“As Pearl, Pearl Buck, God rest her, said just before she passed on upstairs, “Christopher,” she said, ‘keep the flame.””
As he stared at the new students, some of whom had long since ripened, he wondered which of them, male or female, would become his bed mate for the summer.
“It is time to pass the torch,” Christopher whispered.
Rita Maldonado realized in less than two weeks that she had bought an ultimate con. Or she faced an ultimate reality about her writing. No one can teach writing sitting in a happy circle barbecuing each other’s writings. The criticism sessions could have killed a budding Shakespeare. Christopher drooled and dozed as his students had at it.
Rita was packing to leave when Quinn held up the brass knocker on the Jack London cabin. He was suddenly stricken with a notion that Rita might be in the middle of ... well, a scene.
He used the knocker and took a step backward.
Rita opened the door and squinted through the screen.
“I’ve come to see you,” he said.
The screen door squealed open, and he inched into the cabin. She was so beautiful he had to lower his eyes for fear of blushing. Rita took his hand to her lips and kissed the joint of one finger at least a dozen times. Then she reached behind him and slid the bolt.
Their foreheads came together gently. She began to tremble.
“I don’t want to hurt you anymore,” Quinn said, “but I feel like .. . this here, now is the great beyond .. . and we’re floating . Rita, I don’t want to hurt you anymore.”
She brought Quinn’s hand to her blouse and unbuttoned the top button with him, never taking her eyes from his, button by button.
“I love you, Rita.”
“Yes! Yes!”
She wore no bra.
“God, you’re beautiful. I’ve been a real fool.”
“Yes,” she said.
“I’m worried that—“ She pressed a finger to his lips. “Don’t worry.
Quinn, you’re never going to want to leave me.”
“I think you’re right,” Quinn said
“Shall we be lovers?”
“I want you so bad.”
“Bad or badly?”
“Both,” he said.
She turned from him and went to a big armchair. “Just enjoy,” she said, “I want to undress for you.” There wasn’t all that much to disrobe, jeans and panties. She did it deliberately, as she must have practiced the moment a hundred times in her fantasies.
Rita sat on the big arm of the chair and struck a pose, handed him her panties. Quinn rubbed it against his cheek, then tried to eat it, drink it, bite it.
The dinner gong sounded for those for whom the gong rang.
TROUBLESOME MESA—EARLY 1980s
Events, both sorrowful and joyous, befell Troublesome Mesa. Father Scan Logan, the gentle priest, passed away. He had never forgiven himself for his counseling an abortion for Quinn’s sweetheart; nor had he fully accepted the vows that imposed secrecy in the matter of Quinn’s biological parents.
Siobhan O’Connell, a church functionary with high midlevel contacts, began a quiet probe at Sean’s funeral about locating the mysterious Monsignor Gallico. It was fruitless. He had disappeared, leaving no footprints.
A few months later, Daniel O’Connell had another more devastating stroke that almost totally debilitated him.
A moment of unabashed bliss happened for the wedding of Quinn and Rita. Over three hundred people from all over the state gathered to celebrate. The wedding vows were performed at Dan’s bedside. Dan died shortly after with his wife holding one hand and his son holding the other.
So let it be. A bombastic wedding celebration and wake took place together with a party that Troublesome Mesa would never forget.
Quinn grieved for Dan in his long walk through the darkness. For all
their being at odds, for all the mistakes, he and his father had ended up on the same road. Quinn realized that he and his father had been cemented by the same sense of honor and love developed in the Marine Corps. No matter Dan’s flaws, these were overwhelmed by loyalty and honesty and courage.
After three months of intense mourning, Siobhan said, at the end of a meal one night, “We have to go on with life. I’m going to make an offer you can’t turn down. Why don’t you and Rita take a few months off just, just to follow your bliss? Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I’ll take care of everything.”
Their bliss led them to Venice. They arrived just a pinch before dawn and boarded the only gondola to be seen on the Grand Canal as a feeble sun arose, casting pastel glows mixed with foggy dew as in an Impressionist painting.
The honeymoon had been worth waiting for.
Glide, glide, glide skimmed the ornate boat; splish-splash whispered the gondolier’s rudder.
Under the little footbridges, click, click, click sounded the women’s heels.
The luring alleyways twisting and trapping as in a maze.
And not to forget the pigeons of San Marco Square.
Their corner suite of the Gritti Palace was mellowed by the smooth music of the Italian jazz saxophones and tapes of the San Remo Festival .. . and Pavarotti!
They did their initiation to Venice by making great love in a gondola. The rest of it was powerful, so powerful they seemed drugged and weary by daylight until the great blinds were opened and the sounds and light of that fairyland out there reached them.
At the end of a week, Quinn realized he had not thought of Greer Little since they arrived. Rita, him, Venice. A lifelong plan that absolutely thrilled him. Realizing he had not thought of Greer caused him to think about her. She was now locked away in a place in his memory. His desire for Rita was nearly crazy.
Yet, in the odd moments Rita seemed to stray. She could go from uncontrolled passion to a chilling, languid sadness.
It took six weeks for them to have their fill of Venice and find themselves flying back to America, starting to get homesick.
Once home, Rita dared her great challenge. The ranch and its divergent sounds, from bleating cattle to zooming pickup trucks and the general activity, threw her attempts to write off kilter.
She sought Quinn’s blessing and set up a studio at the Maldonado villa a half mile below. Her bedroom was huge, had a fireplace, and was isolated.
Rita put a small wardrobe for herself and Quinn down there. If she worked late, if he needed a break from the ranch, if they wanted to make mad love, the studio was perfect.
Now there was a commitment to write, but the plushest office is no guarantee for lush pages. Rita was alone with Rita, with nothing between her and her typewriter.
It was serenely quiet.
Mal was gone a good part of the time, sculpting or painting some gorgeous body. Jesus, Mal, all those rich married ladies who want their boobs aggrandized! Some of his clients were older ladies, not of the sturdiest stuff but defiant and flouting their sensuality.
Rita had seen a lifetime of her dad working them. Anyhow, he always seemed inspired, no matter their sag.
Mal settled into his studio down in Cuernavaca in order to give his daughter thinking space.
Quinn had some apprehensions about Rita’s studio. He did not want it to become the scene of her heartbreak. He traveled back and forth to Denver as a senator, or on ranch business or flying about the country to Democratic Party meetings. Ordinarily, he’d want Rita with him, but she was entitled to follow her own bliss and make her own life.
She wrote her Venice pages and read and corrected them, lured by the soft-scented fire. Thoughts which had been so clear in her mind had terrible trouble finding their way onto paper.
It was perfect here, she knew. Peace and isolation had been achieved. She had a wonderful, understanding husband. God, she thought, does God want writers to go to hell to write?
For all the ethereal wonderment, Rita began to feel she was in a trap, a cage. Why did the story stop suddenly?
Quinn was due home from San Francisco late. She admoni
shed herself for not going into Denver to meet him and stay over at their condo. She didn’t like him flying into Troublesome at night.
She closed her eyes and thought of him, and the stirring between her legs went on automatic. She’d while away the hours thinking of Venice, and then his Jeep would vroom into the driveway. Hearing his voice was like eating chocolate. Rita purred and stretched and ran her hands over herself.
Her tummy felt squiggly. She made a pitcher of margueritas, which she never did when drinking alone. As she licked the salt around the top of the glass, her forehead broke into tiny droplets of perspiration. Now came unfettered fright.
The level in the marguerita pitcher lowered.
Quinn knew something was awry when he arrived a few hours later. Rita’ was slightly listing, and their kiss was punctuated with salt.
“I’m a couple of drinks up on you,” she said. “How did the meetings go?” He related the business of the trip. Dinner was sitting on the floor before the fireplace at the coffee table and afterwards, a sink into soft pillows with softer sax over the hi-fi.
Rita appeared misty-eyed, hardly taking her eyes off him. Quinn loved what he saw. It seemed that they were unable to pass each other without some kind of touch. Painted-on leather pants, bare midriff, an open blouse knotted under her breasts, glowing lipstick. He watched her clear the table .. .
“Quinn,” she said, meandering to her desk. “I’d like you to read my
pages. I realize some of them look like they were writ *
ten between the sheets. Look, I think I might need some help.”
Quinn was about to go into his standard evasion, but on this night the air had something different drifting on it.
“I’d be scared to death,” he said.
“Scared of hurting me? Scared of rejecting me, telling me I stink? Mal has played that game with me for years.”
“Rita, it isn’t as though Mal was telling you that you made the bacon too crisp, try to get it right the next time. Writing has been at the center of all your longings most of your life. I don’t have the proper credentials. I don’t want to screw around in a place I have no right to be.”
“I’ve heard all that before,” she said with a tart edge rising in her voice.
“Don’t be pissed at Mal for wanting to protect you from his ignorance. He was smart not to make that kind of mistake. Damned if I want to sit in judgment of you.”
“You’re both convincing. Frankly, I think you’re copping out. Between you and Mal, you’ve read every piece of literature written since the Middle Ages.”
“That doesn’t make me an expert.”
“Who is an expert? Christopher Christopher? I’ve reached that stage where anyone with a license to steal is a self-promoting prick in business to keep the wannabes coming back for one more writers’ conference. Quinn, do you know what it’s like making a submission for publication? You’re dead, rejected before you put it in the mail. “Your story is well-written but doesn’t fit our needs,” signed “The Editors,” who will remain nameless.”
“Rita, nobody forced you into writing.”
“Thanks, I really appreciate that. I’m twenty-five years old. I’ve been doing this since I was nine. I need a break. Mal takes my work to the literature professors on campus. “Shows a lot of promise, but needs work.””
“Haven’t you just answered your own question? What professors at the
University of Colorado, or all the universities in Colorado, have published anything of major note in the past fifty years?” Quinn argued.
“I want a straight answer. I want to hear cold-turkey truth from one person of literary integrity. Just one person. If I can’t get that from my husband, who can I get it from?”
Rita would not be deterred. She had drawn the line, and Quinn had to cross it.
“Are these the pages?” he asked. “All right, but I wish to hell I knew better about what I am doing.”
He knew enough.
Some of her earlier poetry had danced and leapt and was filled with cunning and grace and metaphors. Down through the years, as each new piece of non-poetry grew longer, it strayed. She was unable to organize the work, keep it under the central command of the writer. The dialogue came from pickled talking heads, not people of wit and observation.
There was a list of commonplace pitfalls, no sense of when a sentence could be expanded into a paragraph or a chapter shrunk to a few paragraphs. Her first chapter was front-loaded with information, a fear that novice writers have about leaving anything out of the manuscript.
What about the prerequisites? Writing required both enormous motivation and enormous drive. Rita had only enormous desire.
The baffling part of it was that lesser writers had succeeded. Rita could glow in spots. Some writers were ready to cut off their arms and legs for the title of writer. Was it possible she could rally her gifts, enhance them, and then make the commitment to enslave herself at the typewriter?
Perhaps Rita’s life and Troublesome Mesa and her beauty and her father had all been too perfect to arouse a bit of rage. Rita had been too protected, and her craving for expression could only carry her through a half dozen verses of a psalm.
Quinn set down the Venice pages deep in the night. He was dog tired, too tired to be intelligent about it now.
Rita had fallen asleep atop the bed, adrift in self-deprecation. She was curled up tightly, her perfect hair askew and an odor of tequila lingering. Rita couldn’t drink worth a damn. She had tipsied out.
Jesus, Quinn wondered, what was she making him do?
Rita’s eyes opened slowly, and the first thing Quinn saw was her fear.
“Hi,” he said, patting her hair.
“I’ll take a shower,” she said.
“It’s almost five o’clock,” Quinn answered. “I flew in late, remember?
I’m dead tired. Push over, let me on the bed.”
Quinn pressed his backside into her tummy and she wrapped her arm over him in a favorite sleeping pose, but she could sense his eyes were open and Quinn always knew when she was staring at him from behind.
“I need to hear it, Quinn,” she pressed.
“I loved you this morning more than I loved you yesterday, and I love you now more than I loved you earlier tonight. Isn’t that what really matters?”
“And with three you get egg roll!” Quinn felt the violent jerk of the comforter being flung off as she ripped it away from him. Quinn rose on an elbow as the end table lamp blared on. Rita stood over the bed, disheveled and rocking back and forth. Obviously, she had been awake and seething to a boil.
“It’s actually very good,” he said. “I don’t want to go into it point by point until I have a few hours’ sleep and can get my thoughts together.”
“I I”
Liar!
“There’s some fine writing there,” he said. He closed his eyes. “But most of it stinks!”
It was not Rita standing before him but a pained, contorted creature who had pushed herself beyond the edge. In that single instance of truth Rita heard what she had avoided for a decade and a half.
“It’s not the end of the earth,” Quinn said.
Lord, he’d never seen her like this! She was an angry Gypsy,
disconnected from herself. “Two things, two things, just two things,” she hissed. “That was all I wanted. I wanted to write, and I wanted to be perfect for you. I’m neither.”
“Let me hold you, darling.”
“No, you can’t hold me anymore.”
“Rita, get a grip—“
“I wanted to be perfect for you, Quinn. I was not perfect. Do you know what I mean?”
“How could you be? We were never promised to each other. You grew to be a woman while I was gone. I know you must have had lovers. It doesn’t matter now.”
“I thought,” she moaned, “that by becoming a great writer, you’d forgive me for my imperfection. I’m neither.”
Rita moaned low, all that beauty fal
len into wreckage. “I did what I did in the hope you would learn and be jealous and pay attention to me. I did it to anger you. I did it .. .”
“What?”
“Carlos and I.”
The pain of his head wound came alive, and he fought for his feet and staggered around the room. Her sobs were loud and followed him until he turned to her and pushed her away.
Rita heard the screen door slam.
Vroom .. . vroom, vroom, vroom. The Jeep screamed away.
DENVER—EARLY 1980s
Bloody secrets! Bloody lies! The church, the ranch, his parents, the whole goddamned valley seemed to conspire.
This was far worse than losing Greer Little. Greer never betrayed him. He had seen truth in Rita. But what the hell, Quinn thought, he had been away at El Toro Air Base shagging the ladies, breaking hearts. She couldn’t make promises to him, for there were no promises to be made.
But Carlos? Hot and deliberate. Aimed to gore him! Why hadn’t she come to him with this before the wedding? Why did it have to be a part of the goddamned secrets and goddamned lies?
Reynaldo Maldonado returned from Cuernavaca after Rita had fled. He was shocked and hurt almost as deeply as Quinn.
“Sorry it took me so long to get here,” Mal told Quinn. “I made a couple of stops along the way.”
“Did you find her?”
“The day before yesterday she went to Carlos in Houston.”
Mal watched his son-in-law shudder.
“Apparently, she arrived in bad shape. She wouldn’t see me. Quinn, I
had no idea they were carrying on. When a woman deceives, she can carry it off so smoothly. Only, she got caught in her own web.”
“I thought she loved me more than this,” Quinn said.
“She does, beyond all reason. Don’t jump on me. My throat is dry from the salt from my eyes.”
“What kind of destructive logic consumed her with the notion that she had to become a writer to atone for a sin she never committed?”
“If anyone is responsible, I am. I should have seen it coming,” Mal said.
“Why didn’t she tell me? Why Carlos?” Quinn cried.