“Your wife couldn’t tell you apart, yet you two were the love of the century. I can tell you from your brother, but you and I can’t abide each other.” She paused a moment. “Except for sex,” she said softly.
He looked away. “Yeah, except for sex.”
“You should marry somebody normal, somebody who wants to be a wife and mother, and wants to live on a ranch and ride horses and milk cows or whatever. Above all, you shouldn’t think of, shouldn’t even consider, marrying someone because of great…I mean, because of one very ordinary sexual encounter. These things happen. I bet this kind of thing happens with every group you take out—especially New York women.” She was warming to her subject. “There’s the disease scare in New York so the women don’t feel safe—not that I endorse one-night stands—but they feel safe with a big, clean cowboy who’s lived all his life in pure, innocent Colorado. I mean, what can you get from a cowboy? Hoof-and-mouth disease? Anthrax? Are they the same thing? So, anyway, it was just something that happened. The right time, the right place. I bet that if Ruth had been in that upstairs window it would have…been…Ruth that you…” She was slowing down, and, with horror, she recognized that what she was feeling was jealousy. If, she thought. If. If Ruth had been there, Kane would have pulled her from the window. Then Ruth and Kane would have…
Getting up, she dusted off the seat of her jeans. “There are millions of women out there. Go meet them and find someone to fulfill your legend. I’m not the one. I’m not anyone’s princess in a tower.”
All the way down that mountain, with every step I took, I hoped he’d come after me. Since my thoughts are my own, I figured I could indulge them—there was no one to tell them to and no one to laugh at me.
I knew his coming after me was a stupid idea. I knew we were completely incompatible, since we’d barely said a civil word to each other. Except for one afternoon of wonderful, divine, heavenly sex followed by a beautiful man holding me in his arms and pouring his soul out to me, we’d always fought. We disliked each other a great deal. We had nothing in common. Except maybe two kids that I wanted. Wanted in the abstract, that is. What was I thinking of: moving those darling children out of the wilds of Colorado, out of the clean air of this mountainous state, and putting them in a penthouse in New York with nothing but a terrace to play on? Of course, being raised in Colorado was no assurance that a person would grow up happy. Maybe the kids would like big, dirty New York. Or maybe I could move to Colorado.
None of this thinking did me any good, because the cowboy didn’t come after me, didn’t fall on his knees before me and tell me he couldn’t live without me. In fact, he stayed on top of the mountain while I went down it.
Mike was waiting at the bottom. Not that I thought he was waiting for me, but he gave a good imitation of concern. I was so depressed I didn’t even suggest that he should visit a gym now and then. After Kane, Mike was a pale second best.
“I want to go home,” I said.
“Home?”
Mike sounded as dumb as I’d once thought Kane was. But Kane wasn’t dumb. He was smart and funny and kind, and…and I wished he believed that stupid ol’ legend. My fantasies started going on me, and I imagined a father with a shotgun forcing us to marry because we fulfilled the prophecy. Where were fathers with shotguns when you really needed them?
“Yes, home,” I said. “Home to New York.”
Mike looked up the mountain, but I knew he wasn’t going to see his brother.
“We said our good-byes up there.”
“But…”
It was obvious Mike didn’t know what else to say. No doubt he’d done the expected thing and hauled his wife before the family tribunal before he even considered marrying her. Oh, well, it was a good thing nothing was going to come of Kane and me, because I’m not good with families, and I think I could come to hate his.
“Mike,” I said slowly and as though I meant it, “I want you to drive me to Chandler so I can leave this state. I want to go back to a place where they just cut your heart out.” Not break it as they did in Colorado.
I had to look away because I was giving in to my flair for drama. Just once I wanted to make an unflamboyant exit. No fits, no tantrums. I wanted to keep my pride and just walk out.
Mike helped me get my gear together, but he took forever doing it. I know he was trying to give his brother time to make up his mind. But Kane had made up his mind, and he was right to be so sensible. I would make a rotten wife. I’d be involved in a book and forget about food for days at a time. If I didn’t have a nanny for the kids, I’d probably forget about them too. And heaven help the man if he crossed me! I’d dig my heels in and do whatever he didn’t want me to do just
because he wanted me to do it. All in all, it was better for somebody like me to live alone. To be free. Yes, that’s it. Freedom. Freedom to come and go as I please. Freedom to…to have no one to laugh at my jokes, to rub my keyboard-tightened shoulders, no one to listen to my latest plot idea. No one to make love to.
Mike managed to dawdle until sundown, then began to find reasons why we shouldn’t leave until morning.
“Colorado’s so backward they don’t have headlights on the cars yet?” I asked, with my most belligerent New York attitude.
Mike gave in to me and drove me back to the tiny town of Chandler. He wanted to take me to his parents’ house. And what? Tuck me in Kane’s bed and hope his brother would come home during the night and stumble into bed with me?
I made him take me to a motel, and at ten o’clock the next morning he drove me to the airport where I took a tiny airplane to Denver. From there I flew to New York.
My editor wasn’t very happy with me. In the six weeks since I’d been back from Colorado, I hadn’t killed anybody. I mean on paper, of course. Since my publishing house sent me all that lovely money for killing people, they weren’t too happy with me either.
It wasn’t that I wasn’t writing. I was writing ten to fourteen hours a day, but I kept writing about things like mail-order brides and shotgun weddings. I never finished any of the stories, I just wrote proposals and sent them to my editor.
At the beginning of the seventh week, my editor came to my apartment to have a talk with me.
“It isn’t that we mind your changing genres,” she said patiently. (All editors deliver bad news to their best-selling authors with extreme patience and tact, rather like you’d talk to a crazy man who was holding a machete: “It’s not that you’re wrong to want to mutilate and maim…”) “After all,” she said, “romances make a fortune.” (Thank God I wasn’t trying to write something that would make no money—there’d be mass hysteria in the corridors of my publishing house.)
She lowered her voice and smiled sweetly. “It’s just that your romances aren’t any good. They’re so sad.”
Life is weird, isn’t it? You kill people off in book after book and that’s not considered sad, but the heroine of a romance falls for some guy who then walks off into the sunset, and that’s considered too sad. If I’d killed the s.o.b., the story would have been a tragedy. Tragedy is okay, murder is grand, but sad is bad. Even worse, sad doesn’t sell.