My Unsentimental Education

I want to go home, I decided. I said, “Thank you.”
Sim got bit by a rattlesnake, and the vet said to hold a compress on Sim’s chest, and he might live. I’d once tried to clean a tiny leg wound, and Sim bit me, but now he laid his head in my lap like a hurt cowboy staring at the kind schoolmarm, and the wound drained. Afterward, he neglected deer patrol, so sometimes I chased away deer from my flowers.
Jed Pharr told me one morning after we’d drunk too much that he felt like he needed a PhD. “Why?” I was serving eggs, biscuits. He wasn’t sure, he said, ornery. Yet he’d hated college, I thought. He’d complained about studying for a real estate exam. It seemed clear that, to paraphrase Shakespeare, my PhD was an impediment to the marriage of our whatevers. Minds. Bodies. Our love wasn’t love if it altered while encountering alteration. My dad once said: “I don’t see how anyone could have stayed married to you—starting with a waitress, ending with you now.” Hence, I’d led a fitful life.
But movies started getting filmed in Texas, and, with Jed’s knowledge of place, his carpentry, he was making a career swerve whether I objected or not, he said. Like I was the ex-wife, I realized, who’d disapproved of the tequila business, or the adobe business. The new job impressed people, life on the set: handing Tommy Lee Jones a cup of water with spray-on mist to make the cup look as if it had beads of condensation; searching junkyards for a radio to put inside a truck Kris Kristofferson would pretend to drive.
Jed would be gone for months, and I’d visit him for a weekend now and then. This left me more time to work. Reunited, we’d make love, then sleep in each other’s arms. On one visit, Jed told me he’d paid for the grand hotel bill, the trip to Wisconsin, the bottles of wine and tequila, while not earning a red cent. I’d cooked for him or bought him clothes when his wore out. Not equal. “Why did you spend money you didn’t have?” He said, “You’d never been anywhere for fun. How else would I date you?”
Complicit, I’d fallen in love with it all. His moody eyes, his lean body, the lovemaking, the whirlwind fun fun fun tour. I offered him money, but he was almost from another generation; he said no, emphatically. At least for now. He had that new job.
A movie was being filmed in a border town where Jed’s family lived, including a brother who’d made a fortune building colonias—slumlike housing developments. I later realized that selling houses on land that won’t have electricity or water for years, if ever, requires cozy relationships with corrupt judges. At the time I knew only that Jed’s brother, Vick, paid the house note or rent for every relative except Jed and Jed’s sister. But Vick had given Jed start-up money for all of Jed’s businesses, Vick told me, shaking his head: “I never thought there’d be so many.” Jed and I once stopped by Vick’s house as Vick paid workmen to chase an owl. An owl near the house portended death, Vick explained.
No wonder Jed believed in conspiracies, I thought. Because Vick’s wife was from Mexico, or wasn’t. She was from Germany, she said with a Mexican-Spanish accent. Jed’s sister was married to a rich rancher. She bought a house her husband didn’t know about and filled it with furniture and Navajo blankets. She had a boyfriend everyone liked except that, unlike the husband, he wasn’t rich. Jed’s eighty-year-old mother had never been told her oldest son was dead. She thought he was living in a trailer park, drunk.
I didn’t find this out all at once. It took the entire summer.
The production company would have paid for Jed’s lodging, but Vick loaned Jed a little rental house for the length of the shoot—to make our weekends together pleasant, Vick told me as he met me at this house on the edge of a colonia, the former manager’s quarters, to give me a key, telling me he’d had the house cleaned and filled with furniture. It was a burden, being naturally generous, he added. And Jed and I must keep the loan of the house quiet because Vick’s wife would object. I thought Vick’s wife would object that the house, loaned to Jed, wouldn’t be earning rental money. I didn’t yet know the extent of Vick’s ill-gotten riches or that the secret about the house was me, not Jed.
It was summer. I wrote steadily, but every other weekend I drove to the border town. Besides Jed, Jed’s mother, and maybe Vick, everyone must have assumed I had my eye on the family fortune. Jed’s sister—hoarder of Old West antiques and Talavera pottery—snubbed me. Vick’s wife and children did. I asked Jed why. He said, “Who cares? What’s that hyper word you use? Hyperanalytical. Don’t be so hyper-analytical. What’s the other word you use? Persona. You’ll need a new persona to get along down here.”
But I couldn’t help wondering. They thought I was too young for Jed? I was somebody’s midlife crisis? The only relative who smiled at me was Jed’s mother. I’d bring groceries and cook her dinner. I still remember a photo Jed took and then enlarged because it made him happy to see me in his mother’s kitchenette, holding a saucepan as she tied a polka-dot apron over my pretty dress, as she would call it, and hugged me from behind.
Or I cooked at the house Vick provided—chicken baked with olives, capers, figs; cucumber salad; couscous; chilled wine. We’d invite the prop people, the makeup artist, the location scout. For a few hours people who didn’t write books, but they read them, sat on a patio surrounded by a trellis that hid the steel fence with razor wire. There’d always be a live band deep in the desert, playing conjunto. A hot wind