Leon Uris - A God In Ruins

“Look,” Quinn said, speaking softly and smiling to those seated nearby.

“See, I know how to talk barely above a whisper. Let’s go outside.”

She pouted a moment. He loved to see her pout. “Okay,” she said.

They found a place on the library steps. From there the campus was guarded by a picket of mountaintops on the other side of the Great Divide. Many were old white-headed boys gushing their winter snow, soon to fill the down slopes with great mountain daisies.

“Is it me?” Quinn asked. “Is it me—Quinn O’Connell’s personality or belching habits or nose picking that puts you off? Just say, “I don’t like you, Quinn,” and I’ll split.”

“No, it’s me,” she said. “I threw you all that raw meat, and you’ve called my bluff.”

“Hey, Greer, baby .. .”

“Quinn, I’m not in my right mind about you, and I know what I know and what I know is that once I put my hands on you, we’re going to go for the championship.”

“We can start slowly,” he said. “Lots of weekends to know each other up at the ranch.”

“Dammit! I don’t want to go to the ranch with you. I don’t want to fall helplessly in love with you. Nothing is going to keep me from going to New York.”

“Well, can’t I visit?”

“Quinn baby, I’ve got a ten-week internship with a producer director at Crowder Media in New York. If you’re there, it won’t be fair to me.”

Quinn digested it grudgingly. Her whole life had been geared to this opportunity. As a couple in Manhattan they could barely learn the bridges and tunnels in ten weeks. She was on a sacred mission. Quinn? Going nowhere, doing nothing. Since the trip East with his mother, Quinn had a mountain of second thoughts about that human blizzard called Manhattan, but he could see Greer relishing it, all right. Not himself.

“You plan to come back to Colorado?” he asked.

“Scenario one, yes. Scenario two, no. Maybe I’ll forget you, maybe I won’t. Maybe New York is going to grab me.”

“You’re gone,” he whispered.

“Quinn, maybe you don’t know how desperately I’m holding myself together at this moment. I want you, man, but I can’t stay home the rest of my life and bake cookies.” She thought. She had been thinking of it. The time had come.

“I’ll make you a deal. I swear I’ll come back from New York and take my next year in Colorado and live with you. Then we go our separate ways.”

“Why come back?” he asked, a bit acidly.

“Twenty years from now I don’t want to curse myself for passing this over.”

“Sounds a little Faustian to me. How free can we be knowing there is a time clock ticking away?”

“If it’s not for you, Quinn, I don’t come back. I’d go to NYU. God

knows, a TV station might want me—no, wait, don’t butt in. Even if I

get the scholarships and even if I see myself advancing, I’ll come back because I’ll know I can make it there. I’m not afraid of swapping my place in line for a year with you.”

He pulled her up to standing, and they walked tightly together. She cuddled so close he felt better than at any moment he could remember. “How about us making love tonight?”

“Oh, God!” she cried. “Don’t dangle wisps of paradise over me, driving me back to Colorado before my time.”

“You’re right,” he said. “I was trying not to be fair. Baby, when I think of you, I just forget to remember what I was supposed to be thinking of. It’s more powerful than anything I’ve known,” he said.

“Me, too.”

“I’ll be at the airport to meet you on Labor Day.”

It was the summer of great hurting and healing. Dan tried to hold his feelings of fear and urgency and to take their lives back ten years when peace and love prevailed.

Quinn realized how much it ran against Dan’s Marine Corps grain to take this path of compassion and was glad for it. They had a fine time together, the best, a retreat to Langara Lodge up on the Canadian-Alaskan border, where the salmon were an honest yard long.

Quinn read a lot and hung out with Maldonado, always coming out brighter than when he went in. Mal didn’t preach, he just spoke and a twisted U-turn in one’s brain suddenly straightened out.

Rita whipped through her seventeenth birthday looking twenty and feeling ridiculous with some of the pimple-faced young men she was dating. Quinn was a man! A man in his twenties! Her spirits dropped when she considered her chances.

In the first two weeks of vacation, the phone lines burned up between

the Village in New York and Troublesome Mesa. These times were

difficult for Quinn because Greer was hiding the thrill of her New York

experience. He slowly brought him self around to the realization she might not come back, even for their fantasy year.

Dan and Siobhan met Greer by telephone. Dan felt it was rather serious because Quinn was spending the summer very much alone except his visits to Maldonado and a long week when Carlos came home.

Was Dan more desperate to know more about Greer—or more desperate not to rock the boat?

“She Catholic?”

“Nope. Why?”

“Well, you know it’s better if everyone’s the same religion.”

“Why?”

“You know, kids and all.”

“Dad, we’re not that serious about each other.”

“Sure, good,” Dan would say, relieved.

“Greer a good cook?”

“Pizza Hut’s finest.”

“She a Nixon person?”

“She’s a Kennedy liberal.”

“They say most of the girls at Colorado are on the wild side.”

“You mean, like Mom?”

The feeling was forlorn as August ended and Labor Day led to the new semester.

Greer had not returned as promised, and he could feel the apprehension in her voice. Phone calls had slowed to a trickle. Greer told him she’d be working on late shifts or have to cover something out of town or would be a second teamer on a big event in Manhattan.

No calls for ten days. Quinn didn’t complain as he braced for the fall.

“Son,” Dan said with great empathy, “why don’t you bring one of your girlfriends up to the ranch and head up to the cabin for the weekend? You’ve been getting calls from everyone else all summer.”

“Except from Greer.”

“You haven’t smiled much this summer, either.”

“Appreciate your sympathy, Dad, but let’s call it for what it is. You’d be just as happy if she stays in New York.”

“Yes and no. I don’t like to see you this unhappy. I’m your father, and I’m entitled to an opinion. Greer Little will never give you what you need. The pain of losing her will diminish. It simply wasn’t meant to be.”

“Never truer words spoken,” Quinn said with a saddened voice.

Siobhan’s foot kicked the screen door open, and she set a pair of grocery bags on the counter.

“Any more groceries?”

“Yes.”

As he went out the back door, the phone rang and Siobhan took it. When Quinn returned, she handed him the phone, appearing somewhat dumbstruck. Dan had his face halfway down his coffee cup. Siobhan smiled very weakly as she left the room with Dan.

“Quinn,” he said.

“I’m on the way back to Colorado,” Greer said at the other end. “Baby, I haven’t been laid all summer. Can’t fight you, man.”

Quinn’s sigh was complete with vocals.

“Here’s the skinny. I’m flying to Junction to see my family. I’ll be at your apartment sometime Sunday.”

“Me, too. We’ve got a round-up in the high country and a branding, but I’ll be in Sunday as well. Baby, is this for real?”

“Changed your mind?”

No way.

Greer arrived first, bursting with Manhattan stories she wanted to

share but afraid they’d bother as much as please Quinn. Like the