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Forrest Gander: The Trace

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Forrest Gander The Trace

The Trace: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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The Trace With tenderness and precision, Gander explores the intimacies of the couple's relationship as they travel through Mexican towns, through picturesque canyons, and desert capes, on a journey through the heart of the Mexican landscape. Taking a shortcut through the brutally hot desert home, their car overheats miles from nowhere, the story spinning out of control, with devastating consequences.

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It wasn’t a particularly striking analogy, “a nose like a knife,” but Dale had been mulling the merits of that translation of the French le nez pointu. He’d never studied French. Even now, twenty years after first meeting Hoa in the library, he couldn’t pronounce a single word correctly, or so it seemed on their recent trip to Paris. At the moment she bent toward him with her question, he had been comparing two translations to see which he might want to read in English: one translator translated nez pointu as “snub nose” and another as “nose like a knife.” Hoa, waiting to see whether he knew how to turn on the lights in the stack, definitely had a nose like a knife, thanks, he would learn later, to her American father. She also had, still leaning toward him in a stained white V-neck T-shirt, a shapely body and expressive gleaming eyes. She smelled like mulch. Dale stood up to show her the timing switch, and they started talking. She said she was just about to graduate and asked if he wanted to see her ceramic work in the senior exhibition. He was so focused on her lips — they were vermilion at their edges, the sharp vertical groove in her upper lip completely hypnotized him — that she had to ask him twice. With her relaxed confidence, her straight-shooter way of talking — giving her real opinion without worrying about what anyone might want her to say — with her sultry looks and her animate face — the way her mouth opened when she laughed, those lips, Jesus — she commenced a serious swerve in his attention. Aside from herbal eye-definer, she used no make-up back then and none now, twenty years later.

Until their son’s accident, sex with her had stayed good throughout their marriage. Although the hair of her pubis had thinned and her breasts now sloped, the changes in her body fascinated him, and he was acutely aware of the corresponding changes in his own. Despite it all and the painful intensities of raising Declan, their headstrong son, there was a marvelous intimacy to experiencing so much time together in so physical a way.

Now, Hoa was sitting up on him in their hotel bed. When she held her breasts in her fine, skinny fingers, her eyes half-closed, she was at once herself and every bit the fulfillment of his imagination’s erotic longing. They had begun making love slowly and gently after what had been a long grief-induced abstinence, months of her brushing his hand away or him failing to adjust to the abruptly shifting rhythms of her body. Tonight even seemed, at first, a little too planned. First there was her decision to take this trip with Dale during his summer break. Then the long flight from Asheville to El Paso and the exhausting drive in their rental car from El Paso to Marfa, smack in the middle of the Chihuahua Desert, just a few miles from the Mexican border. They had checked in at El Paisano Hotel, where James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor, and Rock Hudson stayed while the movie Giant was filmed. They’d had a glass of wine at the hotel bar, steaks with plum sauce and more wine at Maiya’s, the restaurant around the corner, and then a stroll after dinner to the bookstore a few blocks away. They had crossed the railroad tracks to the Presidio County Courthouse. It was too dark to find the pair of screech owls they heard calling each other. So, in the still early evening, hoping to heal themselves on this journey, desperate to return to the realm of normalcy after all they had been through with their son, they found themselves back in their hotel room. Through the open curtain, light from a streetlamp draped the foot of their poster bed.

Dale wanted to go slowly, but Hoa seemed to be pushing him faster, riding him when she was on top, riding him when she was beneath. It surprised him when she started to climax, her breath quickening, her torso lifting, sinking back into the bed, her thighs shuddering in spasms, low animal groans breaking loose from her throat. She was gasping dramatically, clutching at him as though in terror or anger, wrapping her arms and legs around him, crying out, shouting almost. Suddenly he realized that she was sobbing spasmodically, her face was soaking wet. She turned her eyes away from him into the pillow, slid away as he rolled to his hands and knees, her eye-liner smearing her cheeks. She was saying over and over, “I can’t stop, I can’t stop,” and Dale didn’t know what she meant at first: can’t stop climaxing, can’t stop loving you, and then as he drew toward her and tried to kiss her tears from her eyes, saying my love, my love softly, even as she thrashed away from him, Dale realized, ashamed of himself, that she simply meant that she couldn’t stop sobbing, she couldn’t stop worrying about their son, that this release simply manifested a relentless, ongoing pathos that had nothing to do with Dale.

For twenty minutes, they were silent and awake and side by side. Separate in their breathing. If he were James Dean, Dale thought, he’d be smoking a cigarette. Hoa rolled out of bed and began to dress. It was almost ten. The door to the room next to theirs opened and shut, and they heard voices and then a TV through the wall.

“Dale.” She was putting on her blouse, once more in control of her breath. “You’re not going to sleep are you?” A touch of mischievousness edged into her voice. Denial. They were not going to talk about what had just happened. She was pushing through it. His eyes were closed, but he could visualize the twist in her smile, her widening eyes. This is how it had been going for months. As though she were stalled, unable to get her life on track again.

The depression would slide its hands over Hoa’s shoulders and shove her under its fathomless water for days at a time. Dale would find her incommunicable, lying on the couch surrounded by pillows and unread magazines. At night, she drank too much wine and took too many pills. Then something would click, and Hoa would manage to reach through the devastation to some kernel of resiliency. She breached the black water and made contact with Dale, with her ceramic work, with their friends. She would be laughing on the phone, losing track of time in her studio, or cooking up a fragrant spaghetti with Greek olives and loads of garlic. But the intervals between her obliterations and recoveries had become shorter these last weeks. Dale wasn’t sure if that was good or not. The road trip was risky, he thought.

Their road trips had often taken them south in the summers, into heat, sweat, barbecue sauce, and homemade pies. He had mapped this excursion — part of his research on the turn-of-the-century writer Ambrose Bierce — to try to reconstruct the last journey Bierce took when, in 1913, he saddled up a horse, rode into Mexico to cover the Mexican Revolution, and simply disappeared, as all the scholars said, “without a trace.” Hoa loved Mexico. They had traveled there before, collecting ceramics. She owned a set of plates from Puebla and two stunning black-and-white bowls by Maria Martinez, which she displayed on one of the shelves she had built along the wall of their living room.

Those long shelves held several pieces by other celebrated potters too, but for Dale, it was the row of little animals Declan made as a boy and half a dozen of Hoa’s own pieces from a series she called Cambrian Explosions — abstract but suggestive of early life-forms — that lit up the room like glowing ingots. Hoa had shown fairly regularly in the last ten years in galleries around the country, which was hard for ceramic artists, often considered mere craftsmen, not “real” artists. Hoa had some sharp things to say about those sorts of distinctions, and Dale had heard about them more than a few times. What he knew was that people in her field admired her, and she’d volunteered to give up a week of work to come along with him. The trip from Asheville to El Paso to Sierra Mojada, Mexico, could be a time of healing and renewal for them.

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