The Pot Thief Who Studied Georgia O'Keeffe Read online

  “No, but they’re a bit tough.”

  Probably not as tough as nuchal ligaments, I thought.

  The arctic char was spectacular, similar to the coho salmon from New Mexico’s El Vado Lake. Yes, there are salmon in New Mexico, and the ones stocked in El Vado flourish because of the cool deep water. Which makes no sense because vado means ford, and I don’t think you can ford something 150 feet deep.

  The only dish other than the char was a slaw of thinly sliced apples and matchstick carrots in a vinaigrette of blood orange juice, grainy mustard and avocado oil.

  Eating Sharice’s cooking is like dining on another planet. Consuela raised me on chiles rellenos, posole, frijoles and enchiladas both red and green. The only fish we had was on Fridays.

  Just a few years before Consuela was hired to be my nanny and my family’s cook and housekeeper, Vatican II released Catholics from meatless Fridays. Consuela evidently believed the new policy was heresy.

  And who could blame her?

  It was 1962. The Supreme Court ruled that mandatory prayer in public schools is unconstitutional. Yet another nuclear bomb was detonated in the atmosphere, this time in Nevada rather than New Mexico. Yet the only issue Vatican II seemed interested in was eating meat on Friday. No wonder Consuela chose to ignore them.

  Although I’m not Catholic, I also abstain from meat on Fridays. When I was in high school, the cafeteria served bean burritos for lunch every Friday even though that was long after Vatican II. I like to honor that tradition.

  I like trout because it’s fresh and local, but Sharice’s arctic char was the first thing I’d eaten from the ocean since an unfortunate incident with some mussels about ten years ago. I should have known better than to order moules marinières at a place named Chuy’s Mexican Mariscos.

  We had blackberries for dessert. When Benz saw us selecting Scrabble tiles and putting them on our stands, he evidently thought the object of the game was to see who could collect the most tiles. He tried to help Sharice win by knocking my tiles off the stand.

  After the third time, we switched to the autological word game. Sharice chose w as the letter.

  “Wee,” I said after a couple of minutes.

  “Word,” she said immediately.

  “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that one.” After a few moments, I said, “Whole.”

  “Wussy,” she said without hesitation.

  “Showoff.”

  “Not really. I just have a lot of time to think of my next one because it takes you so long.”

  “Oh yeah? How about this—wide.”

  She imitated the sound of a buzzer. “Wide is not wide.”

  “Sure it is—w is a very wide letter.”

  “Nice try, but there is no way I’m ruling a four-letter word to be wide.”

  “Okay, I’ll find another.”

  I thought about wing, but the word itself has no wings. Then inspiration struck. All I had to do was negate the word.

  “Wingless.”

  “Writable.”

  “Witless.”

  “Which describes your new strategy. You’re just going to append -less to everything. Okay, two can play at that game. Weaponless.”

  “Wartless.”

  “Yuk. Wageless.”

  “Wakeless.”

  “Waveless.”

  “Weedless.”

  “Wishless.”

  “Womanless,” I said.

  She smiled. “I’ll bet you’ve never been womanless.”

  “I have. Most of my life, in fact. But being with you now more than compensates.”

  While I smiled at her like a witless teenager, she seemed absorbed in thought. She asked me if I remembered the scene in Four Weddings and a Funeral where Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell tell each other about their sexual histories.

  A warning bell clanged in my mind. “Not in detail.”

  “I think we should do that.”

  “Uh … I’m not sure that’s a good idea. Why bring up stuff from the past? Actually, I don’t have much of a past. And nothing from your past would change how I feel about you, so—”

  “It’s one of those things I have to do, Hubie.”

  “Your one-at-a-time list?”

  She nodded. “You go first.”

  I swallowed. It was so loud, people in the next apartment probably heard it.

  “The last woman I had a relationship with was Dolly Aguirre. She was the daughter of my history teacher at Albuquerque High School.”

  “Wow. You knew her from high school? Sounds serious.”

  “I didn’t know her in high school. She was a freshman when I was a senior. We didn’t meet until a couple of years ago.” A possible exit from this conversation occurred to me. “It turns out she had been divorced three times. When she told me that, it didn’t bother me at all. So that sort of makes my point that there really is no purpose in us telling each other about—”

  She was shaking her head. “We have to do this. I have to do this.”

  So I did. It was perhaps the most uncomfortable three minutes of my life.

  Yes—three minutes. Well, what did you expect? I already admitted I’ve been womanless most of my life. Plus, I kept details to a minimum.

  “So I guess it’s my turn,” she said.

  “You don’t have to—”

  “Yes, I do.”

  We looked at each other in silence for perhaps thirty seconds.

  “Okay,” she said, “I’m finished.”

  “You didn’t say anything.”

  “I said everything there was to say on the topic.”

  Another few seconds passed in silence.

  “So you have nothing to tell me?”

  She nodded.

  “So does that mean … ?” I let the question hang in the air.

  “It does.”

  “You’re a …”

  “I am.”

  The next five seconds took five minutes to elapse.

  “Surprised?”

  “Yes. You’re impossibly attractive and fun to be around. And I know from sleeping with you on our last date that you are obviously not frigid.”

  She laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “That may be the first time any man ever said ‘sleeping with’ to actually mean sleeping with. The fact is I’m as surprised about my virginity as you are. It’s not like I planned it. I was admitted to dental school when I was nineteen. You can start in Canada before you have a baccalaureate. I figured my first experience would be with some handsome and charming dentist in training. I had no idea what dental school was like. The only way a guy would take time out from studying to court me was if he thought it would distract me enough to lower my grades. I couldn’t believe how competitive they were. And conceited.”

  She paused to sip some Gruet. I thought that was an excellent idea and did the same.

  Benz jumped onto my lap. He weighs as much as Geronimo, but he’s lighter on his feet. “I guess he does like me.”

  “He sees me talking to you, so he jumped up there to be in my line of sight.”

  “Oh.”

  She swallowed. “Then I found the lump.”

  I rubbed Benz behind the ears. He started purring.

  “Fast-forward to the new me living in a dark apartment on San Mateo with no furniture, no friends, no designer dresses and no left breast. I worked all day and saved my money for the operation. But every penny I dropped in the piggy bank made me sadder. One day closer to another operation. Never mind that it was giving me something rather than taking something away. It still involved hospital, surgery, pain and fear.”

  She bit her lip. A teardrop teetered. “I need to tell you something scary.”

  “Another thing on the list?”

 
“Yes. And another one we are never to speak of again.” She took a deep breath. “In addition to saving pennies, I started saving midazolam.”

  “That’s a semiprecious stone like agate, right?”

  She didn’t laugh at my lame joke.

  “Dentists use it for sedation. Florida used it to execute William Happ.”

  “Oh.” Something twitched in my stomach.

  “A woman named Angie Crowley stopped at a convenience store to use a pay phone. Happ smashed her car window and kidnapped her. After raping her, he strangled her with her stretch pants and threw her body in a canal.”

  I swallowed hard. “Sounds like Florida put the drug to good use.”

  “I had enough for another execution.”

  I stared into those green eyes. “I’m glad you didn’t use it.”

  “I almost did. Then I thought about my parents. I couldn’t do that to them. I decided a happy life is a lot more important than a breast.” She paused and smiled. “Especially one made from butt tissue.”

  After we stopped laughing, she said, “I flushed the midazolam. I used my operation money for a down payment on this condo. I traded shag carpet, Formica and harvest gold for polished concrete, granite and stainless steel. I gave my clothes to Goodwill. I bought designer dresses and expensive perfumes. I made myself beautiful again. Then I started dating.”

  “And men from the four corners of the Earth celebrated.”

  “Right. Until I told them I don’t have—”

  “I thought we were never to talk about that.”

  She cried for a few moments—smiling while doing so—then regained her composure. “If it got to the stage where I liked them enough, I told them. They all said it didn’t matter. Then they stopped calling.”

  “Glad they did. Otherwise you might not have been available for me.”

  “I suspected right from the start that you were the one. The man who would like me despite—”

  “There is no despite. There is nothing to get over or learn to deal with. It’s not like you keep a glass eye in a jar of water on your nightstand.”

  “I think maybe your sense of humor is what made me think you wouldn’t run away. When you made light of my dramatic moment by hoisting your ankle onto my bed, it was the happiest moment of my life.”

  “It was the second happiest moment of my life.”

  “What was the happiest one?”

  “It hasn’t happened yet.”

  She blushed. Which was interesting to watch, given her complexion.

  “And it won’t happen tonight,” she said.

  First the neighbors heard me swallow. Now they heard me sigh. “Why not?” I asked, trying not to sound petulant.

  “It’s too soon after the bombshell I just dropped on you. You need some time to think about it. But you can sleep over if you still want to.”

  We had been asleep only an hour or so when Susannah called to tell me her car had died on the way back from La Reina.

  Sharice said, “You can’t leave her stranded all night.”

  “You’re right, but this is only the second night we’ve slept together.”

  Her giggle is childlike and charming. “That’s the second time you’ve used that phrasing literally. It won’t be long until you’ll use it metaphorically like everyone else.” She kissed me. “Go rescue Susannah.”

  20

  It was well after midnight when I spotted Susannah’s Crown Vic on the shoulder of the dirt road south of La Reina.

  On the one hand, it’s a terrible place to be stranded. Even though Rio Arriba County covers over 5,000 square miles, its county seat, Tierra Amarilla, has only 700 residents and is not even incorporated as a town. There are no all-night convenience stores, no garages open after dark.

  On the other hand, it’s a good place to be stranded. The chances of anybody being on that dirt road in the wee hours of the night are one in a million. The odds against that one being a threat are even higher.

  Abiquiú, the village where Georgia O’Keeffe spent the last thirty-five years of her life, is also in Rio Arriba County, about forty-five miles southeast of Tierra Amarilla. It’s a bigger town—almost 1,000 people. Nothing open after dark.

  You might die of loneliness, but not from violence.

  It was not always so.

  O’Keeffe had been in the county almost twenty years when the Alianza Federal de Mercedes, led by Reies Tijerina, raided the Rio Arriba County Courthouse. The Alianza claimed the land grants given to the original Spanish settlers of the area were valid under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo between the United States and Mexico.

  Tijerina’s cause was probably just, but his actions were bizarre. In October of 1966, he and his group (mostly descendants of the original grant holders) occupied Echo Amphitheater Park in the Carson National Forest and proclaimed it the Republic of San Joaquín del Rio de Chama. They issued visas to the surprised tourists who stopped in. When forest rangers tried to remove the squatters, Tijerina arrested them. They were tried, convicted of trespassing, given suspended sentences and released without harm other than to their dignity.

  Some of Tijerina’s colleagues were arrested for this activity. The raid on the courthouse freed them and made Tijerina famous for fifteen minutes.

  Imprisoned several times, he led a colorful and bizarre life. On the day in 1969 when Warren Burger was sworn in as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Tijerina went to Washington to place him under citizen’s arrest. Burger dodged the arrest by exiting out a back door.

  Maybe growing up in a state colonized by Spain rather than England and by people who were granted land a century before the Pilgrims hit Plymouth Rock explains why I don’t have any qualms about ignoring the Archaeological Resources Protection Act. Politicians and bureaucrats back east are clueless about New Mexico. Trying to arrest them is charmingly quixotic, but I’ll just stick to ignoring them.

  I found Susannah on the hood of the Crown Vic gazing up at the heavens.

  “What are those two?” she asked, pointing.

  I arched my back and followed the line of her finger. “That one is Sirius.”

  “It looks frivolous.”

  “The one next to it is Canis Major.”

  “They’re so bright.”

  “Yep. One of the best things about living here is the high altitude and dry air make you feel like you can reach up and grab a handful of stars. See that fainter line of stars below Canis Major running parallel to the horizon? The Navajo say those are the tracks of a celestial rabbit.”

  “You don’t even need a telescope out here.”

  New Mexico has one of the strongest night-sky protection laws in the country. It helps in Albuquerque, but it isn’t needed out here on a dirt road west of the Jemez Mountains, where it can seem like Thomas Edison was never born.

  “What’s wrong with your car?”

  “It keeps stalling. I think the throttle position sensor is broken.”

  “I don’t know what that is, but obviously you can’t fix it or you wouldn’t have called me. Do you just want a ride back to Albuquerque or do you want me to tow your car back?”

  “I’d rather tow it now than have you make another trip.”

  We hooked my tow rope under the Crown Vic’s bumper. I would have enjoyed her company, but she had to ride in her car and use the brakes to keep it from running into me when I slowed or stopped.

  “Good thing the stars are so bright,” she said. “I’m not turning my headlights on. I don’t want a dead battery on top of a dead sensor.”

  Once we got rolling, it was all downhill, so the tug I felt was not Susannah’s car. It was the memory of Sharice saying I had to give more thought to her virginity before—excuse the phrase—taking the plunge.

  But why? The only answer I could come up with is that doing the deed carried a commi
tment of some sort. That conjured up my high school friend Naldo stammering and sweating as he explained that his cousin and her girlfriend from Portales were coming to Albuquerque because they wanted to have sex before they went to college, and was I interested in pairing with his cousin. I had only the vaguest idea about the mechanics of the operation, but what I lacked in experience I made up for in enthusiasm.

  Our pooled money was just enough to cover dinner for four at La Hacienda and a room at a cheap hotel on Central. We flipped a coin. I got the room. He got the backseat of the car. His cousin—I feel bad that I can’t remember her name—did not strike me as the sort of young woman who would drive two hundred miles to have sex with a stranger. We were both so nervous when I closed the door to the motel room that the floor was vibrating. We kissed awkwardly. Since my arms were already around her, I seized the moment to unzip her dress. She stepped back and let it fall to the floor.

  I hadn’t anticipated her full slip, which was like a second dress. She lay down on the bed. I removed my jacket and tie and lay beside her. I suspected that actually having sex would require shedding a lot more of our garments, but I took her dress and my jacket and tie as a good start.

  We resumed kissing. My left hand groped awkwardly under her clothes. She let it roam around aimlessly for a moment, then gently pushed it away. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “When you get married, do you want your wife to be a virgin?”

  I’d never had a girlfriend, much less given thought to whom I might marry. What I did have an opinion about was my own sexual status. I was anxious not to be a virgin.

  Her query seemed like a trick question to thwart my objective.

  One of the drawbacks of insecurity is the tendency to overanalyze. She wouldn’t have sex with me if I said yes because what I hoped to do with her would disqualify her from marrying anyone who gave the answer I gave. And she wouldn’t have sex with me if I said no because she knew that’s why I was there, and who wants to have sex with a liar?

  So I fell back on the ploy of answering a question with a question. “When you get married, do you want your husband to be a virgin?”

  “I don’t know.”