“Your great anthem was, Never give up your illusions.”
“There’s illusions and there’s illusions.”
“Well, Holly’s illusion is that this water-hoarding bozo is a romantic figure.”
It was hard to be indignant about this. He didn’t really know where Gracie had been and the look of defiance he had expected wasn’t there. Gracie was mostly a practical person and she looked as sad as it was practical to be. The biggest thing that they had once had together had been themselves — not some third thing, not a business or a child or even a view of the future, but just this enveloping situation that had lasted a long time — had lasted, in fact, right up to the very second that it didn’t. And then it was truly gone.
“How did you get here?”
“I drove. Frank, do you know what? I don’t think I can sit in this depressing place long enough to get something to eat. Would you mind terribly if we went someplace else?”
“No, not at all. I — not at all.”
“Maybe we can get the girl to put our drinks in to-go glasses. Or I’ll tell you what, we’ll just gulp them and split.”
“I’m not hungry anyway.”
“Neither am I.”
They drove to a small park with modest houses around its sides, a concrete tennis court without a net, a swing set and a steel flagpole. There was a light overcast sky and it was pleasantly cool. The only people in the park were those crossing it to go elsewhere, including an old woman making agonizing progress on a cane. Sitting on one of the wooden benches, Frank looked around and thought how easy it was to feel sunk into one of these spots where the world goes by. He thought of the doctors decamping from his clinic, now a pathetic shell, and the bath he took on the yearlings, the sort of faux pas he once never made. You could sit in this park and in a couple of months get a warm sweater and sit in it some more and feel yourself either immersed in the small human routines of a town or perched on a cooling planet hurtling through time and space. It was dealer’s choice.
He couldn’t understand sitting next to Gracie. Either this was an illusion or she had never gone, never really gone; or if she had gone, she would be right back; or, how was this, she had gone but she’d had to go and then would be back. It was satisfying to think in little crazy units like this, kind of absorbing to avoid sweeping concepts. Gracie was there, then went forth, then returned. She was following her star! He was stuck in the mud. She was on a high wire. He was sucking wind. Other times, it was his star and her mud. Other times, for each of them, it must have been like leaving the house to go to work while the old dog watched from the lawn and wondered why he didn’t get to go along. When he had been young he barked; when he was old he just watched; and then he was dead and gone.
And Frank remembered how poorly he had dealt with solitude — well to remember that, because he was going back to it — how he had slunk around like a coyote, encountering other lonely prowlers, joyless, glancing occasions, losing ground with every event in a steady regression. What was the name of that girl he met at Hour Photo? Picking up her nephew’s school pictures? Gone. He covered Gracie’s hand with his. She removed her hand and laughed. Out the window went his dream of mystery poontang.
“What are you laughing at?” Frank asked, wondering if she could read his mind.
“Remember when Holly was little, she used to drink out of the hummingbird feeders?”
“Yeah.”
“I was just remembering.”
“Well, it takes a big dog to weigh a ton.”
“Sure enough?”
“It seems funny, though.”
“What’s that?”
“The way things have flown by.”
“Flown by,” said Gracie. “They’ve flown by, all right.”
“I think once I get over being bitter, I’ll feel we had a pretty good run at it.”
“I’m already at that point. I never was bitter.”
“What did you have to be bitter about?”
“Oh, Frank, let’s not start.”
“Okay.” He was inches from an unproductive fugue state, the very trees in the park darkening as though in an eclipse. He looked around at the beaten paths in the grass, a lot of anonymous human use. He wished they were living together now in a raw Sunbelt subdivision with no history whatever.
“I feel kind of guilty about this,” Gracie said. “I promised that this trip would be highly focused on Holly’s situation.”
“I don’t follow.”
“I wasn’t anxious for any renewal of intimacy.”
“Is that what you think I have in mind?” No sense in trying to fool her, he thought. “I imagine you’re pretty loyal to Ed …”
“It’s not that. He’s been no solution to my problems. But his problems may be more serious than mine and I can’t push him off the brink, which is where I think he is currently living.”
“In what way?” Frank asked, his heart leaping. What did he hope for, cancer? bankruptcy? AIDS?
“I don’t want to get into it. He’s still married too.”
“Leave him —?”
“God, just look at you!”
“I can’t conceal everything, Gracie.”
“What’s the difference, Frank? You couldn’t get rid of me quick enough, a regular hanging judge. Anyway, I’m going to need to get a few things out of the house,” she said.
How was this to be understood? “To be continued”? She was certainly a bit agitated. “Okay,” said Frank boldly, “so you’re out of this relationship at some level and it’s, what, reconnaissance time?”
“Fuck you, Frank.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I hate it when you look so triumphant. What a disgusting man you are, Frank. Yes, disgusting.”
“You act like you lost match point and that’s not at all the way I’m viewing this, Gracie, honestly it’s not.”
“You’d just like to find some alpha male one-liner for the coarseness and lust that drove me from my home. I know your every thought, you rotten shit.”
Alpha male, that was a good one. Is that why he stared down from his bedroom window at the college couple as they waited for a summer shower to pass, jerking off into his curtain? Is that what an alpha male does? Frank knew perfectly well he was sinking into a pure shadow state as several of his dreams turned to dust. One was showing a faint glow of light, but mostly it was a broad flowering of shadow.
“Anyway,” Gracie said, “I thought this was about Holly.”
“It is.”
“I’ve been thinking.”
“And?”
“It’s none of our business.”
“Gracie, I think that’s an abdication. No más abdicación.”
“Yes, I suppose it is. But I think that’s what you do. Abdicate. In fact, I’m going to get into it, on several fronts. I’m going to set an abdication track record.”
“I tried that. They’re stripping me of my belongings.”
“This must be a ball buster for you, champ.”
“Not as much as you might think. As discussed, your comprehension of me was never as deep as you thought.”
“Give me a call the day you learn to accept failure,” she said. “I’m in the book.”
She looked down into the wilderness of her purse, found some Carmex and slicked it onto her lips. She reflexively glanced at him to see if he saw her finger touch her lips, and then averted her eyes sternly. “There’s a tone, Frank, almost like dictating a letter. It’s unbearable.”
“They’re stripping me of my belongings. Tone’s the first to go. Plus, finding Holly infatuated with the Lord Haw-Haw of the northern Rockies —”
“Let’s not make it worse than it is.”
“Let’s not make it worse than it is!”