Leslie’s Mansion in the Sky

by Lana Spendl

Featured art: “October” by Marianne

After a kerfuffle in Phoenix about whether to drive to Sedona for New Year’s Eve or not, I find myself in Tara’s car. She’s won. We’re heading to her friend Leslie’s mansion on the mountain. I mope and eye bumper-to-bumper traffic in the afternoon sun.

Tara has seen Leslie a total of two times. Tara’s ex-boyfriend introduced the two, and then, post-breakup, Leslie invited her to Sedona for a hike. Tara has been transfixed by the woman ever since.

“What is it about Leslie that draws you so much?” I ask her, curious, in the car.

We are about to exit Phoenix. To one side, across neighborhoods of rooftops, stands a lone mountain.

“I don’t know. What’s funny is that I don’t usually like female alphas. But Leslie is a different species of alpha than I am. I think that’s what makes it all right.”

I imagine Tara as a rhino and Leslie as a cheetah wandering the savannah. From across the plain, the rhino nods. The cheetah, not stirring a muscle, remains stoic. But then a flirty turn of the tail reveals her pleasure at being recognized.

Tara glances at me sideways. “You know, I could never figure out if you’re an alpha or not.”

This makes sense. I stand confident in my body but am also romantically attracted to female alphas. I make way for them. Admire them. I hold them in my arms as they cry about bitterness and betrayals. The traffic thins out, and the road opens to single cars speeding up.

* * *

I am in Arizona for the first time, for several days, visiting Tara over New Year’s. I live in the Midwest. Tara is a friend from graduate school who moved to Phoenix years earlier for work. In her late thirties, she is attractive and chic. She spends her time teaching, dating, and going on hikes.

Leading up to my visit, Leslie invited us to a New Year’s Eve party in her mansion in Sedona. I seldom have access to mansions, and at the invitation, my mind ran wild with images of spacious rooms, dripping jewelry, champagne glasses, and balconies that opened to mountain rock and night sky. Overwhelming but fun.

The day before my trip, though, Tara clarified that the party would consist of Leslie’s immediate family. The idea of strangers chewing steak in silence and referencing mutual relations seemed less fun. She also suggested that she and Leslie take a hike on New Year’s Day while I tour Sedona with Leslie’s husband, which I adamantly refused. I was flying out to see Tara and didn’t know Leslie at all, to say nothing of the husband.

Moreover, the day we were getting ready to drive out from Phoenix, a snowstorm hit Sedona, and Tara texted and texted Leslie about how to proceed.

“If your car gets stuck,” Leslie’s final, dismaying text said, “Jordan and I can come get you.”

The prospect of darkness, road blockages, and whirls of snowflakes in my nostrils horrified me. I expressed my fears to Tara.

“But could we go a bit later, Lana? When the snow stops?”

In the end I gave in to make her happy. She bounced around.

* * *

Now, as we exit Phoenix in Tara’s Mazda, the check engine light turns on. Tara grows uncertain. I celebrate inside. But with slim fingers, she dials Leslie for advice.

Leslie’s Voice of God fills the car. I am hearing her for the first time. Her intonations are speedy, uninterested: “When the check engine light goes on in new cars, it doesn’t mean that anything is wrong. The car is simply telling you that it is time to start thinking about making a maintenance appointment.”

This sounds dubious.

“I see,” Tara replies.

“Whatever you want,” Leslie says. “It’s up to you guys whether you come out or not.”

Her lack of warmth makes me wonder if she’s irritated. Maybe Tara’s texts about the snowstorm in the morning were too much. I feel protective over Tara, defensive over myself.

Tara, on the other hand, is emboldened now. The Mazda zooms forth like a rocket through the skies. She tells me to go with the flow. To embody the spirit of adventure.

I look out my window at dry land and cacti. I have flown all this way to spend the holiday with her—I could have been with my parents and brother—and I feel unappreciated by Tara and guilty for leaving my family. I sip bitter warmth from my coffee cup.

Twenty minutes outside Phoenix, Tara feels sick. I touch her cheek with the back of my hand and then her forehead. She is burning up. “Tara,” I say with honest concern. “I really think we should turn back.”

But she says it will be fine.

I blow out a sigh.

Two friends in my Midwestern town, the pagan-leaning ones, always say the universe gives them signs. I nod along on their couches—it is their reality, not mine—but I wonder now if Tara and I are indeed getting hit upside the head with signs. Billboards even.

* * *

As we near Sedona, snow falls at an angle toward our windshield, the flakes spreading around us in a whoosh. Abandoned cars sit roadside. My phone has no bars. “Do you have reception?” I ask.

Tara looks. One bar. Night falls, and she, too, loses all bars.

We pass an emergency crew rescuing a truck that’s gone wayside, and we turn up a narrow, dark road. Snow-covered shrubs line it on either side. We reach a spot where the path before us plunges down at an alarming angle and Tara stops. I lean to the windshield and strain to look down. Everything below our brights—which shine into night air—remains black.

“There is no way the road would lead down at this angle,” I say. But what do I know about mountain roads in Sedona?

Tara leans over my lap to look out the passenger window and up the mountainside. She points up. “I think that’s Leslie’s house.”

About thirty yards above, across sloping ground covered in white mounds, a large angular building shines bright. It looks like it's made of glass. “Yeah?” I say. Its angles are warm. Tidy. Inviting. “But how do we get the car up there?”

Tara tries calling Leslie. After a few failures, we hear her answer, but she cannot hear us. Then Tara takes a flashlight from the glove compartment and walks to stand by the side of the car. Lifting her arm as far as she can, she waves its light from side to side.

This is what it has come to. I can’t believe it.

Minutes later, a slim, tall man walks downhill. His spine is unusually erect.

“Lana! Lana!” Tara runs to the driver’s door. “That’s Jordan. Leslie’s husband.”

I straighten my posture. Suddenly I want to make a good impression. Start things off right. I step out and walk over to shake hands.

Jordan tells us to leave the car—it won’t make it—and to follow on foot. He takes one of our bags, and the three of us climb toward the light. The air in my nostrils is cold. I am not wearing a hat and iciness snakes between the strands on my scalp.

“People here don’t know what winter is,” Jordan announces. “Just a bunch of morons leaving their cars by the side of the road. No one has four-wheel drive.”

I do a double take. Does he realize what we’ve just done?

His expression remains stony as he looks at the snow. His head turns to me stiff, at a slight angle, but his eyes remain on the ground. “We’re from the Northeast. We’re used to winter.”

I nod, even though he is not looking at me.

We reach the house and open the door to the bright world inside. To our left, near the entrance, a staircase leads up to the second floor. To our right sits a spacious kitchen. Its large island separates it from the dining area directly in front of us. Beyond the dining area expands a living room. The wall that borders both dining and living areas is made of glass, and it looks onto dark night. A glass fireplace stands between the dining and living rooms, its flames rising and falling over pebbles. Everything—walls, kitchen island, furniture—follows a palette of desert shades. The openness and warmth of the space comfort me almost to tears.

Tara steals upstairs to the bathroom. She knows her way around. A tall, slim blonde in her fifties, as erect as Jordan, approaches me and holds her hand out. “I’m Leslie.” She is wearing jeans and an understated gray sweater.

I take her hand in both of mine, smile with warm eyes, say it’s a pleasure, say that we’ve had quite a drive, laugh.

Leslie remains serious, as if her mind is occupied with something. She walks to the kitchen island—I glance up the staircase for Tara, then follow Leslie—and she resumes cutting cucumbers on a wooden board and transferring them with hand and knife into a bowl. Tara returns, happy and relaxed after her bladder release. She rolls her sleeves up and sits on a stool across from Leslie.

I hover in the back, waiting for an invitation to be seated.

Leslie ignores my presence. Knife in hand, she tells Tara that she tried the crab curry recipe that Tara sent her but that she reduced the amount of coconut milk. Everyone loved it, she says. People raved for days.

“You’re such a great cook, Leslie,” Tara says to her. She turns to me. “Leslie is a great cook.”

Leslie glances at me, says “I am,” and turns back to her cutting board. “I’m becoming quite a foodie. I’ve been cooking the gumbo for tonight for the last six hours.”

I make an impressed face. Then, hesitant, I near the kitchen island and take a seat by Tara.

Leslie walks to one end of the kitchen, the end closest to me. On the counter, next to a tall wine fridge with glass doors, stands an open bottle of wine. She pulls down two wine glasses onto the island and with the near-empty bottle begins to fill one. She fills it halfway and then pours the dregs into the other glass. There is barely enough in there for two sips.

The half-full glass is closest to me, but to my surprise, she slides it across the kitchen island all the way to Tara. She hands me the near empty glass.

Quiet, I say, “Thank you.”

Jordan returns to the kitchen with two teenage boys. The boys, in a lively conversation about astronomy, greet me with handshakes. They seem friendly and open, and my shoulders relax. The oldest does not make eye contact and moves his head and limbs in a measured way. The two seem eager to hear and see new things, to argue points. They retire with their father to the dining area and continue talking about force and energy and gravity and light. They bounce ideas like big cosmic beach balls, and I long to join them. But it feels rude to abandon the hostess at the kitchen island. Boldly, Tara walks away with her wine glass to the father and boys and starts laughing and prodding them. It is a sparkling, sparkling time. Now I find myself alone with Leslie at the island.

She glances at me.  “So. What do you do, Lana?”

I work in communications, I say, and write creatively on the side. She is likely engaging me out of obligation, but I feel warmed at being addressed. I sip my dregs, pleased.

She lifts a produce sticker from a tomato with her knife. “Have you written anything, Lana?”

“Yes, yes,” I say. “I mainly write fiction—short stories—but also short memoir pieces and poetry. They’re in literary journals.” I refrain from using the word “published” for fear of coming off as immodest.

“I wrote a memoir once.” She walks to the fridge and returns shaking a bottle of salad dressing.

“You did?”

“It was about coming up in finance, about working with my mentor, about ultimately changing the entire field from the inside. My daughter read it and said it was great.” She peels the plastic off the cap—it is labeled fat-free—and throws it in the bin.

She is saying all this with a straight face. I waver on whether to judge this degree of self-assurance but then decide to stretch myself, to try to understand.

“She said I needed to send it to an agent. So, I did. He wrote back to say that it was going to sell big, Lana. He said to call him immediately. I saw the email at three in the morning. I called him then. He said he didn’t mean ‘immediately’ literally.” Humorless, she drizzles dressing over the vegetables and begins to toss them with a fork and spoon. “Anyway, in the end, I decided against selling. I was concerned I’d get sued.” She shrugs. “Oh well. It was fun to write.”

I retreat into myself like a small animal. Writing—which I toil over and avoid and toil over again—is being shrugged off like a so-so carnival ride.

“One thing everyone who read it said was that it was a memoir about an older man’s obsession with his younger protégé. I had to go back and read it through again myself. I didn’t realize until then that my mentor had been obsessed with me for years.”

“Wait, wait.” I lose self-consciousness and my focus hones sharp. “You were not aware that this man was obsessed with you when you knew him?”

She eyes my empty glass and walks to her wine fridge to open a fresh bottle.

“I guess, for myself”—I lean over the island—“I am so conscious of things like that. When someone is showing certain kinds of interest, certain signs.”

She pops the bottle and pours it in my glass. “Honestly, Lana, I didn’t care enough to notice things like that. I was always all about following my own curiosity, my own nose. Nothing else mattered.”

“Wow.” I sit back in awe of this woman who is not limited by others’ eyes. I remember that I once believed in living like that. At the start of my thinking life, when I read books till all hours by the lamp.

“Where are you from, Lana?”

“I’m from Bosnia,” I say. I want to engage with everything inside. I tell her about the war when I was a child. About living in Spain for part of my childhood. About coming to the States at age twelve. Most people are interested in this story. Leslie looks indifferent.

She tells me about growing up in Wisconsin. About deciding at sixteen that she wanted out. About getting a full scholarship to an Ivy League school and leaving her family and never looking back.

Her decisiveness drives through my mental landscape like a fast car. Not dangerous—its tires are planted firm on the ground. I gulp from my glass and ask more questions.

We retire to the dining room and sit at the table, Leslie in the power seat, Jordan directly across, and the remaining four of us to the sides. I sit next to Leslie. We are striking a rhythm, and I want it to continue. I admire her, also, and now want her to like me. She ladles her gumbo onto my plate and onto the plates of the boys.

The dish looks like shredded pork in brown liquid. I pause. No vegetables. She pours more wine into my glass.

Everyone begins to talk about consciousness. About sight. About the anatomy of the eye. But Leslie turns to me and says, “Lana.”

About to pick up my fork, I let it go and slide my hand to my lap. I focus on her and smile. The others fade. I am sharply aware that no one has ever used my name this much. It neither bothers nor comforts me. Rather, I wonder if it is a technique used by powerful individuals. Something one learns in power school.

“Yes, Leslie,” I say back.

She tells me about one of their homes, the one on the east coast. About a dispute with the neighbors, about how everyone wanted to sue them for building a deck in the back. Except for one woman. “She was Buddhist,” Leslie says.

“I am Buddhist,” I say. “Well, I’ve studied Buddhism for twelve years.” I add this explanation out of habit. I’m hesitant to own labels because of the expectations people have in hearing them.

“Then tell me why, Lana. Tell me why she did not join in with them.”

I do not know the woman she is speaking about. But I do my best, from a Buddhist perspective, to explain that attachment and anger distort the way we see reality. They inhibit our ability to observe its flow. Perhaps this woman did not want to feed into them by joining this group. I feel more at ease now—a whole tradition of thinking holds me up—but Leslie’s eyes glaze over. I finish, and we sit quiet. I feel insecure. She begins her salad.

I pick up my fork again and raise the gumbo to my mouth. What hits my palette is one-dimensional—bare pork, tasteless sauce. I take another bite. Same. Perhaps I am not familiar with this kind of gumbo.

At the other end, Jordan and the boys have moved from consciousness to debating the existence of God. Tara is jumping in, laughing, talking about this book, about that one. Jordan nods to everything she says. He likes her a great deal. The boys stare at the two of them, thirsty, nodding, asking questions, interrupting with “buts.” I start joining in—Jordan doesn’t care about softening arguments as they burst from his mouth—and I find myself retorting with the same energy. We are like beams of light rushing through tunnels, bouncing off walls. Pure energy. They boys’ enthusiasm only fuels us.

I am struck, too, by how Jordan and Leslie talk to the boys. In everything they say, it is a given that their boys will be immensely successful, that they will change the way the earth turns. It is not put-on optimism, not merely encouragement. Not one doubt shakes the foundation of their belief. And the boys soak this message in as a given.

Leslie pours me more and more wine. I drink up.

Lana Spendl is the author of the chapbook of flash fiction “We Cradled Each Other in the Air.” Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in World Literature Today, The Rumpus, Hobart, The Greensboro Review, Notre Dame Review, Baltimore Review, New Ohio Review, Zone 3, and other journals. You can find her at lanaspendl.com or on Facebook at Lana Spendl.

Marianne is a multidisciplinary artist originally from Tennessee, now based in Philadelphia. Her work engages with our ecology and the divine. She loves walking in the woods and swimming in the creek.