Angela leaned forward and put her hand over Philip’s.
“And you know, she was so worried that Mabel was going to try and pull something with Lawrence’s ashes that she had them sealed in concrete. They are still sealed up at his memorial on the ranch.” She smiled, knowing he loved this sort of inside information to history. “When you come visit, I’ll take you up there.”
In her mind’s eye, she saw them standing under the eaves of the memorial, Philip with his back to the vista rolling out before them hundreds of miles of mesas, mountains, sage brush, pinon trees and bleached skulls even beyond Georgia O’Keeffe’s hideout in Abique. Philip’s gray hair would be blown up in the back, and he would be silhouetted against the setting sun.
In just a split second, Angela went from the soft padded leather booths of the restaurant in Manhattan’s midtown district, to the edge of the dried up inland sea. The Pedernal, an extinct volcano a hundred miles away, gauzy in the light of sundown colors.
She imagined that four in the afternoon would be the earliest she could persuade Philip out of the room. His city ways were so ingrained in his daily habits of moving through the world. She knew he would say he did not care when she told him the sidewalks rolled up at eight in this place.
“Bumfuck, New Mexico, you say?” he’d ask, eye brows arched over the Sunday Times, which, though four days old, was something he’d hang onto for dear life during his visit.
And Angela would answer in her best, cloaked facetious voice, “A bum fuck? Are you sure? You told me you thought you were in the arms of god or his mistress, the last time we fucked but seriously, Philip. You must get dressed and go now, if you want to get to see Lawrence’s memorial.”
It was in this way that Angela never needed to actually DO some things. By fleshing out a possible arc of reality from its
tangential place in the circle of her life, she could follow the arc to its likely and most probable conclusion and tell if it would
be worth the diversion. This way, Angela reasoned, she did not waste her time with failed enterprises.
Like persuading Philip to come to visit her out west. She could see, as she unspooled the narrative about dilettante flapper Mabel Doge Luhan and taciturn British writer D.H. Lawrence. She knew she should just give up trying to entice Philip to come and visit her in New Mexico. An appealing a place as it was, Philip would be just like Lawrence. He would be bitchy, unbending in his routine, and impossible to please. She knew, as long as she and Philip were friends she would always have to come to him.
