“Will you buy me a little computer? I’ll pay you back.”
“Sure,” he said, and closed the refrigerator door.
“I took some lessons to see if I like it, and I like it.”
“Sure, if you think you need it. I guess everyone is using them.”
“Thanks, Daddy. Also, I’m in love.”
“Oh no, not again. This one got a ring in his nose?”
“Nope. I’m not going to describe this one. You never get the picture from my descriptions. You’ll have to see for yourself.”
“No hints?”
“I’ll give you just one: he’s older than you are.”
“Older than I am!”
“Mama’s meeting him tonight. She’s not too happy.”
Frank walked around the block, then down toward town, where he thought he glimpsed Smokie coming out of Sage Records. When the wolf was extinct, you could go to Sage records and get a wolf tape. Frank even felt that he would feel less dolorous about his situation if there was a good tape of himself.
It was early Friday evening and Frank walked along the sidewalk in front of his building, formerly the clinic. It was a cool, low, sanitary shape with an even hedge of potentillas along the front and specimens of paper birch and seedless cottonwoods in bark-filled beds. An old man was running a Weed Eater along the base of the building with a fanatical small-engine raving, a monofilament hiss as the weeds tumbled neatly. The building was pale ocher brick and overhead the sky was deepest cobalt, the clouds white, white, white. The street seemed to climb into a magnificent cloudland.
The Weed Eater man watched Frank let himself in with a key. The doors were self-closing and made a soft cushioning sound as they shut off the outside and exposed the silence of the interior. Frank hiked himself up on the receptionists’ desk and looked out into the waiting room. Magazines, fireproof curtains, green naugahyde (“unborn naugahyde,” Gracie called it) chairs, shin-high tables; no anxiety, nobody waiting to hear what was wrong with them, no news of a baby they weren’t supposed to have, no maintenance reports on wearing-out bodies, no heartbroken fat girls waddling back to the doctors’ offices carrying their own records. It was a true dead zone, with decorations by Cézanne, Matisse and Charlie Russell. He picked up the phone, also dead. The Rolodex was opened to Bungalow Pharmacy and some wag had written on the desk blotter, “Eat Shit and Die, Motherfucker.”
As he walked back through the hall past the receptionists’, looking into the denuded lab and trying out the scales, peering at an anatomy poster and, finally, stretching out on an examining table, he asked himself what else you could do with a clinic, for Christ’s sake; acoustic tile ceiling, nonglare lights: time for self-examination. Oh, no, wait a minute, not just now. Let’s rent the building first.
It was such a nice little cash cow, when you matched up its receipts with its credits and depreciations. In low moments, he had waved the records in Gracie’s face while she struggled with Amazing Grease — its moody pothead cook, its recalcitrant swampers and dishwashers, the steam heating system, the hot sauce whiners and check bolters, the food and wine experts, the academics who weren’t sure if they were out on the town or ironically observing those who were. Quietly, throughout this mayhem, the cash cow clinic went on. Now? Dead in the water. The boats gathered ’round the carcass; flensing knives drawn … Helplessly, Frank had started rotating his equities through his head, noting the pattern of erosion. He was in need of an introspective convalescence. Too much was going wrong and he hadn’t taken the time for lamentation or simple worry. Worry took time, and it must have taken energy because it often produced a terrific appetite. Heartbroken chow hounds were familiar figures. But he would have to take that time before things turned to powder.
It was interesting to ponder the meat color of the arm-spread man in the anatomy poster. He looked at all the little parts doctors have to memorize or they don’t graduate. This poster was supplied by the makers of Valium and this big muscular fellow with the cutaway face that seemed like a fierce smile didn’t look like he was the tranquilizer sort. Yet no one was above tranquility, however it was achieved. Frank imagined that this was Holly’s boyfriend, flayed for science, howling at the very movement of air, cradle robbing the baldest crime.
Frank sensed that he was not alone. He listened and heard someone walking in a neighboring office, more than one person. He opened his door an inch or two and watched. In a moment, he made out the forms of men carrying out the scales — the doctors, in jogging spandex. He couldn’t quite remember who actually owned the scales and so he hesitated before stepping into the corridor, but finally he did emerge and the doctors hesitated for a second, played it as if they knew he was there all along. Then when they steadied the scales on their shoulders, the weights ran across the bars and clattered to a stop, and Dr. Frame said, “Frank.”
“Get ’er all, boys,” said Frank. “She’ll never be a clinic again.”
Dr. Jensen said from beneath his bangs, “We’ll only get what belongs to us.”
“My lucky day,” said Frank. He waved them on in their work and seemed to mean it.
31
He drove five hard hours to Whitefish, where he took a room on the lake. For most of the next day he watched the cat’s-paws move across the blue water and listened to a train travel through the woods above the dark, stony beach. He lay out on the dock and watched the cutthroats fin around the pilings. There were numerous smoke-blackened fireworks fragments and Frank, lying face down with his nose between the boards, smelled gunpowder. He loved that smell. He occasionally thought it would be pleasing to shoot several people in particular, accompanied as that would be by this fine smell. A plane went by overhead; no reason he couldn’t be in that plane. A boat glided past and there was no reason he couldn’t be on that boat.
Just at sundown he paddled a floating cushion out to the middle of the lake, legs dangling in the cool green water, where he met a radiologist, a woman in her forties, also on a cushion, hers with parti-colored seahorses and an inflated pillow. She worked in Kalispell and came here, she said, anytime she found a cancer, to float between earth and sky and to sustain, on her seahorse floatie, a sense of deep time that could accommodate life and death. Frank looked at her long, melancholy face with its thick, seemingly puffy lips, stringy hair and short square brow and said, “You have a hard job.”
She took a moment to consider. “Yes I do. My job is to search for something I hope I don’t find. That is a hard job, mister.”
Darkness seemed to be forming, a circle of contracting shadows from the shoreline and faint stars overhead. There wasn’t a breath of wind, and when Frank reached out to take the tip of the radiologist’s finger, he was able to draw her raft to him with an ounce of pressure. Her face was now an inch away and they both moved imperceptibly toward each other to kiss. Her mouth was open and he tasted a mentholated cough drop. He slipped his hand a small distance inside the top of her bathing suit and felt a hard nipple. He opened his eyes and thought he could make out trembling water around her raft. The bottom of her bathing suit was drawn across the points of her hips and a flat stomach.
Very quietly, Frank moved to board the radiologist’s raft, a delicate matter that worked, right up to the point that it didn’t work; and with a sudden rotary motion the radiologist shot out of sight. “Hey!” Frank shouted impulsively, and trod water between the plunging shapes of the floaties. He felt the radiologist’s head under the arch of his foot and struggled to get a hold of her. She came up spraying water from her mouth and with a minimum of floundering she got onto her raft again, on her stomach, and began to paddle toward shore. Frank followed her.