Carry the One by Carol Anshaw Page A

heard Maude saying, but from a great distance, like an animated character on a cartoon show being played on a TV in another room. When he was straight, she scared him with her arrogance, that and her low opinion of him. She hated him for bringing Olivia to the wedding, for taking some stupefying amount of drugs with her, then letting her drive. He could tell she had also written him off as a loser. She thought he was blowing off a big career on account of the drugs.
    He couldn’t explain to her, to anyone, the whirl astronomy sets up inside a person’s head, the vertigo that comes with trying to understand what’s going on way out there. He might be the first person to understand a significant piece of missing information. People didn’t see that pursuing information on this scale can be agitating. He needed something to help him chill out. Drugs were just extremely helpful. Also manual labor, which let him back off from the abstract into the concrete, finite, orderly nature of carpentry and plumbing. Tools and measures. Something, in the end, he could put his hand on.
    “I can’t let him back out on the street to drive around like a bumper car,” Alice was telling Maude when he tuned back in. Then Alice guided him to the sofa. “Good thing you brought that wrench, Mr. Handy. You’re going to be doing a lot of work tonight.”
    He saw the sofa coming into view. Lying down was so right. You couldn’t argue with lying down. A perfectly simple equation appeared before him, linking black holes to dark energy. It shimmered for just a second, then dissolved.

small breeze
    A few thousand kisses, maybe a hundred fights into their relationship, Maude leaned over the back of the sofa to kiss Alice, who was in the throes of a bad summer cold.
    “I don’t think you have a fever,” she said. “Just take some Contac and you’ll be fine.
    “Stay and play doctor with me,” Alice said.
    “Can’t. I’ve got a shoot at ten.” But even as she said this, Maude was getting undressed, letting Alice pull her on top of her. “Okay. You win. Give me your cold. Come on. Really try.”
    This moment, taken out of context, would be misleading, making it appear their relationship had moved along to some further place where Alice could feel secure. What Alice wanted was for Maude to love her and they could go on from there to wherever people go when they have paved the road they’ll be traveling together. That was not happening. They were still in the place where Maude was deciding which fork in the road to take. Maybe further back than that even. Maybe they were still waiting for the asphalt truck.
    The problem was not between Alice and Maude. Their time together,their conversations, their shared jokes, the sex, even though they were three years in, was all still dense with color, everything so amazingly vibrant. The problem lay in the connection between Maude and her mother, Marie, who had by now figured out what was going on between Maude and Alice, and was lobbying her daughter to move back into her own apartment. She referred to Alice’s loft as an occasion of sin. Alice was resigned to this move. What worried her more was that Maude had taken on some of her mother’s crazy queer hating herself. She saw her attraction to Alice as something inside her, but not exactly who she was. Alice feared Maude saw it as something she should be able to kill.
    “This won’t really change anything,” Maude said, now deeply late for the shoot, rushing back into her clothes and clattering handfuls of tape cassettes into a duffel. “I’ll call to see how you are tonight. And I’ll see you this weekend.”
    Alone, Alice sat at the kitchen table while her coffee went cold, then finally went into the studio and sanded a gessoed canvas to begin a fresh portrait of Casey Redman. This would be the fifth. The early ones came to Alice set in places of Casey’s childhood—inside a snow fort in a field by the toboggan hill, on a raft in what was