Ute Mountain is nothing more than a nipple on the southern horizon and the high cliff-line of Mesa Verde has sunk from sight by the time Tom John addresses my latest predicament. What he wants to know is whether I’ll ever walk again, but all he is courageous enough to ask at the moment is if I ’m going to have to get good at driving a wheelchair.

“I hope not,” I tell him. “It’s not like my arms are a whole lot more cooperative than my legs are. If this is like the other exacerbations I’ve had, I’ll be back on my feet in a week or two, but . . . I guess I’ve got to face the fact that this is going to be a permanent fucking situation someday.”

“Whew.” Tom John doesn’t know what else to say.

“Yeah.” Neither do I, but silence always has been something Tom John and I comfortably can share, and we quietly cross the Utah line as thunderheads rumble above the Abajos and a thin rain starts to spit at the windshield.

Earlier, once we neared the highway and dear Ted had surrendered the chase, Tom John said the one thing he really did need to know was where in the world we were going. “This truck’s going to have to turn one of two directions right up here, so think fast.” But I still didn’t know where I wanted to go because it hardly seemed to matter, and we sat at the stop sign for a while, watching the trucks roar past and imagining ideal destinations.

“We could go see Cynthia in Tucson,” he finally suggested, certain he’d struck on the perfect plan, “drag her with us down to Puerto Peñasco for a day or two. We’ll sit on the sand and eat shrimp all day and watch the waves splash till we get wise.” Cynthia is yet another comrade archaeologist, a mutual friend who recently returned to the University of Arizona determined to finish the Ph.D. she’s repeatedly abandoned, and although it did sound wonderful to see her and do a little lounging beside the Sea of Cortez, I said no, reminding Tom John how heat makes all my symptoms worse and readily saps whatever strength I otherwise can muster.

“Right. Bad idea,” he said as he pulled onto the lane of the highway that pointed us northwest. “We’ll aim for the North Pole. We can’t tarry too long in Utah or they’ll try to get us into the Mormon underwear, but then we’ll either go to Montana to court some cowboys or I’ll take you to the Oregon coast and show you the prettiest sights you ever saw. ”

“You’re on,” I said, doubtful that we’d really get very far afield, but pleased to pretend that we would, and as we wind down now into the Lisbon Valley, the spires and buttes and hoodoo rocks of the canyonlands stand red in the early evening light, and I tell Tom John that I’m sure we’ve taken the proper road.

We dine tonight at the Taco Bell in Moab so I won’t have to be maneuvered in and out of the truck, and we stop as well for gasoline and the quart of beer Tom John makes his dessert, then we drive on into the dusk, the sky as dark red as the rock now, the storm behind us and kicking its heels up in Colorado, the highway empty and hot from the heat of the day, my mood oddly buoyant until Tom John finally demands to know some details.
I’m reluctant to play it all out again, to try to describe a situation that, so far, I’ve only run from, but I owe him that much, owe him more than I’ll ever be able to repay, so I begin by explaining the way the day began—my legs on sudden hiatus, my mother and Lionel determined to be of some help, Harry sweet and understanding and out the door at his regular hour, Alice arriving in the afternoon, kind and solicitous until I asked her the question.

“But you didn’t really talk about it?”

“What was there to talk about?”

“Well, I don’t know, the sordid details. Whether it’s love or only something a little more carnal. ”

“Oh, I think I understand. There hasn’t been any calculated attempt to ruin my life, nor do I suppose they’ve spent much time crying about being star-crossed lovers. I guess they just . . . well, it’s really pretty simple, isn’t it?”

“Sarah, can I say something?”

“You can.”

Tom John pauses before he begins, and it’s clear as he gathers his thoughts that he hopes I’ll really hear him. “I think by now I’ve got a pretty clear idea of how men’s minds and penile appendages operate, and we are not the noblest of creatures, which you probably are already understand too. It is possible that as ugly as all this is, it doesn’t truly mean too much. Mean in that big-picture way, in a way that has to change everyone’s lives.

“There’s a part of me that thinks this is all very understandable,” I tell him, “but me ending up with MS and then Harry fucking our best friend is bizarrely symbolic of something that’s fundamental, that’s at the core of my relationship with him. It isn’t just that I’m a cripple now. Forever, always, I’ve never been enough for him. He loves me—goddamnit, he does love me, but there’s always been this look of disappointment that spreads onto his face that just kills me. He wants me, but you can see it in his eyes, this longing for more than me. And I suspect that sex with me, even in the best of times, has left him desperate for more, better, other. It’s pretty hard on your self-esteem after years and years, and you end up just wanting to walk away.”

“We’re walking, we’re walking,” Tom John assures me. “Rolling at any rate. And I don’t know what to say, other than to tell you I love you. The mysteries of how two people connect, or only partially connect, or never truly connect at all—I feel damn stupid about all of that. I do know Harry, think I do, and I also think I know what it’s like for a man to want everything under the sun. It’s accepting the fact that you just plain can’t have everything that makes some men crazy. I do suspect that Harry is sick to death at this minute, and he’s hearing nothing but my answering machine, and he’s put two and two together and he thinks I’m a son of a bitch.”

“If Harry can have Alice, then why can’t I have you?”

“Wouldn’t that have been something?” His voice is wistful, and in it I hear that he is aware, like I am, that the two of us just might have connected completely. Tom John finds my hand in the darkness and I squeeze his hand inside both of mine. Night nuzzles close to the land in Utah and I can’t imagine tomorrow morning or any of my mornings to come.

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Excerpted from The Sorrow of Archaeology by Russell Martin, Copyright© 2005 by Russell Martin. Excerpted by permission of the University of New Mexico Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.