of all. That’s the whole point. Look at these people here, these Mormons, with their eternal marriage and their principles of modesty. The army drove them out of Iowa and Missouri, and do you know what they did? They came all the way to Utah just to be left alone.” He gave her a sheepish laugh, unfolded himself out of the bed, went to fetch a glass of water. He drank and let his other hand rest on his hip. Mary Beth saw how the width of Mike’s shoulders almost matched his waist. He was rectangular, larger than Texas himself. He was Alaska.

“But you could go anywhere. Seattle. Upstate New York. Why not Montana? Or Colorado?” Mary Beth sighed and slid down flat on her back, still staring at the ceiling.

Mike climbed back on the bed, pulled at his trunklike legs until they folded into a yoga-like pretzel. “Seattle is over. And the assholes have already gotten to Colorado. Filled to the brim with Californians.”

Mary Beth relaxed, showing some of her well-appointed teeth. “That’s because there’s no space left in California.”

“I don’t really know how this happened. Texas went all sour on me. Like a song that I’d heard all summer on the radio. You’re never sure when it happens, but by the time Labor Day rolls around, the thing is ruined forever.”

“So there’s only going to be space enough in Utah?”

“There has to be a chance.”

For Mary Beth, the discussion existed like the moment between burning a finger and actually registering the sensation. She was still debating how much of a reaction she would allow herself to show. “How far have you looked into this? I’m just hoping that you haven’t found anything yet. That you haven’t made commitments.”

Mike said, “I haven’t done much of anything. But I’m sticking around. That’s the one resolution I made. I came here to stake a claim, find a Utah homestead.”

Mary Beth pulled a pillow to her lap, petted it like a cat. “I think that’s excellent. I really do. Sounds like a more ambitious resolution, as opposed to the usual ‘I’ve got to lose twenty pounds’ crap. When does this little surveying project begin?” She kept expecting a more specific invitation. But she wasn’t going to spell it out for him. There were any number of ways he could say the right thing. Help me find a house. Help us find our house. His vagueness was exasperating. She had spent years imagining her future, and Gabriel’s, and even the most fanciful versions of what she imagined had never included Utah. She wasn’t even certain that she’d imagined Mike as part of it. And maybe he was being obtuse, but he wasn’t exactly spelling out where she and her son fit in to all of this. He hadn’t said anything explicitly, and to her, her future and that of her son were far too important to assume she belonged in someone else’s future too.

“Tomorrow morning. After I drop you off, I’m meeting a guy. The guru of Great Basin real estate. We’re taking out the Jeep and scouting for a homestead.”

Her passing thought: their coming to an end was logical, even inevitable. She should have said no, no to the idea of the trip, no to the idea of taking up with Mike in the first place; her late father called that way of thinking “paralysis by analysis,” yet here she was, in bed, next to a man who was her boss and her lover and who apparently did not think of himself as her future husband. She’d come to Utah filled with questions, and now the answers she was most afraid of were here, taking up space beside her in a hotel bed.

There wasn’t much else to say. Soon Mike rolled away, perhaps feigning sleep but certainly showing that the discussion had been tabled for now. She wondered what New Year’s Eve at Mike’s house would have looked like, Mary Beth in a simple black dress serving a dinner that she’d labored over for hours. She wanted all the comforts of home, to dice the shallots and herbs for the sauce, to cook a five-course feast on the $4,000 range that Mike used only as a storage cabinet for his pots and pans. She wanted Gabriel helping in the kitchen, tasting sauces and batters out of stainless steel bowls, decorating sugar cookies with rainbow-colored sugar sprinkles. She didn’t want to head home alone and have an almost three-hour flight to think about where she’d gone wrong.

Utah would be solely his decision, and even in the middle of the night, Mary Beth couldn’t fault his reasoning. He wasn’t a Texan any more than she was, so maybe leaving wasn’t a bad idea, not for Mike and maybe not for her. She just wished she’d been a party to the decisions he’d already made. In his new home, wherever it might be, she would not be a partner or a helpmate. She would be nothing more than another of his accessories.

She felt restless, consumed by her inability to sleep. Mike wasn’t having that problem. He breathed with a rhythm like a shallow purring, a melody that, in her own bed, Mary Beth had always found soothing. Not tonight, though, so she threw back the blanket, slipped from the bed, and headed to the bathroom.

She hadn’t been able to sleep without difficulty for years. She needed the cool side of the pillow, clean sheets, the occasional ten milligrams of diazepam, the calm of a controlled environment. In her own apartment, Mary Beth let the air conditioner, a window unit that spat a fine black dust onto the floor, console her with its autonomic noises. Even in optimum conditions, sleep never came in torrents, as she suspected it did for Mike and most normal people. The world was too intrusive, her heart too insistent, to allow more than an hour or two of sleep at a time. When she was lucky, she could string together three or four of these breaks in a night and be a reasonable facsimile of herself in the morning, after, say, three cups of coffee. She had tried everything, prescriptions that left her muzzy-headed, exercise, valerian root, a black satin sleep mask and yellow foam earplugs to block out the world. The world came anyway.

She knew only one reliable remedy. She eased herself into the empty bath, the plastic of the molded tub cold against her skin. She piled together a temporary bed of ample, plush towels, then made a pillow out of the white terry hotel robe and sprawled out, tensing and relaxing her legs. The small knot of muscle in her midcalf burned with a pleasant feeling that bordered on overexertion, a consequence of the evening’s dancing in high heels.

She bit into a towel, the texture raw on her tongue. She liked the idea of him walking in, knew how much he would enjoy watching the rest of the performance. That’s what she was picturing as her hand began to work a little faster, as her legs moved wider to accommodate her movements. She wanted to make him feel hungry, carnivorous.