“Nope.”
“What about the cancer?”
“That was pretty much true. I confess that it’s also sort of an unimpeachable excuse. But don’t you think that most personal freedom is built on other people’s misfortune?”
“Good grief.”
“I never look at a set of x-rays without being reminded how short life is. Lust follows. It’s like living in a city under siege. And here’s another weird thought: I’d hate to ever have to x-ray someone I’ve had sex with.”
A few minutes later, Frank let his eyes close. What an adorable woman, he thought, a little crush forming; so full of life and now asleep with an untroubled conscience. Her peace was catching and he was soon falling asleep with a feeling that was a lot like love.
In the morning, they got doughnuts and coffee from a gas station-convenience store. The sky was clear except for a huge white thunderhead to the west that caught a pink-orange effulgence from the morning sun. Elise slid into her yellow Jeep Cherokee. Traffic headed toward Flathead streamed past behind her. She nodded, smiled as if to say “yes” or “yep” or “uh-huh” and pulled into traffic. He knew she loved him too.
He finished his coffee and went back to the motel to check out. He felt a goofy pride to see the thrashed and discomposed bed. “Good job, Frank,” he said aloud, and climbed into the shower, letting the needles of hot water drive into his revitalized flesh. Then he shaved. Frank loved to shave. It was a daily challenge to get the little groove in his upper lip and to make the sideburns come out even. He had to stretch the skin of his neck to shave it smoothly, as it no longer stayed taut on its own. What difference does it make if my flesh is firm, he thought smugly, if they’re going to put out like that anyway? That simple fiesta of venery has restored me. I’m like the happy duck that spots the decoys.
32
He checked out and drove south toward Missoula, where he fancied the prospect of running into Gracie while he was detumescent, indifferent, superficially inquiring, amiable. The only thing new he had to talk about was whether or not he had lost his touch, and he didn’t expect to admit or say that.
There was a fair amount of traffic on 93. Summertime seemed to reveal the ranches along that route in all their nakedness: junk-filled yards, small corrals with a couple of steers or sheep in them, modest flower boxes, yards that seemed meant only for their occupants and not the careering tourists of 93. Huckleberry stands appeared between Whitefish and Kalispell, then, as he started down the fjord-like shores of Flathead Lake, stands selling the incomparable Flathead cherries, cars nosing out of steep lakeside driveways to peek onto the highway. A condominium rose next to its white reflection on the black, clean surface of the lake.
Frank pulled over and bought a couple of pounds of cherries and placed them on the seat next to him. He rolled the window down and spit the pits out as he drove until the hot buffeting wind made him feel deaf on that side. He rolled the window up and began spitting the pits onto the dashboard. He turned on the radio and listened to an old song called “Big John”: everybody falls down a mine shaft; nobody can get them out because of something too big to pry; Big John comes along and pries everybody loose but ends up getting stuck himself; end of Big John. Frank guessed it was a story of what can happen to those on the top of the food chain.
On to an oldies station and the joy of finding Bob Dylan: “You’ve got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend.” No one compares with this guy, thought Frank. I feel sorry for the young people of today with their stupid fucking tuneless horseshit; that may be a generational judgment but I seriously doubt it. Frank paused in his thinking, then realized he was suiting up for his arrival at Missoula. In a hurricane of logging trucks, he heard, out of a hole in the sky, the voice of Sam Cooke: “But I do know that I love you.” Frank began to sweat. “And I know that if you love me too, what a wonderful world this would be.” He turned off the radio, looked into the oncoming chrome grille of a White Freightliner and shouted, “My empire is falling!” Then he twisted the rearview mirror down so that he could study his own expressions. He now permitted himself to think about Gracie. He knew that she might be in Missoula and he wanted to be ready but he didn’t know how. He was nervous.
All the little questions. Will they lose interest when you go broke? Sam Cooke: “Give me water, my work is so hard.” What work? Tough to believe both Sam Cooke and Otis Redding are dead. Heading for a white world: polo shirts, imported beer. The back nine. Lawn care. Etiquette. Epstein-Barr. Then he thought with disturbance about trout fishing. Blacks didn’t seem to care about that. They liked fishing off bridges, though. It was hard to picture Otis Redding and Sam Cooke fishing off a bridge. Maybe they did before they were famous.
Holly’s apartment was on a small side street behind the university, about three blocks from the Clark Fork River. Frank first stopped at the river and watched it rush through town. There were some small trout dimpling along a speeding current seam about ten feet below traffic. Because of the previous night, Frank felt it was going to be out of the question to develop a truly huffy tone. But he meant to do his best. There were several cars parked in front: Holly’s green Civic, a well-kept old tan Mercedes 190SL and a National rental car with Utah plates. Next door, a pretty college girl was hanging out wet towels while a Louis Armstrong solo played its scratchy uproar from the windowsill. In the space between houses a steep hillside angled away, green and dotted with small white stones. Frank could smell the nearby paper mill and just make out the iron red top of a crane moving beyond the roofs of buildings. He felt faintly sick to his stomach.
The door to Holly’s apartment opened and instead of Holly, there was Gracie. That’s what he was afraid would happen. Frank was partway out of his car, still cushioned by the sounds of the radio as well as by the accidental moods of a neighborhood of temporary college housing; but it nearly stopped his heart, a feeling so intense it resembled fear more than anything else. He felt as if his brain were photographing everything in an exhausting superrealism that he couldn’t absorb. He was experiencing flu-like symptoms.
“Would it be better if I left?”
“As you wish, Gracie.” He could scarcely believe the bland tone of his voice.
“As I wish?”
“As you wish.”
“Okay, I’ll stay.”
For the second time in a weekend, Frank thought he had found himself in hailing distance of dramatic poontang. If nothing else, such a puerile thought was heartening in the face of his shakiness. He was swept under by self-contempt. He didn’t even have time to imagine who was the wronged party or, still worse, account for the water over the dam. He feared old rooted love more than anything else, blunt and tragic, like horrible news from the doctor.
“Gracie, how are you?” he asked, now at the door.
“I’m fine, Frank, and yourself?”
Bad English, thought Frank, but said, “I’m fine. Holly here?” Gracie sort of smelled his little thought and squinted before speaking. Her squint was perfect, eternal.
“Yes she is, Frank. And she’s with … Lane.”
“Who is Lane?” Frank asked, titrating just a bit of conspiratorial intimacy into his conversation. She stayed rigid. It didn’t appear she wanted much to do with him. He was a jerk.
“Lane is Holly’s gentleman friend. Shall we?” She backed away from the narrow screen door to let Frank into the hallway. Frank stepped in and then Gracie followed, a panicky situation in a small spot. There was a brass holder for umbrellas, to remind Frank that he was in a rainy area. Beyond a pair of divided-pane glass doors was the old parlor of the house, which Holly had furnished with junk shop furniture, including a folding card table, a cream-colored La-Z-Boy recliner, a television set with its futuristic insides exposed, cinderblock-and-board bookcases and a large public drinking fountain. On one wall was a poster so out of keeping that it startled Frank. It showed the bomber Enola Gay with the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima behind it, and underneath the legend “It’s Miller Time.” There was a miscellany of small, uncomfortable metal chairs in one of which, gesticulating feverishly, sat Holly, and in another a gaunt figure with a shock of gray curls, wearing a three-piece suit and lace-up cowboy packer boots, Lane Lawlor. He dressed the same way Frank’s grandfather had, only that was sixty years ago and the old fart had had a Maxwell touring car. Who was this costumed geezer courting his daughter? Frank wondered.