The Grand Canyon

MY HUSBAND AND I went to the Grand Canyon on our honeymoon, I don’t know why, it wasn’t close by, neither of us liked the desert, or hiking, or canyons, it was as though we had made a deal with someone, our parents, God, or some other only somewhat-interested third party, that we would be allowed to get married only if this somewhat-interested third party were allowed to choose where we would go on our honeymoon, so anyway, here we were, at the Grand Canyon, making the best of it, I guess, and speaking of making the best of it, in high school I was good at painting, my art teacher had said so, he’d said, hey, you’re good at painting, you should take some art classes in college, and I’d always wanted to do that, take art classes, but my major, which was elementary education, didn’t give me enough time for that, which was fine, I loved teaching the kids, or at least I loved the idea of

teaching the kids, but I also loved the idea of being a painter, the thing that my major, my chosen profession, had not allowed me to be, and as it turned out the Grand Canyon was very popular with painters, they were lined up easel to easel at the rim, the south rim, the north rim was too far away to see clearly but presumably they were lined up there too, but the painters were definitely out in full force at the south rim, I couldn’t believe how many of them there were, I mean, you expect hikers at the Grand Canyon, backpackers, mule riders, rafters, just regular tourists who aren’t after anything in particular, and yes, even honeymooners, I guess, but I never expected it to be so popular with painters, so popular that a kind of small industry had grown up there around them, and you could rent an easel and a canvas and a palette and a brush, and while they didn’t rent stools for you to sit on while you were painting, I had brought my own stool, a collapsible camping stool, and thinking of it now that’s probably why we went on our honeymoon at the Grand Canyon, not because some somewhat-interested third party had chosen it for us, but because you could camp there, which was of course much cheaper than staying in a nice hotel somewhere, but then it was also the Grand Canyon, so it wasn’t as depressing going there for your honeymoon as it would have been if, say, you’d camped in Gravel Creek State Park in Donville, Ohio, which was the state park in our hometown, where we had never camped, but if we had camped there on our honeymoon it would have been much more depressing than camping at the Grand Canyon on our honeymoon, I guess, so anyway I’d brought my camping stool, which my husband had purchased, along with all our camping gear, at a steep discount at the sporting-goods store because he worked at the sporting-goods store, but regardless I’d brought the collapsible camping stool to sit on, and now I brought it even closer to the Grand Canyon, right up to the south rim, and I remember it was the third day of our honeymoon, our third day of five days, and where was my husband at that moment when I started painting, I didn’t know, I supposed he was jerking off somewhere, because that’s what he’d threatened to do less than an hour before, when I told him I didn’t want to have sex, because we had had sex several times on the two previous days and nights, and because we’d had sex many times leading up to our honeymoon, because after all we had lived together for three years before we were married, and we’d had sex many times during those [End Page...