“I do, Eileen,” Frank said thinly. In fact, he had already made an appointment with a therapist. He was looking at the picture of a movie star in People magazine who was attending a Crow Indian sun dance ceremony, hanging by thongs through his chest from the lodge poles of a prodigious tepee.
A short time later, it seemed to make sense for Frank to stand inconspicuously in the parking lot behind Mullhaven Hardware, watching people park their cars. His eyes were covert slits. An old rancher came in, parked his big Toronado, with its pink and white paint job, and climbed out pocketing his keys. A heavy red-haired woman in jogging pants arrived in a green Wagoneer, thrust the keys under the seat and got out. A man who looked slightly costumed in his gardening clothes drove up in a white Ford station wagon and went inside without making any special movements toward the ashtray, the visor or beneath the seat. When he was out of sight, Frank went to the car and got in.
The keys were in it. There was a crisp, unopened Wall Street Journal on the seat and Frank took a moment to glance at the headlines. The Fed had cut the interest rates again but it was not expected to impact the recession. He started the car and backed out of the angled slot into the alley. He swung around to Main and turned east, enjoying the commodious volume of space behind, thinking of it filled with kids’ bicycles or fitted with a dog barricade or redolent of a well-used rotary mower, green polished off at the corners to a pewter gleam under its veil of 30-weight oil. Unfortunately, it was a brand-new shell of a station wagon and had the familiar, disconcerting, prop-like quality of the unearthly exercise equipment that freighted the yard sales of America.
That feeling went right away as he tooled over the pass, eyeing the various gougings of the nearby mountainsides and looking forward to the prospect of pouring his guts out to a stranger. Then quite suddenly he lost all sense of what he was doing in this car and began checking in the rearview mirror for the police, staring between the retreating twin columns of mountainside reflected down toward his eyes, then scanning the silver-gray bands of pavement and the spheres of white clouds on a dome of blue sky: no cops. The fear passed and he resumed his confident occupancy of the station wagon, custodian of the deeply throbbing wheel and air-light accelerator as the pass opened to the shallow plains of cattle pastures.
It was then that he spotted the cellular phone. It seemed comforting, as if a car thief would scarcely drive the speed limit and make a few telephone calls. First he called Lucy at her office. “I’ve been looking for you,” she said, “and you didn’t come in today.” She didn’t sound hurt, nor did she seem reticent about looking for him.
“I’m trying to make some adjustments, Lu.”
“Who isn’t, Frank? Are you coming in today?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, let me get something off my chest then.”
Frank thought about her chest, the receptive undercurve of her resting bosom. A wonderful homey thing that helped pass the time. “Fire away, Lu.”
“Frank, I don’t think these ‘episodes’ are good for me.”
“No?” He pictured the Buick’s interior, the upended Lucy with a whelk curve of open pink flesh.
“No. Sure, there’s pleasure. But just now they make my, uhm, plight seem more extreme, and it lasts longer than the pleasure. I’ve been noticing that.”
“Aw, Lu.” That sounded unhelpful, but he couldn’t touch the white whale of a subject that buried everyone just now, the deep distaste men and women had for each other of late, the unstable truces of the new marriages, the warlike affairs. Frank hoped they had bypassed that with an avalanche of sheer lewdness, but it was just wishful thinking. Indelicacy was not a cure for everything.
“Anyway,” said Lucy, “I had already come to that conclusion before the other night, and suddenly there I was with my feet on the roof of those people’s car —”
Frank felt a fever go through his face at the very thought and as billboards emerged from pastures, with skiers and swan divers and stylized silhouettes of the Big Sky on them.
“— and I realized that I simply have to ask you, as a friend, to make sure that that never happens again. People like us have a special need to look out for each other, and what we’ve been doing hasn’t been good for me.”
She’s asking me as a friend to quit fucking her!? With all that energy spent on venery, the intricate, often baffling pursuit would turn to poison. Poison! Plus, Frank thought, it’s guilt because of Gracie. We’ve descended from Heartbreak Hotel to Heartbreak Bed-and-Breakfast.
“Okay, Lucy.”
“You make it sound so flat,” said Lucy.
“Well, I don’t want it to. But I guess it makes me feel sort of flat to promise you that.” A candy-apple green Mazda went by at about a hundred. It seemed to have a sidling shudder induced by its pure speed as it mounted the long hill, then disappeared from sight.
“Why?”
“Why? Because I enjoyed it, Lu. I enjoyed you.”
“I enjoyed you too, Frank.”
Right at the interchange where two peninsulas of trailers gathered on the high banks along the highway, a girl was hitchhiking with an aluminum-frame backpack, holding up a sign that said “Madison.” Heading east — that must mean Madison, Wisconsin, not the Madison River. This was Frank’s turnoff but he was going to forget that and give this young woman a ride, this fresh-faced stranger. Frank wheeled over and gestured for her to get in, smiling, indicating that he was on the phone and therefore not able to help much. She put the pack in back and got in. He grinned, tried with shifting and grimacing to indicate he’d be off the phone in a sec.
“But if you want it that way, Lu, we can sure leave it at that.”
“I ask myself if I really want to leave it like that.”
He made out the inner curve of her thighs with sheer peripheral vision. The girl smelled like sagebrush. Brunette, long hair held together low in back with a piece of knotted blue cloth. He started to sweat. He had the tip of one finger on the rim of the abyss, but Lucy’s voice was sucking him back in.
“I guess I can’t answer that one for you, Lucy.”
“Even as I hear myself speaking, I know I’m lying.”
“You do?” How’s that for stupid.
“Yes, I do.”
“How do you mean, exactly?”
“I want you. Frank, I want you.”
“Uh-huh,” said Frank, as if, lifting the hood to add a quart of oil, he spotted smoke coming out from under the valve covers.
“Shall I tell you how?” she asked in a numb, involuntary voice.
“Sure,” he said, absolutely confounded in his effort to bring this to a stop. She began to roll on as in a trance, overcome by the erotic power of her telephone. Frank looked over at the girl, who had raised her eyebrows in a coolish look of inquiry. To underscore his helplessness, he removed the phone from his ear and held it out. Lucy’s voice, reduced to a tiny scratchiness like a little witch doll’s, projected into the car’s interior: “… when you’re all the way in my mouth and I feel your big balls …”
“Stop the car,” shouted the brunette. She had thrust her legs out and seized the door handle as if to suggest that she would jump if he didn’t stop.
“Frank!” shouted Lucy through the phone. “Are you with someone this very minute?”
“Call you back, gotta go.” He hung up and pulled off to the side of the road, where the girl jumped out, turned and flung open the back door, hauling out her backpack.