Frank was looking down at his disc of jerky, held between thumb and forefinger. He was trying to sink his nail into it while wondering what sort of family or town could produce a dipshit like this. Lane had the gleaming true-believer tone of a James Watt, but with his own beetling menace. It was the knowledge that people like this existed that made Frank really fear that he was losing some advantage in business. Given that Lane was dating Holly, Frank felt that if this were an Arab nation and he, Frank, were a middling sort of emir, he would go on ahead and have Lane beheaded. Maybe arrange to have the head fall into a bag so that Holly wouldn’t be traumatized. Have the headless corpse float out to sea after dark; try to do it in a thoughtful way. Maybe have an orchestra. So long, head.
Frank excused himself to use the bathroom, which was at the end of a corridor behind the steep stairwell. Lane followed him back there. Frank was surprised.
“I’m going to the bathroom,” he said.
“Just a quick word with you,” said Lane.
Frank stopped. “What is it?”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“What do you think?”
“About what, Lane?”
“About me and Holly?”
“As a couple?”
“As a couple.”
“How old are you?”
“Fifty-three.”
“You’re several decades older than Holly, Lane. I think that’s a bit extreme.”
“Don’t get yourself off the hook with that, Frank. What do you actually think?”
Frank appraised him for a moment, feeling challenged. “It’s not so much a matter of thinking, Lane. It’s more a feeling.”
“A feeling of what?”
“Of being sick to my stomach.”
Lane smiled evenly and said, “Fair enough.”
Frank went into the bathroom and closed the door, bouncing a douche bag that hung from a hook there. It looked like some tired thing from a yard sale. There were small porcelain fragments of an angel fastened to the wall, children’s towels with cowboy and Indian scenes on them, a sunburst on the toilet seat and a claw-foot tub. He realized that he didn’t need to use the bathroom and that the reflexive trip down the hallway to its door was out of hope that Gracie would follow for a heart-to-heart talk, bandied remarks or whispers of assignation. He was eager to tell her that he thought he had a real chance of going broke, but he didn’t want Lane or Holly to hear. He desperately wanted her to know that he might fail. Nevertheless, his short absence produced a change. When he got back to the living room, Gracie, Holly and Lane were standing. Holly had a class and Lane had to get back to the office. Frank heard each of these two before letting his eyes drift to Gracie. She was looking at him.
“I’m available for lunch,” she said, “if you are.”
Frank just smiled and offered a poor joke at departure. “I look forward to seeing you again,” he said to Lane, adding, “Don’t forget your annual physical.”
The women looked over at him in barely concealed astonishment. This was beyond the pale, even for Gracie.
“And you,” said Lane levelly.
“My family’s up and grown,” said Frank.
“Yippee,” said Lane. “By the way, I’ll be down in your town lecturing. You ought to come and see me, see my constituents, before your mind closes completely.”
“Boys, boys, boys,” said Gracie.
Lane stood without motion, made even taller by the lace-up boots that stuck out incongruously from the cuffless bottoms of his suit pants. Don’t want to get fooled by this arch-bumpkin livery, Frank thought; guy like that’d run a Dun and Bradstreet on you in a minute. Instead, he looked at his daughter, who had become a bit corn-fed, one of the few predictable effects of zealotry. As soon as he could get to a phone, he meant to offer her a trip around the world. Any horizon-broadening at all would reduce this Lane to a dot. Furthermore, he suspected it would be Gracie’s view that Lane was the sort of thing to be expected when Frank was functioning as a solo parent. If he could get her to a restaurant, he would disabuse her of that, big time.
They saw Lane to his pickup truck. Holly kissed her fingertips and reached through the window to touch Lane’s liver lips. Frank watched him bat his eyes in mock collusion; it was unbearable. Lane wound a gray curl around his forefinger and said to her, “So long, pard,” then nodded curtly to Frank and Gracie.
“Get us a table at the Red Lion and I’ll be along in just a minute,” Gracie said.
“Okay,” Frank said. He turned to Holly and squeezed her. “Bye, pet.” The embrace had become awkward. Holly was unresponsive.
33
He drove several blocks to the restaurant and went into the air-conditioned semi-darkness. He bought the newspaper from a stand next to the cigarette machine and got a table overlooking the Clark Fork River. The staff far outnumbered the customers. He ordered a Löwenbrau and leaned up against the plate glass window with his paper, trying not to think about family matters at all. He turned to soybeans in the Chicago Board of Trade report, then remembered you couldn’t really tell where things stood, as it would be another month until their moisture requirements peaked. And here was real live news of the drought elsewhere: corn stockpiles were the lowest they’d been in eight years, with estimates lowered by a hundred million bushels. He danced through his favorites: barley, flax seed, feeder cattle, orange juice, cotton, heating oil — no surprises, no atmosphere of opportunity. Maybe because he wouldn’t know an opportunity if he saw one.
Throughout the business world, there was a desire for clout. Clout was what Frank would want if Lane tried to investigate his financial health. Clout would prevent his bank from cooperating with Lane or any other lawyer. Cloutlessness sent politicians to pollsters. Frank wanted clout. Clout enabled you to fly your daughter around the world. Without clout, you grabbed your ankles and waited for the big boys to shred your undies. Frank’s curiosity about clout had sent him staring into the windows of neighbors to see what they were doing with what clout they had on the off hours. It seemed quite proper to seek information in a covert way — what the police called a fishing expedition.
A negligible domestic instant like meeting Lane made Frank want to start a riot, a civil disturbance that would ventilate his own malaise and sense of peril. Frank had felt for years that the new man in him was prepared for a debut, but it was locked in a lingering postponement. A galoot was after his baby.
“I’m devastated by this clunker,” Gracie said, as if reading his mind. She had pulled her coat off her shoulders and was standing next to the table.
He stared at her and attempted to think. “As who is not?”
This was not conciliatory. Frank had made the least of the opening. He just wanted to be in motion, not caught flat-footed, and he came up with something not so nice. But he jumped up to hold Gracie’s chair. She made a wry smile and sat down. He glanced at the top of her dear little head, then took his seat in despair. He could just make out the soup of the day on a chalkboard: cream of broccoli. His life reeled past, continuously taxiing, rarely airborne. When the waitress arrived, they vied to order drinks, Absolut vodka and grapefruit juice for both, pharmaceutically powerful choices.
“For some reason,” Gracie drawled, as though they’d been talking all along, “I don’t think we’re the quality of people who can finish some long-term thing like raising a child. I should have known that what we thought we’d done with Holly would turn out to be an illusion. That cluck is far from what I had in mind for her.”