The Atomic Weight of Love (9 page)

“I’ll be fine. Really, I will.” I assured him. He didn’t look at me, kept his gaze fixed out the window, wedded to the tree branches. “Alden?” I begged a response.

“It’s not that.” He turned to face me. “It’s not you.” He looked at the pile of our hands, and I felt the weight of them grow. I decided I needed to be quiet—to let him tell me whatever was bothering him. I heard the heartbeat of a sprinkler on the lawn below.

“What we’re doing . . .” he began, a false start. The sprinkler measured out the time. “Maybe it will work. No one knows, really. We’re all trying damned hard, using everything we’ve got.” Again I had to resist the temptation to fill the silence, somehow to make everything all right with words. “It has the power to end the war,” he said, finally looking at me. I felt my head tilt, my eyes fill. He was, in that moment, so inalterably beautiful to me with his wild hair, his tanned face, his straight, narrow nose.

“It also has the power to end life as we know it. It will change the world.”

I could tell he took no joy in that possibility. That he feared his science, his intellect, were not necessarily lending themselves to positive change. I bent and kissed his hands in mine, and we sat together, both of us looking out that window. To the north, unseen by us, clouds boiled into giant castles, dark, rumbling monsters shot full of thunder, lightning, and menace.

I OPENED ALL OF
my pores to what New Mexico had to offer. With a portion of the weekly seven-dollar allowance Alden gave me, I bought a clunky old tank of a bicycle. I rode through neighborhoods where the houses matched those from Alden’s postcards—crumbling adobe, cardboard patching broken window panes, dispirited dogs chained in desolate yards, dust devils forming and dying in seconds.

Within a few days of moving into the Walter Street rooms, I met Jan Tilman, a nurse at the veterans’ hospital who lived on the ground floor beneath me. When Alden couldn’t come to town, Jan and I would go dancing at the USO. She was a bit on the chubby side, but it was the kind of chubby that is comforting, plush, not yet spilling over into excess. Her softness undoubtedly soothed the sick and hurting; she was friendly, genuine, and on the hunt for a man who could knock her socks off, she said. At the dances, we drank Coca-Colas and laughed alongside the soldiers who were blowing off steam, and Jan showed me the lucky rabbit’s foot one particularly enamored soldier had given her.

There was never a moment when I didn’t want Alden with me at those dances, and I think he understood that. I know he trusted me, and with good reason: I loved him so, and the proximity of him combined with the constant lack of him created a sweet sort of torture, a push-pull of palpable desire. Some nights, when Jan and I got back to our rooms after the USO dances, I’d stand in front of the armoire, pull one of Alden’s shirts to my nose, and inhale.

On weekends, Alden and I went to the movies to escape the heat. D-Day happened that summer, and I remember sitting in the dark next to Alden, watching one of the United News newsreels describing the Normandy invasion. Haunting images of ready-and-waiting paratroopers, their faces blackened to lessen their visibility in the dark. Churchill with his cigar boarding invasion crafts to encourage departing troops, Eisenhower speaking to the soon-to-be-liberated population of France, encouraging “all who love freedom” to “stand with us.” Bomb after bomb burst into huge, fuel-filled clouds of smoke and fire. I held on to Alden in the darkened theater, and when I saw the parachutes of so many men open and drift earthward, all I could think about was their courage, their faith. I wondered, too, where Jerry was, if he were anywhere near France. Alden leaned toward me quietly and said, “We will end this carnage.”

Alden took me to San Felipe Pueblo, north of Albuquerque. With the other tourists, we sat cross-legged in the dirt along the edges of a wide, rectangular courtyard, and Indian dancers filed in from two sides, keeping time with a circle of four men who beat out increasingly intense rhythms on drum heads made of leather and sinew. Draped across the shoulders of the women were beautiful, colorful woolen weavings. The women wore white leather moccasins studded with silver buttons and fringes that curled with the pounding of their feet. Sweat ran down the faces of performers and audience members alike, and rattles made from seed-filled gourds made me think of rattlesnakes—something Alden said people regularly found in homes and yards out here.

In Santa Fe we walked down picturesque, unbelievably narrow corridors where I could not shake the feeling that we were being followed, that Alden was being watched. Surely the usual Santa Fe residents had to know something was going on just north of the old city, up on that mesa where Los Alamos grew overnight. The influx of people had to be obvious. Even I could spot probable Los Alamos transplants as they made their way through town on errands impossible to fulfill in Los Alamos: watch repairs, car parts, more liquor than your fellow scientists should know about. The scientists even walked differently, precisely, either wholly self-conscious or lost in the clouds. I saw them squatting to inspect bolo ties, belt buckles, and rings sold by the Indians who lined the shadowed portico of the Palace of the Governors on the Plaza, and I saw them seated on benches, hungrily spooning chunks of Woolworth’s Frito pie into their mouths.

Maybe everyone felt as if they were being watched; everyone was on edge. Alden must have become inured to having someone look over his shoulder, check his credentials; he must be used to locking his thoughts away. Maybe he had always lived an inviolate, completely interior, intellectual life. I had a strong sense of vulnerability though, of unseen violation. I wasn’t used to living that way—I lived my life on a college campus where thoughts and ideas flourished because they thrived in sunlight, in soil enriched by other theories, by challenge. I realized what a huge adjustment this wartime secrecy must be for an academic like Alden. Even on the Hill, as he called Los Alamos, conversation was circumscribed.

I took Alden’s hand, willing my thoughts to enter his bloodstream through that skin-to-skin contact, wanting for him to know that while we couldn’t really discuss much of his life, I honored his sacrifice. I was determined to focus on something other than the leviathan secret weighing on our marriage, our intimacy.

I fingered the wool of Navajo rugs and thought about Scottish woolen works, what my father would have said and done in the arid New Mexico heat. We ventured east of the Plaza to the cool interior of the minuscule gothic Loretto Chapel to see the wooden spiral staircase, built with only wooden pegs. Alden rested his palm on a curve of the wood as if it were a reliquary, and I inhaled the mix of incense, candle wax, and desperate prayer. Standing there, with my hands resting on the back of a pew, my eyes relaxing into the wedding-cake white of the altar, I wanted to believe in a God—a God that would end the war, the state of suspended animation in which Alden and I lived our marriage.

ONCE ON MY OWN
again, I didn’t return to Tingley Beach; instead, I hiked the bosque along the Rio Grande. Beavers had carved some of the cottonwoods into wasp-waisted creatures, and at times the wind on the water would create spectacles of shimmering, dancing refractions of summer sunlight. I loved encountering one big male coyote in particular. Gold, brown, and gray, he would freeze and stare back at me, his hindquarters quivering with the energy he’d need to turn and run if I got too close. In the shadows of the canopy, I found beefy flickertails and the occasional bright, tropical-colored tanagers. I also saw my first greater roadrunner—the bird’s odd, warning rattle was what initially caught my attention. His beak was more ferocious than I’d imagined—long, sharp, and clearly made for spearing his prey of small songbirds, lizards. I found him disconcertingly threatening—more so than any coyote I encountered while walking alone in those woods.

I discovered that when the limbs of cottonwoods die, they slough off their bark until all that remains is a smooth, supremely touchable gray-white wood. Only then is it possible to see that beneath the skin of bark, burrowing insects have engraved the wood with trails of hieroglyphic language. I loved to touch those symbols with my fingertips, closing my eyes as if reading Braille.

Some evenings, I would sit on a downed tree carcass along the river to watch crows return from days of foraging to roost and repossess their home territories. Eventually, hundreds of crows would gather and send up a loud, raucous din that lasted until dark. I knew my master’s thesis would be on crow behavior, the social aspects of the bird, but I also knew I needed to hone in on a narrower aspect of their social lives. I longed to know how, when, and why they formed allegiances and if those bonds crossed familial boundaries. I wanted to understand loyalty—to know if it derived solely from evolutionary advantage, or if it might also be motivated by something else, something akin to caring, love, and devotion.

On several occasions I observed crows acting in concert to attack another species, and my beautiful giant of a coyote was one of their humiliated victims. I saw the crows’ display first from a distance, heard them cawing and shrieking at something close to the ground. My magnificent boy was standing in an open area along the river, his tail tucked beneath him, his head lowered. The crows dive-bombed him repeatedly, but why? Was it a matter of territory? Or were they merely seeking to relieve their bright minds of boredom? They reminded me of cocky young men on a street corner, hassling passersby in a display of virility.

Darwin talked about the struggle for survival being more intense between species of the same genus, when they come into competition with each other. He said it made sense that competition would be the most severe between allied forms, since they fill almost the same stratum in nature. I was thinking about crows this way—how much infighting was there? Social behaviors only survive if they increase the bird’s survival and ability to reproduce, but how social were they, really? Did the degree of participation in family life vary throughout the crow’s life, or did it follow a stable pattern? These were the questions I wanted to answer, and I tucked them away in my memory bank, eager to build upon them when I began my graduate studies.

FOR OUR LAST EVENING
together before I returned to Chicago and school, we found our way to a little hole-in-the-wall spot called La Cocinita, and there I had my first taste of enchiladas. They were delicious, smothered in jack and Colby cheeses, heavy with onions, accompanied by
papitas—
little fried potatoes. I tasted pinto beans for the first time, too. They’d been liberally doctored with a powder made from red chiles—so hot with spices that I drank two glasses of water trying to soothe my tongue and throat. Watching me, Alden laughed.

“It’s a New Mexican test, you know. How hot you can stand your chile. A measure of your
cojones
.”

“My what?” I choked, dipped my napkin in my water glass, and applied the water directly to what I was sure were blisters indicative of third-degree burns, at least.

“Balls, my dear.”

“Balls?”

“Your manhood, your macho status.”

“Oh. And I’m supposed to want that?”

“Meri, you
are
that. You are one ballsy woman. The ballsiest I’ve ever known.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“It was meant as one.” Alden took a bite of his pork tamale. “You’ve done a good job this summer. You’ve made the best of things, taken care of yourself.”

“Isn’t that what you expected?”

“It’s what I knew you could do. It’s not what other men’s wives have done.” I let what he’d said sink in. I felt pride, but it was tinged with something else, something I couldn’t identify. “And soon, Meri. Soon, maybe we’ll be together permanently.”

“Are you telling me something?”

“No. No, I’m not. I am emphatically
not
telling you anything.”

“How wonderful it would be not to have to part.” I reached across the table and pulled a lock of his hair until it was straight. It extended past his collar. There were sopaipilla crumbs in his mustache. He kissed my wrist and then returned my hand to my side of the table so that he could continue eating. I could hear the rasp of cicadas in the trees lining the street outside.

After a few minutes, Alden pushed back from the table, and we both lit up, exhaling smoke toward the wood-beamed ceiling. “I know a purported cure for too-hot chile,” he said.

“Do tell.” It had been a good meal. I felt my shoulders relaxing away from my ears, and I was sure he’d say the cure was making love.

“Ice cream.”

“Ice cream?”

“Yes.”

“All right. I believe you.”

“You should always believe me, Meri. I will never lie to you.”

I knew he meant it. It’s keeping promises, not making them, that is the impossible thing.

A Tidings of Magpies

1. Gregarious birds, magpies are intelligent, opportunistic, and bold.

2. The magpie is viewed by some cultures as an omen of bad news; other cultures consider the bird a messenger of good tidings.

During my senior year, I missed Alden so, and I sought out distractions. In September, Kitty, Red, and I saw Bette Davis marry an older man to save her brother from embezzlement charges in
Mr. Skeffington
, and Mother wrote that she was canning peaches. October had one of the most beautiful harvest moons I’d ever seen, a rich, gold disc hovering ripe over the horizon. As a surprise for Alden when I next saw him, Kitty and Red borrowed a car so they could teach me to drive, and we sweet-talked everyone we knew into donating gasoline ration coupons so we could refill the tank with ethyl.

Alden couldn’t break free for the holidays, and the weather was so awful that I left Mother in the capable hands of her many Somerset County cousins while I stayed in Chicago, sharing Christmas with Mrs. Hudson and the other boarders who had no place else to go. A small part of me secretly hoped that Alden would appear on Christmas Eve, make a big surprise of it, but I was wrong. I chastised myself for having harbored such little-girl wishes.