Nothing but Blue Skies (12 page)

Dr. Frame spoke abruptly. “Do you uhm know what?” He was trying to look right through Frank.

“I shudder to think.”

“The rent at the uhm clinic is too high.”

“No, it’s not,” said Frank.

“Too high, too low, it’s more than we’re uhm willing to pay.” Frame was teaching Frank the ABCs of running his building.

Frank sipped his coffee, peered over the top of the cup at the other doctors, who were not tipping their hands, letting Frame run point. Popelko had a purely inquiring look on his face; he wanted a factual outcome. Jensen was just being serious about whatever it was. No one was going to mediate on Frank’s behalf, that was clear. Frank said, “Why don’t you move out?”

“We haven’t paid last month’s rent.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“We just wanted to uhm send a signal.”

“I don’t understand signals. I understand English.”

“I tried English,” said Dr. Frame. “You didn’t seem to uhm understand.”

“I understood. I was short on information. I didn’t realize you hadn’t paid the rent last month. You’re evicted.”

At this the other doctors clamored. Dumars immediately pulled Jensen toward him by the coat and spoke into his ear. Frank stood up. The doctors were all trying to look like one unit, a little tribal dance group or something. Frank knew they didn’t want to move out; they just wanted to improve their deal. Frank read once that ninety percent of doctors went to medical school for business reasons. That made it easier for him to keep the rent where it ought to be than to imagine they were sheltering sick orphans.

“Get your stuff out. Or hand deliver last month’s rent. I’ll be able to give you the new figures for next month, if you decide to stay. I don’t see last month’s check in my office today, you’re going to have to work out of your upstairs bedrooms.”

Frank walked out into the street. The sunshine hit him. He could never think about property, or its problems, if the sun was in his face. A ranch couple walked by in matching denim; she had a dramatically tooled purse and he wore a bandanna. They were gazing around at the buildings and gesturing to each other with show-business savvy, projecting their feelings. What a big town this is! they seemed to say.

Frank turned and went back into the hotel, feeling his thoughts roll forward like a barrel going down a hill. The doctors were still at their table. Frank stood at its edge.

“That building is killing me,” he said. “Six percent of its capitalization before expenses. Why don’t you buy it? No, hold it, I know why. Because the return is so low. We’ll let Frank Copenhaver go on owning the sonofabitch. Let me tell you something: nobody’s getting such gentle rent treatment in this whole town. But don’t be greedy, don’t be greedy.”

Outside, the sun was still shining. He saw crisp newspapers in their stand and smelled the bakery on Reno Avenue. There was a white vapor trail angling upward in the blue sky. He returned to
his office in bounding spirits and gave Eileen Joanie’s, June’s and Lucy’s names and asked her to get them on the phone for him. He went to his desk and waited. His desk phone rang and Eileen told him none of the three was in. He suddenly wanted company. It was painful.

It was beyond stillness; for a moment he didn’t know where he was. He felt the heat of her body against his right side and her open-mouthed breathing on his neck, the uneven breathing of a pounding heart.

“Who is it?”

“It’s not Gracie.”

“Oh, hi, Lucy.”

She eased upright and drew the covers back. “A little birdie told you,” she whispered. “A little birdie told you a woman devoid of self-respect had stolen into your bed. Man, you’ve been out like a light.” He could see her breasts, pushed somewhat together by her upper arms. She was looking straight into his eyes as she reached up between his legs and took him in her hand, her hair hanging straight down alongside her face, a faintly superior smile. “Ooh,” she said, “it’s harder than Chinese arithmetic.”

“Uh-hm.”

“You pretty swift with this little deal?”

“If everything goes according to Hoyle.”

“We’ll see.”

She was gradually drifting away as she held him, moving her hand up and down, her form almost rigid, head hanging down. Then she stretched her face toward the ceiling, murmured something
and came slowly down on him with her mouth — a white arc of scalp visible where her thick hair was parted — all the way to the back of her throat, and she tried to say “We’ll see” again. The
W
was the only thing she could pronounce.

“Ooh, hold it, hold it, hold it,” he said, grasping the sides of her face.

She lifted her glistening mouth. “Too much?”

“Yeah, too much.”

“Can I put it in?”

“Yeah, put it in — no! Just hold it a sec.”

She made her finger slick on the end of his cock and swirled it around one nipple. “Let me put it in.”

“You’ve got to hold it a sec. Don’t even say it again.”

“In.”

“Sh.”

Her hips were still moving. He had to look off at the wall, the blank window, the drapes, the dresser. “Okay,” he said.

She lifted up to kneel over him on one knee, one foot flat on the bed, and reached down to barely put him inside her, then slowly let herself down. All grace went out of her and she began to fuck out of control, a look as if of horrified surprise on her face, going “unh unh unh unh.” Then she added, “This could get habit-forming.”

“Thanks.”

“This
is
habit-forming!”

He hoped she wouldn’t say it could get habit-forming again. It was the sort of remark that could bring him to a screeching halt. But she went on until he felt the hotness loosen then shoot up out of him. He felt a long fall, thought how men didn’t want to shoot
into
anything, but simply, in the vulgarism,
off;
so much more abstract.
Off
, as in off into space or off we go into the wild blue yonder. Women would be insulted if they ever pictured this solitary deed. Actually, maybe they’d gotten wind of it already. “Shooting off” — it was outlandish.

In a moment, she closely curved beside him and said, “It’s easy. Two syllables. Lu-cy.”

Frank thought, This isn’t working. This isn’t making me feel good. She is having to act extremely silly and it can’t be very good for her. Except for about a minute, this is worse than work.

When Frank woke up again and realized she was still there, he was suddenly annoyed. He had been through this before, but to find his morning solitude erased was too much. A young woman smelling of cocktails and bar smoke from her last stop before this one was asleep in a key location of his home. What next? He went downstairs to the kitchen and put three shredded wheat biscuits into a bowl. To his aggrieved eye, they looked like sanitary napkins. He mashed them down so they’d stay within the rim of the bowl. He poured milk carefully into the center and it just disappeared until finally its white sheen rose around the cereal.

A bird hit the window hard and he jumped up, threw the window open and looked out. A black and white magpie was staggering on the ground. It sat down and fluffed out its feathers and looked around groggily. Frank whistled and the magpie looked up. It didn’t feel well enough to fly away, just walked off in a hunched, disconsolate manner.

He returned to his breakfast. He was wearing a bathrobe that had an old box of goldfish food in the pocket. The goldfish had long since moved to the office. Probably ought to throw the robe in the wash. The low, white, nearly silent German coffee machine quit drizzling and the half-black pot was filled with steam. Frank poured himself a cup of coffee, a cup of Mexican Pluma to be precise. He was continually changing brands in the hope of tasting something. He drank so much coffee, he might as well have put caffeine pills in boiling water.

Frank was thinking about all the good times he had had with Gracie and Lucy. He recalled the time he went trick-or-treating with them on Halloween, drunk and out there with the kids. They cut holes in a sheet and stuck their heads through; they went as a
ménage à trois
. By the time they got home with shopping bags loaded with M & M’s, Good & Plenties, Milky Ways, Snickers, Hershey Kisses, candy apples, caramel popcorn on strings, they
were filled with a crazed and diffuse lust; but it went away and they didn’t go through with anything because at the last minute Lucy went on a crying jag, something about proving her mother wrong and what was left, what happened to meaning, and so on. Lucy had knelt on the floor, face on the rug, sobbing, while Gracie and Frank continued to sit on the sofa, their heads through the sheet, trying to think what in the world to do. And Frank was burdened with what seemed to be an outlaw and omnidirectional lust.

He had a bad feeling about his night with Lucy. His skin was clammy. He felt guilty of everything, no matter what it was. He felt as if he had shot poison into the blameless uterus of a travel agent and old friend of his wife, the kind of thing he had tried to avoid, at least in his mind, if not on the actual mattress. He could hear her now, of all times, singing in the bathtub, a buckaroo tune to the meter of “ ’Twas the Night Before Christmas” which might have been composed for the musical saw.

Frank went upstairs to look in on Lucy. She was sitting in the tub, bubbles up to its gunwales, and when he entered she grabbed her breasts with soapy hands and said, “Come in and make the ficky-fick, Frankie!” Frank wondered if most property investors were addressed in this manner. He was startled by this new Lucy. She had evidently had some conversion since he last was with her, one that seemed entirely foreign to her personality.

“I don’t think so.”

Nothing about Lucy moved. Her big eyes searched Frank. She looked like a deer caught in the headlights. Steam lifted from the tub and went out through the tilted window. She had invented this character for herself and now she didn’t know what to do with it. Real empty-headed wantonness didn’t quite work for Lucy.

“I knew if I lived long enough, someday I’d get turned down,” she said. “They say it builds character.”

Frank stopped by Dick Hoiness’s insurance office and asked him to join him for a drink. It seemed to be a wonderfully burgeoning insurance world in there, with all sorts of things pressed into service to hold down papers, even rocks. There were two secretaries on suave gray rolling chairs faced in opposite directions, operating computers. Dick got the jacket of his seersucker suit off the coatrack in the corner of his office. He was watching Frank quizzically. Frank had known for some time that he was going slightly downhill since Gracie’s departure, but this odd gaze from Hoiness confirmed it.

“Man, it’s ten
A.M
.,” said Dick. “Can I join you for something other than a drink?”

“No, this is more of a drink situation. You’re going to have to roll with me on this one.”

They drove back to the Dexter Hotel and went into the Meadowlark Bar with the Art Deco aluminum cocktail silhouette in front.

“Is this important?” he asked.

“Important.”

“Do I have to drink?”

“Yes.”

They had the bar to themselves. At such an hour, even the bartender viewed one with suspicion, barely accepting that in
hard times problem drinkers help make ends meet. The light was dim, designed really for chatting up the opposite sex; but at this hour it seemed just gloomy.

“Let’s sit in a booth,” Frank said.

The bartender rolled his eyes. They each ordered a beer. Dick gathered his toward himself on the tabletop without actually taking a drink from it. He still had a kind of nocturnal demeanor from his rock-and-roll days. Frank looked at this well-adjusted insurance man and remembered him calling out over the top of reaching hands and transported faces, “I didn’t know God made honky-tonk angels!” with a death grip on the bucking neck of his guitar. Long time ago.

“I don’t know why I had to tell you this,” Frank said, “but I’ve accumulated a good many things and you’ve got them insured and I just had to tell someone that I am not enjoying any of this, including the accumulations, and it’s probably because I haven’t gotten over Gracie.” Hoiness looked at him in astonishment; it confirmed Frank’s sense that he was coming adrift.

“You’re telling me this? I’m flattered you would think of me to tell this.”

“You’re in insurance. You deal in the values the world accepts or you’d be out of business. I pay you to insure things that are starting to have no value to me.”

“You’re not canceling …”

“No, I just need to have things spruced up so I can keep playing. I want to be a player. I don’t want to get benched just at the point I’m getting a few things done. I want to play my ass off. But does this ever happen? Do you get clients that say they don’t want things insured until they rediscover their meaning?”

“No.”

“You don’t? It’s worse than I think.”

“I’m not saying that …” Hoiness lifted his hands in confusion. “I guess we all get the feeling we’re doing something wrong. It’s like walking alone through a store at an off hour, trying to act like you’re not shoplifting. In other words, your only choice is to go on about your business. How is your business?”

“My business is good,” Frank said. He didn’t mention any doubts he might have had.

“Now we’re businessmen,” Hoiness said.

“Yes.”

“How did it happen?”

“I don’t know,” said Frank. “The Theys have taken us in.”

“We’re pretty cozy. We’re one of them. I married a They — nice tits, mother of my kids, never seen me on drugs, never seen me with my dick through the back of a park bench waving to the nuns. It’s outa sight. It’s PTA.”

“We’re pretty cozy in here,” Frank mused, “right in the golden hearth of American life. We should thank our lucky stars.” Frank stared at the picture of the elk and the waterfall behind the bar. “I don’t want to get booted out of the hearth, Dick. I think it’s possible to appreciate it. I think you ought to be able to sit in front of your hearth even if you are all by yourself.”

Dick looked at him and said, “This is from the point of view of the committed life insurance salesman: I’ve noticed that people who lose the point of everything don’t seem to be around too much longer.”