“You gonna tell?”
“No, I’m not gonna tell.”
Frank batted him playfully on the shoulder. “You promise you’re not gonna tell?”
“I promise I’m not going to tell.”
“Steve —”
“What?”
“I owe you one.” Frank dropped his head submissively.
Frank declined Steve’s offer of a drink. He didn’t want to get into anything intimate about the clinic, much less discuss his hosing Phil’s wife. Gesturing to the house next door, Frank said that he had seen enough, and indeed he had; but the desire for the ordinary was still in him and it was heightened the minute he contemplated returning to his empty house. Steve commented that it was amusing that Frank even left his car elsewhere, calling it “extreme realtor fear.”
Frank could only go along with these spiraling witticisms. These days, everything took such a long explanation, it was turning smart people into mutes. Combining the knowing look with absentmindedness was the great modern social skill as far as Frank was concerned, and he thought he had it down pretty fair. It would never occur to the doctor that this was a new Frank, certainly not the one who acquired and managed the clinic so acceptably over the years. This was the night Frank. This was the solitaire who feared that happiness was past. This was the roaming dog.
But he had extraordinary luck just a few blocks away, a couple helping their daughter, who was maybe twelve years old, with her homework. They sat around the kitchen table, the mother right next to the struggling child, the father sipping coffee and pitching in when he had an answer. Frank tried to remember how much of this he had done with Gracie and Holly. He tried to be ironic about the golden light that flooded these three people from the opulent globe over the table. The schoolbook lay open in front of the pretty child next to a heap of marvelously rumpled papers. Steam rose from the coffee. The mother had pinned her hair up to keep it out of her way. The father sharpened a pencil. Frank thought these people had not always lived in town and were buoyed by the convenience of their suburb, the handy shopping, the populous grade school. Good grief, it was an American family! Frank rested his chin on the windowsill and gazed upon this rapturous scene, shriven by time, tears pouring down his face. We used to be one of those, he told himself. We had that in our hands.
21
Frank put his car in the short-term parking lot and walked into the airport, a low and rustic-looking modern terminal just past which could be seen the tall silver tail of an airplane. It was dusk and the airplane was tinted with the dusty pink of sunset. Frank was sure it wasn’t Holly’s plane, and when he got inside he found he had almost ten minutes to spare.
He stopped at the newsstand and bought the paper, skimmed the local news and left it on a plastic chair. The plane on the ground was being loaded and there was a short line at the security x-ray. A few of the older and more countrified travelers who perhaps had not flown much put their purses and other belongings on the conveyor belt with extreme suspicion. Frank hunted around for a tearful goodbye and found one, a plain girl in dowdy navy blue slacks and jumper, squeezing the hand of a vague-looking youth with long sideburns and a catfish mustache; she wept silently. She stared into his face almost imploringly while he gazed around in a rubbernecked way, as if to say, “Get a load of this.”
Frank was eager to see which one was leaving. When the ticket agent announced the final boarding call, the girl released the young man’s hand and boarded the plane. The young man looked around anxiously to see if anyone had been watching, and in case someone had, he wiped his brow with the back of his hand and flicked the imaginary drops of perspiration to the ground. In a matter of time, Frank thought, this loving relationship would be converted into a marriage.
Frank joined the mixed group at the big window in scanning the sky for the next inbound flight. For some reason, he remembered a winter trip to St. George, Utah, he had taken with Gracie and Holly. He and Gracie had had an argument at their motel and Holly pretended to be drowning in the swimming pool. It was a realistic imitation of a drowning person — face down, limbs slowly sinking — and it ended the argument. Frank and Gracie were startled that Holly would go to such lengths. The desert abruptly seemed pointless.
A glint appeared to the north, right at the level of the horizon, and began to enlarge. A moment later, the plane was taxiing at right angles to the terminal, a good way off, and then it turned and came straight in — pure, pretty silver, pink in the dusk with wriggling heat waves behind it and a big sound that suddenly penetrated the building.
Frank stared at every passenger emerging from the expanding tunnel that attached itself to the plane. Some passengers took their own sweet time getting off and held up people behind them. After the first press, only a few passengers remained and Frank was afraid Holly wasn’t among them. But then she emerged, burdened by carry-on luggage, magazines and rolled-up newspapers, with the beaming smile that still filled Frank with complete happiness. She affected a rolling, impatient sailor’s gait until the last passengers were out of her way.
He put his arms all the way around Holly and her luggage and squeezed. It was wonderful to feel plain love, even stupid love, just this sense of everything mattering all at once. He began hanging the luggage from one arm as he unloaded it from Holly’s. “Do you have a suitcase?”
“Nope, this is it.”
They walked toward the lobby. Frank gazed at her from the side while she walked, looking straight ahead, occasionally smiling at him. Holly had a serenely pretty olive face with brown, almost black, eyes that were as intense as the eyes of a sleek, quick animal. But when she grinned every bit of her face was affected in a crinkled way that swept Frank away with appreciation. She was wearing baggy cotton pants and a washed-out pink mountaineer’s jersey. She had an old green bookbag with a drawstring of the kind that prevailed during Frank’s college years. And she wore a big, cheap man’s wristwatch without a strap safety-pinned to the jersey. She looked a little like her mother, but even more definitely she had inherited Gracie’s careless prettiness and the unpretentious assumption that, somehow, she was being admired. Our only child, thought Frank. It’s true!
They got in the car and started toward town. Along the road out to Seventh, clouds of grackles showered down from power lines and swept back up again. Holly picked up one of Frank’s cassettes and smiled. “Can I play this?”
Neil Young filled the car, guitar feedback and all. Holly played it loud and looked out the window at the weedy ditches flying by, the crazy, day-in-and-day-out blue sky of Montana, and the mournful howl of Neil Young: “Your Cadillac got a wheel in the ditch and a wheel on the track.” It was funny, Frank thought, how that tone of apocalypse just kind of went away.
When the song was finished, Holly turned it off and looked fondly at Frank. She said, “Dad.”
“Weird Dad,” Frank said.
“Weird Dad.” She punched out the cassette and held it up. As she peered at it, it seemed to acquire the quality of an artifact. “Where do you find these things?”
“They find them when they demolish old mansions.”
“Like you used to do?”
“Yeah. They tore down this copper baron’s mansion in Butte. The walls were filled with Bob Dylan. When they got to the attic there was a mountain of Big Brother and the Holding Company posters and Jefferson Airplane albums nearly devoured by pack rats.” Frank was getting into this. He saw the black hand of times gone by lying on this treasure trove.