Frank said, “Lucy.” He wanted to be decent and let no smile cross his face. But he suddenly remembered going to a whorehouse in Livingston with Mike and hearing Mike’s voice boom out from behind a closed door, “Great Caesar’s ghost, it’s a cunt!” And now he began to laugh. He really ought not to remember any of Mike’s views on women, including the one that the only people who understood women were the Africans who practiced female circumcision, nipping off the clitoris with a clamshell. Mike would pantomime the action of the clamshell, like Señor Wences and Johnny.
“What are you laughing at?” she demanded.
“I had a completely inappropriate and unwelcome memory. I’m sorry. Lucy, have dinner with me.” He felt a little ashamed.
“This early?”
“I could eat.”
“I could too, I guess. Well, sure.”
“That’s good. Thank you, Lucy.”
“You’re welcome, Frank.” They went down the street to O’Nolan’s, a quiet, unpretentious place filled with well-educated nouveau Rockies people whose bland love of recreation fascinated Frank. They sat opposite each other, silently looking into their menus as though they were secret documents. They knew each other well enough to read their menus without nervous chatter or commentary on the offerings. Frank was feeling a weird flutter.
“It’s amazing this place is so busy at this hour,” said Lucy.
“They probably want to turn in early. Wild-mushroom seminar at daybreak.”
“What?”
“I’m surprised too.”
“Well, Frank, we left off on a sour note. But we’re mature people. I think we’re moving right along to a new tone and I find that very welcome.”
“Hear, hear. Nutone.”
“This is your treat, right?”
“Right.”
“May I say that I had no right to impose my romantic schemes without more input from you — please don’t make a rude joke about input.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
The waitress came and recited the specials. Frank had no interest in food. He wanted to say, Who gives a shit? He was always interested, though, in the way the waitresses could rattle off the specials along with a little description of the sauces and methods of preparation. And phrases like “fines herbes” and “crème fraîche” had a certain dorky melodiousness that seemed to work on the other diners and that Frank, therefore, wished would work on him. They did have a rib eye steak of splendid dimensions and he ordered that. He ate so fast that when he was in restaurants he had to order large-volume meals to avoid having a lot of time to kill. Lucy asked for a couple of the oddities. They also ordered drinks.
Frank made a mental note to watch the drinks closely so that some immensely complicated stirring of the old trouser worm didn’t get started. Lucy was very real to Frank. Sometimes women got so real you couldn’t have sex with them anymore: you and the real person had to get involved with some third entity to have the atmosphere of wished-for intensity. It could be a child or a business or pornography or the desire to do away with your people’s enemies. Prowling suburban couples ambushed unsuspecting individuals in off-color lash-ups. Car, rooftop or diving-board sex. Love that referred to something. “Love.” Frank sauntered through these notions in what he thought was a pleasant atmosphere.
“Frank?”
“Yes?”
“I don’t seem to have your attention, Frank.”
So, okay, how do you field this one. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be sorry.”
“Right, then. Say, what did I order?”
“A steak.”
“And you, dear?”
“Veal Bolognese.”
He knew very well this was not veal baloney. But a thought of a lone slice of flat meat, something isolated-looking even in a school lunch, went through his mind. “I’m looking forward to my steak,” said Frank. He thought of his cattle deal. He thought about the yearlings slowed to a stop by the depth of his Salvation Army lease grass. He saw those melting pounds forming along the calves’ ribs.
Their drinks came. The bourbon went straight into his thoughts as he gazed across the room. He was quite conscious of their hands resting on the table. Lucy excused herself. He nodded slightly and watched with vague attention until he realized that she was not going to the rest room, she was going out the door of the restaurant, and if his eyes didn’t deceive him, she had succeeded in snagging her coat en route.
He snapped to attention and quite properly chased after her out the door. He caught her at the curb. Her eyes were brimming.
“I’m perfectly capable of buying my own dinner,” she said.
“What did I do? What did I do, Lucy?” He knew that without their rueful camaraderie he could never ask this seriously.
“You drifted off. You simply drifted off, Frank.”
“Oh Lucy, it’s true. I’m guilty. Come on, let’s go back in. I did a big cattle deal and sort of scared myself. I started worrying about it. Come on. Our steak and baloney will be there in a jiff. One more chance.”
“So of course she buys this,” said Lucy. “She plods back into the mediocre restaurant. Life is just going by a step at a time. He has his deals and their eyes never quite meet, much less their thoughts. She begins to ask herself, What sort of discount can I offer the Methodists for Machu Picchu? Does Royal Holland Lines have any interesting guest hosts this year? Was it Viking that had the bad comedians?” Frank’s eyes sparkled.
They were back at their table in time for the entrées. Lucy looked abashed, as though she had forced him to pay closer attention to her. Frank thought he could see in Lucy a sort of formal decision to take her own destiny in hand. She had had an unsuccessful marriage; and Frank’s biggest reservation about her was that she was heading back into another unsuccessful marriage by hook or by crook. She never seemed to know which cards to play, and Frank was not attracted to women who wanted a lot of help with their cards. Everything else he liked about her. He was so much the sleepwalker lately that it may have been the peculiar floundering way she fucked that brought him back to the bright lights of the reality he craved. He was always interested in people’s businesses and Lucy had a business with some reality in the community. People wanted to get away from time to time and she helped them efficiently. She had a good feeling for the different ways they wanted out, and was a successful sales person. She had led a few tours, even did a Lindblad bird thing in the South Pacific with a group from the university, cramming bird lore and successfully staying ahead of a group that prided itself on being at an information advantage. Before the celebrated busts of the television evangelists, Lucy had a reliable Holy Land trade but that had fallen off, and the region’s reputation for violence took care of what was left.
“Frank?”
“?”
“What’s it all for?” She made this seem a radiant question.
“I knew you were going to ask that.”
“But it makes sense I should ask you. We have our business interests. We’re beyond survival. What are we trying to achieve?”
“Hm.”
“Well, I think it’s important to find out.”
Frank stopped eating for a moment. He often liked just being a businessman, much of the time, enough of the time. He was very absorbed in Holly’s emerging story. Maybe he had transferred too much of himself to that. He realized that his compulsion to watch people going about their lives, watching them through their windows as though they were in a laboratory, came from some sense that not enough of the right things were going on in his. If life seemed anything, it seemed thin. It had an “as if” quality. He sensed that everyone was living in an atmosphere of postponement.
He wondered why people didn’t acknowledge this. If President Bush had said he felt “as if” he were waging war on Iraq, Frank would have seen it as a breakthrough in candor. “It’s as if bombs were falling on people.” It was for others, real people, to actually receive the bombs, to have nationalist struggles, to lose the crop, to suffer the red tide, to feel an inner joy at the way the new Audi handles the winding road, to be cheerfully fooled by the instant coffee served secretly to them at Antoine’s in New Orleans, to be disappointed by all the cotton wadding in their little bottles of aspirin. Yet there was a real bravery as Lucy decoded the birds of Micronesia for the know-it-alls who hadn’t taken the time, on those snowy days in Montana, to prepare for the intricacies of a cruise ship’s pecking order. This also put her cheek by jowl with the ship’s biologist and it was only a matter of time before they pretended to make a baby in his stateroom. She told this to Frank once before, when she had wondered if you could always detect a lust scenario if you were diligent.