Trinity Fields by Bradford Morrow Read Free Book Online Page B

into the last decade of his life; my mother was daft and content; my sister had married, was raising a kid, and hoped that another boy would follow. Ariel was growing up fast. Five years old, hard to fathom. It was time I grew up as well.
    There was a Chinese saying my mother sometimes used, an inside joke we shared, that went, “May you live in interesting times.” It was an inside joke because on the surface it sounded like a blessing but what the saying meant was, “May you be cursed.”
    We had lived in interesting times. And now I believed the curse must be lifted. It is a commonplace that we all depend once in a while upon the kindness of strangers. Strangers have a curious way of coming through for other strangers. But having to depend on the kindness of friends is a more unpredictable business. After all, there is something to lose with friends, whereas between strangers the freedom to say no allows one to say yes, even acts as a strong incentive to say yes. It is kind of my old friends to take me in on such short notice.
    I feel both unnerved and grateful when Alyse picks me up at the airport. And more so, when she tells me that I will stay in her studio on Mountain Road, just across the river from their adobe. “Martha won’t be in your way there.”
    It is more that I don’t want to be in anyone’s way. “How old is Martha now?”
    Martha is four. Alyse and Michael were late bloomers, together since forever but held off starting a family until the last possible moment.
    â€œShe won’t remember me.”
    I had met Martha once, when she was still a baby, in New York one Christmas when her parents had come east to introduce her to her grandparents, Michael’s mother and father. She was memorable for her clear, round face and dark eyes. There was strength in her brow and grip. “But I remember her.”
    â€œWith Martha you never know. I wouldn’t be so sure she won’t have all sorts of questions for you about Jessica and Ariel and what do you think of the new president. Nothing surprises me anymore. How does it feel to be back?”
    â€œI don’t think I want to feel anything about being here, if you want to know the truth. I’m not completely sure I should be here.”
    â€œYou told me not to ask, so I’m not asking.”
    â€œGood. Don’t. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
    â€œTry me.”
    Instead, I look out the window and express real amazement, and not a little dismay at how quickly things have grown and developed. If you come back to where you grew up as seldom as I do, you are bound for shocks of various kinds. People your memory holds in time, changeless and smiling, have moved away or are dead; places you cherished—a shallow crossing in a river, an old tree whose cherries you loved to pick and then eat sitting in its generous shade—are silted or sawed down. It all goes merrily or unhappily along whether you stick around to watch or not. Commonplaces, but they come at me in full force as we encounter the outskirts of town where once there was nothing but piñon and tumbleweed.
    â€œIt’s changed a lot since you were here last.”
    â€œSeems a shame,” I say.
    â€œWe got too famous for our own good. All these Los Angeles people commuting in for the weekends, New Yorkers too, artists and dealers, and not just art dealers but people who made a lot in drugs, got away with it and now are legitimate, into crystals, organics, whatever all, a lot of money now. We’re being californicated is how they put it. Are you tired?”
    â€œNo,” I say. But I am. Or, maybe less tired than enervated. And unnerved.
    The studio is secluded. An adobe cottage cantilevered over a steep ridge and surrounded by forsythia in full bloom, lilac and apples, cottonwoods and aspen, and bushes whose names I don’t know or cannot remember, all beginning to bud. I’m left here to wash